"if Bush was an emperor, and held power for a few generations, it isn't far fetched to see a dark age of bio research."

The total federal research and development budget increased under Bush. The objection that some people have is his moratorium on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

This is a small part of all bio research that is morally contentious. I doubt your assertion of seeing a "dark age of bio research" is warranted.

I do admit a great bias in favor of stem cell research and consider it the new frontier. But "morally contentious" is highly subjective, whereas the applicability of bio research is not. That is also to say that you have more wiggle room in interpreting what is contentious research, whereas research results have no wiggle room (well, there is for bio, but there is always the option of disproving something).

Which means that it is easy to muddle the issues by drawing hazy borders around themes that vary from person to person, which is likely a source of impediment for bio research. Therefore, it isn't far fetched, at all. Funding is certainly good, but restricting what areas can be done, or even having a say in it, when it comes to pure research, is not helpful.

But, I am not very educated about these policies and you do make a good point. This is just a mostly personal interpretation of it, which I believe has a good likelihood :)

nVidia is a fabless semiconductor company that is entering patent-mine field.

Hmmm. I don't think the problem is just with design. The problem probably lays with fabrication.

Intel is large enough to both upgrade their fabs and CPU design alternate years. Fabs are becoming more capital intensive to build each year. Furthermore, Intel can afford to make mistakes. This is the reason why AMD is being killed - its 45nm process was way behind Intel's. AMD is now being split up into a foundry and CPU design company (but the future is bleak).

nVidia will never be a serious competitor – it is a fabless semiconductor company (its stuff gets manufactured by TSMC).

The looming Intel monopoly will be worse than Microsofts monopoly. IMHO the only hope for competition is for for companies such as Via to manufacture low-end CPUs at foundries.

Maybe. I think it may work in computer graphics applications. Most calculation is done for only a single frame and then discarded.

If it were a little off there would not really be any bad effect.

The libavcodec has an option that does exactly that. It skips steps in the filter loop that only affect the single frame. It makes things quite a bit faster.

Mandela founded the ANC's armed wing (Umkhonto we Sizwe). This armed wing was responsible for its fair share of atrocities such as:

- Planting landmines that killed people indiscriminately in rural areas

- Torture and executions esp. in foreign camps

- Burning people that worked with the apartheid government alive (necklacing). Mandela's wife killed a 14 year old boy without spending a day in jail (Stompie Sipei)

- Church Street bombing and Magoo's bar bombing (which killed civilians). Bombing of an Amamzimtoti shopping center (which killed two children and a woman).

- Factional fighting with the IFP in the late 80ies and early 90ies (which killed more than 15,000 people).

What happened in South Africa was amazing - but it was not just Mandela that made a great leap. White people gave up all power that they had - military, political, just on the basis of a constitution. This knowing full well that there were no other successful democratic African country.

This brings this post to a familiar ground - we do not want to be discussing politics on YCNews. So if you want to use a person as a hero, use Archbishop Desmond Tutu who advocated for non-violence from the start.

Yes, Mandela is a great example of someone who was able to change his ways from hate and violence to understanding and compassion. If he can do it, I guess there is hope for online flamers and trolls ;)

The saying goes: one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. I made this account especially because I knew I will be regarded as a “troll” by some.

The real world is unfortunately not entirely black and white. I never said that what Mandela fought for was wrong - I said that the way it was done was wrong. Unfortunately most people spend time on the Apartheid era's misdeeds but ignore that of the liberation movement.

I said he should use Desmond Tutu as a fine example. Tutu fought for the same thing as Mandala (equal rights) but he did it in a non-violent way. He denounced violence and terrorism on both sides (he even intervened once risking his own life to prevent a crowd from necklacing a person).

You will also notice above that I recommended moving off from the politics topic because it is unnecessarily divisive and not really the focus point of YCNews.

EDIT: Why I also think that Tutu makes an excellent example is that his actions (such as the non-violence he promotes) stems from his religious identity. This is clearly the case in which a person's identity is a good attribute.

Great - then use Tutu for the example. Just be careful that you don't go through life missing the point in discussions by getting caught up nit-picking the examples people use.