I use my touchscreen because it appears to be the only way to sign into my Windows 8 laptop. Also it is the only way to change into desktop mode.

Microsoft deserves whatever beating they get after this debacle.

I loved my Tivo over the years but it became just too much.

It became a super zombie machine. Add a M card. Add an external HD. Add a cable tuning adapter.

When I had trouble, Time Warner would blame the Tivo. Finding customer service to sort out this hot mess was a disaster.

On top of that, each update made the interface more and more sluggish.

I eventually went to a standard TWC crappy cable box and now Direct TV Genie. Not great, but adequate. And the interface is not a total slug.

It's also important to remember, as in any major discipline, that mathematics has numerous components, some of which aren't commodious for many real-world problems; as such, it could take a fair amount of time to train someone so that they would be able to make a worthwhile contribution.

As one example, I have a friend and colleague who focused entirely on abstract algebraic topics for his research and enrolled in an ordinate number of analysis, topology, and algebra classes whilst eschewing ones deemed more practical, like those dealing with differential equations, optimization, numerical analysis, and applied probability; further, despite graduating from an Ivy League institution, let alone being incredibly smart, he has yet to find employment, as most of his knowledge does not translate well to solutions for any of the burgeoning fields, such as data analysis, computer vision, or robotics/autonomous systems. Consequently, in order to even consider a position out in industry, he's looking at spending the next two years diving into a sea of applied math.

I'm normally not one for coarse language and insults, but, given that the atypical neurogenic tic disorder that the individual suffers from can lead to both life-threatening asphyxia and tachycardia, I would have to say that you are a massively apathetic twat. I hope that you never become afflicted by any debilitating condition, let alone wind up in a similar situation and encounter someone insouciant who denies you access to medicine or necessary sustenance, as I doubt you'd have the fortitude to stand up to your ilk.

Fortunately, your pococurante attitude served some purpose beyond broadcasting your own inadequacies: it spurred me to pledge several thousand dollars for this guy's legal fund.

You need to control your data! Now more than ever.

We hate Microsoft, but at least you have some control there. They sell you bad software, but at least you sorta have it in your possession (until they sunset the license / activation servers).

Luckily, I learned a few lessons early on with the loss of Yahoo Photos. I now have nicely named folders of the selected good family photos for relatively quick online upload (again) if I have to move services. Or I can roll my own web server if I had to, just for photos.

You need to be prepared to download your documents and switch your email if needed.

I was about to start up full-force with g+, but after this reader nonsense I went and make an account at joindiaspora.com and tried out Diaspora. It looks pretty solid now and they are trying to do it the way God intended for the internet, open standards and software so you can roll your own. I only use g+ now to bitch and moan about google...

As you noted, the project was fun to undertake, even though it was only a sub-component to a much larger endeavor. I may yet go back, visit it, and submit an extension as a nice stand-alone article.

To answer your questions, though, I relied on a pool of around seventy subjects, equally distributed across genders and with a tri-modal distribution for age, many of whom were nudists that had heard about the data collection through some friends of mine. I also had a couple of adventurous fellow students and peers sign up to contribute; even my girlfriend at the time had no qualms about being filmed.

In any event, while there was some inherent selection bias in who I chose, mainly because I needed footage of as many different body types as I could capture, so as to allow the underlying model to generalize well, I do admit to being elated whenever people with certain body types were incredibly eager to help. Granted, I did, at the later stages, have to turn some people away, since I was spending too much time acquiring data.

For the experiments themselves, people had multiple options for what to wear for the various training phases, aside from the different changes of loose- and tight-fitting clothes that I'd ask them to bring and don. I did my best to provide multi-sex body suits of different sizes, which provided more than sufficient constraints when coupled with manually-derived measurements of quantities such as chest circumference, stomach circumference, and so forth. Others opted to strip down to their undergarments and a fair amount, surprisingly many of them women, wore nothing at all.

Regardless of what they wore or didn't wear, each subject executed a series of actions, such as walking, sitting down, standing up, skipping, and climbing. I used six pairs of stereo vision cameras to record the events. I had hoped to use Vicon cameras for the ground truth, but the professor that had them in her lab, even though they hadn't been turned on in a year or so, was aghast over my intended application and barred me from borrowing them.

What you proposed isn't that far-fetched, as I ended up having to contrive and implement the equivalent of this, i.e., passive, automated estimation of body shape under clothing, either from a single image or from multiple video frames, for some work I did in action recognition that required a fairly accurate representation of the person's proportions. Others, e.g., A. O. Balan and M. J. Black, "The naked truth: Estimating body shape under clothing," in Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2008, pp. 15–29, have come up with solutions too.

It did not have a camera. I don't think it did mp3 or video playback either.

Palm had a wireless PDA for a bit, but it was not that great. Email and crappy browser, no music or camera.

I have tried various things over the years. The best I ever found was to make myself run every day. Get in the habit of roll out of bed, go run, shower, go to work.

One day I went to work, then after eight hours I realized that I never even stood up. I was busy all day long, with all of my meetings coming to my office. I never got thirsty or had the call of nature. I realized that I had been sitting on my rear for a full eight hours. I try to at least go get coffee now...

There are ways to make it look like GoogleReader I think. In the top right gear / settings, I tried "Timeline View" which gives you a blurb and image. Decent shortcuts as well.

The point was, it did everything the iPhone did and more.

It had features the iPhone still does not have.

Go back to your shiny little toys and let the men work with their tools.

Some other iPhone limitations (that Treo could do)

-No video recording
-No editing MS Office documents
-No EVDO (iPhone Edge was slow)
-No laptop tethering

But the iPhone was shiny!

Palm had the first integrated smartphones, the Treo series. Camera, PDA, net connectivity, music and media all in one.

They were far ahead of the first iPhone in terms of features. Stereo bluetooth and copy paste were there way before iPhone implemented them. Palm had stuff iPhone never will have, like hardware keyboard, SD card slot, user-replaceable battery, install any program, multi-day battery, and actual physical buttons.

Too bad the OS was dated...

I matriculated when I was fourteen, about two years before the turn of the second millennium, and finished both degrees before I turned twenty. Despite starting early, I was far from the youngest graduate, as one of my peers managed to complete an S.B./M.Eng. CS by the time he was sixteen.

In any event, in both my situation and his, let alone those of others I have encountered, we all had little prior experience dealing with electronics and computers yet plenty of natural aptitude for and budding interest in the subject. In my case, I was fascinated, and still am, about the possibility of furthering statistical machine vision and managed to find the perfect adviser to not only spur my creativity, but also put up with my astounding initial ignorance. In his, he wanted to advance computer graphics and wound up submitting some excellent, now heavily-cited papers to SIGGRAPH and Eurographics.

There are more than a handful of people who grow up in affluence or are sheltered most of their lives from the denizens of seedy places that might prey on others. Ergo, they have little recourse, mostly in the form of previous experience or tales from their associates, to guide them in such matters.

I know that, in my case, it was not immediately apparent that I was a potential drug mule target, when I was accosted, late one evening, by a buxom, beautiful, crying woman in Ybor City. The only factors that ultimately saved me from helping her were that: (i) I had never been anywhere near the Central/South Florida area and hence was lost looking for a sushi restaurant at which I was to meet some fellow research conference attendees and (ii) I was incredibly late due to having canvassed the area on foot several times without finding the restaurant.