You do realize that in the past couple decades, standards for public school teachers have been increased substantially (at least in most U.S. states). In order to teach in New York City for instance, you need a bachelor's degree in a related subject, plus a masters in teaching. So the education level of the teachers (in their subject area) would, at the least, match that of a "college educated parent." Add to that the fact that the teacher is continuously working in the relevant field, while the parent likely isn't. I've only been out of college for a few years, and I retain random trivia far better than average, but I highly doubt I could come close to matching your average high school chemistry/bio/physics teacher. I might exceed the math teachers in some fields, but I've forgotten most of my trig and even some geometry.
It's more expensive than the Segway (which runs $3-5K last I checked), has 1/4 the range, and while it weighs less, this only partially offsets the more limited movement (it can't rise over a curb without aid, a Segway can). Unless your balance is atrocious, you can use a Segway (my 80 year old grandfather bought one as his knees declined). Why would I buy this?
Humans already develop this "ability" occasionally. There are two forms (that I'm aware of), one that can't sense pain, and the other that can't sense pain or heat. Being born with either usually means a short life. If I bite my tongue, I stop before I do serious damage. If I touch a hot stove, I pull back quickly. These reactions aren't automatic for CIPA sufferers (CIP sufferers might react to the stove). When I get a splinter in my foot, I remove it. If I get an infected ingrown nail or hair, I apply anti-biotics to relieve it. If I fracture a bone, I know I need to go to the doctor. Again, CIP/CIPA sufferers, lacking pain, don't know there's a problem. If they don't see it themselves, or suffer non-pain related symptoms, they'd die of infections without ever knowing the cause. For CIPA sufferers, their body frequently can't regulate it's own temperature; a simple cold could fry their brain.
While self-checks and careful behavior might seem relatively simple for an adult, you're born with this, and it's really hard to explain to a child who can't feel pain why they *shouldn't* put their hands on a stove, stick needles in the hand, etc.
Even if you managed to introduce it later in life (via retrovirus, drugs, or the like), lacking pain only makes you an awesome soldier for one battle. If you get shot five times and don't realize it, you'll function more effectively than someone who feels pain, but you'll still bleed out and die (and unlike the soldier who feels pain, you may not know you need help).
Depends on the cattle. My uncle was a dairy farmer, and while his cows had stalls of cow size, they were open on one side, so the cows could go in and out as they pleased. While they looked to small to turn around in (and most cows would just back in or back out), I've seen quite a few turn around inside the stall, if a tad awkwardly. When they weren't being milked, they were allowed to roam around a field outside the barn.
I don't know how the beef industry works, but at least for small scale family dairy farmers (my uncle topped out at a few hundred cows, with a total number of workers equal to himself plus a niece or nephew or two), the cows have enough freedom to injure themselves, and this modification would be a really bad idea.
That's the solution to the heat island effect. The heat island effect is a separate issue from long term climate change (there is some overlap; lower heat in cities means less use of inefficient AC).
Small items (like these mirrors) don't survive reentry. Space dust is falling on us all the time (to the tune of 30K-40K tons per year). A little extra silica in the mix would be barely noticeable, assuming they didn't all come crashing down at once.
Now if you want to argue about the increased amount of space junk in desirable orbits, go ahead, but the risk to people on the ground is negligible (unless a launch goes awry; even then it's a localized risk).
To be fair, the reasons for not recognizing the territory are ostensibly noble; they theoretically believe that the continent should be treated as a shared resource with limited exploitation (primarily for scientific purposes). Granted, both Russia and the US "reserve the right" to make territorial claims in the future, but to do so they'd have to withdraw from the Antarctic Treaty (which explicitly forbids new territorial claims, and explicitly fails to either recognize or dispute pre-existing claims). I can't find any evidence that China has made similar statements (they are also a signatory on the treaty, and therefore can't make claims), but I'm sure if the treaty were broken they would try and get in on the action.
RTFA. That $117,000 figure includes the whole rack, not just the raw HDs (which come to $81,000 according to their chart). They priced out everything in what they refer to as a "storage pod" in detail, so you can see for yourself. My primary concern is the fact that the boot disk (priced separately) doesn't appear to have a drop in back up. If one of the 45 storage HDs goes down, you can replace it (presumably it supports hot swapping), but if the boot drive goes you've got downtime.
You misread. It's $7,867 per 67 terabytes. So at the hard disk standard for a petabyte (base 10, not base 2), 1000 TB == 1 PB:
(1000 TB / 67 TB) * $7,867 = $117417.91
For the two systems mentioned (Xbox 360 and PS3), they're both using variants on the PowerPC architecture. While I can't be sure, I believe both chips use IEEE floating point numbers (outside of Crays, most chips nowadays at least have the option of using IEEE floating point), so the errors should be identical. I think the bigger problem is that the networking protocol for these games is usually licensed from the console maker, using the console maker's servers for matchmaking and the like, and it's considered to be less of a hassle to program against two different APIs than it is to write a single network protocol from scratch and maintain the servers required to support it.
I stand corrected. I was misinformed, and passed it on without checking it. Thanks for the correction.
That said, it appears clear that the conflict can, in a purely logical sense, only be resolved the way the judge ruled. Fair Use created a general right, but the DMCA cut off most avenues for exercising that right. Since the DMCA makes no exceptions for fair use, an established law at the time, she must work under the assumption that no exceptions are allowed.
You can't really fault the judge for this. It's bad law, but explicit legislation trumps common law. Fair use is common law, created by the judiciary. The DMCA is legislative, passed by Congress and signed by the President. Common law is law of the gaps; the DMCA closed most of the gap, and the judge has no choice but to abide by it. If the case ever makes it to the Supreme Court, they have some leeway in striking or reinterpreting parts of the law, but a low level judge has to follow precedent and adhere closely to the letter of the law.
Yeah, but they wanted a test case against a private company with real money and little public support. As soon as a Linux distributor has enough money to be worth the bother, expect to see either:
libcss2 to be removed from their repositories
The company to reincorporate overseas to avoid DMCA (only possible for smaller companies)
Lawsuits
Of course, it doesn't help that RealDVD is more accessible to consumers, and takes the easy "wizard" approach of doing a single task well. libcss is not a special purpose ripping program, even if it enables that sort of functionality. RealDVD is.
Actually, we don't. Since Intelligent Design merely posits that "evolution" is really just the result of tinkering by a deity (as opposed to pure Creationism which is problematic for the reasons you state), it's rather hard to disprove. It fails Occam's Razor (requiring countless interventions by a single entity to remain consistent), but it's not falsifiable in any way. Which is why it's not science. By trying to claim it's falsifiable, and failing to provide falsifying evidence, you actually lend it (some) credence, albeit undeserved.
Vendor liability for software is a good idea only in *very* limited fields, with *very* strict parameters. If the problem domain allows for exhaustive testing (every possible input, every possible code path), then this sort of liability is reasonable. Embedded control software for vehicles is a good candidate. But to apply the law to general purpose computers like we would for mechanical devices is absurd. They aren't a monoculture; they can run anything, which means anything can break them. Every general purpose OS out there suffers from the occasional crash (Windows, OSX and *NIX included), and the very nature of the machine means that you can't always determine the cause. If one kernel level process writes into the memory space of another, overwriting pointers and code, the eventual crash will appear to be the fault of the innocent process (after all, it tried to dereference null). The forensics required to assign blame unquestionably would cost more than the lawyers would.
Much like patent law, this is one field where hardware can go that software should not.
The question is why? Ideology should not make this determination. Assuming the current trajectories continue (or close enough to what we've seen so far), by the time the CPU can do what we want, the GPU will still be able to do it faster and with less waste. Energy costs aren't likely to drop in the next 50 years, and the GPU applications (e.g. 3D modelling/lighting) that we've done with a CPU based approach (ray tracing) usually require 10x the hardware. If one GPU (drawing, for example 200 watts) can do the work of 10 CPUs (each drawing 50 watts), you need to give a compelling, non-ideological reason for why the CPU is the better option. As the increasing number of GPGPU accelerated apps has shown, there are a lot of things that are better done with semi-specialized hardware. No, we don't need a special chip for every complex task, but at the same time it's ludicrous to ignore the advantages of specialization when you have so many tasks that benefit from it.
I wouldn't be so sure on nVidia. They appear to think CUDA is a better system, and from what I've heard and seen, they're right. OpenCL appears to be more limited in scope and harder to optimize, partially due to OpenCL being written as a spec for abstract, heterogeneous hardware, while CUDA was written with the 8000+ series nVidia cards in mind. They'll probably eventually implement OpenCL, but I suspect it will take a back seat to CUDA.
OpenCL has advantages in larger systems (e.g. supercomputers built from large numbers of commodity processors), but on a single machine, the heterogeneous support gains you little; CUDA's focus on the GPU often means the GPU does more work than an OpenCL program using both GPU and one or two CPU cores.
Some of the cores are specialized in the same way that current GPUs are: You may lose some performance due to memory bottlenecks, but you'll still have the specialized circuitry for doing quick vectored floating point math.
You throw out the current graphics model used in 99% of 3D applications, replacing it with ray tracing, and lose 90% of your performance in exchange for mostly unnoticeable improvements in the quality of the generated graphics.
Of course, you're reading this the wrong way. You think they are trying to replace GPUs with CPUs. They're really just trying to deal with the fact that some systems lack GPUs, and many systems with GPUs will have underutilized CPUs. GPGPU applications are using the specialized GPU hardware for a reason; falling back to CPU is for improved compatibility with low end systems and full hardware utilization on high end ones; it's not intended to get rid of the GPU (defined as any chip specializing in minimal branching, high throughput, vectorized floating point math).
Take a look at Folding@Home sometime. They have a CPU and GPU client. They are both trying to solve protein folding problems. The CPU, being good at integer math, looks at the problem as a discrete particle simulation. The GPU, being good at bursts of floating point math, models the system in a continuous way (see their site for a complete explanation). While the GPU results have a small margin for error (due to FP rounding), they're still one of the best clients from the perspective of advancing the field, because on similar value hardware (say, an recent Core2Duo vs. a 8800GTX) they solve similar problems 5-10x faster. If they could run the GPU specific code on a CPU it wouldn't do them any good; since the CPU is bad at that type of problem, they'd end up doing worse than running the correct client on the CPU. The CPU clients can double check the GPU results if needed, but the GPU is by far the fastest at sorting plausible from implausible results.
It's worse than that. The term for large numbers above 999,999,999 differs depending on which scale you've learned. Using a thousand trillion is a term that is only correct in the long scale, but I'm fairly sure they meant the short scale trillion times 1000 (aka quadrillion), as long scale thousand trillion is equivalent to a sextillion in the short scale, and we're not that complex.
That makes no sense whatsoever. If you believe that an organization has a political bias, then all related organizations have a bias too? You don't even know what paper/show/fortnightly dispatch he enjoys, so how precisely do you know it is biased?
Fox News is biased. Period. But most of Murdoch's news organizations are biased in favor of sensationalism first, ideology second. There are loons on both sides of the aisle; Fox News decided to play to the right wing loons, but that's not the goal. The goal is viewers, and they got their market share locked down. In many of his other news organizations, ideology is a tertiary concern, because it doesn't work as well with the target audience as tabloid gossip.
Interesting. Of course, it was only published in 2005. If they'd written this up 20 years ago, it might have been more helpful. As is, the various CSV writers have been around so long that a lot of non-conformant CSV is out there. So the parsers remain fairly complex, to account for the previously undefined behaviors. And of course, that standard is for a MIME type; non-web focused CSV generators will still ignore parts of it.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that in the past couple decades, standards for public school teachers have been increased substantially (at least in most U.S. states). In order to teach in New York City for instance, you need a bachelor's degree in a related subject, plus a masters in teaching. So the education level of the teachers (in their subject area) would, at the least, match that of a "college educated parent." Add to that the fact that the teacher is continuously working in the relevant field, while the parent likely isn't. I've only been out of college for a few years, and I retain random trivia far better than average, but I highly doubt I could come close to matching your average high school chemistry/bio/physics teacher. I might exceed the math teachers in some fields, but I've forgotten most of my trig and even some geometry.
Slight correction: Not all Segways get four times the range, but all of them seem to get at least 50% more than this product, usually twice the range.
It's more expensive than the Segway (which runs $3-5K last I checked), has 1/4 the range, and while it weighs less, this only partially offsets the more limited movement (it can't rise over a curb without aid, a Segway can). Unless your balance is atrocious, you can use a Segway (my 80 year old grandfather bought one as his knees declined). Why would I buy this?
Humans already develop this "ability" occasionally. There are two forms (that I'm aware of), one that can't sense pain, and the other that can't sense pain or heat. Being born with either usually means a short life. If I bite my tongue, I stop before I do serious damage. If I touch a hot stove, I pull back quickly. These reactions aren't automatic for CIPA sufferers (CIP sufferers might react to the stove). When I get a splinter in my foot, I remove it. If I get an infected ingrown nail or hair, I apply anti-biotics to relieve it. If I fracture a bone, I know I need to go to the doctor. Again, CIP/CIPA sufferers, lacking pain, don't know there's a problem. If they don't see it themselves, or suffer non-pain related symptoms, they'd die of infections without ever knowing the cause. For CIPA sufferers, their body frequently can't regulate it's own temperature; a simple cold could fry their brain.
While self-checks and careful behavior might seem relatively simple for an adult, you're born with this, and it's really hard to explain to a child who can't feel pain why they *shouldn't* put their hands on a stove, stick needles in the hand, etc.
Even if you managed to introduce it later in life (via retrovirus, drugs, or the like), lacking pain only makes you an awesome soldier for one battle. If you get shot five times and don't realize it, you'll function more effectively than someone who feels pain, but you'll still bleed out and die (and unlike the soldier who feels pain, you may not know you need help).
Depends on the cattle. My uncle was a dairy farmer, and while his cows had stalls of cow size, they were open on one side, so the cows could go in and out as they pleased. While they looked to small to turn around in (and most cows would just back in or back out), I've seen quite a few turn around inside the stall, if a tad awkwardly. When they weren't being milked, they were allowed to roam around a field outside the barn.
I don't know how the beef industry works, but at least for small scale family dairy farmers (my uncle topped out at a few hundred cows, with a total number of workers equal to himself plus a niece or nephew or two), the cows have enough freedom to injure themselves, and this modification would be a really bad idea.
That's the solution to the heat island effect. The heat island effect is a separate issue from long term climate change (there is some overlap; lower heat in cities means less use of inefficient AC).
Small items (like these mirrors) don't survive reentry. Space dust is falling on us all the time (to the tune of 30K-40K tons per year). A little extra silica in the mix would be barely noticeable, assuming they didn't all come crashing down at once.
Now if you want to argue about the increased amount of space junk in desirable orbits, go ahead, but the risk to people on the ground is negligible (unless a launch goes awry; even then it's a localized risk).
To be fair, the reasons for not recognizing the territory are ostensibly noble; they theoretically believe that the continent should be treated as a shared resource with limited exploitation (primarily for scientific purposes). Granted, both Russia and the US "reserve the right" to make territorial claims in the future, but to do so they'd have to withdraw from the Antarctic Treaty (which explicitly forbids new territorial claims, and explicitly fails to either recognize or dispute pre-existing claims). I can't find any evidence that China has made similar statements (they are also a signatory on the treaty, and therefore can't make claims), but I'm sure if the treaty were broken they would try and get in on the action.
RTFA. That $117,000 figure includes the whole rack, not just the raw HDs (which come to $81,000 according to their chart). They priced out everything in what they refer to as a "storage pod" in detail, so you can see for yourself. My primary concern is the fact that the boot disk (priced separately) doesn't appear to have a drop in back up. If one of the 45 storage HDs goes down, you can replace it (presumably it supports hot swapping), but if the boot drive goes you've got downtime.
But what about storing the new episodes in HD? Clearly a masterpiece of TV such as this should not be stored at mere SD quality!
You misread. It's $7,867 per 67 terabytes. So at the hard disk standard for a petabyte (base 10, not base 2), 1000 TB == 1 PB:
(1000 TB / 67 TB) * $7,867 = $117417.91
For the two systems mentioned (Xbox 360 and PS3), they're both using variants on the PowerPC architecture. While I can't be sure, I believe both chips use IEEE floating point numbers (outside of Crays, most chips nowadays at least have the option of using IEEE floating point), so the errors should be identical. I think the bigger problem is that the networking protocol for these games is usually licensed from the console maker, using the console maker's servers for matchmaking and the like, and it's considered to be less of a hassle to program against two different APIs than it is to write a single network protocol from scratch and maintain the servers required to support it.
I stand corrected. I was misinformed, and passed it on without checking it. Thanks for the correction.
That said, it appears clear that the conflict can, in a purely logical sense, only be resolved the way the judge ruled. Fair Use created a general right, but the DMCA cut off most avenues for exercising that right. Since the DMCA makes no exceptions for fair use, an established law at the time, she must work under the assumption that no exceptions are allowed.
You can't really fault the judge for this. It's bad law, but explicit legislation trumps common law. Fair use is common law, created by the judiciary. The DMCA is legislative, passed by Congress and signed by the President. Common law is law of the gaps; the DMCA closed most of the gap, and the judge has no choice but to abide by it. If the case ever makes it to the Supreme Court, they have some leeway in striking or reinterpreting parts of the law, but a low level judge has to follow precedent and adhere closely to the letter of the law.
Of course, it doesn't help that RealDVD is more accessible to consumers, and takes the easy "wizard" approach of doing a single task well. libcss is not a special purpose ripping program, even if it enables that sort of functionality. RealDVD is.
Actually, we don't. Since Intelligent Design merely posits that "evolution" is really just the result of tinkering by a deity (as opposed to pure Creationism which is problematic for the reasons you state), it's rather hard to disprove. It fails Occam's Razor (requiring countless interventions by a single entity to remain consistent), but it's not falsifiable in any way. Which is why it's not science. By trying to claim it's falsifiable, and failing to provide falsifying evidence, you actually lend it (some) credence, albeit undeserved.
Vendor liability for software is a good idea only in *very* limited fields, with *very* strict parameters. If the problem domain allows for exhaustive testing (every possible input, every possible code path), then this sort of liability is reasonable. Embedded control software for vehicles is a good candidate. But to apply the law to general purpose computers like we would for mechanical devices is absurd. They aren't a monoculture; they can run anything, which means anything can break them. Every general purpose OS out there suffers from the occasional crash (Windows, OSX and *NIX included), and the very nature of the machine means that you can't always determine the cause. If one kernel level process writes into the memory space of another, overwriting pointers and code, the eventual crash will appear to be the fault of the innocent process (after all, it tried to dereference null). The forensics required to assign blame unquestionably would cost more than the lawyers would.
Much like patent law, this is one field where hardware can go that software should not.
The question is why? Ideology should not make this determination. Assuming the current trajectories continue (or close enough to what we've seen so far), by the time the CPU can do what we want, the GPU will still be able to do it faster and with less waste. Energy costs aren't likely to drop in the next 50 years, and the GPU applications (e.g. 3D modelling/lighting) that we've done with a CPU based approach (ray tracing) usually require 10x the hardware. If one GPU (drawing, for example 200 watts) can do the work of 10 CPUs (each drawing 50 watts), you need to give a compelling, non-ideological reason for why the CPU is the better option. As the increasing number of GPGPU accelerated apps has shown, there are a lot of things that are better done with semi-specialized hardware. No, we don't need a special chip for every complex task, but at the same time it's ludicrous to ignore the advantages of specialization when you have so many tasks that benefit from it.
I wouldn't be so sure on nVidia. They appear to think CUDA is a better system, and from what I've heard and seen, they're right. OpenCL appears to be more limited in scope and harder to optimize, partially due to OpenCL being written as a spec for abstract, heterogeneous hardware, while CUDA was written with the 8000+ series nVidia cards in mind. They'll probably eventually implement OpenCL, but I suspect it will take a back seat to CUDA.
OpenCL has advantages in larger systems (e.g. supercomputers built from large numbers of commodity processors), but on a single machine, the heterogeneous support gains you little; CUDA's focus on the GPU often means the GPU does more work than an OpenCL program using both GPU and one or two CPU cores.
There's only two ways to do that:
Of course, you're reading this the wrong way. You think they are trying to replace GPUs with CPUs. They're really just trying to deal with the fact that some systems lack GPUs, and many systems with GPUs will have underutilized CPUs. GPGPU applications are using the specialized GPU hardware for a reason; falling back to CPU is for improved compatibility with low end systems and full hardware utilization on high end ones; it's not intended to get rid of the GPU (defined as any chip specializing in minimal branching, high throughput, vectorized floating point math).
Take a look at Folding@Home sometime. They have a CPU and GPU client. They are both trying to solve protein folding problems. The CPU, being good at integer math, looks at the problem as a discrete particle simulation. The GPU, being good at bursts of floating point math, models the system in a continuous way (see their site for a complete explanation). While the GPU results have a small margin for error (due to FP rounding), they're still one of the best clients from the perspective of advancing the field, because on similar value hardware (say, an recent Core2Duo vs. a 8800GTX) they solve similar problems 5-10x faster. If they could run the GPU specific code on a CPU it wouldn't do them any good; since the CPU is bad at that type of problem, they'd end up doing worse than running the correct client on the CPU. The CPU clients can double check the GPU results if needed, but the GPU is by far the fastest at sorting plausible from implausible results.
It's worse than that. The term for large numbers above 999,999,999 differs depending on which scale you've learned. Using a thousand trillion is a term that is only correct in the long scale, but I'm fairly sure they meant the short scale trillion times 1000 (aka quadrillion), as long scale thousand trillion is equivalent to a sextillion in the short scale, and we're not that complex.
That makes no sense whatsoever. If you believe that an organization has a political bias, then all related organizations have a bias too? You don't even know what paper/show/fortnightly dispatch he enjoys, so how precisely do you know it is biased?
Fox News is biased. Period. But most of Murdoch's news organizations are biased in favor of sensationalism first, ideology second. There are loons on both sides of the aisle; Fox News decided to play to the right wing loons, but that's not the goal. The goal is viewers, and they got their market share locked down. In many of his other news organizations, ideology is a tertiary concern, because it doesn't work as well with the target audience as tabloid gossip.
Of course, Rather got fired for rushing ahead with one bogus story. If only the media would apply that rule universally...
Yeah. I meant to insert a question mark before the close parentheses because I wasn't sure.
Interesting. Of course, it was only published in 2005. If they'd written this up 20 years ago, it might have been more helpful. As is, the various CSV writers have been around so long that a lot of non-conformant CSV is out there. So the parsers remain fairly complex, to account for the previously undefined behaviors. And of course, that standard is for a MIME type; non-web focused CSV generators will still ignore parts of it.