Simpsons did it - "People like us can't afford justice".

That sounds like a result in itself. By packaging the problem as a game, he's managed to enlist free help from random people on the internet - crowd-sourcing, if I can use that awful buzz-phrase. Perhaps its a victory for scientific marketing more than science, but a better algorithm is a real result that speaks for itself.

We also shouldn't be surprised that an extra few thousand people looking at the problem can come up with a better algorithm than "the professionals". Maybe the researchers were too close to the problem, maybe the other guys had a different perspective, maybe they were lucky... it doesn't really matter.

Here is another example, where a presenter of newsnight mercilessly grills a man who is effectively her own boss.

The problem with doing that is that such a sudden change will make their motives clear. They have to use this frog-boiling approach - essentially a very gradual declaration of martial law - so that nobody will notice a sudden change and complain.

Pedants: Yes, I know the frog boiling thing is a myth.

I use CPython for performance dependent stuff and have found the loops themselves, even not doing anything, are surprisingly slow. Do you have a reference for your "200x slower than C" claim? I'd be interested to see if it tallied with my experiences.

You say that, but did you look at the numbers on that page? The OpenOffice recommendation has more than 100,000 upvotes. Why would 100,000 people who don't care show up on Dell's webpage to click on that arrow?

I work in a University where Dell is the main approved supplied for PC kit. I had to buy a work machine with XP even though the first thing I did was to install Linux. I wonder how many other forced-to-buy-Dell or don't-know-anything-but-Dell people there are out there who might buy FOSS if they could and it was cheaper?

Sure, a majority of people may not be interested in Linux or OpenOffice. But a significant minority might take the opportunity to go for an alternative to MS if one was made available.

My dad tried to make Christmas decorations out of the CDs. They looked hideous and cutting them out made really jagged edges that were pretty dangerous.

I guess I could have used them like ninja throwing stars to slay the call-centre staff. "Yes, I want to cancel my fucking account!"

There have been several stories on Slashdot recently about the demise of newspapers. Commentary from blogs and elsewhere is fine, but somebody needs to be gathering the primary data. If AOL are willing to pick up the slack on this, I might just start to forgive them for all those damn floppy disks in the late 90s.

They talk about paying for it with syndication and distribution; I wonder if this model can be used to pay for proper long-term investigative journalism, the kind of stuff that is vital to democracy.

Thanks for the tip. I'm using it now. We'll see how it goes.

Man, there must be something seriously broken with my (vanilla Ubuntu) install. I regularly have to kill Firefox because it's causing my 8GB machine to hit the swap.

I only use AdBlock and NoScript and there are no issues listed.

I do run a lot of windows, rather than tabs - usually half a dozen, some with sub-tabs, spread across many virtual desktops. Still, I've been running Firefox for about 4 or 5 hours today and it looks like this:

  3206 pzs 20 0 1132m 639m 28m R 1 8.1 92:38.58 firefox

which seems very high.

I'm a not-very-happy Firefox user, since I find it has horrendous memory leaks. I can get it up to 2GB virtual memory in a morning's average browsing. Yes, I have tried the tips on the Mozilla site.

However, I have become addicted to a controlled web experience with NoScript and Adblock. I won't be switching to Chrome until I can get similar tools.

I guess you could convert a SAT problem into a Sudoku. However, I think a crucial pre-condition for Sudoku people is that the puzzle is solvable with the given information. Nobody is going to spend hours plugging away at a Sudoko in order to try to return an "it can't be solved" answer.

Somebody mod parent overrated - version numbers in TeX is mentioned in the TFA.

The proper way to use version numbers is to continually improve the precision of an irrational number, as in Tex.