Why would you not expect all of the participants to (statistically speaking) modify their behaviour in the same way? If the people who get the real anti-HIV drug modify, and the people who get the placebo modify then the chances are good that the modifications will be evenly spread with a large enough sample pool. If, given the modified behaviour, the HIV drug performs with statistically meaningful results then you have a positive result from the study.

er... each of those cores has 16 things that aren't cores so they have lots of cores?

Each of the Cores on a i7 has an AVX pipe (or two, depending on how you look at it) with 8 ALUs in it. Does that mean a quad i7 has 32 cores?

Texture units clearly aren't cores, they're largely passive data pipelines. If you really look at a GPU more closely you can of course get far more complicated, The AMD architecture at the high end has two control flow cores with 24 SIMD coprocessors that execute blocks of non-control flow non-memory work. It is true that even those are hard to qualify as cores given their limited capabilities.

Without question a single SIMD lane is not a core, though.

One thing I've been really keen to know is what the utilisation is like on those supercomputers. We know they can do LINPACK really fast and more efficiently than the CPUs do, that's what you get for having a high ALU density, a few threads per core and wide SIMD structures. The question is: out of the algorithms that people intended to run on those supercomputers, then what level of efficiency are they hitting.

Are they still a net gain over a standard opteron-based machine? They may be, but I don't know the answer. What I heard about Roadrunner with its Cell chips was not so good.

No they don't, let's stop such silliness.

The GTX580 has 16 cores. The GTX280 has 32. The AMD 6970 has 24. The AMD Magny-Cours CPUs can have up to 16 (ish, if you don't mind that it's an MCM).

292 indeed. NVIDIA does an even better job of marketing than they do of building chips.

And python compiles to the same x86 assembly as C++, so clearly turning C++ into python won't change any of the code that exists. A scala compiler doesn't have to compile the Java code that the entire industry expects to still compile perfectly 10 years after they first wrote it.

And who didn't have to deal with backward compatibility. Designing a language from scratch is a completely different problem from evolving one that's heavily used.

Although that's such a bad dialog you have to copy it into a text editor and copy it back to be able to edit it properly.

It's never occurred to me to look where I would set that in a config file (short of checking if the old DOS batch files still work).

The City of London police covers 1.1 square miles with 813 police officers. That's one policeman for every 10 residents, interestingly, though obviously number of residents in the city is a fairly meaningless number.

The NYPD covers 468.9 with 35,284 police officers, or 75 per square mile.

If it's done through withholding then it's not really taken at all, you just don't get it to begin with. Your income is your post tax income. Also if you don't think of it as your money in the first place then it's more of a short term loan that you have to repay. It's all about the way you look at it and can be spun in all sorts of ways.

Organised crime isn't providing you the framework in which to earn the money. If they are providing something worth paying for, then it's no long really extortion. If you can't survive without paying then you could possibly try to avoid it, but it would be counterproductive over all. The more important difference, though, is that governments are (largely) democratic.

It is quite true that not everyone believes that compulsory taxation is necessary. Unfortunately evidence from around the world doesn't offer much hope that they're right.

But it's not slavery. If you weren't paying the taxes you simply wouldn't have the income to not pay from. The entire system would collapse. You'd have no roads to go to work on, no police to stop what you do have being stolen, no laws to prevent the company from exploiting you, no economic stabilisation to stop inflation running out of control and making your income worthless. You simply can't look at the gross income and claim that tax is theft from it, that's ridiculously naive.

Why not just be honest and stop pretending that the money that was "taken" in tax was ever yours to begin with? Without the tax the system wouldn't work and you wouldn't have been able to earn the money. Such is the way of the world and it might as well be accepted.

I'd happily pay slightly higher prices to have the tax included in the quoted price, too. If they also (as in the UK) display the charged tax on the receipt so much the better. The same can be true of service, if they like. Quote all service charges in the prices of the food and stop using "tips" as an artificial way to have higher food prices. If necessary, say on the receipt that a proportion of the food charge was specifically for carrying it to you as opposed to cooking it, which for whatever reason is already included.

The 0.99 gimmick should absolutely die, though, irrespective of whether tax is going to be added on or not.

Unfortunately from the physics simulations I've been working with I'm pretty sure that what they've done there is simply removed physics activity from the non-accelerated version rather than adding it to the accelerated one. A sneaky way of making GPU-accelerated PhysX look better. I'd be shocked if those book effects wouldn't be just as easy at the same framerate on the CPU unless there are truly ridiculous numbers of books.

Why do you need a free *implementation*? The whole point is that OpenCL is a free standard, which is at the heart of AMD's stream SDK (with AMD GPU and CPU backends) and also included in nvidia's SDK. Given that OpenCL has an ICD interface so that you can use any of the backends from any OpenCL-supporting software, I'm not sure what isn't present that you're after other, arguably, than current market penetration.