Who cares about physical formats except for half a dozen music nerds who wants the "experience" of a physical object? It's pretty obvious that the younger generations just want to hear their music, not accumulate dust.

you know why people don't even bother anymore to try buying stuff anymore?

Because the "pirate" download is easier, sometimes faster, and, especially in the case of videos, earlier and better (meaning without all these traillers, fbi screens on the beginning etc).

Besides, the industry only moved their slow butts for two reasons: this piracy they speak of and apple. If they could, they would be selling nicki minaj crap por 30 dollars each song.

Don't do ANYTHING related to it. You will have time for that. Go walk, spend a month in india, climb the andes, whatever. Those things you will miss.

It's not about supporting arts. It's about supporting a dead business model that rewards little to the artists themselves, and which now has the right to spy on what you do online.

Easier said than done. A lot of companies sell you a software, not the source. Zealotry doen't change this.

It has been solved for a while, and works well. You can use the camera app or skype as on any other android device.

Yeah, because using C and having to write your own string, data structures and memory management routines is hardly reinventing the wheel at all.

For this price, I can buy an aerogarden, which comes with the water deposit, water pumps, lights and even comes with some seeds inside an optimized growing medium and fertilizer, besides being an aeroponics system, with a lot of advantages over growing stuff on dirt.

Even for those pot growers this is not a good idea.

Or this is how they will become more like china - with their "communism" meaning the same people are in power forever.

Their radio devices only access preselected stations. They don't have a dial, and being in possession of one is ilegal in there. The few people who do have one, stay quiet about it.

Another good thing is that by having these more "friendly" reactors, you can power more supercomputers! It's a win-win situation

Don't forget that x86 comprises five of the top 10, being the rest Powerpc-based (BG/Q and Power7). Other contenders have much more chance on this market than, say, the workstation market.

Mostly, because of the network. Although the cpus (or the whole system, in the case of the Pi) are cheap, the inter-communication is SLOW. And this gets worse with scale. So what starts bad (with the PI) network, gets much worse in bigger scale.

Although this is an excellent test bed for teaching parallel computing - EXACTLY because it scales so badly, so the bad effects are exaggerated.

There are a lot of different research that benefits from these kinds of machines. Mind you, the machine will hardly be running a single program at 30 pflops scale, but instead running dozens of smaller jobs at the same time, and economy comes with the scale. It's simpler to scale your job from 10,000 processors to 1 million on the same machine than running the smaller job in one site than porting to the big one. Besides, give 30 pflops and people on the physics, math and biology department will ask for 50 :)

Hum, why BSD? He mentioned linux not because is the best solution ever (which might or might not be), but because a lot of petaflop-capable code was written specifically to run on it.. and because the big names (IBM, Crazy) fully support it. In fact, I don't remember ever using a BSD-based supercomputer. The top500 only shows one machine, at 0.1 petaflop, running a bsd-based OS. Search for os here: http://top500.org/statistics/sublist/