1. Start writing new automated tests for the existing features of the application.

2. Run them against the original, unmodified code.

3. When your changes break the tests, work out what *you* did wrong, before you commit your changes.

How can you get anything done if you don't find out quickly that you broke something?

$900 payout + first home owners boost + NBN + solar rebate + insulation rebate + school building program.....

Every stimulus program Labour started put money directly in tax payers pockets. All of them together had a huge impact on our economy.

Personally I'd say the first home owners boost had the biggest long term impact as it encouraged people to buy just as our housing bubble was starting to burst. Though prices started to fall / stagnate after the boost ended, the housing market is heading upwards again. Without that boost, housing prices could have plummeted and triggered all kinds of strife through banks and investment funds that were exposed.

The housing bubble will eventually burst though. It's just a matter of time.

And yet Australia, which gave cash to tax payers instead of bank managers, did even better. But even though Australia completely avoided a technical recession, all they have done is delay the inevitable.

When you start modelling money and debt, global economies still look very sick indeed.

And how many times has malware started to take advantage of bugs that Microsoft just patched?

There are people who examine every change to find the backdoors that have been closed so they can attack them on unpatched machines. Do you think they'd ignore a backdoor that was just opened?

That's great, but you can't. I mean, sure you can reallocate spending to more productive long term investments. But government spending is private sector income. If you unilaterally cut spending in the middle of this volatile financial crisis, it will be like 1937 all over again. In 1937, they believed that the depression was over and the "New Deal" spending initiatives should be rolled back. Almost immediately unemployment started to rise, and GDP fell plunging the economy back into recession.

What eventually helped the US out of the Great Depression? WWII spending. This finally reduced the level of private debt to serviceable levels. While increasing industrial capacity and output. We're not going to get out of this financial situation until we learn the lessons of history.

Input events are usually time-stamped by the operating system interrupts that captured them. On network games, these timestamps can be used by the server to work out after the fact who shot first. While pro-gamers like to say that frame rates higher than the monitor refresh rate help them win. I have yet to see a double blind study to confirm that it actually helps.

Usually network latency is a much bigger and more noticeable problem for this type of after the fact simulation. But the process can be applied equally well to local input events.

No, the frame rate doesn't matter. Sure you don't want to drop below 60fps. But that doesn't mean you need to render more than 60fps.

Above 60fps, without waiting for vsync, only a fragment of your rendered frame can possibly be displayed. I have wondered if graphics drivers can take advantage of this to only run the final fragment shader passes for the fragment of the screen that will be drawn.

Looking at those graphs, for those games, the current open source driver is running above the refresh rate of most monitors.

So while the catalyst driver may be faster, in some cases doubling the frame rate, I highly doubt you'd actually notice the difference.

What you want, is a first pass which identifies some interesting points in the image. Similar to microsoft's photosynth. Then you can compare this greatly simplified data for similar sets of points. Allowing you to ignore the effects of scaling or cropping.

A straight hash won't identify similarities between images, and would be totally confused by compression artefacts.