Hmmm, I saw that in a movie once. Wonder how much the air will cost?

FYI - it is more politically correct to refer to them as Tea Baggers.

So, I'm having trouble understanding this. The OS has a buffer somewhere in memory, and the the host controller has full R/W acess to the entire memory space so that it can try and write into that little buffer? Never mind the security implications, what about reliability? It seems nice and easy to take a system down through some really simple address arithmetic bugs. I really can't see the advantage they were trying for.

Not strictly true.

Sometimes a particular item can be degraded by the the storage of another item. For example, artificial neural networks store trained stimuli in the weights between nodes. This storage is global in the sense that storing a new pattern causes a shift in all weights and so alters every other stored item slightly. No idea how it works in the human brain, but it seems completely plausible that storing a memory changes all of the others slightly up until saturation at which point they all get erased.

The idea that (in the article) that human memory should be lossless is bizarre and has no basis in any neuroscience whatsoever.

There is a little under $6B of bitcoin in circulation, and it has a much wider range of uses. The thing to bare in mind about this story is:

Economist who studies Eve says it is very important and interesting to have economists studying Eve. Srly?

The article contains little or no value (cough, bit like the Eve economy then, cough) and the only vaguely interesting point that he makes is glossed over. Apparent ISK is not a fiat currency because CCP closely control the supply by tying it directly to... *stuff*. Remarkable.

Did in fact read it as a total rather than an average and assumed the China figure was an error. Makes more sense now.

How many births outside of China is coal responsible for to make those numbers?

Or, they are not net, then when did China cease to be part of the world? I hope there was some kind of memo about this, I haven't seen it.

You mean that people would glow with approval?

Play Lizard 100% of the time.

That's interesting, thinking of scenarios where there is no adversary (other than "dumb luck") would a usage pattern like the following degrade the life of the drive:

Random access to live data: e.g. using the drive as a cache or hosting a database on it that contains live data. (in both cases assuming the size of the cache/database was filling the drive).

Or, to put it another way: what is the probability that a (uniformly?) random-access pattern on a drive-filling file would trigger the worst-case behaviour?

How is that the worst case? Block erasure is only necessary to free up space, not to make a write.

Build Phase involves the programmer typing "make all" and going to read Slashdot or fetch a coffee.

How dare you perpetuate this insulting and offensive view of programming. All real developers know that it involves sword-fighting on wheelie chairs.

:) That is a lot more detailed than the response I was going to write. Nicely put.

Efficiency is the ratio of useful output to wasted effort. Are you really in a position to evaluate what kind of society that would produce and how their global output would compare to our current system?

It may sound expensive in comparison to our current education system, but expense is a different issue to efficiency. What kind of society would result from every individual being raised to their own personal maximum potential. I suspect that the productivity of such a society would be higher than our own, and surprised that you feel capable of calculating the trade-off that implies between allocation of resources into education and increased productivity across the board.

once you allow monads which are needed to make FP Turing complete.

Artful troll, no?