You mean "squeal like a H. Sapien"

Until somebody finds gold asteroids, it's not profitable. Maybe Uranus has gold.

Put toddlers around the office to drown out the CPU sound.

My mind inevitably goes to this when someone says "Big O". Makes being a computer scientist somewhat difficult.

Seems like GPG could defeat this pretty easily by putting in some random HLTs.

If they want to serve the public, they can start by opposing our government. Being hired muscle for the aristocracy doesn't help anyone but the aristocracy. All the property crime in the country doesn't add up to even a percent of the fraud committed by banks. All the violent crime in the country doesn't add up to the lives that could be saved by throwing a wrench in the military industrial complex, or the agriculture industry, or the insurance industry.

No "good person" can support this government in any respect. The "actual bad guys" are the ones in Congress and corporate board rooms throughout the country. Find me a cop who is willing to arrest James Clapper, and I'll show you a good cop. The rest of them are "good Germans" at best.

Not to mention floating-point computation, numerical analysis, anytime algorithms, and classic randomized algorithms like Monte Carlo algorithms. Approximate computing has been around for ages. The typical scenario is to save computation, nowadays expressed in terms of asymptotic complexity ("Big O"). Sometimes (as is the case with floating point), this tradeoff is necessary to make the problem tractable (e.g., numerical integration is much cheaper than symbolic integration).

The only new idea here is using approximate computing specifically in trading high precision for lower power. The research has less to do with new algorithms and more to do with new applications of classic algorithms.

Plea bargaining in the sense you see on TV - "plead guity to the jaywalking or we seek the death penalty" - is, to my mind, coercion. I don't know to what extent that exists in reality, however.

In reality, fewer than 10% of criminal cases go to trial. Fewer than 2% of federal criminal cases go to trial. Mandatory minimum sentences run in the multiple decades, making a bid for a trial an extremely risky proposition. This is extortion, plain and simple.

It's in nobody's interest to spend public money trying someone who is willing to plead guilty

Only if you assume that he is actually guilty, and not an innocent person assuming that he's going to be railroaded at trial, and taking the only chance he sees to minimize the damage.

that has to be balanced against the very large cost and time savings.

If it's not worth paying for a trial, it's not worth prosecuting at all. If you can't afford to offer your citizens trials, the solution isn't to shovel people into prisons until you have the largest prison population in the world(which we do, and it's not saving us any money either). The solution is to reexamine your laws, figure out the ones that are worth having, and which ones you can't afford.

A real justice system doesn't cost us money, it saves us money. e.g. if we stopped prosecuting murders, chaos would ensue, and we would stop having a functioning economy. That would cost us a lot more than it would to prosecute murders. If we stopped prosecuting drunken driving, carnage on the highways would discourage people from using it, damaging our economy. Again that would cost us more than DUI enforcement. And that's just considering economic damage, and not the human costs.

So all this talk about cost saving is quite frankly bullshit. If the laws you are enforcing aren't paying for themselves, directly or indirectly, it's a bad law. Trying to save money on top of the inherent payoff of justice by denying us our rights is incredibly wrongheaded.

As I explained before, the aim of these policies is not to try to secure convictions that otherwise would not be obtained

Bullshit. The aim of these policies is to pad prosecutor conviction rates so they can appear "tough on crime". No prosecutor ever got reappointed, or reelected, because he released innocent people.

The aim is to avoid the expense of a lengthy trial.

By depriving citizens of their rights. Sorry, civilization is expensive. It's worth the cost!

it's a systemic policy, and the system wants to avoid trials.

This much I agree with you on. The system wants to deprive us of our right to a trial.

that makes sense in terms of 'rewarding' people for saving as much time and expense on the part of the justice system as possible

No, this is no reward. This is punishment for exercising your right to a trial. It doesn't save time and expense at all. What it really does is fills our prisons to capacity, including a large number of innocent people who were extorted out of their right to a trial. Plea bargaining is barbaric.

it's not abuse. It's following the law.

As if they were mutually exclusive?

"Suddenly, everybody's talking about robots and robotics. ..."

Obviously I'm going to the wrong parties, no one around me is talking about robots.

Well, one lady did say to me at a party, "I'd rather date a robot".

I'm a hobby musician...I can't tell the difference most of the time

But enough critics, audiophiles, and fans can such that it can affect the reputation of a work or publisher.

The organic, primitive sound of a beat-up but well-chosen instrument for vintage chamber music is sometimes pure magic. It's very difficult to emulate something half falling apart in the hands of somebody who knows how to tame a wild mustang to it keep just on the inside of rogue.

An article by a digital musician I read recently claimed that although digital synthesis can approach the quality of a real orchestra, it's extremely time-consuming to shape every note to fit the mood and context of that note.

If you factor in the time and effort to "carve" the note to sufficient quality, it's not economical compared to a smaller orchestra, because experienced musicians do the same in real time, with 1 practice and 2 takes on average. The performing group gets it done in about an hour, while diddling a synth rendering can take weeks. Even though it's one dude or so, it's a LOT of one dude.

Plus, you risk "ear burn-out" from so many replays such that you cannot recognize quality anymore. One has to switch between projects and styles to keep their ears fresh, delaying the finished product.

Maybe the editing software eventually will get better and the computer can assist with more natural "guesses" to get closer to expectations to reduce customization, but at this stage if you want quality performances, synthesis is not fully competitive.

No, Democratic politicians are a little more subtle than that: they allow Republicans to lower corporate taxes in exchange for spying silence, and then BLAME the Republicans.