You have to understand that also science and research is heavily influenced by politics. Research is simply spent only on things people want to find out about. If a politician wants to find research that supports the political views his party represents he will only fund such research and not research that refutes his views. Also scientists want and need money for their research. In fact, they need the money to keep their jobs and do what they like to do; research. This seriously tends to make research heavily biased and just because a person wears a lab coat and has a PhD degree it doesn't mean you can trust him and what he says. There is a famous quote from the Ghostbusters movie:

"Ah, if there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say. "

The same goes with research and so called experts. There is another example of how research can get biased by politics: In Scandinavian regions a feministic political agenda is pushing through and influencing people in various ways. There is also a strong influence of anti-racism (some people refer to this ideology as anti-white) and multiculturalism in the politics of western Europe.

Under these political views the sexes are both perfectly equal and actually born the same. The book "Men Areähg from Mars, Women Are from Venus" by John Gray is almost as taboo as "Mein Kampf" in a Jewish community and e.g. research that would indicate that some ethnic groups would have a higher (or lower) IQ level than other is highly unethical and banned in these countries. Also scientifically trying to find evidence that would support that there would be some physiological differences between homosexuals (and other HBT people) and normal heterosexual people is a definite no-no.

I recommend watching the following Norwegian documentary Hjernevask (Brainwash):

Brainwash (1/7) - The Gender Equality Paradox

It is the first of a 7 part documentary that explores the concepts of what I mentioned above. The subjects themselves are not as interesting as how the research institutions in Norway are totally blinded by the political ideologies they are trying to uphold. It shows how you can conduct research into something over years and years and yet be totally blind to the truth. Norway is far from the only country with these problems and I seriously believe that a lot of this "environmental research" suffers from these issues as well.

Yep, I have eaten both breads, this sounds like a stupid question. The bread needs to be fresh when frozen and the defrosted bread needs to be consumed immediately after defrosted. Also if you let the frozen bread sit to long in the microwave it goes dry and stiff so you need to experiment for a while until you find the proper time. Some oil or butter may help preventing it from going dry/stiff in the microwave. I'm not really sure why I'm explaining all this as this is naught but common sense.

So even an Intel SSD drive with the SandForce controller shoud be avoided?

Lately, the Samsung drives have become very popular but there is one caveat to them as well; they don't have a unique WWN like normal hard drives have. This drawback leads to problems using several SSDs on the same controller; the system cannot tell them apart. It's like a router or a switch cannot tell two computers apart because their NICs use the same MACs. Unlike NICs you cannot change the WWN of a Samsung drive.

I think the reason why Asperger's Syndrome is classified as a disease or a disorder is because that a lot people with this disorder have problems with social interactions just like a person with dyslexia or even myopia have a problem with reading. Some people even have problems with taking care of themselves so the spectrum may vary. So whenever there is a problem there is a desire to find a solution to this problem.

Ultimately I don't think this classification is intended to judge or put any sort of moral value on this medical condition but to understand what's going on and to find ways to help these people better cope with their surroundings and the surroundings to better cope with them. After all there are quite a few successful people out there diagnosed with this condition such as Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Daryl Hannah, Alfred Hitchcock, ... the list is long.

Or store it in the freezer. Just defrost the slices you want to consume in the microwave and they will be just as fresh as newly baked bread.

My pet peeve with all of those window managers is that they don't scale well on high resolution displays, especially xfce. I know Linus Torvalds have written a critical post about this awhile ago in connection with Apple's retina displays on their macbooks. But even on a low-resolution 1080p display, fonts and the user interface don't scale well.

Nowhere did I state that it should be free. If you remove the "F" from the FOSS you are mentioning then you are talking my language. While I'm a proponent of FOSS I don't think all open source software necessarily should be free. If people are concerned about this openness then perhaps some kind of encryption or other ways to obfuscate the source code that would make it understandable only to the compiler would be in place. However, in the end I don't think people would want to obfuscate the code before distribution. After all, even binaries can be reverse engineered and cracked so going open source shouldn't be that big of a deal.

The problem many CISC CPUs (such as x86 based CPUS) are facing today is that they are encumbered by legacy instruction sets so as to maintain backwards compatibility. I understand that there is an abstraction layer in many x86 CPUs that emulates some of these legacy instructions at the hardware level. The downside with this is that the wafer space required for this circuitry logic could be used for something else that would improve performance instead of maintaining this backwards compatibility.

As an abstraction layer between hardware and software; CISC cannot be compared to the implementations I mentioned in prior post. Assume that Intel introduces a new instruction set that would make any concurrent CPU without it pale in comparison. Let us call this instruction set SSE6. Any precompiled software will not take advantage of this new instruction set. The software has to be recompiled. In the examples I mentioned, the hardware support is determined at the driver level while the applications take advantage of whatever is available. As we all know, hardware and their drivers/compiler stick together like a horse and carriage.

Maybe the ideal CPU is EPIC based, maybe it is a CISC that is not encumbered by legacy instructions or even a RISC. We will not know until we spend time and research to find out. Most likely, what is optimal will depend on circumstances or the quantum mechanical properties of the materials used which is likely to change as newer and more efficient materials are discovered. Maybe we will see all these CPUs in one and the same system eventually as they are all good at specific tasks. So it would mean a great deal if existing software could immediately take advantage of the new hardware features and optimizations as they reach the market.

Perhaps breaking of compatibility between CPU generations is not a weakness of the VLIW/EPIC architecture per se but rather a weakness in how people look at software and software distribution. First of all, why should software be distributed as pre-compiled binaries? A much better way would be to distribute the sources while maintaining a compiler/installation environment that automatically handles the software. This environment would then automatically optimize the software for the specific computer system and its particular hardware configuration during the installation process and migration of this software to newer generation systems would be a non-issue.

Another approach would be to add an abstraction layer between the hardware and software very much like what is done with virtualization, Java, ZFS, LVM, DirectX, Crossbow et al. That would make the software more independent of the underlying hardware...

Who is to judge whether developing and marketing the Itanium is worthwhile other than Intel themselves? Perhaps the development and marketing of these chips will give them valuable information that is useful for the development of future generation processors.

The EPIC architecture (which is looked upon as a continuation of the development of the WLIV architecture) is significantly different from other more wide-spread architectures and perhaps the performance issues are there because people have not yet figured out how to fully utilize such an architecture in an efficient manner. So maybe one day when the compiler tools get more mature we might see EPIC CPUs with a competitive price/performance in the market. But that's my two cents.

Btw, damn to the depths whatever muttonhead thought up 'all butt'!

Wind power is not as clean and safe as you may seem to imply. Windmills have given rise to mass death of endangered bird species when they get hit by the turbine blades while in the air. Piles of dead birds, especially birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles are commonly found dead near those windmills.

Hydro power is a very strong intrusion on the course of nature and the aquatic ecosystem therein. Many species of fish, especially trouts, crayfish are now extinct from waters upon where a hydro power plant has been built, but nobody talks about it.

But will/does HAMMER2 have end-to-end checksumming like ZFS has? Will it have support for software raid similar to ZFS raidz/raidz2/raidz3 (like hardware RAID5/6/7 but safer)? Will it have support for ditto blocks, or par2-like single disk/vdev redundancy on both data and meta-data?

If it doesn't have these above features it will be a deal-breaker at least for me.

Other things that I miss in some of these file systems are; defrag (even ZFS has potential fragmentation issues), the possibility to convert a raidz2 pool to raidz3 after adding an extra disk to cover for that extra redundancy, a laid out "contingency plan" if a corruption would occur.

I also still use my old RAZR v3 and I absolutely hate it. The menus are sluggish as hell, I can only store about 60 or so text messages and the email client is a pain in the rear side.

The things that are good about it is the reception which is abso-f:ing-lutely AMAZING compared to other phones and yet the SAR level is among the lowest that can be found on a phone. Where other peoples' phones fail, it still shows 100% reception. I don't think there is any phone out there dumb as smart that can beat this phone in this regard.

The phone is seeing its 6th year with me in its possession and I'm on my second replacement battery which I have paid about $10 for and it is still going strong. I'm waiting for a good Smart phone but I have not yet seen one so I'll stick with this one as long as I can make phone calls and it wakes me up in the morning. If I'm gonna let a phone get into my pants it better be a damn good one ;)

A good blackboard, or a chalkboard as you call it when frequently cleaned properly, (which the ones at my primary university are) and operated by an experienced lecturer beats any whiteboard when it comes to readability.

A particular nuisance with whiteboards is when the pens are about to run out of ink and dry out; the text is barely readable and the glossy surface doesn't exactly make things better. A chalk on the other hand always deliver 100% color, or nothing which makes it more reliable as a writing tool. The exception is when the board is wet, but with proper technique you can overcome that which most lecturers have.

My primary university has chalkboards in 99.999% of all the lecture halls. There have been whiteboards in some halls in the past but eventually they got replaced by chalkboards. Only in some departments, the smaller lecture rooms have a whiteboard. I guess that it is more convenient for inexperienced users in smaller rooms.

In the other university that teaches social sciences (such as economics, business administration and law) it is the other way around but these boards are barely used in lectures and I have so far only met one lecturer who could use a whiteboard properly, all other other peoples' attempts of using it have been a total disaster.

Chalkboards come in different colors, we have dark green, dark blue, dark brown, dark red and black / dark gray at our university and I cannot say that one color is better or more readable than another. My guess is that there are other factors than the color that determines the quality of the chalkboard. I personally like the blue and red ones best as I somehow find the color somewhat soothing. Our chalkboards are made of some kind of frosted glass, I think and they are probably of the best quality there is available.

I know that some people suffer from the sound the chalk makes as it moves over the board. I'm not one of these people though and I guess that most people get used to it after a while. That's the only downside to the chalkboard I can tell. I take it that you are in high school. It's not common with kids horsing around at universities so I cannot really relate to what you're saying about that.

Maybe this is about to change now that we have smartphones and mobile broadband/4G.