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And yet, you failed to compare it to radiation on earth. Boulder has a significant higher incidence rate of many cancers for missing only a mile of air,

Umm, the mass of a 1 mile high column of air (1.2 kg/m3 at sea level) is substanitally less than the mass of a 1 meter column of rock (2600 kg/m3), and the rock has the additional advantage of not having an exponential decrease in density versus height.

Habitat radiation sheilding is already a well-considered problem. You should read about rather than taking ignorant pot-shots.

It has been my understanding that one reason for a deposition is discovery, to find out what questions a jury needs to hear the answer to. For example, if during deposition you asked Bill Cosby "have you ever drugged a woman" and he said "yes, I have", that's something the jury should hear and you'd ask the same question in testimony before the jury. You're after asking that in deposition, you can't ask the question in open court, for the jury to hear?

It has also been my understanding that it is common to depose someone as soon after the events as possible, while their memory is still fresh, then point out if they change their answer at trial. In fact here's a script from Indiana law school showing the proper way to point out when a witness gives an answer in court that is different from the answer they gave at deposition:

http://www.law.indiana.edu/ins...

Do you happen to remember which rule number says you can't ask a question in open court which you asked at deposition? Any explanation of why that would be the case?

LED flicker causing issues sounded like bullshit to me, so I figured I'd read the link you provided. The citation for LED stuff in there led here, and that's hilariously not the evidence you want it to be. From that "research":

Subjects. The authors served as subjects.

So yeah, a real, deep, double-blind, comprehensive study.

And what they found was that a flickering light might cause changes in an electroretinogram that are non-linear, and that suggest a low-pass filter in the retina. So flickering light effects their eyes in interesting ways. No sign of of harm was documented or discussed.

If that's the evidence against shitty LEDs, that makes them better than the natural light to work under.

Well, it's not exactly coherent reasoning, but there is an orbital oscillation that is having a minor effect. (I'm not sure sun spots have anything to do with this, though, and the orbit of Mars doesn't shift it's oscillation in parallel with Earth, so the argument fails even though it's talking about a real, if minor, effect.)

Check out http://www.indiana.edu/~geol10... . But also note that I have no idea where we are in the cycle...except that based solely on that cycle we should have been re-entering an ice age during the last century. So some other effect is swamping it.

Unfortunately, true. Also interesting to note that journalism as a whole is sexist (many more males than females), racist (declining and way under-representative of minorities), and opposed to equal pay for equal work. So while they tend to champion such things as equality for all in theory - they really don't carry through in actions.

Snopes history is quite "illustrative" on how "fake news" propagates. Snopes is an aggregator of memes, and gets 99% of their content from "Factcheck.org) .. Who owns Factcheck.org?.. The Annenberg Foundation! Who are the Annenberg's .. only one of America's favorite Mafia families. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Just take this one example of how Snopes spreads disinformation: http://www.indiana.edu/~p10134... Snopes has had over 17 tries to get the "facts" right on this one single issue. Snopes started with .. "The Test is a hoax.. never existed" .. WRONG, The Test was never given to students .. WRONG, The test was only given to Teachers.... and over 15 other tries to get the "facts" right! Still 17 tries later, they still don't have the "facts" .. Snopes is a joke, and "exhibit A" of how lies are propagated to their followers. SNOPES .. is nothing but a pack of Lies.

Well, obviously there are also average differences between men and women besides upper-body strength - including factors that lead to success in computer science.

Men aren't just women with more muscles, and women aren't just men with less muscles.

As for attracting "as many good people as possible", I'll assert the proper way of doing that is to be gender-blind, so that you don't waste resources trying to drive people away from their own free choices, and making them "good people" for a job when their inclination is not in that direction.

If anything, we should be targeting socially inept and awkward folks (aspergers, autism), who might not make it through typical education paths because of their lack of social skills, but whose natural proclivities are highly productive when dealing with computing. https://www.iidc.indiana.edu/p...

It's a turn of phrase in this case, but we know that man's emissions cause some aspect of the climate change we're seeing.

"Some aspect" where the exact amount is undefined.

Over a time scale of years, natural variations dominate. Over a time scale of decades, there aren't any other hypotheses that can explain the observed rise in temperature-- all the other proposed explanations have been ruled out by data. So, the answer to the "exact amount" of "some aspect" is "the temperature rise on a scale of decades is due to human emissions."

Oh, and the total amount of warming we'll see is undefined..

Known to within current error bars of plus or minus fifty percent (3C per doubling, plus or minus 1.5. See http://www.ipcc.ch/publication... ). The largest uncertainty is how much carbon dioxide and methane we will emit in the future, not what the effect will be.

Oh, and the amount of warming that is harmful is undefined..

Yep. That needs more work, including better bounds on the definition of "harmful".

Oh, and the benefits to the world from a warmer climate are undefined.

Yep. That needs more work.

Oh, and the mechanism that triggers an ice age is undefined.

Nope. That was unknown years ago, but now is pretty well established to be Milankovitch variations.

A high school diploma will get you around $1 million over your lifetime, and college degrees up the income from there. Given that about 88% of all people have high school diploma, the $1 million over your lifetime is probably a very good estimate for what most people will make.

Quick thought experiment: there are approximately 45 years of "work" for most people (assume the average start of adult work is 20). That means if you average $2000 per month over your entire 45 year career, you'll make more than $1 million by the time you retire.

Haskell has been used for safety critical code in the aviation industry

Do you have a link I could read about it? My google-fu is weak.

I honestly thought that I'd heard that at least one big player in the aviation industry used Haskell, but after looking around myself, I believe you're totally right in asking for some evidence. Perhaps I've fallen prey to some Haskell aficionados who wanted it to be used for safety-critical systems. But e.g. these guys:

https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~lepike/pubs/pike-rv2011.pdf

only use its type system for their own language, and only for research purposes. So yeah, sorry about that.

I never claimed that.

Then go back and re-read what you wrote. It's ambiguous and my interpretation is completely fair.

Yes, I also want to apologize for that, although you could perhaps have given me the benefit of the doubt. This list was meant as an example of technologies that are dubious from the perspective of safety-critical systems. Machine learning definitely belongs into this category. BTW, just to rule out another potential misunderstanding, in the context in which I am using the word "deterministic", it means fixed runtime and memory consumption guarantees within a given system (including the hardware).

You seem deeply confused.

Yet perhaps I only seem so. Anyway, better not write things like that! It will antagonize people needlessly.

You're going on about how machine learning shouldn't be used. Given that before machine learning was up to the task, no reasonable self driving cars existed AND given that all existing self driving cars use machnine learning, the onus is on YOU to provide a convincing argument that machine learning is unnecessary for making a self driving car.

Why do you think so? My point is that any technology that potentially endangers the lives of other people should satisfy some stringent safety requirements. Nobody would argue in the aviation industry "look we can only make it fly by using inherently unsafe and unpredictable technology, so that's what we should do". On the other hand, I've worked in the aviation industry, so perhaps I am being too optimistic...

Formal code verification, at least for safety critical parts of the code, is commonplace in the aviation industry

I don't think you know what formal verification actually is and what it can do.

Fine. Your opinion. Luckily that doesn't affect my knowledge in any way.

You can prove the algorithms terminate and prove they don't leak memory and prove a bunch of things.

Exactly, and that's what I want them to do, before unleashing their cars on millions of pedestrians. That's a very simple and coherent position.

What you can't do with formal verification is prove it actually detects pedestrians. Which is kinda critical.

Exactly!

It might come as a surprise to you...

*chuckles* No, that didn't come as a surprise. All I want from the makers of self-driving cars is that they use some safety standards that have been accepted in the aviation industry despite being expensive. Frankly speaking, it kind of weird to argue against this, given the fact, which you have pointed out so eloquently, that autonomously driving a car under varying conditions is a way harder task than autonomously flying a plane. But I do understand that monetary concerns would speak against higher safety standards ...

Apparently, there is a difference. This paper for instance lists graphite and carbon separately as anode materials. So I'd guess the "crystal" structure of the various forms of carbon does make a difference.

One issue of course would be that the voting registry (which is public already and contains who voted and is time stamped, so also in what order) could very easily be used to guesstimate matching up specific people with specific votes, as the roll is going to be in chronological order as well. I'm not totally familiar with Kansas law, but there's a good chance they're legally supposed to have a secret ballot.

Secret ballots are primarily supposed to be secret from the government.

No, they are supposed to be secret to anonymize who voted for what/whom to prevent reprisal or intimidation. I am not sure what history books you're reading or where you get your definitions, but they certainly aren't from factual sources. Try reading this: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu...

Here ya go, AC.

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pu...
http://kff.org/other/state-ind...
http://scholarship.law.cornell...
http://www.americanbar.org/con...
https://docs.google.com/spread...
http://www.indiana.edu/~emsoc/...

I can only assume that you'll return the favor. :D

And, pray tell, how is that relevant for the demonstration of a fact that it already has been done twenty years ago (as a subject of serious research, in fact)? Where do you see me "recommending something"? I strongly suggest that you read things before replying.

(BTW, the latest commit is four days old.)

Truthy database.

Streaming Twitter data is acquired in real-time from the 'Gardenhose'. We match all tweets against a set of keywords to exclude tweets unlikely to contain political discussion, and extract all memes

Yeah, what "memes" would the government want to pay millions of dollars to extract? I'm sure "hate speech" and "terrurusm" are in the mix.

While you can rile on religion, there are numerous statistics that show that religion and spiritual beliefs help with drug addiction and alcoholism[1] [2]--main items preventing the chronic homeless from reintegrating with society. This is why the religious shelters push religion so hard. The goal in these shelters isn't just to provide a bed, but to get the person to overcome the conditions in themselves that prevent them from leaving homeless life.

Nearly all chronic homeless have dreams of a better life, but almost none of them have goals to achieve their dreams, and are stuck in the homeless life. Is trying to give homeless people the tools they need to achieve their dreams "evil"?

The real tragedies in shelters is the rate of rape and violence, which is especially true in (underfunded) public teen shelters. These shelters house hundreds of mentally ill or drug addicted people, who frequently rape others. Most of the homeless people I've run into (who live in a hard life--hearing gunshots nightly) refuse to go anywhere near the public shelters because of fear of their safety. That's how bad they are--that's where the real evil is.

Sources:
[1] It was concluded that among this sample of Scottish post-secondary students, having a strong religious commitment was associated with less substance use and that heavy drinking and using tobacco was correlated with illicit drug use.
http://www.indiana.edu/~engs/a...
[2] The one-third of prison inmates who participate in religious activities exhibit lower rates of recidivismand recidivism is due almost entirely to drug and alcohol abuse.

Teens who do not consider religious beliefs important are almost three times more likely to drink, binge-drink and smoke, almost four times likelier to use marijuana and seven times likelier to use illicit drugs than teens who believe that religion is important.
http://www.casacolumbia.org/ad...

From a public health perspective: who cares? T2 Diabetes rates are still going up, yet we've known that for a long time. We need to keep telling obese people with T2 diabetes to lose it, obviously diabetes isn't the only problem associated with obesity, and that drives up costs for the public at large, but telling the public to diet isn't working.

You individually, great, pat yourself on the back, but you're not most people. We know empirically that most overweight people will stay overweight, and diabetes on top of that is going to cost the public a lot of money through health insurance. A preventative measure that is not "lose weight" is a very good thing.

And yet, homeschooled kids tend to outperform their bricks-and-mortar peers.

Homeschooled kids who volunteer to take tests administered by their own parents tend to outperform public school students...bit of the ol' selection bias there.

The vast majority of homeschooled kids in the U.S. are being taught by religious fundamentalists, ignorant of the most basic facts about science.

He's replying to me there.

It opened my eyes to what Linus really is; and for him it's not about freedom. It's about popularity. And sacrificing principles for the sake of industry adoption.

Oh, and a conflict of interest.

If you don't want a machine that is locked down, just don't buy it. It's
that simple. But don't try to take the right away from others to buy that
kind of convenience.

And yes, Tivo is exactly such a situation. It's damn convenient. I've got
two Tivo's myself (and yes - I actually paid full price for them. I was
given one of the original ones, but that's long since scrapped, and even
that one I paid the subscription fee myself). But you don't have to buy
them. You can build your own at any time, and it will probably be more
powerful.

-- Linus Torvalds, LKML, 2006.

Source

Everybody now contributing to the kernel is doing so knowing they are helping companies like TiVo evade the spirit of the GPL. This is called 'Tivoization'.
Source

Thanks to Linus Torvalds.

like the Android - running ROM

Flashbacks to the original Mac, system in ROM and any new patches being pulled in from disk on boot.

non Von Neuman arch

it has been done before and at some point "data" needs to be executable.
there are bits to protect the exec spaces but any zero day can be used to subvert. http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0406.0/0497.html

Why there are no good tutorials that on how to write basic kernel code, good guides on its structure (many book sold on Amazon are outdated) ......there should be one, centralized place with all the useful materials for the beginners + it should be constantly updated.

Welcome to the world of commercial software. All OSS software is like this. The online guides and documents are always more up to date than printed materials (why I don't buy books for this anymore), and then I noticed that not just OSS software, but *all* software that gets frequent updates (and that includes all commercial software), means the programming guides are outdated. There are guides online to provide information about programming Linux kernel code. Like anything else, look for something up to date, but remember, new snapshots of the Linux kernel come out every week (usually Sunday), and if you look on the Linux kernel mailing list, you can see that there is a lot of traffic all the time (keep in mind that development is split into different mailing lists and the are combined into a main list) see: here for one place where the list is mirrored.

It makes a certain sense to me. Indeed, I suspect it made sense enough to Newton as well, since his notes discuss what a static universe would look like:

At the end of the 9th key.
If th' whole worlds nature were but one
Merely by one figure shown
And Art could nothing els invent
The world no wonder could present
Nor nature plainly be exprest
For which let God be ever blest.

Unless somebody has proof that somebody was trying to create a back door then stop with all of the "X-Files" shit. It could have been a hacker trying to put that code in. How was the system that hosted the CVS repository managed? Was it hacked? Was there any investigation or was it possibly somebody that did something stupid and now everybody thinks it's somehow tied to the NSA?!?!?

Yes, there was an investigation. The name attached to the log entries belonged to someone who said he didn't make the changes.

Slashdot has sucked for ELEVEN YEARS.

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0210.1/1978.html

a lot of hot air, slashdot fodder and a troll

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1309.1/02981.html

RTFM ;-). Looking at the thread:

I long ago gave up on doing backups. I have actively moved to a model
where I use replacable machines instead. I've got the stuff I care
about generally on a couple of different machines, and then keys etc
backed up on a separate encrypted USB key.

I only periodically back up the stuff i really care about (pictures, music, movies) and generally have a majority or all on laptop and desktop.

No backup?

Non-discoverable backup, non-discoverable buses, it's all just one happy Linus world.

captcha: stupid

What is really fantastic is the extended support for pro usb devices from Roland and Yamaha. It should be very possible to create a really effective cheap laptop DAW running Linux tuned for RT audio without having to mess install drivers the way you do with Windows. Not that you could not use these devices in the past it was just difficult to set them up correctly because alsa had trouble working with most Roland mixers and the like the only way to do it sometimes was using a stupid setup that was flaky as hell.

I hope this kernel version is adopted quickly by the Ubuntu Studio guys, but if necessary I will roll my own so I can use Roland usb devices with my laptop!

You are absolutely right. Sonic is not a major carrier.

Yet it still blocks port 25. (Maybe you should read the links you post before actually posting them?).

Still Sonic is more open than any of the big country wide ISPs. I'd love to do business with them but alas, I don't live in their minuscule foot print.

As for bad decisions, you should remember most people in this country have a choice of dial-up or exactly ONE provider.

And, you are also wrong about ARPA. They have been out of the funding of the internet since 1990. ARPAnet was decommissioned in 1990. At that time there was still no public internet.

Funding for the internet in the US from 1995 to present is all commercial. Most infrastructure was built with outrageous subscription fees of home and small business users. Nothing of the original ARPAnet remains.

According to the story it is Indiana University, not Indian University.

See, that makes a lot more sense. :)

I wonder if scheme was in some way necessary or conducive to running on the gpu, or if that was an arbitrary choice.

I'd say it's a mixture of both. On the one hand, Professor R. Kent Dybvig is one of the editors behind R6RS (and earlier editions) and author of Chez Scheme. In general, IU uses Scheme as one of the major languages to teach things including compiler design, so basically a CS alumni from IU is almost always a Schemer (or perhaps an anti-Schemer from the experience :)). That boils down to the point that Scheme is basically a much simplified version of Lisp (basically, the reverse of Lisp in complexity) which can function as a functional language (with all the inherent thread-safe features) if you're careful about not using mutable functions on your data, and Scheme readily supports 1st order and anonymous functions. Given that GPUs (and Cell processors) are basically very apt for those properties, it'd seem to be quite a good fit. Having said all that, there's probably plenty of other functional languages that are as good or even better for the job--the very scope of Scheme being such a cut down language good for teaching also tends to make it a pain to actually use in any production environment because of a lack of libraries, so I hope Harlan is designed to hand off the non-GPU work to another language.

I still have nightmares of car and cdr from way back when.

Can't really help you there. Personally, car and cdr ended up making linked-list so intuitive for me that I'm often perplexed why anyone has so much trouble with them, especially with memory leaks and the like. :/

Do we not like Kernel Newbies anymore? I've always looked to them for a synopsis of kernel features: http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.10

Even Linus's release mail suggest that "As usual, I'm sure H-Online and kernelnewbies will do better writeups of the details.." :-) http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1306.3/04336.html

Actually Linus wrote a follow-up for that in rc6. :)

And I didn't even need to curse all that much at people. Sure, I talked smack about some of your hamsters, and I declined a couple of pull requests, but let's face it, it was pretty halfhearted. Most of the time things were good.

Give Linus a break. If you happen to moderate the thousands of patches on daily basis , you would realize how frustrating it is to keep rejecting someone else's work. Saying "No" to someone else not only gives negativity to them but also brings negativity into one's life. He's job is not that easy. Here's are few recent interactions : http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1306.1/00154.html , some guy submitted some patch which ( obviously ) had bugs in them. Then there was an issue about the date. Linus sounds furious about the mess but then explains why he wants it fixed and how he foresees its use. Its not possible to keep giving explanations all the time to everyone who screws up. I think its just frustration nothing else , on his part .

Jboots have been nerfed?
No idea, usually a list, only thing I'm seeing is;
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1304.3/02009.html

That's more 'techy stuff fixed' rather than the shiny stuff mentioned.

http://www.indiana.edu/~homeeduc/FAQ.html

Look at their question about religion. The biggest single reason people homeschool is that they are religious nutters. I have a friend who's wife quit working to homeschool, every time they bring it up they have to mention they are not religious nutters since that is the most common reason for that arrangement. The wife stays home only because her income was lower than his.

From your link

Q: What are the demographics of the typical homeschooler? As I explain in the third of my Three Key Points About Homeschooling, describing the "typical homeschooler" is about as difficult as defining the "typical public schooler"--the range of demographics, philosophies, and practices make such a generalization practically impossible.

When offering evidence to support your description of a typical homeschooler, don't submit ones that include statements about how it is impossible to describe a "typical homeschooler". :)

http://www.indiana.edu/~homeeduc/FAQ.html

Look at their question about religion.
The biggest single reason people homeschool is that they are religious nutters. I have a friend who's wife quit working to homeschool, every time they bring it up they have to mention they are not religious nutters since that is the most common reason for that arrangement. The wife stays home only because her income was lower than his.

The Tulip chips gained a lot of their fame as being one of the fastest build a Beowulf cluster cards going back to August of 2000. 3c905B cards didn't work right under Linux until kernel 2.2.17 in September 2000. I believe the Tulip came out first, then the 3c905B, but it was very close in time. Exactly when the original 3c905 came out relative to those two is even harder to place.

In 2000 I could afford 3c905 cards but still preferred Tulip ones. Before Linksys started screwing up the market by releasing both Tulip and knock-off versions, the card to buy was the Kingston KNT40T or KNE100TX. Those were much cheaper than a 3c905, and on Linux they were faster and more reliable too. Eventually Netgear and Linksys replaced Kingston as the Tulip vendors of choice, and then they started racing toward lower quality/cost with clone chipsets.

You can have a GP computer which will be locked from installing a third-party OS, at least for all practical reasons. Obsession with security is so high these days that this "only run trusted stuff" approach seems to be welcomed even by geeks - who are happy to build their own cage.

Mike just posted a mirror of his post on another server. Hopefully this will hold up better under load.

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~mihansen/modeling-programmers.html

I mirrored just this post on my University's servers: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~mihansen/modeling-programmers.html
My network admins were obviously not prepared for Slashdot.

Too many issues, too little time...

They do the grunt work so we don't have to think about it. I think that makes sense. They get hot interns and corporate bribes, and we get some laws made and enforced.

http://congress.indiana.edu/the-job-congressman

I do think education creates intelligence.

That's an unusual supposition. Here's a more thorough view:

http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/gifted.shtml

Why are you so convinced that everyone is so dumb?

Why are you applying binary labels to a more complex situation?

The average IQ in this country is around 100. You can work out a standard distribution around that.

First you said that it was stupid to give everyone an education. Now you're saying that it's okay for everyone to get some education. Two totally different things.

My statement refers to the tests, not the education.

No it does not.

Not convincing.

Why do you think that offering education geared to an average intelligence is not going to harm those who need something more stimulating?

I see a lot of bored kids in our high schools. Are you telling me they just have attitude problems?

The SPLC does in deed execute their honorable mission. Go to http://truthy.indiana.edu/ for other meme propagation and dissemination graphics so you can see that this is one lens to the output of a much larger engine.

Allow me to act the part of the brother officer, if you will, and suggest that the conversation you and that doctor had was possibly a product of differing definitions.

When most people ask, "is this addictive?", what they mean is, "will I become physically dependent on this medication?" or "will I become a junkie if I use this even once?". In that case, properly prescribed methamphetamine is actually a pretty low-risk drug. Further, most doctors are steeped in the logic of the DSM-IV, even if they're not psychiatrists. For that, see here and notice that "addiction" doesn't appear - there are substance abuse and dependence, but "addiction" is a popular term that doesn't really have a good home in medicine. There are all sorts of drugs that cause tolerance to their effects and physical withdrawal symptoms if abruptly stopped but that have no abuse liability because they won't get you high (drugs for high blood pressure are a great example - beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers, clonidine all do it). Conversely, even a drug that could be abused is not necessarily "addictive" in the casual sense that many people mean - I've seen plenty of people who abused benzodiazepines (Xanax, Valium, etc.), but taking one or two here or there is harmless. I took one during a recent trip so I could sleep on a long flight. I didn't get high; I just went straight the hell to sleep and woke up six hours later.

In short, I suspect that the question being answered in the doctor's mind wasn't the one you asked in yours. That's not your fault - as you point out, we are supposed to be the experts - but I hope this helps explain it from the other side of the white coat.

I don't think doctors are more truthful than anyone else on a personal level, but the eternal fear of lawsuits is a strong discipline on professional misbehavior. That's one difference between us and cops: we are ultimately accountable to a system of which we are not a component part

Anyway, totally agree about our "justice" system. Tremendously biased in all the wrong ways - you know, you have to make quota on arrests, arresting white kids generates too much paperwork, so you arrest black kids, but not the hardcore thugs/gang members, because those guys are dangerous, just the dumb teenager smoking weed on the street because he thinks it looks cool. Screws up a lot of people's lives to have that sort of thing on their record - especially the people who are most likely to think that smoking weed in public is a cool idea, because blue-collar jobs often discriminate heavily against anyone with a substance record. (Except painting. Maybe the fumes make it better?)

SOS, like this: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0302.2/0548.html

This sounds like a question to the Internet Oracle
http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/index.cgi

The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:
> O Oracle, great and all the rest
>
> how do you get sales people to learn programming?

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:
} You offer a commission.
}
} you owe the oracle a piece of informaion that is correct but unhelpfull, yesterday's weather for example.

It is unfortunate that people use hostile labeling for creationists since it makes it harder for everyone to think clearly. I grew up believing as you. But the evidence for an old earth and evolution of species became so clear that I abandoned Young Earth Creationism. The evidence is really not circular. For the full story about how radiometric dating works, check out the essays linked at : http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/evid.anc.earth.pdf For a more complete account of why many Christians find the evidence for evolution compelling see: http://biologos.org/ And let's be clear that this is not about the origin of the universe. Or even the origin of life. The point that is overwhelmingly obvious from the data is that life has become more complex on earth over the last few billion years.

http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/flynneffect.shtml

Well, some rocks do float in water and are surprisingly light. The Scientists of the Knights of the Round Table weren't *that* crazy :-)

But these ones look like limestone, which isn't particularly prone to floating.

Anyway, getting back on topic: This isn't the first time an x86 has had a stack-pointer related bug. I remember the 80386s that had the so-called "POPAD bug". That one was a bit easier to hit.

Hopefully, AMD will be able to publish a microcode update or something to work around theirs. That's one thing modern x86s have over their predecessors: A good number of CPU bugs can be patched around with microcode updates. I believe Intel added that with the Pentium Pro, and AMD followed suit. I believe my Phenom is one of the affected parts. I guess I'll have to keep an eye out for such a patch.

I was thinking... how the heck does he remember that flaw.
Then I saw your UID. Good job, carry on sir.

-AI