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"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

The hit isn't a very big one:

"with the hardware offload the battery lasted up to 36% longer"

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

And with each faster processor generation, the difference gets smaller and smaller still.

Followed the link but couldn't see where it showed actual power consumption of the hardware decoder they used (their own I guess?) but given that an ARM CPU might consume around 500mW whereas an H.264 hardware decoder doing HD uses 10mW, either the screen is using a huge amount of power or their hardware leaves a bit to be desired.

At risk of feeding the troll:

Your racism is showing. Where we draw distinctions, we discriminate (in the broadest sense of the word). If we find ourselves faced with two entities, described in the same terms (e.g., "human"), we do not discriminate. Where we find ourselves faced with two entities, which we have chosen to differentiate between, we find ourselves discriminating. If you don't like racism, stop drawing the distinction. People are people are people, period. Purple, green, orange, black, white, Martian, Venusian, hyper-intelligent shades of blue, etc..

People are people are people, period. I suggest you read, critically, from beginning to end, Douglas Hofstadter's essay, "A Person Paper on Purity in Language" and his subsequent comments

Won't the DDR take "50 to 150 cycles" to service each request? Or is there some sort of pipelining going on, where the DDR can take a request every 10 cycles but have a whole bunch of queued requests in flight?

Actually, that's pretty much exactly how it works. If you have a bunch of independent requests to DDR—and by independent, I mean that the processor(s) do not stall waiting for the information from one request in order to make the next—then you can get multiple requests in flight and they can pipeline. Streaming works this way, for example. The STREAM benchmark is a textbook example of a benchmark dominated by throughput, where all the accesses are independent. For example, a[i] = b[i] + c[i] does not depend on a[i - K] = b[i - K] + c[i - K] or a[i + K] = b[i + K] + c[i + K] for any value of K in STREAM's "Add" loop. All four loops of the benchmark have that character. So as long as the processor can get enough work in-flight, it can get multiple cache misses outstanding to DDR. And if one processor and its caches have limited ability to 'execute ahead' like this, multiple processors (or multiple independent threads on the same processor) acting independently can fill in those gaps.

Linked list traversal results in a series of requests that are all dependent on each other. If all the requests miss the caches and must go out to DDR, then the CPU's performance is bounded by the round trip latency to DDR, not the DDR's throughput. Take a look at the linked list benchmarks in Ulrich Drpper's paper, "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory." (Specifically, go down to section 3.3.2 on page 20.) Pay particular attention to Figure 3.15, Sequential vs. Random Read (for a single thread), and also compare to Figure 3.21 which shows multi-threaded random accesses for 1, 2, and 4 threads.

The paper might be a little old (it uses a Pentium 4 for its benchmarks, after all), but the principles remain true. I should know... part of my day job is as a memory system architect. :-)

If the current patent mess had been in place when cars were first industrialized, one automaker would have had the patent on the gas pedal, another on brake lights, another on the turn signal lever, and still another on windshield wipers.

The current patent mess was in place then, except there were a lot fewer inventors so a lot fewer patents. But when Ford started building the Model T, guess what happened? The other auto makers sued Ford for patent infringement, even though they infringed no patents!

Oh, and BTW, when cars were first industrialized (before Ford when only the rich had cars), the gas pedal wasn't standardized (still wasn't with the Fords), there were no brake lights, there were no turn signals (you signaled with your arm), and there were no windshield wipers.

If Mr. Smith's car is one of the high, hideous, but efficient model T Fords of the day, let us watch him for a minute. He climbs in by the right-hand door (for there is no left-hand door by the front seat), reaches over to the wheel, and sets the spark and throttle levers in a position like that of the hands of a clock at ten minutes to three. Then, unless he has paid extra for a self-starter, he gets out to crank. Seizing the crank in his right hand carefully (for a friend of his once broke his arm cranking), he slips his left forefinger through a loop of wire that controls the choke. He pulls the loop of wire, he revolves the crank mightily, and as the engine at last roars, he leaps to the trembling running-board, leans in, and moves the spark and throttle to twenty-five minutes of two. Perhaps he reaches the throttle before the engine falters into silence, but if it is a cold morning perhaps he does not. In that case, back to the crank again and the loop of wire. Mr. Smith wishes Mrs. Smith would come out and sit in the driver's seat and pull that spark lever down before the engine has time to die.

Finally he is at the wheel with the engine roaring as it should. He releases the emergency hand-brake, shoves his left foot against the low speed pedal, and as the car sweeps loudly out into the street, he releases his left foot, lets the car into high gear, and is off. Now his only care is for that long hill down the street; yesterday he burned his brake on it, and this morning he must remember to brake with the reverse pedal, or the low-speed pedal, or both, or all three in alternation. (Jam your foot down on any of the three pedals and you slow the car.)

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday

First, it hasn't yet been "a hundred years or more." As Frederick Lewis Allen says in Only Yesterday (written in 1932)

One thing the Smiths certainly will not do this evening [in 1919]. They will not listen to the radio.

For there is no such thing as radio broadcasting. Here and there a mechanically inclined boy has a wireless set, with which, if he knows the Morse code, he may listen to messages from ships at sea and from land stations equipped with sending apparatus. The radiophone has been so far developed that men flying in an airplane over Manhattan have talked with other men in an office-building below. But the broadcasting of speeches and music-well, it was tried years ago by DeForest, and "nothing came of it." Not until the spring of 1920 will Frank Conrad of the Westinghouse Company of East Pittsburgh, who has been sending out phonograph music and baseball scores from the barn which he has rigged up as a spare-time research station, find that so many amateur wireless operators are listening to them that a Pittsburgh newspaper has had the bright idea of advertising radio equipment "which may be used by those who listen to Dr. Conrad's programs." And not until this advertisement appears will the Westinghouse officials decide to open the first broadcasting station in history in order to stimulate the sale of their supplies.

Secondly, radio is forced to pay a whole lot less than internet, and until fairly recently didn't pay at all. In fact, in the 1950s there was a scandal called "payola" where labels would bribe disk jockeys to play their music. Rather than being paid to be heard, they were paying to be heard.

The only way you can monetize internet radio is to have low enough streaming fees, or high enough advertising costs. You can't stay in business unless you can generate more than your expenditures. The law was crafted to kill internet radio -- but the internet is international. You can always stream from another country.

I'm fairly certain legalizing things like meth and cocaine wouldn't do much to aid the addicted.

It's better than sending them to prison, AKA Criminal University. If their drugs were cheaper they wouldn't be stealing from me. I never knew a cigarette smoker or alcoholic stealing to support their addictions.

Legalization would end the drug violence, just as Prohibition's end ended the violence of the illegal liquor trade. All the arguments for Prohibition as well as against it still apply in today's prohibitions, and history shouldn't be ignored.

We THOUGHT we were voting for a new FDR in 2008. What we GOT was a new Calvin Coolidge.

A little weak on your history, aren't you? We thought we were getting an FDR but we got... well, not Coolidge, that would be Bush (and if McCain had won, he would have been Hoover). I'd say we wanted FDR and got Jimmy Carter.

I mean, really, do you believe for a second Coolidge would have signed the ACA?

I feel this is a behavioral bump in the road that may disappear as my generation becomes the parental generation.

Of course you do, you're only 30. What you don't know is that every generation since 1880 has had the same problem. Nobody had a clue what telephony would lead to. Nor the automobile (F.L. Allen had a bit to say about that in his 1931 book Only Yesterday), movies, comic books, TV (OMFG Elvis), VCRs, now the internet and cell phones. I have no more idea what will come up in 20 years that will confound parents' abilities to raise their kids than than someone freaking out over Elvis' gyrations had any idea that some day everyone would have a camera and a phone in their pocket.

Yeah, you get the internet. You won't get what's next. Nobody will (and the youngsters take to new things like fish to water, a geezer like you has to work at it).

Small problem; wealth inequity in this country has never been this bad, not by a long shot.

Pedantic nit: It hasn't been this bad since the 1920s (which were alarmingly like the times we're living through now).

However, we don't have one anymore; we have the poor, and the super rich. The line separating those two is getting thinner every year.

It's not QUITE that bad... yet. I'm median income and I'm not hurting, but I'm certainly not rich, let alone super rich. I can afford everything I need and most things I want. But it is getting there. You know what wealth inequality brings? Economic collapse and depression.

What Allen says in the linked 1931 book pretty much mirrors what my grandmother (born in 1903) told me -- the roaring twenties only roared for a few. It was a miserable time for most.

Chapter III

Those were the days when column after column of the front pages of the newspapers shouted the news of strikes and and-Bolshevist riots; when radicals shot do* Armistice Day paraders in the streets of Centralia, Washington, and in revenge the patriotic citizenry took out of the jail a member of the I. W. W.-a white American, be it noted-and lynched him by tying a rope around his neck and throwing him off a bridge; when properly elected members of the Assembly of New York State were expelled (and their constituents thereby disfranchised) simply because they had been elected as members of the venerable Socialist Party; when a jury in Indiana took two minutes to acquit a man for shooting and killing an alien because he had shouted, "To hell with the United States"; and when the Vice-President or the nation cited as a dangerous manifestation of radicalism in the women's colleges the fact that the girl debaters of Radcliffe had upheld the affirmative in an intercollegiate debate on the subject: "Resolved, that the recognition of labor unions by employers is essential to successful collective bargaining." It was an era of lawless and disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict-in a very literal sense, a reign of terror.

* OCR error, I have the printed book. There are quite a few OCR errors in the University of Virginia copy.

Do you not see where your reasoning is flawed?

You obviously don't see where yours is. Rape has a victim, someone illegally possessing drugs does not. Dope addicts should not be my problem, but drug laws make them my problem. I live on the edge of the ghetto (I'm a cheap old bastard and it's close to work) and my house has been burglarized twice in four years. When did you ever hear of someone stealing for beer money?

Read this. Prohibition doesn't work.

The Boomers got old, they liked voting in the people that promised them the most at the expense of the Gen-Xers, and blamed the Gen-Xers for being whiners when they found they inherited a country fundamentally broken and deep in debt.

"The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us," wrote one of them (John F. Carter in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1920), expressing accurately the sentiments of innumerable contemporaries. "They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don't accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the 'eighties."

-- FL Allen, Only Yesterday (1931)

Dude, i am as pissed about what the baby boomers have done to this nation as any other person not in that generation

"The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us," wrote one of them (John F. Carter in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1920), expressing accurately the sentiments of innumerable contemporaries. "They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don't accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the 'eighties."

F.L. Allen, Only Yesterday, chapter V (1931)

Of course no one wants to visit great-grandma when she just wants to scream racist gibberish about the president and homophobic crap about your cousins.

You make the very mistaken assumption that everyone dies of alzheimer's, when most geezers do not, in fact, get that disease.

Old people often have beliefs that are simply not compatible with living in a modern society.

And you make the mistake of thinking that old folks haven't seen radical change all of their lives. My grandmother was born 3 months before the Wright brothers took off, in a world where most people lived exactly like they had a thousand years earlier, and hers was the first generation of radiacl change. When she was 5 few had seen an airplane, there was no radio (except morse code), most people had never seen an automobile, and the Cubs won the world series. before she died she'd ridden on airplanes, owned cars and radios and TV sets and microwaves and all those things that simply didn't exist in her youth. Just because you're old doesn't mean you don't keep up. My mom's 84 and has a computer and a cell phone and a flat screen TV.

You can't take them into public if you fear they may call your waiter the N word or go on a tirade about the jews when you are trying to get groceries.

Again, your view of the elderly is really fucked up. Most simply aren't like that. Yes, racism was rampant in their youths and they were as racist as the rest of society when they were young, but guess what? My dad, who thought nothing of calling a man a "nigger" when he was your age stood up in court shortly before he retired and testified against his employer for a co-worker who had filed a discrimination lawsuit.

Times change and people change with them. Read this book and see how much different the world was in 1930 than in 1920.

I'd guess more than a hundred years, read about the Teapot Dome Scandal 90 years ago. Historian Frederick Lewis Allen covered it in Only Yesterday: a An Informal History of the 1920s written in 1931. It's suggested in that tome that Harding's death was either assassination or suicide because of that scandal.

I have the printed book, just finished re-reading it on my phone (there are a few OCR errors). I recommend it, it's a fascinating read. The 1920s were very similar to today, possibly even worse. A housing bubble, runaway stock market, gang wars in Chicago over an illegal drug (alcohol in the '20s). They seemed to have learned a little from History or we'd be in a deep depression now.

That is a very well done AC troll.

Well, congrats to him for being modded +4 insightful. If I were moderating he'd be at +5, tool.

When the well runs dry, the survivors move to where the water is.

Where might that be, and how are the downtrodden to get there? History is repeating itself, fool. Read this history of the 1920s (required reading in a general studies undergrad history class I took in 1978, it's a very good read). The same shit is happening now. Then, it was Bolsheviks. Now, it's terrorists. Now you right wingers say "liberal" like it's an insult, then it was "socialist" when a working man wanted a living wage.

It led to the KKK, and even worse things (including the Great Depression). Read the book. Learn history, or be doomed to repeat it -- the same shit is happening now.

And has been happening for at least a century. From chapter 3 of Frederick Lewis Allen's Only yesterday, An Informal History of the 1920s:

This latter group of communists and anarchists constituted a very narrow minority of the radical movement-absurdly narrow when we consider all the to-do that was made about them. Late in 1919 Professor Gordon S. Watkins of the University of Illinois, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, set the membership of the Socialist party at 39,000, of the Communist Labor party at from 10,000 to 30,000 and of the Communist party at from 30,000 to 60,000 In other words, according to this estimate, the Communists could muster at the most hardly more than one-tenth of one per cent of the adult population of the country; and the three parties together-the majority of whose members were probably content to work for their ends by lawful means-brought the proportion to hardly more than two-tenths of one per cent, a rather slender nucleus, it would seem, for a revolutionary mass movement.

But the American business man was in no mood to consider whether it was a slender nucleus or not. He, too, had come out of the war with his fighting blood up, ready to lick the next thing that stood in his way. He wanted to get back to business and enjoy his profits. Labor stood in his way and threatened his profits. He had come out of the war with a militant patriotism; and mingling his idealistic with his selfish motives, after the manner of all men at all times, he developed a fervent belief that 100-per-cent Americanism and the Welfare of God's Own Country and Loyalty to the Teachings of the Founding Fathers implied the right of the business man to kick the union organizer out of his workshop. He had come to distrust anything and everything that was foreign, and this radicalism he saw as the spawn of long-haired slavs and unwashed East-Side Jews. And, finally, he had been nourished during the war years upon stories of spies and plotters and international intrigue. He had been convinced that German sympathizers signaled to one another with lights from mountain-tops and put ground glass into surgical dressings, and he had formed the habit of expecting tennis courts to conceal gun-emplacements. His credulity had thus been stretched until he was quite ready believe that a struggle of American laboring-men for wages was the beginning of an armed rebellion directed Lenin and Trotsky, and that behind every innocent professor who taught that there were arguments for as well as against socialism there was a bearded rascal from Europe with a money bag in one hand and a smoking bomb in the other.

So has the rate of violent crime in schools:

http://curry.virginia.edu/research/projects/violence-in-schools/school-violence-myths

Not that I think the War on Drugs (TM) is any less stupid and wasteful than the War on Terrism (TM), but at least we see that we don't need a parallel, secret justice [sic] system to "fight" it.

Both are drains on the treasury and both are harmful to society. The "war" on terror castrates the constitution, and the drug laws foster violent crime. Look at Chicago in the 1920s and Chicago today. Different illegal drug, same outcomes.

So when do we get the really cool pictures from Magelan II, in higher resolution than we got from Hubble?

Iconic photos like Mars:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Hubble.jpg

Jupiter:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Ancient_Storm_in_the_Jovian_Atmosphere_-_GPN-2000-000910.jpg

Saturn:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saturn_with_auroras.jpg

And the Hubble Deep Field:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg

And completely off-topic, how often do you see a color photo of the moon:

http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/im/moon-color-mosaic-NCarboni.jpg

You're not born programmed to feel that 1+1=0 is wrong, so you don't have the instinct.

The only reason 1+1 = 2, is because there is something like a half-bit adder in the brain. If the human mind reflects the universe (to a rough approximation), then it is no accident that such an adder would exist. You might say that there exists a culture somewhere that doesn't know about larger numbers. Well perhaps. (The social sciences have manufactured a lot of "evidence" like this.) But even if it were true, you would find it impossible to tell someone these people that 2 apples is not the same as 1 apple and 1 apple.

There are also intuitive notions of biology, which gives us much of our understanding of race. You can tell this from cross-cultural studies of young children. They see an "essence" in living creatures that is unique to their "class". Plays very well in to creationist populism. Much learning is actually about seeing that such naive notions exist, and much political populism is playing to those naive notions that are embedded in our minds. (Every mind is different though.) We never leave our naivety behind. It is part of every thought.

If that sounds distressing, Kant wrote: "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space." The limitations of the mind *is* the air that makes the resistance to knowledge.

Regarding homosexuality: if one identical twin is gay, then the concordance rate for the other twin is only about 50%. Keep in mind that that says next to nothing about the amounts of nature and nurture. It does say that homosexuality is not purely genetic in origin. If you are interested, I summarised a lot of research in a short essay about two years ago.

As for the biological basis of homophobia, we have no reason to believe that it is purely cultural, but there sure is a lot of wishful thinking on the issue. Yet we see every culture in all times engage in persecution of gay men in particular. We also see adolescents reliably engage in homophobic harassment. We also know from the three laws of behavioural genetics that genetics (not just biology) probably has a large role in homophobic behaviour.

With these culture war issues, it really is just an issue of choosing the "evidence" for what is "natural" for whatever position you want to take, all the while ignoring the very problems with any notion of "natural", and all the while surreptitiously asserting that if it is "natural" it must be good. It is a fraught exercise through and through.

But just to make sure we're on the same page, when you say "structure of the mind" you are also considering our mental tools (e.g. language) right?

Language is couched in mentalese. The structure of mentalese determines the types of thoughts that we can have as much as the limitations of memory and other such factors. Language comes later.

They lie to the people, to Congress, to judges and even to each other. This crap started late in the GWB's second term

Ah, yes, another youth who hasn't read or lived through much history. Look up the McCarthy witch hunts, J.Edgar Hoover's spying on American anti-war protesters and civil rights activists, and the Kent State massacre just for a start. It happened at least as far back as Coolidge with prohibition; here is a book about the roaring twenties that was required reading in a general studies history class I took at SIU back in the seventies. It's well written and a good read.

I'd guess it's gone on even longer, and nobody my age is surprised by any of this. Disgusted, but not surprised.

The great depression wasn't caused by the stock market crash, by the way.

Indeed. It was caused by the very same actions that caused the 2008 meltdown. There's an excellent history of the 1920s written shortly after the crash that was required reading in a class I took at SIU about 40 years ago, Only Yesterday. It's a good read, and an eye-opener about our own time.

After the crash, the unemployment rate was about what it is now - floating between 9 and 10 percent

I'd be very interested in a citation -- everything I've read (and my grandparents, who were born about the turn of the century) said it was more like 25-35%.

Notice below how you see the dow begin to recover up until Smoot-Hawly

That was enacted in 1930, your graph shows no such thing. Read the book I linked, the full text is there.

You're full of shit. I'll try to find your comment when I can log in and say it again so you can attempt to rebut it. You talk like prohibition stopped people from drinking when actually Alcohol consumption doubled during prohibition. My grandmother, who was born in 1920, explained it succinctly: before prohibition, it was socially unacceptable for US women to drink. A salloon was no place for a respectable women; the few women who did drink did so in secret.

During prohibition, the speakeasies came about. It was as "socially unacceptable" (because it was illegal) for men to drink as women, and unlike the pre-prohibition saloons, women went there.

As to the "drop in alcohol-related deaths," that too is bullshit. There were more alcohol related deaths, mostly because you can't regulate an illegal product. Not just deaths, but blindness. People were sold wood alcohol, people were sold alcohol that was distilled using old radiators with the resultant poisoning from the antifreeze residue. There were a lot of deaths from food poisoning from bathtub gin as well.

Citation here, I took a history class as an undergrad, and the linked book was required reading; the 1920s was the subject of the class. Where did you get your "information," from MADD or the Partnership for a Drug Free America? Because WHAT YOU SAY IS NOT TRUE.

BTW, Grandma borrowed the book and she said the only thing the writer got wrong was that the "roaring twenties" only roared for the rich, everybody else was struggling badly.

#7 looks a lot like a Soviet Venus lander:

http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/im/venera-on-Vensurf-artists.jpg
   

Working in isolation can sometimes be more productive. But if the work is moving on quickly, people away from the office have latency. Also, certain spontaneous things just cannot happen. I remember rewriting a critical internal component of a rather core library since the original version, my rewrite, the other guy's rewrite and my re-rewrite had reached the limits of their flexibility, generality and performance. Like I said---a critical part. So I wandered over to discuss it with someone, and started some pair programming. A third person overheard and joind us. We probably ended up arguing back and forth oover the design on every line of code.

The end result hasn't needed to be rewritten or even modified in 7 years.

And honestly, it's a piece of code I'm proud of.

I've also found it harder to work with genuinely remote workers and I've found that the team spirit or whatever it is is harder to achieve. I've also worked at a Very Large Orgnisation, where we were all on-site but the critical people (for me) were within walking distance, so I could go over to their office. That was probably the best of both worlds in some ways, but I wouldn't like to rely on such a setup since that project was run by someone who was an utter genius at project managment, so it probably would have worked whatever happened.

Also on a final note, I would point you at:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

search for "door closed". The piece is a very well written peice (and not very nice) about research careers, but I think that section has enough in common with programming. After all in both, you have to move with the times almost brutally and continously solve new problems and learn new things to stay on top.

But it's not true.

Oh? This is made up?

Or, it wasn't a "patent". It was an "innovation patent", which is something completely different ...

Oh? It wasn't a patent, but wait, it WAS a type of patent?

... and doesn't get any substantial examination by any examiner.

Correct. And this means the wheel patent is practically guaranteed not to be upheld if ever examined in preparation for litigation. But it doesn't make it not silly.

Fire and shelving melt/collapse, no substantial water involved. Once the fire fighters left fighting the fire coming up the mountain they did not come back until at least a day later... we were busy fighting fires in the 500+ homes that burnt down that same day (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Canberra_bushfires and http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~rjp0i/mso). The point was not that it flooded, but that the collection was lost to an unforeseen event. Put it in a basement and it can be lost to flood, fire, earthquake... put it above ground and you can still lose it.

Yeah, 'cause it unheard of that an above-ground library on top of a mountain could be lost: ANU Astronomy 2003 http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~rjp0i/mso/library_interior2.large.jpg Disasters happen.

Actually, it explains several apparently unrelated anomalies.

And FYI, MOND is very good at explaining galaxy rotation curves, but utterly fails at the other stuff.

Sorry, but I don't remember what the other stuff is or how dark matter explains it.

- Galactic cluster X-ray masses.
- Cosmic large-scale structure.
- Absence of photon diffusion damping in Cosmic Microwave Background fluctuations.
- Gravitational lensing (for example, the Bullet Cluster
- Concordance cosmology

None of these things are explainable without dark matter. This whole "no evidence other than that discrepancy" stuff is simply ignorant.

The fact is patents championed by Thomas Jefferson http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/classes/tcc313/200Rprojs/jefferson_invent/patent.html and enshrined in Article I Sec. 8 of the U.S. Constitution. It may or may not be wise to eradicate patents, but doing so will require a Constitutional Amendment.

Regulations, on the other hand, are generally understood to be created by the bureaucracy without having been voted on by Congress nor signed by the President. Sorry, but if patents are a government regulation then so is the Second Amendment.

When our users connect to their VPN, a script automatically randomizes their keyboard layout.

You aren't serious, I presume; but since we are talking about cryptography here, a simple one to one translation is trivial to break as long as you know the language. Read "The Gold-Bug" for details :-)

To borrow from XKCD, this cipher is very hard for people to use and is very easy for a computer to break :-)

we need historians to get informations about an only 30 year old technology?

It's nothing new. From the introduction to Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's by historian Frederick Lewis Allen

Obviously the writing of a history so soon after the event has involved breaking much new ground...

Further research will undoubtedly disclose errors and deficiencies in the book, and the passage of time will reveal the shortsightedness of many of my judgments and interpretations. A contemporary history is bound to be anything but definitive. Yet half the enjoyment of writing it has lain in the effort to reduce to some sort of logical and coherent order a mass of material untouched by any previous historian; and I have wondered whether some readers might not be interested and perhaps amused to find events and circumstances which they remember well which seem to have happened only yesterday-woven into a pattern which at least masquerades as history. One advantage the book will have over most histories: hardly anyone old enough to read it can fail to remember the entire period with which it deals.

The linked book (posted in full at the link) was required reading in an undergrad general studies history class I took in the late 1970s. It was published in 1933 and concerned the 1920s.

I'd ask you if you were 15, but your id shows you couldn't be.

Multiply by four.

Life can't be summed up in dystopian novels.

Of course not, it was simply an illustration.

Laws exist to protect the public good, not to validate your view that you should be allowed to do anything you want, then pay for any harm you do later.

Which is why there are laws against theft and assault. I'm no "do what you want and pay later" libertarian, I simply believe in FREEDOM. If my activity doesn't harm anyone, why should I be punished for it? Your having ten beers in an hour doesn't affect me so it should be legal. But if you're one of those mean drunks that want to fight, you deserve to spend a night or two in jail. If you get in your car and drive home you should also be in jail, because you are endangering my life. But if you're a happy drunk and walk home there's no reason whatever to keep you from drinking. Alcohol prohibition to prevent DUIs and fistfights is a "Minority Report" mindset, and I don't like the paternalistic attitude at all. The libbies put the label "nanny state" on damned near everything, but in this case it fits.

The cost of meth prohibition is low and the benefit is immense.

There's your problem. The cost of meth is very high to the idiot that would do that stuff, but far lower to society than incarcerating every dumbass stupid enough to snort the shit and the resultant violence caused by its prohibition.

My grandpa's generation (he had a beermaking kit in his barn in the '20s) learned the lesson of prohibition. Too bad his generation didn't pass the info along.

Oh wait, they did.. To bad Bush Jr didn't learn what similar policies on another subject did to the economy. If you'd like to read the whole book, here is the index. That particular tome was required reading in an undergrad history class I took at SIU in the late '70s, and is a very good book (quite readable).

I'd ask you if you were 15, but your id shows you couldn't be.

Multiply by four.

Life can't be summed up in dystopian novels.

Of course not, it was simply an illustration.

Laws exist to protect the public good, not to validate your view that you should be allowed to do anything you want, then pay for any harm you do later.

Which is why there are laws against theft and assault. I'm no "do what you want and pay later" libertarian, I simply believe in FREEDOM. If my activity doesn't harm anyone, why should I be punished for it? Your having ten beers in an hour doesn't affect me so it should be legal. But if you're one of those mean drunks that want to fight, you deserve to spend a night or two in jail. If you get in your car and drive home you should also be in jail, because you are endangering my life. But if you're a happy drunk and walk home there's no reason whatever to keep you from drinking. Alcohol prohibition to prevent DUIs and fistfights is a "Minority Report" mindset, and I don't like the paternalistic attitude at all. The libbies put the label "nanny state" on damned near everything, but in this case it fits.

The cost of meth prohibition is low and the benefit is immense.

There's your problem. The cost of meth is very high to the idiot that would do that stuff, but far lower to society than incarcerating every dumbass stupid enough to snort the shit and the resultant violence caused by its prohibition.

My grandpa's generation (he had a beermaking kit in his barn in the '20s) learned the lesson of prohibition. Too bad his generation didn't pass the info along.

Oh wait, they did.. To bad Bush Jr didn't learn what similar policies on another subject did to the economy. If you'd like to read the whole book, here is the index. That particular tome was required reading in an undergrad history class I took at SIU in the late '70s, and is a very good book (quite readable).

I'd ask you if you were 15, but your id shows you couldn't be.

Multiply by four.

Life can't be summed up in dystopian novels.

Of course not, it was simply an illustration.

Laws exist to protect the public good, not to validate your view that you should be allowed to do anything you want, then pay for any harm you do later.

Which is why there are laws against theft and assault. I'm no "do what you want and pay later" libertarian, I simply believe in FREEDOM. If my activity doesn't harm anyone, why should I be punished for it? Your having ten beers in an hour doesn't affect me so it should be legal. But if you're one of those mean drunks that want to fight, you deserve to spend a night or two in jail. If you get in your car and drive home you should also be in jail, because you are endangering my life. But if you're a happy drunk and walk home there's no reason whatever to keep you from drinking. Alcohol prohibition to prevent DUIs and fistfights is a "Minority Report" mindset, and I don't like the paternalistic attitude at all. The libbies put the label "nanny state" on damned near everything, but in this case it fits.

The cost of meth prohibition is low and the benefit is immense.

There's your problem. The cost of meth is very high to the idiot that would do that stuff, but far lower to society than incarcerating every dumbass stupid enough to snort the shit and the resultant violence caused by its prohibition.

My grandpa's generation (he had a beermaking kit in his barn in the '20s) learned the lesson of prohibition. Too bad his generation didn't pass the info along.

Oh wait, they did.. To bad Bush Jr didn't learn what similar policies on another subject did to the economy. If you'd like to read the whole book, here is the index. That particular tome was required reading in an undergrad history class I took at SIU in the late '70s, and is a very good book (quite readable).

No. Conservatives are againt profligate government spending, and then seeing taxes raised rather than spending less in the first place.

And what does "tea" in "tea party" stand for? Yep, "taxed Enough Already" despite the fact that Federal taxes are lower than any time since Truman.

I didn't notice any famous scripture that mentions taking money from other people in order to be generous with it.

And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not? 15Shall we give, or shall we not give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it. 16And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar's. 17And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And they marvelled at him.

How can a Christian be for being generous to the hangman and the General, but not to the poor?

No. But liberals are certainly intolerant of conservatives, as you're demonstrating.

You have a strange definition of "intolerance". Many things offend me, including conservative hypocrites who claim to be Christian, but I tolerate them. I wish I had Aaron Chambers' Eats With Sinners in front of me so I could quote some of it. He lists people God loves, including crooked politicians, gangsters, gays, whores, pimps, etc. Hate the sin, love the sinner.

Jesus ate with sinners. "He who is well has no need of a physician," He said. Tolerate sinners, try to help them to find God.

You're confusing religious crazies with conservatives.

Then why did so many conservative state legislators pass laws outlawing homosexuality? And by the way, I'm a religious crazy. Here's another book for you (look in your local public library), Wierd: Because Normal Isn't Working.

No, it was religious people - and mostly women

You might want to read a history book that was required reading in an undergrad general studies history class I took in the late '70s, historian Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday (full text here). The book was about the roaring twenties, written in the early thirties. Allen's book contradicts what you believe. Please educate yourself, you've been fed incorrect data. Oh, you were correct about the "mostly women" part, though.

My grandparents were young adults in the twenties, and what they told me about that decade meshed with what the historian wrote.

They are against forcing you to spend part of each day working for the poor.

Stingy bastards.

Liberals are the least charitable with their own money.

Matthew 6:1 -

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
2Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 3But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: 4That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.

Nobody knows how much or how little I give, because I try to follow Christ's teachings. I'm not always sucessful, but I try. I won't even deduct my alms from taxes, and I expect my fellow Christians to do teh same. The conservatives you speak of are exactly the people Jesus spoke against in the above passage.

You used the term "Walled Garden" in a way that is not approved by the Apple fans on Slashdot. "Walled Garden" must only be used to describe a safe place that has everything you'd ever want -- a garden that you're happy to be trapped in because you never want to leave.

Not to be confused with the Walled Garden in, say, the short story Rappaccini's Daughter -- No matter how great the analogy.

The Vietnam war was stopped? Yeah and how many wars have there been since that?

The protests were against that particular war and against the draft. And we weren't in any more wars until Bush Sr. almost a quarter century later, and the last soldier to be drafted went to Vietnam.

The 60s movement caused the war on drugs

No, they've been fighting a "war on drugs" since the thirties. It's just that the Vietnam war introduced thousands of draftees to pot, who came home and introduced it to friends and family. The phrase "war on drugs" was coined by Nixon to bolster more Republican support. Reagan reintroduced the phrase in the early eighties.

The EPA? How effective is the EPA?

Very effective. I grew up in Cahokia, IL, 5 miles from downtown St Louis. To get to St Louis you had to go through Sauget, IL, past the Cerro Copper and Monsanto plants. Vegetation was scarce and what was there was sickly. Driving through Sauget in the '50s and '60s you had to have the windows rolled up, even in 95 degree heat, and this was before many cars had AC, because the air would literally burn your lungs and make your eyes water. When I got home from the USAF in 1975 there was seldom any odor at all, once in a while a whiff of bleach, and the vegetation had turned form a sickly brownish to a healthy green.

Factories dumped hazardous wastes directly into rivers. Before the EPA, rivers and creeks actually caught fire!

The 60s radicals of the left served to legitimize the anti-communists of the right.

The anti-commies were never illegitimate. We were in a "cold war" with the USSR at the time. We had "duck and cover" atom bomn drills in schools, and everyone was terrifies of the communists.

And we still have millions of people in prison on drug offenses.

Too bad the protests against the drug laws were so weak. They were nothing like the antiwar and civil rights movements.

So if the 60s radicals really accomplished so much why hasn't anything gotten better?

They did. Rivers don't catch fire any more, we no longer draft people into the army, and there are laws against racial discrimination. The protester's goals were met. Things didn't start getting terrible until Bush Jr came into office and did the worst job of it than any president in my lifetime, maybe in history. I never thought I'd see a worst President than Carter, but Bush proved me wrong. He took office in a booming economy with $1.05 gasoline, before he left office we were in the worst economy since the depression and gas was $4.50. Bush and friends were exactly like Coolige and Hoover. Here's a book about the 1920s that was required reading in an undergraduate general studies history class I took in the late '70s at SIU. History does indeed repeat itself if one doesn't pay attention.

Ending the war in Vietnam and bringing the war to American soil is still fucked up.

I don't know what you mean by "bringing the war to American soil." The last time there was war on American soil was the Civil War, discounting Pearl harbor and 911.

when people form a monopoly on their product - labour

But there is no monopoly on labor. A union is the employees of a company bargaining collectively with management, which is also a collective. Unions take power from the 1% and give it to the 99%. I'm in a union and I hold no monopoly; there are thousands of me. And should I break the contract, management is free to fire me and hire someone else. Management can hire anyone.

As to the rest of your post, where do you get those ignorant ideas? Not in any college level history class! The 1929 stock market crash was caused by exactly the same thing that caused the 2008 crash -- Republicans and the "the less government we have, the better". Read Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's Frederick Lewis Allen, the entire book is online here. It was a required text in an undergrad course I took at SIU in the late '70s.

Everything needs balkance. Too little water and you'll die. Too much water and you'll die. Too much regulation causes problems, too little regulation causes problems. Misregulating causes problems in any case.

Sure, why not. The Library of Congress is 10 TB nominal (which is wrong, but whatever) so 1 LoC = 160 iPads. The Osborne 1 is 26.2 lbs and 2527 ci vs. the iPad's 1.46 lb and 25.7 ci, so it's 18 iPads by weight, and 10 iPads by volume.

You think tobacco and alcohol are the two most deadly and addictive drugs in existence???? Ever heard of heroin? Crystal meth?

I've known reformed junkies, not one of them quit cigarettes.

Can you imagine the effect on society if you could buy heroin the way you can buy cigarettes?

Yes, it would be cheap enough that they wouldn't have to break into my house and steal my shit to support their damned habits. Anybody that would take meth or heroin is already addicted to it. The laws against it don't reduce the supply at all, they only make it expensive.

They said the same thing about alcohol legalization in the 1920s that you say about the illegal drugs today. But when prohibition was lifted, the problems prohibition caused, which are exactly the same probems today's prohibition causes, all went away.

Here's a little history from a book that was required reading in an undergrad class I took in the '70s. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And this isn't limited to stories that touch on national issues; it happens at every level of media.

Yes, and this voluntary censorship of stories "not in the national interest" goes back at least to the early Cold War years, that golden age of common purpose against a common enemy which a previous poster longed for. It wasn't really a secret - Mockingbird was one of the forms in which it surfaced, British Security Coordination was another, and I'm sure there were others. If you've looked at the old Superman stories, it's interesting how quickly Supes turned on a dime from fighting corrupt defense contractors trying to drag the USA into a European war in 1938, to actively promoting that same war in the 40s. One can see why George Orwell became so cynical about Eurasia/Eastasia when so many "we have always been at war with Russia^WGermany^WRussia" alignment flips in the US-UK axis happened within ten years.

Completely voluntary self-censorship of multiple publishers due to mass patriotic fervour is one explanation. Coordinated propaganda action by intelligence agencies is another. The truth is probably somewhere between the two.

Edgar Allen would be so proud.

Roosevelt forced them to accept the New Deal through court packing, and it's all precedent from there.

Skin colour is different mostly because of environmental differences. What environmental differences do you propose to explain your suggested differences in the expression of genetic xenophobia? Dark skin is beneficial where the sun is strong, lighter skin -- in the latitudes that are closer to the poles, but it seems the cruelty with which people kill the other tribe is approximately the same everywhere.

lol! Well, culture can affect skill colour too! For example, some people like to go to tanning salons.

In the nature-vs-nurture debate, it is important to realise that this is a false dichotomy. Something can be 80% genetic, and 85% biological. (The remainders being chance factors.)

There are plenty of environmental circumstances that affect xenophobia -- but, according to what Turkheimer 2000 calls the "gloomy prospect", we will never be able to point to reliable environmental predictors of behavioural traits. Social scientists have been trying for, like, 80 years. (Read the paper for more information, it really is very interesting.)

According to Harris (The Nurture Assumption), our early-teenage peer group is a strong shaping factor on our personalities. (It has been shown conclusively that parents have little-to-none systematic permanent effects on behaviour.) Harris wrote a book "Why Children Turn Out the Way they Do", perhaps your answer to xenophobia will be there.

I do know that trait-conformity is correlated with trait-racism. But the only known strong causal predictors for either of these traits is genetics -- with only medium effect sizes.

Another issue is that of culture. How many parents are involved in their child's life today compared to a post WW2 family? I content that family values have dropped which is at the root of our youth crime rate. It basically has led us into a destructive positive feed-back cycle from a cultural standpoint.

If the loss of family values are responsible for the youth crime rate, we need to divest ourselves of family values as quickly as possible. The trend in youth crime has been decreasing since the mid 90s.

The really funny part is that you just committed the same error you accused me of making. That is, mistaking your own increased perception of a problem for an actual increase in incidence. In both cases if you care to dig up data you'll see that I'm right.

All I can get from the website/wiki is thats its a tool that processes things, which is kind of vague.

I found this paper via google:

http://www.mae.virginia.edu/meclab/images/AIAA%20Paper%20--%20VSP.pdf

Not a goatse link, honest.

If you remember the microsoft flightsimulators of the 80s/90s you could list specs and it would make you a plane, like make me a plane with a 50 foot wingspan and then you would attempt to fly it. This is pretty much the same idea for spec'ing a plane but instead of simulating flying it, it dumps out a file containing the model that you can do "whatever" with. Something like clippy for aerospace cad "so you seem to be trying to make a twin engine turboprop, would you like a wizard to help with that?".

To say the employment of the handicapped declined after passage of the ADA is a great oversimplification.

For example there was a concomitant reclassification of non-disabled people as disable for a number of reasons, the major one being the cutting of welfare benefits which encouraged non-employable people to seek out disabled classification.

That made it look like there was a decrease in employment for employed handicapped folks but that actually turns out not to be the case. The level of employment for previously employed handicapped folks stayed the same or possible increased slightly.

As with most things it is not as simple as a half sentence talking point.

This 2002 follow up (PDF alert) to the MIT 2001 paper that made the claim in the first place, examines in greater detail what possibly occurred:
http://people.virginia.edu/~sns5r/microwkshp/EmpADA_3_02.pdf