"When you push the performance, the architecture doesn't matter as much, because most of the energy is spent figuring out what to run and when to run it."

I doubt that.

Hyperthreading, an Intel tech, significantly increases speed while not doing the same to power consumption or die size. Another Intel only tech, power boost allows them to run the processor at an unsustainable clock speed for a short period of time. There's also a concept of pipelining that allows multiple instructions from a single thread to run staggered as long as they won't collide in their use of a particular component within the CPU architecture and don't have hard inter-dependencies such as reading the result of the previous operation.

Basically, features specific to a CPU architecture very much impact execution performance and efficiency. I guess you could have been talking strictly about the instruction set but that's only a very small part of a CPU architecture.

I have 20/20 vision and I cannot resolve 1080p on a 15.4" monitor that's 20" away unless I focus like I did when I took my last vision test which is not a comfortable state to be in. In other words, what is your source?

If people are playing these games at work then the geolocation might be where the company's datacenter is, not where the people are.

I bought a HP Pavilion dv6 15.4" widescreen laptop about a year ago. It has a full sized keyboard with numpad, 1080p screen, core i5, 6gb ram... The build quality is amazing; I don't think anyone makes a higher quality laptop than this. You should be able to pick one up for less $1000.

I'm not following the discussion but I saw your comment about "Gran Turismo" meets "The Fast and the Furious". This is "Need For Speed: Underground" which was a blast to play.

Medicare and Social Security are funded separately from the rest of the budget and still have a hefty surplus of funds on paper but the federal government kept borrowing money from it until there wasn't any left. The payroll tax cuts are directly cutting funding from those two programs as well. How is the budget cut to NASA at all related to SS and M? Maybe you think they should have had MORE money available for the federal government to borrow to pay for other stuff like the NASA mission.

or a penchant for misleading the public into believing falsehoods that promote his own personal desires. Even if they manage to collect accurate data I could definitely see Rupert manipulating the data or how it's interpreted to tell the public his own narrative of what needs to be changed in education.

Blaming HAARP for weird weather isn't brainless. That's how the program was sold to the US military, unless you want to admit that the Pentagon was brainless. The reality seems to be that the scientists wanted funding and knew that the military is gullible.

I thought he was covertly bashing US foreign policy until he mentioned Russia in the second paragraph :). As far as I know, even the Russian generals liked us. The cold war was a superpower rivalry if anything else. Who can get into space first? Who can build a nuclear bomb first? Who can invade Japan first? Who can collapse their economy first!

Thanks for actually pointing out something tangible that is wrong with the video.

Please please anonymously submit a complaint to your congressman about this issue. I'm absolutely sick of seeing the government write horrible contracts. How the hell do they manage to do this with so many lawyers working for them?

You are aware that Bush was increasing the debt during an economic boom and Obama is increasing it during a recession, right? Tax revenue is the main difference between those two situations.

Also, debt only became an "important" issue to congress once Obama took office even though Bush's policies are responsible for a majority of the debt growth during Obama's term in office. If one wants to see an accurate accounting of who raised the debt and who lowered it they need to take into account the economic conditions and policy decisions made by each president as some decisions have longer lasting effects and longer delays before they impact the economy. A simple but rough accounting would be to look at the budget office's 10 year forecast during a president's term in office as those at least try to deal with the long term implications of policy decisions.

Why does the prisoner need a new 360. The first 3 years of production had no built-in wireless. Also, the 360 has no web browser and in fact all forms of Internet connectivity goes through xbox live so MS would just have to ban the console and that would be end of story for anyone but a firmware engineer or seasoned hacker.

"non-gm plants" is not rice exclusive meaning any crop nearby has a .04-.8% chance of acquiring genes from the rice which make it almost certain that the genes will flow to another crop considering the scale of production required to make this gm-rice useful to hospitals. They would have to isolate this rice in order to ensure that the genetic modification didn't flow to another crop. Unless of course we don't care if that happens but that would require lots of trials to determine.

Immediate feedback only encourages trial and error if the feedback is a pass/fail. I used a program in college for learning chemistry and if you got the answer wrong it told you why you were wrong, explained the underlying concept and then asked you a different question that tested the same principles as the first one. This type of feedback is impossible without a computer or a personal tutor and far superior to anything a teacher can provide for a class with more than a couple students.