iirc Rasmussen telephone polling doesn't even include cell phones. Polling people who still have a land line seems like a good way to get a skewed result.

passwords are rarely in plain text. the issue is if it's not salted then the passwords can be discovered by looking at a precalculated table (rainbow table). so it would be useful to know whether or not it's salted

This kind of breach is usually just bugs in the forum software or the server software they run on.

Abrash is critical of AR for technical reasons he has shared on his blog. She most likely was fired because they didn't believe in AR as it has significant problems to solve over and above the problems in the way of implementing good VR.

Further VR follows a fairly obvious path from current games whereas AR requires innovation in game design and input to realize its potential.

that said the only article I saw there was comparing a $650 chip vs a $130 AMD A10 chip. and the only game it's close to the 650 in performance is Crysis Warhead which is heavily CPU limited. in other games they were only competitive where the settings were low which not only allowed the Intel card to close performance but also the A10.

the 4770k which is the $339 part is slower than the a10 in games according to this

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i7_4770K_Haswell_GPU/

There are plenty of bad articles in good journals, true; however even if you point out it's not a difference in kind there's surely a large difference in degree. It doesn't give anyone ammunition to say anything negative about the non traditional models (e.g. plos). All these fake journals are parasitic on the reputable journals that have a rigorous peer review whether they are for profit or are completely voluntary, print or online only.

It also presupposes phone primary functionality on a device that is an internet connected general purpose computer. What if you watch videos on the train? What if you like to browse the web? What if you like to play games? Any of those things can make one want to use a larger device and ignore the existence of substitutes for the phone criteria (like using a bluetooth headset). The person doing a lot of one handed texting and value that over other things will want a smaller device but even in that case I think it's exaggerated as I see people all the time holding the phone in one hand and typing with the other. Further those keyboards like the one in iOS are slow and inefficient in the first place and are not ideal input devices. I can probably type twice as fast as an iOS user with a swiping style keyboard (those can also be used one handed - just pointing out that the status quo isn't as ideal as it's made out to be)

Most of this discussion is just bad historiography. Some people here should go read James Burke to see the connections between the development of different technologies through history.

That said, ~48% of Steam users still have a dual core on Steam according to their hardware survey

The question was whether it improved it enough to be a viable upgrade. And the answer is yes, assuming the CPU in the system is a quad core or better. Dual core, no. Luckily people stopped buying those around 2007 (e8400)

he may also just be referring to how easier it is to install on Ubuntu just small things like installing a server will have it properly configured already meanwhile I'll install some things from a port then need to edit for what seems like forever to get things up and running assuming I can find the conf files as they aren't necessarily put in a logical place like in ubuntu

I've been using FreeBSD on my home servers since 2.1 until recently when I tried Ubuntu on the new server I was building. It's just drastically better at initial configuration. Most of the servers I would want to use are either installed by default or are very easy to install or configure with little intervention. There are too many hoops to jump through on FreeBSD.

Yes, we often interpolate from knowing what is being discussed. We can have algorithms to stand in to some extent but there is a limitation when the inference we make is from a representation of things out there in the world and knowledge about how those things work. We can sometimes get a sense of a conversation from very lossy understanding of what is being said.

This is another one of those cases where the authors want to write about a science fiction scenario that doesn't exist like direct neural input so they do an EEG study that in no way resembles the scenario they are imagining. EEG is terrible for extracting information so there's not much to worry about.

Actually cognitive therapy shows why it won't work. The change in cognitive therapy comes from a process through exercises to change thoughts, question beliefs, alter maladaptive behaviors.

If you imagine beliefs people have as reinforced by a web of other beliefs trying to find a middle ground will run into a million excuses why the original position is right. The troll (who often has no clue they are a troll) won't change their opinion in the moment - their beliefs will change gradually then they will act as if the new position was what they believed all along. The worst trolls have personality defects or don't get out enough to have social skills.

The attempt to use intelligence is more likely to defuse the original intention (to make themselves feel better or superior through antisocial behavior)