I could understand the possibility of a commercial company researching this.... because it has potential commercial applications. However, this was done at a university -- an institution of education. How did convince people to give them money to research this? Am I missing something?

This sort of information can also be useful for sales people. Many people don't know anything about PCs when they purchase a home computer. Many customers have heard of Intel, but the number of people that have heard of AMD is much less and they don't know if their products are any good. If a sales person wants to sell a particular computer that will fit their needs, the customer may be hesitant to buy an AMD based system if they haven't heard of it... even if the sales person says it fits their needs perfectly. However, if the sales person can tell them give them some nice stats, such as "15% of the top super computers in the world use AMD chips" or "the fastest super computer in the US (and 3rd fastest in the world) used AMD CPUs", then the customer will understand they are a legitimate and respected brand.

Also, the fact that AMD's numbers are growing helps indicate that Intel is getting a little bit more competition.... which is usually good for us geeks, in terms of price and performance.

Space exploration or ICBM reasearch? Like another post said, putting a 285+ Kg into space demonstrates that they now have the capability to launch rockets that can reach anywhere on Earth (although maybe not accurately, yet). Furthermore, the fact that they are sending it up into space, controlling its free orbit trajectory, but not planning to recover the capsule suggests they are more interested in the launching and in-flight capabilities of the rocket than any of the other data that may be associated with the 'passenger.' Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but this just screams of ICBM research to me.

IP over Avian Carriers. (IPoAC). With the pigeons, you don't have to worry about EM radiation interrupting the signal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

Were the researchers at Twitter simply monitoring all of the posts or were they paying attention to who was posting. To say if a country, as a whole, was happier in the morning, they would need to monitor and compare the posts of the same people throughout the day. However if they simply monitor all of the posts, ignoring who is posting, and then find the average level of happiness, then all they can say is the posts sampled in the morning are more positive than those posted other days. They can't say Americans are happier, because not everyone posts will post throughout the day. Will you see most high school students that are home on summer break post at 6 AM? No. He/She will most likely be asleep. However, they will be up later. Similarly the people that get up at 5AM to prepare for work are less likely to post late night because they are asleep. If you aren't tracking individual users throughout the day, then you aren't saying Americans are happier during the day... you are saying people that post at time X have more positive tweets than those that post at time Y.

I believe that a large part of the reason behind Hollywood frequently remaking old movies and mutilating novels and stories when converting them to "the big screen" is caused by the fact that companies want to make their movie popular with fans from all genres and not just a small niche market. However, to make something appeal to many people that are fans of different genres, you notice several things occurring frequently. These things include a popular young male star to appeal to the teanie boppers and young teens, a very cliche romance between two young characters to appeal to teens, large amounts of special affects without a complex plot to appeal to those that do not want to think, and a few random science terms (used improperly) and either time travel or machines that fight humans to attempt (and often fail) to please sci-fi fans. But to include all of these things, the plot must often be modified to create a cheesy, cliche romance that did not occur in the original story. Scenes must be created to show off aspects of stars to appease those that desire eye-candy. Concepts must be 'dumbed down' to keep from confusing those that don't want to (or can't) think.

By telling the movie studio that the writers have something that will appeal to a wide audience, the movie will likely be given a larger budget than something that will only appeal to those that like technical and accurate sci-fi movies.

But that is just my theory...

Porn industry, for not letting the sexually impaired (geeks) feel the masterpieces.

: Start rant about a rant: You do realize that as a language and its common terms are spoken over a period of time, the language will evolve and definitions of words change. This is why many scientific classifications are done in Latin, which is more or less a dead language. What do you think will happen when you have a general public that has little, if any, knowledge of a subject (such as high-speed internet connections) trying to quickly pick up a subject when making a purchase? They will try and find the simplest definitions they can to explain the "new" terms they hear and read in the information given by sales people. Furthermore, the English language has this funny thing called context. This allows words and phrases to have different meanings that will apply to different situations or sentences. So if you are talking with your computer illiterate grandma about how to get switch from her AOL internet connection, you can use the term bitrate (without reference to the actual function of symbol rate) to say that DSL, cable, or FIOS connections will load webpages much faster. On the otherhand, if you are writing a technical paper, you can use the technical terms in their original and not-dumbed-down state without problems. Definitions of technical words change and words get "dumbed down" by the general public. Get over it. :End rant about a rant

I currently use Firefox for its UI and its plugins. I use relatively few plugins, so that is not a major concern. On the other hand, the UI is of great importance. I like many of the features that Chrome has, but I hate its UI. I really like Firefox's current UI and, because of this, Firefox is my primary browser. If Firefox changes its UI to match Chrome's, I hope they have an option to change it to the old UI. If they don't, I will just find another browser or drop Firefox and switch to Chrome. I suspect Firefox will lose other users if they force this change in the UI.

Everyone competing in IAAF competitions should be fat, lazy, nonathletic, slobs.

But I don't think anybody on Slashdot wants to compete.