The article mentions how macs are often used for product placement, though it doesn't seem to cite any sources showing that Apple actually paid for such product placement. Not saying that they don't, a source would have been nice. But anyway, Apple computers often appear in TV/movies/commercials when there clearly isn't any product placement, because the iconic glowing apple logo is edited out.

I cannot tell you how many times I have seen computers that were clearly macs have just a generic grey back because they weren't trying to focus on the PC. This is especially true in photo ads, but I have seen it on TV and movies as well. My guess is that the producers liked the design of the mac laptops, but didn't want to risk being sued by Apple or just didn't want their product associated with Apple etc.

As much as I hate to burst your "boo pharma, yay me!" bubble, the current batch of drugs, when taken properly(and that is the key) are almost as effective as condoms in preventing HIV transmission, and if used in conjunction with condoms, prevent probably about 99.9% of all infections. So yeah, obviously big pharma is trying to give everyone HIV. You cracked the case!

I already tried this, but all that happened was that Snoop stole my weed and banged my wife. Didn't really help my allergies at all.

countries, such as Brazil, move forward with legislation that would require service providers to ensure that data belonging to a citizen of a certain country remain in the country it originates

In other words, a cash grab. Brazil isn't the most enlightened country when it comes to spying, so this is a little "pot kettle black" situation, but really its just an excuse to try to force more companies to spend more money in Brazil. It has absolutely nothing to do with the feigned "outrage" the politicians are espousing.

So in the future my "Will To Persevere" could potentially dwarf my "Will To Say 'Fuck it' and Get a Beer"? I find that hard to believe...

One of the biggest potential long-term issues with these cars will be maintenance. If you look to autopilot in airliners as an example, autopilots only tend to fail/disengage when there is something wrong with the sensors on the plane. For instance if the pilot and co-pilots air speeds disagree(indicating a potential blockage in a pitot tube) etc. Now since the airline industry is heavily regulated and since airplanes are so expensive, the airline companies have a huge incentive to keep their sensors well-maintained. However, if you take a look around at how people treat their carsâ¦wellâ¦

As any good coder knows, the base case is often times the easiest, what is going to be challenging, at least from a practical perspective, is how these autonomous cars deal with failures/inconsistent data in their sensors. My guess is that all these demos were done with relatively new, clean and maintained sensors, but what happens if someone just lets their equipment go to shit, what happens in rainy/snow environments where mud/snow may gum up the sensors, etc. I think that even 7 years might not be time enough to solve these problems, at least not without new, potentially unpopular legislation dictating that maintenance standards for automobiles come at least close to those of airliners.

Mac sales have also, for the most part, bucked the trend and have seen flat/increasing sales. It seems that the very low end of the PC market is the one getting thrashed.

As a I-O psychologist and researcher

I am just imagining you sitting on a couch, talking to a hard disk:

You: Well Mr. Hard Disk, how are you feeling?
Hard disk:Doc, I tell you my head feels like its constantly spinning in circles, and I am afraid something might come unhinged and I'll crash!

Unfortunately there are 2 major hurdles that limit all but the most groundbreaking experiments:

1. Money
2. Glory

Money is probably the biggest factor, there just isn't enough money allotted to trying to reproduce experiments. Most budgets only exist for new/continuing research, not verifying experiments done by others. And as the cost of doing experiments rises(more sophisticated equipment necessary, lots of paid "volunteers" etc) this is only going to get worse.

Second, although not as important, is the "glory" factor. Very few talented scientists want to spend their time and research money on reproducing experiments done by others. There aren't a whole lot of publishing opportunities in doing so, esp. if you cannot refute what they have done. You can see this to a certain extent in the open source world as well, for all but the most famous of projects you tend to have a very large # of projects that essentially do the same thing. Why? Because a lot of people want to "invent" a new program rather than improve upon what is there. Fortunately in the OSS world money isn't nearly as much an issue, so you do have large #s of people improving OSS rather than trying to re-invent the wheel.

Because he thinks he is the center of the universe and things that don't appeal to him are worthless not only to him but to everyone else too? Just a hunch.

The on-board systems continue to suck juice from the vehicle's batteries overnight because Tesla has temporarily disabled (or diminished) their sleep mode due to some issue waking them back up (incidentally, that makes this issue hardly mysterious or "bizarre").

AKA Dracula, so the summary is right. He has issues with waking up during the day, and thus cannot sleep at night. Finally, the metaphor has been explained!

Actually cost to fab custom chips is a huge impediment to getting faster(at least faster on Linpack) supercomputers. Both the Japanese entries that have grabbed the top spot in the past 10 years(earth simulator and the K-Computer) were actually custom jobs that added in extra vector CPUs. These machines were very fast but also very expensive to make because they had such small runs of CPUs. The K-computer was slightly better in this regard as it uses a bunch of SPARC CPUs with basically an extra vector unit bolted on, but it is still a custom CPU that needed to be custom fabled.

It would be great for supercomputing if there were more commodity cpus that had multiple vector units per core, but unlike GPUs, where gamers subsidize a lot of the research, development, and production of high performance hardware, there is just no demand outside supercomputing for more than one vector unit per core on a CPU. So at least for the time being we may see the current pattern continue: someone will come up with the funding for a custom cpu that will have multiple vector units per core, leapfrog everyone else for a while, then eventually fall behind commodity hardware as they do not have the resources to continue developing their hardware designs for their very small customer base. Rinse and repeat.

TFA doesn't actually contain any details on how they did that, but (ironically) with the help of Google, I was able to find a page that details the process. The short answer is they took advantage of the fact that any form submitted from the browser to a site would allow that site to install cookies, so they added a hidden form submit to their ads.

My phone # is 867-5309, it already has a reputation you insensitive clod!