That can only lead to more snake oil e-mails from Nigeria, I venture to say. Is Nigeria perhaps the biggest snake oil producers in the world?

and Netflix sucks. The stores had literally thousands of movies to choose from, but Netflix? A few dozen mediocre titles... I want my DVD backlog opportunity back, not more productions, from yet another source!!!

From http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...

"Saudi Arabia can cope with low oil prices for "at least eight years", Saudi Arabia's minister of petroleum's former senior adviser has told the BBC. Mohammed al-Sabban said the country's policy was to defend its current market share by enduring low prices. "You need to allow prices to go as low as possible in order to see those marginal producers move out of the market," he said."

Eight happy years!

http://www.theweek.co.uk/busin...

"The dramatic fall in the oil price will spur the UK economy to grow faster than had been predicted this year, according to influential forecaster the EY ITEM Club."

Yo-hoo

That is an issue overcome by Wikipedia quite rapidly. One or a few trolls per hundred contributors are rapidly swamped out. Look at Slashdot. ;) My suggestion would be that the rather collaborate formally with Wikipedia, and tap their infrastructure, to get it going for real. I realize this may feel awkward and may hamper enthusiasm and funding opportunities if proposed the wrong way. Yet, it would give the idea a stronger start if they are more interested in their idea than in funding. Questions related to Strontium would be next the to the Wikipedia of Strontium, etc.

9 percent of the nation's greenhouse gas pollution is a bloody lot of greenhouse gas! Does the adding of the word "just" make it any less?

or Grrooink, gimme dat rock?? or Grroink, like to see cave etchings? I'm prone to think the latter

Any belief in the supernatural is begging for a disaster in the long run, be it Hinduism, Judaism, Animatrix, Obelix, Jesus, whatever. The violence you see in the Bible, Asterix and in the Wachowsky Epic is largely irrelevant. It is the belief as such which is the dangerous feed for the alienated.

Shi's Law

http://developers.slashdot.org...

http://spartan.cis.temple.edu/...

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

"Researchers in the parallel processing community have been using Amdahl's Law and Gustafson's Law to obtain estimated speedups as measures of parallel program potential. In 1967, Amdahl's Law was used as an argument against massively parallel processing. Since 1988 Gustafson's Law has been used to justify massively parallel processing (MPP). Interestingly, a careful analysis reveals that these two laws are in fact identical. The well publicized arguments were resulted from misunderstandings of the nature of both laws.

This paper establishes the mathematical equivalence between Amdahl's Law and Gustafson's Law. We also focus on an often neglected prerequisite to applying the Amdahl's Law: the serial and parallel programs must compute the same total number of steps for the same input. There is a class of commonly used algorithms for which this prerequisite is hard to satisfy. For these algorithms, the law can be abused. A simple rule is provided to identify these algorithms.

We conclude that the use of the "serial percentage" concept in parallel performance evaluation is misleading. It has caused nearly three decades of confusion in the parallel processing community. This confusion disappears when processing times are used in the formulations. Therefore, we suggest that time-based formulations would be the most appropriate for parallel performance evaluation."



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