Only a (former?) SF editor could say that “VR that actually works” is just a mundane instance of “better iterations of the same thing.” While I agree with the general point being made, the widespread appearance of actual, working VR will be a revolution as significant as any we have seen in the last few decades.…

But If(I could do that & yeah but you didn’t) =/=> modern art, either. Turns out there’s a lot of simple stuff that also doesn’t count as modern art either. In fact, like most great art, the vast majority of stuff that looks like art-genre-X is crap, just as most stuff is crap. This logo is an example of something…

This doesn’t even belong on io9, and isn’t even funny as SF. This is akin to speculation that dark matter causes global warming. 99% of experts think both theories are BS. One reason this one is BS is that dark matter doesn’t clump in the plane of the galaxy. One of the primary characteristics of dark matter is that…

Thank you for not headlining "Senate votes to..."!

I don’t do much of it these days, but when I did it, it was because legit streaming TV still looks like crap. I’ve tried all the supposed HD flavors from various streaming sources on a high-bandwidth connection, and it still looks much worse than what the pirates copy off of broadcast TV. The stills usually look ok,…

I really don't understand the hunter mentality. Let's go out into the beautiful outdoors and shoot things that are a thousand times stupider and less equipped than us. Let's spend hundreds of dollars on equipment without which we wouldn't even be able to touch these animals, and then let's romanticize the fact that…

These arguments aren't the greatest, but the most important and realistic argument against nuclear energy is that it has already lost. It's already more expensive than solar or wind when you include insurance costs, and barring some massive new laws where the federal government (ie the taxpayers) adopt even more of…

These things change, though. Remember that water was a government mandate too — no way would the free market have bothered providing it to the poor. A lot of things got more right-wing and anti-government starting in the 80s, but the pendulum has been slowly swinging back. Even the Tea Party, bless their incoherent…

I never judge a book by its cover, author, era, introduction, conclusion, adjectives, or nouns. I prefer to run it first through a NLTK python script to extract the pure grammar, so that I may appreciate the beauty of the sentence construction unencumbered with meaning.

"Or you can convey that the person speaking is feeling grim, by describing something about his or her body language, or the way that their voice drops a register as they speak these words."

it reminds me of how the USA was formed - to escape taxation as one of the main reasons for it

Don't forget micro-sleeps, which can happen throughout the day; moments of distraction where you aren't really conscious, which happen all the time; and on a smaller time-scale, trillions of microseconds where you are surely not conscious. Every conscious moment is someone else thinking they're you.

I like how you take someone worrying about the circumstances of other people, people they don't even know, and frame it as making it all about themselves.

As a big fan of CJA, I must say, this is the first essay where I've vociferously disagreed with the premise. I'm certainly not one to say that books can be about anything the reader wants — books have meanings, and some readings are much more accurate than others. But the idea that these books aren't really about X,…

In the meantime I just fake it — my TV does a very nice frame interpolation with very few artifacts — certainly far fewer that are generated by 24fps movies with their judder and blur. Obviously there's not as much detail as a true HFR video would have, but it still makes everything much smoother.

I understand people who think someone asking a question should look it up. I even somewhat understand being an ass about it and going through the effort of telling someone to look it up, although why people do that rather than just ignoring the question in the first place I don't entirely get. But the people who…

Under what definition of "accurate" is frame interpolation not more accurate? It may be not what the director intended or what you aesthetically prefer, but it is certainly more accurate, in the sense that it more closely resembles what real life looks like.

I'm looking forward in a few years to the gun nuts explaining how one sentence written about militias by a bunch of 200-years-dead white guys means that everyone has the unalienable right to print and carry machine guns.

I've thought this about photos too. Each year we get slightly more megapixels, and for the most part have long surpassed what our screens can display. We stare at these images that are colorful and high-contrast, but lack real resolution. In the old days even a nice 4x6 had way more sharpness. And I grew up viewing…

I don't see any stuttering or artifacts when I watch Amazon Prime, but I don't think I've ever seen anything running at higher than around 15 fps. And that includes stuff I've downloaded from Bittorrent in an effort to get a better version; eg, Transparent was just as low-fps when recorded by god-kn0ws-who, though…