So let me get this straight. We're paying billions upon billions and sacrificing our constitutional rights to guard our airports from purely theoretical terrorist threats. Meanwhile, we're cutting funding for satellites that warn us about very real weather threats. Glad to see we've got our priorities straight.

When driving, for example, it is next to impossible to resist answering the phone when it rings.

I have a proven, reliable algorithm for not answering the phone when it rings, either while driving, or in a movie theater, or even while coding. Here it is, in all its unpatented glory:

1. Step 1: Don't answer the phone

Works every time!

Not even that. Just a couple months ago, I spent two days trying to get Ubuntu 10.04 to run at the native resolution of my bog standard 19" monitor, and finally concluded that it's either not possible, or so obscure that I'll never figure it out. Not doing anything fancy or unusual here, just trying to use an LCD that was lying around the office on the cheap on-board video card this machine came with. At this point, Linux on the server is great, but I've pretty much given up on Linux as a client OS. Even the "easy to use" distros don't even have the basics in place.

Now that 4.0 allows you to background a VOIP app and still place and receive calls, what's stopping you from installing a VOIP client on your iPod Touch and telling Google Voice to use that number?

The main characters take down a technically far superior alien species by exploiting a security vulnerability to upload a virus on to the mothership. Since the entire alien fleet is networked together (and apparently unfirewalled), the virus spreads to and disables the entire fleet in just moments. Since that movie was made, we've started to look a lot more like that alien race: one giant global network that many, many systems are linked to one way or another. The lesson is that, just like those aliens, lax security can allow our infrastructure to be shut off in an instant by a single malicious program if it can spread unchecked through the network. Moral: SCADA systems don't belong on the Internet.

I use my MacBook Pro for full time software development and system administration, plus web browsing, email, chat, ebooks, and playing Starcraft 2 with friends. Even with SC2, a Windows virtual machine, and a handful of dev tools, I'm still only sitting at 46 GB of used space. Source code doesn't really use up much storage, and I don't do graphics, audio, or video work. I don't even own any high def movies, much less carry them around on my laptop. At this rate, the 120 GB of space on my SSD should easily outlive the laptop. Meanwhile, replacing the stock hard drive with an SSD has had a much larger impact on system performance than most of the upgrades I've done over the years.

Thank you!

That's how we know he's a terrorist!

Thanks! I had never even considered the branching issue, but that does make a lot of sense.

Yes, exactly. CPUs are built from the ground up to do scalar math really, really fast. That lends itself well to doing tasks that must be performed in sequence, such as running an individual thread. However, they've only recently gained the ability to do more than one thing at a time (dual core processors), and even now high end CPUs can only do six calculations at once (6 core processors).

Meanwhile, GPUs are built to do vector math really, really fast. They can't do individual adds anywhere near as fast as a CPU can, but they can do dozens of them at the same time.

Which type of processor is best for which job depends entirely on the nature of the math involved and how parallelizable the task is. In the case of 3D graphics, drawing a frame involves tons of vector arithmetic work, which is why your 1 GHz GPU will run circles around your 3 GHz CPU for that task (and is also where the GPU gets its name from). In the case mentioned in the article, password cracking is highly parallelizable: you've gotta run 100 million tests, and the outcome of any one test has zero influence on the other tests, so the more you can run at the same time, the better. By running it on the GPU, each individual test will take a bit longer than running it on the CPU would, but you'll be able to run dozens simultaneously instead of just a few, and will thus get your results much faster.

CPUs certainly have their place, though. Some tasks simply must be done in sequence and cannot be easily divided up in to seperate parallel tasks. The CPU will get these done much faster, since running them on the GPU would incur the speed penalty without realizing any benefit.

I've simplified it a bit for the sake of explanation, but that's the gist of it. Hope that helps!

[Citation Needed]

Blizzard only allows one authenticator per account at the moment, but I believe they are planning on changing that.

As for losing your authenticator, when you first add the authenticator to your account, they tell you to write down the authenticator's serial number, keep it secret, and store it in a safe place. (For software authenticators, the "serial number" is randomly generated the first time you launch the app). If you lose the authenticator or it quits working, you can supply that number and the answer to your secret question to remove the authenticator from the account without calling support.

Another big factor to my mind is the lack of anything resembling post-counts, avatars, images, or anything that would be regarded as cruft

You pretty much nailed it right there for me. I absolutely cannot stand it when forums allow avatars and images. The exact same posts plus avatars and images (especially animated ones) would have driven me off many years ago. Incidentally, the tendency for +3 and higher posts to contain mostly accurate spelling and grammar is also quite a nice change of pace compared to most forums, not to mention the distinct lack of "lol" and other such abominations.

I recently learned that, in some applications, you can command click the zoom button to make the window zoom to full screen regardless of content. This is great for applications such as MacVim. In that app, sometimes I know a window will be dedicated to a particular document, so sizing to to fit that document makes sense. Windows I'm using to code, however, almost invariably get split in to three or four viewports by the time I'm done, so I can use every pixel I can get. In that case, full screen makes the most sense, even if it wastes space at the moment.