Cause I got no points and that's a handy tip!

-Rick

...less than any other ISP? No. Just like Google funded Mozilla this is more of a long term effort to push more people and more services online, where Google can get a piece of it. The "old media" advertising budgets are still pretty huge and people willingly sign up to Google's services so there's no need to get shady. In fact their roll-out is extremely slow if they were seriously intending to become a major ISP, they're really just trying to shame the rest of the country into demanding they get the same kind of service from their incumbents. Who needs cable TV when you got gigabit service and can watch any show, any time over streaming without hitting any caps? That's what Google is selling, of course it's out of self-interest but for tech geeks I think they're on our side in this case.

He didn't say they were his. Aaaand, his name is Mr. Intel. So...

They need to leave the euro (as does every other member). Monetary union doesn't work unless you have fiscal and economic union as well, and Europe is too diverse for that any time soon. Trade imbalance results in the most efficient exporter (Germany) beggaring their neighbors and accumulating cash, since the rest can't adapt by floating exchange rates -- it's classic merchantilism. What's worse is that only the heads of the German economic engine really benefit from it, due to wage suppression at home (which is part of what fuels their trade surplus).

I don't think you understand macroeconomics. There is a too limited money supply that is significantly worsening a recession/derpession. Greece gave up one of its primary rights as a sovereign -- issuing its own currency -- and so lacks one of the most powerful policy tools for intervention in its own economy. If it wasn't part of the euro, it wouldn't have to borrow from anyone but itself. Even the US mainly borrows from itself: the majority of its debt is not held by foreigners but is simply a number registered between treasury and federal reserve, which is an accounting fiction akin to debt between husband and wife. There are primarily political reasons some of the US debt is held by others, but it's not a basic requirement of its monetary system. The typical argument against government spending is inflation, but that doesn't happen if the spending is targeted as to decrease unemployment and thus increase aggregate demand -- which is exactly what's needed in a recession. The devil is in exactly how the spending should be carried out (things like a job guarantee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... come to mind) and should not be carried out (Bernanke's quantitative easing).

For real-time rendering of a simulated environment - that is, gaming - textures are generally stored as mipmaps so the more pixels it's going to take up on the screen, the more detailed version of the texture is used and thus the memory use rises accordingly through the entire pipeline. It's pretty easy to see if you keep resolution or texture quality constant and vary the other. If you're doing some other kind of simulation that might not hold, but for gaming what you said is pretty much false.

Hey, I'm still happy about my purchase but when I bought it I looked at the specs and thought: Hmm, they've disabled 3/16ths of the shaders, but it has the same ROPs, same cache, same RAM... if I buy two for SLI it should perform like the GTX 980 except for having 2x13 = 26 shader blocks instead of 16/32 for a single/double 980. Now I find out that's just not true, it has 0.5 GB quasi-RAM it can't access at the listed memory bandwidth, I feel I got very legitimate reason to feel cheated.

Apparently the ROP/cache isn't a big deal at it makes sense to use 7/8th = 14/16th to serve 13/16th the shaders, if only they'd listed the specs right. But gaming at 3840x2160 with SLI there's a fair chance I could run into a game now or in the future that wants to use all 4GB where it'll either act like a 3.5GB card or drop the framerate significantly underperforming compared to the GTX 980, I don't think that's just theoretical.

I'd probably still be quite cool with a 3.5GB card with 0.5GB of "last resort" memory that's still faster/lower latency than system memory. But they were in error and have admitted they were in error, I think that goes a little beyond "We said we're sorry" Paying some kind of compensation for falsely promised functionality would not be unreasonable (or swapping my GTX 970s with a 8-channel memory version, but I guess that's overkill). I'd be very surprised if there isn't a class action lawsuit very soon.

Zero billions, because the auto companies' lawyers are quite aware of liability issues, and so they aren't going to allow the sale of any self-driving car to the public until they're damn sure it's smart enough to avoid running over pets and children.

So either the automobiles will reliably detect and avoid pets/children, or they will never be released to customers.

The bulk of the laws involving surveillance pivoted on this "Close" work. It was hard to do, and it required some motive to be "worth the effort". So in the old days where you needed to intercept physical mail or actually enter a property to spy, the laws were in balance.

Of late the state has had a free ride, with the information being pumped into it at central stations and spycraft was just a click away. And the state has gotten fat and lazy, and with the decreased minimum effort the spying has become free. And the state, fat and happy, likes it that way.

But strong encryption would put the state back into the footrace. It would require the same work and effort as the old days. Boo farking hoo. It was _supposed_ to be hard to spy. The entire Big Brother 1984 idea was about the destructiveness of surveillance made too easy to bother being selective. The "just watch everybody" economy of effort leads to gluttony and abuse. We kwow that.

So Omand's "warning" is that of the plaintive child. But mom, then I'll have to _try_ and I want my participation trophy!

So Omand has made the case for why strong encryption should be universal so that the state cannot engage in universal surveillance.

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.

Bullshit.

Google are a highly effective propaganda company.

But, as providers of a platform for developers, they are absolutely horrible. Writing software for their "platform" is like building a house on quicksand.

They make me look back on the time spent developing for Microsofts products with fondness.

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.

Since those guys are likely to be in full heavy body armor as well and humans need to see and breathe the face is still the weak spot, unless you got a high powered rifle or something. Not that you're going to win against a whole SWAT team anyway, but one lone nutcase who has you backed into a corner... I'd aim for the face.

Pfft, I'm getting 1.1mbps over DSL on a good day where I am. And my 4g phone, when I can get a signal, pulls maybe 600kbps. A 1/4 mile down the road our neighbor has cable at 30mbps, but he pays roughly 4 times as much as we do. Even with that price tag though, they end their line at the corner he's on, there is no service for us.

-Rick

I don't think I've seen anyone argue that the distribution of child porn isn't a problem.

I have seen people argue that the First Amendment permits it, regardless of whether it's problematic or not.

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.