Of course, it's illegal to take oxycodone in any manner other than as directed by a physician, so we don't have to worry about that, right? Right?
More importantly, I don't care what happens to someone who willfully takes drugs in a non-prescribed manner. If you want to suicide by drugs, please make sure your living will is up to date.
Ask your doctor before you take any medication in conjuction with a prescription medication. At the very minimum, ask your pharmacist (the pharmacist will have better knowledge of potential drug interactions, but poorer knowledge of your personal medical situation).
This is great advice, although I don't particularly agree that a pharmacist will have better knowledge of the drug interactions. My wife is an ob/gyn, and apart from the fact that she spent most of her second year of medical school learning about drugs and their interactions, she also has to continue to educate herself on new medications (including their interactions).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking pharmacists--they're good people and they know what they know.
Their emulator is capable of executing arbitrary BASIC code. That's like complaining that you spent a bunch of time writing a Java emulator for the iphone but then it was rejected. It's clearly disallowed, and that's not unreasonable--if they didn't disallow it, it would basically make the app store completely useless. People could write apps that were specifically intended to run on your execution platform, and completely bypass the app store. While you may not agree with this decision, it's reasonable as-is.
What I'm certain they'll be able to do is what Sega and others have done, and release a game pack that has a few games, but doesn't support downloadable content, or release one (or a few) game(s) at a time that uses their emulator backend for $0.99 each. I suspect as long as they don't expose their emulator directly, they'll be fine.
(And frankly, if you're going to argue that a programmable calculator or even a chip-8 emulator is in the same category as a BASIC interpreter, you're simply wrong).
Your response sounded to me like a complete dismissal of the whole situation, which is equally foolish.
A complete dismissal by the general population is likely appropriate, though.
You should be doing the same things you always do to avoid illness: wash your hands frequently, cover your mouth when you sneeze/cough, stay home when you're sick. If you're in a position where you're likely to encounter the disease (medical profession, travelling to areas that have seen high numbers of infections), then you should definitely study up on what you can do to promote general health (both others and your own).
It's wrong that the media cries wolf every time anything remotely "scary" happens, just like they did with Avian Flu, and just like they were doing a few months ago. It desensitizes the population in a very real way.
I go to Lake City, Colorado every other summer or so. It's in rural SW Colorado, fulltime population ~200. The town is one of a very few in Hinsdale County, which has the lowest population density of any county in the lower 48 states. Lake City sits in a mountain valley about 4 miles long by 1.5 miles wide, at an elevation of 8600 ft. Once you're on the highway, two or three mountain bends out you're sitting at about 10,000 feet with virtually no light pollution.
I say all of this to help you understand that when you find somewhere that's truly dark--and with significantly less atmosphere in the way--the milky way ceases to be a haze of stars, and starts to be millions of points of light. It's the most breathtaking sight I think I've taken in so far in my 30 years.
You hit it in the summary. I program professionally. At work, I use gcc, xcode or msvs (depending naturally on the platform).
At home, for personal development on Windows in C++, nothing beats Visual Studio Express. It's lightweight, meaning they've trimmed out most of the stuff that you don't care about anyways for personal projects.
As much as it might pain the free software crowd, Microsoft has done a good job with Visual Studio Express.
I'm sorry man, but Sarah Palin was a terrible choice for VP. She was an obvious appeal to the conservative base, and an attempt to grab the female vote after Obama *didn't* choose Hillary as his running mate.
The woman has almost no political experience to speak of (the population of her entire state is less than many cities in the US--giving her command over fewer citizens than numerous mayors). This wouldn't have been a problem if her presidential candidate wasn't moderately likely to die during his term, but you had to realize when voting for the team that you were basically voting someone with no experience into the white house
And to top it off, she had a really unfortunate intersection of personal beliefs and personal circumstances. She doesn't believe in abortion, and she supports abstinence-only sex education, despite statistics that disagreed about its effectiveness. Combine that with the fact that her own daughter is a shining beacon of what abstinence-only education is more likely to cause, and there was a recipe for disaster.
McCain basically gave Obama the election. If he'd wanted to make it a race, he should've selected Ron Paul as his VP candidate. I'm not even a huge RP fan, but even I would've had to think twice about who I was voting for if he had.
However, I don't think Obama and Hillary were at all "more or less identical". Except to people who weren't interested in voting for either of them in the first place.
Democrats were fairly polarized over Hillary vs. Obama, and for once it wasn't because the candidates were overwhelmingly the same--it was because they were overwhelmingly different.
I'd agree with your post, but the movies and art that most people are stealing (that's right, I said stealing) are not works that should theoretically have already been released into the public domain. Even under really old statutes, before all of the extensions.
What you're arguing about (copyright duration) is not the same at all as the flag that thieves operate under when they're downloading music, movies and games that haven't even been released yet.
You're buying into their marketing spiel. Stop it.
Read about how this works in other countries, then realize that networks are networks. If it works elsewhere, there's no reason it can't work here. Are networks subsidized by the government in other countries? In some places yes, in some places significant competition actually drives prices down. (In Japan, for example, I could get an unlimited 160Mb connection for $60 / mo, and they would be *happier* than if I bought the $55 / mo 30 Mb unlimited connection).
Meanwhile, right here at Time Warner Cable, their costs per subscriber went down while their revenues went up.
Either you're being ignorant or you're being disingenuous.
With the advent of cable internet service, cable providers began vertical integration of internet services, a practice of questionable legality. (Leveraging a monopoly in one area to gain a monopoly in another area is generally frowned on). In this case it's of questionable legality because the government generally granted them their monopoly in the first place.
And while you might argue that cable companies such as TWC do not have a monopoly, the fact is that for their price point and level of service offered--they do.
I think you're right on the money. A friend of mine also pointed out that this is also a kindof backdoor to a tiered internet.
Imagine that if everyone had caps, TWC and others could go to netflix and say "you know, for only 1% of every customer's signup fee, we'll avoid counting bandwidth you send against our customers", and then announce the partnerships and how you can watch Netflix streaming on their service "for free".
I can't wait to replace TWC. As soon as I find a provider in my area who isn't TWC and isn't AT&T, I'm so there.
Sorry man, but your argument flies in the face of what this country was built around: the US Constitution, including the Bill of Rights.
Violating our constitutionally guarenteed rights is unacceptable, period.
Here's a refresher for you. I've bolded the important bits: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
You might argue that the Constitution is outdated or wrong, but that's the beauty of it. If it's wrong, we can amend it. (Just like we did for prohibition). To ignore it because it doesn't currently fit in with our needs is a very dangerous road to be on, and not one that my fellow citizens should tolerate in any way.
Your claims that we should accept this and just move on are, frankly, unamerican. In America, we're subject first and foremost to the constitution. We believe that our government gets its power from us, as granted explicitly by the Constitution. Your proposal is utterly unacceptable.
Oh, and since you didn't rtfa, let me spell out the scariest bit of Obama's position on this issue: his adminsitration has taken the position that the federal government is immune from prosecution because of sovereign doctrine. Therefore, they're claiming that you can't sue the government. If that's not opaqueness, I'm not sure what is.
And I voted for Obama. Clearly I should've voted for Mickey Mouse.
I voted for Obama, and I'm disappointed by a lot of choices that his administration has made. I'm not surprised in a lot of these cases, but I'm still disappointed.
A lot of choices he's made, I'm happy with. I'm fine with an attempt at getting us out of the hole using FDR-style spending. I'm fine with an approach to extracting us from Iraq that doesn't leave the country worse-off than when we went in. I'm very fine with the fact that he decided to close down gitmo, and that he's taking steps to end the torture that was condoned and perpetrated by the previous administration.
On the whole, I'm reasonably happy with Obama. But he is still a politician.
Are you including games and music in that 'information should be free' quote?
Because people pay money to develop that information. They feed their families by their ability to make that information, because the companies they work for expect to be able to sell licenses for people to use and enjoy that information.
Would game developers and musicians just charge for 'support' of their games and music? Does that mean I get to call Billy Idol when his mp3 doesn't play properly in my car? Based on the number of MP3s that haven't worked properly for me in the last 12 or so years, I think Billy might have to find a day job.
The trouble with good ideas is that people tend to want to overapply them. There's nothing wrong with free information, when it's your choice to discover and release that information for free--I write and release free software. But requiring that all information be free is just as bad as requiring all information be closed. They're opposite sides of the same coin.
Of course, being as this is slashdot, I expect to be modded down to -9001.
Let's say you're right. Big pharma is still required to find the thing in nature, refine it, figure out how to mass produce it, figure out how to make it safe (or if it even is), and bring it through the FDA to market.
That costs them a lot of money. They're making investments just like any other company. If they weren't making sound investments, they'd either need to: a) Invest in something else b) Go out of business
Neither of those are necessarily in our best interests. Do you honestly believe that nature would be able to provide all of us with cures for the next big bacterial outbreak? If you do, you might be a bit more naive then you think you are.
No that's silly. The winner-take-all system is clearly what's broken.
The GP wasn't proposing that you obliterate the EC system, just that you obliterate winner-take-all. So that if a candidate wins 51% of the votes in a state, he gets 51% of the electoral college votes from that state. If you ensure that the winner actually always gets voted%+1 vote, then the winner will always win (for example, in DC or other places that have relatively few votes).
It also would increase the importance of states that aren't currently swing states, because then there's not a lock that a republican would get 34 electoral votes from Texas, for example.
Because you equate abortion with murder. I'm sorry, but I don't. When a fetus is viable, it's a person. Before that, it's a parasite. I don't care that it's going to be a human eventually. More importantly, I may find abortion a deplorable act, a disgusting act, and something I personally would only consider in the most extreme cases (Anencephaly, for example), but that doesn't mean that I believe I know better than all people for all situations. People will take extreme measures in extreme situations, and they need access to safe healthcare. That includes all reasonable procedures.
But that's not the real point here, is it?
The real point is that the media (I don't know of any person that) freaks out about bird flu, a disease that has killed exactly 248 people in the last 11 years, while Malaria has been busy doing its thing, killing around a million people every year while we've been keeping records. And there have been deaths attributed to malaria recorded as far back as 50,000 years.
Frankly, I personally applaud Bill Gates for both of these acts--but especially trying to bring attention to Malaria. This is a disease that gets neither the attention nor the respect it deserves, and it's absolutely because of the reason he says... it only happens to poor people.
I'll go one further and say that it's bad design on Firefox's part that backdoor installs are even possible.
This seems like a gaping security hole to me. What's to stop a malware vendor from slipping in a keylogging addon to me using almost this exact mechanism?
From a compromised website, they could attempt to crash firefox with a stack overflow, then execute code to figure out what other addons are installed, then basically slipstream in a keylogger masking itself as one of the other plugins. I'd claim that if the keylogger was transparent enough, 99% of users would never notice.
No question it was bad form of microsoft to do this (please use the front door, and don't be upset if I ask you to leave), but it's bad form of firefox to create a door-sized window frame next to the front door and to not put any glass there.
It's tricky, and I was perhaps being disingenuous by not mentioning it. Sue me.:)
Pixels that are uncovered (ie, no geometry touches that pixel), are basically free. So if you're running a vertex shader that uses constants to always ensure that it covers 1 pixel on the screen, the pixel shader will only be invoked for that one pixel. Regardless of your resolution... You could be running at 1x1 or 1600x1200 with 8xAA, and the pixel shader will only run for that one pixel.
However, some pixels can be covered several times. This is commonly referred to as 'depth complexity.' In most games, this value is between 1 and 2, averaging around 1.5. It's a little trickier than that, because sort order matters, but the complexity for a particular 'Draw' call on the modern GPU looks something like this:
In a raytracer, the cost of drawing a patch of sky is roughly the same as the cost of drawing a section of ocean or a boat. On a GPU, the cost of drawing a patch of sky is usually ~0 (or very close to), while the cost of drawing a section of ocean or a boat could be quite high.
You are somewhat correct--there's no requirement that you have to have an image ready to display every time the monitor refreshes. If you don't, the old image will be displayed (or when vsync is off, the image will be updated as often as the data is available, possibly even multiple times per redraw).
However, what's the point of having a monitor that can display at 240 Hz if you're not using that rate to convey more information?
If 15/30/60 Hz is fine for you, then stick with the monitor you have now. If you find that you want a higher framerate (for example in FPS games), but you don't want to have visual tearing (which is caused when we refresh the front buffer in the middle of a screen redraw), then you want a monitor with a higher refresh/redraw rate, and a graphics card that can drive it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it's illegal to take oxycodone in any manner other than as directed by a physician, so we don't have to worry about that, right? Right?
More importantly, I don't care what happens to someone who willfully takes drugs in a non-prescribed manner. If you want to suicide by drugs, please make sure your living will is up to date.
Ask your doctor before you take any medication in conjuction with a prescription medication. At the very minimum, ask your pharmacist (the pharmacist will have better knowledge of potential drug interactions, but poorer knowledge of your personal medical situation).
This is great advice, although I don't particularly agree that a pharmacist will have better knowledge of the drug interactions. My wife is an ob/gyn, and apart from the fact that she spent most of her second year of medical school learning about drugs and their interactions, she also has to continue to educate herself on new medications (including their interactions).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking pharmacists--they're good people and they know what they know.
He's not trolling. Did you read the article?
Their emulator is capable of executing arbitrary BASIC code. That's like complaining that you spent a bunch of time writing a Java emulator for the iphone but then it was rejected. It's clearly disallowed, and that's not unreasonable--if they didn't disallow it, it would basically make the app store completely useless. People could write apps that were specifically intended to run on your execution platform, and completely bypass the app store. While you may not agree with this decision, it's reasonable as-is.
What I'm certain they'll be able to do is what Sega and others have done, and release a game pack that has a few games, but doesn't support downloadable content, or release one (or a few) game(s) at a time that uses their emulator backend for $0.99 each. I suspect as long as they don't expose their emulator directly, they'll be fine.
(And frankly, if you're going to argue that a programmable calculator or even a chip-8 emulator is in the same category as a BASIC interpreter, you're simply wrong).
Your response sounded to me like a complete dismissal of the whole situation, which is equally foolish.
A complete dismissal by the general population is likely appropriate, though.
You should be doing the same things you always do to avoid illness: wash your hands frequently, cover your mouth when you sneeze/cough, stay home when you're sick. If you're in a position where you're likely to encounter the disease (medical profession, travelling to areas that have seen high numbers of infections), then you should definitely study up on what you can do to promote general health (both others and your own).
It's wrong that the media cries wolf every time anything remotely "scary" happens, just like they did with Avian Flu, and just like they were doing a few months ago. It desensitizes the population in a very real way.
I go to Lake City, Colorado every other summer or so. It's in rural SW Colorado, fulltime population ~200. The town is one of a very few in Hinsdale County, which has the lowest population density of any county in the lower 48 states. Lake City sits in a mountain valley about 4 miles long by 1.5 miles wide, at an elevation of 8600 ft. Once you're on the highway, two or three mountain bends out you're sitting at about 10,000 feet with virtually no light pollution.
I say all of this to help you understand that when you find somewhere that's truly dark--and with significantly less atmosphere in the way--the milky way ceases to be a haze of stars, and starts to be millions of points of light. It's the most breathtaking sight I think I've taken in so far in my 30 years.
You hit it in the summary. I program professionally. At work, I use gcc, xcode or msvs (depending naturally on the platform).
At home, for personal development on Windows in C++, nothing beats Visual Studio Express. It's lightweight, meaning they've trimmed out most of the stuff that you don't care about anyways for personal projects.
As much as it might pain the free software crowd, Microsoft has done a good job with Visual Studio Express.
I'm sorry man, but Sarah Palin was a terrible choice for VP. She was an obvious appeal to the conservative base, and an attempt to grab the female vote after Obama *didn't* choose Hillary as his running mate.
The woman has almost no political experience to speak of (the population of her entire state is less than many cities in the US--giving her command over fewer citizens than numerous mayors). This wouldn't have been a problem if her presidential candidate wasn't moderately likely to die during his term, but you had to realize when voting for the team that you were basically voting someone with no experience into the white house
And to top it off, she had a really unfortunate intersection of personal beliefs and personal circumstances. She doesn't believe in abortion, and she supports abstinence-only sex education, despite statistics that disagreed about its effectiveness. Combine that with the fact that her own daughter is a shining beacon of what abstinence-only education is more likely to cause, and there was a recipe for disaster.
McCain basically gave Obama the election. If he'd wanted to make it a race, he should've selected Ron Paul as his VP candidate. I'm not even a huge RP fan, but even I would've had to think twice about who I was voting for if he had.
Your signature is oddly appropriate in this case.
However, I don't think Obama and Hillary were at all "more or less identical". Except to people who weren't interested in voting for either of them in the first place.
Democrats were fairly polarized over Hillary vs. Obama, and for once it wasn't because the candidates were overwhelmingly the same--it was because they were overwhelmingly different.
Without permission from Orson Scott Card, the only difference between fantasy and science fiction are the rivets.
You see a fiction book cover with rivets? Sci-fi. Book cover with trees? Fantasy.
Realizing this comment is really old, and I won't get a response on it...
"Unjust laws serve to bring all law into contempt."
Applying Stanton's commentary on women's suffrage with your desire to obtain works for free is insulting to women everywhere.
I'd agree with your post, but the movies and art that most people are stealing (that's right, I said stealing) are not works that should theoretically have already been released into the public domain. Even under really old statutes, before all of the extensions.
What you're arguing about (copyright duration) is not the same at all as the flag that thieves operate under when they're downloading music, movies and games that haven't even been released yet.
You're buying into their marketing spiel. Stop it.
Read about how this works in other countries, then realize that networks are networks. If it works elsewhere, there's no reason it can't work here. Are networks subsidized by the government in other countries? In some places yes, in some places significant competition actually drives prices down. (In Japan, for example, I could get an unlimited 160Mb connection for $60 / mo, and they would be *happier* than if I bought the $55 / mo 30 Mb unlimited connection).
Meanwhile, right here at Time Warner Cable, their costs per subscriber went down while their revenues went up.
Either you're being ignorant or you're being disingenuous.
They rape the legal system to best serve their clients.
FTFY. (Otherwise I agree with your post).
Cable companies are not usually natural monopolies. They're generally de jure monopolies.
With the advent of cable internet service, cable providers began vertical integration of internet services, a practice of questionable legality. (Leveraging a monopoly in one area to gain a monopoly in another area is generally frowned on). In this case it's of questionable legality because the government generally granted them their monopoly in the first place.
And while you might argue that cable companies such as TWC do not have a monopoly, the fact is that for their price point and level of service offered--they do.
I think you're right on the money. A friend of mine also pointed out that this is also a kindof backdoor to a tiered internet.
Imagine that if everyone had caps, TWC and others could go to netflix and say "you know, for only 1% of every customer's signup fee, we'll avoid counting bandwidth you send against our customers", and then announce the partnerships and how you can watch Netflix streaming on their service "for free".
I can't wait to replace TWC. As soon as I find a provider in my area who isn't TWC and isn't AT&T, I'm so there.
Sorry man, but your argument flies in the face of what this country was built around: the US Constitution, including the Bill of Rights.
Violating our constitutionally guarenteed rights is unacceptable, period.
Here's a refresher for you. I've bolded the important bits: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
You might argue that the Constitution is outdated or wrong, but that's the beauty of it. If it's wrong, we can amend it. (Just like we did for prohibition). To ignore it because it doesn't currently fit in with our needs is a very dangerous road to be on, and not one that my fellow citizens should tolerate in any way.
Your claims that we should accept this and just move on are, frankly, unamerican. In America, we're subject first and foremost to the constitution. We believe that our government gets its power from us, as granted explicitly by the Constitution. Your proposal is utterly unacceptable.
Oh, and since you didn't rtfa, let me spell out the scariest bit of Obama's position on this issue: his adminsitration has taken the position that the federal government is immune from prosecution because of sovereign doctrine. Therefore, they're claiming that you can't sue the government. If that's not opaqueness, I'm not sure what is.
And I voted for Obama. Clearly I should've voted for Mickey Mouse.
I'll be the first to say it, then.
I voted for Obama, and I'm disappointed by a lot of choices that his administration has made. I'm not surprised in a lot of these cases, but I'm still disappointed.
A lot of choices he's made, I'm happy with. I'm fine with an attempt at getting us out of the hole using FDR-style spending. I'm fine with an approach to extracting us from Iraq that doesn't leave the country worse-off than when we went in. I'm very fine with the fact that he decided to close down gitmo, and that he's taking steps to end the torture that was condoned and perpetrated by the previous administration.
On the whole, I'm reasonably happy with Obama. But he is still a politician.
Are you including games and music in that 'information should be free' quote?
Because people pay money to develop that information. They feed their families by their ability to make that information, because the companies they work for expect to be able to sell licenses for people to use and enjoy that information.
Would game developers and musicians just charge for 'support' of their games and music? Does that mean I get to call Billy Idol when his mp3 doesn't play properly in my car? Based on the number of MP3s that haven't worked properly for me in the last 12 or so years, I think Billy might have to find a day job.
The trouble with good ideas is that people tend to want to overapply them. There's nothing wrong with free information, when it's your choice to discover and release that information for free--I write and release free software. But requiring that all information be free is just as bad as requiring all information be closed. They're opposite sides of the same coin.
Of course, being as this is slashdot, I expect to be modded down to -9001.
Let's say you're right. Big pharma is still required to find the thing in nature, refine it, figure out how to mass produce it, figure out how to make it safe (or if it even is), and bring it through the FDA to market.
That costs them a lot of money. They're making investments just like any other company. If they weren't making sound investments, they'd either need to:
a) Invest in something else
b) Go out of business
Neither of those are necessarily in our best interests. Do you honestly believe that nature would be able to provide all of us with cures for the next big bacterial outbreak? If you do, you might be a bit more naive then you think you are.
No that's silly. The winner-take-all system is clearly what's broken.
The GP wasn't proposing that you obliterate the EC system, just that you obliterate winner-take-all. So that if a candidate wins 51% of the votes in a state, he gets 51% of the electoral college votes from that state. If you ensure that the winner actually always gets voted%+1 vote, then the winner will always win (for example, in DC or other places that have relatively few votes).
It also would increase the importance of states that aren't currently swing states, because then there's not a lock that a republican would get 34 electoral votes from Texas, for example.
Down with winner-take-all. It's an unfair system.
Because you equate abortion with murder. I'm sorry, but I don't. When a fetus is viable, it's a person. Before that, it's a parasite. I don't care that it's going to be a human eventually. More importantly, I may find abortion a deplorable act, a disgusting act, and something I personally would only consider in the most extreme cases (Anencephaly, for example), but that doesn't mean that I believe I know better than all people for all situations. People will take extreme measures in extreme situations, and they need access to safe healthcare. That includes all reasonable procedures.
But that's not the real point here, is it?
The real point is that the media (I don't know of any person that) freaks out about bird flu, a disease that has killed exactly 248 people in the last 11 years, while Malaria has been busy doing its thing, killing around a million people every year while we've been keeping records. And there have been deaths attributed to malaria recorded as far back as 50,000 years.
Frankly, I personally applaud Bill Gates for both of these acts--but especially trying to bring attention to Malaria. This is a disease that gets neither the attention nor the respect it deserves, and it's absolutely because of the reason he says... it only happens to poor people.
I'll go one further and say that it's bad design on Firefox's part that backdoor installs are even possible.
This seems like a gaping security hole to me. What's to stop a malware vendor from slipping in a keylogging addon to me using almost this exact mechanism?
From a compromised website, they could attempt to crash firefox with a stack overflow, then execute code to figure out what other addons are installed, then basically slipstream in a keylogger masking itself as one of the other plugins. I'd claim that if the keylogger was transparent enough, 99% of users would never notice.
No question it was bad form of microsoft to do this (please use the front door, and don't be upset if I ask you to leave), but it's bad form of firefox to create a door-sized window frame next to the front door and to not put any glass there.
What the GP was saying is correct--most pstriple developers write the pushbuffer directly, instead of using the OGL:ES implementation.
I love that every time I post anything remotely work related on /., I get one of these posts. I wonder if it's the same guy every time?
What other kind of hardware would you propose we build? What companies are you aware of that build non-proprietary hardware?
It's tricky, and I was perhaps being disingenuous by not mentioning it. Sue me. :)
Pixels that are uncovered (ie, no geometry touches that pixel), are basically free. So if you're running a vertex shader that uses constants to always ensure that it covers 1 pixel on the screen, the pixel shader will only be invoked for that one pixel. Regardless of your resolution... You could be running at 1x1 or 1600x1200 with 8xAA, and the pixel shader will only run for that one pixel.
However, some pixels can be covered several times. This is commonly referred to as 'depth complexity.' In most games, this value is between 1 and 2, averaging around 1.5. It's a little trickier than that, because sort order matters, but the complexity for a particular 'Draw' call on the modern GPU looks something like this:
O(DrawCall) := MAX(O(Vertices * VertexShaderCost), O(DepthComplexity * PixelCount * PixelShaderCost))
In a raytracer, the cost of drawing a patch of sky is roughly the same as the cost of drawing a section of ocean or a boat. On a GPU, the cost of drawing a patch of sky is usually ~0 (or very close to), while the cost of drawing a section of ocean or a boat could be quite high.
You are somewhat correct--there's no requirement that you have to have an image ready to display every time the monitor refreshes. If you don't, the old image will be displayed (or when vsync is off, the image will be updated as often as the data is available, possibly even multiple times per redraw).
However, what's the point of having a monitor that can display at 240 Hz if you're not using that rate to convey more information?
If 15/30/60 Hz is fine for you, then stick with the monitor you have now. If you find that you want a higher framerate (for example in FPS games), but you don't want to have visual tearing (which is caused when we refresh the front buffer in the middle of a screen redraw), then you want a monitor with a higher refresh/redraw rate, and a graphics card that can drive it.
PS: Still not speaking for my employer.