I'll agree that there were two groups - the usual black bloc and then what you call the facebook rioters. But I'll have to tell you that angry Canucks fans were NOT the minority - in fact that was the group that made up most of the facebook rioters. Just look at the photos - most rioters wear Canucks jerseys, many even older versions of the jerseys which would now be expensive collector's items. And I am not talking about people standing there and filming, I am talking about people jumping on cars and tossing them over. These were people who didn't necessarily go downtown with the expectation of a riot (you can tell - unlike the black bloc, they did not come prepared with bandanas etc), but got carried away in the moment, either by the loss of the game, or by seeing the black bloc do its thing and getting away with it (for the moment).

I live downtown Van, I saw many dozens, if not hundreds of Canucks fans go by with parts of police barricades, sticks, arms and legs ripped off mannequins from some shop window, etc. The highrise I live in would also have been ransacked as well if we didn't have a bunch of guys standing out front guarding it. The most shocking part of it all was to see how "normal" the vandals were - a complete cross-section of Vancouver society, white, asian, indian, man and woman, all going into a frenzy.

Well, we are getting into semantics here, but on OS X, "application" != "program". An application is everything packaged into a ".app" directory. By and in large the described method will work for these applications. The method will not work for all "programs", i.e. stuff started on the command line etc.

Why? Autosave is something you could implement today for any given OS X application using AppleScript. All you need is to do is write a 3 linear script that calls the "Save" hook every couple of minutes. Of course that isn't all that desirable, since the user should be able to control when the original gets overwritten. But as soon as you have a versioning file system, that concern no longer exists. Just automatically send call the save function of all applications every couple of minutes. For resume, you just get asked on program start whether you want to load the latest snapshot or the explicitly saved previous version. Very simple.

The makerbot has a much lower resolution - this thing can do 20 layers/mm (about 500 layers per inch, so close to the resolution of a laser printer).

That is only near-earth, unmanned space flight. What is the commercial motive for a manned mission to another planetary body (even if it is as close as the moon)?

Why wouldn't you just get a stand alone GPS unit for that? By saving the dataplan, you'll have amortized the cost of the device in less than a year.

Thank you. "Rocket Science" is one of the big misnomers of the past century. It really is rocket engineering (i.e. applying scientific results to solve problems). There is nothing wrong with that, but its not science.

So don't update the OS? For most people OS updates are a nuisance anyways.

Wow, you really have no clue. If your problems are that loosely coupled, then you don't need to do SIMD at all, just solve each matrix in a separate process on separate CPU. For typical applications where supercomputers are used the problem is to solve a single, huge problem, not a gazillion small ones. That is when parallelism becomes hard, otherwise you don't need a supercomputer at all.

Whatever, I want to see him do computer graphics without calculus and continuous math, just as an example.

That said, his statement is a bit more credible if you looks specifically at his own institution. U Tennessee isn't exactly a top tier school, so I would expect their graduates to go into relatively low profile positions, possibly web design with a bit of PHP, or possibly they'll learn network or system administration after their degree and move into that. They are not going to be expert programmers at Google or Microsoft.

Also, at any decent university, you are not getting a Computer Science degree. You are getting a Science degree with a specialization in CS. That means you are supposed to have a fairly broad understanding of science and math when you graduate, so even though you may have specialized in CS you will be able to shift to other fields within science to some degree. If that is not for you, then go to vocational school.

I can't speak for the GP, but as a Canadian I agree with the GP. My source(s) of information:

- I read news from sources in the Canada, the US, UK, and Germany. Somehow they all seem to make some level of sense, except for the American version.

- first hand opinions expressed by Americans on online fora. To name an example, I don't think you'd get a significant number of people from any other western country to have a Democracy vs Republic debate along the lines of what just happened in the parallel Utah thread. Sometimes I have to resign to just look in awe about the level of collective brainwashing that seems to be going on in the US.

I take it you haven't been to Vancouver when it snowed?

I know about the political situation - I live in Western Canada. But you didn't read my post properly: Canada HAS nuclear reactor technology, we HAVE nuclear reactors, and we DO sell them abroad - they are actually quite a success: see CANDU reactor.

The question was why Canada went with this more traditional design, rather than a thorium design.

That doesn't explain why countries without a nuclear weapons program haven't gone that way. For example, Canada and Germany gave up nuclear weapons ambitions decades ago, but they both have the technology to build nuclear reactors, and they export those reactors to other countries.

This seems unlikely, since rods are inhibited in situations where there is enough light for cones to function (i.e. at normal photopic light levels). Basically, rods just saturate and do not contribute to human vision vision at daylight levels. Do you have a reference?