Expansion of the human habitat beyond earth.

If the input conditions are somewhat more constrained than "the current state of the universe". If the algorithm can be executed on hardware that is any simpler than the physical machine.

Clear proof then that the timeline was altered by the events of Terminator 2.

If your program is more thana single page then it makes sense to vertically split into two 8:9 panes, making it roughly twice as good as 4:3.

I used to do this, but in the end I switched them both back to landscape. Looking up and down is surprisingly tiring, but looking side to side is not. My screens are a little too big for a dual screen layout (23" maybe?) so the total width is a little uncomfortable and one screen is now directly ahead for 80% of what I do with the second screen offset for less frequent tasks.

If they claim that they are from The Microsoft you could say that you are "Bob from the Internet" or vica versa. Spend some time finding out if you have friends in common, maybe from back when you worked at the Facebook. Did they know June from the New York office? Really? Because June died five years ago!! etc etc...

They can be a lot of fun. When you get bored with them just ask how they *feel* about scamming people for money. Good times.

Yeah the telephone support is amazing.

And yet this has reached a conclusion, so it did not take forever. Sounds like a win?

Did you know that cards can be validated for an amount as well as charged?

When I book a hotel stay for $x and give them a card to hold it the first thing they do is validate with the CC company that the card can be charged $x. When I check out they ask how to settle the bill including charging the amount to a different card.

So if a hotel wants a card to book a room (guaranteeing payment on no-shows) and you provide a dummy card that they could not charge for the amount then over here we call that fraud. But I guess you call them idiots...

If the prof is no longer available then they get a replacement. Courses are phased out very slowly, when a course is cancelled the intake is capped at zero but it hangs around in the system for up to ten years to deal with resit attempts.

Not at all - I work at a university where students cannot graduate with a failed course on their transcript. They must resit the course in a later year with the same teacher to earn credit. Ymmv

The only delay is unloading all those boxes of Half-life 3 off of the front.

Been there.

First student to offer proof they are the author gets a bare pass mark, the other three fail. If nobody offers proof then they get referred to the Disciplinary board (for expulsion). It's not quite a Prisoner's dilemma, but the expected payoff is close enough to push someone into action.

A lot of the value in your article is lost by trying to shoehorn "general purpose processors" into an argument about task-optimisation. The difference between properties relating to computational power and those relating to performance is really basic textbook stuff that we teach to undergraduates. Being able to run any program, and being able to run any program efficiently, is a difference taught in undergraduate architecture courses.

The parts of your article that are interesting and valuable would have been better served by a narrative that does not rely on a straw man. Cleanly separating the issue of power / performance and explaining that task-neutral optimisation is impossible would have been a better article, and one that would have been easier to write. There is a natural analogy with representation-bias in machine learning that would have provided more explanatory power without the unnecessary rhetoric. I know its the queue, but even so I am a little disappointed in your reviewers.

Indeed the addition of a 4th fix does not constrain the equations, I was thinking of a slightly different positioning system when I wrote that.

The 4th signal is not historically from a ground station: most GPS receivers will generate an estimated position with a low-accuracy warning on 3 fixes, but they expect 4 in order to generate a real estimate. That 4th signal is normally another satellite. I did look briefly for the difference in CEP-50 between 3 fixes and 4, but could not find a source. You have not linked to any previous discussion on this subject, or external references, so if you have numbers on what the real difference between 3 and 4 fixes is then they would be interesting.

Ground stations are used in d-GPS, but not only as an extra point of reference. As an known location they can be used to cancel errors in the satellites estimate of its position.