Slashdot Mirror

I think title of TFA is (aptly, it would seem) entitled "Basics of Intel CPUs. What does the IBM Power series have to do with Intel CPUs?
If you broaden the scope of an article like this to include wildly different architectures like the Power series, you'd have a book instead of an article. Seriously. WTF. If you care so much about the PowerPC, check out Ars Technica's nice collection of related writeups. They're much better than the BigBruin articles...

I think title of TFA is (aptly, it would seem) entitled "Basics of Intel CPUs. What does the IBM Power series have to do with Intel CPUs?
If you broaden the scope of an article like this to include wildly different architectures like the Power series, you'd have a book instead of an article. Seriously. WTF. If you care so much about the PowerPC, check out Ars Technica's nice collection of related writeups. They're much better than the BigBruin articles...

I think title of TFA is (aptly, it would seem) entitled "Basics of Intel CPUs. What does the IBM Power series have to do with Intel CPUs?
If you broaden the scope of an article like this to include wildly different architectures like the Power series, you'd have a book instead of an article. Seriously. WTF. If you care so much about the PowerPC, check out Ars Technica's nice collection of related writeups. They're much better than the BigBruin articles...

I think title of TFA is (aptly, it would seem) entitled "Basics of Intel CPUs. What does the IBM Power series have to do with Intel CPUs?
If you broaden the scope of an article like this to include wildly different architectures like the Power series, you'd have a book instead of an article. Seriously. WTF. If you care so much about the PowerPC, check out Ars Technica's nice collection of related writeups. They're much better than the BigBruin articles...

In the article they state: "The Intel naming system used for the Pentium 4 processors in this class uses letters to represent the frontside bus speeds present. An "A" means 400 MHz, "B" means 533 MHz, and "C" means 800 MHz. So, a Pentium 4 2.4C would offer greater performance than a 2.4B or a 2.4A, despite them all having the same 2.4 GHz clock speed."

But this is wrong.

Original Pentium 4 CPUs used the Willamette core and ranged in speed from 1.3Ghz to 2Ghz in 100Mhz increments. They were built on a 0.18 micron process, had 256K L2, used a 400Mhz FSB, and came in Socket 423 and Socket 478 packages.

Second generation Pentium 4 CPUs use the Northwood core, built on a 0.13 micron process. They range in speed from 1.6Ghz to 2.8Ghz and come in 400Mhz and 533Mhz FSB versions. They have 512K L2 and come in Socket 478 packaging. Any speed where a Northwood and Willamette overlapped (like 1.6Ghz, 1.8Ghz and 2.0Ghz), the Northwood receives an A suffix. Any speed where both a 400Mhz FSB and 533Mhz FSB CPU overlaps, the 533Mhz FSB CPU gets a B suffix (2.4Ghz CPUs come in 2.4 and 2.4B flavors). The final

The second and a half generation P4 use the Northwood core, but enabled HyperThreading. They range in speed from 2.4Ghz to 3.4Ghz. There is but a single P4 CPU with a 533Mhz FSB that has HyperThreading - the 3.06Ghz. The rest are 800Mhz FSB CPUs. They still have 512K L2 and come in Socket 478 packaging. Based on the latest datasheets, all 800Mhz FSB P4s received a C suffix.

The third generation P4 uses the Prescott core, built on a 0.09 micron process. They have 1MB L2, still use Socket 478, have 533Mhz or 800Mhz FSBs, and use an E suffix to denote their core type when overlapping with 800Mhz FSB parts from the Northwood era. However, they use an A suffix to denote their Prescott cores when overlapping with existing 533Mhz FSB parts. For example, a 2.80A is a Prescott core on a 533Mhz FSB with HT disabled. Based on the latest specification update, Prescotts range in speed from 2.4Ghz to 3.4Ghz. HyperThreading is only enabled on the 800Mhz FSB parts.

This covers just the Desktop P4, not the P4 Extreme Edition or the mobile/semi-mobile parts.

I pulled this from here: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s= 50009562&f=77909774&m=913000713631

==>lazn

How about jobs for the existing science PhD's? Yes, the state of basic math and science education is abysmal; yes, the average person has a very poor grasp, but it's not the average person who drives these programs, it's the trained scientists and engineers. And right now there aren't enough jobs for us. (Ars article)

*cough* *cough*

And that's not even much of a big deal.

I've had a Cappucino PC ( http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q2/cappuccino/cap puccino-1.html ) for years and the only difference is that it can be loud at times.

Don't get me wrong, quieter is better.

There are likewise thousands of Lisp projects that will never have this problem, but there are both Java and Lisp projects that have compatibility problems anyway. Note that this assumes that the VM is a correct solution to this problem. I personally don't think it is although it is a very pretty solution with some extremely interesting results that have come out of them (like HP's Dynamo).

There are many C programs that don't have any trouble running on multiple platforms (and that's without getting into platform specific #ifdefs, which are one of the ugliest programming constructs there can be), and they don't have any performance issues, either. C didn't become a form of premature optimization just because Java got invented.

Java has merits, but I don't believe it's going to be here at the finish line. The biggest thing going for it now is the number of pointy-haired bosses that know about its claims. This has pushed development of Java into places that a lot of people didn't believe it'd go (performancewise).

At the end of the day, Java can't compete with projects done like QT. QT is written damned well, is very cross platform, and gets faster and lighter with every release. At a certain point, Java won't be able to get faster and lighter, and that is why it'll die. You can optimize your Java program down to its skivvies, but you're still bound by the VM. When your Java program is as perfect as you can make it, you'll still have the Java VM multiplying the number of function calls by thousands of times. A program without a VM will have that advantage over anything written in Java.

According to this ASP will be integrated into IIS. Exectly what that will mean is not very clear to me, but it is interesting to note that this is the opposite direction of what Apache is doing with PHP, mod_perl , etc.

Perhaps this is like when MS decided to mode the graphics subsystem into the kernel, a way to gain performance at the cost of security and stability.

Kids, when you buy a bootleg DVD, you may be supporting people who might sympathize with a terrorist group that hasn't actually attacked us

----
I already passed the Turing test but failed to prove my humanity to /.

but if history serves, it will be a minor spurt in advancement until Microsoft has re-landed their stranglehold on that segment of the market.... and I'm guessing that won't take very long.

Actually, the reason why IE has 90% of market share is not that Microsoft put it by default in windows. It helped, indeed, but there're proofs that netscape pretty much fucked it up. Basically, Netscape let them win without opposing resistance

Here's an interview from Arstechnica to Scott Collins, a programmer who was working at netscape back in the netscape 4.0 days:


Ars: You mention mistakes made by Microsoft. What do you feel are mistakes that Mozilla has made in the past?

There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a great deal of our market share loss to this mistake that was pretty much based completely on lies from one executive, who has since left the company (and left very rich) and who was an impediment to everything that we did. He was an awful person, and it is completely on him that we missed a release. We had a "Netscape 5" that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead. Every single engineer in the company told management "No, it will be two years at least before we ship something based on Gecko." Management agreed with the engineers in order to get 5.0 out.a

Three months later they came back and said "We've changed our mind, this other executive has convinced us, except now instead of six months, you need to do it in three months." Well, you can't put 50 pounds of [crap] in a ten pound bag, it took two years. And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever, and I put it all on the feet of this one individual, whom I will not name.

After you've read Blatchford's write-up, read this for a reality check:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050124-4551 .html

It uses such terms as 'hogwash' and 'wild-eyed and completely unsubstantiated claims'. Ouch.

In defense of the one-billion comment, J Allard was saying the game industry in general would reach one-billion, not just the Xbox 360.

As for crack smoking, here's a quote from Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment regarding the power of the Playstation 3:

"Users will be able to store their content in an online storage server called the 'Cell Storage.' And the Cell processor, when it's not being used, can refine the content's quality. We call it the 'aging' process. For example, users can 'age' their Standard Definition (SD) video and up-convert it to High Definition (HD) video."

via Gamespot

More crack smoking from MS, claiming the Xbox 360 has 6x the bandwidth of the PS3 (carefully skewing numbers to favor the 360).

The only sound coverage of the new consoles so far has been this piece at Ars and hopefully, the piece Anand has been working on.

It just ain't fun anymore.

Imagine trying to look through ALL of your files manually because for whatever reason browsing by folders won't do the job. Imagine how slow the 'old' tools (checking the bits one by one) will work with all of the excess data associated with these so-called 'folders' getting in the way!

I don't see any reason why having good metadata in the filesystem would be any more problematic than the current system.

Then again, that BeOS didn't get very far.

You can manually specifiy any directories that you want to be included in the index. By default System, Library, and all of the hidden unix dirs are excluded. You just need to edit a config file to tell spotlight which ones you want to include and then reindex your drive.

See here.

Apple have figured out how to offload a massive amount of processing that would normally be done on the cpu to the gpu. Of course people can say that this has been done several times in the past 5 years, but the point is that AFAIK it hasn't been presented to programmers in a friendly, stable (even if OS dependent) manner. Fer cryin' out loud, Apple are waiting for the opportunity to flick a switch in the OS to allow every application to use this in its rendering path. This'll happen when they consider it stable enough, and when they consider enough of their hardware to support it. Now that they've worked this out for standard gpus, I'd say Apple is positively itching to do it with the eight 'mini-gpus' basically living inside a stock G5 processor.

So these divisions will look to the programmer like function calls that shoot through data sets at an insane speed. Streaming is the key word: this stuff will be used - as the gpu currently currently can be used in 10.4 - to fling large floating-point data sets around and manipulate them like no current cpu can.

Apple will gobble up Cell processors at the earliest opportunity if they're allowed. How about a Mac Mini without a separate gpu, but with nearly the graphics performance of a machine equipped with an Nvidia 6800? Doing 1080p HDTV? Coupled to their rumoured iDownloadablemoviethingy? For a hundred bucks cheaper than the current Mac Mini? Of course this'll be after they juice their pro stuff up to the max.

Or maybe not. Who knows?

Apple have figured out how to offload a massive amount of processing that would normally be done on the cpu to the gpu. Of course people can say that this has been done several times in the past 5 years, but the point is that AFAIK it hasn't been presented to programmers in a friendly, stable (even if OS dependent) manner. Fer cryin' out loud, Apple are waiting for the opportunity to flick a switch in the OS to allow every application to use this in its rendering path. This'll happen when they consider it stable enough, and when they consider enough of their hardware to support it. Now that they've worked this out for standard gpus, I'd say Apple is positively itching to do it with the eight 'mini-gpus' basically living inside a stock G5 processor.

So these divisions will look to the programmer like function calls that shoot through data sets at an insane speed. Streaming is the key word: this stuff will be used - as the gpu currently currently can be used in 10.4 - to fling large floating-point data sets around and manipulate them like no current cpu can.

Apple will gobble up Cell processors at the earliest opportunity if they're allowed. How about a Mac Mini without a separate gpu, but with nearly the graphics performance of a machine equipped with an Nvidia 6800? Doing 1080p HDTV? Coupled to their rumoured iDownloadablemoviethingy? For a hundred bucks cheaper than the current Mac Mini? Of course this'll be after they juice their pro stuff up to the max.

Or maybe not. Who knows?

One cell could handle the needs of many HDTVs. Toshiba showed a demo they claimed was one cell, decoding 48 MPEG-2 streams using 6 of the SPE's. That leaves one left over in the PS3, or two left over in the full spec cell. Oh, and a 64 bit Power core with an altivec unit.

Cell is a multipurpose system. It's main claim to fame is a low-level logic that allows it to farm tasks out to other Cells it connects to dynamically. One Cell is pretty potent and will likely be able to handle the needs of a typical HDTV so IBM hopes every TV, TiVo, and stereo system has a Cell.

The cell system workload sharing system is apparently accessible through the general bus so it can theoretically farm tasks out to any Cell on the same network. So if you've got a WiFi network between your PS4, HDTV, TiVo, Stereo, and cell-powered PDA your video games (or PDA) could take advantage of those other devices' unused clock cycles.

Here's some A to RTF.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1. ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2. ars

Cell is a multipurpose system. It's main claim to fame is a low-level logic that allows it to farm tasks out to other Cells it connects to dynamically. One Cell is pretty potent and will likely be able to handle the needs of a typical HDTV so IBM hopes every TV, TiVo, and stereo system has a Cell.

The cell system workload sharing system is apparently accessible through the general bus so it can theoretically farm tasks out to any Cell on the same network. So if you've got a WiFi network between your PS4, HDTV, TiVo, Stereo, and cell-powered PDA your video games (or PDA) could take advantage of those other devices' unused clock cycles.

Here's some A to RTF.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1. ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2. ars

1. I have several e-mail accounts to deal with
2. I chat on IRC daily
3. I follow several USENET news groups
4. I routinely post on a variety of message boards
5. I subscribe to Mental Floss, SysAdmin Magazine and Columbus Monthly
6. I read /. and technocrat and fark and El Reg and Something Awful and Google News and Groklaw and The Onion and Maddox and Ars Technica and USA Today and NewsForge every single day
7. I use Stumble Upon to find random, new and interesting web sites
8. ...AND I CAN'T GET ENOUGH!!!

Now, for a dose of reality, check out this opinion piece over at Ars Technica. It points to a study by a UC Davis professor (who wrote this op-ed piece over at News.com) found out that there was, in fact, no studies showing a shortage of IT workers. Why would both academics and indistry go off on such a chicken-little hissy fit? Money, of course.

What IBM and other tech companies really want is dirt cheap labor, not just sufficient labor. Hence their push to get H1B visas while there is still a fairly high unemployment rate among computer professionals (personally, I know of a *lot* of former colleagues who have left the industry because they couldn't find work). H1B workers have their hands tied, since the second they are no longer employed in the US, they get kicked out. That is a huge stick for a company to be able to use against an employee.

And how does academia benefit from the doom and gloom? Easy. More research grants. More money pumped into computer science departments to "attract new stidents." More territory for people who are more bureacratic empire builders than they are actual educators.

Ars Technica's review of Tiger also explains why Quartz was so freakin' slow on OS X 10.0 and has gotten faster with each version. Quartz was a new and ambitious way of drawing and displaying what's shown on screen (especially compared to Mac OS Classic). In version 10.0, Quartz was new and unoptimized software and almost all of the work was done by the CPU with lots of data being passed between the CPU and main memory. With each new version of OS X, the software has been optimized and more work has been moved to the GPU when possible. More traffic has been moved off of the slow CPU-memory bus and onto the faster AGP bus or the GPU's local VRAM. It's all explained on these two pages from the review:

Page 13: Quartz
Page 14: Quartz 2D Extreme

I think it's more accurate to say that Apple initially chose a new and very slow method of drawing/displaying (Quartz) and this method has matured with each OS update. The improvements to Quartz has outweighed the potential performance hits of any new eye candy. Microsoft's method of drawing/displaying is already mature and new eye candy will always decrease performance overall.

Ars Technica's review of Tiger also explains why Quartz was so freakin' slow on OS X 10.0 and has gotten faster with each version. Quartz was a new and ambitious way of drawing and displaying what's shown on screen (especially compared to Mac OS Classic). In version 10.0, Quartz was new and unoptimized software and almost all of the work was done by the CPU with lots of data being passed between the CPU and main memory. With each new version of OS X, the software has been optimized and more work has been moved to the GPU when possible. More traffic has been moved off of the slow CPU-memory bus and onto the faster AGP bus or the GPU's local VRAM. It's all explained on these two pages from the review:

Page 13: Quartz
Page 14: Quartz 2D Extreme

I think it's more accurate to say that Apple initially chose a new and very slow method of drawing/displaying (Quartz) and this method has matured with each OS update. The improvements to Quartz has outweighed the potential performance hits of any new eye candy. Microsoft's method of drawing/displaying is already mature and new eye candy will always decrease performance overall.

Ars Technica's review of Tiger also explains why Quartz was so freakin' slow on OS X 10.0 and has gotten faster with each version. Quartz was a new and ambitious way of drawing and displaying what's shown on screen (especially compared to Mac OS Classic). In version 10.0, Quartz was new and unoptimized software and almost all of the work was done by the CPU with lots of data being passed between the CPU and main memory. With each new version of OS X, the software has been optimized and more work has been moved to the GPU when possible. More traffic has been moved off of the slow CPU-memory bus and onto the faster AGP bus or the GPU's local VRAM. It's all explained on these two pages from the review:

Page 13: Quartz
Page 14: Quartz 2D Extreme

I think it's more accurate to say that Apple initially chose a new and very slow method of drawing/displaying (Quartz) and this method has matured with each OS update. The improvements to Quartz has outweighed the potential performance hits of any new eye candy. Microsoft's method of drawing/displaying is already mature and new eye candy will always decrease performance overall.

From what I understand, emulating the CPU is not a problem. However, realtime emulation of the GPU is much harder. An optimized vector processor does not automatically have an easy time emulating a weaker but differently optimized vector processor. This is why Sony just included the PS1 GPU inside the PS2. Microsoft can't do that because Nvidia hates them and they would charge them a fortune for it. Check out this article for more details about this.

> ...but that's not because of the extra RAM...which btw is useless.

It's not useless. Apple and Microsoft are both persuing imaging models that heavily leverage GPU processors and VRAM to avoid pushing large numbers of bits through the bottleneck interfaces to video cards. These new imaging models maintain window backing stores, compositing buffers, cached font rastrizations, etc in VRAM. For details see:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 14

Its iCal and the Address book that do this, Mail just stores messages as individual files.

It's not that simple, as everyone knows the $5 a month that isn't going to Yahoo, goes to fund global terrorism. Some of our finest thinkers have concluded this:

http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1011727157.html

Napster was the cause of 9-11. Think about it, all that rampant thieving of peoples copyrighted thoughts that occurred during Napster was bound to result in something terrible.

Without the DMCA anti circumvention clause, Terrorists would have Neutron bombs by now!

Al-Qaeda was a direct result of pirating Weird Al Yankovic songs.

So its not the $5, its what you do with it. You can't let teenagers keep $5, or they'll only do drugs, blow up stuff or go undermine democracy with it. Duh!

Arstechnica has a nice review of all the windows desktop search tools:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/desktop-search .ars

Of course it has the beta of the MS search, but a pretty good guide I think.

As Mr. Siracusa over at Ars is so fond of saying:

FTFF: Fix The F**king Finder!

Mine did the grinding noise too and then it died - just like this: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/hdfailure. ars (except that mine mine was still in warranty and the smart status didn't say anything).

Backup everything while you can.

It was a joke. I fully understand that every technology has beneficial effects, including RFID. I understand that the majority of privacy issues are overstated, although things like chipped passports still worry me. I am well aware how useful RFID can be in a number of situations, such as the one you described.

I understand that DRM, while being problematic for privacy advocates and those of us who like complete control over our own computers, is, when properly applied, one plausible way of encouraging more people to acquire non-infringing copies of media. I don't like it cos I fit into both the above categories but, as long as they don't figure out how to stop me re-encoding media in a decent format, I can live with their attempts.

I'm not keen on the RIAA or MPAA cos, viewed as monolithic organisations, they're both bastards. However, I understand that it's naive to label any one organisation or individual as completely good or evil - for example, a friend of mine works for Microsoft, and another is getting his education courtesy of IBM.

None of this stops me seeing the article title, having a sudden image of many millions of geeks having spontaneous heart-attacks, ruining my keyboard with the proverbial Morning Dew and deciding to share that little frisson of amusement with the rest of Slashdot, in the hope of cheering people up. My investments in the keyboard-manufacturing industry have nothing to do with it at all.

The Cell is a joint Sony/IBM/Toshiba project, and it uses the PowerPC instruction set.

See here and a bunch of other arstechnica articles for details.

The Ars Technica page on hyperthreading with the Xeon might provide some clues. It lists which parts of the CPU are replicated, partitioned and shared.

One final bit of information that should be included in a discussion of partitioned resources is the fact that when the Xeon is executing only one thread, all of its partitioned resources can be combined so that the single thread can use them for maximum performance. When the Xeon is operating in single-threaded mode, the dynamically partitioned queues stop enforcing any limits on the number of entries that can belong to one thread, and the statically partitioned queues stop enforcing their boundaries as well.

...

The same can be said for the register file, another crucial shared resource. The Xeon's 128 microarchitectural general purpose registers (GPRs) and 128 microarchitectural floating-point registers (FPRs) have no idea that the data they're holding belongs to more than one thread--it's all just data to them, and they, like the execution units, remain unchanged from previous iterations of the Xeon core.

For a simultaneously multithreaded processor, the cache coherency problems associated with SMP all but disappear. Both logical processors on an SMT system share the same caches as well as the data in those caches. So if a thread from logical processor 0 wants to read some data that's cached by logical processor 1, it can grab that data directly from the cache without having to snoop another cache located some distance away in order to ensure that it has the most current copy.

...

You might think since the Xeon's two logical processors share a single cache, this means that the cache size is effectively halved for each logical processor. If you thought this, though, you'd be wrong: it's both much better and much worse. Let me explain.

Each of the Xeon's caches--the trace cache, L1, L2, and L3--is SMT-unaware, and each treats all loads and stores the same regardless of which logical processor issued the request. So none of the caches know the difference between one logical processor and another, or between code from one thread or another.

Somebody mod parent and grandparent up : both are informative. The ars technica article linked in the /. posting above (http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars /5) is a great introduction to what launchd is.

Have you looked at launchd, the new all-purpose task control daemon? Don't be put off by the fact that it's from Apple--it's open source, licensed under the APSL, which I believe is GPL-compatible, if you care about that kind of thing. It seems to offer many of the features you want, including task scheduling, preemption control, etc.

Here's the manpage; here's a tutorial (geared towards OS X developers, unfortunately), and here's John Siracusa's overview of launchd from Ars Technica.

Here's something I've been doing all day with regards to the Real ID act and something you might be able to do with regards to this news on the Patriot Act: email the media and get them to cover the issue. Basic format of the email I've been trying to send out follows...

-To -media organiztaion here-,

First off, thank you for taking the time to read this email. While I realize that it is not in good taste for any news organization to take any political stance on matters, I do feel that it is in the best interests of both the media and for the nation if the media would do more to cover the less known topics that happen in Washington.

Case in point is the recent passge of the Real ID act. (H.R. 418, it can be found here: http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:H.R .418:) This act was attached to the recently passed emergency spending bill approved by the President. However, there are some scary details about this act, besides the intended effect of creating a national ID system. For instance, check out Section 102, which allows the Secretary of Homeland Security "the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section." It also prevents any oversight or judicial review of those actions.

There are several other topics on this bill that I think people would find rather enlightening. Here are a few links to other websites with articles over it:

ArsTechnica Article about a Potential part of the RealID act breaking the Constition:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050509-4886 .html

CNet Article Overview:
http://news.com.com/FAQ+How+Real+ID+will+affect+yo u/2100-1028_3-5697111.html

At any rate, thank you again for taking the time to read this email. I hope that you will at least take the time to consider the impliciations of such an issue, and the rather underhanded means of having it been acheived.

Yours,
-name-

I think the only way we're going to get word across is if we can get the media to reveal the implications of this on a much larger scale that what we might be able to do. Here's a general email I've been sending out to sites like the NYTimes and NBC's The Nightly News:

-To -insert media organization here-,

First off, thank you for taking the time to read this email. While I realize that it is not in good taste for any news organization to take any political stance on matters, I do feel that it is in the best interests of both the media and for the nation if the media would do more to cover the less known topics that happen in Washington.

Case in point is the recent passge of the Real ID act. (H.R. 418, it can be found here: http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:H.R .418:) This act was attached to the recently passed emergency spending bill approved by the President. However, there are some scary details about this act, besides the intended effect of creating a national ID system. For instance, check out Section 102, which allows the Secretary of Homeland Security "the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section." It also prevents any oversight or judicial review of those actions.

There are several other topics on this bill that I think people would find rather enlightening. Here are a few links to other websites with articles over it:

ArsTechnica Article about a Potential part of the RealID act breaking the Constition:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050509-4886 .html

CNet Article Overview:
http://news.com.com/FAQ+How+Real+ID+will+affect+yo u/2100-1028_3-5697111.html

At any rate, thank you again for taking the time to read this email. I hope that you will at least take the time to consider the impliciations of such an issue, and the rather underhanded means of having it been acheived.

Yours,
Brandon G.

Saturday May 29 1999
moonboy writes "I saw this over at Ars Technica. This dude submerged his entire motherboard in mineral oil. As if that weren't enough, he then and got a 5,000 BTU (window?) unit and circulates the oil through the coils to keep it all cool." Don't expect Gateway to be offering these any time soon... I suspect it will a bit more than just void your warranty. It'll probably make motherboard engineers come to your home under cover of darkness carrying loaded shotguns :)

II. Waiver of Laws to Facilitate Barriers at Border44

Section 102 of the IIRIRA generally provides for construction and strengthening of barriers along U.S. land borders and specifically provides for 14 miles of barriers and roads along the border near San Diego, beginning at the Pacific Ocean and extending eastward. IIRIRA 102(c) provides for a waiver of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA)45 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA)46 to the extent the Attorney General determines is necessary to ensure expeditious construction of barriers and roads...

H.R. 418 [the Real ID Act of 2005] would provide additional waiver authority over laws that might impede the expeditious construction of barriers and roads along the border. H.R. 418 would require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any and all laws that he determines necessary, in his sole discretion, to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads under IIRIRA 102...

Section 102 of H.R. 418 would amend the current provision to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any law upon determining that a waiver is necessary for the expeditious construction of the border barriers. Additionally, it would prohibit judicial review of a waiver decision or action by the Secretary and bar judicially ordered compensation or injunction or other remedy for damages alleged to result from any such decision or action.

Yep, it sure looks like they'll be constructing gas chambers and death camps in no time!

Or it could be that politicians are so eager to appear to be supporting our troops that they will pass anything as a military appropriations bil.

from ars

H.R. 418 [the Real ID Act of 2005] would provide additional waiver authority over laws that might impede the expeditious construction of barriers and roads along the border. H.R. 418 would require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any and all laws that he determines necessary, in his sole discretion, to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads under IIRIRA 102...

Section 102 of H.R. 418 would amend the current provision to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any law upon determining that a waiver is necessary for the expeditious construction of the border barriers. Additionally, it would prohibit judicial review of a waiver decision or action by the Secretary and bar judicially ordered compensation or injunction or other remedy for damages alleged to result from any such decision or action.

Opponents of the concept of judicial review appeal to an obscure and cryptic article of the Constitution, the (in)famous Article 3, Section 2 (A3S2 for short), which states:

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

That last sentence is the kicker, because it looks for all the world like language that would enable Congress to wave a magic A3S2 wand over any piece of legislation no matter how outrageous and have it be completely exempt from review by the courts. The implications for the system of checks and balances if Congress actually invokes this provision are about as profound as it gets, which is why no Congress in American history has ever opted to open that particular can of worms... until now.

You can read more on the tinfoil hat implications of this here if you're interested, but I'll sum it up for you: Congress has crafted a completely unprecedented provision that guts the principle of judicial review by granting the DHS secretary complete and total immunity from the courts when it comes to the construction of "barriers and roads" in this one specific geographical region, and they've buried this provision inside a national ID card act which is itself attached to a large military appropriations bill that no Congressperson in their right mind would vote against (money for the troops and all that). ...

Obviously, if this passes, it'll set a precedent. First, some obscure border region outside of San Diego, and then on to bigger and better things? As the present bill stands, if DHS built a road through an endangered wetland and committed four murders in the process, nobody could take the government to court over it. Is this the kind of unchecked power that we want Congress to have? The sky's the limit, once the A3S2 can of worms is opened tomorrow.

----
Fuckers. I tried. I faxed my senator. What's the national governors association gonna do when the DHS builds a road over their house?

Check out this post at Ars Technica.

Basically, there's a clause in there that states allows a certain part of the bill to be exempt from judicial review.

Check out this post at Ars Technica.

Basically, there's a clause in there that states allows a certain part of the bill to be exempt from judicial review.

I read an article on Ars earlier that details a hidden power grab by the Department of Homeland Security:

H.R. 418 [the Real ID Act of 2005] would provide additional waiver authority over laws that might impede the expeditious construction of barriers and roads along the border. H.R. 418 would require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any and all laws that he determines necessary, in his sole discretion, to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads under IIRIRA 102...

Section 102 of H.R. 418 would amend the current provision to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any law upon determining that a waiver is necessary for the expeditious construction of the border barriers. Additionally, it would prohibit judicial review of a waiver decision or action by the Secretary and bar judicially ordered compensation or injunction or other remedy for damages alleged to result from any such decision or action.

Apparently Article 3, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution states:

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

The key here is "...the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction...with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."

So...it seems the Supreme Court can only rule and judge on things the Congress doesnt Exempt from them. This may be only a start to a situation where 'activist judges' are preempted by congressional exclusions and regulations preventing them from making decisions on a number of things Republicans, in particular, dont want Judges ruling on. In addition, the Congress could make a blanket statement, 'thou shalt not rule on gays, abortion, or guns' and be done...who knows what may happen in a republican controled Congress.

There is a provision in the bill that sets the gruesome precedence that it is in the power of Congress to prohibit juridical review. Since the latter is a cornerstone of the American republic this is a very big deal. You can learn more about it here.

I didn't see this aspect discussed here (doesn't mean it wasn't, I haven't read all 979 comments), but thought it pertinent:
"Does the Real ID act contain a Constitution-busting Trojan horse?"
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050509-4886 .html

From TFA:

If he isn't careful Bill Gates might just Betamax him while the crowds cheer him on.

Hardly, when iTMS has between 70% and 80% (depending on whose estimates you believe - Apple's is the lower end) of legal, DRMed downloads, 90% of HDD-based players and just shy of 60% of Flash players. If there's a betamax here, it's anything requiring Windows Media Player.

And while much Microsoft software may be strong in the marketplace generally (and we can all suggest reasons why), I don't see much evidence of people cheering him on...