It's totally possible to build electric motors that use electromagnets for both the rotor and the stator... Could someone explain why permanent magnets are so much better?

People who believe in libertarianism are people who are already well off, and who think that letting capitalism run free without any regulation will somehow make the world fairer and better. The reality is that they just want to pay less taxes, because they think *they* can do without any government services. It's only slightly less stupid than people who believe in anarchy. My libertarian friends tell me how we'd be so much better protected if we all had to pay some corporation to be the police.

Let's give SecuriCorp a bunch of guns and all the power it wants. Let's pay this company to protect us, and let's let it grow as big as it can. They're so reliable, everyone buys their safety from SecuriCorp, until they've become a monopoly. Then they're all powerful, untouchable, and they can impose whatever law they want on you. They can prevent any smaller security company from ever coming into existence. Maybe the president of SecuriCorp has a taste for little girls too. He can take a few of his buddies with him into his big SUV and grab teenage girls from the street at night to gang rape them, and nobody will do anything about it.

You could of course speak with your wallet, and not pay them for safety, you smart libertarian, except then nobody's protecting you but yourself. You, of course, think you're so awesome, because you own an MP5 and a handgrenade. Too bad SecuriCorp has trained mercenaries who can make your death look like a gang-related crime. You're obviously dead because you failed to pay SecuriCorp to protect you, you unwise person.

I think that when people say "The PC is going away", they do include laptops in the definition. They honestly believe that tablets and smartphones are going to eliminate desktops and laptops... Not realizing that some of us want full-fledged keyboards to, you know, type messages longer than a few lines, do homework, write reports and other work documents, or even *gasp* programming code to run on all these devices.

I honestly think tablets are a fad, just like netbooks. Most people who use tablets would be better served by lightweight laptops, such as the MacBook Air or something along those lines... And they know it too. I mean, woah, you can watch movies on that thing, read webpages you say? You just can't tilt the screen in a convenient position without some kind of holder, using a tablet while sitting on the couch is uncomfortable, and typing on it is a pain, you need some kind of external keyboard.

Ah, yes, deemphasizes programming... Because existing CS degrees don't do enough of that already. I've done a B.Sc., a masters and am now doing a Ph.D. in CS... And the whole time, everybody's been pretending that programming is just not that important. That computer science should be something pure and somehow entirely detached from the practical realities of computing. The result? Lots of students can't code. Lots of students don't really understand how computers work, both in the concrete and in the theoretical sense.

I think if you hate coding, you should pick another field. Like it or not, unless you're doing purely theoretical CS, you're going to need to implement something on a computer at some point... And this is done with a programming language.

I think coding could be made more *fun* and less tedious, but I don't think we should try to hide it under a rug and pretend it's not there. If anything, learning to program is a great way to develop your logical/critical thinking.

Some people have a limited definition of what constitutes "science" or "progress".

At least we have the Turing Award.

I've always imagined that elementary particles must be point-like, without any actual volume. Does this study contradict that notion?

It just seems to me that it wouldn't make sense for electrons to have a volume, because that would imply some kind of structure. Nobody ever seemed to suggest that photons actually have a "shape", other than a point.

They don't use hash maps to represent objects. Both SpiderMonkey and V8 regroup objects into pseudo-classes based on the set of properties they have. The technique was actually pioneered by SELF many years ago.

V8 calls this "hidden classes": http://code.google.com/apis/v8/design.html

As for closures, they can be represented in a multitude of ways... Some more efficient than others.

Erm. I wouldn't call them "mediocre". I own a 14MP Sony digital camera, as well as a Flip Mino HD. Both do 720p video, but the video quality on the Flip Mino is much better. I seriously doubt most smartphones could even remotely compete. The thing can take pretty good video both in near darkness and in very loud environments. I've used it to take clips in nightclubs which came out quite good. I routinely use it to film my video blogs and have few complaints (although it does have some design flaws).

I think the truth is that this product is not that well known, and the average Joe will be satisfied with the video quality from a digital camera. Won't want to buy a second dedicated device that's just as expensive as a whole second digital camera so they can get potentially better video quality... Especially since it's pretty hard to judge the video quality in a store, looking at the video only on the device's display. Then you have the other problem that the Flip Mino doesn't look like your "traditional" camcorder. Customers looking specifically for a camcorder might just shell more on a "reputable" $500+ camcorder-looking device from Sony, rather than something small and "toy-like" from a brand they never heard of.

>> check out Quake II with multiplayer support [youtube.com] completely done in html5 and javascript.

Completely done in html5 and javascript... Except it isn't. This won't run in a stock browser, it needs custom plugins.

I looked into programming an FPS game in a browser myself, and ran into multiple issues. For one, you can't capture the mouse. This means you can't have traditional FPS-style mouse control. The networking is also an issue. You can't just do regular TCP/IP. There's websockets, which I'm not sure if they're standardized and uniform yet, but can apparently only connect to the web server. Then there's the sound. Do you have any idea how buggy and pathetic the implementation of the audio tag is in both firefox and chrome right now? It's terrible.

I'd like for browsers to become a better gaming platform too, but right now, JavaScript and HTML5 are being standardized by people who don't really seem to truly understand (or care about) the full potential of the browser as a game platform. Hopefully they will lighten up at some point, or browser vendors will provide suitable extensions. I'm sure browser games will gain in popularity no matter what. Lots of people are already addicted to mafia wars and all those games you find on facebook. For the browser to one day replace consoles as a gaming platform though, that would take a more targeted effort by browser vendors, in my opinion.

At this year's CASCON, I spoke to Murray Campbell from IBM. He's one of the lead people who work on this project and who also worked on Deep Blue. I discussed this with him. My girlfriend had told me that she also had no difficulty beating the online demo. He answered that the online demo is only a part of the system, and that their full system routinely beats top Jeopardy players. They're going to showcase their system on TV because they truly believe it has a chance at winning.

Unrelated to this, I also learned that Deep Blue had custom processors engineered and fabricated (VLSI) just to be chess accelerators. Prior to this, I always thought the machine was a relatively powerful supercomputer (with general purpose hardware) running their custom chess software. It turns out that it had many blades of processors dedicated to searching positions really fast, which each even contained libraries of chess opening moves engraved in ROM.

>> Observing real-world behavior will teach you alot more about human nature...

You have me confused with my younger sister, LUH 3417.

Common misconception. Too big can be very cumbersome and frustrating. When you get down to it, it's all about effectiveness and sleekness, you see. I think women spot one they find attractive, try it for a bit, and if their experience is pleasant, they'll stick with it. I think women (and quite a few men) like simplicity, that they want something that can adapt to them, not the other way around, and I think Steve Jobs has that figured out pretty well.

Despite what you think you might have learned from all those edutainment movies. Observing real-world behavior will teach you alot more about human nature...

It's not a question of cheating. Those algorithms are simply approximate. They can't be guaranteed to get the optimal solution, but only to get a solution that is within some factor as good as the optimal... Or sometimes give no guarantees at all (e.g.: genetic algorithms). Those are often the solutions used in practice for NP-complete problems, because they're fast and will often get you very very close to the optimal solution. So close that you don't really care it isn't guaranteed optimal. Methods such as genetic algorithms or simulated annealing work by sampling the space of possible solutions and performing random mutations on the better solutions that are found in an attempt to get even better solutions.

I agree. Education takes so long. I'm currently working on a Ph.D. I'll probably be done around 28. I wish I had more time, so I could take things a little slower, enjoy my life more, and also spend even more time learnings about other topics. The perspective of growing old doesn't bring me any comfort. It's just something we all have had to resign ourselves to, thus far... But I honestly would love to have the opportunity to have 4-5 different careers in my life, to try alot of different possibilities, without having to feel any kind of rush.

Clearly, from the other comments, alot of people see it as wrong and unnatural for people to live indefinitely, because it's never been achieved. It would be a radical change. I honestly think, though, that if we could find a way to keep people young indefinitely, to keep both our bodies and our brains from aging, it might be a good thing. It might indeed imply that we would have to enforce population control, to avoid a population explosion, but is that so bad? It means less children to take care of, which means those children might be better taken care of. It also probably means more educated people, more experts in all fields, lower crime rates, etc. Not to mention... If people are young forever, it means no more old folks to care care of. Society suddenly has a bigger supply of able workers available.

If you're worried about changing the "natural order of things", then I say, we've already done that, as a species. We have the power to use our intelligence to improve our living conditions. Should we really refrain from doing so? Do you really think it's best for us to simply breed more and more children forever? If we have the power to prevent aging and greatly reduce fatality rates, should we really just do nothing, just so we can keep breeding more children? Should we just let people suffer and die because it's "natural"?

There is a programming model for FPGAs. They have their own programming languages which are widely used in the industry (Verilog/VHDL). This model isn't so different from the way OpenCL is used with GPUs. This kind of design will work well for some applications, where custom hardware accelerators can be precompiled and loaded on demand. There will already be demand for this. Some companies that can't afford to make ASICS will certainly like the idea of integrating their own decryption/routing/video accelerator into a chip for cheap, and be able to patch the hardware.

I would personally love to have a CPU that's coupled with an FPGA because it would allow things like implementing your own raytracing accelerator. You can even implement a whole custom CPU into an FPGA... To give you an idea of the flexibility, you can design your own custom memory controller, your own cache. Custom-design your own CPU with a hardware-accelerated garbage collector... The possibilities are boner inducing....

I don't know how much of a difference it will make for customers in the very near future, but for researchers, this will be an invaluable tool, and it might lead to insight on how to make good-ole regular processors (without FPGAs) better (hardware design research).