Here is a presentation given by John Carmack that explains it a bit better than my first link.

No, they are talking about a technique that is also used by Oculus to translate variable frame rate renderings to smooth fixed frame rate output without judder.

The motorola Quantico or the kyocera dura XT are the dumbphones I've carried - I like riding my motorcycle year round - phones like those can take shock, water, being thrown against a wall and still work.

I've owned both and while I liked the Quantico better - US Cellular moved out of my region so I was forced to the dura XT on Sprint.

Not necessarily. Greenland ice core records show that in the past the planet has seen temperature shifts of up to 7 C in as little as 30 years. 7 C is huge. It's like transporting Moscow to Rome. Of course, we have no idea what caused such rapid changes in the past. It wasn't CO2 levels, or particulates.

I would. If one or more isolated populations managed to survive more than a couple of generations after the event, I think it's highly likely that they'd continue to survive indefinitely. The worst of the changes would be past, and they'd clearly have learned how to survive in the new environment, else they'd have died sooner.

Human intelligence makes us highly adaptable, as evidenced by the extraordinary diversity of environments in which we live, and lived even before the advent of modern technology. Humans who lack the necessary knowledge of how to survive in a particular environment are at severe risk of death any place on the planet, but if they manage to survive for even a year or two, odds are that they'll have learned enough to be able to extend that time almost indefinitely.

Because sitting around playing video games all day is *exactly* like a career as a programmer. If you like one, you'll *love* the other.

The article is also based on some terrible reasoning, like:

That means there will be no asteroids left in the Solar System, because they all will have struck Earth, in another few hundred million years. Think someone’s overestimated something there? Yeah, me too. Let’s take a look with the flaws in our fear-based reasoning.

Yeah, in a universe where our solar system is some sort of perfect steady state. Which, of course, it is not. Asteroids collide or - more commonly, come close to other bodies and gravitationally interact - and throw each other into different orbits. When that happens, non-Earth-crossing asteroids can become Earth-crossing ones. For example, one of the candidates for the K-Pg extinction event is a Batisma-family asteroid. This family came from an asteroid breakup 80 million years ago.

A person well versed in the field would be aware of the fact that asteroids are not in some sort of unchanging steady state. Which is why they're the ones paid to do the research on the subject.

And more to the point, we really don't have a good handle on what's out there. We have trouble making out dwarf planets in the outer solar system. We really have no bloody clue what could be on its way into the inner solar system, apart from studying how often major events happen.

And on that note, another flaw in his logic, given that until recently, the vast majority of Tunguska-style events would never even have been detected, having occurred over the oceans, remote deserts, the poles, etc. So by all means it's perfectly fair to say that the fact that an asteroid hitting earth is more likely to hit a remote uninhabited area is perfectly fair. But saying that while mentioning the rarity of inhabited areas having been hit in the past is double-counting. The historical record is evidence of how often they hit populated areas, not how often they hit Earth.

Lastly, his claim that only one person has ever been "hit by an asteroid" is ridiculous. 1500 people were injured by the Chelyabinsk one in 2013 badly enough to seek medical attention. Yes, they weren't "hit by rocks", but that's not what large asteroid impacts do; they mostly or completely vaporize by exploding in the atmosphere and/or on impact. And there's lots of reports throughout history of people getting struck by asteroids; just because they weren't documented by modern medical science doesn't mean it never happened. Seriously, what's the bloody odds that the only person to ever in historical times be hit by an asteroid would be in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation? Now what's the odds that someone being hit in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation would be well documented, publicized, and believed?

Just a lot of really bad arguments.

- good.

- good.

- good

- irrelevant.

In fact the syntactic sugar added starting with Java 5 is mostly bad. Generics - bad, horrible code. 'for (blah: type)' - bad, no Iterator access. Autoboxing - horrible, gigantic mistake, etc.

But what do I know, I just end up releasing one working project after another by hiring novices and training them in a month to a level they become to projects.

Sure an organisation the size of Mozilla or wikimedia's requires a lot of money. Losing that money would be painful and require a massive downsizing.

But do these overbloated nonprofits really serve their communities? Neither wikipedia or firefox seem appreciablly better (and in some ways worse) then they were when the organisations behind them were much smaller. The resources seem to be being spent on pet projects and contraversial UI redesigns rather than on making real improvements in their core products.

The thing that really got me about GTA V was that at least offline (I don't have an xbox live account, maybe I should have got one, I understand there was more money to be made in the online stock market than the offline one) there was no real way to make money in the endgame other that waiting for money from your buisnesses which arrives painfully slowly (and unlike in earlier GTA games saving repeatedly to advance time doesn't seem to help). If you played the main story normally you end up with enough money to make the rewards from side activities look pitiful (and doing each race etc once took nowhere near long enough for the money from the buisnesses to build up) but not enough to buy all the properties (and thus feel you have completed the game). Stock trading didn't seem to yeild much. Repeating missions did nothing for your ingame currency.

This was made worse by the inability to move money between characters, buy a property jointly between multiple characters or sell a property owned by one character to another. Building up enough money to buy the golf course by endgame activities would take an insane ammount of time.

Even more annoying was I found that you can be rich in the endgame by combining the assasination missions with stock trading but the assasination missions are limited in number so if you do them when they become available and/or don't fully exploit the stock trading benefits then you lose the ability to make money out of them later.

It doesn't take very long to swap a battery pack either. I wonder how the cost having a charging rack and enough battery packs that you always have a charged one compares to the cost of having a source of hydrogen for refueling.

Theres two ways to make electricity from radionuclides.

One is to just have a lump of radioactive material and let it decay. Then you capture (some of) the decay energy either thermally (radioisotope thermal generator) or electrically (beta-voltaic generator). Upsides are it's simple and it scales down pretty well. Downside is that the efficiency is very poor and so is the power to weight. Usefull if you want a little bit of power for a long time. Probablly not suitable for a UAV.

The other is to go in for a full-blown fission reactor. As well as the safety issues there is the problem that they just don't scale down very well and the power to weight is still poor (especially when you include radiation sheilding). The US and russian militaries did attempt to design fission powered jet aircraft but it was difficult to provide enough shielding to protect the crew and the programs were abandoned after the development of ICBMs. The US also started design on a nuclear ramjet powered missile but again abandoned it after the development of ICBMs. While UAVs don't have a crew I doubt a craft that was a massive radiation hazard to those arround it would ever be approved for civilian use or even peacetime military use.

It got him an off-hour story on Slashdot.

Which is doubly annoying/funny because Google, at least, doesn't give people brain teasers.

How does that first sentence read again? I think someone left out a verb.