Government is almost irrelevant, it's just another tool. As long as humans remain social creatures, and more than 2 of them exist, inequality must exist.

Just about any camera over say $50, is going to be light years better than a cellphone camera.

Only buy an interchangeable lens camera if:
1. You've already spent significant time with a prosumer camera(Canon s100/Panasonic lx5/other large sensor compact cameras), and you have run into their limitations.
2. You plan to spend many times more money on lenses, than you did on the camera itself.
3. You're absolutely sure you want to lug it, and all of it's lenses and accessories, around with you everywhere you might want to take pictures.

Excluding telephoto ranges, a prosumer camera, with it's matched optics is going to perform as well or better than a low to medium end DSLR or other interchangeable lens camera, and do so for a lot less money.

If you really really need telephoto type ranges, then you'll have to settle for the limitations of a pro-/con-sumer super-zoom, or spring for, and lug around, an interchangeable lens camera. In some cases a better option is to buy the equipment to hook up a pro-/con-sumer camera to a spotting scope. In any case, even a consumer super-zoom will still be way way way better than a cell phone camera.

And I will echo, that the only current mirrorless camera system, that might be worth the money, is probably the Sony.... But I hear it lacks for great lenses. And ugh, it's Sony....

I would say, if you just want a camera to take "good" pictures with, in decent to great photographic conditions, buy a super zoom of some sort. If you also definitely want to try your hand at really learning how to take pictures, then either give up the super-zoom, for a small prosumer camera. Or... buy both. Even together, they'll take up less space and weight, than a single decent DSLR or micro-4/3rds telephoto lens. And with 2 cameras, you'll have a backup in case one breaks.

In theory, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, has access to sufficiently comprehensive statistics, such that they would be able to see an effect. Even if only a very small percentage of drivers paid attention to the various bans on cell phone use while driving.

Since they don't see an effect, then it's almost certain that the actual effect of cellphone use on vehicles accidents is very very small.

Which explains why so many cell phones bans have been passed, but yet they aren't being enforced. It's just a bunch of feel-good measures that help the politicians look good, without accomplishing anything important. And so long as they don't enforce them, there won't be any significant backlash, so there's no downside.

No, 7 is Vista 1.1. Of course I actually like Vista, it's only significant flaw was that it was too piggish on old hardware. I never ran it on old hardware.

I think Microsoft should've used what little clout they have, and released Vista as a 64-bit only OS. A small side-effect would've been no one running it on ancient hardware and claiming it was too slow. It's well past time for 32-bit to die die die, especially on the desktop.

Not to say that the patent owner hasn't been a pain to deal with. But, the Toyota Prius uses NiMH batteries. They're far from the best batteries for storage/weight ratio. But once you factor in operational lifetime, they're about as good as it gets at the moment.

It ENTIRELY depends on who you target.

If you crack, or even are ever so slightly suspected of having cracked some Fortune 500 or gov computer, and the admins/management of such don't like you, then you might go to jail.

But if you put a key logger onto some grandma's computer, and max all her credit cards, and drain her bank account, the police and FBI will just about completely ignore her if she files a report.

Small business owner? Probably the same as the grandma, medium sized business owner? Maybe you can get someone to pay attention if you inflate your "losses" enough.

And that is one of the big huge glaring problems with all of these computer security laws. What happened to equal protection under the law?

A few years back, I had my HVAC blower motor replaced with a GE Evergreen ECM motor. AFAIK, ECM motors are basically DC motors with AC conversion circuitry. Since I run the blower all the time, to help equalize temperature throughout the house, it's probably already paid for itself. It's roughly 30% more efficient than a comparable AC motor. In addition, it is significantly quieter than the motor it replaced.

It seems likely similar DC motors would work in pretty much all household appliances, though they may not have the same efficiency gains in all applications. So, it just comes down to economics, if it becomes cheaper to go to DC distribution in homes, then it will happen.

Accidentally deleting things, is usually fixable, as long as you immediately stop writing new things to that filesystem. Search for undelete tools for whatever platform and filesystem you use.

Relatively speaking 48 cores on a single board has been "affordable" since Magny Cours launched a bit around a year ago. And the new G34 Bulldozers, can give you 64 cores using the same motherboards. Even if you discount the huge 4 socket boards, the 2 socket G34 boards will give you 24-32 cores.

So 16 cores is certainly not some sort of upper bound at the moment. The only thing keeping it out of sub 1k desktop computers is price. And that'll come down in a die shrink or 2. No fundamental new design required.

Almost all of the hardware going into the Top500 clusters these days is standard off the shelf components. So, I'd tend to agree with the OP, it is kind of ho hum to add 10k new cores to an existing cluster, or to build yet another cluster with a nearly identical architecture to 100 others that came before it. It just requires money, and the will to spend it.

I'll second ZFS. Set up a 4, 6, or 10 disk raidz2(comparable to raid6) or a 5, 7, or 11 disk raidz3(3 "parity" drives). Raidz1(1 "parity" drive), and the similar raid5, are both too fragile for today's huge disks.

ZFS does checksumming of all sectors it stores, and you can have it verify those checksums to test data integrity at any time by running a scrub, it's a good idea to run 1-4 scrubs a month.

I currently run a Freebsd 8.2, 10 disc raidz2 array in one box, which is backed up over rsync to a linux box on to standalone xfs and/or ext3 formatted disks. The filesystems are served to various windows/linux/etc boxes and VMs using Samba and NFS. After having zero problems with the zfs box, over the past year, I'm planning to build a 2nd ZFS box(probably FreeBSD again, though I might try out a Solaris based distro first). This'll let me start using ZFS syncs, which will let me keep the full snapshotting history on both machines. If that works for a year or more, I'll retire and re-use the linux box components.

If possible use server grade hardware to build said boxes, supermicro/tyan/etc. motheboards, hot swap bays(Norco cases are a good way to get a lot of bays cheap), etc. Or at the very least run an AMD AM3 system that supports ECC ram(that's what my Linux box currently is). And put the box(es) on a UPS(Uninteruptible Power Supply), and configure auto-shutdown at low battery.

When you run ZFS you do not need or want a hardware raid controller, it'll just get in the way. I've had good luck with various LSI HBAs. The older 1068 based cards(br10i,3081-8, 3082-8,etc.) are cheaper but don't support 2.5TB and larger drives. The newer 92xx cards(9240-8,9211-8,m1015,etc.) are a bit more but they have full support for 3-4+ TB hdds.

Do you have an estimate for the time and materials cost, required to design, build, and launch Qu8k?

At those bitrates, with a decent encoder, you should not be able to hear a difference in the vast majority of tracks, even with golden ears.

The only way to know for sure that you can hear a difference, is with a blind ABX test of volume normalized samples. One easy way to perform such a test, is with foobar2k and it's foo_abx plugin.

I have an HP calculator emulator on my PC as well, but my muscle memory doesn't work with it. So it doesn't flow nearly as well. I supposed if I worked with it a lot more I might get better... But, if I do similar things on a PC I just pop up Matlab or a Ruby prompt or similar.

Mine's a 48sx, it's probably 18-19 years old. I had a GX for a while, but it's screen cracked. It used to go everywhere with me, though now it lives on my desk. I probably only use it on average once a week though. I keep looking at the newer HP calculators, but it sounds like none of them quite match the ergonomics of the early 90s models.

I don't consider it's use to be nostalgic though. It's still an excellent quick and easy to use calculating tool. Now if I were still developing programs for it... that would be pretty nostalgic.

Another annoyance with chrome search, as soon as you navigate off of the current page, the search panel closes. Both FF and IE leave the panel open, which is much more convenient when you want to repeat the same search on a group of linked pages.