I dunno. I've never been pleased with the performance of optical media. I'd think being in a data center, heating up and cooling down from usage and storage is going to have very bad effects on recordable optical discs (CDs, DVDs, Blurays). Not to mention, it's always a pretty well known fact, consumer recorded media (the ones with dyes and stuff) aren't terribly reliable in the long term. My personal experience with recordable optical media is poor at best, I have very very few discs that've remained readable and error free after just five years of relatively decent care and storage. And this is not even using them every day, heating them up and cooling them down, just stored in a dark cool place.

Seems... overhyped. I simply can't come to believe this is an actual viable storage medium for any kind of large scale operation. But enh, if it works for them, good deal. Seems like you'd get more bang for your buck using high capacity tapes which hold up much better to heating up and cooling down.

The power saving claim also seems silly. This could be easy done with standard hard drives in a cartridge type system they're saying they're using, powering down unused drives and putting them into a storage position (though for me, I think it'd be much smarter to make the connector the moving part and just plug into the right bank of HDs, instead of moving HDs around in a cartridge.)

The more I think about this operation, the less intelligent and efficient it seems to be.

...feeding the trolls! Geeze people, this kind of headline is just what all those internet trolls have been waiting for. Now they'll be even more relentless!

Seriously folks, on the internet, you gots the trolls. Just look the other way.

Considering the absurd amounts of incompetence and waste we see with visible government entities, should we really be overly concerned about the NSA? Not saying I like them, or anything, but I'm not sure they're quite the beast we've made them out to be. Maybe.

Wait a minute. Where is this summary even remotely pro-anything but technology? It's simply outlining the high tech that's being employed in this conflict, it by no means draws any conclusions of that conflict.

I personally feel the post is in just the right context for a /. article, its about technology, not about who's using it (though there's talk of who's supplied whom, but still fails to cast a good or bad tilt on it.)

What caught my eye most about this invention is how much closer it brings us to operating HEAVY machinery by just moving our hands and the machine responds to our movements.

For me this brings exo-skeletal machines to mind as being much closer to reality, things like the loader from Aliens, the exo-combat skeletons in Matrix, etc. The applications of the tracking system exampled in the video are simply endless, from operating sci-fi constructs already mentioned, right down to more real machinery such as excavators, cranes and other construction machinery.

Looking forward to seeing who merges this stuff with heavy machinery first. ^.^

Without reading the details.. I doubt this will pass, if its democrat sponsered, the repubs will shut it down in the house. If it's GOP approved, the senate will kill it. Gotta love our divided country!

Summary and title is a bit misleading. I was eager to see what they would say about how this 'higgs boson' infers mass to other particles, but they never say anything about that, they just talk about how they found this data and how they produced the results. Maybe I missed something?

Like.. um.. Novell Netware on ARCnet? :D

Orbital data centers. Problem solved. Solves lots of problems, actually, full time solar energy, easier cooling. What a good idea! And it's under no government's jurisdiction.

Yeah, we can tell you haven't been to a theater in a while. For starters, the cellphone use has gone to almost zero, with most theaters threatening to throw anyone out who uses any electronics during the feature.

As far as overcrowding, go during the day, go a week after the movie is released, to reduce the crowding. Arrive early (10-15 mins) to get prime seating choice, put your jacket on one seat to your left, popcorn to the right to keep smelly people from sitting too close. Bring your own snacks in your pockets (including a bottle of water or soda!)

The smart ones get to got to the show, see it on the big screen (possibly in 3D), for the ticket price ($10 typically.) You're just missing out on one of life's pleasures there bro. Anyone who can't afford to take in a movie every month or two must truly be in utter destitute poverty. It's a $20 bill tops if you're smart and stay away from the concession stand.l

This right here. Accessibility is become a serious issue for legal means to watch the movie of your choice. I only have NetFlix myself, but I do find it highly annoying when I pay for this fantastic service and yet whenever I wanna see any obscure movie, I gotta hit a torrent site to get it. It's not that I don't wanna pay, I'd be glad to, if it was available.

Not to burst your bubble there, but anyone with a modicum of skill with a search engine can quickly glance over a list of torrents, skim the comments on likely 'good' candidates in a matter of minutes, and once the download begins you're free to do as you please. And who the heck burns anything to a DVD anymore? Just fricking stream it over wifi, or stick it on a usb stick.

Optical media has gone the way of the floppy, sorry, it's dead technology.

Could have told you that, without a study or any silliness, 10 years ago. File sharing was a kick in the nuts for music, cuz music isn't very large, but movies? Never was an issue. Never will be.

MIAA just wanted to play the game same as RIAA, just because it makes sense to them. Too bad it doesn't make sense to anyone else.

"Theft" of data has always been vastly over-valued. They never ever mention how many 'thefts' resulted in an actual sale, or in this case, a family going to see a good movie cuz dad downloaded it and view some or all of it and decided it'd be a lot more fun with the family on the big screen.

As someone who's been on the audiophile ride from the early days of strange use of the PC speaker, and the first FM synthesis boards, I can say honestly say, a few things happened that made discrete audio hardware obsolete:

1. a basic DSP became widely available, to do audio processing
2. storage became vast enough, combined with audio compression, it made more sense to just pre-record all your audio effects and music and play them back through a basic DSP. I seen this shift in games through the years, from old school methods of creating sound effects and music with code, to just playing audio files included with your game.
3. the general purpose CPU became powerful enough to do any complex signal processing and simply use the basic DSP to output the results of the processing.

Basically, in my opinion, specialize hardware is useless in the face of vast storage and general purpose CPU processing. So a basic DSP is all ya gunna need and that's what basically every PC comes with, standard now.

First off, we do have Streisand effect, I never heard of this guy until today. Now I'm among the millions who've now viewed this suspect wikipedia page. Second and more importantly, you're not permitted a 'side' or whatever you wanna call it on Wikipedia. It's just the facts man, no spin either direction, and from my review of the page, seemed to just present the facts. Or maybe I was reading something wrong, I dunno. Seemed pretty factual to me.