"Beats NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 580 by just a hair."

You don't say. Must not have factored in Nvidia's history of selling and shipping GPUs that were known to be defective and then conspiring with the purchasers to hide this fact from the users until after their warranties ran out.

If they had, this new GPU would out perform Nvidia's by huge leaps and bounds.

6150 Go. Look it up.

"Such an option is going to cause panic..." but not enough, not in the right places.

While blackouts in protest are a noble gesture, I fear that it will not be significant enough. Certainly if it only lasts for one day. If they really serious in wanting to send a message in no uncertain terms to Washington, the big dot com CONTENT providers need to partner with the major SERVICE providers.

Like has been mentioned, it should be tiered and last over several days. Start at Zero Hour with Google and Facebook going dark. Six hours later more sites go dark. At Z+18, ISPs should start throttling the backbones. At Z+24, start shutting down the backbones. By Z+36, only the most critical infrastructure communications should be allowed to have traffic.

If Congress is going to let their bad policy making decisions be steered by corrupt and greedy corporations that refuse to embrace the new paradigm of online content, corporations who would rather cripple the greatest content delivery system ever conceived... they need a blunt wake up call from those who really control it. Show them who REALLY is in charge.

Agreed. 90%+ of your everyday users fall into that category and probably around half of them don't even really need the upgrade. It just seems to be the knee jerk response buzz word. Strangely, the knee-jerk reaction happens to be the correct one in this case. Slow computer? More RAM. With just a bit of optimization however, that need for more RAM would vanish.

With that said though, I did precisely that in my aptly called userland laptop. I received it in the Nvidia lawsuit settlement and it was at the lowest of the low end. It came loaded with 2GB and seemed adequate for the mundane; email, internet and office...

However, for $50, I was able to quadruple the memory to 8GB (the max for this model). Now, the performance is amazing, especially for a crackerjack prize laptop. I can run what I already could better, run things that I couldn't before and even turn on some of the more blingy features in Win7.

As an aside, I learned a few things. Laptop builders have the habit of loading memory that functions, not the fastest the board is capable of supporting. I learned that this was not the case in mine, it was loaded with the 10600 it was capable of supporting. The memory I got was the MicroCenter "store brand" from A-Data and that also the same brand that the laptop came with as well.

Also, with shared graphics, I intended to turn up the amount "partitioned" for the graphics. I'm know that there is a function that will allow you to manually scale it, but I discovered that either Win7 or the graphics driver detected the new RAM and auto scaled the shared memory for me, so I left it alone.

I like that article better. The title is hilarious as well.

"Planet with British weather found 20 light years away
Cold, rainy, inhabitants likely to be hostile"

Actually, there was no ship one and two. They were trying to get rid of the useless third of their population. Then their world was killed off by a disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

Thank you. I had to go half way down the comments page to find someone who actually read the paper.

They haven't confirmed squat. The article title here and on the source is another case of media sensationalism. Modeling gets you bupkis. It has only shown that it MIGHT be possible, ASSUMING that it has a thick CO2 atmosphere. It could be a rock ball for all we know.

Get the direct image of the planet and do the spectral analysis. Then and only then can we even come close to 'confirming' anything.

 

My understanding as to why we are no longer evolving is that the Human population is so greatly out-bred. That is to say, the population is too large for slight genetic variations to assert themselves. Variations are quickly 'lost' in the background noise.

Your point on stimuli is valid though, but I propose that there could be a different set of stimuli entirely. A small 'closed loop' population, a scientifically 'inbred' population, (not the other form of inbred) could foster the genetic variations to take hold. They could be selective for smaller stature and better adapted for reduced/limited nutrition.

That's just a guess, there could be other factors as well.

Yup, April 8th, 2014.

I think that in many cases though, that the "compelling reason" may be sooner for some due to issues with their own system. I have a secondary machine that I "inherited" that was poorly maintained. I attempted to install SP3 a while back and it failed for some reason I can't recall why. I can't be bothered with reinstalling because it is only a secondary system and it isn't worth the effort.

However, I think that the state of this machine may be indicative of many computers currently in use by "John Q. Everyday Citizen." I may be over generalizing with that, but it seems apparent to me that the well informed and able users are in the minority. I have the feeling that the end of SP2 support tomorrow and not the 2014 end for SP3 will be the large scale death knell for XP.

I think that by and large, the majority of those users (ie those less able) still using XP will feel compelled to upgrade. Probably by the end of the year, I'd wager.

http://img389.imageshack.us/f/sciencevfaith20yp6ds3.png/ 'nuff said. What blows me away is how severely they contradict themselves in their own faith. From the Book of Revelations, Ch. 22, Vs. 18-19 (NIV): I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. This isn't some obscure verse that is little talked about, It is in the closing if the New Testament, in the Book of Revelations, the cornerstone of the Modern Christian Faith in the Second Coming and The End Times. YET, there are currently SEVENTEEN modern translations of the Bible... and each one paraphrases the above verses a little bit differently. That issue is so bad, that when quoting the Bible in print, for clarity you need to reference the translation it came from. http://bible.cc/revelation/22-18.htm Additionally, the Bible has gone through many translations changes, revisions, additions and edits over several thousand years. Largely based on political influences. Eg: why is the Book of Tobit only found in the Catholic Bible? Why does the Bible end with The Book of Revelations according to John and not Peter? What happened to The Gospel of Thomas? What of the legendary book suposed to have PRECEDED The Book of Genesis, co-authored by an Angel? Languages have changed SO much in the past 2-3 thousand years that things have been badly lost in translation. This just doesn't wash with Rev.22-18/19. Followed to the letter, the Old Testament should have never been translated from ancient proto-Hebrew and the New Testament should not have been translated from Aramaic and Latin. How do they reconcile these facts? They don't. It is more or less ignored, or decried as an attempt to undermine the faith. Hey bro, I'm not trying to undermine anything, I'm only pointing out what's there in the book and in the history of it. Not only do they ignore the Scientific Method in the Sciences, it is ignored internally for the faith as well. The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Gospel of Judas and the Nag Hammadi Library are some examples. Again, decried as an attempt to undermine the faith. Yeah, sure. That is what the authors were thinking 2000 years ago when those passages were penned. Recent evidence also suggests that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas was planned between the two and intentional, not really a betrayal. This translation error seems to have occurred about 2000 years ago when translating a Gospel from Aramaic to Greek. Many American Christian Fundamentalists want to say that the Constitution of the United States is not an interpretable document, that it is meant to be taken as it is written. Yet the Bible is open for all forms of interpretation. Pick a standard and stick to it people. All anti-science ignorance and rhetoric aside, I cannot take them seriously when they can't even get and keep their own faith in order.

No, no, no. millions years in the Astronomical time scale, not millions of Light years of distance.

"Because film doesn't have infinite resolution. You can only fit so many of those silver halide crystals on a bit of film, and that limits how much "data" can be stored in the frame." True, but a thought that I had the other day was that with the application of nanotech techniques in the manufacturing processes, the silver halide crystals could be made increasingly smaller and effectively increase the "data rate" and the resolution of the film. Some quick research tells me that during the exposure process, there needs to be four contiguous atoms of silver in order to render a "pixel" and the approximate atomic size indicates that there is the theoretical potential for 16 pixels per square nanometer and 160MP in one sq cm. (Ag=Ag bond is about 250PM, 8*8 grid = 1 sq NM, 64 atoms/4 atoms per pixel; * 10000000 for 1sq cm) Bear in mind that this calculation is "dirty" math with estimates and I don't really know what I am talking about, so I am probably wrong. :)

Wow, you can still find film? I haven't exactly been looking, but I haven't seen any in years...

I don't think that film photography will ever go the way of the dinosaur. It will just be further relegated to the realm of art and to highly esoteric and technical uses.

I think that NASA aught to take a look in storage and see if they have any Hasselblads left over from their old space programs. I have a strong feeling that a $14k adapter for a 39MP camera would be a better investment than the money spent on the R&D for a new system for future space missions.

It would be quite poetic too... Standing on the backs of giants and the foundation laid by our space exploration forefathers and continuing to use (after a fashion) some of the same equipment they did.

I voted Math because of my love of Science. That doesn't make sense you say? The REALLY exciting advanced sciences, the ones that I an interested in ARE essentially Math.

Corporate Troll has a good point about the tactile nature of having a hard copy. That is something that I think will never go away. I am guilty of it too, but zuzulo has really hit the nail on the head. What are the legal ramifications of electronically signed documents? Believe it or not ,the US Military, in particular the Army is very nearly paperless now. All Field & Technical Manuals and Army regulations are available in electronic format. Department of the Army and Defense forms are also digital as well. They may be filled out electronically and signed digitally with the Common Access Card (Smart Card to the rest of us) Even the "hard copy" personnel records are a thing of the past with vital paperwork electronically filed on military servers. For the Army, the digital signing is legally binding, but what about the Civilian realm? Another problem is accessing the electronic documentation. In an office or shop environment, accessing electronic manuals is not that big of an issue. In a field environment, weather that be an on site call as a civilian, or forwardly deployed in the military, that is an issue. You simply cannot be tied down to a desktop. In some cases even a laptop or net book is a stretch, and not a feasible option. Weather you are an IT professional crawling around in access ducts and need to pull up a schematic or a Soldier in the heat of battle that needs to pull up the map of the battle space and/or the operation order, even a net book is not an option. Users can create electronic forms in a variety of programs, or use those created for them, but what do you do with them? Fill them out at the office? Pull out a laptop or net book? I have created several electronic forms in order to streamline my work, but I am still forced to print them out in order to use them. I think that the release of the Slate format PC this year will start nailing the coffin shut on paper driven systems. The Slate format has been panned by some critics as being a novelty, one that will have no real use. They said the dame about the Home Computer and the Cell Phone. IF done right, the Slate format has the potential to revolutionize the office space. Paper will never truly go the way of the dinosaur, but it will become the novelty, not the electronics that are replacing it. The key factors that are inherent to making this a reality though, I think are: 1) A standard for digitally signing documents and the legal acceptance of them. 2) Slate PC's that are capable of producing legally accepted digitally signed documents, weather that be an "etch-a-sketch" signature capture, a Smart Card endorsement or fingerprint reader. 3) Slates that have negligible boot times, (SSD anyone?) batteries that allow for "all day operation" and durability. Durability I think is the key factor on this mark, as sleep states can to a degree remedy the boot time and battery life. It has been stated that the price point on Slates will be in the neighborhood of about $500. If I can find a Slate that can meet all of my needs, I will happily pay twice that. The next year of technology offerings will be very telling as to weather the paperless work space will come to fruition.