Ideally, I would prefer if I didn't get any unsolicited calls on my phone. Short of that though, it might actually be nice if unsolicited callers could leave me voicemails without actually causing my phone to ring: that way I wouldn't be bothered as often with phone calls I'm going to ignore anyway, and I can just delete the messages at my convenience.

Attaining and maintaining wealth requires work.

Those who put in the work to earn their wealth tend to have the drive that pushes them to get out and do things. Not just cruising around the world and hanging out with friends, but actually working towards tangible goals.

On the other hand, those who receive a windfall of unearned wealth (inherited, lottery, etc.) often spend the money and end up worse off than they were to start with. They see more zeros in their bank account, and they constantly have the urge to splurge.

In both cases, working is a defense mechanism: It helps keep one group sane, and the other from spending through all their money.

Varied life perspectives likely have more to do with the results. A team made up of young, heterosexual, white males who were raised in upper-middle class households is likely to have a less diversity of thought than a team that includes those of other colors, ages, genders, and sexual orientations.

Think of it more in terms of adding diversity into the intellectual gene pool. Collaboration is often an iterative process; The more diverse the group, the higher the chances are that it will produce something truly novel. The converse can also be true.

That all being said, while I agree that diversity can be great, I don't believe that having "quotas" or "goals" (which almost universally require standards to be lowered) for diversity to be a healthy option either.

You're entirely on the right track.

Common behavior in games like DayZ fairly accurately mirrors behavior that is appropriate in a situation where the rule of law has entirely disappeared.

Just look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs and it should become far more clear. Morality, at least as we generally conceive it, is something that doesn't really come up until pretty much every other need is fulfilled. In a situation without the rule of law, individuals are generally forced to spend much of their time working in the bottom two levels of the pyramid.

Thus, the logical reaction to new persons revolves around our needs and the available resources. Since there is little benefit to be gained (at least in DayZ) from working with strangers, and a huge amount of risk, there are really only two options: Kill them, or avoid them. Since avoiding other people is often so difficult, and they have little to offer you other than your death, this leads to people defaulting to the other option.

As the benefits of cooperation increase, and the penalty for dying goes down (read: when you can securely cache excess equipment for use with future characters), I suspect that we'll see less KOS, more avoidance, and more cooperation.

It may be a case of potato/potatoe, but while one is correct, the other will get you relentlessly mocked by the press.

Except we don't have a 'representative democracy'; We have a Constitutional Republic.

That case you quote is bullshit though; The law they are apparently being tried under really should only apply if they found (or bought it from someone who found it) the suitcase and then didn't try to return it to the "rightful owner." The article you link to clearly states that the original owner of the suitcase sold/donated said suitcase to the Salvation Army who in turn sold it to the couple. Essentially, the original owner sold/donated the item in question, and did not *lose* it. As far as I see it, it is unreasonable to pursue the couple in question in criminal court over this, at least for the offense they are seemingly being charged with. Now to be clear, the right thing for the couple to do would have been to go back to the Salvation Army store where they bought it and see if the SA could get in touch with whoever the suitcase came from, but doesn't mean that the law they're being charged under applies in that situation. Also, the case you quote doesn't correlate with the Gizmodo iPhone case; the only way it could is if Apple sold it (knowingly or unknowingly) to a third party from whom Gizmodo acquired it.

I'm not the world's leading expert on processor design, but from what I can tell from the schematics and die pictures I've seen of the Westmere 6-Core CPU's, it only *looks* like they stuck 2 3-core processors on the same die. Everything I have read about Nehalem (and now this current die-shrink) has said how modular and scalable it has been designed to be; Intel saw the limitations of their early dual-core designs in that they *weren't* particularly modular or scalable, and I can't imagine that they would repeat that mistake.

That said, from what I can tell, they laid it out like they did (so that it looks like three cores on one side and three on the other) in order to minimize the maximum distance(s) between certain key components (they stuck the queue and most of the uncore in the middle). It is my assumption that although there appears to be two L3 caches on the die, that any core can directly access any of the cache. I base this mostly on my understanding of how the QPI system works on a DP platform -- one link is for communicating with the Northbridge (Current DP NB is tylersburg 5520 while SP boards usually use X58) while the other is for direct communication with the other processor --- I would assume that if processor 0 can get data directly from the cache on processor 1, that any core on processor 1 can access any data on it's internal shared cache.

Your argument seems to be "GTA 4 runs like shit on my dual core CPU, and they say that you really should run it with on a quad, so therefore it will run even better on a 6-core CPU."

No offense, but that's a load of crap. GTA 4 runs like shit because it is for all intents and purposes a completely non-optimized console port. I've seen PLENTY of people with computers hands down above and beyond mine (tri/quad SLI with watercooled and heavily overclocked GTX285/295's (respectively), along with watercooled and heavily overclocked extreme-edition i7's) have difficulty running GTA 4 well.

I have a pretty good computer for these days (Core i7 920 CPU on an EVGA E759 X58 motherboard with an EVGA GTX 275 SC {at least that's how it came flashed}), and I have been able to graphically max out EVERY console port I have ever run at a minimum resolution of 1600 x 1200. -- titles like Call of Duty: World at War (I played it completely maxed out at 1600 x 1200 and I think my FPS was capped at 60 (I think I had it set to not do FPS above the monitor's refresh rate), and Mass Effect 2 (which I run completely maxed out at 1920 x 1440 and it has never gone below 60 FPS in any of my 2-3 playthroughs totaling at least three days ingame so far).

Basically, what I'm saying is that if your argument for more processor cores is based on the fact that badly written/optimized code runs better with more processor power, you need to find a better argument.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." -- Mark Twain