Youtube is far from the best speech-to-text technology available. The best STT technology is probably owned by the NSA or companies that work with them. Part of the secret sauce to good STT is voice training and speaker recognition, which I don't believe youtube's STT is capable of yet. As far as Youtube is concerned, it's only one person talking throughout each video, so when you have a French dude speaking one sentence, followed by an Irish woman the next sentence, youtube may not dynamically adapt to that.

But besides that, the first thing any STT vendors ask when you start talking to them is about the quality of the recorded sound. If your speakers are not in a low-noise environment with good microphone setups, the results will always be disappointing.

Texas is the only state which has any chance of dividing into smaller states, since the US government explicitly agreed to let Texas eventually divide into five smaller states when it was annexed in the 1800's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_divisionism

Virtualization is perhaps the biggest driver in failure rates of enterprise drives. When you have several VM's competing for access on the same spindle, you're bound to have a lot more drive wear than an HDD in an laptop running not much more than a web browser.

Organizations seem to get the idea of using Oracle identity management when they're already using Peoplesoft HR. The executives on the administrative/HR side see Peoplesoft/HR as the hammer you should use to do everything, and they often have more clout than the executives on the technology side who see would rather deploy anything else. Nevermind the users who have to put up with frequent login time-outs, account lockouts, and frequent browser restarts. What the users are supposed to be doing, their work is not as important as the goal of "doing everything in one system" which is Oracle/Peoplesoft because that's where employment records are kept.

Pure E0 gasoline is available here and there. It's usually branded as "Amoco Silver" sold at one specific pump and costs maybe 5% more than 93-octane E10 depending on the station.

http://puregas.org/

Surprised it took the industry 30+ years to figure out how to do something so deceptively simple.

Those yellow low-pressure-sodium lamps are the most efficient source around. You see them around Palomar because they create far less less pollution and sky-glow than other sources. Astronomers love them, and they create less glare too.

"Best of breed" for software development works the opposite way. The "magic quadrant" solutions touted by Forrester and Gartner tend to be associated with companies presenting the most polished sales staff selling solutions that meet the most checkboxes with the flashiest demos. "All you do is click apply, and it's done!" Problem with those "best of breed" vendors is that instead of delivering a tight package of software that does a few things well, they give you a toppling stack of software that does tons of stuff poorly. They charge a lot to license, charge a lot to implement, and charge even more to support.

First time I've ever seen anyone on slashdot complain about something supporting Linux but not Windows.

I bet the same OCZ tech is getting another laugh today from reading your post.

Following any story about about airline seats, you always have comments from people "complaining" about how it sucks to be tall. Cry me a river.

The question answers itself, because the 16-year old tech geniuses from 2006 have become the 23-year old tech geniuses of today. Presumably any "tech genius" will become more genius as they grow older from 16 to 23. So today's 23-year old whizzes should always be superior than today's 16-year old whizzes. And after another seven years, some of today's 16-year olds will become 2020's best 23-year olds, and should outshine 2020's best 16-year olds, who won't be 23 until 2027. The better question to ask is, at what age is person going to peak in technological ability?

The bigger fallacy is who enters these competitions? They might attract exceptional high school students looking to distinguish themselves in their college applications, but your best college/university kids and young professionals are going to be too busy with other ventures and commitments to participate in these contests and hackathons. If you've got a million-dollar idea, you're not going to waste a weekend on a contest that can net you a couple of thousand dollars.

In reality, most of the young professionals participating in these events are either unemployed or underemployed. They're hardly the best representatives of their generation's talent.

...such precision.

Doh, I'm being a troll, aren't I.

To protect against hornets, carry around a vacuum cleaner. Nothing can live inside a vacuum.

Have they disabled government MX hosts, too? If they're going to disable web, they ought to disable email too.

Will this release of Java come with an Ask.com toolbar, a Yahoo.com toolbar, or a Google toolbar?