AH! Maybe that's what I need! Bringing cookies to my class. That's smart!

Actually, this is misconception. The cloud can probably deliver 16Pflops. The problem with the cloud is not computation power. It is communication bandwidth and latency.

What makes a supercomputer is the balance between processing capability, communication capability and IO speed. For many applications, you need to be able to synchronize the processors with very little overhead. Many scientific application work under the following patterns: do a small computation, make a small communication with your neighbors, rince repeat for 10 hours. If you do not have balance capabilities, you are wasting lots of ressources. This is the type of computation the cloud can not really help you with.

Now if your application is: get 1MB of data, compute for 2 week, send 1MB of data. Then the cloud will be fine. Unfortunately, not many scientific applications follow that model.

I am not too familiar with US laws and regulations. But I assume that if the same company get caught twice or if DoL start catching one company like that every week, then the fines will become higher.

Of course it can! It can even edit videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

The question should be, what ridiculous use of a text editor has the developers not think of yet?

But does it work with real audio files?

This should not be tagged funny! This should be tagged depressing.
What I really don't understand is "why is this part of systemd and not a separate program?" I can only see two answers:

-Because it has to be tightly integrated with systemd. In this case, I would rather we do not clutter a critical system component with more unnecessary code such as a console implementation.

-Because it is a tactic to get it deployed as part of the systemd package. In which case, systemd really starts looking like a attempt at conquering the world. I feel like that is exactly what it is here.

Not sure if it is true or not. But I had read there was probably not enough nuclear material (see how much I know by my proper use of vocabulary?) in the world to power the world using nuclear power plants for a significant portion of time.

We certainly need a mix of energy and should certainly not disregard nuclear. But I am a NIMBY too. There is not enough room in my back yard to build a nuclear power plant! :)

I am no expert in mesh networking, but I was under the impression that addressing in them does not scale well. The best technique seems to be BATMAN [1]. AFAIU it requires everynode to perform a full broadcast regularly and that each device stores a complete routing table to each other device. That will not scale to build a city wide network.

Somebody knows more?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B....

Indeed, I am fairly disappointed by this video. This is pure BS. There is no actaul fact presented. Statements are not facts. You can do lots of that.

MYTH: the little girl droped the ice cream on the floor
FACT: In reality the cat made it fall.

Maybe it is a fact, but without any proof it is just a statement in the air.

This is spot on! I do not believe there are parts of computer science with NO industrial applications. I work as a assistant professor and I saw hundreds of PhD students. All of what they were doing had some form of practical relevance.

Even if what you do is not directly applicable (yet), you have to have a wide knowledge of a chunk of the discipline. Even the most theoretical chunks have practical relevance. A friend of mine was researching complexity theory (some weird complexity classes that appeared since the PCP theorem came). And he works designing algorithms for planning (of both, nurses, schools, ...) He did not find anybody interested in complexity, but his understanding of complexity made him very useful to design models and build algorithms.

Would I give my heart surgery to a guy that does not have an MD, but has a bachelor in poetry? Absolutely not!

Does a bachelor in poetry have a place in a hospital? Yes absolutely!

In particular, liberal art graduate tends to be good communicators. And that is something pretty much all tech field need. We need lots of people to help the tech field communicate.

I am working in a university in a CS department, and I strongly believe that having people to help us "publicize" our work is very important. I'd love to have a youtube channel full of interviews of different members of the department. Maybe short videos explaining a particular paper I wrote. That would be cool and would fulfil our job to explain what we are doing to the public.

We had a couple of artist in our college last year who essentialyl tried to make a piece of art by taking a marionette and coupling it with a few camera to build an "interactive automaton".

Well, the article does not even convince me that the benchmark was properly executed. When going from a 32-bit to a 64-bit architecture, you certainly need the code to be properly optimized for the new target architecture. For instance, if you do not use the new instructions, it is unlikely you will see a major performance improvement. If you normalize the benchmark result to clock speed and number of cores there is not much difference between the 2 processors.

So my guess is: they did not properly compile the benchmark.

I disagree with that. What we want is to have net neutrality in practice. Now competition in the ISP market is a tool that could lead to net neutrality. It is an indirect way of getting net neutrality. But I strongly believe that net neutrality is important enough that we want to have a direct regulation about it.

Now, more competition in the ISP market woud not hurt :)

This is slashdot. Nobody RTFA anyway (even the editors).

There is a similar law (in spirit) in North Carolina about public universities trying to hire a university professor from another public university. You can not make an offer more than xx% over what they currently have (I think it is 10%). The reasonning is similar, it cost more money to the state to get the same person they were already having at a similar position.