Treadmill desks are actually cool. A lot of what I do is reading, thinking and typing - and (except for debugging really intricate logic), I do that as well whether I'm sitting or walking 1.6 mph. I am pleased with how my 2nd hand ikea desk + used treadmill is working out for me. An example: jerker-treadmill-desk (not mine, but a similar setup - I've read the jerker desk is out of production at Ikea, I was lucky enough to find one on craigslist).

So yeah, I'm a fan of the treadmill desk and recommend them.
Unless of course basic fitness smells too much of douchery for you, then never mind.

Mandatory bounties is the wrong way to go; it reminds me of this: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/. An approach like TFA advocates would have an underground economy in bug fixes spring up and wouldn't solve real zero day. Instead...

Allowing users to recover damages seems more suitable; a "zero day" class action suit or two would result in tremendous advances in best practices for security and qa (aspects of software development that, for some odd reason, just don't seem to get much funding today). By 'allowing' I mean changing software licensing so that verbiage like '...AS-IS WITHOUT RECOURSE TO RECOVER ANY LOSSES OR DAMAGES, DIRECT OR INDIRECT...' no longer holds.

Which is a pretty huge change, and a number of interests would lobby against that. So I expect it will take a pretty severe incident (e.g. loss of life, or maybe a loss of significant money) to shock existing legislation and treaties (it would have to be global; hello WTO) sufficiently to encourage change. By "significant" I mean larger than the multi-billion dollar loss 'estimates of global damage from cybercrime' cited in TFA. That "cost" isn't nearly enough to change behavior, especially when you average it out across the world population.

Because I'm lazy I asked wolfram.alpha to do the math: What is $10.5 billion divided by the population of the usa.
It says $32.90 / person. I briefly thought GM could give everyone a free car as their way of saying "We're sorry" but $32 doesn't really buy much more than a license plate holder.

From the referenced article...
page 2, paragraph 7:

And at the end:

The referenced article isn't the slam-dunk that its headline suggests. There are other more valid reasons to be pro-nuke than pro-coal. (Heck, there are valid reasons to be anti-coal even if you take nuclear-anything out of the equation.) The article doesn't add as much in the way of useful light as I had hoped it would; interesting, but not a compelling data point.

Which makes me wonder,
1) "[R]egularly unable to fix..." ranges from "Never able to fix" to "Able to fix up to 49% of the problems." TFA smells like weasel phrasing here (e.g. spin) to emphasize the hand-wringing tragedy of (millions?) of poor ignored creative souls across the land laboring away in vain...
I would like to know what %ge of their solutions were adopted, and what %ge of those actually improved upon the original problem situation; e.g. what exactly is this 'intensely creative and intelligent person's actual track record ?

2) The 'close friend' works for a tech startup, and was hired for their problem solving skills.
Which means friend (aka 'anecdotal data point') has a job where they get paid to sit around and do (apparently) nothing?
Sounds like a squandered opportunity for all involved parties.
Which leads me to agree 100% with your conclusion:

I'll just leave this here; it may offer the OP some inspiration: tom mabe / telemarketer / crime scene.

Just for fun, here's a test ( "Vitamin-D-25-Hydroxy-Blood-Test" ) for about $60.
test writeup excerpt: "You should know your Vitamin D blood level. Life Extension offers a reliable vitamin D blood test at a fraction of what most commercial blood labs charge. Optimal blood levels of vitamin D are often far greater than the standard reference range."
Just as an aside, in case you haven't had your bloodwork done, it can be a useful benchmark health-wise. "Blood Tests A to Z"
Ordering a test this way may be less headache than talking a doctor or insurance company into doing the same.
Some things to consider for Women and Men.

btw - I have no stake in LEF.ORG, I just find their tests and articles useful. Since we are talking Vitamin-D, for example, if you know anyone supplementing calcium then this is worth reading: "Brittle Bones and Hardened Arteries: The Hidden Link".

Executing? Perhaps you meant electrocuting (shocking) for science, as per this: Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures .
A fascinating read, and yeah it has creepy implications about what people can do. Something everybody should know about.
Excerpt: The experiment... measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience

About the the "clay" you use for sculpting (I've always thought of you as an artist + sculptor): Any tech you wished was mainstream, or maybe soon to invented, that you'd like to sculpt with? Any older more retro components that are limiting what projects you'd like to do? p.s. Love your work, followed for a while here & engadget.

Pop quiz: what are the chances that somebody practicing social engineering and penetration testing would place the tantalizing results of this amazing DEFCON exercise just one click away inside of the super-secure never been exploited format known as PDF?
*shrug* A bit of paranoia seems like cheap insurance.

This caught my eye 3 months ago: I was pleasantly surprised to see an article like this in the Wall Street Journal (which I had thought of as more of a mouthpiece for conservative oil interests and thus opposed to this sort of news):
excerpt:
U.S. Corn Belt Expands to North "Warmer Climate, Hardier Seeds Help Crop Gain on Wheat, North Dakota's Staple

RUGBY, N.D.—Wheat has long dominated the windswept farm fields of the northern Great Plains. But increasingly, farmers here are switching to corn, reflecting how climate change, advancements in biotechnology and high corn prices are pushing the nation's Corn Belt northward.
...
The shift, which is occurring in northern Minnesota and Canada's Manitoba province as well, shows how warming temperatures and hardier seeds are enabling farmers to grow corn in areas once deemed inhospitable to the crop."

That is a fair point r.e. reboot vs. data access.
I was thinking of what could give the op a performance boost while staying on a ramen budget.
*shrug* without knowing more it is really hard to say.

In order to realize all possible performance from your hardware, I would suggest linux over XP.
With xeons going 64-bit around 2005, it would have to be really old to be only 32 bit.
And even if it was an ancient 32-bit only xeon, XP is still going to have issues using more than 3.5 gb ram.
XP process management seems weak to me compared to the linux side of things.

I don't have a favorite brand of linux to recommend; I would ask your professors and fellow researchers if they have a preference (because they are going to be your go-to support crew).

In any event, I would try to max out the ram your specific motherboard can handle.
And I would beg/buy/borrow/steal a modest SSD to run the OS on, you can probably get both for $100 or so.
Keep your data sets on the slower spinning-rust drives.

One especially insightful response I saw above was asking about what kind of computation you're running.
The python guys are probably right.
I suspect your problems with VB is it will be single-threaded, and (I'm not a VB developer, I've just had to cope with it from time to time) not so generous with efficient data types.
I've had some awful experiences trying to run multi-threaded procsses on XP and Java.
I think you'd get better results from ditching XP.
Your actual language doesn't matter as does some parallel-capability.

Finally, the good news: almost anything is certain to be better than running VB in XP.
The fact that you could implement your solution VB suggests that it is not crazy complex.
Doing it in raw C will be a pain because you'll have to code your own process management.
I'd be very interested in seeing if numpy or perhaps "R" can do the math that you need.

Do follow up and let us know what you end up doing.

turns out on the professor's web page Emmanuel Candes, there is a link to Some old talks that shows an example of the kind of transforms / cleanup they're talking about (they're lengthy PDFs, but worth skimming if you're curious about the kidns of images). Nothing like real world pictures; synthetic examples with some shapes (almost like something you could mock up with MS Paint), but the premise is rather interesting.
And I just saw this like on the Candes web page above: this does have some interesting more real-world pictures. Fill in the Blanks: Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets Into Hi-Res Samples (wired, 2010)

This! is the kind of article I joined slashdot to find out about.
I wish there was a way to mod actual articles +1 or -1 instead of just modding comments; or to at least toss the submitter a karma point or something.