Let me summarize the conversation so far. Someone said "GLSL and HLSL are about as hardware level as javascript." Someone else disagreed in no uncertain terms. I gave evidence that GLSL and HLSL were not as hardware level as javascript. You attempted to sidetrack the discussion into the realms of HTML5 and "environment" specificity. When I pointed out that that was off topic, you brought up some supposed "theory versus practice" debate, as if that would actually change the answer to the original question: Are GLSL and HLSL about as hardware level as javascript?
However, I have since determined that this question is itself a red herring, as the original poster appeared to be using "hardware level" when the concept he really meant to address was security: can these languages be used to directly manipulate hardware, bypassing normal operating system security measures? I think the answer to that is actually, "No. Not really any more than javascript."
So! I believe we've solved the dilemma in such a way that everyone can go home thinking they were right all along.
Who asked anything about HTML 5? Who said anything about "environment specific?" Your entire post is a non-sequitur, relating to nothing that was actually under discussion. Let me refresh your memory. We were comparing HSLS or GSLS to javascript and asking which was more hardware specific. Now, do you have anything to add that is relevant to the topic under discussion?
Somebody needs to take a refresher course in "What is this 'news" thing, anyway?" Something that happens with utter predictability and regularity, like a dog biting a man, is never really news. But if a man were to bite a dog, or Facebook was caught protecting user information, then that would be news.
No, the cooperative collaborative folks are fighting against the legal structures known as corporations which are nothing more than feudal fiefdoms of the ultra wealthy. I'm not talking mom and pop businesses. I'm not talking about medium sized businesses, either. I'm not talking collectives, credit unions, or cooperatives, the real collaborations of individuals. I'm talking about mega corporations which only care about the interests of the executive officers, the board, and maybe the wealthiest shareholders. These corporations act like sociopathic monsters who do not care who they hurt.
You don't really need a control group to determine whether or not these wells are contaminated before or after the fracking, they were used for hundreds of years without contamination, and then suddenly, they are contaminated by gasses that have been molecularly analyzed and found the same as what is being pumped out.
Basically, you can come to the conclusion that these well, dug before the fracking, somehow all chose pre-contaminated sites that, coincidentally, would someday be located within a few miles of fracking operations, OR, you can rightly conclude the operations caused the contamination.
Please don't pretend you are on the side of the many. You aren't. You are a fascist, corporatist tool who thinks that perhaps if he kisses Master's ass enough, Master will let him play with the nice toys. You are letting yourself get raped and asking yourself, "How can I pay for this delightful service?"
Corporations, and people like you, are tools of the sociopaths who call themselves individualists, while I and people like me are fighting for the right to real collaboration unmarred by coercion and the threat of force.
Hmm, sure as hell looks a lot more hardware-level than javascript to me. I've never heard of javascript execution depending on the hardware you have, but the features of this HLSL and GLSL stuff seem to be closely tied to the particular make and model of graphics card you own. For instance, the question "can Javascript do X?" can be answered without knowing what hardware it is running on. The question "can HSLS or GSLS do X?" can not always be answered without knowing what hardware it is running on.
To make the example specific, let me ask you, can HSLS or GSLS do geometry shading? Answer yes or no without reference to hardware specifications.
So you are concerned about non existent beings who dwell in an imaginary land called the future? Cool. Now, do you believe that anything you do right now, today, is going to affect how humanity handles the death of the sun in four billion years?
The difference between the present, the past, and the future is that only one of them is real. The others are imaginary, in that they do not exist here and now. You only exist in the present. While your actions may impact the future, the further into the future you look, the less predictable any consequences of your actions become. Looking four billion years into the future, anything you do today is absolutely irrelevant. Might as well have asked the trilobites what they planned to do about global warming.
Your speculations about your 4-billion-years-in-the-future descendants are as irrelevant as what the trilobites think about us. I'm sure your fantasies do have value to you, mine certainly have value to me. But I don't think of them as anything but fantasies. And I don't think that acting on my fantasies will help the inhabitants of my fantasy world. Your individual actions won't make any more of a difference to our descendants than the actions of an individual archeopteryx might have had on us.
If you were to die tomorrow, would that impact our future survival as a species? If you say "yes," then you need to get some serious help for your narcissistic personality disorder. If you actually do think your actions will materially impact the chances that we will escape the death of the sun in four billion years, I can't really help you, you need a professional. I don't have to be there in four billion years to hazard a guess that your choices today won't impact our descendant's chances of survival in the least.
I stand by my assertion: worrying about the death of the sun is silly, childish, and irresponsible to the present day and the real problems such as hunger and disease that we as humans still face. How about we focus on getting through the next hundred years, and if we survive that, maybe our great-great-great to the unpteenth-great-grandkids can start to worry about the sun.
You see, you can't do anything but talk a bout the death of the sun, but if you wanted to, and you weren't distracted by your fantasies, you coudl actually prevent the death of a real, living human being, today. But you don't want to worry about problems with real solutions that might require actual effort on your part, you simply want to feel good about not doing anything to help real people, today.
If you'd said, "We need a space program" I would fully agree. If you'd said "We should focus far more of our efforts on getting off this rock than we currently are" then I would also agree. But absolutely NOT for the reasons you give. Escaping the death of the sun, do you really not see how tragicomic that obsession is?
Seriously, I thought they had driven off all their more intelligent fans when they started catering to the developmentally challenged. I found this turn of events very disappointing until I realized, the Syfy channel isn't just for the learning disabled, it is run by the learning disabled as well. I mean look at them, they sent a marketing bot to slashdot to do some market research and try to find out why real geeks don't watch Syfy anymore.
Wll, Mr. Retarded Marketing Bot, please take this back to your superiors: premium channels require premium content first, not last. You don't get to create literally the dumbest channel on television anywhere in the world and then complain that you could make it better if only you had some more money. You don't have money because you are doing it all wrong. You won't get more money until you start doing it right. You don't get to skip over the "getting it right" part. We are not a captive audience. We have other choices.
Until I realized that Syfy is actually a retard employment program, the idea of having to explain any of this to grown adults would have blown my mind.
It's almost a given, for any story about a big corporation doing something terrible, there will be a certain cast of recurring characters who will jump to the defense. You can almost hear their thoughts, "How dare these unimportant little peons question the activities of their betters?" It is a knee-jerk defense of authoritarianism.
So tell me, did you miss the part about the methane being "fingerprinted" as exactly the same methane coming from the fracking well? Science has been satisfied. But science doesn't matter to you, does it? The only thing that matters is that the "better" class of people are allowed to do whatever they like without interference from the serfs.
If everyone is naturally selfish and not naturally cooperative, why do we have so much cooperation? For instance, the natural world is built on cooperation between cells. Cooperation is more basic than competition. You seem to have a pretty dark and twisted view of humanity. Which is not to say we aren't dark and twisted, we are. But we're more than that, in case you hadn't noticed, and your cynicism belittles all of us.
No, the overpopulation problem is fixing itself. Turns out, when people get over a certain income, they don't want to have kids. Italy is already below replacement rate. I also can't believe I have to point out the technological differences between now and the last few thousand years. "It's happened for thousands of years" is only relevant if now is the same as thousands of years ago.
If anyone is looking for something to worry about, and can't find anything just from a cursory glance about the place, might I suggest worrying about unicorn vaccinations? It is more realistic than worrying about the death of the sun.
Maxo, my man, you are thinking ass backwards here. If "WWIII" is the potential problem "Getting a few people off the earth in a big tin can" is not the answer. Stopping WWIII is the answer. What will those few dozen folks in the tin can do when the world blows up? You think they are going to make a go of it someplace else? Uh huh, sure they are. Maybe the answer to the potential problem of over-breeding is not a damn rocket ship, MAYBE it is a condom. If we are on the verge of never lifting off this rock again, maybe we should fix that problem instead of sending a few humans off into the void.
You think the human race is too pathetic to chart its course into the future, so you want to abandon ship right now? If we are too pathetic to fix the problems you mention, we are too pathetic to live in this universe. Let's just give up, off ourselves, and clear the stage for something with a little more imagination.
Not what I meant, really. Caring about the future is one thing, but thinking "I'm going to save humanity from the death of the sun!" is NOT an example of caring about the future. It is an excuse not to care about the present, or the immediate future this present will lead to.
The only way the problems of today will become irrelevant is if we solve them. I'd say it is just as important to worry about unicorn vaccinations as it is to worry about the death of the sun. Seriously, it is ego-puffery to think that, because you are worried about the death of the sun, you are a more serious and realistic person than someone who worries about ending world hunger.
Please get help, and get on some better medication. We've been watching you go downhill for years now. Schizophrenia is a hell of a disease, and untreated, it can lead to you becoming a danger to yourself and others.
I care. Because 100 billion years of life is better than 4 billion years of life.
You aren't going to have either, though. Those billions of years of life are nothing more than a phantasm in the here and now. You will never, ever know whether we as a species will make it a hundred billion years, four billion years, or four thousand years. It might as well be a gazillion years, because you won't be around for a hundred. And nothing, nothing you do in your lifetime will make a difference to the longevity of the species as a whole, and how we face problems four billion years in the future.
Nice that you are thinking ahead, though. Fantasizing about the impossibly distant future is no different than fantasizing about becoming a superhero or the King of Westeros. It's a great way to ignore real-world, present day problems while puffing up your own ego by imagining that you are pondering the really weighty, long term problems.
In many people's minds, karma absolutely is saying "Do this and this or I will punish you with my wrath." Many people believe that the concept of karma means that, if I do bad things to you, bad things will happen to you. What karma really means is simply cause and effect, as you say: if I do bad things to you, bad things will happen to you.
If indeed the concept of karma is that, if I do bad things to you, bad things will happen to me, then karma is nothing more than an authoritarian overseer saying, "Do this and this or else I will punish you with my wrath!" And that is how most people see karma, and why Buddha rejected the common idea of karma as it relates to reincarnation. When you add "reincarnated as a slug" into the possibilities, then absolutely, karma is an authoritarian overseer saying, "Do this and this or else I will punish you with by turning you into a slug!"
If authoritarians live in a society that promotes peace and love, then that is what they will try to practice. We're all both devils and saints. We have the capacity for good and evil in us, and it is mere circumstance that determines whether the good side of our nature wins out. But good is, I think, the default behavior for most of us, unless our society is inherently unjust, and we feel the need to act selfishly in order not to be taken advantage of. I've heard a theory that states that there are really only two human cultures in the world, the culture of feast, and the culture of famine, and that basically, we got locked into the culture of famine when we began practicing agriculture and animal husbandry, lost our mobility, and then got hit with climate change. Check out "Saharasia" by James DeMeo.
Most people misunderstand karma to be a force working to restore moral balance, and I was basing what I wrote on how most people view karma, not on what I believe to be the correct interpretation of the meaning of karma.
Is it scary, or liberating, or is it freedom itself is scary? For an answer to that question, I give you "No One at the Bridge" by Rush.
Crying back to consciousness, The coldness grips my skin. The sky is pitching violently, Drawn by shrieking winds. Seaspray blurs my vision, Waves roll by so fast, Save my ship of freedom I'm lashed, helpless to the mast.
Remembering when first I held The wheel in my own hands, I took the helm so eagerly And sailed for distant lands. But now the sea's too heavy And I just don't understand Why must my crew desert me When I need a guiding hand?
Call out for direction And there's no one there to steer. Shout out for salvation But there's no one there to hear. Cry out supplication For the maelstrom is near. Scream out desperation but No one cares to hear.
Site name, egodeath, says it all. Anyone who has done DMT knows exactly what this song refers to, but I hear you can get to the same place if you meditate long enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me summarize the conversation so far. Someone said "GLSL and HLSL are about as hardware level as javascript." Someone else disagreed in no uncertain terms. I gave evidence that GLSL and HLSL were not as hardware level as javascript. You attempted to sidetrack the discussion into the realms of HTML5 and "environment" specificity. When I pointed out that that was off topic, you brought up some supposed "theory versus practice" debate, as if that would actually change the answer to the original question: Are GLSL and HLSL about as hardware level as javascript?
However, I have since determined that this question is itself a red herring, as the original poster appeared to be using "hardware level" when the concept he really meant to address was security: can these languages be used to directly manipulate hardware, bypassing normal operating system security measures? I think the answer to that is actually, "No. Not really any more than javascript."
So! I believe we've solved the dilemma in such a way that everyone can go home thinking they were right all along.
Who asked anything about HTML 5? Who said anything about "environment specific?" Your entire post is a non-sequitur, relating to nothing that was actually under discussion. Let me refresh your memory. We were comparing HSLS or GSLS to javascript and asking which was more hardware specific. Now, do you have anything to add that is relevant to the topic under discussion?
Somebody needs to take a refresher course in "What is this 'news" thing, anyway?" Something that happens with utter predictability and regularity, like a dog biting a man, is never really news. But if a man were to bite a dog, or Facebook was caught protecting user information, then that would be news.
No, the cooperative collaborative folks are fighting against the legal structures known as corporations which are nothing more than feudal fiefdoms of the ultra wealthy. I'm not talking mom and pop businesses. I'm not talking about medium sized businesses, either. I'm not talking collectives, credit unions, or cooperatives, the real collaborations of individuals. I'm talking about mega corporations which only care about the interests of the executive officers, the board, and maybe the wealthiest shareholders. These corporations act like sociopathic monsters who do not care who they hurt.
You don't really need a control group to determine whether or not these wells are contaminated before or after the fracking, they were used for hundreds of years without contamination, and then suddenly, they are contaminated by gasses that have been molecularly analyzed and found the same as what is being pumped out.
Basically, you can come to the conclusion that these well, dug before the fracking, somehow all chose pre-contaminated sites that, coincidentally, would someday be located within a few miles of fracking operations, OR, you can rightly conclude the operations caused the contamination.
Please don't pretend you are on the side of the many. You aren't. You are a fascist, corporatist tool who thinks that perhaps if he kisses Master's ass enough, Master will let him play with the nice toys. You are letting yourself get raped and asking yourself, "How can I pay for this delightful service?"
Corporations, and people like you, are tools of the sociopaths who call themselves individualists, while I and people like me are fighting for the right to real collaboration unmarred by coercion and the threat of force.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLSL
Hmm, sure as hell looks a lot more hardware-level than javascript to me. I've never heard of javascript execution depending on the hardware you have, but the features of this HLSL and GLSL stuff seem to be closely tied to the particular make and model of graphics card you own. For instance, the question "can Javascript do X?" can be answered without knowing what hardware it is running on. The question "can HSLS or GSLS do X?" can not always be answered without knowing what hardware it is running on.
To make the example specific, let me ask you, can HSLS or GSLS do geometry shading? Answer yes or no without reference to hardware specifications.
So you are concerned about non existent beings who dwell in an imaginary land called the future? Cool. Now, do you believe that anything you do right now, today, is going to affect how humanity handles the death of the sun in four billion years?
The difference between the present, the past, and the future is that only one of them is real. The others are imaginary, in that they do not exist here and now. You only exist in the present. While your actions may impact the future, the further into the future you look, the less predictable any consequences of your actions become. Looking four billion years into the future, anything you do today is absolutely irrelevant. Might as well have asked the trilobites what they planned to do about global warming.
Your speculations about your 4-billion-years-in-the-future descendants are as irrelevant as what the trilobites think about us. I'm sure your fantasies do have value to you, mine certainly have value to me. But I don't think of them as anything but fantasies. And I don't think that acting on my fantasies will help the inhabitants of my fantasy world. Your individual actions won't make any more of a difference to our descendants than the actions of an individual archeopteryx might have had on us.
If you were to die tomorrow, would that impact our future survival as a species? If you say "yes," then you need to get some serious help for your narcissistic personality disorder. If you actually do think your actions will materially impact the chances that we will escape the death of the sun in four billion years, I can't really help you, you need a professional. I don't have to be there in four billion years to hazard a guess that your choices today won't impact our descendant's chances of survival in the least.
I stand by my assertion: worrying about the death of the sun is silly, childish, and irresponsible to the present day and the real problems such as hunger and disease that we as humans still face. How about we focus on getting through the next hundred years, and if we survive that, maybe our great-great-great to the unpteenth-great-grandkids can start to worry about the sun.
You see, you can't do anything but talk a bout the death of the sun, but if you wanted to, and you weren't distracted by your fantasies, you coudl actually prevent the death of a real, living human being, today. But you don't want to worry about problems with real solutions that might require actual effort on your part, you simply want to feel good about not doing anything to help real people, today.
If you'd said, "We need a space program" I would fully agree. If you'd said "We should focus far more of our efforts on getting off this rock than we currently are" then I would also agree. But absolutely NOT for the reasons you give. Escaping the death of the sun, do you really not see how tragicomic that obsession is?
Seriously, I thought they had driven off all their more intelligent fans when they started catering to the developmentally challenged. I found this turn of events very disappointing until I realized, the Syfy channel isn't just for the learning disabled, it is run by the learning disabled as well. I mean look at them, they sent a marketing bot to slashdot to do some market research and try to find out why real geeks don't watch Syfy anymore.
Wll, Mr. Retarded Marketing Bot, please take this back to your superiors: premium channels require premium content first, not last. You don't get to create literally the dumbest channel on television anywhere in the world and then complain that you could make it better if only you had some more money. You don't have money because you are doing it all wrong. You won't get more money until you start doing it right. You don't get to skip over the "getting it right" part. We are not a captive audience. We have other choices.
Until I realized that Syfy is actually a retard employment program, the idea of having to explain any of this to grown adults would have blown my mind.
It's almost a given, for any story about a big corporation doing something terrible, there will be a certain cast of recurring characters who will jump to the defense. You can almost hear their thoughts, "How dare these unimportant little peons question the activities of their betters?" It is a knee-jerk defense of authoritarianism.
So tell me, did you miss the part about the methane being "fingerprinted" as exactly the same methane coming from the fracking well? Science has been satisfied. But science doesn't matter to you, does it? The only thing that matters is that the "better" class of people are allowed to do whatever they like without interference from the serfs.
If everyone is naturally selfish and not naturally cooperative, why do we have so much cooperation? For instance, the natural world is built on cooperation between cells. Cooperation is more basic than competition. You seem to have a pretty dark and twisted view of humanity. Which is not to say we aren't dark and twisted, we are. But we're more than that, in case you hadn't noticed, and your cynicism belittles all of us.
No, the overpopulation problem is fixing itself. Turns out, when people get over a certain income, they don't want to have kids. Italy is already below replacement rate. I also can't believe I have to point out the technological differences between now and the last few thousand years. "It's happened for thousands of years" is only relevant if now is the same as thousands of years ago.
No harm at all, just don't pretend you are solving the weighty issues of our day by shooting a few humans into space.
If anyone is looking for something to worry about, and can't find anything just from a cursory glance about the place, might I suggest worrying about unicorn vaccinations? It is more realistic than worrying about the death of the sun.
Maxo, my man, you are thinking ass backwards here. If "WWIII" is the potential problem "Getting a few people off the earth in a big tin can" is not the answer. Stopping WWIII is the answer. What will those few dozen folks in the tin can do when the world blows up? You think they are going to make a go of it someplace else? Uh huh, sure they are. Maybe the answer to the potential problem of over-breeding is not a damn rocket ship, MAYBE it is a condom. If we are on the verge of never lifting off this rock again, maybe we should fix that problem instead of sending a few humans off into the void.
You think the human race is too pathetic to chart its course into the future, so you want to abandon ship right now? If we are too pathetic to fix the problems you mention, we are too pathetic to live in this universe. Let's just give up, off ourselves, and clear the stage for something with a little more imagination.
Not what I meant, really. Caring about the future is one thing, but thinking "I'm going to save humanity from the death of the sun!" is NOT an example of caring about the future. It is an excuse not to care about the present, or the immediate future this present will lead to.
The only way the problems of today will become irrelevant is if we solve them. I'd say it is just as important to worry about unicorn vaccinations as it is to worry about the death of the sun. Seriously, it is ego-puffery to think that, because you are worried about the death of the sun, you are a more serious and realistic person than someone who worries about ending world hunger.
Please get help, and get on some better medication. We've been watching you go downhill for years now. Schizophrenia is a hell of a disease, and untreated, it can lead to you becoming a danger to yourself and others.
I care. Because 100 billion years of life is better than 4 billion years of life.
You aren't going to have either, though. Those billions of years of life are nothing more than a phantasm in the here and now. You will never, ever know whether we as a species will make it a hundred billion years, four billion years, or four thousand years. It might as well be a gazillion years, because you won't be around for a hundred. And nothing, nothing you do in your lifetime will make a difference to the longevity of the species as a whole, and how we face problems four billion years in the future.
Nice that you are thinking ahead, though. Fantasizing about the impossibly distant future is no different than fantasizing about becoming a superhero or the King of Westeros. It's a great way to ignore real-world, present day problems while puffing up your own ego by imagining that you are pondering the really weighty, long term problems.
Ah, so you are an authoritarian, defending authoritarianism. That's what I thought.
In many people's minds, karma absolutely is saying "Do this and this or I will punish you with my wrath." Many people believe that the concept of karma means that, if I do bad things to you, bad things will happen to you. What karma really means is simply cause and effect, as you say: if I do bad things to you, bad things will happen to you.
If indeed the concept of karma is that, if I do bad things to you, bad things will happen to me, then karma is nothing more than an authoritarian overseer saying, "Do this and this or else I will punish you with my wrath!" And that is how most people see karma, and why Buddha rejected the common idea of karma as it relates to reincarnation. When you add "reincarnated as a slug" into the possibilities, then absolutely, karma is an authoritarian overseer saying, "Do this and this or else I will punish you with by turning you into a slug!"
Interesting guess. What makes you think so?
Authoritarians hate it when we point out that authoritarianism exists. We aren't supposed to think about it, we're just supposed to do it.
If authoritarians live in a society that promotes peace and love, then that is what they will try to practice. We're all both devils and saints. We have the capacity for good and evil in us, and it is mere circumstance that determines whether the good side of our nature wins out. But good is, I think, the default behavior for most of us, unless our society is inherently unjust, and we feel the need to act selfishly in order not to be taken advantage of. I've heard a theory that states that there are really only two human cultures in the world, the culture of feast, and the culture of famine, and that basically, we got locked into the culture of famine when we began practicing agriculture and animal husbandry, lost our mobility, and then got hit with climate change. Check out "Saharasia" by James DeMeo.
Most people misunderstand karma to be a force working to restore moral balance, and I was basing what I wrote on how most people view karma, not on what I believe to be the correct interpretation of the meaning of karma.
Is it scary, or liberating, or is it freedom itself is scary? For an answer to that question, I give you "No One at the Bridge" by Rush.
Crying back to consciousness,
The coldness grips my skin.
The sky is pitching violently,
Drawn by shrieking winds.
Seaspray blurs my vision,
Waves roll by so fast,
Save my ship of freedom
I'm lashed, helpless to the mast.
Remembering when first I held
The wheel in my own hands,
I took the helm so eagerly
And sailed for distant lands.
But now the sea's too heavy
And I just don't understand
Why must my crew desert me
When I need a guiding hand?
Call out for direction
And there's no one there to steer.
Shout out for salvation
But there's no one there to hear.
Cry out supplication
For the maelstrom is near.
Scream out desperation but
No one cares to hear.
Great essay on the meaning here: http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm
Site name, egodeath, says it all. Anyone who has done DMT knows exactly what this song refers to, but I hear you can get to the same place if you meditate long enough.
Awesome, my library carries it, I will reserve it.