They didn't want to look like Starfleet Academy. They wanted to look like a rich suburb:

Civil rights have come a long way if having iPads is now one. Do people even know what civil rights are anymore?

One would think lifting off with all that fuel needed for the landing is inefficient compared to a splashdown parachute recovery like the shuttle's boosters. And the damage caused by landing on water with parachutes has got to be less than the explosions from the landings on the barges.

One of the first produced autogyros was for mail delivery and landed on the White House lawn. That one got a trophy from Pres Hoover.

That being their drivers suck. Also that writing GPU drivers is hard and the OSS community hasn't done a good job.

AMD released a bunch of hardware info, and what code they could (they can't just open up all of their proprietary driver, there are things in it they legally can't release). There were claims of an absolutely amazin' driver that would be made, better than Windows, that there were thousands of skilled OSS programmers who were chomping at the bit to work on it.

Well that was mostly just people bragging on places like /. who didn't know what they were talking about, someone who'd fooled around writing a NIC or SATA driver and thought it was easy. Turns out graphics drivers are REALLY COMPLEX and each generation of hardware needs a new one. So the AMD OSS driver has been pretty poor quality. I mean it works, and supports some features, but it has some stability issues and is nowhere near the full feature set.

So ya, not really helping them. What the OSS community wants is for someone to write an nVidia quality driver, and open it up. Do all the work and then hand it out. Doesn't seem like anyone is interested in doing that. In part that is because some of what makes those closed drivers good is IP that gets licensed that can't be open sourced.

Valve has little to no Linux gaming clout. Ya they released a rebadge of Ubtunu with Steam on it. Yay. So far it has had very little influence. Most people continue to game on Windows (and to a lesser extent OS-X). They are not migrating in droves, nor are there droves of people who used Linux but didn't game that are now. Valve has changed very little in the Linux gaming space, as of yet,

The Unity engine and Kickstarter have done a lot more for driving any sort of Linux gaming than Valve.

Most of nVidia's gaming customers play on Windows, and they don't care about closed source drivers. Indeed, binary drivers are the way of things, the users would be extremely mad if you gave them source packages and told them to download a compiler. On OS-X it is all Apple's way, all the time. You gets the drivers you gets from Apple and live with it. Only in the Linux arena is there any wish for OSS drivers, and then only form a minority of their customers. Most of nVidia's Linux customers are high end enterprises, doing simulations or CAD work. They want certified binary drivers, because they want everything to be verified to work.

Valve really doesn't have much they can do to change nVidia's mind. I mean maybe if Valve themselves made Steam Machines and they could threaten to change vendors, but they don't, all kinds of hardware companies make them and they all do business with nVidia.

my work computer could really go for one of these; this kind of performance is needed to be able to grind through all the corporate security software.

How would you know the open internet is one of the most democratizing things we have in a modern society? Net neutrality rules were just published to the federal register today so only today does the internet finally, at long last, start to become open? It seems net neutrality is yet another piece of social openness being hunted down by government regulation.

WTF? The cost of maintaining a country is based on the government budget, not GDP. GDP is a measure of economic output. If citizens have good saving habits and the government doesn't run deficits then the cost of maintaining the country can be a small fraction of GDP. For bad savers and runaway spending governments, the cost can be much higher than GDP.

And in your example, trucks are charged a highway tax all their own to help pay their share.

It's sad you work at McD's but stop hating on more economically successfull people. It's clear from your posts that you're a coffee shop marxist.

I thought he had simply mis-spoken or was mis-quoted given that the commercials have already run for more than a year.

If the quote is accurate, then it must mean the new tax rules began in 2015.

Still, it's one year of hype leading to a launch that virtually no one showed up for.

Where did you get the idea that it had been running for just a quarter of a year?

The program was being developed in 2013 and by January 2014, they had already begun running ads.

That makes the program more than a year and a quarter old.

Those industrious few that were repairing and reusing equipment should have been free to start their own enterprises and invent and produce new things. Instead they had to struggle under communism and miss the opportunity to become the next Steve Jobs of Eastern Europe.

Of course by holding them back all were kept equally poor (except party insiders) and so the pride and ego of even the most incapable person was spared any uncomfortable comparison.

The proof is in how many different kinds of games are being made. That we have games which are massive franchises, that have been homogenized and distilled to appeal to the masses, yet we have games that are filling niche wants for gamers of certain types. We have games for people who are extremely hard core games, and games for those that are extremely casual. We have games targeting all skill levels, all types of play, and so on.

Whatever you likes, there is probably a game being made for you.

That list of games was a list of games which were to counter the point of things just being "movies" since all were most emphatically not. If you want a list of something else, then specify what you are interested in. The whole point was the AC, like so many of the other whiners, are complaining about a very specific type of game that is popular, but hardly the only thing. I was providing a list of games that are not what they are complaining about, and were released fairly recently as a counter example.

What has happened is that various things have brought down barriers, so now small groups of people, or even single people, can create and compete in the games marketplace. The upshot is we get things for more interests, not just the mainstream.

The Chinese fab is a 65nm fab, which is for older stuff. All their 22nm fabs are in the US and Israel.

True, though it could well impact the estimates of methane emissions worldwide. If there's some unexpected source of methane, there may be more. Or it may indicate that if some sources are producing more then others are producing less, or that that methane atmospheric lifetime is different than we thought.

So it's scientific curiosity, but it may well end up having an impact on our understanding of climate change due to greenhouse gases, beyond the immediate production at this site.