Hmm…

Been wondering for a month if I should brag about this…um, being a nerd/geek/dork is cool these days, right?

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The machines are slowly taking over

Right now there’s a man vs. machine chess match between world champion (the real world champion) Vladimir Kramnik and Fritz 10. It well-established at this point that computers can play better chess than humans, and I do not think that any competition pitting people against computers has been won by the people in the past [...]

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Great Firewall of Canada?

Today a number of large Canadian ISPs announced that they are partnering with Project Cleanfeed, meaning they will now actively block access to web sites that (supposedly) contain child pornography. This is accomplished using an actual list of sites that have been investigated by cybertip.ca and found to contain such content.
This is a bad idea, [...]

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Why Richard Dawkins Is Hostile Toward Religion

Dawkins says that he hates what he calls fundamentalist religion because he says it’s “hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless eager minds.”
Quote: ‘Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, “sensible” religion may not be doing that. But it is making the [...]

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Thoughts on the Microsoft-Novell deal

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft and Novell signed a patent cross-licencing deal that would indemnify Novell customers against patent lawsuits. Ars Technica speculates that the deal is really just about provinding virtualization support for their customers who also use Linux for some purposes and that it’s not clear that it’s quite detrimental to Linux [...]

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A few interesting things:

Techdirt has a series of post discussing the economics of scarcity in the context of digital goods. The essential point is that digital goods do not suffer from scarcity, which naturally drives down the cost of the content – something that will (is?) force (forcing?) content providers to recognize a dramatic shift [...]

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I haven’t posted in along time, and the reason is that I’ve been trying to get a production run going for the research on HPCVL (big computing cluster) and it’s always trying to port your code to another machine with a different compiler. So here’s what happened.
Three weeks ago we decided to get a big [...]

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Teach Sex and Evolution or Close, Schools Told

The Quebec ministry of education has told unlicensed Christian evangelical schools that they must teach Darwin’s theory of evolution and sex education or close their doors after an Outaouais school board complained the provincial curriculum wasn’t being followed.
Er…go Quebec education ministry!
read more | digg story

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