That is absolutely correct, Plato's vision was a monstrous police state nightmare that did more to inhibit the development of Western civilization than any other single factor. When people talk of elitism and "rule by the enlightened" what they really mean is, effectively, a new branding for totalitarianism and disregard for the individual.

"Joe Sixpack" might be a nuclear engineer, brain surgeon, or astronaut - i.e. much smarter than you or your typical code monkey - who just doesn't care about the details of the OS, and just wants a simple solution to his annoyance.

Insulting them and thinking because you know how cookies work and they don't makes them an object of derision is why IT and computer people are held in such low esteem.

    Grow up, script kiddie.

The default color settings on most current TVs I have seen is blown out to comic proportions. That is, oversaturated to the point that the colors are "blocked". that is, there is no resolution, it's just "max red" or "max blue". Most of the time the color saturation has to be turned down substantially to prevent this.

      I am not sure what you are getting at with the hostility, I know this is slashdot but you seem to be taking it to the next level.

Not long ago at all. And it wasn't just the resolution, it was noise, color bleed, airplanes flying over, the wind, etc. Color bleed and color accuracy was utterly *abysmal* on analog, most of the time black-and-white was more tolerable. Now, you can get cartoon colors, but can be adjusted to give nearly perfect if you turn down the saturation enough

I am a pretty old guy and I don't know anyone who said or thought that, 2 seconds of HD viewing can prove it ridiculously false. to the point that viewing TV is a fundamentally different process. Baseball and Hockey on HD is transformational, you aren't picking up any small details in the good old days.

Size may better point, spreading the same pixels over a larger area means they are bigger, and depending on the viewing distance absolutely *does* make a difference, you do not need a study to tell you that. That is where the 4K or 8K *does* make a difference. What they are saying, really, is the same thing that Apple figured out long ago - the pixel dimensions at the viewing distance only has to be smaller than a cone or rod cell in your retina, that is the limit beyond which is it no longer important..

Hanoi, eh?

That's just the direct cost, there is also massive administrative overhead that is spread across the entire range of shows, At one time it was far more than 10 people/hour on indirect cost and I doubt that is has gotten better since I last figured it out.

Yes - forcing women into the workplace diluted the labor pool.

No, it is about football, you know, the sport that's played worldwide with your feet and a ball by children, homosexuals, and foreigners .

      FTFY

A slashdot article with the phrase "tiny nose robots" in the title. My life is complete.

I am not sure why you say it is "particularly useless". It's not appropriate for storing large amounts of raw data. It is probably the best electronic format for storing actual documents, that is, things like engineering reports and analysis that have to be rendered properly and are primarily intended to be read by a person. It's still not nearly as good/safe as actual paper but if your application cannot tolerate math symbols showing as random font-substituted garbage, then it's about the only game in town.

We pass data files as text or FORTRAN binary, not PDF. We archive engineering reports as PDF, TIFF scans - or, the best, actual paper in a file cabinet, which so far has proven far and away the most reliable. PDF is hardly immune to corruption issues itself, depending on how you do it, it ALSO attempts to OCR or somehow convert information into something, and invariably corrupts the document. If it's not searchable, fine, at least it is *correct*.

Right, it is more-or-less making images of each page. That's also the appeal of it, in that you don't ruin the formatting or render something incorrectly because you don't have a particular font, or some other local feature required to make something like WORD work. Even just the "font substitution" bug alone is enough to make people want to use PDF, and I haven't heard any better solution for archival documents.

We had a Platinum-level trouble ticket with MS for the font substitution issue, they concluded it was insoluble and that to keep our documents from getting corrupted, that we print it on paper, scan it as a TIFF, and save the TIFFS.

Aside from paper - which works fantastically well for this purpose, from the many examples I have at hand - I still don't see an answer that keeps searchable electronic documents intact over time and program version changes. And certainly not that are WYSIWYG when creating it in the first place. Various typesetting programs, - TeX and LaTex, formerly Runoff, etc, are just as prone to bit rot over version changes over many years/decades and also *torturous to use in the first place*.