If you compare the percentage of poorly-written perl code (versus well-written code) to the percentage of poorly-written C/C++ code, I bet you won't find a statistically significant difference.

Perl just makes it really easy to publish a module in a centralized location (CPAN), whereas C/C++ code is spread all over the place.
Just because it's in CPAN, doesn't mean it's quality, nor that it's been tested and is production-worthy.

Please don't judge perl based on some bad code you've read. It takes a good programmer to write good code -- perl just is less strict about how you must write code, and so the programmers must keep themselves to a proper set of standards. A good programmer can utilize perl's flexibility to produce some very simple and powerful code, without sacrificing quality or maintainability.

It's pretty pathetic and negligent that software that controls explosive missles was not tested for over 100 hours of operation. That's a standard Quality Assurance procedure for even the simplest low-budget hardware...

It's also pretty pathetic that the system designers implemented a broken design and did not foresee this problem. High-resolution timekeeping has been accomplished pretty successfully already...

I wonder how much time and money was spent in research and development for this thing
It doesn't seem like we're getting a quality product for the likely huge sum that was paid for it...

Actually there will be a net gain in the plant population.

Plants are already at the bottom of the food chain and the higher up your OWN meal is on the food chain, the more plant mass is required to grow your food. Those plants are going to get eaten no matter what.

Skip the trophic levels and go straight to the bottom, and you save on calorie taxes that are imposed on carnivores.

Eat a pound of beef, and you use up the 12 pounds of grain that were needed to grow the beef. Eat a pound of grain, and you preserve 11 pounds of grain that would otherwise have gone into ranching.

Besides, you can't get rid of cows by eating them. That's called demand, and demand increases price, and price increases boost supply. So the long and short of it is that attempting to exterminate methane farting cows by eating them will only encourage farmers to breed more of them. The only way to make someone stop selling a good is to stop buying it.

Why must we beam the power to a space elevator?

Wouldn't it be reasonable to use wire conductors? If we will be able to build the support lines that can span from the earth to orbit, why couldn't we also make a couple of smaller ones inside the main one for carrying power? Or why not just use the support lines themselves to provide power (assuming there are multiple support lines for redundancy)?

Can anyone provide some more insight into this? I haven't been able to find a decent explanation

Music Player Daemon (mpd) has the right idea: separate the playing backend and the user interface. The result is an easily-interfaceable (many, many clients for all platforms, web, etc) and reliable player that rarely (never for me) crashes, and will continue to play even if X dies (which makes repairing X a little more enjoyable).

My favorite client is QMPDClient, which is cross-platform and has a good user interface for easily switching between the Library view (3-section Artist/Album/Songs), the Directories view (which shows the Music directory as a folder tree), and the Playlist view (for saving or loading playlists). The directory view is the big selling point for me, because I have my music folder well organized by genre, artist, album, but not necessarily well organized as far as ID3 tags go.

Here's a screenshot: http://dump.bitcheese.net/images/batidij/qmpdclient-win32.png

It's definitely worth a try...

MPD: http://mpd.wikia.com/
QMPDClient: http://bitcheese.net/wiki/QMPDClient
Other MPD Clients: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients

I think the OP was referring to data transfer bandwidth (the throughput, or data rate), rather than the traditional electronics use of "bandwidth" (referring to the width of the transmitted signal in the frequency spectrum; though "channel width" is a more exact term).

Of course higher carrier frequencies don't have a higher bandwidth, because bandwidth is a property of the whole system, including the data signal and modulation method. You can make the bandwidth as big or small as your system's constraints allow (e.g. one constraint might be to keep most of your transmitted power inside the allocated bandwidth).

If your data signal is modulated in the exact same manner regardless of the carrier, varying the frequency of the carrier will not affect the transmitted signal's bandwidth. The carrier frequency imposes the upper limit on the data signal's frequency, and thus a higher carrier frequency will theoretically allow for a high data rate.

Practically, however, the data signal is almost always much smaller than the carrier signal, and the transmitted frequency is subject to many other important factors such as noise, signal propagation through the environment, etc... In the case of 2.4GHz vs. 800MHz carrier frequencies, there is no practical gain in potential data rate.

This is all based on my limited understanding of communication theory. Please correct me and/or provide further details if possible!

Whenever I see facial recognition enhancement, I think of this:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1156

Turns out... it's theoretically impossible!

Seriously, this video plays like a bad science ficition movie... they say "let us monitor everything and we'll magically know when crimes are committed," without saying exactly *how* they plan on sorting through the incredible amount of data and coming up with "crime X being committed right now" in a timely manner.

I knew someone would bring up cellphones. However, it's relatively hard for it to capture much useful video from inside my pocket...

Also, my phone belongs to me, not my phone company, and it's open source. Meaning, it's pretty unlikely someone will actually use it to snoop on me. If they can, it'd certainly be a targeted attack, not a broad monitor-every-driver-always situation like we're discussing here. It's next to impossible to defend against a targeted attack, especially when it comes to computers (e.g. cell phones)... but that's not the issue here.

I will never put a camera in my car that wirelessly transmits to anyone. I think a lot of people would have problems with this...

However, I've always thought it would be a good a idea to put small cameras in my own car (probably hooked up to a car pc), set to record on motion and store the past few days of video. These would be for my own use only -- I'd never allow a third party unrestricted access, but it might be useful if there's ever any question about what happened in an accident.

They're introducing this product by initially marketing it for teens... as if it is somehow more acceptable to spy on them than anyone else. I'm sure this product will eventually be marketed towards all drivers, but if they introduced it initially like that, it might not get as favorable a response (maybe)...

As for "computer engineers are most likely to crash" ... correlation does not imply causation

What if the patrons you mention aren't just a few rich people, but a bunch of fans which can now follow and contribute to their favorite artists with the internet?

Plus, what about all the artists who refuse to give up creative control to anyone? You do realize that many artists have second jobs to pay for their living expenses, while their art is their hobby?

While that situation may be possible, I'd bet that there are enough university researchers studying this area who would not be silenced by whomever stands to lose profits. The whole point of tenure is so that professors are immune or at least buffered from the effects of current politics (e.g. the desires of the "well-heeled corporations" you mention).

Besides, we wouldn't just get rid of all radio communications. Instead, there would be a huge drive to find and implement non-harmful radio techniques. That would require a lot of research, a lot of investment in new infrastructure, etc... Imagine replacing every radio transmitter and receiver with a more complicated version... You're telling me *that* isn't profitable? Wherever someone is making profit, there will be others waiting to steal that profit-making opportunity for themselves (i.e. .... capitalism).

Not to mention that at 1700KHz (the upper end of AM medium wave radio), the ideal quarter-wavelength antenna is around 144 feet long.

Ignoring the fact that we aren't very good conductors... at 5-6 feet tall, I doubt the human body can effectively absorb a lot of this relatively very-long-wavelength radiation.

Does anyone have actual data or methods to predict this kind of effect on human bodies?

AM radio causes cancer?

I'm from Jamaica, the show-me island. So show me you're blowing it out your fanny!
(obligatory Futurama reference)

I wonder if any of these ELF people understand physics... Radio behaves according to the inverse square law; in effect, your cellphone exposes you to much more power than all the cell towers around you, simply due to it being much closer. Similarly, any local transmitter you have (e.g. microwave ovens, CRTs, wifi APs, high-speed digital circuitry, etc) will expose you to more power than those far-away broadcast towers. Unless the AM radio tower is in your backyard, you are probably not in tremendous danger...

...well maybe your home intercom *is* in danger... won't someone please think of the intercoms?!?

Microwave ovens tend to have a lot of emissions in the 2.4GHz band, the same frequencies that most Wi-Fi uses.

If he were really allergic to Wi-Fi, wouldn't he have an extreme allergic reaction to microwave ovens too?

This is a pretty insecure authentication mechanism, because it necessarily has to be simple -- so you'll want to use some obscurity as well.

Make sure that if the incorrect answer is given, the user is redirected to a 'login success' page that has minimal and outdated content.
They will quickly lose interest and leave.

If you redirect to a 'login error' page, then they may try harder to get in.

Another approach would be to distribute (multiple or a single) SSL client keys to all your neighbors.
Then its a simple matter to redirect users based on the key -- if they have it, they get the content; if they don't, they get the dummy page.