Certain kinds of products are moving online. But I have a feeling the electronic retail stores are making their money on selling refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, dishwashers, TVs and everything else too big to fit an ordinary parcel. A lot of other goods are selling on look and feel where people want to see the actual product in person, I got burned on this before Christmas when I bought something that... I mean all the specs and images were correct, but it was just underwhelming in reality. I certainly don't think they're worse off than specialty stores. The thing is, when people look at specialty stores what they often want is the selection, not necessarily the service. Online stores can often have an even wider selection and really there's no better service than getting what you want. I guess if you really want useful help but I suffer from a general distrust of clerks/salesmen, are they really helping me or their profit margin. Most of the time I'd rather trust my own judgement.

I've can't decide if you're a troll or just lack sane opinions, you seem to hate on most things except AMD for which you have a major boner. The average person doesn't use an encoder, ever. The only reason they care about decoding formats is because they download stuff off the Internet want their MKV to work on their gizmo, not just their computer. Both "DivX 3.11 ;-)" and MKV gained popularity that way.

Ordinary users upload videos to YouTube, but they don't have any say in what codec/settings/resolution/bitrate Google chooses to use. The people who edit video want it in their save/export dialog of whatever editing software they use, which Google can do fuck all about and those who transcode for "the scene" are 99% fine using a CLI. They just don't give a shit about legality so if WebM beat H.264 they'd use it and it'd be popular. Absolutely nobody cares about encoder GUIs.

Isolated speaking, yes. However, you can consider it a cross-subsidy to enable other and presumably more worthy causes for high speed broadband than watching YouTube. Or you can assume that at some point we'll want higher bandwidth anyway for 4K TV so using a less efficient codec now means you're doing most of the roil-out for later when you'll use a more efficient codec. It's hardly unusual that creating less favorable conditions for some individuals may benefit the group as a whole or that different short-term incentives benefit the long term result.

Personally I consider broadband to be the electricity, telephone and running hot water of the 21st century, if you're not online you're more or less detached from contemporary society. Not that we all need to be on gigabit fiber, but dial-up just isn't cutting it anymore. Not like necessity of life because people lived without 100+ years ago and I guess in poorer parts of the world many do but it'd just not the way I'd like to live now.

And the ISS will help how, exactly? The entire ISS came from the Earth's surface. Unless you have a really fancy plan to do asteroid/lunar mining, that's where all future materials will ultimately come from too. The ISS is way, way down in Earth's gravity well so if you could do mining you wouldn't build it there anyway. We can assemble a ship in orbit with or without the ISS, nothing really gets easier. What we're building must have a crew module, so any astronauts working on assembly can just live there. Not that I really see the need, the assemblies could dock like spaceships do and just interlock with bolts.

Star Trek has ruined a generation's sanity when it comes to space stations. The only reason you'd want a space station is so you can have a ship come in for maintenance, repair, upgrades or refueling in orbit so they don't have to go down the gravity well. If all you're doing is sending ships out never to return, it's a total waste of time. Unless you get to the point where you have a shuttle taking things from Earth orbit and Mars orbit and returning for a refuel it doesn't make sense. And it probably doesn't make sense unless you can refuel in Mars orbit. Which means it's not happening in this century.

Space stations are not like gas stations where you just drop by as you pass one by. Unless you're planning to be in Earth orbit, entering Earth orbit to dock with the ISS and deorbiting to get to your destination costs a helluva lot of fuel. And that is the crux of the issue, it almost never makes sense to build a waypoint into your route as opposed to just going to whereever you were planning to go in the first place. If possible you might not even want to assemble in oribt, just launch multiple rockets on the same trajectory and have the bits assemble in zero g before firing off to their final destination.

Does that include medical bills?

Of course it is, the question is if anybody will care. We know there are many better image compression routines than JPEG like JPEG 2000, JPEG-XR and WebP, but it's "good enough" nobody cares and it is now absolutely guaranteed patent free. Same with PNG, there are arguably better compression algorithms but it works. Everywhere but the US the MP3 patent has expired and in 2017 the last patent will expire there too. In 2018 the MPEG2 patents including AAC end, which I think will make AAC the de facto codec for lossy audio.

Video is another ball of fur, there's Theora and VP8/9 and WebM but none have gained any real traction and from what I understand not even MPEG2 is patent free yet while H.264 is 10+ years from becoming patent free. In that kind of marketplace what's another patented codec? I assume the gains for each generation will be less though and with bandwidth and disc capacity increasing we might not care that much anyway. I know it's not the JPEGs slowing down my browsing experience...

You don't need to have the best quality or be the cheapest, even from a customer perspective. As long as you offer the best value for money. Ikea does pretty good there as long as you know what to buy there and what to avoid. And don;t forget to put a price on convenience: instead of waiting 4-8 weeks for your new stuff, you get to take it home and use it right away (some assembly required). That's very useful... we use Ikea all the time in rental properties that need to be furnished on short notice.

It's 2015, and the same still goes for a lot of equipment with built in web interfaces. Web cams, printers, routers, stuff like that. Try and access them with anything other than IE, and they won't work.

I think the Steam hardware survey is a pretty good indication, of the people on steam only 23.5% have >1TB disk space. And they're probably way above average as the average officer worker (no, not you with the MSDN collection and 14 VMs) sure doesn't use that much, nor the kind of people who could use a Chromebook. The "problem" for HDD manufacturers though is that they've killed any interest in anything but $/GB. The most typical big media people have is video and it's accessed linearly and for that hard drives work just fine. Everything else you can put on an SSD. So the incentive to invest is really, really low.

Yes, I looked building an 8x8GB rig back in end of 2012 when the RAM market tanked but couldn't really find any reason to. In fact the 4x4GB RAM from 2011 is pretty much the only component I kept when I upgraded last year. By the way, for $2-3k you can now get an X99 mobo, Xeon E5-2603 and 8x16GB DDR4 Reg/ECC RAM but unless it's all about the RAM performance will be very anemic. But I haven't even found the incentive to bump it up to 32GB yet, which I could do any time. It doesn't exactly help that prices have more than doubled the last 2-3 years.

Well in this case I'd say there's Google and Wikipedia, use them. The source code is not the right place to teach someone about what CRC32 is or when, where or why you might want to use it. It's almost as bad as comments that try to teach you the programming language you're in. If you're implementing something that's not in an RFC or standard of some sort, I'd agree with you.

Or they could start making horribly bad decisions because they have no clue what to do when the computer glitches, like with Air France 447. I don't know the number of ways an airplane could break and probably neither does the pilots, they just drive the thing. I'm pretty sure the engineers at Airbus and Boeing can simulate a whole host of instruments failing or malfunctioning to add redundancy and determine which instruments are actually unreliable, probably far better than a pilot. If we increase engine power and our airspeed doesn't go up, are the engine control failing or the airspeed measurements? There's probably other instruments that can tell you the difference, but I wouldn't have much faith in the pilots figuring it out on the spot. Degraded autopilot mode might still be better than manual mode.

The whole point of the cabin lock-out is that a terrorist can't threaten/torture the code out of a crew member and gain access to the cockpit. All you need to do is add a second terrorist to press the other switch and they now got access to the cockpit. That would be silly.

The right solution is always having two persons in the cockpit. That way one would have to assault and incapacitate/kill the other which is a pretty big psychological barrier compared to turning a few knobs and waiting for impact. Anyone in mortal danger will also put up a good fight and hopefully alert other crew, who may then try to unlock the door and divide the attacker's attention. Or with luck maybe the attacked person can manage to hit the unlock switch.

It's not a perfect system but you should also realize the current crash was probably not the fastest way to crash the plane. There's almost certainly a "you're malfunctioning, give me manual control" override on the flight controls and after that a pilot could send the plane nose down in a spin which would make it almost impossible for any other crew to reach the cockpit within a matter of seconds, be almost impossible to recover from and with impact in less than a minute from flight altitude. The Germanwings pilot crashed it slow because he had all the time in the world as long as he kept the captain locked out.

Ah, but that's just the regular bureaucracy, you can add another order of magnitude if you want a military grade hammer.

Indeed, and in some places of work (notably government) they still give 10-20 "ATV-dagen" (workweek reduction days) on top of the contractual amount of holidays. But keep in mind that wages have been decreased accordingly as well.

Exactly. And I see the same happening over here with teaching "critical thinking". It's important, but it got turned into the idea that questioning everything makes one a critical thinker. A college professor in history once told me he gave a guest lecture at a high school. The kids kept challenging him on points during his lecture, and at the end of class, the regular teacher proudly noted how critical the children were and didn't take everything from an authority figure at face value. To which the professor replied: "Yes, but it's a shame they know bugger all about history".

Some of this attitude carries over when these kids graduate and get a job. They're highly vocal and opinionated, but they are equally noisy on topics they have no knowledge on as they are within their own area of expertise. Thankfully, most of them quickly learn better, but sadly some of them are perceived as "strong decision-makers" (whatever the hell that means) and promoted to management, where their unfounded opinions actually do damage.