The Russians were offering to send you around the moon for a measly $100 million in 2005, and now all these new commercial space ventures are offering the same thing for the same price.
More generally, I'm also perplexed by the social double-standard where men who have (had) multiple sex-partners (or are sexually aggressive, for lack of a better word) are "studs", but women are "sluts".
Women call women who sleep around sluts. Men just call them.
What? Did you expect Goldman Sachs to just go away after screwing the economy (housing bubble, oil futures, rigged bailout).
I expect that at some point we might learn that the government distortions of markets is not something to be done so willy-nilly, regardless of the 'good intentions' its sold to us with. That housing bubble was also built on the good government intentions to help people at the very edge of affordable home ownership. The collapse was predicted years in advance, but the only members of government that recognized and wanted to do anything about it were shut out, such as Ron Paul in 2001
Wattage limits are set according to the performance level of the card. Cards that do more computation have a higher limit.
So whats the limit? How many computations per watt? Oh, can't answer that? I know you can't.
Emissions reduction goals for cars and certain industries seem to be doing pretty well.
Emission regulation is not legislating how much fuel they can use, or how much performance they have. Its legislating how much pollution they can emit. You just duped yourself into equating one form of vehicle legislation (pollution controls) with another (fuel efficiency targets.)
Here is the problem. You do not see that with vehicles (and light bulbs, other things) a certain performance metric (acceleration, distance per tank) must be met or they are not fit for purpose.
A suitable vehicle is fit for purpose if it can accelerate from 0 to 60 MPH in under 10 seconds, and can travel for 300 miles before requiring a fill-up. Fuel targets revolve around maintaining fit for purpose using less fuel.
A suitable light bulb emits 1000 lumens, so lets legislate doing it with less power. Thats fine because 1000 lumens is a fixed target. Its fit for purpose as long as it produces 1000 lumens.
With computation, there is no 'fit for purpose.' There is no 'X gigaflops is good enough' metric in order the optimize the power requirements around. Stop being a dumbass.
The real kicker are some of the quotes in the article..
"Some possible effects, such as deep-water oxygen depletion and alteration of distant food webs, should rule out ocean manipulation"
"Possible effects" should "rule out".. very absolutist. Lets forget the fact that those "possible effects" may be imaginary, or even beneficial. Can't have any ocean manipulation, ever! its "ruled out!"
I wouldn't go into this with the assumption that everybody is a dishonest fuck when ignorance is a vastly simpler explanation.
I didn't call him a dishonest fuck because he was ignorant. I called him a dishonest fuck because there is no way that he could not have known that he was ignorant.
As someone who has done a lot of assembly and embedded work on systems going back to days of yore, I still view C as pretty low level. I can look at most lines of C, and short of abuse of macros, have a good idea what machine instructions would result.
I can look at VB6 code and have a good idea what machine instructions will result. This line of reasoning is obviously not a testament to how low level a language is. Its instead a testament to your familiarity with assembly language.
My test is far more pragmatic.. I can of course coerce the compiler (without ASM blocks) to emit some specific instructions on demand, but are some of the instructions that I cannot coerce out of the compiler generally useful? Lets consider your favorite x86 C compiler.. can you coerce it to emit rotate through carry instructions (RCL and RCR) ?
The flags register is a fundamental part of the x86 (and many other) architectures, yet the C language has no concept at all about a flags register, to the point where you cannot even coerce many useful flag related instructions. Not low level.
I'm a little confused by your plus 5 mod, I usually get flambaited into oblivion when I say so, but I was taught that C, along with Pascal, pretty much embodied 'high level programming language' and anything more abstract isnt programming, it is scripting.
I too was taught that C was a high level programming language. However, over the years, the C zealots seem to have been successful at redefining what a low level programming language is to include their pet favorite language. I was not taught that other languages were scripting. I was taught that there were assemblers, compilers, and interpreters.
C isnt exclusive to compilers. There are plenty of C interpreters.
Java's byte code, on the right architecture, is a full fledged assembly language.
JavaSCRIPT of all things, is now most often compiled before execution.
This idea that 'thats scripting' and 'thats not scripting' is distracting you from the underlying reality.
Assembler is still quite abstract. Low level programming means hexadecimal.
The differences between assembler and microcode are only in the syntactic and the utility. Assembler is abstract, but its not based on an abstract machine. C is always (so far) based on an entirely abstract machine.
A CPU can stomp a GPU in non-parallel calculations.
Your problem is that you took this little bit of information and tried to apply it on a grand scale. The fatality comes when its realized that GPU's arent trying to do non-parallel calculations efficiently, and arent used for that purpose.
GPU's are more efficient than CPU's because they do more calculations per watt. Were you thinking of a different measure of computational efficiency that amazingly doesnt relate calculations with power usage? This is the end of your ridiculously argument, am I right?
Wrong again. Physical architecture plays more of a role than power consumption.
Are you really this daft? You seem to be missing the part where market forces are defining the physical architecture, and the physical architecture defines the available power envelope. You think they don't want to do more computations per second in the phone of yours? Of course they do.. but its not available. The power is the limit.
That statement violates thermodynamics.
Hey everybody.. this guy just found a violation of thermodynamics.
The goal is not to limit your access to computation, it is to set a minimum standard for efficiency of computation.
First, what standard is that? Do you see some sort of evidence of a proposed standard of computational efficiency, because all I see is a proposed limit on wattage regardless of the amount of computation happening. Do you understand the difference?
Second, having upstanding 'goals' is meaningless. The world is an applied science, not a theoretical one.
It is exactly the same as minimum fuel efficiency requirements for cars. The goal is not to limit how far you can travel
Increased fuel efficiency in cars INCREASES how far you can travel. It is not 'limiting how far you can travel' as you somehow think. What the fuck world are you living in, imaginary land?
When you figure out how to think instead of echo, at least to the point where you know when echoing is inappropriate and wrong, just don't talk to people. Seriously. School clearly has failed you greatly.
I don't think 'energy efficiency' means what you think it means. It does not mean 'able to be supplied via a portable battery'
GPU's are already far more energy efficient than CPU's, and thats using the term correctly. GPU's that use a lot of power do so because they do an enormous amount of computation per second.
In your fantasy world, the power consumption is limited by a desired computational capacity.
In the real world, the computational capacity is limited by a desired power consumption.
There is no limit to desired computational capacity. We always benefit from more. Laws which artificially restrict power consumption beyond market forces are laws which artificially restrict your access to computation. "You are calculating way too fast! By law you must slow down!"
The way that some of you progressives get things backwards is quite amusing.
I'm not saying its a good idea to develop an elitist attitude towards the people that use them, but this explains why there's some rational basis for looking down on scripting languages. It's not that they are inherently bad or that the people who use them lack the ability to do 'real programming'. But, they are basically all about not having to know anything at all about how the other layers of abstraction work, and a consequence is they also don't give the programmer any real connection to how the hardware layer works and how you get from it to what they know.
The same argument could be used against C++, or C, and not just scripting languages like you claim. I know that most C programmers think they are doing low level programming, but they aren't.
For example, if you know how an OS is generally compiled in a language such as C or C++, then the next step is understanding that the compiler is itself running 'on a level above' assembly language. Understand that, and its a straightforward conclusion that a program can always be written in assembly that bypasses ANY controls the OS has about accessing different parts of memory, doing file copying, assigning user and admin permissions, and similar things.
Umm, no. Just no. I have a great idea.. when you don't know what you are talking about, don't fucking talk. We both know that you don't know what you are talking about, which leads to the conclusion that you like to pretend to know what you are talking about... in short, you are a dishonest fuck.
Marriage has a specific societal purpose
And what is that?
Its purpose is to create a class of people with special rights, sometimes exclusive special rights, above and beyond those afforded to single people. Homosexuals, and some heterosexual supporters, want homosexuals to be afforded the opportunity to be in on the action of being part of the elite married class.
Neither the proponents nor the opponents of gay marriage are suggesting fairness or equality. This is just two groups of people each trying to decide who gets to be treated special. There is nothing fair or equal about the outcome that either side is trying to realize.
Somehow, the act of sex became one of the defining conditions that allows you to refuse to testify against someone else, whether you get certain tax breaks and exemptions, tax free transfers of property, extending social security payments beyond death, and any number of other special rights.
Fuck both the anti-gay-marriage folks as well as the gay-marriage folks. Neither of these groups give a fuck about equality.
Are you really this stupid? I was even talking about diabetes.. and this flew right over your head, while you go on about "obese people"? Ignorant fucker you are.
On average, again just going from your own numbers, Democrats are willing to vote against their party line 10% of the time
Yes, the average amount of descent in the Democrat party is only 10%, but no it does not mean that "Democrats are willing to vote against their party 10% of the time" --
another possibility is that its always the same 10% of the party voting against the party line, people your party vilified in the media several years ago during the health-care debates. These people are the "Blue-Dog Democrats" and there are exactly 26 members of the "Blue Dog Coalition." But thats another thing that you didn't know.
Now, you sit there with your bullshit crap about 10% being higher than 2%, while ignoring the fact that 10% aint shit, because in your eyes 10% isnt evidence that they arent willing to negotiate. I see now exactly what reaction you have taken to having been proved wrong. Instead of re-evaluating your initial assumptions, you have just dived in further into irrationality in an attempt to save the assumption.
The simple fact is that the Republicans in Congress have voted as a unified bloc, over and over, ever since Obama took office, while the Democrats have not.
The actual voting record says that BOTH parties have behaved as a unified block on the exact same issues.
These are the very last 10 House votes, no cherry picking of any kind.. I just picked the last 10.
These are the actual numbers, not just some pundit bullshit. Notice that the largest deviation from "uniform block" on the Democrat side was only 1 out of 7.28. Sure, the Republicans are a bit more partisan, but the Democrat voting record hardly paints the picture that you are trying to paint.
It almost seems like you just believe whatever Democrat pundits will tell you. I check up on claims like these because I know for a fact that the media will not, while you just repeat whatever bullshit your party tells you to repeat. What does that tell you about the difference between people like me and people like you, and will this demonstration that should be wholly embarrassing for you effect your future critical thinking when listening to Democrat pundits? Will you just repeat a lie next time when you arent sure what the facts actually are? I wonder.
So...Republicans did NOT work with the Democrat Bill Clinton to pass the (now gutted by Executive Order) Welfare Reform
To be quite fair, the Republicans forced Clinton into a balanced budget by shutting down the government and threatening to shut it down again. The Democrats have been saying that Clinton was responsible for the balanced budget for so long now, that even people such as yourself that contradict that belief still give him some credit.
It all started with a document called Contract With America, and while we may no longer like Newt because of his womanizing and corruption, he still got real beneficial stuff done while Speaker of the House. Very smart man, with certainly questionable ethics. Nobody is perfect, but we benefited.
All-in-all tho, the most credit for the balanced budget should go to the tech bubble, not to Newt, the Republicans, and certainly not to Clinton.
However, Romney has no credibility on budgets... he claimed that he left MA with a $20 Billion "Rainy Day Fund" when actually that was $20 Million in a debate just before the NH Primary that was televised by CNN.
While I don't like the nanny state aspect of this law, if it mostly only applies to the obese and it sends a message that obesity is not good, I don't see the harm.
I'm sorry.. I didn't intend to kill your wife.. most people don't need insulin, so when I kept it from her, I was just trying to keep a poison out of her hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Going to the moon again will cost billions.
The Russians were offering to send you around the moon for a measly $100 million in 2005, and now all these new commercial space ventures are offering the same thing for the same price.
More generally, I'm also perplexed by the social double-standard where men who have (had) multiple sex-partners (or are sexually aggressive, for lack of a better word) are "studs", but women are "sluts".
Women call women who sleep around sluts. Men just call them.
What? Did you expect Goldman Sachs to just go away after screwing the economy (housing bubble, oil futures, rigged bailout).
I expect that at some point we might learn that the government distortions of markets is not something to be done so willy-nilly, regardless of the 'good intentions' its sold to us with. That housing bubble was also built on the good government intentions to help people at the very edge of affordable home ownership. The collapse was predicted years in advance, but the only members of government that recognized and wanted to do anything about it were shut out, such as Ron Paul in 2001
Wattage limits are set according to the performance level of the card. Cards that do more computation have a higher limit.
So whats the limit? How many computations per watt? Oh, can't answer that? I know you can't.
Emissions reduction goals for cars and certain industries seem to be doing pretty well.
Emission regulation is not legislating how much fuel they can use, or how much performance they have. Its legislating how much pollution they can emit. You just duped yourself into equating one form of vehicle legislation (pollution controls) with another (fuel efficiency targets.)
Here is the problem. You do not see that with vehicles (and light bulbs, other things) a certain performance metric (acceleration, distance per tank) must be met or they are not fit for purpose.
A suitable vehicle is fit for purpose if it can accelerate from 0 to 60 MPH in under 10 seconds, and can travel for 300 miles before requiring a fill-up. Fuel targets revolve around maintaining fit for purpose using less fuel.
A suitable light bulb emits 1000 lumens, so lets legislate doing it with less power. Thats fine because 1000 lumens is a fixed target. Its fit for purpose as long as it produces 1000 lumens.
With computation, there is no 'fit for purpose.' There is no 'X gigaflops is good enough' metric in order the optimize the power requirements around. Stop being a dumbass.
Market distortion at its finest. Before the government got involved, carbon sequestration was worth almost zero.. now its worth big bucks.
The real kicker are some of the quotes in the article..
.. very absolutist. Lets forget the fact that those "possible effects" may be imaginary, or even beneficial. Can't have any ocean manipulation, ever! its "ruled out!"
"Some possible effects, such as deep-water oxygen depletion and alteration of distant food webs, should rule out ocean manipulation"
"Possible effects" should "rule out"
If carbon credits werent involved, would the same people be in an uproar?
I wouldn't go into this with the assumption that everybody is a dishonest fuck when ignorance is a vastly simpler explanation.
I didn't call him a dishonest fuck because he was ignorant. I called him a dishonest fuck because there is no way that he could not have known that he was ignorant.
As someone who has done a lot of assembly and embedded work on systems going back to days of yore, I still view C as pretty low level. I can look at most lines of C, and short of abuse of macros, have a good idea what machine instructions would result.
I can look at VB6 code and have a good idea what machine instructions will result. This line of reasoning is obviously not a testament to how low level a language is. Its instead a testament to your familiarity with assembly language.
My test is far more pragmatic.. I can of course coerce the compiler (without ASM blocks) to emit some specific instructions on demand, but are some of the instructions that I cannot coerce out of the compiler generally useful? Lets consider your favorite x86 C compiler.. can you coerce it to emit rotate through carry instructions (RCL and RCR) ?
The flags register is a fundamental part of the x86 (and many other) architectures, yet the C language has no concept at all about a flags register, to the point where you cannot even coerce many useful flag related instructions. Not low level.
I'm a little confused by your plus 5 mod, I usually get flambaited into oblivion when I say so, but I was taught that C, along with Pascal, pretty much embodied 'high level programming language' and anything more abstract isnt programming, it is scripting.
I too was taught that C was a high level programming language. However, over the years, the C zealots seem to have been successful at redefining what a low level programming language is to include their pet favorite language. I was not taught that other languages were scripting. I was taught that there were assemblers, compilers, and interpreters.
C isnt exclusive to compilers. There are plenty of C interpreters.
Java's byte code, on the right architecture, is a full fledged assembly language.
JavaSCRIPT of all things, is now most often compiled before execution.
This idea that 'thats scripting' and 'thats not scripting' is distracting you from the underlying reality.
Assembler is still quite abstract. Low level programming means hexadecimal.
The differences between assembler and microcode are only in the syntactic and the utility. Assembler is abstract, but its not based on an abstract machine. C is always (so far) based on an entirely abstract machine.
A CPU can stomp a GPU in non-parallel calculations.
Your problem is that you took this little bit of information and tried to apply it on a grand scale. The fatality comes when its realized that GPU's arent trying to do non-parallel calculations efficiently, and arent used for that purpose.
GPU's are more efficient than CPU's because they do more calculations per watt. Were you thinking of a different measure of computational efficiency that amazingly doesnt relate calculations with power usage? This is the end of your ridiculously argument, am I right?
Wrong again. Physical architecture plays more of a role than power consumption.
Are you really this daft? You seem to be missing the part where market forces are defining the physical architecture, and the physical architecture defines the available power envelope. You think they don't want to do more computations per second in the phone of yours? Of course they do.. but its not available. The power is the limit.
That statement violates thermodynamics.
Hey everybody.. this guy just found a violation of thermodynamics.
I'm not sure why you had to put that on progressives.
I put it on the progressives because they are the primary factory of bad ideas like this one.
The regressive folk try to legislate a completely different type of stupid shit.
You blame the people responsible, not the people that arent.
The goal is not to limit your access to computation, it is to set a minimum standard for efficiency of computation.
First, what standard is that? Do you see some sort of evidence of a proposed standard of computational efficiency, because all I see is a proposed limit on wattage regardless of the amount of computation happening. Do you understand the difference?
Second, having upstanding 'goals' is meaningless. The world is an applied science, not a theoretical one.
It is exactly the same as minimum fuel efficiency requirements for cars. The goal is not to limit how far you can travel
Increased fuel efficiency in cars INCREASES how far you can travel. It is not 'limiting how far you can travel' as you somehow think. What the fuck world are you living in, imaginary land?
When you figure out how to think instead of echo, at least to the point where you know when echoing is inappropriate and wrong, just don't talk to people. Seriously. School clearly has failed you greatly.
I don't think 'energy efficiency' means what you think it means. It does not mean 'able to be supplied via a portable battery'
GPU's are already far more energy efficient than CPU's, and thats using the term correctly. GPU's that use a lot of power do so because they do an enormous amount of computation per second.
In your fantasy world, the power consumption is limited by a desired computational capacity.
In the real world, the computational capacity is limited by a desired power consumption.
There is no limit to desired computational capacity. We always benefit from more. Laws which artificially restrict power consumption beyond market forces are laws which artificially restrict your access to computation. "You are calculating way too fast! By law you must slow down!"
The way that some of you progressives get things backwards is quite amusing.
I'm not saying its a good idea to develop an elitist attitude towards the people that use them, but this explains why there's some rational basis for looking down on scripting languages. It's not that they are inherently bad or that the people who use them lack the ability to do 'real programming'. But, they are basically all about not having to know anything at all about how the other layers of abstraction work, and a consequence is they also don't give the programmer any real connection to how the hardware layer works and how you get from it to what they know.
The same argument could be used against C++, or C, and not just scripting languages like you claim. I know that most C programmers think they are doing low level programming, but they aren't.
For example, if you know how an OS is generally compiled in a language such as C or C++, then the next step is understanding that the compiler is itself running 'on a level above' assembly language. Understand that, and its a straightforward conclusion that a program can always be written in assembly that bypasses ANY controls the OS has about accessing different parts of memory, doing file copying, assigning user and admin permissions, and similar things.
Umm, no. Just no. I have a great idea.. when you don't know what you are talking about, don't fucking talk. We both know that you don't know what you are talking about, which leads to the conclusion that you like to pretend to know what you are talking about... in short, you are a dishonest fuck.
...you are talking about valuable time, but seem to be suggesting that he learn MMIX? Really?
Its called atheism, and you think you've got it bad? Try being a polytheist in a world run by monotheists.
Marriage has a specific societal purpose
And what is that?
Its purpose is to create a class of people with special rights, sometimes exclusive special rights, above and beyond those afforded to single people. Homosexuals, and some heterosexual supporters, want homosexuals to be afforded the opportunity to be in on the action of being part of the elite married class.
Neither the proponents nor the opponents of gay marriage are suggesting fairness or equality. This is just two groups of people each trying to decide who gets to be treated special. There is nothing fair or equal about the outcome that either side is trying to realize.
Somehow, the act of sex became one of the defining conditions that allows you to refuse to testify against someone else, whether you get certain tax breaks and exemptions, tax free transfers of property, extending social security payments beyond death, and any number of other special rights.
Fuck both the anti-gay-marriage folks as well as the gay-marriage folks. Neither of these groups give a fuck about equality.
Face it, Democrats vote as a block, and the numbers prove it. You didn't know this, because you don't care about facts.
Why don't Democrats care about the facts?
Obese people don't need soda to survive.
Sometimes type-1 diabetics do.
Are you really this stupid? I was even talking about diabetes.. and this flew right over your head, while you go on about "obese people"? Ignorant fucker you are.
On average, again just going from your own numbers, Democrats are willing to vote against their party line 10% of the time
Yes, the average amount of descent in the Democrat party is only 10%, but no it does not mean that "Democrats are willing to vote against their party 10% of the time" -- another possibility is that its always the same 10% of the party voting against the party line, people your party vilified in the media several years ago during the health-care debates. These people are the "Blue-Dog Democrats" and there are exactly 26 members of the "Blue Dog Coalition." But thats another thing that you didn't know.
Now, you sit there with your bullshit crap about 10% being higher than 2%, while ignoring the fact that 10% aint shit, because in your eyes 10% isnt evidence that they arent willing to negotiate. I see now exactly what reaction you have taken to having been proved wrong. Instead of re-evaluating your initial assumptions, you have just dived in further into irrationality in an attempt to save the assumption.
The simple fact is that the Republicans in Congress have voted as a unified bloc, over and over, ever since Obama took office, while the Democrats have not.
The actual voting record says that BOTH parties have behaved as a unified block on the exact same issues.
These are the very last 10 House votes, no cherry picking of any kind.. I just picked the last 10.
Roll Call 603 Republicans 214-13, Democrats 19-162
Roll Call 602 Republicans 0-227, Democrats 173-6
Roll Call 601 Republicans 215-10, Democrats 11-171
Roll Call 600 Republicans 218-11, Democrats 10-172
Roll Call 599 Republicans 7-222, Democrats 161-21
Roll Call 598 Republicans 3-225, Democrats 157-25
Roll Call 597 Republicans 224-4, Democrats 23-159
Roll Call 596 Republicans 2-227, Democrats 162-20
Roll Call 595 Republicans 0-228, Democrats 164-18
Roll Call 594 Republicans 222-6, Democrats 20-162
These are the actual numbers, not just some pundit bullshit. Notice that the largest deviation from "uniform block" on the Democrat side was only 1 out of 7.28. Sure, the Republicans are a bit more partisan, but the Democrat voting record hardly paints the picture that you are trying to paint.
It almost seems like you just believe whatever Democrat pundits will tell you. I check up on claims like these because I know for a fact that the media will not, while you just repeat whatever bullshit your party tells you to repeat. What does that tell you about the difference between people like me and people like you, and will this demonstration that should be wholly embarrassing for you effect your future critical thinking when listening to Democrat pundits? Will you just repeat a lie next time when you arent sure what the facts actually are? I wonder.
So...Republicans did NOT work with the Democrat Bill Clinton to pass the (now gutted by Executive Order) Welfare Reform
To be quite fair, the Republicans forced Clinton into a balanced budget by shutting down the government and threatening to shut it down again. The Democrats have been saying that Clinton was responsible for the balanced budget for so long now, that even people such as yourself that contradict that belief still give him some credit.
It all started with a document called Contract With America, and while we may no longer like Newt because of his womanizing and corruption, he still got real beneficial stuff done while Speaker of the House. Very smart man, with certainly questionable ethics. Nobody is perfect, but we benefited.
All-in-all tho, the most credit for the balanced budget should go to the tech bubble, not to Newt, the Republicans, and certainly not to Clinton.
However, Romney has no credibility on budgets... he claimed that he left MA with a $20 Billion "Rainy Day Fund" when actually that was $20 Million in a debate just before the NH Primary that was televised by CNN.
If this is the game you want to play, then we can go all day.
While I don't like the nanny state aspect of this law, if it mostly only applies to the obese and it sends a message that obesity is not good, I don't see the harm.
I'm sorry.. I didn't intend to kill your wife.. most people don't need insulin, so when I kept it from her, I was just trying to keep a poison out of her hands.