Or bypass the problem completely by using a USB microphone. These digitize the audio right next to the microphone proper, with everything floating at the same voltage so nothing substantial is picked up betwen the air pressure sensor and the A-D converter.

Bluetooth headsets work great for this, too. Most current generation laptops already have the bluetooth central-role radio onboard. Or get a cheap low-profile bluetooth dongle.

4. PC/laptop microphones suck. I don't know why no one bothers to test them to the same level as your average cheap dumbphone speakerphone. They pick up all kinds of system electrical noise, ...

The problem usually isn't the microphone. It's the way it's wired (per the standard) and the way the desktop/laptop is powered.

PC microphones are wired UNbalanced: They have a signal and a ground wire, rather than the + and - signal wires and everything-but-desired-signal cancelation of the balanced wiring setups typical of professional microphones.

Laptops typically use power supplies that are not grounded, so they don't require a three-prong outlet. This usually ends up with the stray capacatance to BOTH sides of the line wiring capacitively coupling equally to the laptop "ground". That means the "ground" of the laptop is at half the line voltage - about 60 volts of AC (a rotten approximation of a sine wave plus lots of other junk it picked up at an assortment of frequencies). The capacitance is substantial - not enough to shock you if you touch the laptop and ground, but enough to feel a buzz if you rub your hand lightly across a "grounded" metallic part of the device.

Plug in the unblanced microphone and hold it, put the headset on your head, or just leave it sitting on the table. The "ground" is at 60V and you are driving maybe a couple MA of it down the shield wire. The voltage drop of that current (along with any other pickup) adds straight onto your audio input. The best microphone in the world will perform horribly if hooked up this way.

Try this: Unplug the laptop and let it run on battery. Notice how almost all of the noise disappears. You can also get rid of most of the noise by tying a decent ground onto the laptop. (Unfortunately, many meetings last longer than the laptop batteries...)

Plug in a VGA monitor with a three-prog power plug, which grounds the case of the laptop via the shield and the two hold-in screwd. I've done that without actually hooking up the monitor (which would have disabled my laptop screen) by adding a couple of the nuts scavenged from another DB connector as conductive spacers so the actual signal pins are not quite into the plug. And done this on a docking station, so the laptop headset was quieted when the laptop was docked, even though I used none of the docking station features except the power input.

Make a second cable with a three-prong plug to bring a ground up to the laptop. Green wire from the third pin to a screw into or clip onto such a chassis ground point.

Or bypass the problem completely by using a USB microphone. These digitize the audio right next to the microphone proper, with everything floating at the same voltage so nothing substantial is picked up betwen the air pressure sensor and the A-D converter.

BS

List the "top 3", hopefully with links to specifics.

This passage may prove key:

Mr. Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton...said that because Mrs. Clinton had been sending emails to other State Department officials at their government accounts, she had "every expectation they would be retained." He did not address emails that Mrs. Clinton may have sent to foreign leaders, people in the private sector or government officials outside the State Department.

If she CC'd a government email address each and every time she was on gov't business, then technically it would be properly preserved because all gov't email accounts are supposed to be archived. We don't know if or how many were not CC'd in this way yet.

As far as whether using that technique is an official "security risk" is also unclear. Bad practice, yes. Illegal, perhaps not.

I expect a lot of complex and controversial interpreting of the law text during the course of this. Laws involving IT are often vague.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

What exactly is her big "Benghazi sin"? I cannot get a good, clean answer from conservatives. Civilian workers died in the middle east under W also.

As far as this current (alleged) scandal, give it time to play out. Often these things are more nuanced than initial headlines suggest when one digs into the details and gets more analyst opinions. There are too many drama queens on both sides of the isle.

Khronos is the organisation responsible for the OpenGL standard amongst other things.

And why should I care?

No idea. Perhaps you don't. If you're into 3D graphics then you will care. If you don't care then that's up to you. The implication here that we think you should care is a little childish. If you don't care that's fine. Find something you do care about.

Windows still has 90% market share on the desktop. I imagine D3D will keep going for a while.

Does this do tile-based rendering?

I presume you intended this as a joke, but from the OpenGL/Vulkan comparison table in the overview: "Matches architecture of modern platforms including mobile platforms with unified memory, tiled rendering"

On that point - I'm not all that sure exactly what it does to support tiling. The PowerVR blog says "A render pass consists of framebuffer state (other than actual render target addresses), and how render targets should be loaded in and out of the GPU at the start and end of each render. This structure is the key object that allows tiled architectures like PowerVR to run at extremely high efficiency." but that it's not really all that clear to me how this makes a difference.

Is this really something OpenGL didn't previously do? I remember DX8 drivers compiling to a bytecode. It was a pretty simplistic language, with a suboptimal bytecode but it still avoided at least one slow part of the process. I realise that optimisation takes the bulk of the time on non-trivial architectures but it still seems like a poinless inefficiency to expect a driver to even handle string parsing.

That's the Presidential Galaxy. It ages faster than normal due to stress.

They've gone to plaid!

I wish physicists would stop using the word "measurement" when talking about quantum mechanics. To detect fundamental particles we have to interact with them in an intrusive or destructive way.

Hmmm, strangely like the Middle East.

Because they didn't sign it.

Saying: "everyone who has them except Israel is allowed to keep them" is just plain wrong.

Which just might be why they didn't sign on - and part of why "Israel has had a policy of opacity regarding its nuclear weapons program."

Some things to remember about the NNPT:
  - Not every country in the world is a signatory.
  - Even signatories didn't permanently give up their right to develop nuclear weapons: By the treaty's own terms (section X(1)), they can drop out on three month's notice:

Article X

1. Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.