They certainly are reluctant about it at times; but the military has the convenient 'reality is what shoots you even when you try to pretend it isn't there' incentive to remain members of the reality-based-community.

Would you prefer advice on escapist fantasy or birth control? I can provide either.

Because it hurts those poor ISPs so much when they are forced to charge you an overage fee...

Has anybody actually examined the difference in bandwidth consumption(obviously Netflix has; but I was hoping for a 3rd party)?

'4k' is four times the pixels; but your target bitrate is a different question. I doubt they'd be gutsy enough to keep it the same as for 1080p; but they could have concluded that 3 times the bitrate actually looks just fine (or, less likely but possible, that anything they can get in '4k' is more likely to have been produced at high resolution all the way from camera to final output and more than four times the bandwidth is needed to keep from munging the result).

It would also be interesting to know(but a lot harder to test yourself) how much of the additional cost is storage and bandwidth and how much, if any, is the "More Pixels Means More Premium!" content markup that we saw between DVDs and BDs, where the same title would cost more if you wanted it at higher resolution.

Netflix can certainly attempt to charge what they wish, and it's certainly possible that the difference in price closely reflects the actual difference in cost; but I'd be interested to know more about how much more costly the additional resolution is, and where the additional costs come from.

This 'study' is invalid on its face because Free Will. It simply must not be possible that behavior is driven by causal, physical, mechanisms because that would be philosophically inconvenient. Therefore, it must be false.

I'm...not exactly sure... that the clandestine services of the world are worried about legal exposure incurred in the course of their activities. I certainly can't think of any being bitten in the ass for deploying spyware and it's a matter of public knowledge that it has been done reasonably frequently.

If you just take them down, you get nothing, not even traffic data. If you distribute malware, you get continued tracking of people who visited, possibly keylogger data, dumps of address books and contact lists, credentials for other accounts, and other fun stuff.

It'd be childish if the 'malware' were just serving pop-up ads or sending herbal viagra spam. The stuff designed for surveillance of infected targets, though, would be an entirely logical intelligence gathering strategy.

Since SDXC cards go up to 2TB and record 4K at consumer bitrates I don't see any reason for a new standard for years and even if one was needed it doesn't matter one bit to Google's data mining and most likely all it'd do is make phones with SD cards $2 cheaper so there's no money in it either. Sure denying Microsoft revenue would be nice but Microsoft already has a fat wallet, Google mainly wants to keep them out of their product space.

Teens who want to get laid. Like it or not, cell phones and social media has taken over a lot of the real-world interaction we used to have as teens. Mainly because I didn't have a cell phone until my late teens, much less a camera phone and nothing like social media. A lot of the flirting and teasing that used to happen in dark corners at parties is now happening through texting and sexting online. Not to mention the upkeep of an ongoing relationship, if you wanted to get more graphical than you'd say over a fixed phone line in the hallway you had to hook up in person. Today you're more expected to keep it up all the time, even if you're apart which means sending naughties on Snapchat and such. Yes, sometimes it backfires badly but people in love won't believe their love will stab them in the back. And while I'm pulling this statistic out of my ass, I think most personal photos most of the time aren't shared with anyone but the intended recipient and aren't abused. And I think that still holds true even though these 200k pics leaked.

Not to mention that it was a lot more obvious who was copying and who was not. Ever hear the expression "yesterday's news"? Well that was whatever they read in a competitor's paper yesterday and printed as news today. Today I'm sure they all have watcher services on each other, for every article posted they have someone evaluate whether they can run a copycat article. And I don't mean that in terms of copyright infringement, but just knowing that some event happened and is newsworthy they can write their own, non-infringing article using much the same sources. Today that might mean that one online site is 5-10 minutes behind the original source instead of a day, most people don't even notice who broke the news. Like today pretty much all our services covered the hit-n-run of a cyclist that died. I'm sure someone was first but it's not exclusive and they can all use the same source so they don't have to cite anyone. I suppose investigative journalism is still valuable, but "discovering" journalism has lost a lot of value.

There seems to be one major difference between this situation and your analogy:

In the case of the neighbor and the TV, the neighbor is a moral person with an interest in his TV (and even if he is dead, his 'estate' has an interest in it, and even if the TV is going to be destroyed, it is likely to have insurance coverage that he won't get if you salvage it and it isn't destroyed after all). It quite likely would be ethical for you to help him out by saving some stuff from the fire; but you'd be a total dick to save some stuff from the fire, then tell him 'haha, no, mine now!' rather than "Here, I got these out for you."

In this case, your 'neightbor' only exists if you treat the possible-future-child (that might have been produced from the embryo, if somebody was found who wanted to use it, most IVF surplus just stays on ice until it eventually gets tossed, since people tend to want either their own children, or go with adoptions of already-born children) as a moral person. This is a position that some take, and arguably a cogent one; but it's far from immediately proven.

If you don't consider the embryo to be a moral person(at least not this early in development, if it was chosen for cellular plasticity it probably doesn't even have a neural network yet), then there is no 'neighbor' analog to speak of. Simply an item of value that can either be used or be allowed to be destroyed.

Am I out of consideration if I refer to the polygraph as 'truth dowsing' while it is being administered? How about asking if it can detect witches?

That makes as much sense as saying Intel should provide a magic generic driver so it can run ARM software. nVidia, AMD and Intel all have different hardware implementations, the only thing most people care about is high level DirectX/OpenGL support which is the equivalent of Java on the CPU side. You have an expected functionality but how it's actually implemented in assembler differs from hardware to hardware. To be fair, there is a "thinnest possible overlay" created with Gallium3D which is something like what you ask for. Basically it's something like C for graphics card, one unified interface for shaders. As I understand it in theory the community could create support for OpenGL 4.5 and hardware accelerate it on AMD and Intel chips given the information that's available now. But the open source drivers are ~4 years behind the state of the art at OpenGL 3.3. And that's just for support, the closed source drivers go through tons of optimization for popular games so in practice they're way further behind on performance parity. Why don't they give it away? Competition mainly, just like AMD with Catalyst. Why give Intel a free optimized driver way more advanced than their current one?

I think I'll have to invoke Godwin on this one or for that matter post 9/11 US, education doesn't stop wacky wars. At least not education with a high degree of political slant and indoctrination, people can read/write or for that matter be an engineer/developer and still swallow political propaganda hook, line and sinker.

This is far older and simpler than this, it's opposition to equality of the sexes. They'd rather have their women be ignorant half-slave housekeepers, sex servants, child bearers and nannies. The first step is denying them any education so they're illiterate, then wrap them in burqas and make them terrified of contact with any other male who might treat them like a human being and finally subjugate them in law, to refuse your husband is never rape, no divorce, the kids belong to the father and if a woman gets raped let's punish her because obviously she tempted them in some way.

And just to get back on that education track, if the choices are no education, religious indoctrination (ev-uh-lution? what's that?) or government indoctrination I think for the most part I favor democratically imposed standards of education over individual whack jobs who want to inflict their wacky world view on their children. Not that I think public school is necessarily a good school, but most of them are pretty bland and expose you to a wide variety of other children with different backgrounds.

The guys with the space program get to use the acronym. Those are the rules.