Singapore is a relatively new and untested place for offshoring, which is a risk in itself.
Not really. Singapore is one of the most well developed countries in Asia, and a huge financial centre. Banks and other operators in the financial services industry have long since relocated some of their operations there. The big difference is that Singapore has established a niche place in the offshoring world, specialising in high-end services, high-tech industry and telecomms, and a well educated workforce, which is a stark contrast to the manufacturing sweatshops that Asian offshoring is traditionally associated with. The economy of Singapore is held up by economists as an example for other nations (it's healthcare model has also been praised by economists for successfully mixing universal healthcare with capitalist principles to reduce costs to only 3% of GDP, whilst providing one of the highest qualities of service to patients of any nation in the world). For a high-tech corporation, relocating to Singapore would present very few problems (apart from the obvious - resistance from its employees who do not want to relocate).
This is a very interesting claim, because the major constraint to labor mobility isn't technical or geographical, it is a person's resistance to relocation. Lack of labor mobility is blamed as one of the prime factors that drives unemployment, particularly in economically disadvantaged areas. There are numerous examples of areas where employment has boomed due to some local economy growing, migrants are attracted to the area, and begin to have families. When this economy then collapses, people are left in an area with a lack of jobs and hence high unemployment. A minority of these people will leave the area looking for work. The majority will be resistant to change, and will refuse to move. They were happy to move there to work, but have since developed a sense of entitlement - that they shouldn't have to move to find work, and are happy therefore to live on benefits.
The minority who are willing to relocate will usually discover new geographical areas where there are more job opportunities. But to the people who refuse to relocate for work, particularly the young who will simultaneously complain that there are no jobs in the local town, but refuse to consider moving away, I have little sympathy. One of the more recent trends I've noticed is unemployed people complaining about immigrants, who have often relocated themselves thousands of miles, being employed. But when I point out that there are jobs available in factories only 50 miles away, these same people will absolutely refuse to consider moving. Well, guess what, jobs that are geographically-bound are going to be taken by people who are actually willing to move to where the jobs are, rather than those who expect the jobs to move to them.
Different situation. Dell shifted to Poland because the overall costs are lower - the cost of employing people there is less, even though tax is higher. Corporation tax in Poland is 19%, which is significantly higher than Ireland's 12.5%. If anything, your example demonstrates that corporate tax rate is not the most significant factor when considering a relocation, and therefore reducing your corporate tax rates will not save your manufacturing economy in a globalised world.
After the Irish raise their corporate tax rates, and all of those large, international businesses pull their facilities out
But will they really, or is this all just empty bluffing? Given that there are already 0% corporate tax jurisdictions within the British Isles (but outside the E.U.), why haven't these companies already relocated? The answer is: none of those jurisdictions with lower corporate tax rates are inside the European Union. A company like Google can't do business inside the E.U. without having an E.U. legal presence, and if it trades as an E.U. corporate entity, then it has to pay corporation tax. As long as the Irish rate is competitive against other countries inside the EU, these companies won't move, and their screams of protest amount to nothing more than bluffing and posturing.
Not true. The Guardian did a weekend special with pages and pages covering the Wikileaks data, and they continued to publish articles based on the Wikileaks data for a week afterwards. They have an online tag for Wikileaks articles: guardian.co.uk/media/wikileaks shows 474 articles, many of them mentioning "war logs" in the title. They also published Afghanistan: the war logs and Iraq: the war logs, with numerous articles based directly on the leaked data. Likewise, the New York Times published the series The War Logs based on the leaked data, as did Der Spiegel.
I know what you are getting at though,and the Guardian also had an editorial talking about this point (Assange is 'force-feeding truth to a world that has no stomach for it'): that the released data has been ignored by much of the mainstream media, whereas in the past in would've been lapped up. Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers was widely examined and discussed in the media, and this hasn't happened so much with the Wikileaks data. They blame general resignation and apathy amongst the population, and a lack of people who are willing to stand up and actually protest against the things that are done in their name. However, I have another hypothesis: the opponents of Wikileaks have done a really great job at getting the media to shoot the messenger, rather than listen to the message.
The anti-Wikileaks organisations have become much, much better at handling the media than they were during the time of the Vietnam war. The Pentagon has a put together a team of 120 people to deal with the Wikileaks problem. They have been amazingly successful in waging a media campaign to discredit Assange, and in turning media attention away from the data that Wikileaks has leaked, and onto unproven allegations of:
Rape
Personality issues (abuse of power, sexism, attitute towards women etc.)
Financial fraud
Anti-U.S. government bias
Endangering the lives of troops
Endangering the lives of collaborators and their families
Assange obviously has issues with U.S. foreign policy, but so do many people, including many Americans. Apart from that, nothing in the list has been proven, and yet - based entirely on these "rumours" - the media has mostly been manipulated into discussing Assange and his personal life and supposed "recklessness", rather than the leaked data.
The assault on Assange has been slow but relentless. He has lost support in several jurisdictions (Iceland, Sweden), and he is about to become an international fugitive from justice - Sweden has requested that Interpol issue a warrant for his arrest. This is for a man who was informed, in writing, by the prosecutor that there was no warrant for his arrest, and that he was free to leave the country. The Australian government has signalled that it would cooperate with a U.S. prosecution of Assange. His British visa expires next year and is unlikely to be renewed. There are certainly clandestine operations against Wikileaks: Assange has had laptops stolen from his checked luggage on international flights, and Wikileaks operatives in other countries have been put under surveillance.
Dealing with Assange was not enough - he had to be discredited, so that people would no longer support him, his organisation, or the principles of leaking data to the world. The opponents of Wiki
It is important to remember that Ron Paul is only against federal government officials putting people through body scanners and heavy pat downs. If the exact same procedures were put in place by the corporations that own the airlines or airports, and carried out by employees of those corporations, then he would say that should be a completely legal situation. As an extreme example - if an airline insisted that all (white/black/asian) women must submit to group sex with (white/black/asian) men before boarding, then that should also be a completely legal situation. That is obviously an extreme example, but what I'm getting at here is that Ron Paul believes that corporations and individuals should be able to enforce any rules that they want on their property, as a condition of being allowed to remain on that property. The airport is some corporation's property. The airplane is some corporation's property. It should be lawful for corporations to enforce any rules, even racist ones, on potential passengers. State government can presumably also do the same. However, the moment the federal government attempts to do it, then it has overstepped the constitutional authority bestowed on it, and must be stopped.
This is exactly the same thing as the conversion/arithmetic functions that Google has. Is it Anti-trust for Google to automatically show you the "centimeters to inches" conversion instead of simply linking to another page that has a converter app?
I was about to say something similar. Searching for "csco" versus "csco$", the results are identical, apart from the link to Google Finance at the top of the "csco" results. There is the issue that the Google Finance box appears identical to a regular search result, and gets a graphic icon, however, I would say that this is strongly compensated for by Google's inclusion of multiple links to competing web sites within the "value added Finance box" (links are "Google Finance Yahoo Finance MSN Money DailyFinance CNN Money Reuters"). As a comparison point, search for "csco" on bing.com. You will get a top result linking to msn.com, but with no links at all to other finance sites. On Yahoo, the top result is finance.yahoo.com, but it does show other results, and the results don't change when manipulating the keyword, so maybe there is not so much bias here (it is quite believable that an unbiased search would return finance.yahoo.com as the top result - Google's own search prompts "finance yahoo" as the first suggestion when you enter the single word "finance").
Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged as the impact this has on our future energy supply could be enormous. With a little bit of googling you can readily find oil fields from old that have mysteriously started refilling with oil.
Abiogenic oil, the great oil conspiracy theory. Which of these is the more likely:
There is a global conspiracy between oil corporations, national governments, and academics to push the accepted "fake" theory that oil reserves were created by compressed and heated biomass. The aim of this is to create an artificial scarcity and control the world, when in fact oil is plentiful, constantly regenerating, and can be found everywhere.
There is no global conspiracy. Oil reserves really were created from biomass, natural oil really is a scare resource, and the oil fields will eventually run dry.
If oil fields refill, then why isn't the U.S. still producing large amounts of oil? Why did the U.S. hit peak oil and become reliant on Middle Eastern oil? Do people really believe that this is just a big conspiracy, and that the various U.S. governments since 1970 when the U.S. hit peak oil have all been in on the conspiracy? Why would they do this? What would they gain from this? Hmm.
A medical student friend of mine realised that someone was copying his answers (multiple choice) half way through an exam (the exam was taken in a lecure hall, and the seats behind were raised enough to see over the person in front). He was outraged, and went to hide his paper, but then had a better idea - he went through the second half of the exam paper ticking the wrong answers for each question, then hid the paper, and went back and changed all the wrong answers. Awesome job. Though it did worry me to hear his stories of medical students cheating - this is the profession that our society puts on a pedestal of honesty and trust, and if they can't be bothered to learn about medicine while they're at uni, what kind of doctor will they turn out to be?
Was physical attendance at your class mandatory? One of the first things I did as a TA was to tell the students that they didn't have to turn up for the actual teaching sessions. Although officially attendance was supposed to be compulsory, I told them I would not be reporting anyone for non-attendance. I got this idea from an old teacher of mine, who said that if there are people in the class who don't want to be there, then get them out as quickly as possible, otherwise they will drag everyone else down with them. I never saw about 20% of the class after that. However, the rest of the class wanted to be there, they wanted to learn - maybe for interest, maybe for the grades - but regardless, they wanted to learn and chose to be there, and that made a huge difference.
A paper address book is not as crazy as it sounds. I know an elderly woman who really does carry a paper phone book around with her so she can call people on her mobile phone. She hasn't figured out the user interface at all, but she can turn the phone on, type in a number, and press dial. For a long time, the fact that she didn't get a dial tone was confusing, and she would press dial to "pick up" and then try dialing the number, which of course didn't work.
Another friend of mine took to writing down all of her numbers after she wanted to transfer them to her new phone. I pointed out that she could've used the "transfer to SIM" function on the old phone and then "transfer from SIM" on the new phone. She was shocked that was possible, and told me it had taken her hours to copy out the address book to paper and re-enter the whole lot into the new phone, but at least now she had a paper copy she wouldn't ever lose it.
Funny how your arguments keep being lies. The claim that Jews drink blood of anything is a lie.
I am not sure you are being mentally coherent at this point. Of course the blood libel against Jews is a lie. What do you think I meant?
Why do you claim that I was lying when I said that Arnaud Amalric said "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius"? It is accepted by historians that he did say that. It was reported at the time that he did say this, and he never denied saying it. Your quote from Wikipedia about the unarmed servants attacking the city is not a denial that he said that phrase. As to the attack on Beziers - why do you think it was okay for Christian soldiers to murder 20,000 innocent people in cold blood? Why was it okay for the Pope to order the extermination of the Cathari people anyway?. Why do you make excuses when Christian forces commit atrocities, but when Muslim forces do the same, you blame Islam?
nazis in America 50 years ago played the racism card
Nazis claimed that other races were inferior to whites. You are suggesting that Nazis claimed to be the victims of racism from other white people? That makes no sense - because white Germans and white Americans are the same race.
I am surprised and saddened to hear that you have travelled and talked to people of other cultures and still feel the way that you do. If you honestly believe that over one sixth of the humans on this planet are genocidal maniacs, then it is no wonder the world seems like a scary place, and that you are so angry and defensive.
It's easy to demonise people, isn't it? People like you did the same thing to the Jews, saying that they were a danger to society, that they murdered Christian children in blood rituals, that they just had to be dealt with.
Have you ever actually engaged in conversation with any Muslims? Have you ever visited a Muslim country? Or do you get all of your "knowledge" from web sites that cater to your extremist point of view? I dare you to leave your armchair and travel the world, to meet people of different races and ethnicities face-to-face, and to broaden your extremely narrow horizons. If George W. Bush can have a close friend who is a Muslim, then why can't you?
Did you look at the diffs? The addition of the "true;" operation should make absolutely no difference to the output code. It's a NOP. The fact that it makes a difference indicates that either something fishy is going on, or there is a bug in the compiler that fails to recognise "true;" or "return (at end of function)" as being deadcode to optimise away, and yet the compiler can apparently otherwise recognise the entire function as deadcode. Just to be clear, we are talking about a compiler that can apparently completely optimise away this whole function:
function cordicsincos() {
var X;
var Y;
var TargetAngle;
var CurrAngle;
var Step;
X = FIXED(AG_CONST);/* AG_CONST * cos(0) */
Y = 0;/* AG_CONST * sin(0) */
TargetAngle = FIXED(28.027);
CurrAngle = 0;
for (Step = 0; Step CurrAngle) {
NewX = X - (Y >> Step);
Y = (X >> Step) + Y;
X = NewX;
CurrAngle += Angles[Step];
} else {
NewX = X + (Y >> Step);
Y = -(X >> Step) + Y;
X = NewX;
CurrAngle -= Angles[Step];
}
} }
but fails to optimise away the code when a single "true;" instruction is added, or when "return" is added to the end of the function. Maybe it is just a bug, but it certainly is an odd one.
This shows the dangers of synthetic non-realistic benchmarks. I was amused to read Microsoft's comments on SunSpider: "The WebKit SunSpider tests exercise less than 10% of the API’s available from JavaScript and many of the tests loop through the same code thousands of times. This approach is not representative of real world scenarios and favors some JavaScript engine architectures over others." Indeed.
btw the Hacker News discussion is more informative.
If your entire thesis is comprised of your prior works then that's just fine.
It's fine for some institutions and types of PhD. It is not fine for others, where the institution will insist that the work must be original and not previously published.
It's funny how you blame Islam for all the bad stuff. You realise that Saudi Arabia is not run by Islamists? It's run by the House of Saud, who are Monarchists and very close allies of the United States. Would committed Islamists ally themselves with the Great Satan? Of course not. Would Islamists allow one of their formal representatives to have such a close relationship with the Bush family that they affectionately nicknamed him "Bandar Bush"? No. It's a totally different situation to Iran. Though you might like to ask why the United States allies itself so closely with Monarchists who have no respect for human rights or democracy?
Likewise in Pakistan, the government are at war with Islamists in the Frontier provinces. Clearly, if the Islamists were in power, they would not fighting against themselves. So, again, it's a totally different situation to Iran.
there's the Armenian massacre, the constant Saudi massacres that have barely stopped (just read their history), also read the Saudi treatment for "domestic servants" (you see islam allows slavery, including killing and raping slaves, and the paedophile prophet *did* that), the Pakistan "secession" massacres
Yes, and as I pointed out - the greatest genocide of all - the Holocaust - was carried out by a nation with a deep history of Christianity and anti-Semitism. Christians had slaves, some of them had sex with their slaves, and they have waged wars that killed millions of innocent people. They invented the phrase "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." - you may recognise it's modern day equivalent, "Kill them all and let God sort them out". So, since you hate and blame modern Muslims for the crimes of other Muslims throughout history, do you also hate and blame modern Christians for the crimes of other Christians throughout history?
Does it bother you that you aren't allowed to log in as root on your dishwasher?
Oh, but I am. I own my dishwasher - I can do whatever I want to it. There is no end user license agreement. I can write my own roms and I doubt anyone will ever care.
I can do the same with all of the other examples you list. The manufacturers of my TV set don't include an EULA telling me that I can't modify it. They don't tell me that I would be breaking the law if I tried.
more people should sabotage countries like Iran, or all muslim countries in general, for the simple reason that their handling of minorities can only be described as "genocidal".
Iran's proud but discreet Jews: "the father of Iran's revolution, Imam Khomeini, recognised Jews as a religious minority that should be protected." "Imam Khomeini made a distinction between Jews and Zionists and he supported us," says [Jewish community leader] Mr Hammami."
Persian Jews: "Jews are protected in the Iranian constitution."
Righteous Among the Nations: Muslims Who Saved Jews from Holocaust: "The Righteous Among Nations are gentile rescuers who make up 'a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values,' according to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial museum...Gershman's story begins during the Holocaust and involves Albanian Muslims -- villagers, peasants and farmers -- who risked their lives and the lives of their families to shelter Jews fleeing Nazi Germany."
If you think that is genocide, I suggest you study the history of a real genocide, one that took place, unfortunately, at the heart of the Christian nations of Europe, who for centuries reviled Jews as the Christ Killer, and adorned churches and cathedrals with anti-Semitic imagery.
And I've seen an instructor pass students after they turn in ~10 pages of nearly identical answers. Years ago when I was marking CS Masters degree coursework, I noticed that two papers were almost identical. The only thing changed was the spelling had been corrected in one version. I took it to the course organiser, who said he agreed that it was certainly copied, but we should drop it because a) it just wasn't worth the hassle and b) these were foreign students (Taiwanese) who were paying a lot to be at the university, and it may be a cultural thing that they don't see copying as a bad/prohibited thing, and it just wasn't worth the hassle of following the official plagiarism process.
Another anecdote: several hours before a big programming deadline, I am sitting in the lab, and one of the guys from my course comes in. He's one of the guys who isn't so knowledgeable about computers - computer science students tended towards being geeky and into programming, math, electronics, physics etc. but there were always a few who were just there for the qualification so they can get the money whilst learning as little as possible (to be honest, these were the ones who were usually doing joint degrees in business or management)... with about 4 hours to go, this person asks his friend to send him a copy of his work, and promises to change all the variable names and add a few dummy declarations, so they won't get caught. It was blatant copying, he didn't have any idea how the program worked, and he didn't care how it worked.
Another interesting anecdote I have comes from an EE friend of mine. He got so fed up of people stealing his work that he stopped using the lab printers during normal hours. He was known as one of the more knowledgeable people on his degree course, and it was just completely normal that, coming up to a deadline, he would print his circuits and associated text ready for handing in, and it would get stolen by someone while it was sitting next to the printer.
So, whilst I agree that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether or not cheating has really taken place, there is no doubt that people do cheat. I think we should actually use more automated systems to detect possible cheating, pay people to find out whether it is cheating, and have strict processes and penalties in place to remove habitual cheats. Doing otherwise just devalues the whole academic institution.
Actually, you might be able to, but it is an unusual case. For some doctoral theses, you are required to sign a plagiarism notice stating that the work you are presenting as original has not been previously published elsewhere, even if it was credited to yourself. If you copy some of your previous published work, present it as original and don't cite it because you want it to appear as new work, then you may well be found guilty of plagiarism.
Apparently the lowest-power end of the AMD Fusion APU is a combined CPU + GPU (on the one die) with a TPD of 1 watt.
TDP isn't a great metric by itself, you need to consider the amount of computation that is actually being done in exchange for that peak thermal energy, and, more importantly, what the power consumption for real world usage patterns is. Intel's Atom similarly promised a revolution, with a minimum TDP of 0.65W, and whilst it has been successful in the netbook market, it hasn't challenged ARM in the lower arenas of cell phones etc.
Shyeah right... The photos clearly show some new form of kryptonite, which has been subjected to trans-positited fillifitation of ferrous ions within the crystalline structural matrix.
the engine market is not dominated by RR this much. General Electric is bigger and Pratt & Whitney is also huge.
Fair enough, in engines GE > RR > P&W. But my point still stands - all have good reputations, and the cautious airline industry in the West is unlikely to switch away any time soon.
This does not mean one should not invest but I think a second thought should be spent on sustainability (both in terms of economics as well as environment) in this particular industry
I totally agree. Humans are generally reactive rather than proactive. It is easy to look at current growth rates of the airline industry and assume that they will continue for the next two decades, but it's just a guess - Peak Oil could easily derail it. Unfortunately, the governments of the world seem to be keeping relatively quiet on what, exactly, their contingency plans are for that...
My personal opinion is that investing early in identifying suitable technology and replacements to mitigate rising oil prices would be a wise move. Shifting the industry of the entire world away from oil is an enormous task, and one that is being ignored or underestimated by our politicians. If the task is of a magnitude comparable to that of the Manhattan Project or landing on the moon, which both cost around 1/4 U.S. GDP for several years, then it would be better to start the work sooner rather than later.
Slashdot Mirror
Ireland just needs to boil the frog
Except the "boil the frog" story isn't actually true... the frog will jump out at some point.
Singapore is a relatively new and untested place for offshoring, which is a risk in itself.
Not really. Singapore is one of the most well developed countries in Asia, and a huge financial centre. Banks and other operators in the financial services industry have long since relocated some of their operations there. The big difference is that Singapore has established a niche place in the offshoring world, specialising in high-end services, high-tech industry and telecomms, and a well educated workforce, which is a stark contrast to the manufacturing sweatshops that Asian offshoring is traditionally associated with. The economy of Singapore is held up by economists as an example for other nations (it's healthcare model has also been praised by economists for successfully mixing universal healthcare with capitalist principles to reduce costs to only 3% of GDP, whilst providing one of the highest qualities of service to patients of any nation in the world). For a high-tech corporation, relocating to Singapore would present very few problems (apart from the obvious - resistance from its employees who do not want to relocate).
Capital and technology are mobile; labor isn't
This is a very interesting claim, because the major constraint to labor mobility isn't technical or geographical, it is a person's resistance to relocation. Lack of labor mobility is blamed as one of the prime factors that drives unemployment, particularly in economically disadvantaged areas. There are numerous examples of areas where employment has boomed due to some local economy growing, migrants are attracted to the area, and begin to have families. When this economy then collapses, people are left in an area with a lack of jobs and hence high unemployment. A minority of these people will leave the area looking for work. The majority will be resistant to change, and will refuse to move. They were happy to move there to work, but have since developed a sense of entitlement - that they shouldn't have to move to find work, and are happy therefore to live on benefits.
The minority who are willing to relocate will usually discover new geographical areas where there are more job opportunities. But to the people who refuse to relocate for work, particularly the young who will simultaneously complain that there are no jobs in the local town, but refuse to consider moving away, I have little sympathy. One of the more recent trends I've noticed is unemployed people complaining about immigrants, who have often relocated themselves thousands of miles, being employed. But when I point out that there are jobs available in factories only 50 miles away, these same people will absolutely refuse to consider moving. Well, guess what, jobs that are geographically-bound are going to be taken by people who are actually willing to move to where the jobs are, rather than those who expect the jobs to move to them.
Dell were, and they did
Different situation. Dell shifted to Poland because the overall costs are lower - the cost of employing people there is less, even though tax is higher. Corporation tax in Poland is 19%, which is significantly higher than Ireland's 12.5%. If anything, your example demonstrates that corporate tax rate is not the most significant factor when considering a relocation, and therefore reducing your corporate tax rates will not save your manufacturing economy in a globalised world.
After the Irish raise their corporate tax rates, and all of those large, international businesses pull their facilities out
But will they really, or is this all just empty bluffing? Given that there are already 0% corporate tax jurisdictions within the British Isles (but outside the E.U.), why haven't these companies already relocated? The answer is: none of those jurisdictions with lower corporate tax rates are inside the European Union. A company like Google can't do business inside the E.U. without having an E.U. legal presence, and if it trades as an E.U. corporate entity, then it has to pay corporation tax. As long as the Irish rate is competitive against other countries inside the EU, these companies won't move, and their screams of protest amount to nothing more than bluffing and posturing.
So Wikileaks published the data and.... nothing.
Not true. The Guardian did a weekend special with pages and pages covering the Wikileaks data, and they continued to publish articles based on the Wikileaks data for a week afterwards. They have an online tag for Wikileaks articles: guardian.co.uk/media/wikileaks shows 474 articles, many of them mentioning "war logs" in the title. They also published Afghanistan: the war logs and Iraq: the war logs, with numerous articles based directly on the leaked data. Likewise, the New York Times published the series The War Logs based on the leaked data, as did Der Spiegel.
I know what you are getting at though,and the Guardian also had an editorial talking about this point (Assange is 'force-feeding truth to a world that has no stomach for it'): that the released data has been ignored by much of the mainstream media, whereas in the past in would've been lapped up. Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers was widely examined and discussed in the media, and this hasn't happened so much with the Wikileaks data. They blame general resignation and apathy amongst the population, and a lack of people who are willing to stand up and actually protest against the things that are done in their name. However, I have another hypothesis: the opponents of Wikileaks have done a really great job at getting the media to shoot the messenger, rather than listen to the message.
The anti-Wikileaks organisations have become much, much better at handling the media than they were during the time of the Vietnam war. The Pentagon has a put together a team of 120 people to deal with the Wikileaks problem. They have been amazingly successful in waging a media campaign to discredit Assange, and in turning media attention away from the data that Wikileaks has leaked, and onto unproven allegations of:
Assange obviously has issues with U.S. foreign policy, but so do many people, including many Americans. Apart from that, nothing in the list has been proven, and yet - based entirely on these "rumours" - the media has mostly been manipulated into discussing Assange and his personal life and supposed "recklessness", rather than the leaked data.
The assault on Assange has been slow but relentless. He has lost support in several jurisdictions (Iceland, Sweden), and he is about to become an international fugitive from justice - Sweden has requested that Interpol issue a warrant for his arrest. This is for a man who was informed, in writing, by the prosecutor that there was no warrant for his arrest, and that he was free to leave the country. The Australian government has signalled that it would cooperate with a U.S. prosecution of Assange. His British visa expires next year and is unlikely to be renewed. There are certainly clandestine operations against Wikileaks: Assange has had laptops stolen from his checked luggage on international flights, and Wikileaks operatives in other countries have been put under surveillance.
Dealing with Assange was not enough - he had to be discredited, so that people would no longer support him, his organisation, or the principles of leaking data to the world. The opponents of Wiki
It is important to remember that Ron Paul is only against federal government officials putting people through body scanners and heavy pat downs. If the exact same procedures were put in place by the corporations that own the airlines or airports, and carried out by employees of those corporations, then he would say that should be a completely legal situation. As an extreme example - if an airline insisted that all (white/black/asian) women must submit to group sex with (white/black/asian) men before boarding, then that should also be a completely legal situation. That is obviously an extreme example, but what I'm getting at here is that Ron Paul believes that corporations and individuals should be able to enforce any rules that they want on their property, as a condition of being allowed to remain on that property. The airport is some corporation's property. The airplane is some corporation's property. It should be lawful for corporations to enforce any rules, even racist ones, on potential passengers. State government can presumably also do the same. However, the moment the federal government attempts to do it, then it has overstepped the constitutional authority bestowed on it, and must be stopped.
This is exactly the same thing as the conversion/arithmetic functions that Google has. Is it Anti-trust for Google to automatically show you the "centimeters to inches" conversion instead of simply linking to another page that has a converter app?
I was about to say something similar. Searching for "csco" versus "csco$", the results are identical, apart from the link to Google Finance at the top of the "csco" results. There is the issue that the Google Finance box appears identical to a regular search result, and gets a graphic icon, however, I would say that this is strongly compensated for by Google's inclusion of multiple links to competing web sites within the "value added Finance box" (links are "Google Finance Yahoo Finance MSN Money DailyFinance CNN Money Reuters"). As a comparison point, search for "csco" on bing.com. You will get a top result linking to msn.com, but with no links at all to other finance sites. On Yahoo, the top result is finance.yahoo.com, but it does show other results, and the results don't change when manipulating the keyword, so maybe there is not so much bias here (it is quite believable that an unbiased search would return finance.yahoo.com as the top result - Google's own search prompts "finance yahoo" as the first suggestion when you enter the single word "finance").
Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged as the impact this has on our future energy supply could be enormous. With a little bit of googling you can readily find oil fields from old that have mysteriously started refilling with oil.
Abiogenic oil, the great oil conspiracy theory. Which of these is the more likely:
If oil fields refill, then why isn't the U.S. still producing large amounts of oil? Why did the U.S. hit peak oil and become reliant on Middle Eastern oil? Do people really believe that this is just a big conspiracy, and that the various U.S. governments since 1970 when the U.S. hit peak oil have all been in on the conspiracy? Why would they do this? What would they gain from this? Hmm.
A medical student friend of mine realised that someone was copying his answers (multiple choice) half way through an exam (the exam was taken in a lecure hall, and the seats behind were raised enough to see over the person in front). He was outraged, and went to hide his paper, but then had a better idea - he went through the second half of the exam paper ticking the wrong answers for each question, then hid the paper, and went back and changed all the wrong answers. Awesome job. Though it did worry me to hear his stories of medical students cheating - this is the profession that our society puts on a pedestal of honesty and trust, and if they can't be bothered to learn about medicine while they're at uni, what kind of doctor will they turn out to be?
Was physical attendance at your class mandatory? One of the first things I did as a TA was to tell the students that they didn't have to turn up for the actual teaching sessions. Although officially attendance was supposed to be compulsory, I told them I would not be reporting anyone for non-attendance. I got this idea from an old teacher of mine, who said that if there are people in the class who don't want to be there, then get them out as quickly as possible, otherwise they will drag everyone else down with them. I never saw about 20% of the class after that. However, the rest of the class wanted to be there, they wanted to learn - maybe for interest, maybe for the grades - but regardless, they wanted to learn and chose to be there, and that made a huge difference.
A paper address book is not as crazy as it sounds. I know an elderly woman who really does carry a paper phone book around with her so she can call people on her mobile phone. She hasn't figured out the user interface at all, but she can turn the phone on, type in a number, and press dial. For a long time, the fact that she didn't get a dial tone was confusing, and she would press dial to "pick up" and then try dialing the number, which of course didn't work.
Another friend of mine took to writing down all of her numbers after she wanted to transfer them to her new phone. I pointed out that she could've used the "transfer to SIM" function on the old phone and then "transfer from SIM" on the new phone. She was shocked that was possible, and told me it had taken her hours to copy out the address book to paper and re-enter the whole lot into the new phone, but at least now she had a paper copy she wouldn't ever lose it.
Funny how your arguments keep being lies. The claim that Jews drink blood of anything is a lie.
I am not sure you are being mentally coherent at this point. Of course the blood libel against Jews is a lie. What do you think I meant?
Why do you claim that I was lying when I said that Arnaud Amalric said "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius"? It is accepted by historians that he did say that. It was reported at the time that he did say this, and he never denied saying it. Your quote from Wikipedia about the unarmed servants attacking the city is not a denial that he said that phrase. As to the attack on Beziers - why do you think it was okay for Christian soldiers to murder 20,000 innocent people in cold blood? Why was it okay for the Pope to order the extermination of the Cathari people anyway?. Why do you make excuses when Christian forces commit atrocities, but when Muslim forces do the same, you blame Islam?
nazis in America 50 years ago played the racism card
Nazis claimed that other races were inferior to whites. You are suggesting that Nazis claimed to be the victims of racism from other white people? That makes no sense - because white Germans and white Americans are the same race.
I am surprised and saddened to hear that you have travelled and talked to people of other cultures and still feel the way that you do. If you honestly believe that over one sixth of the humans on this planet are genocidal maniacs, then it is no wonder the world seems like a scary place, and that you are so angry and defensive.
Sounds like you're talking about the quack.exe fiasco.
It's easy to demonise people, isn't it? People like you did the same thing to the Jews, saying that they were a danger to society, that they murdered Christian children in blood rituals, that they just had to be dealt with.
Have you ever actually engaged in conversation with any Muslims? Have you ever visited a Muslim country? Or do you get all of your "knowledge" from web sites that cater to your extremist point of view? I dare you to leave your armchair and travel the world, to meet people of different races and ethnicities face-to-face, and to broaden your extremely narrow horizons. If George W. Bush can have a close friend who is a Muslim, then why can't you?
Did you look at the diffs? The addition of the "true;" operation should make absolutely no difference to the output code. It's a NOP. The fact that it makes a difference indicates that either something fishy is going on, or there is a bug in the compiler that fails to recognise "true;" or "return (at end of function)" as being deadcode to optimise away, and yet the compiler can apparently otherwise recognise the entire function as deadcode. Just to be clear, we are talking about a compiler that can apparently completely optimise away this whole function:
function cordicsincos() {
var X;
var Y;
var TargetAngle;
var CurrAngle;
var Step;
X = FIXED(AG_CONST); /* AG_CONST * cos(0) */ /* AG_CONST * sin(0) */
Y = 0;
TargetAngle = FIXED(28.027);
CurrAngle = 0;
for (Step = 0; Step CurrAngle) {
NewX = X - (Y >> Step);
Y = (X >> Step) + Y;
X = NewX;
CurrAngle += Angles[Step];
} else {
NewX = X + (Y >> Step);
Y = -(X >> Step) + Y;
X = NewX;
CurrAngle -= Angles[Step];
}
}
}
but fails to optimise away the code when a single "true;" instruction is added, or when "return" is added to the end of the function. Maybe it is just a bug, but it certainly is an odd one.
This shows the dangers of synthetic non-realistic benchmarks. I was amused to read Microsoft's comments on SunSpider: "The WebKit SunSpider tests exercise less than 10% of the API’s available from JavaScript and many of the tests loop through the same code thousands of times. This approach is not representative of real world scenarios and favors some JavaScript engine architectures over others." Indeed.
btw the Hacker News discussion is more informative.
If your entire thesis is comprised of your prior works then that's just fine.
It's fine for some institutions and types of PhD. It is not fine for others, where the institution will insist that the work must be original and not previously published.
It's funny how you blame Islam for all the bad stuff. You realise that Saudi Arabia is not run by Islamists? It's run by the House of Saud, who are Monarchists and very close allies of the United States. Would committed Islamists ally themselves with the Great Satan? Of course not. Would Islamists allow one of their formal representatives to have such a close relationship with the Bush family that they affectionately nicknamed him "Bandar Bush"? No. It's a totally different situation to Iran. Though you might like to ask why the United States allies itself so closely with Monarchists who have no respect for human rights or democracy?
Likewise in Pakistan, the government are at war with Islamists in the Frontier provinces. Clearly, if the Islamists were in power, they would not fighting against themselves. So, again, it's a totally different situation to Iran.
there's the Armenian massacre, the constant Saudi massacres that have barely stopped (just read their history), also read the Saudi treatment for "domestic servants" (you see islam allows slavery, including killing and raping slaves, and the paedophile prophet *did* that), the Pakistan "secession" massacres
Yes, and as I pointed out - the greatest genocide of all - the Holocaust - was carried out by a nation with a deep history of Christianity and anti-Semitism. Christians had slaves, some of them had sex with their slaves, and they have waged wars that killed millions of innocent people. They invented the phrase "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." - you may recognise it's modern day equivalent, "Kill them all and let God sort them out". So, since you hate and blame modern Muslims for the crimes of other Muslims throughout history, do you also hate and blame modern Christians for the crimes of other Christians throughout history?
Does it bother you that you aren't allowed to log in as root on your dishwasher?
Oh, but I am. I own my dishwasher - I can do whatever I want to it. There is no end user license agreement. I can write my own roms and I doubt anyone will ever care.
I can do the same with all of the other examples you list. The manufacturers of my TV set don't include an EULA telling me that I can't modify it. They don't tell me that I would be breaking the law if I tried.
This is the complete opposite of Apple's position - that it is illegal to modify the software on an iPhone
more people should sabotage countries like Iran, or all muslim countries in general, for the simple reason that their handling of minorities can only be described as "genocidal".
Iran's proud but discreet Jews: "the father of Iran's revolution, Imam Khomeini, recognised Jews as a religious minority that should be protected." "Imam Khomeini made a distinction between Jews and Zionists and he supported us," says [Jewish community leader] Mr Hammami."
Persian Jews: "Jews are protected in the Iranian constitution."
Righteous Among the Nations: Muslims Who Saved Jews from Holocaust: "The Righteous Among Nations are gentile rescuers who make up 'a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values,' according to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial museum...Gershman's story begins during the Holocaust and involves Albanian Muslims -- villagers, peasants and farmers -- who risked their lives and the lives of their families to shelter Jews fleeing Nazi Germany."
If you think that is genocide, I suggest you study the history of a real genocide, one that took place, unfortunately, at the heart of the Christian nations of Europe, who for centuries reviled Jews as the Christ Killer, and adorned churches and cathedrals with anti-Semitic imagery.
And I've seen an instructor pass students after they turn in ~10 pages of nearly identical answers. Years ago when I was marking CS Masters degree coursework, I noticed that two papers were almost identical. The only thing changed was the spelling had been corrected in one version. I took it to the course organiser, who said he agreed that it was certainly copied, but we should drop it because a) it just wasn't worth the hassle and b) these were foreign students (Taiwanese) who were paying a lot to be at the university, and it may be a cultural thing that they don't see copying as a bad/prohibited thing, and it just wasn't worth the hassle of following the official plagiarism process.
Another anecdote: several hours before a big programming deadline, I am sitting in the lab, and one of the guys from my course comes in. He's one of the guys who isn't so knowledgeable about computers - computer science students tended towards being geeky and into programming, math, electronics, physics etc. but there were always a few who were just there for the qualification so they can get the money whilst learning as little as possible (to be honest, these were the ones who were usually doing joint degrees in business or management)... with about 4 hours to go, this person asks his friend to send him a copy of his work, and promises to change all the variable names and add a few dummy declarations, so they won't get caught. It was blatant copying, he didn't have any idea how the program worked, and he didn't care how it worked.
Another interesting anecdote I have comes from an EE friend of mine. He got so fed up of people stealing his work that he stopped using the lab printers during normal hours. He was known as one of the more knowledgeable people on his degree course, and it was just completely normal that, coming up to a deadline, he would print his circuits and associated text ready for handing in, and it would get stolen by someone while it was sitting next to the printer.
So, whilst I agree that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether or not cheating has really taken place, there is no doubt that people do cheat. I think we should actually use more automated systems to detect possible cheating, pay people to find out whether it is cheating, and have strict processes and penalties in place to remove habitual cheats. Doing otherwise just devalues the whole academic institution.
You can not plagiarize or cheat from yourself.
Actually, you might be able to, but it is an unusual case. For some doctoral theses, you are required to sign a plagiarism notice stating that the work you are presenting as original has not been previously published elsewhere, even if it was credited to yourself. If you copy some of your previous published work, present it as original and don't cite it because you want it to appear as new work, then you may well be found guilty of plagiarism.
Apparently the lowest-power end of the AMD Fusion APU is a combined CPU + GPU (on the one die) with a TPD of 1 watt.
TDP isn't a great metric by itself, you need to consider the amount of computation that is actually being done in exchange for that peak thermal energy, and, more importantly, what the power consumption for real world usage patterns is. Intel's Atom similarly promised a revolution, with a minimum TDP of 0.65W, and whilst it has been successful in the netbook market, it hasn't challenged ARM in the lower arenas of cell phones etc.
Shyeah right... The photos clearly show some new form of kryptonite, which has been subjected to trans-positited fillifitation of ferrous ions within the crystalline structural matrix.
the engine market is not dominated by RR this much. General Electric is bigger and Pratt & Whitney is also huge.
Fair enough, in engines GE > RR > P&W. But my point still stands - all have good reputations, and the cautious airline industry in the West is unlikely to switch away any time soon.
This does not mean one should not invest but I think a second thought should be spent on sustainability (both in terms of economics as well as environment) in this particular industry
I totally agree. Humans are generally reactive rather than proactive. It is easy to look at current growth rates of the airline industry and assume that they will continue for the next two decades, but it's just a guess - Peak Oil could easily derail it. Unfortunately, the governments of the world seem to be keeping relatively quiet on what, exactly, their contingency plans are for that...
My personal opinion is that investing early in identifying suitable technology and replacements to mitigate rising oil prices would be a wise move. Shifting the industry of the entire world away from oil is an enormous task, and one that is being ignored or underestimated by our politicians. If the task is of a magnitude comparable to that of the Manhattan Project or landing on the moon, which both cost around 1/4 U.S. GDP for several years, then it would be better to start the work sooner rather than later.