More simple explanation: Life is out there, it's just too far away to detect, or to visit us--and will ALWAYS be so, because you can't cheat Newton and Einstein. An alternate "simplest" explanation (though less likely) is that we are first.

To suggest that ET hasn't come to visit us because we are "too violent" or whatever, and that they are masking their presence is definitely NOT the simplest explanation--it suggests that every nearby alien species has agreed to isolate us, and every member of those civilizations is on board with the idea. No one is out there playing with an RF emitter in the VHF band, Harry Mudd hasn't stopped by and spilled the beans, no one's even accidentally done anything to give the game away.

Sorry, I'm just not buying that.

Heh, with a quick glance, I read your first line as:

Histrionic Storm!

The Army alone has about 500,000 soldiers. A lot of them are in support roles but a private military also needs support.

Where are the families of the people in the private military? Because if they have to go back to the USofA (the "enemy" in this scenario) to visit Mom and Dad then there's going to be a problem. So you'll need room on the uber rich estate for the families of your military. And your support personnel.

Which brings up the infrastructure to support those families. Schools, hospitals, etc. Which means more support personnel.

Which means more schools and hospitals, etc.

Of course you can skip that if you want to. But remember who has the guns.

Consumers are fine. The only benchmark that matters to a normal consumer is "How fast does it run my games?" and the answer for the 970 is "Extremely damn fast." It offers performance quite near the 980, for most games so fast that your monitor's refresh rate is the limit, and does so at half the cost. It is an extremely good buy, and I say this as someone who bought a 980 (because I always want the highest end toy).

Some people on forums are trying to make hay about this because they like to whine, but if you STFU and load up a game the thing is just great. While I agree companies need to keep their specs correct, the idea that this is some massive consumer issue is silly. The spec heads on forums are being outraged because they like to do that, regular consumers are playing their games happily, amazed at how much power $340 gets you these days.

I'm in the Northeast and this *&%!@ snowstorm is keeping me from viewing the stars.

They support two prior versions of OS-X and that's it. So OS-X 10.7, released 3 years ago, is unsupported as of October 2014. I guess that works if you have the attitude of just always updating to the latest OS, but it can be an issue for various enterprise setups that prefer to version freeze for longer times, or for 3rd party software/hardware that doesn't get updated. Also can screw you over if Apple decides to change hardware like with the PPC to Intel change.

At best, their excuse can be summarized as "we can fix this for some users, but not all, therefore we are not going to fix it at all".

My widely distributed product has been discovered to have a serious security flaw affecting millions of users. I have fixed this but it requires you to get your congressman to fetch it for you and have his staff install it. It's not MY fault if you can't convince your congressman to do this, it's HIS fault, and if you suffer, that's just too bad. Take it up at the voting booth.

I'm sure that they have the best of intentions. The problem is with the underlying assumption that there is some kind of conspiracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenatchee_child_abuse_prosecutions

Once you accept that there is a conspiracy, there is no end to it.

If they were just interested in cataloguing the various cases then that could be done by scripts and Google news. If something is not getting media exposure then it is more likely to be because of lazy "journalists" than because someone is trying to bury the story.

Between a bit better language design and superior support and tools, CUDA is way easier to do your work in. We've 4 labs that use CUDA in one fashion or another, none that use OpenCL. A number have tried it (also tried lines like the Cell cards that IBM sold for awhile) but settled on CUDA as being the easiest in terms of development. Open standards are nice and all but they've got shit to do and never enough time to do it, so whatever works the easiest is a win for them.

On a different side of things, I've seen less issues out of nVidia on CUDA than AMD on OpenCL for video editing. Sony Vegas supports both for accelerating video effects and encoding. When I had an AMD card, it was crashes all the time with acceleration on. Sony had to disable acceleration on a number of effects with it. I had to turn it off to have a usable setup. With nVidia, I find problems are very infrequent.

Obviously this is one one data point and I don't know the details of development. However it is one of the few examples I know of a product that supports both APIs.

Like send the Colorado congressional delegation to attack SpaceX for no particularly good reason. ULA has a large operation in Denver and they pay Colorado Republicans handsomely.

I had hoped that SpaceX might hold higher principles :(

Why would you say that?

The problem with that is whether your promise would also apply to your heirs.

Once something becomes worth $X there will always be people trying to make money off of it. The larger X is, the more people like that there will be.

NTSC stuff is so bad when viewed on a large TV. It is amazing how blurry things look when you flip back and forth between the HD and SD channels. That is part of what lead to the rise of big screen TVs was actually having content for them. With NTSC, a large TV just meant a big blurry image. With ATSC it can mean a nice large image.

Why shouldn't they continually improve their products? Even with NTSC sets this was done. New ones would be larger, have better focus, more clearly resolve the signal, have better phosphors, and so on. Why shouldn't this continue? They should keep trying to improve their products as technology allows.

None of that means you need to buy a new toy all the time though. You can stick with what you have until it breaks, or until the new stuff is a big enough leap that you wish to own it.

I think a lot of the whining from people comes down to simple jealousy. They'd like to own the new stuff, but cannot afford it, or do not wish to. So they try and hate on it and act like a luddite. You see it practically any time Slashdot has a story on new technology. People complain about it like it is somehow a bad thing that there might be something new.