Think of it as evolution in action. You can stay on one planet while some disaster takes it out. We have lots of choices of disaster, don't we? The human race can continue via those "space nutters".

Sure, we should try to avoid the disaster, etc., but planets are not forever.

That it runs TF2 well isn't saying much. That wasn't very intense when it came out and it is very old. TF2 runs great on integrated Intel cards. Try a game that is a heavier hitter, and uses more modern API calls. Then you'll see issues.

Se what you are really saying is "A problem can be fixed by throwing enough hardware at it." Your GPU and CPU are unimaginably powerful compared to what was available in 2007. So of course it runs well, it could be running at 25% efficiency and still run well because your monitor's scan rate is the limiting factor.

However that's not so easy to do with new games that push the envelope. You can't just throw tons of hardware at them because they are already pushing the high end hardware that is out. So efficiency matters. If the driver is slow, you are going to have poor performance.

Further there is the issue of crashing. AMD drivers seem to have a tendency to 'asplode when you start throwing some of the new features at them. These features are there for a reason, they allow greater detail, more efficient rendering, new visuals, etc. If you can't support them, then that's an issue.

If you want a real test, fire up Metro Last Light Redux, see how that works.

"Oh that's an old version, we aren't going to patch the bug." Really? That's an acceptable response that something that's 3 years old is too old to patch? But somehow, taking 100 days to patch a product that's 5 years old (in 7's case) is too long? Much easier to deal with patch issues if you just declare you only support the latest greatest and require everyone to upgrade all the time, no matter the issues.

MS's response is particularly understandable given the complexity of doing regression testing on the wide variety of hardware, software, and patch sets the patch might need to be applied against. If they released it and it caused issues, well then people would cry even more about how shitty they were for not testing it.

I think you are right about the mud slinging/political office: What with Chrome books Google now wishes to directly attack MS. They want to make Windows look bad, and thus make their own product look good by comparison. This isn't motivated by being a good citizen, it is motivated by something else.

For that matter one can get all conspiracy theorist and say maybe they chose their reporting date knowing MS's patch cycle to try and create just such a situation.

Aldrin is a hero, the hoaxer is a very annoying moron. While technically that shouldn't matter, justice should be truly blind, it isn't. Nobody wanted to find Aldrin guilty of any wrong doing, so any plausible explanation was taken to make sure he got off.

I'm talking about large pension plans. My employer (a university) has one of those. It is mandatory, they simply withhold part of your salary (and match it dollar for dollar) as a condition of your employment. If you work to retirement, it then pays out a defined benefit monthly, which is taxable. If you do not, you can roll it over to an IRA or other account, which can vary int terms of tax liability.

However while you work there, you don't report it, other than a check box that says you are participating in an employer retirement program. You have no access to the money, there's no provision for loans or anything, so it does not count as a gain of any sort. So even though you are having a sizable chunk invested on your behalf (12% of your salary matched so 24% total) it doesn't count as an investment that would need any schedule of reporting because you aren't actually investing it, just paying in to a defined benefit plan.

Ya it looks like a good choice as well. Either of them are cheaper and better than Turbotax :P.

What I mean is some places still offer defined benefit pensions. Those are investments, but they don't count as a normal investment does for tax purposes. You don't report on them or their value since you have no access to the money during your term of employment. So no need for a form for that.

Not what they should be doing, but the IRS doesn't seem to care much to go after people for it. I can see it too, given that usually you'd end up close to even. While the money you charge is income, you can deduct the space used, expenses, etc, etc. As such I doubt there is a lot of extra taxes to be had for people with roommates and so the IRS doesn't do much in the way of enforcement.

I haven't used their equivalent of the deluxe version, but the standard one has worked well for me for quite a few years and costs less than Turbo Tax.

What would Slashdot be saying if MS discontinued Windows 8 patches because 8.1 is now out? A reasonable support lifecycle is something that isn't too much to expect out of modern OS. It should be defined at OS inception.

Part of doing good science is being exceedingly critical of your own work. Feynman put it very well "I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen." So if he is so sure he is right, and so fragile about it, that he files a lawsuit when someone questions it, that is a bad sign. That means he's not thinking critically about it. A critical thinker would consider the arguments put forward. They might well decide they are all crap, but they wouldn't file a lawsuit to try and shut someone up.

Also this is the precise behaviour you see out of scammers. They shout down and try to use the legal system to bully critics. They know their work cannot stand up to criticism so they try to silence it with a big stick. I'm not saying that is what Mann is doing, but you do have to understand how it looks.

Needs to be thought about for the police too. They are people, and most people are not happy about being watched all the time. I mean think if you had a camera on you that recorded video and audio all day, every day at work. Might you feel a bit uncomfortable? I mean what if you and a coworker are sitting in the break room, complaining, as people do, and later your boss decides to look over the footage because he can and then fires you for it?

So there are reasons to try and find a balance. One thing that could help is a pre-roll system. Security systems do that these days, they'll continuously loop the last 30 seconds or whatever of footage in a buffer and then when an event happens (motion, alarm, etc) they'll commit that to disk and continue recording from there.

Could do the same here. Have a buffer, probably more like a 5-10 minute one, and then commit that when a recording event starts. Recording events could be triggered by things like cruiser lights getting activated, taser/firearm discharge, noise above a certain threshold, manual officer triggering, and so on.

Then you get to see what happened in the immediate leadup to the trigger as well as the aftermath. Privacy at other times is maintained as it isn't recording all the time.

Hopefully we'll find out eventually.

I think you are missing the application for an Open gate array.

It is not really for you and your company. You don't have any particular interest in the open part, and thus you and your company don't fit the demographic of the sort of user we would want. We don't need your money. I can do the first runs of this using Mosis and its ilk for chump change, and go from there.

It simply doesn't matter if it's 32 nm or 15 nm or 50 nm. What matters is that the user can completely understand the bitstream and produce their own tools for it. We have no shortage of users who want that.

It doesn't matter if it is on the leading edge in terms of cost, speed, power, thermal efficiency, or size. It matters that it's open.

And maybe we can do something that you can't do with any integrated circuit available to you, which is verify from first principles that the manufactured device is without deliberately hidden security back-doors. Because we don't have intellectual property to hide and thus we don't mind producing it in a way that would make it capable of being examined.

So, I am not particularly worried about what foundry I'll use and whether I can compete on the same playing field as Xylinx and Altera. I have my own playing field, with radically different rules from the ones they are using. I have my own customers to satisfy.

One well-known market would be immediately available and very eager to embrace an open FPGA, namely EE education.

Yes. EE education and academic research.

There is also the security problem. How can you determine from first principles that the chip really contains what it says it does? Insoluble with any commercial component. Maybe we could make ours sufficiently visible.

So, my feeling is that we could get a grant for this.