I like matplotlib and scipy but I have lots of problems with memory not being freed when making and closing a lot of plots. It might be something I'm doing though, so I'm curious if the book discusses this.

I am not concerned at all about my personal health, I realize there is little chance that this flu will raise my chances of dying above the background noise of car accidents, random violence and bee stings. I am a little concerned about the potential effect on an already very fragile economy.

Normally I am skeptical of claims about radio waves causing people harm, but 100MW/9 means Vatican Radio is using over 10 MEGAWATTS. I nearly soiled myself. Cancer is no surprise. Hell, I'm surprised there aren't birds dropping from the sky pre-cooked (yes I'm aware that due to the wavelength absorption in tissue is low). Instead of mutating children and spewing nonsense, they could be providing power for a few thousand poor villages.

It wouldn't. But slave labor and unemployment are not the only options.

You might see a resurgence of a local service industry repairing these more expensive components. So the chinese could get paid more to build higher quality parts, and we wouldn't need to buy a new keyboard every year, and there would be some moderately skilled service jobs in the developed world.

Trade is generally, though not always, good for society as a whole. It is always good for the traders. It is often not good for the labors, especially when one partner in the trade uses unethical labor practices to reduce prices.

Thanks for the heads up, I was about to dismiss this as fluff. Instead it is something 10-20+ years off, but much more interesting.

QAM and commercial AM radio are not the same thing. QAM is used extensively for digital communications, especially in modems. It isn't as common is wireless communication, so far as I know. Of course, if this was just a lame excuse to bash Rush Limbaugh, carry on.

In order to purchase the XP 'downgrade', you also had to purchase Vista Business. So the actual cost over Vista Home was closer to $150 dollars. Linux, or no OS, was probably not available as an option, arguably because of Microsoft's unfair business practices.

That's because the TFS left out a very important detail. The laptop will have two processors.

So Linux can do heavy lifting, but the ARM chipping running it can't.

You can run your installed windows partition under a VM and avoid having to reboot at all.

You can verify the result. If you're familiar with some basic communication theory, consider one of the operands as the source, encode it with some redundancy (parity bits for instance), and pass it through the channel which is the 'probabilistic' processor and the other operand. The channel parameters will give you a probability model for the output which you can use to try to correct any errors that occurred. This situation is very similar to a regular communications system, except there you don't even know the original signal (if you did, you wouldn't need to communicate it).

That is so 1960s. Modern error correction algorithms are much more efficient. If the machine runs 7x faster and you use an error correcting algorithm that uses 2x as many ops you're still 3x ahead. And you could selectively apply the error correction depending on where you needd more or less accurracy. Even for financial applications, there is an upper bound to the accuracy required.

Isn't that similar to the model Selinux uses?

Or, it could just be that o and i are next to each other, and when typing quickly it is easy to hit them in the wrong order. I do actually know the meaning of viola, voila and voilà. I am baffled by people who assume that a typo is actually a sign of ignorance, and amused by the better jokes based off my typo.

Technically it is voila` (can't seem to use the correct accent character).

All of which are irrelevant for a wall-wart powered device developed by the Indian government using a COTS wireless chip.

Actually, the photo posted in the addendum blog makes it look like this isn't even a wireless device.