Are you saying TSA stands for The Stupid Army?

And I always thought it meant Travel Suppression Agency

http://www.nelson-haha.com/

What's so special about the invention date, that it should affect all future time travelers?

Lets see, if only you had a constitution that knuckleheads think protect them against the state.

I've sent 6 SMS messages this year, so extrapolated to the U.S. population that's about 110 MILLION per day

Interesting how you think that the U.S. accounts for half the SMS traffic in the world?

A dollar a day for a device you spend an hour a day on?

I can't believe people spend $5 a day on Starbucks.

might actually make more sense to wall those machines off from the net and keep using them instead of staying on that one-more-patch-tuesday-til-I'm-secure treadmill.

Some people actually need to use a web browser to access various websites, though, or use a vendor's web application on a remote website, to get their job done.

Actually, meaningful and readily understood labels are a considered a good thing, and beneficial to those who work in the field they apply to.

They want to do the equivalent of telling the C standards designers and programmers... You need to stop using a function named main() or _start as the entry point to your programmers.

From henceforth.... main() should be renamed to Program()

Also, instead of returning an INT, it should return a string with text describing the exit condition, or NULL if the program exits with no error.

Also, the order of the arguments should be reversed, and instead of the entry point using an array of pointers to char*, it will be a pointer to an array with 256 elements, and instead of an integer argCount, argCount will be an array with the lengths of each element; the last program parameter will have length of zero, the new signature of the renamed main() function will be:

extern char * Program( char (*argumentData)[256] , int argumentLength[256]);

the mean *absolute* deviation, rather than the square root of the mean *squared* deviation (the standard deviation).

The mean absolute deviation is a simpler measure of variability. However....

The algebraic manipulation of the standard deviation is simpler; the absolute deviation is more difficult to deal with.

Further, when drawing a number of samples from a large population --- the standard deviation of their mean deviations is substantially higher than the standard deviations of their individual standard deviations; that is to say, the standard deviation of a sample provides an estimate that is more in-line with the whole.

That is to say.... there are cases where the Standard Deviation may be better, AND, much of statistics is using standard deviation as its basis.

Fisher, R. 1920 Monthly Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society, 80, 758-770:

the quality of any statistic could be judged in terms of three characteristics. The statistic, and the population parameter that it represents, should be consistent , The statistic should be sufficient, and the statistic should be efficient -- e.g. the smallest probable error as an estimate of the population. Both the standard deviation and mean deviation met the first two criteria (to the same extent); however, in meeting the third criterion -- the standard deviation proves superior.

Have you investigated things like "Pentagon audit" or "Black budget"?

  NSA operates under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense and reports to the Director of National Intelligence.

Congress will not ever touch "defense" appropriations, and were they to do so the DoD "dark matter" will just funnel here. If the agency PR is so very bad, then the real functions function will just move to different sponsorship, under DISA or something.

You have no Republic.

Epicycles. :-)

Let's go to the Libertarian Right for some perspective on this:
http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=488

You'll be crushed, either way. The ratchet turns only one way.

Absolutely.

I do encode my own videos (well my colleagues videos), professionally. they are watched by literally millions of people literally every day. I aim for a constant quality, not a constant bitrate. Most items I encode at a given subjective quality will add about 50% to encode at 1440x1080 25i over 576x768 25i, however I've encoded some low light stuff in SD that's hit a peak bitrate of 45mbit for a given quality on a given h264 video stream. The 3 minute piece came in at an average 25mbit.

That was originally off a DV25 piece.

Recently, 5 minutes of glorious looking pictures of floods, with a lot of running water, waving reeds, etc; rather than a typical 4-8mbit over 3-4 minutes depending on the clip, this stuff came in at 18mbit. It was well lit, but had a lot of detail and a lot of motion. The piece is a brilliant test, far better than people skipping through a forest.

Now encoding something simple like south park will use a lot less bits for a given quality.

So for the same subjective quality and same resolution you can have a bitrate varying by an order of magnitude at the same resolution. Even if bitrate scaled linearly with resolution you'd still have a minute of some SD material taking more bits to encode than a minute of other HD material.

I haven't run any tests, but my gut would tell me that something cartoonish like southpark at 1080p60 will use a lot fewer bits per second than encoding Blue Planet at 480i or 576i -- for starters I think southpark is only 15fps, so you're only really encoding 1080p15 (given the inter-frame changes on each frame will be zero).