"We must do something!" != "Here is something, so we must do it!"

I've not seen many people complaining about the idea of having crypto regulations or taxes in general. (I'm sure there are some, but I'm not one of them.)

The problem is the specific wording of the bill contains provisions that are LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to comply with. If you run a validator node and see a transaction over $600 you're required to send the recipient a 1099-MISC tax form. How the hell do I send a 1099-MISC form to "1zbqxd5g71234"? That would make it illegal for anyone in the US to run a validator node since they'd be unable to comply with that provision. There were bipartisan approved amendments to fix that wording, but Senator Shelby killed the amendment by trying to stick a $50b military contractor pork rider into it.

Just because some idiot congressperson says "this is common sense legislation!" doesn't mean it is common sense.

And this boom generation shall be dubbed the Coronials.

NO! Crowdfunding is NOT an investment! An investment gets you an ownership share of the thing you're investing in, which could go down in value, maybe even to zero, but it could also go up. It also gives you at least some say in how the money is used, even if only a fraction of a vote. With crowdfunding, you'll never get the 'up' -- the company could walk away with billions but you don't get any piece of that, and you get no say in how your money gets used.

Crowdfunding is more like buying raffle tickets from a charity. You may walk away with nothing more than the satisfaction of helping a cause you believed in. If you're lucky, you might walk away with something worth a bit more than you put into it, but probably not by a lot.

It's completely different. A 4K HDR Netflix stream might be efficiently encoded at 10-15Mbps, but a realtime low latency gaming stream would need 50-100Mbps to get similar quality.

Efficiently compressing VOD is done by making multiple passes through the file, using information from earlier and later frames (up to +/- 30 seconds) to find redundancies that can be coded, using the results of prior passes to find segments of video that can be encoded with fewer bits without noticeable quality loss or which need more bits to look good, and using CPU/GPU intensive compression algorithms which can operate slower than real time. It makes sense to make every effort to save every bit when the video only needs to be encoded once but the output will need to be uploaded millions of times.

Live streaming video is tougher - You can't make multiple passes through the file but usually you can tolerate some delay, often anywhere from 5 - 30 seconds, so you can still use later frames to find redundancies. You have 1 producer streaming to an audience, so there's only one stream that needs to be compressed to serve many end users, and it makes sense to throw a lot of power into that compression since multiple viewers can benefit from the results.

Real time gaming, on the other hand, means you need an encoder for every user. That practically requires using less intensive and less efficient encoders, and thus more bits are needed to encode the same quality. Games tend to have a lot of small details such as text labels, so you can't drop the quality too much. And the stream has to be encoded with extremely low latency, which means you can't look at any later frames to find redundancies, you can only look at a few past frames.

Think of it like herd immunity for vaccines. As much as I love the internet, it broke through all of the barriers that used to protect us from the spread fake news, and society hasn't yet figured out how to fix it.

There have always been lots of crazy people spread throughout society, but before the internet, your social interactions were limited to your local community groups. If you didn't want to be ostracized, you had to at least pretend to blend in with local norms. Your choice of media were limited to things like TV, radio, and newspapers which had to appeal to a geographic market rather than a particular bias or viewpoint. These factors acted like herd immunity, protecting these vulnerable crazy people and helping to contain fake news before it could spread.

Enter the internet. Every crazy and/or dishonest person can now make a direct connection with millions of vulnerable people without geographic, political, or financial barriers. Media outlets can now specialize in highly tailored viewpoints without any consideration for geographic appeal, and have to constantly out-extreme each other to maintain a shrinking slice of viewers. Instead of local social groups helping to contain the spread of misinformation, we now have a positive re-enforcement cycle: the bolder and crazier your fake news, the bigger your audience of gullible people eager to consume more and more outlandish ideas, and the faster it spreads. It's like a virus spreading rapidly through a population that lacks natural immunity.

Apparently Han did come in that thing, after all.

Unless you happen to use Spotify... http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Had the iPhone 7 switched from Lightning to USB-C, this would kind of make sense. Put USB-C ports on the laptops and now all accessories (chargers, headphones, displays, Thunderbolt, USB devices, etc.) could use the same port across all devices. But with the iP7 using Lightning, losing the Macbook headphone jack would really suck. You couldn't use Lightning headphones on the Macbook without an additional USB-C to Lightning female dongle (on top of your USB-C to Lightning male for charging your phone, USB-C to USB-A dongle(s) for regular USB devices like flash drives, USB-C to HDMI dongle for displays, etc.), and to use regular stereo jack headphones on both devices would require carrying 2 dongles. Most wireless headphones only pair to one device at a time so it would be super inconvenient to use the same wireless headphones on two devices.

I'm a big scifi nerd and I'd love for FTL travel/communication to be proven possible, but if it ever is, it likely won't be via quantum entanglement.

Here's an analogy: We have a red ball and a black ball. We randomly put each one into a sealed box so that it's impossible to tell which ball is in which. I take one on my spaceship and fly away from you at top speed, you do the same in the opposite direction. When we're a light year apart, we both open our boxes. Mine is red, so I immediately know that yours must be black, and vice versa. We were able to determine the color of a ball 1ly away instantaneously, even though it would take at least a year for any message like "mine is the red one" to reach the other.

However, this doesn't mean we can send information FTL. Even with an unlimited supply of balls, the best I can do for any particular ball is know that yours is the opposite color. I can't manipulate the color or choose the order in order to send information FTL, at least not without some side channel of communication which must necessarily happen at c or slower. (If the side channel communication was FTL then we'd just use that to communicate and skip the entanglement part.)

Even jerks need freedom of speech, but trademark protection goes far beyond just freedom of speech. Trademark protection means the full force of government -- the courts, the criminal justice system, the police (to enforce the court's decisions), the military (to enforce economic sanctions), customs & border control, etc. -- can be wielded by the trademark holder to enforce their sole ownership of a term. Do you think it's right that the government should be forced to spend millions of tax payer dollars to enforce someone's exclusive use of an offensive term?

If that were true, there would have been half a dozen other people documenting the conference for "experience", but there weren't, so you're proven wrong.

Creators/artists of any skill level should not be expected to work for free for the "experience" or "exposure" as a cost cutting measure. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/e...

As a liberal from Maryland, I'd like to add that O'Malley was such a terrible governor that a solid blue state elected a virtually unknown Republican to succeed him.

You mean, stop verbing nouns?

In my experience it's not just a head tracking issue. Just the feeling of seeing your avatar walking around in the virtual world, while your real body is stationary, was enough to cause nausea in a lot of people.

Games where your avatar remains seated in a cockpit, like a fighter sim, were no problem. You can crane your neck to look around the cockpit from different positions and angles without any nausea (provided the head tracking works well enough), because both your avatar and your real body are seated and not moving. The lack of G forces from the motion of the craft were apparently not a problem.

On the other hand, I'm not convinced that even a perfect head tracking VR helmet will ever work for FPS-type games where your avatar is walking around while your real body sits still.