Well, I just wanted an excuse for my 120Hz requirement.

Exactly, the games themselves have been pared down to fewer objects because our older cards couldn't handle it. Now there are new cards and people expect games that can use that horsepower to be available instantly? Sounds unreasonable to me.

When your graphics card can handle 3x 4K monitors at 120Hz and 3D while playing a game with fully destructible and interactable environments (not this weak-ass pre-scripted 'destruction' they're hyping in BF4 & Ghosts) the size of new york city without breaking a sweat, the bank, or the power bill, THEN you can talk about the overabundance of gpu horsepower.

Awesome! Now we're only half a step until completely uninformed CHAIN MAIL BECAUSE IF YOU DON'T SEND THIS TO ALL YOUR CONTACTS IN THE NEXT 27 SECONDS YOU ARE A MURDERER AND HAVE SURRENDERED YOUR SOUL TO THE DEVIL!!11!11! THINK OF THE MILLIONS OF DEAD BABIES!

Videos are meant to play forward, and codecs take advantage of this for compression. A common way to capitalize on this property of video is to use two different types of frames, usually named A and B frames.

A frames contain the complete data for that frame.
B frames refer to the previous frame and only have data on the changes that need to be made to the previous frame to make the current frame. (e.g. "move this section 2px to the right", "this little section has these completely new pixels...") **Note: B frames can be stacked.**

Why use B frames at all? They greatly improve compression. Think about shots in scenes where very little changes over the course of the shot, like a standoff in a western duel; there could be 10 full seconds where the only thing that changes in the shot is some tumbleweed blowing across the road. With B frames, it only has to store the tumbleweed on each frame along with some other very small changes, and there could be several hundred B frames in a row.

Playing forward is easy, just keep a copy of the current frame; if an A frame comes along, completely overwrite the current frame and display it; if it's a B frame, make the listed changes to the current frame and display it.

But if you're playing in reverse, what happens when you get a B frame? The player doesn't know what the "current" frame is since the current frame is built in forward order, so to do it correctly the player would have to walk back until it finds an A frame, then play all the B frame changes to it until it gets to the frame we want.

There are other complications to playing in reverse as well. For example, frames can have very different lengths. The length of each frame is recorded at the beginning of the frame, so to find the next frame you add the length of the current frame to the current position in the file. What about the previous frame? Where does it start? Since a frame could be any size and any type (A or B) you have to jump back the maximum frame length and search forward until you get some data that looks like the beginning of a frame.

It's not impossible, but playing highly compressed video in reverse (or stepping back frame by frame) can be very complex.

So, that means chrome is vim, and IE is notepad... sounds about right.

No, they want to figure out how the "coffee shops" were legislated.

Number of orbits: the assembly instruction count of spacecraft docking optimization.

I agree with this. Carriers should abandon "contracts" and call them leases. Then it would be more clear to consumers what they are doing when they sign a contract.

Add a clause analogous to break contract fees to allow the consumer to pay it off all at once if they wish to move to another carrier.

Contract break fees should be illegal.

We already have a system for this and it makes everything crystal clear who owns what when: Leasing.

Answer: Consumer leases phone from carrier. When the lease is up they own the phone, until then the carrier owns it. Only the owner can legally unlock the phone. If the consumer wants to break the lease, there should be a clause to pay off the remaining balance analogous to ETF.

Well lets change the terminology then:

Consumers don't buy phones and have to pay an ETF, they lease phones and if they want to keep it they have to pay the remaining balance. There, now the carrier clearly legally owns the phone up until the lease is over, at which point the consumer now owns it and can unlock it because they own it.

We *should* own all of those things. EULA's are a joke, you should either own it or lease it (or rent it), there should be no middle area.

Also your sig makes no sense whatsoever.

I'm thinking "embedded" actually means "included", like how chrome included flash player instead of using the plugin version.

This is a good thing since updates to flash player happens at the same time as updates to the browser (in the case of IE, it's handled by windows update) and it's easier to update and therefore more likely for critical flash updates to be applied.

Not sure how different "embedded" vs plugin is for security.

If they have a problem with their TOS being violated, then they should take it up with the people that are actually violating it. (Class action lawsuit anyone? Piriform vs All PC users: importing ini files stored in the clear. Yeah that will work.) It looks like this has nothing to do with you.

This feature annoyed them and they figured, what the heck, if you were weak kneed about it then sending you a pansy email would be the easiest solution.

So they *will* get it back. Eventually.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/103583939320326217147/posts/A8mtUUpdEH8