John Carmack is a programmer, not a scientist.
His main skills are at understanding theory and efficiently implementing it, not creating new theories.

Without people like John Carmack, all we would have would be useless equations and equally useless pieces of silicon. Of course the reverse is also true, it is the "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing.

Nope,
just Bart Jansen

The survey is not about what kind of data they harvest and how the companies use it internally.
It is about their policy about how they handle data requests.

I believe that Photoshop actually benefits from piracy.
Imagine an uncrackable Photoshop. Obviously, few people beside pros will buy it. They others will use cheaper software like Paint Shop Pro instead, or even worse for Adobe : the GIMP. As a result, young enthusiasts, will start to learn GIMP, GIMP tutorials will pop up everywhere, and where these young people turn pro, they will continue using it. It will motivate coders too, and GIMP will become better with more contributors.

Windows is not that badly designed, not anymore. And it already comes with an excellent free antivirus.
Norton and McAffee are just crapware that don't need a legitimate reason to exist. And AV are not the only type of crapware, there are also online stores, browser toolbars... Even Microsoft is at fault with their MSOffice trial.

To be part of anonymous, you just have to call yourself anonymous.
For example, I can deface a website, write "we are legion never forgive never forget blah blah" and it becomes yet another action of anonymous. The anonymous that DDOS MasterCard and the one that hunt down child porn may be completely different groups that don't even know each other.

Saying that anonymous is a powerful organization is as stupid as saying that the opensource community is a powerful organization. They are certainly powerful, have similar ideas and often work together but they are not an organization.

I don't know much about oil companies but I suspect that they do a lot of R&D.
Just because what always sell the same stuff doesn't mean that there isn't a whole lot of innovation happening behind the scene.

... and Andrew Nikolic had contacted me.
I would have asked all my employees to like the satirical article in question.

I also worked with Mandriva. I also know some people who used Gentoo or CentOS. But I've never seen Arch nor Mint.
I am not saying that my distros are better than your distros. What I am trying to say it that there is no real distinction between "major" and "minor" distros. #1 is maybe 5 times more popular than #10, not a big difference.

Audio is much less demanding than video and MP3 is good enough. This is why few people look elsewhere.

As for Vorbis, it is a top of the line format, with results equaling or exceeding MPEG's AAC for stereo audio. It is also used by many games internally. It is not like WebM and Theora that are visibly worse than h.264. I think that Vorbis can get more easily accepted than WebM.
To get an idea. I sometimes see pirates use Vorbis, but not WebM or Theora. And pirates don't care about licenses, they want widely accepted and technically good formats.

Note : OGG is just a container, like AVI, MKV or MP4. The actual audio compression format behind most OGG files is Vorbis.

Right but if someone manages to break into android because of a bug in the kernel, it will benefit Linux even if it is not Google's code. Same thing for all other open-source components.

MOC is mostly for the part of Qt that deals with signal and slots, a form of loose coupling for objects that is very convenient for GUIs. Boost-like features of Qt are standard C++ and don't require a precompiler.

What may be unfortunate is that once you decide to use Qt there is no turning back because you will end up with Qt objects everywhere in your code. But isn't it the same with boost ?

It is not surprising that statistical analysis can distinguish between good or bad essays.
Just take a bunch of human-graded essays and try to find correlations on things like the presence of some words, total length, etc... Smarter algorithms may analyze things like proper spelling and syntax.
The idea here is that the robo-grader does not really grade the essay, it tries to mimic the most superficial aspect of human grading. For example, most of the time the word "wether" is a spelling mistake and the robo-grader may simply lower the score each time the word is present. The rare cases where the word is properly used is statically insignificant so it doesn't matter... 99% of the time.

This approach may work well but it is totally unfair. It is like grading using race or gender as a criterion. It will certainly improve correlation but I hope that no one think about it seriously.

With mind uploading will come mind downloading, mind copying, mind copying, etc...
We should start thinking about implementing Mind Restriction Management to prevent unauthorized mind sharing or else our minds will be shut down. The most scary thing is that the tool to shut down minds already exists, it is called TV.

I use a 12 year old CRT that was considered relatively high quality at the time (Iiyama Vision Master Pro 510). So let me answer your claims.
- Ability to display perfect black color :
When the brightness is not set too high the blacks are great (better than LCD) but not perfect. When the brightness it at 100% it is worse than the cheapest LCDs.
- Ability to display more than one resolution correctly :
True, great for games, especially considering that reducing the resolution increases the refresh rate (to about 150Hz)
- Ultrafast response time, no input lag :
True, I especially like the high refresh rate. As for the input lag, my skills are far too low to take advantage of this.
- Reliable and have long life :
Yes and no : Yes because my monitor is 12 years old and just refuses to die and no because there is significant degradation in the colors. I lost about 20% contrast in red and blue leading to a greenish tint in dark areas that is difficult to correct.
- More affordable than a 24" LCD that can display 2304x1440 :
It is difficult to compare prices because CRTs are now a rarity but I remember paying close to $1000 for mine. So let's say it is in the same category as current 2560x1440 LCDs. But I with a maximum resolution of 2048x1536, I stayed well above LCDs for a long time.
- Great image quality :
It is subjective. I find LCDs better for text and CRTs better for moving pictures. At high resolution / high refresh rate, my CRT becomes blurry.