Legged in just to bitch about how depressing it is for AMD when "newer (but still not the most recent) kernel support" is the highlight of their much-touted special edition OMEGA driver. I'd like to know if performance for Linux users of older cards is better, though I think performance improvements are being the focus only for the SI cards and above. If that's indeed the case, I think the open Radeon driver will surpass Fglrx very soon, at least for the 5000-6000 series.

The jedi were cool and popular. So they based the whole prequel trilogy around them, and we all know how that turned out. Sometimes the best thing you can do if leave the coolest chacter in the sidelines.

Well, /. is filled with news of smartphones - announcements, rumours and whatnot. New tech reviews also appear pretty heavily. And this isn't just a smartphone review. It's a piece about how little manufacturers, as a whole, value their customers for low end devices, taking advantage of their historically low expectations. Pretty much every manufacturer sells absolute crap on the low end. The only exceptions I can think of are Apple, since they simply don't deal on the low end spectrum, Motorola, who has been churning out genuinely good products like the E and G, and Microsoft/Nokia, on select devices such as the Lumia 520. This is followed by a brief economical commentary on the failure of the market to provide us with good products.

Given that tech and economy are the two most proeminent topics of conversation here (well, that and indiscriminate flaming), I don't see why it shouldn't be here, even if I didn't particularly like the piece.

It depends. If you add about 30 mins of cycling to work and back every day, that adds 600 calories to your list, but then you could remove about 25.000 calories that would be used in driving a car. And, since you're talking calories per capita, if enough people did that and less cars were needed, you could subtract the savings from the whole auto industry, which include energy needed to power factories, extract raw materials, build factories and retailers, shipping... I can't really estimate, but it would be pretty significant if you consider it takes about 240.000 calories just for the welding of a single car in the assembly line (source: www.energystar.gov/ia/business/industry/LBNL-54036.pdf ). Now think along these lines about heating, too, and you'll see the enourmous savings we get by adding some manual effort.

I'm sorry this isn't xkcd.

I thought, in Microsoft's case, the CEO was the Chairman.

On the subject of intrusive government applications, I wonder if it would make prisons more or less humane. No revolts, no issues with control, no angst. Just hook people off of the thing for about three hours a day for feeding and exercising. Can someone sleep while uncounscious like that? (it sounds like a dumb question)

Probably facial recognition on every image that's uploaded to Google+ (which I believe is done by default on new Androids - I don't know beause I don't use Google+), just like Facebook does.

Kind of. Heat dissipation starts being a bigger problem, and thermally limit slock speed. Look at overclocking sandy bridge vs ivy bridge chips.

Easy enough. Take a car X driven by a driver Y. One driver can drive one car, so X = Y. If you make the car 50% smaller, then you'll have 2X = Y. If each car has a top speed of V, then the same driver Y can achieve 2V by driving those two smaller cars at once.

AFAIK, you can't see the source for Google apps like Play Store, Maps etc, tough. Maybe not even for the launcher. I don't know what's part of AOSP and what's a Google add-on, these days. My point being that, for reaping the benefits of being able to see the source code, you must be able to see it all. Unless you have root access and can manage permissions on a per-app basis directly via the base, open OS. That's not Android's case, though - at least not by default.

Mod parent "+1 Wait, what?"

Now why would that be? You're probably inferring that the anonymous posting has no value or hasn't been worked on. But an anonymous posting can be as valuable as music. If you take Slashdot's own sort of news, that's pretty interesting. It amounts to a curated collection of news with commentary, and journalism can be argued to be more socially valuable than music in our current information society. Also, if we're talking about any kind of anonymous posting, yes, it can have value. Including literary value. If Pynchon decided to post Gravity's Rainbow online, would its value as art be diminished? I think I get what you're trying to say, but the way you chose to differentiate data is too arbitrary.

Plus, you seem to be overlooking that fact that "large groups of people agreeing with you" can be made of "individual acts of defiance", and that major economic shifts in point of view take time. We're not going to snap out of the economics of scarcity overnight, but the very existence of Creative Commons is a sign that the opinion you seem to be arguing against is quite widespread. I don't really know if it's on the rise, though I'd wager it is.

Trade secrets were a more charming concept. You could see what a competitor was achieving. So you could look into their product and reverse engineer their results - often coming up with a completely different solution. It was based on effort and merit. Whoever implemented it first had a head start, and if it was simple enough to copy quickly, then your invention wasn't so revolutionary anyway.

Yeah, that's still pretty fucked up, dude. The major difference in the level of craziness between Mormonism and Scientology isn't quantitative, but qualitative. Mormonism descends from a different brand of crazy, one we are used to. And really, the 1800s were a little late for believing a 15-year-old saying he heard God and is now a prophet. The correct response to that sort of stunt is to either slap him silly for lying badly or properly educating him about the effects of recreational drugs after they wear off.

Sorry if this came out a little blunt. Do consider, though, that a scientologist would be equally offended to be compared to a mormon.