I'm quite sure that you can find travelling saleman function somewhere on CPAN. Problem is that it will expect some very specific inputs - zero chances that these inputs will be compatible with whatever format you might get geolocation data. This seems to me to be THE power of Wolfram language - binding data, not actually having saleman solver in global namespace.
Unless of course it is so big fake that this salesman function cannot accept anything except Earth map data... but I have a strong feeling that it will work as good with multiple other types of source data.
And of course - if you would replicate exactly same things as Wolfram did in any reasonably powerful language (lisp comes to mind), you would achieve similar effect. But it wouldn't be lisp anymore - it would be Wolfram Lisp, same way as what he shows currently is Wolfram Mathematica.

You wish... you forgot about 100 extra commands you need to set up proper nvidia drivers afterwards...

And I think you misunderstood the premise. It is not a language to write salesman algos in. It is language to data mine, connect facts, process and visualize them. And it looks pretty impressive from this point of view.

I dare you. Let's start with travelling salesman example. 4 lines of perl. It has to include the map with graph as an output displayed on the screen. You are free to import any CPAN module, but no utilities of your own written specifically for this purpose.

I do not expect post of excuses and example of things you can do in perl in 4 lines instead of this problem - I expect 4 lines long perl code.

Why they are burning this stuff?
I understand picking through it to find sellable parts, possibly smashing it down to extract some metal etc, but why burn the rest? To save the space?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscie...

I suppose that dead salmon should get credits for social science classes in such case...

Ok, maybe I should separate the quotes better (and bold highlight was from OP, not me). I was calling BS on later part of statement statement
"Members don't really have much influence over each other, and they have even less influence over people who have already proven themselves willing to kill."
I think that members (especially 'priests') of religions have HUGE influence on certain groups of followers.
Seems that artor3 somehow wanted to say that we cannot blame NY muslims for not stopping 9/11, because they could not influence the bombers. But nobody is discussing it - we are talking about terrorist priests who are manipulating gullible teenagers into sacrificing their lives.

And if we are discussing definitions... Hive mind also means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C..., which is "Collective conscious or collective conscience is the set of shared beliefs, ideas and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society[...]This has also been termed "hive mind", "group mind", "mass mind", and "social mind"" I understand that OP meant something more ant-like, which obviously cannot be literally true with humans.

No, I said that religion is closest thing people have to hive minds. And I do not talk about muslims in particular - any strong reglion/cult is like that.
And no, I would not be a jihadi. I was raised in Catholic country, been indoctrinated from early age and when I was teenager I said 'it is bullshit' and never went back. I could be now picketing under abortion clinics, but I'm not. Because I made a choice. And if you are suggesting that I would not be able to make that concious decision if I would be born into fanatic muslim family... then you would be only proving hivemind theory.

http://sullydish.files.wordpre...
People are trampling each other to death each year there. Please tell me it doesn't look like hive to you... Same can be probably said about things like Woodstock even - but religions are a LOT better at this stuff.

Quotation needed. I think that you are considerably underestimating amount of 'angry Muslims' in the world.
If you would say 99.9% of Muslims aren't _actively_ involved in terrorism - sure. But oppose?

Now, this is pure BS. Religions are closest thing people have to hive minds (I count cults of dictators, like in NK, as a religion, even if it is not using world 'god'). Religons influence minds of people in extreme ways. Think about Scientists or other strange cults/sects - this is example of religion completely brainwashing the person. Bigger religions are trying to be slightly more subtle, but still, religion is probably best mind manipulation tool ever invented by mankind.

We are going in loops. I'm saying that in my opinion, for sport broadcasts and movies, full immersiveness is less important than quality/resolution. Different thing for games, where Rift-like solution is not doubts way better. I haven't chance to play with Glyph, but reports are saying they got rid of visible rainbow effect - people were explicitly checking for that by fast horizontal movements.
We are having a choice of seeing football with:
- 3d normal TV with HD resolution
- Glyph which is just a bit bigger 3d TV which you can point in various directions
- Rift where you will have a ball taking 3x3 antialised pixels, but will be able to fully immerse in all the edge of view noise

Question is, are you trying to build 'being in stadion simulator' or 'best device to see sports'. My take is that taking high-quality 3d TV experience and adding a _bit_ of interactivity by headtracking is better than degrading quality at benefit of higher 'be-in-place' immersivness.

Rift is aimed at different audience than Glyph. This is why I think it is more tailored for Glyph, because it might be better to have high-quality moving screen in front of you, rather than medicore quality full-surround experience. It is all about pixels. Do you prefer to have 1000x1000 pixels centered on the action, without seeing hands of people sitting next to you on the bench, or do you want to have only 400x400 pixels for actual action, with pronounced screen-door effect on top of that, but having bigger immersion factor by being able to spot that soda drink vendor with corner of your eyes?

Don't get me wrong - I'm going to buy Rift and not the Glyph, because there is no comparison for gaming/immersion purposes. I'm just suggesting that watching movies and sports might be better with Glyph - trading FOV for considerably better quality might be worth it.

I doubt that this 360 film technology would support positional tracking of head movements, which seems to be a major benefit for immersivness in new version of Rift - plus not controlling your movements might be also quite confusing. Glyph is probably better tailored for viewing rail-road movies where you can just move your screen around.

_Real_ breakthrough would be to mix movies and game/rendering engines and let film render on the fly. This way, all the positional tracking/limited movement control etc could be achieved. Probably graphic power/distribution size limits might be a showstoppers right now, but maybe in future... Interactive content could be added there almost for free (not that I think it is that good idea for movies).

Still, even for single center of view, 360 degrees video, size has to be immense? We are talking about probably 8 HD movies stiched together on just horizontal angle - might easily require 20-40 full HD videos to cover entire sphere. Multiply by two because of 3d, let's assume 60 times requirements of HD stream. Compression might be better for this size of video, but stil... Are we talking about swapping bluray each 2-4 minutes?
Of course, they can as well just do a 2000x2000 pixels for entire sphere and let us stare at interpolated blur. Which they will most probably do, which means it is nothing else that "let's be there first without solving any real issues" ploy.

I was quite puzzled to see a country with lower Freedom index that North Korea. The gap is quite large (82 versus 85 points of 'non-freedom'). Even if they have described the method used (and misnamed it 'methodology', but thats separate story), they don't give detailed per-country factors, so it is not possible to understand _why_ given country is lower or higher in the ranking.

Actually, after reading further, it is based on _questionaire_. It might just mean that Eritrean citizens are allowed to complain about their country more than NK ones... or that NK data is based on imagination of journalists as opposed to interviews with ones which escaped from Eritrea.

Just like everyone else...
Seems that being confused about gender identity is fulfilling same niche as being vocal about not having TV 30 years ago (or never reading Harry Potter book few years ago, or not having Facebook account until recently). Nobody really cares, but you still have to push it into everybody face.

and proudly introduce yourself as Inspector Gadget.

Astrology -> Astronomy
Alchemy -> Chemistry
Herbalism -> Pharmacology
Economy -> ???

I wonder if we will live till the point where Economy will also give the birth to some real science...