That's designed-in dealership work, not the inherent difficulty of the job.

Are Fords ("Fix Or Repair Daily") routinely that bad. Iremember being told that the design of the Maestro (or was it Montego - I give not two shits about cars) included a sub-frame holding transmission and engine together so that changing a clutch absolutely required a multiple-metre long optical alignment jig to get things back together. And that jig was only rented to main dealers, never sold. Designed-in bitchery to repair.

To rephrase what Eunuchswear says - if we got to know that the NSA could decrypt material like this, they'd really be fucked because people would move onwards and upwards to higher grades of encryption.

Or, if there really is no such thing as secure encryption ... what then? Back to coins and personal meetings?

I've had a couple people think they had ot give up on cusing a computer (including my wife) because of W8.

The wife is going through this at the moment. One day she might look beyond windows, but at the moment she just spits and swears at the damned thing.

Microsoft's Marketing division's best move ever. For non-MS operating systems.

if a Bussard ramjet can't be built, how can you salvage one?

He didn't say one couldn't be built, only that one wouldn't work. Which is not what the Wikipedia-linked article said as far as I can see - though it does suggest that Bussard's original proton-proton fusion system may not work as a propulsion system. You might build it for some other reason though - not that I can figure out what that reason might be. Maybe you want to wipe part of the sky clean of interfering interstellar hydrogen for your new super-duper telescope?

Upwards of 80% of every dollar spent at the concessions stand is profit for the theater.

Tough on them. I literally cannot remember when I last brought any sort of beverage or eats at a movie theatre ... OK - now I remember : it was about 1998 and I was taking a girlfriend from a decade earlier out and we had a pint after the movie. Didn't get laid, but then, I wasn't really hoping to.

projects with serious geek cred like Guardians of the Galaxy

Huh? Guardians of the Galaxy has serious geek cred? Seriously?

OK, I'll admit that my only exposure to the advertising for it has been the half second or so needed to recognise it as "advert" and hit the fast-forward button, but I'd got as far as classifying it under "infants space bang flash American crap." Judging from the hype it's receiving, I don't think that's a far-wrong assessment.

I suspect that you and I have different meanings for "geek". And for "credibility". And probably "serious" too.

I started doing this in 2003, by 2006 I was ready to quit it because my house started to resemble a knacker's yard,

You're not a company that specialises in handling old data formats.

But I know what you mean. I was still keeping controller cards and hard drives (do you remember when you had to have a controller card for each hard drive? Before this new-fangled IDE thing.) into the late 1990s when some idiot burglars relieved me of much of the problem. But I still keep a 3.5in and 5.25in floppy drive sitting in a box upstairs (I'd need to build a desktop to use it! And find cables!!) And work has a reel-to-reel tape drive which I know I haven't used since 1996, and I doubt anyone else knows how to use. I suppose I'd better check with Stores to see if that is still in existance and if anyone expects to use it. but we're not in that game either, and it might be better to pass the hardware onto someone who is likely to use it more often (for a consideration - of the "get our ass out of trouble" variety).

Hardware doesn't like sitting dead and quiet.

America is not interested in global issues, since they only affect "foreigners" who are "abroad."

On average, they just don't get that there is an outside world.

Ohhhh, accepted for publication. That is a significant step up, though I haven't yet had time to check out the reviewer's policies at that journal.

Fuck, an AC doing something useful. Thank you mysterious person who is not logged in for some incomprehensible reason.

I suspected that there was an ARXIV somewhere at the root of things, which Pickens hadn't taken the effort to track down. Downloading it to read (because, like, everybody on Slashdot reads the fucking article as closely as possible ot the source, before making stupid, pointless and uninformed comments about it, like wanking onto the biscuit in the middle of the room. (Not sure how that would work for women, but they're vanishingly rare, this being Slashdot.)

I suspect that the original journalist (OK, almost certainly not "original", in any sense ; the most proximate journalist in the chain from submitter to the scientists who originally did the work) is mis-using a literary flourish from a century or so ago when what we now call "galaxies" were frequently described as "island universes."

This was before Hubble (the guy for whom the Hubble Space Telescope was named) demonstrated that
(1) other galaxies are far, far further away than most clouds of stars seen at parallaxable distances from Earth ;
(2) the same physics apply in those distant accumulations of stars as in our corner of the universe (up to the subtle interplay of nuclear physics and optical opacity that controls the oscillation of Delta-Cephii type variable stars);
and (3) those star clouds are receding from us at velocities proportional to their distance fomr us (determined in step (2), above).

The phrase "island universe" was out of favour before world war 2, but still resurfaces in popular work, as I suspect has happened here.

How deep does that rabbit hole have to go before it can't be cited for violating copyright?

In most jurisdictions, it takes a considerably higher standard of evidence to convict one of an offence than it does to cite (i.e. to initiate an investigation by "the authorities") one for that offence.

Because the further down you drill, the more likely it becomes that merely talking about the issue can be ruled illegal, and that should never be permitted.

Will nobody think of the children and jail any people involved in talking about child pornography, as we are doing?

(You may note that I have dleiberately made you a participant in thought crime without involvement on your behalf. Maybe we'll meet on the steps of the gallows? Have a nice day.

When I first started to use Hugin about ... probably 6 years ago ... it was a very manual tool chain (unlike you, my experience is from using it with very little RTFM). I needed to dive back into it about 6 months ago to bolt together a square array of microscope images into a 5x5 array - for work, and where I needed to be able to explain exactly what had been done - and so why straight lines weren't straight. For that, for confidentiality reasons I had to do the work on the client's computer (windoze), not on my own machine Linux, and I had about 6 hours to deliver results in an IT milieu where installing anything takes a minimum of 2-3 days (and approval of new software dypically takes 3-4 months) ... well, lovely environment, but that's the rules I have to work through and around. I get paid for working microscopes, not doing IT arcana. I dived off to PortableApps.com and grabbed the Portablised Windows version, dropped it onto a USB drive, copied that to the secured machine, and got to work.

Is it drag'n'drop? No. Is it MUCH faster and easier than it used to be? Yes. Depending on your subject, the system will often automatically pick control points pairs between images (though you do need to make sure the images are correctly sequenced, particularly for 2d arrays). My photos, being almost abstract, of low contrast, and quite uniform colour really give the control point algorithm ("panostift", IIRC, I don't have bandwidth here to d/l it. Rebuilt laptop, toying with Tor) a hammering, but it still manages to get some points.

"Fully automatic" isn't a good phrase in my lexicon. It might be appropriate if you're taking city-scape panoramas, but I don't waste much time visiting cities unless I'm being paid. Microphotographs come up from time to time at work. Array panels of rock outcrops also need doing too - a few dozen images to document structural complexities.

Long story short - the system has improved a lot over the last few years. If you need to take detailed control of your photo stitching, then its certainly worth a look. I notice (from archaeology work last year, trying to produce 3-d models of archaeological artefacts) that there has been a lot of development in this whole area over the last half-decade or so. Definitely worth a shot.

Since the Hugin tool chain is all open source stuff, I'd be fairly astonished if the M$ people haven't been plundering it for ideas, if not code. Colour me cynical.

The PortableApps version is damned useful - it lives on my "get the fucking job done NOW" hard drive/ tool box. Only gets used every year or so, but when I need it, it's good.

there were technology powerhouse corporations before Apple.

Not true. Apple invented time.

This free Microsoft tool for automatically stiching images together to make a panorama is pretty freaking amazing,

Doesn't sound much of an advance on Hugin. Which is available Free and cross-platform. There are up-to-date portable versions too.

Since I move from system to system, from client to client, that last point is a mega-killer. If it takes 3 months to get a program installed through the IT department, and the project lasts 1.5 months, portability is an essential.