Several of their "animal shelters" were closed because the government was going to force them to call themselves "euthanasia clinics" because they killed so many animals. PETA closed them rather than accept the more accurate name.

Ebola is weird.

It doesn't spread easily. The virus is basically content to sit in a corpse and multiply. It doesn't spread through air, or aerosol, or even a lot of fluids. Just blood and bile - which, granted, it does like to make you spew out, but it's not too hard to avoid unless you're trying to treat infected people or lugging corpses around.

On the other hand, just a small initial infection can be lethal. Most diseases don't spread from one particle of the virus or bacterium entering your body - most need quite a lot, otherwise they get smashed by your immune system before you even show symptoms. Ebola doesn't need much of an initial infection to turn into a full-blown case.

Given those two things, there's no surprise that Ebola so often infects the doctors who are treating it. But that's on outlier on its infectiousness - it's still not going to be a massive plague, because outside medical and funeral services, it just doesn't spread well.

The line is when the payment goes from "covering expenses" to "generating profit".

The level of astroturfing for Uber is getting ridiculous. I was sympathetic at first, because I can see how the existing monopolies are bad, but:
a) They aren't even trying to change the laws, they're just ignoring them. There are some laws that are so bad civil disobedience is a valid tactic. This is not one of those laws, and even then, when you do civil disobedience you're supposed to *accept* the legal punishment, because you *did* break the law.
b) They're astroturfing like crazy to frame the debate as "the common man versus the big bad taxi monopolies" when it's really "big international web-based corporation versus big local corporations". I don't care how many times you make sockpuppet comments about it, nobody's getting arrested for driving their grandma to the grocery store. People are getting arrested for running unlicensed taxicabs.

Licensing taxis is a good thing. The current laws may be overly-restrictive to protect existing businesses, but the spirit of the law is good. Uber? You're not. Any sympathy I once had is gone, purely because of your PR tactics. I was already unlikely to be a customer (I *have* my own car), but now I'm definitely not going to.

The SPARC processors are still doing some interesting things, and there's been some shakeups in the GPU architecture space.

Not as a main phone, hell no. But there are times when I might not want to carry my expensive, fragile phone - going to a metal show, or a bad neighborhood, or whatever.

For that, being able to pop my SIM out of my Nexus 5 into something literally a tenth the price would save a lot of hassle and cash if it gets broken or stolen, and as long as it can still make calls and texts, it will work for most purposes. There isn't a single app I rely on, even email, but I do rely on being able to make phone calls and send texts. I briefly looked into buying a second-hand phone to see if it was cheaper, and it still can't beat the price of $35.

That said, who the hell said "let's make a dirt-cheap phone OS so the entire planet can enjoy the web!" and then decided to do everything in HTML and Javascript? Even Android is better than that. That's one of the areas where you would really want the speed and efficiency of a low-level language.

Spray-and-pray is a gangster or rebel tactic. Actual soldiers use actual tactics.

Most infantry don't use automatic fire except as suppressing fire - making the enemy keep their heads down while your guys move in close enough for a kill-shot. For a while our main rifle didn't even have full-auto - late-era M16s were single or three-round-burst only. There's some exceptions for urban combat, but for the most part, if they're shooting full-auto, they don't expect to hit you, they're just making it unsafe for you to pop out of cover.

I work with several IT guys that are former military. I DM a D&D game including two of them, and one is also a massive Warhammer geek. They also had basically zero formal IT training (we all went to the same shitty night school, and taught ourselves the actual skills on our own) and yet are fully capable, so they're also big enough computer nerds to teach themselves programming at a professional level.

The PS3 was (and sometimes still is) widely ridiculed in gaming circles for having "no games", despite a launch lineup of 6-23 games (6JP/14US/23EU) and a current library of 796 retail games.

As no similar critiques were lobbed against the Xb360 (1,125) or Wii (1,222), we can conclude that the number of games necessary is somewhere in the range of 800-1100, most likely 1000.

However, your link only shows 702 games for me. Also, the above counts are of retail releases, which excludes a lot of the small indie stuff that makes up most of that list. And so we can conclude that Linux has "no games", and will continue to have "no games" for quite some time.

Look, if it's not running straight LISP at the hardware level, it's not a real computer. Who needs firmware when you have CONS?

Others have tried arguing with you, but I'll make this very plain and answer your questions bluntly, since you seem to lack some of the knowledge they assume you have.

It's not a ripoff - they are selling consumers exactly the performance they are promising.

Manufacturing isn't perfect. They test at the factory to see if each chip can run at the promised core count and clockspeeds. Fairly often, particularly with top-of-the-line chips, a few cores will be broken, or unstable at the specified clock speeds. They are unfit for sale as the originally-designed product. Rather than throw it away, they disable whatever is broken (either in firmware, or by blowing fuses built for this purpose on the processor) and sell it as a lower-cost, lower-capability product. This is standard procedure for everyone. Just off currently-sold chips:

For Nvidia:
The 970 is a 980 with 3 SMMs disabled (out of 16)
The Titan is a Titan Black/780 Ti with one SMX disabled (out of 15).
The 780 is a Titan Black/780 Ti with 3 SMX disabled (out of 15)
The 760 Ti is a 770 with one SMX disabled (out of 8)
The 760 is a 770 with two SMX disabled (out of 8)
The 745 and 750 are 750 Tis with one SMM disabled (out of 5)

For AMD (GPUs):
The 290 is a 290X with four CUs disabled (out of 44)
The 280 is a 280X with four CUs disabled (out of 32)
The 265 is a 270/270X with four CUs disabled (out of 20)
The 260 is a 260X with two CUs disabled (out of 14)
The 240 is a 250 with one CU disabled (out of 6)

Note: I wanted to include AMD CPUs as well, but I can't find perfect info on their CPUs. They are clearly using binning like everyone else (probably more, if their Phenom II days are anything to go by), but I can't tell you exactly which ones are stripped-down versions of which.

For Intel (CPUs):
The 5920K is a 5830K with 12 PCIe lanes disabled (out of 40). Both of those *might* be 5960Xs with two cores (of eight) disabled.
Every current desktop i5 is an i7 with hyper-threading disabled. Likewise, any current desktop Celeron or Pentium is an i3 with hyper-threading disabled. For the most part though, Intel only bins based on clock, not cores - if it's a low-clock version of a given chip, it likely tested unable to run at higher speeds with stock voltages and cooling.

Oh, and every single PS3 processor had one SPU disabled out of 8. Processors with all 8 functional were used in certain IBM servers, amongst other things.

If you want a car analogy, imagine you were sold a car with a 4-cylinder engine. You check later, and find a 6-cylinder engine block, but two don't have piston heads in them and don't run. When you get some spares and try to run them, you find the two cylinders have completely busted sealing, and they contribute no power, only noise and pollution and a nasty rumble.

When run exactly as you were promised it would run, it works perfectly. The extra cylinders affect nothing, because this is a metaphor and the actual physics of a car don't apply. They used a part to a higher-end car that would not work in said higher-end car, but they neither told you that it would, nor charged you as if it did. They actually probably charged you slightly less than if they had built it as a four-cylinder engine to begin with.

For this story, imagine some unscrupulous car dealer (also known as just "a car dealer") took that car, put the pistons back in, and sold it to you as the higher-end car without letting you test-drive it to find out that it doesn't actually work, only letting you pop the hood to see that it has all six cylinders. The car manufacturer then changes their procedures so that instead of simply removing the pistons, they actually fill the broken cylinders with steel to prevent it from even pretending to work.

Oh, exactly. I used SQLite for a game database - RPGs have a lot of stats and such, and SQLite was a million times faster than the hand-rolled CSV parser I was using. And I love how focused it is on reliability and correctness and standards compliance. It's just not built for certain things - it will work as a web database, and one of the frameworks I use even ships with it as a testing option, but it's not a good pick for production use.

The performance degrades (or at least, doesn't scale well) once you have multiple processes accessing the same database, as you would be on a web server. It's a great tool, don't get me wrong, and I can definitely see the use case for a test environment. But even on a single-server system, you're better off with an actual database process.

I really, really hope nobody is using SQLite for a production web database, but sadly I know somebody probably is.

1) They still haven't explained how they solved the memory-bandwidth issues inherent to point-cloud rendering. As far as I'm concerned, they're probably a scam just because of this. I can't say with 100% certainty, but their refusal to demonstrate it actually running in real-time is extremely suspicious.

2) How do they plan to work with dynamic content? Animations? Dynamic lights/shadows? So far I've only seen static scenes - unless they just want to make a new Myst, this is basically useless for games.

3) How exactly is this "cheaper"? Instead of making a scene in Maya or whatever, you now have to physically fabricate your set, then scan it, and then probably do some edits on the computer anyways. Even if they really can do everything they say they can, they're just going to make game development orders of magnitude more expensive, which is directly against one of their main advertising pillars.