TwinIon

The text wasn't the only demo, nor the only 8K TV I've seen in person, I just thought it was demonstrative of what lengths you have to go to in order to see a meaningful difference. CES show floors are not a great way to evaluate a TV, but I feel pretty comfortable in saying that the leap from 4K->8K is far less noticeable than the jump from from 1080p to 4K. It's absolutely possible to see a difference, but I don't think it's anything people need to get excited about.

That does seem odd. I didn't really love his arc in Agents of Shield, but I think he's a fine actor for the part. The Disney+ Marvel shows seem so much more interesting.

Depending on the distance from the screen, yes. I was at CES a couple years back when some of the first 8K displays were being shown off on the floor. One demo had two very large (I'm guessing 75"-85") screens next to each other. One was 4K and one was 8K, and both had very small text filling most of the screen. The key part of the demo was a very large magnifying glass covering part of each screen, showing that on the 8K one the (magnified) text was super sharp, while the text on the 4K screen was a bit muddled and hard to read, even magnified. Of course, if you took more than a step or two backwards you couldn't tell the difference at all. I think that at standard TV sizes 4K is of questionable value. In my opinion, 8K is pointless.

That sounds like exactly the kind of insanity that is very likely enshrined in law, I don't really know. Either way, it seems like maybe that shouldn't be the case.

That wouldn't surprise me. I also think that it just feels like an impossible task. I don't think he wants to gloss over things like travel times in the same way the show does. At this point, you kinda have to just handwave away how long it takes to travel anywhere in Westeros. Characters appear when they need to, and that's fine. I can't imagine trying to juggle all these storylines, make the basic logistics make any sense at all, and tell a good story. I'd guess he told D&D some pretty basic outlines, but he didn't really know how he'd actually do it. So they're just kinda fudging things in order to mostly keep true to what he had told them.

It's almost hard to understand how this can happen. As the article points out, most of the $2B spent on this drug was from Medicare. How was it that there's not some kind of price control built into Medicare? It seems like a simple rule that says Medicare won't accept a price increase beyond inflation + x% would fix this kind of thing. As long as X is less than 900% it would have caught this. Bribing doctors is almost a completely separate issue. Yeah, it's bad, and yeah, basically everything about how drugs are marketed (to doctors and patients) should be overhauled, but it seems like the core problem here is that raising the price of a drug by 1000% year over year doesn't raise a red flag anywhere. Punish everyone involved here, but also maybe we should make it harder to just jack up the price of medicine for no particular reason.

I read through a bunch of reactions over at r/asoiaf and people are pissed. I think there are plenty of legit gripes to be had, I have a few myself, but people were really unhappy about how this episode went down. I think a lot of it is that some of these storylines tied up in ways that didn't match the expectations they've been building up in their heads for more than a decade.

I get the feeling that Valve built this because it's what they wanted, and not what would actually sell well. I'm bummed about that as well. I haven't personally tried an HMD with those features, but it certainly seems like the kind of thing that would justify a $1000 price tag and be a generational leap. Unfortunately it would probably make the headset by itself cost $1000.

They've only agreed to "try and craft a $2 trillion plan." Great. So they've agreed that they want to figure something out, but they have no clue how to pay for it, which couldn't possibly be a roadblock. If I recall correctly Trump's last plan was mostly made of up tax exemptions and refunds and it was a non-starter for both parties. If this means the Democrats will spend time coming up with a good plan, fine. I don't want to see them take a good plan and blow it up in an attempt to please Trump.

With pre-orders open and a shipping date of May 21st, Oculus Quest reviews are coming in. Road To VR Tom's Hardware Polygon The Verge Engadget Tested The reviews are all on relative agreement on some of the main points. The tracking works very well, the optics are pretty good, and wireless VR is great. It seems that some people had better luck than others with how well it remembered rooms, with some people needing to go through a short setup process before playing again. The audio is fine and the graphics, while nothing to get excited about, are perfectly fine for many games. Battery life is just over 2 hours, which seems fine to me. I'm happy that they included chromecast streaming. I can mirror my PC screen to my living room TV, and having people watch a Beatsaber round or Superhot level really makes it a much more social experience. There are some mixed reactions to the comfort, with some reviewers reporting that it's a bit too front heavy. It seems to me that the biggest differences between reviews are the overall sense of optimism for this platform specifically. At $400 it's a reasonable entry point into VR, but it's not exactly rivaling a traditional gaming platform for value. The graphics are fine, but there's uncertainty as to if they're enough for exciting new games to come to the Quest. It's a rather polished little headset that works really well, but we don't know if the content will be there. As a Rift owner, I'm of two minds with the Quest. I think this is the obvious future of VR form factors. I love the idea of playing anywhere in my home and being able to take it places. Tracking was my biggest fear, and it seems they figured that out, so now there's just a question of processing power and content. If there were more Superhot or Beatsaber quality games, I'd put in my pre-order today. As it stands, it's unclear what other worthwhile games will be coming, and some of the most promising aren't coming to Quest. Still, if I were to recommend VR to most people, it would probably be a Quest.

Valve has finally shown off their new VR HMD, Index. Road to VR has a hands on and all the specs. Where Oculus has decided to reduce friction and price, releasing the new Rift S at $400 with inside out tracking, Valve is pushing in the other direction. The Index is focused on improving the quality of the experience. They're upping the LCD screens to a Vive Pro matching 1440x1600 per eye resolution and with a maximum "experimental" refresh rate of 144Hz. They've also put a lot of effort into the optics, with a two element system that Valve says gives an improved field of view and a larger sweet spot. Where Oculus removed all internal adjustment mechanisms, Valve made it much more complicated, but hopefully it's a worthwhile tradeoff in terms of clarity. The audio solution looks like headphones, but they don't actually touch your ears, instead putting powerful little speakers that over just past your years. R2VR seems to think it's by far the best sounding audio solution in a VR headset so far. The Index uses the long gestating "Knuckles" controllers and their established outside in tracking solution. The headset itself is $500, but the whole kit will cost $1000. Pre-orders start tomorrow. It's interesting to see Valve pushing so far in the other direction, favoring quality of experience over convenience, but I'm not sure it's going to work out for them. R2VR's initial impressions aren't gushing, and I think it's a hard sell to a niche audience. Oculus said they didn't put out a full Rift 2 this year because they felt the tech hadn't sufficiently advanced to feel like a real generational upgrade. The Index might be the proof of that. While it's almost certainly going to be the best VR hardware available, I think it's going to have a rough go of it. The Facebook F8 keynote is happening right now, and it's likely that the Rift S and the much more exciting Oculus Quest go on sale today.

I was holding off on this one until they fixed some of the bigger issues it has, but it seems that if that ever happens, there might not be a player base left. I can't believe Anthem has fewer players than Fallout 76. What a disaster. I wonder if this will be enough for Bioware, or any studios, to take another look at Blizzards' old "we'll release it when it's done" mentality.

On Friday I was looking for tickets to see it again this week and I was surprised how full showings were still. I think we'll see it over perform at least through this coming weekend.

That is an amazing cultural artifact from the 90s. Strange they've kept it on the shelf for so long.

It puts a big screen in a smaller form factor. I think the appeal is quite obvious. There seem to be some pretty significant drawbacks to early implementations, but I feel like folding devices are very much the obvious future.

I don't recall how specific they got, but I thought that everyone North of Winterfell had basically completely evacuated. In episode 1 the Umber kid was just getting more help to get everyone down from Last Hearth. Bear Island is a bit North of even that. Of course, it's an island, and it wasn't directly in the path from Eastwatch to Winterfell, so maybe they didn't evacuate completely. My point being that there just might not be many left from Bear island at all, and it's very unlikely to be anyone in the line of succession. I would guess that makes it just like any other swath of land in the North.

I remember hearing about how some musicians will try out sound mixes in their cars before finalizing the record, with the assumption being that's most people will be listening to it. You push it through the MP3 compression, plug it in with an AUX cable or use bluetooth compression as well, and see how it sounds "in the real world." I feel like they don't go through a similar process on GoT, and they probably should. I have to imagine that when they were mastering this episode on their perfectly calibrated 4K monitors from the nearly raw source, it looked pretty good. They really should have a 2 year old $400 Vizio off to the side that they can watch it through the crazy compression algorithm that everyone will actually see. Movies are one thing, mastering it towards a theatrical experience, but for TV, even TV like GoT, they should take this kind of thing into more consideration. If they did actually do that, it doesn't show.

According to some recent leaks, it seems that the patent drawings may have been rather accurate in what the new RAZR could look like. Given Samsung's recent woes, I wouldn't be surprised if this gets delayed, but if they could get it out and make it work well enough, I certainly see the appeal. I have real doubts that the hinge would be such that I could flick it open, and I'd be hesitant to slam it shut like I did my old RAZR, but it's still pretty nifty.

Anyone else watching Barry? I thought season 1 was very good, and season 2 is pretty great as well. Last night's episode was amazing. It was this crazy surreal shenanigans that really was the best example of it's particular blend of slapstick dark comedy. Really just an incredibly entertaining episode of television.

Yeah. Adding up all the Christians and it's 71%. That seems like the top religion to me.

Did the Dothraki augment their weapons with dragonglass? I guess being on fire should have been useful, but they weren't exactly planning on that.

Agreed. There are so many oddities in Star Wars when it comes to space battles and navigation that don't make a ton of sense. Droids are emotional, sentient beings, who possess the ability to calculate incredible probabilities using very limited data, are able to directly interface with spacecraft or (depending on the droid) use the controls built for humans, yet we very rarely see droids fly ships at all, even though it seems like they should be quite comfortable doing so. I could go on, but in general I think there are a lot of questions about what droids can do and what we see them doing in Star Wars. Also, when it comes specifically to the Holdo maneuver, there are so many unanswered questions that it's pretty easy to assume that her sacrifice wasn't needless. We've never seen a hyperspace ship in Star Wars blow up another ship. Maybe droids have an Asimov-ian law of robotics keeping them from doing it, maybe there was something odd or difficult about this particular task, or maybe she just didn't trust a droid to save the remnants of the rebellion. There are a million possible in universe explanations that hold up just fine. I've been personally critical about the Holdo maneuver and what it means in the geekiest possible terms. (The mass ratio of Holo's ship to the Supremacy is pretty close to mass ratio of an X-wing to an imperial class star destroyer, so...) Still, I don't have a problem with her personal sacrifice.

I don't think this is the case. The data is from the The General Social Survey (GSS), out of the University of Chicago. You can see their questionnaires here. On English Ballot 1, page 121, it starts by asking "What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?" If they say "other religion," they they try to break that out into other Christian denominations, but they include inter or non-denominational Christian as an answer that is seperate from no religion.

I know HBO is still just proud that their streaming platform manages to continue functioning and have no real interest in increasing quality, but good lord their compression continues to suck. How is it no bright mind at AT&T has looked at Netflix's pricing and thought "I bet we could charge more money for the same content if we offer it at a higher quality." It's been almost 7 years since the same complaints were raised about the Battle of the Blackwater. This is the most expensive television show in history, a cultural touchstone that HBO is unlikely to equal. You think Jeff Bezos would allow LOTR to look so bad? I wish there was some way to see it in higher quality. Hell, if they didn't release it Endgame weekend, they could have sold tickets. Anyways, as for the episode itself. I know we've seen a few of these, but I still think it's incredible to get 80min of a battle of this scale on screen. You pretty much can't spend that much of a movie on a single battle. Freaking Endgame, for all it's build up and all it's funding, couldn't spend that much time on one battle. It's amazing that we get something like this at all. I thought the battle itself was fun to watch. I'm long past analyzing the battle strategies on GoT. My interpretation was that the Dothraki just kinda went off on their own, and it wasn't really the plan, but whatever. The lights of their swords going out was a very effective opener. As was the incredible wave of undead breaking on the first lines of unsullied. The mix between epic battle and zombie horror worked well for me. I was continually surprised when characters kept popping up, still alive. I bet there are a dozen points where it felt like they could have killed off a few characters. Grey Worm felt like his time had come every time he was on screen. Brienne could easily have died protecting Jamie, same for the Hound protecting Arya. Hell, when Tyrion said he could be making a difference, I thought he might actually try, and die along the way. For whatever it's worth, the show had done a good job of making me feel like anyone could die at any time. Which is probably why it was almost deflating when so few did. I think the deaths we did get were well done, but were still rather few. I imagine that a lot of the next episode will be about the great cost of this battle; the almost complete loss of the Dothraki and Unsullied, the few remaining wildlings, the last pieces of the armies of the North and the Vale. I can appreciate that we saw those numbers dwindle, but you felt that Rob Stark was winning because he captured Jamie, not because we saw a field of dead Lannisters. The snap wasn't tragic for the loss of all those nice Wakandan soldiers or the trillions of randos that got dusted, it's the loss of those main characters that gives it impact. My first reaction to this battle is that, while thrilling, it didn't take as heavy a toll as it might have because almost everyone was spared. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the wrong call for the larger story (for whatever there is left of it), but I do think that it lacked a certain emotional weight. I was a surprised as anyone that the Night King died, but looking back I suppose I shouldn't have been. This is ultimately a story about human power dynamics. While the army of the dead was an ever-present threat, they really didn't have a significant impact on the politics until very recently. The good guys that fought for the living will be disadvantaged because of their heroism. The people of Westeros won't rally to your cause because of that sacrifice, even if they believe the story. If there's one thing that the show has been consistent about, it's that good deeds don't sow their own rewards, and often end up costing even more.

It's going to be interesting to see what kind of legs it has. I don't feel comfortable predicting it, but I think that this coming week and next weekend are going to continue breaking records. After that, who knows. Every record is up for grabs at this point. $1B domestic seems unlikely, but possible. $3B WW could happen, though I'd be shocked if it ends up below Titanic on the WW all time list.