I had firefox 6 clock in at just under 4GB of ram with about 60 to 90 tabs open before the stuttering got so bad I started closing things. It went down to 2.2 GB after I closed about half the tabs. It's common for me to have even more tabs open across multiple windows given the way I use the browser, but I must say that was the first time I've seen it stutter at 4GB like that. Usually it would sit around 2GB of ram with anywhere from 100 to 200 tabs open.

So with 39 tabs open I'm happy to see just 390MB of usage right now on FF7. Usually we'd be approaching 700MB already.

I work a bit south of Baltimore. We felt it here for about 30 seconds. Of course my office is next to shipping and I thought maybe they'd finally lost it and knocked all the shelves over in an attempt to crush me finally. But nope.. earth quake. They've evacuated a number of office buildings in downtown Baltimore from what my wife is saying (she was sent home). Her brother said he felt it as far as Ft. Wayne IN as well.

Actually, Seatbelts and automotive safety took off once Murphy(yes of Murphy's law) showed the army how many men it was losing to automobile crashes and how many could be saved by seatbelts. Thus the saftey of automobiles was born. Plus having the shit sued out of you because you didn't make your car as safe as possible has some pretty good economic motivation behind it. Surprisingly enough most people don't want to drive death traps if they can avoid it.

Nerd moment. Best raid leader I ever played with was the MT. He delegated subleaders, but if there's one person who relies on healers and dps not to die time and time again.. it's the MT. The MT has to know the encounter, the movements, the timings, etc etc. The dps are dependent on the MT to not lose aggro, but the MT is dependent on them to not go nuts and draw aggro. The healers have to keep the MT up or they die, but they also have to watch other people. But what probably made this guy the best was that if he didn't know a fight, but someone else did, he'd put ego aside to learn things. So he was exactly what this article calls for, an expert who was willing to delegate when needed, but had a good core knowledge of the system.

Further nerd moment, having played as both a tank and dps... The needs of the healers and the dps really are secondary to those of the tank. Without a tank nothing happens, without healing there can be no tanking, and without dps ... well unless the fight has a timer... things just take longer.

To bring it back to the article, you need people with vision and skill running things, the only problem with having an engineer run the show is if he's got an ego and no social skills. But frankly I'd rather have an engineer in charge than someone from accounting or sales.

Whatever happened to posting stories that aren't filled with FUD and hate? Maybe HTML5 is more standards compliant and more widely available on other things... like say... Mobile devices... Which are probably one of the places many people would want to access the 'cloud' from. Or perhaps silverlight is too heavy for the task of being a portal UI... Whatever happened to using the right tool for the right job?

I believe your example of the Lyme disease is erroneous. Watson would be primed with that sort of information as it can be fed a list of common causes and common environmental issues quite easily. Watson could then say, "you're symptoms sound like Lyme disease, but that is not common here. Have you traveled to these areas recently?" Pretty much the same as a doctor or nurse at a clinic.

Watson will also be able to do things like search the entire patient history and perhaps identify lingering things that add up into a whole or flag symptoms for non-specialists. For instance, I had a history of shortness of breath in the morning and occasional acid reflux as well as sinus pressure/infection, I went to a couple of doctors/school nurses and they did the standard tests and found nothing wrong. I have very powerful lungs. Take some antibiotics, you'll be fine. However, 3 or 4 years later I'm on my ass with chronic fatigue due to allergies. I was even taking allergy meds.

Turns out the acid reflux and shortness of breath were a semi-obscure allergy symptom due to chronic drainage since my sinus were nearly swollen shut and the meds I were taking weren't in large enough doses to control the issue. My allergist spotted this almost instantly. You would have to think Watson would be able to learn that sort of behavior as well.

I do agree with you regarding the image processing capabilities. I have been doing research in medical imaging for the last 5 years, and it's a tough field. However, it's a field that's ripe for machine learning approaches(and I have colleagues who do this sort of research) since there's already large amounts of labeled data generated every day. You'd need technicians to take images, or measurements perhaps, but I think you're underestimating how powerful Watson could be in this area.

That said Watson isn't going to eliminate the need for doctors as it doesn't have hands and can't take readings or run MRI's, but it will probably greatly speed up diagnoses and like I said bring specialist knowledge to non-specialists.

To nitpick, I thought several metallurgical historians had pretty much established that Wootz steel ingots and a forging process with a high/medium heat cycle would result in Damascus steel due to the presence of vanadium or molybdenum. They've also found the presence of carbon nanotubes in the steel recently. I can't find the exact article, but there was an excellent article on the subject in the mid 2000's that seemed pretty definitive. The real speculation seems more to do with how the technique was lost and what the precise methods of forging the ancient smiths used, more than how to recreate it.

They're using the stems and leaves of the plants. As in the left over parts after food is processed. They can also use the plants that rot in the field or don't make the grade for edibility I'd imagine. There was word of Pepsi switching its bottling process over to use plastics made out of the leftover plant matter from their food processing plants a few weeks ago. I imagine this would be much the same and not like the corn based ethonal boondoggle.

You assume the cost of openness is free, but for a company like Apple it's probably much much greater than the pittance it will take them to make their own. Especially considering they might even get MS to actually help them with compliance.

Enslaved? Really? That's the analogy you want to work with?

Slavery implies that the person is forced to do something and stripped of their rights to do other things. Software is an object. An inanimate object. Saying someone has enslaved your software is like saying someone has enslaved the bricks they used to build their house, or since this is /. it's like saying your car has enslaved its tires.

If someone uses your code, they have not deprived you of the original code or indeed truly stolen anything of value. You can argue that you took all the time and effort to make the code and thus the code is valuable in the time it took to create. However, you chose to make it freely available. It's polite to contribute back to the code if you've made it better, certainly, as community tends to be an important element of the human social order, but really you haven't lost anything if someone else is using your code. Your code is still freely available, but the new product that someone else made with your code is not. But now something might exist that wouldn't have before your wrote your code. So your code is already increasing utility in the market.

GPL is saying if you want to use my code, then I have to be able to use your code. GPL then places a cost on using your code. So now your code is not free either in the sense of beer or liberty(for the developer, who lets be honest is really the person who's going to look at the code). So does it really surprise anyone that a group of developers would choose to avoid software which makes them less free?

I went through security wearing a kilt once. Never have I seen a TSA agent so loathe to touch someone. His boss had to force him to pat me down higher than my knees.

Kilt + come hither smile == security breach 9/10

They problem with math education is that it is taught in a sort of vacuum. Students don't see the necessity of math until much later in their lives when it's too late. People try all sorts of methods to teach math, but what we really need to teach, I feel, is the necessity of math. We need to wow students young to show them that math can be useful.

That said I think that we should introduce logic and geometry at younger ages and geometry needs to play a more natural role than doing those retarded column proofs that scar 10th graders so much. Math was invented to help explain the world around us, to help keep count of that which is important to us, but it has been divorced from that in education. Sure we have those asinine word problems, but again these problems rarely connect with their target audience.

If you look at higher math so much of it has very deep connections to geometric structure as well as critical logic skills. So it makes no sense to me that these ideas are taught in compartmentalized nature and that all the areas of math are so segregated. Plus Logic and critical thinking are skills that cross all areas of life.

In conclusion, we need to be showing children how and why math is important, not just trying to beat the rules of arithmetic and fractions into their aching and confused brains.

I have a record player with the built in capability to rip records to MP3... It cost 50 or 60$