Ants are actually incredibly clean. Your bench will be slightly cleaner after an ant has walked across it. Use a better analogy, and love your ants!

Are you suggesting that Bitcoin is as safe as the USD? One of those still works when the lights go out...

I agree. Downloaders, Hulu watchers, or network website viewers will not see the TV ads because that's not how the system currently works. To include those folks in the Nielsen ratings would make the ratings less relevant to the people who actually pay for the shows. Viewers don't pay for the shows, advertisers do (excepting premium, which, why can't I buy an Internet subscription from HBO?).

It's unfortunate that the number we talk about as a show's popularity is the Nielsen number, which increasingly does not represent actual popularity. Because these networks are a business, though, as these other audiences make up more of their income due to Hulu ads/whatever, the networks will have to start taking them into account. Then the definition of show popularity will no longer solely be the Nielson rating based on TV viewership. It'll probably just be proportional to delivery medium income...

They aren't, at least, not directly. They are however generally connected at various points to the "business" network which is connected to the Internet (people gotta email). The literal air gap is largely fiction. The business network is hacked, then some vulnerability exploited in the bridge points or routers (it's a network of networks!). Why connect the SCADA to the business network at all? To get the data out to do reports, send email alarms etc. in theory this data exporting should be secure. Problem is that who is hacking your SCADA system? It's not the usual suspects; there is no money in it and the barrier of entry is too high for the script kiddies. It's other countries wanting to perform espionage. How the hell do you protect against that? Look at stuxnet, I mean really look at how that took down the centrifuges. Governments have resources that the average hacking group simply doesn't (or SCADA group). They also have no reason to reveal a compromised system. There could be sleeper, targeted, custom malware sitting on every SCADA server in the US, just waiting for the a time where it will be useful to activate. It's a brave new world!

Linux is small. And it's just source code. Storing binaries happens a lot for a lot of reasons. You might have binaries for a third party library, you might have various art assets, compiled CHM files for help, installers for dependencies, etc etc. Git was designed for a particular problem space, in which binaries were not considered a big issue. Other groups have different requirements.

[Citation needed] It's not that I think this can't be true, I'd just like to know specific cases where it was true. Certainly I can think of unethical appropriations of the type you mention, but I wouldn't put deals with Boeing in the category of "worst acts from our government".

Here's the relevant part (sorry, editing on a phone isn't that easy...):

Now comes the fun part: modern hardware acceleration. I assume everybody already knows what OpenGL is. It’s not a library, there will never be one set of sources to alibGL.so. Each vendor is supposed to provide its ownlibGL.so. NVIDIA provides its own implementation of OpenGL and ships its ownlibGL.so, based on its implementations for Windows and OS X.

If you are running open-source drivers, yourlibGL.so implementation probably comes from Mesa. Mesa is many things, but one of the major things it provides that it is most famous for is its OpenGL implementation. It is an open-source implementation of the OpenGL API. Mesa itself has multiple backends for which it provides support. It has three CPU-based implementations: swrast (outdated and old, do not use it), softpipe (slow), llvmpipe (potentially fast). Mesa also has hardware-specific drivers. Intel supports Mesa and has built a number of drivers for their chipsets which are shipped inside Mesa. The radeon and nouveau drivers are also supported in Mesa, but are built on a different architecture: gallium.

I've wondered this before too. How does it all fit together. I found this very helpful: http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/#rendering-stack

I saw this headline and was worried about the Cheeto and Mountain Dew famines that would occur if a community of displaced Battlestar Galactica Gamers was unleashed upon this land.

Well, if you were talking to a geosat satellite, those are way out there in orbit. Fast electrically steerable antennas may allow comms with low earth orbit satellites, which would lower latency.

There are a lot of ways to look at hard, somewhat generic problems, like Sudoku. Have you seen the SAT problem? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem One way to consider it is like you describe - a set of simultaneous equations. Another way to consider it is to use the equations and some rules to draw a graph, then perform graph operations. NP problems are an active area of academic interest. It's generally not possible to know how hard these problems are before solving them, so if this technique can be more general than just Sudoku, that could be important.

Yes. This. In the same way, dumb folks are a complete turnoff, I don't care how good you look.

I've put this statement to the test.

Clearly, then, the solution is to install listening devices in everyone's homes.

That was my initial thought too. But the complaining worked, so more power to the complainers.

My interpretation was, "temperature variations caused by cosmic rays are influenced more by supernovae than by the Sun." I think it's similar to yours, but that the Sun and supernovae are causing cosmic rays to affect Earth's temperature. It probably infers what you're saying too.