My guess would be they use a non-fixed width font, and therefore they limit based on whether it would print (or display) on one page. Which i can actually agree with, however the solution is to use a fixed width font, and specify a page/character limit.

However if it's not for this reason, i agree it seems rather arbitrary(and lazy programming) to have the electronics differ from the stated rules.

Kids who have a social life are more likely to do social activities than their non-social peers?

Shocking!

While i understand my OCD bretheren, there is a lot to be said about most of your important stuff being precisely one click away.

I have my entire desktop full of files, some links to folders, most text or reference files, and being able to open any of them in one dclick(and two hotkeys for hiding all windows then restoring them to their previous configuration) allows me to switch tasks efficiently. I'm not talking alt-tab switch tasks, i'm talking say someone needs a bug fixed on software yyy, well suddenly i gotta open the folder for that, the code, the versioning system, and the actual report itself and thats only if it's a simple thing.
The only thing to make this more efficient would be if i wasted the time to reduce these actions to batch files and hotkeyed those for the different projects I Work on.... speaking of which, note to self....

The reason the death star beams produce a resultant beam at another angle is simple.
Physics 101 my good man, vector addition.
The beams are colliding, and since each beam is projected has an opposite beam, at a similar angle.
Therefore the horizontal velocity is canceled out when the beams collide (since the horizontal of one is offset by the negative horizontal of the other, therefore they produce that third beam which is the normal.

Which is the main argument for why the death star is not neccessarily a laser but a form of mass such as a plasma or proton cannon.

This is art at it's best. Maybe a bit too satirical/ironic for people's tastes depending on your viewpoint, but personally it looks like the survivor in the video is getting a blast out of it, so great for him. and if he's enjoying it you all should too. :)

I'll bite the karma bullet on this, you're being relatively shortsighted and blind in your insinuation they are stupid.

It actually does improve your vision.
I'll give you a simple experiment. Go outside at night, shine a bright flashlight(halogen makes this work better) at the ground. stare at that flashlight for a good 5 minutes.
Now turn the stupid thing off, and wait 5 minutes.
Once your eyes adjust suddenly you

The light forces your eyes to restrict the light comming in, killing your darkvision. Yes it lets you see the small patch it illuminates, but seeing anything to either side or beyond that is much harder.
Compare that to the normal nightvision a person has on a decent night with a moon, and you can see a mile easy.

Yes, lights help when there's no moon, but if you have a moon, lighting destroys your night vision.

This kid rocks and is putting his brain to good use, doing things he finds interesting and fun.
Pity the sensationalist article makes it sound bad.

How many of you built cool things out of legos when you were kids just to see if you could make it work.

Class Action lawsuits in this country are near pointless in terms of causing redress, and barely hurt the companies they're brought against. In a lot of bigger companies they're seen as a regular cost of business.
As said in other posts, enjoy your coupon that ends up making you spend more money.

If you REALLY wanted to get redress, take sony to small claims court.
$50-100 filing fee(75 in my state), you can get damages up to $5000, and you can make sony pay the court fee upon winning too.

They'll either start settling cases, or waste a lot more sending representation to win.
So sue em for the cost a new PS3, since that's what it will take to restore you the original functionality that they took away ( one PS3 to play games and do PSN, one to run linux, since you can't do it on both anymore).

Well, if it's not a joke, than someone is about to get fired for making sony come under a bunch of lawsuits for breach of contract.

Major coporations might not typically play joke, but they also typically avoid anything legally questionable, and even the most basic armchair lawyers are on slashdot are aware that this is taking away an advertised feature of a product.
Either you can play games and patch (advertised feature) or use linux and don't patch (advertised feature).
Either way you're losing an advertised feature.

So yeah my bet is on joke.

I'm hoping i can point this out early enough, but the slated released date for this patch is april 1st.
Talk about one of the most successful trolls on the internet today, sony generated a TON of nerd rage on this stunt, it's rather hilarious.

I'll also say that many news stories about this pointed out the obvious fact that it conflicts with a recent statement that sony supports this feature and will continue to preserve it, it seems a fairly obvious april fools joke.

Just saying.

x + $.07 = $.70
x = $.70 - $.07
x = $.63

$.07 / $.63 = .111111
11% rise of 63.

i'll bite.

Mule: Requires food, water, and has the potential to get scared in combat or make noise when it should be stealthy due to being surprised. Also surprisingly vulnerable to lead bullets.

Robot: requires maintenance, can resist bullets, requires recharging, and does not tire.

Lets be generous: Food, shelter, drugs, etc, to keep the mule healthy would be about equal to maintenance on the robot.
I'm being generous here, any sufficiently mass produced and sufficiently hardened military hardware requires surprisingly little maintenance(compared to some commercial counterparts)

Mule has a lower upfront cost, but lasts less time(old age, injuries, etc). However the robot, while being expensive, would drop in price as more are brought into service.

Likewise, robots cost little to store when not in use, and are quite compact. Mule's require a lot of work.

So yeah, local rented mules are great for our current situation, but in the long run (which is the military's main focus) and in other theaters of combat, the robot is a little more feasible.

I've always been amazed that until recently, most work on AI has been focused as a preconstructed system that fits data into pathways while having some variation in thought abilities to let it expand it's model slightly.
They'd write the rules for the system and try to include most of the work on it, and then let see how good it does, with limited learning capabilities and still based on the original model.

I'm glad a lot of research is finally gearing more towards the path of having a small initial program, then feeding it data and letting it grow into it's own intelligence.
If you give it the ability to learn, then it'll learn itself the rest, rather than giving it functions that let it pretend to learn while fitting into a model.

And i know there have been research into this in the past, but it didn't really take off till the last decade or so, and i'm glad it has.
True, or at least somewhat competent AI, here we come.

I'm going to burn some karma for this, but there was a children's book i read ages ago that i thought was really witty.

It was about an octopus that made pizza, and then got the wrong oven shipped, that ended up puffing his pizzas into 3d pizzas.
It had a detective who i believe was a cat.
Anyway it was a really cool little book that helped kids visualize the 2d->3d transformation.

I was gonna post a link saying THAT's what 3d pizzas lookedlike, but i can't find it, so anyone have a clue?

Ok, so maybe someone can help me out here, but how exactly do you anonymize travel data?

I mean sure, psuedo anonymized could be fairly easily done, just take the raw data, match with topographical data, and output the combined result devoid of geographic representations.
But even that wouldn't be anonymized to anyone who's looking for info on a specific area, since the data would all be similar and it wouldn't be hard to detect a route that goes through a given set of terrain, especially if the start or stop points (someone's house/parking garage) is known.

So someone who's more in-the-know with anonymizing data sets of this or similar nature able to shed some light on this?