It was only 3 years ago when I gave up on ATI and switched to NVidia because ATIs drivers could not handle bad inputs, and would crash the entire system. So I had to write my own abstraction layer to ensure that no bad point coordinates and so on could be sent to the driver. I also filed kernel crash bugs with ATI that took forever to get fixed. After I switched to NVidia, I have yet to see a single kernel failure due to programming mistakes. Their drivers are just rock solid. So much better to develop on that it would take a lot to go back. I also had much the same bad experience with the open source Intel drivers.

The debate has been ranging here in Norway lately, since we hold a lot of the world's known reserves of the stuff (as opposed to many wild guesswork assumptions about possible reserves around the world). The reason why not more reactors are built is quite simply because the technology is not there yet. By most accounts, a functional prototype reactor is 20 years away. It is a very complicated technology, and more difficult to engineer safely than uranium reactors that we currently know a lot about. Several studies, for instance from MIT, cast doubt on whether thorium reactors will even be cost effective. Extracting thorium from the ground is harder than for uranium, and the enrichment process is more difficult and costly. Thorium will also produce dangerous, radioactive by products, and if you have enrichment capabilities for thorium, it is not a far step further to produce weaponized plutonium.

So it may be the future, but apparently no silver bullet.

All this is IANANP (I Am Not a Nuclear Physicist) so I guess someone reading ./ can answer this better than me.

That is way too much hyperbole. None of the recognized mass extinction events were caused by Yellowstone or Toba eruptions. A supervolcanic eruption would be really bad news for humanity, but it would not be a mass extinction event on the scale you are talking about. Such supervolcanic events happen quite frequently, from an evolutionary and geological perspective, with several occurring each million years, while mass extinctions are quite rare.

From the linked article, it seems the theory both predicts the heat death of the universe (continued accelerated expansion) and that our universe started from a "Big Crunch" scenario (gravity had pulled everything back again). This seems quite strange (although of course nature can be quite strange at times). Anyone know this theory any better and can provide some enlightenment?

It is not only the estimates of temperature increase that are rising, but so are the uncertainties. We know very little about how the feedback cycles work once the temperature changes so many degrees, and we know next to nothing about how they work when faced with such quick changes. We do not know how much methane hydrate there is stored on the ocean floor, but we do know there is a lot of it and that an eruption of it 55 million years ago was at least in part responsible for a 6 degree C rise in global temperatures. It is also thought that the biggest mass extinction event ever was caused by massive volcanism and methane hydrate release. There is plenty of evidence that large parts of the ocean can and have previously become anoxic during climate changes. This is really bad news not only for everything that lives in the ocean, but also for us since a large part of our food supply comes from the ocean.

Basically, we are getting into a territory where all bets are off, and it is not good news for humanity. I am linking to wikipedia since that is good place to start to read up on this stuff and find links to the actual research.

If you do not have a passion for low-level graphics programming, I would strongly recommend using a higher level library like OpenSceneGraph or Ogre rather than programming directly at the nuts and bolts level of OpenGL. You get more done that way and leverage other people's experience instead of reinventing so many wheels yourself.

...which is exactly the same as the second edition. Almost. But not quite as painfully obvious a reprint as the OpenGL book that usually accompanies it (the Red Book). It just had some warnings that OpenGL 3 is, like, totally different, and saying that we are not going to bother with any of that, despite announcing that prominently on the cover of the book. Nothing on, for example, how to do transforms without all the old pipeline commands. Lots on, say, display lists, instead. Display lists that have been unofficially deprecated now for about a decade. Oh, well.

And for those not in the know, the Orange Book and the Red Book together form the unofficially official documentation for OpenGL.

Someone really needs to step up to produce quality documentation for the new lean and mean non-backward-compatible profile of OpenGL 3 if that is to make any headway. Or maybe that lets-make-the-API-even-more-low-level approach was wrong to begin with, and people are just afraid to say that out aloud like Mark Kilgard of NVIDIA recently did (see slide 35).

Anyway, if you are going to work with OpenGL, you need to read those two books. But you can just as well buy the previous edition.

Once the big game engines and physics libraries get generic support for GPU programming through OpenCL, this will all be pretty moot anyway. From what I can tell, the bullet physics library is already developing this, and I am sure closed source competitors are doing that as well. Relying on anything that will only run on a single vendor's hardware is just a losing business proposition (unless that vendor pays you for it, which I guess is how PhysX got going).

No, you need gravity to hold an atmosphere, much more than the Moon currently has. A strong magnetic field helps, but is not necessary, as in the case of Venus.

That number for drug R&D costs is described by some commentators as "9-digit fairy tale" (source article http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/180/3/279). It is true that you cannot market directly to consumers in many countries, the industry can and do market to doctors. Although the doctors are relatively few in numbers, the pandering they receive is far more expensive.

"If you own something then you can sell it."

There are lots of things you can own, but not sell. Some things you can only sell under certain very limited circumstances, other things not at all. There is an infinite variety of property arrangements, and trying to define property to be just one, simple (ideologically loaded I guess) concept is meaningless. Try reading a book about the philosophy of law and property one day. You might learn something.

Whose lawn?

<shotgun action="load" />

China does not want the existing regime to collapse, which would most likely lead to a mass exodus of millions of poor people across the border to China. But North Korea does not really have any friends in the international arena anymore. It is so bat shit crazy that it would be a liability to anyone associated with it.

Judging from the screencast, this looks just like what Fedora is trying to do with the revisor application. I wonder how fast it is, though. In the screencast, it looked like the image was created almost instantly, while revisor can take hours to complete, and it is so full of bugs and so hard to make working images with that it is IMHO nearly unusable. I have spent days trying to make revisor and then pungi create working images with a custom kickstart file, but eventually had to go over to doing everything by hand instead. I really hope SuSe deliver on their promises on this, it will make life so much simpler for people working with embedded systems and kiosk systems.