- - - - - Yes. You're talking about a singular FEATURE. Yes, the feature helped revolutionize the market. But the market existed BEFORE the feature. - - - - -

Funny how the Newton gets left off the canonical list of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand then.

sPh

- - - - - That's not creating a new business out of nothing, nor is it being particularly visionary. It's a natural improvement on an existing market segment. - - - - -

One has to be careful about trusting accounts written later, whether written by the winners or the losers. But multiple sources have reported that the response to the introductory demo of the iPhone at the highest levels of both Nokia and Blackberry was "that's impossible - they must be faking it". Nokia and Ericsson at least did a reality reset within a year and tried to get back in the game, but Blackberry only realized the iPhone was for real 18 months ago - say early 2014, 7 years after the iPhone was introduced.

I'd call that creating, or recreating, a new segment.

sPh

Algasol's photobioreactor technology requires less than 1/10th the land of other biofuel technologies and, in fact, it requires no land at all, preferring to be located on saline water. The largest photobioreactor, the 250m^2 Alga6, sells for $3,375 retail. When the numbers are all run, Alga6 biocrude is competitive with $40/bbl oil -- and that includes all costs including the cost of insuring the photobioreactors against hail, the power cost of centrifugal separation, the power to drive the wave mixing when natural wind is too low, etc. Right now the market emphasis is on algal biomass for fish feed, simply because the signal to noise level in the biofuels industry is so low that (combined with recent declines in crude price) no one can be bothered to sit down and do the arithmetic for Alga6 biocrude.

If this was a Libertarian Paradise, you probably would pay $500 dollars a month for landline service while someone in a densely populated urban area would pay $5 a month.

Why would that be so bad?

People that want rural living should pay for rural living and should not force urbanites to subsidize their quiet, peaceful life on the farm away from the noise of the city.

The US government has spent the past 50+ years using subsidies and regulations encourage people to get out of the cities.

What has it accomplished except to gut cities and spread asphalt everywhere?

I have to agree, but it's too bad in some ways, IMO.

I used to get so much joy programming the metal or tinkering with the assembly that came out of the compiler.

Doing that is still possible, but it doesn't pay the bills.

The dream of abstraction is a bit of a nightmare for those that like to get into the guts of the machine.

GPU programming is another example, though Mantle allows the programmer to get a bit closer to the hardware.

Christianity = everyone encouraged to help the less fortunate and free to decide who is less fortunate

Care to cite where the Bible tells people to only help the deserving poor?

Yet in even some of the poorest countries you can get 20Mbit connections with no cap for less money than you pay in the US.

Citation, please, because Akamai's State of the Internet mostly disagrees with you.

But I'd take this in a heartbeat over an AMD counterpart. The maxwell chips are leagues ahead of anything AMD's got.

WIth one exception: the R9 280x when used for DP floating point compute.

For about $250 you can get an R9 280x that in one second will do one trillion double precision floating point operations. That's about 10x faster than the Maxwell cards.

With such a card AMD should have had the scientist/engineer space for GPGPU locked up by now.

But, you know, they're AMD, so...

Personally I love the GTX 750. It gives the biggest bang-for-the-buck and running at about 55 watts max or so it usually doesn't require a larger power supply. It can run completely off motherboard power going to a 16-lane 75 watt PCIe slot.

It's the perfect card for rescuing old systems from obsolescence, IMO.

The only trouble you might have is finding a single-slot-wide card if your system doesn't have room for a double slot card, though in my case I found a double-slot card that I could modify to fit in a single-slot of an old Core 2 Duo E8500 system.

And heat doesn't seem to be a problem at all, even with the mod I did. The low power of the card means less heat. Even if heat becomes a problem, the card is capable of slowly clocking itself down, though I've never seen that yet, even running Furmark.

It's more that the clock reflects the current global political climate.

Ie when Pakistan and India, both nuclear powers, are duking it out, the clock goes closer to midnight.

I strongly suspect that the announcement is due to strong rhetoric from russian leadership - I believe recently either Putin or one of his lackeys declared that they could "raze" the US. There's also been increasingly aggressive "patrols" by Russian bombers along the US and Europe, the recent sub incident in Sweden, and of course the invasion of Ukraine.

Sub freezing temperatures aren't necessary.

In the UK, for example, for every one degree drop in temperature below 18C, deaths in the UK go up 1.5%. The risk of heart attack and stroke seem to increase with dropping temperatures.

And in the USA, the mortality rate is highest in January.

Vietnam shows a similar pattern.

You do realize why that is, right?

Hint: where does the FSF get the majority of its funding from?

There is an unspoken assumption by abusers that the abusive way they're treating people is normal and that it's just that the person complaining is "too sensitive."

This is literally another form of abuse in and of itself. It's called minimizing.