They have to be because they're dealing with the highest percentage population of sociopaths in our society - successful business leaders.

The key point with Amdahl's law is that you can reasonably determine how much paralellism will help you. You fast approach a point of diminishing returns for most problems. So if, say, your maximum theoretical speedup is about 10x, then you start seeing drastically reduced returns at > 10 processors running it.

There are absolutely parts of a program that cannot be paralellized. Data dependencies charted using the Polyhedral Model (or similar) can be mathematically proven to be unable to be done in parallel without potentially changing the result. Many automatic parallelizing compilers use this or similar to generate parallel code.

But by all means, dismiss the work of generations as "complete bullshit" we await your genius suggestions about how to do this better.

There's at least two reasonably decent free projects out there for auto-parallelism: Par4All and PLUTO. They both can take C code as input and chuck out a paralellized OpenMP implementation. I did a research project last semester comparing them with hand optimization on wavelet filters (think JPEG-2000 image processing). So far, hand optimization blew them out of the water in every case. And that was after reworking the code to be more amenable to their particular "quirks". Both of these have reasonably recent ongoing work being poured into them. At least as of Spring 2012, the state of the art for auto-paralellizers wasn't anywhere near "holy-grail" territory.

More to the point, what is being claimed in this paper is that they can prove thread-safety and auto-split functions as long as the variables are properly typed into read-only and writable . While this is very cool and useful, it's not some game changing breakthrough that's suddenly going to let you multi-thread all your programs. The program must still be built with multi-threading in mind, but as long as you set up all of the type correctly, it can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Very cool, but hardly the "holy-grail" that the /. summary claims.

There are times that I feel like having Asperger's is like having selective sociopathy. I can choose to feel for something for someone or not. It makes me wonder about the times when I do feel bad. Is it legitimate empathy? Or do I just feel bad because I know I'm "supposed to" and want to appear normal? I find that most of my emotional responses are learned rather than "natural".

It took 143 patches today with a slipstreamed SP3 CD and after installing .NET 3.5SP1. That's with optional updates like Media Player 11 included. It would've been about 130 critical and security updates.

It seems like it would be more, but many times the updates supersede other updates. So you would probably have applied 300-400 updates from SP3 to now, but only 130 of them still apply.

Depends on what you're using it for. Accident investigation is hardly the kind of job that requires a rugged phone. I mean, I wouldn't give an iPhone to a construction worker or to someone doing any real physically strenuous job, but accident investigation is much more about forensically analyzing a wreck, not the dangerous and rough parts during or immediately following one, such as the crash itself, first responders, search and rescue. It's incredibly important work, but it's hardly inappropriate for a "fragile" phone like the iPhone.

There are many solutions for it. SAP/Sybase Afaria, Fiberlink MaaS 360, Centrify, Symantec Mobile Device Management, Good Technology, and many, many others will do all of the app management/device management/whatever you need. Most of them have at least feature parity with BES and some that I've looked at go above and beyond. It all depends on what exactly your needs are. Rest assured there's a solution out there somewhere that feels custom tailored to your unique situation.

That, and you can programatically set up the native iOS e-mail application vs. Android that makes you either purchase a third party app (Touchdown is especially popular, and $20) or manually configure the native e-mail app. Samsung is attempting to fix this with the enterprise initiative codenamed S.A.F.E. but unfortunately that will only fix the issue for late-model Samsung devices.

Pretty much. Bankruptcy judges do this *all the time*. Ultimately the judge is the arbiter of the law and if they make enough bad rulings there exist avenues for recourse and possibly removal of the judge from his position entirely. But on the bench judges have extraordinary latitude to rule as they see fit. And while there are appeals and other legal options to override a judge's decision (the bulk of which require you to get another judge or judges to agree to overturn it), there are precious few options in the moment in the courtroom.

Okay, the adolescent needs to be checked out, I agree. But honestly the fastest and most humane way of killing a small game bird is ripping its head off. It looks horrible and bleeds like crazy for a few seconds, but it is the simplest and fastest way to put a wounded bird out of its misery. Instant lights out.

As an aside, the accepted method for killing larger game birds (ducks, geese) is wringing their necks by holding them by the head and spinning the body around until the neck snaps. Again, it sounds horrible but again it's about the fastest and most humane way to do it.

You can't just shoot them again at close range (as you might with a wounded deer) because typically at that point the wad (and the majority of the shot) will center-punch the bird and leave you with a few feathers and some fine red mist.

Having hunted both pigeons and doves I can tell you that flight patterns of pigeons are a reasonable practice run for doves. However doves are slightly more challenging by virtue of being about half the size.

In some small towns I have heard tell of the town giving their night-shift police officers air rifles and a request that the pigeon problem be "dealt with". Apparently you can reduce the nuisance by a couple hundred roosting birds a night when there's no actual crime that needs attending to.

I don't know, I'd rather liken this to you not going to jail for shooting the robber who invaded your property. Maybe the hunters felt threatened by the helicopter, maybe they were buzzing the hunters with it and one of them took the expeditious route of shooting it with the gun already in his hand. Maybe there was concern that the animal rights group had gone full blown psycho eco-terrorist and loaded the thing up with TNT to protect the precious little birds by blowing the hunters up.

Big, loud, strange looking thing is hovering over you menacingly - who knows what to think about that. It certainly had no business on your property. Shoot first and ask questions later.

I have yet to find any civilian purchasable ammunition or ordinance cable of traveling 7+ miles straight up in the air. Hell, I don't even know of any that can travel 7+ miles overland in a ballistic arc.

Military is different (obviously) but more expensive and not generally available to the civilian population.