That's happened several times. It's an arms race... the current CAPTCHAs you see where there's 2 images to solve, one of which is essentially OCR and the other is an actual scrambled CAPTCHA, is a direct response to the previous versions being solved.
The GP is American. They don't put doctors in ambulances. We don't here in Canada, either, but I have lived in countries where ambulances can have a doctor, so what you're saying isn't quite as mad to my ears as it appears to be to his.:)
Hmm my father once had a heart attack, he lived a 3 minute drive from the hospital. The options were to call emergency units possibly longer than that 3 minute drive or to load him in the car and drive like hell the few blocks to the hospital. Of note my brother did call 911, of note after I arrived after 5 minutes, the ambulance still hadn't arrived so I chose to drive him the short distance.
Bad idea... absolutely disgusting that it took that long for the ambulance to arrive, but you're treated with lower priority for triage because you were able to get to the hospital under your own power. Unless it's a small/quiet hospital where there's usually no wait to begin with (they do exist, usually in rural areas), you're better off waiting the 10 minutes for an ambulance and riding with them.
That, of course, depends on rural versus urban. I've been to urban hospitals where you can expect to wait 8 hours when you present with respiratory distress/asthma, and I've been to hospitals in rural areas where you can expect to be seen for a broken foot within 15 minutes of hobbling in the front door. If you're in the latter situation you're probably fine self-presenting, but if it's the former, you absolutely should wait for the ambulance. That being said, the city I live in has 9 minutes or less for 90% of calls response time for EMT in the urban area, and I've seen them arrive in under 5 minutes in the downtown core, and there's people in thread saying that their cities can be over an hour *average* (let alone 90% rate). I really don't understand how a for-profit system like the US can have response times that pathetically slow (I'm in Ottawa, Canada): the patient can't pay the bill if he dies, and they're more likely to get sued, to boot. And Americans complain that *our* health care system is slow/inefficient?
Ambulances come with doctors and proper equipment to save lives, you know?
That depends where you are, actually. In North America, they have paramedics whose job is to get you to a hospital as quickly as possible with the minimum risk to your life in doing so. In parts of Europe, the ambulances have doctors, though.
That being said, you're still *much* better off calling an ambulance for any actual medical emergency, if for no other reason then because they have bottled oxygen and defibrillators, both of which can be critical in treating shock, which can happen as a result of serious injury or illness.
no, that 1980s tech was not reliable and was extremely rare.
How about 2002? One of the names on that list was convicted in 2002, only to have his conviction overturned in 2009. The technology had been around for 20 years by that time... is that enough time for it to mature?
I've heard of police gunning down people just for the adrenaline high, they do that every day
That's a truly stellar argument for trusting in the legal system....
That is, essentially, what you need in order to support the death penalty, btw: the utter confidence in the legal system's ability to never make a mistake. If you cannot look me in the eyes and tell me with utter conviction that the legal system/police *never* make a mistake, then you look rather pathological when you tell me in the same breath that you support the death penalty.
There's people on that list who were convicted in the 2000's. We've had commercially available DNA testing since the 1980's.
Why do you put such faith in a technology that *still* didn't correctly exonerate people during their trial 20 years after it became available? Have you never heard of a biased jury or police tunnel vision?
It's essentially allowing said criminals to continue to victimize society by leeching taxpayer dollars that could be spent elsewhere on more deserving causes. Execution is an alternative that is less humane in most cases, but it also permanently ends any further exploitation of society by those who can't be reformed and can't live in said society.
In most countries where capital punishment has been banned, it was done so because there were too many cases where people were later exonerated after their execution. Let's skip the argument over the ethics of executions as they're done in the US, though, because that is a way to a very vitriolic exchange.
The US is a strange case, though. You have an enormous prison population as a proportion of your general population. Money becomes an issue when such a large percentage of the population is incarcerated, but when you have a more reasonable justice system (and a social security net which removes a large percentage of the impetus for crime... insert obligatory link: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/09/24/breaking-bad-canada-comic-health_n_3984793.html ), the increased cost of keeping somebody alive for the duration of their prison sentence is still reasonable.
It depends on the agreed terms with the employer. If you're on call, at a minimum they have a right to know you're available. If you miss a call, then you can bet that they will be asking what happened and why you weren't available. Depending on what line of business you're in, that may include them knowing exactly where you are when you're on call.
can the employer follow you all the time?
No employer has the right to do that. But if they are paying you for your time, then (presumably) they have a reason to know what you're doing, or in the case where you're on call, they have a right to assurance that you will be available if/when they decide they need you.
how about unpaid lunch break?
As long as you're not impaired when you return to work, it's none of their business what you do when you're not being paid. Unless you're using company resources. If you sit at your desk surfing Facebook using the company network and a company computer, then expect that they will monitor it. I'm not sure what's difficult to understand with that. If you don't like it, then don't use company resources for that purpose.
What happens when a boss doesn't like the movie you went to see?
The boss will probably tease you mercilessly for watching My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, and then move on.
If it's personal use, why aren't you using your own computer?
It's the company's truck. After hours.
Why are you driving the company truck for personal affairs outside of company time? This one, there is a *small* degree of leeway in favour of your argument, but generally our employees who have a company vehicle leave it at the company lot at the end of the day and have their own transportation to get to/from home. A small number of them dispatch from home, and park the company vehicle in their driveways overnight, but it's still really bad juju for them to take it on a grocery run after hours....
It's the company's phone. On a private call.
Why are you using a company phone to make a personal call? Especially in this day and age, when almost everybody has a cell phone....
Companies have the privilege (not right!) of monitoring their employees
Companies have a right to make sure they receive the contracted services for the money they're paying you. They also have a right to ensure you aren't misusing/abusing company resources. If you're on company time/using company resources, then it should be for the work they're paying you to do. If your company has a policy that allows you to use company resources for personal use when you're on your own time (just as my company does -- I'm posting this while on break, from my office PC), then you have to expect that they're monitoring it. If, for no other reason, then to make sure you aren't wasting their time/money when you're supposed to be on the clock.
We need to draw a line that says only conduct that happens on company time or using company resources is subject to any disciplinary action. We need to prohibit employers from taking action against employers punitively on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identification, etc. And this is not just about protecting "the little guy"; This is about protecting the country as a whole.
I agree with you completely here. Of course, I live in a country where we already have those protections. Every single one of the categories you listed has been read into the constitution and human rights/anti-discrimination legislations as protected classes of people.
Pervasive electronic monitoring is a strike against that goal.
It doesn't have to be. The company I work for has GPS trackers in the company vehicles. They monitor the location/speed of every company vehicle in the field, along with engine idle time, and people do get censured for driving like idiots or wasting fuel. They also monitor the data use on the cellular devices provided to employees, and make sure you're not wasting bandwidth, and disable data on company-provided equipment where people are using too much. On company PC's, everything is logged and goes through a proxy. Every phone call made, both on cellular and desk phones, is recorded, and if you're logged in to your PC at the time, screenshots of what's on your screen during the call are recorded as well. It's company resources, and this kind of monitoring is completely reasonable -- They don't care what I do on my own time or with my own equipment, but they do (reasonably) have a right to expect that I'm not going to waste their money, and that I am not impaired while on company time.
If you're on personal time, you can use personal equipment. But if you're using company-provided equipment, expect them to monitor it.
And if you're driving a company-provided vehicle, with the company logo on it, you are on company time. End of discussion -- Anything you do while in that vehicle can have repercussions for the company. If you're on personal time, park the vehicle and go for a walk.
So... you think that 6mbit MPEG-4, which is what the cable company here is using (so they can fit 3 HD streams in a single QAM channel) is equivalent picture quality to 18mbit MPEG-2? There's picture degradation... MPEG-4 is *not* that much better than MPEG-2. When I say that broadcast TV is uncompressed, it's because it is uncompressed... it's the original broadcast stream as created/provided by the broadcaster. It's encoded at a certain bitrate, but when your cable company takes the broadcast and resends it through their network, they are compressing the stream to a lower bitrate and picture quality.
Get off your computer and change the rolls in the men's room.
Charming. Go forth and multiply yourself... see? we can all resort to juvenile name calling... Or perhaps we can collectively pull our heads out of our asses and try to engage in meaningful conversation for a change? I know, this being Slashdot, I'm probably asking for the moon, but it's worth asking....
Why the heck would I want UHD when most HD content is so compressed that the artifacts are easily discernible from across the room. At least that is my experience with every HD medium I have seen OTA, cable, satellite, and to a much lesser degree in Blu-ray.
You have a point, but you lost credibility when you included OTA in that list. OTA is uncompressed 18.2mbit MPEG. There is no point in compressing an OTA broadcast because the bandwidth is functionally unlimited, and I don't even think that the ATSC standard supports compression beyond normal MPEG2. When you see artifacts on an OTA broadcast it is most emphatically *not* from compression, it's usually from interference or a badly tuned/aligned antenna.
With a proper antenna setup, an OTA HD broadcast looks pristine... *way* better than the cable provider's offering. Some stations are broadcasting SD signals using digital/ATSC, but that is a completely different animal than compression.
All that said, I can't make a case for wanting UHD either. Compression aside, it's an incremental upgrade that the majority of users won't notice. The jump from an SD stream to an HD stream was a *huge* improvement, but the jump from HD to UHD simply isn't that much better. I liken it to Sharp's introduction of the yellow pixel in their TV's -- Most people have trichromatic vision, and the 3 colours included in a normal TV (Red/Green/Blue) were chosen because those are the colours of the cones in your eye. Ignoring the fact that *none* of the media is encoded for RGBY, the addition of the yellow doesn't add anything because your eye physically can't see the additional colour depth. In order to actually see the improved picture from UHD, you need to be sitting close enough to the TV that most people would be uncomfortable.
Obligatory disclaimer: I work for a company that provides IPTV/Satellite services, and we also own broadcast TV stations.
The author is a massive troll for comparing Surface Pro hardware (which runs a full blown i5 processor) with iOS and Android hardware (which is typically far lower power both in terms of wattage and processing).
He's also comparing it against a MacBook, which can have exactly the same i5 processor. See the part in TFS about how running Windows on Apple Hardware doesn't actually change the deficit?
Pretty sure Windows generally gets (sometimes substantially) better battery life than Linux.
Depends on what you're doing. My laptop gets better life on Linux than it ever did in Windows, but all I do with it is surf the web. It doesn't require a lot of processing power, and Windows wastes a lot of clock cycles running stuff it doesn't need to accomplish the task.
Do you have to worry when your currency is collapsing because of out of control costs? Or when the death panel decides that you aren't worth treating?
There's a fine line between satire and actually being crazy... I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're being facetious, but given the rhetoric going back and forth in the US lately, I just can't let it go....
In response to your first question -- Canada has had a publicly funded single-payer health care system for nearly 70 years. If it was going to make our economy collapse, it would have done so by now. More than that, in 2008 when *your* economy fell into the shitter, we didn't have *any* banks collapse, and for several years, our dollar was worth more than yours. Your dollar *still* isn't anywhere near recovering to where it was before the 2008 collapse -- 10 years ago, $1 CAD was worth about $0.65 USD. Today it's $0.98. Clearly, a publicly funded health care system will *not* make the currency collapse....
In response to your first question -- "death panels" don't exist. Never have, and never will. The decision on what kind of treatment options to pursue is made by both the patient and the doctor together, and nobody is refused care under any circumstances. Whether that care is palliative or therapeutic will depend on the individual case: just like in the US, sometimes it's better for your quality of life to give you meds so you can breathe easily and not suffer pain than it is to put you through another round of chemotherapy. The sad reality is that medicine *can't* cure everything, and any doctor worth his salt will tell you when the chances are slim/non-existant and give you the choice in how to proceed.
However, I'm kind of opposed to game controllers on principle. If I was a teenager, I might not have this issue, but I can't see owning a device just for controlling games, when I can have such fine control with a mouse and keyboard (which is already on my desk). I have no such compunction about buying a $250 video card that is only really necessary for the games I play, but I never said I was consistent.
It really depends on the game... some games are designed for a controller input, and the keyboard/mouse, while they exist, feel like a tack-on. I have a USB Xbox 360 controller: it works perfectly out of the box, even on Linux, and probably half of the games in my library work better with it than they do with keyboard/mouse. General rule of thumb: anything that's got arcade type action will work better with a controller. Some of the games in my library will actually allow multiplayer action on a single system by connecting a controller -- Trine 2, for example, will allow one player on keyboard/mouse, and another on a controller, both controlling characters on screen at the same time. I don't have a 3rd controller, so I can't test it, but in theory it supports 3-player at the same time.
I'm a bit surprised they'd use Civ5 as their demo game, though.... that game was never designed for controller input, and is *way* better with a keyboard.
That's how the political machine works everywhere in the world, I'm afraid. At least, everywhere that the people think they have a say in matters....
In an ideal world, the question wouldn't be about figuring out who's culpable; it'd be about figuring out how to fix it. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world... people look to whoever is supposed to be able to fix it, and they blame them for not having fixed it already.
*shrugs* Everybody has their own experiences. I have a Core i5 2500k system with 16GB of RAM, and a Radeon HD 6970, and have never had a problem despite its age. It still runs all of my current games library without breaking a sweat (and that includes recent AAA titles on Steam running under WINE), and I've never had any of the issues you claim happened to yours.
In fact, I'm at a loss to explain how it's even possible for a video card to set your system on fire. You could blow some capacitors, I suppose, if you have a cheap motherboard with cheap caps, you could crater a chipset by sending too much voltage, you could even wreck a cold solder, but the flash point on the plastic they use to make motherboards is high enough that the system would have shut down for critical heat *long* before it ever got hot enough to set the silicon on fire....
All of the above would be solved by not having a crap motherboard, btw... I've seen all of the symptoms I've listed in computers, but every single one of them was either a cheap motherboard or a cheap power supply, and not really anything the CPU vendor could have controlled... (I've seen them all in Intel systems as well as AMD)
Police look at every single civilian as an enemy first. Remember that.
I disagree... there's certainly bad apples, and there's even entire forces that are in desperate need of a sharp kick in the ass, but I do still choose to think that the majority of people who go into police work are doing it because, fundamentally, they want to make a positive difference.
You need to look at, and consider, the culture they're thrust into. Right now, there's increased militarization happening among police forces in the states, and it's in direct response to the increased chance of getting shot at. You need to figure out why cops are more likely to face off against somebody who's pointing a gun at them, and address that.... The animosity and hatred that they face on a daily basis is what's really at fault here.
For my part, I've never had a negative interaction with the cops. I'm absolutely certain that part of that is white privilege, part of it is upper class privilege, and part of it is female privelege, but every time I've spoken with police about anything (from traffic stops to helping with a murder investigation -- a friend was murdered a few months ago), it's been a positive interaction. Tell the truth to the best of your ability, avoid speculation, be honest about when you don't know the answer to their question, and you should be fine.
It's a tabloid newspaper, on a Sunday, when all the journalists are at home, and they just make shit up instead. I'm going for 100% untrue, until proved otherwise. Fan sites seem completely dismssive also.
The proof is in the pudding, but I will point out that the tabloid newspapers tend to have better fact checking than the mainstream news because of the risk of getting sued for libel. It's unlikely that somebody'll sue them for reporting incorrectly that episodes of Dr. Who have been recovered, but they employ people to verify facts because it's *very* likely that somebody'll sue them if they report that Celebrity X got arrested after a 3-hour high speed police chase, and that they were high on cocaine, completely naked, and had a dead hooker in the boot at the time.
Truthfully, and I know I'm in the minority in a discussion about benchmarks, cell phones have been "good enough" for quite a while, and I bought mine based on feature list and price. I bought the cheapest phone that had all of the features I wanted: FM radio, GPS, bluetooth, wifi tether, and that's it. Didn't even care whether it had 4G connectivity (though it did). Even a bottom-end $100 smart phone with an 800MHz single core processor is in the performance range that will be good enough for most of us, and for the serious gamers, they can worry about getting the most expensive quad core on the market, or, like I did, get a good quality tablet to accompany the phone. With entrants like the Asus MeMo Pad HD 7" (a sub-$200 quad core tablet with plenty of memory, there are others but that's the one I bought), it's getting ridiculously easy to get good performance in your devices for just about anything you throw at it in the real world.
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That's happened several times. It's an arms race... the current CAPTCHAs you see where there's 2 images to solve, one of which is essentially OCR and the other is an actual scrambled CAPTCHA, is a direct response to the previous versions being solved.
The GP is American. They don't put doctors in ambulances. We don't here in Canada, either, but I have lived in countries where ambulances can have a doctor, so what you're saying isn't quite as mad to my ears as it appears to be to his. :)
Protip- instead of the hospital stop at a fire station (if you pass one) instead, as the ambulance can do most things the ER can.
Mod parent up. That had not occurred to me and is a very good idea.
Hmm my father once had a heart attack, he lived a 3 minute drive from the hospital. The options were to call emergency units possibly longer than that 3 minute drive or to load him in the car and drive like hell the few blocks to the hospital. Of note my brother did call 911, of note after I arrived after 5 minutes, the ambulance still hadn't arrived so I chose to drive him the short distance.
Bad idea... absolutely disgusting that it took that long for the ambulance to arrive, but you're treated with lower priority for triage because you were able to get to the hospital under your own power. Unless it's a small/quiet hospital where there's usually no wait to begin with (they do exist, usually in rural areas), you're better off waiting the 10 minutes for an ambulance and riding with them.
That, of course, depends on rural versus urban. I've been to urban hospitals where you can expect to wait 8 hours when you present with respiratory distress/asthma, and I've been to hospitals in rural areas where you can expect to be seen for a broken foot within 15 minutes of hobbling in the front door. If you're in the latter situation you're probably fine self-presenting, but if it's the former, you absolutely should wait for the ambulance. That being said, the city I live in has 9 minutes or less for 90% of calls response time for EMT in the urban area, and I've seen them arrive in under 5 minutes in the downtown core, and there's people in thread saying that their cities can be over an hour *average* (let alone 90% rate). I really don't understand how a for-profit system like the US can have response times that pathetically slow (I'm in Ottawa, Canada): the patient can't pay the bill if he dies, and they're more likely to get sued, to boot. And Americans complain that *our* health care system is slow/inefficient?
Ambulances come with doctors and proper equipment to save lives, you know?
That depends where you are, actually. In North America, they have paramedics whose job is to get you to a hospital as quickly as possible with the minimum risk to your life in doing so. In parts of Europe, the ambulances have doctors, though.
That being said, you're still *much* better off calling an ambulance for any actual medical emergency, if for no other reason then because they have bottled oxygen and defibrillators, both of which can be critical in treating shock, which can happen as a result of serious injury or illness.
They had a robot car from Audi (I think?) a couple of years ago doing a lap around the track... it did pretty well, I recall.
no, that 1980s tech was not reliable and was extremely rare.
How about 2002? One of the names on that list was convicted in 2002, only to have his conviction overturned in 2009. The technology had been around for 20 years by that time... is that enough time for it to mature?
I've heard of police gunning down people just for the adrenaline high, they do that every day
That's a truly stellar argument for trusting in the legal system....
That is, essentially, what you need in order to support the death penalty, btw: the utter confidence in the legal system's ability to never make a mistake. If you cannot look me in the eyes and tell me with utter conviction that the legal system/police *never* make a mistake, then you look rather pathological when you tell me in the same breath that you support the death penalty.
There's people on that list who were convicted in the 2000's. We've had commercially available DNA testing since the 1980's.
Why do you put such faith in a technology that *still* didn't correctly exonerate people during their trial 20 years after it became available? Have you never heard of a biased jury or police tunnel vision?
It's essentially allowing said criminals to continue to victimize society by leeching taxpayer dollars that could be spent elsewhere on more deserving causes. Execution is an alternative that is less humane in most cases, but it also permanently ends any further exploitation of society by those who can't be reformed and can't live in said society.
In most countries where capital punishment has been banned, it was done so because there were too many cases where people were later exonerated after their execution. Let's skip the argument over the ethics of executions as they're done in the US, though, because that is a way to a very vitriolic exchange.
The US is a strange case, though. You have an enormous prison population as a proportion of your general population. Money becomes an issue when such a large percentage of the population is incarcerated, but when you have a more reasonable justice system (and a social security net which removes a large percentage of the impetus for crime... insert obligatory link: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/09/24/breaking-bad-canada-comic-health_n_3984793.html ), the increased cost of keeping somebody alive for the duration of their prison sentence is still reasonable.
What happens when you are on call?
It depends on the agreed terms with the employer. If you're on call, at a minimum they have a right to know you're available. If you miss a call, then you can bet that they will be asking what happened and why you weren't available. Depending on what line of business you're in, that may include them knowing exactly where you are when you're on call.
can the employer follow you all the time?
No employer has the right to do that. But if they are paying you for your time, then (presumably) they have a reason to know what you're doing, or in the case where you're on call, they have a right to assurance that you will be available if/when they decide they need you.
how about unpaid lunch break?
As long as you're not impaired when you return to work, it's none of their business what you do when you're not being paid. Unless you're using company resources. If you sit at your desk surfing Facebook using the company network and a company computer, then expect that they will monitor it. I'm not sure what's difficult to understand with that. If you don't like it, then don't use company resources for that purpose.
What happens when a boss doesn't like the movie you went to see?
The boss will probably tease you mercilessly for watching My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, and then move on.
or the church you go to?
Protected class/speech.
It's the companies laptop. In your home.
If it's personal use, why aren't you using your own computer?
It's the company's truck. After hours.
Why are you driving the company truck for personal affairs outside of company time? This one, there is a *small* degree of leeway in favour of your argument, but generally our employees who have a company vehicle leave it at the company lot at the end of the day and have their own transportation to get to/from home. A small number of them dispatch from home, and park the company vehicle in their driveways overnight, but it's still really bad juju for them to take it on a grocery run after hours....
It's the company's phone. On a private call.
Why are you using a company phone to make a personal call? Especially in this day and age, when almost everybody has a cell phone....
Companies have the privilege (not right!) of monitoring their employees
Companies have a right to make sure they receive the contracted services for the money they're paying you. They also have a right to ensure you aren't misusing/abusing company resources. If you're on company time/using company resources, then it should be for the work they're paying you to do. If your company has a policy that allows you to use company resources for personal use when you're on your own time (just as my company does -- I'm posting this while on break, from my office PC), then you have to expect that they're monitoring it. If, for no other reason, then to make sure you aren't wasting their time/money when you're supposed to be on the clock.
We need to draw a line that says only conduct that happens on company time or using company resources is subject to any disciplinary action. We need to prohibit employers from taking action against employers punitively on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identification, etc. And this is not just about protecting "the little guy"; This is about protecting the country as a whole.
I agree with you completely here. Of course, I live in a country where we already have those protections. Every single one of the categories you listed has been read into the constitution and human rights/anti-discrimination legislations as protected classes of people.
Pervasive electronic monitoring is a strike against that goal.
It doesn't have to be. The company I work for has GPS trackers in the company vehicles. They monitor the location/speed of every company vehicle in the field, along with engine idle time, and people do get censured for driving like idiots or wasting fuel. They also monitor the data use on the cellular devices provided to employees, and make sure you're not wasting bandwidth, and disable data on company-provided equipment where people are using too much. On company PC's, everything is logged and goes through a proxy. Every phone call made, both on cellular and desk phones, is recorded, and if you're logged in to your PC at the time, screenshots of what's on your screen during the call are recorded as well. It's company resources, and this kind of monitoring is completely reasonable -- They don't care what I do on my own time or with my own equipment, but they do (reasonably) have a right to expect that I'm not going to waste their money, and that I am not impaired while on company time.
If you're on personal time, you can use personal equipment. But if you're using company-provided equipment, expect them to monitor it.
And if you're driving a company-provided vehicle, with the company logo on it, you are on company time. End of discussion -- Anything you do while in that vehicle can have repercussions for the company. If you're on personal time, park the vehicle and go for a walk.
So... you think that 6mbit MPEG-4, which is what the cable company here is using (so they can fit 3 HD streams in a single QAM channel) is equivalent picture quality to 18mbit MPEG-2? There's picture degradation... MPEG-4 is *not* that much better than MPEG-2. When I say that broadcast TV is uncompressed, it's because it is uncompressed... it's the original broadcast stream as created/provided by the broadcaster. It's encoded at a certain bitrate, but when your cable company takes the broadcast and resends it through their network, they are compressing the stream to a lower bitrate and picture quality.
Get off your computer and change the rolls in the men's room.
Charming. Go forth and multiply yourself... see? we can all resort to juvenile name calling... Or perhaps we can collectively pull our heads out of our asses and try to engage in meaningful conversation for a change? I know, this being Slashdot, I'm probably asking for the moon, but it's worth asking....
Why the heck would I want UHD when most HD content is so compressed that the artifacts are easily discernible from across the room. At least that is my experience with every HD medium I have seen OTA, cable, satellite, and to a much lesser degree in Blu-ray.
You have a point, but you lost credibility when you included OTA in that list. OTA is uncompressed 18.2mbit MPEG. There is no point in compressing an OTA broadcast because the bandwidth is functionally unlimited, and I don't even think that the ATSC standard supports compression beyond normal MPEG2. When you see artifacts on an OTA broadcast it is most emphatically *not* from compression, it's usually from interference or a badly tuned/aligned antenna.
With a proper antenna setup, an OTA HD broadcast looks pristine... *way* better than the cable provider's offering. Some stations are broadcasting SD signals using digital/ATSC, but that is a completely different animal than compression.
All that said, I can't make a case for wanting UHD either. Compression aside, it's an incremental upgrade that the majority of users won't notice. The jump from an SD stream to an HD stream was a *huge* improvement, but the jump from HD to UHD simply isn't that much better. I liken it to Sharp's introduction of the yellow pixel in their TV's -- Most people have trichromatic vision, and the 3 colours included in a normal TV (Red/Green/Blue) were chosen because those are the colours of the cones in your eye. Ignoring the fact that *none* of the media is encoded for RGBY, the addition of the yellow doesn't add anything because your eye physically can't see the additional colour depth. In order to actually see the improved picture from UHD, you need to be sitting close enough to the TV that most people would be uncomfortable.
Obligatory disclaimer: I work for a company that provides IPTV/Satellite services, and we also own broadcast TV stations.
If you have the resources to put somebody in space, you can afford to pay a lawyer to answer this question....
The author is a massive troll for comparing Surface Pro hardware (which runs a full blown i5 processor) with iOS and Android hardware (which is typically far lower power both in terms of wattage and processing).
He's also comparing it against a MacBook, which can have exactly the same i5 processor. See the part in TFS about how running Windows on Apple Hardware doesn't actually change the deficit?
Pretty sure Windows generally gets (sometimes substantially) better battery life than Linux.
Depends on what you're doing. My laptop gets better life on Linux than it ever did in Windows, but all I do with it is surf the web. It doesn't require a lot of processing power, and Windows wastes a lot of clock cycles running stuff it doesn't need to accomplish the task.
Do you have to worry when your currency is collapsing because of out of control costs? Or when the death panel decides that you aren't worth treating?
There's a fine line between satire and actually being crazy... I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're being facetious, but given the rhetoric going back and forth in the US lately, I just can't let it go....
In response to your first question -- Canada has had a publicly funded single-payer health care system for nearly 70 years. If it was going to make our economy collapse, it would have done so by now. More than that, in 2008 when *your* economy fell into the shitter, we didn't have *any* banks collapse, and for several years, our dollar was worth more than yours. Your dollar *still* isn't anywhere near recovering to where it was before the 2008 collapse -- 10 years ago, $1 CAD was worth about $0.65 USD. Today it's $0.98. Clearly, a publicly funded health care system will *not* make the currency collapse....
In response to your first question -- "death panels" don't exist. Never have, and never will. The decision on what kind of treatment options to pursue is made by both the patient and the doctor together, and nobody is refused care under any circumstances. Whether that care is palliative or therapeutic will depend on the individual case: just like in the US, sometimes it's better for your quality of life to give you meds so you can breathe easily and not suffer pain than it is to put you through another round of chemotherapy. The sad reality is that medicine *can't* cure everything, and any doctor worth his salt will tell you when the chances are slim/non-existant and give you the choice in how to proceed.
However, I'm kind of opposed to game controllers on principle. If I was a teenager, I might not have this issue, but I can't see owning a device just for controlling games, when I can have such fine control with a mouse and keyboard (which is already on my desk). I have no such compunction about buying a $250 video card that is only really necessary for the games I play, but I never said I was consistent.
It really depends on the game... some games are designed for a controller input, and the keyboard/mouse, while they exist, feel like a tack-on. I have a USB Xbox 360 controller: it works perfectly out of the box, even on Linux, and probably half of the games in my library work better with it than they do with keyboard/mouse. General rule of thumb: anything that's got arcade type action will work better with a controller. Some of the games in my library will actually allow multiplayer action on a single system by connecting a controller -- Trine 2, for example, will allow one player on keyboard/mouse, and another on a controller, both controlling characters on screen at the same time. I don't have a 3rd controller, so I can't test it, but in theory it supports 3-player at the same time.
I'm a bit surprised they'd use Civ5 as their demo game, though.... that game was never designed for controller input, and is *way* better with a keyboard.
That's how the political machine works everywhere in the world, I'm afraid. At least, everywhere that the people think they have a say in matters....
In an ideal world, the question wouldn't be about figuring out who's culpable; it'd be about figuring out how to fix it. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world... people look to whoever is supposed to be able to fix it, and they blame them for not having fixed it already.
*shrugs* Everybody has their own experiences. I have a Core i5 2500k system with 16GB of RAM, and a Radeon HD 6970, and have never had a problem despite its age. It still runs all of my current games library without breaking a sweat (and that includes recent AAA titles on Steam running under WINE), and I've never had any of the issues you claim happened to yours.
In fact, I'm at a loss to explain how it's even possible for a video card to set your system on fire. You could blow some capacitors, I suppose, if you have a cheap motherboard with cheap caps, you could crater a chipset by sending too much voltage, you could even wreck a cold solder, but the flash point on the plastic they use to make motherboards is high enough that the system would have shut down for critical heat *long* before it ever got hot enough to set the silicon on fire....
All of the above would be solved by not having a crap motherboard, btw... I've seen all of the symptoms I've listed in computers, but every single one of them was either a cheap motherboard or a cheap power supply, and not really anything the CPU vendor could have controlled... (I've seen them all in Intel systems as well as AMD)
.... you seriously don't see the practical real world uses for a fusion reactor that produces energy above parity?
Turn in your geek card, please. :)
Police look at every single civilian as an enemy first. Remember that.
I disagree... there's certainly bad apples, and there's even entire forces that are in desperate need of a sharp kick in the ass, but I do still choose to think that the majority of people who go into police work are doing it because, fundamentally, they want to make a positive difference.
You need to look at, and consider, the culture they're thrust into. Right now, there's increased militarization happening among police forces in the states, and it's in direct response to the increased chance of getting shot at. You need to figure out why cops are more likely to face off against somebody who's pointing a gun at them, and address that.... The animosity and hatred that they face on a daily basis is what's really at fault here.
For my part, I've never had a negative interaction with the cops. I'm absolutely certain that part of that is white privilege, part of it is upper class privilege, and part of it is female privelege, but every time I've spoken with police about anything (from traffic stops to helping with a murder investigation -- a friend was murdered a few months ago), it's been a positive interaction. Tell the truth to the best of your ability, avoid speculation, be honest about when you don't know the answer to their question, and you should be fine.
And they're on Netflix... in Canada at least... :)
It's a tabloid newspaper, on a Sunday, when all the journalists are at home, and they just make shit up instead. I'm going for 100% untrue, until proved otherwise. Fan sites seem completely dismssive also.
The proof is in the pudding, but I will point out that the tabloid newspapers tend to have better fact checking than the mainstream news because of the risk of getting sued for libel. It's unlikely that somebody'll sue them for reporting incorrectly that episodes of Dr. Who have been recovered, but they employ people to verify facts because it's *very* likely that somebody'll sue them if they report that Celebrity X got arrested after a 3-hour high speed police chase, and that they were high on cocaine, completely naked, and had a dead hooker in the boot at the time.
Fair enough, And not an unreasonable measure.
Truthfully, and I know I'm in the minority in a discussion about benchmarks, cell phones have been "good enough" for quite a while, and I bought mine based on feature list and price. I bought the cheapest phone that had all of the features I wanted: FM radio, GPS, bluetooth, wifi tether, and that's it. Didn't even care whether it had 4G connectivity (though it did). Even a bottom-end $100 smart phone with an 800MHz single core processor is in the performance range that will be good enough for most of us, and for the serious gamers, they can worry about getting the most expensive quad core on the market, or, like I did, get a good quality tablet to accompany the phone. With entrants like the Asus MeMo Pad HD 7" (a sub-$200 quad core tablet with plenty of memory, there are others but that's the one I bought), it's getting ridiculously easy to get good performance in your devices for just about anything you throw at it in the real world.