Is there any reason why you don't walk it? 1.6 miles is a pretty easy walk for an able-bodied person - it'd take about thirty minutes. Biking it would take a little under ten minutes.

The software runs on the hardware. If there's a hardware fault, the software may run incorrectly and find itself in a corrupt state. Turning on and off would reset the software state, thereby (temporarily) fixing the problem.

In your case, what if there's a fault in the touch sensor controller? Perhaps there's a counter that gets incremented with each tick and one of the bits in it is faulty and won't flip. After a certain number of ticks the counter might effectively reset rather than increment, which could force the controller into an invalid state which might prevent it from sending any sensible values to the operating system. A hardware fault that causes a software failure.

*heh* Nice troll.

I admit that it's possible that what they claim is true. However, given the record of the fast food, tobacco and alcohol industries of dishonesty when it suits their bottom line, I see no reason to consider that website a reliable source. Why would I? They have a history of dishonesty, why should I believe this is any different?

Ah. A website created by a lobby group for the fast food, tobacco and alcohol industries.

I think I'd rather side with PETA than with them.

You know that we get to vote for our European MPs, right?

With respect, you can't possibly suggest that the Wii and 360 are using Cell processors! The defining characteristic of the Cell are the Synergistic Processing Units, which neither the 360 or the Wii have.

As far as I remember the aspect of the Cell design that Microsoft used was the in-order execution PowerPC cores, not the SPUs. The Cell was very definitely a custom processor - just because it has a couple of PowerPC cores in it does not make it off-the-shelf!

Er... I think it's a bit much to refer to the PS3's Cell CPU as 'off-the-shelf'!

Apart from a few niche PCI development boards, the PS3 was pretty much the only thing to use the Cell.

... is High School necessary?

I think if you went for a sprinter, a cyclist would probably be a very good choice.

I read that Chris Hoy can put out around 1000W for just over a minute. Obviously he weighs a bit more than the student in the film, but I'd imagine he'd have what it takes, so long as he could adjust to the riding position.

What, so digging up billions of tons of hydrocarbons and releasing them into the atmosphere isn't dicking around with things we don't have complete knowledge and control over?

Today, something like 300 children die every hour due to malnutrition. Feeding the world's current population is well within our technical abilities, but the rich sections of the world (I'd guess that's most people on this website) are in general only prepared to make very minor sacrifices to help the poorer sections of the world.

By the year 2060 the world population will have probably more than doubled. I find it unlikely we'll even have worked out how to feed everyone by then, let alone cure them of their disabilities.

and a quote from the actual article...:

No, the real idiots here are you and the wazzocks who rated you 'informative'...

Programming SPUs is really very unlike programming on a 'normal' multi-core processor. Experience with the six hardware threads available on the Xbox360 is going to be more useful on multicore PC CPUs than experience with the Cell.

It's not that developers are too stupid (although some may be).

It's that if you have to spend a bunch of extra time managing the complexity inherent in the system, you've either got to put less time in to other parts of the game or you've got to spend more money making the game.