Seriously. All this article is making me feel is dread knowing a new barrage of requests to update firefox will soon be arriving, and I will have to ignore them for a few weeks so I don't lose any of my add-ons. I'm not a software developer, but I'm pretty sure dread is not a feeling developers should be striving to instill.

There is a professor named Eric Klavins at University of Washington who was doing this like 2 years ago. I toured his lab and I think he already had all the basic logic gates working, and they were working on getting an oscillator going. Here is his site in case you are interested. http://depts.washington.edu/soslab/mw/index.php?title=Main_Page

Wow, you can write at a whopping 12,500 feet. I'm sure that did wonders up in space...

I am right there with you. I seem to have lost half of my add-ons since they started this release schedule. They weren't super important ones, but these add-ons are really the only reason I use firefox. Once an upgrade kills one of my main ones, I think I am gone. In fact tonight I plan on installing a few other browsers to see if I like them in preparation for the inevitable. I've been hearing good things about Opera. btw...I like your nicely veiled signature on Heisenburg

I was working on a metering device for residential solar arrays and attempted to contact google about the technical aspects to link our product easily with google's powermeter, as it was just getting going. They never got back to me or showed any interest in getting some products to adopt the technology. Seems to me they lost it on their own...

Well, we just learned about this in a graduate comp arch course and yeah, it can get hairy. Especially if using a processor consistency model as opposed to the sequential consistency model. The easiest fix is to throw up some fence instructions around the interdependent code sections to force sequential consistency, and then lay some flags as a means of time signaling between the processors. This eliminates the randomness that the author discussed in one of the examples.

Here is a link that shows the actual PCBs rather than, say, a cracker... http://www.space.com/11508-shuttle-launch-satellite-chips-endeavour.html

I was wondering when this was going to happen. The future of hardware is obviously towards parallel processors, in which the burden of further exploiting code parallelism is placed explicitly on the programmer, and not on the hardware or compiler. It makes sense that up and coming programmers should be seeded with this mindset above all others, and this is exactly what CMU is doing. Other universities should take note, and we should applaud CMU for taking that first step towards the new world.

I have noticed this social interaction problem myself. There is nothing more annoying in a casual conversation when you are discussing an idea and are like "I wonder what so and so actually is?", but you don't really care like your life depended on it. But then the smartphone user whips out their phone and is like, "Here hold on..." So if it is just you two you have to sit there for like 2 minutes while they search and find the answer, when you would much rather be carrying on with the conversation that led you to the ancillary question in the first place. Or if it is more than two, you keep going with your other friends, and then when the smartphone user finds the answer, they interrupt you (from where you've already progressed in thought by two minutes) to answer this question that was in no way inhibitory to the discussion, and then ruins the natural flow of what was evolving with your other friends because now you have to deal with this info.

Facebook does actually have a use. I have traveled a lot, and practically everyone around the world in their 20's has a facebook account. So first, you can keep in touch with people you have met around the world in case you are ever in their town, such as when I recently went to Vancouver and was able to quickly get in touch with a friend I met in Berlin. Got a great local tour of the city, and a ride up to Whistler for some boarding. Second, people you have met can tag you in pictures you were in, and thus now have a broader collection of pictures from your travels as seen from other people's perspectives. You will argue that I could do the same with email, but the interface of sharing the pics and having an easy method of contact as the infrastructure is much nicer and more convenient than simple email.

I have to question whether or not a few of those should even be considered robots. Particularly the third one (I think) that was a replacement for you so that you could teleoperate. I am a grad student in robotics and have come to view robots as being those that have at least some element of autonomy. I think that tele-operated robots should start to get their own name, as they are really just complicated tools. Obviously it is a fine line. If the third one took care of avoiding walls and what not for you, then it gets into robotics. But I think that as this technology progresses, people should take more care in how they throw around the word 'robot'.

I absolutely agree with this, for the most part. At the undergrad level, your school name doesn't really matter, but it is everything in grad school, because the big name schools have awesome research programs, great professors, and lots of money. I went to a smaller, no name school for undergrad, but made it a point to go to a big name engineering school for my masters because I knew that the opportunities there are much better, and my experience here so far is proving itself right. The only reason I say for the most part is that some niche research areas exist in weird places.

We could put up WANTED posters... "Have you seen this prick? Report immediately to Beulah Balbricker. Do not attempt to apprehend this prick, as it is armed and dangerous. It was last seen hanging out in the girls' locker room at Angel Beach High School." I love Porky's.

Absolutely. When you are thinking, you just need something quick to get it out so you A) can run with it...and B) have it for future reference. Until the electronic world can come up with such a disposable, permanent solution; there is no equivalent.