I usually know where I am indoors as well. I make a semi-conscious effort to find my direction before I enter a building, and tend to keep it going through elevators etc.

It's mostly memory. I orientate myself not with respect to north but with respect to reference points. Like right now I'm in my college town and I can point to my house and two cities. Knowing where those locations exist on a map I can also point fairly accurately anywhere on the planet.

I'm not sure how I'd do in Grand Central but I can imagine that I might go mad if I got lost. I would attempt to orientate myself as I moved but eventually I'd get confused. Most buildings make sense geometrically so it's fairly hard to get lost. I remember getting lost in a circular mall when I was younger. I ended up running back to where I came in and was afraid to head further in the mall until I understood the dynamics of a circular building (4 reference points inside the circle, 90 180 270 0).


I agree with some of the posters that having to rely on a bike and your feet to get places when you're younger might develop this "sense".

Not sure if this is just conspiracy theory stuff but,

http://www.prisonplanet.com/medical-director-swine-flu-was-cultured-in-a-laboratory.html

Could be referring to scientists creating viruses like this in the past to test medication. Also if it was produced in a lab I doubt it would have been "intentionally" released.

This is a real problem if you think about it. My experience with TOR .onion, or I should say what my friend has told me about TOR, is that there's a lot of child porn. Freenet is a lot better in that regard (significantly less child porn), but I don't know anything about I2P.

I think there could be a case brought up against services like TOR on the grounds of child porn. It wouldn't be justified, but seeing as how things are developing I could see it happening. If my friend remembers correctly, basically the "main" .onion page and .onion chat is full of links to child porn. The "main" freenet page however only has links to legal porn. These services should probably make sure that all the child porn and other illegal stuff is more hidden.

Even though I believe in neutrality (regular porn shouldn't take forced precedence over child porn) it might be a smart move that would help keep these services legal.

The OMAP4 has a whole bunch of shit on the die including a graphics accelerator, multimedia decoder (capable of 1080p), an image processor, and two Arm Cortex-A9s runing at 720mhz or 1Ghz each, depending on the model.

http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12842&contentId=53247

Something like this seems like it could run a netbook fairly well. The touchbook is using an OMAP3 chip already and supposedly it's fairly fast because everything is optimized for it.

This is precisely how the law is supposed to be.

The United States constitution is specifically designed to give the defendant an edge in court. The founding fathers believed that it's better to let a guilty man run free than let an innocent man be found guilty.

Hence all the principles about innocent until proven guilty etc. This is a very important cornerstone of our country and sadly it seems a lot of people don't understand this. A lot of people would rather lock up almost anyone who gets put on trial just to make sure that all the guilty are in fact found guilty. The problem of course is that you end up locking up more innocent people than you do guilty people.

FYI in English we usually say "western" (eg westerner) not occidental but your english is very good. I don't know if that word is used in Britain but very few Americans would understand that term.

Well that's actually good news. Thanks for the info. Their support was greater in 2006 and was quite strong, hence wikipedia's citation verifying this claim. It's easy to see how the situation could change so quickly, what with the palestinian situation getting worse. However 76 / 132 parliament seats I would consider a majority, not a "slim plurality".

You have to be careful with the polls as well. It's hard to collect data from this region; if they poll only educated palestinians you're going to have much more support for Fatah. Younger, more radical, and worse off Palestinians tend to support Hamas; and not just politically (militarily as well).

There was a poll showing 80% support for Hamas, or "the current regime", probably around 2006. It might even be the link I provided earlier.

There is a citation on wikipedia which might be a dead link now.
http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2006/01/31/66888

Hamas won majority election in 2006 before any major conflicts with Fatah.

I do not support Hamas but the reason Hamas is so popular among Palestinians -- and don't kind yourself they are -- is because of their social programs. Hamas has done more for the Palestinian people than any other political entity in the region; building schools, hospitals, and smuggling food for starving Palestinian families (and making it clear that Hamas is responsible for these improvements, even putting their name on schools / hospitals that they build). They are not supported because of their stance wit Israel, calling for Israel's destruction. They are supported because of what they have done at home. Hamas has done a very good job gaining support in the region. Sadly this is probably at a cost to the Palestinian people because Hamas is not friendly internationally.

For more information please read,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah-Hamas_conflict
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas

IIRC hamas has an 80% approval rating. They were, in fact, democratically elected by the Palestinian people.

It seems like the people who side with Israel tend to have the least knowledge about the situation.

Well of course there are going to be different strategies. The Palestinians don't have anything. They're being suppressed by Israel who is systematically cutting off all food, water, and medicine into the region with a huge military funded by the US.

Israel bombs the hell out of them and the Palestinians shoot a few rockets back and deface a couple websites.

It's interesting how the media treats this as well. "Israel retaliates against terrorist rocket attacks." We have situation where an entire group of people is being oppressed by one of the most well-funded militaries on the planet, can barely get their hands on a few rockets to defend themselves, or food to feed themselves, and when Israel breaks the cease-fire agreement the US media is sympathetic to Israel.

That's basically what I meant. The next best thing is a multi-gpu design which is less efficient as far as data access and communication is concerned. But when you reach a limit as to how fast you can make your gpus run there's really no other way to go.

Another example of the law of diminishing marginal return.

The OP isn't talking about the amount of the amount of vram.

When you have two separate GPUs sometimes they work very efficiently together and you get a really high spike in framerate and other times resources aren't allocated efficiently and you get short periods where framerate is very low. When you take the average framerate over a second or so you end up with a fairly stable fps reading because these ups and downs usually average out.

However if you're actually playing the game and it's taxing your video card you'll notice "microstuttering" in the graphics or gameplay because you're not getting a stable framerate, your framerate is actually dropping low enough to cause short periods of lag several times a second.

Part of the problem with dual GPUs is that sense they don't share the same pool of vram the actual amount of usable vram is cut almost to half. Multi-core GPUs, if they scaled entirely, would probably perform better than dual-GPU cards because they would be able to share the same vram. The reason I think you don't see dual-core GPUs (there have been a couple in the past) is that the actual core on a GPU is very large and hard to shrink. They have all those shader and floating point units so it's probably easier, and definitely more efficient, to just fill up as many arithmetic units on a single GPU as possible then to make two cores each having half (or less) total number of arithmetic units.

I program x86 assembly both 32 bit and 64 bit. I can tell you that most instructions as compiled by gcc/g++ are 32 bit. Whenever gcc/g++ uses 64 bit operations it is most of the time a speed improvement, excluding operations on the stack pointer. The extra registers are used when applicable (as in the 32 bit parts of the 64 bit registers %r8-%r15, eg %r8d-%r15d). Stack references have to be 64 bit but you can use 32, 16, and 8 bit operations on the actual data. Only when performing actions on the stack pointer directly do you use 64 bit operations. For example subq $8, %rsp subtracts 8 from the stack pointer, movl %eax, (%rsp) moves the value of %eax to the data region pointed by %rsp.

Where you really see speed improvements are where your program uses floats, doubles, or longs. All int variables / operations in your program use 32bit registers. Float is used a lot by opengl so there is definitely a benefit for using 64 bit over 32 bit when it comes to things like games.

So it's not as "one sided" as you're trying to make it out to be. Eg the program might be larger because opcodes for 64bit instructions are bigger but whenever gcc/g++ is using these registers it's most likely going to result in a speed improvement (minus stack operations).

Eg,

subq %rax,%rax: 48 29 c0 (64 bit operation, 3 bytes on HD)
subl %eax,%eax: 29 c0 (32 bit operation, 2 bytes on HD)


movq $0xffffffff,%rax: 48 b8 ff ff ff ff 00 00 00 00 (64bit, 10 bytes)
movl $0xffffffff,%eax: b8 ff ff ff ff (32 bit operation, 5 bytes)

Of course in the second example the two instruction do exactly the same thing. %rax and %eax look exactly the same afterwords (%rax: $0x00000000ffffffff, %eax: $0xffffffff). So in this case the compiler would automatically use the 32 bit operation. But if you were dealing with longs for example and were moving $0xffffffffffffffff into %rax it would use the 64 operation, and this would of course be a performance boost.