Sure, but accepting that reasoning would mean accepting Iran's own definition of whether or not they're breaking the NPT.

True, the danger in Iran isn't millenarianism. It's the fact that the people who are leading the various factions won't have anything to lose once they feel their power (and by extension their very lives) is at stake.

By building a nuclear facility in secret they have broken the treaty. That's what the sanctions are about.

The regime appears to be locked in a power struggle between the 'regular government' (for lack of a better term) and the Revolutionary Guard. Last week's on the media has a good analysis on how Iran has now become a dangerous place even for those who vocally support its policies because of this. Regimes that feel threatened in their existence are generally not known for the rationality of their actions.

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but at best it smells of moral relativism stemming from a laziness to think or to get informed (I'm sure there's a term for that).

I guess they're staying in the NPT so that their facility in Bushehr can be legitimately maintained by Russia. What Russia gains from this isn't very clear to me, though.

Iran is a ratified signatory to the Nuclear Non-Profileration Treaty, so: they certainly don't have the right to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear facilities except with IAEA oversight. Iran's nuclear activity is pretty clearly in contravention of this (they built a nuclear facility in secret near Qom, for example), and there are now several UN sanctions in force against Iran because of this.

Is it 'Western hubris' to demand that a country abide by treaties it ratified? Especially a treaty on a matter as important as nuclear armament...

The reason the West is so hostile to the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that the only peaceful doctrine nuclear weapons allow, MAD, assumes rational actors on all sides. In Iran that rationality might well be subservient to theology.

It heats the coolants at the power station. But maybe your power station uses that heat to heat cities, like in some cold places in Europe.

Take a look at /sys/devices/system/cpu: it has information about cpu topology, cpu hot-swap, cache sizes and layout across cores, current power state, etc.

It's all there, in an architecture-independent way in /sys/devices.

They don't have any obligations outside the US whatsoever, of course. Until they want to do business in the biggest economy of the world. Then they have to play by their rules.

I really don't understand how this is so hard to fathom - the biggest market in the world is not something a business like Oracle can ignore, even if they share your misguided xenophobia.

BTW, movie industries sell regionally because they can make more that way, not less.

You don't seem to understand the difference between financial modeling and financial transactions.

Apparently your dumb ignorant ass missed the part where square roots of dollar amounts were taken, which clearly points towards some kind of random walk diffusional modeling which has nothing to do with financial transactions and pennies.

If you would have been really clever, you would have noted that what he wanted (complex values for dollars) is mathematically the same as asking for imaginary negative time. The GGP should have been talking about logarithmic dollars to begin with to just avoid this whole issue. It's the only quantity where such quantities make sense.

You're completely right, though, in asserting that distributed computing clients don't need numerical accuracy per se. Getting an estimate of the size of phase space is often more than enough - it's what makes simulation different from single-point energy evaluations, it's exactly what makes CPU time useful for scientific applications.

I'd still advise anybody against working with you, or for you, for the sole reason that the pedantry you're bringing forward in your arguments would seem to make you a very poor manager of actual people. There's an aggression there that is simply not professional.

If you're running one of the most popular distributed computing clients out there, you're actually running some of my floating point work, mr. Troll.

If you'd looked at GPs post it'd be obvious that he's talking about taking square roots of dollar amounts, which no financial transaction software should ever do, so doubles are perfectly appropriate here, and probably overkill.

Note that he's using doubles. 'Extremely large' here would be bigger than $10^15. If he's in Zimbabwe, or his company has transactions two orders of magnitude bigger than the GDP of the EU, there may be a few dollars lost in rounding. But anything less than that should be safe.

Hardly. Considering SCO still owes Novell, and that this ruling only overturns a summary judgement, doesn't make Novell's copyright claim much weaker.

This case is not about end-users, but about whether SCO even has standing to begin to sue Linux end-users. Which it doesn't (the nature of their copyright deal with Novell was pretty clear, but apparently not enough for a summary judgement).

In the very unlikely event that SCO wins this case, big end-users like IBM may again have to begin to worry about defending against SCO's bizarre claims.

Until then, this case has about as much impact on Linux users as one of the many claims against Apple, Microsoft or Sun have on their respective products' end users.

That's true, and it will make a big difference for some applications, but once the problem set fits in cache (and for many applications it already does) you won't get any faster.

The truly interesting thing, though, is that CPUs will look more like GPUs when there's many of them. My prediction would be that the distinction between cores will get fuzzier and CPUs and GPUs will be integrated into devices that can reconfigure themselves into a massive number of very simple cores (like a GPU), or a smaller number of superscalar traditional CPU cores.

The relative complexity of instruction decoding will get smaller and smaller as the number of transistors increases, so reconfiguring CPUs like that will get cheaper and cheaper.

Multicore CPUs are more about what CPU designers can deliver than about what people can actually use.

Because the limiting factors in single-cpu performance have been memory latency and instruction-level parallelism for the last half decade, there has been very little progress in single-core cpu performance over that period of time.

Both these problems won't find a solution any time soon, so don't expect the cores of your 64-core CPU of 2015 to be much faster than the cores of today.