neona

I agree, this talked about none of the things I was hoping it would talk about.

I've always assumed that breakfast was said to be important because it improves various facets of functional performance, not because of weight loss. Maybe general body health from spreading out digestive load.

I've always wondered whether breakfast has an impact on performance throughout the day, or just the morning. It seems fairly obvious that you'll be more tired if you don't eat breakfast though.

I have to say, splitting things up makes me think of the whole Netflix-Qwikster thing - pointless brand splitting that does little more than confuse and frustrate consumers.

I do like the new logo though.

4% is an average anyway. There are absolutely people in the US that must spend a notable portion of their income on food. I'm not in the best of situations, and I generally end up spending 20-30% on food, and I don't even eat enough.

Food is already hard enough to get for many Americans.

Another non-obvious change would be the elimination of minimum wage, which would improve corporate profits, which should (theoretically, at least) increase the taxes they pay.

As someone who's worked retail in america, this is entirely unsurprising. I didn't sell furniture for the most part, but it's probably consistent with my experiences.

This has little to do with defective products. People just expect to be able to return any product they don't like, or if they got the wrong one, or for whatever arbitrary reason. I would always be asked by customers if they could return it if they didn't like it, and they were always dismayed to learn that we generally only took returns if the product was defective. I lost more than a few sales that way.

My guess is that this comes from two things. First, most people are wholly uninterested on doing any product research. They want to just buy something that seems right, and then just take it back if they don't like it. Second, some stores will accept returns so readily (sometimes even of merchandise not actually sold by that chain!) that customers now expect it from everyone. Khol's is particularly notorious for this - we joke that their return policy is "yes."

I hope we see an increase in real software parallelism, since that's the only real way out of this for the foreseeable future. Tacking on more cores is still an option we have, we're just having trouble using them right now in many contexts.

In the longer term, we'll hopefully see advancements that let us fundamentally change how logic processors are constructed, such as possibly photonic logic chips. Only a major shift will let us break through the current single-thread performance wall.

Retail, going to start school soon instead.

I don't feel like finding the source, but iirc one of the articles covering this mentioned that they actually managed to grow a penis before they did vaginas, so that is indeed very good news for transmen. Whether it's been actually attached to someone successfully is a different question of course..

A tangential, but this complexity is one reason I think that sales tax should largely be abolished in favor of rolling it into income taxes. The only context it makes much sense in is taxing various luxuries. Beyond that, it's confusing, adds administrative overhead, and discriminates towards those with lower incomes.

At least to me, the issue is more that Facebook is not who I want developing these technologies.

I think facebook is going to eventually use this to create a modern connected virtual world. Which is something I dearly want. I just don't want it controlled by facebook.

In the short term I don't think facebook will screw Oculus up, however.

CCP might make more sense, but they still don't really have technology for building these sorts of worlds. I deeply respect them, and think that they probably have more appropriate tech to offer than most, but I think that one of the most important parts of virtual worlds is Second Life's original killer feature - content creation, which is something they have little experience in.

The ability for anyone to create is powerful, as recent games like minecraft have shown. Second Life just never kept up with technology, and now the best ways to create content for it involve the use of modeling software with a high barrier to entry. (Of course, it's terrible in many other ways, but that's a separate discussion).

If someone can build a virtual world platform from the ground up, with tightly integrated content creation that is intuitive (maybe something like sketchup), and all in-world, it would be very powerful.

I've actually been wanting to build just such a platform for a long time, but learning 3d graphics isn't the easiest thing out there :)

I hope not. Secondlife is a terrible and dated piece of software. For a serious virtual world, they'll need something a lot more modern and robust.

Ow, my eyes.

I've actually wanted to build something like this for a while, but with something a bit more.. modern than secondlife/opensim. Firestorm is a great project, but second life is so badly engineered at its core that using opensim seems like a terrible idea.

There should probably be a way be a way to contact you, if you're going to invite people to message you.

It would be interesting to see a pixelart/emulator scaler that was temporally aware - that is, able to use context from near or all relevant sprite frames to get additional detail/context. This would require a compositing emulator, as some others have discussed, but I could see it producing notably superior results, given it would have much more source data to work with.

While I can certainly agree that people can have relative value, and even agree that a disparity of four orders of magnitude might just be possible on occasion (though overall i'm skeptical of that claim), I think we're confusing skill/value to society vs value in terms of money one can extract via their skills/etc.

Generally, at the high end of skill, skill increases linearly, but financial reward can sometimes increase exponentially with it.

While someone may be 100x more skilled than someone else, this can result in them making 10,000x as much money as them. Is that fair? I'm not sure. Certainly some amount of potential reward is helpful, as it may drive some to pursue skill and benefit society as a whole, but I think It's grown out of proportion.

True, it's an imperfect solution, but it was an example. Of course robots are inevitable for such menial tasks.

Honestly, while I think many out there have earned their money, this stops at a certain point. It's just not reasonable to think someone is 10,000x more valuable than someone else. That's just ridiculous.

Even beyond this, I see little proof that individuals having absurd amounts of money is in any way beneficial to society, at least on any consistent basis.

To be perfectly honest, I almost feel that there should be a legislated maximum income disparity within a company to reduce the insanity that can happen. Maybe something like no employee may make more than 100 times what another employee makes in terms of net hourly compensation. 100 times is still an absolutely massive disparity, and yet this would improve things. Want to pay your CEO more? Give your janitors a raise.

I wouldn't say more options so much as societally-encouraged options. It's a lot more conforming to expectations to be attractive than it is to be a hacker, so it's easy to leave the less-accepted things by the wayside in a pressuring society.

Generally not. I work in retail and we're not really supposed to take PC games back, though this is often fudged.

Console games we'll take back if our disk tester says they're faulty.

It's too bad it's too expensive to be relevant for people who rely on bike transportation for financial reasons (at least, in much of america) :(

I'd love one, but it seems silly to spend that much on my bike.

Similar situation here, my only problem is that while I am able to (barely) sustain myself, depression and similar issues are continuing to stymie what attempts I can make to better my situation. I honestly don't know what I think these days, other than that something needs to change, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm not as much of the problem as I like to tell myself.

8pen is neat, but i'm still not entirely convinced it can be that fast an input method. I've started using it semi-recently (last month or so), as it seemed better than using a touchscreen keyboard (swype is an okay solution, but I prefer to avoid imprecise input when possible).

I'm getting faster, but it seems that I will need to dedicate a fair bit more time to it before it will be that practical as an input method.

I really wish companies would just continue making nice phones with hard keyboards, would make my life easier. :(

You'll hopefully be able to choose based on preference, since choice seems to be the theme here.

I always liked Halo a lot more on PC, so that's pretty subjective.

I'd say that Genres built for a gamepad, such as platformers, feel much better on a gamepad, but shooters still feel best with a more precise and fast device. Sure you can design around it to make it suck less, but in the end you still need to add in aim assist to make it an enjoyable experience (as pretty much all console shooters do).

I really do hope you're right on the trackball bit, though i'm sure a lot of other people would hate it..

At this point, unless you care a lot about keeping graphics high, I wouldn't be too surprised if you could keep a decent computer for at least 4 years. Even more so if you didn't care about resolution/played games at low resolutions (keep in mind, consoles have run games at 720p or less for the past 7 years!).

The thing is that most people who're willing to deal with pc gaming also care enough to upgrade more often, so a lot of the cost is self-imposed.

This, so much this.

The problem with poverty is often not that you have no excess income, but that you have so little (or should have none, but sacrifice some food to have some) that you're exhausted and can't help but want what little luxury you can afford.

It's easy to say that if someone was better disciplined they could save what little extra they have and make something of it in the long run, but it's very different to actually be in that situation and have the resolve to do that.

You can be smart enough to know you're being irresponsible and keep doing it, which just makes it that much more painful, but many aren't even smart enough to be aware of this.

This does not mean that giving people in this situation additional means would always be a total waste; often, people just want/need a certain baseline, and beyond that will use additional means to lift themselves up.

The problem is that this is comparing apples to oranges.

Things also cost more in the US than in many places with lower incomes, so it's not fair to say "But people in country x make lots less money, so our poor people aren't /real/ poor people."

Beyond this most social programs people mention are harder the be eligible for than one might think. The only thing that pretty much any US citizen will be consistently eligible for if they have a low enough income is food stamps. Most other programs require having kids or a disability to be eligible for.

And to be poor enough to get much out of food stamps, you're likely to be in a situation where you're struggling to afford a place to live and associated costs, even with food stamps factored in.