Good research is usually applicable in other places as well. For example, this "frivolous" research such as understanding sound might translate into advances in sonar or sonic weapons or sonic manipulation, and "frivolous" research into soccer player dynamics could translate into better AI for robotic warriors, UAV's, etc. People researching pointless game theory for making Checkers AI can translate into improvements in AI such as robots that can play Jeopardy or outsmart opponents on the battlefield. Even completely unrelated things can be useful when there are mathematical or computational similarities that aren't obvious at the surface. For example, the problem of moving a jointed arm is essentially identical to the problem of reconstructing a 3D camera, and it might be solved using a technique that was originally invented as a path-finding algorithm for a soccer player. If you only fund research specifically related to, say, military designs, then these happy accidental discoveries wouldn't happen so much and fewer people would be interested in doing research in 1 particular area that is deemed "worthy."

To quote a Mozy user,
http://mozy.com/blog/misc/backing-up-hundreds-of-gigabytes-with-mozy/

"Gregory had mentioned that there is a 5mbps upload speed cap. In my experience, it’s much lower than that. The fastest I have seen uploads are around 1.8mbps or so. So maybe a 2mbps upload cap. "

I currently have about 1 TB of material that needs to be backed up. That will take 48.5 days to make the initial backup using Mozy...or about 2 hours to backup to another HDD. Honestly I think most people acquire or create new data faster than you could upload with a continuous stream...not to mention that if your upload pipe was 100% filled all the time, it would congest your ability to download or use the internet in any useful way.

Of course, backups are useless if you only make them once, so I want to do a backup about once a week. Guess which option I use??

To quote the referenced article,

"Why is Ophcrack so fast? Because it uses Rainbow Tables. ....If you've salted your password hashes, an attacker can't use a rainbow table attack against you-"

In other words, any service with 1/10 of a brain will salt their passwords and be immune. They are also only vulnerable if they let their system get hacked and database stolen.

In other words its the same classic trade off as ever: you have to trust the person who runs the service to know what they are doing with your password. But if they do know what they are doing, then you shouldn't have to worry.

Because all the camera focal points are approximately at the same location, the images can be stitched together in software to create a full hemispherical view. This is essentially the same type of snapshot that is used in Google street view, and allows you to look in different directions.

In order to change position, however, requires depth information. Because the focal points are not EXACTLY at the same location, it is theoretically possible to estimate depth, although the practical reality is that the precision of these depth estimates are sensitive to image resolution and the ratio between baseline and depth.

Even if each individual camera was something like 14 megapixel, the accuracy of depth estimations would be so terrible as to be completely useless for anything more than a few feet away from the device. The author's neglect to mention this critical short-falling in their demonstration...

I would recommend OpenGL because its flexible, efficient, and cross platform. DirectX is a lot easier to use for 3D graphics but for simple 2D stuff I wouldn't mind using OpenGL and it's worth it for the benefit of being cross platform.

Sounds like a great way to reduce gas mileage.

It's odd that so many people don't understand that electronics actually run on gasoline...via an alternator. What a concept.

It's more distracting to talk to have a conversation with a living person in the car than to talk on a cell phone anyway. Are we going to make passenger cars illegal next?

The policy is a ridiculous infringement upon personal freedom.

Are extremely easy to break, which is why we use them in tae kwon do. Little kids have to break them for testing. Adults would often punch or kick through 3 or 4 boards like this. Not impressed.

There is no cross-platform instruction to call the CPUID assembly instruction...so you can only use CPUID if you can run native code on the computer, and if youcan do that, you've already broken in so you don't need it.

Now imagine that you are running some generic code like javascript...which has a limited instruction set and is possibly even being run in a browser based sandbox. If you can use simple floating point arithmetic to detect the processor type, and then you know that this particular processor has a flaw such that if you evaluate: "44.5 / 222.3 + 1" then the following benign string literal in javascript gets interpreted as native binary code which executes outside of the "sandbox" imposed by the limitations of the language...do you get what I'm saying?

The green float would "use a number of technologies to make a carbon negative system" and "would also produce zero waste by recycling resources and converting waste into energy". However none of their proposed ideas to accomplish these tasks would be any easier to do on a green float as opposed to on dry land. If it's so easy to build a carbon negative city with zero waste, prove it first on dry land...it will surely be more difficult to do on one of these contraptions where you have so many other technological nightmares to deal with. And I won't bother to mention what a catastrophe it would be when one of these things sinks or flips over in a major storm.

[quote]If you want to install a program, you typically google around until you find a few things that look OK, download them from untrustworthy websites, double-click the installers, running untrusted native code on your machine, click through license agreements, choose where to install them, and hope they don't own your machine.[/quote]

Don't download crappy freeware/shareware apps from no-name companies? I don't ever want or need to install such programs. Most of these apps are things like "convertXtoY"...if you want lots of little free tinker apps, linux definitely has them. But this is the linux mentality. The windows mentality is instead of collecting hundreds of little 1-function programs made by different people, you buy 1 piece of quality software that covers everything related to a particular task.

Adobe provides the majority of suites that are needed for creative work. If you are a CG artist your software staples are Photoshop, ZBrush, Painter, 3ds max, Illustrator...none of these available for Linux for forget about it. Yes you have "alternatives" like Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender but this isn't what the rest (99%) of the artistic community uses and you will always be struggling behind the curve if you insist on using different software from the rest of the community. Obviously MS wins when it comes to gaming although I don't game at all so that is irrelevant to me.

I don't like the Windows OS, it has a lot of flaws, but no less than linux or mac in my opinion, and I'm not about to sacrifice well designed professional applications for hundreds of disorganized 1-function free apps. Your choice of OS shouldn't be about the OS itself it should be about what apps you need to use. If the apps I need existed on Linux, I would probably switch...but they just don't.

I also am quite impressed with the ability of MS to create truly amazing API's with excellent documentation. DirectX is far far superior to OpenGL in terms of documentation and usability, and the MSDN documentation for windows programming is also excellent. Visual Studio is a really top notch IDE that has no equal on Linux.

I'm really not sure what the point of this article is, and I apologize up front if someone is offended by what I am going to say, but it is not my intention to troll here. I'm just saying it how I honestly see it. It seems that the author is proud of himself for finally reaching inner peace with his Linux usage and is looking to show off or find affirmation in others. If you read between the lines, this is really what the author is saying:

"I switched to Linux for no particular reason other than disliking corporate giants like Microsoft. I enjoy using my problem solving skills to overcome basic user interface navigation problems, and I use my wallet to make unheard statements about my distaste for corporate giants like Microsoft by pigeonholing myself into only using specific product brands. Linux really is not so bad, you just have to stop asking yourself how to "make things work" or "be productive"...and instead ask yourself, "are you geek enough to accomplish trivial tasks in a reasonable amount of time?"

It beats me why anybody would even consider using Linux as their primary or sole desktop operating system. Don't get me wrong, Linux has it's place...it's a great cheap alternative for lab computers or servers or academic tinkering, and I hope that people continue to use it as a desktop environment simply because it gives a slight competitive pressure to all other operating systems....but seriously, who wants to be the martyr and take a stand by sacrificing their productivity to deal with an operating system that cannot natively run 99% of software products, has compatibility issues, and bugs up the wazoo due to being a mish-mash of spaghetti code written by unorganized contributors? I just don't get it.

if it were a busy street, the presence of people would have reduced the average light creating visible darkness on the road. there are no dark patches or streaks so it was probably an empty street after all.

Real programmers have evolved on to see in dimly lit caverns typing on the QWERTY keyboard. I have to wear special corrective lenses to see in daylight. I get arthritis just thinking about typing less than 220 WPM, and walking upright may cause a herniated disk.

"At first you might think that a very slow, awkward runner should just walk directly from base to base, except that he'd likely fall down trying to make the sharp turn at first.."

I would like to point something out.

Making a 90 degree turn is physically impossible without coming to a complete stop. If a person immediately applies a force orthogonal to their current velocity, it would not result in a 90 degree turn in the path (but it would probably cause them to fall down). The only way to make a 90 degree turn is to come to a complete stop, then turn, then accelerate in the new direction. There would be no reason for the runner to fall down under these circumstances.

Because our muscles exert a finite amount of force, and force is the time rate of change of momentum, and momentum is mass times velocity, the time required to come to a stop must be proportional to the velocity of the runner.

This confirms the obvious fact that for a walker, the time that it takes to go from walking speed to a full stop is a fraction of a second, and hence there is no measurable time wasted in making a 90 degree turn, and no reason to walk anything other than the shortest path if you are walking.

We know that the optimal path for a faster runner involves some overshooting, and this proves that there is a continuum of optimal paths that is dependent on velocity. It is also clear from Newton's first law, as I showed above, that running faster befits reducing curvature of the path. This applies to any velocity. Thus, in the limit as velocity goes to infinity, curvature becomes ever increasingly important, and hence in the limit the optimal path must be a circle.