much of the noise from fans comes from the noise as the air blows over the heatsink etc. and not from the fan itself.
This is largely a myth. Unless you have super high air-speed fans, the turbulence is a minor noise generator. With the popularity of low speed and 80mm+ fans, this situation has almost entirely disappeared.
While those interlaced fields can be back-converted for progressive display, the information is still stored on the disc as 480i at 60 fps.
Video on a DVD can be stored interlaced, but most commercial DVDs are progressive 24fps. Most players output that material interlaced, but the data on-disc for movies is still almost always progressive.
DVD is essentially NTSC-III (digitized NTSC).
NTSC is not a resolution and frame rate. It is an RF encoding of analog data. Digitized video can never be "NTSC".
To make the point clear, go put a "PAL DVD" in your DVD player (it has to be region free)... It will still work and playback just fine. With an analog formats, where "NTSC" means something, it won't work at all.
Compared to CD players? (mentioned earlier in the article) That surprises me.
Very much-so.
Sony lists their CD Walkman at 30 hours on 2xAA with MP3 CDs. Aiwa and Panasonic aren't far behind. And frankly, those are low estimates. Besides, it could be much better still if specifically designed for MP3s (maybe 256kbps max), and unable to play CDDA.
When the switch is flipped, the analog UHF stations will go away and the VHF DTV stations will move to UHF. Does anybody know for sure? Investing in VHF antenna stuff may be a waste of resources.
You are mistaken.
Check my journal entry for everything you might want to know. Specifically, you can follow the FCC link at the end for proof that VHF-high (7-13) is most certainly NOT going away. http://hardware.slashdot.org/~evilviper/journal/184757
What makes broadcast relevant again is having the Internet to compliment it.
I think the DVD, Netflix, and DVRs have a LOT more to do with it.
DVDs have changed the way people watch TV. Why wait for the repeats of TV shows with all the commercials and annoyances, when $10 will get you a hard copy? Why wait for some blockbuster or B-movie to show up on TV, when it's on the shelf at the supermarket?
Netflix fills a very large niche for movies and TV shows you didn't see, but think you might like. Not to mention older or cult movies that probably aren't ever going to be on TV, anywhere. If I had to chose between 3 movies at a time, and 200 channels a month, I'd go with Netflix. And don't bring the internet into it, I'd have subscribed to Netflix if they shipped out hard copies of their movie catalog, and required me to create my queue with pencil and paper.
DVRs are having a huge impact as well, they may entirely eliminate the need for cable channels that do nothing but syndicate TV shows... If you watched EVERY single episode of Law & Order when it was first aired, you're not likely to watch repeats of it. If you can record the weekly 2:00 am airing of Star Trek on NBC, and watch it anytime, why would you need 5 cable channels that show it around the clock?
plus Internet for pre-recorded stuff people want on demand.
DVRs and DVDs both largely fill the need for on demand shows, as well as fringe/small-audience content.
Unfortunately, NTSC isnt going anywhere. Its just the analog transmissions which are going away.
NTSC is the analog encoding of RF TV signals, it is going away with the switch to digital (replaced by ATSC), just as PAL did in many places in Europe (replaced by DVB-T).
The old resolution isn't even being kept, as 1080i is universal. So the only vestige of NTSC is the ~30 fps rate, and there are alternatives to that as well, they just aren't commonly utilized.
Why you Americans dont use PAL, I'll never know.:)
You Europians better be careful... We invented TV and we can still take it away.
Nobody creates something new, then gives it away for free, that's why we need copyrights.
Funny you should mention it, because the original design was, in fact patented.
Or could that tired old argument just possibly be wrong?
No, your argument is a logical fallacy. Who can you possibly cite that has ever said that "NOBODY" gives away their work? And used that as justification for copyrights?
The fact that a couple people gave away a couple days worth of their work (BASED ON A PATENTED DESIGN) is not proof that our entire economy can depend on inventors/creators giving away everything they do, and begging for donations.
Maybe you've noticed that over the air TV broadcasts are essentially coming to an end in a few years?
Actually, I've noticed exactly the opposite.
* Many more homes will be able to receive an OTA signal, that previously could not. * Digital broadcasts will offer perfect reception, eliminating much of the need for cable/sat. * OTA HDTV will offer the highest quality picture anyone can get. * OTA ATSC offers the potential for more TV channels than an expensive subscription service (50*6 = 300), in addition to other informational services. * Rising prices and horrendous support will push people away from cable/satellite. * Proprietary STBs and feet-dragging on CableCard will push even more people away from cable/sat. * DVR technology will eliminate the need for syndication, and there the business model for 90% of cable/satellite networks will fail. * The quality of original programming on cable/satellite networks has dropped SEVERELY, anyhow. * Pop-up ads on cable/sat networks (largely not found on broadcast) will push even more people away.
That $200 PC with Myth is NOT the equivilent of a Tivo Series3.
You're absolutely right! The $200 PC is infinitely more capable than any Tivo could ever DREAM of!
By going to a Series3 you get CableCARD technology.
That much is true. However, there are innumerable problems with CableCards, and simply using analog pass-through is both more flexible and can give even better results (eg. smaller files with potentially visually better quality through on-the-fly encoding/processing).
This is simple economics. Opportunity cost.
You're the one who doesn't grasp economics. You obviously aren't going to be working every (spare) waking hour, so there is no opportunity cost here. If putting together a DVR required you work on nothing else 24/7 for weeks, THAT would be an opportunity cost. But that's not how it works. ie. No opportunity cost.
TiVo has, bar none, the best HCI.
If you've used nothing else, it's easy to say that. It's hard to beat a flat list of files, being one click away from all your content, and any operations you want to perform on them. Yes, MythTV's UI also sucks, but it's a piece of crap I wouldn't dream of using or recomend. It's merely the press' favorite.
It's all superior to every other DVR I'd seen.
Obviously your experience is far too limited, but let's just go with it as a hypothetical...
Does your Tivo3 allow you to watch DVDs without being forced to watch trailers? How much of your time is wasted on every FBI warning and forced trailer? How many such DVDs will it take before it would have been quicker (or CHEAPER for you) to put together a DVR?
Better yet, does your Tivo3 allow you to STORE all your DVD, VHS, etc. movies on it's hard drive, so you never have to waste your time (or MONEY for you) removing them from the packaging, waiting for your DVD player to power up, cleaning them, etc?
How's your Tivo doing, replacing your CD player and disc collection?
How well does your Tivo allow you to edit out commercials, so that you don't have to skip through the commercials every time you want to watch a show that you've saved?
How good is your Tivo at allowing you to convert any videos to DVDs (or VCD/SVCDs) so you can give hard copies to other family members (eg. kids) to watch in another room and not bother you, or to give out?
How often do you think you're going to need to replace your Tivo, because it runs out of space or doesn't support some feature like CableCard2 or HDTV/QAM? What's the opportunity cost of losing all your saved shows and the like?
What's most disturbing about your post isn't how utterly wrong you are on all counts, it's how utterly sure you and your actions are the only right ones, and everyone else MUST be wrong, somehow.
The remaining question is, do you have the skills to do this fast enough, and do you work cheap enough, for it to take less than $400 of your time?
It's a bullshit question.
Unless you're forced to do it all during your work hours, OR you work every waking hour of every day, you will have some "free time" (in every sense of the word).
What's more, it's amazing how people focus on initial time, and ignore the rest... How much money does it cost you due to the user interface (on every electronic device you own) isn't exactly perfect, and therefore wastes untold amounts of your time, in a few seconds increments?
Considering that I built my DVR 5+ years ago, I think I've much, much more than broke even... Count subscription fees, the ability to retain the same box across different TV service providers with minimal time invested, and all the other benefits it offeres, I'm going to say anyone who doesn't put together a DVR is wasting several thousands of dollars worth of their time...
That's ok - he'll still put his life on the line to protect your right to continue to whine.
As opposed to us non-military citizens, who are sworn to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and bear arms on behalf of the United States when required.
So I suggest creating an official defense botnet client that civilians can download to help our military from home.
Why in the hell would the US Military NEED a botnet of Windows PCs, when they can plug a few supercomputers DIRECTLY into the major internet peering points and do whatever the hell they want?
A botnet is an attempt to create a flood by controlling millions of individual drops of rain. Meanwhile, the US government can just hook up to a dam, and put ALL the water anywhere they damn well please.
Why don't these black boxes stream their data live to satellites during the entire trip?
Because it would be absolutely horrendously expensive, terribly unreliable, and almost completely useless. There are huge, huge numbers of glitch-free flights every day (but they all have to pay for uplinking numerous megabytes of data per hour), and only the very tiniest fraction of aircraft ever need that flight data examined.
They should keep the crash-proof boxes, for events that stop the streaing before the recorder stops.
Which would be just about every single event that they would possibly WANT to examine.
If the data is streamed live, they might also find the box sooner, if the box has a GPS that continues streaming after the box has landed somewhere.
as it is, modern malay and austronesian peoples living on southeast asian islands are generally a little smaller than people from the mainland (generally... the dayak people of borneo are quite tall). and their migrational wave is very recent in human history. so this size change tirck is very easy and quick to pull off
That's not exactly compelling. Minor size differences can happen in a generation, just due to differences in nutrition. Without DNA evidence that genetic changes are entirely the cause, it doesn't indicate a larger phenomenon (island effect) at work that could exaggerate size differences further.
You could look at the US, and come to the conclusion that human are evolving to be shorter and fatter, even though there's no genetic change involved, and so a hard upper limit to that change in physical appearance.
Funny how people are so quick to rant about Wordpress whenever a site gets/.ed, yet nobody is bothering to mention that the incredibly dynamic nature of Wikipedia is an unnecessary HUGE drain on resources.
If the main content of Wikipedia was static, not only would it be a TON less load on their servers, it could also be cached by ISPs, browsers, and the like.
Static content doesn't mean Wikipedia would never change, it would just mean contributions would be done on the development section, where contributors would see it, and only after it's been up for a week or so would the changes be pushed out to the main site. Really now, how often are most articles edited, only to change one letter? Do you really think Wikipedia should incur the bandwidth hit just to make sure that everyone sees that typo fix immediately?
Besides saving untold resources for everyone, this would pretty much eliminate all vandalism, as it would never be seen by 99% of readers, and most would not bother and give up on it... It would do quite a good job eliminating lots of mistakes and misinformation, as there's time for review and/or discussion before anything goes live.
Personally, I'd like an even more extreme version of this myself... I'd like nothing better than a lightweight GTK app that allows me to browse a local (gzipped) copy of Wikipedia, without using ANY bandwidth to do simple lookups. Every few months, changes can be fetched as (low bandwidth) diffs.
After that's working, I'd like some similar interface to edit articles, which would either verify that the local copy is the newest version, or otherwise fetch whatever is (without all the HTML overhead, or the horrible performance of a slow and memory hogging web browser) and allow me to edit, preview, and submit back changes as simply as using a word processor. Then, everybody saves money, gets huge performance improvements, etc.
(1) By your logic, Wikipedia should be a news source, a private/public note-passing service, grocery list, etc. Just because the financial costs are not AS high as another medium does not mean it's okay. Wikipedia has goals and guidelines... Just because it's technically possible, and doesn't cost you anything, doesn't mean it's then okay. The cost would be technically possible and trivially cheap to add movie posters at random places inside dictionaries, but that would simply not be appropriate.
(2) The two pieces of legislation have only the most tenuous link to the person... A brief mention that the law arose to address circumstances that one person was previously found in, would be plenty.
(3) I fully addressed the notability question. Wikipedia has a global scope. If it isn't globally important, or at least important to a large region, it doesn't belong there. Notability isn't always clear-cut, but that doesn't make it relative. Individual opinions, as to what Wikipedia should be, is the only thing that is relative here.
Would you expect an article in Encyclopedia Britannica about your daughter? If so, would you read book upon book of similar bios? Everyone in the world who has ever been murdered, and had a charitable fund spring up after?
Would anyone 50+ miles from you care about the subject? I'm just a couple states over from you, and I certainly don't care in the slightest. No way the rest of the world would.
Though I'm not going to get involved in the issue on Wikipedia, I also agree the subject doesn't need an article, as her death is the only noteworthy event in her bio, and even that isn't significant enough to warrant more than a few sentences.
Of course you hate me now, because it's a very, very important subject to you. Unfortunately it isn't necessarily important to anyone else.
If they consider an article trivial, isn't it fairly easy to just not read it and not contribute to it?
It's a question of context.
Take any Wikipedia article. It would be quite easy to divide it up, and give every trivial point it's own article. However, making such a distributed list of facts makes the information largely useless.
How would you feel if you watched the news one day, only to find they start listing names and what they did that day? It's not very useful to know that Abu Suwab Alzahari died today, unless you know he's the leader of a country, how old he was, what this means, etc.
I daresay that the resulting human (or any animal in 2008) digestive tract and immune system is pretty freaking robust and capable of isolating/filtering/rejecting pollutants and contaminants.
Tell that to anyone in a 3rd world country... You know, the ones where 10 million people died this week due to drinking contaminated water.
Despite these pollutants being in our water systems for probably the last 50 years, people are living longer than ever. QED?
False logic. The fact that this one issue is not overriding ALL the other health and medical improvements in the past several years, does not guarantee that it isn't killing a large number of people (not that I believe it is).
Evolution for the win.
Evolution doesn't solve death. Evolution only guarantees organisms that will live long enough to reproduce. Let me know when you evolve resistance to being poked with pointy sticks...
Considering the general life-improvements most of those drugs have given the human species overall, I think the tradeoff has been worth it.
Somehow, I missed the part of the article where anyone advocated banning pharmaceuticals.
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This is largely a myth. Unless you have super high air-speed fans, the turbulence is a minor noise generator. With the popularity of low speed and 80mm+ fans, this situation has almost entirely disappeared.
You are completely and totally wrong.
Video on a DVD can be stored interlaced, but most commercial DVDs are progressive 24fps. Most players output that material interlaced, but the data on-disc for movies is still almost always progressive.
NTSC is not a resolution and frame rate. It is an RF encoding of analog data. Digitized video can never be "NTSC".
To make the point clear, go put a "PAL DVD" in your DVD player (it has to be region free)... It will still work and playback just fine. With an analog formats, where "NTSC" means something, it won't work at all.
Very much-so.
Sony lists their CD Walkman at 30 hours on 2xAA with MP3 CDs. Aiwa and Panasonic aren't far behind. And frankly, those are low estimates. Besides, it could be much better still if specifically designed for MP3s (maybe 256kbps max), and unable to play CDDA.
You might want to note the tilde in "~30fps".
In fact, it's not 29.97 either. It's 30/1.001 or 29.9700299700299700299700299700299700299700299700299700299700299700
Cable companies are falling over themselves to switch to digital.
DVDs are digital NOT NTSC. They use approximate NTSC resolution, and the overwhelming majority use ~24fps (24/1.001) progressive, rather than 30i.
You are mistaken.
Check my journal entry for everything you might want to know. Specifically, you can follow the FCC link at the end for proof that VHF-high (7-13) is most certainly NOT going away. http://hardware.slashdot.org/~evilviper/journal/184757
I think the DVD, Netflix, and DVRs have a LOT more to do with it.
DVDs have changed the way people watch TV. Why wait for the repeats of TV shows with all the commercials and annoyances, when $10 will get you a hard copy? Why wait for some blockbuster or B-movie to show up on TV, when it's on the shelf at the supermarket?
Netflix fills a very large niche for movies and TV shows you didn't see, but think you might like. Not to mention older or cult movies that probably aren't ever going to be on TV, anywhere. If I had to chose between 3 movies at a time, and 200 channels a month, I'd go with Netflix. And don't bring the internet into it, I'd have subscribed to Netflix if they shipped out hard copies of their movie catalog, and required me to create my queue with pencil and paper.
DVRs are having a huge impact as well, they may entirely eliminate the need for cable channels that do nothing but syndicate TV shows... If you watched EVERY single episode of Law & Order when it was first aired, you're not likely to watch repeats of it. If you can record the weekly 2:00 am airing of Star Trek on NBC, and watch it anytime, why would you need 5 cable channels that show it around the clock?
DVRs and DVDs both largely fill the need for on demand shows, as well as fringe/small-audience content.
NTSC is the analog encoding of RF TV signals, it is going away with the switch to digital (replaced by ATSC), just as PAL did in many places in Europe (replaced by DVB-T).
The old resolution isn't even being kept, as 1080i is universal. So the only vestige of NTSC is the ~30 fps rate, and there are alternatives to that as well, they just aren't commonly utilized.
You Europians better be careful... We invented TV and we can still take it away.
Funny you should mention it, because the original design was, in fact patented.
No, your argument is a logical fallacy. Who can you possibly cite that has ever said that "NOBODY" gives away their work? And used that as justification for copyrights?
The fact that a couple people gave away a couple days worth of their work (BASED ON A PATENTED DESIGN) is not proof that our entire economy can depend on inventors/creators giving away everything they do, and begging for donations.
Actually, I've noticed exactly the opposite.
* Many more homes will be able to receive an OTA signal, that previously could not.
* Digital broadcasts will offer perfect reception, eliminating much of the need for cable/sat.
* OTA HDTV will offer the highest quality picture anyone can get.
* OTA ATSC offers the potential for more TV channels than an expensive subscription service (50*6 = 300), in addition to other informational services.
* Rising prices and horrendous support will push people away from cable/satellite.
* Proprietary STBs and feet-dragging on CableCard will push even more people away from cable/sat.
* DVR technology will eliminate the need for syndication, and there the business model for 90% of cable/satellite networks will fail.
* The quality of original programming on cable/satellite networks has dropped SEVERELY, anyhow.
* Pop-up ads on cable/sat networks (largely not found on broadcast) will push even more people away.
You're absolutely right! The $200 PC is infinitely more capable than any Tivo could ever DREAM of!
That much is true. However, there are innumerable problems with CableCards, and simply using analog pass-through is both more flexible and can give even better results (eg. smaller files with potentially visually better quality through on-the-fly encoding/processing).
You're the one who doesn't grasp economics. You obviously aren't going to be working every (spare) waking hour, so there is no opportunity cost here. If putting together a DVR required you work on nothing else 24/7 for weeks, THAT would be an opportunity cost. But that's not how it works. ie. No opportunity cost.
If you've used nothing else, it's easy to say that. It's hard to beat a flat list of files, being one click away from all your content, and any operations you want to perform on them. Yes, MythTV's UI also sucks, but it's a piece of crap I wouldn't dream of using or recomend. It's merely the press' favorite.
Obviously your experience is far too limited, but let's just go with it as a hypothetical...
Does your Tivo3 allow you to watch DVDs without being forced to watch trailers? How much of your time is wasted on every FBI warning and forced trailer? How many such DVDs will it take before it would have been quicker (or CHEAPER for you) to put together a DVR?
Better yet, does your Tivo3 allow you to STORE all your DVD, VHS, etc. movies on it's hard drive, so you never have to waste your time (or MONEY for you) removing them from the packaging, waiting for your DVD player to power up, cleaning them, etc?
How's your Tivo doing, replacing your CD player and disc collection?
How well does your Tivo allow you to edit out commercials, so that you don't have to skip through the commercials every time you want to watch a show that you've saved?
How good is your Tivo at allowing you to convert any videos to DVDs (or VCD/SVCDs) so you can give hard copies to other family members (eg. kids) to watch in another room and not bother you, or to give out?
How often do you think you're going to need to replace your Tivo, because it runs out of space or doesn't support some feature like CableCard2 or HDTV/QAM? What's the opportunity cost of losing all your saved shows and the like?
What's most disturbing about your post isn't how utterly wrong you are on all counts, it's how utterly sure you and your actions are the only right ones, and everyone else MUST be wrong, somehow.
It's a bullshit question.
Unless you're forced to do it all during your work hours, OR you work every waking hour of every day, you will have some "free time" (in every sense of the word).
What's more, it's amazing how people focus on initial time, and ignore the rest... How much money does it cost you due to the user interface (on every electronic device you own) isn't exactly perfect, and therefore wastes untold amounts of your time, in a few seconds increments?
Considering that I built my DVR 5+ years ago, I think I've much, much more than broke even... Count subscription fees, the ability to retain the same box across different TV service providers with minimal time invested, and all the other benefits it offeres, I'm going to say anyone who doesn't put together a DVR is wasting several thousands of dollars worth of their time...
Yeah, CDs and DVDs were such pieces of crap. Damn You Sony!
If you can somehow "shutdown" several supercomputers, you can presumably shutdown the major peering points as well, taking the internet off-line.
The US military has bases all over the world. They're in numerous places on every continent, and have a very cosy relationship with many countries.
As opposed to us non-military citizens, who are sworn to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and bear arms on behalf of the United States when required.
Why in the hell would the US Military NEED a botnet of Windows PCs, when they can plug a few supercomputers DIRECTLY into the major internet peering points and do whatever the hell they want?
A botnet is an attempt to create a flood by controlling millions of individual drops of rain. Meanwhile, the US government can just hook up to a dam, and put ALL the water anywhere they damn well please.
Better yet, try to find a way to make humans out of stuff that can withstand a 900 MPH crash...
Because it would be absolutely horrendously expensive, terribly unreliable, and almost completely useless. There are huge, huge numbers of glitch-free flights every day (but they all have to pay for uplinking numerous megabytes of data per hour), and only the very tiniest fraction of aircraft ever need that flight data examined.
Which would be just about every single event that they would possibly WANT to examine.
Black boxes already have locater beacons.
That doesn't mean it's useful.
That's not exactly compelling. Minor size differences can happen in a generation, just due to differences in nutrition. Without DNA evidence that genetic changes are entirely the cause, it doesn't indicate a larger phenomenon (island effect) at work that could exaggerate size differences further.
You could look at the US, and come to the conclusion that human are evolving to be shorter and fatter, even though there's no genetic change involved, and so a hard upper limit to that change in physical appearance.
Funny how people are so quick to rant about Wordpress whenever a site gets /.ed, yet nobody is bothering to mention that the incredibly dynamic nature of Wikipedia is an unnecessary HUGE drain on resources.
If the main content of Wikipedia was static, not only would it be a TON less load on their servers, it could also be cached by ISPs, browsers, and the like.
Static content doesn't mean Wikipedia would never change, it would just mean contributions would be done on the development section, where contributors would see it, and only after it's been up for a week or so would the changes be pushed out to the main site. Really now, how often are most articles edited, only to change one letter? Do you really think Wikipedia should incur the bandwidth hit just to make sure that everyone sees that typo fix immediately?
Besides saving untold resources for everyone, this would pretty much eliminate all vandalism, as it would never be seen by 99% of readers, and most would not bother and give up on it... It would do quite a good job eliminating lots of mistakes and misinformation, as there's time for review and/or discussion before anything goes live.
Personally, I'd like an even more extreme version of this myself... I'd like nothing better than a lightweight GTK app that allows me to browse a local (gzipped) copy of Wikipedia, without using ANY bandwidth to do simple lookups. Every few months, changes can be fetched as (low bandwidth) diffs.
After that's working, I'd like some similar interface to edit articles, which would either verify that the local copy is the newest version, or otherwise fetch whatever is (without all the HTML overhead, or the horrible performance of a slow and memory hogging web browser) and allow me to edit, preview, and submit back changes as simply as using a word processor. Then, everybody saves money, gets huge performance improvements, etc.
(1) By your logic, Wikipedia should be a news source, a private/public note-passing service, grocery list, etc. Just because the financial costs are not AS high as another medium does not mean it's okay. Wikipedia has goals and guidelines... Just because it's technically possible, and doesn't cost you anything, doesn't mean it's then okay. The cost would be technically possible and trivially cheap to add movie posters at random places inside dictionaries, but that would simply not be appropriate.
(2) The two pieces of legislation have only the most tenuous link to the person... A brief mention that the law arose to address circumstances that one person was previously found in, would be plenty.
(3) I fully addressed the notability question. Wikipedia has a global scope. If it isn't globally important, or at least important to a large region, it doesn't belong there. Notability isn't always clear-cut, but that doesn't make it relative. Individual opinions, as to what Wikipedia should be, is the only thing that is relative here.
Would you expect an article in Encyclopedia Britannica about your daughter? If so, would you read book upon book of similar bios? Everyone in the world who has ever been murdered, and had a charitable fund spring up after?
Would anyone 50+ miles from you care about the subject? I'm just a couple states over from you, and I certainly don't care in the slightest. No way the rest of the world would.
Though I'm not going to get involved in the issue on Wikipedia, I also agree the subject doesn't need an article, as her death is the only noteworthy event in her bio, and even that isn't significant enough to warrant more than a few sentences.
Of course you hate me now, because it's a very, very important subject to you. Unfortunately it isn't necessarily important to anyone else.
Animal IQ test:
When your pet is watching you, point at something.
Most dogs will look in the general direction you are pointing, and possibly go in that direction.
Cats will stare at your finger, get bored, and leave.
Dogs: 1
Cats: 0
If you HAD actually read the article, you'd know there is a causal link.
It's well proven that contact with pets relieve stress in humans, and it's also well known that stress increases health problems.
It's a question of context.
Take any Wikipedia article. It would be quite easy to divide it up, and give every trivial point it's own article. However, making such a distributed list of facts makes the information largely useless.
How would you feel if you watched the news one day, only to find they start listing names and what they did that day? It's not very useful to know that Abu Suwab Alzahari died today, unless you know he's the leader of a country, how old he was, what this means, etc.
Tell that to anyone in a 3rd world country... You know, the ones where 10 million people died this week due to drinking contaminated water.
False logic. The fact that this one issue is not overriding ALL the other health and medical improvements in the past several years, does not guarantee that it isn't killing a large number of people (not that I believe it is).
Evolution doesn't solve death. Evolution only guarantees organisms that will live long enough to reproduce. Let me know when you evolve resistance to being poked with pointy sticks...
Somehow, I missed the part of the article where anyone advocated banning pharmaceuticals.