The problem is that a 1.5 TB tape costs $50 and were it not for the flooding in Thailand, a 3 TB hard drive would cost under $80 like they were last year, which means that you never break even with tape cost-wise no matter the volume.
And then there's the added inconvenience. When lots of desktop computers come with a 3 TB hard drive and your tapes only hold 1.5 TB apiece, that means that even home machines are split across multiple tapes. This means the $1500 bare tape drive isn't enough to back up even a home computer. You'll need that $5,000 tape library instead.
Also, I wish people would quit calling LTO-6 an 8 TB drive. It uses only a 3.2 TB tape, which is too small to even back up hard drives that were shipping three months ago (4 TB) without compression. So the product that they haven't even started shipping is already hopelessly out of date, just has been the case for every consecutive generation of tape drive for at least the last ten years. Even more amusingly, the tape industry keeps creeping up in their estimates of compression. It used to be that their best-case capacity estimates assumed 2x compression. Now it's 2.5x. They're trying to look like they still matter, when in reality, they're falling further and further behind the hard drive industry. If it provided 8 TB uncompressed, I would consider buying one (assuming the tape price were under a hundred bucks a tape), but tape drives will really only be interesting to me if they actually get out ahead of peak hard drive capacity by enough of a margin that the tape drive will still be able to back up an entire machine in less than three or four tapes after a few years. Otherwise, they will never make sense unless you're backing up terabytes per day.
It's a shame, too. I really liked owning a tape drive back in the late 1990s. The big difference is that my computer at the time was five years old and had a small hard drive, so I was able to buy a used tape drive for under a hundred bucks that would back it up onto a single tape that cost me ten or twelve dollars. The difference between that and a $1,500 drive with $100+ tapes is not small.
For big, institutional setups where you're backing up terabytes per day, tape might still make sense, but only because hard drive prices are temporarily high and because storage space has a nonzero cost. For folks with more realistic daily data deltas, they're way too expensive, way too small, and for all practical purposes, completely irrelevant already. It's going to take a lot more than being able to back up 3/4ths of the current top-of-the-line hard drive per tape before tape will make sense again.
With most browser extension APIs (Chrome, Safari, etc.), the browser vendors promise API backwards compatibility and their development teams go to great lengths to avoid making changes that would break that compatibility. By contrast, the Firefox extension API makes no such promises, and as far as I can tell, requires each extension to provide a minimum and maximum compatible version that is hard-coded into the extension itself. When the browser changes versions, if the maximum version in the extension is less than the browser version, the extension stops loading even if the extension would have worked perfectly otherwise.
The way I look at it, if an extension breaks because of an incompatible API change, that's a bug in the browser, not in the extension; all the other browser vendors manage to maintain backwards compatibility. Why can't Firefox? And even if you feel that occasional backwards-incompatible changes are acceptable, if an extension breaks, it breaks. That's life. Kill it and move on. However, artificially breaking *every* extension merely because of a change that *might* break *some* extensions is just plain asinine. Yet this is what Firefox does. Firefox is getting blamed for good reason. Their extension architecture is fundamentally broken by design.
No, the summary is not FUD. The way those services work is that they use a Facebook app. Although they do not have access to your account, per se, the app is running as an authorized app in your account, which means that it can do anything that any other Facebook app can do.
Even the base level of permissions is more than I would trust an arbitrary third-party site to have. If I'm posting on an Internet message board, I don't normally want to post with my full name and photo, and I sure as hell don't want that website to have a list of all my friends, even if it is just their IDs.
I am very selective about what Facebook apps I am willing to authorize. I sure as hell will never authorize an app just to be able to post in some online forum. In effect, this means that by making this decision, they will never get comments by anyone who knows enough about computers to know how Facebook's API works. Basically, they'll be cutting the median tech knowledge level on their message boards in half.
Probably because you can recognize horseshit when you smell it. Apparently, this article's author has never heard of solar lease programs, which are intended for precisely that market. Instead of paying money to the power company, you pay a lower power bill to a company that sticks panels on your roof (and presumably reaps the profits if production exceeds your usage). There's usually zero up-front cost, and these programs are readily available in many places.
True, and that's a very good reason to not buy this game, if you feel that's a risk
A risk? It's practically guaranteed. The only thing that isn't guaranteed is the timeframe. It's like buying a computer knowing that it has a timebomb inside that will destroy the CPU after a random period of time. It might go off after a week, or it might go off after three or four years, but it will go off.
These are just a few of the types of content that have become inaccessible or are expected to soon become inaccessible because of the shutdown of DRM-related servers. In some cases, the content still functions on the original devices, but for most of the above list, it does not.
Buying games that will stop working if they can't contact a server isn't taking a risk. It's throwing money away. Taking a risk is buying products that require activation on new machines; at least the continued operation of your own equipment is, to an extent, under your control.
You're going to have a very flat little generator.
Something like this turned on its side would probably be small enough. Of course, you would need about 12-24x that much power to drive continuously, but if it kicked in at 50% charge, assuming a 100 mile initial range, it would extend your travel by... about four miles over the course of that hour of charging. Okay, maybe not so useful.
Now that I do the math... if you want a generator that lets you drive continuously on that gasoline-powered engine, you can pretty much forget about a removable generator, whether in-trunk or on your bumper. A generator powerful enough to run a small battery-powered electric vehicle starts at about 350 pounds (plus fuel), and takes up somewhere on the order of 25 cubic feet (more than double the entire volume of your trunk in a typical car, and very nearly the entire cargo space in an SUV. In other words, it would take at least three or four people just to lift the thing, and it would basically load down the vehicle just like a trailer at or near the maximum allowable tongue weight for a class III hitch. Your car is going to drive like crap. Forget gas mileage, if you don't replace your suspension with hardware designed for towing, you'll be lucky if your muffler doesn't drag the ground even on the straight stretches.
To be fair, without the inverter and subsequent downstep, you could get away with a slightly smaller engine, but it still won't be small enough for an average person to lift without a motorized winch.
The bottom line is that if you're driving a pickup truck, this might be feasible. Otherwise, it just isn't. So I guess a trailer is probably the only feasible choice, at least for generators.
The disadvantages of your approach are that A. it would significantly reduce the fuel economy (or electrical economy or whatever) of the vehicle because of all the extra wind resistance, and B. anything hanging below the rear bumper is likely to get scraped off or leave you stuck when you pull into any parking lot with a steep driveway.
If you do it with a chamber in the floor of the trunk, it avoids both of those problems, and you can still hook up an external power trailer if you really wanted to do so (provided that the wiring harness is designed properly) by running the wires through the rubber gap between the trunk lid and the body of the car.
Such a design would, however, require a significantly deeper trunk than many cars currently have, assuming you care about having a spare tire in there, too. It would work a lot more readily in mini-SUVs where you can put the spare tire on the back of the vehicle....
How about just having an extra compartment in the floor of the trunk, vented to the outside and sealed from the inside, into which you can drop a small portable generator with an electric starter?
If the candidate were clearly better overall, then people would not be concerned about that candidate taking away votes from the less evil main party candidate because that candidate would be polling strongly enough to have a chance of winning. If, as is usually the case, the third party candidate doesn't do well in pre-election polling (when it doesn't count), then that casts into doubt the assumption that poor third-party representation is predominantly caused by fear of spoiler candidates.
That said, to the extent that this does occur, it is evidence of a strong need for something more sensible than the current plurality voting.
Actually, that's debatable, too. Putting the period inside the quotation marks every time is strictly an American English distortion of the English language.
In British English, the period goes inside or outside depending on whether it is part of what is being quoted. So about 18% of native English speakers and an even larger percentage of non-native English speakers would tell you that your rule is completely wrong.
Actually, I would argue that in sufficient quantities, any of the current U.S. third parties would screw things up significantly worse than the two major parties. If they weren't lesser choices, they would get way more votes than they currently do, regardless of any funding differences.
Six inches? Most people struggle to even focus up that close. Most people look at smaller prints at 14-18 inches (reading distance). It's not that hard to imagine people getting within a couple of feet of a picture hanging on a wall.
That would work... if the other party would field a competent candidate. Unfortunately, you get elections like California's recent senatorial race where a fair number of California Democrats (possibly even the majority) would have voted against Boxer, but the alternative was the woman whose leadership nearly bankrupted what by some standards is the largest computer company in the world....
Replacing one bad candidate with an even worse candidate solves nothing. The illusion of competition between the two major parties is no more relevant than the illusion of security that the TSA provides. It's all just a show to appease the proles.
If anybody honestly expected the U.S. government to bring in experts on any issue even slightly tied to the giant boondoggle that is the TSA, you must have been hiding under a rock for the past ten years.
In fact, I'll go one step further and say that the day Congress actually lets competent, intelligent technology experts into any discussion, we'll have solved global warming semipermanently by balancing the heat from the sun with the icy breeze coming up from hell.
We *almost* have a distribution system. In principle, Blu-Ray players can add multiple layers to allow greater storage per disc, and this doesn't require any hardware changes to existing players, and some Blu-Ray hardware can actually read data at up to 12x speeds, which is 8 times the maximum allowable data rate for a Blu-Ray movie (don't ask). This is probably enough to handle 4K content at more-than-respectable quality with only minor firmware tweaks on the optical side of things.
Two things we don't have (AFAIK) are: 1. an HDMI specification that can handle that data rate (I'm pretty sure 4K video exceeds the HDMI 1.4 maximum), and 2. hardware codec chips that can decompress video at such high resolutions and data rates. Neither of these is a huge barrier.
The real barrier to things like 4K is that the studios can't make money from it. The market is showing pretty clearly that most folks aren't willing to pay more than about an extra buck or two for a Blu-Ray copy of a movie, and in some cases, they've even resorted to artificially inflating their Blu-Ray numbers by refusing to sell the DVD except in a combo pack with a Blu-Ray, all so that the Blu-Ray format doesn't look like a dismal failure. Turns out that for most people, 720x480 is good enough.
Based on that, it seems likely that the cost of recapturing and re-encoding existing content at a still-higher resolution would have almost no payoff. Without the content, there's no incentive to buy 4K sets, and without 4K sets, there's no incentive to encode content at such an insane resolution. Maybe if the companies doing the telecine work upgrade their gear to start from a 4K camera master (as you put it, the infrastructure to create the content), the re-encoding cost could be minimal in the future, in which case 4K might go somewhere eventually, but for now, I'm not convinced the market cares enough.
Perhaps because some "smart TVs" include 3D support at next to no additional cost.
Yup. And can be firmware-upgraded at any time without your knowledge to add exciting, new DRM features that blank out your TV when you play a movie from your digital video jukebox... err... I mean... protect the quality of your movie viewing experience.
Thanks, but I prefer my TVs to be as dumb as possible. It is an appliance, no different from my toaster oven.
Seriously though, a pimple may not show up in one frame but...
Stop right there. A pixel (at least in properly designed systems) isn't drawn based on what color appears at a particular infinitely small point in a continuous field of color variation. A pixel is drawn based on the average over an area of a particular size.
Further, because of the way human vision works, unless you are insanely close to the screen, a small change in a cluster of adjacent pixels is perceived similarly to a much larger change in only one pixel.
Thus, no matter how big the pixels are, that pimple will never disappear in one frame and reappear in the next. Either the pimple is large enough to cause an entire pixel or a cluster of pixels to shift far enough in color to be noticed, or it isn't. If it is, it will be noticed in every frame (assuming similar distance and camera angle, of course). If the pimple isn't big enough to notice in one frame, it will not be noticed in any frames. Any exceptions to this are almost invariably indicative of a bad scaling algorithm, compression artifacts, or other flaws elsewhere in the system.
And that goes double for the "photographers" who think you need Z number of megapixels for an X x Y print.
Not really. Unless you're dealing with billboards or something similarly unusual in which distance from the print is forced by the display environment, 99% of the time, people are going to get fairly close to your prints. Thus, it is not unreasonable to require a certain minimum DPI regardless of print size, based on the assumption that some people will be viewing it at a typical reading distance of a foot or two no matter how big the entire print might be.
Sure, there are exceptions that prove the rule, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good rule of thumb.
Basically it boils down to a phone that asks for your username and password to your account. And you know the majority of passwords would be weak and there'll be huge inquiries as to why people can easily steal cellphone service from others.
That's a relatively easy problem to solve. Instead of a SIM card, provide a SIM paper slip with a high density barcode that contains a 4096-bit public-private key pair and an account number. All the customer needs to do is either keep the paper slip in a safe place (for easier future moves to a new phone) or burn it (ensuring that the account can only be migrated by someone with physical access to the customer's phone).
Heck, you could make the bar codes be one-time use. When the phone connects to the server for the first time using key pair A, it receives a new public-private key pair B from the server and uses that for future conversations with the cell network, after which key pair A is no longer functional.
Then, when you want to migrate to a new phone, the old phone could display a copy of a barcode with its current key pair (B) and unregister that key pair from the cell network, thus preventing it from being used in any way other than to register a new phone. At that point, the new phone could read pair B, register with the cell network, and obtain a new pair C for its ongoing use.
And as is the case now, if you call customer service, they could always migrate a dead phone by unregistering it and emailing you its barcode directly.
It's a Mac running Time Machine. That said, the Airport Extreme looks just like any other AFP server, so if I cared enough to back up my MythTV backend box (Linux), it probably wouldn't be very hard.
I am not a process engineer, so I may be wrong here, but I seem to recall that another big problem silicon chips face is electron tunneling, in which an insulator fails to insulate. Because a superconductor would provide less resistance to electron flow, I would expect a superconductive trace in a silicon chip to be less prone to such problems. If that is correct, then I would expect superconductors to make higher yields possible at smaller die sizes, which would help with one of the causes of inefficiency, assuming that the reduced resistance doesn't just replace one problem with a different problem somewhere else.
Again, though, IANAPE, so I could be off by a mile.
What? You mean we can't move across to the passenger's seat to use the GPS system while the vehicle is in motion? That takes all the fun out of highway 17.
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The problem is that a 1.5 TB tape costs $50 and were it not for the flooding in Thailand, a 3 TB hard drive would cost under $80 like they were last year, which means that you never break even with tape cost-wise no matter the volume.
And then there's the added inconvenience. When lots of desktop computers come with a 3 TB hard drive and your tapes only hold 1.5 TB apiece, that means that even home machines are split across multiple tapes. This means the $1500 bare tape drive isn't enough to back up even a home computer. You'll need that $5,000 tape library instead.
Also, I wish people would quit calling LTO-6 an 8 TB drive. It uses only a 3.2 TB tape, which is too small to even back up hard drives that were shipping three months ago (4 TB) without compression. So the product that they haven't even started shipping is already hopelessly out of date, just has been the case for every consecutive generation of tape drive for at least the last ten years. Even more amusingly, the tape industry keeps creeping up in their estimates of compression. It used to be that their best-case capacity estimates assumed 2x compression. Now it's 2.5x. They're trying to look like they still matter, when in reality, they're falling further and further behind the hard drive industry. If it provided 8 TB uncompressed, I would consider buying one (assuming the tape price were under a hundred bucks a tape), but tape drives will really only be interesting to me if they actually get out ahead of peak hard drive capacity by enough of a margin that the tape drive will still be able to back up an entire machine in less than three or four tapes after a few years. Otherwise, they will never make sense unless you're backing up terabytes per day.
It's a shame, too. I really liked owning a tape drive back in the late 1990s. The big difference is that my computer at the time was five years old and had a small hard drive, so I was able to buy a used tape drive for under a hundred bucks that would back it up onto a single tape that cost me ten or twelve dollars. The difference between that and a $1,500 drive with $100+ tapes is not small.
For big, institutional setups where you're backing up terabytes per day, tape might still make sense, but only because hard drive prices are temporarily high and because storage space has a nonzero cost. For folks with more realistic daily data deltas, they're way too expensive, way too small, and for all practical purposes, completely irrelevant already. It's going to take a lot more than being able to back up 3/4ths of the current top-of-the-line hard drive per tape before tape will make sense again.
With most browser extension APIs (Chrome, Safari, etc.), the browser vendors promise API backwards compatibility and their development teams go to great lengths to avoid making changes that would break that compatibility. By contrast, the Firefox extension API makes no such promises, and as far as I can tell, requires each extension to provide a minimum and maximum compatible version that is hard-coded into the extension itself. When the browser changes versions, if the maximum version in the extension is less than the browser version, the extension stops loading even if the extension would have worked perfectly otherwise.
The way I look at it, if an extension breaks because of an incompatible API change, that's a bug in the browser, not in the extension; all the other browser vendors manage to maintain backwards compatibility. Why can't Firefox? And even if you feel that occasional backwards-incompatible changes are acceptable, if an extension breaks, it breaks. That's life. Kill it and move on. However, artificially breaking *every* extension merely because of a change that *might* break *some* extensions is just plain asinine. Yet this is what Firefox does. Firefox is getting blamed for good reason. Their extension architecture is fundamentally broken by design.
No, the summary is not FUD. The way those services work is that they use a Facebook app. Although they do not have access to your account, per se, the app is running as an authorized app in your account, which means that it can do anything that any other Facebook app can do.
Even the base level of permissions is more than I would trust an arbitrary third-party site to have. If I'm posting on an Internet message board, I don't normally want to post with my full name and photo, and I sure as hell don't want that website to have a list of all my friends, even if it is just their IDs.
I am very selective about what Facebook apps I am willing to authorize. I sure as hell will never authorize an app just to be able to post in some online forum. In effect, this means that by making this decision, they will never get comments by anyone who knows enough about computers to know how Facebook's API works. Basically, they'll be cutting the median tech knowledge level on their message boards in half.
Probably because you can recognize horseshit when you smell it. Apparently, this article's author has never heard of solar lease programs, which are intended for precisely that market. Instead of paying money to the power company, you pay a lower power bill to a company that sticks panels on your roof (and presumably reaps the profits if production exceeds your usage). There's usually zero up-front cost, and these programs are readily available in many places.
A risk? It's practically guaranteed. The only thing that isn't guaranteed is the timeframe. It's like buying a computer knowing that it has a timebomb inside that will destroy the CPU after a random period of time. It might go off after a week, or it might go off after three or four years, but it will go off.
Let's look at the history of DRM for a moment.
These are just a few of the types of content that have become inaccessible or are expected to soon become inaccessible because of the shutdown of DRM-related servers. In some cases, the content still functions on the original devices, but for most of the above list, it does not.
Buying games that will stop working if they can't contact a server isn't taking a risk. It's throwing money away. Taking a risk is buying products that require activation on new machines; at least the continued operation of your own equipment is, to an extent, under your control.
Something like this turned on its side would probably be small enough. Of course, you would need about 12-24x that much power to drive continuously, but if it kicked in at 50% charge, assuming a 100 mile initial range, it would extend your travel by... about four miles over the course of that hour of charging. Okay, maybe not so useful.
Now that I do the math... if you want a generator that lets you drive continuously on that gasoline-powered engine, you can pretty much forget about a removable generator, whether in-trunk or on your bumper. A generator powerful enough to run a small battery-powered electric vehicle starts at about 350 pounds (plus fuel), and takes up somewhere on the order of 25 cubic feet (more than double the entire volume of your trunk in a typical car, and very nearly the entire cargo space in an SUV. In other words, it would take at least three or four people just to lift the thing, and it would basically load down the vehicle just like a trailer at or near the maximum allowable tongue weight for a class III hitch. Your car is going to drive like crap. Forget gas mileage, if you don't replace your suspension with hardware designed for towing, you'll be lucky if your muffler doesn't drag the ground even on the straight stretches.
To be fair, without the inverter and subsequent downstep, you could get away with a slightly smaller engine, but it still won't be small enough for an average person to lift without a motorized winch.
The bottom line is that if you're driving a pickup truck, this might be feasible. Otherwise, it just isn't. So I guess a trailer is probably the only feasible choice, at least for generators.
The disadvantages of your approach are that A. it would significantly reduce the fuel economy (or electrical economy or whatever) of the vehicle because of all the extra wind resistance, and B. anything hanging below the rear bumper is likely to get scraped off or leave you stuck when you pull into any parking lot with a steep driveway.
If you do it with a chamber in the floor of the trunk, it avoids both of those problems, and you can still hook up an external power trailer if you really wanted to do so (provided that the wiring harness is designed properly) by running the wires through the rubber gap between the trunk lid and the body of the car.
Such a design would, however, require a significantly deeper trunk than many cars currently have, assuming you care about having a spare tire in there, too. It would work a lot more readily in mini-SUVs where you can put the spare tire on the back of the vehicle....
How about just having an extra compartment in the floor of the trunk, vented to the outside and sealed from the inside, into which you can drop a small portable generator with an electric starter?
If the candidate were clearly better overall, then people would not be concerned about that candidate taking away votes from the less evil main party candidate because that candidate would be polling strongly enough to have a chance of winning. If, as is usually the case, the third party candidate doesn't do well in pre-election polling (when it doesn't count), then that casts into doubt the assumption that poor third-party representation is predominantly caused by fear of spoiler candidates.
That said, to the extent that this does occur, it is evidence of a strong need for something more sensible than the current plurality voting.
Actually, that's debatable, too. Putting the period inside the quotation marks every time is strictly an American English distortion of the English language.
In British English, the period goes inside or outside depending on whether it is part of what is being quoted. So about 18% of native English speakers and an even larger percentage of non-native English speakers would tell you that your rule is completely wrong.
It would be nice if Murdoch got pounded.
I mean, normally, prison rape is not funny, but in his case, I'll make an exception.
Actually, I would argue that in sufficient quantities, any of the current U.S. third parties would screw things up significantly worse than the two major parties. If they weren't lesser choices, they would get way more votes than they currently do, regardless of any funding differences.
Six inches? Most people struggle to even focus up that close. Most people look at smaller prints at 14-18 inches (reading distance). It's not that hard to imagine people getting within a couple of feet of a picture hanging on a wall.
That would work... if the other party would field a competent candidate. Unfortunately, you get elections like California's recent senatorial race where a fair number of California Democrats (possibly even the majority) would have voted against Boxer, but the alternative was the woman whose leadership nearly bankrupted what by some standards is the largest computer company in the world....
Replacing one bad candidate with an even worse candidate solves nothing. The illusion of competition between the two major parties is no more relevant than the illusion of security that the TSA provides. It's all just a show to appease the proles.
Public funding need not be controlled by politicians. The government could just as easily spin off nonprofit organizations to make the decisions....
If anybody honestly expected the U.S. government to bring in experts on any issue even slightly tied to the giant boondoggle that is the TSA, you must have been hiding under a rock for the past ten years.
In fact, I'll go one step further and say that the day Congress actually lets competent, intelligent technology experts into any discussion, we'll have solved global warming semipermanently by balancing the heat from the sun with the icy breeze coming up from hell.
No, the alternative to patents is public funding grants.
We *almost* have a distribution system. In principle, Blu-Ray players can add multiple layers to allow greater storage per disc, and this doesn't require any hardware changes to existing players, and some Blu-Ray hardware can actually read data at up to 12x speeds, which is 8 times the maximum allowable data rate for a Blu-Ray movie (don't ask). This is probably enough to handle 4K content at more-than-respectable quality with only minor firmware tweaks on the optical side of things.
Two things we don't have (AFAIK) are: 1. an HDMI specification that can handle that data rate (I'm pretty sure 4K video exceeds the HDMI 1.4 maximum), and 2. hardware codec chips that can decompress video at such high resolutions and data rates. Neither of these is a huge barrier.
The real barrier to things like 4K is that the studios can't make money from it. The market is showing pretty clearly that most folks aren't willing to pay more than about an extra buck or two for a Blu-Ray copy of a movie, and in some cases, they've even resorted to artificially inflating their Blu-Ray numbers by refusing to sell the DVD except in a combo pack with a Blu-Ray, all so that the Blu-Ray format doesn't look like a dismal failure. Turns out that for most people, 720x480 is good enough.
Based on that, it seems likely that the cost of recapturing and re-encoding existing content at a still-higher resolution would have almost no payoff. Without the content, there's no incentive to buy 4K sets, and without 4K sets, there's no incentive to encode content at such an insane resolution. Maybe if the companies doing the telecine work upgrade their gear to start from a 4K camera master (as you put it, the infrastructure to create the content), the re-encoding cost could be minimal in the future, in which case 4K might go somewhere eventually, but for now, I'm not convinced the market cares enough.
Yup. And can be firmware-upgraded at any time without your knowledge to add exciting, new DRM features that blank out your TV when you play a movie from your digital video jukebox... err... I mean... protect the quality of your movie viewing experience.
Thanks, but I prefer my TVs to be as dumb as possible. It is an appliance, no different from my toaster oven.
Stop right there. A pixel (at least in properly designed systems) isn't drawn based on what color appears at a particular infinitely small point in a continuous field of color variation. A pixel is drawn based on the average over an area of a particular size.
Further, because of the way human vision works, unless you are insanely close to the screen, a small change in a cluster of adjacent pixels is perceived similarly to a much larger change in only one pixel.
Thus, no matter how big the pixels are, that pimple will never disappear in one frame and reappear in the next. Either the pimple is large enough to cause an entire pixel or a cluster of pixels to shift far enough in color to be noticed, or it isn't. If it is, it will be noticed in every frame (assuming similar distance and camera angle, of course). If the pimple isn't big enough to notice in one frame, it will not be noticed in any frames. Any exceptions to this are almost invariably indicative of a bad scaling algorithm, compression artifacts, or other flaws elsewhere in the system.
Not really. Unless you're dealing with billboards or something similarly unusual in which distance from the print is forced by the display environment, 99% of the time, people are going to get fairly close to your prints. Thus, it is not unreasonable to require a certain minimum DPI regardless of print size, based on the assumption that some people will be viewing it at a typical reading distance of a foot or two no matter how big the entire print might be.
Sure, there are exceptions that prove the rule, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good rule of thumb.
That's a relatively easy problem to solve. Instead of a SIM card, provide a SIM paper slip with a high density barcode that contains a 4096-bit public-private key pair and an account number. All the customer needs to do is either keep the paper slip in a safe place (for easier future moves to a new phone) or burn it (ensuring that the account can only be migrated by someone with physical access to the customer's phone).
Heck, you could make the bar codes be one-time use. When the phone connects to the server for the first time using key pair A, it receives a new public-private key pair B from the server and uses that for future conversations with the cell network, after which key pair A is no longer functional.
Then, when you want to migrate to a new phone, the old phone could display a copy of a barcode with its current key pair (B) and unregister that key pair from the cell network, thus preventing it from being used in any way other than to register a new phone. At that point, the new phone could read pair B, register with the cell network, and obtain a new pair C for its ongoing use.
And as is the case now, if you call customer service, they could always migrate a dead phone by unregistering it and emailing you its barcode directly.
It's a Mac running Time Machine. That said, the Airport Extreme looks just like any other AFP server, so if I cared enough to back up my MythTV backend box (Linux), it probably wouldn't be very hard.
I am not a process engineer, so I may be wrong here, but I seem to recall that another big problem silicon chips face is electron tunneling, in which an insulator fails to insulate. Because a superconductor would provide less resistance to electron flow, I would expect a superconductive trace in a silicon chip to be less prone to such problems. If that is correct, then I would expect superconductors to make higher yields possible at smaller die sizes, which would help with one of the causes of inefficiency, assuming that the reduced resistance doesn't just replace one problem with a different problem somewhere else.
Again, though, IANAPE, so I could be off by a mile.
What? You mean we can't move across to the passenger's seat to use the GPS system while the vehicle is in motion? That takes all the fun out of highway 17.