Cursory search for "successful self published book" gives:

"Supposedly......the most successful self-published book of all time would be "The Celestine Prophecy" by James Redfield. According to Publishing Trends, The Celestine Prophecy was the #1 international bestseller of 1996 (#2 in 1995). It spent over 3 years on the New York Times bestsellers list. As a completely self-published bppk it solf more than 100,000 by word of mouth, and was then picked up by Warner Brothers Books."

ALso, wasn't Accelerando (Stross) self-published or did he just release it after the fact with a copyleft license?

I think there's an underlying assumption in your writing: that there is no inherent good in people so they will evade taxes or sell drugs if given the chance. As for myself, I don't think that's true of the majority...

I don't know if you're writing that tongue in cheek but on face value, it doesn't seem plausible due to the need for centralization. See "e-gold Ltd" - shut down by the feds.

Anyone else notice the similarity between Llano's and Arrandale's memory controller configuration, i.e., that both put the MC on the GPU and have the CPU talk to the GPU via some protocol for data? Okay, in Llano's case there's the option of going directly to memory through WCs but still.

And then, this FSA crap seems to be going in the direction of Sandy Bridge, i.e., a unified L3 cache... as much as I like AMD, they do seem like their following in Intel's footsteps. This new architecture reminds me a little of Larabee. Not that I know much about either, but IIRC in Demers' keynote he mentioned something like 24 CUs per chip... which seems way too low, I must have heard him wrong or there must be a factor of 40 or so I'm missing somewhere...

From what I understand (I attended the AMD summit in question), Llano cannot multitask natively, although through the driver you should be able to do it and much more efficiently than in the past. I believe set up time for kernels has been drastically reduced with Llano, since there's no PCIE layer. Their future APUs will be introducing hardware scheduling so this will be better then...

"Crashes of exactly the kind I described have happened multiple times throughout history. The US, with it's rapidly growing economy, was hit by them several times in the 19th century - despite multiple gold rushes and expanding gold mining activities."

And look where the US is today... hardly a spec in the economic big picture...

With current precision, a single bitcoin would have to be worth 1 million to have equivalent precision to the USD. That is, when 1c USD equals 0.00000001 BTC. As I understand it, the precision can be expanded practically to infinity, e.g., using big number libraries far beyond the precision of your average joe's ALU.

There have already been some great posts about how deflation actually reflects progress better than inflation. I tend to agree with that and further think it's just a different way of seeing the same value: a hot dog is worth what a hot dog is no matter what you use to pay for it, theoretically. So there's no change in anything except our perception of value. Given that, I'd argue the status quo should be to "hoard", actually it's much more like conserve. Consider that, at some point, we're talking about the stimulation of certain sectors of industry, e.g., whaling or clear-cutting, but also in general. I don't think an inflationary currency accurately reflects the cost of those activities...

Admittedly I may not understand this that well but my impression is that it's flexible enough that it can be patched in the future for things such as SHA-256 going out of style.

Thanks for clearing that up, it was indeed not claimed. I believe you said you would be surprised if it wasn't possible.

This is a follow-up to http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-oakland2010.pdf where they demonstrate various attacks of varying levels of danger from relatively innocuous (turn the horn on permanently) to kind of scary (disable brakes and power steering). In a talk, Stefan claimed to have the ability to remotely drive as well, i.e., steer/accelerate/brake.

1) Dirk wasn't CEO til 08, well after AMD64 and Barcelona. Bulldozer was scrapped *by* Dirk IIRC

2) AMD had nothing to compete with the atom in that market. Sure, they were first, but with a Geode IIRC slower than an Atom which is already pathetically slow.

3) This is arguable, it falls under the strategy where AMD needed to focus on core business. Whether or not you buy that or you believe they should've switched core business or whatever is where its arguable. I think from AMD's fiscal performance, Dirk probably did the right thing.

http://cow.mooh.org/2009/12/phone-o-scope-attaching-slr-lenses-to.html

Around the year 2000, I'd been walking home from school one day and some guy had a 660AV on his doorstep so I rang his bell and he gave it to me. He said it was broken but all it needed was a battery. I played around with it, oooh ahhh retro mac with video, I said. Ultimately, it left my hands along with a IIci, a IIfx, a 610, and a couple 6100s for a couple cases of beer.