...

Lappy!

*runs*

But I'm not all that impressed with blu-ray. I don't think its worth the premium price over a decent upscaled DVD. I don't like the DRM. I don't like Sony. I care more about plot and dialog than pixels, and i can lose myself in an SDTV broadcast movie just as easily as a 1080p bluray. If I'm watching for the clarity of the picture, the movie's not doing a good job of holding my interest...

If you're not impressed, your TV isn't good enough. :) Also, non-HiDef TV can just as often destroy your interest in a movie - some movies have points of interest in the fine details... details that are lacking in DVDs. For example, how about Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet where he's doing the soliloquy with the soldiers in the background bound for Poland. On a DVD, you can't tell what it is in the background until he mentions it in the soliloquy. In many movies, the actors often read something that is legible in the movie theater, but too blurry to read on the DVD... and you miss an important plot point. BluRay is VERY impressive, and most BDs are the same price as DVDs, or only $5 more in a few cases. Granted, I still buy DVDs when it doesn't make a difference (like Shin-chan), but certain movies NEED to be watched on BD for the best experience.

That same money? You mean the money that the socialist did not work for? The problem here illustrates the sense of entitlement socialism breeds - they want the world but someone else has to provide it to them.

The guy driving the Ferrari almost certainly didn't work for the money used to buy the car (thousands of "peons" in "Daddy's" company did), and it's a virtual certainty he has a FAR greater sense of entitlement than ANY socialist... probably greater than ALL socialists put together.

Software people get this wrong all the time... leave it to a hardware guy to straighten it out. :)

It's not the bus size, it's the size of the ALU inside the CPU (the ALU actually performs the operations). The 68000 was a 16 bit processor NOT because of the 16 bit bus, but because the ALU was only 16 bits. The 68000 has a full 32 bit architecture, but because the ALU was 16 bit, it took two operations to perform 32 bit instructions. It wasn't until the 68020 that the M68K family had their first 32 bit processor. The 386SX may have had a 16 bit bus, but internally had a 32 bit ALU, so it was still a 32 bit processor.

Wait, 2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bits, but only 2,305,843,009,213,693,952 bytes.

No, you address bytes, not bits. So 2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes, not bits.

What would you have them do instead?

How about work for a living instead of patenting vague ideas and waiting for a company to make something that sort of resembles it?

It depends on the person. In my case, yes, I'm flat out telling you practice made no difference in how well I did in school. How many times do you need to add numbers to understand addition. For me - just once. Homework was a waste of my time, and I did as little of it as I possible could, so far as even not doing it at all if the teacher told us what percentage of the final grade it would be and I felt it worth the lower marks for skipping it.

"Practice" via homework is called learning by rote, but where the teacher is too lazy to do so in class. Excessive homework has ALWAYS been my first indicator of a BAD TEACHER. I've never had a good teacher who assigned a lot of homework.

I see you and the AC below will ignore scientists/doctors who write SciFi when their opinion goes against your own. That's no reason to disclaim them as mere "science fiction authors", as if their degrees and teaching positions are somehow negated by their writing of fiction. Do you also decry Benford and Sagan? They too are/were also mere "science fiction authors" as you like to put it. Obviously that makes them quacks who should be discounted. :P

Looking at the last page:

QUOTE

About the General Public Survey

Results for the general public survey are based on telephone interviews conducted under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International among a nationwide sample of 2,001 adults, 18 years of age or older, from April 28 to May 12, 2009 (1,500 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 501 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 198 who had no landline telephone).

About the Scientist Survey

Results for the scientist survey are based on 2,533 online interviews conducted from May 1 to June 14, 2009 with members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A sample of 9,998 members was drawn from the AAAS membership list excluding those who were not based in the United States or whose membership type identified them as primary or secondary-level educators.

END QUOTE

So what we see is 2,001 regular people were polled, while almost 10,000 "scientists" were polled. "Scientist" meaning someone who belongs to the AAAS who is not a grade school through high school teacher. That smaller public poll could easily be influenced to say anything the pollsters wanted. We also don't know anything about the "scientists" polled other than they aren't grade school through high school teachers. Maybe they're janitors... we don't have that information. I especially noticed this comment: "Membership in AAAS is open to all." So ANYONE (including functionally illiterate people) could be part of the AAAS sample of "scientists" polled... as long as they didn't mark teaching grade school through high school as their job.

Most people would define "profound" as meaning "of significant impact". That seems to be the definition used here - we're supposed to think that this ice thinning will impact us (the environment) significantly.

I LOVE your response. That would be an interesting way to try to deal with protesters. I wonder if anyone has ever tried it. :D

Dull info: Yes, bean bags like in the images, just much smaller so they can be fired by a hand-held weapon.
Google image link for dull info: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=police%20bean%20bag%20gun&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

- at this point NASA does not know how much Ares I and Orion will ultimately cost, and will not know until technical and design challenges have been addressed, the GAO concluded.

Isn't that NASA's function? To figure out how to overcome those "technical and design challenges"? How are they supposed to do the job when they'd denied the money needed on the basis that what they're MANDATED to do can't easily be estimated? That's why NASA is doing this instead of a company - because the government can more easily shoulder the unknown cost than any one company.

I vote about half the time... because I don't vote strategically, I vote my desires - which means I end up "throwing my vote away", which in turn discourages me enough that I don't vote the next time.

It's not the prom (which is in June), it's Spring Break (which is in March). High schools need to be banned from taking a Spring Break. It's the CLEAR solution. ;)

Well, if people would RTFA, they'd see the "brief periods" is not how long you stand in front of the weapon, but how long they use it. As mentioned in the article, riot police used a "brief blast" that caused the crowd to recoil, giving the riot police room to safely use tear gas and bean bag projectiles.

The police don't turn this thing on and leave it running. That WOULD cause deafness. They only use it as needed in brief bursts. I'm sure there's probably some "training" they make the users of the device go through, just like the training they do for the Taser.