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It's actually much harder than that. You have to figure out when the work was created and where, and when the creator died, and then there's exceptions for different types of work in some countries.

For the US see:

http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm

That was the plan of the founders, but it doesn't work that way in practice.

In fact, a voter in California has *more* power to influence the presidential election than a voter in Wyoming. 2.5 times more power, in fact. There was a very important paper published on this 30 years ago (sorry, can't find the reference right now -- I'll look later today and post it) that found a way to mathematically calculate the power of a vote, and applied the technique to this question.

The concept is called the Banzhaf Power Index, and the basic idea, like all great ideas, is very simple: The power of a vote is equal to the probability that it will change the outcome of the election. In the case of the electoral college, this means that the power of your vote is equal to the probability that your vote will change which way your state's block of votes go times the probability that your state's block will change the election.

What makes a Californian's vote so much more powerful than one from Wyoming is the latter part of that calculation. The probability that California's 55 electoral votes will decide the election is enormous. How many presidents have won while losing California? The probability that Wyoming's 3 votes will change the election is small.

In fact, according to this calculation, voters in California are the most powerful in the country. The weakest are those in Montana, which has the same number of electoral votes as Wyoming, but a larger population.

More recent papers have added considerations of regional political leanings into the mix, taking into account the fact that many states, especially the smaller states, tend to have political biases that also influence the power of an individual vote. For example, I live in Utah, a state that is so strongly Republican that the probability that its electoral votes would ever go to a Democrat is vanishingly small.

These papers indicate that the real effects of the electoral college are pretty minimal. This is supported by the fact that the popular and actual winner is so rarely different, and the cases where they are different even the popular vote is so narrow that the win margin is within the noise.

Personally, I think anything that increases the power of small states' votes is a good thing, because I believe the founders had the right idea, just not the mathematical savvy to implement it. Really, though, this comes down to a question of whether you believe the USA should be a coalition of (nearly) sovereign states or a single nation state divided into administrative regions. That, of course, has been a point of serious debate since the beginning.

I think this is much more impressive. Tracing isn't needed if the location of the camera can be determined. Pretty cool stuff.

On the internet, nobody knows youre a dog
 
  http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html

Probably none of it. Interesting reading though. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I don't think there is a version of this available for home, use, but this has definitely been done. As sib. points out, the problem that needed to be solved was determining the position of the camera in space relative to the subject. Generally speaking, this is the field of Photogrammetry. One researcher I know of doing fascinating stuff with this is here:

Marc Pollefeys at Chapel Hill NC. Scroll down to see his 3d from video demo, pretty amazing stuff. Somewhere on this site is also a 3d model of a Chapel Hill street constructed from 2 cameras mounted to the roof of a car.

For home use, PhotoModeler is the best you'll do, and from my experience it doesn't quite do the trick.

GPS receivers use Doppler to track the signal being received from the SVs; but that is the Doppler from the relative velocity between each of the SVs and the GPS receiver.

(I used to work on a military GPS system.)

Replying to myself. There's another good example of legal vote "buying" in the US and this was the "Nader Trading" that went on. People were trading their vote for nader in one state in return for a vote for another candidate in another state. (the goal was to boost nader's numbers while avoiding the spoiler effect in tight races). Some states did shut down websites doing voteswapping but others did not (oregon for example) . There's a very well research discussion of the legality issue here

Additionally there's the question of how much is a vote worth? You might be thinking well not much so no one is going to pay for votes. But if you look at the amount of campaign cash spent in places like florida where the elections were close you can compute that votes in such races are worth thousands of dollars given the millions spent for swings of less than a thousand votes. Thus offering 10 to 100 per vote might be quite economical if you could assure that ateleast 10% of the votes you purchased were "new" votes in the sense that someone either changed their vote or a person who voted who was not planning to vote.

The latter category of voter motivation is probably the larger one and most easy to assure. For example this is exactly what get-out-the-vote drives that provide van services and coffee to get people in undervoting neighborhoods target. One could target such demographics for example by offering non-monetary rewards that appeal to certain demographics. e.g. A limited edition U2 T-shirt. Or Concert tickets to Wayne Newton. An american flag. A signed copy of the president of Venezuela's works. Extra Gas-ration cards for the family you left back in burma.

You missed this Vista (the Visual Statistics System by Forrest W. Young), which is probably the (much underrated — quality does not 'sell') 'original'.

CC.

On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog.

I did forget to reset it once with tragic consequences. I really miss that dog.

Hmmm, does that joke have any connection to this one...

http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html ... inquiring minds would like to know!

From now on I'm only relieving myself on the neighbor's lawn.

http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.h tml

At what point to we question the system of transportation as a whole? A completely sober person with no distractions can still cause an accident. That coupled with the fact that the modern lifestyle demands people do things like not get enough sleep, be on their phones constantly, not stay home when sick (and therefore be at the wheel drowsy), etc. makes for a completely idiotic system of transport.

Studies have shown driving fatigued is a major problem too: One of many articles you can find on google.

Do we ban people not sleeping enough?

Granted, most people on the road are good enough drivers that we don't constantly have complete chaos on the roads. But cars are not inherently safe, efficient, or anything really that great.

The fact that we are so enamored with them is as sick as mine and others' addictions to cigarettes.

When I see articles about drunk driving accidents or drunk drivers (heh: Paris, Lindsay, Bush, Cheney, etc.) my first reaction isn't "that person is a stain," but "I've never seen a major study about what percentage of people who drove regularly for any period of their lives and are not teetotalers drove drunk at least once."

I'm guessing that it's at least in the high 60% range, but that's a completely blind guess. There's never been a study. Nobody knows.

Of piracy's affect on music sales

http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/strumpfoldpapers.htm

1. People who would have bought the product, but didn't because they downloaded it.
2. People who wouldn't have bought the product, but downloaded it and liked it enough to buy/recommend it to their friends.
3. People who wouldn't have bought the product, but downloaded it and didn't like it enough to buy/recommend it to their friends.

Wait, I thought the saying was "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

(1) The Reconstruction Congress forcing the ratification of the 14th Amendment as a condition for readmitting the Confederacy to the Union. This eventually gave the federal government final say over whether just about anything the states did was Constitutional.

The 14th Amendment binds the state governments in much the same way as the first ten Amendments binds the federal government.

It exists because of the inevitable abuses in state power in a society in which every aspect of life is shaped and corrupted by institutions that reinforce racial superiority, chattel slavery and peonage.

Texas and Florida can no longer execute children. The Muslim is free to built a mosque in Tennessee. The fly-trap rural township in Georgia does not get more votes in the state legislature than the whole of metropolitan Atlanta.

Would you believe that the Supreme Court determined that a man growing wheat for his own family's consumption could be prevented from doing so because that consumption, taken together with others doing the same thing, would overall reduce the national demand for wheat? You should, because it not only happened, it's still good law.

Would you believe...

In 1934 lower courts had begun overturning major parts of the New Deal program. Potentially the most serious threat came from rulings invalidating the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which used the same broad power to levy taxes for the general welfare as the basis for its program of agricultural price supports and controls. Lower courts ruled this unconstitutional and the Supreme Court followed in January 1936, ruling that ". . .a statutory plan to regulate and control agricultural production, [is] a matter beyond the powers delegated to the federal government. . ." There was a silver lining in the cloud, however, because the same opinion ultimately sided with Hamilton on the larger question of a strict or a flexible interpretation of the general welfare clause by holding that: " . . .the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution."
The AAA was an attempt to rescue farmers from the collapse of the farm economy that happened with the coming of the Depression. It sought to control agricultural production in order to stabilize prices and restore farming to profitability. The 1937 Supreme Court Rulings on the Social Security Act

3) Abraham Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus on United States soil as applied to United States citizens.

While the Confederate Congress - in its usual paralysis over state's rights - did nothing until 1864. Lincoln had at least a clear sense that the Executive in wartime must act decisively.

Whereas, The Constitution of the Confederate States o America provides..that "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when in case of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it;" and whereas, the power of suspending the privilege...is vested solely in the Congress, which is the exclusive judge of the necessity of such suspension; and whereas, in the opinion of the Congress, the public safety requires the suspension of said writ in the existing case of the invasion of these States by the armies of the United States; and whereas, the President has asked for the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus...

Confederate States of America. Congress. Senate. Senate Bill, No. 119: Secret: A Bill to Suspend the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus in Certain Cases.
Confederate States of America. Congress. House of Representatives House Bill, No. 267: Secret: A Bill to Suspend the Privilege of Writ of Habeas Corpus, in Certain Cases, for a Limited Time.

(1) The Reconstruction Congress forcing the ratification of the 14th Amendment as a condition for readmitting the Confederacy to the Union. This eventually gave the federal government final say over whether just about anything the states did was Constitutional.

The 14th Amendment binds the state governments in much the same way as the first ten Amendments binds the federal government.

It exists because of the inevitable abuses in state power in a society in which every aspect of life is shaped and corrupted by institutions that reinforce racial superiority, chattel slavery and peonage.

Texas and Florida can no longer execute children. The Muslim is free to built a mosque in Tennessee. The fly-trap rural township in Georgia does not get more votes in the state legislature than the whole of metropolitan Atlanta.

Would you believe that the Supreme Court determined that a man growing wheat for his own family's consumption could be prevented from doing so because that consumption, taken together with others doing the same thing, would overall reduce the national demand for wheat? You should, because it not only happened, it's still good law.

Would you believe...

In 1934 lower courts had begun overturning major parts of the New Deal program. Potentially the most serious threat came from rulings invalidating the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which used the same broad power to levy taxes for the general welfare as the basis for its program of agricultural price supports and controls. Lower courts ruled this unconstitutional and the Supreme Court followed in January 1936, ruling that ". . .a statutory plan to regulate and control agricultural production, [is] a matter beyond the powers delegated to the federal government. . ." There was a silver lining in the cloud, however, because the same opinion ultimately sided with Hamilton on the larger question of a strict or a flexible interpretation of the general welfare clause by holding that: " . . .the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution."
The AAA was an attempt to rescue farmers from the collapse of the farm economy that happened with the coming of the Depression. It sought to control agricultural production in order to stabilize prices and restore farming to profitability. The 1937 Supreme Court Rulings on the Social Security Act

3) Abraham Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus on United States soil as applied to United States citizens.

While the Confederate Congress - in its usual paralysis over state's rights - did nothing until 1864. Lincoln had at least a clear sense that the Executive in wartime must act decisively.

Whereas, The Constitution of the Confederate States o America provides..that "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when in case of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it;" and whereas, the power of suspending the privilege...is vested solely in the Congress, which is the exclusive judge of the necessity of such suspension; and whereas, in the opinion of the Congress, the public safety requires the suspension of said writ in the existing case of the invasion of these States by the armies of the United States; and whereas, the President has asked for the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus...

Confederate States of America. Congress. Senate. Senate Bill, No. 119: Secret: A Bill to Suspend the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus in Certain Cases.
Confederate States of America. Congress. House of Representatives House Bill, No. 267: Secret: A Bill to Suspend the Privilege of Writ of Habeas Corpus, in Certain Cases, for a Limited Time.

Ahhh what the heck, here's what just 2 minutes of actually looking turns up on the health dangers of kids and cigarette butts... I guess you weren't reading "the literature" all that often.

From: http://www.fammed.unc.edu/enter/fact_sheets/Parent sFactSheetl.pdf
"The American Association of Poison Control Centers receives 7,900 reports of potentially toxic exposure to tobacco products among children 6 years old or younger, primarily by young children ingesting cigarettes, cigarette butts, and other tobacco products they find around the house, in ashtrays, and in the garbage." Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). Ingestion of cigarettes and cigarette butts by children,Rhode Island, January 1994-July 1996. MMWR. Feb. 1997;46(6):125-128

From: http://www.cfc-efc.ca/docs/cccf/00000056.htm
"Eating even one or two cigarette butts can make a baby seriously ill."

From: http://www.eparentingnetwork.ca/pdf/HomeSafety/Hom e%20Safety%20Fact%20Sheet%202.pdf
"Safely dispose of cigarette butts. If your child swallows just 1 unsmoked cigarette or 2 cigarette butts, they could get very sick"

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press/1995/DECEMBER /19953.HTM

http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/seasonal /listpoisonous102102.html

#6 claims that "similar online media distribution systems emerged and attempted to capitalize on the growing illegal market Napster fostered," followed by examples. This statement is provably incorrect in two ways. The first is that most, probably all, of these networks are not designed for media sharing, they are designed for file sharing. I only personally have knowledge of Bittorrent, eDonkey and DirectConnect but in all those cases the software is designed to share any and all files a user wishes, with no special exclusivity for media. Some, like the eDonkey variant eMule can restrict searches to various types of files (such as just video or music) but it does so only via the extension of the file. Others, like Bittorrent, have no such capability at all since search isn't an included part of the protocol. Bittorrent is just a distributed HTTP mechanism, searching is added through other means.

The second is that they are designed and/or primarily utilized for illegal purposes. Bittorrent, being highly popular, is the best example. It was designed simply to allow peer-to-peer downloading of files from websites to take the load off of a single server. It is currently extremely widely used for legitimate purposes. One of the largest would be the patch mechanism for Blizzard Entertainment's (a subsidiary of Vivendi Games) MMORPG World of Warcraft. The official patch mechanism form Blizzard uses Bittorrent so as to lessen the load on Blizzard's own servers. Another high profile use would be Linux distribution, nearly every Linux distro's preferred method of distribution is Bittorrent.

#9 claims that the RIAA members lose massive amounts of revenue to P2P copying. However there is no proof of this offered, and indeed I am aware of no proof out there. The only empirically valid, peer reviewed study I am aware of at this point is a 2005 study conducted by UNC Chapel Hill and Harvard (found here) which found: "Using detailed records of transfers of digital music files, we find that file sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample. In specifications that identify the effect of file sharing on sales relatively precisely, we reject the hypothesis that file sharing is responsible for the majority of lost sales." To the extent the RIAA has offered any figures at all it is based off of the assumption that every copy made is money lost, at full retail value. This is of course false because it fails to take in to account several factors:

1) The music producers do not receive the full retail price for each album.
2) Some people who made a copy of the music, never would have purchased it had it not been available for free. They simply were unwilling or unable to spend the money, and as such nothing has been lost.
3) Some people may have bought some of the music they had downloaded, had they been unable to get it for free, but not all of it. For example a university student with a disposable income of less than $100 per month would clearly not purchase 100 albums costing in excess of $10 each, even if they downloaded that many. Thus while some sales may have been lost, not all of them have.
4) Some people may have bought more as a result of their downloading. They download songs as a sort of "virtual window shopping" and when they find ones they like, they purchase the CD. Thus sales are actually gained.

The RIAA's model for calculation could be mathematically stated as L = D * R where L is the amount of loss in dollars, D is the number of downloads presumed to have taken place and R is the average retail price. This is clearly overly simplistic and thus incorrect. A real formula would look more like L = D * P1 * W - D * P2 * W where L is the amount of loss in dollars, D is the number of downloads presumed to have taken place, P1 is the percentage of the time people did NOT bu

The editors are asleep again. The summary says the discovery was made at University of North Carolina, which really surprised me because all of the good engineering is happening at North Carolina State University.

It might seem like a trivial slip but to those around here there is a pretty huge difference.

Oh yeah, and DUKE SUCKS.

ViSta is the trademark for Visual Statistics, a sort-of-FOSS (free, but source access is "moderated") numerical analysis/visualization package for windows, macintosh, and unix.

http://forrest.psych.unc.edu/research/index.html

Yeah that's right C++ can't match C. It outperforms it. The STL sort function is faster than qsort http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT/results.html http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT/results.html. I'll leave it to you to figure out why this is true but it has to do with the extra type information you can embed when using templates in C++. I'm willing to bet that a library written in C++ using expression templates, like Boost::uBlas or VSIPL++ will be faster than an equivalent C implementation. Anyway arguing for C based on it's performance against C++ is daft and it annoys me that people still do. Also read this http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/the_c_is_ efficient_language_fa.php. He makes some good points about what C and C++ is good at (mucking with memory addressese) and not good at (numeric computation, efficient optimized code). Now go tell your programmers at your company to use the STL sort because it's faster.

Yeah that's right C++ can't match C. It outperforms it. The STL sort function is faster than qsort http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT/results.html http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT/results.html. I'll leave it to you to figure out why this is true but it has to do with the extra type information you can embed when using templates in C++. I'm willing to bet that a library written in C++ using expression templates, like Boost::uBlas or VSIPL++ will be faster than an equivalent C implementation. Anyway arguing for C based on it's performance against C++ is daft and it annoys me that people still do. Also read this http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/the_c_is_ efficient_language_fa.php. He makes some good points about what C and C++ is good at (mucking with memory addressese) and not good at (numeric computation, efficient optimized code). Now go tell your programmers at your company to use the STL sort because it's faster.

These kids weren't drinking "a lot" of fruit juice

Did you even READ the article?

"The average daily consumption of pure fruit juice in the study population was 4.1 ounces (about half a cup) -- an amount in line with recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

.. half a cup - that's 45 calories. Not even half an Oreo cookie.

Even if they were to drink 4x as much, that's still pretty much nothing in comparison to what the average kid is drinking in terms of soda pop ... a 2 litre bottle of coke is 770 calories - and a lot of kids are drinking a 2 liter a day.

http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/sept04/popkin0916 04.html

The study is from 6 years ago .. and even then, it notes that under-reporting of soft drink and "sweetened beverages" - another term for junk calorie drinks like gatorade and "sports drinks" that contain little if no "real fruit juice" is a problem.

Fat people lie about how much they eat. They loie to themselves, they lie to their friends, their doctors. There was a study published in Scientific American (before the web) where they placed FREE vending machines in a room and let people eat as much as they wanted. They monitored who ate what, and the fatties continually SEVERELY under-reported whatthey ate.

Why not stop trolling (4 or 8 ounces of OJ is NOT a lot) and look in the real world ... take a visit to your local supermarket checkout and look at all the fat people and what's in their shopping baskets. Then look at their kids ... the next generation of over-sugared, over-salted fatties.

Some of these people are so fat I can't imagine how they take care of basic bodily functions like wiping after they've used the toilet. How can they reach when they're so BIG and their arms are like overstuffed sausages. How does the toilet not break under all that weight?

Or maybe they don't, and these are the people who are buying all those adult diapers.

Think about the damage heavily sugared and equally heavily salted soft drinks are doing. Who's defending this shit? Just follow the money ... fast fod joints, soda pop manufacturers, others who are already fatty faty 2 by 4's, can't get through the bathroom doors, and want some (preferrably even fatter) company, so they don't look so fat themselves in comparison.

Its easier to feed the kids dogs, tater tots, and a coke and not miss that "must see" crap on the tube than it is to actually take 20 minutes to make a decent meal.

What's served for breakfast in most homes is a crime. A bowl of cereal is not breakfast. Take the time to start with a decent, REAL breakfast, and maybe kids (and adults) won't be so interested in scrounging for those extra junk calories all day.

It does show a total lack of respect for the opponents. Nothing wrong with that. The official spoken arguments for certain positions, such as alien visitors, creationism or the immorality of birth control are utterly insane. Trying to counter them with rational arguments are a total waste of time, as they are not based on rational thinking.

I remember a science teacher in the early 1980s telling us of an incident from a farm.

Then I found it as a Physics exam question.

A farmer reportedly stole electrical power by strategically placing a large coil of wire beneath the high-voltage transmission lines that crossed his field. For several years, the farmer obtained free electricity to operate equipment for his farm, until the power company finally discovered the theft. Eventually the farmer was convicted of stealing power even though no physical connections were made to the transmission lines.

Maybe it was ripped from the headlines, CSI style. Or maybe it's just an apocryphal tale. What impresses me is the fact that I was a 12 year-old in England when I learned this, and this example comes from a University test in the US. It might say something about why America has lost position to European countries in technology...

For example, California consolidated a variety of common law crimes into theft in 1927, and now distinguishes between two types of theft, grand theft and petty theft.[1] Grand theft generally consists of the theft of something of value over $400 (it can be money, labor or property),[2] while petty theft is the default category for all other thefts.[3] Both are felonies, but grand theft is punishable by a year in jail or prison,[4] while petty theft is punishable by a fine or six months in jail.[5] As for the older crimes of larceny, embezzling, and stealing, any references to them now mean theft instead.[6]

a noncommercial willful infringer is subject to up to a one-year prison term and $100,000 in fines.

See here.

Iran has repeatedly threatened the US

To quote the actual post you're replying to: "The vast majority of things that Ahmadinejad is saying is purely for internal support."

Let me ask you a question: What do you think would happen to Iran if they attacked us openly? Our military, even as overstretched as it is, can kick six kinds of crap out of their military. Do you really think they don't know that?

Now, what if they did something covert? Well, we've proven the ability to trace the lines of funding and organization for terrorist operations pretty well, at least after the fact. (It was the investigation of 9/11 that showed it had nothing to do with Iraq, remember?) Iran would be taking a terrible risk doing that, because if it was found out they'd be just as screwed as if they'd attacked us openly.

They have a lot to gain from rhetoric. They have everything to lose from an actual attack.

"Once more of them get sampled, then we can start being able to compare the extinct with the extinct," he said. "Then they could really support, or overturn, previous hypotheses. The results of this paper aren't so much that they have made an important contribution to our understanding of T. rex or mastodons, but rather that they are opening a window into an entirely new approach to these fossils."

Horner told journalists that the findings already have strengthened the dinosaur-bird connection: "It's the first way we can test the hypothesis of relationships. ... This is a test, and we have failed to falsify that dinosaurs and birds are related. It changes our hypothesis to a theory now."

"Once more of them get sampled, then we can start being able to compare the extinct with the extinct," he said. "Then they could really support, or overturn, previous hypotheses. The results of this paper aren't so much that they have made an important contribution to our understanding of T. rex or mastodons, but rather that they are opening a window into an entirely new approach to these fossils."

Horner told journalists that the findings already have strengthened the dinosaur-bird connection: "It's the first way we can test the hypothesis of relationships. ... This is a test, and we have failed to falsify that dinosaurs and birds are related. It changes our hypothesis to a theory now."

Ethernet was around for quite a few years before Netscape and Mosaic.

10Base5 and vampire taps, babeeeeeee!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5

Those were the days. I couldn't find a good picture of a DELNI so this will have to do:
http://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/help/network/graphics/sn391 _rack.jpg

I would imagine that these issues are being addressed. The advantage of shared memory, if it becomes the standard, is that multiple GPU cores, and even non GPU cores could manipulate it.

That and the advantage of having a GPU for use in pipelining tasks is far too great not to head in this direction.

A good write-up can be found here: http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=15&CI ID=66653&p=1 It details the differences between GPU's and CPU's and starts to discuss the future (what's finally happening now).

There is no doubt in my mind that the days of the add on video card, as we know it, are getting short. These high end graphics cards simply have too much processing power to have them sitting idle during general computing tasks. With the ridiculously small transistors that Intel can fab these days, it makes sense to cram this power in next to a CPU core or two, a massive cache, very high speed memory controllers, and maybe even a kitchen sink.

And as stated in the article, it's not just GPU's... think co-processors for other common tasks. For example an encryption/decryption co-processor for secure web servers, floating point co-processor for various modeling systems, even heavily pipelined co-processors that can perform fast sorts and searches of databases are possible: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~ritesh/papers/gputerasort-m sr.html

I can see where Intel is going with this... and I see it being very similar to what AMD suggested a while back where you could place a coprocessor on the HyperTransport bus of a multiprocessor system. I think that AMD's implementation might actually be better, as it allows you to upgrade or replace the coprocessor without replacing your CPU, but having one in the same package as the CPU makes sense too.

What you are talking about here are collisions of culture, which you are conflating with the idea that morals are absolute - which they certainly are not. In the past, when a severe collision occurred, the survivor's answer was to fight until only one culture survives. The Islamists still understand this, but the (quite different) morals of the west reject the idea of putting down an entire culture, even though that culture is polarizing against them in the most obvious manner possible, and has no such scruples. The answer that beckons with survival as the prize - from history - is clear and obvious (and it is the same answer the Islamists have come to.)

Except the "Islamists" can't threaten the survival of our culture.

They can't field a competent army, and Islamic culture also produces second-rate science. Their whole social system bears more than a passing resemblance to feudalism. The only thing that supports it is the reserves of oil there. Their economies can't be productive (or stable) any other way.

Terrorists are not an existential threat to the "West". They can cause harm, occasionally a lot of it. But they do not threaten our culture's existence in the slightest.

Personally, I think the obvious choice is to spend billions on working out economical technology that doesn't involve depending on oil (as opposed to, say, military adventurism, which doesn't change the long-term picture at all - at least, for the better). If we weren't dependent on the oil, we wouldn't have to care what they think. (For better or worse, humanitarian crises in Africa don't affect pocketbooks elsewhere, for example.) If we cut our consumption, and sold products and technology that cut worldwide demand for oil, the price would drop and the "Islamists" would face a funding crisis.

Pretty straightforward, really. Get over the stupid aversion to nuclear power (which can be made safe) and we gain a lot more interesting advantages - like serious exploration of space, (no, that's not an Orion, no fallout at all), which leads to orbital power generation, etc.

This is the working paper, so it might not be the final version that was published in the Journal.

Over the sample period we observe 1.75 million file downloads or roughly ten per minute.10 This is about 0.01% of all the downloads in the world. A significant majority of the downloads were music files. U.S. users accounted for about one third of the downloads (and the data contain about 0.01% of all music downloads by U.S. users).

The mean of sales for these albums during our observation period is 151,786 copies, ranging from 71 copies to 3.5 million copies.

We find that file sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample.

If we are correct in arguing that downloading has little effect on the production of music, then file sharing probably increases aggregate welfare. Shifts from sales to downloads are simply transfers between firms and consumers. And while we have argued that file sharing imposes little dynamic cost in terms of future production, it has considerably increased the consumption of recorded music. File sharing lowers the price and allows an apparently large pool of individuals to enjoy music. The sheer magnitude of this activity, the billions of tracks which are downloaded each year, suggests the added social welfare from file sharing is likely to be quite high.

That's a different paper; the one cited in the story is posted on arXiV here http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0610213 The difference between the two papers is the causal patches you mention. The causal patch concept isn't in the former. The latest paper takes care of the entropy problem caused by a contracting universe by distributing entropy among each causal patch. Just before the Big Rip, expansion reverses and the patches contract into an infinite number of separate universes, each taking a little bit of entropy. One patch becomes/stays our universe. These patches are called causal patches because they don't interact with each other -- no light, gravity or other force can bridge the space between the patches. There's a press release about this http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jan07/newmodel012 907.html

First off, the metric system is the only system that has been officially recognized as a legal system for trade, in 1866.
Secondly, the existing Imperial system was officially based on the metric system in 1893, known as the Mendenhall Order.
(References.

So, we're already using Metric. We just use funny names for cm, g, and l. Those of us who are into unilateral, pre-emptive metrification use the regular names, instead of the funny names, and eventually we'll win. Nobody ever changes anyone else's mind: you just wait for the fogeys to die off and the revolution will be successful.

After having to do engineering in the imperial units, I thought when I swithed to a more sciencey field of study and all metric, life would be easy factors of ten. But alas, it is not so. there are in fact two metric systems, MKS and CGS, and they are not different by factors of 10 in units involving electomagnetism. In fact, under the two different systems, the equations of electromagnetism gain or lose constants depending on which system is used. So much for easy powers of ten....

The U. S. has been "metric" since 1866. Reference

The US has been metric since 1866, there is just no rule you can't use the other system.

http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/usmetric.html

Ok - so I mis-spoke. The distinction (for lawyers) is significant when I use the word license to mean "right to copy." It's an error, and I understand your response.

However, my understanding of copyright law is that I have the legal right to produce archival copies for personal use in the event that my original media is destroyed. In the case of the original post (to which I replied) the situation was that the person whose media was destroyed during Katrina had failed to make an archival copy of his media, and felt it was acceptable to download copies of the music he paid for originally. I suppose he considers it a retroactive archival copy. I'd suggest that this is not in the letter of the law, but may be within the spirit of the law.

Your quote about "No...rights to.. reproduce additional copies" may be inaccurate. I believe that the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 allows unlimited personal copies of music. As I said, IANAL, so you might want to check with one before making any copies of anything. :)

"Pray tell...."
 
That was a play on this. A poor attempt at a joke I suppose. And I know teenagers aren't all fools. I never said that they were. I was one not too long ago.

I can find a few:

http://www.freemuslims.org/news/article.php?articl e=32

http://www.freemuslims.org/

http://www.unc.edu/~kurzman/terror.htm

http://groups.colgate.edu/aarislam/response.htm#St atements%20from%20Leading%20American%20Muslim%20Or ganizations:

http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/arti cles/muslim_voices_against_extremism_terrorism_par t_ii_statements_by_organizatio/0012210

These are all sites easily found with a google search on muslims against 9/11. Did you even bother to find any evidence of your statement that none had spoken out against it? Some of these people are Muslim scolars, people raised in the middle east. Yet they apose the terrorist attacks?
You are just ignoring whats in front of you because you don't want to hear it. Remember that these terrorists are called extreamists. Alot of the rest of the Muslim and Islamic population in the middle east is afraid of them or don't understand enough to protest. Even so you can still find hundreds of instances on the internet not to mention Muslims that I have spoken to personally.

"The Free Muslims Coalition is a nonprofit organization made up of American Muslims and Arabs of all backgrounds who feel that religious violence and terrorism have not been fully rejected by the Muslim community in the post 9-11 era."

Oh, silly me. I forgot that civilization would collapse if we had sex with someone of the wrong color. "Mixbreeds" are the greatest possible danger of all... because sooner or later *you* lose the ability to tell "us" from "them". You might get tricked into marrying someone who is one quarter or one eighth "them", and never even know it. Your children would contaminated with "them" genes, and your grandchildren and your entire bloodline would be forever contaminated as part "them".

And you know what? It's already too late. Aside from the fact that you already can't be sure of the purity of anyone you might want to marry, you already can't even be sure of your own purity. Go ahead, try and trace your family tree back even just 10 generations. And then factor in the fact that in at least 2% of births the ACTUAL biological father is NOT the man who thinks he is the father. Even just going back 10 generations, you are facted with a statistical certainly that 10 or more of the branches in your "official" historical family tree are wrong, and that they are actually unknown outside influences being philanderingly injected into your own genetic line. That some unknown actual great grandfather might have been part indian or part asian or part black or part jewish or part anything-else-that-pisses-you-off.

You're not evil for being white. You're evil for being a racist jackass.

You've already lost. Mixing has already happened, you can't prevent people from doing it, and while you might manage to prevent your daughter from marrying someone who's half-whatever you'll never KNOW and never be able to prevent her from marrying someone who's one eighth or one sixteenth something or other. With each passing year the diffusion just increases and there are more and more people with ancestry on both sides of your imaginary line, people who consider you and bigotries to be neandertal.

You should enjoy it here at Slashdot. You'll get lots and lots of opportunities to enjoy playing the poor victim. You'll have lots and lots of oppurtunites to self-righteously revel in being insulted and 'oppressed' by the evil commie liberals that dominate the online population, especially here on Slashdot.

Why is online, and especially Slashdot,so absolutely dominated by the evil commie liberals? The reason is perfectly summed up in the insightful truth of one of the first and most famous peices of humor about the internet: On the internet nobody knows you're a dog. On Slashotvirtually no one will hate you for being white, because no one KNOWS you're white, and because the internet lays bare the truth that what matters is what people say and think and do. We don't know or care if the person at the other end is Japanese or German or African... or even a dog. A post is judged by the thoughts and words in the post, and that value does not change if the post was written by a beagle.

The overwhelming majority here on Slashot will not know or care if you are white, not unless you yourself make a point of it. And if you do make a point of it, they still will not insult and ridicule and call you evil for being white, they will overwhelimingly insult and ridicule and call you evil for the thoughts and words you post, they will overwhelimingly insult and ridicule and call you evil for dragging racism onto the internet where it is absolute absurd, dragging racism onto the internet where even a beagle is equal.

So enjoy playing the victim here, and go ahead and enjoy your whining about the evil commie liberals insulting and oppessing you here, go ahead and enjoy ranting about the "groupthink" around here, and go ahead and enjoy ranting about how everyone is unfairly modding your posts down to -1. But don't even TRY to bitch that you are being censored when people yell at you and insult you or even mod your posts into oblivion where they won't be seen... because the evil commie liberals who are insulting you and modding your posts out