The only reason Windows still lurks in my computer is Photoshop. True, GIMP is good, but it just doesn't measure up in terms of features or speed of workflow.

I'm a dependent, your insensitive clod!

Add dust to the final image. Make it four or five specks - even at 1% opacity works. Then, write a script to -Open "pixelspecs.config" containing information about the pixel color at each 1px speck of dust -Iterate through the "studentprojects" directory ---Open the file ---Loop through and check how many of the pixels match the color ---If it's more than two, print the file name: they plagiarized! Not too hard to do, could be done in less than 50 lines of code.

Yet, for $100+, they still can't beat the resolution of gift-shop picture slideshow keychains. Obligatory XKCD reference.

As an American school student, I can say that it has often been shown as part of middle-school-level history class. Maybe there's some note about it in the Teacher's Edition of the textbook or something.

Agreed - maybe minimalist worked on the computer, but it doesn't seem to be doing much good in the real world.

... he picked a bad one to single out. I am still in high school for another little while, and last year I took Chemistry. While I may not have enjoyed it all too much, I realized its importance. Chemistry is the basis of nearly every science; biology, geology, astronomy, archaeology, even psychology... the list goes on. Why would you want to deny to your son the basic understanding of life and the world around us?

Let's see, did they invent it? No, they discovered it. Too bad Christopher Columbus isn't around these days - he could have patented the Americas!

Mine is probably one the the nerdiest ones xD. I have several old laptops and desktop sitting around. With one, I re-purposed it into networked a RAID6 array. With the others, I put them in a closet loaded them with a minimal (no desktop) Ubuntu installation. It's designed to listen over the network to receive computing jobs. So, whenever I need to do some rendering I just click a button on a remote control (turns on the power) and have my computer broadcast assignments. Not quite the power of Pixar's render farm, but it works alright for me. I've been thinking I need to make an instructable on it sometime... The only downside is that I can only use Linux-friendly open source applications.

I think, rather than enhancing the brain with this discovery, it would be interesting to see if there are any diseases that mess with this gene that could possibly be fixed. For example, people with Parkingson's disease have a high buildup of a certain protein. This makes me wonder if there are related diseases that can be cured by "resetting" this gene.

The world is even more shocked by a followup story:

Guys who make a living running into walls have brain damage!

Or drop the barometer of the top of the building, and count how long it takes to reach the ground! Obviously a stopwatch would be nice, but it is not a necessity.

With Thunderbolt cables themselves costing $50 I don't think this will be an "incredible" impact. I predict it being the Firewire of the future: something that's great but not used much by the public. Just look at eSATA, which although its been around since 2004 you'd be hard pressed to even find an eSATA port on any mid to low end (i.e. not enthusiast) motherboard.

This would actually be the ideal situation to use a minicomputer such as Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/). If you want to get really cool, you could use E-Ink displays. Then, one Raspberry could run as many displays as you want because it would not have to update the displays constantly. Save energy too. I would load it up with a little Linux kernel and some programming in order that they could all be controlled over the network (even remotely!).