Lots and lots of classism is born from racism. People around the US complain about "the poors" when their actions indicate that their real fear is black people, as they consider the two groups to be one and the same thing.

Absentee voting can also be important for people with terrible jobs that won't let them take the day off (or even a few hours while the polling places are open). Also bear in mind that in many areas, polling places are ridiculously underfunded such that it may require waiting in line most of the day to finally vote.

Restrictions to absentee voting only make sense if we have strictly-enforced rules for availability of polling places.

Except for the problem that lie detectors don't work.

This is rather like teaching a person how to get a psychic to give an incorrect prediction.

Because law enforcement really seems to believe the pseudo-scientific bullshit that is lie detection.

a) Each CPU in these clusters typically has anywhere from 4-8 cores, and may support two or more times as many threads.

b) It's far, far more difficult to make full use of GPU hardware than CPU hardware. The best application for stressing GPU hardware is 3D graphics rendering, and even there if you run through the numbers, you find that it's rare that they really push half of their theoretical processing limit. General processing is significantly less efficient on GPU hardware, in particular because it's difficult to come up with computing problems that work well with the GPU's extremely limited I/O compared to their processing power. You need to do a lot of processing on each bit of data read or written to not be limited by either PCI Express bandwidth or video RAM bandwidth. Typical best-case real world scenarios for GPGPU programming put GPU's at closer to 10x or so the performance of CPU's, not 1000x as just looking at the number of shader cores vs. CPU cores might suggest. So they're quite powerful, but not overwhelmingly so. Whether or not they're worth it is highly dependent upon the application.

c) You can bet that companies like Microsoft and Google have a significant number of GPU's in use for specialized tasks.

Sure, but that's why Microsoft and Google will rapidly catch up if the numbers are real. Both employ lots of extremely talented and creative people exactly for solving problems like this, and the methods they use have been published.

Anyway, if they did really manage to produce some better algorithms, that's impressive and important work. But bragging about such a tiny computer seems seriously out of place.

The computer has 72 processors and 144 GPU's. That's tiny. Seriously tiny. Sure, GPU's are powerful, especially for image processing. But the larger computers these days are running tens to hundreds of thousands of processors in parallel.

For example, assuming each shelf has 2 processors and 4 GPU's, and they can fit 12 shelves into a single rack, that's a total of 2 racks. Compare that to this image of one of Google's datacenters, where you can see dozens of racks, each containing 14 shelves by my count. And that's just one row. These are gigantic warehouses, with row upon row of racks.

The level of processing power claimed here is closer to the level of a university processing cluster. The larger scientific clusters can be ten or a hundred times larger, and it's not clear just how big private datacenters are.

So overall I'm very, very skeptical. There's a very good chance that they fudged the data somehow to make theirs appear better. But if it is better, well, there's no reason why Google and Microsoft couldn't easily outcompete them in short order.

I'm skeptical that the research angle is that big of a deal. The focus on research harms adjunct faculty greatly and student education slightly, but I don't think it really has a negative impact on tuition cost.

The university provides an estimate of total living expenses. Tuition itself increased from something in the range of $6,000 to about $15,000. Obviously personal situations can vary, and if your parents live close to the university it can be a lot cheaper, but local living costs are usually a large part of the cost of higher education. This doesn't include books or medical insurance.

Fortunately, I don't think so. Religious people got a lot louder, and became stronger in politics (this article, for example, claims that politics became much more Christianity-infused after 9/11). But in terms of population number I don't think they ever increased by a measurable amount.

If you can find a source that proves me wrong, I'd be interested to read it, though.

It's probably more down to urbanization. The more people live in denser areas, the more they're exposed to other ways of looking at the world. Religion in general is quite hard to support once you've seen other perspectives.

Religion has been on a slow decline in the US for decades now. It was probably on the rise back in the 50's or somewhere thereabouts, but not recently.

Fortunately this isn't true everywhere. There's pretty wide disparity in such sentiments, with many urban areas being much less concerned.

They aren't very numerous, but there are a number of irreligious people holding US office at present (e.g. Bernie Sanders, who is culturally Jewish but non-practicing).

These laws are pretty flagrantly unconstitutional, but the states may try to enforce them regardless. Fortunately, elected officials are generally pretty powerful people who could afford to fight the court case, so it'd be pretty ridiculous for the states to actually try to enforce these laws.

But it's still disgusting that these states still have these laws on the books.

Which is an excellent explanation for why student loans are the wrong way to finance education.