We are indeed pack animals, and packs do not exhibit total individual freedom. Rather, they balance individual freedom with societal freedom and governmental freedom (the sum total of which is the same for all societies, no matter what the form). I do not pretend to know where in this three-way division the ideal balance should be, but I am absolutely certain that political evolution must involve changing those values. Holding them fixed, regardless of what they are fixed to, is a Bad Idea. Holding any of the three above a certain threshold has never, historically, been so great either. Somalia has total individual freedom, France has total societal freedom and Iran has total governmental freedom - all three are complete disasters.
Now, you're all completely safe as I'm totally unelectable anywhere on the planet, but if I were to be able to wave my hands and impose some bounds, I'd probably start by splitting freedom in a 4:4:2 ratio, giving equal rights to society and to the individual, with government mostly ensuring that neither abused the system to deprive the other of those rights. My underlying principle is that a balanced system is free to evolve, an unbalanced one will forever fight itself and have no time left over to evolve.
So why do I sneer at individual freedom if I make it such a big part of this concept? It isn't individual freedom I have a problem with, it's absolute freedom I have a problem with. Once any of the three divisions has all the degrees of freedom for itself, the other two automatically have nothing left for themselves. I don't care which division that is. I'd have said the same thing replacing individual freedom with any other type of freedom in any other discussion that covered the freedom of something else. One-sided freedom isn't free. Indeed, this isn't even one-sided - you need two points to make a side and absolute freedom only has one.
Ideally, you'd have far more points than the three I've listed, but three is an easy number to work with on a posting. You can extend the concept as much as you like in your mind, where the only restrictions my idea places on the concept are that no parameter is set to 0, interdependencies should start balanced and regulating dependencies should be capable of regulating but never supplanting.
And since tourists are more likely to want to go to places not drowned, they're also quite nicely snagging interested elements in the tourist entry to back them. It's actually quite ingenious and although it's unlikely to succeed to the point of saving their nation, it might well be the point at which eco-tourism becomes a significant movement. Or perhaps not - that's the danger of futurology, the future is too damn uncertain to make accurate predictions on what will happen.
The most important aspect of this, though, is the incredible gamble of present-day unreliable income in the hopes of securing a future stable income. Politicians are not noted for being up on long-term thinking, when short-term goals offer them rewards right then and there. This is actually quite remarkable, regardless of what happens, and I am greatly impressed.
I agree it's not good for any nation to be 100% reliant on any other nation. I would far prefer all nations to have as many Internet feeds as they can sensibly afford - greater reliability through greater redundancy, shorter paths to destinations makes for better performance, and the avoidance of any particular political master prevents "unfortunate accidents" disconnecting sources that may conflict with one ideology or another. (Both the US and Iran have extensively used disinformation and psychological warfare, we have to assume other nations use these techniques as well, so the only possible way to get good information is to get maximal information.)
The Shiite muslims overthrew an externally-imposed government after the Iranian President was assassinated - possibly at the request of the US, but that information won't get released for 10 more years at the very best. I regard the state of affairs in Iran as basically part of a standard pattern that repeats throughout history - when a government is created through violence, it will maintain itself through violence and it will usually collapse through violence. This cycle will be repeated endlessly until enough people take the risk of being peaceful.
(It is the main reason I mistrust the 2nd Amendment - you will never have enough people willing to take the risk of being peaceful when they perceive there to be a quick and easy way out of their problems. The only way out of the quagmire is neither quick nor easy and depends on the renunciation of force, not the use of it.)
Most of what is written either sounds fairly typical for Microsoft (they've been caught harassing other countries in similar ways before and were also caught bribing officials regarding the ISO standardization of their proprietary format, and their behaviour with regards the anti-trust verdicts in the US and EU has been.... questionable at best). I could be wrong, but I suspect that some have marked the parent post down because the style makes it look more like an attack ad than a considered post. Way too many people are trigger-happy with the moderating. There are also people who abuse moderation points to score political points, knowing damn well that too few people metamoderate to catch it and there's next to no consequences.
However, ripping away the presentation and looking at the actual detail, the substance seems sound and credible. I couldn't tell you if it was a factual statement of what happened, but I can tell you that it would not in the least bit surprise me. Open Source advocates in the EU (especially) would do well to see if any government-level Open Source projects there show evidence of corruption - the media LOVES corruption scandals, and the EU has shown it has no opposition to large quantities of free money from Microsoft fines.
They've already done brain-scans on people with political affinities. Those who are right-wing show under-developed regions dealing with emotion, those on the left-wing show similar defects in other areas of the brain. I'd like to say politicians have no brain, but politicians fit into the same category as CEOs and CEOs are well-established as schizophrenic sociopaths and politicians will likely therefore exhibit brain damage accordingly. All political persuasions, by definition, operate on the theory that ideology comes before consequences, so all political persuasions can be considered neurological diseases.
This is not to say all politics is that way - it is entirely possible for a person to borrow from other ideologies to evolve their own heterogeneous philosophy. The end result may not be "correct" in any practical sense in any specific case, but it is mentally the sounder approach and shows a good balance between rationality and emotions. The "ideal" political process would be one of continuous evolution, with a multiplicity of variation, where both mentally unhealthy and socially unhealthy strains died off, and new ideas were both encouraged and continuously integrated in efforts to exploit the inherent health of heterogeneous systems versus homogeneous systems.
The reality is that no country in the world practices evolutionary politics - proportional representation is the closest anyone has got but hasn't yet successfully reduced power-play politics. Libertarians, Tea Party loonies and other fanatics are worsening the situation by devolution. Individualism ceased to be a significant force in the affairs of what would later become humans long before primates ever evolved. Even insects have long realized that that path is a dead end.
Look, your sock puppet modding me down for disagreeing with you won't change either what is recorded and documented, not will it change what I wrote. So get over your ego.
First, "again" requires there to have been a previous time and your refusal to demonstrate such shows you to be nothing but a troll.
Second, I expressly stated there was no numeral for zero but a CONCEPT of zero. You do comprehend the difference, I take it? No? Good, then bugger off.
Third, the Romans acquired all their maths from the Greeks. The alphabet they stole from the Phoenicians. They invented bugger all themselves. (Much like modern Americans.) Anything the Greeks had, the Romans had. The knowledge is known to have been kept in Greek-run libraries right up until the Roman Empire split into East and West, so you can't even claim that it was "lost" at that time. They had the information, scholars were using it, and that is an end to the matter.
Fourth, the Arab mathematicians derived virtually all of their knowledge of maths from what they pillaged from Constantinople. Including the Greek texts on zero.
Finally, no, you are wrong about maths and mathematicians. Skilled workers with limited materials are no less skilled for it. Unskilled workers with extensive materials are no more skilled for it. This is so utterly and insanely trivial that a 5 year old could comprehend the distinction. But you claim you cannot? And I'm supposed to feel like I am inferior due to your lack of comprehension? Trust me, I am so far beyond your pitiful intellect it gives me a headache just trying to think down to what might be your level - though I'm beginning to suspect that your level is considerably more primitive still.
What's with this "again"? Ok, I mistyped - meant to say less not more - but you are wrong. The Archimedes Palimpsest explicitly refers to an arithmetic zero that was in wide use even though no digit for it existed. You should spend more time reading rather than repeating bogus history. Parroting pop history merely demonstrates you lack the capacity to think.
The Greeks, however, not only had zero - a concept the Arabs got from the Greeks but, in all fairness, improved upon and made much better use of - the Greeks also had rudimentary calculus and rudimentary combinatorics. The Arabs had neither. The Greeks, then, had more advanced maths and the Arabs had more advanced mathematicians.
So to the extent you are right, you are right for the wrong reasons and are therefore really wrong. On the rest, you are simply wrong.
I'd have said that "Open" and "Closed" don't - in and of themselves - alter anything. They change the scope of the source, but if you have N developers looking at the code, it should not make any difference. What makes the difference is that "Open" means that N can (not will, but can) increase up to the total number of users of the software, whereas "Closed" means that N is strictly bounded by the number of developers the company is willing to hire.
Well, almost. QA is also important, but again if you have N QA guys looking at the program, it should make no difference whether the code is visible to the rest of the world or not. Again, for "Open" code, N is bounded only by the number of users for both unit tests and integrated tests, whereas for "Closed" code, N is strictly bounded by the number of QA guys the company is willing to hire for unit tests and is strictly bounded by their policy on handling user bug reports and crash dumps for integrated testing.
This chief exec would either have to be incompetent OR (more likely) playing to the local media. The Latin America countries are far more open to Open software than North America, and that is a serious threat to Microsoft. My guess is that this is FUD aimed at terrorizing the locals into buying Microsoft products. I strongly suspect that if these countries did switch from Open Source to some vendor other than Microsoft, the same exec would be wheeled out with complaints about the competence of that vendor as well. It's not about the method, it's all about who is counting the cash afterwards.
True, the Romans are more modern than the Arabs, but they still had forms (inherited from the Greeks) that the Babylonians lacked. And comparative linguistics suggests that the basic numbers through to ten are amongst the oldest Indo-European words, placing them at around 5000 years old. In comparison to those, the Romans are positively last week.
You're forgetting all the zombie networks that connect to Yahoo. There's probably a few billion nodes there, and there's not a friggin' chance Yahoo will admit to knowing about them.
You made some good points, so I won't mod you troll. Nyah!
Seriously, FireFox should be faster than anyone else precisely because it is extensible. It only needs to load the code being used, so it doesn't need to have a footprint larger than necessary. It doesn't need to do behind-the-scenes housekeeping for routines that aren't in use. And so on. A totally modular browser should be faster than anyone else, in the same way that RISC is always faster than CISC, and stacking on top of a well-written underlying stack should give the same performance boost any hybrid RISC/CISC architecture would have.
IE's speedup is probably more to do with ripping out unnecessary code that churned cycles and hogged heap than to do with multi-core, so that it is faster by being lighter is no big deal. That it is faster than FireFox is actually disturbing, as it should not be possible to convert a monolithic design into a hybrid that is superior to a hybrid design that was that way from the start. The former will have inefficiencies due to constraints caused by assumptions in the original architecture, the latter should have no such limitations.
FireFox could easily be built with Silk++ (G++ with a few parallel keywords added) or with OpenMP extensions (although I'll be fair and say that's harder). That would cover all the multi-core aspects and would allow builds on single core machines on unextended compilers with zero overhead. FireFox could also be linked to libraries like liboil or other accelerator libraries as needed. This would give you hardware acceleration where the acceleration existed, or standard performance on unaccelerated systems.
Mind you, so could IE9. There is absolutely nothing to stop transparent acceleration. The libraries exist, the compilers exist, everything all these developers need exists. The only thing missing is the use of them. This would let you use IE9 on XP, you'd merely not get those performance enhancements that are in Windows 7. So why didn't Microsoft do this? (Obviously, to pressure XP users into downgrading.)
To me, the greatest stupidity of all is the refusal to use the tools that exist because... well, there isn't really a because. Silk++ added, what, three keywords? Oh the agony of learning! The pain! The pain! Soooo difficult! Since it's G++ with extensions, #define those keywords as nothing for basic compilers and the code will compile just as well but without the parallelization. No special code blocks for the different cases. I have a VERY hard time taking seriously any argument that says that parallelization would be hard work. Nor do I accept that finding these sorts of things is "difficult" - I find and list these kinds of projects on Freshmeat precisely so that you don't have to do the legwork. That part has already been done for you. If you're too godawful lazy to look at a single website, I don't see why I should be interested in what's produced.
(I'm no longer using FireFox, except for web testing via Selenium, because I do not - and will not - trust my computer to the incompetent. On Windows boxes, I refuse to use IE for the same reason. I'm seriously considering writing my own browser because at least I know it'll work and I know where I can find the toolkits I'd need.)
Does anyone know if there were any strange space/time anomalies around de Beers when this story first first broke? If so, we can say for certain the star-diamond isn't there now.
And that final remark is perhaps the most important of all. You differentiate between opinion and theory. Where scientists have failed, it is often because they have lost sight of that distinction. I also like the fact that you are concerned with the underlying cause rather than the observed effect - many causes can have the same effect, so investigating the effect has limited value. It will tell you some of the what and none of the why.
There are phenomena that cannot readily be explained by treating time as in some way a special dimension (a horrible tendency of physicists, I'm afraid). Time-based diffraction grates, rather than spacially-based diffraction grates, should not work - or, at least, not in the same way, if time is not fundamentally the same as space. However, observation shows that they not only work but work in exactly the same way - which is what true spacetime models had predicted. (True spacetime models ultimately stem from the geometric observation that 4D works and 3D+1 does not. Most theories are based on 4D spacetime. The only real problem is that causality and the second law of thermodynamics rely on an arrow of time, a simple 4D spacetime has no more an arrow of time than it has an arrow of space, and you get some really serious problems that appear insoluble if you simply chuck out causality and entropy. My opinion - and it is just an opinion - is that the arrow of time is indeed real but as a consequence of something fundamental and not as some intrinsic property.)
Not so fast. I see that he does not dispute global warming, merely the magnitude that is caused by man, which he places at 1/3rd that identified in the worst-case IPCC models ("Taking Global Warming Seriously" - you'll find it in his papers). Further, he does not dispute the positive feedback mechanisms or any of the other mechanisms described in global warming, he merely states that other effects also exist and that radiative models alone are inadequate to model the atmosphere as a whole.
In short, his papers do NOT say what you (or Wikipedia) say they say. Unless you can get him to post here himself (verifiably, so no sock puppets), I will have to take what he has actually written over and above any other claim.
The US is crawling with dark fiber. You don't have to pay to install something that's already there. Also, since wavelength multiplexing is now the in-thing, you need only have one cable running into a town. (The upper capacity for a single fiber is about 10 Tb/s. Just one fiber can therefore handle gigabit traffic for 10,000 homes. A single 24 fiber bundle will therefore support 240,000 homes - enough to support a decent-sized city in the US.) Running one more line from town X to town Y is as close to a zero cost as you can get.
A bigger cost is the metropolitan network itself. Manchester's G-MING didn't set itself up overnight, nor was it cheap. However, that's a one-off cost. Pay it and you're done. The biggest cost of all is the technical support needed. Network administrators (at least those who are any good) charge a fair bit. The on-call support needed won't be cheap either, especially as home systems were never designed to actually be pushed to any decent speed and most users will be using an OS known more for its security flaws and propensity to host zombies than for its usefulness. This kind of bandwidth is going to attract interest from the kind of people you really don't want pwning the computers.
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We are indeed pack animals, and packs do not exhibit total individual freedom. Rather, they balance individual freedom with societal freedom and governmental freedom (the sum total of which is the same for all societies, no matter what the form). I do not pretend to know where in this three-way division the ideal balance should be, but I am absolutely certain that political evolution must involve changing those values. Holding them fixed, regardless of what they are fixed to, is a Bad Idea. Holding any of the three above a certain threshold has never, historically, been so great either. Somalia has total individual freedom, France has total societal freedom and Iran has total governmental freedom - all three are complete disasters.
Now, you're all completely safe as I'm totally unelectable anywhere on the planet, but if I were to be able to wave my hands and impose some bounds, I'd probably start by splitting freedom in a 4:4:2 ratio, giving equal rights to society and to the individual, with government mostly ensuring that neither abused the system to deprive the other of those rights. My underlying principle is that a balanced system is free to evolve, an unbalanced one will forever fight itself and have no time left over to evolve.
So why do I sneer at individual freedom if I make it such a big part of this concept? It isn't individual freedom I have a problem with, it's absolute freedom I have a problem with. Once any of the three divisions has all the degrees of freedom for itself, the other two automatically have nothing left for themselves. I don't care which division that is. I'd have said the same thing replacing individual freedom with any other type of freedom in any other discussion that covered the freedom of something else. One-sided freedom isn't free. Indeed, this isn't even one-sided - you need two points to make a side and absolute freedom only has one.
Ideally, you'd have far more points than the three I've listed, but three is an easy number to work with on a posting. You can extend the concept as much as you like in your mind, where the only restrictions my idea places on the concept are that no parameter is set to 0, interdependencies should start balanced and regulating dependencies should be capable of regulating but never supplanting.
And since tourists are more likely to want to go to places not drowned, they're also quite nicely snagging interested elements in the tourist entry to back them. It's actually quite ingenious and although it's unlikely to succeed to the point of saving their nation, it might well be the point at which eco-tourism becomes a significant movement. Or perhaps not - that's the danger of futurology, the future is too damn uncertain to make accurate predictions on what will happen.
The most important aspect of this, though, is the incredible gamble of present-day unreliable income in the hopes of securing a future stable income. Politicians are not noted for being up on long-term thinking, when short-term goals offer them rewards right then and there. This is actually quite remarkable, regardless of what happens, and I am greatly impressed.
I agree it's not good for any nation to be 100% reliant on any other nation. I would far prefer all nations to have as many Internet feeds as they can sensibly afford - greater reliability through greater redundancy, shorter paths to destinations makes for better performance, and the avoidance of any particular political master prevents "unfortunate accidents" disconnecting sources that may conflict with one ideology or another. (Both the US and Iran have extensively used disinformation and psychological warfare, we have to assume other nations use these techniques as well, so the only possible way to get good information is to get maximal information.)
The Shiite muslims overthrew an externally-imposed government after the Iranian President was assassinated - possibly at the request of the US, but that information won't get released for 10 more years at the very best. I regard the state of affairs in Iran as basically part of a standard pattern that repeats throughout history - when a government is created through violence, it will maintain itself through violence and it will usually collapse through violence. This cycle will be repeated endlessly until enough people take the risk of being peaceful.
(It is the main reason I mistrust the 2nd Amendment - you will never have enough people willing to take the risk of being peaceful when they perceive there to be a quick and easy way out of their problems. The only way out of the quagmire is neither quick nor easy and depends on the renunciation of force, not the use of it.)
Most of what is written either sounds fairly typical for Microsoft (they've been caught harassing other countries in similar ways before and were also caught bribing officials regarding the ISO standardization of their proprietary format, and their behaviour with regards the anti-trust verdicts in the US and EU has been.... questionable at best). I could be wrong, but I suspect that some have marked the parent post down because the style makes it look more like an attack ad than a considered post. Way too many people are trigger-happy with the moderating. There are also people who abuse moderation points to score political points, knowing damn well that too few people metamoderate to catch it and there's next to no consequences.
However, ripping away the presentation and looking at the actual detail, the substance seems sound and credible. I couldn't tell you if it was a factual statement of what happened, but I can tell you that it would not in the least bit surprise me. Open Source advocates in the EU (especially) would do well to see if any government-level Open Source projects there show evidence of corruption - the media LOVES corruption scandals, and the EU has shown it has no opposition to large quantities of free money from Microsoft fines.
Let me know when you're done with those and I'll find some more.
I saw "eaten employees" too and took it as a new Microsoft strategy.
They've already done brain-scans on people with political affinities. Those who are right-wing show under-developed regions dealing with emotion, those on the left-wing show similar defects in other areas of the brain. I'd like to say politicians have no brain, but politicians fit into the same category as CEOs and CEOs are well-established as schizophrenic sociopaths and politicians will likely therefore exhibit brain damage accordingly. All political persuasions, by definition, operate on the theory that ideology comes before consequences, so all political persuasions can be considered neurological diseases.
This is not to say all politics is that way - it is entirely possible for a person to borrow from other ideologies to evolve their own heterogeneous philosophy. The end result may not be "correct" in any practical sense in any specific case, but it is mentally the sounder approach and shows a good balance between rationality and emotions. The "ideal" political process would be one of continuous evolution, with a multiplicity of variation, where both mentally unhealthy and socially unhealthy strains died off, and new ideas were both encouraged and continuously integrated in efforts to exploit the inherent health of heterogeneous systems versus homogeneous systems.
The reality is that no country in the world practices evolutionary politics - proportional representation is the closest anyone has got but hasn't yet successfully reduced power-play politics. Libertarians, Tea Party loonies and other fanatics are worsening the situation by devolution. Individualism ceased to be a significant force in the affairs of what would later become humans long before primates ever evolved. Even insects have long realized that that path is a dead end.
Look, your sock puppet modding me down for disagreeing with you won't change either what is recorded and documented, not will it change what I wrote. So get over your ego.
First, "again" requires there to have been a previous time and your refusal to demonstrate such shows you to be nothing but a troll.
Second, I expressly stated there was no numeral for zero but a CONCEPT of zero. You do comprehend the difference, I take it? No? Good, then bugger off.
Third, the Romans acquired all their maths from the Greeks. The alphabet they stole from the Phoenicians. They invented bugger all themselves. (Much like modern Americans.) Anything the Greeks had, the Romans had. The knowledge is known to have been kept in Greek-run libraries right up until the Roman Empire split into East and West, so you can't even claim that it was "lost" at that time. They had the information, scholars were using it, and that is an end to the matter.
Fourth, the Arab mathematicians derived virtually all of their knowledge of maths from what they pillaged from Constantinople. Including the Greek texts on zero.
Finally, no, you are wrong about maths and mathematicians. Skilled workers with limited materials are no less skilled for it. Unskilled workers with extensive materials are no more skilled for it. This is so utterly and insanely trivial that a 5 year old could comprehend the distinction. But you claim you cannot? And I'm supposed to feel like I am inferior due to your lack of comprehension? Trust me, I am so far beyond your pitiful intellect it gives me a headache just trying to think down to what might be your level - though I'm beginning to suspect that your level is considerably more primitive still.
What's with this "again"? Ok, I mistyped - meant to say less not more - but you are wrong. The Archimedes Palimpsest explicitly refers to an arithmetic zero that was in wide use even though no digit for it existed. You should spend more time reading rather than repeating bogus history. Parroting pop history merely demonstrates you lack the capacity to think.
The Greeks, however, not only had zero - a concept the Arabs got from the Greeks but, in all fairness, improved upon and made much better use of - the Greeks also had rudimentary calculus and rudimentary combinatorics. The Arabs had neither. The Greeks, then, had more advanced maths and the Arabs had more advanced mathematicians.
So to the extent you are right, you are right for the wrong reasons and are therefore really wrong. On the rest, you are simply wrong.
I'd have said that "Open" and "Closed" don't - in and of themselves - alter anything. They change the scope of the source, but if you have N developers looking at the code, it should not make any difference. What makes the difference is that "Open" means that N can (not will, but can) increase up to the total number of users of the software, whereas "Closed" means that N is strictly bounded by the number of developers the company is willing to hire.
Well, almost. QA is also important, but again if you have N QA guys looking at the program, it should make no difference whether the code is visible to the rest of the world or not. Again, for "Open" code, N is bounded only by the number of users for both unit tests and integrated tests, whereas for "Closed" code, N is strictly bounded by the number of QA guys the company is willing to hire for unit tests and is strictly bounded by their policy on handling user bug reports and crash dumps for integrated testing.
This chief exec would either have to be incompetent OR (more likely) playing to the local media. The Latin America countries are far more open to Open software than North America, and that is a serious threat to Microsoft. My guess is that this is FUD aimed at terrorizing the locals into buying Microsoft products. I strongly suspect that if these countries did switch from Open Source to some vendor other than Microsoft, the same exec would be wheeled out with complaints about the competence of that vendor as well. It's not about the method, it's all about who is counting the cash afterwards.
The problem with fuzzy logic is that the last digit of any binary mantissa merely can't be definitely 0.
True, the Romans are more modern than the Arabs, but they still had forms (inherited from the Greeks) that the Babylonians lacked. And comparative linguistics suggests that the basic numbers through to ten are amongst the oldest Indo-European words, placing them at around 5000 years old. In comparison to those, the Romans are positively last week.
You're forgetting all the zombie networks that connect to Yahoo. There's probably a few billion nodes there, and there's not a friggin' chance Yahoo will admit to knowing about them.
I might or might not care - but only if you don't know which.
The last binary digit of Pi is both 0 and 1.
Are you sure? 0, for large values of 0, approaches 1, for small values of 1.
You made some good points, so I won't mod you troll. Nyah!
Seriously, FireFox should be faster than anyone else precisely because it is extensible. It only needs to load the code being used, so it doesn't need to have a footprint larger than necessary. It doesn't need to do behind-the-scenes housekeeping for routines that aren't in use. And so on. A totally modular browser should be faster than anyone else, in the same way that RISC is always faster than CISC, and stacking on top of a well-written underlying stack should give the same performance boost any hybrid RISC/CISC architecture would have.
IE's speedup is probably more to do with ripping out unnecessary code that churned cycles and hogged heap than to do with multi-core, so that it is faster by being lighter is no big deal. That it is faster than FireFox is actually disturbing, as it should not be possible to convert a monolithic design into a hybrid that is superior to a hybrid design that was that way from the start. The former will have inefficiencies due to constraints caused by assumptions in the original architecture, the latter should have no such limitations.
FireFox could easily be built with Silk++ (G++ with a few parallel keywords added) or with OpenMP extensions (although I'll be fair and say that's harder). That would cover all the multi-core aspects and would allow builds on single core machines on unextended compilers with zero overhead. FireFox could also be linked to libraries like liboil or other accelerator libraries as needed. This would give you hardware acceleration where the acceleration existed, or standard performance on unaccelerated systems.
Mind you, so could IE9. There is absolutely nothing to stop transparent acceleration. The libraries exist, the compilers exist, everything all these developers need exists. The only thing missing is the use of them. This would let you use IE9 on XP, you'd merely not get those performance enhancements that are in Windows 7. So why didn't Microsoft do this? (Obviously, to pressure XP users into downgrading.)
To me, the greatest stupidity of all is the refusal to use the tools that exist because... well, there isn't really a because. Silk++ added, what, three keywords? Oh the agony of learning! The pain! The pain! Soooo difficult! Since it's G++ with extensions, #define those keywords as nothing for basic compilers and the code will compile just as well but without the parallelization. No special code blocks for the different cases. I have a VERY hard time taking seriously any argument that says that parallelization would be hard work. Nor do I accept that finding these sorts of things is "difficult" - I find and list these kinds of projects on Freshmeat precisely so that you don't have to do the legwork. That part has already been done for you. If you're too godawful lazy to look at a single website, I don't see why I should be interested in what's produced.
(I'm no longer using FireFox, except for web testing via Selenium, because I do not - and will not - trust my computer to the incompetent. On Windows boxes, I refuse to use IE for the same reason. I'm seriously considering writing my own browser because at least I know it'll work and I know where I can find the toolkits I'd need.)
The star probably crystallized a good deal earlier, though. Even the light was a dupe.
Does anyone know if there were any strange space/time anomalies around de Beers when this story first first broke? If so, we can say for certain the star-diamond isn't there now.
And that final remark is perhaps the most important of all. You differentiate between opinion and theory. Where scientists have failed, it is often because they have lost sight of that distinction. I also like the fact that you are concerned with the underlying cause rather than the observed effect - many causes can have the same effect, so investigating the effect has limited value. It will tell you some of the what and none of the why.
There are phenomena that cannot readily be explained by treating time as in some way a special dimension (a horrible tendency of physicists, I'm afraid). Time-based diffraction grates, rather than spacially-based diffraction grates, should not work - or, at least, not in the same way, if time is not fundamentally the same as space. However, observation shows that they not only work but work in exactly the same way - which is what true spacetime models had predicted. (True spacetime models ultimately stem from the geometric observation that 4D works and 3D+1 does not. Most theories are based on 4D spacetime. The only real problem is that causality and the second law of thermodynamics rely on an arrow of time, a simple 4D spacetime has no more an arrow of time than it has an arrow of space, and you get some really serious problems that appear insoluble if you simply chuck out causality and entropy. My opinion - and it is just an opinion - is that the arrow of time is indeed real but as a consequence of something fundamental and not as some intrinsic property.)
Not so fast. I see that he does not dispute global warming, merely the magnitude that is caused by man, which he places at 1/3rd that identified in the worst-case IPCC models ("Taking Global Warming Seriously" - you'll find it in his papers). Further, he does not dispute the positive feedback mechanisms or any of the other mechanisms described in global warming, he merely states that other effects also exist and that radiative models alone are inadequate to model the atmosphere as a whole.
In short, his papers do NOT say what you (or Wikipedia) say they say. Unless you can get him to post here himself (verifiably, so no sock puppets), I will have to take what he has actually written over and above any other claim.
The US is crawling with dark fiber. You don't have to pay to install something that's already there. Also, since wavelength multiplexing is now the in-thing, you need only have one cable running into a town. (The upper capacity for a single fiber is about 10 Tb/s. Just one fiber can therefore handle gigabit traffic for 10,000 homes. A single 24 fiber bundle will therefore support 240,000 homes - enough to support a decent-sized city in the US.) Running one more line from town X to town Y is as close to a zero cost as you can get.
A bigger cost is the metropolitan network itself. Manchester's G-MING didn't set itself up overnight, nor was it cheap. However, that's a one-off cost. Pay it and you're done. The biggest cost of all is the technical support needed. Network administrators (at least those who are any good) charge a fair bit. The on-call support needed won't be cheap either, especially as home systems were never designed to actually be pushed to any decent speed and most users will be using an OS known more for its security flaws and propensity to host zombies than for its usefulness. This kind of bandwidth is going to attract interest from the kind of people you really don't want pwning the computers.
Just about any intelligent switch will do the trick. It's not like you need anything sophisticated.
They did, yes. The porn testers have not, ummm, returned yet.