It's pretty easy to hit the limit of what our ear can distinguish in quality, even when we're trying.

How close are we to the limit of what our eyes can distinguish in resolution, quality, and fps? It'll be awhile.

Sorry, but this doesn't work for me. Floating point operations are perfect for integrating with the CPU because they are instruction-level commands whose results may be used on an instruction-by-instruction basis. Furthermore, there's a pretty hard limit on how many/much of an FPU someone needs: one per core, most likely? (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

With GPUs, there's no limit to how powerful, fast, memory-caching, and power-hungry they need to be. The ceiling keeps rising. It doesn't scale exactly with processing demands, as FPU requirements do/did.

If a resource scales differently for different users, it'll probably never be fully integrated with the CPU. Graphics processors are being added now, because there's a low enough ceiling for what many users want and need. But separate GPUs will probably never disappear. The task they perform is highly unrelated and separate from that of the CPU.

And it's not like this new technology is actually binding the two together (unless I've missed something), it just puts them side-by-side on the same chip so that Intel and AMD can make more money from the bundle. If anything, this trend leads eventually toward preprinted motherboards complete with all features (RAM etc), not CPUs which perform lots of different functions.

The big companies/RIAA/MPAA pushing for stricter copyright enforcement, felony charges for copyright violators, etc. are wrong.

So wrong, in fact, it might just be enough to save us from them.

It was one thing when they targeted poor college students on bittorrent. How many average Americans or other companies are going to stand up for them? It was a great way for the RIAA, for instance, to make a killing. (Off of creative content they never created, by the way -- what's the point of copyright anyway?)

But this is a whole new ballgame. When you try to make showing a music video on youtube illegal (which it would be under these laws, as far as I can tell), suddenly you've turned 90% of America against you. When you stop entrapping people by offering up torrents, and start using the word "wiretapping", you move objections from the underground nerdosphere up into the mainstream. And most importantly, you've stirred up till-now sleeping giants in Google and the other companies mentioned.

The folly of the MPAA etc in trying to extend these bans (surely, if people can't stream movies, they'll start spending thousands more on DVDs!) may have caused them to overstep their bounds just enough to ruin them in the copyright wars. Once other corporations with profits on the line get involved, the playing field evens up a little. When that happens, there's a chance for reasonableness to win out.

So, I'm not saying I applaud these new initiatives by our government, but it's about time copyright law got some negative publicity and opposition by companies with $$. Let's hope some positives come out of this.

Interesting (albeit, very unlikely that anyone will develop ID to this level), but getting away from the point.

The law states that you cannot discriminate "based on the conduct of research" relating to ID. So if you do any so-called research on the subject at all -- whether it's an in-depth scientific study or a confession on a blog -- it doesn't matter what kind of research or how good or bad -- the quality of your research, as I read it, cannot be a factor in your hiring etc.

The problem isn't about being able to hire/not hire researchers based on topic. It's about being able to judge based on research quality.

I think academia is right to distrust "teaching to the fad" because concepts don't change, and people who know the concepts will be good at picking up the fads. Math -- to a lesser or greater extent, it's arguable -- is one of the concepts.

Analogy: if you'll be programming in Java and Python, why learn C or assembly? Don't "tough" concepts like pointers and managing your own memory turn off a lot of potentially great programmers? Well ... apparently they wouldn't have been so great. Without these concepts, you think you're fine bubbling along in Java till one day you try reading in a 10-MB file by using String str = str + nextLine() and don't understand why it's taking forever.

So -- this is also about standards. What standards a student has for herself, and what standards a school wants to set for its students. You think most of the programmers hired at Google don't know calculus and linear algebra? It's not about whether you integrate functions on a daily basis, it's that (1) you've proven you're smart and those smarts often correlate with good coding, and (2) you have additional tools and a better understanding in many cases. In industry, that pays.

And to be blunt, if someone told me they hadn't had calc or probability, I would distrust their overall understanding of the field of "computer science". Nothing against their programming skills, it's just that a lot of what I call "CS" includes mathematical concepts, and I think that a CS degree should include them.