Only the really cheap stuff is particle board. They also have plenty of real wood stuff. What they really do well is the non-particle, real wood, cheap shelves like the Ivar brand. These are everywhere and there is essentially no alternative.

Only of those Europeans that have rich families. The European universities are full of European students too (and very few North Americans), usually the not-so-rich kind.

Most prestigious, most awash with money, yes. What befuddles me is why these super-rich universities don't simply select the very best students all over the world (including the US), and don't offer them affordable tuition. They would be even better. As of now, most US universities simply perpetuate a rich class divide.

The US to the rescue! the dream of all countries mired in anti-democratic squalor. If you look around the list of recently US-"liberated" countries, even as far back as the 1950s, it could perhaps bring you back to reality.Getting the US attention is more a curse than a blessing.

I'm sorry, citation needed. It does have compression and encryption, and you *can* make a RAID 0 or 1 with it, so it has some (weak) redundancy support, but I have never heard about it having deduplication. ZFS is the only filesystem I know that has deduplication.

As long as the US remains attractive for immigrants, you are correct, this is a life choice. However realize that population in any given country needs to be replaced. Having (too) many kids in Uganda do not compensate for the (dramatic) lack of kids in Japan. It's not a simple matter of shifting kids around, which is never simple to begin with.

So in short you may choose not to have children, but somebody will have to pay your pension eventually. It can help if this is someone you now well.

It is because it is a more complex issue that first thought.

Quadtree are an approximation technique widely used in imaging and computational geometry. Did you look on Google Scholar/Web of Science or just in patents?

A light search returned these links:

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-47789-6_106 (sorry paywalled)

https://diglib.eg.org/EG/DL/Conf/EG2002/short/short90.pdf

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for. In discrete geometry (construction of a Voronoi tessellation on pixel data), it is often more efficient to used an Euclidean distance function, which is linear. Indeed constructing the quadtree plus using it for the computation takes more time.

Is the project poorly managed now? Do you have inside information?

No, we really do have working quantum computers in the lab right now. They are fully capable of running Shor's algorithm. It's just that they can factor at most a number like 15.

In many cities around the world, taxis are heavily regulated. Among these regulations are a fixed number of license plates, and the costs of these plates (or equivalent medallions, etc). This means that in many instances there aren't enough taxis to go around because these numbers were fixed a long time ago and may not be have been updated to meet demand. This benefits most the taxi operators and to some extent the drivers themselves because a high demand drives the price of the fare up. Also a business with low competition is always more comfortable to run. Customers hate it but are used to this situation.

Now Uber and others have sought to change the game, first by ignoring regulation and getting self-employed people to drive their own car to ferry people around. This is very good to some extent because taxi business in a lot of places is over-regulated and does not meet demand. Also the Uber et al have a nice online presence and at this stage at least do provide a useful service, so why not.

However, Uber fares are not cheap, this is not "sharing", this is a business. The self-employed individuals driving the cars may be putting themselves at risk: with their rides, the regulatory authorities, in case of accident, with other regulated taxi drivers, etc. We are still in a "honeymoon" period but this is sure to end. Uber has become much to big to be ignored, and so will soon have to fight for its own existence, in a lot of places all at once. I'm not sure their (huge) valuation will be enough.

Dear Troll,

You are wrong and you know it, but please continue.

Exactly. Thank you. Right now Snowden is innocent under the law.

Actually there would be a trial, where you, the murderer shooter, would be first assumed innocent of any crime. Then facts would be brought up to ascertain whether or not you were allowed to invoke self defense when you shot that murderer.

In Snowden's case, this is completely hopeless. Everybody has their media-hammered opinion that he is guilty. And since he ran away, everybody is convinced he is a coward too and does not even deserve a second glance. This opinion is everywhere in this discussion.

Nothing is illegal for the NSA then. The law is a human construction, it is deeply flawed, not a hallowed text. In this case there should be some checks and balances over what the NSA is allowed to do and how they go about doing it. There isn't, and Snowden was right to expose that fact. One can express some pride at the extent and depth at which the NSA has been able to spy on foreign people (including friends and allies), one can also be frightened.