Let's disaggregate the data by US State, so we can find out which of them are dragging us down. Any wagers?

That is a propaganda lie. Proof is easy, these following infrastructure items all cost more than communications infrastructure; roads, gas services, power services, sewerage services and storm water services. All of the cost more to build and more to maintain. Funnily enough not one of them in metropolitan areas is subject to population density. When it comes to linking cities of course roads cost way and above the cost of putting a cable in the ground.

Reality is, countries with substantive infrastructure also have one other burden, incumbent telecommunications firms run by psychopaths who routinely lie, deceive and misrepresent reality in order to generate greater profits. Lies to keep rotting copper profitable, lies to prevent self publishing and attempt to monopoly publishers, lies to restrict bandwidth in order to be able to charge more for it, lies to prevent governments working around that insane greed in order to create what is becoming an essential broadband service.

According to a documentary I saw, it caused him to drop and break one of the three tablets.

Exactly. Some genius at a corporate HQ figured out that at any given moment, tens of thousands of people are standing around waiting for their fast food orders to come up. This represented a vast untapped pool of willing and free labor.

If you look at the soda fountains of a large restaurant at a busy time, it often looks like it would easily take two dedicated employees to just to fill drinks at the rate that customers are filling their own. Maybe even more would be required to keep track of all the drinks and match them to orders. That's a lot of extra staffing.

Yes, the compiler is going to turn the switch into a function pointer lookup table. The reason for doing this yourself is to decompose the cases into small, understandable and testable functions, plus to make it easier to add and remove them. From a performance perspective there will be very little (if any) difference.

You mean you can't read and comprehend the thread before replying to it? Shocking!

Graphics APIs these days are basically just a way of get shaders into the GPU. Odds are, pretty much the same shaders are running on the PC as the console, so there's no room to 'unoptimize' them.

And, on the CPU side, I rarely see mine more than 20% used when playing games. So they're not 'unoptimized' there, either.

Verizon wanted to charge me a $30 "upgrade" fee when I tried to upgrade to a new iPhone. They're already charging me $200 for the phone and $80/month for the service (plus a new two year contract to replace my recently lapsed one). That means I'm already going to be paying them $2,120. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal for them, what possible expense could this upgrade fee cover?

But the committee better figure something out because this kind of problem is going to be the norm, not the exception. The age of one or two scientists making such an outsized contribution to standout from the rest of their (or other) research groups is over.

I certainly agree with that, and there are many other instances where three was at least one too few - Doug Prasher comes to mind, and also the prize for ribosome structure where they easily could have picked out a half-dozen people whose contributions were essential. (On the other hand, I can also think of another case where I'm really glad they didn't "spread the wealth" around to someone who didn't deserve it.)

Leaving racist rant aside, scientific Nobel pizes are serious, non-scientific prizes (peace, literature or even economy) are not in the same level of credibility, by any means.

They're not even awarded by the same organization or process. At least in the case of the Peace prize, anyway - that institution is in Norway, whereas the science Nobels are in Sweden. It's all coming from the same source in the end, but even in the cases where the science prizes were controversial (usually because someone got left out, or someone didn't deserve the award) there's been no evidence of political motivations, unlike the Peace prize.

It will certainly be an improvement, but from what I've read they're only comparable to current mid-range PC GPUs. By the time many games are out, a high-end gaming PC will still be several times as powerful.

Because coins can last for decades, whereas paper money has to be continually replaced. I'm sure I read somewhere that the Bank of England heats the building by burning old money, which is replaced by new notes.

The problem is that PC games have been cripppled for years by being developed on consoles and ported to PCs. Some do take advantage of the extra power of PC GPUs, but the majority will run fine on a GPU that's several years old, because it's more powerful than the crap in the consoles.

I will never understand how people break these things. Surely they realize they can't just throw them around and expect them to continue functioning. Do they just forget they have them in their hand and drop them? If you have this problem, do you also break a lot of bowls and plates and glasses? How do people go through life if they can't keep one of these devices in one piece?

The assertion that torture doesn't work is based on some torture as applied by some rules of engagement. While that assertion is deeply cherished, examples of effective torture include the breaking of captured US aircrew by the North Vietnamese. That it wasn't a very effective intel tool (as contrasted with an effective propaganda tool) in that situation is mostly due to cultural disconnects rather than resistance by those interrogated. It's worth noting that organized criminal enterprises routinely use torture and it apparently has the desired effect. Torture coupled with effective interrogation also worked in Algeria.
There is such deeply held desire that torture "not work" because the fact it CAN work depending on how it is used is frightening. Torture is merely applied stress. How it is used (for example in conjunction with other methods and information) determines its effectiveness.