Hardware costs money. If you want cheap consoles, you have to trade things off. For example my PC has no problems rendering games like Titanfall at 60fps, even at resolutions beyond 1080 (2560x1600 in my case). So, just put that kind of hardware in a console right? Ya well, my GPU alone costs near double what a current console does, never mind the supporting hardware. It isn't feasible to throw that level of hardware at a console, it just costs too much.

That kind of thing has been tried in the past and it never worked. Remember the Neo-Geo? Had real arcade hardware (back when arcade units had better hardware than home systems) in it, far and above its contemporaries. However with a price equivalent to about $1100 today compared to its competitors which were about $350 in today's dollars it did very poorly.

The console makers had to make tradeoffs, and price was a big concern. Hence the somewhat limited hardware. Basically consoles are for people on a budget. They want something that plays games, but doesn't break the bank. So, the hardware in it has to be scaled accordingly. For those that want performance and are willing to for over more coin, the PC market is happy to oblige.

I'm not sure I agree on the honesty thing either. I see all types. Some are extremely honest, some are shady as hell. Heck we have some professors that basically just milk tenure. They don't teach, don't research, just sit around and collect a paycheck because it is too difficult to fire them. It really runs the gamut.

Because prison sucks and they'll usually seize any assets that they can prove were from the crime. So that's a pretty good reason not to do it.

Oh, and there's the whole "being a moral person" thing. Some people care about that too.

I like working in an academic environment, but getting shit done isn't the strong suit, particularly standards. You get a bunch of faculty on a committee and it'll take years to decide what to call the damn thing.

Just saying that the claim that the reason the IETF can't move fast is because of corporations as opposed to academics is silly.

You can hate on corporate types for various thing, but anyone who acts like academics know how to get anything done has never worked in academia. I work at a university and fuck me do we spend ages spinning our wheels, having meeting after endless meeting, discussing shit to death, and finally doing things 10 years after they needed to be done.

Speed is not what you find in an academic environment.

So they are a bit different, hardware wise. A big difference is unified memory. There is only one pool of memory which both the CPU and GPU access. That's makes sense since the CPU and GPU are also on the same silicon, but it is a difference in the way you program. Also in the case of the Xbone they decided to use DDR3 RAM, instead of GDDR5, which is a little slow for graphics operations, but the APU (what AMD calls the CPU/GPU combo chips) has 32MB of high speed embedded RAM on it to try and buffer for that.

Ok so there are some differences. However that aside, why the problem with the target? Visual quality. Basically, a video card can only do so much in a given time period. It only can push so many pixels/texels, only run so many shaders, etc. So any time you add more visual flair, it takes up available power. There's no hard limit, no amount where it stops working, rather you have to choose what kind of performance you want.

For example if I can render a scene with X polygons in 16ms then I can output that at 60fps. However it also means that I can render a scene of 2X polygons in about 33ms, or 30fps.

So FPS is one tradeoff you can make. You don't have to render at 60fps, you can go lower and indeed console games often do 30fps. That means each frame can have more in it, because the hardware has longer to generate it.

Another tradeoff is resolution. Particularly when you are talking texture related things, lowering the output resolution lowers the demand on the hardware and thus allows you to do more.

So it is a tradeoff in what you think looks best. Ya, you can design a game that runs at 1080p60 solid. However it may not look as good overall as a game that runs at 720p30 because that game, despite being lower FPS and rez, has more detail in the scenes. It is a choice you have to make with limited hardware.

On the PC, we often solve it by throwing more hardware at the problem, but you can't do that on a console.

Why the heck is ASL not American English? Perhaps there is a good reason, but it just seems silly to me, and it seems like something that would make it that much harder for someone who is hearing impaired to interact with those that are not. The fact that it is a different format is not a reason. I mean written and spoken English are very different formats, and do not have a direct 1-1 mapping in terms of things like letters to phonemes and so on, but yet they are exceedingly similar. I fail to see why this couldn't be done with ASL. Yes, you are going to want to have signs that represent words, rather than letters or phonemes. No problem, however syntax, grammar, structure, etc should all be the same as spoken or written English.

When you gain the power that comes with being a police officer, then everything you do when on duty and filling that official capacity should be open to public scrutiny. Since abuses of that power have very direct and damaging effects on the victims of said abuses, I feel that all officers must sacrifice some of their freedom, while on the job, in order to help protect civilian rights. Those who are good officers that go by the book in every situation (outside of emergency situations that can and do occur, that require nearly instantaneous reaction time) and don't abuse their power have nothing to worry about - if something bad happens that is questionable, having a record of it would also protect the officer.

Yes, I realize that's dangerously close to "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide". However, there is a difference between applying that to civilian individuals (including off-duty police officers) who have a very real right to privacy, and applying it to people who we have allowed to have legal power above and beyond what we allow civilians to do (for example, while civilians in many areas have the right to make a "citizen's arrest", they most likely do not have the right to use physical force to detain that individual, whereas the police do have that right). With power comes the responsibility to ensure that those powers are used properly, and having such interactions recorded as a matter of law protects the civilian and the officer.

I personally think this would be a good idea with civilians too, but the difference is, with officers (and other public officials with power above an ordinary civilian), those recording devices should be mandated by law and such footage available for review by any member of the public, but with civilians, the control over such devices (and indeed, the entire decision to wear them at all) should rest with the individual device owner. I really wish people would get over their Google Glass hangups and realize that, while in public, there is no right not to be recorded. Having a record of the day's interactions (that would automatically fade into the ether after, say, 24 hours, unless a segment is explicitly reviewed by the user and saved) would help prevent or at least reduce the "he said, she said" arguments that sometimes occur when a claim is made, because there is an impartial record of what happened (and in fact, in a society that doesn't have such a hangup about "public privacy", all parties would be recording, making for a way to corroborate what happened and have a fighting chance at detecting editing or other tampering).

It's 2Ah, so 240A.

Now, it could be that their battery runs at a higher voltage (and thus not really 2Ah, but they're using that figure as a 3.7V li-ion equivalent capabity), or that there is a power converter built into the battery pack (unlikely for a prototype, though). Still, even for a 37V battery (vs. 3.7V for a normal Li-Ion cell), we're talking 24A. That cord didn't look like 24A cord, and I highly doubt they were using a voltage higher than 37V to charge (especially not with exposed banana jacks like that).

I call the demo highly dubious if not an outright fake/mock.

Mozilla is not a public company. It is a 501C3 tax exempt non profit and its wholly owned taxable subsidiary. Our stockholders are the people of the world. Our decisions are based on maximizing the value of the Internet for the benefit of everyone everywhere, especially those who lack representation from the giant institutional multinational publicly traded corporations like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Our student at work has a plan that is like $30-40/month or something that is unlimited data (I don't remember how much high speed, they throttle at some point), 400 talk minutes and unlimited text. It's a prepaid deal.

I mean yes, there are expensive Android devices. You can have a nice, premium, phone or tablet if you wish. I loves me my Galaxy Note 3 but it certainly costs a lot, more than an iPhone even. However there are also cheap Android devices. You can get a smart phone for $100 or less (talking full price here, not subsidized). So Android phones are an option on most budgets.

Until recently, all you could get with Apple was the standard iPhone which is like $600-700 full price. Even the new "c" model is $550 full price. That puts them out of range of most people who want prepaid phone plans, which is often what people with lower incomes go for.

Well those people are also likely to spend less on apps. After all, if your finances are such that you wish to buy an economical phone, you probably don't want to ruin it with spending a ton of money on software.

So ya, that will push the average down on Android phones. Personally, I see that as a big positive to Android. There's something to be said for a thing that can be available to a wide segment of the population. Exclusivity to the affluent isn't something I consider to be positive.

I know a lot of people, my sister included, who have a big issue with taking drugs prescribed by a doctor, but no issue with taking drugs purchased from a dealer. The logic can be pretty strange. For example I was talking with her about looking in to trying an anti-anxiety medication. My family all has issues with that, but she is far worse than the rest of us. My parents and I take low doses of SSRIs for it and it seems to help a lot. Thus it would probably be worth a try for her, since we have a great deal of genetic commonalities so the chances it works on her are high. Her response? "I don't want to do that, I only want to take the drugs I choose." I pointed out to her that it was completely my choice to take an SSRI, I could stop any time I wished, they aren't addictive, there is no court or medical order that requires me to take it, I continue to take it because I find it useful. Same reason we all take allergy medicine in the spring: It is useful in dealing with that, not because there is a requirement of some kind. She didn't like that though, to her it is different, though she could not articulate how or why.

I'm not sure why it is such an issue, perhaps because of the stigma associated with mental health issues, but I've seen it in numerous occasions. People who have no issue with recreational drugs that alter your brain chemistry but think that prescription drugs that do the same are evil or bad or something. It is, as you point out, a very silly position. I can respect, though not agree with, the position of taking no drugs that alter brain chemistry for whatever reason. However it is silly to be ok with THC and LSD and the like, but not with an SSRI.

Now please don't anyone mistake me for saying "Everyone should take SSRIs." No, not at all. However if a professional suggests they, or another drug, may be useful to treating a condition you have, you shouldn't say "No I won't take drugs," but then go out and smoke a joint. That is just silly. That would be like then refusing to use marijuana if a doctor prescribed it.

So, in other words, never.