Similar regulation of the internet will follow that will bring internet access to similar levels of guaranteed service that other utilities offer. It is only a matter of time.
You understand nothing. The Internet is not a utility that has a particular purpose. It is a collection of independent networks, each will it's own purposes, needs, budgets, desires, etc. Some networks are used for things like ecology data collection, and only need to provide a link once a season or so. Some networks are dedicated to frivolous purposes, like gaming. Some networks are stable for years, and require a military security clearance to join. Some networks are ephemeral, and allow unknown strangers to connect via WiFi. Some networks are used for real-time remote control of surgical robots, and require six-nines reliability.
If someone were stupid enough to mandate a uniform quality of service, it would be too expensive for many uses. All those useful, fun, interesting applications would basically be outlawed. As long as porn, spam, gaming, illegal gambling, and copyright infringement remain popular but low-rent, the Internet will remain unregulated.
Given a choice between an $1,800/month point-to-point circuit PLUS provider termination and service fees, or a $59/month xDSL for probably 4x the bandwidth, which do you think most will use?
The malpractice premiums for doing life-critical work over a single DSL connection would be tens of millions of dollars a month.
#1: D'oh! I latched onto the quote about their previous generation of instrument. Picogram deserves not to have the door slammed in its face.
#2: I am not familiar with how good the resolution is (and too lazy to look). What I do know is that the background molecules are usually random organic crud of biological origin, in varying states of decomposition and polymerization. The mass spectrum is appallingly like a continuum. This is why many explosive detectors are preceeded by a gas chromatograph or incorporate chromatographic processes.
#3: That certainly does improve sensitivity, if your instrument produces data in multiple output bins for a single run (which a mass spec can). Many explosives have a very characteristic set of side reaction products and decay products, as well as taggants, plasticizers, and so forth. For example, TNT (trinitrotoluene) is nearly always found with its brother DNT (dinitrotoluene). An issue to be aware of is that the constituents have wildly different volatilities, so there isn't a fixed fingerprint.
You'd definitely have to pull out electronics and batteries--those would be toast.
There are two show stoppers. One problem is that many bombs are disguised as consumer electronics. The detection problem is to sort the evil electronics from the good. Another problem is that anything that can ignite a bare chunk of explosives can also ignite other materials. Think thin aluminum foil in a microwave oven.
Construct your bomb. Shrink wrap it in plastic, taking care to get as little explosive residue on the outside as possible. [lather, rinse, repeat]
Typical wrapping materials are rather porous, and several important explosives diffuse to some extent even through nonporous plastics. It is possible to seal explosives, but you have to really know what you are doing and even then a single microscopic dust particle can tip off the detector.
Regarding the article, nanogram sensitivity (a trillion molecules of TNT) is utterly unimpressive. The vapor pressure of most explosives is so low that you need femtogram sensitivity to directly sense vapor. For an explosive like RDX that has an absurdly low vapor pressure, you really want attogram sensitivity (about a million molecules). You can heat up dust and surfaces to vaporize more explosive, but with a mass spectrometer you then run into a problem with selectivity: many ordinary boring compounds will have the same molecular weight as the explosive--the signal will be swamped by the noise. (Hmmm... the article says they're using clever ionization, and tandem spectrometry. That helps a lot, but they still have a hell of a problem to solve.)
The article says "'If you tried to detect a particular compound out of a mixture of thousands of different substances, you might begin to see the limitations of this method,' Talaty said. 'But real-world explosives are not that complex.'" What, people walk through airports with purified blocks of luggage? No! You get a suitcase drenched with sweat (which includes urea), solvents, ammonium nitrate from natural sources, perfumes, plasticizers, plastic monomers and short chain polymers, various mineral oils, a whole boat-load of volatiles from living things, and many more. The background signal is a freaking nightmare. I work in the explosive detection field, and I sure wish it was as easy as they say.
Where are their mailing list posts saying "we're having this weird problem, what might be wrong?" You know, if folks are willing to help some teenager in Africa, odds are they'll be willing to help you.
How many passes did memtest86 successfully make? How many times did you successfully do a total system stress test? (Like rebuilding a kernel or XFree86.) I've got $5 says it was defective hardware and what they now have is SAP/Windows silently corrupting their data.
What did it do when you installed it under VMWare? You did try to run things under an always-the-same virtualizer to control the variables, didn't you? Hello? Is this thing on?
Considering the small amount of people involved with peacefull research of anthrax,...
There are thousands of people at several hundred organizations who are actively interested in anthrax: military defense specialists, university researchers, vaccine designers, occupational health and safety people, USAMRIID, defense contractors, FBI, intelligence organizations, CDC, ag schools (the ag depargment of my local university lost a cow to anthrax a few years back), the postal service, civil engineers specifying HVAC systems in Washington DC, city disaster planners, and many others.
...and the legitemate amount of the agent needed for same, the purchase and deployment of these amounts is rather suspicious.
I work at a defense contractor who, among other things, is actively developing NBC (nuke, bio, chem) detection and defense systems. You can't just throw together a piece of equipment and pray that it works during an actual attack. For one thing that would be foolish, and for another nobody is going to spend $50M on your hardware without evidence that the money is well spent. You have to actually carry out field tests. Generally this means you develop a simulated agent that is less dangerous than the real thing, calibrate it against the live agent in a sealed chamber**, and then conduct full-scale field trials with the simulant.
(**For some mysterious reason the government-licensed test facilities want a big pile of money before they play with sarin gas or anthrax. And you generally don't get your equipment back afterwards, since it is now covered with a thin layer of Nasty Death.)
And anyway, anthrax production equipment is not even slightly suspicious. Commercial companies already make bioreactors to grow almost any microorganism you care to name, including bacillus thuringiensis, a very close relative of the anthrax organism b. anthracis. In fact, b. anthracis, b. thuringiensis, and the common soil bacterium b. cereus*** have been called strains of a single species.
(***B. thuringiensis is used commercially as a biowarfare agent against insects. It's basically anthrax for bugs. B. cereus is ubiquitous and can cause food poisoning.)
Detectors, on the other hand, are not so easy, at least at the wavelength most people are interested in, 1550 nm.
Too true. However, this page says LightTime LLC, whose Chief Research Officer wrote the article being discussed, is working with mode-locked lasers centered at 860 nanometers. That's a piece of cake for silicon to detect (although making those lasers cheap, reliable, and phase-lockable will be a nice trick.)
Fourier transforms of gene transcription rates, for one thing. It is good for finding oscillators, cyclic mechanisms, entrainment with external stimuli, and so forth.
Yes, evolution is slow. But in the Darwin definition of evolution by natural selection, when nearly 100% of the population that *choose* to procreate can and do, I find it hard to see how evolution by natural selection is still functioning on a level higher then "ever so slightly"
That's your error. Evolutionary advantage expands through the mackerel of compound interest. Let's work through a simplified example. Suppose we have two varieties of a gene. People with the first variety have an average reproduction rate of 1.08, while people with the other have a rate of 1.0908 (which is 1% larger). After 63 generations (around 1000 years), the first group will have increased its size by a factor of 128, while the second group will be 239 times larger!
That's an 87% advantage per millenia, for a piddling 1% reproductive advantage. It's not hard to imagine a 1% advantage in aspects of modern living. For example, things like not crashing your car, not spending a quarter of your income on credit card interest, not eating and drinking and smoking yourself to death, not building your house on a flood plain, not going on a crystal meth-fueled unprotected gay sex holiday, not telling your son to come back on his shield or carrying it, and so forth. All those examples are strongly determined by intelligence and personality, and therefore by brain genes, so I would expect those genes to currently be under strong selective advantage.
At the same time, a 1% reproductive advantage isn't obvious just by looking. It's a mere one extra baby per hundred people. If you wanted to measure that sort of difference with statistical significance, you'd have to get two groups of several thousand people who were otherwise genetically identical. To untangle it from the effects of environment and culture, you'd probably want tens of thousands of people in your experiment. In a genetically mixed population? Impossible to measure. So gigantic evolutionary differences are nearly invisible if you just look at the people around you.
8 highly parallel processors and a single core coordinating them (PS3), or 6 identical general purpose cores. Have fun writing ANYTHING that will run on both of those without rewriting a lot of the low level stuff.
I strongly expect that one processor will run the main program and game logic, and all the others will be used as workhorses to crunch numbers. The number crunching code will come as little off-the-shelf modules that you buy and use, without needing to understand. If you want to write them yourself, you can, but the average level designer is no more likely to touch this than he is to edit his nVidia driver.
This is exactly like PC games work. One processor (CPU) runs the game logic, supervisory code, etc. Another processor (sound card) does various audio processing. Another processor or two (video card(s)) does graphics stuff. Putting it all on a single chip is just a way to save money and reduce latency.
Perhaps. Sending people somewhere is expensive, and learning to shoehorn your project into an existing radio telescope doesn't teach you the same things as designing your own. And why not? Building your own is cool.
I wonder if research into the actual control mechanism can lead to a treatment for people with major pychological problems. Maybe there is a protein component to OCD that can be blocked.
Take a look at PANDAS, pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections. The hypothesis is that a kid gets a strep infection and successfully fights it off. However sometimes the antibodies produced by the immune system also bind to important things in the brain. (Neurotransmitter receptors?) As long as the antibody levels are high, neurological dysfunction occurs. It's sort of a rheumatic fever for the soul.
It's common knowledge to those who work with EEG devices and other electronics that work in the pico, nano, and micro volt ranges that background noise is the biggest problem to getting useful data.
EEG designers deal with their problems mostly by filtering the radio-frequency noise out of their low-frequency signal. The MIT folks are listening to the radio-frequency noise. The only way to make sure the noise is of cosmological origin is to turn off all the local noise sources in that frequency band.
In reality, when a researcher puts customers at risk by releasing exploit code for a vulnerability before the vendor has had a chance to fix it, it's ridiculous to expect the vendor to say, "Thank you for putting our customers at risk."
You are the ones who intentionally designed in the flaw, and you are the ones who deliberately defrauded your customers by falsely warranting the product as "Unbreakable". If this was securities and not software, the SEC would have tossed you in a Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
"Oh, but we're innocent, somebody framed us!" Tell it to the hand 'cause the face ain't listening.
With this new equipment and an additional DS3 line, we could handle 2500 simultaneous transactions.
... what the hell were they thinking? Suppose 5e+6 people had bought from the site every month when their prescriptions needed refilled, with 50 page loads per sale, and $0.50 net profit per sale. That would be an overall net profit of $30M/year, which is pretty darn respectable. However that workload is only 96 page loads per second on average. Even accounting for load nonuniformity, the original system would still have been total overkill. Furthermore, if popularity had ramped up quickly, they'd have just been able to upgrade directly from the profits. Oversizing the machines was just pointless.
Why does money make people lose the ability to do arithmetic?
Well, that's the FCC's domain, when one system interferes with another, the FCC gets to decide who gets to do what.
And the FCC already has: electronics must accept interference from all nonmalicious lawful transmitters, including that which may cause misoperation. If a transmitter interferes with your gadget, you have three choices: shield your gadget, convince the transmitter's operator to help out, or live with it. The FCC truly does not care.
Like cell phones are fully FCC approved, but cannot be used on planes because the FCC has determined they can interfere with the plane's operation (nevermind that they don't work anyhow, you're too high).
Salaried also means they must not keep track of the hours. (US labor laws, look it up).
Hardly. The US gov't requires its contractors to record all hours for billing purposes. If a salaried employee works 40 hours on a gov't contract and 10 hours on some other jog, at a cost of $3000 to the employer, the gov't will only pay $2400. (Under the usual contract, at least.)
[The theory of evolution has] nothing to do with how life got here in the first place.
But it does. A theory that cannot predict the past is difficult to trust.
The thing is, evolution can predict the ancient past, up to a point. By comparing a variety of modern species, we can predict how their common ancestors were built. (In a few happy cases we can actually test the predictions.) But look back far enough and you see a black wall. Things like ribosomes and amino-acyl tRNA synthases* simply cease to have a history; there is no evidence of what they evolved from, or how, or why. There was, presumably, a whole world of life before protein-based life arose, but all we have left now are a few tantalizing traces like reverse transcriptase** and certain RNA parasites. Far from being a meaningless inquiry into meaningless origins, it tells us something impressive and a little scary: evolution can suddenly rebuild life in a whole new form and erase the predecessors almost completely.
*The foundations of protein synthesis.
**Which translates RNA into DNA in retroviruses like HIV. The odd thing is that plain RNA works just fine for a virus, as does plain DNA. From a fitness point of view, reverse transcriptase is preposterous: it solves a problem that doesn't exist, poorly. It makes a lot more sense as an ancient machine borrowed by a virus.
Indeed, epilepsy too. It and migraine are both brain hyperexcitability disorders. They are even related: both occur in the same person at a much higher rate than random chance would predict.
Lights making your friend sick sounds remarkably like migraine. When he is sick, do sounds also seem really loud to him even though they're normal volume? What about cold hands or other strange symptoms? For years I rarely had headaches from my migraine problem, just abdominal cramping, extreme nausea, faintness, and a general feeling of illness, as well as sensitivity to light and sound. I kept telling doctors that I started feeling worse as soon as my eyes opened in the morning; they decided I was mentally ill. Sometimes I didn't know if I would make it out of the grocery store conscious, which I now know was from the cheap yet bright lights they use. Eventually I developed the visual aura and headaches and finally started getting relief from anti-migraine drugs. (Still haven't found a good treatment though.) Given your friend's debility and the fact he has a high risk of migraine, it would be worthwhile to try migraine drugs and see what happens. Many of the migraine drugs are cheap and safe, and play well with anticonvulsants, so this shouldn't be a major undertaking. He also might want to try different anticonvulsants; Topamax actually made my migraine problem worse.
The movie camera along with the movie projector work on the principle of freeze-framing a segment of film, strobing that segment with a shutter, and then advancing the film to the next frame segment. That has the effect of flashing a still image, blanking the image, and then flashing a still image of the next frame.
It's actually more interesting than that. Most movie projectors leap through the film at a rate of 24 frames per second. That gives a very economical use of expensive film, but 24 fps is hideously slow compared to the flicker fusion threshold. You'd practically be able to count the frames as they go by. So what they do is run the shutter at 48 cycles per second. I.e., show black and change to the next frame, light up the frame, show black, light up the same frame again, show black and change to the next frame, etc. It works surprisingly well for something so barbaric.
I also never heard of the movie theatre as posing a "severe health risk to a non-insignificant number of people."
It's called migraine. For whatever reason the neurons in some people's brain are way overexcitable. Zapping them with a repetitive stimulus causes them to go nuts and spew inflammatory chemicals. This inflames the membranes surrounding the brain. It is basically non-infectious "benign" meningitis; you don't have a virus eating your brain, it just feels like it. Depending on how vigorous the problem is, the pain ranges from mild discomfort to suicide headache.
A lot of the "higher production values" TV shows are shot on film, scanned on to video tape, and then broadcast to get the motion sampling effect of the movie camera for better motion rendering among other effects.
Decent electronic cameras will give you plenty of motion blur. In fact, certain sports cameras occassionally get misconfigured and give video as a series of stroboscopic frozen frames--it's nasty and painful to watch. (The Dawn of the Dead remake used this effect in the closing scenes to great effect.)
Film is actually used because, historically, the electronic cameras and recorders sucked beyond belief. Resolution was crap. Media self-erased and wore quickly. Dynamic range was pitiful, and saturated highlights were sharply clipped and blown out. Noise was high. Occassionally you see electronic TV recordings from the '70s and the picture is butt ugly. Film may be expensive and cumbersome, but it has great resolution, great dynamic range, reasonably low noise, and lasts forever if stored properly. A true film-replacement electronic camera is still a laboratory curiosity and expensive as hell.
The LCD may be far better tech for being parked in front of a computer monitor viewing source listings for 8-10 hours a day. When the LCD gets into people's living rooms when the HDTV deadline is approached (was it pushed back?), there is going to be a different group of people viewing entirely different content, and I am telling you there are going to be dissatisfied consumers viewing motion-blurred HDTV mush who will want their old TVs back.
That's an important point. Migraine and eyestrain-induced-discomfort (which is probably mild migraine in many cases) depend on how and what you watch too. Computers use sharp, high-contrast content with repetitive patterns. The eye is constantly moving around in fast, jerky motions. There are incentives to constantly stare at the screen without breaks. This is very stimulating to the visual parts of the brain. (I'm typing this with the lights turned off, wearing sunglasses. Three guesses why.) Reducing flicker is one of the few ways to reduce the irritation.
On the other hand, TV and movies have soft edges and low contrast, and the eye does not move much or rapidly. You can look away occassionally without feeling like you're missing something. So the designer can get away with a lot more flicker without pissing off viewers' brains.
Also, few transmission methods can so easily slice through poor radio conditions as Morse.
Nope. Modern signal processing runs rings around Morse code. Assuming a friendly modulation scheme, a rake receiver can turn multipath interference into extra signal. ECC codes can reconstruct missing data. Smart transceivers can reduce their signal strength to just the amount needed for communication, allowing better use of spectrum by other people. Ditto for phased array antennas. By comparison, Morse code is the radio equivalent of banging two rocks together.
Those opportunities have been around since 911, yet only now are they investing in it.
The opportunities have been around since at least the early '90s. However the political will to fling suitcases full of cash at anybody with security tech has really, er, exploded in the past few years.
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If someone were stupid enough to mandate a uniform quality of service, it would be too expensive for many uses. All those useful, fun, interesting applications would basically be outlawed. As long as porn, spam, gaming, illegal gambling, and copyright infringement remain popular but low-rent, the Internet will remain unregulated.
#2: I am not familiar with how good the resolution is (and too lazy to look). What I do know is that the background molecules are usually random organic crud of biological origin, in varying states of decomposition and polymerization. The mass spectrum is appallingly like a continuum. This is why many explosive detectors are preceeded by a gas chromatograph or incorporate chromatographic processes.
#3: That certainly does improve sensitivity, if your instrument produces data in multiple output bins for a single run (which a mass spec can). Many explosives have a very characteristic set of side reaction products and decay products, as well as taggants, plasticizers, and so forth. For example, TNT (trinitrotoluene) is nearly always found with its brother DNT (dinitrotoluene). An issue to be aware of is that the constituents have wildly different volatilities, so there isn't a fixed fingerprint.
Regarding the article, nanogram sensitivity (a trillion molecules of TNT) is utterly unimpressive. The vapor pressure of most explosives is so low that you need femtogram sensitivity to directly sense vapor. For an explosive like RDX that has an absurdly low vapor pressure, you really want attogram sensitivity (about a million molecules). You can heat up dust and surfaces to vaporize more explosive, but with a mass spectrometer you then run into a problem with selectivity: many ordinary boring compounds will have the same molecular weight as the explosive--the signal will be swamped by the noise. (Hmmm ... the article says they're using clever ionization, and tandem spectrometry. That helps a lot, but they still have a hell of a problem to solve.)
The article says "'If you tried to detect a particular compound out of a mixture of thousands of different substances, you might begin to see the limitations of this method,' Talaty said. 'But real-world explosives are not that complex.'" What, people walk through airports with purified blocks of luggage? No! You get a suitcase drenched with sweat (which includes urea), solvents, ammonium nitrate from natural sources, perfumes, plasticizers, plastic monomers and short chain polymers, various mineral oils, a whole boat-load of volatiles from living things, and many more. The background signal is a freaking nightmare. I work in the explosive detection field, and I sure wish it was as easy as they say.
How many passes did memtest86 successfully make? How many times did you successfully do a total system stress test? (Like rebuilding a kernel or XFree86.) I've got $5 says it was defective hardware and what they now have is SAP/Windows silently corrupting their data.
What did it do when you installed it under VMWare? You did try to run things under an always-the-same virtualizer to control the variables, didn't you? Hello? Is this thing on?
(**For some mysterious reason the government-licensed test facilities want a big pile of money before they play with sarin gas or anthrax. And you generally don't get your equipment back afterwards, since it is now covered with a thin layer of Nasty Death.)
And anyway, anthrax production equipment is not even slightly suspicious. Commercial companies already make bioreactors to grow almost any microorganism you care to name, including bacillus thuringiensis, a very close relative of the anthrax organism b. anthracis. In fact, b. anthracis, b. thuringiensis, and the common soil bacterium b. cereus*** have been called strains of a single species.
(***B. thuringiensis is used commercially as a biowarfare agent against insects. It's basically anthrax for bugs. B. cereus is ubiquitous and can cause food poisoning.)
Fourier transforms of gene transcription rates, for one thing. It is good for finding oscillators, cyclic mechanisms, entrainment with external stimuli, and so forth.
That's an 87% advantage per millenia, for a piddling 1% reproductive advantage. It's not hard to imagine a 1% advantage in aspects of modern living. For example, things like not crashing your car, not spending a quarter of your income on credit card interest, not eating and drinking and smoking yourself to death, not building your house on a flood plain, not going on a crystal meth-fueled unprotected gay sex holiday, not telling your son to come back on his shield or carrying it, and so forth. All those examples are strongly determined by intelligence and personality, and therefore by brain genes, so I would expect those genes to currently be under strong selective advantage.
At the same time, a 1% reproductive advantage isn't obvious just by looking. It's a mere one extra baby per hundred people. If you wanted to measure that sort of difference with statistical significance, you'd have to get two groups of several thousand people who were otherwise genetically identical. To untangle it from the effects of environment and culture, you'd probably want tens of thousands of people in your experiment. In a genetically mixed population? Impossible to measure. So gigantic evolutionary differences are nearly invisible if you just look at the people around you.
This is exactly like PC games work. One processor (CPU) runs the game logic, supervisory code, etc. Another processor (sound card) does various audio processing. Another processor or two (video card(s)) does graphics stuff. Putting it all on a single chip is just a way to save money and reduce latency.
Perhaps. Sending people somewhere is expensive, and learning to shoehorn your project into an existing radio telescope doesn't teach you the same things as designing your own. And why not? Building your own is cool.
"Oh, but we're innocent, somebody framed us!" Tell it to the hand 'cause the face ain't listening.
Why does money make people lose the ability to do arithmetic?
The thing is, evolution can predict the ancient past, up to a point. By comparing a variety of modern species, we can predict how their common ancestors were built. (In a few happy cases we can actually test the predictions.) But look back far enough and you see a black wall. Things like ribosomes and amino-acyl tRNA synthases* simply cease to have a history; there is no evidence of what they evolved from, or how, or why. There was, presumably, a whole world of life before protein-based life arose, but all we have left now are a few tantalizing traces like reverse transcriptase** and certain RNA parasites. Far from being a meaningless inquiry into meaningless origins, it tells us something impressive and a little scary: evolution can suddenly rebuild life in a whole new form and erase the predecessors almost completely.
*The foundations of protein synthesis.
**Which translates RNA into DNA in retroviruses like HIV. The odd thing is that plain RNA works just fine for a virus, as does plain DNA. From a fitness point of view, reverse transcriptase is preposterous: it solves a problem that doesn't exist, poorly. It makes a lot more sense as an ancient machine borrowed by a virus.
Lights making your friend sick sounds remarkably like migraine. When he is sick, do sounds also seem really loud to him even though they're normal volume? What about cold hands or other strange symptoms? For years I rarely had headaches from my migraine problem, just abdominal cramping, extreme nausea, faintness, and a general feeling of illness, as well as sensitivity to light and sound. I kept telling doctors that I started feeling worse as soon as my eyes opened in the morning; they decided I was mentally ill. Sometimes I didn't know if I would make it out of the grocery store conscious, which I now know was from the cheap yet bright lights they use. Eventually I developed the visual aura and headaches and finally started getting relief from anti-migraine drugs. (Still haven't found a good treatment though.) Given your friend's debility and the fact he has a high risk of migraine, it would be worthwhile to try migraine drugs and see what happens. Many of the migraine drugs are cheap and safe, and play well with anticonvulsants, so this shouldn't be a major undertaking. He also might want to try different anticonvulsants; Topamax actually made my migraine problem worse.
Film is actually used because, historically, the electronic cameras and recorders sucked beyond belief. Resolution was crap. Media self-erased and wore quickly. Dynamic range was pitiful, and saturated highlights were sharply clipped and blown out. Noise was high. Occassionally you see electronic TV recordings from the '70s and the picture is butt ugly. Film may be expensive and cumbersome, but it has great resolution, great dynamic range, reasonably low noise, and lasts forever if stored properly. A true film-replacement electronic camera is still a laboratory curiosity and expensive as hell.
That's an important point. Migraine and eyestrain-induced-discomfort (which is probably mild migraine in many cases) depend on how and what you watch too. Computers use sharp, high-contrast content with repetitive patterns. The eye is constantly moving around in fast, jerky motions. There are incentives to constantly stare at the screen without breaks. This is very stimulating to the visual parts of the brain. (I'm typing this with the lights turned off, wearing sunglasses. Three guesses why.) Reducing flicker is one of the few ways to reduce the irritation.On the other hand, TV and movies have soft edges and low contrast, and the eye does not move much or rapidly. You can look away occassionally without feeling like you're missing something. So the designer can get away with a lot more flicker without pissing off viewers' brains.