This is awesome! Not to detract from it, but why is there so much more love for Theora than for Dirac?

Might I ask what about Itanium makes it bloated, brute-force or an abomination? Its circuitry is not hand-designed like the Alpha's was, but its design is really beautiful, a testament to the later Berkeley RISC philosophy. It's everything SPARC should have been, really.

Were many Itanium users running Windows? My impression was that most Itanium users were running some sort of *nix. I don't think it's a huge deal for Itanium.

I also don't see Itanium going anywhere any time soon. As much as people like to talk about its demise, its numbers do grow every year. Or at least they were growing up until a couple years ago; I assume they're still growing. They're not growing very quickly, but they're still going.

It's a shame. It's a remarkably beautifully designed architecture, especially when it was first designed (1991-ish?). It's a shame no one can build a good chip for it or write a decent compiler for it :P

We're not supposed to make any decision on whether the soldiers acted appropriately or not. Or at least I hope we're not supposed to. We're really not qualified to do that.

What we're supposed to do is compare the video to the official statements from military brass 3 years ago and realize how badly they were lying through their teeth. Nothing the military said about the incident three years ago meshes even remotely to what actually happened. They did their best to cover-up. They ignored access to information requests, possibly illegally.

That's what this video is about. It isn't about the front-line soldiers who may or may not have made an honest mistake. It's about the entire structure of the military that exists for no purpose other than to lie and spread propaganda to its employers (the American people).

The experience doesn't need to actually exist. No experience needs to exist: for all you know, the universe did not exist one second ago. All you need is for a memory to be formed and it's absolutely indistinguishable from a real experience. If you look at what memories are formed when the brain regains consciousness, you'll have your answer.

"Uses" or "has mmap()ed into its address space"? There's a galaxy of difference between the two.

I know NASA used Reed-Solomon codes for the old Voyager probes. Maybe they're using something more efficient these days, but I'd have to imagine they'd be using error-correcting codes of some sort in whatever custom protocol they've devised. It would be ludicrous to use simple error-detection (necessitating a retransmit) at that latency.

As for the software itself, the Mars rovers just run VxWorks, right? Once you've got the code uploaded I'd think it'd be as simple* as restarting the process.

* Yes, I'm sitting in my pyjamas eating a bagel right now and describing what NASA does as "simple". Suck it!

That's IU. IO looks like an E with umlauts.

We speak English, not Latin. The Latin word "virus" has no plural. The English word "virus" does have a plural form, which is "viruses".

That's not entirely true, depending on what you mean by "independent". So long as you are a member of SOCAN and have music tracked by SoundScan, you're eligible for the levies, regardless of whether you're signed onto a major label. This flow chart (warning: PDF) describes the pay-out structure.

The media have been kind of lacking here, though. I have no idea how this pay-out scheme works in practice :(. Go go go investigative journalism!

No I think they got this going the right away around. The Internet will finally reach its full potential once everyone can filter out everything except .xxx domains.

No one has billions of dollars in chequing. These people have billions of dollars in investments. The mainstream media likes to talk about these investments in terms of dollars because it makes for cute headlines, but for the people involved I suspect it has more to do with control. Controlling billions of dollars worth of organizations means, for better or worse, you can help shape a sizeable chunk of the world.

Not true at all. The disparity between consuming resources to attack and consuming resources to defend is the crux of a Denial of Service attack, which is essentially what these drones are. If you know that you can force your enemy to spend $6000 for every $1 you spend, it's pretty easy to drag them into attrition.

I don't see why the summary is misleading or why a desktop machine would be the only measuring stick worth considering, especially when you think of how seldomly Linux is run on the desktop.

This is like saying, "My toaster runs linux and it can boot instantly!"

What would be wrong with that?

They poured a tonne of work into making this happen. Just because they control the hardware their hard work isn't worth anything? I think it's pretty cool what they've been able to do, someone no one else in the history of Linux has ever been able to do.

That's a really good point! You could have an acquaintance (you don't really like the guy, but hang out with him, know his living situation). Him posting to the world that he's going to be out of town for the next couple days could be tipping point.