1) East coast folks usually don't acknowledge anything farther west, so when the weather reaches them, only then does it become news.

Ahh....why don't I have points to share today? Definitely Insightful.

Aww. $500 million. Just imagine how many satellites could have been built from a fraction of the military budget.

Or, even by cutting off welfare for people that ARE able bodied and can work. Or by cutting the waste from Medicare and SS, which are about the other 2/3 of the main budget chunks along with military.

You know, if we shrunk the Federal Govt back down to more resemble what it is Constitutionally mandated to do, we could easily afford a lot more stuff.

Hell, why don't we quit sending so much fucking money out for Foreign Aid, and spend it on satellites? Who objects to that one?

Except when it doesn't and goes west off Africa and comes in from the southeast and slams across Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, South/North Carolina, Virgina, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, etc.. Or when it comes in from the North Atlantic from the northeast....

Hello? Louisiana.....

Did we just suddenly fall off the fuckin' hurricane map?!? WhooHoo...I certainly hope so!!! That way, I can get rid of that damned flood insurance, and not have to leave town a couple times each summer...

:)

If you want higher resolutions and frame rates, you need more powerful GPUs to handle it. For example moving to 2560x1600 or to 120fps doubles the pixel requirement over 1920x1080@60fps. So whatever amount of power you needed to achieve 1080p60, double that for either of those targets. 4k will require a quadrupling, and 120fps 4k would require 8x the power.

All this is assuming you are getting 60fps in the first place. Now maybe you are fine with trading off lower frame rates, or lower resolutions, that's all up to you. If 720p30 is your target, you can get away with a whole lot less power. However that doesn't mean that nobody wants to target higher resolutions or frame rates.

There are also other visual quality settings to consider, like anti-aliasing and so on that can require more power. Depending on what you are targeting with that, you can need a lot of power.

Personally I really find frame rates much below 60 pretty annoying in most games. I really like the feeling of fluidity you get. 120 fps is even better, but the monitor I normally use doesn't handle that. Well maintaining that 60fps at a 2.5k resolution is not a trivial feat. I don't think a $250 graphics card would do that for most games.

Seriously, for some people, gaming is their hobby and that kind of money is not that much when you talk what people spend on hobbies. My coworker just bought himself like a $2000 turbo for his car, to replace (or augment, I'm not sure) the one that's already there. He has no need for it, but he likes playing with his car.

Now that you, and most others, don't want to spend that kind of money is understandable and not problematic. There's a reason why companies have a lineup of stuff and why the high end stuff is just for those with plenty of money. It also doesn't scale linearly since the higher end something is, the less units get sold, and so the more the fixed costs influence the unit cost.

However don't hate on it. That you don't wish to spend that kind of money doesn't mean that nobody should. Also you should be glad people do: The expensive parts fund the cheap parts. They can recover more R&D costs on these units, letting them sell lower end parts for less, since lower end parts are the same tech, just less of it.

What she made wasn't really a science experiment; it was a "bottle bomb" consisting of mixing tinfoil and Drano in a Coke bottle. These explosives are well-known among schoolyard pranksters and can cause serious injury (chemical burns, loss of fingers, etc.)

It's not politically correct to say, but if she was cooking one of these up on school property with her friends without teacher oversight, she should have been punished. As long as she didn't actually hurt anyone, though, it should have amounted into a few days' detention at worst.

That said, I'm happy she's going to space camp and that this sort of mischief might develop into a real interest in science.

Not so in Los Angeles, where in many areas the peripheral traffic jam is well in session by 6am and doesn't abate until 7pm or later. If I had to be in L.A. by 9am, I had to be OUT of my bedroom community, nominally an hour away, by 6am, and ready to jump to the alt-surface route at the halfway point if the freeway was already thoroughly jammed up by 7am.

Conversely, midmorning to early afternoon, and most of the night -- no problem! (Unless you're on the 405, which seems to have become a 24 hour traffic jam in recent years.)

If it's a violent act against a government actor, it's terrorism, so it deserves your liberties to be eradicated by that government.

If it were 'just' violence against a little girl, it would be merely a statistic, not nearly as important (according to government actors).

But I'm sure it's the driver, and only the driver making the difference here. What a ridiculous comparison.

If you look at TFA, he's making both a whole-stack comparison and separately a driver version comparison.

The OSX stack appears to fair worse against most of the linux tests, and the new driver does marginally better than the old driver.

Thank you, Intel driver folk, for reassuring my purchasing decision (based on linux driver support).

From reading the synopsis, all I can say is:

WOW...this is amazing!! I cannot believe such a world changing thing has become available to the public!!!!

By the way, what is snapchat?

POTUS-PRIME

Great, now I have to imagine Roosevelt with Peter Cullen's voice saying, "Allied Forces, roll out."

Have any of you guys heard of solar panels? Wind mill maybe?

Sure I've heard of them...but those things tend to get damaged or completely blown away when a hurricane comes inland.

Ah, thanks for this. So, it sounds like it's probably possible to preserve a quantum state over time, which is good for us in the real world where things tend to break and get lost.

This must've been what Scotty did when he put the pattern buffer into its diagnostic cycle. Except, poor Franklin, in the real world things break and get lost.

That's so funny. You're a funny guy. In my language, a cattle trader is a synonym for a crook ("un maquignon").

I really wonder what would happen if you kept a kid in the dark and only taught him about quantum mechanics... Would the understanding be more innate ? Or would the fact that we still need to explain it in everyday words and usual reality-based maths lead to the same interpretations ? Yeah, I'd make a terrible father.