Of course, it's perfectly possible for policies to reduce piracy. But the most effective way of doing that would be to make legal methods to obtain media more convenient than illegal methods (e.g. streaming services).
But merely sending notices is far more likely to convince people they need to hide their access than it is to convince them to stop pirating altogether. When it's difficult or ridiculously expensive to get media legally, people aren't going to get it legally.
I still don't think it can compare to the state in a great many minimum wage and near minimum wage jobs.
Tech may, in some situations, be worse than other similarly-paying jobs, but I don't think it's possible to really compare to low-wage jobs in terms of stress due to the people you have to deal with.
Any large-scale computing implementation must be able to deal with nodes going offline. For example, if typically you have one hour of downtime per machine per year, and are running a process on 10,000 nodes, then at any given time you have about a 64% chance of having at least one node down. If you have to restart the process on all 10,000 nodes, that's going to be a huge amount of wasted computing power.
Less responsibility? Maybe. But you're more likely to have asshole bosses or customers, the work is far more repetitive, it's far more likely to be physically demanding (which may cause medical problems later in life), and lower wages mean less financial stability. There's also the issue that in most part time jobs, hours are not guaranteed (so you may have some months with far fewer hours than other months), and you may be asked to come in any time and be expected to do so or be fired.
Increasing the minimum wage helps with many of these issues (a lot of the reason why conditions are so terrible for minimum-wage workers is they have no power to fight unfair and unlawful treatment, but an increase in wages would give them a better chance to do that). But I can guarantee you that if you tried a minimum wage job for a few months, you'd want to go running back to the software job.
Also, you should probably look for a better employer. Good employers know that pushing employees to work 12-hour days leads to burnout and crap productivity, as well as high turnover rates. My employer (in software) actively urges me to make sure I don't spend too much time at work.
Nope. The Fed sets the average inflation level by managing the money supply. So an increase in the minimum wage will make some prices increase, but other prices will be forced to decrease. Overall inflation will be unaffected.
Lots and lots of classism is born from racism. People around the US complain about "the poors" when their actions indicate that their real fear is black people, as they consider the two groups to be one and the same thing.
Absentee voting can also be important for people with terrible jobs that won't let them take the day off (or even a few hours while the polling places are open). Also bear in mind that in many areas, polling places are ridiculously underfunded such that it may require waiting in line most of the day to finally vote.
Restrictions to absentee voting only make sense if we have strictly-enforced rules for availability of polling places.
a) Each CPU in these clusters typically has anywhere from 4-8 cores, and may support two or more times as many threads.
b) It's far, far more difficult to make full use of GPU hardware than CPU hardware. The best application for stressing GPU hardware is 3D graphics rendering, and even there if you run through the numbers, you find that it's rare that they really push half of their theoretical processing limit. General processing is significantly less efficient on GPU hardware, in particular because it's difficult to come up with computing problems that work well with the GPU's extremely limited I/O compared to their processing power. You need to do a lot of processing on each bit of data read or written to not be limited by either PCI Express bandwidth or video RAM bandwidth. Typical best-case real world scenarios for GPGPU programming put GPU's at closer to 10x or so the performance of CPU's, not 1000x as just looking at the number of shader cores vs. CPU cores might suggest. So they're quite powerful, but not overwhelmingly so. Whether or not they're worth it is highly dependent upon the application.
c) You can bet that companies like Microsoft and Google have a significant number of GPU's in use for specialized tasks.
Sure, but that's why Microsoft and Google will rapidly catch up if the numbers are real. Both employ lots of extremely talented and creative people exactly for solving problems like this, and the methods they use have been published.
Anyway, if they did really manage to produce some better algorithms, that's impressive and important work. But bragging about such a tiny computer seems seriously out of place.
The computer has 72 processors and 144 GPU's. That's tiny. Seriously tiny. Sure, GPU's are powerful, especially for image processing. But the larger computers these days are running tens to hundreds of thousands of processors in parallel.
For example, assuming each shelf has 2 processors and 4 GPU's, and they can fit 12 shelves into a single rack, that's a total of 2 racks. Compare that to this image of one of Google's datacenters, where you can see dozens of racks, each containing 14 shelves by my count. And that's just one row. These are gigantic warehouses, with row upon row of racks.
The level of processing power claimed here is closer to the level of a university processing cluster. The larger scientific clusters can be ten or a hundred times larger, and it's not clear just how big private datacenters are.
So overall I'm very, very skeptical. There's a very good chance that they fudged the data somehow to make theirs appear better. But if it is better, well, there's no reason why Google and Microsoft couldn't easily outcompete them in short order.
I'm skeptical that the research angle is that big of a deal. The focus on research harms adjunct faculty greatly and student education slightly, but I don't think it really has a negative impact on tuition cost.
The university provides an estimate of total living expenses. Tuition itself increased from something in the range of $6,000 to about $15,000. Obviously personal situations can vary, and if your parents live close to the university it can be a lot cheaper, but local living costs are usually a large part of the cost of higher education. This doesn't include books or medical insurance.
Fortunately, I don't think so. Religious people got a lot louder, and became stronger in politics (this article, for example, claims that politics became much more Christianity-infused after 9/11). But in terms of population number I don't think they ever increased by a measurable amount.
If you can find a source that proves me wrong, I'd be interested to read it, though.
It's probably more down to urbanization. The more people live in denser areas, the more they're exposed to other ways of looking at the world. Religion in general is quite hard to support once you've seen other perspectives.
Religion has been on a slow decline in the US for decades now. It was probably on the rise back in the 50's or somewhere thereabouts, but not recently.
Fortunately this isn't true everywhere. There's pretty wide disparity in such sentiments, with many urban areas being much less concerned.
They aren't very numerous, but there are a number of irreligious people holding US office at present (e.g. Bernie Sanders, who is culturally Jewish but non-practicing).
These laws are pretty flagrantly unconstitutional, but the states may try to enforce them regardless. Fortunately, elected officials are generally pretty powerful people who could afford to fight the court case, so it'd be pretty ridiculous for the states to actually try to enforce these laws.
But it's still disgusting that these states still have these laws on the books.
The expected total expenditures for a student at my university when I graduated back in 2003 were in the range of $19,000 per year in today's dollars. Estimated total costs for students at the same university in the upcoming school year are about $35,000.
There really is no comparison here. School is vastly more expensive today than it was even 15 years ago. And that is tremendously unfair to current students.
Also, the loan program helps add to the problem. If it weren't for the federal loan program, it would be far, far harder for schools to charge students the tuition they charge, so either they would lower their tuition, educate fewer students, or manage to lobby their states to invest more in the public university system. Loans aren't the sole cause, but they're definitely a contributing factor of high tuition.
I think you also missed that states around the US have been reducing their support for universities. This was especially true after the depression started in 2008.
As for research, the private sector has been smaller than the public sector in research funding since the 60's, and federal research funding hasn't really changed as a portion of total research funding, so I really don't think that makes sense as a cause, except in that the government has been reducing its research spending.
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Rand Paul did something I agree with?
Ugh. What is this unclean feeling? Can't we have better allies than the mendaciously dishonest Rand Paul?
Yup.
Of course, it's perfectly possible for policies to reduce piracy. But the most effective way of doing that would be to make legal methods to obtain media more convenient than illegal methods (e.g. streaming services).
But merely sending notices is far more likely to convince people they need to hide their access than it is to convince them to stop pirating altogether. When it's difficult or ridiculously expensive to get media legally, people aren't going to get it legally.
Good VPN services don't keep logs, so they can never reveal to a government which user had which external connection.
I still don't think it can compare to the state in a great many minimum wage and near minimum wage jobs.
Tech may, in some situations, be worse than other similarly-paying jobs, but I don't think it's possible to really compare to low-wage jobs in terms of stress due to the people you have to deal with.
Small comment on that last point:
Any large-scale computing implementation must be able to deal with nodes going offline. For example, if typically you have one hour of downtime per machine per year, and are running a process on 10,000 nodes, then at any given time you have about a 64% chance of having at least one node down. If you have to restart the process on all 10,000 nodes, that's going to be a huge amount of wasted computing power.
Less responsibility? Maybe. But you're more likely to have asshole bosses or customers, the work is far more repetitive, it's far more likely to be physically demanding (which may cause medical problems later in life), and lower wages mean less financial stability. There's also the issue that in most part time jobs, hours are not guaranteed (so you may have some months with far fewer hours than other months), and you may be asked to come in any time and be expected to do so or be fired.
Increasing the minimum wage helps with many of these issues (a lot of the reason why conditions are so terrible for minimum-wage workers is they have no power to fight unfair and unlawful treatment, but an increase in wages would give them a better chance to do that). But I can guarantee you that if you tried a minimum wage job for a few months, you'd want to go running back to the software job.
Also, you should probably look for a better employer. Good employers know that pushing employees to work 12-hour days leads to burnout and crap productivity, as well as high turnover rates. My employer (in software) actively urges me to make sure I don't spend too much time at work.
Nope. The Fed sets the average inflation level by managing the money supply. So an increase in the minimum wage will make some prices increase, but other prices will be forced to decrease. Overall inflation will be unaffected.
Lots and lots of classism is born from racism. People around the US complain about "the poors" when their actions indicate that their real fear is black people, as they consider the two groups to be one and the same thing.
Absentee voting can also be important for people with terrible jobs that won't let them take the day off (or even a few hours while the polling places are open). Also bear in mind that in many areas, polling places are ridiculously underfunded such that it may require waiting in line most of the day to finally vote.
Restrictions to absentee voting only make sense if we have strictly-enforced rules for availability of polling places.
Except for the problem that lie detectors don't work.
This is rather like teaching a person how to get a psychic to give an incorrect prediction.
Because law enforcement really seems to believe the pseudo-scientific bullshit that is lie detection.
a) Each CPU in these clusters typically has anywhere from 4-8 cores, and may support two or more times as many threads.
b) It's far, far more difficult to make full use of GPU hardware than CPU hardware. The best application for stressing GPU hardware is 3D graphics rendering, and even there if you run through the numbers, you find that it's rare that they really push half of their theoretical processing limit. General processing is significantly less efficient on GPU hardware, in particular because it's difficult to come up with computing problems that work well with the GPU's extremely limited I/O compared to their processing power. You need to do a lot of processing on each bit of data read or written to not be limited by either PCI Express bandwidth or video RAM bandwidth. Typical best-case real world scenarios for GPGPU programming put GPU's at closer to 10x or so the performance of CPU's, not 1000x as just looking at the number of shader cores vs. CPU cores might suggest. So they're quite powerful, but not overwhelmingly so. Whether or not they're worth it is highly dependent upon the application.
c) You can bet that companies like Microsoft and Google have a significant number of GPU's in use for specialized tasks.
Sure, but that's why Microsoft and Google will rapidly catch up if the numbers are real. Both employ lots of extremely talented and creative people exactly for solving problems like this, and the methods they use have been published.
Anyway, if they did really manage to produce some better algorithms, that's impressive and important work. But bragging about such a tiny computer seems seriously out of place.
The computer has 72 processors and 144 GPU's. That's tiny. Seriously tiny. Sure, GPU's are powerful, especially for image processing. But the larger computers these days are running tens to hundreds of thousands of processors in parallel.
For example, assuming each shelf has 2 processors and 4 GPU's, and they can fit 12 shelves into a single rack, that's a total of 2 racks. Compare that to this image of one of Google's datacenters, where you can see dozens of racks, each containing 14 shelves by my count. And that's just one row. These are gigantic warehouses, with row upon row of racks.
The level of processing power claimed here is closer to the level of a university processing cluster. The larger scientific clusters can be ten or a hundred times larger, and it's not clear just how big private datacenters are.
So overall I'm very, very skeptical. There's a very good chance that they fudged the data somehow to make theirs appear better. But if it is better, well, there's no reason why Google and Microsoft couldn't easily outcompete them in short order.
I'm skeptical that the research angle is that big of a deal. The focus on research harms adjunct faculty greatly and student education slightly, but I don't think it really has a negative impact on tuition cost.
The university provides an estimate of total living expenses. Tuition itself increased from something in the range of $6,000 to about $15,000. Obviously personal situations can vary, and if your parents live close to the university it can be a lot cheaper, but local living costs are usually a large part of the cost of higher education. This doesn't include books or medical insurance.
Fortunately, I don't think so. Religious people got a lot louder, and became stronger in politics (this article, for example, claims that politics became much more Christianity-infused after 9/11). But in terms of population number I don't think they ever increased by a measurable amount.
If you can find a source that proves me wrong, I'd be interested to read it, though.
It's probably more down to urbanization. The more people live in denser areas, the more they're exposed to other ways of looking at the world. Religion in general is quite hard to support once you've seen other perspectives.
Religion has been on a slow decline in the US for decades now. It was probably on the rise back in the 50's or somewhere thereabouts, but not recently.
Fortunately this isn't true everywhere. There's pretty wide disparity in such sentiments, with many urban areas being much less concerned.
They aren't very numerous, but there are a number of irreligious people holding US office at present (e.g. Bernie Sanders, who is culturally Jewish but non-practicing).
These laws are pretty flagrantly unconstitutional, but the states may try to enforce them regardless. Fortunately, elected officials are generally pretty powerful people who could afford to fight the court case, so it'd be pretty ridiculous for the states to actually try to enforce these laws.
But it's still disgusting that these states still have these laws on the books.
Which is an excellent explanation for why student loans are the wrong way to finance education.
The expected total expenditures for a student at my university when I graduated back in 2003 were in the range of $19,000 per year in today's dollars. Estimated total costs for students at the same university in the upcoming school year are about $35,000.
There really is no comparison here. School is vastly more expensive today than it was even 15 years ago. And that is tremendously unfair to current students.
Also, the loan program helps add to the problem. If it weren't for the federal loan program, it would be far, far harder for schools to charge students the tuition they charge, so either they would lower their tuition, educate fewer students, or manage to lobby their states to invest more in the public university system. Loans aren't the sole cause, but they're definitely a contributing factor of high tuition.
I think you also missed that states around the US have been reducing their support for universities. This was especially true after the depression started in 2008.
As for research, the private sector has been smaller than the public sector in research funding since the 60's, and federal research funding hasn't really changed as a portion of total research funding, so I really don't think that makes sense as a cause, except in that the government has been reducing its research spending.