I haven't followed this race in a very long time though, I do remember GM's Sunraycer back in 1987. My question is: what has changed in the past twenty-six years? From a quick look on Wikipedia I see that the average speeds are higher but nothing like double what they were back when I was a kid. Is it safe to assume that the improvements made have been largely incremental? Are we talking about an ever so slightly more refined design every two years, better solar tech, better drag calculations? Please don't think I'm flaming. I all challenges like this one. I'm simply interested in what kind of progress has been made.

Too bad Wii is already trademarked.

The company Google may not have been founded until 1998 but the search engine existed in the form of BackRub and google.stanford.edu prior to that. Though, I do agree that it is incredibly unlikely that Jensen used any version of Google. More likely he was using Yahoo or Altavista.

GOOG-411 has been discontinued. All we're left with is BING-411 which it typical Microsoft fashion doesn't have as nice of an interface.

If you're interested in using Qt with Python you should take a look at PySide which is being developed by Nokia.

You're crazy if you think more than a handful of US schools have wood or metal shops anymore. It's a sad fact but we seem to really enjoy underfunding our schools.

I think a fair chunk of the "/bin/cp /from/large.iso /to/large.iso" problem could be eliminated if cp (and dd) helped the kernel and dropped the page-cache on large copies via fadvise/madvise. Linux really defaults to the most optimistic assumption: that apps are good citizens and will dirty only as much RAM as they need. Thus the kernel will generally allow apps to dirty a fair amount of RAM, before it starts throttling them.

Why haven't basic system tools like cp had this functionality added to them? I can't imagine the required patches would be incredibly complex.

Speaking of kinematics, you might want to take a look at a EMC (Enhanced Machine Controller). EMC is a CNC package originating from NIST. EMC has an active community using and developing it. There are known bugs in the forward and inverse kinematics for PUMA style robots that could really uses the eye of a trained mathematician.

I'm sure there are are plenty of other areas that the EMC project could utilize your math skills. There are many, many users and developers of EMC that would appreciate your skills.

I can't even think of anything Oregon's known for.

Mostly Pabst Blue Ribbon and annoying hipsters on their fixed gear bikes. At least that's what Portland is known for.

What's wrong with NNTP? I'm not exactly sure how it fits into the whole social network theme but it works so much better than mailing lists or even web forums for threaded multiparty conversations.

What is learned by simply booting up a VM and loading a game? In the story submission he specifically mentioned "all the fun workarounds" that he had to come up with get everything to work on a modern system. Don't you think doing a cleanroom reimplementing a subsystem like DirectDraw presents a great learning experience?

No, I wouldn't have done this if you had payed me; I have my own interests and passions. I'm not at all interested in graphics programming or for that matter video games, though, apparently someone is and I think it's great that he saw a problem and decided to attempt to find a solution for it.

This is what being a geek is all about. Bravo.

You've obviously never been to the Pacific Northwest if you think unicycling clowns are out of the norm.

Not to be pedantic, but natural monopolies aren't "granted" but are rather, well, natural.

I would LOVE to start my own cable company that simply pushed analog and QAM TV without the need for converter boxes and was utterly lacking in all but absolutely require encryption. I think the public would love to use their own TV tuners again and be able to build their MythTV boxes/use their Tivos without having to clear it with some mystical gate keeper.

I live in the Pacific Northwest (NW US) where Comcast is the one and only cable provider (there are some outer-suburbs with FiOS but not tons). I recently started researching my cable situation and found that Comcast pushes all their Basic Digital channels (2-71 plus some), which is all I subscribe to via clear/unencrypted QAM[1]. It turns out that most if not all of Comcast's West Coast network is the same. This means it dead simple to hookup a HDHomeRun from Silicon Dust to a MythTV box.

[1] http://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/lineup_web/US:97201#lineup_558689

would LOVE to start my own cable company that simply pushed analog and QAM TV without the need for converter boxes and was utterly lacking in all but absolutely require encryption. I think the public would love to use their own TV tuners again and be able to build their MythTV boxes/use their Tivos without having to clear it with some mystical gate keeper. I live in the Pacific Northwest (NW US) where Comcast is the one and only cable provider (there are some outer-suburbs with FiOS but not tons). I recently started researching my cable situation and found that Comcast pushes all their Basic Digital channels (2-71 plus some), which is all I subscribe to via clear/unencrypted QAM[1]. It turns out that most if not all of Comcast's West Coast network is the same. This means it dead simple to hookup a HDHomeRun from Silicon Dust to a MythTV box.

[1] http://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/lineup_web/US:97201#lineup_558689