We don't have a completely satisfactory theory of gravity (getting GR to play nice with quantum mechanics). Yet, we are very confident that the hypothesis that "things tend to fall" is correct.

Gravity is exceedingly complex, yet there are certain things which are evident from even a rudimentary theory of gravity -- namely, things tend to fall. CO2, likewise, has a complicated relationship to the climate -- but it is a known greenhouse gas, which has certain implications.

Unfortunate that respecting privacy to the extent the law permits is the exception, not the norm...

From TFA, so it must be true:

I just wish my bank did that sort of math...

of the flexible semitransparent display?

Ah, I think we're talking about different issues: Monoprice is fantastic, and absolutely is proof that you don't need to spend a ton of money to get good cables. I'm just saying that lousy cables -- if you can find them -- are problematic. For instance, RF attenuation is roughly exponential (units are usually dB/m) -- hence the need for Monoprice's Redmere series of active HDMI cables. I'm not saying Monster is better (all of my cables are Monoprice), I'm just pointing out that there are legitimate bandwidth requirements on video cables.

As to VGA, try running a monitor off of a significant (10m or so) length of lousy/old VGA cables at high resolution -- in my experience you get terrible ghosting and whatnot. I've personally had issues running monitors at 1920x1200 over short (~2m) VGA cables, though that could in part be due to the monitor's ADC, etc.

Man I wish I had Over 9000!!! free disk space.

I know this is a humorous post, but for really high-bandwidth applications, cables do actually matter. For example, driving WUXGA (1920x1200) at 60Hz, 24-bit/px, this is roughly 3.3Gb/s, or a little north of a gigabit/s for each color (RGB). Since each color runs over a single wire (I think), this is comparable to the requirements of gigabit ethernet -- except (I think) gigabit ethernet over twisted pair uses all 4 pairs of wires, as opposed to just a single wire for VGA. And, given that VGA is analog, noise certainly does creep in.

With a bandwidth in the 10s of kHz range, yeah...I sorta doubt audio cables matter much at all =)

Agreed. It's just too bad that, AFAIK, there isn't great CEC support on desktop/laptop computers -- though this could be an outdated observation. Of course, the $35 Raspberry Pi supports HDMI CEC very well.

I think "performance" might be referring to framerate (i.e., a measure of how CPU-intensive it is to drive the onboard vs. dedicated card), whereas audio quality is considered separately. Not the best writing, I'll agree...

http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

I haven't really used it, but I've heard good things about Julia (especially if you're familiar with Matlab). Plus, it seems to play nice with Python. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
http://julialang.org/

So you would outlaw an advertising firm giving out two different coupons for the same food item, listed as "0% fat!" on one and "fat free!" on the other? After all, they are, at the end of the day, running an experiment on you the consumer, to find out which phrasing is more effective.

From TFA:

I don't think they're trying to upload data through your phone without your knowledge, I believe the "cell phone charging" and "connects to the cell network" are unrelated, aside from the fact that both are supposedly powered via the solar panels.

According to the WSJ's coverage http://online.wsj.com/articles... ,

So although conventional wisdom might say that seeing positive things makes you happier, here there have been accusations to the contrary -- positive things about other people makes you feel lousy about yourself. This study ostensibly looked at that (and I think it found something along the lines of conventional wisdom: happy posts make you post happy stuff, a [dubious!] proxy for your own happines...).

If Facebook knew (and how would they?) that X makes you depressed, then yes...there might be some moral issues with that. But it seems that Facebook asked a legitimate question -- especially so given that it was published in PNAS.

That said, yeah...it feels a little shady. But then, when I log onto Facebook, I am certainly not expecting any aspect of the website to be designed with my best interests in mind!