Actually, an FFT is often cheaper than autocorrelation because it's N*log(N) whereas auto-correlation is N^2. In any case, it's insanely cheap on today's machines.

Aren't Christmas and Easter about the same guy anyway? ;-)

Anti-matter still has a positive mass. Otherwise when a positron meets an electron it wouldn't release any energy. Personally, I highly doubt it "falls up", as that would be inconsistent with general relativity because anti-particles would not follow a curved space. What would be really cool is if it was found that anti-matter curved space in the opposite direction as matter, making gravity repulsive. I highly doubt that's the case, but it would certainly be a cool discovery.

KDevelop 3 was indeed pretty nice and I used it for a while. But then -- like too many OSS projects these days -- developers decided it'd be much better if they rewrote it. The result is that version 3 stagnated for a long time and when KDevelop 4 was finally ready, it ditched support for many features, including autoconf/automake which I used for all my projects. That's when I switched to Eclipse/CDT and I've been happy with it since then.

My biggest issue with GMOs aren't related to health issues, but economic issues. The use of GMOs tends to not only reduce crop diversity, but it also leads to more resistant parasites, which also help wipe out the "original" crops. So we end up in a situation where we have low diversity and strong parasites and it's a recipe for disaster. It's just a matter of time until global production of a certain plant gets almost completely wiped out, with disastrous consequences. Unfortunately preventing that requires much more than just labeling (though I'm still in favor of it) because it's not just a matter of individual choice. It's a global issue, like many environmental concerns.

Modern codecs are better at 256 kb/s than MP3 is at 320 kb/s. Also, at those rates, it depends a lot on the actual encoder. The newer formats (be it Opus, Vorbis or AAC) all have the potential of giving you perfect quality at 256 kb/s VBR. In the (very) few cases where you can hear an artefact, it's due to the encoder making the wrong decision (e.g. not detecting a transient).

And try Musepack or Layer2 on something extremely tonal like harpsichord or (to a lesser extent) 12-string acoustic guitar. Each type of codecs has upsides and downsides. Overall though a freq-domain codec *with* a good encoder should be better because it still has the option of going with a good time resolution (Layer2 can't ever use a good freq resolution).

Could you please post the specs of the reel to real equipment you're using. To beat a 16-bit digital system, it has to have better than 96 dB SNR and dynamic range. I don't remember having ever seen that.

And the solution to both objections (including doctors not wanting to be obsolete) is to have the machine *assist* the doctor, in a similar way that auto-pilots assist but do not replace pilots.

I think overall for-profit companies have made a huge contribution to the Free Software community. While Canonical has probably contributed less than many others, I still still their total contribution as positive. Of course I still disagree when their new Ubuntu spyware and even before that I had already decided to stop using it for unrelated reasons (Unity and other interface-related decisions). In any community, there will be individuals and companies that do the wrong thing and I don't see anything special about for-profit. The best example of non-profit org messing up badly that comes to mind (there's probably many more) is XFree86. That was quickly worked around.

Many have commented that "people don't use $1 coins", but it's not like most people actually choose one over the other. In practice, you withdraw money as $20 bills or something like that. You only get $1 coins/bills as change when you buy something. So in practice, it's the stores and/or the banks that decide, not individual people.

The work-around is to actually download the ad and just not display it. Then the publisher gets to pay extra bandwidth for still not having their ads displayed. What I *am* surprised of is that they aren't just serving ads from the servers as the "content" to avoid detection in the first place.

And how do you extract the gold-extracting bacteria from the water?

You can justify fines for under-consuming. However, there's no way you can justify the fines being higher than the cost of the electricity that was not consumed, as seems to be the case here. This is silly.

According to Michio Kaku, the biggest advantage the US has is the H-1B.