"Ever wonder how Jimi Hendrix would cover Lady Gaga?"

I think I speak for everyone when I say no, no I haven't.

The argument that they need to do things that "really, really" :-) require access to the bare metal, doesn't hold anymore, because the applications they are building will anyway need to be able to run in a virtualized environment.

There are cases where this is a necessity though. For instance, my work is with CUDA/OpenCL and that requires access to "the bare metal" so to speak. Or anyone who works with an FPGA. Or Cell. Or driver development. And even though virtualization is pretty good, it isn't perfect either and can have its own issues (I've had my fair share). But, for good portion of programming (I'm thinking web development, GUIs, etc), virtualization is an excellent solution.

I didn't read the paper (which I can't find in a peer reviewed journal either, but I'm not a sociologist). But from the article:

"Gambetta and Hertog propose that a lack of appropriate jobs in their home countries may have radicalized some engineers in Arab countries....But the promises of modernization and development were often stymied by repression and corruption, and many young engineers in the 1980s were left jobless and frustrated."

Its economics, not 'style of thinking', that the authors propose as the problem. If you slogged through 4 years of undergrad plus 2-7 years graduate work only to discover that the jobs you were promised weren't there, wouldn't that leave you disillusioned and susceptible to someone whispering in your ear "Hey, you know whose fault this is?" The authors even point out a Middle Eastern country where engineers were not disproportionately represented in the radical movement: Saudi Arabia, "where engineers had little trouble finding work in an ever-expanding economy."

I haven't actually done this, but if I had to pick my passwords all over again, I would use a foreign keyboard (my choice would be some type of hangul keyboard), and just pick words that make sense in the foreign language. For instance, if you need an alphanumeric password, you could do something "11tlqdlf" where t = "siot", l = "ee", q = "bieup", d = "digeut" and f = "rieul". Its "11eleven" in Korean.

Or if its one of those bank question/response things, you could do something like "What did the truck say to the bread?" Your response would be "Qkd Qkd" or "bbang bbang".
Or, "What did the bus driver say to the egg?" "rp fks" = "ge-ran" or "get on".

From the article:
SF, at its best, is an exploration of the human condition under circumstances that we can conceive of existing, but which don't currently exist

This is Charles Stross' definition of science fiction (and explains a lot of his writing). And he doesn't hate just Star Trek, he hates Babylon 5 and didn't watch BSG. If this is Charles Stross' starting point, then its perfectly reasonable for him to hate ST/B5/BSG.

The creators of TNG/B5/BSG simply had a different world view from Charles Stross. They wanted to use their shows as a reflection of our current world. TNG was so touchy feely (and upon recent viewing, fairly preachy), its a reflection of the politically correct atmosphere from which it was wrought. Nothing like an classically trained Shakespearean actor to bring a moral voice to the world. Likewise BSG is a reflection of its times with flawed characters making morally ambiguous decisions. Or, more concrete examples of a science fiction as a mirror would be a religious nut for a president or Battlestar Pegasus as a reflection of military zealotry.

Sticking with IBM for Cell would have made very little sense. The Cell processor is very similar to how NVidia's CUDA presents the graphics card to you: limited cache (shared memory), lots of very simple hardware threads, almost no branch predication, etc. So, both CUDA and Cell would crank out great numbers on things like a particle simulator, MPM, image processing, and the like, but are not equipped to do some useful things like running a scheduler, or a word processor. Basically anything that's very difficult to multi-thread would be very hard/impossible to adapt to a Cell like architecture.

And some of the applications that are would be useful in Cell most likely work in CUDA. So, instead of having to have a regular processor + Cell + CUDA, why not just have a regular processor + CUDA?

Yep, in Scotland. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/7635404.stm Of course, this link was in the article.

Here are some graphics books on my shelf:

General Graphics:
Real-time Rendering: Tomas Akenine-Moller
Any OpenGL Red Book
Physically Based Rendering: Humphreys and Pharr
GPU Gems: Published by nVidia
Intro to Graphics: Shirley

Visualization
Real-time Volume Graphics: Engel et al.

Computational Geometry
Computational Geometry: de Berg et al.
Introduction to Algorithms: CLRS

Physical Animation
Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics: Bridson (I haven't read it but I have read his '06 and '07 SIGGRAPH course notes)
Numerical Recipes: Press et al. (In general, a must have book for Computer Science)

Image Processing/Vision
Digital Image Processing: Gonzalez et al.
Computer Vision: Forsynth and Ponce (not a huge fan, but apparently lots of people use it)
Shape from Shading: Horn and Brooks (kind of old)

I'm sure there are plenty others as well that are still packed away in boxes. These are the ones on my shelf atm.

Records, books...pshh whatever.

Dick: I guess it looks as if you're reorganizing your records. What is this though? Chronological?
Rob: No...
Dick: Not alphabetical...
Rob: Nope...
Dick: What?
Rob: Autobiographical.
Dick: No fucking way.