The opening crawl begins with "A long time ago," so the more the movie ages the more authentic it gets. Furthermore, Lucus made a good business decision targeting the new movies to children. Adults have already seen the original 3 movies and probably already own them on whatever medium and most will not upgrade. However, by getting a new generation of consumers, he extends the amount of time people watch the movies. Maybe in 10 or 20 years he'll make the last 3 to get another generation interested. Even by themselves, the original movies are classics and will be required viewing by anyone who isn't culturally retarded.

I was taking more issue with the part of your post where you said, "there are certainly computational challenges where a few million core-hours would be welcome." Now, a few million core-hours isn't cheap, but if you have a good idea and you can sell it (to the grant agencies or someone who has a huge cluster), then getting the requisite compute time is certainly do-able. Furthermore, going back to OP's post, the researchers who did this Rubik's cube stuff were not competing for the same pool of resources as oncologists (i.e. it's not likely that Google had some cancer research they put on the back burner because finding God's Number was more pressing, and I couldn't tell who was funding this research, but it looks like it may have been a volunteer effort).

As you mentioned, the bottleneck is people. And the oncologist you mentioned was going about recruiting people in the right way, by saying something to the effect of, "here are a set of problems you have the skills to solve, you may be interested on these issues, and there is funding for you to do research in this field." That works a lot better than telling a bunch of mathematicians that they are wasting their time and that they should work on curing cancer while you are not an oncologist yourself (this is referring to OP).

The computational resources are available. If the researcher needs clock time, he can talk to the folks at TeraGrid, among others. Of course, the researcher you mentioned was doing something similar to what OP wants, although more politely and probably the "correct" way, which is to try to get people who are working on problem X to work on cancer instead. At least the oncologist was "walking the walk" in that he is actually working on his topic of interest instead of just complaining that there is no cure for cancer.

No, he'd rather just complain. It's much easier to criticize researchers than to do the research yourself.

Ah, so what you really meant is:

Wikipedia has a decent article on the subject.

It is still a wonderful solution since many (if not most) people don't actually make anything. Please crawl back into your cabinet now.

That's aspect ratio not resolution.

Yeah, he goes by Larry when he's on the job.

Bad analogy. I sell you a car with stolen aftermarket parts. Are you responsible for stealing the parts? No, but they should be given back to the original owner and the previous owner, who stole the parts, should go to jail. In this case, profits are the stolen parts, and Michale Dell, Kevin Rollins & co. are the previous owners who should be slapped with fraud charges. This is still not a great analogy because a company is it's own legal entity.

Imagine now that the car you bought was KITT from Knight Rider. Michael Knight & KITT stole a huge bunch of crap and installed it in KITT and then Knight sold you 1/7th of the car so now you can drive it on Tuesdays. When the police finds you guys, they should take away the stolen parts and then further punish Michael and KITT (now KITT spends 3 hours each day doing community service because they can't arrest KITT). You are now deprived of 3 hours in which you can do donuts in KITT, and the car is significantly less bad-ass than the one you bought. If you want to recoup your value, go after Michael (Knight and Dell), since he is the one who defrauded you. If you sold your Tuesdays to someone else before the jig was up, the person you sold it to should probably sue Knight as well, although they may sue you and you in turn have to sue the original owner.

Doesn't seem likely to me. From what I can tell, the PSP was profitable for Sony, but it is being sorely beaten by the Nintendo DS series and now standalone portable video game sales are being cannibalized by smartphones. I would say that this is more likely to end up in a Zune phone and will be Microsoft's in-house alternative to nVidia's Tegra processors. I will chuckle if they contract AMD/ATI to do the graphics again, kind of like how they switched to ATI graphics when building the XBox 360 processor.

Oh, wait, I get it. This is a manly laser. It holds manly shows like "24." It will refuse to store shows like "Days of Our Lives" and "The L Word."

I read the patents. There are no chip circuit diagrams or descriptions of them (I guess diagrams of how shit is connected together technically forms a circuit - but if that is what you are asking for, I can mail you this napkin I drew on). They just show how a DVD player/console/etc are connected to a magic "SET TOP BOX" then connects to the TVs and wirelessly is connected to the glasses. This device handles the synchronization of frames with the 3D glasses and the TV. There is nothing describing the schematics for the actual "control circuits" - only what they do. I guess you have only figured out how to be snarky but without any actual substance.

So let's see Sony's control circuits for their 240hz display. What? They didn't include them in the patent? I guess you don't actually understand how patents work yet.

Yeah, read that right. Player 1 sees frames 1 and 4, Player 2 sees frames 2 and 5 and Player 3 sees frames 3 and 6. Hold up, I'm having a Gillette moment here.

1. Player 1 sees frames 1 and 6
2. Player 2 sees frames 2 and 7
3. Player 3 sees frames 3 and 8
4. Player 4 sees frames 4 and 9
5. Player 5 sees frames 5 and 10

That's right assholes. Five blades^H^H^H^H^H^Hplayers.