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Comment Re:Message passing between cores? Hmm... (Score 2, Interesting) 326

Yes, I've been wondering the same thing. Transputers contained key ideas that seem to be coming around again...
But a more crucial thing might be how much heat can you handle on one chip? These guys are already at 25-125 watts, likely depending on how many cores are actually turned on. After all they're playing pretty hefty heat management tricks on current i7's and Phenom's.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15818/2
What use are 48 cores, let alone 1000 if they're all being slowed down to 50% or whatever by heat and power juggling?

Comment More foolish narrow vision... (Score 2, Insightful) 80

The article is way too optimistic and as expected weak on science. They start out with the old mindset of each bacterial line being completely seperate, totally missing the extensive lateral gene transfers that have spread such wonders as antibiotic resistance and the toxins that created O157...
And follow it up with assumption that knowing the code makes it so much easier to figure out how to stop or fix any problem organisms arise. We still barely understand protein folding, and then only with the help of supercomputers.
Oh, and then you add a funny thing called evolution to add random mutations...
Life is a massively parallel ongoing experiment, with the current ecological terrain/surface the result of countless battles in multiple dimensions. And we are continually making the terrain more and more fragile through the chemicals we spew and spray all about the globe with hardly a clue of their impact let alone their combinatorial influence...
Unfortunately most humans are not saints, but lazy, greedy and sometimes outright paranoid and murderous. Expecting morals and miracles to stop mistakes is foolish.

Comment Re:It Hurts (Score 1) 320

perhaps the text is simply anagrams of Italian words.

Then why does she only offer up a single page of plants as decoded anagrams? What about the other ~199 pages? What about the pages of block text?

More importantly, why does the Voynich Manuscript flip between things derived from plants like gallic acid, oil and then return to naming the plants? Furthermore, I call the labeling of the plants to be absolute complete bullshit. Yes, I said it. I'm not a botanist but I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings.

While plant names do change, some have stayed consistent over the years. However plants that are heavily used for food, medicine and flavouring tend to remain the same over time.

I have studied a bit of botany and herbal medicine and while I don't have the referred to text in front of me, I do find the comparisons a bit ludicrous.

Particular bad examples : garlic, rose bush, juniper berry, bay leaf

A particular glaring one for me is "nutgall", which presumably refers to oak galls, and were used to make ink, that drawing makes no sense to me. I think this "solution" has a bit too much selective matching.

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