Another thing worth noting is that a small percentage of people choose the other two options. Thus, it can be logically inferred that there's an evolutionary advantage to having a few hermits and sociopaths as a sort of a failsafe in the relatively rare situations where being a hermit or a sociopath confers a survival advantage compared with normal, functioning members of a modern society, such as plagues or corporate boardrooms.

That's remotely possible, but if so, it means Samsung has no cojones. After all, they haven't strong-armed Apple into dropping support so quickly. Either way, it makes Samsung look bad, just for different reasons.

The closest anyone has come up with is the "was this review helpful?" but that gets abused easily.

The big problem with the helpful/not helpful dichotomy as a means for rating reviewers is that it fails to take into account why the reviewer didn't find it helpful. What the system needs, IMO, is to ask a second question at that point:

Did you find the review not helpful because (check all that apply):

• It mainly covered things that I don't care about.
• I disagree with the opinion.
• It contains facts that are incorrect.
• It had nothing to do with the product/service (spam and other abuse)

A review marked with the fourth one will get flagged for review by a human, and if verified to be crap, will lower the reviewer's reputation for everyone, and will be removed.

A review marked with the third one (factually incorrect) will just lower the reviewer's reputation, but at least initially by a smaller amount than a "Helpful" vote increases it. The more reviews this occurs in, the more negatively each negative impacts that person's score, so if a person consistently lies, the negatives count more and more, until they greatly outweigh the positives. However, that balance should only tip when those negatives come from unique users (so that one user can't just mark every review by a particular reviewer as unhelpful and have a bigger impact than marking a single review that way), and those ratings should be cancelled out by a sufficient number of positive reviews, ensuring that a small number of people can't attack a reviewer by each reporting one of his or her reviews as factually incorrect.

A review marked with the first two options ("not interested" and "I disagree") will lower the reviewer's reputation, but only for that reviewer and other people whose "not interested" and "I disagree" ratings on other goods and services are statistically similar to those of the reviewer. This allows users to get better, more individualized reviews that are more likely to match their interests and concerns, without adversely penalizing other people who might be interested in and concerned about the same things as the reviewer in question. To that end, instead of "44 out of 50 people found this helpful", it would say "44 out of 50 people whose tastes match yours found this helpful", such that other users of the site might well see completely different numbers.

And users who frequently give "not helpful" ratings with more than two boxes checked, but rarely give "helpful" ratings, should have progressively smaller impact on the overall helpfulness rating for the reviews that they rate, until at some point their helpful/not helpful ratings end up getting thrown away entirely (except in their own view).

I know this one. It's something about the rightful beneficiary of the estate of Prince Akeem Joffer.

Of course, if it's a minor road, you might be able to save a lot of power by not showing the lines unless there's somebody actually on the road (at least during the day, when cars cast shadows). Then again, I don't suppose you would typically need movable lines on a minor road, so... never mind.

Another approach might be something more passive, where the line areas become reflective when an electrical charge causes them to line up in a certain way, so that the sun provides all the light, and where the line areas change to be transparent when you polarize them the other way, thus showing the relatively dark surface of the solar cells. Then, you could use the LEDs only at night, when the light requirements are much lower, or come up with a means of tweaking the polarity so that the lines reflect the headlights.

He's wrong. The problem is that the concept of "God" is un-falsifiable. So you can always tack "because God wanted it that way" onto anything.

Which is relevant how? This is what makes religious belief not a science, but that has zero bearing on whether science makes religion irrelevant, except in the minds of people who already believe it to be.

This bizarre misunderstanding of science yields the paradox that even as we expect the impossible from science ("Please, Mr Economist, peer into your crystal ball and tell us what will happen if Obama raises/cuts taxes"), we also have a very anti-scientific mindset in many areas.

He thinks that Economics is a science. That's how wrong he is.

I think you seriously misread that bit. What he said was that people who don't understand science believe that it can explain things like what would happen if the President raises or lowers taxes. In other words, he's saying that economics is not a science.

And in that regard, he is wrong, and so are you (unless that was a typo). At its core, economics is about making hypotheses about how a complex system will react to an event, then observing how it actually reacts and falsifying those hypotheses. Or at least that's what economics is supposed to be about, Reagonomics notwithstanding.

When you ask "why is the universe here" the first thing to notice is you are giving human intent to something that has no intent. It is like asking "why does my shirt want to be blue?"

No, it is like asking, "Why does this shirt exist." It isn't anthropomorphizing the shirt; it is merely assuming that there is a reason for the shirt to exist. In that case, the answer is obvious: because someone created it. Asking the same question about a plant gets you the answer, "because the seed fell on fertile soil and grew." It may or may not have been planted by a human; if it was, then the answer is interesting. If it merely blew in, then the answer is also interesting, but for different reasons.

Asking why the universe exists is a reasonable question. It is a question that may or may not be impossible to answer with science in any useful fashion, if only because science occurs within the universe, and thus probably cannot answer questions about anything that occurs outside that universe.

Religion is one approach to answering the questions that science cannot feasibly answer. It is not the only approach, certainly, but that makes it no less useful than philosophy or any other nonscientific field that concerns the contents of the hearts of man. Where religion strays into problem territory is when it attempts to answer questions that science can answer. Those bounds are constantly shifting as science improves, hence the perceived conflict between the two. However, that conflict is illusory. After all, we can explain religion, or at least the evolutionary path that led us to have religion, scientifically. Therefore, religion is at its core a natural phenomenon that is no less a part of every human being than the desire for knowledge itself.

Ultimately, there are really only three approaches to safety: treat others like you wish to be treated and hope that they reciprocate, wall yourself in and protect yourself from any situation where you would have to put trust in others, or kill everybody else before they kill you. The second approach might work, but isolation is a horrible experience for most people. The third approach, when viewed rationally, leads to ever-escalating violence. This leaves you with only one sensible option.

This. You pretty much have to explain things in an anvilicious way for them to "get" the basic concepts, from what I've seen. They're just like the American public when it comes to technology; most know how to turn on a computer, open "the Internet" (Internet Explorer or, if you're really lucky, Safari), and "go to" Facebook. If you want them to understand, you have to explain it to them like you'd explain it to someone in the 1800s, except with the assumption that they know the names (and little more than the names) of websites.

For example:

The purpose of net neutrality is to prevent cable/Internet companies like Comcast from artificially limiting the speed (and thus quality) of movies on Netflix to pressure you to rent more expensive movies through Comcast On Demand instead, and to prevent them from extorting extra fees from Netflix in exchange for not limiting them in this way.

That's the minimum level of anviliciousness required. Not only does it have to be simple, but it has to be incredibly obvious why every random person who doesn't understand computers should care. When you word it like I worded it above, they get the point. When you don't, their eyes glaze over.

If you get a really highly educated journalist, you might be able to go on from there to say that every time a new technology comes out, it uses more bandwidth than what came before it. And every time, the ISPs have fought to restrict it to keep costs down. The only thing that has enabled the Internet to become as amazing as it is is that customers have fought back and demanded that their service get fast enough to handle the traffic. But ISPs are now fighting against that by pressuring companies like Netflix to pay them money to keep the service to their customers fast. And the goal of net neutrality is to stop that anticompetitive extortion.

But this requires you to get someone who didn't sleep through high school economics, so don't count on it.

Right. The correct solution is to break up the monopolies, requiring the company that owns the physical infrastructure to be a nonprofit that non-prejudicially leases access to that infrastructure to any other company that wants to use it. Such a design gives the wire provider the natural advantages of a monopoly without them being able to capitalize on it for profit (in part because they are limited to providing point-to-point fibers, and are forbidden from ever providing Internet service), and ensures that multiple ISPs can easily compete in any area without having to buy their way past the high barrier to entry.

And those wire providers should be common carriers, complete with the requirement for universal access within the areas they serve, and the state should build out infrastructure as needed to make it truly universal, spawning off nonprofits as it does so.

Private key and public key are factors in a two factor mathematical relationship.

So there can potentially be many (possibly infinitely many, I haven't tried to prove this) valid private keys for any given public key.

So I can see that, given the public key john@doe.com, I can see that there could be potentially many private keys. I see how you could brute force selecting a private key that matched your public key, and I can see that, depending how the brute-forcing is done, it would not be determinate that an attacker also trying to brute force a private key from the same public key would not come up with the same private key.

What I can't see is how, if you have a message which unlocks with the public key, how you can tell whether it was locked with the 'authentic' private key or with an attackers' inauthentic private key.

Anyone?

BTW, 720p is just shy of a megapixel, not a third of one. You're probably thinking of the old 720x480 format used for widescreen standard def content. :-) Not that a megapixel is all that amazing, either, mind you.

Let me correct myself further. 720p is just shy of a million full-color pixels. On a Foveon sensor, depending on how you count megapixels, that might be the same number. On a Bayer-filtered sensor, it's more in the neighborhood of 3 MP, because each color channel has about a third the spatial resolution of the sensor as a whole.

It will indeed be interesting to see if that happens. If I was to bet on it I would say that it's not going to happen in cinematography. Indeed moving focus through the scene is one of the tool that a cinematographer uses to achieve the desired artistic effect. It is hard to imagine that a computer algorithm would be able to predict how fast or slowly we want to bring objects in/out of focus and how much smoothness we want in these transitions.

That's an interesting question, and you're right that for that particular effect, you're probably better off doing it manually—preferably with a long-throw manual lens and a reasonably long stick attached. But that's likely to be an occasional thing, with either static focusing or traditional subject-following focusing used for probably 99% of your shots; if you're using focus to move from one subject to another for 99% of your shots, the viewers are likely to get nauseated rather quickly. :-D

Can autofocus beat the precision of a measuring tape?

Depends on how narrow the depth of field is. At large f-stops (e.g. the Zeiss 50 f/0.7 lens that Kubrick used), it can be done by hand, sure, but if you blow that up to where you can see pixels at 4K resolution, you're almost certainly going to notice the softness compared with what modern electronics could achieve, particularly if the subject is close to the lens and he or she decides to move a fraction of an inch. Mind you, that's a rather extreme case. :-) At more sane stops, it's not quite that bad. It's still a lot of work, though—work that's largely unnecessary with a decent, modern, subject-tracking AF mechanism (even without eye tracking to set the starting point). It's not that focus pulling can't be good enough, so much as that the extra work to make it good enough is significant, and it makes little sense to bother with that when a simple circuit can do at least as good a job (if not better) without all that effort. :-)

Lastly focus depth even though sometimes shallow isn't nil in most circumstances so small focusing errors might not have an adverse negative effect on the result.

That's true. With that said, the higher the resolution, the more visible that small effect becomes. At some point, you start to swear because the soft focus limits your effective resolution, and all those extra pixels are just taking up more space on disk without any real benefit. I'm not quite sure where that magic point is for manually focused movies—you'd have to ask somebody who regularly does film scanning and media ingestion for their take on it. Obviously it would depend on the f-stop, the distance to the subject, the film format, the focal length, and the skills of the person doing it. :-)

Chances are you've got the experience here while I certainly don't. However my impression so far was that what you're saying is true but not to such an extreme extent. People do use old lenses including those which are much older than a decade on modern still cameras and the results they're getting certainly don't look like they were shot with resolution of about 1/3 mega pixel provided by 720p video. I think the truth must be somewhere in between and the old glass must still be a valuable tool. After all if that glass was indeed that bad why wouldn't the prices not be nil today? Some of these lenses still command amounts of money which one on a budget would think twice before spending.

I'm probably being a bit on the cynical side; I'm sure there are some older lenses that are usable at 4K. The point I was trying to make was that the newer lenses are breathtakingly better at high resolutions—maybe not at 4K, but long before you get to 8K. And their handling of bad lighting conditions (lens flare, for example) is just amazing compared with the older lenses. Unless, of course, you're into that whole lens flare thing. (Yes, I'm talking to you, Mr. Abrams.)

BTW, 720p is just shy of a megapixel, not a third of one. You're probably thinking of the old 720x480 format used for widescreen standard def content. :-) Not that a megapixel is all that amazing, either, mind you.

I can't imagine why Texas Instruments' lack of support would be relevant in any way unless the phone vendor seriously lacked foresight. Most hardware manufacturers won't ship a closed binary blob that they don't build themselves. They may not be able to make the sources available, and it may be guarded under piles of NDAs so tall that the falling tower of paper would kill anyone who tried to leak it, but that doesn't mean they don't have the sources. I can't imagine that even Samsung would put themselves in such a vulnerable position.

Then again, if Samsung really doesn't care much about long-term support, maybe they would.

*shrugs*

Backups make no difference. GP is correct. A backup of an iOS device includes only user data and apps, not the OS itself, because it is always more reliable to install the OS from a known-good source, and you wouldn't want those bits getting overwritten by corrupted versions from a backup.

And as I understand it, iTunes won't sign the firmware for your device unless Apple says it should. And Apple stops letting it do so shortly after the next OS comes out. Therefore, short of a jailbreak and some sort of forced downgrade from within iOS itself, it is not possible to reinstall a non-current version of iOS even if you've kept the old IPSW file (except on older devices where no newer version is available).