Oh, they're quite aware of the distinction. You can find definitions from Norman Spinrad, Gregory Benford, Larry Niven, Hal Clement, etc.

The Russians own half the modules on the ISS.

It's more like 5 out of 17. And one of those (Zarya) was bought with US funds. A real shame that functions of Zvezda aren't redundant, though..

One common method of setting up stereo speakers is to set them up so the the left speaker, the right speaker, and your ears form an equilateral triangle. This often makes for a spectacular stereo image.

Now Imagine that the space in between the left and right speakers is now completely filled by a screen, (and that it somehow did not cause acoustical problems)

That's what the optimal screen size for 4k looks like.

My TV has far more extensive calibration controls than my monitor-- perhaps the latter is simply too inexpensive.

If you want to sit 9 feet away from a 4k display, you'll probably need a 120 inch screen. For 16.5 feet away, you'll want a 225 inch screen. By choosing an absurdly close viewing distance, you are depriving the set manufacturers of tens of thousands of dollars. Shame on you!

It's a reasonably popular gimmick. The local theater is showing four films in 3D-- X-Men, Spiderman 2, Godzilla and Maleficent, as well as seven 2D only titles . A few months down the road, if you want to replicate the experience of seeing any of those four films at home, a 3D TV would be useful.

Grados sound nice in quiet rooms, particularly if paired with a half decent headphone amplifier. Connected to an ipad, outside, with the wind and the traffic? Not so much.

If sealed headphones that sound as good can be had, I'm all ears.

Beats takes analog audio hardware that hasn't changed since the 70s

If a pair of headphones incorporates neodymium magnets, it was designed after the 1970s. As for analog? Most passive headphones are analog.

Hard Science Fiction is about worlds and plots and themes that could happen, but haven't happened yet.

More to the point: Iain Banks or Iain M. Banks?

Considering how modern processors save power-- turning off cores, reducing frequency, a performance benchmark is an unrealistic workload when measuring battery life-- most battery benchmarks loop video, or test web browsing.

Here's a review of the nexus 7 Note that the battery life under GLBenchmark is dramatically less than the benchmark under "web browsing."

The display brightness for the tablets was set to 200 nits, which is is probably not enough to use outdoors.

[The 2013'sNexus 7] is also incredibly bright. I typically view 500 nits as the threshold for outdoor usability, and the new Nexus 7 definitely exceeds that threshold. The tablet will drink away all of your battery life if you leave it at this brightness setting indefinitely, but if you need to actually use your tablet outdoors for a while the Nexus 7 works.

Those two usage profiles do overlap, though. If you need it to work outside, ready access to an outlet is probably not in the cards.

So you enjoyed Hellstrom's Hive?

Interesting. The History of Science is inconsistently taught.

(wikipedia)

And yet for all this time, I had only heard of phlogiston. Boy was I missing out.

Virus Total Uploader sounds like a malware development kit. The Headline had me thinking of Google taking the IOS-Android war to new levels of barbarity.

Stross's novels are an extrapolation of contemporary science and culture into various futures. As a geek, you should be able to recognize the beginnings of Stross's fantasies--crypto currencies, IT culture, malware, MMORPGs, maker culture, -- and laugh as these trends are taken to their logical conclusion in the various universes he has devised.

Now, I seek out and read hard SF. The trouble with classic works of this subgenre, (the vast bulk of which is still under copyright protection) is that it becomes obsolete. For instance, take the Bussard Ramjet-- a relativistic spaceship that was (at least for the time)theoretically possible without breaking physical laws. The Bussard Ramjet enabled a host of authors, most notably Poul Anderson, to write stories about Relativistic Time (twin paradoxes, and the like) But IIRC, the fuel density in the interstellar medium is insufficient for the Bussard scheme to work. So all those stories suffer from a patina of obsolescence.

To avoid this, it's necessary to acquaint yourself with the writers of the here and now. Stross is one such writer.