It's not even people giving recommendations to friends. It's people giving recommendations to anyone. Some jackass who went to the same college as me simply spammed everyone who went to there asking for recommendations. Perhaps back in the day it was a bit of the norm for people from the same university to skip together, but my school had nearly 5k people in it's graduating class and I certainly wouldn't vouch for just anyone from there. However, with the level of anonymity and lack of accountability on LinkedIn, I'm pretty sure someone eventually just clicked the "recommend" button and that was that. Similarly, I've seen people just asking everyone in their network for recommendations as well. This is a bit more legit, but it becomes a bit fishy when you are asking people who have only tangentially worked with you for a recommendation, but I wouldn't doubt that there are people who still click the recommend button even in those cases.

Compared to such articles as AnandTech's coverage of this in November 2009, I don't see much new information. Perhaps the key bit, and this is glossed over but you can tell from the slides AMD gave them, is the difference between the bulldozer and bobcat cores. The bulldozer cores contain the two integer units that have been revealed before, but the bobcat core only has one but it still implements hyperthreading.

Okay, first the citation. They used PS3 footage for XBox's Final Fantasy XIII.

Secondly, I agree wholeheartedly that people who try to game the comment system by replying to the first post just to get at the top of the thread are fricking annoying. I wish I had modpoints left to downmod GP.

I think you are missing the point of the argument that others are making. Let's take your two circles. The first is the size of a quarter and represents users that want to run Linux, and the second circle is the number of people who want to pirate games and that is 50 meters in diameter. However, you will find that not everyone in either circle has the technical proficiency to actually do the hacking, but the average technical aptitude of people in the Linux circle is far greater than the mean aptitude in the piracy circle. The real comparison needs to be between the people who want to run Linux, have the technical ability to do the hacking and are willing to invest the time to do it versus to the people whose motivation is piracy. The argument that is made is that the Linux circle now shrinks to the size of a dime, whereas you would need a microscope to see the piracy circle.

Probably because they approached the problem from the other direction (e.g. not looking for something to do with all that N2O, but looking for a source of the gas).

Seems like Cantwell developed the N2O rocket first and then looked for where to get fuel. He got in touch with Craig Criddle, "a professor of civil and environmental engineering and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford," and this idea was born.

The opening crawl begins with "A long time ago," so the more the movie ages the more authentic it gets. Furthermore, Lucus made a good business decision targeting the new movies to children. Adults have already seen the original 3 movies and probably already own them on whatever medium and most will not upgrade. However, by getting a new generation of consumers, he extends the amount of time people watch the movies. Maybe in 10 or 20 years he'll make the last 3 to get another generation interested. Even by themselves, the original movies are classics and will be required viewing by anyone who isn't culturally retarded.

I was taking more issue with the part of your post where you said, "there are certainly computational challenges where a few million core-hours would be welcome." Now, a few million core-hours isn't cheap, but if you have a good idea and you can sell it (to the grant agencies or someone who has a huge cluster), then getting the requisite compute time is certainly do-able. Furthermore, going back to OP's post, the researchers who did this Rubik's cube stuff were not competing for the same pool of resources as oncologists (i.e. it's not likely that Google had some cancer research they put on the back burner because finding God's Number was more pressing, and I couldn't tell who was funding this research, but it looks like it may have been a volunteer effort).

As you mentioned, the bottleneck is people. And the oncologist you mentioned was going about recruiting people in the right way, by saying something to the effect of, "here are a set of problems you have the skills to solve, you may be interested on these issues, and there is funding for you to do research in this field." That works a lot better than telling a bunch of mathematicians that they are wasting their time and that they should work on curing cancer while you are not an oncologist yourself (this is referring to OP).

The computational resources are available. If the researcher needs clock time, he can talk to the folks at TeraGrid, among others. Of course, the researcher you mentioned was doing something similar to what OP wants, although more politely and probably the "correct" way, which is to try to get people who are working on problem X to work on cancer instead. At least the oncologist was "walking the walk" in that he is actually working on his topic of interest instead of just complaining that there is no cure for cancer.

No, he'd rather just complain. It's much easier to criticize researchers than to do the research yourself.

Ah, so what you really meant is:

Wikipedia has a decent article on the subject.

It is still a wonderful solution since many (if not most) people don't actually make anything. Please crawl back into your cabinet now.

That's aspect ratio not resolution.

Yeah, he goes by Larry when he's on the job.

Bad analogy. I sell you a car with stolen aftermarket parts. Are you responsible for stealing the parts? No, but they should be given back to the original owner and the previous owner, who stole the parts, should go to jail. In this case, profits are the stolen parts, and Michale Dell, Kevin Rollins & co. are the previous owners who should be slapped with fraud charges. This is still not a great analogy because a company is it's own legal entity.

Imagine now that the car you bought was KITT from Knight Rider. Michael Knight & KITT stole a huge bunch of crap and installed it in KITT and then Knight sold you 1/7th of the car so now you can drive it on Tuesdays. When the police finds you guys, they should take away the stolen parts and then further punish Michael and KITT (now KITT spends 3 hours each day doing community service because they can't arrest KITT). You are now deprived of 3 hours in which you can do donuts in KITT, and the car is significantly less bad-ass than the one you bought. If you want to recoup your value, go after Michael (Knight and Dell), since he is the one who defrauded you. If you sold your Tuesdays to someone else before the jig was up, the person you sold it to should probably sue Knight as well, although they may sue you and you in turn have to sue the original owner.