My 2 cents: If you can, find a job working at a company that produces something useful. Easier said than done of course, but it moves things in the right direction. If you're in an industry that mainly sucks wealth from other people, most of the other people in it for long will be assholes, by natural selection.
Better not pay them by the haul, or that's a good strategy for inducing fishermen to dump massive amounts of garbage in the water on their days off. And if you just pay them for time spent at sea, you're paying them to cruise and do nothing.
GPUs are also both cache bandwidth and device memory bandwith limited. If you're working on a problem where your computational complexity is very high compared to your memory bandwidth requirements, then that doesn't matter. Otherwise, your performance will be more similar to an Intel multi-core CPU. Also, scientific problems that don't have high memory bandwidth requirements often require better than 32 bits of numerical precision, which is impractical on current GPUs.
That gives you a lot of practical control over what happens.
Unless you work for especially sly conspirators, its nice of them to offer to pay for the laptop, and doesn't seem like a problem.
I recently had a similar situation with a company laptop. They sold it to me for a token amount when I left the company, and I kept all my personal data.
it wasn't until years later that I really understood that there was anything wrong about the things I had said.
Translation: they finally brainwashed you. People are not equal, never were, and never will be, no matter how hard you try to believe it.
Acknowledging the reality of qualitative and quantitative differences is not what makes a racist. Its the evils that those differences are used to justify. Being more talented or virtuous than someone by some measure doesn't give you the right to fuck them over, or deny that you're fucking them over. The people who claim they just want to be 'honest' about racial differences are also generally loathe to admit the full seriousness of racism.
Its true that the people who try to fight racism by pretending there are no differences are liars, and I disagree with them. But for the most part its the nastiness of the supposedly 'honest' racists that they're concerned about, and that nastiness is real.
I will give one example....suppose you're an honest, hardworking, intelligent black man, at the bottom of some kind of abusive economic power structure. You're doing most of the work, but the good-old-boys who have inherited most of the usable the land or other resources are reaping most of the benefits from your work. For the sincere black person, it is wrong to support that, wrong to feed the powerful parasites. So over time your tend to become lazy and insolent. Your own virtue becomes conflicted, corrupted. How can you escape this? As I see it, this is the chief evil of slavery, in all of its forms. The effects are long lasting, and in a lot of ways its still going on today. Yes, white people exploit white people also, and black people exploit black people, but the white vs. black dynamic has been very strong and has caused a lot of damage. And now, the assholes who supposedly want to be 'honest' about race want to pretend that black people are statistically poorer because they're genetically inferior and have ruined their own culture. Granted, if there was not and never had been persecution by white people, black people might still be less successful by some measure. But they would have far, far fewer problems.
(I previously posted this as AC with the formatting messed up, then logged in and fixed.)
In the past I haven't drawn the line exactly where you have, but I agree its a somewhat arbitrary judgment call.
The irony of course is that Goldman Sachs execs don't want him stealing 'their' code, but they have no qualms about essentially stealing gazillions of dollars from everyone else as long as their lobbyists have the legal formalities taken care of.
This will not hold water in the courts. Don't panic.
Probably not. The problem is that it raises the bar, and makes it that much harder to actually get to court. I presume that's the whole idea.
Right. A few years ago when my wife sued PayPal to recover $1200 they stole from her, the judge threw it out both on grounds of wrong jurisdiction and that the PayPal contract says they can't be sued. The fact that PayPal just flat took the money and repeatedly lied about even having it, did not outweigh the fine print in the PayPal user agreement in the mind of that particular judge. (This was back before eBay bought PayPal, and their internal policies may have been more corrupt then.) Fortunately, PayPal did promptly give the money back (with no explanation) when a state Attorney General inquired about the case. So the system isn't completely broken, and the outcome was right. And at least the lawsuit forced PayPal to pay a lawyer for a few hours to show up in court. But the point is the bogus clause in the user agreement did stop the lawsuit in this case. (The jurisdiction question was a separate issue - there was some contradictory guidance about what state to sue in since the theft occurred online.)
I've known a number of people in my life who would strongly agree with you here. And push come to shove, when their own comfort is on the line, most of them sell out. There's more than one way to sell out, and people often don't represent it to themselves that way, but that's how it looks to me.
To whatever extent a few people will also turn that critical eye on themselves, and stand firm with their moral vision when making choices in their own lives, I think they can accomplish a lot. The corrupt tendencies are weaker than the moral motive, in that the corruption tends to act without commitment in a lot of different directions. I think there is still a lot of strength in our culture (I'm speaking as an American), and those who can see it just have to be true to it. So while I agree with you totally, I think there's room for optimism here.
if you are correctly positioned as a trusted supplier, there are cases when you can get paid for delivering no product at all, but merely for carrying out the ritual of delivering a product, with all the paperwork thereunto appertaining.
there's no need to bring religion into this
Religion? He was talking about SBIR defense research.
Having its own fabs is also one reason Intel is successful. And outsourcing manufacturing was one reason for the decline of companies like TI and Motorola in the digital IC part of their businesses. Yes getting started in fabrication or any industry is really tough. But running your own fabs, once established successfully, is really valuable in my view. It makes the productive coordination between process, design, and product engineering so much easier.
I'm agnostic on the subject, but I think that if you calculate the energies involved when something like a phone is held right up to the side of your head, its not completely ridiculous.
Some people are afraid of living or driving under power lines also of course, but in that case if you do the same calculations it doesn't amount to much.
This being/., and this being a physics or EE topic, there will be hundreds of strongly opinionated postings by people who don't know squat about electromagnatism, and hopefully a handful by subject experts who know what they are talking about.
Right. The problem is that many people's jobs depend on developing tools to detect terrorists, and many people's jobs depend on using those tools. Selling the utility of the tool is far more important to most of these people than honestly facing the question of whether or not some innocent strangers are getting screwed over.
I doubt that a large number of people have had their lives ruined by being falsely accused of terrorism, relative to the number who's lives have been harmed in other ways. But its still a very dangerous pattern, in my opinion. People who say that Stalinist Russia can't happen here (wherever here is for you) maybe don't understand the dynamic very well. Furthermore, the same kind of fallacy applied in other ways has harmed large numbers of people in every country. Consider the way black people and native Americans have been perceived and treated in the US, for instance. The same kind of stupidity has been at play there, mixed with other stupidities also of course.
It is a misunderstanding of atheists and secularists to say they have no basis for right and wrong. They do have a basis, its just not an appeal to divine authority.
Yes, we should all be equally free to say what we think about homosexuality and Christianity. I think you're not going to find much disagreement with you here about 'hate speech' laws, insofar as these are intended to suppress free expression of ideas. Personally I believe that hateful verbal or written attacks against people or groups of people shouldn't be considered acceptable. But criticism should be acceptable, its hard to draw the line exactly, and it should not in any case be controlled by law.
In my view censoring anti-Christians is pretty seriously wrong. And the more right and true the things believed by Christians are, the more wrong it is to censor criticism around those things. If honest scrutiny is not tolerated, then it is not the God of Truth that is being worshipped, it has become idolatry.
I find your "I'm not saying this law is good" criticism to be pretty weak, particularly considering the strength of your resentment against being censored about homosexuality. I think the persecution complex that many Christians have in America to be somewhat ridiculous, considering the freedom and power that they have, and their relaxed attitude towards suppression of free inquiry when it favors their own belief structure.
I think part of the reason American's are sensitive about flag burning, is there's very little unifying national ethnic history. So in the US ideology is used instead. Other countries that have multiple ethnic groups still usually have a longer shared national history, and many have ethnic problems anyway.
Also, many Americans have to beat their chests so that they feel OK about abusing other groups. Its a part of the 'culture war'.
I'm not convinced. You can still get electromagnetic interference with light - look at TV remotes.
Its not my area of expertise, but my understanding was that part of the point of lasers is the light is coherent. If it has an appropriate wavelength and you aim it correctly, you can transmit data at a high rate despite a fairly high level of environmental interference.
So why is it illegal for me to feed a chick booze until she passes out, then fuck her? Same shit, slightly different setting.
I think that hits the nail on the head. People do want to justify doing that, or similar. Some of their arguments are right, and some are bogus, but it often comes down to justifying their own desires. I think most of the people who sarcastically say "think of the children" actually don't give a rip about the children, even though many of their points and criticisms are valid. They argue with misdirection and half-truths.
Same thing with greed. Most upper-middle-class people think it should be illegal to break into people's houses and take their stuff, and they make rational arguments supporting their position. But when it comes to effectively stealing from other people by abuse of economic power, such as through actions that support market and currency manipulations, they have all kinds of fancy ways of justifying it and denying what they are doing.
I have no opinion about whether this particular ruling was good or bad, because I haven't dug into it deep enough, and slashdot summaries are almost always misleading. (What's up with that?) And I think porn should be legal. But its ridiculous for people to pretend that what they look at doesn't affect them. Watching a foolish drug user get fucked does hurt you, whether you understand it or not.
Why do people still live there again? Seriously though, I wonder what the morale of people who live there is like? Do they all hate it but have nowhere else to go, or are they just culturally complacent with their rights being trampled on?
Despite the lack of free political expression, in some practical ways many Chinese people have more freedom than we have in America.
As a mundane example....try working and saving money for several years, then try taking a year or two off to do something else. No matter how good your credit history is and how much money you have piled up in the bank, you are likely to have a hard time renting an apartment, because you're not following the pattern expected by the leasing companies. Then try getting a good price on some antibiotics when you get sick. (As one wag put it, if agribusiness could sell humans as a food product we wouldn't have this problem.) And see if you can get another job after you haven't worked for a year. Depending on what your niche was, you're almost completely screwed. Yes you have free speech, but nobody cares what you have to say anyway.
In many ways China is more dirty, abusive, and corrupt, but their economy is less gridlocked. I would rather live in America, but not by a wide margin.
Slashdot Mirror
My 2 cents: If you can, find a job working at a company that produces something useful. Easier said than done of course, but it moves things in the right direction. If you're in an industry that mainly sucks wealth from other people, most of the other people in it for long will be assholes, by natural selection.
The su-30mki isn't a very stealthy design either, at least not geometrically. Doesn't look much better than an F-15 in that regard.
Better not pay them by the haul, or that's a good strategy for inducing fishermen to dump massive amounts of garbage in the water on their days off. And if you just pay them for time spent at sea, you're paying them to cruise and do nothing.
GPUs are also both cache bandwidth and device memory bandwith limited. If you're working on a problem where your computational complexity is very high compared to your memory bandwidth requirements, then that doesn't matter. Otherwise, your performance will be more similar to an Intel multi-core CPU. Also, scientific problems that don't have high memory bandwidth requirements often require better than 32 bits of numerical precision, which is impractical on current GPUs.
But they can conveniently power our vast array of roadway embedded GPGPU supercomputers.
That gives you a lot of practical control over what happens.
Unless you work for especially sly conspirators, its nice of them to offer to pay for the laptop, and doesn't seem like a problem.
I recently had a similar situation with a company laptop. They sold it to me for a token amount when I left the company, and I kept all my personal data.
it wasn't until years later that I really understood that there was anything wrong about the things I had said.
Translation: they finally brainwashed you. People are not equal, never were, and never will be, no matter how hard you try to believe it.
Acknowledging the reality of qualitative and quantitative differences is not what makes a racist. Its the evils that those differences are used to justify. Being more talented or virtuous than someone by some measure doesn't give you the right to fuck them over, or deny that you're fucking them over. The people who claim they just want to be 'honest' about racial differences are also generally loathe to admit the full seriousness of racism.
Its true that the people who try to fight racism by pretending there are no differences are liars, and I disagree with them. But for the most part its the nastiness of the supposedly 'honest' racists that they're concerned about, and that nastiness is real.
I will give one example....suppose you're an honest, hardworking, intelligent black man, at the bottom of some kind of abusive economic power structure. You're doing most of the work, but the good-old-boys who have inherited most of the usable the land or other resources are reaping most of the benefits from your work. For the sincere black person, it is wrong to support that, wrong to feed the powerful parasites. So over time your tend to become lazy and insolent. Your own virtue becomes conflicted, corrupted. How can you escape this? As I see it, this is the chief evil of slavery, in all of its forms. The effects are long lasting, and in a lot of ways its still going on today. Yes, white people exploit white people also, and black people exploit black people, but the white vs. black dynamic has been very strong and has caused a lot of damage. And now, the assholes who supposedly want to be 'honest' about race want to pretend that black people are statistically poorer because they're genetically inferior and have ruined their own culture. Granted, if there was not and never had been persecution by white people, black people might still be less successful by some measure. But they would have far, far fewer problems.
(I previously posted this as AC with the formatting messed up, then logged in and fixed.)
In the past I haven't drawn the line exactly where you have, but I agree its a somewhat arbitrary judgment call.
The irony of course is that Goldman Sachs execs don't want him stealing 'their' code, but they have no qualms about essentially stealing gazillions of dollars from everyone else as long as their lobbyists have the legal formalities taken care of.
He said that he had inadvertently downloaded a portion of Goldman's proprietary code while trying to take files of open source software
Why try to take open source software instead of downloading it when you need it?
He said he had not used the Goldman code at his new job or distributed it to anyone else.
It sounds like maybe he wanted to keep it around for possible later reference. Not uncommon, but not innocent either.
As it happened, we did go to AG first, it just took a while for those wheels to turn.
The judge was a man.
This will not hold water in the courts. Don't panic.
Probably not. The problem is that it raises the bar, and makes it that much harder to actually get to court. I presume that's the whole idea.
Right. A few years ago when my wife sued PayPal to recover $1200 they stole from her, the judge threw it out both on grounds of wrong jurisdiction and that the PayPal contract says they can't be sued. The fact that PayPal just flat took the money and repeatedly lied about even having it, did not outweigh the fine print in the PayPal user agreement in the mind of that particular judge. (This was back before eBay bought PayPal, and their internal policies may have been more corrupt then.) Fortunately, PayPal did promptly give the money back (with no explanation) when a state Attorney General inquired about the case. So the system isn't completely broken, and the outcome was right. And at least the lawsuit forced PayPal to pay a lawyer for a few hours to show up in court. But the point is the bogus clause in the user agreement did stop the lawsuit in this case. (The jurisdiction question was a separate issue - there was some contradictory guidance about what state to sue in since the theft occurred online.)
I've known a number of people in my life who would strongly agree with you here. And push come to shove, when their own comfort is on the line, most of them sell out. There's more than one way to sell out, and people often don't represent it to themselves that way, but that's how it looks to me.
To whatever extent a few people will also turn that critical eye on themselves, and stand firm with their moral vision when making choices in their own lives, I think they can accomplish a lot. The corrupt tendencies are weaker than the moral motive, in that the corruption tends to act without commitment in a lot of different directions. I think there is still a lot of strength in our culture (I'm speaking as an American), and those who can see it just have to be true to it. So while I agree with you totally, I think there's room for optimism here.
if you are correctly positioned as a trusted supplier, there are cases when you can get paid for delivering no product at all, but merely for carrying out the ritual of delivering a product, with all the paperwork thereunto appertaining.
there's no need to bring religion into this
Religion? He was talking about SBIR defense research.
Why was this posted on Slashdot anyway. They may call programmers rude, but this is clearly a case to RTFM before asking.
Reading the first part of the post, telling us how great the app is, it seemed to me like advertising.
I Generic workstation + classified document = security violation = jail.
Unless you're Sandy Berger. Then you're OK as long as you use a sweaty textile storage device.
Having its own fabs is also one reason Intel is successful. And outsourcing manufacturing was one reason for the decline of companies like TI and Motorola in the digital IC part of their businesses. Yes getting started in fabrication or any industry is really tough. But running your own fabs, once established successfully, is really valuable in my view. It makes the productive coordination between process, design, and product engineering so much easier.
just don't enlist the help of the shadows, that's all I have to say
But maybe in ten or twenty years we'll all be kicking ourselves...
kicking ourselves in involuntary, parkinson's induced spasms :)
I'm agnostic on the subject, but I think that if you calculate the energies involved when something like a phone is held right up to the side of your head, its not completely ridiculous.
Some people are afraid of living or driving under power lines also of course, but in that case if you do the same calculations it doesn't amount to much.
This being /., and this being a physics or EE topic, there will be hundreds of strongly opinionated postings by people who don't know squat about electromagnatism, and hopefully a handful by subject experts who know what they are talking about.
Right. The problem is that many people's jobs depend on developing tools to detect terrorists, and many people's jobs depend on using those tools. Selling the utility of the tool is far more important to most of these people than honestly facing the question of whether or not some innocent strangers are getting screwed over.
I doubt that a large number of people have had their lives ruined by being falsely accused of terrorism, relative to the number who's lives have been harmed in other ways. But its still a very dangerous pattern, in my opinion. People who say that Stalinist Russia can't happen here (wherever here is for you) maybe don't understand the dynamic very well. Furthermore, the same kind of fallacy applied in other ways has harmed large numbers of people in every country. Consider the way black people and native Americans have been perceived and treated in the US, for instance. The same kind of stupidity has been at play there, mixed with other stupidities also of course.
It is a misunderstanding of atheists and secularists to say they have no basis for right and wrong. They do have a basis, its just not an appeal to divine authority.
Yes, we should all be equally free to say what we think about homosexuality and Christianity. I think you're not going to find much disagreement with you here about 'hate speech' laws, insofar as these are intended to suppress free expression of ideas. Personally I believe that hateful verbal or written attacks against people or groups of people shouldn't be considered acceptable. But criticism should be acceptable, its hard to draw the line exactly, and it should not in any case be controlled by law.
In my view censoring anti-Christians is pretty seriously wrong. And the more right and true the things believed by Christians are, the more wrong it is to censor criticism around those things. If honest scrutiny is not tolerated, then it is not the God of Truth that is being worshipped, it has become idolatry.
I find your "I'm not saying this law is good" criticism to be pretty weak, particularly considering the strength of your resentment against being censored about homosexuality. I think the persecution complex that many Christians have in America to be somewhat ridiculous, considering the freedom and power that they have, and their relaxed attitude towards suppression of free inquiry when it favors their own belief structure.
I think part of the reason American's are sensitive about flag burning, is there's very little unifying national ethnic history. So in the US ideology is used instead. Other countries that have multiple ethnic groups still usually have a longer shared national history, and many have ethnic problems anyway.
Also, many Americans have to beat their chests so that they feel OK about abusing other groups. Its a part of the 'culture war'.
I'm not convinced. You can still get electromagnetic interference with light - look at TV remotes.
Its not my area of expertise, but my understanding was that part of the point of lasers is the light is coherent. If it has an appropriate wavelength and you aim it correctly, you can transmit data at a high rate despite a fairly high level of environmental interference.
So why is it illegal for me to feed a chick booze until she passes out, then fuck her? Same shit, slightly different setting.
I think that hits the nail on the head. People do want to justify doing that, or similar. Some of their arguments are right, and some are bogus, but it often comes down to justifying their own desires. I think most of the people who sarcastically say "think of the children" actually don't give a rip about the children, even though many of their points and criticisms are valid. They argue with misdirection and half-truths.
Same thing with greed. Most upper-middle-class people think it should be illegal to break into people's houses and take their stuff, and they make rational arguments supporting their position. But when it comes to effectively stealing from other people by abuse of economic power, such as through actions that support market and currency manipulations, they have all kinds of fancy ways of justifying it and denying what they are doing.
I have no opinion about whether this particular ruling was good or bad, because I haven't dug into it deep enough, and slashdot summaries are almost always misleading. (What's up with that?) And I think porn should be legal. But its ridiculous for people to pretend that what they look at doesn't affect them. Watching a foolish drug user get fucked does hurt you, whether you understand it or not.
Why do people still live there again? Seriously though, I wonder what the morale of people who live there is like? Do they all hate it but have nowhere else to go, or are they just culturally complacent with their rights being trampled on?
Despite the lack of free political expression, in some practical ways many Chinese people have more freedom than we have in America.
As a mundane example....try working and saving money for several years, then try taking a year or two off to do something else. No matter how good your credit history is and how much money you have piled up in the bank, you are likely to have a hard time renting an apartment, because you're not following the pattern expected by the leasing companies. Then try getting a good price on some antibiotics when you get sick. (As one wag put it, if agribusiness could sell humans as a food product we wouldn't have this problem.) And see if you can get another job after you haven't worked for a year. Depending on what your niche was, you're almost completely screwed. Yes you have free speech, but nobody cares what you have to say anyway.
In many ways China is more dirty, abusive, and corrupt, but their economy is less gridlocked. I would rather live in America, but not by a wide margin.