Well, our wiki overlords list 15 known CPU IDs; but one of them is intel, one is AMD, one is a VM, and most of the rest are the forlorn epitaphs of the fallen.
My understanding is that they never explicitly 'slowed down' AMD systems; but that the binaries produced by their compiler refused to honor the capabilities flags of non-intel processors (eg. even if an AMD CPU lists 'SSE2, SSE3' among supported instructions, it would get the fallback to non-SSE instructions, while Intel CPUs would get whatever their supported instructions lists specified). No actual 'here be lots of NOPs for no reason'; but x87 on a machine that can do recent SSE is probably enough to achieve the same effect...)
Depends on the paranoia of the DRM implementation.
A simple "We sell to corporations, so we don't expect cracks but we do expect optimists trying to install a few extra seats" licensing system really just needs to (ideally over SSL, hear that, LG?) phone home the serial number at intervals and get a 'yes/no' in response.
The more paranoid systems, designed on the assumption that the client will be under active attack, may be considerably murkier. Something like 'BD+', for instance, for Blu-ray DRM, mandates a proprietary, blackbox virtual machine (with access to the client hardware's memory and the ability to run native code, including applying persistent patches to the client system, in addition to what it does internally) that executes whatever blob of BD+ code burned into the disk you try to play.
A system like that, or an AV-like 'signature' system that is designed to have one or more parts of the client DRM continually interrogating one another in novel ways to detect compromises in the authentication mechanism would be more or less indistinguishable from a binary, because it would be one.
For something like a compiler, rather than a game, or some precious 'premium content', I'd expect the former; but I've underestimated human stupidity before.
Forgive my ignorance; but how modular are memory management and task scheduling relative to what would seem (to my admittedly untrained eye) to be the two big areas where fragmentation would be a killer: kernel drivers and applications/DEs/etc. (including those of significant complexity, not just Hello World).
If Dragonfly can still use FreeBSD drivers, and run common Linux and BSD applications, they may or may not have a particularly good memory manager or task scheduler; but if somebody wants to go off and pursue his vision of memory and task management, good for him.
If it cuts compatibility with either of those, it might as well join Minix running in a few VMs of antiquarians; because you are going to have a hell of a time without a critical mass to keep your drivers and your userspace more or less current. If it doesn't, there's plenty of room for quibbling about a desktop vs. server priorities; but modularity helps you out.
Given that 'definite' (while unhelpful for sufficiently large values) represents a legal limit on the duration of detention (subject to modification only under established due process, or at least a mockery of it that preserves its forms) while 'indefinite' is usually a polite way of saying "Until we feel like it, or you die, whichever comes first", yes, yes it is.
Saunders's response was rather confusing, esp the closing "Me, I don't want to live in a world where one group of people decides when another group should die."
I guess it is not oppression as long as the choice you want is the one being mandated.
I'm not sure whether she is just unbelievably oblivious (to the fact that she is deciding when another group should die) or whether she is falling prey to 'default blindness'.
For whatever reason, it's not uncommon for people, when faced with or analyzing a decision, to treat the 'default'(the option characterized by perceived inaction, not necessarily actual inaction: 'life support' is a lot more active than 'not supporting life', indeed it's quite sophisticated and tricky in very sick patients; but it merely maintains the status quo, rather than changing it) as not being a 'choice' or a 'decision' and to characterize whatever outcome is defined as the 'non-default' as a 'choice' 'decision' or 'imposition'.
Especially in situations where there really aren't any good options, this tendency can be as powerful as it is dubiously intellectually honest(or just confused, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between mendacity and incompetence). If 'euthanize' and 'do not euthanize' are judged as equally 'chosen', they both have their major downsides, and you don't really feel good about choosing either; but nobody asked if you wanted to choose, they asked you what you wanted to choose, so what's it going to be?
If 'do not euthanize' is treated as the 'default' and 'not chosen', then (however serious the consequences), that's just the way these things go, while anybody who opts for 'euthanize' is judged not against the standard of having chosen 'don't euthanize'; but against the (fictional) standard of having 'not chosen'. And, against that standard, they will look pretty dubious. It's just that that standard is fiction; because you don't get to not choose. There may be one choice that requires you to actively request, sign on the dotted line, whatever, and one choice that you can make just by inaction and letting the system grind on its inertial way; but both are choices, and you cannot escape making them.
Again, I don't know about her specifically; but this sort of 'default blindness' seems to color a lot of analysis of 'no good options' situations, since if you think of only one of the options as a 'choice', and none of the options are good, obviously anyone who 'chooses' that option is going to look like a monster(and arguing otherwise is going to be an uphill battle, since it is the case that both options suck relative to not dealing with the situation, the issue is that 'not dealing with the situation' isn't an option, it's just a passive way of choosing one of the options that is on the table...)
Anybody who knowingly exploits 'default blindness' is the worst sort of charlatan; but it seems to creep up on people without their noticing it, as well, which is what makes it so effective. Unfortunately, it's nonsense, a cognitive error.
This is slightly orthogonal to the point; but whether or not suffocation is painless or agonizing (if relatively brief) is oddly quirky: humans are acutely sensitive to CO2 buildup, and to mechanical obstruction of breathing (either being smothered, choking on something, drowning, progressive pulmonary degenerative diseases); but the body doesn't actually detect absence of oxygen. So, if you are able to breath freely, and the gas you are breathing contains little to no CO2 (and allows the CO2 in your blood to gas-exchange in the lungs approximately normally), you shouldn't feel any sense of asphyxiation or suffocation even if there is no oxygen available (one of the dangers of inhalation anesthetics, which tend to meet these criteria and blunt you in other ways, or of liquid nitrogen, which can turn into an astonishing volume of gaseous nitrogen when it boils, just under 700L of nitrogen gas per L of liquid at common room temperature, and nearly pure nitrogen looks and feels almost exactly like ordinary air, except the 'oxygen' bit...)
Just Avoid any progressive pulmonary degeneration, though. That's a fucking brutal class of diseases.
How ironic that a doctor doesn't want "extraordinary measures". It is like a car mechanic who says "take it to the scrap heap" rather than opting to replace the engine or transmission on his '57 Chevy.
Is it ironic? I'd imagine that doctors (as a population) don't have substantially better access to healthcare than do others of equivalent socioeconomic status (they might have a few good inside insights on picking the right specialist or something; but their own medical skill doesn't allow them to substantially exceed the standard of care that would be afforded to anybody who could afford to be treated by them, and most medical care includes substantial expenses from drugs, imaging machines, hospital facilities, etc. so it isn't like a mechanic who can justify uneconomic car activity 'as a hobby' because he knows how to do it in his garage with a few bits and pieces he has laying around); but do have substantially better understanding of the capabilities, limitations, expected outcomes, and downsides of presently available medical treatment.
Doctors (and probably some less prestigious; but vocationally exposed healthcare support types) would likely be the ones who have the most direct experience of "Yes, actually that is futile; but at least it hurts a whole fucking lot." to counteract the general optimism and/or fear of death that people tend to have.
"At no point should anyone in hospice care die in pain."
It's absurd; but I've actually heard people fretting about the risk of addiction presented by suitably aggressive pain control.
Now, obviously, (for the sake of people who have painful but either temporary or chronic-but-livable-if-the-pain-is-managed), aggressive painkillers that aren't also hardcore opiates would be a nice thing to have in the pharmacy; but what kind of insane do you have to be to worry about whether somebody who is going to die, relatively soon, is going to develop a dependence on painkillers or not?
Dialing it back would probably be a good idea, but this type of rhetoric is pretty normal. Look at any news story involving rape, murder, torture, etc, and the comments section is filled with people who wish pain and death upon those responsible.
And those are just people fucking around on the internet for amusement. You don't usually go to hospices or the EOL sections of hospitals if you are looking for family members to express cool-headed opinions on matters medical...
I'd argue that you are ignoring the distinction that Adams (who I normally find surprisingly shallow) manages to keep in mind:
"I'm okay with any citizen who opposes doctor-assisted suicide on moral or practical grounds. But if you have acted on that thought, such as basing a vote on it, I would like you to die a slow, horrible death too."
He disagrees with; but holds the vitriol, for people who disagree with him; but does not hold the vitriol for people who have actually acted to impose upon others their position.
That's a fairly large and important distinction (though, if Adams were to kill somebody, he should still go down for murder). "Opposing" something is freedom of thought. Voting to make your opposition the law of the land is (in the rather tiny degree afforded to the constituents of contemporary democracies) taking up the force of state power and imposing your will on whoever you can reach. That isn't abstract opposition anymore.
How widely do the various BSD kernels actually diverge?
It is true that Linux has resisted fragmentation pretty well, with the exception of the various fossilized versions usually present at roughly 80% of the completeness that GPL compliance demands in the unending waves of shitty BSPs for assorted hardware, may they sink into hell. That is the 9th circle of hell when it comes to 'Linux fragmentation'. x86 is downright civil, by contrast, with most of the fragmentation, real and alleged, occurring above the kernel level (the various x86 distro kernels aren't pure kernel.org tree; but they tend to track it pretty closely, mostly either trailing a bit to tame its more unpredictable tendencies, or incorporating specific pet features that haven't been mainlined yet)
Do the BSDs actually differ much more substantially from one another than the various Linux distros do? To the degree that they may differ more, do they represent major duplications of effort, or are most of the areas of variation areas that are central to their missions (eg. I'd expect that OpenBSD would have an abnormally well-developed chunk of code around PF, and certain security-critical features, with comparatively vestigial and/or stock FreeBSD components elsewhere, that would seem logical in line with their objectives; but something like one of the BSDs marching off into the weeds with its own driver model would seem deeply unsustainable.
Hey, guys, isn't "prosecution" some sort of procedural step that we used to have to go through before getting to the indefinite detention and torture phase?
They didn't go overboard in computerizing the thing and incorporate ACPI, did they? That would be more than enough both to explain the mysterious power drain in sleep, and the utter inscrutability of the problem...
Hmm... this sounds like a golden opportunity for municipalities looking for new ways to be assholes toward homeless people... With the correct local legislation, it should be possible to convict them for 'vagrancy' or some such nonsense, then lease them to Ohio at a rate just lower than the fines they would otherwise be paying for those unfilled hospitality units!
I know Florida has had a law on the books like this for a while and I'm sure other states do as well. I get why they think they need it but it's a serious abuse of our individual rights as it essentially makes it so you are assumed guilty.
Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear! Umm, as long as they don't try to hide the nothing, in which case Gitmo 'em!
"The book closes with a most accurate observation: digital outcasts are not a biological model for a future we should fear, they are an inspiration for what we can all become. "
Does the book have any advice on surviving saccharine poisoning from asinine feel-good nonsense like that? Outcomes don't come much worse than being irreparably betrayed by your own biology, and the fact that you sometimes only lose much, rather than everything, isn't what I'd call 'inspiration'...
In practice, monarchies are hardly the only political systems that (explicitly or as a matter of practice) have a grooming process for future leaders. If anything, they are among the most dysfunctional because, if #1 Son is a total fuckup, you pretty much either have to kill him quietly or put up with it.
In republican Rome you had the "Cursus Honorum", an atypically formalized variant; but the general pattern shows up even in places where it is much more loosely mandated: Sometimes it starts with the right school (France's Grandes écoles, or the Ivies in the US), sometimes a certain flavor or military service is involved, sometimes it's a matter of working your way up through a series of local and state offices (state governorships, some judicial or criminal justice positions, maybe some time in state or national congress), or of carrying water and doing errands long enough for a given political party(in and out of office) to get the nod as a serious candidate.
Especially when you count the circle of handlers and technocrats who inevitably stand just behind even the most buffoonish, populist, 'man of the people', it would be absurdly false to deny that there is some fairly serious ruler-polishing going on. Not all of it for the best; but they aren't just picking them off the street...
I don't doubt that it either does or will have uses beyond graphics, I just find Intel's marketing, labelling, and packaging choices utterly inscrutable if non-graphics uses are actually ready for prime time.
The only sign, unless you delve into the part numbering alphabet soup, that you even have it, is a change in the designation of the graphics "Iris Pro 5200" vs "Iris Pro 5100", and it's only available in the highest-price laptop parts. I have no reason to suspect that it'll hurt performance on the CPU side; but if that is what "Intel touting the advantages of giant L4 cache for demanding CPU Workloads!" looks like, they certainly are low key about it.
I'll be interested to see if Xeons eventually get some, or if the stuff starts showing up on Intel NICs or anything; but the current generation just doesn't look like a very enthusiastic push beyond pure graphics uses.
At least as marketed, the main advantage is allowing the GPU some RAM that isn't DDR3 stolen from the main system a couple of hops away (which has traditionally been one of the things that make integrated graphics really suck, and cheap discrete parts that use DDR instead of GDDR, and/or an excessively narrow or slow memory bus kind of suck).
Given that even intel's marketing optimists don't say much about CPU performance (and also given that it's a mobile-only feature, you can't even buy an non-BGA part expensive enough to have it, which would be unusual if it actually improved CPU performance enough to get enthusiasts worked up; but is downright sensible if the target market is laptops sufficiently size/power constrained not to have discrete GPUs; but where pure shared memory was dragging GPU performance down.)
It is true that the government doesn't ask anybody to pay for the subsidy; but that's because an externality is a cost (benefit if it's a positive one) imposed on one or more people who aren't the actor making the decision. The state doesn't need to ask; because you already imposed the cost. What they are giving you is impunity for having done so.
The contractual arrangement is different; but the effect of being allowed, at no cost, to impose an externality on others, is a benefit not economically unlike being granted the right to commit a certain amount of theft in a given area every year, without facing legal action. The cash doesn't come directly from the state; but the equivalent amount of value (to the subsidized party) is provided by the state ignoring the interests of its citizens in favor of the subsidized party.
By definition, an externality is a cost (or benefit, if it's a positive externality) that isn't borne by the actor; but by some number of parties around them. How is having the state permit you to impose costs on other people not a subsidy? It isn't a subsidy paid in already-collected-taxpayer-dollars; but neither is a tax break, or an exemption from certain zoning laws, or any number of other inducements.
In what way is having the state waive its protection of others from the injury you do to them, for profit, not a subsidy paid in kind? Unless one wishes to deny that a negative externality exists; enjoying the privilege of having the state take no protective action is sort of like being given a license to pick pockets (which would also be a waiver of state protection for your victims, rather than a cash subsidy; but it would definitely be a consideration of value, given by the state to you).
Slashdot Mirror
If you spend your time dealing with sex offenders, and your rants are about Arial, is it possible that you might have your priorities in poor order?
What about the ones guilty of melanization with malice aforethought or aggravated negritude? We can still lock them up, right?
Well, our wiki overlords list 15 known CPU IDs; but one of them is intel, one is AMD, one is a VM, and most of the rest are the forlorn epitaphs of the fallen.
My understanding is that they never explicitly 'slowed down' AMD systems; but that the binaries produced by their compiler refused to honor the capabilities flags of non-intel processors (eg. even if an AMD CPU lists 'SSE2, SSE3' among supported instructions, it would get the fallback to non-SSE instructions, while Intel CPUs would get whatever their supported instructions lists specified). No actual 'here be lots of NOPs for no reason'; but x87 on a machine that can do recent SSE is probably enough to achieve the same effect...)
Depends on the paranoia of the DRM implementation.
A simple "We sell to corporations, so we don't expect cracks but we do expect optimists trying to install a few extra seats" licensing system really just needs to (ideally over SSL, hear that, LG?) phone home the serial number at intervals and get a 'yes/no' in response.
The more paranoid systems, designed on the assumption that the client will be under active attack, may be considerably murkier. Something like 'BD+', for instance, for Blu-ray DRM, mandates a proprietary, blackbox virtual machine (with access to the client hardware's memory and the ability to run native code, including applying persistent patches to the client system, in addition to what it does internally) that executes whatever blob of BD+ code burned into the disk you try to play.
A system like that, or an AV-like 'signature' system that is designed to have one or more parts of the client DRM continually interrogating one another in novel ways to detect compromises in the authentication mechanism would be more or less indistinguishable from a binary, because it would be one.
For something like a compiler, rather than a game, or some precious 'premium content', I'd expect the former; but I've underestimated human stupidity before.
Forgive my ignorance; but how modular are memory management and task scheduling relative to what would seem (to my admittedly untrained eye) to be the two big areas where fragmentation would be a killer: kernel drivers and applications/DEs/etc. (including those of significant complexity, not just Hello World).
If Dragonfly can still use FreeBSD drivers, and run common Linux and BSD applications, they may or may not have a particularly good memory manager or task scheduler; but if somebody wants to go off and pursue his vision of memory and task management, good for him.
If it cuts compatibility with either of those, it might as well join Minix running in a few VMs of antiquarians; because you are going to have a hell of a time without a critical mass to keep your drivers and your userspace more or less current. If it doesn't, there's plenty of room for quibbling about a desktop vs. server priorities; but modularity helps you out.
Given that 'definite' (while unhelpful for sufficiently large values) represents a legal limit on the duration of detention (subject to modification only under established due process, or at least a mockery of it that preserves its forms) while 'indefinite' is usually a polite way of saying "Until we feel like it, or you die, whichever comes first", yes, yes it is.
Saunders's response was rather confusing, esp the closing "Me, I don't want to live in a world where one group of people decides when another group should die." I guess it is not oppression as long as the choice you want is the one being mandated.
I'm not sure whether she is just unbelievably oblivious (to the fact that she is deciding when another group should die) or whether she is falling prey to 'default blindness'.
For whatever reason, it's not uncommon for people, when faced with or analyzing a decision, to treat the 'default'(the option characterized by perceived inaction, not necessarily actual inaction: 'life support' is a lot more active than 'not supporting life', indeed it's quite sophisticated and tricky in very sick patients; but it merely maintains the status quo, rather than changing it) as not being a 'choice' or a 'decision' and to characterize whatever outcome is defined as the 'non-default' as a 'choice' 'decision' or 'imposition'.
Especially in situations where there really aren't any good options, this tendency can be as powerful as it is dubiously intellectually honest(or just confused, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between mendacity and incompetence). If 'euthanize' and 'do not euthanize' are judged as equally 'chosen', they both have their major downsides, and you don't really feel good about choosing either; but nobody asked if you wanted to choose, they asked you what you wanted to choose, so what's it going to be?
If 'do not euthanize' is treated as the 'default' and 'not chosen', then (however serious the consequences), that's just the way these things go, while anybody who opts for 'euthanize' is judged not against the standard of having chosen 'don't euthanize'; but against the (fictional) standard of having 'not chosen'. And, against that standard, they will look pretty dubious. It's just that that standard is fiction; because you don't get to not choose. There may be one choice that requires you to actively request, sign on the dotted line, whatever, and one choice that you can make just by inaction and letting the system grind on its inertial way; but both are choices, and you cannot escape making them.
Again, I don't know about her specifically; but this sort of 'default blindness' seems to color a lot of analysis of 'no good options' situations, since if you think of only one of the options as a 'choice', and none of the options are good, obviously anyone who 'chooses' that option is going to look like a monster(and arguing otherwise is going to be an uphill battle, since it is the case that both options suck relative to not dealing with the situation, the issue is that 'not dealing with the situation' isn't an option, it's just a passive way of choosing one of the options that is on the table...)
Anybody who knowingly exploits 'default blindness' is the worst sort of charlatan; but it seems to creep up on people without their noticing it, as well, which is what makes it so effective. Unfortunately, it's nonsense, a cognitive error.
This is slightly orthogonal to the point; but whether or not suffocation is painless or agonizing (if relatively brief) is oddly quirky: humans are acutely sensitive to CO2 buildup, and to mechanical obstruction of breathing (either being smothered, choking on something, drowning, progressive pulmonary degenerative diseases); but the body doesn't actually detect absence of oxygen. So, if you are able to breath freely, and the gas you are breathing contains little to no CO2 (and allows the CO2 in your blood to gas-exchange in the lungs approximately normally), you shouldn't feel any sense of asphyxiation or suffocation even if there is no oxygen available (one of the dangers of inhalation anesthetics, which tend to meet these criteria and blunt you in other ways, or of liquid nitrogen, which can turn into an astonishing volume of gaseous nitrogen when it boils, just under 700L of nitrogen gas per L of liquid at common room temperature, and nearly pure nitrogen looks and feels almost exactly like ordinary air, except the 'oxygen' bit...)
Just Avoid any progressive pulmonary degeneration, though. That's a fucking brutal class of diseases.
How ironic that a doctor doesn't want "extraordinary measures". It is like a car mechanic who says "take it to the scrap heap" rather than opting to replace the engine or transmission on his '57 Chevy.
Is it ironic? I'd imagine that doctors (as a population) don't have substantially better access to healthcare than do others of equivalent socioeconomic status (they might have a few good inside insights on picking the right specialist or something; but their own medical skill doesn't allow them to substantially exceed the standard of care that would be afforded to anybody who could afford to be treated by them, and most medical care includes substantial expenses from drugs, imaging machines, hospital facilities, etc. so it isn't like a mechanic who can justify uneconomic car activity 'as a hobby' because he knows how to do it in his garage with a few bits and pieces he has laying around); but do have substantially better understanding of the capabilities, limitations, expected outcomes, and downsides of presently available medical treatment.
Doctors (and probably some less prestigious; but vocationally exposed healthcare support types) would likely be the ones who have the most direct experience of "Yes, actually that is futile; but at least it hurts a whole fucking lot." to counteract the general optimism and/or fear of death that people tend to have.
Your Intrinsic Human Dignity demands no less!
"At no point should anyone in hospice care die in pain."
It's absurd; but I've actually heard people fretting about the risk of addiction presented by suitably aggressive pain control.
Now, obviously, (for the sake of people who have painful but either temporary or chronic-but-livable-if-the-pain-is-managed), aggressive painkillers that aren't also hardcore opiates would be a nice thing to have in the pharmacy; but what kind of insane do you have to be to worry about whether somebody who is going to die, relatively soon, is going to develop a dependence on painkillers or not?
Dialing it back would probably be a good idea, but this type of rhetoric is pretty normal. Look at any news story involving rape, murder, torture, etc, and the comments section is filled with people who wish pain and death upon those responsible.
And those are just people fucking around on the internet for amusement. You don't usually go to hospices or the EOL sections of hospitals if you are looking for family members to express cool-headed opinions on matters medical...
I'd argue that you are ignoring the distinction that Adams (who I normally find surprisingly shallow) manages to keep in mind:
"I'm okay with any citizen who opposes doctor-assisted suicide on moral or practical grounds. But if you have acted on that thought, such as basing a vote on it, I would like you to die a slow, horrible death too."
He disagrees with; but holds the vitriol, for people who disagree with him; but does not hold the vitriol for people who have actually acted to impose upon others their position.
That's a fairly large and important distinction (though, if Adams were to kill somebody, he should still go down for murder). "Opposing" something is freedom of thought. Voting to make your opposition the law of the land is (in the rather tiny degree afforded to the constituents of contemporary democracies) taking up the force of state power and imposing your will on whoever you can reach. That isn't abstract opposition anymore.
How widely do the various BSD kernels actually diverge?
It is true that Linux has resisted fragmentation pretty well, with the exception of the various fossilized versions usually present at roughly 80% of the completeness that GPL compliance demands in the unending waves of shitty BSPs for assorted hardware, may they sink into hell. That is the 9th circle of hell when it comes to 'Linux fragmentation'. x86 is downright civil, by contrast, with most of the fragmentation, real and alleged, occurring above the kernel level (the various x86 distro kernels aren't pure kernel.org tree; but they tend to track it pretty closely, mostly either trailing a bit to tame its more unpredictable tendencies, or incorporating specific pet features that haven't been mainlined yet)
Do the BSDs actually differ much more substantially from one another than the various Linux distros do? To the degree that they may differ more, do they represent major duplications of effort, or are most of the areas of variation areas that are central to their missions (eg. I'd expect that OpenBSD would have an abnormally well-developed chunk of code around PF, and certain security-critical features, with comparatively vestigial and/or stock FreeBSD components elsewhere, that would seem logical in line with their objectives; but something like one of the BSDs marching off into the weeds with its own driver model would seem deeply unsustainable.
Hey, guys, isn't "prosecution" some sort of procedural step that we used to have to go through before getting to the indefinite detention and torture phase?
They didn't go overboard in computerizing the thing and incorporate ACPI, did they? That would be more than enough both to explain the mysterious power drain in sleep, and the utter inscrutability of the problem...
Hmm... this sounds like a golden opportunity for municipalities looking for new ways to be assholes toward homeless people... With the correct local legislation, it should be possible to convict them for 'vagrancy' or some such nonsense, then lease them to Ohio at a rate just lower than the fines they would otherwise be paying for those unfilled hospitality units!
I know Florida has had a law on the books like this for a while and I'm sure other states do as well. I get why they think they need it but it's a serious abuse of our individual rights as it essentially makes it so you are assumed guilty.
Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear! Umm, as long as they don't try to hide the nothing, in which case Gitmo 'em!
"The book closes with a most accurate observation: digital outcasts are not a biological model for a future we should fear, they are an inspiration for what we can all become. "
Does the book have any advice on surviving saccharine poisoning from asinine feel-good nonsense like that? Outcomes don't come much worse than being irreparably betrayed by your own biology, and the fact that you sometimes only lose much, rather than everything, isn't what I'd call 'inspiration'...
In practice, monarchies are hardly the only political systems that (explicitly or as a matter of practice) have a grooming process for future leaders. If anything, they are among the most dysfunctional because, if #1 Son is a total fuckup, you pretty much either have to kill him quietly or put up with it.
In republican Rome you had the "Cursus Honorum", an atypically formalized variant; but the general pattern shows up even in places where it is much more loosely mandated: Sometimes it starts with the right school (France's Grandes écoles, or the Ivies in the US), sometimes a certain flavor or military service is involved, sometimes it's a matter of working your way up through a series of local and state offices (state governorships, some judicial or criminal justice positions, maybe some time in state or national congress), or of carrying water and doing errands long enough for a given political party(in and out of office) to get the nod as a serious candidate.
Especially when you count the circle of handlers and technocrats who inevitably stand just behind even the most buffoonish, populist, 'man of the people', it would be absurdly false to deny that there is some fairly serious ruler-polishing going on. Not all of it for the best; but they aren't just picking them off the street...
I don't doubt that it either does or will have uses beyond graphics, I just find Intel's marketing, labelling, and packaging choices utterly inscrutable if non-graphics uses are actually ready for prime time.
The only sign, unless you delve into the part numbering alphabet soup, that you even have it, is a change in the designation of the graphics "Iris Pro 5200" vs "Iris Pro 5100", and it's only available in the highest-price laptop parts. I have no reason to suspect that it'll hurt performance on the CPU side; but if that is what "Intel touting the advantages of giant L4 cache for demanding CPU Workloads!" looks like, they certainly are low key about it.
I'll be interested to see if Xeons eventually get some, or if the stuff starts showing up on Intel NICs or anything; but the current generation just doesn't look like a very enthusiastic push beyond pure graphics uses.
At least as marketed, the main advantage is allowing the GPU some RAM that isn't DDR3 stolen from the main system a couple of hops away (which has traditionally been one of the things that make integrated graphics really suck, and cheap discrete parts that use DDR instead of GDDR, and/or an excessively narrow or slow memory bus kind of suck).
Given that even intel's marketing optimists don't say much about CPU performance (and also given that it's a mobile-only feature, you can't even buy an non-BGA part expensive enough to have it, which would be unusual if it actually improved CPU performance enough to get enthusiasts worked up; but is downright sensible if the target market is laptops sufficiently size/power constrained not to have discrete GPUs; but where pure shared memory was dragging GPU performance down.)
It is true that the government doesn't ask anybody to pay for the subsidy; but that's because an externality is a cost (benefit if it's a positive one) imposed on one or more people who aren't the actor making the decision. The state doesn't need to ask; because you already imposed the cost. What they are giving you is impunity for having done so.
The contractual arrangement is different; but the effect of being allowed, at no cost, to impose an externality on others, is a benefit not economically unlike being granted the right to commit a certain amount of theft in a given area every year, without facing legal action. The cash doesn't come directly from the state; but the equivalent amount of value (to the subsidized party) is provided by the state ignoring the interests of its citizens in favor of the subsidized party.
By definition, an externality is a cost (or benefit, if it's a positive externality) that isn't borne by the actor; but by some number of parties around them. How is having the state permit you to impose costs on other people not a subsidy? It isn't a subsidy paid in already-collected-taxpayer-dollars; but neither is a tax break, or an exemption from certain zoning laws, or any number of other inducements.
In what way is having the state waive its protection of others from the injury you do to them, for profit, not a subsidy paid in kind? Unless one wishes to deny that a negative externality exists; enjoying the privilege of having the state take no protective action is sort of like being given a license to pick pockets (which would also be a waiver of state protection for your victims, rather than a cash subsidy; but it would definitely be a consideration of value, given by the state to you).