There's no such thing as a purely military mission for large nuclear weapons. It's doubtful there's a use for small ones.
The only thing that is "chilling" in this document is that the deployment of such weapons was carefully, methodically considered. The calculations of a suicide pact.
It's one thing to accept that nuclear war would destroy our civilizations, kill billions, and cause suffering we literally can't imagine. We already 'accept' that war is hell, in our detached way.
It's something else entirely to be forced to say 'yeah, that makes sense' with the purpose behind a target's selection. It's chilling to take a look at yourself and see that you can agree, at some level, with a truly monstrous decision.
Having worked in the HPC/supercomputer world during the rise & fall of AMD, I really wish I could mod you up further.
TFA talks makes much of the Intel compiler & benchmarks compiled with the Intel compiler for Intel processors.
I call BS. Nobody in HPC was dumb enough to be fooled with the benchmarks using the Intel compiler & Intel chips. There are (and were) commercial, highly optimizing alternatives to Intel's compiler, each with similar speed boasts over GCC: PathScale and PGI come to mind. Back in the day, AMD chips easily ran PathScale-compiled code faster than Intel's chips could -- and, for that matter, faster than Intel hardware with code compiled by Intel's compiler.
A big part of my job was compiling & running benchmarks using four compilers - GCC, Intel, Pathscale, PGI on the different architectures.
Even on a level playing field, such as GCC or PGI with model-specific optimizations and the closest thing to 'neutral' benchmarking there was, AMD was unquestionably king - better memory performance thanks to HyperTransport, better floating point performance, better integer performance - you name it, AMD was king. Intel couldn't touch 'em. AMD outsold (and outperformed) Intel, hands down.
The tide started shifting sometime after Intel's Woodcrest came out, with Intel easily being the better chip by 2010.
AMD simply pissed away everything, and did just about everything wrong for at least half a decade.
All Intel had to do was be less incompetent than AMD, and they'd win -- which is exactly what happened.
For a non-Intel example: Then-tiny ARM has grown to 10x bigger than AMD in terms of market valuation.
If benchmarks are to be believed, even Apple's ARM-derived A9 chips used in iPads are giving AMD's best a run for their money - and completely blow them away at flops/watt.
When an Apple chip running on a portable device gives your server hardware a run for its money, pointing a finger at Intel is a little hard to swallow.
Historically, colonists/settlers/pioneers have had pretty appalling mortality rates.
Early settlers to the Americas had a very high chance of dying, with many settlements dying out entirely within the first year.
The high probability of death wasn't a secret; the colonists knew they had a high chance of being dead within a few months of arrival.
Yet they came by the boatload. Repeatedly, even after entire colonies collapsed, even after selling themselves to a near lifetime of indentured servitude to pay for the cost of their emigration.
It's a mistake to underestimate the horrors humans continue to undertake to live in a new place - whether it be immigration through deserts and war zones, stifling rides locked in cargo containers in deserts for weeks, refugees drowning on overcrowded, sinking ships, all the while risking criminal prosecution or racial or ethnic persecution... people go through situations with very poor chances of survival right here on Earth, right now.
Culturally, all of humanity is already used to accepting shockingly large number of people gambling their lives with slim chances of survival to live someplace new.
Lots of people will die trying, as we always have. It's difficult to see that aspect of humanity suddenly changing.
The important question is: How often do you actually drive far enough in one day to drain the battery and need to recharge away from home.
I know in my own life & commute, the answer is "not at all" - being able to gas up on a long trip just isn't a use case. On the other hand, with an Electric, never having to stop at a gas station is a big advantage/selling point.
Batteries are becoming cheaper very quickly with cost parity expected in less than a decade. The ability to charge faster is also improving dramatically, so those disadvantages of electric cars are rapidly vanishing. It's already a lower cost per mile to drive electric, and maintenance costs are lower on electric cars compared to cars powered by ICE's.
I suspect for an increasing number of people (especially those living in cities or suburbia), the advantages of electric cars will soon be more than sufficiently compelling to warrant a switch to electric.
"Green" has little to do with it. Convenience and cost per mile are big advantages of electric vehicles.
You're aware there were hordes of Apple II clones, right? I started my computing life on a Franklin ACE 1000 - a superior clone of the Apple II. After it died, I got another Apple II clone (A "Laser 128" as I recall). There were Apple clones for over ten years with the Apple II, and several more years with the Macintosh.
Apple II clones died for two reasons: The Apple II was a very old architecture, only capable of 64k of memory. Also, most of the cloners illegally copied Apple's BIOS. Even then, Apple vs. Franklin was in 1987 - ten years after the Apple II was released.
IBM did sue clone makers into oblivion. In fact, after Apple vs. Franklin, IBM sued a number of early cloners out of existence for the because they also illegally copied from IBM's BIOS.
The difference is that nobody saw the point in writing a clean-room Apple II ROM in 1987. The world had moved beyond 64k, and there was no point in denying reality. Even Apple was pounding nails in the Apple II's coffin.
In contrast, Phoenix and AMI both had clean-room IBM BIOS clones written in 1984 and '85 - years before Apple vs. Franklin. IBM couldn't touch Phoenix or AMI.
So IBM tried to destroy cloners by creating the backwards (but not forwards) compatible PS/2, complete with their backwards (but not forwards) compatible OS/2.
In the end, it came down to price: A clone was more capable than IBM's PS/2 disaster, and had a cost far less than the PS/2 or a Macintosh.
IBM tried its best to kill the PC clone. The difference is that unlike the Apple II, the PC clone could handily beat the PS/2 that was supposed to replace it.
Never forget: The PC clone didn't just beat the Apple Mac - it beat IBM's replacement for the PC as well.
And it did so for the same reason Timex has far more market share than Rolex or Tag Heuer: It does the same job for a lot less money.
The watch already has infrared LED's and IR sensors in addition to green; the "extra $0.45 per watch" is baked in.
Every engineer has to make a decision about where the point of diminishing returns lies for their design.
For every additional LED and sensor they use, more power is consumed. Does it make sense to shorten battery life by x hours for everyone just so it functions better for y% more users?
In other news, hordes of hipsters realize to their horror that electronics aren't magical.
It's never been a secret the Apple watch uses an optical sensor - if it's blocked by anything it won't work; it's just the nature of optical sensors...
The thing is average Americans don't use BTU's either. MegaJoules are every bit as abstract and unfamiliar.
The only things I see in "everyday" use for the BTU: Cooking stoves and window air conditioners -- things you don't buy or compare often. . In both cases, it's not "meaningful" other than a higher number is more powerful.
Law is a human idea, and is by definition mutable. It's a whim and nothing more.
The reality is the bullet, bludgeons, bars, and bindings. They don't care what you believe. Law is just an idea of when it's acceptable to inflict those pieces of reality.
In the same way, the climate doesn't care what anybody thinks. It just reacts to the physical realities of energy flux.
One big problem is that the "nutritional" industry, which amount to well-spoken charlatans. They make outlandish, unprovable claims, and people swallow it (literally) by the billions.
They masquerade marketing as science in order feign legitimacy, and the fact is they aren't providing anything with a provable benefit.
The only regulatory bar they have to cross is that it's not obviously harmful. There's no requirement that the 'supplement' be beneficial.
It's bad enough to claim that some herb or vitamin supplement provides health benefits that are nonexistent. It's another thing entirely to sell a product that doesn't even have what is on the label. This morning, ABC news had a story about a number of nutritional companies were forced to pull their 'supplements' after testing proved they didn't contain anything they claimed to have.
I wish I could say I'm surprised, but after working for such a company, I have few doubts: the entire industry is rotten to the core, and is only interested in fooling their customers into buying snake oil. It's not like it's an insular thing; you're have to be aware of what the competition is doing, and I saw the same BS everywhere.
Japan can also print its own money, which gives it the ability (at least in theory) to wipe out all public debt with the stroke of a pen. There are consequences to that action, but when your debt is counted in your own currency, you can largely ignore the public debt, as long as inflation is kept in check. Most non-eurozone countries (including the US) do the same thing. In fact, inflation has long been used by most nations to decrease the impact of public debt, as the fixed-dollar debt can be reduced to a smaller %age of the GDP. It's how Great Britian and the US 'paid' for World War II, for example. As another example, recall the talk about a "trillion dollar platinum coin" during the most recent US government shutdown, which would have paid off a trillion dollars of debt as well as instantly and drastically inflated the dollar (among other things).
Greece doesn't have a national currency. Their debt is in Euros, and must be repaid in Euros. Greece can't unilaterally inflate the Euro to reduce their debt load. The situation is closer to the economy of California, which is also heavily in debt. California doesn't get to print its own money, and it doesn't have the option of creating inflation to reduce its debt load.
Greece and California have two choices: Make their payments, and hope inflation happens on its own, or default and accept they won't be able to borrow money for a substantial amount of time. Growing their economies makes both options more palatable, but doesn't solve the problem by itself.
Anybody who lives around snow knows it comes in pretty much every density and consistency water can possibly have: from "wet" heavy snow and huge flakes that stick to everything and entombs cars and houses, to "dry" powder that doesn't stick to anything, and blows around like a dune in a sandstorm.
Anybody who's really looked at security around X11 has known for decades that it isn't that great.
I even remember that as recently as a year ago, ATI's drivers specifically tell you to use "xhost +" to enable GPU compute jobs using ATI devices, which resulted in a lot of "LOL NOPE" in the HPC industry. (It's trivial to root a machine that has had "xhost +" executed inside an X11 session.)
X11 having critical security holes should surprise no one. There's a reason internet-facing servers don't have X11, and it's not just because you don't need a GUI sucking up resources.
On the other hand, I'm thoroughly grateful that somebody decided to do something about it.
Citation, please? Where are you getting the idea that exit nodes have huge bandwidth bills?
For example: run a mac mini colo as an exit node, with unmetered bandwidth. $55/month, with 100 Mb of bandwidth, 24x7.
Or some guy in Korea with 3-5 gigabits of bandwidth at their home for ~$40 USD/month?
Or a university club running an exit point using approved university resources? (I know my alma matter does)
Tor exit nodes are often just people hosting them on their own nickel, often at home. You can throttle the tor server to 56 Kib/s, and leave the rest for your own usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for this.
The trollface was worth it.
There's no such thing as a purely military mission for large nuclear weapons. It's doubtful there's a use for small ones.
The only thing that is "chilling" in this document is that the deployment of such weapons was carefully, methodically considered. The calculations of a suicide pact.
It's one thing to accept that nuclear war would destroy our civilizations, kill billions, and cause suffering we literally can't imagine. We already 'accept' that war is hell, in our detached way.
It's something else entirely to be forced to say 'yeah, that makes sense' with the purpose behind a target's selection. It's chilling to take a look at yourself and see that you can agree, at some level, with a truly monstrous decision.
Having worked in the HPC/supercomputer world during the rise & fall of AMD, I really wish I could mod you up further.
TFA talks makes much of the Intel compiler & benchmarks compiled with the Intel compiler for Intel processors.
I call BS. Nobody in HPC was dumb enough to be fooled with the benchmarks using the Intel compiler & Intel chips. There are (and were) commercial, highly optimizing alternatives to Intel's compiler, each with similar speed boasts over GCC: PathScale and PGI come to mind. Back in the day, AMD chips easily ran PathScale-compiled code faster than Intel's chips could -- and, for that matter, faster than Intel hardware with code compiled by Intel's compiler.
A big part of my job was compiling & running benchmarks using four compilers - GCC, Intel, Pathscale, PGI on the different architectures.
Even on a level playing field, such as GCC or PGI with model-specific optimizations and the closest thing to 'neutral' benchmarking there was, AMD was unquestionably king - better memory performance thanks to HyperTransport, better floating point performance, better integer performance - you name it, AMD was king. Intel couldn't touch 'em. AMD outsold (and outperformed) Intel, hands down.
The tide started shifting sometime after Intel's Woodcrest came out, with Intel easily being the better chip by 2010.
AMD simply pissed away everything, and did just about everything wrong for at least half a decade.
All Intel had to do was be less incompetent than AMD, and they'd win -- which is exactly what happened.
For a non-Intel example: Then-tiny ARM has grown to 10x bigger than AMD in terms of market valuation.
If benchmarks are to be believed, even Apple's ARM-derived A9 chips used in iPads are giving AMD's best a run for their money - and completely blow them away at flops/watt.
When an Apple chip running on a portable device gives your server hardware a run for its money, pointing a finger at Intel is a little hard to swallow.
Historically, colonists/settlers/pioneers have had pretty appalling mortality rates.
Early settlers to the Americas had a very high chance of dying, with many settlements dying out entirely within the first year.
The high probability of death wasn't a secret; the colonists knew they had a high chance of being dead within a few months of arrival.
Yet they came by the boatload. Repeatedly, even after entire colonies collapsed, even after selling themselves to a near lifetime of indentured servitude to pay for the cost of their emigration.
It's a mistake to underestimate the horrors humans continue to undertake to live in a new place - whether it be immigration through deserts and war zones, stifling rides locked in cargo containers in deserts for weeks, refugees drowning on overcrowded, sinking ships, all the while risking criminal prosecution or racial or ethnic persecution... people go through situations with very poor chances of survival right here on Earth, right now.
Culturally, all of humanity is already used to accepting shockingly large number of people gambling their lives with slim chances of survival to live someplace new.
Lots of people will die trying, as we always have. It's difficult to see that aspect of humanity suddenly changing.
The important question is: How often do you actually drive far enough in one day to drain the battery and need to recharge away from home.
I know in my own life & commute, the answer is "not at all" - being able to gas up on a long trip just isn't a use case. On the other hand, with an Electric, never having to stop at a gas station is a big advantage/selling point.
Batteries are becoming cheaper very quickly with cost parity expected in less than a decade. The ability to charge faster is also improving dramatically, so those disadvantages of electric cars are rapidly vanishing. It's already a lower cost per mile to drive electric, and maintenance costs are lower on electric cars compared to cars powered by ICE's.
I suspect for an increasing number of people (especially those living in cities or suburbia), the advantages of electric cars will soon be more than sufficiently compelling to warrant a switch to electric.
"Green" has little to do with it. Convenience and cost per mile are big advantages of electric vehicles.
My faith in human drivers is low enough that I'm eagerly awaiting autonomous cars.
The most dangerous part of traveling by car these days is the inattentive pile of rage controlling it.
I know I'd rather give up driving than have my medical data go up for sale.
If you trust Google translate for diplomacy, you'd better be ready for war.
Your history is incomplete.
You're aware there were hordes of Apple II clones, right? I started my computing life on a Franklin ACE 1000 - a superior clone of the Apple II. After it died, I got another Apple II clone (A "Laser 128" as I recall). There were Apple clones for over ten years with the Apple II, and several more years with the Macintosh.
Apple II clones died for two reasons: The Apple II was a very old architecture, only capable of 64k of memory. Also, most of the cloners illegally copied Apple's BIOS. Even then, Apple vs. Franklin was in 1987 - ten years after the Apple II was released.
IBM did sue clone makers into oblivion. In fact, after Apple vs. Franklin, IBM sued a number of early cloners out of existence for the because they also illegally copied from IBM's BIOS.
The difference is that nobody saw the point in writing a clean-room Apple II ROM in 1987. The world had moved beyond 64k, and there was no point in denying reality. Even Apple was pounding nails in the Apple II's coffin.
In contrast, Phoenix and AMI both had clean-room IBM BIOS clones written in 1984 and '85 - years before Apple vs. Franklin. IBM couldn't touch Phoenix or AMI.
So IBM tried to destroy cloners by creating the backwards (but not forwards) compatible PS/2, complete with their backwards (but not forwards) compatible OS/2.
In the end, it came down to price: A clone was more capable than IBM's PS/2 disaster, and had a cost far less than the PS/2 or a Macintosh.
IBM tried its best to kill the PC clone. The difference is that unlike the Apple II, the PC clone could handily beat the PS/2 that was supposed to replace it.
Never forget: The PC clone didn't just beat the Apple Mac - it beat IBM's replacement for the PC as well.
And it did so for the same reason Timex has far more market share than Rolex or Tag Heuer: It does the same job for a lot less money.
Get real.
Not even North Korea has an economy that is completely what its politicians designed.
Even the (East) Germans, models of efficiency and planning they are, didn't have an economy that was completely planned by its politicians.
The US economy is one step away from anarchy compared to either North Korea or East Germany
Kayye West Probably scores in the 200-300 milliTrump range.
His score is severely limited by the fact he went up on stage twice to proclaim that somebody other than himself deserved best artist awards.
The Trump may be commonly used among the executive crowd, the average road-ragin' 'Murica Joe probably scores in the picoTrump range.
Green LED's provide more accurate heart rate monitoring.
The watch already has infrared LED's and IR sensors in addition to green; the "extra $0.45 per watch" is baked in.
Every engineer has to make a decision about where the point of diminishing returns lies for their design.
For every additional LED and sensor they use, more power is consumed. Does it make sense to shorten battery life by x hours for everyone just so it functions better for y% more users?
In other news, hordes of hipsters realize to their horror that electronics aren't magical.
It's never been a secret the Apple watch uses an optical sensor - if it's blocked by anything it won't work; it's just the nature of optical sensors...
The thing is average Americans don't use BTU's either. MegaJoules are every bit as abstract and unfamiliar.
The only things I see in "everyday" use for the BTU: Cooking stoves and window air conditioners -- things you don't buy or compare often. . In both cases, it's not "meaningful" other than a higher number is more powerful.
Your strawman is unimaginative.
Law is a human idea, and is by definition mutable. It's a whim and nothing more.
The reality is the bullet, bludgeons, bars, and bindings. They don't care what you believe. Law is just an idea of when it's acceptable to inflict those pieces of reality.
In the same way, the climate doesn't care what anybody thinks. It just reacts to the physical realities of energy flux.
A government strong enough to give you everything you want, is also strong enough to take away everything you have.
Look strawman: Even an incredibly weak government can take everything you have.
One big problem is that the "nutritional" industry, which amount to well-spoken charlatans. They make outlandish, unprovable claims, and people swallow it (literally) by the billions.
They masquerade marketing as science in order feign legitimacy, and the fact is they aren't providing anything with a provable benefit.
The only regulatory bar they have to cross is that it's not obviously harmful. There's no requirement that the 'supplement' be beneficial.
It's bad enough to claim that some herb or vitamin supplement provides health benefits that are nonexistent. It's another thing entirely to sell a product that doesn't even have what is on the label. This morning, ABC news had a story about a number of nutritional companies were forced to pull their 'supplements' after testing proved they didn't contain anything they claimed to have.
I wish I could say I'm surprised, but after working for such a company, I have few doubts: the entire industry is rotten to the core, and is only interested in fooling their customers into buying snake oil. It's not like it's an insular thing; you're have to be aware of what the competition is doing, and I saw the same BS everywhere.
Sure, why not. At 22,000 miles away, the letters won't be visible (let alone legible) to most ground-based telescopes.
Japan can also print its own money, which gives it the ability (at least in theory) to wipe out all public debt with the stroke of a pen. There are consequences to that action, but when your debt is counted in your own currency, you can largely ignore the public debt, as long as inflation is kept in check. Most non-eurozone countries (including the US) do the same thing. In fact, inflation has long been used by most nations to decrease the impact of public debt, as the fixed-dollar debt can be reduced to a smaller %age of the GDP. It's how Great Britian and the US 'paid' for World War II, for example. As another example, recall the talk about a "trillion dollar platinum coin" during the most recent US government shutdown, which would have paid off a trillion dollars of debt as well as instantly and drastically inflated the dollar (among other things).
Greece doesn't have a national currency. Their debt is in Euros, and must be repaid in Euros. Greece can't unilaterally inflate the Euro to reduce their debt load. The situation is closer to the economy of California, which is also heavily in debt. California doesn't get to print its own money, and it doesn't have the option of creating inflation to reduce its debt load.
Greece and California have two choices: Make their payments, and hope inflation happens on its own, or default and accept they won't be able to borrow money for a substantial amount of time. Growing their economies makes both options more palatable, but doesn't solve the problem by itself.
+ This
Anybody who lives around snow knows it comes in pretty much every density and consistency water can possibly have: from "wet" heavy snow and huge flakes that stick to everything and entombs cars and houses, to "dry" powder that doesn't stick to anything, and blows around like a dune in a sandstorm.
Sometimes you get both kinds within an hour.
Depends on the City. Los Angeles probably should. As Jimmy Kimmel is so eager to show us all: Most of LA can't even handle rain.
Anybody who's really looked at security around X11 has known for decades that it isn't that great.
I even remember that as recently as a year ago, ATI's drivers specifically tell you to use "xhost +" to enable GPU compute jobs using ATI devices, which resulted in a lot of "LOL NOPE" in the HPC industry. (It's trivial to root a machine that has had "xhost +" executed inside an X11 session.)
X11 having critical security holes should surprise no one. There's a reason internet-facing servers don't have X11, and it's not just because you don't need a GUI sucking up resources.
On the other hand, I'm thoroughly grateful that somebody decided to do something about it.
Citation, please? Where are you getting the idea that exit nodes have huge bandwidth bills?
For example: run a mac mini colo as an exit node, with unmetered bandwidth. $55/month, with 100 Mb of bandwidth, 24x7.
Or some guy in Korea with 3-5 gigabits of bandwidth at their home for ~$40 USD/month?
Or a university club running an exit point using approved university resources? (I know my alma matter does)
Tor exit nodes are often just people hosting them on their own nickel, often at home. You can throttle the tor server to 56 Kib/s, and leave the rest for your own usage.
There's a difference between a honey pot and a dedicated search.
Honey pots exist to collect all traffic that hits them. Were Tor a honey pot, the Silk road would have never exited in the first place.
Given the liberalness with which Apple has wielded the Ban Hammer in the past, it's telling that they haven't used it now.