So then, the best thing to do is exagerate how bad things are to force people to do what some think needs to be done?
Nope, the best thing to do is present separate predictions for each likely scenario... "here is what we think will happen if we don't change anything", "here is what we think will happen if we address the problem very aggressively", and maybe some possible in-between scenarios too.
Come on Slashdotters, there are more than two possible solutions to any problem... so if you don't like a proposed solution, try thinking for a bit and coming up with a better alternative, instead of just slagging the parent poster because you assumed he was advocating the "opposite idea" which is clearly not going to work. If everybody did that, we'd have more interesting discussion and fewer flaming straw men.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones, and the oil age wont end because we ran out of oil
Your implication is that the stone age ended because we found something better than stones to switch to. Perhaps so, but it raises the question, what is there that is 'better than oil' (read: cheaper, more convenient, less polluting) that we will switch to this time? Other than a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, I don't see another energy source that can easily scale to fill oil's shoes yet... which suggests that this time we may be switching to something else not because something else has been discovered that makes oil not worth harvesting, but rather because there's no longer enough oil available to meet our needs.
So you're saying all of the following are figments of the Iraq Survey Group's imaginations?
I don't doubt your ability to cherry-pick details that (when presented out of context) make Iraq look sinister. However, I have to base my conclusions on the survey's main results, which you are welcome to read for youself. In short, while the Iraqi government were no angels, they weren't a significant threat to the US either.
It's better to go in and mitigate a possibly overstated risk than to hand some reactors and nuclear fuel over to a little pot-bellied, dog-eating dictator and wake up ~10 years later to a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Funny you should mention that... that's exactly what we woke up this morning. So by your own measure, Bush's foreign policy has failed us.
I'll put the Bush record of mitigating world threats up against the Clinton record any time, anywhere. Maybe you won't, but clear-thinking people will compare the two and realize that in times of consequence such as these, it's not safe to vote Democrat.
Clear-thinking people look not only at the imagined hazards of voting Democrat, but also at the actual damage incurred by inept Republican policies. You can wave your arms about what you think Democrats might do, but we know for a fact what Republicans done: they've started, bungled, and lost an unnecessary war. As far as what the American public thinks about that, I think you'll find out in November.
Speaking of straw men... yes, the official line was "weapons of mass destruction", not just nuclear weapons. The problem is, we didn't find any weapons of mass destruction of any type. Nor did we find any facilities for making same. The few chemical weapons we did (leftover from before the first Gulf War) find were not usable for mass destruction, and therefore were not WMDs.
In the meantime, we had the President accusing Iraq of smuggling yellowcake out of Niger (an accusation he knew to be false when he said it as part of the State of the Union speech), and Condoleeza Rice saying things like "the first smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud"... literally terrorizing the US population into supporting the invasion.
So you can take your smug comment about people not knowing set theory and shove it up your ass -- it's your deliberate mischaracterization of the situation as a set theory problem that is incorrect. The issue isn't the academic definition of what constitutes a WMD, it's the US executive branch deliberately lying to the US public in order to get public support for an unnecessary, counterproductive, and useless war. It may make you feel better to ignore that in favor of semantic games, but it doesn't solve the problem.
In your worst-case scenario, it will put an impetus on us to find a way to clean up the mess we're already making, and ignoring. Hardly a doomsday event.
And if there is no practical way to clean up that mess (other than waiting for the junk to de-orbit naturally)? Then I guess we're stuck without any space program for the next few hundred years. You're right, hardly a doomsday event, but not much fun for space exploration fans either.
A lack of open hostilities is not peace. And anyway, what will we get? A few damaged satellites? Oh, the humanity, the destruction...
How about most or all usable orbits becoming filled with the debris of destroyed satellites/weaponry, making manned or unmanned space flight impossible (or at least, suicidally hazardous) for the next several hundred years? That would put a bit of a crimp in your grand space-exploration plans, wouldn't it?
Can you say wild overreaction? Can you say schizophrenia? Can you say lift the tin foil full face helmet so you can breathe?
Yeah, I could say all of those things, but the fact remains that we have dropped 120,000+ soliders and $300+ billion into a foreign country to interdict nuclear weapons that did not and do no exist, and stop an alliance with Al-Qaeda that also did not exist. Also, this is the same administration that advocates for the creation and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield. So at this point, there is very little room left for 'overreaction'. Things really are that insane in the White House, and will probably only get worse once the Republicans lose control of Congress in November.
on Friday the house voted to redefine the rights afforded to prisoners in U.S custody.... something that deserves massive media coverage as it's a sign of the creeping 1984 state that seems just around the corner.....
The problem is, for a significant portion of the Republican base, the above is considered a good thing. Bush was (and is) planning on trumpeting his dismantling of the Constitution as demonstrating how his party is "tough on terror".
Hey, I'm a "person like him" -- as liberal as they come -- and what you described above is not the liberal position at all. The liberal position (as advocated by the ACLU, et al) is that anyone should have the right to pray to whomever they want on their own time -- pretty much what you described above. What they don't like is public school teachers leading their students in prayer during classes, because that is government advocating a particular religion, a violation of the separation of church and state.
In short, you are taking the liberal position, and don't know it. You've been misinformed to the point where you think black is white, and vice versa.
Yes, but the Daily Show is not SUPPOSED to have "substance". It's on the COMEDY CHANNEL for chrissakes.
The Daily Show is an interesting (if perhaps unintentional) solution to the problem of political news. The problem is: politics either is so full of bullshit and spin that it disgusts people, or it's so dry and abstract that it bores people. Either way, the networks found that when they covered politics, their ratings went down, and when they covered other things (read: fluff), their rating went up. Their response was the obvious thing to do when you're in it for the money: cover the bare minimum of politics, and spend more time on other, more "fun" stuff.
The Daily Show, on the other hand, takes a different approach: it covers politics and makes its political coverage enjoyable to watch, by making it funny. Also, because it doesn't bill itself as a serious news show, it is free to say things that traditional news shows can't or won't (ironically, because they want to preserve their reputation for "objectivity", which is in tatters nevertheless... because objectivity is an impossible standard to reach, even in principle. One person's "straight facts" are another person's "obvious bias"). That means that there is often more information available in a TDS episode than in the news, because TDS isn't afraid to connect the dots for its viewers.
And chances are, it would be just as nonsensical as this.
You may be right... there may be nothing to this but paranoia and sour grapes on the part of Democrats that lost.
But with Diebold style machines, how can anyone ever prove otherwise? With no paper trail, this issue is going to come up in every single election. The loser will claim that the election was stolen, and there will be no way for anyone to prove that it didn't happen.
That's why we need systems where the results are open to public inspection/recount and difficult to hack. Paper ballots meet this criteria. Electronic machines with a voter-verified paper trail meet this criteria. Diebold machines do not. Even if we assumed that every person involved with those machines was in fact 100% honest and above cheating, they'd still be unusable as an electoral mechanism, because every election result would be suspect.
All they know how to do is whhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnneeeeeeee if they don't get their way.
I'm sure you will remember this when your state's election machines get hacked by some lefty and you end up with Howard Dean as your governor, despite the fact that all the exit polls showed him getting 3% of the vote. Remember your rule: if your guy lost the election, it's YOUR FAULT. Claiming fraud is just loser talk.
I find it really ironic that a Kennedy, of all people, should be warning people about election fraud
The message is valid, regardless of what you think of the messenger.
And I find it particularly sad that the people who are warning about election fraud don't want to do a damn thing to prevent people from voting twice
Having people vote twice is a problem -- someone gets their vote counted twice instead of once. Having compromised electronic voting machines is a much bigger problem: the person who hacks the machine can make the results of the election be anything he wants. Why not seriously consider the issue instead of letting your partisan blinders obscure your vision? Electronic voting fraud is just as big a problem for "your side" as the other one.
Other countries at least make you dip your finger in ink that lasts a few days when they vote. They should at least do that here.
Great, so the guy who walks in to the election booth with the "special" flash card that steals the election will have a blue finger afterwards. I feel much better now.
You (and probably also the grandparent post) misunderstand the concept. You get a print out from the machine, and you place the printout into the ballot box. The printout is in every way treated the same as the paper ballot you use in traditional systems. The only difference is that at the end of election day, there is a quick tally available electronically. The paper ballots can (and should) still be counted in order to verify that the electronic tally is correct. If there is a discrepancy, the paper tally is used.
Kinda makes Hillary a hypocrite based on what she said here, now doesn't it?
Erm -- what exactly did Hillary say there? I didn't see any quotes from Hillary in the article you linked to.
Those looking to pin this ONLY on this current administration are showing they are simply interested in partisan politics. There is plenty of blame to go around.
No doubt there is blame to be laid elsewhere. But the fact remains that it is the responsibility of the sitting government to defend the nation against attack -- not the job of people who are no longer in power, and haven't been for 8 months or more. Whatever happened to "the buck stops here"? Frankly, the Bush administration's "how could we have possibly known?" defense would be more compelling if they hadn't also used that excuse for their complete botch of Hurricane Katrina, despite the fact that Bush is on tape being warned in advance about Katrina, and asking not a single question. Face it, the man simply isn't competent to run the US government, and the sooner he and his cronies are out of office, the sooner our nation can stop falling on its face.
"Yer Honor, it's true that my client butchered three dozen kindergarteners and baked them into a delicious lasagna. But that was back in 2003, yer Honor. It's old news -- I don't even know why we're discussing it. The defense rests."
The only way to get out of the inverse square law is [...] or to use some sort of self-replicating robotic message. Biology, being based on messy chemistry, just isn't good enough.
What do you think robots are made out of? Pixie dust? Guess what -- they are also based on chemistry. Most likely any robots capable of doing this job would be difficult to distinguish from "life".
How would you rate Mac OS X on its multiprocessor handling?
I believe it's pretty good, and getting better.
Obviously, you still need the apps to support it too.
Not necessarily... one trick Apple is doing is to hide the multithreading code inside its higher level libraries. As a hypothetical example, say you have a single-threaded application that calls RenderCool3DScene() in Apple's Cool3DGraphics library: on a single CPU machine, the scene will be rendered in normal way, but on a multi-CPU machine, Apple's code might get clever and spawn two threads internally: one to render the top half of the scene, and one to render the bottom half. Your app is still single-threaded, but it will now run faster because RenderCool3DScene() returns more quickly on the multicore Mac.
but B is sleeping so A sits and waits for B to wake up (be scheduled) and respond. By that time, A may have been put to sleep (by the scheduler) so that when B finally responds, A isn't there to act on the response for another XX milliseconds.
You seem to be implying that threads can't be woken up except at scheduler quantum boundaries. That would be horribly inefficient, so it's a good thing it isn't true... any decent/modern OS can wake up a thread immediately at any time. So even if thread A was put to sleep, the OS can (and usually does) wake it up again immediately when thread B sends it a message (assuming thread B's priority is less than or equal to A's, or that thread B goes to sleep itself after sending the message). There is overhead to this -- the CPU has to save and restore register state on each context switch -- but that overhead is on the order of microseconds, not milliseconds.
Note: all of the above is null and void if your program is using polling loops as part of its communications method. But your program is doing that, then you need to be taken out and shot anyway:^)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, he was expressing sarcasm. I suspect his underlying message and your explicit one are identical.
Nope, the best thing to do is present separate predictions for each likely scenario... "here is what we think will happen if we don't change anything", "here is what we think will happen if we address the problem very aggressively", and maybe some possible in-between scenarios too.
Come on Slashdotters, there are more than two possible solutions to any problem... so if you don't like a proposed solution, try thinking for a bit and coming up with a better alternative, instead of just slagging the parent poster because you assumed he was advocating the "opposite idea" which is clearly not going to work. If everybody did that, we'd have more interesting discussion and fewer flaming straw men.
Your implication is that the stone age ended because we found something better than stones to switch to. Perhaps so, but it raises the question, what is there that is 'better than oil' (read: cheaper, more convenient, less polluting) that we will switch to this time? Other than a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, I don't see another energy source that can easily scale to fill oil's shoes yet... which suggests that this time we may be switching to something else not because something else has been discovered that makes oil not worth harvesting, but rather because there's no longer enough oil available to meet our needs.
Are you sure? I thought the problem was that you wake up and the world has become overrun by sex-crazed, corporate-brainwashed morons...
Hmm... as a solution to prison overcrowding, perhaps?
I don't doubt your ability to cherry-pick details that (when presented out of context) make Iraq look sinister. However, I have to base my conclusions on the survey's main results, which you are welcome to read for youself. In short, while the Iraqi government were no angels, they weren't a significant threat to the US either.
It's better to go in and mitigate a possibly overstated risk than to hand some reactors and nuclear fuel over to a little pot-bellied, dog-eating dictator and wake up ~10 years later to a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Funny you should mention that... that's exactly what we woke up this morning. So by your own measure, Bush's foreign policy has failed us.
I'll put the Bush record of mitigating world threats up against the Clinton record any time, anywhere. Maybe you won't, but clear-thinking people will compare the two and realize that in times of consequence such as these, it's not safe to vote Democrat.
Clear-thinking people look not only at the imagined hazards of voting Democrat, but also at the actual damage incurred by inept Republican policies. You can wave your arms about what you think Democrats might do, but we know for a fact what Republicans done: they've started, bungled, and lost an unnecessary war. As far as what the American public thinks about that, I think you'll find out in November.
In the meantime, we had the President accusing Iraq of smuggling yellowcake out of Niger (an accusation he knew to be false when he said it as part of the State of the Union speech), and Condoleeza Rice saying things like "the first smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud"... literally terrorizing the US population into supporting the invasion.
So you can take your smug comment about people not knowing set theory and shove it up your ass -- it's your deliberate mischaracterization of the situation as a set theory problem that is incorrect. The issue isn't the academic definition of what constitutes a WMD, it's the US executive branch deliberately lying to the US public in order to get public support for an unnecessary, counterproductive, and useless war. It may make you feel better to ignore that in favor of semantic games, but it doesn't solve the problem.
And if there is no practical way to clean up that mess (other than waiting for the junk to de-orbit naturally)? Then I guess we're stuck without any space program for the next few hundred years. You're right, hardly a doomsday event, but not much fun for space exploration fans either.
How about most or all usable orbits becoming filled with the debris of destroyed satellites/weaponry, making manned or unmanned space flight impossible (or at least, suicidally hazardous) for the next several hundred years? That would put a bit of a crimp in your grand space-exploration plans, wouldn't it?
Yeah, I could say all of those things, but the fact remains that we have dropped 120,000+ soliders and $300+ billion into a foreign country to interdict nuclear weapons that did not and do no exist, and stop an alliance with Al-Qaeda that also did not exist. Also, this is the same administration that advocates for the creation and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield. So at this point, there is very little room left for 'overreaction'. Things really are that insane in the White House, and will probably only get worse once the Republicans lose control of Congress in November.
Eat seaweed, fish breath!
The problem is, for a significant portion of the Republican base, the above is considered a good thing. Bush was (and is) planning on trumpeting his dismantling of the Constitution as demonstrating how his party is "tough on terror".
In short, you are taking the liberal position, and don't know it. You've been misinformed to the point where you think black is white, and vice versa.
Except Iraqis. We're allowed to kill them, of course, because it's in the service of a Greater Good.
I prefer the classic implementation, myself:
:: IsLying() const {return AreLipsMoving();}
bool Politician
The Daily Show is an interesting (if perhaps unintentional) solution to the problem of political news. The problem is: politics either is so full of bullshit and spin that it disgusts people, or it's so dry and abstract that it bores people. Either way, the networks found that when they covered politics, their ratings went down, and when they covered other things (read: fluff), their rating went up. Their response was the obvious thing to do when you're in it for the money: cover the bare minimum of politics, and spend more time on other, more "fun" stuff.
The Daily Show, on the other hand, takes a different approach: it covers politics and makes its political coverage enjoyable to watch, by making it funny. Also, because it doesn't bill itself as a serious news show, it is free to say things that traditional news shows can't or won't (ironically, because they want to preserve their reputation for "objectivity", which is in tatters nevertheless... because objectivity is an impossible standard to reach, even in principle. One person's "straight facts" are another person's "obvious bias"). That means that there is often more information available in a TDS episode than in the news, because TDS isn't afraid to connect the dots for its viewers.
You may be right... there may be nothing to this but paranoia and sour grapes on the part of Democrats that lost.
But with Diebold style machines, how can anyone ever prove otherwise? With no paper trail, this issue is going to come up in every single election. The loser will claim that the election was stolen, and there will be no way for anyone to prove that it didn't happen.
That's why we need systems where the results are open to public inspection/recount and difficult to hack. Paper ballots meet this criteria. Electronic machines with a voter-verified paper trail meet this criteria. Diebold machines do not. Even if we assumed that every person involved with those machines was in fact 100% honest and above cheating, they'd still be unusable as an electoral mechanism, because every election result would be suspect.
I'm sure you will remember this when your state's election machines get hacked by some lefty and you end up with Howard Dean as your governor, despite the fact that all the exit polls showed him getting 3% of the vote. Remember your rule: if your guy lost the election, it's YOUR FAULT. Claiming fraud is just loser talk.
The message is valid, regardless of what you think of the messenger.
And I find it particularly sad that the people who are warning about election fraud don't want to do a damn thing to prevent people from voting twice
Having people vote twice is a problem -- someone gets their vote counted twice instead of once. Having compromised electronic voting machines is a much bigger problem: the person who hacks the machine can make the results of the election be anything he wants. Why not seriously consider the issue instead of letting your partisan blinders obscure your vision? Electronic voting fraud is just as big a problem for "your side" as the other one.
Other countries at least make you dip your finger in ink that lasts a few days when they vote. They should at least do that here.
Great, so the guy who walks in to the election booth with the "special" flash card that steals the election will have a blue finger afterwards. I feel much better now.
You (and probably also the grandparent post) misunderstand the concept. You get a print out from the machine, and you place the printout into the ballot box. The printout is in every way treated the same as the paper ballot you use in traditional systems. The only difference is that at the end of election day, there is a quick tally available electronically. The paper ballots can (and should) still be counted in order to verify that the electronic tally is correct. If there is a discrepancy, the paper tally is used.
Erm -- what exactly did Hillary say there? I didn't see any quotes from Hillary in the article you linked to.
Those looking to pin this ONLY on this current administration are showing they are simply interested in partisan politics. There is plenty of blame to go around.
No doubt there is blame to be laid elsewhere. But the fact remains that it is the responsibility of the sitting government to defend the nation against attack -- not the job of people who are no longer in power, and haven't been for 8 months or more. Whatever happened to "the buck stops here"? Frankly, the Bush administration's "how could we have possibly known?" defense would be more compelling if they hadn't also used that excuse for their complete botch of Hurricane Katrina, despite the fact that Bush is on tape being warned in advance about Katrina, and asking not a single question. Face it, the man simply isn't competent to run the US government, and the sooner he and his cronies are out of office, the sooner our nation can stop falling on its face.
"Yer Honor, it's true that my client butchered three dozen kindergarteners and baked them into a delicious lasagna. But that was back in 2003, yer Honor. It's old news -- I don't even know why we're discussing it. The defense rests."
What do you think robots are made out of? Pixie dust? Guess what -- they are also based on chemistry. Most likely any robots capable of doing this job would be difficult to distinguish from "life".
I believe it's pretty good, and getting better.
Obviously, you still need the apps to support it too.
Not necessarily... one trick Apple is doing is to hide the multithreading code inside its higher level libraries. As a hypothetical example, say you have a single-threaded application that calls RenderCool3DScene() in Apple's Cool3DGraphics library: on a single CPU machine, the scene will be rendered in normal way, but on a multi-CPU machine, Apple's code might get clever and spawn two threads internally: one to render the top half of the scene, and one to render the bottom half. Your app is still single-threaded, but it will now run faster because RenderCool3DScene() returns more quickly on the multicore Mac.
You seem to be implying that threads can't be woken up except at scheduler quantum boundaries. That would be horribly inefficient, so it's a good thing it isn't true... any decent/modern OS can wake up a thread immediately at any time. So even if thread A was put to sleep, the OS can (and usually does) wake it up again immediately when thread B sends it a message (assuming thread B's priority is less than or equal to A's, or that thread B goes to sleep itself after sending the message). There is overhead to this -- the CPU has to save and restore register state on each context switch -- but that overhead is on the order of microseconds, not milliseconds.
Note: all of the above is null and void if your program is using polling loops as part of its communications method. But your program is doing that, then you need to be taken out and shot anyway