Honestly, I'd beg to differ. When you cut a human body open you're likely to find a relatively standard set of organs. Even with all conditions and permutations it is a whole less open-ended than say driving a car, where arguably a lot of odd conditions could happen at any time. In short, there's a few vital functions that that the body must uphold and if a robot surgeon does he's not making anything worse. He might not cure everything, but that's not the point.

Maybe not. But it's kinda meaningless to quibble about the negative side effects when it's obvious the positive effects are so huge there's no way we'll give up on it, nobody likes drive-by shooting but it's obvious we're not going to give up cars. Yes, we would like a free global information-sharing network.

This. I got a laptop with 8.1 and I'll be upgrading to 10 (how could it get worse?) while my Win7 box will stay at least until next summer, I think.

This. By far most embarrassing things you've said or done are laid dead when you own up to it and say I was young and foolish, okay? Most of the problem actually comes from shielded youngsters who are still too mentally immature to blush, cope and move on. Of course there are situations you might be caught in that would be genuinely embarrassing, like revenge porn but then you're typically dealing with malice and an army of Internet trolls who won't let it go away anyway. In short, either you ought to grow a thicker skin or you have to grow a thicker skin.

If you're not using an ad blocker in 2015, you're an idiot. It really is that simple.

Except that they're coming in way below their yearly outlook which said:

Revenue:
$18 - $20 mm
Adjusted EBITDA:
$5 - $6 mm
Net income:
$3 - $4 mm

But later they're giving Q2 figures saying for the last 6 months:

Revenue:
7,667 mm
Adjusted EBITDA:
0,852 mm
Net income:
0,316 mm

If the last half of the year is the same, they're only making about 15%-20% of their planned net income. In fact, the last quarter they made no money at all. So I'm thinking way, way less.

Well, SSD typically have speeds in the range of 100s of MB/s and graphics cards in 100s of GB/s so if it's 1000 times faster than NAND I'd say pretty close.

Even if it's a thousand times more durable than NAND it's not much in a loop, if you just write to the same memory location over and over with DDR4 you can write every 5 cycles @ 1.25ns/cycle = 160,000,000 writes/second. I would think the greatest advantage would be a write cache which could return ~1000 times faster from a flush() making sure it's committed to non-volatile memory. The SSD can then work "behind the scenes" to move it to slower SLC/MLC/TLC.

Mainly he's confusing a project which uses an open source licence for a project that wants a community based development model. Google doesn't release the Chromium source so that they can get contributions, they do it to be open so that nobody can claim they're creating another proprietary web like IE did with their closed source, non-standard implementation. And that is all. I mean, he's talking about the source code to the world's most popular browser so it's obviously a very narrow definition of "failure", I doubt neither Google nor the users see it that way.

There are, but drones are only a small part of the armed forces easily reached by radio requiring powerful jammers that would be easy targets and they're usually support for people on the ground - not necessarily your people but affiliated forces. If you want to do a door-to-door search it would be extremely hard to do that by droid remote control, no matter how many operators you have. The goal of autonomous robots is genuine remote warfare, where you have the ability to run an occupation without having boots on the ground. Apart from AI sci-fi stories we do expect somebody to give the robots commands and accept their behavior even though the robot is working out the details of who to shoot itself.

Well if you are gaming when are you ever CPU limited with a 4+ GHz quad core? It would be nice if they dropped the integrated graphics and sold it for less, but the six/eight core processors are typically for people who do video encoding, 3D rendering, lots of VMs or some other semi-pro use. Even GTX 980 Ti in SLI should run fine on an i7-4790k, I guess for triple/quad-SLI you need the extra PCI lanes but then you're extremely far out of the mainstream even for gamers.

I seriously doubt that. I only have global sales number, not US specific, but there are many online retailers that are larger. Newegg had around $2.7 billion in revenue in 2013. The same year Amazon had $68 billion, Apple had $18 billion, Staples and Walmart both had around $10 billion in online sales. Sears (a company that every talks about as dieing) and QVC (yes the website for that crappy home marketing TV station) both had nearly $5 billion in revenue. Even among consumer electronics CDW and Best Buy had more online sales at over $3 billion each. And again, while these are global numbers, most of those companies are US based, with strong US sales.

Newegg is one of hundreds of online retailers of simular size. While it is a great company, it's adoption of bitcoin is by no means an indication that something has gone mainstream.

Source: http://www.wsj.com/news/intera...

Actually, most European countries are divided as well but we typically have a proportional representation with a 4-5% minimum which means we have more than two choices which creates an entirely different dynamic. Now naturally it divides itself into blocks it means there can be 2-3 different directions and 2-3 specialist parties that support their side and their relative strength matters. I'm guessing with a European system you'd have Democrats, Liberals, Republicans, Christians, Tea Party, Libertarians and Greens. Suddenly you're not losing just a few swing voters, you can lose voters in any direction.

Forming a new party actually has meaning as a 30% party and two 25+5% parties have the same power, unlike the US system where starting a party competing for the same voters spells doom for everybody. I used to think our system was worse because of all the compromises and coalitions and in-fighting, but really all the US system does is bring all those warring factions together in the same party. All the bargain-making is just done between factions in Congress, not between parties.

And the voters don't get to be a part of that process, here there's different shades of red and blue that shift far more easily in the polls. If the voters think the conservatives aren't being very conservative or the liberals very liberal or don't think you're doing a very good job, there are other parties with similar politics that would be happy to take over. The politicians have to work all the time to convince the voters that their party is the right one, there are relatively few genuinely safe votes. Typically only 50-75% will vote for the same party twice in a row.

So I think it's the system, of course the only way to change the system would be getting an amendment through Congress so.... yeah, you're pretty much stuck with a two-party state that will flaunt a few divisive political issues while making sure their campaign contributors are happy. They're quasi-monopolists on each half of the political spectrum, they got no reason to want to change and the third parties don't have the power to change anything.

Which is why /. relies on its terms that among other things say:

The catch is of course that the last part might be false, I could be pasting someone else's copyrighted text into a /. comment. Since I can't give a valid license, /. won't have a valid license so they'd have to take it down. Can a 140-character phrase be copyrighted? Yes. absolutely. The courts have found that the phrase "E.T. Phone Home" was infringing when used to sell unlicensed coffee mugs. Though copyrighting a joke sounds like a joke, I can understand wanting credit but not trying to license it.

True, but at such massive bitrates (up to 250 Mbit/s) that pretty much anything will look good and in bandwidth-challenged areas they do physical distribution. And they only premiere a handful of movies each week, size is not a big deal. Since wavelet encoding is heavily patented I'm guessing DCI got a waterproof deal before choosing it as the digital cinema standard, with patent holders hoping this would spur adoption. Obviously it didn't and since then better formats have appeared, so it's never going mainstream. Right now BGP seems to be the superior choice and since it's a subset of HEVC if you license it for video the photo format should be "safe" to implement, which means it might get camera support. Having "native" support without going via RAW would be a big deal.