Daniel Plainview: the most badass misanthropist _EVER_ ;-) I bask in that movie's awesomeness and musical citations of Arvo Paert. So good.

Is Prenzlauerberg completely gentrified yet or are there still pockets of retro-Ostalgie ripe for hipster exploitation? ;-P

Pooklord (#22) -- I do agree that sometimes the issue is simply that of rational disagreement over open issues. However, it appears (though I haven't read it) that the book challenges the more fundamental question of why a large segment of the population seems systematically to reject the Enlightenment program.

Reminds me a bit of Neal Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

which essentially argues that late 20th century Americans are post-rational, as television by its very nature excludes rational discourse. (That doesn't mean TV is necessarily bad, though you certainly get that suggestion from the book.)

There is some question whether this is still true, given the internet, though I imagine "the internet" bifurcates into rational and irrational segments (e.g., political debate forums vs. DIY YouTube videos posted by drunken frat boys).

Uh, maybe the "2 Watt" thing (i.e., extremely low power consumption for a desktop 'puter) is just as important as the "thin client" thing? though I do agree that this genre will be going away soon.

What is it with you BoingBoing folks trying to replace Slashdot? Give me more steampunk Pac-Man unicorn-chaser graffiti ;-P

Dang, I'm supposed to help fix #2...

When the NVIDIA G80 came out, our scientific computing research group had to get an expensive gaming rig just to have a big enough case and power supply to handle it. But nowadays the NVIDIA boards seem to be more reasonably sized, from what I've heard.

The fellow who develops on that machine also claims to use it off-hours for "research on human-computer interaction in networked graphics-intensive consumer applications," or so he says ;-)

btw not to be elitist, but shouldn't this sort of thing go on /. instead of here? The steampunk ironic-retro-pop-art post-singularity applications are only indirect in this case ;-)

How come Apple wants an NVIDIA killer, given that Apple's using their GPUs? CUDA is pretty easy to use if you know C, but it takes a lot of effort to get really kick-butt performance with it. (It's easy to write slow CUDA, alas...) Maybe Apple has solved some of those problems but they need a new language design to accomplish it? Or does Apple not want to be tied to NVIDIA's whims?

One of my close friends is a (liberal, consciously postmodern, highly tech-friendly) Mennonite. The general organizing principle of their denomination that I got from him is full democracy: no ordained clergy or leaders of worship.

My father (who lives in western Illinois) would occasionally trade horses with Amish folks. He's met a few who speak old dialects of German that they preserved from their homeland.

Awesome reporting -- definitely the right way to convey hype at these exoscale ueberhypish levels ;-)

Hey Cory -- don't diss alchemy, man. Alchemists were the hackers of the Renaissance. And they never went away...

#44: last I heard, the DL doesn't even think 10% of those souls are worthy of heaven. Even Pius IX didn't name a fraction, though he was equally annoyed at the loss of his secular power.

Good for the DL to discourage fruitless political agitation -- he should continue along this route. I doubt that he's actually behind all of this business. This has rather the smell of typical hooliganism about it -- it starts with honest and peaceful protesters, then all the bad and hateful people come out of the woodwork and work their evil deeds, and then finally the gov't shows up and beats heads of the unfortunate peaceful protesters who didn't get away in time.

#36: from what I've heard, the Lamas don't even get off their couches when you go to do business with them. They don't consider you worthy enough of their time for them even to sit up in your presence.

#29: Not stirring up Tibetans to call for independence. I don't think he's some kind of violent mastermind, but if he's all for peace and love, shouldn't he discourage "his people" from fruitless political agitation and focus on their souls?

The PRC is less likely to let go of Tibet than it is Taiwan, since Tibet has more strategic value and unexploited natural resources. So constantly protesting and getting stomped down by PRC cops and troops isn't going to do Tibetans any good -- whereas the huge amount of food aid (remember that you can't grow much of anything in Tibet because of the altitude -- the federal gov't send them food aid even during the famine caused by Mao's so-called Great Leap Forward), subsidized housing (which only ethnic Tibetans can get) and college education from the PRC central gov't (there are special quotas for minority ethnic groups) actually helps Tibetans get educated and participate in the global marketplace.

Would you rather than they stay a nice quaint impoverished ethnic zoo at which fancy white tourists can gawk?

Penn and Teller's "Bullsh*t" episode on the Dalai Lama was quite informative. Despite their rather high bias towards debunking, it's a good summary of why you shouldn't trust the DL any more than you should trust the PRC gov't.

While the PRC certainly has its share of evil deeds in Tibet and
elsewhere, don't forget that most of the reports coming out (from
private citizens in Lhasa) spoke of _Tibetans_ beating up ethnic Han
and Hui civilians, even children, and destroying their shops and
places of worship.

I will balance that to say that the Han visitors in Lhasa with whom
I've spoken received nothing but friendly welcomes from the locals.
This ethnic violence is clearly the work of a small minority. It's a
shame that the whole country will suffer for it.

For Tibetans to stand up for the Dalai Lama is like Italians standing
up for Pope Pius IX. He's too busy making book deals and sipping tea
with starry-eyed Hollywood celebrities to have anything meaningful to
say about the plight of "his people."

I'll confirm what Kongjie said -- giving children a silly, low-sounding nickname was pretty common practice as a way to avoid attention from the evil spirits. This is illustrated in a cute scene early on in the old Hollywood movie "The Good Earth," an adaptation of Pearl Buck's novel.

My wife is a native Beijinger and has a big complaint about this restaurant. It used to be really good and not too expensive -- it was good hearty food for working people. Recently, though, it got bought out by a big company, and they raised the prices 5x or more: e.g., a bowl of simple congee that used to cost 1 RMB is now 5. (Imagine a bowl of oatmeal for 5-8 USD and you'll get the idea.) It made her folks so mad that they refuse to eat there anymore, even though the steamed buns are so yummy that my wife wants to go back every time she visits home. The greedy, stupid parent company is driving the restaurant into the ground -- despite being on an incredibly busy, touristy street, it was mainly empty when we visited this winter. (The fullness of a restaurant in China is a reliable indicator of its yumminess/cost ratio.)

So, people of China, unite and revolt against your steamed-bun-monopolizing overlords! ;-)

awww shoot, I knew someone would beat me to it ;-)

Thunderbird actually concatenates e-mails in the same folder into a single (text) file. (Try poking around inside your mail folder and viewing the files.) That makes each folder a lot like a cassette tape: if you want to remove an e-mail, you have to read in the whole file (starting from the e-mail's position) and write it out again with the e-mail's spot removed. Presumably this is what "compacting" does. "Deleting an e-mail" without compacting would just mark the e-mail as deleted, or perhaps overwrite that chunk of the file with zeros or something.

Presumably this classic "mbox" format (concatenated e-mails into a single file) was designed to solve three problems:

1. When you get new e-mail, how does the e-mail client avoid giving it a filename that takes an existing e-mail's filename? (Imagine you get as many e-mails as Cory.)

2. Some file systems can't have more than a certain number of files (in a directory? on a partition of a disk?).

3. If you have one file per e-mail, you still need to read all the files in order to build an index, sort them by date received, etc.

Fluxx is awesome -- a great party game for nerds, with just the right balance of structure and anarchy.