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Comment Re:maybe.. (Score 3, Informative) 155

My 3 year old budget laptop has a 1280*800 screen
current laptops in the same price range are 1366*768

Those are the 'wide screen' adaptations of older standard sizes that are being pushed now.
You might not mind, or even think it's great if you watch movies all the time on your laptop, but that's not what I do with one.

Comment Re:Sounds a lot like the IPv4 crisis (Score 2) 102

There's a second and very important limitation: Signal to Noise Ratio. Noise has a physical minimum, so to increase SNR more power is needed.

This.

See Shannon's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem

Shannon's Law contains nothing about current limits in technology.

Basically, for a given Signal to Noise ratio at the receiver (specifically at the detector), when the noise power approaches the power of the smallest bit division, you cannot reliably recover those bits and further subdivision is pointless.

Even in a lab, Signal to Noise is never infinite, and put a finite limit on the number of bits you can send in a channel. In the real world, the Signal to Noise at the receiver only gets worse the greater the distance between the transmitter and the receiver (inverse square), and this excludes other sources of 'noise' such as interference from other signals, multipath, propagation or other degradation effects such as holding your iPhone incorrectly.

IAARE (I Am A Radio Engineer)

Comment Re:It's a trebuchet (Score 2) 225

Not to mention that catapults are all but medieval.

I'd say that launching rotten tomatoes in a catapult would be mid-evil. Launching pillows would be low-evil, and launching nails and rocks hi-evil. But that's just me.

I guess then if you launch bad music it would be midi-evil?

Comment Re:The text in a readable format (Score 2) 434

Comcast claims that a good network maintains a 1:1 with them, but that's simply not possible unless you had Comcast and another broadband access network talking to each other. In the attached graphs you can see the ratio is more along the lines of 5:1, which Comcast was complaining about with Level (3). The reality is that the ratio argument is bogus. Broadband access networks are naturally pull-heavy and it's being used as an excuse to call foul of Level (3) and other content heavy networks. But this shoulnd't surprise anyone, the ratio argument has been used for over a decade by many of the large telephone companies as an excuse to deny peering requests.

I'm suprised the ratio is that good considering most broadband service providers force their customers into highly asymetric connections (8:1?, 10:1?, higher?) and not allow them to run servers. It's disingenious to expect the Level 3 to be a 'good network' and maintain a 1:1 ratio with them while they force their customers into a highly asymmetric traffic pattern. It appears to me that it's in the ISP's financial interest to force high assymetry.
If Comcast want's Level 3 to pay up for traffic ratios higher than 5:1, and Comcast forces their customers into still higher ratios, shouldn't Comcast be paying (refunding) their customers for the 'excess' traffic?

Comment Re:It is Not DDoS (Score 1) 423

Nobody is breaking into the systems, they are simply utilized beyond their capacity to serve, and that happens because enough people band together to cause the disruption... Witch is in turn caused by company's actions.

Sounds just like a slashdotting. :-)

1) Website posts online article. (Company action)
2) Article gets posted to Slashdot. (Organization of people)
3) Disruption of service!

Comment Re:Explanation? (Score 1) 794

I can see it now, this being marketed as a speed voting 'feature':

Announcer: Tired of voting taking so much of your time? All that tedious 'select a candidate for a race and hit Next'? With new the new Vote-0-Matic 'Speed Voting (tm)' feature just press and hold and the 'best' candidate for your language will automatically be selected and proceed to the next screen. Voting for the whole ballot is fast, easy, and just one-click!

Comment Re:This is just faulty math (Score 1) 1260

Actually, if you define 0.999... as having an infinite number of decimal points, then it is true. And that's how that ellipsis is defined! It means exactly infinite repeating decimals.

So the difference between 1 and 0.999... is an infinite number of zeros followed by a 1

1.0 - 0.999... = 0.000...1

Comment Re:This is why (Score 1) 14

Zogger, I've seen you mention your typing problem a couple of times now...
When your typing fails, is the mouse pointer outside the border of window you're trying to type in?
If this is the case, you may just have a desktop settings problem.

Window managers usually offer multiple window focus options. In some modes focus is always to the window on top (like in MS Windows), in other modes, whichever window the pointer is over will be 'in focus' and receive the keyboard input whether that window is on top or not.

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