While it's unsurprising given that the current Unreal Engine is still in active development and a ton of commercial games are still being developed and shipped using it, it's worth pointing out that this isn't a source code release; instead, it's something much closer to an elaborate mod engine, with generous swaths of behavioral scripting but no real ability to get 'under the hood' as it were. Still, kudos to Epic for this; it'll be interesting to see who picks up the ball and runs with this.

Especially in a case like this, where there are other tightly-correlated variables. Why is the authors' presumption that it's the cosmic rays (or lack thereof) that are regulating tree growth, rather than solar and sunspot activity itself? It seems at least as plausible to me that sunspot activity correlates to some other solar features (e.g., solar irradiance) that would have a more natural and direct effect on tree growth than cosmic rays.

Strictly speaking, there aren't any seriously new methods of multiplying numbers here; even the techniques they use for handling multiplicands larger than the computer's memory (sectional FFTs, using the Chinese Remainder Theorem to solve the problem by reducing modulo a lot of small primes) are pretty well-established from things like computations of pi, with this group offering a few improvements to the core ideas. What they did provide, and what sounds particularly promising, is a library (judging from the article, likely even open-source) for handling bignums like this that they've made available for general use. It'll be interesting to see if anyone else picks up this ball and runs with it.

...depending on your moral stance; the company (which unfortunately owns a host of major computer book publishers, most notably Academic Press, Digital Press and Morgan Kaufmann) has had a small host of scandals, mostly concerning exorbitant journal fees and 'sponsored' pharmaceutical journals (they were the publisher behind the Merck Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine scandal, if you recall that). MK and AP publish some of the finest books in the industry, which makes this that much harder a moral stand to take, but it's worth evaluating how you feel about the publisher before you consider going down that route.

Despite waning console sales, orders for PS3-related hardware have risen sharply.

'related' is an odd word to see there; what 'PS3-related' hardware would this be, and where's the evidence for this random assertion? Is this meant to imply that Sony's suppliers are getting more orders for some of the hardware used to build the PS3 (which could mean more PS3s in the pipeline but could also be wholly unrelated), or just a consolist claim that Sony is doing better than its sales figures would indicate?

...that Google licenses this to scanner manufacturers and we see this at a consumer level at some point in the future? I know I'd pay good money for a book scanner that doesn't need to have a 'book edge' (which you already have to pay through the nose for)...

The Apple ][ version (and probably others, but that's the one I played) of Karateka had my favorite Easter egg ever: while there was nothing to indicate this, the original floppy was two-sided. Inserting the floppy upside-down would bring up another copy of the game, identical in every way -- except that it was flipped over (and inverted left-to-right, IIRC); title screen, all of the character's movements and animation, scores, all of it. It may not have taken that much effort to do, but it's brilliant in its simplicity.

Nonsense. The non-software side of software engineering -- project planning, development methodologies and the like -- may be divorced from Computer Science, but modern CS has a deep and lengthy relationship with modern programming practice and software design. Formal correctness principles (and proofs!) inspire type-safety, functors/functionals come from recursion theory (with a small splash of category theory), generic programming also has deep roots in category theory and denotational semantics... and that's without ever getting into the algorithms that are still at the heart of modern software. All the finest engineering principles still wouldn't have produced something like PageRank without developers who had an intimate knowledge of Linear Algebra and Markov Theory.

What are your relevant browsers (and platforms), and what is Flash giving you that couldn't be achieved with (a) good CSS and DOM scripting code talking to a back-end server, or in a worst-case scenario, (b) Java running on the user's system? Yes, the latter requires a user install, but so does Flash itself -- neither Firefox nor IE comes with it pre-installed...