Anyone calling his win illegitimate or whatever is an idiot...
Call me an idiot, then. By all rights, Trump lost by more than a 2% margin. The only reason he was declared the "winner" is that the electoral college is fundamentally rigged to be biased in favor of low-population states, so people in rural areas, which have leaned heavily Republican for as long as I've been alive, get more of a vote than urban areas, which means that the entire system is biased in favor of Republicans.
And not just a little, either. If we define a California vote (the state whose votes are weakest) as a single vote, then every voter in Wisconsin effectively gets four votes. The whole "one man, one vote" thing is so far from being reality that it borders on pure comedy. The fact that Democrats ever win presidential elections is, frankly, amazing given how much the electoral college weakens California's votes.
To put it another way, any win in which almost three million more people voted for the loser than the winner is an illegitimate win, made possible by a system that even Trump himself admitted is rigged. And instead of recognizing that he "won" purely on a technicality and recognizing that he should try to unify the country, he is picking the most extremist, bats**t crazy right-wingnuts for his cabinet, as though somehow he has a "mandate" when in reality, he lost badly.
The last time this happened, the lying right led us into two failed wars that we're still not fully out of and created a worldwide economic depression that we're still digging our way out of. Here's hoping Trump isn't quite as idiotic as his pro-nuclear-weapons rhetoric suggests, because if he is, and if the war hawks have their way, the future of our world will depend on dolphins evolving legs.
The idea that a nation state is left to rely upon low level phishing scams seems laughable at best. Just look to past examples to see that they had better stuff than this.
Why spend the effort to bug a room or compromise someone's computer when your adversaries are willing to type their passwords into anything that looks even remotely like a password dialog box? I'm sure a lot of nation-state-level hacking happens using such trivial means, but we don't hear about it because the victims are too embarrassed by the level of carelessness required to be compromised like that.
Fortunately, most folks in America's ruling parties are both too computer illiterate to recognize phishing and too clueless to recognize that they should be embarrassed about being unable to do so. Otherwise, most members of the public would never realize just how incompetent our government officials are (on both sides of the aisle).
Agreed. Paywalled, for-profit scientific research journals have done more to contribute to the dumbing down of society than just about anything else in modern history except television (and not just because of the paywalls).
Depends on how it is written. Typically, an open meetings law would make it illegal for even a small number of senators to meet without the cameras on, which would make it illegal to turn the cameras off even if Ryan calls for a recess as long as there is any sort of large group activity (formal or otherwise) going on.
Also, with 41 tracks of HD audio, RAM throughput is going to be a bottleneck - so performance isn't going to scale linearly across threads. The bottleneck is the effects stack itself, which the OP pointed out, isn't very parallelize-able, so brute-force crunching with a ton of clock cycles is the best way to speed this up.
My quad G5 did a decent enough job with 40 tracks of 96/24 audio, and that was over a decade ago. Forty tracks shouldn't even be considered heavy lifting for any modern four-core CPU. (192 kHz audio is just wasting disk space, unless being able to decode WWVB in post-production is a virtue for some reason....) Besides, most of the more complex effects plug-ins take advantage of libraries like Accelerate framework or BLAS to parallelize a lot of the processing, too.
The CPU-intensive part isn't efficiently parallelized, but that rarely matters, as you spend most of your time I/O bound, and that parallelizes well.
Actually, even if you're only dealing with post-mix effects, in many cases, the CPU-intensive part is also efficiently parallelized. FFTs, for example, are highly parallelizable.
Your knowledge of computer sound processing appears to be quite limited and rather obsolete. Although you are correct that there is a lot of highly parallel processing in high performance multitracking, as others point out each individual thread still has the highest performance demands imaginable. Some software synthesizers use state of the art circuit simulation software and increase the fidelity as much as they can given the clock cycles they have to work with. Get a faster cpu and you will immediately and noticeably improve the quality of your output in many situations. The faster we can go, the more synthesis techniques we can use that have not even been dreamt of today because we don't have the power to use them in realtime.
If you're getting lower quality mixes because of a lack of CPU power, you're doing it wrong. Yes, some software has a quality setting to let you reduce CPU overhead, but there's no reason to ever use anything but the highest setting during final mixdown, because that is not real-time.
First, you need to recognize that pricing is ALREADY set at what the market will bear and has little relationship to what it costs to provide the good or service.
Pricing for many products is way lower than the market will bear. If collusion were legal, farmers could drive up the cost of food by a factor of ten. The net effect would be that some people would starve, and the market for many nonessential purchases would collapse as the rest spent most of their income on food. But the market would bear it, because it would still be more practical to spend ten times as much money than for everyone to grow his/her own food.
The T-shirt price is set at $8 because that's the price people will pay for it. If you tax the corporation enough that it would need to charge $9 for the T-Shirt and it raises prices the full $1, it's [sic] sales may drop catastrophically on a product it was making a $7 gross profit on.
Except that it won't unless there's a competitor that is able to continue providing the product at the lower price. Assuming that competitor is in another country, the U.S. businesses close, jobs get lost, and the government ends up bringing in less money instead of more. In the absence of such unfair competition, there's no way that demand would drop "catastrophically" over a low double-digit percentage increase in price, because supply and demand curves are not cubic....
So in reality, they raise the cost of the T-Shirt to $8.25, suffer some lost sales and reduce their gross profits from $7 to $5.95.
In reality, they raise the cost of the shirt to at least $8.75 and eat at most $0.25. Yes, you're correct that a portion of it comes out of the corporate bottom line, but statistically speaking, the overwhelming majority of the cost will be borne by the buyers, not the sellers, just as typically occurs with sales tax increases.
Either way, you're still missing my underlying point, which is that both sales tax and corporate tax decrease the amount of the final purchase price that goes to the seller, so expecting that the sellers will allow the final purchase price to increase when sales taxes are added but won't do so to the same degree when corporate taxes are added is positively naïve.
Uh, no. Actually, it is quite the opposite; multitrack audio processing is highly parallel.
Let's say you have a modest 40-track project. Each project can get data from the disk independently and put it into buffers, minimizing glitches caused by one track getting delayed by another. Then each track gets all of its effects added sequentially, but each track potentially gets processed on a separate thread. Finally, the outputs of those threads get summed and additional effects added to the result, which can happen on yet another thread.
So potentially you have 41 threads working on data in parallel, plus other threads for unrelated stuff like UI updates.
Apple culture isn't anti-choice. It is anti-complexity. Users should be given only choices that are highly useful, choices should make sense to the average user, and interfaces should make common things easy and uncommon things possible. Unfortunately, Apple started rapidly losing its culture in 2007, and the iPhone culture that replaced it is all about dumbing down the UI indiscriminately with no concern about whether uncommon things remain possible. I blame Scott Forstall for everything that is wrong with Apple today, from the unchecked paranoia that impedes proper testing to the iPhonification of the Mac UI.
Except vat tax raises the costs of goods on those who can least afford it.
So do corporate taxes. The corporations don't eat those costs out of their profit margins. Taxes applied universally get passed on, because if everybody has to raise prices, competition can't keep the prices down. To tax effectively, you must do so from beyond the point of control, where the people being taxed lack the ability to demand more money to compensate for the taxes, e.g. by treating capital gains above about $50k–100k per year as ordinary income.
Yeah. It only applies to content that has been released on DVD, and there are limited numbers of copies available, so the movie you want to stream is less likely to be available than it would through a traditional streaming service.
The amount of damage also depends on how big the artery is that got blocked, how completely it is blocked, and whether the blockage clears on its own. So that's not necessarily true. Also, there are some interesting stem cell treatments that can apparently dramatically improve outcomes.
For the most part, that's true, but there are actually two different groups of people who might buy this. The first are, as you mention, the sorts of people who get rich quickly and get poor again just as quickly. We'll call those "lottery winners" even though some of them get rich through other means, because it is still basically the same sorts of folks who come into a lot of money through some sort of luck and then don't know how to do anything with that money other than spend it.
But you're forgetting another group—people who are so enormously wealthy (the top 1% of the top 1%) that hundreds of thousands of dollars is pocket change. Obviously those folks are not likely to throw their money away on these sorts of things frequently. These are the same sorts of folks who could afford to use hundred dollar bills in the washroom if they so desired, but they don't, because as you say, they didn't get that wealthy by wasting money frivolously. But even wealthy people like to waste money on a lark every once in a while. And given enough wealthy people, even if just a fraction of a percent of the über-wealthy decide to buy one as a joke to get a laugh in the boardroom and then give it away as a Christmas gift to their nanny, or decide to give them as family gag gifts for Christmas, they'd still sell a few.
Most of those other factors are supposed to be factored in by the driver when choosing whether to travel below the posted limit. For example, if a car sees children playing beside the road, it should slow down to a sub-fatal speed well ahead of time just in case the kids do something stupid, regardless of the posted limit. Bicycles being where they don't belong, traffic flow (*), etc. are typically situational awareness issues, and require drivers to drive below the speed limit when they occur. None of them can usefully be captured by a static speed limit, though the speed limit does give you some hint about the probability of those sorts of events happening on a given road. So I will concede that they do serve a useful purpose for autonomous vehicles on city streets, though I would still argue that strict adherence isn't really essential.
(*) Limiting speeds to improve traffic flow by making cars arrive shortly after the light turns green is an exception, of course, but this is the exception that proves the rule.
With that said, as soon as you get off of city streets and onto highways, speed limits are largely governed by two things: the length of entrance ramps and human reaction time. The second one is irrelevant with autonomous vehicles, and the first is much, much less important, because an autonomous car's additional cameras mean that it can much more safely perform a merge even with shorter ramps. (Technically, lots of speed limits were set to improve fuel economy during the gas crises of the 1970s, which is even less relevant, because autonomous vehicles are likely to be electric, but that's another argument for another day.)
I'm suddenly reminded of the Russian spy who tried to steal the source code for the American missile defense system. When he got home, he discovered that he had nothing but three pages filled with close parentheses. "The bad news," the spy said, "is that we only got the last three pages, and they contain no useful code. The good news is that we now know what language it was written in."
While most people start thinking, "oh what a breath of fresh air, the government getting it right for once," I worry, "have aliens infiltrated our government? Because it seems like they are listening experts and making logical conclusions.";)
Nope. They no doubt spent millions of dollars on a study to tell them what they could have learned for free by asking any software engineer who has ever spent even a single week in his/her entire life implementing any sort of cryptographic software. This is why our government costs so much money. Tens of thousands of software engineers all tell them the same thing, but they don't like the answer, so they commission a study to try to prove everyone wrong, and after all that, the study still concludes that the original answer was correct. That's Washington for you.
Magsafe's primary failure mode is at the other end - the wall wart. I've had numerous Mac owners aski me if I could fix their wall wart because they don't want to shell out $79 [apple.com] for another one. The frayed cables are an easy fix (electrical tape), and the broken plug can usually be fixed with some epoxy and/or soldering. But the cable fraying where it enters the adapter is pretty much fatal. These things simply shouldn't be happening to a power brick which costs $79.
This. I filed a bug about a decade ago saying that they should put a connector at both ends of the wire so that you could replace a $10 cable instead of an eighty dollar power supply, and also because it would also open up MagSafe/MagSafe 2 to external batteries. Unfortunately, they never did it.
The weak point of Apple laptop PSUs has always been the cable, going as far back as the PowerBook 1xx series with the three-inch-long plug that put so much torque on the connector that it routinely snapped off inside the machine, the black G3 bricks where the wires broke and caused the supplies to overheat, the yo-yos that sparked inside the wires, and the various MagSafe cables that routinely break at the brick (or, in the case of the early MacBook Air supplies, at the connector end, too).
Now that they've moved to USB-C, they finally got the whole "detachable cable" thing right, but only after it ceased to matter (because users are no longer forced to buy an Apple-branded supply anyway). As much as I don't like losing MagSafe, I get some comfort from knowing that nobody will have to depend on Apple's power cords ever again.
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If you mean the equal number of representatives per state part, then no. The longer terms and thus more stable than the House part, yes.
Call me an idiot, then. By all rights, Trump lost by more than a 2% margin. The only reason he was declared the "winner" is that the electoral college is fundamentally rigged to be biased in favor of low-population states, so people in rural areas, which have leaned heavily Republican for as long as I've been alive, get more of a vote than urban areas, which means that the entire system is biased in favor of Republicans.
And not just a little, either. If we define a California vote (the state whose votes are weakest) as a single vote, then every voter in Wisconsin effectively gets four votes. The whole "one man, one vote" thing is so far from being reality that it borders on pure comedy. The fact that Democrats ever win presidential elections is, frankly, amazing given how much the electoral college weakens California's votes.
To put it another way, any win in which almost three million more people voted for the loser than the winner is an illegitimate win, made possible by a system that even Trump himself admitted is rigged. And instead of recognizing that he "won" purely on a technicality and recognizing that he should try to unify the country, he is picking the most extremist, bats**t crazy right-wingnuts for his cabinet, as though somehow he has a "mandate" when in reality, he lost badly.
The last time this happened, the lying right led us into two failed wars that we're still not fully out of and created a worldwide economic depression that we're still digging our way out of. Here's hoping Trump isn't quite as idiotic as his pro-nuclear-weapons rhetoric suggests, because if he is, and if the war hawks have their way, the future of our world will depend on dolphins evolving legs.
Yeah, this feels eerily reminiscent of 2003 and Iraq's supposed WMDs.
Why spend the effort to bug a room or compromise someone's computer when your adversaries are willing to type their passwords into anything that looks even remotely like a password dialog box? I'm sure a lot of nation-state-level hacking happens using such trivial means, but we don't hear about it because the victims are too embarrassed by the level of carelessness required to be compromised like that.
Fortunately, most folks in America's ruling parties are both too computer illiterate to recognize phishing and too clueless to recognize that they should be embarrassed about being unable to do so. Otherwise, most members of the public would never realize just how incompetent our government officials are (on both sides of the aisle).
Agreed. Paywalled, for-profit scientific research journals have done more to contribute to the dumbing down of society than just about anything else in modern history except television (and not just because of the paywalls).
Depends on how it is written. Typically, an open meetings law would make it illegal for even a small number of senators to meet without the cameras on, which would make it illegal to turn the cameras off even if Ryan calls for a recess as long as there is any sort of large group activity (formal or otherwise) going on.
My quad G5 did a decent enough job with 40 tracks of 96/24 audio, and that was over a decade ago. Forty tracks shouldn't even be considered heavy lifting for any modern four-core CPU. (192 kHz audio is just wasting disk space, unless being able to decode WWVB in post-production is a virtue for some reason....) Besides, most of the more complex effects plug-ins take advantage of libraries like Accelerate framework or BLAS to parallelize a lot of the processing, too.
Actually, even if you're only dealing with post-mix effects, in many cases, the CPU-intensive part is also efficiently parallelized. FFTs, for example, are highly parallelizable.
If you're getting lower quality mixes because of a lack of CPU power, you're doing it wrong. Yes, some software has a quality setting to let you reduce CPU overhead, but there's no reason to ever use anything but the highest setting during final mixdown, because that is not real-time.
Okay, maybe "readily" is too strong a word. It can be peeled off with a wide spudger and a lot of force.
Pricing for many products is way lower than the market will bear. If collusion were legal, farmers could drive up the cost of food by a factor of ten. The net effect would be that some people would starve, and the market for many nonessential purchases would collapse as the rest spent most of their income on food. But the market would bear it, because it would still be more practical to spend ten times as much money than for everyone to grow his/her own food.
Except that it won't unless there's a competitor that is able to continue providing the product at the lower price. Assuming that competitor is in another country, the U.S. businesses close, jobs get lost, and the government ends up bringing in less money instead of more. In the absence of such unfair competition, there's no way that demand would drop "catastrophically" over a low double-digit percentage increase in price, because supply and demand curves are not cubic....
In reality, they raise the cost of the shirt to at least $8.75 and eat at most $0.25. Yes, you're correct that a portion of it comes out of the corporate bottom line, but statistically speaking, the overwhelming majority of the cost will be borne by the buyers, not the sellers, just as typically occurs with sales tax increases.
Either way, you're still missing my underlying point, which is that both sales tax and corporate tax decrease the amount of the final purchase price that goes to the seller, so expecting that the sellers will allow the final purchase price to increase when sales taxes are added but won't do so to the same degree when corporate taxes are added is positively naïve.
We need a federal open meetings law. It should not be illegal to turn the cameras on. It should be illegal to turn them off.
Uh, no. Actually, it is quite the opposite; multitrack audio processing is highly parallel.
Let's say you have a modest 40-track project. Each project can get data from the disk independently and put it into buffers, minimizing glitches caused by one track getting delayed by another. Then each track gets all of its effects added sequentially, but each track potentially gets processed on a separate thread. Finally, the outputs of those threads get summed and additional effects added to the result, which can happen on yet another thread.
So potentially you have 41 threads working on data in parallel, plus other threads for unrelated stuff like UI updates.
The word "glue" is something of a misnomer. It has a self-stick backing like gaff tape. It can be readily peeled off.
Apple culture isn't anti-choice. It is anti-complexity. Users should be given only choices that are highly useful, choices should make sense to the average user, and interfaces should make common things easy and uncommon things possible. Unfortunately, Apple started rapidly losing its culture in 2007, and the iPhone culture that replaced it is all about dumbing down the UI indiscriminately with no concern about whether uncommon things remain possible. I blame Scott Forstall for everything that is wrong with Apple today, from the unchecked paranoia that impedes proper testing to the iPhonification of the Mac UI.
Except vat tax raises the costs of goods on those who can least afford it.
So do corporate taxes. The corporations don't eat those costs out of their profit margins. Taxes applied universally get passed on, because if everybody has to raise prices, competition can't keep the prices down. To tax effectively, you must do so from beyond the point of control, where the people being taxed lack the ability to demand more money to compensate for the taxes, e.g. by treating capital gains above about $50k–100k per year as ordinary income.
Yeah. It only applies to content that has been released on DVD, and there are limited numbers of copies available, so the movie you want to stream is less likely to be available than it would through a traditional streaming service.
The GP is wrong, but mainly because it uses 8" floppy disks , not 5.25". Those are way too modern for our nuclear arsenal.
The amount of damage also depends on how big the artery is that got blocked, how completely it is blocked, and whether the blockage clears on its own. So that's not necessarily true. Also, there are some interesting stem cell treatments that can apparently dramatically improve outcomes.
If memory serves, they buy a lifetime supply of discipline rulers and then teach third grade.
For the most part, that's true, but there are actually two different groups of people who might buy this. The first are, as you mention, the sorts of people who get rich quickly and get poor again just as quickly. We'll call those "lottery winners" even though some of them get rich through other means, because it is still basically the same sorts of folks who come into a lot of money through some sort of luck and then don't know how to do anything with that money other than spend it.
But you're forgetting another group—people who are so enormously wealthy (the top 1% of the top 1%) that hundreds of thousands of dollars is pocket change. Obviously those folks are not likely to throw their money away on these sorts of things frequently. These are the same sorts of folks who could afford to use hundred dollar bills in the washroom if they so desired, but they don't, because as you say, they didn't get that wealthy by wasting money frivolously. But even wealthy people like to waste money on a lark every once in a while. And given enough wealthy people, even if just a fraction of a percent of the über-wealthy decide to buy one as a joke to get a laugh in the boardroom and then give it away as a Christmas gift to their nanny, or decide to give them as family gag gifts for Christmas, they'd still sell a few.
Most of those other factors are supposed to be factored in by the driver when choosing whether to travel below the posted limit. For example, if a car sees children playing beside the road, it should slow down to a sub-fatal speed well ahead of time just in case the kids do something stupid, regardless of the posted limit. Bicycles being where they don't belong, traffic flow (*), etc. are typically situational awareness issues, and require drivers to drive below the speed limit when they occur. None of them can usefully be captured by a static speed limit, though the speed limit does give you some hint about the probability of those sorts of events happening on a given road. So I will concede that they do serve a useful purpose for autonomous vehicles on city streets, though I would still argue that strict adherence isn't really essential.
(*) Limiting speeds to improve traffic flow by making cars arrive shortly after the light turns green is an exception, of course, but this is the exception that proves the rule.
With that said, as soon as you get off of city streets and onto highways, speed limits are largely governed by two things: the length of entrance ramps and human reaction time. The second one is irrelevant with autonomous vehicles, and the first is much, much less important, because an autonomous car's additional cameras mean that it can much more safely perform a merge even with shorter ramps. (Technically, lots of speed limits were set to improve fuel economy during the gas crises of the 1970s, which is even less relevant, because autonomous vehicles are likely to be electric, but that's another argument for another day.)
I'm suddenly reminded of the Russian spy who tried to steal the source code for the American missile defense system. When he got home, he discovered that he had nothing but three pages filled with close parentheses. "The bad news," the spy said, "is that we only got the last three pages, and they contain no useful code. The good news is that we now know what language it was written in."
Nope. They no doubt spent millions of dollars on a study to tell them what they could have learned for free by asking any software engineer who has ever spent even a single week in his/her entire life implementing any sort of cryptographic software. This is why our government costs so much money. Tens of thousands of software engineers all tell them the same thing, but they don't like the answer, so they commission a study to try to prove everyone wrong, and after all that, the study still concludes that the original answer was correct. That's Washington for you.
This. I filed a bug about a decade ago saying that they should put a connector at both ends of the wire so that you could replace a $10 cable instead of an eighty dollar power supply, and also because it would also open up MagSafe/MagSafe 2 to external batteries. Unfortunately, they never did it.
The weak point of Apple laptop PSUs has always been the cable, going as far back as the PowerBook 1xx series with the three-inch-long plug that put so much torque on the connector that it routinely snapped off inside the machine, the black G3 bricks where the wires broke and caused the supplies to overheat, the yo-yos that sparked inside the wires, and the various MagSafe cables that routinely break at the brick (or, in the case of the early MacBook Air supplies, at the connector end, too).
Now that they've moved to USB-C, they finally got the whole "detachable cable" thing right, but only after it ceased to matter (because users are no longer forced to buy an Apple-branded supply anyway). As much as I don't like losing MagSafe, I get some comfort from knowing that nobody will have to depend on Apple's power cords ever again.