"Quality" of compressed video is a subjective standard.

For 1080p video, the only objective standard of quality is uncompressed, which is 1.24 Gb/s for a movie and nearly 3 Gb/s for a 60 FPS show or 6 Gb/s for a 60 FPS 3D movie. For 4K video we are talking about about 24 Gb/s for full quality.

Sure, you can squeeze a 1080p video down into whatever bitrate you want by lossy compression, but you lose information. What might be acceptable compression quality to you may not be acceptable to someone else. Netflix can, in theory, deliver 4K TV over a 50 Mb/s connection, but it is (at least to me) an unacceptable loss in quality. Once 4K becomes a legitimate standard, we should expect high speed broadband to be delivering data at 200 Mb/s (more or less) at a minimum. Right now, 50Mb/s is acceptable because it allows for the streaming of full quality 1080p video and for highly compressed 4K video.

Anything less that 100 Mb/s is pitifully slow and does not meet the qualitative expectation of "high speed" internet. It meets the minimum expectation for normal consumer tasks such as streaming highly compressed video.

Anything less than 10 Mb/s does not even meet that standard and it should be designed as low speed as it is inadequate for many common consumer tasks.

Right now, the transfer rate for 1080p blu-ray is a maximum of 40 Mb/s, so that should be defined as broadband download.

When 4K becomes a de facto standard, it should be increased to 150-200 Mb/s.

The FCC should be given the authority to regulate the terms: high speed, low speed, and medium speed for internet connections.

They should currently designate it:

HIGH SPEED: > 100 Mbs
MEDIUM SPEED: (10 Mbs, 100 Mbs)
LOW SPEED: 10 Mbs

ISPs should not be allowed to use any other qualitative terms to describe the speed of the connection.

If an ISP does not provide 10% of their download stream as upload bandwidth, they should be required to drop down to the next tier (for example, 200 Mb/s download with a 5 Mb/s upload should be described as "medium speed".

The whole "high speed broadband" term is archaic. It goes back to the day where ISDN (64-128 Kbs) or better (basically anything faster than dialup) was "high speed".

You should not be able to describe internet as high speed unless the speed is high enough for the most demanding consumer tasks, such as blu-ray streaming.

After all, you can take a Windows server and essentially turn it into a desktop OS with a little tweaking. The problem with Linux is that it is very fragmented, which is Linux's greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

Linux is great for technologically savvy users who want to customize it for a specific role. It is not so great for users who lack technical expertise or the time to administer it. Linux evangelists have been claiming it would take large amounts of desktop user share from Windows. You still see some of those around, but they tend to be quieter. The Unix OS that took away Windows market share was OSX, because like Windows, it has a unified, consistent codebase and is developed to be easy for end-user.

Splitting up Linux would not suddenly make Linux server or workstation uses stronger. Most technical end users of Unix (that I have known) have switched to OSX or some combination of Windows and Unix environment (cygwin or SSH to a UNIX/Linux box). Paid development and unified code simply has advantages that Linux will probably never be able to match. All splitting up linux would accomplish is divide already scarce developer resources.

People should love (or hate) Linux for what it is, a fragmented mess for the average end user that is imminently hackable and customizable to fill any possible role by experienced users who are willing to put in the time and effort.

Every seat should accommodate someone that is at least 6'4". The airlines have no way to know who may be on the flight and extra-legroom seats are likely to be booked by hobbits (those under 5'11") even if they are offered, so it is not as if slightly taller people necessarily have a choice of seats.

Also, it is not as if every flier gets their choice of seats. If you are flying on business, you get the seats that are available and within the travel policy, which may not be comfortable for someone who is on the taller side of normal (6'1-6'6").

If someone does that to me, they are going to feel my knees moving the whole flight.

I'm not sure why you even listened to that flight attendant. Next time I would just ask for her name, write it down, then put in my headphones while she blathered on and record what happened on my cell phone for what would surely be a hilarious youtube video.

If airlines wish to continue to offer reclining seats, they should reconfigure them so they recline forward instead of backwards, otherwise you get this war between people who have common frequent flier etiquette (avoid reclining except during overnight flights and when you do recline, do so slowly and only a bit while looking backwards over the seat to ensure you are not tossing someone's food in their lap or damaging their electronics) and airborne bumpkins.

I've already cracked one kindle screen and gotten into a physical fight with someone on a plane because they reclined hard into my knees (and strangely both people were hobbits, only about 5'10". I suspect that non-midgets have a better understanding of the issue and are less likely to recline). Airlines either need to remove the recline function altogether or make the seats recline within a fixed shell.

Luckily for you, most of the higher-end HP calculators still have RPN support, although they dropped it from the CAS mode of the HP Prime.

Commercial websites are designed to sell products, which is why they are generally not considered a credible source of information for the purposes of research.

Science is generally done at educational institutions as well as through recognized scientific organizations and publications.

So yes, there are some commercial sites which might be considered credible, because they are run by credible publishers like Nature Publishing Group, which runs the peer-reviewed journal www.nature.com and the popular science magazine www.scientificamerican.com.

But some commercial website, hawking a diet, is not a credible source.

It is impossible to prove that a substance does not cause cancer. Your argument is invalid because there is no food in existence which we can show absolutely does not increase cancer risk. What we can say, for example, is that extensive testing has been done on substances like aspartame with no clear evidence of any increased cancer risk in humans. We cannot say, by contrast, that extensive testing has been done on organic apples or most other "natural" foods, since only artificial substances require testing to be approved for human consumption.

It is simply an illogical argument you are making because it could be made for absolutely any food or substance. If you are claiming that it increases the risk of cancer, the onus is on you to back up your beliefs by citing high quality peer reviewed research.

The scientific consensus is not that aspartame causes cancer and I defy you to actually provide valid evidence to support your claim. The scientific literature clearly shows the opposite is true. [1] Also, your claims about aspartame's insulin boosting effects is based on a small number of pilot studies, not on large scale, high quality human studies showing a real-world negative effect on human health. There is no compelling scientific evidence to demonstrate that aspartame actually causes weight-gain and I would defy you to provide it if you believe otherwise.

Finally, as I already stated, this commercial website you keep raving about is not a credible source. I am not going to waste my time reading random internet websites. You need to support your claims with credible science published in legitimate peer reviewed journals and you need to make a proper citation to the actual paper, journal, title, and date, not just say, "look at this diet website that is selling diet products". That is not a credible reference.

It is not my job to "google" scientific data to support your claims. That is a shifting the burden of proof logical fallacy. It is the job of the person making the original claim to provide credible evidence to support it, and in the case of science, that means citations to peer-reviewed publications, not writing , "Google it", or "look at this website selling diet products".

For instance, here are a couple of properly cited scientific references from the article I used as my source:

Council on Scientific Affairs. Aspartame: review of safety issues. JAMA. 1985;254:400-402.

European Food Safety Authority. Opinion on a request from the European Commission related to the 2nd ERF carcinogenicity study on aspartame. 2009. Accessed at www.efsa.europa.eu/en/scdocs/scdoc/945.htm on April 13, 2010.

Notice how the first one properly cites a publication in one of the world's most respected peer-reviewed medical journals and the second one properly cites a publication of the European Food Safety Authority. If I were to follow your example, I might just cite www.sugar.org. If you want to talk about science, you need to actually read and cite credible scientific sources, not diet websites.

SOURCES:

[1] http://www.cancer.org/cancer/c...

And you are missing my point, which is that you were making a lot of claims that fly in the face of what the scientific data actually shows and what the consensus is, and rather than supporting your arguments with high quality peer reviewed studies, you pointing me toward some website hawking a commercial product.

For instance, you made a claim that artificial sweeteners cause cancer, a claim that is directly contradicted by the scientific evidence.

Of the major sweeteners that have been extensively studied, there has been no compelling evidence found to indicate they raise cancer rates in humans. Take saccharine and aspartame. There have been a lot of high quality studies conducted on both of these chemicals and neither one has been found to cause human cancer.

And when I pointed this out, rather than actually admit that your claim was false or cite quality peer-reviewed evidence, you pointed me to the commercial diet website of some guy who was not even formally trained in biology or nutrition.

Most math classes that require calculators are not requirements for graduation. At least, that was the case when I was in school.

Usually only Algebra I and Geometry are mandatory and usually they do not require graphing calculators (it does not help much for geometry anyway).

More features than the 83, but I would expect that the 84 probably has more features now given that it has been in development for an extra decade. Anything the 84 is lacking can probably be added onto the calculator, other than, of course, a CAS.

Many modern graphing calculators have options to enter equations in "pretty print" (basically, just like you would write them out). This takes a bit longer than coding it in like a line in a program or in RPN, but there is less chance of making a mistake.

HP-50g has similar (but improved) functionality (mainly the introduction of a CAS). Unlike the new HP prime, it fully supports RPN as an option.

The calculator competes in a free market.

TI itself has figured out a business strategy to dominate the market.

It is not a monopoly. It is simply domination, similar to Wintel computers back in the 90's.

The biggest problem for competitors is that there is no longer much of a professional market for calculators and in US schools, TI has executed a brilliant business model.

Most teachers are not going to allow tablets on a test (or necessarily even in the classroom at the secondary school level) and actual TI-emulators are illegal to use unless you buy them from TI or you own the actual calculator (although obviously, like NES cartridges, the ROMS for the emulators are available from dubious sources for pirates).

That being said, there are plenty of cheap or free graphing calculators for smartphones and tablets which are legal.