I use stack exchange often. It's very very helpful.

Well said friend

I'm feeling validated to see this. When I heard they said they were coming off nuclear power, I laughed pretty hard. That's because it's a massive population in a tiny area. They use large amounts of power and don't have oil resources. I figure their only option at all is to run on nuclear power. I think they'll want to obviously heavily beef-up their safety regulations. They should also really seriously consider LFTR reactors as an alternative, since they seem very viable and a lot safer (and more productive). I hope Japan's paid their debts when it comes to atomic-based nightmares. Nuclear power has it's problems, but it does also have its merits. And there are no comparable alternatives, despite what "green" types will claim.

Well said Linus.. I think.. lol

I have CS degree and develop web apps. I've worked on web apps since before starting university too, so it's something I do because I enjoy it. I suggest you stick it out. I was fairly jaded many times in the content of my CS program, as I expected a lot more. Since graduating a few years ago, I'm realizing that there was more value than I thought in those courses. Often it wasn't entirely captured in the technical details of the course, but rather the process of getting stuff done in that field. Web apps are continuing to gain traction and unless you want to work on "brosure" websites, you'll probably end up using fairly extensive CS concepts to make your web apps awesome. That said, if you love something, a formal education isn't always necessary. However, if you want to get WORK in that subject, you may find customers/employers bizarrely more receptive to the degree. It's stupid. It's reality. Take care friend!

In 2010, I put a then-modern PCIE video card in my P4 3GHz HT box. Suffice to say, Starcraft II ran on Ultimate settings just fine. I think the big difference between my beater and a much newer machine was load times, but once the core game was up and running, it kept up really really well. I think it probably helped that the video card had a fair bit of memory. Perhaps if I wanted to revive that machine further, I could also throw in SSDs, which would probably only offer limited benefit, but would certainly reduce any potential for disk io in the actual drives from being a choke-point. lol.

As a software developer, I must vote that this is a very very interesting idea. I think there's great potential in this sort of move. Of course, the elegance of the actual implementation will likely make or break it. Javascript is full of potential. Great idea!

From ages 14-25 I consistently slept anywhere from 4-7 hours a night, the average being about 6 hours. I struggled through high school and university. Towards the end of my University tenure, I finally put serious stock in the old notion that sleep was essential to mental function. After a couple weeks of always getting at least 8hrs/night, I found my memory capabilities (which had always sucked) were vastly improved. So was my ability to focus my full attention. It's now been about 4 years since I started sleeping properly and it's made a big difference. Further, sleep deprivation will cause weight gain has something to do with hormones. My short sleeps wasn't a disorder, I think. Rather, it was lack of satisfaction with the day, I wanted to feel like I lived more, so I'd stay up late reading, programming, playing video games, talking with friends, etc.

As far as I know, this was first studied and published about 10 years ago by a group led by Dr. David Keith. This isn't news. No power is "free", everything action has a reaction. Anyway, whatever.

If he were convicted of this in Iran, they'd probably sentence him to having to murder all his friends and family with a belt-sander... Followed up by his own demise induced by stoning. Their gov't is nuts. Which sucks, cause there's some great people over there. Oh, yeah, by the way don't steal stuff. Helping people communicate while not paying others for enabling it is WRONG. And as such, you should be isolated and psychologically assaulted... You know.. For the greater good.

Due to shitty news reporting and general broad-spectrum moronity, I totally agree Democracy is broken. Granted, it remains relatively fair. The key question is how do we get people's heads outta their asses and out of social-politics? We have the communication technology for everyone to contribute to decisions. How do we facilitate that? How do we reduce trolling? I'd start by ignoring any input originating from IE users. ^_^

This is about Ion drives right? Sounds like it.. There are probes/satellites out there that have ion drives - they were conceived of in something like the 1960s. Not exactly news, but indeed it is awesome. Though Ion drives don't produce the necessary thrust to be used for atomopheric travel. But one can hope.

Dear RIM, I appreciate you. I'm sorry that so many others feel threatened to the point of acting like jerk-bags to you. 2011 was a lame year, but you're still here and your new Playbook OS will make ripples. Keep promoting and enabling quality content creation and you'll do well. Afterall, people care more about their own lives than anything else, so keep on with helping them express themselves through your products. I like Amazon just fine, but blocking you like this, that's just a tempertantrum that provides you with otherwise hidden opportinuties. Keep up the quality work. Thank you RIM.

That's extremely interesting information, thank you very much! I've been wondering about this for a while - as I'd honestly (yes, it's crazy) like to build my own rover and deliver it to the moon. I believe that out-of-the-box thinking could possibly acheive this on a remotely modest budget. The whole thing is just a puzzle project that floats around my brain, but I would LOVE to do it. And the alien (to me) EMR characteristics of the environment involved have been a subject of great internal conjecture. Can you tell me, why can't one simple "faraday cage" the shit out of their electronics? I can think of many reasons why just encasing everything in shielding would be difficult - mostly in terms of a solar array and other purposefully external devices. Though for that, I've been toying with ideas regarding levels of optical isloation and the like. I'll add, I hate solar power. It's cool in many ways and it completely sucks in others. RTGs make me hot in geeky and in R rated ways. Regardless thanks for you excellent comment. More input from you would be awesome.

Obviously software and hardware are more conceptual partitions used to help divide and conquer the overall challenge at hand. That said, picking a part that from a digital logic level up was the right part, and it merely failed due to improper sheidling (etc), sounds fairly deep in the hardware camp to me. I think your "B" point is pretty solid. But in terms of jumping to the wrong point of code due to physical error, that's getting to be kind of unreasonable to demand of software - as that case is indicative of the software not executing correctly. You can probably do some neat things in software to help mitigate a little of that, but for the most part, that seems unreasonable to me. I suppose that the key to a meaningful conversation here is understanding what actually caused the failure, as we're all kind of spinning off in to speculation, which means we're basically trolling ourselves.