If someone proposed that we spend a trillion dollars on building lightning rods around the country to save people from possibly being struck by lighting, you'd probably say, wow that's an incredibly dumb idea. But yet, the reality is, this incredibly dumb idea would likely end up saving more lives than what we've spent on the "war on terror".

Americans need to get a grip, we don't need the paternalistic government to protect us, after all on the last two airplane bombing attempts, it was the passengers that jumped the would be bombers. Let's all just relax a little, ask the politicians to stop spending money hand over fist in the name of safety, and let us live our lives.

If terrorism ever becomes a real problem, we can revisit this...

I just run it and time it using the time command. Since this loop doesn't actually do anything, the optimizer should optimize it away, but it doesn't.

That's wonderful _if_ the Java library provides exactly what I need. If I want to do something somewhat non-standard then writing my custom thing in Java is going to be slow. If I have to break out into C anyhow to be fast, I might as well just write in C to begin with.

As far as I can tell neither the compiler nor the JIT do even the most rudimentary of optimizations, like CSE elimination, dead code elmination, loop unrolling, inlining, etc.

Just write 1 function that spins in a loop doing something like:

for(i=0; i 100000; ++i) { a = 5; }

The Java compiler is a joke, if they even made a little effort Java could be so much faster.

One other difference:

Google:
"we asked the Google File System to write three copies of each file to three different disks."

Yahoo:
"On the larger runs, failure is expected and thus replication of 2 is required. HDFS protects against data loss during rack failure by writing the second replica on a different rack and thus writing the second replica is relatively slow."

Google is using 4x as many disks, but writing 1.5 as much data.

I'm actually more impressed that Google is cramming 12 disks onto a single machine, how do they get them to fit?

Just like when our ancestors came to America, they all filed the proper paperwork and... oh wait a second...

I completely agree, I'd rather be holding a book/newspaper/magazine than trying to read the equivalent online.

FISA says you can start a wiretap without a warrant, but you have to get a warrant eventually.

The thing is, what the NSA is doing now is tapping _all_ phone conversations and not getting any warrants until they get a hit, then they get a warrant for that one conversation.

There was a writeup awhile back, a guy that worked for AT&T basically told what was going on. In the main San Francisco telco central office, the NSA owns a huge room, where all communications are routed. This gives them a central point to tap and monitor all conversations. I'm sure they are doing this in all of the major metro areas as well.

From an intelligence point of view, this is really the only way to collect this data, but from a civil liberties point of view its a huge violation.

The "government" just thinks we're too stupid to know what's going on, and admitting what they're doing would be a huge black eye I guess. Especially since Obama could have shut it down, but chose not to.

When it snows, the amount of the earth covered in water will increase quite a lot. It's frozen water, but um, they didn't specify.

You know, it's kind of funny. At this point they are trying to make a moral case for this: Giving people the tools to infringe copyright is wrong.

But in countries like the USA their are companies that sell guns (locally and abroad, even sold them to the evil taliban). People will stand up and shout "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well I say selling guns is more morally objectionable than providing a tool to allow copyright infringement. Torrents don't infringe, people infringe! Err, something like that.