Read this and weep. NOBODY has the ability to just move off of nuclear power. Or any other power source for that matter. There is no such thing as "alternative energy". Global power demand is constantly increasing, even faster than population growth (in fact, as energy use increases, population tends to grow more slowly or even decline). We're going to need every watt of power we can get in the not too distant future, from nuclear sources or otherwise. This is a very foolish act on the part of Germany, that will only end up screwing them down the line as energy costs increase dramatically within 50 years, and their economy struggles to keep up. But by then, it will be too late. If Germany started building nuclear plants NOW, and continued building them at a rate that is practically impossible to manage, there's a CHANCE their economy might not end up collapsing completely within half a century.

Mark my words. People will look back on this as the beginning of the end for Germany.

The Slashdot post is incorrect, according to the article. The actual throughput is about 4GB/s.

Not exactly. The primary reason people would pay big bucks for the SLR camera is because of the difference in lens selection and quality. Other than artistic skill, there's no single component that is going to make a bigger difference to the look of the photograph. All other things being roughly equal, a $1,000 lens on an SLR camera is going to be capable of producing a better photograph than a $99 point and shoot, from a technical perspective at least. There are some photographs that you can get with an SLR that you'll never be able to get with a point and shoot. High speed action, or extremely low/high depth of field shots, for example.

This is absolutely true. Still is, even with digital.

Sure there is. In fact, that's probably the largest market segment for digital cameras. Quality is getting better all the time, even as camera sizes are shrinking. Heck, they're starting to stick cameras in phones that rival the high end consumer digital cameras of only a few years ago.

C'mon, that's just your excuse for being lousy in bed.

That algorithm does particularly poorly on just one processor. In fact, if it ran successfully the universe would implode.

I think it could be done with no more than two. The technology behind the iPod touchscreen is capable of recognizing the shape and size of a touch point. So you should be able to determine the type of piece with a single point, and you'd just need another point for orientation. I think only oval shapes can be recognized, but if asymmetrical shapes are possible (or if you had pieces that were symmetrical and limited the forward direction to a 180 degree arc), you could do it with only one.

But if you had access to the low level touchscreen interface, it may not even be a problem. I believe the iPod filters out points below a certain size threshold as random noise. But if you know that you're looking for certain patterns, you could separate these from the noise yourself and there would theoretically be no limit to the number of recognizable shapes.

It's actually more significant than you might think. Drawing the desktop requires a graphics operation as well as a disk operation, and these are two of the slowest operations the computer can perform. If you have a ton of icons in your desktop folder (which I usually do, since I use it as a generic holding space for temporary files, and only bother to clean it out relatively infrequently), it can take a significant amount of time to draw all of them. Maybe not a whole lot, but when you consider that it's constantly there, it can add up.

Also, disabling the desktop prevents the system from preparing for a cross application drag if you just drag across the desktop while trying to drag from one window to another within the same application. Some poorly designed programs (I'm lookin' at you, Final Cut Pro) will freeze up for several seconds while they enumerate something or other based on the premise that since you crossed over the desktop, you might conceivably want to drop things on it. Disabling the desktop prevents that (but you still have to be careful not to accidentally drag over any stray Finder windows!)

With Tinkertool, you can turn off the desktop entirely so that no icons show whatsoever. Doing so provides a bit of a performance boost since it never has to redraw the desktop window, and it provides the added benefit that a clumsy click on the desktop won't switch you out of the current application.

Also, they're having a conference for criminals down at the local police station. Real big conference, trust me. I bet there'll be booth babes.

The presence of competition is not a necessary condition for a "free market". This is not open for debate--this is a simple matter of the definition of the term. What you might be thinking of is a "perfect market", which is a theoretical concept in economics that is not the same thing as a "free market". Go read up about it on Wikipedia and you'll see what I mean.