It sure is meaningless if you cannot understand the mathematics behind it. What the study reveals are the structure of the attacks. It surely isn't random, but still not well organized at all. That means, instead of one leader planning the attacks, it was a result of several independent group doing independent attacks. The size of each independent group are discovered to depend on the actions taken by the US occupying forces.It reveals that with a strategically placed action by US military, the insurgents can be eliminated. They also discovered alpha = 2.5 as the stable value. So all the military needs to do is to force the value alpha either to go up or down.

Yes, your spending also follow a mathematical pattern, so give up on the comics books and games and instead study some non-linear physics for a change.

Honestly, I don't think a lot of money are used at all. Power law computations are mostly cheap on resources, typical pc will do. Add in a web server, web crawler and some college kid as their assistants. Most of these stuff are already available to the researcher. The largest source of money drain on this type of research are for hiring assistants and software. Compared to the insights it produce, the money spent is well justified. I'll put at most $100k- $200k for 5 year research as initial spending (includes travelling for conferences and hotels). After all the infrastructure is available, cost may drop to mere $30k for 5 years. (p.s this estimate are fairly made redundant, most project of this nature cost much less)

But that would beat the whole purpose of press freedom. If they have a bar to regulate reporters, it would be easy for the business and government to influence it. Lawyers and doctors are not licensed to ascertain their qualifications but to avoid customers getting duped by fraudsters and quacks. The qualification stuff came afterward when they got all smug and everything.

Everyone knows INT is for mana and WIS is for the spell strength. However the majority surely prefers high STR and DXT because it's way easier. Who needs intelligence if you can have power. Ask Hitler and Stalin, those guys sure knows that a mix of brute force and desire for a win is the ultimate recipe for success.

Hitler died (quit the game) because the allies won't play fair and keep calling names (propaganda) and also because he chose the wrong option early on the game (kill the jews or not) thus triggering a whole flag of minus stats. His guild are also terribly ineffective: the japanese live in different time-zones and speak different languages, which also means almost impossible co-op and all the Italians did are botting the whole time.

Maybe youtube will support the gpl implementation of H.264 (mkv) along with the mpeg-4 when they implement html5.

Install Kubuntu for KDE theme. Changing the colors are even easier. Unlike windows, changing the theme is not just a matter of changing mere aethetics, you basicly change the interactions. Simply changing theme (XP style) doesn't even require a sweat either in gnome or kde, and you're basicly designing your own personal theme. You can use both apps from kde and gnome too. I bet the AC would be rather stuck with his typewriter and mechanical calculator if he had the choice.

Common folks always believed linux dudes to be some sort of magician who can do all those fancy stuff they heard about. I believe his roommate is one of them and with a little exageration by the cop, suddenly the linux guy becomes a notorious hacker. The cop also has issues with him previously and may have taken the roomamte testament out of context.

His roomate mentions that he has seen the linux guy tamper with grades. How hard is it to check for proof of grade tampering etc. Most exams still use paper that you can always recheck. No need for seizing equipments. Other than that, I don't think sending a single email regardless of content is worth a warrant. So you can call us slashdotters stupid all you want. We however prefer to be sceptical of the law enforcement officer whom is clearly abusing his power.

The Americans can modify the crappy earth all they want. The chinese and soviets however are aiming for space. But of course not until they waste the earth even futher with their space industries.

In my country, everyone is using CFL. My grandma only pays the mandatory minimum bill (the only electricity she's using is the CFL at night) which is about USD$2 per month(after currency conversion). Never heard a complain about it.

It last very long (~5 years) and the only CFL I ever use is the cheapest one. Never used any fancy shaped CFL other than the classic cylinder shaped CFL. A single CFL can easily replace 2 or more incandescents of the same brightness. Plus we love the glorious white light, dimming it out is such a waste of money. It's bright enough for reading that it seems wasteful to buy a reading lamp. If it does die out, replacing the starter or bulb usually does the trick. I really don't care about the advertised lifetime. Shopping for a light bulb ONCE EVERY FEW YEARS and diy replacements is quite fun.

I assume that you are ignorant of the fact that climatology or meteorology in general is an interdisciplinary science. Most climatologist are also physicist or mathematicians. Some are geologist, chemist or biologist depending on what the subject is. If it involves modelling or statistics that person is likely to be either be a physicist or mathematicians like the all powerful deity of global climate change - Hansen.

In the case of physics and mathematics I would seriously doubt that Dyson are incompetent in either discipline.

To summarize your point:

Evil destroys itself and so does environmentalism.

I dunno about microsoft case but speeding is breaking the law and is a crime although not a serious one. In some country, they could put you to jail for that. Just like tax evasion which normally wouldn't serve you jail time but sometime it does. The same for minor offenses such as littering for example. Breaking the law is a crime dude.

The DVD is not even on sale and the store are selling pirated version of even worse quality. No paypal support either for the whole country. Unlike westereners, only the rich folks have credit cards.

What harm?? The society sets the standards for morality and those *everyone* is the society I live in.

Duhh... read the post... Notice how engineers overcome noise??? yup... by INCREASING VOLTAGE. If you have any experience with electronics at all, you will agree with me that the only reason is to increase SNR (Signal noise ratio). In this context, noise refers to white noise.

Even if you want to worship the guy, a little common sense and deductions doesn't hurt. That's how scientific process works. The guy (in the story) is also at fault for not publishing it first before making a claim. But maybe you're a lawyer or from the sales department. So, the whole peer review rant might not make sense to you.

If you remember binary, it's like this

10101=(1*2^0)+(0*2^1)+(1*2^2)+(0*2^3)+(1*2^4)

If noise are not controlled in the processor, each bit will be induced to change although the error could be compounded on the bits of least significant digits. So you might get 10111 or 10100 or some other combination for the last two bits. This will result in error of around +-3.

Accuracy is more important in calculating the result of bit operators where errors are being magnified. Another important field is bit logic, where a simple error could be disastrous.

This will result in reduced calculation to mitigate error propagation. Thus complex calculation can never be done. For music and video, we could be probably use less than 1 byte for each represented number and the calculations are quite direct (not much use of bit logic and very little error propagation). Another problem that might occur is that you can never do an exact loop ever again which is also a no problem for music. But unlike mp3 where the error are quite controlled, I bet a music player using this noisy processor will produce some of the shittiest music you ever heard and you have to listen to it raw (decompression introduce errors). This will incur extra storage space.

It will sound even worse when you go to a hotter climate. But it might be acceptable for ringtones I think. At it's best, it might sound like your analog radio. Most old timers think it was good enough. But on a plus side, DRM cannot be implemented on such device.