Really? 12 hours of comments and nobody's mentioned the parallel to Firefly yet?

Just picture it where River is your smartphone (that'd be one badass smartphone), and the malware is a program that kicks everybody's ass within a 100-foot radius.

I just hope the malware comes with a safe word.

I once got misdelivered mail that was destined for somewhere about 1,000 miles and about 5 states away. I had never considered that the envelopes stuck together, which might explain it, though they were not stuck together when I got them. I was very puzzled since there were no similarities in street name, address, city, state, zip code, etc...

On the flip side of this poll, I'm always impressed when the post office correctly delivers mis-addressed mail. I currently live in a large complex with several hundred units, and mailboxes spread throughout (about one group of mailboxes outside of every 4 units, and no labels with occupant names). Sometimes either we forget the unit number, or somebody's software chops it off when printing the address. Yet the mailman has figured out the correct unit and put it in my mailbox. Even when it's addressed to my wife's maiden name, and there are no other pieces of mail with that name.

The USPS isn't anywhere near perfect (I'm usually disappointed by their package redelivery in my area, for example), but there are many employees that take their jobs seriously and do a fantastic job - and to them, I say kudos. And I hope their enthusiasm about their jobs spreads to more employees...

On top of this - why is your solution better than what's out there now? There are many similar products and services that improve video quality in one or more ways. Don't get caught if one of them knows your competition better than you - you need to know them all like the back of your hand, and why you're going to blow them out of the water.

Then, once you've blown everybody else out of the water, what's to keep them from entering the market too? Patents? Trade secrets? Difficulty? How will you continue to make money? Upgrades? Expanding market share?

If the details of the algorithm help to tell this story, then sure, show them those parts. Otherwise, who cares? The results and the business are what matters.

It's my understanding that typically, a manual car gets better gas mileage than an automatic, as has been linked in other replies. However, I think this may be because the automatic is at a disadvantage; they often have one less gear than their manual cousins. For example, I just looked up a Toyota Corolla; the base model is a 5-speed manual at 30 mpg, while the upgraded model is a 4-speed automatic at 29 mpg.

This isn't always true; I also looked at the Honda Accord; they offer a 6-speed manual and a 6-speed automatic, but the automatic only comes on a hungrier engine, so they can't be compared. They do offer a CVT as an upgrade to the manual though, and that does get better mileage.

I think it all comes down to price; usually, the automatic gearbox is gimped to get the price closer to the manual, since many people see the automatic gearbox as a necessity, not an upgrade. To save on costs, they use one less gear, and hence the source of the "manuals save gas" generalization.

To add to this, I would also argue that robots and automation have often saved the jobs that remain, rather than replacing the jobs that have been lost. Without automation, many businesses would have moved manufacturing overseas (or contracted it out, or gone out of business), because they simply couldn't afford to compete with other companies (including foreign ones) that have taken steps to reduce their production costs.

Not that the people involved will see it this way, of course. When your plant is struggling and the managers replace half the workers with robots, those workers will see the robots as replacing the half that were laid off, not saving the half that could be kept.

You mean like this one?

I've also seen articles on various other similar robots, including for noodles and pizza.

Have you seen the comments here before?

Now if it was "Always used a Mac", then I could pick it. But I couldn't in good conscience choose the one that said "Always used OS X" because, quite frankly, I'm older than it is.

I'm sure I'm not the only person here that is older than their favorite OS. In fact, there are probably some people around here that were born before EVERY operating system, much less the ones listed.

I voted against it, but believe me - the mailing I received every week from Monsanto almost had me convinced to vote for it, simply because anything Monsanto wants bad enough to spend millions of dollars is probably the opposite of what I want. I felt a little dirty voting in agreement with what they wanted.

In the end, I voted against it for the same reason several other people I know did - just because food is GMO doesn't mean it's unhealthy or otherwise bad. It means that its deserving of more scrutiny, for sure - but labeling the foods does nothing to add extra scrutiny to the process of getting the food on the market. It also doesn't give consumers any extra information about whether the food is bad; instead it promotes fear of the unknown.

By all means, it's worth trying again - but it'd a waste of time and money to try the exact same thing a second time. Instead, something should be done to address the many criticisms of the labeling effort. Perhaps an improved measure has a better chance of passing.

Yeah, I'm with you on the no-tech solution bandwagon. Especially in a chorus, it's pretty easy to be close to somebody else, and if you feel the need, hide the tactile cues behind the row of people in front of you or your music. Though some people might question what the blind chorus member is doing holding a music folder. ;-)

I was in a youth orchestra that had a blind member playing viola (or maybe it was second violin?) for a while. I never knew her, but from what I gathered, she'd learn and memorize all the music on her own before we started rehearsals. She was seated right in the middle of the orchestra - between violins and violas, and in front of the winds - so that she could hear everybody around her. I think for entrances and tempo changes, she'd rely on listening to the rest of the orchestra, or come in a little later if she had to. (Obviously, it's a little harder to have tactile communication in an orchestra, where everybody is using both hands for their instrument, and the strings tend to be spaced apart a bit so that their bows don't collide.)

The summary says: "It was the malware which affected as many Apple computers as the Conficker worm affected Windows PCs..."
This is obviously inaccurately rewritten from what Krebs said, which is "...Flashback [was] roughly as common for Macs as the Conficker Worm was for Windows PCs."

Those are not equivalent statements. The summary is equating raw numbers, while TFA is equating percentages.

Sorry, I just read that sentence and thought "no way in hell is that true." As confirmation, Wikipedia says Flashback hit 600,000 Macs, while Conficker infected between 9 and 15 million PCs.

Yeah, but if they encrypted the titles, how would you tell if an article was posted to every other news site several days earlier, versus, um, ...whatever it is that Slashdot normally posts?

Never mind.

The problem is energy efficiency. In the past 5 years since it was first built, supercomputers have become far more energy-efficient. Roadrunner falls at 444 MFLOPS per Watt, while the current fastest supercomputer (and also a DOE project), Titan, is 2,143 MFLOPS per Watt. Roadrunner uses 2345 kW, and supporting equipment (cooling, backup power adds (on average) 80% more. Assume they get relatively cheap electricity (The Internets tell me the average price charged to industrial customers is 7/kWh), and that means that their electric bill is at least $295.50 PER HOUR. A computer with the same performance but Titan's efficiency would cost $61 per hour. That's the difference between your electric bill being $2.6 million per year and $500,000.

Assuming Titan's cost also scales ($60 million for 17 Petaflops -> ~$3.5 million for 1 Petaflop), then the payback for scrapping it and building a new computer is under 2 years. So yes, it IS saving money to scrap this one. They're not even replacing it with a new one (yet, anyway) - they're using one that was built in 2010.

And also, yes, you CAN use a computer to calculate how your nuclear arsenal is deteriorating. What makes you think they can't?

See the next-to-last answer in the FAQ here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5570

If you've reset your password or changed your security questions, they make you wait first. This prevents somebody from stealing your account, changing the password, and then turning on two-factor authentication preventing you from ever getting it back. As they also note in that article, if you use two-factor authentication, they become unable to reset your password. If you ever lose two of the three things needed to log in (your password, your verified device(s), and your recovery key), then you cannot make any changes to your account. (And if you lose all three, you can't even log in from an already-trusted device.)

My point has very little to do with who your female relatives are. Regardless of whether they can or can't handle it (and many of them shock their younger relatives by dishing it themselves), they hold a position of respect in many families and societies. It's how we perceive them and their elevated status that makes the difference in our behavior.