While this is normally true on matters requiring both the Executive and Legislative branches to work together (ie- anything requiring laws to be changed or more funding to be approved), the executive does have a lot of power to easily change executive policies and appointments. The FBI, Justice Department, Homeland Security, Attorney General, DoD- they're all under the president. While he needs Congressional approval for cabinet appointments, I highly doubt that a Congress controlled by his party would say no.

The first thing a president does after taking the oath of office is appoint cabinet members. If Obama had appointed a DHS director who valued civil liberties (rather than picking Janet Napolitano), you wouldn't be seeing a widespread adoption of body scanners at airports.

Obama could have easily prevented this January 21, 2009. Anyone claiming "he hasn't had enough time" for fixing the DHS/TSA is either lying or ignorant of how the office works.

Here's a small lesson in American government for you: the TSA reports to the Department of Homeland Security, which is a cabinet department of the Executive Branch. For anything under the Executive, the buck stops at the person residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. If the President makes an order not to use full-body scanners, the TSA would have no choice but to obey.

While Bush was responsible during his term, don't pretend that Obama has nothing to do with current policies of TSA/DHS. He's been in charge for the past two years.

There, fixed.

Your arguments are invalid. Under FairTax, necessities such as food, medicine, etc wouldn't be taxed, thus deflating the claim that truly poor people (you know, the ones who can't afford big screen TVs and new cars) will not be taxed much, if at all. The rich will still be paying a much larger portion of their expenses on taxes, since they buy large, luxary items. Stuff like boats, secondary homes, sportscars, will be taxed at a much higher rate, thus forcing them to buy a larger percentage of their income on taxes than the poor, that is, unless rich people will just buy stuff they need, and just sit on rest forever (unlikely).

Money in savings will inevitably be spent. Investments shouldn't be taxed anyway, since they benefit economy as a whole and spur job creation and industry better than any government program.

I think Tim Roth is the only good actor on that show, and some of the acting by his assistants makes the series pretty darn unwatchable. The premise is good though.

To add to what you said, the 5800 series used more power since it was a much larger GPU. The 5830, 5850, and 5870 shared the same chip (Cypress). For the lower-end parts, the shading units, ROPs, texture units were fused off to improve yields and fill in the large performance gap between the 5780 and 5770. Likewise, the 5770 GPU (Juniper) actually started with a smaller core (with less than half as many transistors as Cypress), and subsequently disabled sections for the 5750.

Blowing bubbles is against the law? And is mocking his reaction illegal as well? Inquiring minds want to know.

Can police arbitrarily make up laws, or do we still leave that to the politicians?

The same could be said for netbooks. For about the same price as most mid-range netbooks, I could build a much better desktop with a much faster CPU, GPU, and much larger hard drive. Why do we need these underpowered PCs that can barely surf the web? For that matter, why do we need mobile devices that run applications? Why does my music player also take pictures and play movies? Why does my phone do more than just allow me to call people? The reason is we've come to expect these devices to improve and add more capabilities with every generation.

We used TI-83s when I was in high school nearly 2 decades ago, and they look/perform/cost the same as they do today. Every other electronic device (that I can think of anyway) has improved in those three categories since then. What makes calculators so special that they shouldn't ever be upgraded?

Yes, those chips that handled floating-point operations so well that they eventually were integrated directly onto the CPU die itself; ie- 80386 CPU + 387 co-processor evolved into a single 486DX with integrated FPU.

Still, I don't see the why you're comparing them to GPUs... FPUs were small in comparison, even compared to early fixed-function rasterizers from the 90s; today GPUs are multi-billion-transistor chips with hundreds of programmable stream processors (with faster/higher bandwidth memory) that not only cover all of the rendering pipeline, but can do general-purpose computation as well. While small GPUs are getting integrated into future CPUs (AMD Fusion, Intel Sandy Bridge, etc), I'm doubtful discrete graphics will disappear in the way x86 math-coprocessors did, at least for the foreseeable future.

Don't you mean Sean Parker? But everything else you said was spot-on.

The movie didn't seem to be a hatchet-job on Zuckerberg as the media (and trailers) made it out to be. I mean the character certainly has flaws, but he was portrayed similarly to a tragic figure in a greek tragedy: he had good intentions, though insensitive and oblivious to others' feelings, and was easily manipulated by scoundrels like Parker. At the very least, the characterization of Zuckerberg is a realistic portrayal of many talented geeks I know, if not the real Zuckerberg himself.

Memory is a concern, especially on embedded devices. Plus, many mobile devices have built-in hardware encoding/decoding support for JPEG to minimize CPU and memory usage.

PNG is a great format, but we don't need lossless for most pictures on the net.

Rather, rather than replacing everything with PNG, the web needs a lossy image format with alpha support and ability to do lossless when needed. Oddly enough, (currently) WebP does neither...

So far, nothing- a coworker used over 10 GB one month (streaming world cup from his sling box at home). Not a peep from Verizon. Likewise AT&T hasn't said anything when I went over my 5 GB limit listening to internet radio (I'm grandfathered into the old plan).

True, logical cores can't replace physical cores; a maxed out quad-core with hyperthreading is nowhere near the performance of a maxed-out 8-core system. But the public doesn't realize that- they bring up task manager, and see OMG-8 CPUs!!!

Hyperthreading is just a fancy marketing term for Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT). SMT allows the processor to issue two threads simultaneously in one superscalar pipeline so that threads can alternate whenever delays are encountered in the pipeline- these two threads aren't actually executed simultanously. Try explaining that to B&M computer shoppers or even the salespeople, and you'll get blank stares. I've made the mistake, once, trying to correct a know-it-all jackass at bestbuy who claimed that the i7 in a laptop I was looking at was actually an octocore cpu- I won't make that mistake again.

There are benefits and drawbacks, but the important thing to note is that multiple threads within a single core will share and starve each other of resources- for that reason you would with a true multicore design. For current implementations, you'll end up with a ~35% performance gain at best. At worst, you'll lose 15% performance on threads that share resources and/or cause each other to cache miss more often.

Currently typing this on an i7 920 with 9 gigs of ram (triple-channel). My home PC is a Phenom II X4 w/ 4 gigs of dual-channel ram. 99% of the time, I can't tell the difference between the two, and when I do, it's because of thrashing.

I've cracked ribs before, but this one in particular caused swelling which made taking deep breaths uncomfortable for several months. Then again, while I'm not very old (late 20s), my body now doesn't heal as well as it used to, so that may be a factor.

Rather than tread into ITG territory with my own stories, I'll just say this.

You're probably a trained fighter. Most street thugs haven't spent the thousands of dollars at martial arts training. They're usually equipped with a cheap folder or a saturday night special- or at the very most, a gun they burgled from someone's house or car and have never spent time training with it. They're not going to come up behind me and catch me unawares through stealth and employ a perfect choke-hold. They're likely going to be clumsy because they're drunk/high and desperate for their next fix, otherwise they'd little reason to mug a stranger with hardly any cash in his wallet.

My argument before is that most fights are between unskilled combatants. But even skilled ones can quickly forget training in the heat of the moment and adrenaline can cause even the most conditioned fighters to react erratically. I'm not going to get all ITG, but I know this from firsthand experience.

On the other hand, drawing a concealed weapon is simple enough for anyone to do. At close range, sight aiming is unnecessary (learn effective point-shooting). I consider myself an amateur shooter, but even I can draw from my concealed IWB holster and fire off multiple shots into a silhouette target at 3 meters within the same time it would take for me to reach out and grab someone's arm 4 feet away.

Most people don't have the time, money or physical ability to learn effective martial arts fighting techniques. A CCW permit with gun, some ammo, and trips to the range to practice are far more effective (and fun) ways to spend all three, and will not injure you in ways that years of martial arts training has already injured me (so far- 1 knee surgery, a cracked rib, and a broken collarbone).