A recent study of the "Freie Universität Berlin" of trends in US charts suggests, that pop songs got slower over the last 50 years and use more minor chords. Doesn't mean that society got sadder, the study explains, it only shows that we listen to more ambivalent stuff and are able to enjoy even sad emotions.

When I was a kid 30 years ago, Edison was still the undisputed old god of engineering. It only was later, that he became villified as the suppressor of Tesla and AC. I think, it has todo with Edison's viewpoint towards intellectual property. He and his colleagues at Menlo Park invented mainly and did not produce anything, so he relied on patent fees. He procescuted anyone who produced stuff that violtated one of his many patents including early movie technology. This forced movie people from the east coast to the west. The rest is history. Tesla was clearly the far better, more visionary scientist. Edison remains the more important inventor and engineer (lightbulb, phonograph, movie technology).

The arm itself was developed by the robotics and mechatronics department of German Aerospace Center (DLR) as explained by this article. The extremtech article fails to mention that.

When I was studying chemistry (I'm a software consultant now for 10+ years), there was a special "poison cabinet" in our University library containing "dangerous books". One of them was a book from GDR (former German Democratic Republic, a.k.a East Germany) containing recipes for warface agents, bombs and guerilla warfare. The book wasn't freely available to everyone (you were asked why you wanted to know all that stuff), but it was available. No one was asked afterwards by the police for renting it or BS like that. I wonder if this has changed after 9/11 ?!?

What the article fails to mention is what exactly the difference is between the arcs created by (smaller) tesla coils now and natural lightning. Is it that natural lightning needs lower voltage to travel longer distances through air than teslas? This would explain, why they need to built giant tesla coils in the first place.

not a physicist here, but i think it is a pretty big difference, whether you treat something as a real physical object, whose existence and relationship with everything else you can and must explore or simply as a mathematical convenience to label it as an object without really believing it is one for the sake of simplifying calculations.

i think this has happend with electro-magnetic fields.

This will only lead to better impersonations skills

This would be a reason to drop Skype. I know many people, who don't use Skype because their protocol isn't open, they are not opensource or not SIP based. No reasons for me not to use it, it just works very well, even on Linux. But being forced to open a FB account? Do not want... I abhorr FB and it's poor privacy policies and conduct.

There are some theories out there, which explain things like the galaxy rotation problem, but none is so prominent as Modified Newtonian Dynamics. They do so without the need for Dark Matter. DM is still not a proven thing after all.

What did YOU think, again?

The problem with Dell is, that they were never big into R&D. Dells business consisted always of providing quality PCs with reasonable prices through direct (online) distribution. Not much invention here. It doesn't surprise me, that they lack the vision to invent something (r)evolutionary to differentiate them from competitors. IBM (Lenovo), HP, Apple, Asus, they all tried to diversify lately.

"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win."

Gary Lineker

I cannot search for text with the Firefox' find dialog. But they say, that their documents are now fully part of the HTML infrastructure, so they should be searchable, no? Try their self-introduction for HTML 5 and see, whether you can search for "Highlight me!", which is in the middle of the document.

Or I'm doing something wrong here?

I guess, I'm not very social, I kept my MySpace site for only some month. I'm in keeping my mostly inactive LinkedIn account alive strictly for business networking.

But even I have to chat, when email is overhead or not possible! I knew instant messaging back at univeristy since 1994 by virtue of IRC and the chat facility of ICS (internet chess, does it still exist btw?). I think joined ICQ somewhere in 1998 or 1999 because "everyone did it", but had not much use for it. The ICQ client then was quite decent.

In 2000 I found work at a software company as a consultant. Two years later, a colleague suggested using IM for fast communication within the company and our development partners. I installed IM again and was shocked that it had turned into an unusable mess of bloatware so quickly. It rivalled the Realplayer, which was quite a feat! My colleague said, I should install Miranda. I realized, that IM clients can be substituted as long as the protocol is implemented and the network allows it (AIM vs Trillian, anyone?).

I later used Miranda to also connect to AIM, Yahoo!Messenger and - urgh! - MSN Messenger. Nowadays I use Skype to chat, never used GTalk despite being an early user of GMail, so no experience with XMPP protocol and clients.

As the article says, you can be a valuable developer without being exposed to or needing much math but you will be confined to certain areas. Normal developer work is mostly applied mathematical logic, but advanced math is normally not needed.

I think I belong to this group. I'm a chemist turned programmer/consultant and I now mostly work as a consultant for a company providing UML tools. I had my fair share of advanced math in school and during my chemistry studies, but those courses don't compare in any way to the math lectures provided in computer science. This were (introductory) courses in linear algebra and analysis and they were "pure math". Hard proofs and all instead of calculating or solving equations.

I'm nevertheless thankful for these lessons. They taught me consistent and recursive thinking as much or more so as real programming did.