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Comment From Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" (Score 5, Insightful) 657

And you men and half of the Internet as well are just as bad. We sit here, considering Wikipedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the America they've lost nuclear power. In Japan, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power.

--Salvor Hardin, paraphrased

Comment Re:Still think Wikileaks knows what they're doing? (Score 5, Informative) 632

The interrogation file was dated "10 September 2008." Is someone seriously claiming that the military was willing to wait more than two years to conduct the attack but then had to rush things by a couple of weeks because of this leak?

WikiLeaks released the report last week, prompting speculation that the US, afraid that its planned raid might be pre-empted, brought forward its attack.

Apparently so. We have an article using the passive voice to indicate that someone somewhere is speculating that the military did in fact cut a two-and-a-half year delay down to just 2.5 years minus a week or two because they were worried about the consequences of this leak.

Comment Moving, not fixing, the problem (Score 4, Interesting) 222

The "robustification" of software, as he calls it, involves re-writing it so an error simply causes the execution of instructions to take longer.

Ooh, this is tricky. So we can reduce CPU power consumption by a certain amount if we rewrite software in such a way that it can slowly roll over errors when they take place. There are some crude numbers in the document: a 1% error rate, whatever that means, causes a 23% drop in power consumption. What if the `robustification' of software means that it has an extra "check" instruction for every three "real" instructions? Now you're back to where you started, but you had to rewrite your software to get here. I know, it's unfair to compare his proven reduction in power consumption with my imaginary ratio of "check" instructions to "real" instructions, but my point still stands. This system may very well move the burden of error correction from the hardware to the software in such a way that there is no net gain.

Comment Re:My psychic prediction (Score 3, Informative) 306

near complete annihilation of Drake's equation

Whoa, there! Drake's equation has quite a few terms in it and only two of those terms are subject to reevaluation: the average number of planets per star that are suitable for life, and the fraction of planets which are suitable for life that actually have life. The other numbers, speculative as they are, should remain unchanged by the discovery of microbial life on Mars.

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I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.

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