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29 Feb 2012 10:32

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World: U.S. scores diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea

  • the deal The U.S. got North Korea to agree to curb its nuclear testing and enrichment processes and allow outside investigators to monitor its main reactor, which is a fairly major breakthrough for the countries.
  • the perk In exchange, North Korea will get 240,000 metric tons of food aid. While the U.S. has long considered offering aid for purely humanitarian reasons, North Korea insisted that it be tied to this deal. source
  • » Significant, if “limited”: This result came after a set of talks last week that initially did not seem to go well, but later proved be palatable for the North Koreans. The two countries previously were close to some sort of deal before Kim Jong-il’s death, but the latest development seems to have gone over. “The United States still has profound concerns regarding North Korean behavior across a wide range of areas,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, “but today’s announcement reflects important, if limited, progress in addressing some of these.”

28 Dec 2010 22:54

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Tech: Nerds devise crazy way to make computers insanely fast

  • [Field Programmable Gate Arrays] are not used within standard computers because they are fairly difficult to program but their processing power is huge while their energy consumption is very small because they are so much quicker – so they are also a greener option.
  • University of Glagsow researcher Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede • On the amazing technological discovery he and a team have discovered – a method of creating computer chips that runs 20 times faster than modern computers, and can fit 1,000 cores (rather than one or two) on a single processor. Basically if this actually gets on a real consumer-purchasable computer in the next few years, Moore’s Law will be matched – and then some. The programming issue is kind of a big deal – if they can figure out a way to make these mega-processors convenient to program, it could be a huge deal and a major computing breakthrough. source