How many years ago was the latest console designed?

You realize consoles aren't even competitive with high end graphics when they are brand new?

Build a ship with 3 or 4 hundred components and watch the frame rate crash in KSP.

All outputs are not created equal. First, most consoles target 30 FPS. Second, like the old consoles at 1080p, this output is likely just an upscale. They simply do not have the horsepower to render content at that resolution. Equivalent GPUs can be had for $100 or less in computers.

"for I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson - illustrates the proper attitude.

The act of owning slaves, on the other hand, not so much.

And you're playing at most 1920x1080x60 Hz, from what I understand often less. This is the kind of card you want if you're looking for 2560x1440x144 Hz or 3840x2160x60 Hz gaming on say an Acer XB270HU or XB280HK, pushing at least 4x as many pixels.

I read the article, thinking this was an incorrect claim in the summary. Nope, the article insists in several places that it was "undetectable" by the surgeons. Now, anyone who's played any online FPS knows that 50ms ping times are not only detectable, but are approaching unplayable because some punk kid that's only 10ms away from the server is always taking the head shots before you can even see him.

So I figured there has to be something else. The best hypothesis I could come up with is the current robotic surgery tools introduce their own lag such that the surgeons were unable to distinguish normal device response times from network latency. That, and the goals of a surgeon are completely different from an FPS shooter. A surgeon isn't trying to race anything or anyone - they don't have to shoot first. In a live operating theatre, they are methodical and cautious. It's not like there are sudden surprises that leap out at them that they have to instantly react to. Even a burst blood vessel takes a few moments to assess and plan a recovery from. So maybe if they're used to very slow approach, the latency doesn't impact them as much.

Given the current state of security in "smart" automobiles, who would want to be able for anyone to plug something into the USB port of the car's entertainment system and completely update the software for the car?

. Isn't that just asking for your car to be hacked?

Thanks for the info. I checked with T-Mobile, and the $50/month plan gives you 1 GB per month of 4G data. If I understand correctly, after you reach that limit, your phone continues to work at some slower data rate (how slow, they don't say) and your tethered devices stop working altogether. (Is that consistent with your understanding?)

So for that reason alone, I think this is a no-go as a replacement for my home DSL service.

Now the tethering thing would have value for me, if it would allow me to shut off the expensive DSL service to my home. Is that realistic? Who's your provider, and what kind of speed/reliability do you get?

If you're like me, it's the expense of your talk, text and data plan that you dislike, not the features of a smartphone.

I pay $20 every 90 days to Virgin Mobile (works out to $6.67 per month). I'll upgrade to a smart phone if and when the price of a plan that includes a reasonable amount of data drops to $15 per month. Until then, I'll make a mental note of what online content I'd like to consume, and wait until I get home to consume it.

Calculate the annual cost of your cell phone plan; do you find that having instant gratification of your online desires is worth that cost? Not judging; just curious.

There are a few people using their .gov email addresses for this, some of those can be verified by the IP address

No, you can't. Remember, several different court cases have stated, and people on here have wholeheartedly agreed, you can't tie an IP address to a person, even if there is only one person at a residence.

So either you can use an IP address to tie it to someone or you can't. Which is it?

Besides, if you can do it in 1/16th of the time, you might find your maintenance budget get slashed to 1/16th of previous year/quarter. From what you described, it seems you/they allocate about a day to upgrade each station (16 units at 0.5 hour each.) Beats driving around in traffic to 16 different stations a day, too.

Yes, kitchen counter space is limited. And toolbox space, and desks, and dressers, etc etc. Keurig has a functional niche (places where mess is intolerable or there's no one to clean it up, like medical lobby or a low-use office), but their marketing has convinced a broader market that it's too cool not to have one. It won't last. Already there's blowback about the amount of waste produced by this particular device, and popularity is waning... just like most other uber-popular single-use doohickeys.

In order to survive past initial novelty-driven sales, a single-purpose/non-flexible device had better be utterly awesome at what it does, and seriously durable in both function and regularity of need. That's why the regular pan stays while the egg-magic pan goes to Goodwill (not durable, don't want eggs every day), and virtually every Rolodex has been replaced by a free app on a general-purpose portable computing device (not flexible, need changed). The Keurig makes consistent mid-grade coffee (not awesome), and is moderately durable at best (and DRM is a form of intentional breakage), which means market survival will eventually come down to flexibility. Can JoeBob consumer make ramen with a Keurig? No? Then eventually he'll keep the kettle and throw out the Keurig.

'Jus sayin... as I sip decent coffee out of a mug, made with a 15yo Cuisinart kettle, an $0.80 sbux Via packet, and less waste/cleanup than Keurig. The packet will change, the kettle will stay.

The annual booster shots for dogs is greed. So is the leptospirosis vaccine, and heartworm treatments for anything bigger than a squirrel. The leptospirosis vaccine only protects against 6 of the more than 150 types, and it's transferred by wild infected animals pissing on your dog's food. For heartworm, just keep the mosquito population down, the same as you should be doing to prevent the transmission of West Nile disease in humans. It's not like dogs can catch it from each other.

California is a microcosm of the United States as a whole: liberal around the coasts, except for the south coast; and conservative inland, except near the large body of water on the border.

They also tend to run liberal in federal elections and conservative in state elections.

This split personality is behind a lot of California's budget problems, as one part of the populace with a majority vote has mandated spending on certain programs, and another part of the populace with a majority vote has prohibited raising certain taxes, leaving the legislature tightly bound between the rock of having to spend money and the hard place of not being able to raise it, requiring them to borrow it.

Which, come to think of it, is another microcosm of the United States as a whole, and the reason for the constant debt crises we keep having. Congress mandates spending, doesn't authorize the necessary taxes, and then blames the president for coming to the unavoidable necessity of borrowing to pay for what they've required him to spend and not allowed him to raise.