Whoosh?

Just as an exercise, imagine the original star wars movies without the spaceships and you'll know what i mean.

Do you mean this?

A lot of people say that having seen the movies as an adult they don't hold up as well as when they saw them as kids. Does "Star Wars" affect me the same as an adult as it did when I was 12? No, but I still think it's a fine movie. However, my opinion of "Empire" has increased significantly since I first saw it with my Dad in the theater.

Lucas is a visionary. He sucks at the details. He set out to recreate the Saturday morning serials with "Star Wars" and was very successful in setting a new bar in special effects. His vision for the scope and scale of the movie, the simplicity of the characters, being mythical archetypes, perfectly fit what he was shooting for, and made for a fun and exciting movie. But he can't write dialog to save his life. Even the dialog in "Star Wars" wasn't great, and in the sequels, it was awful. He also cannot direct people, because everyone in the prequels looked like awful actors, even though they aren't.

But he's got the vision, an eye for the kind of spectacle that makes great movies, and should be recognized as such. The problem was when he was allowed to also do those things he was really awful at.

I rewatched the original trilogy as an adult (I was a teenager when they came out) and still felt the first and third were pretty good, and yes, nostalgia plays a part of that, but my opinion of "The Empire Strikes Back" improved significantly. I like it much more now than when I first saw it.

I thought JJTrek was almost, but not quite as bad as Bayformers. There were fewer grotesque continuity errors and no (as far as I can remember) testicle jokes, and the action wasn't so much of a confusing mess, but the Trek reboot movies were just as stupid and incoherent.

So what they want to do is pump the value of BTC up so they can dump their 'largest holding of bitcoin'.

I'm just going to come out and say that to advertise the card with 4GB, but then disable any amount of it, is false advertising. Sure, most games can't actually hit 4GB since most games are still brain-dead 32-bit applications that can't access more than 4GB of any memory.

But this is a sign of things to come. Where the next generation sub-20nm GPU's will be advertised with RAM amounts and supposed to have 2-3X the processing power, but part of the GPU will be competely unusable because the operating system or software being used isn't 64-bit aware.

VRAM has nothing to do with system RAM. VRAM is special memory used by the dGPU, and only the dGPU, for storing framebuffers, textures, models, and other data needed to draw a 3D scene. It's faster than system RAM (GDDR5 is typical, vs DDR3 for regular RAM), and positioning it closer to the GPU reduces latency due to the speed of light (which travels only 10 cm in a single 3 GHz cycle). So the 32- or 64-bitness of the OS and apps has nothing to do with the video card's ability to access 4GB or more of VRAM.

In particular, the 970 GTX has a 256-bit memory bus. The speed constraint of having to retrieve data from VRAM one 32-bit (float) or 64-bit (double) "chunk" at a time became a bottleneck long before the inability to address that VRAM as a flat memory space. So mid- and high-end video cards are designed to retrieve multiple "chunks" of data from VRAM simultaneously. You have to drop all the way down to the GT 730 before you get to video cards using a 64-bit memory bus.

I'm projecting a 1080p image onto a 150" screen (my wall). It's damn obvious 1080p isn't enough. From 12' away I can see the individual pixels, and the anti-aliasing is obvious on news and sports graphics. I'd say 1080p video looks about as sharp as 480i video (DVD) on a 50" screen - not very sharp at all. And I'm 45 and my prescription 2 years out of date, so it's not like my eyes are as good as they used to be. If my next eyeglass prescription is sharper, I may have to intentionally defocus the projector image slightly to mitigate the screen door effect.

I'm seeing more and more 70"+ HDTVs for sale in stores, so I have to believe people are buying them. That's about the point when 1080p starts to become limiting at typical living room distances (about 8 ft between sofa and TV). Theoretical max for a room with 8' ceilings is just shy of 200 inches at 16:9, so there's still a lot of room for TVs to potentially grow. Add in more cameras capable of recording 4k, and 4k is going to gain traction in the next 5-10 years whether you want it or not. I've already decided that when the bulb on my current projector deteriorates, I'm just going to replace it with a 4k projector.

No, it is a better idea because it reduces highway deaths (in the US) without a significant increase in the cost of driving.

Many tens of millions of people are already banned from driving in the US due to age, driving history, or current state of impairment. What's known about the US situation is that a considerable fraction of accidents in the US come from drivers who are already banned from driving either by not having a license or insurance or by driving while impaired. Something like half of all US accidents involve people who shouldn't be driving at the time due to some combination of these factors.

Here's a counterexample from Texas concerning uninsured drivers.

Partly responsible. Otherwise, I agree. So what? My argument hasn't been that AGW doesn't exist, but that there isn't compelling reason to act on it in a costly way.

What's your willingness to pay out of your own wealth to protect these things? That tells me exactly how valuable these things are. And that's how you transform any preference into a purely economic question.

Here's a propaganda lesson for you. These are first past the post arguments from authority. Just because they existed before most counterarguments were formulated. doesn't mean that they were the best arguments even at the time of their creation. For example, the Stern report's flawed time value factor was readily apparent, meaning that reinterpreting the study through a more appropriate time value is already at the time of the publishing of the Stern report, is already better than the Stern report was.

Huh, I've googled that phrase and have been told it's part of the "Summary for Policy Makers" for the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR). But when I actually look at the "Summary for Policy Makers", I see either the 0.2/decade increase for that scenario, baldly presented without error bars (see page 11 of the above link) or presented with far larger error bars (0.1 to 0.3 C/decade presented as 1C to 3+ C increase by end of century and the IS92a predicts near linear increase) than your statement suggests. So why do we have a graph with 0.1 to 0.3 C/decade and a written statement with 0.1 to 0.2 C/decade?

Also, let it be noted that IS92a scenario is not a scenario of the the TAR, but of a previous assessment report. Instead, the TAR presents its own scenarios depending on degree of adoption of non-fossil fuel energy technologies and global dependence on high tech industry. These scenarios uniformly predict a higher temperature increase per decade in the near future than IS92a does, even the scenarios that are more conservative in CO2 emissions.

Looks to me like someone took the boring prediction of 0.1 to 0.2 C per decade in the IS92a scenario and sexed it up to 0.1 to 0.3 C per decade for the graphs, forgetting to change the old written prediction. Here, we need more than merely being in line with inflated expectations. We also need someone who isn't consistently exaggerating the expectations.

There's some glaring abuse of charts as well. The chart on page 17, which claims that the effects of CO2 emissions will even in the face of substantial reductions in CO2 emissions from today will remain at elevated levels indefinitely even over the course of a 1,000 years. But there's nothing on the Y axis. It's touchie feelie curve drawing mixed with a huge assumption about how carbon sinking won't work.

You know, when I get told a story that just doesn't ring true, then I call people on it. And if you really want to be consistent, why don't you take your own advice?

From a little googling, the voltage between the terminals is 2 kV. The clapper draws about 1 nA.

(175 years) * (2 kV) * (1 nA) = 11045 Joules ]

Which in terms most people can relate to is about 3 Watt-hours, or about the same as a singe AA battery. Not very impressive.

The free market strikes again!

What free market? By local government decree, Verizon is the only company allowed to offer POTS (plain old telephone service) in the areas it covers. If the local governments would embrace the free market and allow anyone with a credible proposal and business plan to lay down fiber in public easements and offer service (instead of just the anointed monopoly phone, cable, and electric company), Verizon's incentive to not upgrade its copper wires to fiber would evaporate overnight.

This is actually a perfect example of how government interference in the market initially done with the best of intentions (you don't want a zillion unsightly wires being laid down in easements, so the government decides which companies may do it) can quickly morph into a corrupt scheme where the government protects the monopolies in exchange for kickbacks (in the last city I lived in, the city asked cable companies how much they were willing to pay the city per home wired up, and awarded the monopoly to the highest bid).