>Also, some problems can't be done in parallel, but we won't know how many can until we start trying....and then try for a few decades.

Right, but there's also a grey area between completely serializable and embarassingly parallel, in which methods like this will allow scaling algorithms up from "a few" computation nodes to "many", with the optimal numbers depending on the specific algorithms.

The biggest problems are still the same ones that existed when I got my Master's over a decade ago. Language support for parallelism isn't very good (I personally used MPI, which was awkwardly bolted on top of C++), it requires a certain amount of specialized knowledge to write parallel code that doesn't break or deadlock your machine (and writing optimized code is a bit more advanced than that), and library calls aren't all threadsafe. On the plus side, a lot of frameworks and libraries are now multithreaded by default, which nicely isolates the problems of parallel computing away from people who haven't been trained in it, and gives the benefits of parallel computing with only the downside of having to use a framework. =)

There are a few types I see doing this.

You'll always have those insane people who think Vinyl has better quality than CDs or FLAC... but I imagine they are a pretty small group.

You've got people who're after the experience -- maybe a more personal feel to having a big physical system that needs more interaction. Again I imagine this is larger than the first group, but still relatively small.

And finally you've got hipsters, who'll do anything just because nobody else is doing it. Very suspicious that vinyl's popularity starts to grow with a strong correlation to this group's size.

Ungar's idea (http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/3/6/ask-for-forgiveness-programming-or-how-well-program-1000-cor.html) is a good one, but it's also not new. My Master's is in CS/high performance computing, and I wrote about it back around the turn of the millenium. It's often much better to have asymptotically or probabilistically correct code rather than perfectly correct code when perfectly correct code requires barriers or other synchronizing mechanisms, which are the bane of all things parallel.

In a lot of solvers that iterate over a massive array, only small changes are made at one time. So what if you execute out of turn and update your temperature field before a -.001C change comes in from a neighboring node? You're going to be close anyway? The next few iterations will smooth out those errors, and you'll be able to get far more work done in a far more scalable fashion than if you maintain rigor where it is not exactly needed.

So many people are panning this movie. Have you guys posting negative comments actually seen it, or are you just reacting to the press?

I mean, I get it -- there's bound to be some sort of automatic counter-culture response to defend against the massive amount of press talking about how controversial and important it is.

Yes, it's a little controversial to target an actual country and an actual leader so directly. But you know what, their message while embellished for comedic effect isn't really far off base. I think the world could use some more of this controversy, and there's nothing saying this type of thing needs to be in dry journalistic form.

As far as the movie itself goes --- it's a Seth Rogan bromance dick joke movie. It really doesn't bring anything new to the table. It's not his best movie, but it's by no means bad. It's fun and entertained me the whole way through.

>The 5 largest movie theater chains refused to show the movie out of fear, not Sony. Why can't anyone understand this?

Here's a response from an owner of a small cinema, named George RR Martin:
grrm.livejournal.com/397388.html

It's not like he's throwing bills into a fire. That money goes back into the economy which is good for everybody, and its recipients are still free to spend it on whatever good deeds they want.

I live in San Diego, some of the time, and similar results were posted here, too. The increase in rear-end collisions from people slamming on the brakes negates any benefit from reduced T-bones.

San Diego also reduced yellow light times, sometimes to below the legal limit, in order to boost revenue.

A judge looked at the program in 2001, said, "That's bullshit", and banned it for a year, and then the government finally ended it on its own in 2013.

I haven't seen any evidence that the mechanics of the attack itself is at all noteworthy, yet we keep hearing about how this attack was unstoppable, "nasty", etc. -- not just from Sony's PR guys, but from the FBI. As if it could have targeted literally any company and caused just as unmitigated damage.

To me, a "nasty" worm is Stuxnet: it spread in a very standard innocuous way and seemed like any other worm, but ended up being highly targeted.

This Sony hack just seems like your average trojan worm leaking an admin password back to someone. The only noteworthy part of this hack is that Sony had such horrifyingly moronic security practices that one attack was able to compromise such a large and varying corpus of valuable data.

>Why? Excluding religion, there is no reason to believe that vaccines cause any harm: literally every study attempting to find otherwise has either failed or been proven fraudulent.

Uh, no. You're grossly misrepresenting the case.

"Any harm" - really? All vaccines (heck, all medicine in general) carry a risk of adverse effects. There are common and minor adverse effects, and rare and serious adverse effects, including febrile seizures, allergy to the eggs used in the formulation, and so forth. What the scientific consensus is is that *vaccines are still worth it despite the risks*. That's why we don't give vaccines any more for viruses no longer in the wild - the benefit is no longer worth the risk.

From the CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00046738.htm), adverse effects include:
1) HepB Pain at the injection site (3%-29%)
2) HepB Fever over 100*F (1%-6%)
3) HepB Anaphylaxis (1 in 600,000)
4) MMR Fever over 103*F (5%-15%)
5) MMR Rashes (5%)
6) MMR Joint Pain (3%)
7) MMR Febrile seizures, which caused the vaccine to be reformulate to reduce risk
8) MMR Aseptic meningitis, which led to the vaccine to switch strains in some countries

And so forth. All of these are based on studies, contrary to what you claimed that have found harm in vaccines.

I think you read a headline once that said, "No link between autism and vaccines" and falsely extrapolated that to mean "no reason to believe vaccines cause any harm".