My first thought is: Good luck syncing audio to that!

Second: Good luck doing meaningful digital compression!

In professional broadcasting - _unlike_ the camcorder a mortal can afford - rolling-shutter is under control, as is a lot of other Bad and Wrong stuff that consumer cameras do. (Here's one you can easily check at home: Point a TV remote at it, and press buttons. Do you see the remote LED lighting up? That means it doesn't filter IR, and that wreaks havoc on colour fidelity!)

That's funny. When you see lip-flap in dubbed commercials here in Norway, it's almost always a painfully tacky German ad. Probably for shampoo, or a domestic cleaning product.

That xkcd misunderstands an important point: Resolution should be measured in arc-seconds at typical viewing distance. You have a phone right up against your face. You have a television at one meter distance, at least.

Film cameras need time to advance to the next frame, and to expose the viewfinder. Usually the shutter speed is effectively around 1/50s - in motion pictures the term used is always "shutter angle", never "shutter speed".

That isn't because high-framerate content is bad, though, that's because consumer televisions do a terrible job of motion compensation (which is a HARD problem).

Digital interpolation is not really all that lossy nowadays, if you use the right equipment.

I would prefer the home release to be 720p50, myself, but I expect it'll either be 1080p24 - or maybe 1080i50?

In Norway, the public broadcaster broadcasts 720p50 simply because people watch TV on flat panels, which means that if we sent 1080i50 the TV would deinterlace internally - and deinterlacing is nearly impossible to get right. 720p50 from a hefty box full of ASICs gives much, much higher effective quality than a home user would get from 1080i50, which is the normal HD format until 1080p50 infrastructure becomes adequate.

1080p25 is not something you want. It's really only useful for film material shot at 25fps (as most made-for-TV film stuff is). Frame rates that low incur several restrictions that you cannot process your way out of, like the "safe panning speed".

Some errata:

In cinema, exposure time is a function of frame rate and "shutter angle". The shutter rotates over the film, and by varying the angle you can get higher shutter speeds. IIRC, my Arriflex (made for TV, thus geared for 25fps) maxes out at 180 degrees, meaning 1/52s.

Digital cinema cameras do not have high-speed shutters (unless you set them that way, just like with film). Indeed, since there is no mechanical requirement to blank away the film while the claw advances, you can actually have smaller shutter angles/greater speed.

Why would you want to rotate that monitor 90 degrees? Rotating a 16:9 24" monitor already yields a display height which causes me to have to tilt my neck to read the text at the top.

You're likely comparing these to CRT rear-projection TVs, which were indeed dark - but that's apples and oranges. A DLP rear-projection TV is very bright even in normal lighting. It's essentially a high-quality DLP video projector with a built-in reflector and projection target.

In my experience that's a fallacy. If you say that spewing hate-filled bullshit is "okay" and "harmless", it will catch on.

Dismissing dangerous political ideas as somehow "inherently self-destructing" flies in the face of all experience with human history, which includes a lot of dangerous political ideologies - like Communism and Nazism.

The reason preposterous or dangerous ideologies tend not to catch on in developed societies is because people react to them. If people stop reacting to them, they catch on.

Just as the AlphaServer had desktop equivalents, so did the Itanium, which were discontinued.

Isn't that basically how CISC works nowadays?

Nope. Sorry. There's no comparison. And trying to say that both parties are equally bad isn't merely incorrect, it represents a cowardly cop-out which is far too common, built on the illusion that saying that both parties to a conflict are "just as bad" serves to "raise you from the fray". It does not. It serves to remove you from any useful discourse, and to remove the disincentive to the Republicans for any disingenuous behaviour (thus stimulating it, since the incentives are many).

I'm sorry to be an annoying outsider here as a non-American, but my pet peeve about political discussions in the United States is this absurd belief that all correlation implies total causation - "Say what you want about the Yugo, but when I drove a Yugo the economy went really well". It's a great way to remove all meaning from a discussion.

Discuss the facts of the matter - the concrete decisions made, the changes in culture - and the direct and indirect outcomes of those. That's how you get closer to a good answer. And the clear and obvious reality is that the Republican party has - to a far greater extent than the Democratic party - made the strategic choice to put the popularity of the party above the general welfare of the nation, by eagerly jumping at a chance to obstruct the political system to hinder its work in a manner which - to the casual observer - seem to make the Democrats look bad by impeding their agenda.

This is possible because the press will not criticise the Republicans for fear of being branded partisan. Commercial censorship at its best. This is not a partisan statement even if it is primarily a criticism of a single political party. Objectivity is not the belief that both parties are always equally poor.