"Perhaps you'd like to explain why, if piracy for no-profit is legal, that Napster and warez sites get shut down. "
Simple. (Hah. You thought you were being clever, didn't you?)
Napster got shut down for inciting, aiding, and abetting copyright infringement. Piracy was no part of it at all.
Warez sites get shut down because they offer direct downloads (i.e., THEY are distributing) of copyrighted works, for profit... the profit is generally advertising, but it is STILL offering directly copied works in exchange for money, even if the money is indirect. Not even remotely the same as Napster.
So: warez sites (at least most of them that aren't just links to others) are pirates. Napster was not, but got caught in a different part of the law.
"I would call this misleading. It think the quality of the people they accept to some of the schools is lackluster, but if you're a good student (i.e. one who is willing to question and go beyond the actual coursework), you can get quite a lot out of those types of schools."
I think this reply is misleading. It misses the boat in at least two ways:
First, the quality of the people they accept is completely irrelevant. The quality of the people they graduate is the only thing that matters.
But as for the second point: actually, most of them -- if you want to be honest -- are low-quality schools. They are primarily designed to milk the students for as much government money as they can, then dump them out the door.
Don't blame the students for this... the schools' advertising, promises, and application procedures are outright predatory.
"If it were a no-knock raid perhaps, but if they announce that they are police, then such action would be inexcusable murder."
BUT -- and these are the relevant criteria here -- "no knock" raids are ONLY supposed to be attempted when (A) there is probable cause, (B) there is a judicial warrant based on that probable cause, and (more to the point) (C) the person involved is suspected to be CURRENTLY armed and a danger to the public. OR, (D), there is a significant chance that evidence will be destroyed before it can be recovered. One of the justifications for allowing "no knock" raids in the first place were when it was suspected that drug dealers would flush their merchandise before a "proper" warrant could be served. But they have grossly abused it since then.
(Note also: "Danger to the public" does NOT mean danger to the POLICE! It means a danger to the PUBLIC. If the suspect is only dangerous to the police they can simply choose not to raid, and apprehend him/her elsewhere. End of problem. Lots of court precedent.)
If there is not a clear and present danger, they are supposed to KNOCK on the fucking door, and READ the warrant if asked, before entering.
If it's a "no-knock" raid, and they DIDN'T have probable cause, or announce themselves properly, or a number of other things, it still isn't murder, it's self-defense. At least in this state.
"It may be a "tired" argument to you that "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.", but that doesn't make it an incorrect argument."
That wasn't the argument that I was calling tired.
"You seem to have a common misunderstanding. The "press" refers to using technology for speech, it's not referring to an occupation or a specific industry. Everyone has freedom of speech and of the press."
It isn't my misunderstanding, it's yours. I am well aware of this. Our difference lies in what is meant by "everyone". My opinion -- and consensus legal opinion until 1977 (and which I say should still hold) -- is that it is limited to actual human beings.
"It seems pretty obvious that a law prohibiting people, no matter how they're organized..."
But the key word here is PEOPLE. Corporations are NOT "people". Corporations are government-created entities. They were given the privilege of acting as people for capital investment purposes.
If the people who make up a corporation want to get together and make a political statement, clearly they have the right to do so. But that is not the same as a political statement made by a corporation, at the whim of its leadership. In the latter case, it is (A) "speech" made by an additional entity, entirely separate from the people who work for the corporation, and (B) not necessarily representative [I would guess seldom representative] of the people who work for the corporation.
It is your apparent failure to realize that you are talking about a fictional "person" that does not represent the real people of the organization, that is the essence of our argument here.
"It may be a "tired" argument to you that "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.", but that doesn't make it an incorrect argument."
That wasn't the argument that I called tired.
"You seem to have a common misunderstanding. The "press" refers to using technology for speech, it's not referring to an occupation or a specific industry. Everyone has freedom of speech and of the press."
It's not my misunderstanding, it's yours. I am well aware of this. Our differences here are over what "everyone" means.
"It seems pretty obvious that a law prohibiting people, no matter how they're organized..."
Corporations are not PEOPLE. If THE PEOPLE who make up a corporation want to get together and make a political statement, let them. That is NOT the same thing as a political statement made BY A CORPORATION, at the whim of its leadership.
It is your failure to see the difference that is the basis of this whole argument.
PLEASE, for Christ's sake, STOP doing the RIAA and MPAA's job for them! And Cowboy Neal, of all people, should know better too.
Downloading (and in most cases uploading) is NOT piracy! It is merely civil copyright infringement!
Copyright piracy is a VERY old legal term, and it means to make and distribute multiple copies for profit. Pirates don't share via P2P. It would defeat their whole purpose. Calling downloading "piracy" is not an example of "modern usage", it is just plain incorrect.
Piracy is a crime, sometimes even a felony. Downloading is not a crime at all.
"Big Content" wants you to think they are the same things, but they are not. Whenever you call downloading "piracy", you help them toward their evil ends.
We used to have the world's largest helium supply, by far, in the U.S. Strategic Helium Reserve, until the government decided to do away with it just a few years ago.
"Alibaba seems to be one of china biggest e-commerce site."
I have to wonder why people are calling Alibaba "a Chinese Amazon" when it's really nothing of the sort. Go to Alibaba.com. They do sell retail, but they probably make a lot more in their role as a middleman between manufacturers in China and distributors and retailers in the rest of the world. That is not a role that Amazon plays at all.
I should clarify, since at one point in this thread I was talking about fixed-point but improperly calling them integers, and in another part actually talking about integers.
Apologies for any confusion. It was my fault but not intentional.
The solution to overflow in fixed point is to use scaled integers.
I know of no way to absolutely avoid rounding errors, except to simply use more digits than the significant digits you require, and even that is simply a probability game; you can't absolutely avoid them but you can reduce the frequency.
"I'm sure that you do not view yourself as 'leftist'. The New York Times views Obama as a 'Center-Right' president. To each his own."
And this makes me equally sure that you do view me as a leftist, even though that is about the farthest thing from the truth you could have come up with.
I have gotten pretty used to people accusing me of being "right-wing conservative", even though that is not true either.
I take issues as they come, and consider them on the merits. I do not take a "left-wing" view or a "right-wing" view. I despise both of those "views" approximately equally.
"So if you and I form a corporation to publish a newspaper, we both supply the money and get stock shares, but we decide you'll be the newspaper editor and I'll run the printing presses, or whatever, then it's legal for the government to censor that newspaper, because it's not censoring our individual speech?"
This is a tired argument. The constitution says that the government shall pass no law abridging the "freedom" of the press. It does not say that a press corporation has a right to "freedom of speech". That may seem like splitting hairs to you, but there is a difference.
It should also be pointed out that in that time, "the press" largely consisted of small shops run by individuals, not corporations. Corporations did exist, however. It is not as though the founders were unfamiliar with the concept.
Regardless: the Supreme Court had ruled in past cases that the government could limit political contributions in order to minimize the corrupting influence of money, without stepping on rights of free speech. (See the Wikipedia entry on Citizens United.) To conflate political contributions with a corporate "right" of free speech (the very concept of which was completely unheard of until 1977) was a pretty giant leap.
But to sum it up: the proscription on government interference with free speech and the press does not equate to a corporate "right" of free speech. That is hardly a slam-dunk, or maybe even a rimshot. It takes some pretty twisty thinking to get "corporate right of free speech" out of the Constitution.
"By your reasoning, the New York Times Corporation has no right to publish, since it is a collective body. By your reasoning, it publishes only under sufferance of the government of the day, which is free to impose any type of censorship it desires."
According to the Constitution that is a "freedom", not a "right".
Do you think the Founders mumbled, or garbled their words? Or do you think there was an actual purpose behind the wording?
"Contrary to what many leftist legal commentators assert, Citizens United did not invent rights of corporations, but build on a long line of precedent, including First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti in 1978. It is an incremental decision, rather than a revolutionary one. "
I say or even imply that it came out of nowhere. Nevertheless, the general consensus among analysts has been that it was a bad decision. Citizens United was hardly "incremental"... it broke new ground: as Justice Stevens said in his dissent, the majority addressed a question that wasn't even raised, and "changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law".
I would also argue that certain other portions of the dissenting opinion are irrelevant. But that one, at least, is valid.
I -- and many constitutional scholars -- do not agree that Bellotti was a proper decision either, and Citizens United also contradicted other precedents. So the argument that it simply continued a logical progression is disingenuous.
And just FYI, I am not a "leftist" or a "liberal", by any stretch of the imagination.
"On a fixed point machine however adding both numbers will either result in an overflow or in two bits being tainted. And so on. Care to disprove me? "
I would not attempt to try to "disprove" you on Slashdot. But I will argue with some of your assumptions.
First, you can do "floating point" math using scaled integers of a size to represent the number of decimal points you desire. But the integer math is not subject to either the speed limitations, or the bugs that have been not just known but fairly common in fp hardware. Sure, you still get rounding errors, but you get those anyway. But they aren't the only kind of errors that occur with floating-point. They ARE the only kind of errors you get with integer math.
"I've yet to see why limited liability justifies imposing political censorship on law-abiding citizens."
You are making the same conceptual mistake as so many others here.
This is precisely why most analysts have said that SCOTUS erred in its Citizens United decision.
Censoring political speech by corporations is NOT censoring political speech by individuals. The individuals who make up the corporation -- the actual holders of 1st- and 4th-Amendment rights -- are not censored at all. Just the corporation. So any loss of "rights" is completely imaginary.
You are assuming that a corporation somehow has extra rights that the individual citizens who make it up do not. That is not true.
"Ever since the corporation was invented, it has had many "human rights": the right to hold property, the right to buy and sell, the right to form contracts, the right to sue and be sued, etc."
No, they haven't, and this is where many people get mixed up. Including the Supreme Court recently, to my utter astonishment.
"Rights", according to our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution, belong to us simply as a consequence of existing as human beings. Government (technically) does not have the power to either bestow or abridge "rights".
The ability of corporations to act as "people" in some respects, are privileges granted by government. They are not "rights" of any kind. Those privileges can be granted, taken away, or altered by Congress or state governments at any time. Therefore they cannot be "rights" in any meaningful sense of the term.
"If citizens have rights when acting individually, why should those rights disappear when they act collectively? "
They don't. Your concept of a "collective right" never existed in the first place. Again, you are mixed up. A person has rights. A parade doesn't. A riot doesn't. The crowd at a baseball game doesn't. The individuals do. The crowd does not. Same with corporations... or at least until the Supreme Court came out with that bonehead Citizens United decision. It will inevitably be overturned by a future court.
"People think that being a corporation shields you from almost anything, and you can do whatever you want without fear of personal repercussions. That's simply not true!"
They think that because they see it in the news every day.
"If other creditors of the corporation discover the fraud that was perpetrated, and they will, it won't bode well for the person who attempts to do what you describe."
Other creditors could have / should have known about it from the bankruptcy proceedings. If they didn't, again it's their fault.
Floating-point arithmetic in processors is fraught with errors (such as rounding errors) and has quite often turned out to contain very significant bugs. Integer math simply does not have those problems. If you want "numerical stability", you need to stay away from floating-point in hardware.
"First off, any metric which yields a single number is bound to be misleading as it is easy to find two applications a and b where a runs faster than b on machine 1 and slower than b on machine 2."
Part of the point I was making.
"it's much easier to prove numerical stability with floating point numbers"
"These machines most certainly do NOT simulate floating point with their integer units (nor cheat by calling an integer op as an approximate fp op), and they have massive amounts of dedicated hardware SIMD FP processing units to do their heavy lifting."
I did not say that they did. I said that you could consider integer units that emulated fp hardware to be doing flops. I did not state that this is the usual case.
"... they are rated by the number of IEEE FP operations..."
I KNOW that... my point is that it probably is not an appropriate rating these days. Not representative of many real-world problems.
"The integer OPs currently don't count in the current ratings and I don't see that changing any time soon."
Well, thanks for repeating pretty much what I already said.
Slashdot Mirror
"I guess it's just pirates voting you up for saying what they want to hear, rather than saying anything accurate."
What I stated was accurate enough. I can prove it to you here publicly if you want to look even more like a fool.
"Perhaps you'd like to explain why, if piracy for no-profit is legal, that Napster and warez sites get shut down. "
Simple. (Hah. You thought you were being clever, didn't you?)
Napster got shut down for inciting, aiding, and abetting copyright infringement. Piracy was no part of it at all.
Warez sites get shut down because they offer direct downloads (i.e., THEY are distributing) of copyrighted works, for profit... the profit is generally advertising, but it is STILL offering directly copied works in exchange for money, even if the money is indirect. Not even remotely the same as Napster.
So: warez sites (at least most of them that aren't just links to others) are pirates. Napster was not, but got caught in a different part of the law.
"I would call this misleading. It think the quality of the people they accept to some of the schools is lackluster, but if you're a good student (i.e. one who is willing to question and go beyond the actual coursework), you can get quite a lot out of those types of schools."
I think this reply is misleading. It misses the boat in at least two ways:
First, the quality of the people they accept is completely irrelevant. The quality of the people they graduate is the only thing that matters.
But as for the second point: actually, most of them -- if you want to be honest -- are low-quality schools. They are primarily designed to milk the students for as much government money as they can, then dump them out the door.
Don't blame the students for this... the schools' advertising, promises, and application procedures are outright predatory.
"If it were a no-knock raid perhaps, but if they announce that they are police, then such action would be inexcusable murder."
BUT -- and these are the relevant criteria here -- "no knock" raids are ONLY supposed to be attempted when (A) there is probable cause, (B) there is a judicial warrant based on that probable cause, and (more to the point) (C) the person involved is suspected to be CURRENTLY armed and a danger to the public. OR, (D), there is a significant chance that evidence will be destroyed before it can be recovered. One of the justifications for allowing "no knock" raids in the first place were when it was suspected that drug dealers would flush their merchandise before a "proper" warrant could be served. But they have grossly abused it since then.
(Note also: "Danger to the public" does NOT mean danger to the POLICE! It means a danger to the PUBLIC. If the suspect is only dangerous to the police they can simply choose not to raid, and apprehend him/her elsewhere. End of problem. Lots of court precedent.)
If there is not a clear and present danger, they are supposed to KNOCK on the fucking door, and READ the warrant if asked, before entering.
If it's a "no-knock" raid, and they DIDN'T have probable cause, or announce themselves properly, or a number of other things, it still isn't murder, it's self-defense. At least in this state.
"It may be a "tired" argument to you that "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.", but that doesn't make it an incorrect argument."
That wasn't the argument that I was calling tired.
"You seem to have a common misunderstanding. The "press" refers to using technology for speech, it's not referring to an occupation or a specific industry. Everyone has freedom of speech and of the press."
It isn't my misunderstanding, it's yours. I am well aware of this. Our difference lies in what is meant by "everyone". My opinion -- and consensus legal opinion until 1977 (and which I say should still hold) -- is that it is limited to actual human beings.
"It seems pretty obvious that a law prohibiting people, no matter how they're organized ..."
But the key word here is PEOPLE. Corporations are NOT "people". Corporations are government-created entities. They were given the privilege of acting as people for capital investment purposes.
If the people who make up a corporation want to get together and make a political statement, clearly they have the right to do so. But that is not the same as a political statement made by a corporation, at the whim of its leadership. In the latter case, it is (A) "speech" made by an additional entity, entirely separate from the people who work for the corporation, and (B) not necessarily representative [I would guess seldom representative] of the people who work for the corporation.
It is your apparent failure to realize that you are talking about a fictional "person" that does not represent the real people of the organization, that is the essence of our argument here.
"It may be a "tired" argument to you that "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.", but that doesn't make it an incorrect argument."
That wasn't the argument that I called tired.
"You seem to have a common misunderstanding. The "press" refers to using technology for speech, it's not referring to an occupation or a specific industry. Everyone has freedom of speech and of the press."
It's not my misunderstanding, it's yours. I am well aware of this. Our differences here are over what "everyone" means.
"It seems pretty obvious that a law prohibiting people, no matter how they're organized ..."
Corporations are not PEOPLE. If THE PEOPLE who make up a corporation want to get together and make a political statement, let them. That is NOT the same thing as a political statement made BY A CORPORATION, at the whim of its leadership.
It is your failure to see the difference that is the basis of this whole argument.
PLEASE, for Christ's sake, STOP doing the RIAA and MPAA's job for them! And Cowboy Neal, of all people, should know better too.
Downloading (and in most cases uploading) is NOT piracy! It is merely civil copyright infringement!
Copyright piracy is a VERY old legal term, and it means to make and distribute multiple copies for profit. Pirates don't share via P2P. It would defeat their whole purpose. Calling downloading "piracy" is not an example of "modern usage", it is just plain incorrect.
Piracy is a crime, sometimes even a felony. Downloading is not a crime at all.
"Big Content" wants you to think they are the same things, but they are not. Whenever you call downloading "piracy", you help them toward their evil ends.
Stop.
"Likely to be a permanent condition."
Well, you can thank the U.S. government for that.
We used to have the world's largest helium supply, by far, in the U.S. Strategic Helium Reserve, until the government decided to do away with it just a few years ago.
And now there is a shortage. Imagine that.
"Not only that, but after the helium migrates through the pores in the metal housing, the heads will crash! Physically programmed disk death!"
Well, it's still better than their past efforts. The hydrogen-filled drives worked just great, until they got to New Jersey. Then they exploded.
"Alibaba seems to be one of china biggest e-commerce site."
I have to wonder why people are calling Alibaba "a Chinese Amazon" when it's really nothing of the sort. Go to Alibaba.com. They do sell retail, but they probably make a lot more in their role as a middleman between manufacturers in China and distributors and retailers in the rest of the world. That is not a role that Amazon plays at all.
I should clarify, since at one point in this thread I was talking about fixed-point but improperly calling them integers, and in another part actually talking about integers.
Apologies for any confusion. It was my fault but not intentional.
The solution to overflow in fixed point is to use scaled integers.
I know of no way to absolutely avoid rounding errors, except to simply use more digits than the significant digits you require, and even that is simply a probability game; you can't absolutely avoid them but you can reduce the frequency.
"I'm sure that you do not view yourself as 'leftist'. The New York Times views Obama as a 'Center-Right' president. To each his own."
And this makes me equally sure that you do view me as a leftist, even though that is about the farthest thing from the truth you could have come up with.
I have gotten pretty used to people accusing me of being "right-wing conservative", even though that is not true either.
I take issues as they come, and consider them on the merits. I do not take a "left-wing" view or a "right-wing" view. I despise both of those "views" approximately equally.
"So if you and I form a corporation to publish a newspaper, we both supply the money and get stock shares, but we decide you'll be the newspaper editor and I'll run the printing presses, or whatever, then it's legal for the government to censor that newspaper, because it's not censoring our individual speech?"
This is a tired argument. The constitution says that the government shall pass no law abridging the "freedom" of the press. It does not say that a press corporation has a right to "freedom of speech". That may seem like splitting hairs to you, but there is a difference.
It should also be pointed out that in that time, "the press" largely consisted of small shops run by individuals, not corporations. Corporations did exist, however. It is not as though the founders were unfamiliar with the concept.
Regardless: the Supreme Court had ruled in past cases that the government could limit political contributions in order to minimize the corrupting influence of money, without stepping on rights of free speech. (See the Wikipedia entry on Citizens United.) To conflate political contributions with a corporate "right" of free speech (the very concept of which was completely unheard of until 1977) was a pretty giant leap.
But to sum it up: the proscription on government interference with free speech and the press does not equate to a corporate "right" of free speech. That is hardly a slam-dunk, or maybe even a rimshot. It takes some pretty twisty thinking to get "corporate right of free speech" out of the Constitution.
"By your reasoning, the New York Times Corporation has no right to publish, since it is a collective body. By your reasoning, it publishes only under sufferance of the government of the day, which is free to impose any type of censorship it desires."
According to the Constitution that is a "freedom", not a "right".
Do you think the Founders mumbled, or garbled their words? Or do you think there was an actual purpose behind the wording?
"Contrary to what many leftist legal commentators assert, Citizens United did not invent rights of corporations, but build on a long line of precedent, including First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti in 1978. It is an incremental decision, rather than a revolutionary one. "
I say or even imply that it came out of nowhere. Nevertheless, the general consensus among analysts has been that it was a bad decision. Citizens United was hardly "incremental"... it broke new ground: as Justice Stevens said in his dissent, the majority addressed a question that wasn't even raised, and "changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law".
I would also argue that certain other portions of the dissenting opinion are irrelevant. But that one, at least, is valid.
I -- and many constitutional scholars -- do not agree that Bellotti was a proper decision either, and Citizens United also contradicted other precedents. So the argument that it simply continued a logical progression is disingenuous.
And just FYI, I am not a "leftist" or a "liberal", by any stretch of the imagination.
I, too, was referring to fixed-point numbers. My error for saying "integer", when fixed-point is what I meant.
No, I was not referring to exactness.
"On a fixed point machine however adding both numbers will either result in an overflow or in two bits being tainted. And so on. Care to disprove me? "
I would not attempt to try to "disprove" you on Slashdot. But I will argue with some of your assumptions.
First, you can do "floating point" math using scaled integers of a size to represent the number of decimal points you desire. But the integer math is not subject to either the speed limitations, or the bugs that have been not just known but fairly common in fp hardware. Sure, you still get rounding errors, but you get those anyway. But they aren't the only kind of errors that occur with floating-point. They ARE the only kind of errors you get with integer math.
"I've yet to see why limited liability justifies imposing political censorship on law-abiding citizens."
You are making the same conceptual mistake as so many others here.
This is precisely why most analysts have said that SCOTUS erred in its Citizens United decision.
Censoring political speech by corporations is NOT censoring political speech by individuals. The individuals who make up the corporation -- the actual holders of 1st- and 4th-Amendment rights -- are not censored at all. Just the corporation. So any loss of "rights" is completely imaginary.
You are assuming that a corporation somehow has extra rights that the individual citizens who make it up do not. That is not true.
"... so why should limited liability disqualify a collective of citizens from speaking on political issues?"
It doesn't. The "collective" never had any "rights" in the first place. Only individual human beings do.
There is no such thing as a collective right. The Supreme Court has declared as much, more than once.
(Then, of course, contradicted itself with the majority opinion in Citizens United.)
"They shouldn't of course, but then neither should they gain extra rights when they act collectively."
This.
Precisely. You put it better than I did.
"Ever since the corporation was invented, it has had many "human rights": the right to hold property, the right to buy and sell, the right to form contracts, the right to sue and be sued, etc."
No, they haven't, and this is where many people get mixed up. Including the Supreme Court recently, to my utter astonishment.
"Rights", according to our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution, belong to us simply as a consequence of existing as human beings. Government (technically) does not have the power to either bestow or abridge "rights".
The ability of corporations to act as "people" in some respects, are privileges granted by government. They are not "rights" of any kind. Those privileges can be granted, taken away, or altered by Congress or state governments at any time. Therefore they cannot be "rights" in any meaningful sense of the term.
"If citizens have rights when acting individually, why should those rights disappear when they act collectively? "
They don't. Your concept of a "collective right" never existed in the first place. Again, you are mixed up. A person has rights. A parade doesn't. A riot doesn't. The crowd at a baseball game doesn't. The individuals do. The crowd does not. Same with corporations... or at least until the Supreme Court came out with that bonehead Citizens United decision. It will inevitably be overturned by a future court.
"People think that being a corporation shields you from almost anything, and you can do whatever you want without fear of personal repercussions. That's simply not true!"
They think that because they see it in the news every day.
"If other creditors of the corporation discover the fraud that was perpetrated, and they will, it won't bode well for the person who attempts to do what you describe."
Other creditors could have / should have known about it from the bankruptcy proceedings. If they didn't, again it's their fault.
To elaborate on the latter:
Floating-point arithmetic in processors is fraught with errors (such as rounding errors) and has quite often turned out to contain very significant bugs. Integer math simply does not have those problems. If you want "numerical stability", you need to stay away from floating-point in hardware.
"First off, any metric which yields a single number is bound to be misleading as it is easy to find two applications a and b where a runs faster than b on machine 1 and slower than b on machine 2."
Part of the point I was making.
"it's much easier to prove numerical stability with floating point numbers"
False.
"These machines most certainly do NOT simulate floating point with their integer units (nor cheat by calling an integer op as an approximate fp op), and they have massive amounts of dedicated hardware SIMD FP processing units to do their heavy lifting."
I did not say that they did. I said that you could consider integer units that emulated fp hardware to be doing flops. I did not state that this is the usual case.
"... they are rated by the number of IEEE FP operations..."
I KNOW that... my point is that it probably is not an appropriate rating these days. Not representative of many real-world problems.
"The integer OPs currently don't count in the current ratings and I don't see that changing any time soon."
Well, thanks for repeating pretty much what I already said.