First replicating creature spawned in life simulator - physics-math - 16 June 2010 - New Scientist

First replicating creature spawned in life simulator - physics-math - 16 June 2010 - New Scientist: "See Gemini in action
You can run Gemini on your own computer: just follow these simple instructions.
First, install Golly, a Game of Life simulator, by downloading and unzipping this folder from SourceForge. This will give you a folder called golly-2.1-win, which contains a number of sub-folders.
Next, get a copy of Gemini by downloading and unzipping this document from Google Docs. Save the resulting file, which is called gemini.rle, inside the golly-2.1-win/Patterns"

My Way News - BP comment about 'small people' causes anger

My Way News - BP comment about 'small people' causes anger: "We care about the small people.'"

Libertarian - Wikiality, the Truthiness Encyclopedia

Libertarian - Wikiality, the Truthiness Encyclopedia
Libertarian = Republican - Jesus + pot + hot sexy gun-toting naked chicks.

infite loops

http://www-user.slac.stanford.edu/jimstan/Infinity.htm
Utilizing Infinite Loops

to Compute an Approximate Value of

Infinity

Jim Stanfield, co-founder, The Institute for Further Research

People criticize Al Gore for claiming to have invented the ‘Information Superhighway’ but we do owe him a debt of gratitude for inventing one of the most important concepts in all of computing, the Algorithm. But again, I digress.

Jesus statue fire damages estimated at $700,000

Jesus statue fire damages estimated at $700,000
“I can’t believe Jesus was struck,” said his brother, who noted the giant Hustler Hollywood sign for the adult store across the street was untouched.

MeeGo Needs Intel Investment To Succeed -- Operating Systems -- InformationWeek

MeeGo Needs Intel Investment To Succeed -- Operating Systems -- InformationWeek: 'From the perspective of most third-party developers, MeeGo remains an unknown and unproven quantity that is entering an already highly competitive and crowded landscape,' Ovum analyst Tony Cripps said in a report released Wednesday."

Distributive Justice (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Distributive Justice (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Distributive justice is not an area where we can say an idea is good in theory but not in practice. If it is not good in practice, then it is not good in theory either.

Modern History Sourcebook: The 25 Points

Modern History Sourcebook: The 25 Points

The 25 Points 1920:
An Early Nazi Program

Gov. Brewer would no doubt approve...

4. Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently no Jew can be a member of the race.

5. Whoever has no citizenship is to be able to live in Germany only as a guest, and must be under the authority of legislation for foreigners.

6. The right to determine matters concerning administration and law belongs only to the citizen. Therefore we demand that every public office, of any sort whatsoever, whether in the Reich, the county or municipality, be filled only by citizens. We combat the corrupting parliamentary economy, office-holding only according to party inclinations without consideration of character or abilities.

7. We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens. If it is impossible to sustain the total population of the State, then the members of foreign nations (non-citizens) are to be expelled from the Reich.

Brewer tells conflicting stories about dad's war effort

Brewer tells conflicting stories about dad's war effort

Gov. Jan Brewer said in a recent interview that her father died fighting Nazis in Germany. In fact, the death of Wilford Drinkwine came 10 years after World War II had ended

Patriotism, Baseball, And An Atheist

Patriotism, Baseball, And An Atheist

Once again the conversation changed to current day when I asked how many celebrities we could name who enlisted for the current wars. Sadly, only one name could be answered by all in the room. Pat Tillman. Tillman turned down a $3.6 million contract with the Cardinals to enlist in the Army. That patriotism is so rare. He offered and eventually gave his life for his country.

Why is Pat Tillman so amazing? He was an atheist. For those of you who do not comprehend what is so special about that, he offered and gave his life, the only life that he believed he would ever have, to defend our country.

Linux: Linus On The Extensible Firmware Interface | KernelTrap

Linux: Linus On The Extensible Firmware Interface KernelTrap: "And don't get me wrong - the problem
with EFI is that it actually superficially looks much better than the
BIOS, but in practice it ends up being one of those things where it has
few real advantages, and often just a lot of extra complexity because of
the 'new and improved' interfaces that were largely defined by a
committee.

I think a lot of the 'new standards' tend to be that way. Trying to solve
a lot of problems and allow everybody to add their own features, instead
of just saying that it's better to just standardize the hardware.

For example, instead of ACPI, we could just have had standardized hardware
(and a few tables to define things like numbers of CPU's etc). It would
have been simpler for everybody. But no, people seem to think that it's
somehow 'better' to have wild and crazy hardware, and then have a really
complicated way of describing it - and driving it - dynamically."

Intel Kills Larrabee GPU, Will Not Bring a Discrete Graphics Product to Market - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

Intel Kills Larrabee GPU, Will Not Bring a Discrete Graphics Product to Market - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News: "Intel wasn’t able to make Larrabee performance competitive in DirectX and OpenGL applications, so we won’t be getting a discrete GPU based on Larrabee anytime soon. Instead, Intel will be dedicating its resources to improving its integrated graphics. We should see a nearly 2x improvement in Intel integrated graphics performance with Sandy Bridge, and greater than 2x improvement once more with Ivy Bridge in 2012."

Texas board approves social studies standards that perceived liberal bias

Texas board approves social studies standards that perceived liberal bias
The new standards say that the McCarthyism of the 1950s was later vindicated -- something most historians deny -- draw an equivalency between Jefferson Davis's and Abraham Lincoln's inaugural addresses, say that international institutions such as the United Nations imperil American sovereignty, and include a long list of Confederate officials about whom students must learn.

Q&A: Illegal Immigrants and the U.S. Economy : NPR

Q&A: Illegal Immigrants and the U.S. Economy : NPR

There are places in the United States where illegal immigration has big effects (both positive and negative). But economists generally believe that when averaged over the whole economy, the effect is a small net positive. Harvard's George Borjas says the average American's wealth is increased by less than 1 percent because of illegal immigration.

The economic impact of illegal immigration is far smaller than other trends in the economy, such as the increasing use of automation in manufacturing or the growth in global trade. Those two factors have a much bigger impact on wages, prices and the health of the U.S. economy.

Book of Odds

Book of Odds
your odds of dating a supermodel would be somewhere around one in 178,100. That’s not so good.

RAMMap

RAMMap: "Have you ever wondered exactly how Windows is assigning physical memory, how much file data is cached in RAM, or how much RAM is used by the kernel and device drivers? RAMMap makes answering those questions easy. RAMMap is an advanced physical memory usage analysis utility for Windows Vista and higher."

Trusted Computing for Mac OS X

Trusted Computing for Mac OS X
At the time of this writing (October 2006), the newest Apple computer models, such as the MacPro and possibly the revised MacBook Pro and the revised iMac, do not contain an onboard Infineon TPM. Apple could bring the TPM back, perhaps, if there were enough interest (after all, it is increasingly common to find TPMs in current notebook computers), but that's another story.

Creativity linked to mental health - Startpage - Karolinska Institutet

Creativity linked to mental health - Startpage - Karolinska Institutet
"Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box," says Dr Ullén about his new findings.

InfoQ: Microsoft’s Experiments with Software Transactional Memory Have Ended

InfoQ: Microsoft’s Experiments with Software Transactional Memory Have Ended
I eventually shifted focus to enforcing coarse-grained isolation through message-passing, and fine-grained isolation through type system support a la Haskell’s state monad.
...
I took this path not because I thought TM had no place in the concurrency ecosystem. But rather because I believed it did have a place, but that several steps would be needed before getting there.

Analysis: Why SAP Is Buying Sybase for $5.8B

Analysis: Why SAP Is Buying Sybase for $5.8B: "“With Sybase Unwired, the mobile apps can be written once and deployed on multiple mobile platforms” and “gives SAP the opportunity to develop new types of business applications for mobile devices.”
Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone points out “the fusion of cloud computing, application mobility and social media to transform the enterprise mobility space. This deal now gives SAP 2 out 3 in a single purchase.”"