Yes, but it takes at least 5 pounds of grain (plus a lot of water) to fatten up a livestock by one pound. This was told to me directly by a farmer, so I'm assuming its true. If you used all that land and water growing food for PEOPLE instead of cows, you could feed a lot more people. But what's crucial here is that people don't get as much out of grain as cows do, so it might be that you end up having to eat 10 pounds of grain (or it's equivalent) to get what you would out of a pound of meat.
And another thing, you and I know as much what a cow is like from the inside as we do about an ear of corn. Who says that corn doesn't suffer for being domesticated at least as much as cattle do? And don't tell me plants don't feel because
I do agree that vegetarians can be pretty annoying when they're "in your face" about it. But then again, don't you think an "in your face" meat-eater is just as annoying to them?
I don't know anyone who eats meat who says "I cannot eat a meal with only vegatables," although I know both non-veg people who say "I will not etc." and veg people who say "I cannot eat that, it has meat." Something about that attitude rankles rather. I also don't know any meat eaters who insist on restaraunt changes because of dietary concerns. It's a hassle to hang with veggies.
And as far as Nazi's and bridges, I'd apply those analogies to things like wearing a brand of clothing, whereas meat is more like wearing pants at all. Sure, you could argue that "because everyone does it" isn't sufficient reason to wear pants, but you still look silly in your underthings.
I dunno. Factory farming involves the animal living in a cage for its entire lifespan. If you go out and kill an animal in the wild, at least the animal has a chance for a normal life, not to mention a chance to outwit you and survive.... I always thought hunting was actually less cruel!
By sport hunting I meant hunting for the thrill of killing an animal, not hunting in order to eat the flesh of the animal you'd slain. The former mocks the sanctity of life, while the later comes closer to "natural order" and whatnot.
Yummy. Order a rare steak some places near me, and it comes pick right through and just lightly warm. I think they come as close to raw as health code allows. It's a bit chewy, and different from "properly" cooked, but quite good.
Okay, I could be wasting all my mod points today on this topic, but I've got to post on this one. (Goodbye rest of afternoon...)
There are plenty of arguments to continue eating meat apart from "animals are damn tasty." It's just that they're rarely considered, for the same reasons that while some people might argue that clothes are unneccesary and cumbersome, very few people reason about why they keep wearing clothes. Societal acceptance and all that. In fact: Reasons to eat meat (Apart from "it's damn tasty")
Social Acceptance. I don't know how often I've known veg.* who were eventually reviled by their peers. It's a pain hanging out with veg.* people, because, at least where I live, eating out is a social thing, and veg.* are really picky about where they'll eat. And never once have I ever heard a veg.* say "I will not eat that," always "I cannot eat that." In short, meat eating is almost as socially convenient as wearing pants.
Biology / Economy Cows it plants. They have long, long intestines, and a complicated digestive tract for doing so. They're very good at digesting plants. Humans are not. This begins to explain why vegans need to take dietary suppliments. Furthermore, per volume, meat contains more nutritional stuff than plants. Which would explain why the veg.* people I've known have been fairly lethargic, skinny, wan people.
Ethically Much as I hate to malign my fellow cordates, cows are dumb. Almost as dumb as sheep and chickens, but not quite. And part of that idiocy is an inability to manage their foraging, and the other part is being pretty universal prey. That's not really their fault though. They've been domesticated, by us and by our forbears, and as such we have responsibilty to manage them, to keep them safe from predators, to keep them from grazing fields dead. And when you can point out a person who will undertake that without some recompense, I'll be satisfied to let them do that. Until then, the recompense comes in milk "stolen" from the cows, and meat from their carcasses. And I don't see anything worse in that than hunting them for their meat.
Now, I will admit that I think a certain amount of humanity could be reinvested in the slaughter business. Factory farming has gotten to be cruel, although still not as cruel as sport hunting.
Please tell me the logical path you took to get from "selfish philosophy" to "weak thinking and small souls".
Actually, there isn't a direct one. I've addressed this elsewhere in this thread, but the Fling philosophy smacks of Randian Objectivsm, with which I have ethical, philosophical and personal issues.
Briefly, Rand proposes to produce a purely rational philosophical system and then proceeds to use as a postulate a weak basis and to orate about her system's perfection. So a> it has what I feel to be logical philosophical flaws and b> it seems to be grounded in an almost Scientological hypocrisy of claiming pure rationalism and then getting irrational about it.
Ethically, it denies any concept of debt to parents (for instance) or responsibilty to fellow people. Those two tenets are especially disturbing in my view.
Personally, every self-proclaimed Objectivist demonstrated themselves to be really upsetting people; of the sort who wouldn't rescue children from burning buildings etc. And I do get somewhat emotional about this because one in particular lied to me over a long period because it was better for them.
So, okay, yes, I am a touch emotional about this. But my objections to Objectivism are rational ones.
Fling partakes of Objectivism for the basis of its philosophy, or at least repeats portions of it verbatim by means of parellel evolution. (Although they quote Rand...)
Incidentally, I don't believe in souls as such, although people can have soul, or be soulless, or have small souls. I could just have easily said "heart" instead, if you prefer. (In fact, feel free to #ifdef Nyarly #define soul heart #endif.) Not quite the same, but if my use of the word "soul" upsets you so, have at.
Has there ever been a law to force companies to allow people to buy their products before?
Yes. The suggestion is that the RIAA is guilty of anti-competitive practices from behind the aegis of a monopoly. The monopoly itself is just fine (although there's a suggestion that it may have been acquired illegaly). However, once you've got it, you have to play by different rules, and part of that is that you can't withhold a product and try to prevent others from providing it. So, if the RIAA wants to have any sort of control over how music is distributed electronically, they had damn well better be doing it themselves before they start pitching fits.
Otherwise they just sound like schoolyard bullies who see a toy they don't have, so they break it. The only reason US businesses are supposed to manage monopolies of any kind is for the ultimate benifit of consumers. But whenever someone else can say "I could do that cheaper, but he's keeping me down" or "I could do it better for the same cost, but the Monopoly is in my way" you ought to be in trouble.
Practically, though, monopolies get that way by doing something essential, (cf Railroads around the turn of the century in the US and Europe) and no one wants them to fail. It gets to be like a world full of herion addicts not wanting the poppy fields to burn.
First I'd like to decry the fact that the parent to this comment was moderated down. Although I understand the moderator for dodging meta-moderation with an "Overrated." It's totally logical and correct in itself. The trouble with Objectivism is that it claims to be purely logical, attacks classical philosophy for being bunkum, and then bases it's entire set of theorems on the postulate that perception is reality (okay, Rand said that Existence exists, but then comes down hard on the suggestion that perception might be flawed.) Libertarianism isn't neccesarily flawed, but it's often based in Objectivism and so has a weak foundation.
This is one of those topics I'm always hesitant to post on because I know their are Objectivists and Libertarians on/., and they get Moderation points like everyone else, but to hell with that. I just tend to think of Objectivism as being like unto Scientology; they both claim rational roots, and both diverge into pedantic oratory (in Objectivism's case) and rampant spiritualism (Scientology.) They're the meme equivalent of a compromised crypto program, and they scare and upset me.
Technical The crypto as described seems to add very little apart from immense delays to transmission. Unless you use Fling for everything, it doesn't even begin to protect you, and using a multi-host route is going to probably multiply latency by the number of hosts you add. Frankly this looks like a half-baked MixMaster anonymous email scheme applied with broad strokes to all of low level networking.
Adoption It won't be. You have to write this into any client you want to use it? Name service is a completely seperate entity? This would basically mean redoing the whole networking thing from square one (UDP), and the people who have to implement it are exactly the ones you're try to hide info from. Do you really think MS would ever put truly secure transmission protocols in their TCP/IP package?
Philosophy The entire philosophy behind it is repugnant to me. The conclusions are somewhat accurate, in that there ought to be a means to be anonymous on-line, but the basis is in Objectivist Libertarianism, and implies a freedom from obligation to others and debt to forebearers. It's a selfish, twisted, flawed philosophy, evident of weak thinking and small souls.
I for one doubt it will really go anywhere.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Finally I learned to love Katz rants
on
Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 1
Where else can one find Official trolls that are designed as legitimized flamebait. I'm sure the big K himself would appreciate the irony if I said that a JonKatz article is like a Five Minute Hate.
Parentage and Perfectablity My first reaction to this particular stream of drivel was that I wonder to what degree people would consider the link between parentage and genome. I would think that for the same reasons that adoption is so attrociously under-represented pretty much world-wide, most people are not going to want to host a kid with more genes tweaked than natural.
It seems somewhat reasonable that the idea of congenial correction would be more widespread; who wouldn't want to prevent their children from receiving their sickle-cell gene, but what brown haired couple really wants blonde kids? The joke changes from being about a milkman to the eugenecist.
Frankly, the degree to which people, especially men, are obsessed about the parentage of their kids will preclude a lot of the gengineering processes that might become popular; until it can be done after the fact, on adult organisms.
The End of the World Again But I'm frankly unsurprised by Katz going off the handle about a technological advance. I'm surprised he hasn't predicted that the Pentium 4 will be remembered in history as the end of freedom in the known world. Or maybe that's his next article.
Luddites always see how Satan is coming in the next technological revolution. Motorcars, electricity, mass production. I'm sure someone somewhere wanted Gutenberg branded a heretic for producing a bible without writing it by hand. And we do own the pessimistic visionaries a debt of gratitude, since they do point out the dangers and hazards of new revolutions. But if we were to take them completely at their words, we'd be living in caves pulling gathered nuts around on sleds. Hardly an appetizing worldview.
Societal Preference Speaking of worldviews, though, I've got to wonder who Katz would prefer the Human Genome Map to be in the hands of. Not much of a US fan myself, I wouldn't say that the US is any better or worse than any other culture to handle this. In fact, there's probably more of a reproducive Luddite factor in the US than anywhere else. The Far East has a reputation of female infanticide, the Middle East and Slavic nations of ethnic cleansing and termination-as-birth-control, European nations have histories of eugenics and governmental interference in reproduction, African nations are known for non-existant female reproductive rights and general human rights violations.
Overall, even with a long record of sexual permissiveness and shallow image conciousness, it almost seems like the States would be the best choice. Excepting maybe Canada, granted.
The Weirdo and Persecution Maybe the Hellmouth stories were too popular. Maybe Katz made too many friends on that piece. Or maybe he's always had a geek-as-misfit crusade going. I didn't read him before the Hellmouth stuff. But I think the entire approach is skewed. Until you start jailing people for speech issues, I don't think you're doing anything wring to form cliques, and include or exclude whoever you want. You don't get to be an outcast by being accepted. And the in-crowd doesn't innovate.
Seriously, a step or two off of the paranoid pyramid he's been building might be good for Jon. Genes for weirdness? Come on. Probably easier to find intelligence genes (if they aren't identical.)
The truth of the matter is that there is still no Neo-Nazi organization trying to round up all the geeks and put them down. And there are no Evil Eugenicists working for them.
Part of the problem is that if Nike says "Whoops, we goofed. Sorry. Here's some cash." they effectively say (legally) "This bad thing was our fault" and they end up having to settle with everyone who comes to sue them over it. The statement becomes a legal admission of guilt as far as civil cases go. Sort of like at a car wreck, neither driver is supposed to apologize, since it becomes an admission of guilt later.
When I tried to explain the lack of a real destructor to a fellow C++ programmer he was absolutely astounded.
That your grasp of Java (and garbage collection) is rudimentary is made obvious by the forgoing statement. Out of fear that there are other's who disparage garbage collection for lacking destructors let me throw this into the thread.
Using a destructor in a garbage collection scheme would be like writing top level functions under object orientation. Like C++, yes. The point, though, is that the collector takes care of your allocated and unused memory on the fly without interference. And while it feels weird to create objects and then leave them to be collected when you start Java (or other GC environments) the idea is that, much like the register directive, delete is a thing of the past; the machine should know best how to deal with it.
Finally, the result of run time checking and garbage collection is a debug cycle shorter than the coding cycle. And even though you might disparage the specific implementation, that's a result that's very very nice.
To be sure, I code a lot more in C++ than Java, but that's because I'm looking at final run speeds, not development turnaround.
You'd have to find something for geeks for which there is not an O'Reilly book to refute this.
Really? Where can I get the O'Reilly book on Chicken Eating, then? And, more to the point, what animal would they choose for the cover if they did decide to include carnival geeks in their customer demographic?
Apple will probably (sue them/modify future Imacs so this modification is not possible/otherwise behave in a fashion considered anti-social by the geek culture at large.) Pick one.
Think again, Greyfox. Consider that this won't really hurt Apple's business, since the cost of buying an iMac and accellerating it to a 500Mhz G3 could buy you a 400Mhz G4 and half a decent monitor (although, granted, not from Apple).
Then consider the goodwill that Apple customers usually hold for Apple as their machines last them around twice what a PC would. And how much more an accerator card adds to that.
There are a number of nifty things in this decision.
The timeframe etc. is exactly as proposed; the after-hours Microsoft "let's do this the MS way" document seems to have been totally ignored.
The OS Business will be required to release (in a Timely Manner) the APIs that it would give to it's employees. Not an Open OS, but manditory API release.
The resulting companies are forbidden from so much as a joint venture for the life of the Final Decision. No sneaky starting daughter spin-offs.
Managers in either company are forbidden from owning stock in the other. Good idea; in the short term it prevents dirty money produciton from the breakup. In the long term in keeps Gates or whoever from buying enough stock to control both companies and starting a third parent. You might even think Jackson had done this before...
One trip to the Supreme Court and we can get going already. Part of Microsoft's plan seems to have been to be snotty enough that Jackson will beat them around and they can go to a higher court with a bloody nose. I think Jackson's been pretty controlled so far, and I'd hope that the Supreme Court tells MS to sit and spin.
All in all, I just want to see how it all turns out. I know it's too much to hope that the Evil Empire will wither and die, although I'm not sure what else they have available to them.
I'm curious as to the projection quality of digital movies over traditional silver emulsions. While I'm sure that no lossy compression would be applied to a commercially projected film, what sort of projection technology are we talking about here. Hopefully nothing like the LCD presentation boxes we're using here at work. I can't imagine the image quality being anything near 35 or 70mm film stock.
The other question I have to consider is film processing. I know that Ronin used a lab process to get that wonderful slightly blue, dark and washed out look. How well can that really be duplicated digitally?
IIRC, Yilmaz's GR says that *singularities* don't exist because the graviational field itself will counterbalance collapse past a certain point, not that event horizons/black holes can't exist. The minimum stellar mass required to form a black hole will increase, but that's only an issue with the remnants of supernovae, not galactic black holes.
Wouldn't that suggest that as you approach the speed of light, you'd collapse into a singularity? As I recall, the addition special relativity makes to Newtonian physics is the addition of a gamma term that multiplies mass by the inverse of the difference of velocity and the speed of light (1/(c-v)^2, I think...) It's this result that requires infinite energy to approach the speed of light, but wouldn't it also imply that achieving lightspeed would render the mass a singularity?
Not that I consider myself competant to challenge modern physics theory, but I've never found a better way to grok than to question it. Explains why I don't do well in less Rational fields of Essential Knowledge.
The real irony in the Napster/Offspring suit is that if there is an ideology behind Napster, it's that modern intellectual property laws and ethics need rethinking, yet they find that their only real product is their own IP, which they must defend to the death or lose their hold on.
Which begs the question: is the idea that the digital era damages notions of IP seriously flawed, or is there a better approach to intellectual property that can coexist with global fat pipes and perfect data transmission?
There was a poster some time ago on a seperate topic that made allusions to Renaissance artists being commissioned and sponsered. Is there a way we could return to that model of art and distribution. For instance, what if Metallica's fans put up $20 a piece for them to produce an hour's worth of music to be publicly distributed? Or there's a trend to using advertizing to pay for services (the FreePC company, Eudora's sponsored mode, Geocities), that might be somehow applied (and evaded...) to music.
The conclusion I seem to be more and more driven to is that unless the movement away from outdated ways of thinking is somehow legitimized, then the situation will become ossified much the way the United States relies on oil for transport in the face of ecologic damage and better alternatives. Big business backs it's current stance and drives others into the ground.
Of course the flip side is, if a new intellectual economy doesn't come into existence, is that indication of the might of Corporate Media et al, or the wrongness of ideas like "Information Wants to be Free"?
Apple has never been really good at developing new and exciting technical breakthroughs.
What they are good at is taking new and exciting technical breakthroughs from "Nobody's heard of it" to "Just send it over the airport." (or even "Double-click"). And chosing (usually) the right technologies to foster. Who'd heard of USB two years ago? Firewire is another IEEE standard, and now it's becoming a high-end Mac standard as well. Hell, everybody knows the story of the mouse, right?
A boycott might work if you could get enough people to boycott eBay. Frankly, though, I don't think enough people care what eBay does, mainly because they can't grasp what's wrong with what eBay has done.
The Internet is a hairy-scary place for a lot of it's inhabitants, which makes them much less likely to assert themselves in a boycott, especially if they don't understand why they should boycott or what they'd get out of it.
However, the nature of the Internet does allow for other forms of protest. I'm reminded of a leperchaun story where the little person in question, bound to leave the red ribbon on the tree above his gold in place, instead ties ribbons around every tree in the forest. The analog here is to claim intellectual property violations on any even vaguely reasonable auction, and indicate at the very least that Microsoft's claims brought the possibility to you attention.
Least legally, a virtual boycott of some sort might be arranged, by hijacking the domain to a education site concerning eBay and their practices, and then linking to eBay. Or eBay in a frame, with a description of how eBay is mistreating it's customers page-by-page.
Finally, a serious email campaign might be taken up to make sure that eBay doesn't misunderstand silence as tolerance. Normally, all an email campaign does is annoy the object, but in this case it seems a reasonable course.
Actually, the real difference between polynomical and exponential time is in large problems, where it's going to take a while anyway. Functionally, though, if N is Large Enough, a polynomial begins to look linear, whereas an exponential never slows down.
And large problems are exactly what these apply to. Say, for instance, natural language processing. N is the size of the recognized vocabulary and the complexity of the grammar, roughly. Imagine being able to conceivably using the OED as your vocabulary/grammar set.
P=NP relates directly not necessarily to the speed of solutions (which will be slow, usually) but to the possibilty of reasonable solutions. That's a big difference.
The small issue here is the the Constitution has never stood in the way of the US government. Some laws based on the Constitution have sometimes made them hesitate, but actually paying attention to the document that some of them are sworn to uphold and protect, hah!
More to the point, though, as a munition, it falls outside (supposedly) of the Second Ammendment; something about maintaining peace in general. 50 caliber machine guns are munitions, AFAIA, and are not legal for US citizens (general) to own or operate. You'll recall a certain faix do do in Waco, Texas almost a decade ago, which was justified by the Davidians ownership of heavy automatic weapons.
Math is always news for nerds, because programming is very much like the activity proving theorems - you go for simplicity, generality, and ABOVE ALL, conceptual elegance.
And, actually, the Is P=NP question is vitally important to any sort of reasonable algorithms work. Travelling salesman is one problem that's easy to explain, and even easier to tie up huge amounts of resources with. But it's equivalent to natural language processing, for instance, and a lot of useful AI applications. Reducing any of those problems to polynomial time would be the same as reducing all of them, and the fact of the matter is that that is almost certainly worth far more than a measely $1e6. More like $1e(8 or 9).
So, yeah, these are incredibly hard problems. And like all of the real stumpers in math, they begin with one question: where to start?
if they're inseperable, why is there a K7 and P6? same instruction set, different architecture.
Properly, that's "same ISA, different design." Picky, I suppose, but the design should be immaterial except for how it performs. There could be little smilie faces in the silicon for all you care. It just wants to be fast.
There's an AC who's dubious of www.spec.org, and I thought I'd reiterate that and amplify it by saying that the most recent Motorola chip bench is the 604, which is like bringing a PII into the discussion. Hardly fair.
I've read the article you linked to (here) and it's garbage. I can't necessarily dispute DeMone's findings, but I'm dubious of them. The reason it's garbage, and that disputing it is difficult is that he neglects to document his sources.
For a technical article to not report where he's gotten his benchmark data, his historical facts etc. is not just suspect, it's ludicrous.
The other thing that strikes a weird chord is the chorus of clock speed not being the same as but being strongly corelated to performance. This is a fallacy in chip design, propigated by the truth that clock speed is strongly corelated to chip performance within a chip family but outside the family, clock frequency is meaningless.
In the end, DeMone's article is no less Intel propaganda than Apple.com is Apple propaganda. I suspect many of his claims are erroneous, since they contradict statements from third party journals, but I can't contest them seriously without sources.
Why is it that I rise to the bait so easily? why "x86" is yesterday's chip. Is the statement based on instruction set? No? Perhaps you meant archiecture? Hmm.
Actually, one could argue quite reasonably that the instruction set is outdated (It's CISC, for crying out loud. It's the design for a calculator that they've bolted things onto!) and that only the poorly informed would seperate the instruction set from the architecture, since, in the design field, the two are almost synonymous. The acronym is ISA, if you don't believe me.
Sure they use the x86 instruction set, but they are deftly ahead of any PowerPC architecture.
Sure. Links to numbers would be appreciated. Back your statements, rather than spouting opinion, please. N.b. Quake is not a benchmark.
Sarcasm aside, I'd like to know what MAC-only applications you are referring to in this statement.
First, if I could reiterate an AC with a good point: either use bold if you want emphasis, or tell me why you're using MAC as an acronym rather than a diminutive of Macintosh?
Second, the MacOS would be a good example. From font installation and matching, to integrated color picking and handling, developer color matching pachages, and gamma based on print rather than TV, the MacOS is built around publishing and blows Windows right out of the water.
Slashdot Mirror
And another thing, you and I know as much what a cow is like from the inside as we do about an ear of corn. Who says that corn doesn't suffer for being domesticated at least as much as cattle do? And don't tell me plants don't feel because
Ushers will eat latecomers.
I don't know anyone who eats meat who says "I cannot eat a meal with only vegatables," although I know both non-veg people who say "I will not etc." and veg people who say "I cannot eat that, it has meat." Something about that attitude rankles rather. I also don't know any meat eaters who insist on restaraunt changes because of dietary concerns. It's a hassle to hang with veggies.
And as far as Nazi's and bridges, I'd apply those analogies to things like wearing a brand of clothing, whereas meat is more like wearing pants at all. Sure, you could argue that "because everyone does it" isn't sufficient reason to wear pants, but you still look silly in your underthings.
I dunno. Factory farming involves the animal living in a cage for its entire lifespan. If you go out and kill an animal in the wild, at least the animal has a chance for a normal life, not to mention a chance to outwit you and survive.... I always thought hunting was actually less cruel!
By sport hunting I meant hunting for the thrill of killing an animal, not hunting in order to eat the flesh of the animal you'd slain. The former mocks the sanctity of life, while the later comes closer to "natural order" and whatnot.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Yummy. Order a rare steak some places near me, and it comes pick right through and just lightly warm. I think they come as close to raw as health code allows. It's a bit chewy, and different from "properly" cooked, but quite good.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
There are plenty of arguments to continue eating meat apart from "animals are damn tasty." It's just that they're rarely considered, for the same reasons that while some people might argue that clothes are unneccesary and cumbersome, very few people reason about why they keep wearing clothes. Societal acceptance and all that. In fact: Reasons to eat meat (Apart from "it's damn tasty")
Now, I will admit that I think a certain amount of humanity could be reinvested in the slaughter business. Factory farming has gotten to be cruel, although still not as cruel as sport hunting.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Actually, there isn't a direct one. I've addressed this elsewhere in this thread, but the Fling philosophy smacks of Randian Objectivsm, with which I have ethical, philosophical and personal issues.
Briefly, Rand proposes to produce a purely rational philosophical system and then proceeds to use as a postulate a weak basis and to orate about her system's perfection. So a> it has what I feel to be logical philosophical flaws and b> it seems to be grounded in an almost Scientological hypocrisy of claiming pure rationalism and then getting irrational about it.
Ethically, it denies any concept of debt to parents (for instance) or responsibilty to fellow people. Those two tenets are especially disturbing in my view.
Personally, every self-proclaimed Objectivist demonstrated themselves to be really upsetting people; of the sort who wouldn't rescue children from burning buildings etc. And I do get somewhat emotional about this because one in particular lied to me over a long period because it was better for them.
So, okay, yes, I am a touch emotional about this. But my objections to Objectivism are rational ones.
Fling partakes of Objectivism for the basis of its philosophy, or at least repeats portions of it verbatim by means of parellel evolution. (Although they quote Rand...)
Incidentally, I don't believe in souls as such, although people can have soul, or be soulless, or have small souls. I could just have easily said "heart" instead, if you prefer. (In fact, feel free to #ifdef Nyarly #define soul heart #endif.) Not quite the same, but if my use of the word "soul" upsets you so, have at.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Yes. The suggestion is that the RIAA is guilty of anti-competitive practices from behind the aegis of a monopoly. The monopoly itself is just fine (although there's a suggestion that it may have been acquired illegaly). However, once you've got it, you have to play by different rules, and part of that is that you can't withhold a product and try to prevent others from providing it. So, if the RIAA wants to have any sort of control over how music is distributed electronically, they had damn well better be doing it themselves before they start pitching fits.
Otherwise they just sound like schoolyard bullies who see a toy they don't have, so they break it. The only reason US businesses are supposed to manage monopolies of any kind is for the ultimate benifit of consumers. But whenever someone else can say "I could do that cheaper, but he's keeping me down" or "I could do it better for the same cost, but the Monopoly is in my way" you ought to be in trouble.
Practically, though, monopolies get that way by doing something essential, (cf Railroads around the turn of the century in the US and Europe) and no one wants them to fail. It gets to be like a world full of herion addicts not wanting the poppy fields to burn.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
This is one of those topics I'm always hesitant to post on because I know their are Objectivists and Libertarians on /., and they get Moderation points like everyone else, but to hell with that. I just tend to think of Objectivism as being like unto Scientology; they both claim rational roots, and both diverge into pedantic oratory (in Objectivism's case) and rampant spiritualism (Scientology.) They're the meme equivalent of a compromised crypto program, and they scare and upset me.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Parentage and Perfectablity
My first reaction to this particular stream of drivel was that I wonder to what degree people would consider the link between parentage and genome. I would think that for the same reasons that adoption is so attrociously under-represented pretty much world-wide, most people are not going to want to host a kid with more genes tweaked than natural.
It seems somewhat reasonable that the idea of congenial correction would be more widespread; who wouldn't want to prevent their children from receiving their sickle-cell gene, but what brown haired couple really wants blonde kids? The joke changes from being about a milkman to the eugenecist.
Frankly, the degree to which people, especially men, are obsessed about the parentage of their kids will preclude a lot of the gengineering processes that might become popular; until it can be done after the fact, on adult organisms.
The End of the World Again
But I'm frankly unsurprised by Katz going off the handle about a technological advance. I'm surprised he hasn't predicted that the Pentium 4 will be remembered in history as the end of freedom in the known world. Or maybe that's his next article.
Luddites always see how Satan is coming in the next technological revolution. Motorcars, electricity, mass production. I'm sure someone somewhere wanted Gutenberg branded a heretic for producing a bible without writing it by hand. And we do own the pessimistic visionaries a debt of gratitude, since they do point out the dangers and hazards of new revolutions. But if we were to take them completely at their words, we'd be living in caves pulling gathered nuts around on sleds. Hardly an appetizing worldview.
Societal Preference
Speaking of worldviews, though, I've got to wonder who Katz would prefer the Human Genome Map to be in the hands of. Not much of a US fan myself, I wouldn't say that the US is any better or worse than any other culture to handle this. In fact, there's probably more of a reproducive Luddite factor in the US than anywhere else. The Far East has a reputation of female infanticide, the Middle East and Slavic nations of ethnic cleansing and termination-as-birth-control, European nations have histories of eugenics and governmental interference in reproduction, African nations are known for non-existant female reproductive rights and general human rights violations.
Overall, even with a long record of sexual permissiveness and shallow image conciousness, it almost seems like the States would be the best choice. Excepting maybe Canada, granted.
The Weirdo and Persecution
Maybe the Hellmouth stories were too popular. Maybe Katz made too many friends on that piece. Or maybe he's always had a geek-as-misfit crusade going. I didn't read him before the Hellmouth stuff. But I think the entire approach is skewed. Until you start jailing people for speech issues, I don't think you're doing anything wring to form cliques, and include or exclude whoever you want. You don't get to be an outcast by being accepted. And the in-crowd doesn't innovate.
Seriously, a step or two off of the paranoid pyramid he's been building might be good for Jon. Genes for weirdness? Come on. Probably easier to find intelligence genes (if they aren't identical.)
The truth of the matter is that there is still no Neo-Nazi organization trying to round up all the geeks and put them down. And there are no Evil Eugenicists working for them.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Did I mention IANAL?
Ushers will eat latecomers.
That your grasp of Java (and garbage collection) is rudimentary is made obvious by the forgoing statement. Out of fear that there are other's who disparage garbage collection for lacking destructors let me throw this into the thread.
Using a destructor in a garbage collection scheme would be like writing top level functions under object orientation. Like C++, yes. The point, though, is that the collector takes care of your allocated and unused memory on the fly without interference. And while it feels weird to create objects and then leave them to be collected when you start Java (or other GC environments) the idea is that, much like the register directive, delete is a thing of the past; the machine should know best how to deal with it.
Finally, the result of run time checking and garbage collection is a debug cycle shorter than the coding cycle. And even though you might disparage the specific implementation, that's a result that's very very nice.
To be sure, I code a lot more in C++ than Java, but that's because I'm looking at final run speeds, not development turnaround.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Really? Where can I get the O'Reilly book on Chicken Eating, then? And, more to the point, what animal would they choose for the cover if they did decide to include carnival geeks in their customer demographic?
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Think again, Greyfox. Consider that this won't really hurt Apple's business, since the cost of buying an iMac and accellerating it to a 500Mhz G3 could buy you a 400Mhz G4 and half a decent monitor (although, granted, not from Apple).
Then consider the goodwill that Apple customers usually hold for Apple as their machines last them around twice what a PC would. And how much more an accerator card adds to that.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
- The timeframe etc. is exactly as proposed; the after-hours Microsoft "let's do this the MS way" document seems to have been totally ignored.
- The OS Business will be required to release (in a Timely Manner) the APIs that it would give to it's employees. Not an Open OS, but manditory API release.
- The resulting companies are forbidden from so much as a joint venture for the life of the Final Decision. No sneaky starting daughter spin-offs.
- Managers in either company are forbidden from owning stock in the other. Good idea; in the short term it prevents dirty money produciton from the breakup. In the long term in keeps Gates or whoever from buying enough stock to control both companies and starting a third parent. You might even think Jackson had done this before...
- One trip to the Supreme Court and we can get going already. Part of Microsoft's plan seems to have been to be snotty enough that Jackson will beat them around and they can go to a higher court with a bloody nose. I think Jackson's been pretty controlled so far, and I'd hope that the Supreme Court tells MS to sit and spin.
All in all, I just want to see how it all turns out. I know it's too much to hope that the Evil Empire will wither and die, although I'm not sure what else they have available to them.Ushers will eat latecomers.
I'm curious as to the projection quality of digital movies over traditional silver emulsions. While I'm sure that no lossy compression would be applied to a commercially projected film, what sort of projection technology are we talking about here. Hopefully nothing like the LCD presentation boxes we're using here at work. I can't imagine the image quality being anything near 35 or 70mm film stock.
The other question I have to consider is film processing. I know that Ronin used a lab process to get that wonderful slightly blue, dark and washed out look. How well can that really be duplicated digitally?
Guess this won't be moderated "Informative."
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Wouldn't that suggest that as you approach the speed of light, you'd collapse into a singularity? As I recall, the addition special relativity makes to Newtonian physics is the addition of a gamma term that multiplies mass by the inverse of the difference of velocity and the speed of light (1/(c-v)^2, I think...) It's this result that requires infinite energy to approach the speed of light, but wouldn't it also imply that achieving lightspeed would render the mass a singularity?
Not that I consider myself competant to challenge modern physics theory, but I've never found a better way to grok than to question it. Explains why I don't do well in less Rational fields of Essential Knowledge.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Which begs the question: is the idea that the digital era damages notions of IP seriously flawed, or is there a better approach to intellectual property that can coexist with global fat pipes and perfect data transmission?
There was a poster some time ago on a seperate topic that made allusions to Renaissance artists being commissioned and sponsered. Is there a way we could return to that model of art and distribution. For instance, what if Metallica's fans put up $20 a piece for them to produce an hour's worth of music to be publicly distributed? Or there's a trend to using advertizing to pay for services (the FreePC company, Eudora's sponsored mode, Geocities), that might be somehow applied (and evaded...) to music.
The conclusion I seem to be more and more driven to is that unless the movement away from outdated ways of thinking is somehow legitimized, then the situation will become ossified much the way the United States relies on oil for transport in the face of ecologic damage and better alternatives. Big business backs it's current stance and drives others into the ground.
Of course the flip side is, if a new intellectual economy doesn't come into existence, is that indication of the might of Corporate Media et al, or the wrongness of ideas like "Information Wants to be Free"?
Ushers will eat latecomers.
What they are good at is taking new and exciting technical breakthroughs from "Nobody's heard of it" to "Just send it over the airport." (or even "Double-click"). And chosing (usually) the right technologies to foster. Who'd heard of USB two years ago? Firewire is another IEEE standard, and now it's becoming a high-end Mac standard as well. Hell, everybody knows the story of the mouse, right?
Ushers will eat latecomers.
The Internet is a hairy-scary place for a lot of it's inhabitants, which makes them much less likely to assert themselves in a boycott, especially if they don't understand why they should boycott or what they'd get out of it.
However, the nature of the Internet does allow for other forms of protest. I'm reminded of a leperchaun story where the little person in question, bound to leave the red ribbon on the tree above his gold in place, instead ties ribbons around every tree in the forest. The analog here is to claim intellectual property violations on any even vaguely reasonable auction, and indicate at the very least that Microsoft's claims brought the possibility to you attention.
Least legally, a virtual boycott of some sort might be arranged, by hijacking the domain to a education site concerning eBay and their practices, and then linking to eBay. Or eBay in a frame, with a description of how eBay is mistreating it's customers page-by-page.
Finally, a serious email campaign might be taken up to make sure that eBay doesn't misunderstand silence as tolerance. Normally, all an email campaign does is annoy the object, but in this case it seems a reasonable course.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
And large problems are exactly what these apply to. Say, for instance, natural language processing. N is the size of the recognized vocabulary and the complexity of the grammar, roughly. Imagine being able to conceivably using the OED as your vocabulary/grammar set.
P=NP relates directly not necessarily to the speed of solutions (which will be slow, usually) but to the possibilty of reasonable solutions. That's a big difference.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
More to the point, though, as a munition, it falls outside (supposedly) of the Second Ammendment; something about maintaining peace in general. 50 caliber machine guns are munitions, AFAIA, and are not legal for US citizens (general) to own or operate. You'll recall a certain faix do do in Waco, Texas almost a decade ago, which was justified by the Davidians ownership of heavy automatic weapons.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
And, actually, the Is P=NP question is vitally important to any sort of reasonable algorithms work. Travelling salesman is one problem that's easy to explain, and even easier to tie up huge amounts of resources with. But it's equivalent to natural language processing, for instance, and a lot of useful AI applications. Reducing any of those problems to polynomial time would be the same as reducing all of them, and the fact of the matter is that that is almost certainly worth far more than a measely $1e6. More like $1e(8 or 9).
So, yeah, these are incredibly hard problems. And like all of the real stumpers in math, they begin with one question: where to start?
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Properly, that's "same ISA, different design." Picky, I suppose, but the design should be immaterial except for how it performs. There could be little smilie faces in the silicon for all you care. It just wants to be fast.
There's an AC who's dubious of www.spec.org, and I thought I'd reiterate that and amplify it by saying that the most recent Motorola chip bench is the 604, which is like bringing a PII into the discussion. Hardly fair.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
For a technical article to not report where he's gotten his benchmark data, his historical facts etc. is not just suspect, it's ludicrous.
The other thing that strikes a weird chord is the chorus of clock speed not being the same as but being strongly corelated to performance. This is a fallacy in chip design, propigated by the truth that clock speed is strongly corelated to chip performance within a chip family but outside the family, clock frequency is meaningless.
In the end, DeMone's article is no less Intel propaganda than Apple.com is Apple propaganda. I suspect many of his claims are erroneous, since they contradict statements from third party journals, but I can't contest them seriously without sources.
So there you are.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Actually, one could argue quite reasonably that the instruction set is outdated (It's CISC, for crying out loud. It's the design for a calculator that they've bolted things onto!) and that only the poorly informed would seperate the instruction set from the architecture, since, in the design field, the two are almost synonymous. The acronym is ISA, if you don't believe me.
Sure they use the x86 instruction set, but they are deftly ahead of any PowerPC architecture.
Sure. Links to numbers would be appreciated. Back your statements, rather than spouting opinion, please. N.b. Quake is not a benchmark.
Sarcasm aside, I'd like to know what MAC-only applications you are referring to in this statement.
First, if I could reiterate an AC with a good point: either use bold if you want emphasis, or tell me why you're using MAC as an acronym rather than a diminutive of Macintosh?
Second, the MacOS would be a good example. From font installation and matching, to integrated color picking and handling, developer color matching pachages, and gamma based on print rather than TV, the MacOS is built around publishing and blows Windows right out of the water.
Ushers will eat latecomers.