Is anyone outside of the teenage girl crowd even paying attention to Facebook announcements anymore? I'm legitimately asking. I have a Facebook account that I log into maybe once or twice a year. And most of the circles I spend time in don't really use it much anymore either. Am I the only one that sees Facebook announcements and just shrugs with indifference?
Actually, I thought the demographic went the other way -- most of my young nieces and nephews (18 - mid twenties) seem to have dropped off facebook, with very rare updates. On the other hand, the 30 year old and up parents and grandparents are still posting baby pics and talking about doctor's appointments.
Zuck said that Facebook spends 3 percent of their CPU power on privacy. With such a low CPU budget dedicated to something as important as users' privacy, it's no wonder they do such a poor job of it.
What would you consider to be a more reasonable amount of CPU budget to spend on excluding search results from some queries? I'm surprised it's as high as 10%, but I never really thought of CPU usage as a metric for privacy protection.
What Facebook doesn't seem to realize is that my Facebook "friends" aren't really my friends - they are a large group of family and acquaintances. I don't think my taste in food and/or movies matches maybe 10% of my FB contacts. So if I do search for movies or restaurants my "friends" like, I'm not likely to get any better results than if I search Google.
Plus everyone I know would have to share a lot more information to make this service useful.
Loughner fired all 31 bullets in the magazine and was reloading when a woman in the crowd, already wounded, attempted to grab the gun from him. He finally changed the magazine and tried to fire, but the gun jammed. Meanwhile, two men from the crowd grabbed him and subdued him, officials said.
Had Loughner been successful in firing the second magazine, "there would have been a huge, greater catastrophe," Sheriff Dupnik said. The sheriff also said that the toll had climbed to 20, six dead and 14 injured, including the congresswoman.
Didn't you just give an example?
He stopped to reload, giving a woman a chance to try to stop him - in his haste to put in the new magazine, it jammed.
If he had a 9 round magazine, there would have been 3 additional opportunities to stop him before he had a chance to fire 31 times.
The citizens do not have an explicit right for guns for sporting, hunting, and home defense. They have a right for the purpose of fighting back from an oppressive government. If I see sporting/hunting with regard to gun rights again, I am going to...
And don't be naive with regard to how the US government could turn on its citizens enough to warrant such use of guns. If the citizens cannot fight back, the oppression WILL happen. It would just be a matter of time.
And no, our military power couldn't stop an armed populace. The military wouldn't have a chance...unless they wanted to just kill everyone. But then who do you exercise power over at that point?
But if you really want weapons to protect yourself from an oppressive government, wouldn't you want RPG's and SAM's to protect you from tanks and aerial assault?
What good is an assault rifle when an Apache helicopter can put 10 30mm rounds through your head in less than second from a 1/2 mile away at night when you go outside to take a leak - that's far beyond the range of your assault rifle.
Why is there no call for civilians to be armed with very basic defensive weapons like anti-tank mines?
And this is what happens when you don't know how to design a working GPS
I don't think it's a problem with GPS itself, I think the problem is that the stolen phones are not able to use GPS - like a phone is stolen and whoever took it is keeping it in his kitchen cabinet. The phone can't see any GPS satellites so it relies on a cell tower fix. If it can only see one tower (and maybe this guy has the nearest address to the tower), the phone is claiming that it's at this guy's house.
I suspect that whoever is harassing the guy is ignoring the large circle in his positioning app that shows the range of the positioning fix (or the "Find my phone" app itself is not revealing that it only located the phone to within a 1000 ft radius).
It is in fact a prediction, whether you agree or not.
Fear mongering has always been their principal aim.
It is not in fact a prediction - it's supposed to represent the state of the world. Unless they said "And when the big hand reaches 12, the world will end", I don't see how it could be called a prediction.
Its not like any of us would have stumbled on that symbolism in 66 years since they started making their predictions. We are all so dense you know.....
Go back to the post he's replying to and it seems that maybe it's not so obvious to everyone.
I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.
I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.
Well, of course every prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong - you wouldn't be able to make that observation otherwise.
It couldn't possibly detect meetings, or pocket/purse with any reliability.
Theaters, maybe, but even that will be unreliable.
What is needed is the presence of some inexpensive low power transmitter (wifi access point, Bluetooth, Simulated Cell Tower CID, that can't actually be connected to, but which triggers phone silencing/dimming behavior. Users would probably still demand the ability to override this feature.
My phone automatically detects when I'm in a meeting and silences the ringer.... at least, it does so as long as my calendar is up to date.
The room should tell my phone that there's a movie, meeting, et al. going on (based on a published schedule)
Calls should have a priority
The phone should respond appropriately based on the situation and priority of the call
For example: a low priority call might go to voice mail if I'm in the middle of a meeting, but make the phone ring if the same call happened after the meeting is over. A high priority call could make the phone vibrate or ring depending on the situation and my preferences.
Yeah, I'd rather see this - have businesses install a short-range beacon to announce itself along with information I might be interested in (hours, movie times, etc) and then my phone can do what I want with the information. Though I suppose it could easily be done with geolocation if it worked indoors.
So who is going to volunteer to maintain a list of every movie theater's latitude and longitude? How will they be paid? Will this sort of "location aware" 'feature' be turned into a premium cost of a few pennies per user that is silently added to every smartphone with it enabled (or, with licensing, a few dollars)? What happens when whoever decides to maintain this list doesn't feel like it anymore?
If Google can publish photos of every business, including photos from the *inside* of many businesses, it doesn't seem unreasonable for them to add a field to describe the business type (theater, school, hospital, fire station, etc) in their map database.
Thought about installing a GSM and WiFi jammer? Personally I don't mind, hate people using phones during any gig...
I doubt a theater owner wants to open himself up to FCC liability for running an illegal jammer.
But if it becomes legal and theaters start doing this, then I'll stop going to movies entirely - I *want* the babysitter to be able to call me in case of emergency, that's why I give her my cell number.
I own and operate a movie theatre. I have policy trailers that I play before every show telling you to turn your cell phone off. If I see a light from a cell phone while the show is on, I'll go in and ask you to turn it off until the show is over. If I see your light again, I'll ask you to come to the lobby with me, and when you get there I'll tell you to go home.
I'm surprised you can stay in business with such a small theater - at the big multiplex theaters, they can't even spare the staff to sit through the first few minutes of a film to make sure the sound is running during a movie, relying on a viewer to complain in case of problems. Having someone sit through the entire movie to watch for cell phones seems like it would be cost prohibitive.
Of course the obvious answer is that no one who worked on the script had the slightest fucking idea that a "parsec" wasn't a unit of time, they probably just looked up some scientific sounding terms to spread through the script and thats all she wrote. Explanations after the fact are all fine and dandy but I suspect this one is complete bullshit to cover a very glaring error.
And of course, the obvious counter answer is: Why nitpick the scientific accuracy of a space soap opera? It's not a documentary and never even implied that it's subject to the same laws of physics that govern our world. If you're going to blame something on a scriptwriting mistake, then you open the argument up to pointing out that it's just a script, not a historical document decribing true events that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Well, this seems quite the hokey explanation. Am I wrong to intuitively think that skirting closer to a blackhole and trying to maintain speed would take exponentially more power/fuel? Or would it be truly a linear increase?
Z
Well yeah, that's kind of the point of the bragging - he never said that it saves fuel, or even time. But if an Imperial Star Cruiser is chasing you, a stunt like that might help you get away.
Of course, in a universe where faster than light travel is possible, who knows what their fuel/propulsion constraints are.
Or, the put it in terrestrial terms, imagine that the Kessel Run has to cross a sea with a giant whirlpool vortex - a more capable ship (or a risk taking captain) can skirt closer to the whilrpool, so a captain could boast that he did the Kessel Run in only 12 leagues while others take the longer way around.
It's possible that by moving the pedal so the cyclist's legs are in a different position during the pedal cycle
Doesn't work like that. Draw a crank like this on a piece of paper, jab a pen through the point where the crank would connect to the gear and rotate the paper: you'll quickly notice that the thing still follows the exact same circular motion as any old, regular crank does, and therefore the legs don't actually assume any different a position during cycling. If the crank was displaced from the center then there would be a difference as it would no longer follow the same path as a regular crank, but alas, that's not the case here.
Ahh right, I was lulled into thinking that it solved the no power at top-dead-center problem, but all it does is move TDC 20 degrees along the pedal cycle.
Biomechanics doesn't always follow the rules of simple static analysis. It's possible that by moving the pedal so the cyclist's legs are in a different position during the pedal cycle, it's possible that his muscles could more effectively power the pedals. Kind of like the old oval Biopace chain rings that were supposed to optimize pedal strokes, but ended up having little effect.
I'm skeptical that these new cranks make any significant difference since modern bike racing teams do a lot of biomechanical analysis to optimize pedal strokes, and they probably would have discovered this technique long ago if it were true.
But in any case, this can't be dismissed just because simple physics says that it has no mechanical advantage.
While we're on the subject of cases, does anyone have any recommendations for an inexpensive, small mini-itx case with good cooling that can hold five (or more) 3.5" disks and a 2.5" disk?
I like the LIAN LI PC-Q25B, but at $120 (without a power supply), it's more than I wanted to spend.
I don't care so much about looks, but I'd like it to be as small as possible (so don't want a Micro-ATX case).
You either build a radical new airframe with cutting edge materials and do it in-house OR you radically outsource your operation to cut costs building a traditional airframe. Boeing chose to do both. This is the result.
Why is it better to build up knowledge and processes for cutting edge technology in-house rather than using a vendor that already knows how to do them?
what's wrong with X10 and a wifi bridge? other than the obvious...
I really don't see why someone in China hasn't started cranking out some knockoff TRIAC modules and got the price down to where every switch & socket in a house/office/factory can be on this.
Because most people don't want it and wouldn't use it. You can buy X10 switches for about $15, so if you really want all of your switches to have cheap controllers, you can do it now.
Whoever wired my house didn't even bother to properly label 10 circuit breakers, do you really think they are going to take the time to map out and label 2 dozen switches and outlets throughout the house?
And who wants to go downstairs to the home automation panel to enable an outlet just to run the vacuum cleaner.
Later developments (1997) of hardware are improvements of the native X10 hardware. This is called "Advanced X10" or A10. These devices contain improved hardware with a receiver and transmitter allowing two-way communication between the devices
Holy shit, and this is how you know that you have no idea what you're talking about. The difference of SD to HD was more significant by far than the change from black and white to color. It's huge! Do you have a 10" tv that you're watching from 7 ft away when making this comparison or something?
Are you old enough to remember the B&W TV days? I think you're underestimating the scale of the switch from B&W to color. I still remember when my parents got a color TV (we had a B&W set far longer than most people) and the difference was amazing and quite apparent to everyone. It didn't take a side by side comparison to see the difference between B&W and color, and you could see the difference no matter the size of the screen or how close you were.
On my current 37" LCD (capable of 720p, 1080i), I notice only a minimal difference between SD DVD's (480i) and HD Blu-rays. The difference is so minimal that I stopped paying the extra dollar or two for Blu-ray disks from Netflix because I couldn't really tell the difference. Perhaps if I had a bigger 1080p capable set I might notice more of a difference, but at my normal viewing distance (10 - 12 feet) the difference is quite minimal on my current set. I don't think I'd notice any difference at all between 720p and 4K without a much larger TV, or sitting much closer to the TV.
This chart doesn't go up to 4K, but suggests that you'd have to sit closer than 10 feet away from a 100" screen to take advantage of even 1440p:
Here's a fun fact to contemplate. The version wandering the US right now is H3N2. The prevalent strain making the rounds in China is H1N1. How long before it crosses the pacific and starts round two of the process. Folks if you haven't gotten vaccinated against this yet. DO IT NOW! These strains are no fun and the current vaccine is supposedly a good match against the strains most prevalent.
Based on that information and the recommendations of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, the strains selected for inclusion in the 2012-2013 flu vaccines are: A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like virus A/Victoria/361/2011 (H3N2)-like virus B/Wisconsin/1/2010-like virus.
Slashdot Mirror
Is anyone outside of the teenage girl crowd even paying attention to Facebook announcements anymore? I'm legitimately asking. I have a Facebook account that I log into maybe once or twice a year. And most of the circles I spend time in don't really use it much anymore either. Am I the only one that sees Facebook announcements and just shrugs with indifference?
Actually, I thought the demographic went the other way -- most of my young nieces and nephews (18 - mid twenties) seem to have dropped off facebook, with very rare updates. On the other hand, the 30 year old and up parents and grandparents are still posting baby pics and talking about doctor's appointments.
Do teenagers still care about FB?
Zuck said that Facebook spends 3 percent of their CPU power on privacy. With such a low CPU budget dedicated to something as important as users' privacy, it's no wonder they do such a poor job of it.
I read 10%, not 3%:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/15/facebook-graph-search/
What would you consider to be a more reasonable amount of CPU budget to spend on excluding search results from some queries? I'm surprised it's as high as 10%, but I never really thought of CPU usage as a metric for privacy protection.
What Facebook doesn't seem to realize is that my Facebook "friends" aren't really my friends - they are a large group of family and acquaintances. I don't think my taste in food and/or movies matches maybe 10% of my FB contacts. So if I do search for movies or restaurants my "friends" like, I'm not likely to get any better results than if I search Google.
Plus everyone I know would have to share a lot more information to make this service useful.
Incorrect; in Tucson, the gun jammed because he was using an unreliable extended magazine.
I'm not aware of any mass shooting incidents where reloading provided sufficient opportunity to physically stop the shooter.
From an LA Times article:
Loughner fired all 31 bullets in the magazine and was reloading when a woman in the crowd, already wounded, attempted to grab the gun from him. He finally changed the magazine and tried to fire, but the gun jammed. Meanwhile, two men from the crowd grabbed him and subdued him, officials said.
Had Loughner been successful in firing the second magazine, "there would have been a huge, greater catastrophe," Sheriff Dupnik said. The sheriff also said that the toll had climbed to 20, six dead and 14 injured, including the congresswoman.
Didn't you just give an example?
He stopped to reload, giving a woman a chance to try to stop him - in his haste to put in the new magazine, it jammed.
If he had a 9 round magazine, there would have been 3 additional opportunities to stop him before he had a chance to fire 31 times.
The citizens do not have an explicit right for guns for sporting, hunting, and home defense. They have a right for the purpose of fighting back from an oppressive government. If I see sporting/hunting with regard to gun rights again, I am going to ...
And don't be naive with regard to how the US government could turn on its citizens enough to warrant such use of guns. If the citizens cannot fight back, the oppression WILL happen. It would just be a matter of time.
And no, our military power couldn't stop an armed populace. The military wouldn't have a chance...unless they wanted to just kill everyone. But then who do you exercise power over at that point?
But if you really want weapons to protect yourself from an oppressive government, wouldn't you want RPG's and SAM's to protect you from tanks and aerial assault?
What good is an assault rifle when an Apache helicopter can put 10 30mm rounds through your head in less than second from a 1/2 mile away at night when you go outside to take a leak - that's far beyond the range of your assault rifle.
Why is there no call for civilians to be armed with very basic defensive weapons like anti-tank mines?
And this is what happens when you don't know how to design a working GPS
I don't think it's a problem with GPS itself, I think the problem is that the stolen phones are not able to use GPS - like a phone is stolen and whoever took it is keeping it in his kitchen cabinet. The phone can't see any GPS satellites so it relies on a cell tower fix. If it can only see one tower (and maybe this guy has the nearest address to the tower), the phone is claiming that it's at this guy's house.
I suspect that whoever is harassing the guy is ignoring the large circle in his positioning app that shows the range of the positioning fix (or the "Find my phone" app itself is not revealing that it only located the phone to within a 1000 ft radius).
It is in fact a prediction, whether you agree or not.
Fear mongering has always been their principal aim.
It is not in fact a prediction - it's supposed to represent the state of the world. Unless they said "And when the big hand reaches 12, the world will end", I don't see how it could be called a prediction.
Thank you captain obvious.
Its not like any of us would have stumbled on that symbolism in 66 years since they started making their predictions.
We are all so dense you know.....
Go back to the post he's replying to and it seems that maybe it's not so obvious to everyone.
I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.
I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.
Well, of course every prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong - you wouldn't be able to make that observation otherwise.
It couldn't possibly detect meetings, or pocket/purse with any reliability.
Theaters, maybe, but even that will be unreliable.
What is needed is the presence of some inexpensive low power transmitter (wifi access point, Bluetooth, Simulated Cell Tower CID, that can't actually be connected to, but which triggers phone silencing/dimming behavior. Users would probably still demand the ability to override this feature.
My phone automatically detects when I'm in a meeting and silences the ringer.... at least, it does so as long as my calendar is up to date.
The room should tell my phone that there's a movie, meeting, et al. going on (based on a published schedule)
Calls should have a priority
The phone should respond appropriately based on the situation and priority of the call
For example: a low priority call might go to voice mail if I'm in the middle of a meeting, but make the phone ring if the same call happened after the meeting is over. A high priority call could make the phone vibrate or ring depending on the situation and my preferences.
Yeah, I'd rather see this - have businesses install a short-range beacon to announce itself along with information I might be interested in (hours, movie times, etc) and then my phone can do what I want with the information. Though I suppose it could easily be done with geolocation if it worked indoors.
So who is going to volunteer to maintain a list of every movie theater's latitude and longitude? How will they be paid? Will this sort of "location aware" 'feature' be turned into a premium cost of a few pennies per user that is silently added to every smartphone with it enabled (or, with licensing, a few dollars)? What happens when whoever decides to maintain this list doesn't feel like it anymore?
If Google can publish photos of every business, including photos from the *inside* of many businesses, it doesn't seem unreasonable for them to add a field to describe the business type (theater, school, hospital, fire station, etc) in their map database.
Thought about installing a GSM and WiFi jammer?
Personally I don't mind, hate people using phones during any gig...
I doubt a theater owner wants to open himself up to FCC liability for running an illegal jammer.
But if it becomes legal and theaters start doing this, then I'll stop going to movies entirely - I *want* the babysitter to be able to call me in case of emergency, that's why I give her my cell number.
I own and operate a movie theatre. I have policy trailers that I play before every show telling you to turn your cell phone off. If I see a light from a cell phone while the show is on, I'll go in and ask you to turn it off until the show is over. If I see your light again, I'll ask you to come to the lobby with me, and when you get there I'll tell you to go home.
I'm surprised you can stay in business with such a small theater - at the big multiplex theaters, they can't even spare the staff to sit through the first few minutes of a film to make sure the sound is running during a movie, relying on a viewer to complain in case of problems. Having someone sit through the entire movie to watch for cell phones seems like it would be cost prohibitive.
Of course the obvious answer is that no one who worked on the script had the slightest fucking idea that a "parsec" wasn't a unit of time, they probably just looked up some scientific sounding terms to spread through the script and thats all she wrote.
Explanations after the fact are all fine and dandy but I suspect this one is complete bullshit to cover a very glaring error.
And of course, the obvious counter answer is: Why nitpick the scientific accuracy of a space soap opera? It's not a documentary and never even implied that it's subject to the same laws of physics that govern our world. If you're going to blame something on a scriptwriting mistake, then you open the argument up to pointing out that it's just a script, not a historical document decribing true events that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Well, this seems quite the hokey explanation. Am I wrong to intuitively think that skirting closer to a blackhole and trying to maintain speed would take exponentially more power/fuel? Or would it be truly a linear increase?
Z
Well yeah, that's kind of the point of the bragging - he never said that it saves fuel, or even time. But if an Imperial Star Cruiser is chasing you, a stunt like that might help you get away.
Of course, in a universe where faster than light travel is possible, who knows what their fuel/propulsion constraints are.
You're on Slashdot and you don't recognize this line?
Besides, the use of distance instead of time has been widely explained:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Parsec
Or, the put it in terrestrial terms, imagine that the Kessel Run has to cross a sea with a giant whirlpool vortex - a more capable ship (or a risk taking captain) can skirt closer to the whilrpool, so a captain could boast that he did the Kessel Run in only 12 leagues while others take the longer way around.
It's possible that by moving the pedal so the cyclist's legs are in a different position during the pedal cycle
Doesn't work like that. Draw a crank like this on a piece of paper, jab a pen through the point where the crank would connect to the gear and rotate the paper: you'll quickly notice that the thing still follows the exact same circular motion as any old, regular crank does, and therefore the legs don't actually assume any different a position during cycling. If the crank was displaced from the center then there would be a difference as it would no longer follow the same path as a regular crank, but alas, that's not the case here.
Ahh right, I was lulled into thinking that it solved the no power at top-dead-center problem, but all it does is move TDC 20 degrees along the pedal cycle.
Biomechanics doesn't always follow the rules of simple static analysis. It's possible that by moving the pedal so the cyclist's legs are in a different position during the pedal cycle, it's possible that his muscles could more effectively power the pedals. Kind of like the old oval Biopace chain rings that were supposed to optimize pedal strokes, but ended up having little effect.
I'm skeptical that these new cranks make any significant difference since modern bike racing teams do a lot of biomechanical analysis to optimize pedal strokes, and they probably would have discovered this technique long ago if it were true.
But in any case, this can't be dismissed just because simple physics says that it has no mechanical advantage.
While we're on the subject of cases, does anyone have any recommendations for an inexpensive, small mini-itx case with good cooling that can hold five (or more) 3.5" disks and a 2.5" disk?
I like the LIAN LI PC-Q25B, but at $120 (without a power supply), it's more than I wanted to spend.
I don't care so much about looks, but I'd like it to be as small as possible (so don't want a Micro-ATX case).
You either build a radical new airframe with cutting edge materials and do it in-house OR you radically outsource your operation to cut costs building a traditional airframe. Boeing chose to do both. This is the result.
Why is it better to build up knowledge and processes for cutting edge technology in-house rather than using a vendor that already knows how to do them?
what's wrong with X10 and a wifi bridge? other than the obvious...
I really don't see why someone in China hasn't started cranking out some knockoff TRIAC modules and got the price down to where every switch & socket in a house/office/factory can be on this.
Because most people don't want it and wouldn't use it. You can buy X10 switches for about $15, so if you really want all of your switches to have cheap controllers, you can do it now.
Whoever wired my house didn't even bother to properly label 10 circuit breakers, do you really think they are going to take the time to map out and label 2 dozen switches and outlets throughout the house?
And who wants to go downstairs to the home automation panel to enable an outlet just to run the vacuum cleaner.
problem with x10 has always been, modules can't report status.
Two way modules have been available for at least a decade:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard)#Physical_layer_details
Later developments (1997) of hardware are improvements of the native X10 hardware. This is called "Advanced X10" or A10. These devices contain improved hardware with a receiver and transmitter allowing two-way communication between the devices
Here's an example: http://www.smarthome.com/2001TW/2-Way-X10-Appliance-Modules-with-Status-Request-AM14A-PAM21/p.aspx
I was using 2 way modules back in 2001.
That won't be making it's ridiculous finding goal. Not very useful and stupidly expensive to boot.
I was thinking the same thing - £89 (~$150) seems pretty expensive for a simple Wifi enabled lamp.
even the jump from SD to HD was marginal
Holy shit, and this is how you know that you have no idea what you're talking about. The difference of SD to HD was more significant by far than the change from black and white to color. It's huge! Do you have a 10" tv that you're watching from 7 ft away when making this comparison or something?
Are you old enough to remember the B&W TV days? I think you're underestimating the scale of the switch from B&W to color. I still remember when my parents got a color TV (we had a B&W set far longer than most people) and the difference was amazing and quite apparent to everyone. It didn't take a side by side comparison to see the difference between B&W and color, and you could see the difference no matter the size of the screen or how close you were.
On my current 37" LCD (capable of 720p, 1080i), I notice only a minimal difference between SD DVD's (480i) and HD Blu-rays. The difference is so minimal that I stopped paying the extra dollar or two for Blu-ray disks from Netflix because I couldn't really tell the difference. Perhaps if I had a bigger 1080p capable set I might notice more of a difference, but at my normal viewing distance (10 - 12 feet) the difference is quite minimal on my current set. I don't think I'd notice any difference at all between 720p and 4K without a much larger TV, or sitting much closer to the TV.
This chart doesn't go up to 4K, but suggests that you'd have to sit closer than 10 feet away from a 100" screen to take advantage of even 1440p:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/
Here's a fun fact to contemplate. The version wandering the US right now is H3N2. The prevalent strain making the rounds in China is H1N1. How long before it crosses the pacific and starts round two of the process. Folks if you haven't gotten vaccinated against this yet. DO IT NOW! These strains are no fun and the current vaccine is supposedly a good match against the strains most prevalent.
Which strains were in this year's vaccine?
Oops, answered my own question:
http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm315365.htm
Based on that information and the recommendations of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, the strains selected for inclusion in the 2012-2013 flu vaccines are:
A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like virus
A/Victoria/361/2011 (H3N2)-like virus
B/Wisconsin/1/2010-like virus.