>>Ok, regardless of whether or not an invoice was ever produced, the Senate is required to report things like this on their financial disclosure forms so that under the table payments can be discovered.
Kind of like how Charles Rangel was arrested for not reporting income, or reporting the free rent he gets from his rent controlled *apartments* from a New York developer that is one of the companies he is affiliated with?
Oh wait. Rangel is a democrat, so he gets a free pass.
>>By my definition, the most reliable storage setup you'd see on a desktop is a hardware RAID1 array with 2 Ultra160 or Ultra320 SCSI-based SSD drives.
Sure. I use RAID1 on all my business machines. The extra hard drive isn't expensive, and it guards against HD crashes. What it doesn't guard against is mobo crashes, and if you lose your motherboard, all the data on your RAID array vanishes unless you can find a replacement with an identical chipset. Good luck with that when you're building a machine to last for more than 5 years.
So I actually use a RAID1 array and an external hard drive with nightly backups.
>>And the best cooling setup is a system that doesn't require cooling fans, due to its setup, but has ample cooling measures, just in case.
I'd disagree with this. Passive systems often run much hotter than actively cooled systems, and thus increase your failure rate. Depends on your build, of course, but it's what I've seen from experimenting with trying to build one for silence reasons. Even underclocked, I just couldn't get it as cool as with fans pushing the air out.
>>The underlying assumption here is that the highly reliable hardware is also the more expensive equipment. Although not everything that is more expensive is also more reliable. >>That's because engineering and ensuring the highest level of quality is more expensive to do.
Yeah, but cheaper parts are often the most successful, with the economy of scale pushing the prices down. I don't think there's much difference in reliability between Intel's most expensive and least expensive offerings on the market right now (though I could be wrong). Perhaps if you're looking at el-cheapo DVD drives or something. From some EEs I worked with, there were indeed major quality issues with some of the knockoff brands (they'd reverse engineer whatever Sony was doing, but never really get it right). So in that case, I guess sticking with a Sony drive or whatever would be your best bet.
>>In terms of computer equipment, the most reliable equipment is that designed and intended to be used in servers that run with heavy loads 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Again, I'm not sure about that. Enterprise hardware, because it looks at less customers than consumer products, often have bugs that go unnoticed. A friend of mine works for Hotmail, and they found a number of firmware bugs in various enterprise level products they used, including a very expensive RAID controller capable of running a lot of disks in parallel - it would cause a complete data loss with about a 50/50 probability once per year.
>>The highest reliability comes when the system is designed so that some parts can fail; i.e. Redundant Hard drives, Reduntant RAM, Redundant CPUs, Redundant Power, good power protection.
If you have a dual-CPU motherboard and one of the CPUs or RAM modules fails, I believe most mobos will refuse to boot. In any event, when you have doubled everything you've greatly increased your risk of failure. Remember, the OP wanted a machine that could run without maintenance for 15 years - having to go in and pull bad components defeats the entire purpose.
>>Despite all this, the mainboard can still fail. But the more carefully designed more carefully tested parts are less likely to do so in the long run (assuming they survive the first 90 days)
Yeah, I've had more mobos fail on me than any other component... small sample size, but it sort of reinforces my point about not knowing what is reliable - all the mobos made with bad caps a couple years back certainly seemed reliable under testing, but then would suddenly fail a couple years later when they'd blow a cap. As a customer, you have no way of knowing if any of the current products on the shelf at Fry's have similar ticking time bombs.
>>Keep in mind that it may be prudent to pick less-reliable hardware that should still last 4 or 5 years (most likely), over slightly more-reliable hardware
What is reliable hardware?
I'm sure every nerd on here has his favorite brand of motherboard and hard drive, but by and large, we don't have the slightest idea which DVD drive out nowadays will have a high or low failure rate 5 years from now.
...will be retired as a government indicator of quality care, beginning April 1, 2009
April Fools!
Actually, beta blockers are GREAT for you.
Re:Isn't it high time for a 80x86 cleanup?
on
Larrabee ISA Revealed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The programming languages that will benefit from Larrabee though will not be C/C++. It will be Fortran and the purely functional programming languages. Unless C/C++ has some extensions to deal with the pointer aliasing issue, that is.
Intel has a lot of smart people in their compilers group, and they've done stuff like this before in different times in the past. I wouldn't at all be surprised if they released compiler extensions to allow quick loading of data into the processing vectors.
Umm, you missed the significance here, which is the last sentence they said: "If you've ever had to deal with law enforcement when it comes to recovering what they took from you, you know what a nightmare this could turn into."
I had a friend who had his box confiscated by one of the three letter agencies. After 5 years, they gave it back to him.
Google is in tight with Obama. They did the "Office of the Presidential Elect" web site for him.
>>It's not like they could seal off the tubes, but it's an interesting mental exercise to imagine just how much Internet traffic would be curtailed if Google suddenly ceased all of its operations.
Not much. People know about other search engines... Google is just too easy to use and it works well, so they use that.
VLC crashes and dies on corrupted files a lot more than media player classic, and if you are unfortunate enough to install the VLC plugin for firefox, it'll kill firefox with it. This is with an older version, but IMO it is just not worth the effort.
Actually, the biggest issue with VLC is its shitty playlist support (awkward autorepeat options) and the fact that if you double click a video to go to fullscreen, it'll go back to windowed on the next item in the playlist, but still act like it's in fullscreen mode.
In fact you'd need to backup ALL the wind power generators with equal rating backup systems and since these would probably coal and/or nuclear which can't be started up and shut down on a whim and so need to run 24/7 anyway it makes a mockery of the whole enviromental argument for wind.
Yeah, those darn nuclear reactors produce so much CO2 and other pollutants that... oh wait.
AA has power at selected seats. I almost always sit in the exit row, which does have power. In the rest of the "prime seats" (used by business travelers), I find that approximately every other row has power. If it isn't your row, it isn't difficult to negotiate with the row in front of you to let you use their power outlet. As someone that flies about 10 times a month... it really depends on the plane. Between carrier, model of the plane, and individual planes, there's huge variation in what sort of power is available. I don't even bother with my laptop any more on flights - I just stuff it in the overhead and read a book.
My last plane had the weird airplane specific power adaptors. I love those.:p
>>You have free will because *you*, just like Booth, are the one making the decision. Knowledge of that decision, either in the past or in the future, does not make it any less yours.
It does if you want to change it. Imagine if a device could run a simulation of the universe and figure out what the world will look like in 30 years. In a deterministic universe, this is possible.
Suppose you see yourself with a bad mustache leading a column of tanks into Poland, and say to yourself, "Damn, I don't want to be that guy."
You're trying to say that not having the choice to not do that is perfectly acceptable - I don't think it is. And there's really no particular mechanism I can see that would force us to do something we don't want to.
I don't know where you are from, but i know that the school can't trump parental rights in most parts of the country.
It's not about trumping about parental rights. A school is the kid's parent, legally, while the kid is in school, for most purposes. It's called "in loco parentis".
When I was in high school, I read basically everything I could find about the law and schools. There's a lot of things a school can do, because of this principle, that normal companies or governmental institutions cannot do (like restrict free speech, or give out painkillers to kids) that appear to be unconstitutional, but have been upheld by the supreme court.
>>gone to the hospital for an overdose on ibuprofen
And? I don't think anyone abuses Ibuprofen (though I could be wrong, people are stupid). Just because some random kid took too much Advil because she had some painful cramps doesn't give probably cause for some other kid found carrying NSAIDs.
Legally, schools are considered a kid's parents while they're on campus, so there may be some legal defense for this, but students still have some civil rights under the law, and I think this pretty much violates them. I ANAL of course.
>>I don't think the knowledge of the future negates free will at all - at least not any more than knowledge of the last does.
Facts about the past have truth values. Facts about the future do not. That's the main difference.
If you know that you're going to shoot Lincoln in two weeks (the Oracle has told you so), and you choose not to, then you have free will but the knowledge of the future is wrong. If you have to anyway - even if you try not to, then knowledge of the future is certain, and you have no free will. I don't see any particular way that the second option could be true, though.
>>That's the settings, not the BIOS. The jumper erases the BIOS settings. If your BIOS was trashed, erasing the settings won't help.
Nope, it actually has a second backup BIOS. I can completely fuck by BIOS by turning off the computer in the middle of flashing it, and still recover out of it.
Most mobos I've used work exactly that way. One flashable BIOS, one read-only which (with a jumper set) wipes the flashable one with the original settings.
>>But it's their API and they have every right to control how it's used.
It's debatable. If you're not actually using any of their source code to make your mod for WoW (and most don't), then there's no copyright law that would stop mod authors from telling Blizzard to take a hike. Writing a program that is compatible with another program (which is all a mod is) is a protected form of authoring. Blizzard, of course, is free to make their programs incompatible, and Google Maps is free to block you if you issue too many geolocate requests (which is what they do), but it's not illegal for someone to write a program which uses accesses the Google Maps site, or could work with WoW.
I ANAL, of course, but I don't think Blizzard really can do much but engage in manually trying to identify and disable mods they dislike.
My personal take on it is that Omniscience does not imply knowledge of the future. Technically:
Omniscience is knowing the truth value of all coherent propositions. Propositions about the future have no truth value. Therefore, one can be omniscient and yet not know the future, allowing free will a place.
Either way, the source of our decisions boils down to three options:
1. 100% deterministic. Set in stone at the beginning of time. 2. 100% random. Roll of dice. 3. Some combination of the above. Roll of dice weighted by factors set in stone at the beginning of time.
Personally, I don't see any room for free will there.
Philosophers posit something called agent causality which is a different option from your trilemma above. Essentially, doing something because *I* want to do something, instead of blind chemistry, or quantum randomness. While it appears ridiculous on the surface, you also have to understand that neither of your three options can logically be true at all, as well. If the world is 100% deterministic, for example, then we could build a machine which simulates the universe and runs it forward for the next year or so to see what happens. However, because of Turing, we know this isn't possible. Randomly rolling a 1d6 to see what we do doesn't actually change this conclusion at all.
>>Unless you follow the many-worlds interpretation, which is.. er, I'd call it blindingly obvious at this point. It makes things ever so much simpler.
It doesn't change anything about knowing when a single particle of Uranium will decay. Ok, sure, maybe we've been sorted into a dimension where it decayed and other people got sorted into another dimension where it didn't decay, but nothing about the theory changes anything about observations of quantum effects from a single viewpoint.
Why do actors and actresses who pretend to be politicans and soldiers for tv and movies get more influence over "real world" politics like the UN than I do?
There's a lot of smart, well spoken people with good ideas. Nobody has ever heard of them. People have heard of the actors from various shows, even though actors are, as a population, stupid, narcissistic, and shortsighted.
>>would finance an awful lot of school/university projects
You didn't see the bit about them diverting research money instead into carbon sequestration technologies? IMO, these ideas have a lot more potential for stopping climate change (however much of a threat it actually is) than alternative energies.
Or to put it another way, we're nowhere close to having a viable solar-powered car, but we are reasonably close to a zero CO2 gas-powered car.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Ok, regardless of whether or not an invoice was ever produced, the Senate is required to report things like this on their financial disclosure forms so that under the table payments can be discovered.
Kind of like how Charles Rangel was arrested for not reporting income, or reporting the free rent he gets from his rent controlled *apartments* from a New York developer that is one of the companies he is affiliated with?
Oh wait. Rangel is a democrat, so he gets a free pass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_B._Rangel#2008_ethics_investigations_and_tax_controversies
>>By my definition, the most reliable storage setup you'd see on a desktop is a hardware RAID1 array with 2 Ultra160 or Ultra320 SCSI-based SSD drives.
Sure. I use RAID1 on all my business machines. The extra hard drive isn't expensive, and it guards against HD crashes. What it doesn't guard against is mobo crashes, and if you lose your motherboard, all the data on your RAID array vanishes unless you can find a replacement with an identical chipset. Good luck with that when you're building a machine to last for more than 5 years.
So I actually use a RAID1 array and an external hard drive with nightly backups.
>>And the best cooling setup is a system that doesn't require cooling fans, due to its setup, but has ample cooling measures, just in case.
I'd disagree with this. Passive systems often run much hotter than actively cooled systems, and thus increase your failure rate. Depends on your build, of course, but it's what I've seen from experimenting with trying to build one for silence reasons. Even underclocked, I just couldn't get it as cool as with fans pushing the air out.
>>The underlying assumption here is that the highly reliable hardware is also the more expensive equipment. Although not everything that is more expensive is also more reliable.
>>That's because engineering and ensuring the highest level of quality is more expensive to do.
Yeah, but cheaper parts are often the most successful, with the economy of scale pushing the prices down. I don't think there's much difference in reliability between Intel's most expensive and least expensive offerings on the market right now (though I could be wrong). Perhaps if you're looking at el-cheapo DVD drives or something. From some EEs I worked with, there were indeed major quality issues with some of the knockoff brands (they'd reverse engineer whatever Sony was doing, but never really get it right). So in that case, I guess sticking with a Sony drive or whatever would be your best bet.
>>In terms of computer equipment, the most reliable equipment is that designed and intended to be used in servers that run with heavy loads 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Again, I'm not sure about that. Enterprise hardware, because it looks at less customers than consumer products, often have bugs that go unnoticed. A friend of mine works for Hotmail, and they found a number of firmware bugs in various enterprise level products they used, including a very expensive RAID controller capable of running a lot of disks in parallel - it would cause a complete data loss with about a 50/50 probability once per year.
>>The highest reliability comes when the system is designed so that some parts can fail; i.e. Redundant Hard drives, Reduntant RAM, Redundant CPUs, Redundant Power, good power protection.
If you have a dual-CPU motherboard and one of the CPUs or RAM modules fails, I believe most mobos will refuse to boot. In any event, when you have doubled everything you've greatly increased your risk of failure. Remember, the OP wanted a machine that could run without maintenance for 15 years - having to go in and pull bad components defeats the entire purpose.
>>Despite all this, the mainboard can still fail. But the more carefully designed more carefully tested parts are less likely to do so in the long run (assuming they survive the first 90 days)
Yeah, I've had more mobos fail on me than any other component... small sample size, but it sort of reinforces my point about not knowing what is reliable - all the mobos made with bad caps a couple years back certainly seemed reliable under testing, but then would suddenly fail a couple years later when they'd blow a cap. As a customer, you have no way of knowing if any of the current products on the shelf at Fry's have similar ticking time bombs.
>>Keep in mind that it may be prudent to pick less-reliable hardware that should still last 4 or 5 years (most likely), over slightly more-reliable hardware
What is reliable hardware?
I'm sure every nerd on here has his favorite brand of motherboard and hard drive, but by and large, we don't have the slightest idea which DVD drive out nowadays will have a high or low failure rate 5 years from now.
We like to think we know more than we do.
...will be retired as a government indicator of quality care, beginning April 1, 2009
April Fools!
Actually, beta blockers are GREAT for you.
The programming languages that will benefit from Larrabee though will not be C/C++. It will be Fortran and the purely functional programming languages. Unless C/C++ has some extensions to deal with the pointer aliasing issue, that is.
Intel has a lot of smart people in their compilers group, and they've done stuff like this before in different times in the past. I wouldn't at all be surprised if they released compiler extensions to allow quick loading of data into the processing vectors.
To test this hypothesis, they should go to a country without a history of tennis, and see how long it takes them to "get" pong.
Methinks the author is a bit overblown with the claim that 100 years of ping pong made us ready for the video game.
>>Fortunately, Antarctica is too big to fail - rest assured our representatives are hard at work on crafting a bailout.
I'll just return my Margaritaville.
That'll give us the trillions of dollars we need to bail out the oceans.
Umm, you missed the significance here, which is the last sentence they said: "If you've ever had to deal with law enforcement when it comes to recovering what they took from you, you know what a nightmare this could turn into."
I had a friend who had his box confiscated by one of the three letter agencies. After 5 years, they gave it back to him.
"Oh, thanks... a 5 year old box."
>>What, like he's President Google or something?
Google is in tight with Obama. They did the "Office of the Presidential Elect" web site for him.
>>It's not like they could seal off the tubes, but it's an interesting mental exercise to imagine just how much Internet traffic would be curtailed if Google suddenly ceased all of its operations.
Not much. People know about other search engines... Google is just too easy to use and it works well, so they use that.
>>VLC is far superior to Media Player Classic.
VLC crashes and dies on corrupted files a lot more than media player classic, and if you are unfortunate enough to install the VLC plugin for firefox, it'll kill firefox with it. This is with an older version, but IMO it is just not worth the effort.
Actually, the biggest issue with VLC is its shitty playlist support (awkward autorepeat options) and the fact that if you double click a video to go to fullscreen, it'll go back to windowed on the next item in the playlist, but still act like it's in fullscreen mode.
In fact you'd need to backup ALL the wind power generators with equal rating backup systems and since these would probably coal and/or nuclear which can't be started up and shut down on a whim and so need to run 24/7 anyway it makes a mockery of the whole enviromental argument for wind.
Yeah, those darn nuclear reactors produce so much CO2 and other pollutants that... oh wait.
AA has power at selected seats. I almost always sit in the exit row, which does have power. In the rest of the "prime seats" (used by business travelers), I find that approximately every other row has power. If it isn't your row, it isn't difficult to negotiate with the row in front of you to let you use their power outlet.
As someone that flies about 10 times a month... it really depends on the plane. Between carrier, model of the plane, and individual planes, there's huge variation in what sort of power is available. I don't even bother with my laptop any more on flights - I just stuff it in the overhead and read a book.
My last plane had the weird airplane specific power adaptors. I love those. :p
>>You have free will because *you*, just like Booth, are the one making the decision. Knowledge of that decision, either in the past or in the future, does not make it any less yours.
It does if you want to change it. Imagine if a device could run a simulation of the universe and figure out what the world will look like in 30 years. In a deterministic universe, this is possible.
Suppose you see yourself with a bad mustache leading a column of tanks into Poland, and say to yourself, "Damn, I don't want to be that guy."
You're trying to say that not having the choice to not do that is perfectly acceptable - I don't think it is. And there's really no particular mechanism I can see that would force us to do something we don't want to.
I don't know where you are from, but i know that the school can't trump parental rights in most parts of the country.
It's not about trumping about parental rights. A school is the kid's parent, legally, while the kid is in school, for most purposes. It's called "in loco parentis".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis
When I was in high school, I read basically everything I could find about the law and schools. There's a lot of things a school can do, because of this principle, that normal companies or governmental institutions cannot do (like restrict free speech, or give out painkillers to kids) that appear to be unconstitutional, but have been upheld by the supreme court.
>>gone to the hospital for an overdose on ibuprofen
And? I don't think anyone abuses Ibuprofen (though I could be wrong, people are stupid). Just because some random kid took too much Advil because she had some painful cramps doesn't give probably cause for some other kid found carrying NSAIDs.
Legally, schools are considered a kid's parents while they're on campus, so there may be some legal defense for this, but students still have some civil rights under the law, and I think this pretty much violates them. I ANAL of course.
>>I don't think the knowledge of the future negates free will at all - at least not any more than knowledge of the last does.
Facts about the past have truth values. Facts about the future do not. That's the main difference.
If you know that you're going to shoot Lincoln in two weeks (the Oracle has told you so), and you choose not to, then you have free will but the knowledge of the future is wrong. If you have to anyway - even if you try not to, then knowledge of the future is certain, and you have no free will. I don't see any particular way that the second option could be true, though.
>>That's the settings, not the BIOS. The jumper erases the BIOS settings. If your BIOS was trashed, erasing the settings won't help.
Nope, it actually has a second backup BIOS. I can completely fuck by BIOS by turning off the computer in the middle of flashing it, and still recover out of it.
If the US had a national health care system like every other major first world nation
We do. Do you really want your health care to be like Medicare?
Besides, Obama is working on it. It's called "Health Care Reform".
>>also, the backup bios has to be read-only.
Most mobos I've used work exactly that way. One flashable BIOS, one read-only which (with a jumper set) wipes the flashable one with the original settings.
>>But it's their API and they have every right to control how it's used.
It's debatable. If you're not actually using any of their source code to make your mod for WoW (and most don't), then there's no copyright law that would stop mod authors from telling Blizzard to take a hike. Writing a program that is compatible with another program (which is all a mod is) is a protected form of authoring. Blizzard, of course, is free to make their programs incompatible, and Google Maps is free to block you if you issue too many geolocate requests (which is what they do), but it's not illegal for someone to write a program which uses accesses the Google Maps site, or could work with WoW.
I ANAL, of course, but I don't think Blizzard really can do much but engage in manually trying to identify and disable mods they dislike.
My personal take on it is that Omniscience does not imply knowledge of the future. Technically:
Omniscience is knowing the truth value of all coherent propositions.
Propositions about the future have no truth value.
Therefore, one can be omniscient and yet not know the future, allowing free will a place.
Either way, the source of our decisions boils down to three options:
1. 100% deterministic. Set in stone at the beginning of time.
2. 100% random. Roll of dice.
3. Some combination of the above. Roll of dice weighted by factors set in stone at the beginning of time.
Personally, I don't see any room for free will there.
Philosophers posit something called agent causality which is a different option from your trilemma above. Essentially, doing something because *I* want to do something, instead of blind chemistry, or quantum randomness. While it appears ridiculous on the surface, you also have to understand that neither of your three options can logically be true at all, as well. If the world is 100% deterministic, for example, then we could build a machine which simulates the universe and runs it forward for the next year or so to see what happens. However, because of Turing, we know this isn't possible. Randomly rolling a 1d6 to see what we do doesn't actually change this conclusion at all.
>>Unless you follow the many-worlds interpretation, which is.. er, I'd call it blindingly obvious at this point. It makes things ever so much simpler.
It doesn't change anything about knowing when a single particle of Uranium will decay. Ok, sure, maybe we've been sorted into a dimension where it decayed and other people got sorted into another dimension where it didn't decay, but nothing about the theory changes anything about observations of quantum effects from a single viewpoint.
Why do actors and actresses who pretend to be politicans and soldiers for tv and movies get more influence over "real world" politics like the UN than I do?
There's a lot of smart, well spoken people with good ideas. Nobody has ever heard of them. People have heard of the actors from various shows, even though actors are, as a population, stupid, narcissistic, and shortsighted.
>>would finance an awful lot of school/university projects
You didn't see the bit about them diverting research money instead into carbon sequestration technologies? IMO, these ideas have a lot more potential for stopping climate change (however much of a threat it actually is) than alternative energies.
Or to put it another way, we're nowhere close to having a viable solar-powered car, but we are reasonably close to a zero CO2 gas-powered car.