Lots of 'not's there.. sometimes it's a good thing to leave those things open - to open up the board, and get an opportunity for yourself from your opponent's next play. I've seen boards shut down to a stalemate by adhering to those 'not' rules.

Way more than 3 - 'architecture' surely is a composite of many separable things including: supported instructions, no.&size of registers, no and types of functional units, width and speed, and latency of internal interconnects, pipelining and speculation capacity, HT/SMT functionality (or not), no of caches, cache styles, sizes, speeds, etc., no and sophistication of memory controllers, memory type, , the number, speed and widths of other off-chip interconnects (parallel multi-resident busses or serial links), etc., etc.

It's a bit like the toothpaste market.. throw enough brands and variants out there to ensure that you have something to appeal to everyone so that someone picks one of your products instead of the other guy's. There aren't really that many companies making toothpaste, but they all have several brands and a bunch of options.

Seriously, with the combination of North Sea oil and high fuel taxes, making the motorists stop and go at every set of lights by making sure they were deliberately out of sync seemed like an easy and inoffensive way to bring in tax revenue without hurting anyone.

Only recently have they permitted traffic regulators to synchronize the lights for the benefit of motorists, society, the environment, and utlimately the tax coffers too.

Systems thinking.. meh, they haven't even heard of it.

Considerably better than the US too if wikipedia's suicide rates for 2008 are to be credited.

It so won't be more powerful than Fermi. But it might be available in industrial quantities, instead of cottage-industry amounts.

If we presume that this position were true, how would you explain the fact that commercial pharma companies have invented, and continue to invent new antibiotics, antifungals and particularly new vaccines which are intended to actively *prevent* illness and death, including some common causes of cancer like HPV?

Frankly there's a shitload of money in cures. And keeping patients alive by prevention, cure or treatment means you can sell them other stuff later - so they're all good.

But more than that - it's the right thing to do and it's often personal.. mostly the individuals doing the research really want to help people. You don't become a medical/pharma scientist for the flashy lifestyle (hah) or the opportunities to be evil. You may doubt it but the regulators (science, medical, fianncial, etc.) are actually all pretty much down on evil. And let's face it there are lots of opportunities to be evil without getting an extensive, expensive, education, and working in a field that's subject to public opporbrium at every turn even while you daily work for the public's health and welfare. Quite a lot, probably most of the researchers go into the field because it's a rare chance to make a positive difference to large chunks of humanity.

Remember the people who work in pharma are just that - people. They are also patients themselves or relatives/friends of patients, they're users of their own products, as well as being employees, shareholders, perhaps managers and members of broader society.

They also, somehow, have to find ways to do all that good while running a financial machine called a company - so they have to pick and choose where they put their effort to both do good and self-sustain that operation.

That's why government funding and foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are so important - where some disease area couldn't become a sustainable financial prospect for a pharma company, those funders can help to get the science done by drawing on money generated elsewhere.

In a word: 'Eve' (um, 'Online' :)

That's my reading, if these patents are granted.

It also pwns LDAP, and ORACLE, and well, pretty much everything that will run on multicore CPUs and GPGPUs.

Lovely, time to take up an honest trade.