This is not a fucking hobby project. This is a retail device, sold for profit. You are NOT encouraged to take it apart. This entitlement attitude of being able to reverse engineer everyone elses IP is starting to piss me off.
Hey idiot, if I buy the thing (even at retail!), it's mine to do with as I please. The only thing your Dear Corporate Leader's IP stops me doing is duplicating it (or, were I unfortunate enough to live in a corporatocracy, fucking with the DRM).
You do know what "mine" means, yeah? Refers to this silly little notion called "property", I'm sure you've heard of it somewhere...
(Yeah, feeding the troll, the answer's more for the mass of mindless like-minded retards we've all seen around here - for instance ones that modded him up as of when I wrote this.)
As you will well know, the trouble with nuclear power plants is that when they fail, they fail spectacularly.
Like deep-sea drilling platforms? Or oil refineries? Or tailings ponds near mines?
You do know that radiation isn't the only type of pollution that can kill tens of thousands of people and render large tracts of land unusable for long periods of time (impacting the livelihood of yet more tens of thousands), yes? I mean look at this explosion (one of several due to this quake): lots of people are going to get sick and die as a result of god knows what fumes that's spewing, and there's no way to even try to contain those fumes. How is that an acceptable risk to build while nuclear plants (the ones currently failing in slow-motion giving people time to evacuate and adapt containment strategies) are not?
That and the nuclear waste, which seems to be an unsolved problem that is just silently ignored
The nuclear waste "problem" has been studied extensively, and technical solutions already exist, both in terms of reducing the existing waste and in terms of reducing the amount of waste to be produced in the future. The only people ignoring anything are the NIMBY oh-it's-not-100%-safe crowd, and the only thing they're ignoring are the actual solutions which already exist and would be built today if not for fucking politics.
And Germany, where they stored the trash in a salt mine and now have to dig up the leaking containers.
Neat how all the waste was in one place where they could get to it to fix the problem. Funny how that doesn't work with the sort of exhaust that coal plants produce...
I'll not go into the situation in Russia, because that just makes me sick to the stomach.
Russia has a problem because they didn't care to handle the waste responsibly. First it was more important building the great Soviet arsenal, then it was more important raping what was left of the economy so there would be no money to deal with the problem. That's, again, a political problem, not a technical one. It certainly isn't restricted to the nuclear industry.
See China for more of the same.
Neither coal or nuclear energy is currently at a level where it can produce clean, safe energy at this time.
Correct, in the sense that nobody can guarantee you that no radiation will ever leak anywhere ever at all. However nuclear is demonstrably many times safe-er than coal, and will continue to be so even if both of these plants go full Chernobyl. It's silly to piss ourselves over the prospect of nuclear accidents when we already accept not just the risk, but the actual fact, of far greater environmental damage in order to run our coal-fired plants and drive our cars.
It's pathetic that we refuse to replace a terrible, continuously polluting, and highly prone to catastrophic failure solution with one that produces only a tiny fraction as much ongoing pollution and is only slightly prone to catastrophe, because the average person is under the impression that radiation is that much scarier than toxic fumes and iridescent mining sludge.
He doesn't mean that the original won't act like the real you would.
He was pretty clear about that (allowing for arbitrary accuracy).
He just means that they will be separate consciousnesses, and not the original.
What I'm saying is that the idea of "consciousness" is akin to the idea of "four". It's a property of the particular arrangement of the matter in our bodies, an abstract quality that we made up to describe some interesting aspect of that arrangement. If I add two marbles to two or three marbles to one, the "fourness" of the resulting groups is the same. Even if the marbles in the two groups are made of entirely different substances.
If I build a machine that perfectly simulates the activity in a brain and, at some instant, is configured to perfectly match your internal state, it is at that moment as much "you" as you are "you". Doubtless, that would cease to be true almost immediately (you you and computer you don't occupy the same space, you'll get different inputs, have different experiences and diverge quite rapidly), but for that one instant there is no way for me to walk in and tell which is which if all I can see is the internal state of both minds.
The only way I can differentiate the two of "you" at that instant is by expanding the idea of "you" to include things "attached" to the consciousness (the body hosting it). But then what if I were to build not a computer but an atom for atom perfect duplicate of you? Then I'd have to tell you apart by your positions in space, or maybe by the history of the individual particles that comprise each copy or something like that. But that's odd, because where you stand and which ocean some molecule of water in your body last evaporated off of clearly isn't who you are, right?
He said:
there is no way to transfer the you-ness of you - the real you, the soul or whatever - into the machine.
And I'm saying it makes as much sense to say that as it does to say "there is no way to transfer the four-ness of the two and two marbles - the real four-ness, the essence of four or whatever - into the three and one marbles". There's nothing to transfer and no intrinsic difference within the relevant domain to allow one to meaningfully pin the label "real" to one object but not the other.
Replacing part by part is much preferable to creating a copy and destroying the original.
Only if you see the consciousness as some sort of physical object.
However if you built a robot with all your memories, emotions, thoughts and personality then no matter how accurate it was there is no way to transfer the you-ness of you - the real you, the soul or whatever - into the machine.
Huh? That's like taking a group of two twos and a group of three and one and asserting that the groups somehow have a different "fourness" to them.
And why should it last any longer after 100 generations of egg production and 30 years of dormancy than it would last after 100 generations of sperm production and no dormancy? It isn't like the eggs aren't duplicates in the first place - the difference is when they form.
It's not so much that they're damaged; it's that they're essentially bacteria, and (without a nice hardened nucleus) every little thing (including all of lovely chemicals that they themselves produce) rips into their DNA, causing them to evolve at an absurd rate. Sperm mitochondria aren't broken, they just aren't likely to be very useful outside of sperm cells (or whatever their progenitors are called).
Right, so because Afghanistan and Iran were the most liberal, Saudi Arabia would have become a liberal paradise. Perfect logic. For my next trick, I shall show how 2+2=73 proves that the earth is an equilateral triangle.
Neat how you failed to read (or perhaps understand) the sentence immediately following the one you quoted.
lulz. Easy on the white-mans burden there.
Huh? Wite-man's burden? Where in my post did you manage to read a call for Western nations to expand their empires and bring the light of god and civilization to the savages?
Or do you think I'm trying to tell you to feel guilty about something? That would be your own idea because I never wrote that anywhere.
The kind of convoluted, asinine "logic" used to arrive at that conclusion could just as easily be used to "prove" that WW2 is directly traceable to Iran.
No, it couldn't, because history doesn't record Iran having significantly contributed to any of the recognized major causes of that war. There is, however, record of the US and UK overthrowing Iran's progressive government with a tyrant so brutal that the current Iranian government started to look like a good idea to the locals. So one can indeed say that the US and UK had a significant hand in creating today's Iran without also blaming the Great Depression on Genghis Khan (whee! hyperbole is fun!).
I mean, honestly, by your "logic" (scare quotes are fun, too) WWII was all one hundred percent Hitler's fault and the deplorable conditions in Germany (imposed by the Allies at the end of WWI) had nothing to do with how such a madman could possibly have risen to power.
I was born in "Eastern Europe". Never saw what you describe. Most people there absolutely loved Russia, and huge numbers bought into every anti-US conspiracy that you can think of.
So was I. How'd you manage to miss the endless, "Oh no, we never disappeared our own people ourselves, the Russians did that. And all those people with local last names that worked for the Party and the secret police, uh, Russian conspiracy. And the Russians made us call in all those false accusations against the irritating downstairs neighbor. And the Russians depressed our industry by dumping their cheap crap on our markets. And the Russians built the huge industries that have polluted our land. And it's the Russians' fault that the stucco is falling off the buildings. And the Russians are the reason our government is still corrupt (especially the anti-Russian faction of our government, which may also be a Russian conspiracy)...
On and on ad nauseum. Anything to avoid admitting that some of "us" are opportunistic assholes and some of "them" are good decent folk, because then you'd have to judge people by more than their accent, and that's just so difficult...
My point is simple: people are the same wherever you go. For every flag-waving fanatic there's someone blaming the same country for their cat dying. The US is big, like Russia, and attracts a lot of both parties. Try, if you truly value logic and objectivity, to not to be too firmly in either camp.
Because Saudi Arabia would be a liberal paradise if it weren't for US support?
Given that Afghanistan and Iran were some of the most liberal and progressive societies in the region before the US, UK and USSR fucked them over for oil and a military pissing-match, that may well have been the case. Had those nations not been destroyed, they may have had a significant positive influence in the region.
A lot of progressive movements in the nations around Israel, which were fairly strong early in the century, were also abandoned when the violence (enabled to a great extent by US and UK military aid) really took off.
It is, of course, entirely possible that the tyranny we see today would have emerged on its own without any foreign intervention, but that doesn't negate the fact that most of the tyrannical regimes in the region are directly traceable to Western sponsorship.
I'm starting to think that blaming the US is a religion in and of itself for some folks. I swear, I could say "looks like it might rain tonight"...
The US has done a lot of good and it's done a lot of evil in the world. If you're well and truly sick of it, move to Eastern Europe for a bit, where everything is Russia's fault in pretty much exactly the way that you describe.
What any of that has to do with cloud is rather beyond me. I personally blame bad weather on arctic lichen, Australian butterflies, and the eldest of all living men named Henry:)
Simply not true. I use boost heavily on a 120 kloc project, and it takes under a minute to compile everything from scratch. And I use quite a lot of boost features.
You have one large project that compiles quickly and that somehow contradicts me saying that there exist cases where one gets stuck with ridiculously long compile times (attributable to use of complex language features, as opposed to merely the number of tokens in a compilation unit)? If you aren't trolling then I'd love to know how you maintain a 120 K LoC project with such a poor grasp of basic logic.
The cost of the GC is not fixed in any meaning of the word 'fixed'.
Not everything is a real-time app. The odd 1 ms stall is often a very acceptable exchange for time otherwise spent thinking really deeply about memory (and cleaning up after people who misused a smart pointer because he has real problems to deal with). And over a long enough run, the impact of GC is certainly "fixed" at some small percent of overall time. And I've yet to see a live object graph so pathologically bad that GC costs become unbearable that doesn't translate into something with fairly complex lifetime management in C++ (circular references with no clear and obvious owner object are a bitch).
How is that a problem of the language? it's a problem of your development team, not the language. If you have a shitty development team, they can easily mess up a Java program as well.
The set of ways that one can hide a bug in Java (C and C# in my case) is far smaller than that for C++. That might not affect you much when you're writing the code and have it all fresh in your mind, but some of us have to go back and review that code later on.
Occasionally I find things like the wrong operator being called due to an implicit conversion to a compatible type in some silly header intended for some other task, added after the code I'm looking at was written. That shit takes time to find and fix. And neither the coder that wrote the routine, nor the coder that amended the header, nor I are idiots.
And getting bit by some of C++'s more esoteric little rules hardly makes one a "shitty" coder. It happens to the best of us out here in the real world. (I assume, by your outright disbelief at what I find to be common issues in C++ development, that you work with actual gods or something.)
You mean RAII obviously.
Yeah, that was a silly typo.
Yes, RAII demands destructors, and stack unwinding demands destructors to be invoked, but you are in control of it: if your loop is time-critical, then you can get raw and avoid them.
How is it that a few percent of GC overhead spread over the whole app bother you so much while a few percent of exception-handling overhead spread over everything you haven't specifically sanitized is fine? Do you only work on exceptions-are-free-(except-a-bit-of-cold-memory)-until-you-throw platforms?
How have you used C++ to the point where you feel confident enough that none of what I'm saying could possibly be true to call me a liar and a plagiarist and yet completely ignore the reason that every decent C++ compiler has a switch to disable that entire language feature?
No compiler vendor has implemented a subset incompatibly. The only thing that is left is to clear up move semantics. Other than that, c++0x is ready. I am already using it in GCC 4.5, with exceptional results in code clarity.
The code clarity that GCC 4.5 affords you says little about what other vendors are doing. Still, you may be right. I'm still in pain from years of maintaining code that had to compile under MSVC, GCC, and a handful of the lesser compilers - each with their own unique and precious way of breaking your code.
Modern c++ compilers are extremely fast; not as fast as Java compilers, but considering they do much more many things (templates for example), then they are quite fast. They are so fast that compiling large code bases with them is extremely viable, and it's a task done everyday by millions of developers.
That depends on who's header files you have to include. Often someone's API will be so template-heavy that it takes a full minute (per compilation unit) just to parse their silly headers. Which is sad because I've never had the same issue with enormous C headers or when referencing a good half of the.NET runtime in a C# compilation.
And yeah, that's a minute on a modern compiler on a fast machine.
How is that a big problem? you make it sound like it's a colossal problem, but in reality, it's not. Unless your class is used by every other class or function, the recompilation is minimal.
The real problem there, which the GP missed, is the fact that every type must include the header of every type it contains a value member of in its own header. So if I want to keep d3d11.h out of my UI code, then my bridge renderer classes must either dispatch through virtuals, a tedious PIMPL, or not actually use any D3D types as value members, complicating other code for no good reason.
The benefit of this is that you can use value classes in c++, whereas in Java you can't, every class is by reference, which is stupid.
Java is stupid, agreed. But C++ is retarded too. Link-time code generation is old news, object sizes could be resolved then.
RAII is actually superior to Java's garbage collection. It's much more critical for big applications to release as much memory as possible upfront.
Superior? With GC I pay a fixed performance cost (and not even a very large one on modern VMs) upfront for the whole project and start writing code. With RAII I have to go around making sure everyone is actually using shared_ptr (or whatever) at every single call site.
Now Finalization, I agree, isn't the most amazing thing, but I've spent no more time chasing down finalization bugs than I have going after people who use a raw fopen despite having a nice file class with a destructor available. Depends on what you're used to, I suppose.
Exception handling has a cost only if there are non-trivial destructors to execute.
Leveraging RIAA kind of demands that such destructors exist.
C++0x will have this.
Sure, if they don't delay it another five years while all the compiler vendors run off and implement incompatible subsets of the proposals because they're tired of waiting for the committee to stop bickering.
ACE? what, are you stack in 1999? you know the Boost libraries, don't you?
Boost? I thought we were being careful about what we include so as to keep compile times down.
Templates are, for me, the single reason I prefer c++ over Java. Java's generics are stupid.
Templates are useful, until someone goes nuts with traits types and multiple levels of tag-type-param-to-overloaded-function and your debug build ends up six or more orders of magnitude slower than your release because inlining is off.
Yes, I use them, but the time spent making sure they aren't being misused is non-trivial and needs to be counted against the time saved by using them.
Funny that you say that, because I've worked on million lines of code c++ codebases that didn't have any memory leaks or other problems. But that's because we used the right libraries.
So have I. But don't forget the bit where someone spent countless hours making sure everybody else was following the rules and sticking to those libraries, rather than wandering off into std:: or inventing their own little subdoma
I'll add one more thing: debug performance. Most C++ libraries (certainly the STL) are written for prettiness more than performance and thus rely heavily on compile-time optimizations. Now, it's true, a fully optimized iterator generates the same code as a raw pointer, but that's irrelevant when you've got a debug build that runs several orders of magnitude slower than a release, and the bug you're tracking down is on the third pass over vertex 892,472 of a 2,000,000 triangle mesh.
I mean, yeah, I could rewrite the standard containers and algorithms (etc) into a form that doesn't require heavy inlining to be even remotely performant, but then what was the point of using C++ in the first place?
But as many as 10% of the customers walking in the store are there to steal.
In my experience the customers are nowhere near that bad. The employees, on the other hand... In just a few years I've seen two receivers, three managers, four department leads, two members of the stock crew, and eight or so (I'm starting to forget) sales reps get fired because entire pallets of very expensive merchandise vanished on their watch. That's just the ones that got fired, mind you, there were about a half dozen more that got away with it for years and even got promoted.
That sort of thing probably varies a lot by region, though.
The second usage is just plain laziness. If you really want to put someone down, you should put some thought into it. For examples, take a look at all the Winston Churchill or Mark Twain put downs. They could insult you using your own opinions in such a way that you're defenseless, or make an insult sound like a complement that everyone except the person listening would understand.
Ah, but if one is well known for often preferring complex put-downs, then a simple "go fuck yourself" picks up this lovely overtone of "you're not worth the minimal effort it would take to properly insult you", and may be precisely what the speaker intends...
Hmmm... I never did much low level 3D code when I was in the games industry, but our XBox 360 code could be ported pretty trivially to Windows.
I can see how that's possible. The case I'm thinking of involves the realization that there's a big performance gain to be had if we could just rearrange our data and start doing interesting things with vtxfetch (or whatever the instruction was, it's been a while). The embedded framebuffer also imposed some fairly serious rearranging of the overall render process.
Not quite sure why the Wii is "fixed function madness". It works pretty much like any late 90's graphics card, which makes it a little old fashioned, and difficult to port between it and XBox360 (although that's not the only difficulty - the machines are different hardware generations) but easy enough if you've been in the business for a decade or so. Implementing OpenGL 1.2 on that wouldn't be too hard.
Well, you don't go making a Wii game intending that it look like something running a decade ago on GL 1.2, do you? A lot of the more interesting effects involve setting states that have never had an OpenGL equivalent of any sort. As you say, it's not exactly hard, but it's enough work that one doesn't save much time having started with an OpenGL engine as opposed to a DX engine (and before we wander too far off topic, the context of this thread is porting).
There are other issues, too, but they're hard to explain without getting into the sort of specifics that Nintendo's NDA covers.
Never used the PS2. PSP has a decent API which has an OpenGL state machine like approach. Considering some of the samples are clearly written for PS2 (they expect 2 shoulder buttons), PS2 can't be that different.
The PS2 was honestly a nightmare. The only way to get it to perform decently was to go straight to the hardware, which means mapped registers and the DMA unit. We did crazy things like making our model format be mostly raw DMA control commands which the CPU would minimally touch up and fire off. Manually managing texture memory was also a bit of a pain. And of course there were synchronization issues everywhere. And one of the common blend modes was broken, so that needed to be worked around...
If Sony ever put together a decent GL layer on top of that, it's news to me, because the mini-GL layer I saw was a total joke.
The parent is right. Console graphics are so different from PC graphics that it's absurd to compare the APIs.
On a PC, you call some functions and the driver manages memory for you and builds a nice command buffer for the GPU to execute. On a console, you obsess about flushing caches and waiting for VSync and keeping track of which buffers the GPU may or may not be reading out of at any given moment. Or you fuck it up and get some awesome crashes as the GPU tries to render uninitialized memory noise.
On a PC, your graphics API manages things like texture and vertex memory for you. You say "make me a texture of this size" and it does. You say "I'm done with that texture" and it frees it. Those functions don't exist on a console; you manage that yourself, jumping through all sorts of loops to make sure it's aligned right and in the proper memory bank. On a PC, that texture goes up to the GPU as a nice row-major array of RGBA data. On a console, you have to tile it and reorder it and encode it into crazy hardware-native formats yourself. And make sure you've flushed the CPU cache before you pass it to the GPU!
PC and console GPUs are almost impossible to drive properly using "compatible" shaders. All shaders pretty much always end up rewritten, because the console APIs don't do magic optimizations like the PC APIs do, and you're expected to write in use of specialized chip features yourself if you want to do anything particularly spectacular. God help you when you hit the Wii and it's fixed-function madness.
These differences alone impact engine design to such a degree that any residual similarities between $CONSOLE_API and $PC_API are worth nothing to a porting effort.
Incorrect. The PS3 implemented a sort of GL like library at first, which has now been mostly forgotten in preference for libGCM - which is a library for writing directly into the RSX's command buffer. The Wii implements a library that looks a little like GL at first glance, but is actually vastly different in so many areas.
Further:
The original XBOX implements an API which resembles DirectX inasmuch as the entry points are similarly named. And for most "serious" uses you just grab a pointer to the raw command buffer and dump bytes into that.
The XBOX 360 is similarly set up, only it's even more different since it uses a crazy (and pretty awesome, IMO) framebuffer setup.
The PS2 has nothing like any sort of PC GPU. You drive it with a set of memory-mapped registers and properly formatted DMA commands. The PSP is, I believe, similar to the PS2.
Not only did we develop vast intelligence, but we developed abilities that ANTICIPATED the need for them.
Poor choice of words, that, but I have wondered roughly the same thing for quite some time, now.
Why did we develop the ability to drive 60, 70,-100 miles per hour or more while weaving in and out of traffic?
OK, this is a bad example. We drive 60, 70,-100 miles per hour because that happens to be what our cars can safely operate at when driven by a creature with our reaction speeds. If we had the reflexes of a cat, we'd be driving faster.
But you do raise an interesting point, and I'd like to point it out for anyone that might miss it because of that bad example: our intelligence predates our use of it by a very large margin. The brain, as far as we can tell, has been the same organ for the past few hundred thousand years. However, we've only very recently invented things like agriculture, mathematics, and technology, grown our vocabularies by an absurd degree as we've named all the new stuff we make, we've become literate, and reinvented our social structures many times to cope with both technological to the basis of our survival (agriculture, industrial revolution, modern automation, etc) and our ever denser populations (imagine: in a city you might bump into more people in a day than your ancient ancestors would have known in a lifetime). And if we care to, we can still go out and learn to live in a forest as hunter-gatherers and primitive tool-makers in addition to all of that.
So what were all those neurons doing for the hundred thousand years (or more) or so before the rise of what we consider to be civilization? How were they earning their keep? I mean, they must have been good for something, as there were certainly strong pressures against being wasteful with food energy at that time. And why did we live so long with these modern brains before we did put them to what we'd call a modern use? Did it seriously take a hundred thousand years for some random dude somewhere to figure out the whole "oh seeds grow into plants!" thing? Shouldn't someone have noticed a bunch of fruit-bearing plants growing where everybody was throwing the pits the year before a little quicker than that?
Evolving the ability to evolve and evolving the ability to anticipate need and change for it ahead of time is not conforming to Darwin's theory of evolution as I know it.
Eh, evolution is a powerful idea, and looking at all of the other crazy stuff it's produced our intelligence isn't that shocking.
For example, imagine that the new brain matter was just badly organized by some gene that recently broke, either due to some tiny and truly recent mutation or perhaps the introduction of some new substance into our bodies (this would have to be something like being colonized by a new bacteria - an external agent would be obvious by now).
Or maybe the recent revolution has to do with language and ideas. The capacities we have were never "spare", but we lacked the means to link them together and teach our children to similarly link theirs until some seemingly trivial construct of modern language was invented.
Our ancestors might also have had a much easier life than we imagine. We can be sure there were many famines in ancient times, but maybe not so many in the history of our direct ancestors that the energy cost would have been worthwhile overall, even for only marginal increases of intelligence, until some critical point is reached, and then...
Or maybe big brains really were just a genuinely broken design that somehow, by sheer dumb and unfathomably stupid luck, managed to survive long enough that some other line of evolution happened to take what's there and make it useful. Genetic history is full of similar events on the cellular level, where redundant copies of critical genes are regularly made, allowing the "useless"
I take your point but I think you are underestimating the interaction between the form of popular ideologies and the likelihood of sociopaths having power in the ruling class when those ideologies are part of the founding tradition of a political system.
Possibly. It's hard to say for the specific case we've been discussing. I'd chalk the people's willingness to accept it up to education and upbringing (keep in mind that, as bad as they were, the commies were in many ways better than the disaster the Czar had been - and Stalin came into power at a time when most people could judge that for themselves). Their history also afforded them other opportunities: look at how effective it's been for each American government to claim that it's idiocy is necessitated by the previous government's idiocy or tragedies like 9/11 - the communists had the Czar's reign and both world wars to hide behind - if not for that then people might have gone from disillusioned to outright hostile a lot quicker, and the Cold War may never have happened.
Look at what 9/11 was morphed into and imagine what Bush (since you mention him, you could substitute many others) could have done with a history like that!
The totalitarian inclinations of the likes of Bush and other very unpleasant politicians in the West today is not unrelated to their ideology. I would argue that a nuanced look at the history of communism allows one to draw those parallels more effectively not less.
Bush rammed through his oppressive agenda in part because he is a sociopathic son of a bitch, and ignored the damage it did because he was a sociopathic son of a bitch, but his agenda is also a result of his ultra-conservative ideology and it is no co-incidence that many of these sociopathic arseholes come from his wing of the Republican party. The totalitarian tendencies of the neo-cons and the totalitarian tendencies of the Bolsheviks are a parallel one is justified in mentioning.
Eh. They said one thing when it got them what they wanted, and then they said the opposite when they wanted something else. Now their PR department writes articles in their defense saying, "Who could possibly have predicted it would go as badly as it did?" as though none of us have memories. The only thing that changed in between was 9/11 causing a shift in public opinion, which they opportunistically picked up and ran with as fast as they could. Shrinking government? Balancing the budget? Where was all of that when Bush gave his little speech about how great it was that he expanded Medicare to ridiculously unsustainable levels? Why did the DHS grow while the military had to delegate even more of its non-essential functions to contractors? Not nation-building? OK, then why did Secretary [I forget which] spend the week after 9/11 berating his intelligence officers for not giving him something he could attack Iraq with? And how is it that their "principles" suddenly matter again now that Obama's in the White House?
The only consistent thing about them is doing whatever looks like the easiest way to shift power and influence to their friends. And you can claim that that is their real ideology, but then water is also wet and the sky is occasionally dark, so...
The Democrats hold as opposing an ideology to Neo-Conservatism as is possible in US politics, but their behavior is identical. Compare Obama going on and on about how evil Guantanamo and warantless wiretapping and torture and rendition and Bush's other power grabs are to his administration's current apathy towards Guantanamo and the expansion of the ideas Bush pioneered to include it being OK for the executive to order someone killed without running their evidence and reasoning past a judge. They said they support accountability and whistle blowers, and now look at the Wikileaks debacle. They can't even say they tried their ideas and found they had to temper their idealism since they discarded all principle a couple of Novembers ago, the moment they ceased to be useful.
Reject emissions trading: Stop the "cap and trade" administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants.
Does the bit after "pollution" describe the start of the sentence or propose a better system? If the latter, in what particular way does it differ from Cap and Trade?
Demand a balanced federal budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax modification.
I say Clinton balanced the budget. You say he cheated. The government ignores the constitution while we bicker over the meaning of the word "is".
Simplify the tax system: Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words - the length of the original Constitution.
Oh come on! You want to limit the length of the tax code to a number of words that you picked based on nothing but a sentimental attachment to a document that nobody with power gives a shit about these days? Let's not even get into the real reasons that limiting the tax code of a nation as large and diverse as yours to a few pages is a bad idea, that's just silly...
Audit federal government agencies for constitutionality: Create a Blue Ribbon taskforce that engages in an audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their Constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities
Such agencies already exist. The GAO is one of them. They publish reports. The reports are often surprisingly candid. Nobody seems to care, or even know that they exist. I don't think attaching blue ribbons would be much use.
Let's take a concrete example. You are right that correlation does not imply causation, but you also mention collective farming. Collectivised farming justified by communism in the Soviet Union lead to mass starvation.
Ok, no argument there.
What motivating factors would you say contributed to this atrocity?
A clique within the party saw an opportunity to personally profit and they pushed it until Stalin himself decided to run with it. "Experts" were found to write articles. "Academics" rewrote them in prettier language. "Polls" were held to determine popular support. When collectivization took off, they went out and got really really drunk and had a fantastic time cheering their own success. As sociopaths of all races and ideologies are wont to do, should opportunity present itself.
Keep in mind, there was an agricultural crisis at the time (still fairly early in the post-revolution period), several of the government's attempts to fix it had failed and been abandoned (some of them quite brutal in themselves - a lot of people died when Stalin decided that the peasants had simply betrayed "Mother Russia"), and the idea had been kicking around since before the revolution, so if you're a sociopathic fuck on the lookout for a quick boost to your career, pushing collectivization is a no-brainer.
Which organised belief system would you say those ideas were drawn from?
Obviously communism.
Is it fair to criticise an ideology which still incorporates those ideas?
It's fair to point out that the ideology's premise leads to such absurd ends, yes. And this is where you and I could both go on all day picking over various idiocies - like the inherent brittleness of highly centralized systems and the lack of incentive to innovate and excel under the Soviet system or its simple incompatibility with basic human nature.
What people and ideas caused it?
This is my point. It's the people that get power who make all the difference. The ideas are whatever happens to be lying around at the time.
The widespread belief that Communism was a good idea was one of the major social and political factors that lead to this disaster.
Ignoring the fact that a vast number of Soviet citizens were already disillusioned with the new government and didn't actually really believe in them...
I'll agree that it led to the idea, and even to the idea getting government sponsorship and support rather than being outright laughed into oblivion.
The bit where the government didn't do something to backpedal or fix things when the obvious problems began? Stalin's stubbornness. The bit where people reporting actual starvation back to Moscow were vanished? Stalin's precious ego. Well, his and those of the sycophants he elevated. If someone comes to you and says "you're causing millions to die a slow and terrible death, and here's the proof" and you shoot him it really doesn't matter what you believe, you're just plain sociopathic and insane.
I understand where you're coming from, I do. Ideas aren't all equal and they certainly influence things. Yes. Agreed.
But when you're looking at evil people doing evil things, the ideas are minor details. Communism isn't evil because Stalin did shit in his name any more than free-market capitalism is evil because Yeltsin and his cronies utterly destroyed what was left of the Soviet economy (which also killed a lot of people, if less directly) in the name of privatization and free enterprise. It's wrong in its own rite, and I wish people would stop confusing that because it makes it impossible for us to learn from history, whether it be copying the few things they did right or being able to publicly draw parallels between our sociopaths and theirs without being dismissed with a shallow, "but they're commies and we're [any other label], and those are opposites, so your example is trivially inapplicable (you moron)".
So what's your solution? Give them money, so they raise more kids to be gang members?
You think people naturally want to be gang members? As in they grow up shooting and being shot at and their first thought when they see their baby is, "I want you to grow up to be just as miserable as I've been and live just as short as I'm likely to"?
<morbo>THAT IS NOT HOW HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY WORKS</morbo>
I mean you can say they should all go and get jobs, but the unemployment rate is 11% with likely half as many more unreported. The people with the money to have things made clearly have no need for more production, so where do you propose they find this work they should be doing to support themselves? It's not like they can start growing food in the middle of the city or form their own little economy amongst themselves when they're terribly dependent on goods (like food) sold at prices intended for the rest of us...
...communists need to have a look at their ideology and ask themselves why every time communists get sweeping powers they do such unpleasant things.
Correlation is not causation.
Hitler and Mussolini did unpleasant things in the name of National Socialism. The Japanese emperor did unpleasant things in the name of his glorious empire. The dictators of 20th century South and Central America did unpleasant things in the name of capitalism. The Iranian and Saudi governments do unpleasant things in the name of Islam. Then Chinese (now) do their unpleasant business in the name of harmony and social order.
Sociopaths say and do whatever the fuck it takes to gain and keep power, which tends to be whatever will get the locals of that place and time are likely to go along with. Communism was a convenient way to whip up the terribly oppressed masses of what were then near-feudal societies. It might as well have been a new religion - Stalin would still have been scheming his way to the top, in a funny hat if necessary.
Don't mistake my argument - I'm not supporting communism here. But it also annoys me that someone can make a shallow statement like that as if it were a full explanation of the history, especially as I never want to see that particular bit of history repeated.
They killed people because they were radical communists...
No. They killed people because they were sociopaths with unchecked power. Go read history and you'll find everything they did done by others for a hundred other gods, fatherlands, and miscellaneous causes.
Stalin had Lenin killed to get power. He spent the rest of his life purging random people in the party in order to eliminate or control those that knew where all the bodies were buried. Saddam Hussein's reign was much the same. Oh, and Hitler's. And let's not forget the old Czar's secret police or how folks ended up in the Bastille. As has been the reign of many, many, others like them.
Stalin got a bunch of Russians killed in WWII. Like the Czar (and, well, pretty much everyone) did in WWI. Like countless idiot leaders have all throughout history. No common ideology, just idiocy and the threat of unspeakable violence against anyone that would dare correct it.
Stalin purged religious folks, made their lives miserable, wrecked their shit, sent them off to camps. So did Hitler. And some of the Ottoman rulers. And the Romans at times. And, if the bible is to be believed, even the ancient Hebrews on their way into the "promised land". And many many others. Ideology isn't the common thread here; it's tyrants that want to eliminate groups that might band together to oppose them (and taking all their stuff must be a nice bonus, too).
Stalin fucked up the economy and millions starved to death. While the scale and speed of Stalin's famines is impressive, government mismanagement causing economic suffering is hardly unique. People in parts of Africa starve and die of preventable diseases every day because the warlords horde everything. People die for similar reasons in some of India's more badly managed rural areas. I know people in the former USSR who tell me of friends, family members, and neighbors that got sick and died because they couldn't afford to heat their homes after the collapse of communism, or because they were malnourished, or because what medical infrastructure there was completely collapsed and the nearest doctor was a day's drive away. Is that an indictment against capitalism, or is it just corruption, cronyism, and high-level idiocy? Rulers have been starving the masses to death, wondering why they don't just eat cake instead, since ancient times, regardless of gods or ideals.
So no, Stalin didn't kill because he was a communist. He killed because that was his path to power and because he was an idiot who'd kill anyone that tried to help him past his own idiocy. He kept killing because people
Yes. Because, and I thought this was clear, I'm not bitter that my parents divorced or about the misery that attended the divorce itself.
To clarify further, what I am bitter at is that the "thou shalt not commit adultery/divorce is wrong/what god has joined together..." attitudes they were brought up with were a direct contributing factor in the years of miserable marriage they shared after any hope for fixing things was gone. The same attitudes which vastly magnified the feelings of betrayal, guilt, and general unpleasantness that followed the divorce. I'm bitter that the Christian culture they grew up and married in has latched onto adultery - a mere symptom - and has largely rejected the fact that people change, sometimes you can't fix things by trying, and it's OK to move on and god really won't hate you or send you to hell for all eternity because of that.
It starts long before that with two things: to love the other person unconditionally and to put the other person first, all the time. But in our society, we are so caught up in ourselves, we don't even think about the other person.
What's my motivation to put the other first if I no longer love her? Will going through the motions make me start loving her again? Because my parents tried that for years and it didn't work out so well for them.
Sometimes people just grow apart and you can't always fix it. I mean, you can try to grow together, but things happen and people see them differently, and over years those differences can add up. Better to part amicably and find others you can love than to feel unloved, miserable, and trapped, blame each other for that feeling, and then hurt each other as hard as you can when it all finally does go to hell and the lawyers get involved.
Dude, you can deny it, bury it, whatever, but IME, divorce leaves scars that can last a lifetime...but maybe you're the exception.
I don't deny that at all. But I counter that even small children can tell when their parents no longer love each other, and it's far worse to rob them of a chance at seeing first-hand what a real loving family looks like just to spare them a few months of trauma. Trauma heals. Being ignored for years on end because your parents are too busy sniping at each other to display any sort of love at all? Well, that heals too, but nowhere near as quickly or completely.
That's why I'm glad my parents divorced. Because if they hadn't, that's all I would have had growing up. That and a lot of bitterness towards my friends because how fucking unfair is it that they get to have nice parents that aren't too busy with their own shit to look at them?
At 24, she is still looking for someone to fill the pain in her heart that her biological dad left when he decided he had better things to do than be a dad and husband.
And growing up with a father so disinterested in her and her mother that he could just take off and abandon them is going to somehow fill that void? No offense, but I would think your step-daughter wanted a father, not just some indifferent man that her mother happened to cohabit with.
Transportation and long-distance communications do exist, you know. My parents ended up living over a thousand kilometers apart, but I still had them both. Divorce doesn't take fathers away from little girls. Indifferent assholes breaking all contact with their offspring are what makes fathers go away.
As for pastors wanting to have an endless stream of broken people to counsel...you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about
Yeah. I could have done with hyperbole tags around that bit (there I go, thinking things are obvious again). I don't actually mean that there's some sort of conspiracy on the part of pastors.
My point is though that the attitudes concerning sex, marriage, and fidelity I saw preac
In our society, we tend to think of the commandment against adultery as being one of those antiquated, old-fashioned things, but talk to a kid who's parent's are getting divorced because of infidelity and tell me again how good adultery is.
Are you asking? Because my parents divorced over adultery, and I'm fine with it. Honestly, they were miserable, and their relationship was beyond repair. They needed something shocking like that one unfortunate little slip to break the stony silence and get things finished. If not that, I can easily imagine it being a suicide attempt a few years down the line... So adultery is absolutely fine by me - if you're at the point of cheating on your spouse, there are already far, far, more important things the two of you should deal with than a bit of sex.
And for the "stay together for the children!" crowd: fuck off. The year of misery that followed the divorce is well worth the normal moved-on-with-our-lives people that continued raising me thereafter, especially since the alternative would have been another twelve or so years of being practically ignored by people who silently (but obviously) despise each other. I mean talk about setting a bad example for impressionable minds...
I have a few close friends who's parents also divorced over similar issues. They say largely the same thing. Anecdotal, yes, but worth consideration.
From my point of view that commandment (and all the other "what god has joined together..." bullshit) has nothing to do with preserving the stability of marriages and everything to do with providing the priesthood with a steady stream of neurotic angry people in dire need of counselling services.
For those that honestly don't know and do want slightly more details, you can see some of my old comments here and here. Sorry about the tone, I was bored, and the trolls looked so very hungry...
For those who find clicking difficult, the most relevant bit is this:
GL and DX have near identical capabilities, identical object lifetime management, trivially mappable entry points and trivially mappable state bits, and near identical performance and synchronization behaviors. Porting between the two is trivial compared all the other work a proper port requires.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not a fucking hobby project. This is a retail device, sold for profit. You are NOT encouraged to take it apart. This entitlement attitude of being able to reverse engineer everyone elses IP is starting to piss me off.
Hey idiot, if I buy the thing (even at retail!), it's mine to do with as I please. The only thing your Dear Corporate Leader's IP stops me doing is duplicating it (or, were I unfortunate enough to live in a corporatocracy, fucking with the DRM).
You do know what "mine" means, yeah? Refers to this silly little notion called "property", I'm sure you've heard of it somewhere...
(Yeah, feeding the troll, the answer's more for the mass of mindless like-minded retards we've all seen around here - for instance ones that modded him up as of when I wrote this.)
As you will well know, the trouble with nuclear power plants is that when they fail, they fail spectacularly.
Like deep-sea drilling platforms? Or oil refineries? Or tailings ponds near mines?
You do know that radiation isn't the only type of pollution that can kill tens of thousands of people and render large tracts of land unusable for long periods of time (impacting the livelihood of yet more tens of thousands), yes? I mean look at this explosion (one of several due to this quake): lots of people are going to get sick and die as a result of god knows what fumes that's spewing, and there's no way to even try to contain those fumes. How is that an acceptable risk to build while nuclear plants (the ones currently failing in slow-motion giving people time to evacuate and adapt containment strategies) are not?
That and the nuclear waste, which seems to be an unsolved problem that is just silently ignored
The nuclear waste "problem" has been studied extensively, and technical solutions already exist, both in terms of reducing the existing waste and in terms of reducing the amount of waste to be produced in the future. The only people ignoring anything are the NIMBY oh-it's-not-100%-safe crowd, and the only thing they're ignoring are the actual solutions which already exist and would be built today if not for fucking politics.
And Germany, where they stored the trash in a salt mine and now have to dig up the leaking containers.
Neat how all the waste was in one place where they could get to it to fix the problem. Funny how that doesn't work with the sort of exhaust that coal plants produce...
I'll not go into the situation in Russia, because that just makes me sick to the stomach.
Russia has a problem because they didn't care to handle the waste responsibly. First it was more important building the great Soviet arsenal, then it was more important raping what was left of the economy so there would be no money to deal with the problem. That's, again, a political problem, not a technical one. It certainly isn't restricted to the nuclear industry.
See China for more of the same.
Neither coal or nuclear energy is currently at a level where it can produce clean, safe energy at this time.
Correct, in the sense that nobody can guarantee you that no radiation will ever leak anywhere ever at all. However nuclear is demonstrably many times safe-er than coal, and will continue to be so even if both of these plants go full Chernobyl. It's silly to piss ourselves over the prospect of nuclear accidents when we already accept not just the risk, but the actual fact, of far greater environmental damage in order to run our coal-fired plants and drive our cars.
It's pathetic that we refuse to replace a terrible, continuously polluting, and highly prone to catastrophic failure solution with one that produces only a tiny fraction as much ongoing pollution and is only slightly prone to catastrophe, because the average person is under the impression that radiation is that much scarier than toxic fumes and iridescent mining sludge.
The point is you'll be doing work to port the rendering code anyway, so where you start is irrelevant.
He doesn't mean that the original won't act like the real you would.
He was pretty clear about that (allowing for arbitrary accuracy).
He just means that they will be separate consciousnesses, and not the original.
What I'm saying is that the idea of "consciousness" is akin to the idea of "four". It's a property of the particular arrangement of the matter in our bodies, an abstract quality that we made up to describe some interesting aspect of that arrangement. If I add two marbles to two or three marbles to one, the "fourness" of the resulting groups is the same. Even if the marbles in the two groups are made of entirely different substances.
If I build a machine that perfectly simulates the activity in a brain and, at some instant, is configured to perfectly match your internal state, it is at that moment as much "you" as you are "you". Doubtless, that would cease to be true almost immediately (you you and computer you don't occupy the same space, you'll get different inputs, have different experiences and diverge quite rapidly), but for that one instant there is no way for me to walk in and tell which is which if all I can see is the internal state of both minds.
The only way I can differentiate the two of "you" at that instant is by expanding the idea of "you" to include things "attached" to the consciousness (the body hosting it). But then what if I were to build not a computer but an atom for atom perfect duplicate of you? Then I'd have to tell you apart by your positions in space, or maybe by the history of the individual particles that comprise each copy or something like that. But that's odd, because where you stand and which ocean some molecule of water in your body last evaporated off of clearly isn't who you are, right?
He said:
there is no way to transfer the you-ness of you - the real you, the soul or whatever - into the machine.
And I'm saying it makes as much sense to say that as it does to say "there is no way to transfer the four-ness of the two and two marbles - the real four-ness, the essence of four or whatever - into the three and one marbles". There's nothing to transfer and no intrinsic difference within the relevant domain to allow one to meaningfully pin the label "real" to one object but not the other.
Replacing part by part is much preferable to creating a copy and destroying the original.
Only if you see the consciousness as some sort of physical object.
However if you built a robot with all your memories, emotions, thoughts and personality then no matter how accurate it was there is no way to transfer the you-ness of you - the real you, the soul or whatever - into the machine.
Huh? That's like taking a group of two twos and a group of three and one and asserting that the groups somehow have a different "fourness" to them.
And why should it last any longer after 100 generations of egg production and 30 years of dormancy than it would last after 100 generations of sperm production and no dormancy? It isn't like the eggs aren't duplicates in the first place - the difference is when they form.
It's not so much that they're damaged; it's that they're essentially bacteria, and (without a nice hardened nucleus) every little thing (including all of lovely chemicals that they themselves produce) rips into their DNA, causing them to evolve at an absurd rate. Sperm mitochondria aren't broken, they just aren't likely to be very useful outside of sperm cells (or whatever their progenitors are called).
Right, so because Afghanistan and Iran were the most liberal, Saudi Arabia would have become a liberal paradise. Perfect logic. For my next trick, I shall show how 2+2=73 proves that the earth is an equilateral triangle.
Neat how you failed to read (or perhaps understand) the sentence immediately following the one you quoted.
lulz. Easy on the white-mans burden there.
Huh? Wite-man's burden? Where in my post did you manage to read a call for Western nations to expand their empires and bring the light of god and civilization to the savages?
Or do you think I'm trying to tell you to feel guilty about something? That would be your own idea because I never wrote that anywhere.
The kind of convoluted, asinine "logic" used to arrive at that conclusion could just as easily be used to "prove" that WW2 is directly traceable to Iran.
No, it couldn't, because history doesn't record Iran having significantly contributed to any of the recognized major causes of that war. There is, however, record of the US and UK overthrowing Iran's progressive government with a tyrant so brutal that the current Iranian government started to look like a good idea to the locals. So one can indeed say that the US and UK had a significant hand in creating today's Iran without also blaming the Great Depression on Genghis Khan (whee! hyperbole is fun!).
I mean, honestly, by your "logic" (scare quotes are fun, too) WWII was all one hundred percent Hitler's fault and the deplorable conditions in Germany (imposed by the Allies at the end of WWI) had nothing to do with how such a madman could possibly have risen to power.
I was born in "Eastern Europe". Never saw what you describe. Most people there absolutely loved Russia, and huge numbers bought into every anti-US conspiracy that you can think of.
So was I. How'd you manage to miss the endless, "Oh no, we never disappeared our own people ourselves, the Russians did that. And all those people with local last names that worked for the Party and the secret police, uh, Russian conspiracy. And the Russians made us call in all those false accusations against the irritating downstairs neighbor. And the Russians depressed our industry by dumping their cheap crap on our markets. And the Russians built the huge industries that have polluted our land. And it's the Russians' fault that the stucco is falling off the buildings. And the Russians are the reason our government is still corrupt (especially the anti-Russian faction of our government, which may also be a Russian conspiracy)...
On and on ad nauseum. Anything to avoid admitting that some of "us" are opportunistic assholes and some of "them" are good decent folk, because then you'd have to judge people by more than their accent, and that's just so difficult...
My point is simple: people are the same wherever you go. For every flag-waving fanatic there's someone blaming the same country for their cat dying. The US is big, like Russia, and attracts a lot of both parties. Try, if you truly value logic and objectivity, to not to be too firmly in either camp.
Because Saudi Arabia would be a liberal paradise if it weren't for US support?
Given that Afghanistan and Iran were some of the most liberal and progressive societies in the region before the US, UK and USSR fucked them over for oil and a military pissing-match, that may well have been the case. Had those nations not been destroyed, they may have had a significant positive influence in the region.
A lot of progressive movements in the nations around Israel, which were fairly strong early in the century, were also abandoned when the violence (enabled to a great extent by US and UK military aid) really took off.
It is, of course, entirely possible that the tyranny we see today would have emerged on its own without any foreign intervention, but that doesn't negate the fact that most of the tyrannical regimes in the region are directly traceable to Western sponsorship.
I'm starting to think that blaming the US is a religion in and of itself for some folks. I swear, I could say "looks like it might rain tonight"...
The US has done a lot of good and it's done a lot of evil in the world. If you're well and truly sick of it, move to Eastern Europe for a bit, where everything is Russia's fault in pretty much exactly the way that you describe.
What any of that has to do with cloud is rather beyond me. I personally blame bad weather on arctic lichen, Australian butterflies, and the eldest of all living men named Henry :)
Simply not true. I use boost heavily on a 120 kloc project, and it takes under a minute to compile everything from scratch. And I use quite a lot of boost features.
You have one large project that compiles quickly and that somehow contradicts me saying that there exist cases where one gets stuck with ridiculously long compile times (attributable to use of complex language features, as opposed to merely the number of tokens in a compilation unit)? If you aren't trolling then I'd love to know how you maintain a 120 K LoC project with such a poor grasp of basic logic.
The cost of the GC is not fixed in any meaning of the word 'fixed'.
Not everything is a real-time app. The odd 1 ms stall is often a very acceptable exchange for time otherwise spent thinking really deeply about memory (and cleaning up after people who misused a smart pointer because he has real problems to deal with). And over a long enough run, the impact of GC is certainly "fixed" at some small percent of overall time. And I've yet to see a live object graph so pathologically bad that GC costs become unbearable that doesn't translate into something with fairly complex lifetime management in C++ (circular references with no clear and obvious owner object are a bitch).
How is that a problem of the language? it's a problem of your development team, not the language. If you have a shitty development team, they can easily mess up a Java program as well.
The set of ways that one can hide a bug in Java (C and C# in my case) is far smaller than that for C++. That might not affect you much when you're writing the code and have it all fresh in your mind, but some of us have to go back and review that code later on.
Occasionally I find things like the wrong operator being called due to an implicit conversion to a compatible type in some silly header intended for some other task, added after the code I'm looking at was written. That shit takes time to find and fix. And neither the coder that wrote the routine, nor the coder that amended the header, nor I are idiots.
And getting bit by some of C++'s more esoteric little rules hardly makes one a "shitty" coder. It happens to the best of us out here in the real world. (I assume, by your outright disbelief at what I find to be common issues in C++ development, that you work with actual gods or something.)
You mean RAII obviously.
Yeah, that was a silly typo.
Yes, RAII demands destructors, and stack unwinding demands destructors to be invoked, but you are in control of it: if your loop is time-critical, then you can get raw and avoid them.
How is it that a few percent of GC overhead spread over the whole app bother you so much while a few percent of exception-handling overhead spread over everything you haven't specifically sanitized is fine? Do you only work on exceptions-are-free-(except-a-bit-of-cold-memory)-until-you-throw platforms?
How have you used C++ to the point where you feel confident enough that none of what I'm saying could possibly be true to call me a liar and a plagiarist and yet completely ignore the reason that every decent C++ compiler has a switch to disable that entire language feature?
No compiler vendor has implemented a subset incompatibly. The only thing that is left is to clear up move semantics. Other than that, c++0x is ready. I am already using it in GCC 4.5, with exceptional results in code clarity.
The code clarity that GCC 4.5 affords you says little about what other vendors are doing. Still, you may be right. I'm still in pain from years of maintaining code that had to compile under MSVC, GCC, and a handful of the lesser compilers - each with their own unique and precious way of breaking your code.
Show me a case such as you describe.
I have on the other monit
Modern c++ compilers are extremely fast; not as fast as Java compilers, but considering they do much more many things (templates for example), then they are quite fast. They are so fast that compiling large code bases with them is extremely viable, and it's a task done everyday by millions of developers.
That depends on who's header files you have to include. Often someone's API will be so template-heavy that it takes a full minute (per compilation unit) just to parse their silly headers. Which is sad because I've never had the same issue with enormous C headers or when referencing a good half of the .NET runtime in a C# compilation.
And yeah, that's a minute on a modern compiler on a fast machine.
How is that a big problem? you make it sound like it's a colossal problem, but in reality, it's not. Unless your class is used by every other class or function, the recompilation is minimal.
The real problem there, which the GP missed, is the fact that every type must include the header of every type it contains a value member of in its own header. So if I want to keep d3d11.h out of my UI code, then my bridge renderer classes must either dispatch through virtuals, a tedious PIMPL, or not actually use any D3D types as value members, complicating other code for no good reason.
The benefit of this is that you can use value classes in c++, whereas in Java you can't, every class is by reference, which is stupid.
Java is stupid, agreed. But C++ is retarded too. Link-time code generation is old news, object sizes could be resolved then.
RAII is actually superior to Java's garbage collection. It's much more critical for big applications to release as much memory as possible upfront.
Superior? With GC I pay a fixed performance cost (and not even a very large one on modern VMs) upfront for the whole project and start writing code. With RAII I have to go around making sure everyone is actually using shared_ptr (or whatever) at every single call site.
Now Finalization, I agree, isn't the most amazing thing, but I've spent no more time chasing down finalization bugs than I have going after people who use a raw fopen despite having a nice file class with a destructor available. Depends on what you're used to, I suppose.
Exception handling has a cost only if there are non-trivial destructors to execute.
Leveraging RIAA kind of demands that such destructors exist.
C++0x will have this.
Sure, if they don't delay it another five years while all the compiler vendors run off and implement incompatible subsets of the proposals because they're tired of waiting for the committee to stop bickering.
ACE? what, are you stack in 1999? you know the Boost libraries, don't you?
Boost? I thought we were being careful about what we include so as to keep compile times down.
Templates are, for me, the single reason I prefer c++ over Java. Java's generics are stupid.
Templates are useful, until someone goes nuts with traits types and multiple levels of tag-type-param-to-overloaded-function and your debug build ends up six or more orders of magnitude slower than your release because inlining is off.
Yes, I use them, but the time spent making sure they aren't being misused is non-trivial and needs to be counted against the time saved by using them.
Funny that you say that, because I've worked on million lines of code c++ codebases that didn't have any memory leaks or other problems. But that's because we used the right libraries.
So have I. But don't forget the bit where someone spent countless hours making sure everybody else was following the rules and sticking to those libraries, rather than wandering off into std:: or inventing their own little subdoma
I agree emphatically with everything you said.
I'll add one more thing: debug performance. Most C++ libraries (certainly the STL) are written for prettiness more than performance and thus rely heavily on compile-time optimizations. Now, it's true, a fully optimized iterator generates the same code as a raw pointer, but that's irrelevant when you've got a debug build that runs several orders of magnitude slower than a release, and the bug you're tracking down is on the third pass over vertex 892,472 of a 2,000,000 triangle mesh.
I mean, yeah, I could rewrite the standard containers and algorithms (etc) into a form that doesn't require heavy inlining to be even remotely performant, but then what was the point of using C++ in the first place?
But as many as 10% of the customers walking in the store are there to steal.
In my experience the customers are nowhere near that bad. The employees, on the other hand... In just a few years I've seen two receivers, three managers, four department leads, two members of the stock crew, and eight or so (I'm starting to forget) sales reps get fired because entire pallets of very expensive merchandise vanished on their watch. That's just the ones that got fired, mind you, there were about a half dozen more that got away with it for years and even got promoted.
That sort of thing probably varies a lot by region, though.
The second usage is just plain laziness. If you really want to put someone down, you should put some thought into it. For examples, take a look at all the Winston Churchill or Mark Twain put downs. They could insult you using your own opinions in such a way that you're defenseless, or make an insult sound like a complement that everyone except the person listening would understand.
Ah, but if one is well known for often preferring complex put-downs, then a simple "go fuck yourself" picks up this lovely overtone of "you're not worth the minimal effort it would take to properly insult you", and may be precisely what the speaker intends...
Hmmm... I never did much low level 3D code when I was in the games industry, but our XBox 360 code could be ported pretty trivially to Windows.
I can see how that's possible. The case I'm thinking of involves the realization that there's a big performance gain to be had if we could just rearrange our data and start doing interesting things with vtxfetch (or whatever the instruction was, it's been a while). The embedded framebuffer also imposed some fairly serious rearranging of the overall render process.
Not quite sure why the Wii is "fixed function madness". It works pretty much like any late 90's graphics card, which makes it a little old fashioned, and difficult to port between it and XBox360 (although that's not the only difficulty - the machines are different hardware generations) but easy enough if you've been in the business for a decade or so. Implementing OpenGL 1.2 on that wouldn't be too hard.
Well, you don't go making a Wii game intending that it look like something running a decade ago on GL 1.2, do you? A lot of the more interesting effects involve setting states that have never had an OpenGL equivalent of any sort. As you say, it's not exactly hard, but it's enough work that one doesn't save much time having started with an OpenGL engine as opposed to a DX engine (and before we wander too far off topic, the context of this thread is porting).
There are other issues, too, but they're hard to explain without getting into the sort of specifics that Nintendo's NDA covers.
Never used the PS2. PSP has a decent API which has an OpenGL state machine like approach. Considering some of the samples are clearly written for PS2 (they expect 2 shoulder buttons), PS2 can't be that different.
The PS2 was honestly a nightmare. The only way to get it to perform decently was to go straight to the hardware, which means mapped registers and the DMA unit. We did crazy things like making our model format be mostly raw DMA control commands which the CPU would minimally touch up and fire off. Manually managing texture memory was also a bit of a pain. And of course there were synchronization issues everywhere. And one of the common blend modes was broken, so that needed to be worked around...
If Sony ever put together a decent GL layer on top of that, it's news to me, because the mini-GL layer I saw was a total joke.
The parent is right. Console graphics are so different from PC graphics that it's absurd to compare the APIs.
On a PC, you call some functions and the driver manages memory for you and builds a nice command buffer for the GPU to execute. On a console, you obsess about flushing caches and waiting for VSync and keeping track of which buffers the GPU may or may not be reading out of at any given moment. Or you fuck it up and get some awesome crashes as the GPU tries to render uninitialized memory noise.
On a PC, your graphics API manages things like texture and vertex memory for you. You say "make me a texture of this size" and it does. You say "I'm done with that texture" and it frees it. Those functions don't exist on a console; you manage that yourself, jumping through all sorts of loops to make sure it's aligned right and in the proper memory bank. On a PC, that texture goes up to the GPU as a nice row-major array of RGBA data. On a console, you have to tile it and reorder it and encode it into crazy hardware-native formats yourself. And make sure you've flushed the CPU cache before you pass it to the GPU!
PC and console GPUs are almost impossible to drive properly using "compatible" shaders. All shaders pretty much always end up rewritten, because the console APIs don't do magic optimizations like the PC APIs do, and you're expected to write in use of specialized chip features yourself if you want to do anything particularly spectacular. God help you when you hit the Wii and it's fixed-function madness.
These differences alone impact engine design to such a degree that any residual similarities between $CONSOLE_API and $PC_API are worth nothing to a porting effort.
Incorrect. The PS3 implemented a sort of GL like library at first, which has now been mostly forgotten in preference for libGCM - which is a library for writing directly into the RSX's command buffer. The Wii implements a library that looks a little like GL at first glance, but is actually vastly different in so many areas.
Further:
The original XBOX implements an API which resembles DirectX inasmuch as the entry points are similarly named. And for most "serious" uses you just grab a pointer to the raw command buffer and dump bytes into that.
The XBOX 360 is similarly set up, only it's even more different since it uses a crazy (and pretty awesome, IMO) framebuffer setup.
The PS2 has nothing like any sort of PC GPU. You drive it with a set of memory-mapped registers and properly formatted DMA commands. The PSP is, I believe, similar to the PS2.
Not only did we develop vast intelligence, but we developed abilities that ANTICIPATED the need for them.
Poor choice of words, that, but I have wondered roughly the same thing for quite some time, now.
Why did we develop the ability to drive 60, 70,-100 miles per hour or more while weaving in and out of traffic?
OK, this is a bad example. We drive 60, 70,-100 miles per hour because that happens to be what our cars can safely operate at when driven by a creature with our reaction speeds. If we had the reflexes of a cat, we'd be driving faster.
But you do raise an interesting point, and I'd like to point it out for anyone that might miss it because of that bad example: our intelligence predates our use of it by a very large margin. The brain, as far as we can tell, has been the same organ for the past few hundred thousand years. However, we've only very recently invented things like agriculture, mathematics, and technology, grown our vocabularies by an absurd degree as we've named all the new stuff we make, we've become literate, and reinvented our social structures many times to cope with both technological to the basis of our survival (agriculture, industrial revolution, modern automation, etc) and our ever denser populations (imagine: in a city you might bump into more people in a day than your ancient ancestors would have known in a lifetime). And if we care to, we can still go out and learn to live in a forest as hunter-gatherers and primitive tool-makers in addition to all of that.
So what were all those neurons doing for the hundred thousand years (or more) or so before the rise of what we consider to be civilization? How were they earning their keep? I mean, they must have been good for something, as there were certainly strong pressures against being wasteful with food energy at that time. And why did we live so long with these modern brains before we did put them to what we'd call a modern use? Did it seriously take a hundred thousand years for some random dude somewhere to figure out the whole "oh seeds grow into plants!" thing? Shouldn't someone have noticed a bunch of fruit-bearing plants growing where everybody was throwing the pits the year before a little quicker than that?
Evolving the ability to evolve and evolving the ability to anticipate need and change for it ahead of time is not conforming to Darwin's theory of evolution as I know it.
Eh, evolution is a powerful idea, and looking at all of the other crazy stuff it's produced our intelligence isn't that shocking.
For example, imagine that the new brain matter was just badly organized by some gene that recently broke, either due to some tiny and truly recent mutation or perhaps the introduction of some new substance into our bodies (this would have to be something like being colonized by a new bacteria - an external agent would be obvious by now).
Or maybe the recent revolution has to do with language and ideas. The capacities we have were never "spare", but we lacked the means to link them together and teach our children to similarly link theirs until some seemingly trivial construct of modern language was invented.
Our ancestors might also have had a much easier life than we imagine. We can be sure there were many famines in ancient times, but maybe not so many in the history of our direct ancestors that the energy cost would have been worthwhile overall, even for only marginal increases of intelligence, until some critical point is reached, and then...
Or maybe big brains really were just a genuinely broken design that somehow, by sheer dumb and unfathomably stupid luck, managed to survive long enough that some other line of evolution happened to take what's there and make it useful. Genetic history is full of similar events on the cellular level, where redundant copies of critical genes are regularly made, allowing the "useless"
I take your point but I think you are underestimating the interaction between the form of popular ideologies and the likelihood of sociopaths having power in the ruling class when those ideologies are part of the founding tradition of a political system.
Possibly. It's hard to say for the specific case we've been discussing. I'd chalk the people's willingness to accept it up to education and upbringing (keep in mind that, as bad as they were, the commies were in many ways better than the disaster the Czar had been - and Stalin came into power at a time when most people could judge that for themselves). Their history also afforded them other opportunities: look at how effective it's been for each American government to claim that it's idiocy is necessitated by the previous government's idiocy or tragedies like 9/11 - the communists had the Czar's reign and both world wars to hide behind - if not for that then people might have gone from disillusioned to outright hostile a lot quicker, and the Cold War may never have happened.
Look at what 9/11 was morphed into and imagine what Bush (since you mention him, you could substitute many others) could have done with a history like that!
The totalitarian inclinations of the likes of Bush and other very unpleasant politicians in the West today is not unrelated to their ideology. I would argue that a nuanced look at the history of communism allows one to draw those parallels more effectively not less.
Bush rammed through his oppressive agenda in part because he is a sociopathic son of a bitch, and ignored the damage it did because he was a sociopathic son of a bitch, but his agenda is also a result of his ultra-conservative ideology and it is no co-incidence that many of these sociopathic arseholes come from his wing of the Republican party. The totalitarian tendencies of the neo-cons and the totalitarian tendencies of the Bolsheviks are a parallel one is justified in mentioning.
Eh. They said one thing when it got them what they wanted, and then they said the opposite when they wanted something else. Now their PR department writes articles in their defense saying, "Who could possibly have predicted it would go as badly as it did?" as though none of us have memories. The only thing that changed in between was 9/11 causing a shift in public opinion, which they opportunistically picked up and ran with as fast as they could. Shrinking government? Balancing the budget? Where was all of that when Bush gave his little speech about how great it was that he expanded Medicare to ridiculously unsustainable levels? Why did the DHS grow while the military had to delegate even more of its non-essential functions to contractors? Not nation-building? OK, then why did Secretary [I forget which] spend the week after 9/11 berating his intelligence officers for not giving him something he could attack Iraq with? And how is it that their "principles" suddenly matter again now that Obama's in the White House?
The only consistent thing about them is doing whatever looks like the easiest way to shift power and influence to their friends. And you can claim that that is their real ideology, but then water is also wet and the sky is occasionally dark, so...
The Democrats hold as opposing an ideology to Neo-Conservatism as is possible in US politics, but their behavior is identical. Compare Obama going on and on about how evil Guantanamo and warantless wiretapping and torture and rendition and Bush's other power grabs are to his administration's current apathy towards Guantanamo and the expansion of the ideas Bush pioneered to include it being OK for the executive to order someone killed without running their evidence and reasoning past a judge. They said they support accountability and whistle blowers, and now look at the Wikileaks debacle. They can't even say they tried their ideas and found they had to temper their idealism since they discarded all principle a couple of Novembers ago, the moment they ceased to be useful.
Reject emissions trading: Stop the "cap and trade" administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants.
Does the bit after "pollution" describe the start of the sentence or propose a better system? If the latter, in what particular way does it differ from Cap and Trade?
Demand a balanced federal budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax modification.
I say Clinton balanced the budget. You say he cheated. The government ignores the constitution while we bicker over the meaning of the word "is".
Simplify the tax system: Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words - the length of the original Constitution.
Oh come on! You want to limit the length of the tax code to a number of words that you picked based on nothing but a sentimental attachment to a document that nobody with power gives a shit about these days? Let's not even get into the real reasons that limiting the tax code of a nation as large and diverse as yours to a few pages is a bad idea, that's just silly...
Audit federal government agencies for constitutionality: Create a Blue Ribbon taskforce that engages in an audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their Constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities
Such agencies already exist. The GAO is one of them. They publish reports. The reports are often surprisingly candid. Nobody seems to care, or even know that they exist. I don't think attaching blue ribbons would be much use.
Let's take a concrete example. You are right that correlation does not imply causation, but you also mention collective farming. Collectivised farming justified by communism in the Soviet Union lead to mass starvation.
Ok, no argument there.
What motivating factors would you say contributed to this atrocity?
A clique within the party saw an opportunity to personally profit and they pushed it until Stalin himself decided to run with it. "Experts" were found to write articles. "Academics" rewrote them in prettier language. "Polls" were held to determine popular support. When collectivization took off, they went out and got really really drunk and had a fantastic time cheering their own success. As sociopaths of all races and ideologies are wont to do, should opportunity present itself.
Keep in mind, there was an agricultural crisis at the time (still fairly early in the post-revolution period), several of the government's attempts to fix it had failed and been abandoned (some of them quite brutal in themselves - a lot of people died when Stalin decided that the peasants had simply betrayed "Mother Russia"), and the idea had been kicking around since before the revolution, so if you're a sociopathic fuck on the lookout for a quick boost to your career, pushing collectivization is a no-brainer.
Which organised belief system would you say those ideas were drawn from?
Obviously communism.
Is it fair to criticise an ideology which still incorporates those ideas?
It's fair to point out that the ideology's premise leads to such absurd ends, yes. And this is where you and I could both go on all day picking over various idiocies - like the inherent brittleness of highly centralized systems and the lack of incentive to innovate and excel under the Soviet system or its simple incompatibility with basic human nature.
What people and ideas caused it?
This is my point. It's the people that get power who make all the difference. The ideas are whatever happens to be lying around at the time.
The widespread belief that Communism was a good idea was one of the major social and political factors that lead to this disaster.
Ignoring the fact that a vast number of Soviet citizens were already disillusioned with the new government and didn't actually really believe in them...
I'll agree that it led to the idea, and even to the idea getting government sponsorship and support rather than being outright laughed into oblivion.
The bit where the government didn't do something to backpedal or fix things when the obvious problems began? Stalin's stubbornness. The bit where people reporting actual starvation back to Moscow were vanished? Stalin's precious ego. Well, his and those of the sycophants he elevated. If someone comes to you and says "you're causing millions to die a slow and terrible death, and here's the proof" and you shoot him it really doesn't matter what you believe, you're just plain sociopathic and insane.
I understand where you're coming from, I do. Ideas aren't all equal and they certainly influence things. Yes. Agreed.
But when you're looking at evil people doing evil things, the ideas are minor details. Communism isn't evil because Stalin did shit in his name any more than free-market capitalism is evil because Yeltsin and his cronies utterly destroyed what was left of the Soviet economy (which also killed a lot of people, if less directly) in the name of privatization and free enterprise. It's wrong in its own rite, and I wish people would stop confusing that because it makes it impossible for us to learn from history, whether it be copying the few things they did right or being able to publicly draw parallels between our sociopaths and theirs without being dismissed with a shallow, "but they're commies and we're [any other label], and those are opposites, so your example is trivially inapplicable (you moron)".
So what's your solution? Give them money, so they raise more kids to be gang members?
You think people naturally want to be gang members? As in they grow up shooting and being shot at and their first thought when they see their baby is, "I want you to grow up to be just as miserable as I've been and live just as short as I'm likely to"?
<morbo>THAT IS NOT HOW HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY WORKS</morbo>
I mean you can say they should all go and get jobs, but the unemployment rate is 11% with likely half as many more unreported. The people with the money to have things made clearly have no need for more production, so where do you propose they find this work they should be doing to support themselves? It's not like they can start growing food in the middle of the city or form their own little economy amongst themselves when they're terribly dependent on goods (like food) sold at prices intended for the rest of us...
And what's your solution, anyway?
Gonna go a little out of order here.
...communists need to have a look at their ideology and ask themselves why every time communists get sweeping powers they do such unpleasant things.
Correlation is not causation.
Hitler and Mussolini did unpleasant things in the name of National Socialism. The Japanese emperor did unpleasant things in the name of his glorious empire. The dictators of 20th century South and Central America did unpleasant things in the name of capitalism. The Iranian and Saudi governments do unpleasant things in the name of Islam. Then Chinese (now) do their unpleasant business in the name of harmony and social order.
Sociopaths say and do whatever the fuck it takes to gain and keep power, which tends to be whatever will get the locals of that place and time are likely to go along with. Communism was a convenient way to whip up the terribly oppressed masses of what were then near-feudal societies. It might as well have been a new religion - Stalin would still have been scheming his way to the top, in a funny hat if necessary.
Don't mistake my argument - I'm not supporting communism here. But it also annoys me that someone can make a shallow statement like that as if it were a full explanation of the history, especially as I never want to see that particular bit of history repeated.
They killed people because they were radical communists...
No. They killed people because they were sociopaths with unchecked power. Go read history and you'll find everything they did done by others for a hundred other gods, fatherlands, and miscellaneous causes.
Stalin had Lenin killed to get power. He spent the rest of his life purging random people in the party in order to eliminate or control those that knew where all the bodies were buried. Saddam Hussein's reign was much the same. Oh, and Hitler's. And let's not forget the old Czar's secret police or how folks ended up in the Bastille. As has been the reign of many, many, others like them.
Stalin got a bunch of Russians killed in WWII. Like the Czar (and, well, pretty much everyone) did in WWI. Like countless idiot leaders have all throughout history. No common ideology, just idiocy and the threat of unspeakable violence against anyone that would dare correct it.
Stalin purged religious folks, made their lives miserable, wrecked their shit, sent them off to camps. So did Hitler. And some of the Ottoman rulers. And the Romans at times. And, if the bible is to be believed, even the ancient Hebrews on their way into the "promised land". And many many others. Ideology isn't the common thread here; it's tyrants that want to eliminate groups that might band together to oppose them (and taking all their stuff must be a nice bonus, too).
Stalin fucked up the economy and millions starved to death. While the scale and speed of Stalin's famines is impressive, government mismanagement causing economic suffering is hardly unique. People in parts of Africa starve and die of preventable diseases every day because the warlords horde everything. People die for similar reasons in some of India's more badly managed rural areas. I know people in the former USSR who tell me of friends, family members, and neighbors that got sick and died because they couldn't afford to heat their homes after the collapse of communism, or because they were malnourished, or because what medical infrastructure there was completely collapsed and the nearest doctor was a day's drive away. Is that an indictment against capitalism, or is it just corruption, cronyism, and high-level idiocy? Rulers have been starving the masses to death, wondering why they don't just eat cake instead, since ancient times, regardless of gods or ideals.
So no, Stalin didn't kill because he was a communist. He killed because that was his path to power and because he was an idiot who'd kill anyone that tried to help him past his own idiocy. He kept killing because people
Need I say more?
Yes. Because, and I thought this was clear, I'm not bitter that my parents divorced or about the misery that attended the divorce itself.
To clarify further, what I am bitter at is that the "thou shalt not commit adultery/divorce is wrong/what god has joined together..." attitudes they were brought up with were a direct contributing factor in the years of miserable marriage they shared after any hope for fixing things was gone. The same attitudes which vastly magnified the feelings of betrayal, guilt, and general unpleasantness that followed the divorce. I'm bitter that the Christian culture they grew up and married in has latched onto adultery - a mere symptom - and has largely rejected the fact that people change, sometimes you can't fix things by trying, and it's OK to move on and god really won't hate you or send you to hell for all eternity because of that.
It starts long before that with two things: to love the other person unconditionally and to put the other person first, all the time. But in our society, we are so caught up in ourselves, we don't even think about the other person.
What's my motivation to put the other first if I no longer love her? Will going through the motions make me start loving her again? Because my parents tried that for years and it didn't work out so well for them.
Sometimes people just grow apart and you can't always fix it. I mean, you can try to grow together, but things happen and people see them differently, and over years those differences can add up. Better to part amicably and find others you can love than to feel unloved, miserable, and trapped, blame each other for that feeling, and then hurt each other as hard as you can when it all finally does go to hell and the lawyers get involved.
Dude, you can deny it, bury it, whatever, but IME, divorce leaves scars that can last a lifetime...but maybe you're the exception.
I don't deny that at all. But I counter that even small children can tell when their parents no longer love each other, and it's far worse to rob them of a chance at seeing first-hand what a real loving family looks like just to spare them a few months of trauma. Trauma heals. Being ignored for years on end because your parents are too busy sniping at each other to display any sort of love at all? Well, that heals too, but nowhere near as quickly or completely.
That's why I'm glad my parents divorced. Because if they hadn't, that's all I would have had growing up. That and a lot of bitterness towards my friends because how fucking unfair is it that they get to have nice parents that aren't too busy with their own shit to look at them?
At 24, she is still looking for someone to fill the pain in her heart that her biological dad left when he decided he had better things to do than be a dad and husband.
And growing up with a father so disinterested in her and her mother that he could just take off and abandon them is going to somehow fill that void? No offense, but I would think your step-daughter wanted a father, not just some indifferent man that her mother happened to cohabit with.
Transportation and long-distance communications do exist, you know. My parents ended up living over a thousand kilometers apart, but I still had them both. Divorce doesn't take fathers away from little girls. Indifferent assholes breaking all contact with their offspring are what makes fathers go away.
As for pastors wanting to have an endless stream of broken people to counsel...you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about
Yeah. I could have done with hyperbole tags around that bit (there I go, thinking things are obvious again). I don't actually mean that there's some sort of conspiracy on the part of pastors.
My point is though that the attitudes concerning sex, marriage, and fidelity I saw preac
In our society, we tend to think of the commandment against adultery as being one of those antiquated, old-fashioned things, but talk to a kid who's parent's are getting divorced because of infidelity and tell me again how good adultery is.
Are you asking? Because my parents divorced over adultery, and I'm fine with it. Honestly, they were miserable, and their relationship was beyond repair. They needed something shocking like that one unfortunate little slip to break the stony silence and get things finished. If not that, I can easily imagine it being a suicide attempt a few years down the line... So adultery is absolutely fine by me - if you're at the point of cheating on your spouse, there are already far, far, more important things the two of you should deal with than a bit of sex.
And for the "stay together for the children!" crowd: fuck off. The year of misery that followed the divorce is well worth the normal moved-on-with-our-lives people that continued raising me thereafter, especially since the alternative would have been another twelve or so years of being practically ignored by people who silently (but obviously) despise each other. I mean talk about setting a bad example for impressionable minds...
I have a few close friends who's parents also divorced over similar issues. They say largely the same thing. Anecdotal, yes, but worth consideration.
From my point of view that commandment (and all the other "what god has joined together..." bullshit) has nothing to do with preserving the stability of marriages and everything to do with providing the priesthood with a steady stream of neurotic angry people in dire need of counselling services.
For those that honestly don't know and do want slightly more details, you can see some of my old comments here and here. Sorry about the tone, I was bored, and the trolls looked so very hungry...
For those who find clicking difficult, the most relevant bit is this:
GL and DX have near identical capabilities, identical object lifetime management, trivially mappable entry points and trivially mappable state bits, and near identical performance and synchronization behaviors. Porting between the two is trivial compared all the other work a proper port requires.
The review is written by the reviewer. The score is purchased by the game publisher.