Excellent! I have a bunch of leftover sugar. I will be a good Samaritan and dispose of it in my neighbors' gas tanks. What a pleasant surprise it will be for each of them when they discover they have a full tank of gas.

That's not the way it works even if it is the way you want it to work. They deserve a re-vote if they are able to get a re-vote by going through the proper procedures.

The idea that a decision once made is locked in for ever and ever just because StillAnonymous happens to like it is absurd.

As has been obvious for over a decade, consumers overwhelmingly want to be able to use recent technological breakthroughs so then can listening music easily and conveniently. Most are willing to pay for this and most probably want to support the artist.

The music labels have been fighting this tooth and nail pretty ever since it was possible to download music via the internet. This is slightly bizarre since part of the service they are supposed to be providing to society is to streamline the distribution of music (hence the RIAA curve, etc). Instead, perhaps due to somewhat sociopathic CEOs, they try to cripple distribution of music in order to create false scarcity which harms society and harms the artists and only benefits the labels.

The only reason a 3rd-party can make money from this is because the labels are totally failing at the task of distributing music in the best and easiest way possible. The answer is not to close off 3rd parties who are doing the job the record labels are supposed to be doing. The answer is for the record labels to do their damned job and distribute music in a reasonable way given current technologies. The tighter the labels grip, the more revenue will slip through their fingers. There is no way consumers are going back to buying a vinyl album and then a cassette and then a cd of the same music.

The actual cost for distributing music has plummeted to near zero. If the record labels are not going to take advantage of this and distribute music in a reasonable way then good for Google and for anyone else who steps up and removes the artificial scarcity and artificial inefficiency create by the music labels.

While we're at it let's shorten the length of time copyright stays in effect. That way these rock stars won't be lumping their recent music together with music that was made back in the 30s and 40s by people who have long been dead.

Okay. Fair enough. Thanks for clearing that up. I agree with you that the summary is wrong to lump bank accounts in with prepaid cards. On the other hand it was clear to me that UnknowingFool was talking about an account associated with a prepaid card. If UF had used "prepaid card" instead of just "card" then they would have been even more clear. Your post was misleading because it makes it seem like nothing has changed regarding seizing money.

I think we all agree that they can now seize money from prepaid cards and they weren't able to do this before. I thought that was the point UnknowingFool was making and you seemed to be refuting it.

The fine article also says the police are seizing money from accounts.

Saying that the police are using this to seize money accurately reflects what is said in the fine article. If you think the summary and the article are both wrong on this point then please provide a link to evidence that refutes it.

The Oracle lawyer has it completely backwards. If APIs could be protected by copyright then FOSS could be easily locked out of making compatible implementations. Oracle is not in this battle to get a few billion dollars from Google. They are in this battle to kill off all independent software development. As bad as software patents are, changing the ground rules so APIs can be protected by copyright would be much much worse.

Satoshi-san, I think you are taking your buffoonery a bit too far here.

I agree with you, that was a key claim of the article. It made me extremely skeptical of anything else they had to say because the experimental results have absolutely not been reproducible. The results varied by orders of magnitude and even by direction! The results were always down near the noise threshold. It is true that many experiments got non-zero results that could not be fully explained by their analysis of all the sources of noise. The fact that the magnitude of the non-zero result scaled with the magnitude of the noise over orders of magnitude should be tip off that these claims are extremely fishy. Getting non-zero results right at the noise floor that vary over orders of magnitude and vary in direction is pretty much the exact opposite of reproducible results.

Whenever a new anomalous result is found it is always possible that it will upend established physics but in 999,999 cases out of a million, the cause is experimental error (incomplete analysis of all potential sources of noise). That is certainly what seems to be happening here. It appears that this is yet another entry in the Nobel Prize lottery -- and it has about as much chance of paying off as a lottery ticket.

But for the sake of argument, let's say that despite all of the experimental results to the contrary, the effect is real and this is the correct explanation for the effect. Two points:

1) It directly contradicts the previous "theoretical explanation".

2) The effect does not scale well and would be useless for any practical applications such as space-flight. The effect only occurs because the size of the acceleration is very small compared to the size of the apparatus (the units of size and acceleration are related through certain natural constants such as the speed of light).

It is to prevent name-space collisions when you "stack" short options as in "-rf" (which means the same thing as "-r -f"). The convention often used is that multiple letters after a single dash are stacked single character options while multiple letters after two dashes is a single verbose option. This convention makes things easier for the user and the designer because neither one has to worry about being able to spell out a verbose option with single character options.

The only "further operation" needed is to look at the higher word of the result which takes zero extra effort. For example, if you multiply two 16-bit words then you get a 32-bit result. The "extra effort" is taking the upper 16-bits of the result and ignoring the lower 16-bits.

There may well be good reasons for FP16 to preferred over using integers but scaling the result of multiplications isn't one of them.

I fully agree with you that if we are at the end of Moore's Law then it is because of physical limitations and not economics. As for no preceding tech breakthroughs, Intel's first CTO said (in 2008):

I think it is quite possible he is wrong about Moore's Law extending out to 2028 but I find it very hard to believe he is wrong about the history of Moore's Law leading up to 2008. He was in a position to see the tech breakthroughs first-hand. I don't see why he would lie about it.

Your overall point may (or may not) be valid but this passage in particular is either incorrect or grossly misleading:

We have had to develop new technology after new technology for decades to keep pace with Moore's Law. This is one of the things that makes Moore's Law so fascinating -- it has already spanned over five orders of magnitude (powers of ten). Take a look at the section on enabling factors and future trends on the Wikipedia page. It is possible we have finally reached the end of Moore's Law but to me it seems equally possible that we have not.

Here is a quote from the introduction of the 2005 book Devil's Game: How the US unleashed fundamentalist Islam by Robert Dreyfuss:

As others have said, while some people who claim to be Muslims attack innocent civilians, so do some people who claim to follow other faiths or claim to have no faith. Generalizing to the larger group of all Muslims is extremely counter-productive (unless you goal is to increase the number of and ferocity of attacks against innocent civilians in the West). The mechanism for how fear-based anti-Muslim screeds in the West fuel fundamentalist attacks against the West was explained in the Adam Curtis documentary series The Power of Nightmares.

In addition, while nothing can justify attacks against innocent civilians anywhere in the world -- regardless of the race, nationality, or religion of the attackers or the victims -- by ignoring the causes of the attacks, by disavowing any responsibility for our own actions, and by instead opting for a fear-based knee-jerk emotional reaction, we only make the situation worse, not better.

Fear is the mind-killer. Often the purpose of attacks against innocent civilians is to instill fear and terror. If we drop our reasoning ability and indulge ourselves in these emotions then we are feeding the cycle of violence, reprisals, and incriminations. Over-generalizations, collective blame, xenophobia, and ignoring the obvious consequences of our own actions just fan the flames of conflict. They do nothing to quell it.

If you consider the people who perpetrated these attacks to be you enemy then know your enemy! Certainly avoid aiding and abetting them by reacting exactly how they want you to react! Blaming, attacking, or murdering other innocents just because they share a country, a religion, or a family with people who are responsible for the attacks fuels the conflict. The problem is not that group-A is mostly bad and group-B is mostly good by comparison. The problem is attacking, killing, and even blaming innocent people. This is happening on both sides of the conflict. For example, blaming Iraq for the 9/11 attacks led to the war on Iraq that killed over one hundred thousand innocent civilians and led to the destabilization of the entire area, the rise of ISIS and the massive refuge crisis. Absolving ourselves of any responsibility for the obvious consequences of our actions and instead continuing on the same path of blaming and punishing more innocent people will continue to have the same disastrous consequences.

You have a choice. You can either keep feeding the conflict or you can work to stop it. Even if your fear-based beliefs were correct and they are somehow morally worse than us then it is even more incumbent on us to stop the conflict instead of feeding it.

So by avoiding GMO foods someone can cause harm to others via an outbreak of measles or other potentially deadly diseases? Can you explain how that works? Another difference is that people know when they are getting vaccinations and they have access to information about what is in the vaccinations.

The only similarity perhaps is that you think both groups are idiots. I have no sympathy for the anti-vaxers but I do have sympathy for people who want to personally avoid GMO foods, just like I had sympathy 40 years ago for people who had the far-out idea of avoiding non-organic foods. If people want to pay extra to avoid GMO foods then more power to them. I don't see how they are harming others by this choice.

An example of the common perception of organic/health food in the 1970s is illustrated in the lyrics of Escape (the Pina Colada Song):

I don't know how to fix the anti-vaxer problem but one thing I do know is that restricting information about the vaccines (like information on GMO foods is restricted) will only make the problem worse, not better.