I think by "anything but video" he was referring to gaming, even the 780 Ti and R9 290X struggle with 4K. What do you think DDR4 would change? As far as I know they already support the 4K resolution but it'll play like a slide show.

The Wordpress blog's conclusions at least, in reality the last problem is the same as the first problem. We use so much energy and resources because we can afford to, if "the rest of the world" had money to compete for those resources we'd have to cut back. And despite what the Greens feel like we do recycle and care about emissions and pollution but we also like our cars and huge houses and big screen TVs and air condition and holidays in exotic places. We're not going to stop until we can't afford to, anyone who thinks the first world is going to voluntarily live like the third world is seriously deluded. Next month I'm going on a long vacation flight and I really want this vacation, I can afford it and no amount of eco-babble is going to make me sorry for the CO2 burn.

Like they're pointing out, people are getting literate. People are getting educated. People are getting better health. People spend less time child-bearing. The rest of the world is trying very hard to take over the first world work and bring down the wage equality between them and us. And of course we hate it, you can see people frothing at the mouth if I mention outsourcing here. But I totally understand the employees who of course would like to undercut a westerner and make a lower, but locally still a very good salary. With the world becoming far more connected you are going to get a lot less screwed just for being born in a third world country and you are going to get much less of a free ride for being born in a first world country. The differences are still huge of course, but there's poor and there's illiterate, seven kids, bad health poor.

Actually I think it's the complete opposite, it's the knowledge that yes I'll easily find a torrent that has it and yes the speed will be good, so there's very little reason to hoard it just to have it available or to avoid downloading it again. With the war on piracy it seemed for a while like the good times would come to an end, napster shut down, grokster shut down, winmx shut down, suprnova shut down, grab it now while it's easy because tomorrow it might be harder. With the TPB raid and trial I'd say that was the case no more than five years ago. That and slow speeds, if you want it now then in an hour is very different from in two days. I realized it must be an insanely good movie or series for me to watch it more than twice, if you know all the dialog, the plot twists, the gags I mean some are classics I still zone out way too fast.

I had two friends so around 2001 who tried explaining it to me as they were on a ridiculously fast 100 Mbps campus connection while I had barly gotten DSL - I think less than a megabit. At that time it was rather inconcievable to me how they had no need to hoard because they could just grab whatever they wanted, any time. Today I'm almost there (90Mbit) and I totally get it. I used to have a big maxitower with disks, now I'm down to a half-full miditower and if I really wanted to I could easily live on one SSD and one big HDD. Good series, great series, am I really going to go back and watch season one again? Naaaaaah probably not... ok, delete and if I change my mind later that's no problem.

They said the same thing about YouTube and Netflix, but when the mainstream starts using a service the caps tend to adjust. Granted I'm not in the US but in Norway however YoY bandwidth growth here is 25% and with H.265 promising the same quality at half the bandwidth the transition from 1080p to 4K is about three years of technological advance. Personally I suspect the bandwidth will arrive far ahead of TVs and content to watch, there's a massive fiber deployment and speeds are constantly upgraded as it seems most of the cost is in operating the line, not in bandwidth charges. Like my current provider, you can get a 10 Mbps line or a 90 Mbps line for 1/3rd more. I guess it's also because mostly it means my burst speeds are higher, really I already download all I want to download I only do it faster but averaged out I don't use significantly more.

People are creatures of habit, if you go to the book store and they serve your book needs why screw with what works? Just knowing that there's alternatives out there isn't usually enough to push people over the edge, but if you go to the book store and they're pushing the Kindle and eBooks maybe you figure it's time to follow the crowd. If you go to the whip & buggy store you expect them to try selling you just that, if they instead try to sell you a car on commission because that's where the market is going they're only spelling their own doom. Either you milk the market as long as it lasts or you sell your own car, but unless you're getting very well paid I don't see assisted suicide as being profit-maximizing.

While we're talking about apples-to-oranges comparisons, I don't care much about "trivial" fires that don't cause any personal harm. They're rare enough to be an annoyance for the insurance company to deal with, but not a big deal for the overall cost. For example it's much more expensive to have a small crash with a modern car that has huge, soft crumple zones than an old rigid car as much less gets bent out of place. But if you're in a solid crash you'd want to be in the modern car that diverges all that energy around you, not transferring it to your soft meatbag. I suppose it does sound bad if you're upside down in a ditch or the doors are jammed shut by the collision, but the rate of fire doesn't directly translate to the risk of being hurt by an engine fire.

I feel this is a rather underestimated aspect of deductive logic that all science is based on, nobody knows that the "laws" of nature that we know them are universally valid. Even if you're doing a high school experiment it is "new" science, maybe things are different today than they were yesterday. You don't expect them to be, but in theory they might be. Every step of the way from confirming gravity for atoms to gravity for galaxies is valuable, expanding the experimental proof of an apparently correct formula or discovery is the dull legwork of science. It's of course particularly interesting when you can extrapolate beyond what's tested before, but even interpolation has a value. You tend to assume that anything between two extremes that follow the same formula to also follow the same formula, but it is only assumption not proof.

It's a fun movie but you're not supposed to take it seriously, I don't get the people who do. It's like the people who hate on "Pacific Rim" and give it 1/10 stars because well it's essentially giants robots and monsters brawling it out in major cities with the most contrived mind meld technology and over-the-top characters you could possibly imagine. Except the whole premise is ridiculous, the monsters don't die from bullets and grenades and missiles and bombs (well except one, but spoiler) but they die from getting punched to death by a giant robot. How can you go to a movie like that and expect something else, it's like going to a horror movie and expecting deep drama. It's not going to happen and no, if you're seeing it in Starship Troopers you're imagining things.

Paint.NET also does layers and is free for both private and commercial use. Yes, you must be running Windows but for all of us that do it's a huge step up from MS Paint in functionality, GIMP in usability and Photoshop in simplicity. I've found it to cover pretty much all my needs, those thing I'd like to do that I've found hard to do haven't been any easier in GIMP.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so here. They had ten stable quarters with >6 billion in revenue and >500 million euro profit, the Windows Phone deal is announced and boom they go from a 750 million euro profit to a 200 million euro loss and their sales have been in free fall ever since. Yes they needed a revitalization in the smart phone market where Apple and Google were kicking their ass, but they had sales and profits to fix that. Until Elop issued his "burning platform" memo and announced an all-out switch to Microsoft, that is. If Microsoft hires him it's nothing but kickback for burning Nokia to the ground to promote Windows Phone.

In tournaments it's about who can pick the most points from the weakest players, of course you'd like to win every time but if you're facing Carlsen I think most players will be more than happy to draw and try to outpace him on the rest. The world championship is intended to be a hardcore duel between the two best players, you have to defeat your opponent to win you can't skirt around it. The issue is twofold, one to get the opportunity to play you must win the candidates tournament meaning you must be pretty damn good in tournaments anyway and second by the time another championship comes around many expect the current champion to fall. Unlike many other sports the chess ranking is far more important than "points" collected from tournaments in other sports, so it's hard to make a single tournament be all that important. There are already several long-standing tournaments that usually have most of the top ten players, they're not going to get bigger even if the world championship went away.

Well duh, it's a mini version of a last-gen console released in 2006 so that's the only people who you could sell it to. Even if anyone needed Gamecube compatibility there's now 100 million regular Wiis on the market to 20 million Gamecubes sold. And Nintendo probably looked at the stats and found extremely many Wiis are never online, the only system updates they get are through game discs. Add in a few clueless parents who think anything involving the Internet is a scary place and you got a $99 guaranteed safe kids/family console. No matter how old and boring you think it is, it's always new to some new kids.

AtivceX: So wrong you can't even spell it right.

A five year warranty is not a guarantee of five years of uninterrupted operation, only that they'll fix any problems you have with it the next five years. Otherwise I bet you'd see a lot of "accidents" around the four year, eleven months mark. And while it might have been a new drive when you bought it, if you need a warranty repair after four years and eleven months it's now a four years and eleven months old drive. Do you think your car insurance company should give you a totally new car when your 20 year old car is totaled by a drunk driver? Same with warranties, they are only intended to reinstate you to where you are now, not where you were almost five years ago.

Yes, the refurb should absolutely be tested and working. If it has any metric of how "worn" it is, it should be no worse than what you sent in. But I think you have an exaggerated view of what a warranty could and should do. Particularly if you apply it to the product as a whole, if your laptop broke you should get a new one? They can't just swap the faulty RAM stick for a new one and ship the rest back to you? I mean your operation of the laptop was interrupted right, try again? And while computer equipment tend to fail catastrophically it'd be even sillier to apply this to consumer goods as a whole. I find it quite okay that their choices are:

1) Repair - if you want to swap a broken component, fine no matter if it's one capacitor or one motherboard.
2) Replace - that's how I have a WD SSD in my machine though I bought a OCZ SSD
3) Refund - if all else fails, hand the money back. But not just because you'd like to see the sale "undone".

I feel we here in Norway have very strong consumer protections in law, but still nothing like you imagine them to be. And I don't think it would be very healthy for the market if they were.

So if there's a mall shooting the solution is armed guards in every mall? If there's a school shooting the solution is armed guards in every school? Every bus station, train station, subway station, park and so on until there's a whole army of armed guards running around? The point of the secuity control is that nobody gets to bring anything on board to crash or hijack the plane and in that respect, mission accomplished. It's not a general defense against a random person pulling out a gun and opening fire, not any more than any other place.