Killer whales are dolphins.

I know that this is not a purely gaming card bla bla bla. But here is another ping: in this month's graphics card review at Tom's hardware AMD totally dominated... in all categories. I mean a clean sweep! What's going on? Or is it just bad timing?

Result of Nvidia's crippling DP floating point performance on mainstream graphic cards is people started to look for ways around this bullshit.

Case in point: linear algebra libraries (like 80% of scientific computing). Basically people are modifying algorithms so that bulk of computation is done in single precision and then cleaned up in double. Those mixed mode algorithms often outperform pure DP ones even on non crippled cards (for example MAGMA library).

People don't like to be screwed with...

I suspect it's more like a form of protectionism. They can't slap some serious tariffs due to WTO or whatever. So in order to protect fledgling local production they do a form of bang-bang control: now you can watch that and now you can't.

Am I is the only one concerned about amount of RAM?

I mean, everybody is so excited about DDR4... But do people understand that instead of 8 dimm slots we'll get only 4 (1 dimm per channel instead of 2-3)? So while keeping costs on this side of reasonable, we're getting only half the amount of memory?

WTF?!!

Well, am an engeneer and a scientist.
And considering that arcs (as presented) do not have error brackets on them is a dead giveaway that qualifications of people who did the calculations are highly suspect.

Considering that the arcs are, well, arcs, I'll take a wild guess and say that they had data from only one satellite...
Some spy birds might help, but they tend to focus on land areas.

Data from other planes will not help much - mostly only to set error brackets. The ill-conditioness of the problem does not go away.

And what if the sphere does not intersect earth? :)

Navy guys will need more data.

Those much hyped arcs from Inmarsat are pretty much bogus. The trouble is that the problem is badly conditioned - because satellite is way too far (geosynchonous orbit - not your friendly neighborhood gps) and it's right on top of the search area. In other words - small errors in time/distance measurements, satellite position, etc. produce huge errors in estimation. They're lucky they placed the airplane on earth.

Maybe D.B. Cooper style heist? That would explain weird altitude behavior: need to lower pressure difference to open doors, set on autopilot, and then jump while westward crossing over Malaysia.

Are you sure about this? I mean, if you're not planning for subsequent take-off then your runway may be much - much shorter. Remember, a few months ago, Boeing transport landed in a wrong airport.

For all those morons calling Snowden a traitor: consider this scenario.

Reviewing circumstances of that Petraeus scandal in the light of Snowden's revelations, it's pretty clear that NSA knew about CIA director affair, and more importantly kept the fact to itself (if, of course it wasn't a parallel construction by FBI, which is easy for them to check)

Now what we have? We have that NSA had dirt on a top CIA official, a popular political figure, with very probable presidential candidacy on the horizon. And what it did with that info? It kept it's chips to itself to cash-in at the most opportune moment! And the whole infrastructure at the NSA is built in such a way (intentionally!) that unless NSA wants to, nobody can say with absolute certainty what they knew and when they knew that.

In my books that is a direct threat to the republic.

My T41 runs lubuntu 13.04 just fine. So yes, you can! :) Google for "fake-pae"

I tend to write a lot between the lines. Here's the one of the lines I skipped: in COW setups, in stable state you write at exactly same rate as you free blocks. I.e. by writing 1 gig, you're freeing 1 gig. And so on to the end of block space, then you wrap and repeat. Wear leveling is additional side effect.