You are right. This article is awful, conveying no sense of the nature of the problem or its complexity, and giving no idea of the solution at all.

The only equations I'm aware of for a falling particle subject to air resistance take the form

m v' = -mg -a*v-b*v^2

which is a constant coefficient Riccati differential equation for the velocity v. I'm reasonably sure this would have an analytic solution.

Maybe complications arise in the 2D motion case, or perhaps the problem includes a particle which is also spinning. Maybe the drag terms take more complicated forms. I don't know. The article is pretty dreadful to be honest.

How many of those "cloud-based" solutions are written in PHP, Java, or Python and hosted on LAMP servers? You know, the ones with "Enterprise" features and "24x7 availability", and stiffly worded SLAs?

Lots and lots.

Working at such a hosted solution provider, we replace 50 to 100 onsite servers with 1 or 2 of our own and profit immensely on economies of scale. While we diligently scan uploaded data for viruses, we also benefit from having robust security, firewalls, and rapidly updated servers. In nearly 10 years of doing business like this, we've had zero virus outbreaks and uptime approaching 4 nines. We don't get complaints about our reliability, a few hours of downtime per year.

The worst generation ever is the current generation of decision makers(55-65) who are crushing all beneath them in order to save their inflated pension pots.

If there is really a national or international "Demise of guys" among young men, it has a lot more to do with youth unemployment levels than video games or internet pornography.

What good has come out of SETI so far?

Millions of us in the gutter, looked up at the stars.

If people thought Idle was bad, the Business Intelligence takes Slashdot an order of magnitude lower.

How long until the BI editors demand outright access to the frontpage?

... but it also is true that a few years ago we had a well-ordered world with 3 platforms at most and now with the mobile revolution we pratically are back in the 80ies with a bazillion proprietary platforms none of which are really compatible to one another. ...

The bottom line is that smartphones are taking the computer software industry backwards. About 20 years backwards in fact.

We have legions of shiny but shallow "apps" instead of useful, usable, and comprehensive applications. We have appallingly restrictive vendor control of OSes instead of free private development AND distribution. We have users stuck with small screens, no peripherals, and slow and expensive connections instead of quad core power machines with broadband connections and 20'' widescreens.

It's 1993 again. Shovelware crap is ubiquitous, there are no set standards, no-one knows how to use their devices, and worse the devices aren't yet actually useful for anything more serious than playing low resolution games and "surfing the web" for recreational purposes.

People need to wake up and realise that smartphones are little more than expensive toys with a phone tacked on. People need--at the very least--a laptop to get actual work(and play) done. And developers make money supplying the tools to get it done.

For fucks sake! Four posts down from an actual ontopic TOP, and you're already talking about the administration and the election.

Can we please get add a "political" tag so I can filter this shit out of stories where it doesn't belong.

I've been hearing about the end of hard disks for a long, LONG time now. RAID1 was supposed to be dead a decade ago, RAID5 a few years back.

Strangely, rumors of their deaths have been repeatedly found to be greatly exaggerated. Speeds have improved, (though not kept pace with the sizes of drives), and so has reliability-per-bit.

Someone's never eaten the ham slices at the bottom of the big tub.

Oh my goodness, because I live in Australia I have to wait a week before seeing a TV show? How do I manage?

And why are you in such anticipation of this show? Because its creators and distributors promote it so that you will crave your next viewing, as they should.

Then they release it early in the town down the road, and expect you not drive over there and watch it on a friends TV.