RomP

Complex patterns produced by simple set of rules? DNA->proteins->cells->organisms->societies? The only difference in my view is that DNA happens in 3-dimensional space and uses 4 "colors" instead of 2.

One thing worth adding to the list: Iowa caucuses and the fact that the state produces 19% of total corn produced in the country. Check [?|!]

This is something I have hard time understanding. Most of the stars are having star flares most of the time. If they're like our Sol, they have periods of high and low flares activity, but within the periods the pattern is random (i.e. noise). Presumably, the change in luminosity caused by a random flare is bigger than by a planet transit (remember transit of Venus?). So how are they filtering the noise out?

neverthelss the instruction set and especially encoding of the newer instructions is a nightmare.

I wonder what ARM has to say about 64-bit computing, though

lower power per instruction is the number one advantage here. Lowering power consumption means not only lower power/cooling bills, it also means better scalability in frequency domain, since speed of today's x86/x64 CPUs are limited by the cooling system's capability to evacuate heat (evenly) from the chip. IOW, it means temporal restoration of the MHz race, while starting number-of-cores race.

It won't make its population any less hostile (and armed) when they find out that their beloved leader has been assassinated by the exact people they've learned to hate for as long as they can remember themselves.

IMHO, one way to see how this situation will develop in mid- to long- term perspective is to look at interests of China and, to a lesser degree, Russia. If China wants Taiwan more than it wants to have an argument to bring up during currency negotiations, they'd be inclined to make a deal: control over TW for control over NK, in one form or the other. If the currency negotiations are more valuable to them, they'd be inclined to keep the status quo, within some reasonable limits. There maybe some other interests worth looking at, which I'm missing.

Russia wants an upper hand in European missile shield negotiations. There's also a Russia-Japan situation, where both countries are still in de-jure state of war, and they've been positioning themselves recently to finally sign the peace treaty. It's worth noting that Russia's role in this conflict seems to be smaller than China's.

There's a new perspective is opening up with a new Supreme Leader taking over any time now. He has not seen the war, neither he has seen much of human suffering, and that's a dangerous trait to have while having control over nuclear weapons. To me, this is the scariest part of the puzzle.

There is nothing in Windows which requires fixed endianness. While all known versions of the OS have been shipped on little-endian machines (except XBox 360, albeit running highly modified version of NT Kernel), there is very little dependency on the endianness for all modules except format parsers and network API. Changing that is a relatively simple undertaking, much simpler than building a new version of kernel, for XBox, for example