They me be in your part of the world. They're not in mine. We also didn't have any late bus.

If Google doesn't remove them from its searches, they demand money on the basis of ridiculous copyright claims.

If Google does remove them, they demand money on the basis of Google abusing its monopoly to punish them.

I know it doesn't make sense if you're sane, but that's how these sorts of people reason.

The Council of Elders has declared with enthuisiasm our intention to obliterate the creatures from the blue planet in person.

"For to long have these pathetic monsters hidden in the safety of their hellish atmosphere, while their mechanical agents attacked our world," announced K'breel, speaker for the Council. "We shall have revenge for the unprovoked attacks of the past twenty-two years. Most of all we shall have revenge for the Life Day transmission."

When a junior intelligence officer declined to comment, K'breel had him nailed to a yeast-tree by his gelsacs for being a smartass.

(I'm no good, but I do it for the sake of tradition!)

Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. No link; it's been hardly a month since I last slashdotted a Free software site. You can google it if you're serious.

True, it doesn't do anything spectacularly useful. But it's not useless and there are few things better for testing the stability of your CPU.

That's a common myth.

People can and do die in their dreams and suffer no ill effect (personal experience).

No, you weren't trolling. And if I'd seen this ten seconds earlier I'd have had points for you. But tone it down a little, okay? It's better to rant after the trolling starts.

(I sincerely believe that Eric Raymond is mistaken with this whole "Linus's law" thing. It applies to some types of bugs, but not to all.)

Please, please can we not mention religion on Slashdot?

It's always the same. Religious people flaming atheists, atheists flaming religious people and agnostics flaming both sides. The universal argument? "I'm right because it's obvious and you're stupid for not agreeing".

Let us do a quick Google search on that.

Neutrinos and electrons are regarded as fundamental particles with zero volume -- which may not be correct -- (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle), so they would have the same size. Neutrons have measurable volume (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron), so "about the same" is entirely wrong.

If we suppose you mean mass, then we get a rest mass of about 10^-30 kg for the electron and at most 10^-36 kg for the neutrino (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/32861) and around 10^-27 kg for the neutron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron), making you off by many orders of magnitude.

I'm sorry. I just couldn't resist your sig.

I won't insult you by checking your calculations but your number is too large for your assumptions. Remember that when simulating a brain each processor won't compute for a single cell, but a local group of cells . The vast majority of the bandwidth use would therefore be between each CPU and its memory rather than between different CPUs. Each CPU would than have connections with those CPUs whose local groups of cells its own communicates with. The less local you get, the lower the total bandwidth requirements.

Yes, as I said, there is non-local communication but it's mostly local, and furthermore the non-local connections are fixed (for the purpose of short-term simulations). In a simulation you need relatively few connections between distant CPUs and those connections don't carry as much data as connections between nearby CPUs.

Just about anything is "a lot" at the scale at which the brain operates. It just isn't as complex as it could conceivably have been.

I am not a neuroscientist. As a grad student I do study artificial neural networks, which means that I must also have a little knowledge of neuroscience.

The brain is not a fully connected network. It is divided into many sub-networks. I think it's estimated at about 500k, but don't quote me on that number. These sub-networks are often layered, so if you have a three-layer feed-forward sub-network of 5 cells in each layer, each of these cells has only 5 inputs except for the 5 nodes in the input layer, which connects to other sub-networks. (If there are connections from later layers back to earlier layers, the network is said to be a 'feedback' rather than feed-forward network.) These sorts of networks can be simulated very efficiently on parallel hardware, as a cell mostly gets information from the cells that are close to it.

In short, your suspicion is entirely correct. Moreover, you not only don't need fast connections between many of your processing nodes, most of them don't need to be connected to each other at all.

This is the reason why neural networks are interesting in the first place: that they can be simulated on parallel hardware when we don't know a good parallel algorithm with conventional computing techniques. (If it interests you: another name for neural networks is 'parallel distributed computing'.)

There is a hard limit on the 'order' (think of it as function complexity) of functions that can be computed with a given network. To compute a function beyond that limit, you need to have a larger number of inputs to some cells, thereby increasing the order of the network but making it less parallel. Most everyday things are in fact of surprisingly low order. Fukushima's neucognitron can perform tasks like handwriting recognition with only highly local information.

I can only recognise a few Chinese characters, but all the Chinese (Usenet-)spam I've tried to decipher was quite obviously for porn. Lonely geeks must be bored behind the Great Firewall.

???

This means that 1) Someone cheats you out of everything you own 2) You, the plaintiff, can't recover said things in a court (and additionally end up with legal fees). I.e., you are ruined by the lawsuit that you filed.

Perhaps I could have written more clearly, but it most certainly does mean what I said it does.