Sony's SACD sounded great and it was a 1 bit format... at 2.8 MHz.

Maybe, but not THIS Supreme Leader, which is actually good thing for the whole checks and balances system.

75% of torrents are fake, visit-our-website-and-click-our-ads-for-the-password nonsense or malware. I can believe that around 100 accounts are responsible for the majority of this stuff. They may also fake-seed each other to raise the profile of their garbage files. I do not, on the other hand, believe the vast majority of legit torrents are posted by a small number of people. I mean legit as really in what they claim to be, not as in legal.

Just wait -- if insects take over as mainstream protein the Ramen flavor packets will read Grasshopper or Aphid instead of Beef or Chicken. Or Buggalo. On the other hand, it'll still just be salt, MSG and artificial flavoring.

If there's one positive you can take from the trend to 3D is that it tends towards longer, wider takes. Every time there's a cut in a 3d film it's a jarring experience which forces your eyes to reestablish the 'new' 3D topography. Also, shaking the camera doesn't translate well to 3D either. Witness the 3D Pirates OTC trailer in front of Tron, which is nonstop jump cuts, compounded by the way everything being projected waaaay out into the screen. I had to look away from the screen it was so painful to look at. I certainly hope the final movie isn't cut like that. I really enjoyed the Wizard of Oz aspect to the 3D in TL -- where the real world was shot flat and the 'Grid' computer world was 3D.

That's a bad analogy -- we believe our existing laws of physics (including relativity) DO account for antimatter. It should behave exactly like regular matter apart apart from the whole charge reversal deal, but we've never had enough to play with to find out. The reason we are asking the question of whether there is a disparity between regular matter and antimatter isn't because of anything we've observed, but because we live in a universe which appears to consist of almost entirely regular matter. The models we have of the early universe should lead to a universe in which neither type of matter is more prevalent. So the question is: are our models wrong or is there something different about antimatter which lead to regular matter dominating the universe?

Certainly your friend hasn't had a TV that supports the current Blue Ray 3D standard "for years" since they have just begun to be sold this year.

Define "standard stereoscopic glasses". Stereographic glasses are a bit like the SCSI standard -- the great thing about the standard is that there's so many to choose from. The glasses sold with these sets are lcd shutter style glasses which block each eye alternately at 120Hz so that each eye sees a different 60Hz image. The new glasses use an IR reciver in the glasses to receive the timing signal from the set, and are battery operated. I had a hard wired pair of LCD shutter glasses which came 'free' with an old nVidia card -- I used to play one of the old Tomb Raider games in 3d. Even the CRT computer monitors of the time couldn't do 120Hz.

The reason I think it's a $1000 markup because I see electronics stores proudly offering 3D HDTVs for $2500 and $3000 which are almost identical spec-wise to TVs which cost at least $1000 less.

What differentiates a 3D TV from a non 3D set?

1. Infrared transmitter for frame syncing glasses
2. A display panel with a refresh rate of at least 120Hz
3. An HDMI 1.4 input for receiving 120Hz signals
4. Capability of processing 120Hz content

Let's break these items down and see what it's costing the set manufacturers.
1. The only real added (as opposed to incremented) hardware to the TV, but it's a 50 cent part, at most.
2. Good luck buying a larger HDTV which doesn't already do 120Hz or 240Hz or 6000Hz or whatever. Free.
3. I'll be generous and say the HDMI 1.4 chips are $5 more than the older HDMI 1.3 chips.
4. This is the real wildcard, since even 240Hz TVs up until now haven't had to deal with anything over 60Hz on the input side, and generating 120Hz and higher signals is done with simple field duplication. Still, if you're handling 120Hz and higher signals later in the path, you can do it earlier with not a lot more effort. Let's say this costs whatever it costs to handle 1080P 60Hz signals 18 months ago. Let's call it $25-50 extra.

Of course you also need to include LCD shutter glasses with batteries and IR receivers. Pack in 2 pairs at, maybe $25 each manufacturing costs, though $5-$10 is more likely. Add another buck or two to pay off the standards body to ensure interoperability of the glasses with all TVs. Wait, scratch that, instead throw in a buck for security measures to ensure other sets glasses don't work with your sets. Why? Because f*** 'em, that's why!

So a 3D HDTV with a couple of pair of glasses should cost somewhere between $41.50 and $106.50 more to manufacture. I'd guess it is probably closer to the low end than the high. Double it for profits, and there's a fair markeup to go to 3D. A $1000 markup and $200 glasses is severe price gouging and everyone knows it. When the premium to go to 3D gets down to a reasonable level, it will be embraced. I'd look for a lower end manufacturer like VIZIO to realize they can bundle in 3D for practically nothing and sell a ton of sets to drive the 3D markup down.

When VHS tapes of movies were $80-120, nobody bought them. Once the movie business realized that they could make a lot more money selling them at $10-30 they exploded in volume. I suspect a similar effect would happen with games were they priced comparable to movies. At $60, I rarely buy games. I check reviews, I wait for the price to drop (and usually forget about it) and maybe if it goes on sale on Steam in a couple years time I pick it up on the cheap. I've bought too many $60 games that rarely get played. But if they were at an MSRP of $30, with release day deals around $20 and $10 bargain bins (like DVD or Blu-Ray), I'd buy a lot more, and so would a lot of other people. Yes, games are expensive to develop. So are movies. The marginal cost of 1 unit is very low, and at half or a third the price, you'd probably see at least 4 times the sales. There's a reason Nintendo DS games always top the sales lists.

To express zero in roman numerals, you need to use an I in front of an I. The problem was that this was often confused with 2, which is expressed as an I AFTER a I, leading to the the belief that Romans lacked the zero.

Each digit is half as significant and therefore half as interesting as the one before it. In binary that is -- in base 10, each digit is 1/10th as interesting. Either way, by the time we get this far in, it's incredibly insignificant.

Ask the Mars Climate Orbiter which set of units we use.