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Comment Re:They all suck (Score 1) 190

This. 1000x this. Laptop keyboards are often much better than regular keyboards in terms of minimizing the amount of effort required to get a word from your head into the machine. The only thing missing is for them to be full-size and ergonomic. (My preference would be a split keyboard where both units are separate bluetooth modules, or at have at least 6' of cord connecting them.)

Comment Re:It's in the image (Score 2) 187

Movies don't look smooth. They look like a staccato of motion-blurred still frames. 24fps was simply the minimum (read: cheapest) frame rate at which most of the population would perceive as mostly motion-like. Motion blur helps, but it hardly makes up for the deficiency.

Technology has advanced quite a bit since the advent of motion picture cameras, to the point that the "film" is pretty far from the most expensive line item in the budget. Why not record at a more natural frame rate?

The conceit of the movie industry is conditioning he movie watching public to believe that 24fps looks "more cinematic." How convenient for them that it is also "less expensive." But how disappointing, too, when those hard to-obtain establishing shots from high over the countryside don't really show any of the beautiful detail to the viewers?

Comment Re:Start with copyright (Score 1) 116

3/5ths was about proportionment of representation among the states, not the treatment of individuals. The problem was the existence of states where non-free persons were not eligible to vote, so any proportionment of representation made on their behalf was exercised by the free, land-owning male citizens.

If you think disenfranchisement is unfair, how do you feel about disenfranchisement that grants your own deserved electoral power to the very parties that are oppressing you?

3/5ths was a compromise, but its fundamental unfairness was not that it was too low, but too high. States with non-free populations should never have been rewarded with the ability to exercise electoral power of the people they oppressed.

Comment Re:What a nightmare (Score 1) 332

Instead we have a "Star Trek" universe that JJ has TOTALLY F*&*ed up where people can use the transporter to get anywhere in the galaxy, super-magically powerful "Red Matter", lame plots and passable acting etc. etc.

and magic blood that cures any disease or ailment including death from extreme radiation exposure, yet the episode wasn't about the ethics of a systematic rare-blood harvesting operation or the distribution of its products.

Comment Re:One reason: Annoyance (Score 1) 237

You don't have to wait through all that crap. Most voicemail systems have a key assigned to skip the header and jump straight to the message. It's always a different one, though, as far as I can tell. Next time you're at the main menu of your voice system, try listening through to the end of the options and choose the help one if it exists.

Comment Re:Interesting (Score 2) 293

They compete on price because that's all the information the aggregation networks have. I'm not in the industry, so I don't know if it's the aggregation networks' fault for not having more detail in the spec, or the airlines' fault for not releasing enough information, or what, but the problem is that when using one of the aggregators, you can typically only sort on price or time. Comfort details aren't part of the sorting metric, so the system doesn't optimize for them.

Comment Re:Waste (Score 2) 170

The money goes into the economy, but the resources and labor to build the thing do not. Still, it's his money to spend once people give it to him. If you think there was a waste, then you should be upset about Microsoft for spending as much as they did to buy a somewhat polished, but still fairly shallow indie game. Assuming they do nothing with it other than pass the cost on to you through higher costs for windows licenses.

Comment Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score 2) 292

In his blog, there are a number of comments about the HTML entity he used instead of the hyphen character. There is speculation that text-to-speech accessibility features were mis-interpreting things as a result.

On the TTS note, It seems like HTML (or at least the dialect used for ebooks, but why not everywhere?) should have a tag for providing pronunciation overrides, which would improve accessibility and finally allow us to know how the authors intended the pronunciation of all those apostrophe'd names.

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