Sounds to me like you're describing some serious cultural anxiety there.

And you're deluding yourself about the difference between the UK and continental Europe. The UK isn't so different and the various countries in continental Western Europe aren't as similar as you seem to think. Having been in all of those places, the difference between Germany and the UK is smaller than, e.g., the difference between Germany and Italy or Spain. In either case, the similarities dominate. And the dissimilarities within the countries (e.g. between urban and rural, richest vs poorest 10%) are more significant than the dissimilarities between the countries.

It's obviously not even the same ball park as the difference between Mexico and the US; I mean, that's just ludicrous.

How strange. I typically introduce myself with my name.

I'm not an expert, but I'm not sure how representative those numbers for the energy mix are. I found this page which seems to be more reliable: http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/index.cfm#electricity

For 2010 (Electricity Net Generation: Total (All Sectors)), it lists roughly 44% coal, 23% NG, 20% nuclear, 6% hydro, 2% wind, and the rest is peanuts.

Torrenting usually involves redistribution, though.

Just to let you know I appreciate the customer outreach you're doing here. :) Keep up the good work, I like where Firefox has been going recently and, despite how it may sometimes look, I doubt I am the only one.

Your metric for establishedness of a theory is flawed because it fails to take into account the rise in population (and even greater rise in scientific output per capita). GR could be considered to be more established than Newtonian physics, because, even though it's been the main paradigm for a shorter time, in this time it was recognised (and not disproven) by a larger number of people.

No. The two aren't as separable as some geeks would like them to be. Politics/law shape technology; technology shapes politics/law. And in both directions, the influence is significant. Of course there are segments of technology (and politics) where this is less important than for others.

No, this is an NSF Petascale "Track 2" project like TACC's earlier Ranger system or NICS' Kraken system, whereas Blue Waters was/is the NSF Petascale "Track 1" project. Same basic idea, slightly different pots of money.

(Disclaimer: I work for NICS.)

--t

Barnes & Noble, which paid almost $14 million for Borders' intellectual assets (including customer information) at auction last week, said it should not have to comply with certain customer-privacy standards recommended by a third-party ombudsman.

In unrelated news, I say customers should not buy anything from Barnes and Noble ever again.

Seems like REPLs have gotten more popular recently. I guess I don't really get it, I found a good interactive debugger more useful as a learning tool. Particularly with rich abilities to inspect variables and variable hierarchies. A REPL-like tool as one feature of such an environment is nice to have, sure. But just the REPL on its own seems really limiting.

Hm? World population is roughly 7 billion. I'm sure there's several billion mobile phone users out there. Wikipedia refers to "over 5 billion", but that might just be the number of active phones, number of users will be a bit lower.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the max. throughput will depend on the character of the transmission. If a router can transmit 400Mb/s in the best case, the worst case performance will be lower.

I'd speculate that the best case is a single stream of large but not huge packets between the local and a single remote host, maybe even circumventing NAT; the worst case will be many many streams of small packets between several NAT'ed local hosts and a multitude of remote hosts, which sounds similar to BT traffic. Finally the question is how much of a difference does it make, and I have no idea.

Not to mention the iPod Touch and many other devices.

I'm pretty sure you can run GCC on Android. Developing would still be a pretty hellish experience, though, even with a wireless keyboard and a display.

Or maybe the "huh?" are from people who can wear regular fit 501s and still fit stuff in their pockets...