Why did Roe v Wade even have to use any sort of "penumbra" at all? IMHO, it's a balance of rights, the mother's against those of the fetus. Further, the Constitution and amendments talk about balancing rights of people, the states, and the federal government. There has only ever been one amendment that prohibited a specific act, and it's also the only amendment that has ever been repealed. An anti-abortion amendment has NO place whatsoever in the Constitution. If you want to accomplish that end, then you need a "Fetal Rights Act", to balance the rights of the fetus against the rights of the mother.
> framers' fear
I'm sorry I can't give you a better reference for it. Google is your friend, I hope.
IMHO, a significant litmus test is "privacy" or other rights not explicitly specified in the Constitution or amendments. To be perfectly honest, I don't know how Scalia or Thomas weigh on such matters, but it has appeared to me that denial of such rights has tended to be a "Right" thing.
The Constitution explicitly, both in the body and in the Bill of Rights, states that rights not reserved to the Federal or State governments belong to the people. Articles about the framers and the writing of the Bill of Rights state that many were against them, because it was feared that they would be taken by future generations as a "complete enumeration" of peoples' rights.
The government has all sorts of "innovative" methods of taxation.
For the case you mention, I can think of a very simple solution - some sort of "minimum IP tax". Hold the IP, pay at least the minimum tax. As your revenue stream rises from zero, you continue to pay the minimum tax, until the taxation on your revenue stream exceeds that minimum. You know, pay the greater value.
Then there needs to be a process for releasing content into the public domain, so you can prove it to the Tax Man.
Plus it may sound biased, but there probably needs to be some sort of "equivalent to public domain" status for open source licenses. After all, the purpose of public domain is to make the IP usable by others as a foundation for further work. But then again, that also means that the government would probably meddle in defining open source licenses, at least for tax purposes. I could readily foresee bsd licenses passing the muster, but perhaps not the GPL, though maybe the LGPL. Remember, one thing the US government *likes* is businesses making money, and if you assume that closing the source is *necessary* to making money, as some very powerful business players do, then the gpl can be considered hostile toward that end.
Re:Shorting AMD stock: NASDAQ figures
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
I don't think desktops will go away, I just think they will become less common. Your requirements are clearly heavier than average. My requirements can be heavier than average, but most of that is the type of stuff that can be shuffled off onto a server. My "heavy graphics" is very high polygon count 2D, which while not negligible, is easily handled by today's hardware. A laptop would work well for me, as long as it can be tied to a big screen for graphics work, and tied to some servers for the heavy lifting. Oh, and as long as a Type M keyboard can be plugged in, one way or another.
I don't know much about encoding either, though I am aware of the asymmetrical nature of encoding/decoding, and I am aware that MythTV transcoding takes a looooong time when I want to burn a DVD. I would still expect the people with GPU expertise who develop the decoders probably know more than either of us about encoding, too. They would likely understand the possibilities for hardware encoding accelerators.
Re:Intel mistakes: Lack of competition
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
I'm not saying that they ignored technical concerns. I'm just saying that anti-cloning was in the driver's seat, they all drank the kool aid, and believed that the technical concerns would simply be flattened. Sometimes those technical concerns are simply *hard* and don't fall to ordinary engineering, and this is one of them.
I expect to see the trend toward thousands of PCs to slow, even partially reverse. Energy and cooling are growing issues, as well as maintenance. All of those favor a more measured approach than "Fill a room with commodity boxes." Google already has a maintenance policy that consists at least partly of, "Don't bother." You have to fully understand your cost structure.
Maybe your "meme=horsesh*t" is correct, but the current administration has been pulling a lot of fast ones. I've seen references that the current administration believes that "Customs is Limbo" and acts accordingly. I'd just as soon not be the one to try and prove them wrong.
Re:Intel mistakes: Lack of competition
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
You can also dive into the past. MSDOS 3.3 was it for (stagnant) *years*, until DRDOS 5 came out with significant and useful new features. Then MSDOS 5 came out shortly after as a catch-up, and for a few years DOS development was real, again.
That timeframe also gave us the Microsoft/Stack lawsuit over the integrated disk compression and the AARD anti-non-MSDOS code.
Re:Intel mistakes: Lack of competition
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Intel's failings on Itanium and Netburst were common corporate faults.
When the competitive marketplace isn't driving you, you have to drive yourself. Once that starts to happen, the directions can become bizarre, with Itanium and Netburst being to very good examples.
Itanium: The problem Itanium was designed to handle was cloning. First and foremost, they sewed up the I.P. so that it was not subject to any existing cross-licensing agreements. Second, the architecture was sufficiently different that they were outside of the realm of existing art ahd cross-licensing, so their I.P. was "strong." Notice that I haven't said a word yet about performance, cost, or any of that normal stuff. When mere technical and marketplace concerns are that low in the priority schemes, guess what happens.
Netburst: It seemed like someone in marketing got overly focused on clockspeed as the Ultimate Metric. The rest falls from there.
The reality is that ANY corporate product, will turn to junk without a competitive marketplace to keep it focused on delivering value to customers. Once competition is gone from a specific marketplace, the company will either focus its development budget in other areas where it needs to respond to competition, or it's development will be driven by motivations internal to the company, that are likely irrelevant or even negative to customers
Re:Shorting AMD stock: NASDAQ figures
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
re: video encoding
That may not be an issue of CPU speed. GPUs have been shipping with video decoding hardware for years, similarly Via with encryption hardware. In both cases, I believe that the hardware is not a complete codec, rather generally useful primitives that accelerate what the CPU can do.
I expect that video encoding can be subject to the same approach.
This move of AMDs makes more sense when you consider the "death of the desktop" meme, and that laptop sales have been overtaking desktops. Fold in that even yesteryear's CPU is sufficient for everything except games, simulation, and video. There will never be enough CPU for games and simulation (really games have become simulation) - they have an unquenchable thirst. That leaves video and it is reasonably susceptible to hardware acceleration primitives, and those will fall out of the GPU, in a "related design and expertise" sense, if not more directly. That takes some of the edge out of the speed race. So does the Physics Engine, for that matter.
According to the current meme, when you're in Customs, you're in legal limbo.
You're not in the origination country, you're not in the destination country, so you have no rights of either location. You have exactly the rights that the Customs people choose to give you. They have absolute power, though they generally don't abuse that, because the Press has absolute power, too. (again, according to the current meme)
This is why I've never put up a personal web page.
Enough people are able to find out enough information about me, do I really want to volunteer any more? I realize that I may control what information I put up, but am I really good enough to put up ONLY the information I want to release, and not leak something I don't want to? For instance, a lot of people put up vacation photos. They may thing they're only talking about where they've been, but they're frequently leaking information about their family - the number of members, their appearance, sex, age, etc. If their family car is in a photo, they've leaked a general idea of where they live, the car, clothing, and gear may leak something about general income level, etc.
Whatever, as long as I can://STEP1 CMD=IEFBR14,DSN=SYS1.SLASHDOT.ORG,DISP=(MOD,DELETE)
Oh holy cow, I haven't even really thought about writing any JCL in over a decade, nearly 2. Who'd thunk that a no-op would be one's most commonly used job step, just to get it's allocation/deletion side-effects?
The "Southern California Selene Group" has the ring of what Cringely described. But I followed a few links to check it out and he's not mentioned, though it is possible that he's too minor a player to show at that level.
Knowing your luck, the keys will just happen to have been stored in the section of RAM with the poorest retention.
Knowing the other guy's luck, the keys will just happen to have been stored in the section of RAM with the best retention.
There's another thing to consider, and that's the number of CPUs and caching in the system. In a single-CPU system frequently-used data obviously stays in cache, but by the same token the region of DRAM that that cache maps to becomes stale, and potentially incorrect. In a multi-CPU system cache-snoop protocols may be more likely to have gotten that data flushed back out to DRAM.
At the time I quit working with commodity DRAM, the common spec was for 128mS data retention at 85C. For various reasons, such as guardbanding, we tested well beyond that. I'd seen further data that suggested that most of the data in the DRAM was still good for several seconds, with no refresh. I seem to remember once hearing something to the effect that retention typically increased an order of magnitude for every 10C drop in temperature. So that 128mS @ 85C becomes 1.28S @ 75C, 12.5S @ 65C, etc. Yeah, I guess I can believe the "minutes" figure if you can chill the chips. By the way, that 85C is junction temperature, which is typically 10C-20C above ambient temperature, when running at full tilt. That offset can be even higher depending on airflow, etc. That also means that if the system is quiescent, the DRAM temperature is likely to be well below 85C, with correspondingly greater data retention.
At any rate, even with low temperatures, with such delays I'd never count on being able to get 100% of the contents successfully.
> Fire someone who knows where the bodies are buried, he'll leak the info to the press.
This reminds me of an episode of "The Man From UNCLE" that I saw as a kid. A couple had served many years with THRUSH (the bad guys) and were having their retirement party. (on the supposedly non-existent 13th floor of some building) After the party, their boss was taking them out of the building, supposedly to start retirement with a pleasant vacation. The real intent was of course to eliminate them.
The UNCLE guys rescued them once it became apparent that they were going to be executed, and they became a fount of information.
Relevance... Depending on who you are, you don't fire the guy who knows where the bodies are buried. You either take very good care of him, add him to the pile of bodies, or make sure that he put some of the bodies there, and you have the evidence. (The last choice doesn't always work, either - "State's evidence".)
I beg to differ. IMHO, the primary reason we're in Iraq is so we can have a "sufficiently major and long-lasting" war. After all, you can't be a "wartime President" without a war, and it's really hard to make executive power grabs without using war and national security as a pretext. So we're at war in Iraq, in order to be at war, in order to "enhance" executive power.
Beyond that, Iraq was just too attractive: Afghanistan was (incorrectly) perceived as not being major enough or long-lasting enough. Iraq has oil, always a selling point for Texans. (I didn't say oil wasn't A reason, just not THE reason.) Iraq has been a thorn in various peoples' sides ever since Gulf War I. An Iraq war redresses "sins of the father" - ie GHWB not finishing the job. An Iraq war demonstrates "America Unbound", (As the book says, unbound by agreements with enemies and allies, alike.) willing and capable to go it alone, while pretending to head a coalition.
> the President's job is to kiss as much ass as possible.
Seems to me that this President's efforts have been to reverse that statement.
It's just that you'll need proof before you can sue.
Besides, from another perspective, right now we're in the midst of a gigantic conspiracy to unseat and replace the government of the US. They even know the target date - next November and the following January. So it's merely a matter of using the tools of government to foil this heinous attempt at overthrow.
But then you'll get the argument that the Declaration of Independence is an historical document, and has no legal force like the Constitution. Those will be the same people who tell you that because some individual right is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution or Amendments, you don't have it. (I don't have the patience at the moment to look up the specific contrary language in both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.)
Re:If you want to see the real Cuba, go now...
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Black and White comparisons are SOOOOO much fun, especially when each side thinks it's White and the other side is Black.
Islam was taken over by its own fundamentalists, too.
We're following steps they have trod, about a thousand years later, with our Christian Fundamentalists.
But I still don't see China stepping into the leadership role, the way they're planning. Look at my.sig, China wants the trappings of science, the technology. To really have the science, you need freedom of thought. The real question about China is whether they will grant sufficient freedom of thought for scientific leadership, and then find that they can't cram the genie back into the bottle.
Back before the Iraq war, I suggested that Saddam had "his most loyal scientists" working feverishly on WMD. Had he had "his best scientists" working on them, they might have achieved something. I see something of the same quandary for China, as long as the Party insists on retaining absolute political power.
He's not concerned about people with "safe search" checked. He's fussing over people without it checked getting access to his images without his getting any money for it.
Or you could say that he's either "insufficiently diligent" or "insufficiently knowledgeable" to protect images on his sites from deep searching.
Slashdot Mirror
> "penumbra"
Why did Roe v Wade even have to use any sort of "penumbra" at all? IMHO, it's a balance of rights, the mother's against those of the fetus. Further, the Constitution and amendments talk about balancing rights of people, the states, and the federal government. There has only ever been one amendment that prohibited a specific act, and it's also the only amendment that has ever been repealed. An anti-abortion amendment has NO place whatsoever in the Constitution. If you want to accomplish that end, then you need a "Fetal Rights Act", to balance the rights of the fetus against the rights of the mother.
> framers' fear
I'm sorry I can't give you a better reference for it. Google is your friend, I hope.
IMHO, a significant litmus test is "privacy" or other rights not explicitly specified in the Constitution or amendments. To be perfectly honest, I don't know how Scalia or Thomas weigh on such matters, but it has appeared to me that denial of such rights has tended to be a "Right" thing.
The Constitution explicitly, both in the body and in the Bill of Rights, states that rights not reserved to the Federal or State governments belong to the people. Articles about the framers and the writing of the Bill of Rights state that many were against them, because it was feared that they would be taken by future generations as a "complete enumeration" of peoples' rights.
Only until the Executive branch appoints new judges.
Judges who disagree with the Right are "activist."
Judges who agree with the Right are "strict constructionist."
How can anyone be claiming to talk about crackpot theories like this without adding TimeCube?
The government has all sorts of "innovative" methods of taxation.
For the case you mention, I can think of a very simple solution - some sort of "minimum IP tax". Hold the IP, pay at least the minimum tax. As your revenue stream rises from zero, you continue to pay the minimum tax, until the taxation on your revenue stream exceeds that minimum. You know, pay the greater value.
Then there needs to be a process for releasing content into the public domain, so you can prove it to the Tax Man.
Plus it may sound biased, but there probably needs to be some sort of "equivalent to public domain" status for open source licenses. After all, the purpose of public domain is to make the IP usable by others as a foundation for further work. But then again, that also means that the government would probably meddle in defining open source licenses, at least for tax purposes. I could readily foresee bsd licenses passing the muster, but perhaps not the GPL, though maybe the LGPL. Remember, one thing the US government *likes* is businesses making money, and if you assume that closing the source is *necessary* to making money, as some very powerful business players do, then the gpl can be considered hostile toward that end.
I don't think desktops will go away, I just think they will become less common. Your requirements are clearly heavier than average. My requirements can be heavier than average, but most of that is the type of stuff that can be shuffled off onto a server. My "heavy graphics" is very high polygon count 2D, which while not negligible, is easily handled by today's hardware. A laptop would work well for me, as long as it can be tied to a big screen for graphics work, and tied to some servers for the heavy lifting. Oh, and as long as a Type M keyboard can be plugged in, one way or another.
I don't know much about encoding either, though I am aware of the asymmetrical nature of encoding/decoding, and I am aware that MythTV transcoding takes a looooong time when I want to burn a DVD. I would still expect the people with GPU expertise who develop the decoders probably know more than either of us about encoding, too. They would likely understand the possibilities for hardware encoding accelerators.
I'm not saying that they ignored technical concerns. I'm just saying that anti-cloning was in the driver's seat, they all drank the kool aid, and believed that the technical concerns would simply be flattened. Sometimes those technical concerns are simply *hard* and don't fall to ordinary engineering, and this is one of them.
I expect to see the trend toward thousands of PCs to slow, even partially reverse. Energy and cooling are growing issues, as well as maintenance. All of those favor a more measured approach than "Fill a room with commodity boxes." Google already has a maintenance policy that consists at least partly of, "Don't bother." You have to fully understand your cost structure.
Maybe your "meme=horsesh*t" is correct, but the current administration has been pulling a lot of fast ones. I've seen references that the current administration believes that "Customs is Limbo" and acts accordingly. I'd just as soon not be the one to try and prove them wrong.
You can also dive into the past. MSDOS 3.3 was it for (stagnant) *years*, until DRDOS 5 came out with significant and useful new features. Then MSDOS 5 came out shortly after as a catch-up, and for a few years DOS development was real, again.
That timeframe also gave us the Microsoft/Stack lawsuit over the integrated disk compression and the AARD anti-non-MSDOS code.
Intel's failings on Itanium and Netburst were common corporate faults.
When the competitive marketplace isn't driving you, you have to drive yourself. Once that starts to happen, the directions can become bizarre, with Itanium and Netburst being to very good examples.
Itanium: The problem Itanium was designed to handle was cloning. First and foremost, they sewed up the I.P. so that it was not subject to any existing cross-licensing agreements. Second, the architecture was sufficiently different that they were outside of the realm of existing art ahd cross-licensing, so their I.P. was "strong." Notice that I haven't said a word yet about performance, cost, or any of that normal stuff. When mere technical and marketplace concerns are that low in the priority schemes, guess what happens.
Netburst: It seemed like someone in marketing got overly focused on clockspeed as the Ultimate Metric. The rest falls from there.
The reality is that ANY corporate product, will turn to junk without a competitive marketplace to keep it focused on delivering value to customers. Once competition is gone from a specific marketplace, the company will either focus its development budget in other areas where it needs to respond to competition, or it's development will be driven by motivations internal to the company, that are likely irrelevant or even negative to customers
re: video encoding
That may not be an issue of CPU speed. GPUs have been shipping with video decoding hardware for years, similarly Via with encryption hardware. In both cases, I believe that the hardware is not a complete codec, rather generally useful primitives that accelerate what the CPU can do.
I expect that video encoding can be subject to the same approach.
This move of AMDs makes more sense when you consider the "death of the desktop" meme, and that laptop sales have been overtaking desktops. Fold in that even yesteryear's CPU is sufficient for everything except games, simulation, and video. There will never be enough CPU for games and simulation (really games have become simulation) - they have an unquenchable thirst. That leaves video and it is reasonably susceptible to hardware acceleration primitives, and those will fall out of the GPU, in a "related design and expertise" sense, if not more directly. That takes some of the edge out of the speed race. So does the Physics Engine, for that matter.
According to the current meme, when you're in Customs, you're in legal limbo.
You're not in the origination country, you're not in the destination country, so you have no rights of either location. You have exactly the rights that the Customs people choose to give you. They have absolute power, though they generally don't abuse that, because the Press has absolute power, too. (again, according to the current meme)
This is why I've never put up a personal web page.
Enough people are able to find out enough information about me, do I really want to volunteer any more? I realize that I may control what information I put up, but am I really good enough to put up ONLY the information I want to release, and not leak something I don't want to? For instance, a lot of people put up vacation photos. They may thing they're only talking about where they've been, but they're frequently leaking information about their family - the number of members, their appearance, sex, age, etc. If their family car is in a photo, they've leaked a general idea of where they live, the car, clothing, and gear may leak something about general income level, etc.
Whatever, as long as I can: //STEP1 CMD=IEFBR14,DSN=SYS1.SLASHDOT.ORG,DISP=(MOD,DELETE)
Oh holy cow, I haven't even really thought about writing any JCL in over a decade, nearly 2. Who'd thunk that a no-op would be one's most commonly used job step, just to get it's allocation/deletion side-effects?
> the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles
Third Sunday of every month, April through October, is the M.I.T. Swapmeet, a flea market for computer/audio/ham, etc.
To get to the bathrooms, you walk right past the "J" building, as long as we're talking about "W" and "Z".
The "Southern California Selene Group" has the ring of what Cringely described. But I followed a few links to check it out and he's not mentioned, though it is possible that he's too minor a player to show at that level.
Knowing your luck, the keys will just happen to have been stored in the section of RAM with the poorest retention.
Knowing the other guy's luck, the keys will just happen to have been stored in the section of RAM with the best retention.
There's another thing to consider, and that's the number of CPUs and caching in the system. In a single-CPU system frequently-used data obviously stays in cache, but by the same token the region of DRAM that that cache maps to becomes stale, and potentially incorrect. In a multi-CPU system cache-snoop protocols may be more likely to have gotten that data flushed back out to DRAM.
Murphy Rules!
At the time I quit working with commodity DRAM, the common spec was for 128mS data retention at 85C. For various reasons, such as guardbanding, we tested well beyond that. I'd seen further data that suggested that most of the data in the DRAM was still good for several seconds, with no refresh. I seem to remember once hearing something to the effect that retention typically increased an order of magnitude for every 10C drop in temperature. So that 128mS @ 85C becomes 1.28S @ 75C, 12.5S @ 65C, etc. Yeah, I guess I can believe the "minutes" figure if you can chill the chips. By the way, that 85C is junction temperature, which is typically 10C-20C above ambient temperature, when running at full tilt. That offset can be even higher depending on airflow, etc. That also means that if the system is quiescent, the DRAM temperature is likely to be well below 85C, with correspondingly greater data retention.
At any rate, even with low temperatures, with such delays I'd never count on being able to get 100% of the contents successfully.
> Fire someone who knows where the bodies are buried, he'll leak the info to the press.
This reminds me of an episode of "The Man From UNCLE" that I saw as a kid. A couple had served many years with THRUSH (the bad guys) and were having their retirement party. (on the supposedly non-existent 13th floor of some building) After the party, their boss was taking them out of the building, supposedly to start retirement with a pleasant vacation. The real intent was of course to eliminate them.
The UNCLE guys rescued them once it became apparent that they were going to be executed, and they became a fount of information.
Relevance... Depending on who you are, you don't fire the guy who knows where the bodies are buried. You either take very good care of him, add him to the pile of bodies, or make sure that he put some of the bodies there, and you have the evidence. (The last choice doesn't always work, either - "State's evidence".)
> The only reason we are in Iraq is oil.
I beg to differ. IMHO, the primary reason we're in Iraq is so we can have a "sufficiently major and long-lasting" war. After all, you can't be a "wartime President" without a war, and it's really hard to make executive power grabs without using war and national security as a pretext. So we're at war in Iraq, in order to be at war, in order to "enhance" executive power.
Beyond that, Iraq was just too attractive:
Afghanistan was (incorrectly) perceived as not being major enough or long-lasting enough.
Iraq has oil, always a selling point for Texans. (I didn't say oil wasn't A reason, just not THE reason.)
Iraq has been a thorn in various peoples' sides ever since Gulf War I.
An Iraq war redresses "sins of the father" - ie GHWB not finishing the job.
An Iraq war demonstrates "America Unbound", (As the book says, unbound by agreements with enemies and allies, alike.) willing and capable to go it alone, while pretending to head a coalition.
> the President's job is to kiss as much ass as possible.
Seems to me that this President's efforts have been to reverse that statement.
It's just that you'll need proof before you can sue.
Besides, from another perspective, right now we're in the midst of a gigantic conspiracy to unseat and replace the government of the US. They even know the target date - next November and the following January. So it's merely a matter of using the tools of government to foil this heinous attempt at overthrow.
But then you'll get the argument that the Declaration of Independence is an historical document, and has no legal force like the Constitution. Those will be the same people who tell you that because some individual right is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution or Amendments, you don't have it. (I don't have the patience at the moment to look up the specific contrary language in both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.)
Black and White comparisons are SOOOOO much fun, especially when each side thinks it's White and the other side is Black.
Islam was taken over by its own fundamentalists, too.
.sig, China wants the trappings of science, the technology. To really have the science, you need freedom of thought. The real question about China is whether they will grant sufficient freedom of thought for scientific leadership, and then find that they can't cram the genie back into the bottle.
We're following steps they have trod, about a thousand years later, with our Christian Fundamentalists.
But I still don't see China stepping into the leadership role, the way they're planning. Look at my
Back before the Iraq war, I suggested that Saddam had "his most loyal scientists" working feverishly on WMD. Had he had "his best scientists" working on them, they might have achieved something. I see something of the same quandary for China, as long as the Party insists on retaining absolute political power.
He's not concerned about people with "safe search" checked. He's fussing over people without it checked getting access to his images without his getting any money for it.
Or you could say that he's either "insufficiently diligent" or "insufficiently knowledgeable" to protect images on his sites from deep searching.