"only a minuscule proportion of the sensory data processed by the unconscious mind (capable of processing approximately 11 million bits per second) is referred to the conscious mind (capable of processing approximately 50 bits per second)."
By that measure, a two-hour movie can be compressed down to 22.5 kilobytes... :-)
Making it easier for a post to hit the frontpage might be desirable to reward people for interacting with the "new submissions" page - if it only needs 3 votes, there is a much higher likelihood of instant gratification.
Might be something to build into the next algorithm.
Mexico's problem is in essense, that outside market pressure makes its inhabitants behave in a way that is at odds with keeping up a state under the rule of law.
As a thought experiment, think what would happen if Mexico made drugs legal. Their government would had to fight against the cartels, and might at some point win.
What you have then is a system where Mexico has much less criminality. They can't export to the US directly of course, but people will just buy drugs legally in the Mexican north and try to smuggle it the the US. The US can decide for themselves if they want to legalize it or not, and if they don't the US criminality is still there, but the Mexican criminality is gone.
Well what would likely happen then is another 1989 Panama. One of the main reasons why the US invaded Panama was its involvement in drug trade. So the US would criticize Mexico publicly, and at some point probably invade it.
It looks to me like current time Mexico is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They must be opposed to drugs because their powerful northern neighbor wants them to, but outside market pressure, from the very same neighbor at the same time destabilizes it.
So it's an issue that should be solved by an outside party - the US. But that party won't tackle the issue because Mexican people can't vote in the US.
The problem with the 48fps solution that Peter Jackson went with is that it is using a 48fps 360° shutter. Let me quickly explain.
Traditional film production uses 24fps with a 180° shutter: a film frame gets exposed for half of 1/24th of a second, and then during the other half of that 1/24th of a second, nothing is exposed. We learned to associate the motion artifacts produced that way as looking "film-like".
With digital camera, you can easily crank that up to a 360° shutter: each frame gets exposed for a full 1/24th of a second. Some films used 24fps 360° for selected scenes, and people immediately said that it looked "like TV". A fair response, since TV always had similar motion artifacts.
Now when PJ moved to a higher frame rate, he could have said "let's make sure we get a 180° degree shutter look for both 24fps and 48fps by filming at 96fps, then for every 4 frames, combining frames 1+2 to get traditional 24fps 180° footage, and using frames 1+3 to get a comfortable 24fps 180° (frame 4 would get thrown away in the process). PJ mainly uses Red Epic cameras that go up to 120fps, so this would have been no problem.
Instead, PJ went with filming at 48fps and a 360° shutter. This resulted in normal looking 24fps 180° footage, and very TV-like looking 48fps 360° footage for those cinemas that support 48fps. For me, this whole mess is just an unfortunate lack of good testing in pre-production.
Let's hope that James Cameron recognizes these issues and shows everybody how it's done properly by using the 96fps solution while filming Avatar 2.
Buckyballs are just magnets of a certain material, shape, and size. There are countless shops on- and offline that sell the exactly same product, among other types, shapes and sizes, to consumers and professionals, sometimes to both.
How is the CPSC planning to implement this ban? Prohibit this exact combination? Or ban everybody that sells them in a package that looks vaguely toy-like? Are they ok if the packaging looks boring and industrial? Where do they draw the line? The CPSC is going to have a lot of explaining to do.
As far as I know, there are a lot of Facebook apps that ask for more privileges than they need. The question is, why doesn't facebook look at the app, its requested privileges and reject them if they ask for too much? This would prevent the most egregious problems, and make MyPermissions unnecessary.
Since the speed of light doesn't change in real life, and there is no answer at what speed a changing speed of light would propagate in real life, does it really matter how it's implemented in this game? My guess is that they took the easiest route and made it change instantaneously for the whole world.
A year ago, Apple was asked whether the iPhone 4 or even the 3GS will get Siri. They said no, to do good voice search, you need advanced tech - several microphones, special noice canceling DSPs, fast processors - so get out and buy a new iPhone.
Well, I just did the test. Google voice search on a 40 month old iPhone 3GS is more responsive and much more precise than Siri on the latest and best 1 month old iPhone 5.