Yet, there are currently inactive sand dunes in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, that reactivated several times a century, during sustained years of drought, in the last millennium. A sand dune reactivates when there are no roots from vegetation holding the sand in place. At which point, you pretty much get unpleasant sand storms and they leave clearly identifiable sand deposits behind.
The 1930's dustbowl could have been less extreme if the farming practices were better. However, now we are wastefully draining underground aquifers at a rate higher than the rate of recharge when there is not enough rain.
I should have looked that up instead of depending on a vague recollection of the article, but this is still/. in any case. The machines SGI sold that you describe almost certainly did not resemble the average design of a current x86 PC in any way, regardless of the CPU architecture SGI used. That was no standard Linux Kernel either. Worse yet a system like that would be nearly useless for normal PC tasks like surfing the web, running office applications, or playing demanding 3D games. The current record holding general purpose supercomputer, an IBM Blue Gene system, uses Linux as well. IBM's Roadrunner is great, if the Cell processors do the work you need them to do, which is not the case most of the time. At any rate, on Blue Gene systems a single copy of Linux is run per dual core processor and standard DDR2 RAM is used as well. No attempt is made to micromanage each Linux image.
The primary difference between a liberal and a libertarian is a sense of pragmatism.
The liberal I assume is the pragmatist who has looked at the evidence and thus the libertarian is weirdo frothing at the mouth about what he has decided is true: The Moon is a Liberal Myth.
There is another barrier that we will eventually hit. The current process schedulers in use on modern operating systems have a problem. Attempting to use more than roughly 38 logical processors will result in the additional processors either waiting to run the process scheduler, waiting for a memory access, or waiting for I/O. Currently this is sidestepped on mainframes using virtualization and low latency I/O. I have a hard time seeing how virtualization or lower latency I/O could be adapted for use in desktop computers. Running Windows Aleph-Null, MacOS X 12.8, and Linux 2.8.1853 would probably not have much appeal to average users that would still need the power a desktop computer offered at that point. Intel, the main driving force of the PCISIG keeps pushing newer versions of PCI-Express that do not address the interconnect's inability to play nice with multiple masters, providing any type of packet routing, or deal in any way with its absurdly high latency, which is over 100ns even with PCIe 1.1, and gets worse with each newer version. Some sort of low latency sideband channel would work, but figuring how to maintain backward compatibility with current PCIe cards and motherboards is not easy. Instead Intel has added only DRM features, but no actual security for the computer's user on the bus itself (think Firewire and writing to whatever memory locations you want).
Bad form ahead:
If embryonic stem cell research does not make you uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough. --James Thompson
Better: If embryonic stem cell research makes you uncomfortable, you have thought about it far too much. Try researching the actual potential feasibility of the scare stories, and consider that adult stem cells have never been made totipotent, only pluripotent.
Your liver is fine, your liver can regenerate back to normal even if you manage to kill 75% of it. Without using prescription drugs, only the abuse of Tylenol or alcohol will cause serious liver damage. However, repeatedly damaging your liver over the course of decades is a bad thing.
Meh, he could have done better. There should be four separate boxes, two separate mirrored disk arrays running in RAID6. So with sixteen drives in each box there would be 32 SATA drives total. Each case of drives would also need two of its own 3ware SAS 8-port cards connected to the main server and the hot spare server by external x16 PCIe cables. The hot spare server would be connected to the non-transparent port on the PCIe switches on the drive cases. The non-transparent port allows a backup PCIe root complex to take over in the event of a failure of a primary PCIe root complex. Add a few UPS units that always run the load off the battery and use the wall AC current to charge the batteries. In this case, you would probably be ready for just about anything. However, just to be safe, you could have a motherboard custom designed with one of these: http://www.maxwell.com/pdf/me/product_datasheets/ned/HSN3000_Rev3.pdf
Yeah, it might be worthwhile to read articles an author you disagree with has written, but using it as your only source of information is a really dumb idea. Also, one must keep in mind that certain authors one might find extremist may leave out or minimize certain details from the story. This is true especially when all of the pertinent facts, when reported, don't make as much of the story very alarming any more.
In other words, if an article comes from a Libertarian website or a Ultra-conservative site, you can probably skip reading it there and get a better view on the issue from elsewhere. At least keep in mind that such alarmist stories, like this one, probably are not really alarming that after all. Also, be skeptical about the source as well.
I don't believe that was the original intent, and it certain requires a lot of very creative arguing to assert that it's a reasonable interpretation.
The original intent is really no longer really a valid consideration at this point. The Constitution and what it says/means only matters at the Federal Appeals Courts and Federal Supreme Court level. At least try to learn a bit about how the American Court system works in 2009. The current way the legal system functions works is more important than any intent derived from a half a dozen guys who wrote lots of letters and books from 1750 to 1830 that have been preserved until today. There are probably more men from that time who had totally different opinions and their contributions have not been preserved or have not been scrutinized to such a degree.
The Supreme Court had held multiple times that the Constitution DOES apply to the states as well. This is why you don't see books banned in a city because of their "indecent" or "immoral" content any more. However, some parts of the US still try (with varying degrees of success) to enforce prohibitions on adult pornography. Possession of kiddie porn breaks the law, and is an entirely different issue, however.
It may help to keep in mind that essentially every requirement and feature for a modern OS has not been significantly improved since 1980. No, not the 1980's, the year 1980. As the processing power at each grade of computing power has increased, that grade of computer has run an OS that has been improved gradually until it ran a modern OS. Since then, there has not been much advancement in what features to expect out of an OS. This may be why there is little difference in OS level features between Windows NT4, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. Granted, OS stability and user security have improved from NT4 to XP. However, Windows Vista and Windows 7 seem to add very little to the mix in the end. Consider it a problem of diminishing returns.
Adding cores is also is not the same as a speed up and an improvement in efficiency of the core you already have. Adding cores may help for certain problems, but there are still problems that are inherently single threaded and thus single core. Going up intelligently and going out intelligently both important.
It happens other places too. I got this back in March 2008.
Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, you@example.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
(Skipped some dashes, lousy/. filter)
Apache/2.0.54 (Unix) TongWeb-Director/4 Server at www.npc.gov.cn Port 80
Actually, the POWER ISA and by extension IBM has specifications for Decimal Floating-Point instructions as an optional part of the specifications for the POWER ISA. There are also a few integer BCD to binary conversion instructions as well. The Decimal Floating-Point instructions share the same registers with the standard Binary Floating-Point instructions. The purpose the Decimal Floating-Point instructions serve is that by using decimal numbers one can improve accuracy for financial calculations.
On the other hand, the x86 BCD instructions are totally useless. However all x86 legacy instructions must be included in the newer x86 processors. You never know when you might want to use 16-bit protected mode, MMX instructions, or both while in ring 6 at the same time, you know.
Better than than the old Mexican judicial system, which is still being phased out. In the old system the trial was conducted almost totally with submitted written documents from each side. There was no jury, instead the judge decided. Any testimony was also recorded into documents and submitted. Any hearings were closed to the public and consisted of the judge, lawyers, and the defendant. Fortunately, this system is being phased out in favor of a more open trial system similar to the American trial system. It only took a constitutional amendment. The quality of the results under the old system were poor and trials were prone to being corrupted through violence or bribes.
Sounds much like waiting for Social Security to decide on disability applications for SSDI and SSI. A person can expect about two years or more after applying. One does get two perfunctory denials and then waits for a hearing and decision. I first applied in late November 2006 and my hearing will be next week (March 2009). However, I still will need to wait for a decision after the hearing, hopefully it will take less than a month. Assuming I am successful in my appeal, I receive a lump sum of back benefits, portions of which go to various groups along the way that helped me. All and all, waiting two years for something that could easily have been decided in less than three months ends up costing Social Security more. Worse, delays like this for other disabled individuals cost society as a whole much more as well.
About a quarter of the way down the page is the Income and Expenses breakdown for the Wireless division. Keep in mind that 45% Verizon Wireless is owned by Vodafone and 55% is owned by Verizon proper. So Vodafone and Verizon most likely have some sort profit/loss sharing plan. In any case, these numbers are for the whole Wireless division. In 2008 the division received just over $49 billion in income, a 12.5% increase from 2007. The total expenses for 2008 ended up at just over $35 billion, 10.1% higher than 2007. The profit was about $14 billion, or 18.6% higher than 2007.
As one looks at the breakdown of the wireless division expenses for 2008 one may notice a few odd or unusual numbers, 15.5 billion was from the cost of services and sales. These include both the costs of operating the wireless network, routing calls, and discounts given to customers upgrading their equipment. Not too much interesting I suppose, Verizon could start charging what the phone was actually worth instead of the joke prices they do now, the primary portion of the 19% increase in expenses this section from 2007 was customer equipment upgrades. However, some may claim that this passes the costs on to customers, but the discounts also lock customers into two year contracts.
The $14.2 billion spent on the "Selling, General, and Administrative Expense" category is more interesting on the other hand. It represents wages, sales commissions, benefits, advertising, promotions, bad debt expenses, and regulatory fees. "Can you hear me now? Good." Who thinks that Verizon spends a bit much on advertising these days? Who thinks that Verizon could cut back even, just a bit, on advertising, retail stores, gimmicky promotions, and sales commissions for corporate sales, without significantly cutting back on service or increasing customer costs? In 2008, Verizon managed to decrease its cost related to wages and benefits even.
These spectrum fees may exist so that if Verizon wishes to keep its spectrum, it better be willing to use it in a competitive manner. Otherwise, it is a yearly unneeded cost, like many Verizon employees, potentially, at least in the eyes of a few highly paid, but low skilled executives. One might think that surrendering unusable, costly spectrum to the FCC would be wise. Think of these fees perhaps as being a bit like property taxes for radio spectrum, an added incentive to dispose of costly unused assets that have value.
Of course, I think the whole division of the 700MHz spectrum should be done again. It would be a better fix if it was done properly this time though.
So I was wondering if Pat Roberson was planning on using child labor to mine emeralds in Myanmar, or force children to mine asbestos in Zimbabwe? Though he may want to hire Blackwater "contractors" to protect his laborers, or any available local thugs. The deciding factor in each decision would be how to inflict the most amount of violence and misery at one time.
Yeah, but to get the most painful of the injuries one had to intentionally improperly use the analog stick by rotating the stick with the palm of one's right hand. The intended, but clumsy proper method was to use one's left thumb. I have a friend who played a session of Mario Party which lasted several hours and he played in several games. The next day, after waking up he had a large and deep wound on his palm that was not present beforehand. My semi-informed conjecture is that it was not like a blister caused by bad shoes, but was instead probably from stretching and tearing the collagen that bound the cells of his skin and deeper tissues together. What was even better was that since it was a deep wound and it was in a place nearly impossible to properly bandage he ended up having to wait a couple months for it to heal and ended up with a nice scar as well. Coincidentally, shortly after my friend's injury, Nintendo offered free gloves to purchasers of Mario Party, as a somewhat usable remedy. Mario Party 2 had no minigames using motions like that.
The PS3 texture compression support may be worse that that of the texture compression methods in the 360. Some places it may crop up would be in rendered quality of the texture, size of texture file, number of texture files required, or in memory footprint when loaded. Microsoft may also offer and force developers to use better software development tools than the tools used for PS3 games. While there are optional Sony supplied PS3 software development tools, they are rarely used in production games due to their poor usability, their difficulty to use, and poor performance. Consequently, many devs write their own tools, which may end up working even worse than the Sony tools. Or, they use middle-ware like UE3 from Epic, and the licensing fees might make those devs wish they hadn't.
I doubt these models. Computer models predicted that the financial crash would never happen. The derivatives were just too advanced to ever possibly crash, right?
[citation needed]
Look at the weatherman. He has a hard time predicting rain 48 hours from now. You think you really know anything about the weather 50 years from now? Give me an f'in break.
It is not unreasonable to predict with a high degree of certainty that a person who drives to work will arrive on time and without incident when required. This should be true three years from now, as well as ten years from now. This assumes that the individual is not fired or does not lose their job some other way. However, one can predict that isolated events will occur in ten years, traffic accidents, unusually slow traffic, or their car not starting due to a -35 deg F morning. What you cannot predict as easily is something like an outright bridge collapse, especially when in this case a flawed computer model was used. Granted, the bridge still had serious structural flaws that were only partially taken into account by the previous computer models.
Going back to your financial models, are the models you are referring to a small number of cherry-picked simple simulations that only were done to confirm a bias? Are there financial models that did predict trouble accurately, or are they no longer important? Part of the problem was that too many non-mainstream "economists" and even armchair economic theorists became influential. Most of these types did not develop their theories by using the Scientific Method, attempted to inappropriately apply limited thought experiments from microeconomics to macroeconomics, or did not fully research, distorted the facts to fit their bias, omitted facts contrary to their position, or even outright lied about historical and present day events and data, then used these anecdotes as facts to push their deeply flawed pet theories. The only major figure I have seen to date admit that he was almost totally wrong on the economy was Alan Greenspan. That takes a large amount of testicular fortitude, his announcement not very long after the beginning of the crisis was even more impressive. I would compare this to the Republicans in Congress and in the conservative pundits in the media espousing the same old rhetoric, cut taxes, especially on the rich, and cut spending across the board, especially for the poor.
And if it involves any fighting aliens, it's giving up any hope of realism or education in another fine aspect. Considering the billions of years available on its home planet, and the very early stage we're at, chances are far greater that if we run into a civilization alone, it will be 1-2 billion years older and more advanced than us. We don't want to start that relationship with dick-waving and delusions of having any chance in a fight, because we won't. We're talking not just the same difference as between us and a paleolithic tribe, we're talking that difference _squared_ and then some.
Yes, but through the use of trickery a paleolithic tribe could lure a number of fully-armed, modern day soldiers and throw many sharp rocks at them until the soldiers were knocked unconscious. Then a member of the tribe could stab the soldiers to death with a spear. Granted this would be after some confusion about the soldier's armor. Then the tribe is fucked, however, and will lose any further engagements. The soldiers would not fall for the same trick again.
As an insurgent, never overestimate the gullibility or the restrictions on the operations of your enemy. However, also be aware of your enemy's history. It helps if one knows if you are facing brutal 13th century Mongol raiders or 21st century UN soldiers, who are pansies.
Yes, but equal rights for women did not seem to be important to the founding fathers either. I would like to be wrong, but do you have citations that point otherwise?
The major "Atlantis" features are larger than the road networks in a modern day metropolitan area. Also, the features (or sensor artifacts) of "Atlantis" would be half the width of the entire state of Minnesota. Save your money and look for a more reasonable explanation, first. The closest you will get to an an event that would cause an ocean basin to empty is this:
That was the basin of the Mediterranean Sea (New Tethys Ocean) and it was caused by closure of its inlets. It isn't even plausible for the Atlantic Ocean to have emptied at any point in the last 25,000 years, and especially implausible for glaciers to have locked enough water up for that to happen.
Actually reading this novel has been compared to pushing one's head through a light-year of refrigerated saltwater taffy.
To save you reading over a thousand pages of turgid prose, here is Atlas Shrugged. No "spoiler" alert is necessary:
* A dark and lonely handsome hero with no friends makes shitloads of dosh off the back of lazy and stupid non-union slaves;
* When asked to pay taxes, he and his ilk scream in shock, and flee in a huff to live in the mountains; [4]
* Everyone is miserable except them, as they are busy driving their trains up and down in their incredible mountain hideaway;
* They have laughable sex with other capitalist boors, but cannot commit due to being too busy making money;
* Everyone else is wrong:
* They are right;
* They appear suddenly in public and punish the miserable hordes by lecturing them in interminably boring eight-hour speeches that go on and on and on for about one hundred pages and have only one point - "You're all fucked, and I'm not, 'cos I've got all the money, Ha Ha!";
* The world goes to Hell in a handbasket, except for them, 'cos they're in their seekrit mountain hideout.[5]
I'm sure that set of eight sanity draining video posted by the GP also misses this point as well: democratic governments are also intended to allow for the participation of the people in the decision making process as to how the government runs. This participation includes, but is not limited to voting. This participation can include: writing coherent letters to you elected officials, organizing a peaceful demonstration, or belonging to a group like the ACLU.
Let's see a consumer, employee, small-scale stockholder, or a random person try that with a corporation. Consumers could try a nearly always ineffectual boycott. Or, an employee can try to join or organize a union, but that is by no means easy. Also, as all libertarians know unions are "ebil". The proxy vote of a small-scale stock holder doesn't have much effect when the executives hold over 50% of the shares, especially when there is only one candidate for each corporate office.
In any case, the libertarian concept of a "constitutionally limited" government is flawed in several ways. For instance, the legislative branch can make legislative laws. On the other hand, the judicial branch interprets the Constitution, legislative laws, and case law coming from court decisions. If a legislative law is found to be lacking, it can be struck down by a court decision. Case law can be struck down as well by the courts or can it be overruled by newly legislated laws.
This is roughly the legal system currently in use in the US, with probably some errors on my part. It is a system where courts can interpret the meaning of what has been written and the courts can rely on previous court decisions to make a new decision. This legal system is known as the common law system. If you do not like this legal system there are other law systems in use today, like the civil law system in France or Germany, which are a bit different.
Oddly enough, roughly 40 years since its conceptual invention, libertarians cannot point to any country in the world where libertarianism has been adapted and where it works. Instead, the best we can do is only watch eight long, rambling videos on YouTube in which a speaker explains a system he is certain that would work. He does this, I imagine, without offering any examples of how parts of his system currently in use and how they work. I would imagine that there is also no highly detailed description of the new society, only that the new society would have more "freedom". At least until the guy with an AK-47 shoots you and steals all your stuff. You forgot to pay your monthly police bill.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet, there are currently inactive sand dunes in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, that reactivated several times a century, during sustained years of drought, in the last millennium. A sand dune reactivates when there are no roots from vegetation holding the sand in place. At which point, you pretty much get unpleasant sand storms and they leave clearly identifiable sand deposits behind.
The 1930's dustbowl could have been less extreme if the farming practices were better. However, now we are wastefully draining underground aquifers at a rate higher than the rate of recharge when there is not enough rain.
Okay, here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_lockout
I should have looked that up instead of depending on a vague recollection of the article, but this is still /. in any case. The machines SGI sold that you describe almost certainly did not resemble the average design of a current x86 PC in any way, regardless of the CPU architecture SGI used. That was no standard Linux Kernel either. Worse yet a system like that would be nearly useless for normal PC tasks like surfing the web, running office applications, or playing demanding 3D games. The current record holding general purpose supercomputer, an IBM Blue Gene system, uses Linux as well. IBM's Roadrunner is great, if the Cell processors do the work you need them to do, which is not the case most of the time. At any rate, on Blue Gene systems a single copy of Linux is run per dual core processor and standard DDR2 RAM is used as well. No attempt is made to micromanage each Linux image.
The primary difference between a liberal and a libertarian is a sense of pragmatism.
The liberal I assume is the pragmatist who has looked at the evidence and thus the libertarian is weirdo frothing at the mouth about what he has decided is true: The Moon is a Liberal Myth.
There is another barrier that we will eventually hit. The current process schedulers in use on modern operating systems have a problem. Attempting to use more than roughly 38 logical processors will result in the additional processors either waiting to run the process scheduler, waiting for a memory access, or waiting for I/O. Currently this is sidestepped on mainframes using virtualization and low latency I/O. I have a hard time seeing how virtualization or lower latency I/O could be adapted for use in desktop computers. Running Windows Aleph-Null, MacOS X 12.8, and Linux 2.8.1853 would probably not have much appeal to average users that would still need the power a desktop computer offered at that point. Intel, the main driving force of the PCISIG keeps pushing newer versions of PCI-Express that do not address the interconnect's inability to play nice with multiple masters, providing any type of packet routing, or deal in any way with its absurdly high latency, which is over 100ns even with PCIe 1.1, and gets worse with each newer version. Some sort of low latency sideband channel would work, but figuring how to maintain backward compatibility with current PCIe cards and motherboards is not easy. Instead Intel has added only DRM features, but no actual security for the computer's user on the bus itself (think Firewire and writing to whatever memory locations you want).
Bad form ahead:
If embryonic stem cell research does not make you uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough. --James Thompson
Better:
If embryonic stem cell research makes you uncomfortable, you have thought about it far too much. Try researching the actual potential feasibility of the scare stories, and consider that adult stem cells have never been made totipotent, only pluripotent.
Yeah sorry about that.
Your liver is fine, your liver can regenerate back to normal even if you manage to kill 75% of it. Without using prescription drugs, only the abuse of Tylenol or alcohol will cause serious liver damage. However, repeatedly damaging your liver over the course of decades is a bad thing.
Meh, he could have done better. There should be four separate boxes, two separate mirrored disk arrays running in RAID6. So with sixteen drives in each box there would be 32 SATA drives total. Each case of drives would also need two of its own 3ware SAS 8-port cards connected to the main server and the hot spare server by external x16 PCIe cables. The hot spare server would be connected to the non-transparent port on the PCIe switches on the drive cases. The non-transparent port allows a backup PCIe root complex to take over in the event of a failure of a primary PCIe root complex. Add a few UPS units that always run the load off the battery and use the wall AC current to charge the batteries. In this case, you would probably be ready for just about anything. However, just to be safe, you could have a motherboard custom designed with one of these:
http://www.maxwell.com/pdf/me/product_datasheets/ned/HSN3000_Rev3.pdf
This is the USA, do not attempt to impose any of your "Civil Law" logic to our "Common Law" illogic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
Yeah, it might be worthwhile to read articles an author you disagree with has written, but using it as your only source of information is a really dumb idea. Also, one must keep in mind that certain authors one might find extremist may leave out or minimize certain details from the story. This is true especially when all of the pertinent facts, when reported, don't make as much of the story very alarming any more.
In other words, if an article comes from a Libertarian website or a Ultra-conservative site, you can probably skip reading it there and get a better view on the issue from elsewhere. At least keep in mind that such alarmist stories, like this one, probably are not really alarming that after all. Also, be skeptical about the source as well.
I don't believe that was the original intent, and it certain requires a lot of very creative arguing to assert that it's a reasonable interpretation.
The original intent is really no longer really a valid consideration at this point. The Constitution and what it says/means only matters at the Federal Appeals Courts and Federal Supreme Court level. At least try to learn a bit about how the American Court system works in 2009. The current way the legal system functions works is more important than any intent derived from a half a dozen guys who wrote lots of letters and books from 1750 to 1830 that have been preserved until today. There are probably more men from that time who had totally different opinions and their contributions have not been preserved or have not been scrutinized to such a degree.
The Supreme Court had held multiple times that the Constitution DOES apply to the states as well. This is why you don't see books banned in a city because of their "indecent" or "immoral" content any more. However, some parts of the US still try (with varying degrees of success) to enforce prohibitions on adult pornography. Possession of kiddie porn breaks the law, and is an entirely different issue, however.
It may help to keep in mind that essentially every requirement and feature for a modern OS has not been significantly improved since 1980. No, not the 1980's, the year 1980. As the processing power at each grade of computing power has increased, that grade of computer has run an OS that has been improved gradually until it ran a modern OS. Since then, there has not been much advancement in what features to expect out of an OS. This may be why there is little difference in OS level features between Windows NT4, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. Granted, OS stability and user security have improved from NT4 to XP. However, Windows Vista and Windows 7 seem to add very little to the mix in the end. Consider it a problem of diminishing returns.
Adding cores is also is not the same as a speed up and an improvement in efficiency of the core you already have. Adding cores may help for certain problems, but there are still problems that are inherently single threaded and thus single core. Going up intelligently and going out intelligently both important.
It happens other places too. I got this back in March 2008.
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, you@example.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
(Skipped some dashes, lousy /. filter)
Apache/2.0.54 (Unix) TongWeb-Director/4 Server at www.npc.gov.cn Port 80
Actually, the POWER ISA and by extension IBM has specifications for Decimal Floating-Point instructions as an optional part of the specifications for the POWER ISA. There are also a few integer BCD to binary conversion instructions as well. The Decimal Floating-Point instructions share the same registers with the standard Binary Floating-Point instructions. The purpose the Decimal Floating-Point instructions serve is that by using decimal numbers one can improve accuracy for financial calculations.
On the other hand, the x86 BCD instructions are totally useless. However all x86 legacy instructions must be included in the newer x86 processors. You never know when you might want to use 16-bit protected mode, MMX instructions, or both while in ring 6 at the same time, you know.
Better than than the old Mexican judicial system, which is still being phased out. In the old system the trial was conducted almost totally with submitted written documents from each side. There was no jury, instead the judge decided. Any testimony was also recorded into documents and submitted. Any hearings were closed to the public and consisted of the judge, lawyers, and the defendant. Fortunately, this system is being phased out in favor of a more open trial system similar to the American trial system. It only took a constitutional amendment. The quality of the results under the old system were poor and trials were prone to being corrupted through violence or bribes.
Sounds much like waiting for Social Security to decide on disability applications for SSDI and SSI. A person can expect about two years or more after applying. One does get two perfunctory denials and then waits for a hearing and decision. I first applied in late November 2006 and my hearing will be next week (March 2009). However, I still will need to wait for a decision after the hearing, hopefully it will take less than a month. Assuming I am successful in my appeal, I receive a lump sum of back benefits, portions of which go to various groups along the way that helped me. All and all, waiting two years for something that could easily have been decided in less than three months ends up costing Social Security more. Worse, delays like this for other disabled individuals cost society as a whole much more as well.
Here is a different analysis of the facts from me. From the SEC 10-K form Verizon filed for the fiscal year ending 12/31/2008, submitted 2/24/2009 and can be found here:
http://idea.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/732712/000119312509036349/dex13.htm
About a quarter of the way down the page is the Income and Expenses breakdown for the Wireless division. Keep in mind that 45% Verizon Wireless is owned by Vodafone and 55% is owned by Verizon proper. So Vodafone and Verizon most likely have some sort profit/loss sharing plan. In any case, these numbers are for the whole Wireless division. In 2008 the division received just over $49 billion in income, a 12.5% increase from 2007. The total expenses for 2008 ended up at just over $35 billion, 10.1% higher than 2007. The profit was about $14 billion, or 18.6% higher than 2007.
As one looks at the breakdown of the wireless division expenses for 2008 one may notice a few odd or unusual numbers, 15.5 billion was from the cost of services and sales. These include both the costs of operating the wireless network, routing calls, and discounts given to customers upgrading their equipment. Not too much interesting I suppose, Verizon could start charging what the phone was actually worth instead of the joke prices they do now, the primary portion of the 19% increase in expenses this section from 2007 was customer equipment upgrades. However, some may claim that this passes the costs on to customers, but the discounts also lock customers into two year contracts.
The $14.2 billion spent on the "Selling, General, and Administrative Expense" category is more interesting on the other hand. It represents wages, sales commissions, benefits, advertising, promotions, bad debt expenses, and regulatory fees. "Can you hear me now? Good." Who thinks that Verizon spends a bit much on advertising these days? Who thinks that Verizon could cut back even, just a bit, on advertising, retail stores, gimmicky promotions, and sales commissions for corporate sales, without significantly cutting back on service or increasing customer costs? In 2008, Verizon managed to decrease its cost related to wages and benefits even.
These spectrum fees may exist so that if Verizon wishes to keep its spectrum, it better be willing to use it in a competitive manner. Otherwise, it is a yearly unneeded cost, like many Verizon employees, potentially, at least in the eyes of a few highly paid, but low skilled executives. One might think that surrendering unusable, costly spectrum to the FCC would be wise. Think of these fees perhaps as being a bit like property taxes for radio spectrum, an added incentive to dispose of costly unused assets that have value.
Of course, I think the whole division of the 700MHz spectrum should be done again. It would be a better fix if it was done properly this time though.
Or maybe:
pat.robertson@ob.org
May make more sense after this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Blessing#Criticism
So I was wondering if Pat Roberson was planning on using child labor to mine emeralds in Myanmar, or force children to mine asbestos in Zimbabwe? Though he may want to hire Blackwater "contractors" to protect his laborers, or any available local thugs. The deciding factor in each decision would be how to inflict the most amount of violence and misery at one time.
Yeah, but to get the most painful of the injuries one had to intentionally improperly use the analog stick by rotating the stick with the palm of one's right hand. The intended, but clumsy proper method was to use one's left thumb. I have a friend who played a session of Mario Party which lasted several hours and he played in several games. The next day, after waking up he had a large and deep wound on his palm that was not present beforehand. My semi-informed conjecture is that it was not like a blister caused by bad shoes, but was instead probably from stretching and tearing the collagen that bound the cells of his skin and deeper tissues together. What was even better was that since it was a deep wound and it was in a place nearly impossible to properly bandage he ended up having to wait a couple months for it to heal and ended up with a nice scar as well. Coincidentally, shortly after my friend's injury, Nintendo offered free gloves to purchasers of Mario Party, as a somewhat usable remedy. Mario Party 2 had no minigames using motions like that.
The PS3 texture compression support may be worse that that of the texture compression methods in the 360. Some places it may crop up would be in rendered quality of the texture, size of texture file, number of texture files required, or in memory footprint when loaded. Microsoft may also offer and force developers to use better software development tools than the tools used for PS3 games. While there are optional Sony supplied PS3 software development tools, they are rarely used in production games due to their poor usability, their difficulty to use, and poor performance. Consequently, many devs write their own tools, which may end up working even worse than the Sony tools. Or, they use middle-ware like UE3 from Epic, and the licensing fees might make those devs wish they hadn't.
I doubt these models. Computer models predicted that the financial crash would never happen. The derivatives were just too advanced to ever possibly crash, right?
[citation needed]
Look at the weatherman. He has a hard time predicting rain 48 hours from now. You think you really know anything about the weather 50 years from now? Give me an f'in break.
It is not unreasonable to predict with a high degree of certainty that a person who drives to work will arrive on time and without incident when required. This should be true three years from now, as well as ten years from now. This assumes that the individual is not fired or does not lose their job some other way. However, one can predict that isolated events will occur in ten years, traffic accidents, unusually slow traffic, or their car not starting due to a -35 deg F morning. What you cannot predict as easily is something like an outright bridge collapse, especially when in this case a flawed computer model was used. Granted, the bridge still had serious structural flaws that were only partially taken into account by the previous computer models.
Going back to your financial models, are the models you are referring to a small number of cherry-picked simple simulations that only were done to confirm a bias? Are there financial models that did predict trouble accurately, or are they no longer important? Part of the problem was that too many non-mainstream "economists" and even armchair economic theorists became influential. Most of these types did not develop their theories by using the Scientific Method, attempted to inappropriately apply limited thought experiments from microeconomics to macroeconomics, or did not fully research, distorted the facts to fit their bias, omitted facts contrary to their position, or even outright lied about historical and present day events and data, then used these anecdotes as facts to push their deeply flawed pet theories. The only major figure I have seen to date admit that he was almost totally wrong on the economy was Alan Greenspan. That takes a large amount of testicular fortitude, his announcement not very long after the beginning of the crisis was even more impressive. I would compare this to the Republicans in Congress and in the conservative pundits in the media espousing the same old rhetoric, cut taxes, especially on the rich, and cut spending across the board, especially for the poor.
And if it involves any fighting aliens, it's giving up any hope of realism or education in another fine aspect. Considering the billions of years available on its home planet, and the very early stage we're at, chances are far greater that if we run into a civilization alone, it will be 1-2 billion years older and more advanced than us. We don't want to start that relationship with dick-waving and delusions of having any chance in a fight, because we won't. We're talking not just the same difference as between us and a paleolithic tribe, we're talking that difference _squared_ and then some.
Yes, but through the use of trickery a paleolithic tribe could lure a number of fully-armed, modern day soldiers and throw many sharp rocks at them until the soldiers were knocked unconscious. Then a member of the tribe could stab the soldiers to death with a spear. Granted this would be after some confusion about the soldier's armor. Then the tribe is fucked, however, and will lose any further engagements. The soldiers would not fall for the same trick again.
As an insurgent, never overestimate the gullibility or the restrictions on the operations of your enemy. However, also be aware of your enemy's history. It helps if one knows if you are facing brutal 13th century Mongol raiders or 21st century UN soldiers, who are pansies.
Yes, but equal rights for women did not seem to be important to the founding fathers either. I would like to be wrong, but do you have citations that point otherwise?
Okay, here is Minneapolis/St. Paul area, at the same scale, it is also has a bit lower population density than some US metropolitan areas.
http://maps.google.com/?q=Minneapolis,+MN&sll=31.480209,-24.120483&sspn=2.988616,5.026245&ie=UTF8&ll=45.069641,-93.262939&spn=2.863094,5.564575&t=h&z=8
Compare features in a modern city to those in the "Atlantis" photos:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=31.480209,-24.120483&spn=2.988616,5.026245&t=h&z=8
The major "Atlantis" features are larger than the road networks in a modern day metropolitan area. Also, the features (or sensor artifacts) of "Atlantis" would be half the width of the entire state of Minnesota. Save your money and look for a more reasonable explanation, first. The closest you will get to an an event that would cause an ocean basin to empty is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis
That was the basin of the Mediterranean Sea (New Tethys Ocean) and it was caused by closure of its inlets. It isn't even plausible for the Atlantic Ocean to have emptied at any point in the last 25,000 years, and especially implausible for glaciers to have locked enough water up for that to happen.
No that book has little to teach us and can be easily summarized.
From: http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Shatlas_Rugged
Shatlas Rugged
Actually reading this novel has been compared to pushing one's head through a light-year of refrigerated saltwater taffy.
To save you reading over a thousand pages of turgid prose, here is Atlas Shrugged. No "spoiler" alert is necessary:
* A dark and lonely handsome hero with no friends makes shitloads of dosh off the back of lazy and stupid non-union slaves;
* When asked to pay taxes, he and his ilk scream in shock, and flee in a huff to live in the mountains; [4]
* Everyone is miserable except them, as they are busy driving their trains up and down in their incredible mountain hideaway;
* They have laughable sex with other capitalist boors, but cannot commit due to being too busy making money;
* Everyone else is wrong:
* They are right;
* They appear suddenly in public and punish the miserable hordes by lecturing them in interminably boring eight-hour speeches that go on and on and on for about one hundred pages and have only one point - "You're all fucked, and I'm not, 'cos I've got all the money, Ha Ha!";
* The world goes to Hell in a handbasket, except for them, 'cos they're in their seekrit mountain hideout.[5]
This is the link referenced as 5 and is also very appropriate:
http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
At then end of the day Atlas Shrugged is a steaming turd of a book and Ayn Rand ideas never had any value.
I'm sure that set of eight sanity draining video posted by the GP also misses this point as well: democratic governments are also intended to allow for the participation of the people in the decision making process as to how the government runs. This participation includes, but is not limited to voting. This participation can include: writing coherent letters to you elected officials, organizing a peaceful demonstration, or belonging to a group like the ACLU.
Let's see a consumer, employee, small-scale stockholder, or a random person try that with a corporation. Consumers could try a nearly always ineffectual boycott. Or, an employee can try to join or organize a union, but that is by no means easy. Also, as all libertarians know unions are "ebil". The proxy vote of a small-scale stock holder doesn't have much effect when the executives hold over 50% of the shares, especially when there is only one candidate for each corporate office.
In any case, the libertarian concept of a "constitutionally limited" government is flawed in several ways. For instance, the legislative branch can make legislative laws. On the other hand, the judicial branch interprets the Constitution, legislative laws, and case law coming from court decisions. If a legislative law is found to be lacking, it can be struck down by a court decision. Case law can be struck down as well by the courts or can it be overruled by newly legislated laws.
This is roughly the legal system currently in use in the US, with probably some errors on my part. It is a system where courts can interpret the meaning of what has been written and the courts can rely on previous court decisions to make a new decision. This legal system is known as the common law system. If you do not like this legal system there are other law systems in use today, like the civil law system in France or Germany, which are a bit different.
Oddly enough, roughly 40 years since its conceptual invention, libertarians cannot point to any country in the world where libertarianism has been adapted and where it works. Instead, the best we can do is only watch eight long, rambling videos on YouTube in which a speaker explains a system he is certain that would work. He does this, I imagine, without offering any examples of how parts of his system currently in use and how they work. I would imagine that there is also no highly detailed description of the new society, only that the new society would have more "freedom". At least until the guy with an AK-47 shoots you and steals all your stuff. You forgot to pay your monthly police bill.