It's great that they're pushing for cleaner power, but isn't this a textbook case of interstate tariffs that states are forbidden to enact?

> What current gen smartphone do you know of that lacks a basic headphone jack?

Most phones that aren't an iPhone. How many phones have you even owned?

Angstroms are awful big. Just for the sake of maximum precision, how many digits would you need if you were measuring in planck lengths?

Nor does it come with a mini-usb to phono patch cable. The earphones that come with the phone oddly enough end in actual earphones.

Yes, getting an adapter is not a big deal, but it's a technical hurdle you can't surmount if you don't carry it with you or keep it in your car. My point was that bluetooth is supposed to free us of this nonsense, but I still don't see it making any inroads for home or car stereo equipment.

> The best part is if I select a restaurant it will bring up pertinent info on that restaurant such as its phone number and opening hours.

Actually what's really nice is you can then flip between the map and the Zagat reviews (or whatever you have in Oz) while you listen to some tunes to pass the time, then when you find one you like, call the restaurant, browse their menu on your phone while you're on the phone, quickly put your reservation into a reminder, then flip back to the menu while still on the call.

Minus the background tunes, I did exactly that just the other day, and I'm hardly some kind of tech wizard (I don't even read my email most days).

> It's called an aux in jack, and many more new cars have them than IPod docks

Except the phone doesn't come with an aux out plug. And wasn't bluetooth supposed to make this irrelevant?

I never said I wished them dead. That's the sort of mean-spiritedness that the Darwin Award fans go in for.

Same here: Peets coffee, bagels on mondays, fresh fruit on tuesdays and wednesdays. They did cut down on the travel and bumped up the teleconferencing. Except for getting to travel a few of the nicer European offices, that's actually kind of a bonus.

Just keeping the loyalty of a handful of critical engineers can really make or break a tech company that depends on actual innovation and research. They'd be stupid to drop any of these small perks.

For me it's not so much the mockery as the snarky self-righteousness mixed with credulity. There's a big list of folks who I'd like to keep from propagating their kind of stupidity, and the people who click "forward" on every "Darwin Award" announcement are way up there on it.

Slashdot editors: Take Darwin's picture off this. He deserves better.

The first digit in an nvidia model number is the generation, the second denotes how hopped-up the card is. The 6800 Ultra had some pretty decent memory bandwidth that isn't even matched by a mid-range 8600, but an 8800 will blow it out of the water. Suffice to say that the difference between the 8600 and the 8800 is way more than it was between the 6600 and the 6800. Your 8600 supports shader model 4 however, while your 6800 does not, so that would come in useful to newer games that take advantage of it (which is unfortunately not all that many).

Fact is though, a game like Frets on Fire shouldn't choke, and I suspect your problem is driver-related. NVidia's 19x series of drivers frankly just suck, and I would downgrade to the 18x series if you can. If you're on Linux, there's a utility that makes it easy to switch to older versions, but its name escapes me.

> Maybe The Truman Show is the last unique storyline I can think of.

What about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?

Funny thing, Jim Carrey is actually pretty good in serious roles.

My favorite thing about the 3D in Up was that they didn't overuse it. There were about two "stuff coming out of the screen" scenes in the movie, and one of them was even sort of appropriate.

I thought it was all right -- it certainly struck a poignant note other Pixar films didn't, and it gave the elderly protagonist some real dignity. Still, I place Wall-E at the very top, and it's going to take something really amazing to displace that.

> Sherlock Holmes looks like a chick-flick period piece

Guy Ritchie hasn't done a chick flick since Swept Away. Downey isn't exactly beefcake, and the guy he was fighting in that scene certainly isn't. Here's a hint: bare knuckle boxing usually means it's not a chick flick.

It was a nice period piece and a daring take on the character, but I still think of Jeremy Brett as Holmes the same way I think of Tom Baker as Doctor Who.

The REF device is really meant for debugging or rendering static screens. Windows 7 comes with a fairly serious software renderer for DX10, called "Warp10". But even a quad-core i7 (warp10 does use multiple cores) will struggle to keep up with something as puny as Intel integrated graphics.

I've had this effect on some calls I've made recently. I think what goes through most peoples minds when this happens to them is "oh my god do I really sound that high-pitched and flat and nasally?" Really gets the self-consciousness going.

(And apparently the answer is no, because I'm told at all other times I have quite a deep voice. I think the missing subharmonics in a low quality recording just get mentally filled in by everyone but yourself.)