Just wanted to thank eldavojohn for the review link. Apparently the site is blocked due to adult/pornographic content on my work network. Which is always a nice message to see pop up in your browser...

While clusters are cool for cranking away at data, any sort of real time application would get killed by the network latency pushing and pulling data between boxes. One of these SGIs can go to 80 processors, 960 GB memory and 726 GFLOPS but how fast can you get the data you need onto the processor it needs to be on? I find more and more latency acrros network, from disk and to the processor dominates performance. How many of those 726 GFLOPS are spent waiting for data to crunch? I would guess less than in a network cluster of machines.

Just give it an hour or two. The basement dwellers are still wrapped in the throws of slumber. But soon, they will throw off the confines of their StarBlazers comforter, imbibe their hideous concoction of cold pizza and Cocoa Puffs and ready themselves for an assault upon the stone walls of reason! Beware their +16 Rashness tinfoil hats! It makes them impervious to reason!

So accurate, its scary. I wonder if someone leaked it to him.

No manner of technology can defeat good, social engineering. An intelligent attack is made upon the weakest link in the system. In this case, an unscrupulous user with privileges.

I would love to ban MySpace...

If you define an emergency as a peaceful demonstration of public disfavor in their government, then there is no difference at all.

It is very short sighted to think they could "mutually remove each other from human memory" without taking a few of us with them.

At the very least there would be some forensic evidence left over. The watch would have been tracked, the arm found and the hounds unleashed. There would be a blood trail easily tracked by a tracking dog to either the girl or the site in which she was loaded into a vehicle. The condo would have been examined for blood indicative of the act. Their vehicles would have been checked in the same manner. The girl would not have been found alive in the case of her arm being removed, but something would have been found. Dismemberment is just too messy.

Does buying a new netbook with XP installed count as a product?

How well will 7 run on a netbook? Considering the main purpose (in my mind, anyway) of a netbook is as a thin web client, having an un-patched hole in the TCP/IP stack of an OS makes it "not feasible" for installation on a netbook in my mind. I am not certain anyone with a XP netboook can move on to 7.

He did not even come close to saying anything of the like.

On the subject of money, at first blush this appears to be a pretty sweet deal for out-of-print book copyright holders. I linked to wikipedia for the quick-and-dirty version.

So if you are paying attention and actively defending the copyright of your (out-of-print) book, Google will pay you a fee for scanning the book into their database. This will provide your (out-of-print) book with increased visibility, provide a platform for the (out-of-print) book to be sold, create a brand new advertising revenue stream and give the rights holder of the (out-of-print) book a fairly sizable cut.

It is difficult for me to see the drawbacks to someone who's book is now out of print. Not only do they receive financial compensation, but they could reach a new audience and have renewed interest in their book. My concerns are the broad interpretation of fair use Google is using. It is a change from the super narrow view of fair use *AA's have been pushing for years. Of course, there has been no court ruling on Google's interpretation because of the settlement. I think the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers stand to make a great deal of money alongside Google in this venture, which is why they relented and settled.

Is this a robot or a cyborg? Sounds more like cybernetic gray goo to me. Who knew it would literally be gray goo?

I did not catch on until well after being rid of Chem Lab, but reverse engineering results was the expected practice. Physics Lab was about carefully assembling, conducting and measuring experiments, then performing error analysis to explain differences between experimental results and theory. According to my chemistry major friends, working backwards from the answer was accepted because the lab TAs had no expectations of students performing the experiments well. As a Physics major, I spent a great deal of time in the lab trying to perform the experiment correctly, but could never get the exact answer. Others would phone in the experiment and spend 30 minutes reverse engineering the expected numbers. Since my numbers were always a bit off, I generally earned 75-85% on my labs.

I guess I should have caught on earlier.