obligatory http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g

+1 I don't think there is any other desktop system that has something like kio_slaves.. I love how it lets me edit text files (using kate with vim mode) on remote systems, open PDFs etc. Also, KWin is great, multiple desktops with tiling support has become one of my favorite features when working on my laptop.

Yep, a Crystal HD decoder should work. I put one into the mini-PCI slot of my 5 year old laptop recently. The decoder is about $20 on ebay.

+1 You can save additional money by having a phone that supports SIP (or skype) and make calls using WIFI whenever it is available.

+1 There is no way you could control an RC helicopter using this. As you said, the controls are too imprecise and in addition wifi probably has too much lag.

I tried, but adobe reader crashed when I clicked on "credits". (No joke, 9.4.2 on amd64 Linux)

Also, whether you will get a significant speedup by using the GPU really depends on the algorithm. Some algorithms may not even be possible to implement for the GPU (due to limitations of CUDA, OpenCL etc.).

They should just outsource the handling of nuclear weapons to a contractor. It's much cheaper and safer that way.

Link to paper: http://www.rle.mit.edu/stir/documents/BilgicGA_MagResMed2011.pdf I guess the reason this shows up on slashdot is that it was on MITnews (and of course the work was done at MIT). It is nothing really groundbreaking (or novel for that matter). They use Compressive Sensing where they assume that the different scan types (T1, T2,etc) have a similar structure (same sparsity profile, enforced through shared precision hyperparameters in a Bayesian formulation).

+1 for a Thinkpad I just moved from a T61 to a T420s and everything works flawlessly (on both of them).

What exactly is "standard CPU TDP"? My 4+ year or thinkpad T61 has a (total, not just CPU) TDP of about 15W during light use.

If you have Linux PC that is accessible from the internet, then just use Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/). I use it all the time to synchronize my PC at work, my PC at home, and my laptop. It is quite fast, my synchronized folder is currently ~7GB and it takes maybe 10s to check for changes (not sure how Unison manages to do this).

Exactly. It is especially ridiculous if you consider that most government funding to the University comes from the STEM fields..

On a more serious note, what does "in a few minutes" even mean? You can already charge commercially available lithium polymer batteries in about 15 minutes (4C charge rate). So the actual number of minutes would be nice to know.

Exactly. It's funny, a guy from comcast came by last week to see if we want to get any of their services.. I told him that we have DSL and we don't need cable. Then he asked if we get everything through DSL (TV, phone, internet), so I said yes, which is true as we use skype and mostly watch Hulu, Netflix, and movies from Amazon. He wanted to know how much we pay and I told him $35 per month.. then he just said good bye and left.