As a matter of fact, I do carry a Zune and a smart phone. The reason? Battery life. I really don't want to run down the battery on my phone so I can listen to audio books and music. As a dedicated device, the Zune seems to handle that sort of thing much more efficiently than my phone. I go days of heavy use of my Zune before I have to recharge.

Maybe they thought it was the new Mafia game.

That sounds great, until you realize that UW is cutting the numbers of in state students that they're admitting because out of state students bring in more money in tuition. WWU cutting it's CS department reduces the options that in-state students have for getting a technical education.

For example, management, monitoring, and logging traffic.

Awesome. Experts exchange now blocked! This has immediately become my favorite google search feature.

by the number of idiots who have posted comments on this story. 1. Blizzard has to defend their trademarks or lose them, so of course someone creating a game called "World of Starcraft" is going to get a C&D. 2. People seem to get the idea that fans of something should be able to do whatever they want with that thing. Fanfic can be interesting, but non-canonical, and a creator may feel that his/her baby was violated by it. I feel it is entirely up to the copyright owner as to whether or not they allow such things, and so it is completely up to Blizzard whether or not they let you muck around in their world. If someone steps over the line of what they will allow, here comes a C&D.

It's sad that these guys have put so much work into their mod for naught, but Blizzard acted as soon as they knew, so you can't really blame them.

The article doesn't say that there had been no updates for 10 years. It says that there were no contributions to the code from outside of the company for 10 years.

The Time article never actually states that her son was misdiagnosed. It says that some scientists have pointed out that his symptoms are similar to a childhood neurological disorder. It's the blog (a blog for a sports based radio talk show) that jumps to that conclusion. Personally, I'm inclined to believe the diagnosis. In theory, you have a doctor who has made a diagnosis based on direct observation vs. a group of scientists that don't like her position, and who have found something that is similar to the symptoms that she has talked about publicly.

Of course, I'm one of those parents of a child with Autism who "lives on hope." I also have vaccinated all three of my children, and will continue to do so. Do I believe that vaccines are 100% safe? I'm not sure. I think there are flaws in the methodologies of the studies that call in to question their conclusions. However, there is no conclusive evidence that vaccines cause harm, so I'm simply left with the benefits. Also, I have to think of this: would I rather my child live with Autism, or die from smallpox or polio?

As long as the office furniture keeps pace with technology. Basically from the synopsis, people have gone from 8x8 cubicles to 7x7. Since flat panels have pretty much taken over for CRT's, the loss of one foot of space in either direction isn't that big a deal, as long as the table space has shrunk accordingly. Basically, the cubicle worker hasn't lost much usable space.

Not necessarily true. It is representative of a CLASS of scientific and engineering problems. If the science that you want to run involves heavy use of vectors, then you want a computer that would be high on the top 500 list. Derivatives and integrals? Not as much. Problems that require a high degree of interaction between nodes? Get a computer with a faster interconnect. It all depends on the science you intend to do with that computer. The NEC Earth Simulator (mentioned in another thread) would do poorly for chemical models compared to another machine. Climate models wouldn't run as well on a cluster of Dells as it would on a Vector based box like the Earth Simulator.

I call bullsh*t on this comment. Around 8 years ago, the top computer on the list was a Japanese machine, and it rode atop the list for 3 years straight. Those of us who have worked in high performance computing have known for years that the top 500 list was a load of crap. It's something to write a press release about so that the people that give us money to build the big computers feel like their money is well spent. I worked on a top 5 computer at one time, but our focus was always the science that we wanted to do on the computer. Running the linpack benchmark for the top 500 list was an afterthought (though it was a pleasant surprise to score as well as we did).

While not practical for programming, for reading I use a program called Eeerotate. Pressing a hotkey, I can rotate the screen 90 degrees, allowing me to use the long axis for reading PDF documents.

My employer does not allow the use of bittorrent at work. Running a bittorrent client on a work computer is a good way to get your network drop disabled and a visit from the network security fairy (which by the way doesn't leave money under your pillow like the tooth fairy).

Why not, it works for Mother Nature.

Browsing history is a horrible way to determine anything. You don't know exactly how someone got to a particular page, you can only surmise. Also, if I clicked on a video and then immediately closed it, my browsing history would still say I "watched" the video. Even if the video downloaded fully, it's no guarantee that he watched it. Quite frequently, I'll pause a video to allow it to download fully before I begin watching it. My browsing history has no concept of whether or not I watched it fully or watched 2 seconds and then closed it.