We've had SIMD multicore PC's forever, and they're useless as desktops. [...] it'll be like that until MIMD hits the street
Those acronyms, I don't think they mean what you think they mean. SIMD refers to a Single Instruction operating on Multiple Data values in parallel... think Altivec or SSE. MIMD is Multiple Instructions, Multiple Data... i.e. the multiple CPU machines you and I have been running for years.
And most of us would rather have 1 cpu that runs 16x faster than 16 cpus.
Sure, anyone would. Barring some major breakthroughs in superconducting circuits, however, it's not going to happen anytime soon.... well, not unless you want to run one of those liquid-helium cooled machines....:^)
Small, unobtrusive government is the way to go - the less they know about and use these types of applications and services, the less control and say they have over how we use them.
I think that open, transparent government is the way to go. Even if there are some minor implementation costs, the benefit of people being able to find out what their government is up to is huge. Corruption festers in darkness... turn the lights on and the cockroaches scatter. If you're tired of Halliburton-style crony capitalist good-old-boy's club kleptocracy, then open, transparent government is the cure.
You've drunk so deeply of the two party Kool Aid you can't see a way out.
Unfortunately, voting 3rd party isn't a way out unless a statistically significant number of people do it. And there's no evidence that that's going to happen in this election. So for this election at least, voting 3rd party is equivalent to not voting at all.
There's a big difference between accepting someone's endorsement, and faithfully attending his church for 20+ years.
Care to explain what that difference is? From my perspective, it looks worse for McCain, since he clearly accepted the endorsement in full knowledge of the objectionable things Hagee said. Obama, on the other hand, was attending church long before Wright made his objectionable speeches, and it's a bit much to hold him responsible for not correctly predicting what somebody would say 15 years in advance.
Not that any of this has anything to do with what's best for the nation, of course. Perhaps we would be better off sticking to the issues and leaving the "gotcha" guilt-by-association memes by the wayside...
All the incredible technological change and advances of the 21st century will do little more than keep a small percentage of the world's elite living at quality of life that was accepted as normal in 2000.
Ah, dammit, you're right. There really is no hope for mankind's future. I'm just going to pop over and shoot myself now. Goodbye!
If I'm an individual, and I've been contracted to commit a crime by the "government", once I'm granted immunity why wouldn't I tell on everyone? Especially if I'm compelled by a court?
Well, in this scenario, a good reason why you wouldn't tell is because the government has threatened to kill you (or otherwise make your life miserable) if you do tell anyone. Of course, it would be illegal for the government to do that, but under the rules proposed, it would be allowable for the government to hire a hit man to kill you, and then grant the hit man immunity afterwards.
Regarding the mob scenarios you mentioned... mobs often do the same thing to keep witnesses quiet. The difference is that it's possible to defeat the mob. Defeating the US government, OTOH, is much more difficult.
They want immunity from civil litigation. That's different from criminal prosecution.
I don't think that's a relevant distinction, though. If our legal system was working properly, they would have been both criminally and civilly liable for their illegal actions. For political reasons, however (the foxes are guarding the henhouse), the criminal liability isn't being enforced. That does not and should not make a difference on the civil liability side.
They don't want to get sued for doing what they think is the right thing.
It doesn't matter what "they think is the right thing". It matters what the law says. I may personally think that giving away free copies of Microsoft Windows is the right thing to do, but I'd get laughed out of court if I tried to use that as a legal defense.
The other options are for the telecoms never to divulge any information, or only when they think it's justified, or when they think its not an undue burden
They, like everyone else, are required to follow the law to the best of their ability. That's why they have lawyers, to decide what is legal and what is illegal for them to do. If those lawyers gave them bad legal advice, that is their problem, but it's not a justification for granting them legal immunity from the consequences of their own actions.
They aren't equipped to judge whether it's justified or not -- that's what the cop/intel/court system is for.
They have lawyers whose express purpose is to help them make those decisions... but on the whole you're right: in the end, it comes down to what the court system says. Which is exactly why the court system should be allowed to do its job and process the lawsuits.
If you cooperate with a police investigation and someone sues you because of it, do you want to pay a lawyer to defend you?
That's an interesting example. The salient point here is that in this case, what the government requested the telephone companies to do was almost certainly illegal, and both the government and the phone companies knew it.... hence the clamoring for immunity.
So to make the parallel more exact: say a corrupt police officer asks me to "cooperate with his investigation" by kidnapping a witness's daughter and holding her hostage in order to get the witness to talk. Say that I actually do kidnap the girl and threaten to kill her unless the witness talks. The question, then, is: should I be arrested and charged with kidnapping and extortion? In my opinion, hell yes. Just because a government official asks you to break the law doesn't mean it's legal to break the law.
Congress makes a dumb law, the Executive branch enforces the dumb law, the Judicial branch tells them hey this law is dumb and they get rid of it.
No, that was the old system. The new system is: [...], the Judicial branch is packed with yes men who believe that the "Unitary Executive" has the right to do whatever he damn well pleases, and rules accordingly.
Alanis Morissette suggests that President Hillary Clinton could make broad use of these new Presidential powers to unilaterally outlaw all private health care and replace it with a centralized, government-run system.
Why is immunity for complying with government requests bad? What possible harm could it do?
If the government requests that you break the law, and you comply, and then you are given immunity for your crimes, then effectively there is no law. The government can then commit any crime it likes (by proxy) and get away with it.
In a civilized society, nobody is above the law, especially the government. Societies where the government is above the law are properly called dictatorships.
- walk away/ignore - talk out of our asses like we do know when clearly we don't - quietly observe to learn what others know - change the subject
That as an example of what current AI conversation applications are not capable of.
Actually, current AI "conversation" applications do all of the above all the time... that's one of the things that make them so easy to detect.
n the case of an AI answering machine making a meeting appointment, it would only take one odd question, like: how about those cowboys? to throw the process out of whack if you did not know that you were talking to a machine.
To be fair, that question, without any context, would confuse the majority of human beings also. Not everybody knows the names of American football teams;^)
The game of chess has a finite bounded domain. A conversation with a human does not.
Are you sure? Human conversational domain might be finite, albeit quite a bit larger than the chess domain. At some point it becomes very difficult to tell the difference between "infinite" and just "very very very large"...
That was going to be my point EXACTLY...14Million? WOW they spend that much in iraq in about 10 minutes..
The point to take away from the comparison isn't that $14 million is worthless, but rather that the war in Iraq is ridiculously expensive. $14 million, applied in a productive manner, can go a long way. On the other hand, when trying to solve an insoluble problem like Iraq, no amount of money would be effective.
The BUSH has been a complete disaster to science research in this country, we may never recover
Given a competent replacement, I believe we can. Just because we've spent the last 8 years spinning our wheels doesn't mean we have to continue to do so.
Funny enough, Bush proposed this back in 2001, right after he took office. But everybody was so upset that Bush and Cheney would talk with oil companies when drafting an energy. Yet another case where Bush did a lot but nobody noticed
What exactly has Bush done to promote renewable energy? Simply writing a proposal doesn't count as doing anything. Hell, in his 2000 campaign Bush promised that he would put carbon emissions caps in place to stop global warming. Time and experience has shown that Bush's words and Bush's actions are not related in any meaningful way.
The statement by the Administration that they haven't used waterboarding for some time now also prevents any sense of urgency from forming around the issue.
That's if you can assume that "statements by the Administration" have even a passing relation to the truth. Recent history has shown that to be a very shaky assumption.
Wait, wait wait-- how is preventing a competing browser from functioning on their platform not/worse/ than what MSFT did to Netscape?
It would be, if that was what Apple was doing. But Apple isn't putting in an evil "if app == FireFox then don't run it" command, they are just saying that application code is not allowed to load and execute other application code. That decision was made for security reasons (i.e. to prevent exploitation of security holes), not to keep competing web browsers out. There's nothing that says you need to be able to load plugins to load a web browser.
Indeed... the "War on Terror" is nothing more than various groups of people trying use terror to "hack our fears". The terrorists try to hack our fears to gain power over us, and the governments fighting them do the same.
Or if you are Apple dictating $100 even to freeware/opensource, 30% Soprano commission from a single store, dictating the _CPU_ and the OS to develop apps is OK?
It's Apple's product, and they'll do as they like with it. If you don't like their policies, use a product whose policies you like better. Nobody is forcing anybody to use the iPhone or to develop for it.
I'm sorry, IMO, that's assinine logic. You shouldn't vote one way because you don't like the other. If you don't like any particular candidate you shouldn't vote at all. So what if it didn't get them a Nader presidency, they voted for the message that resonated with them as citizens.
I guess it depends on what your purpose is in voting. If your purpose is to "send a message", then by all means vote for whoever you like best, or don't vote at all. However, most peoples' purpose in voting is to get the best results they can, and given that goal, they will vote strategically if they have to.
If I may use an analogy, it's like you are sitting in the stands at an American football match, and screaming at the players that football is a stupid game, and soccer is better, and so if they are smart they should start using soccer strategy instead of football strategy. You may be right that soccer is a better game, but trying to use soccer strategies (sincere voting) in a football game (a plurality election) will only cause your team to lose, unless you can get the other team to agree to play soccer as well. And why should the other team agree to that, when what they really want is to win the game? So don't be surprised when your advice is ignored.
I guarantee this time around strategists looked at Nader's voters, figured out what attracted them to Nader, and are attempting to appeal to them. That's what their vote for Nader got them: consideration this time around.
That's plausible, but it's really hard to prove that link one way or another. And even if you could prove it, "some consideration" eight years later is a really small compensation to receive in return for eight years under a really bad government.
That's fine - if that happens then the Democratic candidate did not run a platform that appealed to enough people.
Not necessarily. You can have a really good platform, and if two or more candidates are running on that platform, and they will likely lose to a different candidate with another, lesser platform. That's because voters won't know which of the "clone" candidates to vote for and will split their votes amongst all of the clones. Meanwhile, the people who prefer the different strategy of the non-clone candidate will all vote him, so his vote won't be diluted. Because of this, the different candidate is likely to be elected even though the majority of voters would have preferred any one of the clone candidates over the different candidate.
Even if you are a democrat, why does this not happen in the republican party?
It absolutely does happen in the Republican Party. Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 mainly because Ross Perot split the conservative vote with George Bush Sr, drawing enough votes away from Bush that Clinton ended up with a plurality of the votes. There is a good article on the spoiler effect here which includes a list of elections where this has occurred. In a plurality voting system, any race with more than two candidates is subject to the spoiler effect, and the effect gets worse the more candidates there are in the race. That is, in fact, the main reason we have primary elections: to reduce the number of "clone" candidates in the general election by making sure that only one candidate from each party competes in the general election. But of course that only pushes the problem back, because you often still have five or more candidates in a primary election.
That's all well-and-good, but why does he "draw them away"? Do those people have guns to their heads? Obviously not - they agree with more of Nader's message then they do with the Democratic candidate's message.
The point is, in our current system if you want to express a preference for candidate A, you are forced to abstain from stating any preference
Are you implying they are throwing away their votes by voting for a losing candidate?
I'm implying that voting for Nader didn't get them a Nader presidency, it got them a Bush presidency. Given the (IMHO reasonable) assumption that the average Nader voter is left-leaning, and would therefore have preferred a Gore presidency to a Bush presidency, their sincere voting worked against their own interest. I'm not saying that's a good thing -- I think the system completely sucks -- but sticking your head in the sand and pretending it doesn't work that way doesn't help anything.
Jesus Christ people, what's wrong with you..?
You really need to calm down. I didn't attack the honor of your mother, I merely pointed out that in a plurality voting system, the spoiler effect is a real problem. I understand that that pisses you off -- it pisses me off too -- but the place to lay blame is with the plurality system, not the voters who do the best they can given the circumstances they find themselves in.
Have your party produce a better message.
That's also good advice, and I believe the Democrats have done just that. However, it doesn't change the fact that in a plurality voting system, two viable similar candidates will often split the vote and allow a lone dissimilar candidate to win the election despite his being the least popular choice.
Please, for the love of whatever God you believe in, don't vote for a candidate because you want to be with the "winner". Stop being Sheeple. Make a difference or the next plague will remove you from the gene pool.
Perhaps you should stop and consider just how arrogant and condescending you sound. Just because people disagree with you doesn't make them "sheeple" or unworthy of living. In fact, if one were so inclined, one could make the argument that you are the "sheeple", since you are actively advocating that people do something that is against their own best interests. You are aware that a large portion of Nader's funding comes from wealthy Republicans who disagree with everything he stands for, but still send him money because they correctly understand that he helps draw votes away from the Democratic candidate and therefore helps the Republican candidate win? That's an insipid strategy and in a reasonable electoral system (again, check out Range Voting or Condorcet) it would not be a workable one. But we use plurality, and so that strategy works. Moan and wail all you like, but that's how it is.
This is why Obama has not earned the support among the black community that many thought he should.
Except that he he has. At first, many African Americans were reluctant to vote for him because they were afraid he wouldn't be viable. But ever since he proved that he could win even in white-majority states, the African Americans have been overwhelmingly supporting him.
So is he giving away those books or is he making money off them at my expense? Has he released his vision on his website at least? Maybe a PDF download?
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Those acronyms, I don't think they mean what you think they mean. SIMD refers to a Single Instruction operating on Multiple Data values in parallel... think Altivec or SSE. MIMD is Multiple Instructions, Multiple Data... i.e. the multiple CPU machines you and I have been running for years.
Sure, anyone would. Barring some major breakthroughs in superconducting circuits, however, it's not going to happen anytime soon.... well, not unless you want to run one of those liquid-helium cooled machines....
I think that open, transparent government is the way to go. Even if there are some minor implementation costs, the benefit of people being able to find out what their government is up to is huge. Corruption festers in darkness... turn the lights on and the cockroaches scatter. If you're tired of Halliburton-style crony capitalist good-old-boy's club kleptocracy, then open, transparent government is the cure.
Unfortunately, voting 3rd party isn't a way out unless a statistically significant number of people do it. And there's no evidence that that's going to happen in this election. So for this election at least, voting 3rd party is equivalent to not voting at all.
Care to explain what that difference is? From my perspective, it looks worse for McCain, since he clearly accepted the endorsement in full knowledge of the objectionable things Hagee said. Obama, on the other hand, was attending church long before Wright made his objectionable speeches, and it's a bit much to hold him responsible for not correctly predicting what somebody would say 15 years in advance.
Not that any of this has anything to do with what's best for the nation, of course. Perhaps we would be better off sticking to the issues and leaving the "gotcha" guilt-by-association memes by the wayside...
Ah, dammit, you're right. There really is no hope for mankind's future. I'm just going to pop over and shoot myself now. Goodbye!
Well, in this scenario, a good reason why you wouldn't tell is because the government has threatened to kill you (or otherwise make your life miserable) if you do tell anyone. Of course, it would be illegal for the government to do that, but under the rules proposed, it would be allowable for the government to hire a hit man to kill you, and then grant the hit man immunity afterwards.
Regarding the mob scenarios you mentioned... mobs often do the same thing to keep witnesses quiet. The difference is that it's possible to defeat the mob. Defeating the US government, OTOH, is much more difficult.
I don't think that's a relevant distinction, though. If our legal system was working properly, they would have been both criminally and civilly liable for their illegal actions. For political reasons, however (the foxes are guarding the henhouse), the criminal liability isn't being enforced. That does not and should not make a difference on the civil liability side.
They don't want to get sued for doing what they think is the right thing.
It doesn't matter what "they think is the right thing". It matters what the law says. I may personally think that giving away free copies of Microsoft Windows is the right thing to do, but I'd get laughed out of court if I tried to use that as a legal defense.
The other options are for the telecoms never to divulge any information, or only when they think it's justified, or when they think its not an undue burden
They, like everyone else, are required to follow the law to the best of their ability. That's why they have lawyers, to decide what is legal and what is illegal for them to do. If those lawyers gave them bad legal advice, that is their problem, but it's not a justification for granting them legal immunity from the consequences of their own actions.
They aren't equipped to judge whether it's justified or not -- that's what the cop/intel/court system is for.
They have lawyers whose express purpose is to help them make those decisions... but on the whole you're right: in the end, it comes down to what the court system says. Which is exactly why the court system should be allowed to do its job and process the lawsuits.
Ah, but human conversations are limited by the human lifespan, which is finite and much smaller than the universe.
That's an interesting example. The salient point here is that in this case, what the government requested the telephone companies to do was almost certainly illegal, and both the government and the phone companies knew it.... hence the clamoring for immunity.
So to make the parallel more exact: say a corrupt police officer asks me to "cooperate with his investigation" by kidnapping a witness's daughter and holding her hostage in order to get the witness to talk. Say that I actually do kidnap the girl and threaten to kill her unless the witness talks. The question, then, is: should I be arrested and charged with kidnapping and extortion? In my opinion, hell yes. Just because a government official asks you to break the law doesn't mean it's legal to break the law.
No, that was the old system. The new system is: [...], the Judicial branch is packed with yes men who believe that the "Unitary Executive" has the right to do whatever he damn well pleases, and rules accordingly.
Alanis Morissette suggests that President Hillary Clinton could make broad use of these new Presidential powers to unilaterally outlaw all private health care and replace it with a centralized, government-run system.
If the government requests that you break the law, and you comply, and then you are given immunity for your crimes, then effectively there is no law. The government can then commit any crime it likes (by proxy) and get away with it.
In a civilized society, nobody is above the law, especially the government. Societies where the government is above the law are properly called dictatorships.
- talk out of our asses like we do know when clearly we don't
- quietly observe to learn what others know
- change the subject
That as an example of what current AI conversation applications are not capable of.
Actually, current AI "conversation" applications do all of the above all the time... that's one of the things that make them so easy to detect.
n the case of an AI answering machine making a meeting appointment, it would only take one odd question, like: how about those cowboys? to throw the process out of whack if you did not know that you were talking to a machine.
To be fair, that question, without any context, would confuse the majority of human beings also. Not everybody knows the names of American football teams
The game of chess has a finite bounded domain. A conversation with a human does not.
Are you sure? Human conversational domain might be finite, albeit quite a bit larger than the chess domain. At some point it becomes very difficult to tell the difference between "infinite" and just "very very very large"...
The point to take away from the comparison isn't that $14 million is worthless, but rather that the war in Iraq is ridiculously expensive. $14 million, applied in a productive manner, can go a long way. On the other hand, when trying to solve an insoluble problem like Iraq, no amount of money would be effective.
The BUSH has been a complete disaster to science research in this country, we may never recover
Given a competent replacement, I believe we can. Just because we've spent the last 8 years spinning our wheels doesn't mean we have to continue to do so.
What exactly has Bush done to promote renewable energy? Simply writing a proposal doesn't count as doing anything. Hell, in his 2000 campaign Bush promised that he would put carbon emissions caps in place to stop global warming. Time and experience has shown that Bush's words and Bush's actions are not related in any meaningful way.
That's if you can assume that "statements by the Administration" have even a passing relation to the truth. Recent history has shown that to be a very shaky assumption.
Really? I thought they were put into office to dig us out of Iraq. Not that they've done that, either...
It would be, if that was what Apple was doing. But Apple isn't putting in an evil "if app == FireFox then don't run it" command, they are just saying that application code is not allowed to load and execute other application code. That decision was made for security reasons (i.e. to prevent exploitation of security holes), not to keep competing web browsers out. There's nothing that says you need to be able to load plugins to load a web browser.
Indeed... the "War on Terror" is nothing more than various groups of people trying use terror to "hack our fears". The terrorists try to hack our fears to gain power over us, and the governments fighting them do the same.
It's Apple's product, and they'll do as they like with it. If you don't like their policies, use a product whose policies you like better. Nobody is forcing anybody to use the iPhone or to develop for it.
I guess it depends on what your purpose is in voting. If your purpose is to "send a message", then by all means vote for whoever you like best, or don't vote at all. However, most peoples' purpose in voting is to get the best results they can, and given that goal, they will vote strategically if they have to.
If I may use an analogy, it's like you are sitting in the stands at an American football match, and screaming at the players that football is a stupid game, and soccer is better, and so if they are smart they should start using soccer strategy instead of football strategy. You may be right that soccer is a better game, but trying to use soccer strategies (sincere voting) in a football game (a plurality election) will only cause your team to lose, unless you can get the other team to agree to play soccer as well. And why should the other team agree to that, when what they really want is to win the game? So don't be surprised when your advice is ignored.
I guarantee this time around strategists looked at Nader's voters, figured out what attracted them to Nader, and are attempting to appeal to them. That's what their vote for Nader got them: consideration this time around.
That's plausible, but it's really hard to prove that link one way or another. And even if you could prove it, "some consideration" eight years later is a really small compensation to receive in return for eight years under a really bad government.
That's fine - if that happens then the Democratic candidate did not run a platform that appealed to enough people.
Not necessarily. You can have a really good platform, and if two or more candidates are running on that platform, and they will likely lose to a different candidate with another, lesser platform. That's because voters won't know which of the "clone" candidates to vote for and will split their votes amongst all of the clones. Meanwhile, the people who prefer the different strategy of the non-clone candidate will all vote him, so his vote won't be diluted. Because of this, the different candidate is likely to be elected even though the majority of voters would have preferred any one of the clone candidates over the different candidate.
Even if you are a democrat, why does this not happen in the republican party?
It absolutely does happen in the Republican Party. Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 mainly because Ross Perot split the conservative vote with George Bush Sr, drawing enough votes away from Bush that Clinton ended up with a plurality of the votes. There is a good article on the spoiler effect here which includes a list of elections where this has occurred. In a plurality voting system, any race with more than two candidates is subject to the spoiler effect, and the effect gets worse the more candidates there are in the race. That is, in fact, the main reason we have primary elections: to reduce the number of "clone" candidates in the general election by making sure that only one candidate from each party competes in the general election. But of course that only pushes the problem back, because you often still have five or more candidates in a primary election.
That's all well-and-good, but why does he "draw them away"? Do those people have guns to their heads? Obviously not - they agree with more of Nader's message then they do with the Democratic candidate's message.
The point is, in our current system if you want to express a preference for candidate A, you are forced to abstain from stating any preference
I'm implying that voting for Nader didn't get them a Nader presidency, it got them a Bush presidency. Given the (IMHO reasonable) assumption that the average Nader voter is left-leaning, and would therefore have preferred a Gore presidency to a Bush presidency, their sincere voting worked against their own interest. I'm not saying that's a good thing -- I think the system completely sucks -- but sticking your head in the sand and pretending it doesn't work that way doesn't help anything.
Jesus Christ people, what's wrong with you..?
You really need to calm down. I didn't attack the honor of your mother, I merely pointed out that in a plurality voting system, the spoiler effect is a real problem. I understand that that pisses you off -- it pisses me off too -- but the place to lay blame is with the plurality system, not the voters who do the best they can given the circumstances they find themselves in.
Have your party produce a better message.
That's also good advice, and I believe the Democrats have done just that. However, it doesn't change the fact that in a plurality voting system, two viable similar candidates will often split the vote and allow a lone dissimilar candidate to win the election despite his being the least popular choice.
Please, for the love of whatever God you believe in, don't vote for a candidate because you want to be with the "winner". Stop being Sheeple. Make a difference or the next plague will remove you from the gene pool.
Perhaps you should stop and consider just how arrogant and condescending you sound. Just because people disagree with you doesn't make them "sheeple" or unworthy of living. In fact, if one were so inclined, one could make the argument that you are the "sheeple", since you are actively advocating that people do something that is against their own best interests. You are aware that a large portion of Nader's funding comes from wealthy Republicans who disagree with everything he stands for, but still send him money because they correctly understand that he helps draw votes away from the Democratic candidate and therefore helps the Republican candidate win? That's an insipid strategy and in a reasonable electoral system (again, check out Range Voting or Condorcet) it would not be a workable one. But we use plurality, and so that strategy works. Moan and wail all you like, but that's how it is.
Except that he he has. At first, many African Americans were reluctant to vote for him because they were afraid he wouldn't be viable. But ever since he proved that he could win even in white-majority states, the African Americans have been overwhelmingly supporting him.
Indeed.
Have you tried your local public library?