You are sooo wrong, sadly. This woman has gone far beyond being an idiot. Even an idiot at some point would know to just shut up. This is much worse. She is full-blown narcissistic paranoid-delusional loony-bin material. There is no person left on this planet that she will listen to, because EVERYONE who says anything negative to her or about her is automatically assumed to be in cahoots with the EEEVIL Sheriff Garcia. This includes all kinds of random internet people on Twitter, the commenters on the photographer's original article (the initial "lynch mob"), as well as the commenters on the PetaPixel article. According to her all of these random people are part of a conspiracy run by this Sheriff Garcia that she's trying to get rid of. If she ever finds out about Slashdot we'll all be included in the conspiracy too, I'm sure.

Even if you got the Christ-figure in this drama, her immaculately-conceived hero Louis Guthrie, to speak to her about this, it wouldn't make any difference. In fact, the next article on her blog afterward would be something like, "Guthrie Sells Soul to Garcia, Satan Wins!" And it will be yet another extensive, zig-zaggy, rambling diatribe about how the whole world is trying to destroy her (and by extension, how the world is trying to destroy the disabled children she has supposedly dedicated her life to serving).

This woman seriously needs to be put in a padded room and given some intense psychological help before she ends up living on the streets arguing with imaginary people. It may be as simple as a dose of lithium to even out a manic episode. I'd hate to think she's been this crazy her whole life and nobody's noticed, but that's not unheard of either. Witness Michelle Bachmann.

P.S. It's really interesting going through the comments on the PetaPixel article. With her odd writing style it's quite easy to identify the dozen or so comments she made in support of herself WHILE PRETENDING TO BE OTHER PEOPLE. Hint: She's the only one who keeps harping about Jay Lee (the photographer) "taking down her websites" and slipping in references to "Garcia". Oddly she never says a word against her beloved web host GoDaddy, the ones who actually took her sites down.

I guess the most interesting thing about this is that America isn't slowly going insane, as one might think. The religious nuts have just gotten louder and more obnoxious in the last several years, making it seem like they're taking over. Doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, but at least my perception that people are abandoning reason left and right in this country is incorrect. That's a good sign. I guess...

Something that nobody seems to have brought up so far is that increased pixel density brings with it increased color saturation and contrast, which is a great thing for movies and photos as well as text display. This is already one of the draws of the new iPad, which is just barely a "retina" display by Apple's definition with a pixel density of just 264 ppi. Further increases in pixel density should continue to improve these color attributes on all devices. It's not the resolution increase per se but the reduction in the thickness of the lines separating the pixels that is a desirable thing.

We should also continue looking forward to the day when pixel density is so high that both text and objects can be scaled up or down to fit the device without introducing horrible pixelation effects. That day will only arrive when pixel densities on all devices are far beyond the range of human perception. Until then we are still stuck with making on-screen objects at a set pixel size in order to keep them from looking awful.

So I say let the device makers have a ball making high density displays. It can only be a good thing.

So you have faith that "eventually" there will be "evidence" to prove that the Bible is 100% correct about everything, but in the meantime no available evidence will ever sway your beliefs. Does that pretty much sum it up? Exactly how long is this "eventually" that you speak of? I have to wonder exactly what sort of evidence you believe will suddenly turn up to support your theories.

You believe yourself to be a rational person, but you are in fact not rational at all. Quite the opposite. Having an unshakeable faith in an idea that has no evidence whatsoever currently supporting it is completely irrational.

But if you haven't figured out by now that you're a fruit loop, you probably never will.

You say that to be funny, but in fact that is another of the many reasons that I always just tell people these days to buy a Mac. Since they only make a few different models of laptops and they don't change the form factor sometimes for years, there is an EXTENSIVE amount of really nice after market accessories available for Macs, including hard cases in various colors, tons of different "skins" and some very nice keyboard protector options. Great for protecting the laptop inside and out, and great for those who like to customize what their computer looks like. A few PC manufacturers sell colored laptops, mainly their cheap consumer models, but guess what? It will always be that color. With the cases and skins widely available for Macs, you can change your laptop's looks as often as you want, and keep the thing looking like new for years even in harsh environments like school/college.

Plus there's the fact that if we can learn to get our damn techie egos out of the way we might realize a couple of things. Firstly, the specs really don't matter much anymore unless you're doing something like hardcore gaming or video processing. Normal people never hit the limits of even low end processors and GPUs these days. Secondly, most non-techie people will actually prefer using Mac OS X, which is yet another reason to get her a Mac.

I'm glad I'm not the only one anymore who just plain got tired of trying to find a decent PC laptop out of the hundreds being marketed. You go to the Apple store and you just decide how big a screen you want, and whether you want an optical drive. That's pretty much it. No matter how anti-Apple you may be, you do have to wonder why there are so many people besides me who are answering this question with "Just buy a Mac."

They're damn good computers. Period.

My bad. Allow me to sincerely apologize for mistaking one group of batshit crazy liberal-media-conspiracies-are-destroying-the-universe loons for a completely different batshit crazy liberal-media-conspiracies-are-destroying-the-universe loons. I can't imagine how I got so confused.

By the way, I was using "tea party" as a figure of speech, as in "crazy like the tea party", which is why it's hyphenated and uncapitalized. Not that it particularly matters. Nuts is nuts, no matter what side they're on or what they call themselves.

Reading just bits and pieces of this lady's blog it is quite apparent that she is full-on batshit, tea-party, paranoid-about-liberal-media crazy. Ignoring the fact that most of her wrath should be directed toward the insane policies of GoDaddy who are the ones who decided to shut down ALL her sites over a single photograph, she needs to have someone with backbone sue her dumb ass for slander and defamation so she can see how the law actually works. She needs a massive mental slap upside the head to rattle her brain back into place. She's pulling conspiracies out of thin air left and right, making all kinds of accusations without a shred of evidence. Oh, her evidence is, "I don't believe in coincidences."

I love the cognitive dissonance of these people. She quotes a supposed conservative psychologist expounding on some sort of horribly obvious but also incredibly nebulous psychological "problem" with Obama: "His externalizing all blame to conservatives, George W. Bush, or the “racist” bogeyman hints at persecutory delusions." Funny, I thought that's what conservatives were doing all day long, in the other direction. Externalizing all blame for literally EVERYTHING to liberals and Obama. Pot, kettle, carbon motherfuckin' black.

Wow. Just wow. Reading that blog is scary. She should apply for a job at Fox News. I'm sure she'd fit in perfectly. Now excuse me while I go scrub the crazy out of my brain with some Dragonball.

WTF are you talking about? The N-word is a purely derogatory slang form of the descriptive word "negro", which of course merely means "black". I've never heard anyone else imply that the descriptive term "shemale" is offensive in any way, just as the equally descriptive term "ladyboy" is not offensive. Racial slurs are in a whole different class. Being offended by a purely descriptive term makes no sense. That would be like me being offended by someone calling me a "white male". That's taking offense-sensitivity a bit far.

You probably would have received a slightly more useful set of responses if you were able to be more clear about what sort of nefarious "things" this person is expecting to uncover with all this NSA-level data monitoring of his own home network. I think it's really hard for most of us to imagine that any of this would be more effective than a simple heart-to-heart family talk about the perils of the interwebs.

But the bottom line is that this sort of project is miles outside your realm of expertise, which you've already admitted to when you submitted the original post. What you should have done (before asking the internet to condense several years of network security expertise into a five minute tutorial) is referred your "client" to a real network security specialist agency, or perhaps even the FBI if he really has some preliminary evidence of some kind of wrongdoing happening on his network. Those are the sort of people who have the resources to actually conduct a non-pointless investigation of this type. But the chances that the situation actually calls for such parties to be involved are practically nil.

I do love how speeders justify their speeding by pointing out how it's safe and acceptable because "everybody does it". Doesn't matter how many people are also violating the law along with you, you're still a douchebag speeder who is endangering all the poor silly people attempting to avoid exceeding the posted speed limit. If you want to drive faster than the speed limit you should be lobbying to have the speed limit increased. But no, you have to "stick it to the man" and drive whatever speed you feel like driving so you can show everybody how much smarter you are than the guys who put up the speed limit signs.

As for being so safe, I do hope you realize that increasing your speed from 55mph to 70mph nearly DOUBLES the kinetic energy of your vehicle, and increases your required stopping distance from around 150ft to around 240ft (on DRY pavement). Yeah, real safe.

Might want to get some therapy for that road rage too.

I am going to have to strongly disagree with this assessment. All my life so far I have always had eyes that are more sensitive to both color quality and frame rates than most of the people around me. I have always been bothered by CRT monitors set to 60hz, and as soon as I learned that you could increase the frame rate to 75hz or 85hz I did so on every computer I ever sat in front of, because otherwise I'd get a headache. Fluorescent lights always used to bother me, before they came out with new types of ballasts that weren't restricted to 60hz. Every computer monitor that was still set to 256 colors got changed to at least thousands of colors when I sat down in front of it (16 million colors if possible), because the lack of color depth was blindingly obvious to me and annoying.

I waited to buy an LCD TV until I could afford to get one with at least a 120hz refresh rate, because it was quite obvious to my eyes when comparing models at the store that 60hz just wasn't enough to give a clear, ghost-free, jitter-free picture. I'd probably be even happier with one of the newer 240hz models because I could see a slight difference with those even over the 120hz models, but couldn't afford one at the time.

In other words, I have *always* been the first person I know to move to the newer, faster, sharper stuff whenever possible because my eyes can actually see the difference and appreciate it.

But you know what? The frame rate of the actual video programming displayed on the TV does not seem to conform to the same rules. Cinematic 24fps movies have never bothered my eyes, nor does 30fps TV. What does bother my eyes is stuff like soaps and amateur films that are filmed at higher frame rates. They just don't look right. Yes, they look more "real". But for some bizarre reason, they also look amateur, and "cheap", and have significantly less dramatic impact. I am far from the only one to notice this.

We've had this kind of programming available for decades. We've had plenty of time to "acclimate" to faster frame rates, yet nobody in their right mind has ever released a 60fps film because they know it will end up looking and feeling like a soap opera, and it will feel like a home-made movie, and people will hate it. That's just the way it is. There's nothing magical about it, it's just the way our visual cortex works. And until we evolve new visual cortexes, I call BS on all you people calling everyone who hates films with faster frame rates "whiners". Feel free to attempt to move to a higher frame rate as a standard for films, but just don't be surprised when everyone ends up either consciously or unconsciously hating the "new" films. Because I don't believe for a second that everyone will just get used to it and start loving how much all new movies feel like cheap soaps. Ain't gonna happen.

Higher resolution was a bit jarring for some people, but easy to get used to. But higher frame rates? I don't think the phenomenon of converting still frames to "motion" in the brain is that simple.

550 billion particles? That's it? How exactly does that equate to a "full observable-universe simulation"? Last I checked, the minimum estimate for our galaxy alone was 100 billion stars. Multiply that by at least 100 billion other *galaxies* and we're looking at... uh... a much larger number to even begin to simulate the entire observable universe.

I'm sure I'm significantly misunderstanding something about the simulation parameters though.

No. You misunderstand the purpose of the stillsuit. On Arrakis there was enough humidity for plants such as cacti and small desert animals such as the desert mouse (muad'dib) and the hawk to survive even in the deep desert. Even in the Atacama in Chile, the driest place on Earth, you will be fine as long as you have enough drinking water. The reason the stillsuit and mask were needed was due to the fact that there were so few water sources, not because of a lack of moisture in the air. If there had been sources of water available (such as drilled wells) in the deep desert they would have no particular need to recycle the body's moisture with a stillsuit.

Besides which, you would only become desiccated after you're dead. Before that it's dehydration. And you're actually more likely to get dehydrated while climbing Mount Everest than while wandering in the Sahara. Cold air holds less moisture and the lower air pressure also helps dehydrate you very efficiently.
 

I saw a couple of demo files years and years ago. DOS-based stuff. I think they were probably 16k files. I was amazed at how long the animations and music lasted from a 16KB EXE file. The demo just went on and on, for like ten minutes. Had some fairly impressive animations too. But it was all line-based sorts of things, like old screen savers.

But this... this is insane. I can't even believe what I'm seeing. I'm downloading the 720p version of the first video in MP4 format, and it's 91MB. A 91MB full-motion video rendered from a 64KB demo file. That's just nuts. It frazzles my brain to even think about how this is possible.

So in the future we'll all be driving electric-hydrogen vehicles covered in a sort of shag carpet of nanowire trees?

That...

is...

AWESOME!