Let us say that was true. (It isn't, but let's pretend.) MySQL is faster than PostgreSQL or Ingres, correct?
Then use PostgreSQL or Ingres for your primary storage DB, and use MySQL to store cached responses. (Key issues, etc, are then a non-issue - you don't need a vast key to identify a cached pre-generated page.) You then get the full power of a complex DB with the performance of a lightweight DB.
Wait, isn't this what NoSQL databases are used for? Well, duh. Where do you think they got the idea? The rest of the world has been using multi-tier databases for a very long time now, and obviously if you want extremely high performance and only a simple key/value search for your highest-level DB, then why not use a system that is purely key/value?
The problem with NoSQL databases is that they can be a little TOO simple. You'll often want web pages where -some- of the content is universal, -all- of the content is cacheable, but where different content in some div block is used for different users (or different parameters or whatever). For something programmatic like that, you -could- use a language like Cold Fusion. Which, like its namesake from Utah, has no redeeming value whatsoever. It's much better to do something like this in a database engine rather than in an interpreter running in a servlet inside an interpreter, as procedures can be pre-compiled.
But if you want to do this, isn't MySQL still heavier than necessary? Oh, lots. What you really want is (NoSQL || (GDBM/QDBM + Network Access)) + Loadable modules. That's about as lightweight as you can get.
In an "ideal" system, you'd actually have three layers, not two. The lowest level should also be lightweight, but not MySQL lightweight. It wants to load/save data and create views, but having stored procedures on there as well complicates load balancing and high availability. It also means more arcs through the code, and each arc you add is a potential source of bugs. The lowest level wants to be rock steady (though ska will also work), feeding to the servers that do the heavy lifting. That way, database bugs (inevitable, it's complex code) will have no significant impact on transactions, each component in the system is highly specialized (so makes fewer decisions, so is smaller, faster and more reliable), and the critical path of any given transaction is blocked by as few incidentals and overheads as possible.
Tight coupling of components is only a good idea when components run at roughly the same speed and aren't particularly blocking. The greater the speed disparity or the greater the thread blocking, the more you want loose coupling or complete decoupling. Lacking dynamic reconfiguration, you layer things so that each layer will mostly have just one type of behaviour and the adjoining layers also mostly have just one type of behaviour. There will be exceptions, nothing is optimized for all cases, but if you get most of the available performance under most of the conditions that arise, you're ahead of most of the game.
The other reason you want multi-tier is for security. Everyone makes mistakes in coding, so you can expect some component of your system to be vulnerable to attack. If it's a component that an attacker cannot reach (because it's effectively firewalled by the databases above it), it's not an issue. If it's a component that an attacker can do nothing with (because all that's being attacked is cached data that will be refreshed from further down after some time interval or when the data below changes), then only those who hit that specific load balancer in the few seconds of significance will see the defaced data. Moments later, the correct data will replace it.
You try them in a civilian court, you don't use inadmissible evidence or coerced "confessions" (people would confess to being Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy at the same time, if being waterboarded), you use what solid evidence you have. OR, you declare them Prisoners Of War, keep them confined under the terms of the Geneva Conventions until the US ceases meaningful combat operations, then release them.
The jail officials in Gitmo will never be tried or convicted. Neither will the CIA operatives named by Italy, or the staff at any of the Black Prisons operated in Europe. Those found innocent already (or between now and when Gitmo ever closes) will never be paid compensation for unlawful arrest or false imprisonment. Hell, there are still attempts to sue for unpaid wages for spies, defectors and other "plausibly deniable" individuals dating as far back as the American Civil War but including pretty well all the wars between then and now as well. If the US can drag its feet over its own people on its own turf for 200 years, nobody else has much of a chance.
Well, according to the lawyer to the remaining British citizen in Gitmo, America has been trying to deport him for six years to the Middle East (where his odds of survival are nil), despite the fact that - being British - he should be deported to Britain. There are a few theories as to why this hasn't happened (apparently said citizen witnessed an MI6 officer being present at an "enhanced interrogation"), but since British intelligence has never been seen as shiny-white and all innocent, the stories don't seem credible. You can't lose a reputation you never had.
Regardless, American intelligence has classed him as innocent of all charges, he's been cleared for release, and it is for those who defend Gitmo to do the explaining, it isn't for those questioning Gitmo to explain anything.
Last, but by no means least, there's nothing to decide. Under the Constitution (which applies to Gitmo), it is for the Administration to prove (not others to disprove) that they have the "Right to the Body", and under Common Law (which also applies to Gitmo), it is for the Administration to show that they have neither withheld nor denied the right to justice (not for others to prove justice has been denied). These are absolutes.
So what if the people were picked up under questionable circumstances? So what if the grounds for holding them initially was "walking whilst wearing Casio"? It seems reasonable to me that YOU would want to have your day in court if you'd been arrested for wearing a digital watch.
Their associates continue to kill people? Can you prove that? Or are you simply assuming that for a large enough group of people, at least one of them must be an associate of a terrorist? How many steps removed would count? Six? If so, tag. And how do you define associate, anyway? From the same village? The Boston bombers came from Boston, but nobody is so stupid as to accuse the whole city of being terrorist. Also, with the Administration defining an "enemy combatant" as being ANY male of potentially military age (plus all others within blast radius), I would be very wary of accusing their associates of anything more than having the wrong number of birthdays without proof.
Delicacy? Like "kidnapping people off the streets of Italy" delicacy? (Btw, he was later found innocent of all charges, which is more than can be said of the CIA agents for whom Italy holds international arrest warrants. They haven't been found guilty either, true, but fleeing the scene of the crime and refusing to answer the warrants would convince most people they're guilty.)
First, America doesn't have one of those. All they have are Drill Sergeant/PsyOps-trained lawyers who are adept at getting the jury to believe all kinds of bullshit. Remember, jurors who manage to believe six impossible things before the first coffee break get a luncheon voucher for Milliways.
Second, due to this thing called "the right to arm bears" and the complete inability of conspiracy nuts and rightwingers to digest new information, those wrongly accused are at extremely high risk of getting killed by wannabe-vigilantes who reject the evidence against the two accused (and blogs aren't short of such nutters).
Third, even "established" news sources had trouble distinguishing Chechnya and, well, all other countries beginning with Ch. Apparently, inciting xenophobia is a spectator sport for journalists. Either that, or they're irredeemably stupid and bloody ignorant. 'Course, might be all of the above.
Well, there was a buzzing noise for all electric doors. Don't recall a whooshing sound, but in a spaceship it's reasonable to assume sections will acquire an air pressure differential.
Agreed on all points, though I'd have to agree with femtobyte as well that profiteers make horrible scientists. $100 million is peanuts, as the original article notes, but that is only a bad thing if it operates in complete isolation. If it cooperates with the Connectome Project and other neurological studies, this study could be quite useful. But that is only true if the division of labour is correct. You cannot break a scientific project into N sub-projects at random, even $100 million ones. If everyone got together and discussed who is best placed to do which part, the results could be extremely valuable.
Even more so, when you consider that a 13T MRI scanner capable of handling humans should be online just about now. Since that has already been built, the cost of building it is effectively zero. The resolution achievable from such a scanner, however, should be nothing short of spectacular.
Can you even begin to imagine the advances achievable from a consortium of Connectome researchers, high-end (9.3T and 13T) MRI labs, and this new foundation?
Ok, now you've imagined it, stop. We're talking politicians, scientists under publish-or-perish rules, get-rich-quick corporations and corrupt "advocacy". There's no possible way any of those involved will be capable of doing what they should do.
Excellent! At this rate, by the time the thread is frozen, we'll have beaten DPI and other newspaper publishing systems. (Ok, ok, I'll be honest, we've already beaten most newspaper publishing systems.)
Not messed with tikz, but will take a look.
The main problem I've had with TeX and its subsystems for vectors is that it's actually very difficult to snap to points, or define relationships between vectors. Normally, this is a non-issue - TeX' built-in maths has perfectly good precision for most purposes, so provided the functions are defined correctly, you don't get freaky rounding errors or endpoints in the wrong place. There are pathological cases, however, where certain shapes only scale correctly by certain amounts. You need fiddly conditionals and other hacks. Since most engineering and maths software has had workarounds almost as long as TeX has existed, and it would be an addition to the syntax (so retaining backwards compatibility, just as LuaTeX is backwards compatible with TeX), there should not be any reason for such solutions to exist in TeX.
It may well be that tikz solves 99.9% of all the cases I'm concerned about. If so, great. If not, the system is built to be infinitely extensible. I'll get round to it. Maybe. Or wait for a new package on the TeX archive.
Think it's graphicsx. One of the packages, anyways, lets you include PNGs, JPGs, etc. No problem. I include graphics all the time with LaTeX, very few of which are EPS. True, graphics import isn't as clean as I'd like (it's a bugger to remember all the different nuances of each type of graphics format you can use and through which package you need to use it with).
I also don't like the fact that vector images require you to master Asymptote, Metapost and an armful of other systems. This can - and should - be massively cleaned up.
So, whilst I agree that TeX has crappy image handling, it's not nearly as bad as you depict.
TeX has control elements for describing structure, since structure is a key part of typesetting. Since these elements are macros, they're programmable, although not truly abstract as in XML. About the only thing I can think of that XML can do for document structure that TeX cannot is out-of-order elements, and I'd argue that out-of-order is incompatible with structure.
In database terminology, XML is a key-data pair system. The data can be anywhere in the XML file and you need some sort of key to know where it is and/or when you've found it. (Since XML is not organized, you can't do random access to get at the key. You have to load it in and organize it, in which case it isn't XML, or you have to sequentially search it.)
TeX is a semi-sequential structure, with relationship links between specialized data tables. Again in database terms, it's a set of batch sequential files with crude but useful support for concrete data association. Because it's batch sequential, real-time usage gets hairy. Big deal. Those in the middle of writing should be concerned with the writing. It would be nice if editors had better error-detection, but it's not usually that critical.
Never had any problem writing books in LaTeX. The main difficulty has been in deciding whether I want a modern or medieval structure.
Docbook, on the other hand, I hated. I helped with the writing of a few chapters of the Linux Advanced Traffic Control book, which was abandoned in part because Docbook was such a disgusting system.
XML is useless for typesetting. It's not really that useful for organizing anything - you'll have used XML-driven databases, but you'll have never used an XML-driven database that had any performance or serious functionality. (LaTeX doesn't do databases, either, but it doesn't pretend to. It has external engines for databases, which are actually quite nice.)
Web pages? Never had any problem embedding HTML in LaTeX. In fact, I have very very rarely found ANY document style to be LaTeX-incompatible. Load up the correct document type, load up the appropriate stylesheets and you're good. Yes, spiral text is hard. Yes, embedding HDR images can be a pain. Yes, alpha blending isn't that hot. But how often do you use any of these for owner's manuals or contracts?
There are more table classes than I'd really like, and some of the style coding is scruffy, but I challenge anyone to find a genuine, common document type that LaTeX* cannot do as well as or better than any non-TeX wordprocessor, DTP solution or XML-based system. (Non-TeX means you can't compare TeX with Scientific Word, TeXmacs or any other engine that uses TeX behind the scenes.)
(To make it absolutely clear, "as well as or better than" can refer to any one or more parameters. So if I get better-quality output, that's better than. If I can achieve comparable results with cleaner, easier-to-maintain syntax, that's also better than. To win, your solution has to not merely equal but actually exceed what I can do on EVERY parameter, or you have failed to demonstrate something that supercedes.)
A bitcoin to anyone who can do this.
*I am including all dialects of LaTeX here, so LuaLaTeX, PDFTeX, etc, are all things I can consider on my side, as are all WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM editors, Metapost, supplemental services, style sheets, etc. Since this is versus a specific alternative, anything comparable for that specific alternative is fair game for you to use, but you can't mix in other alternatives. It has to be one versus the complete TeX family if you want to prove your point.
Well, with WebKit up the proverbial creek these days, a new rendering engine would make sense.
The question would be whether you could create a TeX-alike engine that supports the additional functions required in HTML and can convert any well-formed SGML document into a TeX-alike document. If you could, you can have one rendering engine and subsume HTML and XML entirely within it.
The benefits of doing this? The big drawback of style sheets is that no two browsers agree on units. TeX has very well-defined units that are already widely used. These also happen to be the units industry likes using. Eliminating browser-specific style sheets would be an incredible benefit.
The big drawback of the Semantic Web is that everyone, their brother, cat and goldfish have designed their own ontologies, none of which interoperate and few of which are any good for searching with SPARQL. LaTeX has a good collection of very standard, very clean methods for binding information together. Because it's standard, you can have a pre-existing ontology libraries which can be auto-populated. And because LaTeX is mostly maintained by uber-minds, rather than Facebook interns during their coffee break, those ontologies are likely to be very, very good. Also, microformats will DIE!!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
The big drawback with HTML 5 is that the W3C can't even decide if the standard is fixed, rolling or a pink pony. TeX is a very solid standard that actually exists.
Ok, what's the downside of TeX? There's no real namespace support, so conflicts between libraries are commonplace. I'm also not keen on having a mixture of tag logic, where some tags have content embedded and others have the content enclosed with an end tag. It's messy. Cleanliness is next to Linuxliness.
Parsing client-side is a mild irritant, but let's face it. AJAX is also parsing client-side, as is Flash, as are cascading style sheets, etc, etc. The client is already doing a lot (one reason nobody has a fast browser any more), so changing from one set of massive overheads to another really wouldn't be that much of a pain.
Ok, so if we consider TeX the underlying system, do we need a TeX tag? No. We would rather assume all parts of a document not enclosed by an SGML tag are TeX. This would be a transitory state, since you could then write SGML-to-TeX modules for Apache, IIS and other popularish web servers. The world would then become wholly TeXified, as it should be.
Whereas now, people are still not accustomed to seeing correctly typeset documents and are now completely used to vast numbers of typos, malformed web pages, poor indexing via the semantic web, gratuitous XML, excessively long style sheets, browser incompatibilities, Javascript...
Revelation says 1000 years of heaven (clearly a Linux install) followed by 1000 years of hell (a Windows revival?), and only after that is there eternal bliss (only assembly language coding is allowed).
You kill your cash cow IF your cash cow is lame and on life-support (basically the x86) AND you have a substitute cash cow that is so good, so novel and so ready that you can switch to it and gain more customers than you lose AND gain a time advantage over all your competitors of such magnitude that you'll have a very stable market before anyone is in a position to match you.
This does happen in the CPU world from time to time. The problem is that Intel has failed to make a new product of adequate maturity from the start, which is what it needs. If Intel had ditched its internal politics (which are horrible, BTW) and continued developing the Itanium until it got to where it is today BEFORE releasing it, it would have scored over big. (The extra time would have also been considerably shorter, as there would have been more designing, more working, less blaming and less avoidance.) Intel LOST a remarkable opportunity to eliminate the x86 market, because they had (and have) much the same culture as the old IBM, NASA and Lockheed Martin - pushing for good headlines rather than good products. I guess it's also the same as the Medieval Catholic Church. In the end, there is only one possible result - a catastrophic collapse in confidence and capability, where you go from market leader to borderline extinction in pretty much an afternoon. Sinkholes, rot and corporate failure all share one thing in common - you see nothing until it's all over.
ARM and MIPS have pretty much total control over the mobile world and the embedded world. However, the PC world isn't going to vanish. It will change, though. Why? Because there'll be more action in the ARM and MIPS toolchains, because people will want programs to work seamlessly across devices (not just talk, but actually run on multiple systems), because manufacturing is cheaper when you've a common base architecture, because software companies don't like supporting multiple architectures. And that means PCs will have to switch to the same architecture as the mobile/embedded world, albeit with performance considerations rather than power.
There are still a huge number of programs (especially for Windows) for which 32-bit versions are the only versions. This is by no means a good thing - and at this point, there is no excuse for it. (Size may have been a factor at one point, but if you're capable of running 64-bits, you're probably working with a memory that can cope with the larger pointer sizes.)
Firefox, for example, is threatening to abandon the 64-bit line. You lose 32-bit support, you lose Firefox support. Now, that might not be such a bad thing (it's bleedin' bloatware, it's slow, the distinction between plugins and extensions is annoying, I hate the menu tree layout, they release major releases too often, there's no UTF-32, and I'm sure there are other problems I could find if I could be bothered, and they should Get Off My Lawn!). However, Chrome and clones don't have enough plugins yet, Opera isn't the performance giant it was, and there's really no other browsers out there of much significance.
I would object to calling Intel's processors "the best". The best at what? I'd pit a MIPS64 CPU against an x64 CPU (equal cores, equal FPUs, equal bus speeds) for servers. I'd consider the T2 to be easier to radiation-proof than comparable Intel offerings. The AMULET processor series is the most original. For bus speeds, HyperTransport is still faster than PCI Express.
That doesn't mean Intel isn't "the best" at XYZ, what it means is that there is no generic "the best". There will ALWAYS be another processor that is better at something else.
How do you get 3? At 10k per pop, 1 mil allows 100 sequences to be performed. Divide by 3 sources, they should be able to do 33 sequences each. The cost of sequencing is further reduced if you just want SNPs, as you can use a microarray for that. . But sequencing the entire genome is cheap these days. The cost has fallen very rapidly and continues to do so. It really is at the point where garage enthusiasts can perform many of the basic steps and will be able to do at-home SNP discovery within a few years. Of course, at-home work isn't criminology-grade, but just as enthusiasts can do basic work for pocket money, crime labs can easily swallow the cost of a clean room plus an Illumina or Oxford Nanopore sequencer.
(Oxford says it can get costs down to $1k per sequence within a year or two. They also are working on sub-thousand disposable sequencers, which may be useful.)
The question has no meaning. By using a static spacetime diagram, there is no before or after. Time is merely a spacial dimension in this type of analysis.
Furthermore, "you" have no defined meaning in either of my two scenarios. In the first, simpler, framework, "you" can be either the individual particles in the body, the body as a collective whole, the instantaneous logical state of the brain, the collective logical state over a defined unit of time, or any combination thereof.
The Greek Ship paradox only occurs because you reuse the same label for utterly different aspects of a construct that is simultaneously logical and physical. By using a generic label, you can persuade yourself of almost anything. You must use specifics. And, yes, that means distinguishing object state from object dynamics from object encapsulation.
This is what I mean about uneducated. You lack the understanding necessary to comprehend my first post, you will doubtless fail to understand this one, and you cannot even be bothered to do the basic legwork to comprehend spacetime static waves (far simpler than m-theory, which I guarantee is as complex a model of existence as anyone has managed to achieve).
It is with nonsensical replies such as yours that I end up wondering if eugenics was such a bad concept. I still firmly believe better schooling would fix most examples of stupidity (I think 9 hours/day, compulsory between the ages of 3 and 23, narrow-band streaming per subject should suffice).
Science is not done by straw poll, so the views of most (uneducated, I might add) people is unimportant. What matters is that physicists and mathematicians take the possibility seriously and have published papers on how simulation affects QM.
Something "exists" IFF there is a defined energy matrix superimposed on a defined probability matrix where said matrices cover non-zero, finite space, and non-zero, finite time, and interact with other such matrices of equal or higher number of dimensions.
The universe can be described also as a single object, static in 5D, with all possibilities as branches, that lies at the intersection of two membranes.
The cost of sequencing is negligible these days (around $10k for a full genome). Buying a machine isn't cheap - I looked at the cost of one a year or so ago, and they were still multi-million dollar devices. (Why? Bcause I'm a geek! Having a sequencer of my own would be bloody amazing! Useless, but amazing!) Buying a slot at a lab that can run a full sequence - dirt cheap.
This would, however, mean using REAL data and not the 7-12 markers they currently use for criminology. (NB: Genetic genealogists looking to see if two people are closely related would need to perform in excess of 100 STRs and a dozen or so SNPs - if both are male, PLUS a whole load of markers off the autosomnal region, PLUS a full mitochondrial sequencing. And even then, accuracy isn't great and falls off sharply. Nobody in genetics, even those who are experts in the criminology aspect, takes current DNA testing by police seriously. The probability of coincidental matches is too high.)
Easy. Move to a system that focuses more on rehabilitation, retraining and (when an external element is a factor) removal of external factors contributing to the criminality. You still isolate from society (the sole benefit of prison) but with reduced or eliminated punitive element, there is no risk of punishing an innocent person who happens to be cojoined to someone who is guilty.
Even in the case of identical twins, the genome differs by many hundreds of markers.
The sequencing of the entire genome would cost around $10,000 (USD) each. That, by my calculation, makes $30,000 (one per guy and one for the DNA sample). The cost of finding the closest match is the cost of writing about 15 lines of C code.
I am trying to figure out where the rest of the money goes.
Look, this is very simple. We don't even know if THIS universe is a computer simulation. (See arXiv for constraints.) If this universe is a simulation, it is by definition a cyberspace. If cyberspace does not exist, then no law governing anything within this universe is possible.
Since laws governing this universe are possible, one of the statements in that chain must be false. The one most likely to be false is that cyberspace does not exist.
If cyberspace is true, then it is just as possible to establish laws in cyberspace.
However, and this is the incredibly annoying part, the assumption by the original article was that you couldn't have cyberlaws AND laws within nations. The cables have a physical location AND a logical location, and therefore must be subject to laws in both.
True, but it doesn't matter what the company is like. When people look at your resume in the future, be it on paper or on LinkedIn, they notice the names. Having Big Names on your resume is significant, and anyone applying for a job involving Linux is applying for a job at a company that knows Red Hat and probably uses their enterprise products.
In the end, a resume is all smoke and mirrors anyway. Accurate, yes. Truthful, yes. But market-speak just the same. It has no relationship to your ability to do things in the future, all it can ever do is summarize in hyper-compressed form what you have done in the past, in a context your future employers probably don't have, where the hyper-compression necessarily takes out much of the essential information as to what the starting point was and how the end point was achieved from there.
The employer knows this just as well as you do. So employers pay a lot of attention to brand names, in the hope that vendors with a good reputation to uphold will have hired and/or kept on employees who help maintain that reputation.
Again, this goes back to Marketing 101 - it doesn't matter what you know, it matters only who you know. (Which is why industry is such a mess.)
I do not, will not, customize a resume for Red Hat. The Starship Enterprise could be flying over and hiring, but they would get standard and that is that.
Those who have spent any serious time applying for jobs know that numbers matter. It is ALL a numbers game. There may be ten thousand, or maybe a hundred thousand, people who will apply for the position who technically qualify. The job market is overflowing with programmers who have "mad skillz" (and maybe even spelling skills). The odds of getting the job are very very slim and you will have taken 8 hours to customize the resume, format it perfectly, etc. It takes about 2 minutes to fire off the appropriate standard resume (I assume you've three or four standard resumes) and a marginally modified cover letter.
Assuming the probability of getting a specific job is about the same, you do the maths on which is the more productive approach.
Sure, Red Hat is a major prize, but so is the lottery. And you know how that is a really crappy investment.
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Let us say that was true. (It isn't, but let's pretend.) MySQL is faster than PostgreSQL or Ingres, correct?
Then use PostgreSQL or Ingres for your primary storage DB, and use MySQL to store cached responses. (Key issues, etc, are then a non-issue - you don't need a vast key to identify a cached pre-generated page.) You then get the full power of a complex DB with the performance of a lightweight DB.
Wait, isn't this what NoSQL databases are used for? Well, duh. Where do you think they got the idea? The rest of the world has been using multi-tier databases for a very long time now, and obviously if you want extremely high performance and only a simple key/value search for your highest-level DB, then why not use a system that is purely key/value?
The problem with NoSQL databases is that they can be a little TOO simple. You'll often want web pages where -some- of the content is universal, -all- of the content is cacheable, but where different content in some div block is used for different users (or different parameters or whatever). For something programmatic like that, you -could- use a language like Cold Fusion. Which, like its namesake from Utah, has no redeeming value whatsoever. It's much better to do something like this in a database engine rather than in an interpreter running in a servlet inside an interpreter, as procedures can be pre-compiled.
But if you want to do this, isn't MySQL still heavier than necessary? Oh, lots. What you really want is (NoSQL || (GDBM/QDBM + Network Access)) + Loadable modules. That's about as lightweight as you can get.
In an "ideal" system, you'd actually have three layers, not two. The lowest level should also be lightweight, but not MySQL lightweight. It wants to load/save data and create views, but having stored procedures on there as well complicates load balancing and high availability. It also means more arcs through the code, and each arc you add is a potential source of bugs. The lowest level wants to be rock steady (though ska will also work), feeding to the servers that do the heavy lifting. That way, database bugs (inevitable, it's complex code) will have no significant impact on transactions, each component in the system is highly specialized (so makes fewer decisions, so is smaller, faster and more reliable), and the critical path of any given transaction is blocked by as few incidentals and overheads as possible.
Tight coupling of components is only a good idea when components run at roughly the same speed and aren't particularly blocking. The greater the speed disparity or the greater the thread blocking, the more you want loose coupling or complete decoupling. Lacking dynamic reconfiguration, you layer things so that each layer will mostly have just one type of behaviour and the adjoining layers also mostly have just one type of behaviour. There will be exceptions, nothing is optimized for all cases, but if you get most of the available performance under most of the conditions that arise, you're ahead of most of the game.
The other reason you want multi-tier is for security. Everyone makes mistakes in coding, so you can expect some component of your system to be vulnerable to attack. If it's a component that an attacker cannot reach (because it's effectively firewalled by the databases above it), it's not an issue. If it's a component that an attacker can do nothing with (because all that's being attacked is cached data that will be refreshed from further down after some time interval or when the data below changes), then only those who hit that specific load balancer in the few seconds of significance will see the defaced data. Moments later, the correct data will replace it.
You try them in a civilian court, you don't use inadmissible evidence or coerced "confessions" (people would confess to being Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy at the same time, if being waterboarded), you use what solid evidence you have. OR, you declare them Prisoners Of War, keep them confined under the terms of the Geneva Conventions until the US ceases meaningful combat operations, then release them.
The jail officials in Gitmo will never be tried or convicted. Neither will the CIA operatives named by Italy, or the staff at any of the Black Prisons operated in Europe. Those found innocent already (or between now and when Gitmo ever closes) will never be paid compensation for unlawful arrest or false imprisonment. Hell, there are still attempts to sue for unpaid wages for spies, defectors and other "plausibly deniable" individuals dating as far back as the American Civil War but including pretty well all the wars between then and now as well. If the US can drag its feet over its own people on its own turf for 200 years, nobody else has much of a chance.
Well, according to the lawyer to the remaining British citizen in Gitmo, America has been trying to deport him for six years to the Middle East (where his odds of survival are nil), despite the fact that - being British - he should be deported to Britain. There are a few theories as to why this hasn't happened (apparently said citizen witnessed an MI6 officer being present at an "enhanced interrogation"), but since British intelligence has never been seen as shiny-white and all innocent, the stories don't seem credible. You can't lose a reputation you never had.
Regardless, American intelligence has classed him as innocent of all charges, he's been cleared for release, and it is for those who defend Gitmo to do the explaining, it isn't for those questioning Gitmo to explain anything.
Last, but by no means least, there's nothing to decide. Under the Constitution (which applies to Gitmo), it is for the Administration to prove (not others to disprove) that they have the "Right to the Body", and under Common Law (which also applies to Gitmo), it is for the Administration to show that they have neither withheld nor denied the right to justice (not for others to prove justice has been denied). These are absolutes.
So what if the people were picked up under questionable circumstances? So what if the grounds for holding them initially was "walking whilst wearing Casio"? It seems reasonable to me that YOU would want to have your day in court if you'd been arrested for wearing a digital watch.
Their associates continue to kill people? Can you prove that? Or are you simply assuming that for a large enough group of people, at least one of them must be an associate of a terrorist? How many steps removed would count? Six? If so, tag. And how do you define associate, anyway? From the same village? The Boston bombers came from Boston, but nobody is so stupid as to accuse the whole city of being terrorist. Also, with the Administration defining an "enemy combatant" as being ANY male of potentially military age (plus all others within blast radius), I would be very wary of accusing their associates of anything more than having the wrong number of birthdays without proof.
Delicacy? Like "kidnapping people off the streets of Italy" delicacy? (Btw, he was later found innocent of all charges, which is more than can be said of the CIA agents for whom Italy holds international arrest warrants. They haven't been found guilty either, true, but fleeing the scene of the crime and refusing to answer the warrants would convince most people they're guilty.)
First, America doesn't have one of those. All they have are Drill Sergeant/PsyOps-trained lawyers who are adept at getting the jury to believe all kinds of bullshit. Remember, jurors who manage to believe six impossible things before the first coffee break get a luncheon voucher for Milliways.
Second, due to this thing called "the right to arm bears" and the complete inability of conspiracy nuts and rightwingers to digest new information, those wrongly accused are at extremely high risk of getting killed by wannabe-vigilantes who reject the evidence against the two accused (and blogs aren't short of such nutters).
Third, even "established" news sources had trouble distinguishing Chechnya and, well, all other countries beginning with Ch. Apparently, inciting xenophobia is a spectator sport for journalists. Either that, or they're irredeemably stupid and bloody ignorant. 'Course, might be all of the above.
Well, there was a buzzing noise for all electric doors. Don't recall a whooshing sound, but in a spaceship it's reasonable to assume sections will acquire an air pressure differential.
Agreed on all points, though I'd have to agree with femtobyte as well that profiteers make horrible scientists. $100 million is peanuts, as the original article notes, but that is only a bad thing if it operates in complete isolation. If it cooperates with the Connectome Project and other neurological studies, this study could be quite useful. But that is only true if the division of labour is correct. You cannot break a scientific project into N sub-projects at random, even $100 million ones. If everyone got together and discussed who is best placed to do which part, the results could be extremely valuable.
Even more so, when you consider that a 13T MRI scanner capable of handling humans should be online just about now. Since that has already been built, the cost of building it is effectively zero. The resolution achievable from such a scanner, however, should be nothing short of spectacular.
Can you even begin to imagine the advances achievable from a consortium of Connectome researchers, high-end (9.3T and 13T) MRI labs, and this new foundation?
Ok, now you've imagined it, stop. We're talking politicians, scientists under publish-or-perish rules, get-rich-quick corporations and corrupt "advocacy". There's no possible way any of those involved will be capable of doing what they should do.
Excellent! At this rate, by the time the thread is frozen, we'll have beaten DPI and other newspaper publishing systems. (Ok, ok, I'll be honest, we've already beaten most newspaper publishing systems.)
Not messed with tikz, but will take a look.
The main problem I've had with TeX and its subsystems for vectors is that it's actually very difficult to snap to points, or define relationships between vectors. Normally, this is a non-issue - TeX' built-in maths has perfectly good precision for most purposes, so provided the functions are defined correctly, you don't get freaky rounding errors or endpoints in the wrong place. There are pathological cases, however, where certain shapes only scale correctly by certain amounts. You need fiddly conditionals and other hacks. Since most engineering and maths software has had workarounds almost as long as TeX has existed, and it would be an addition to the syntax (so retaining backwards compatibility, just as LuaTeX is backwards compatible with TeX), there should not be any reason for such solutions to exist in TeX.
It may well be that tikz solves 99.9% of all the cases I'm concerned about. If so, great. If not, the system is built to be infinitely extensible. I'll get round to it. Maybe. Or wait for a new package on the TeX archive.
Think it's graphicsx. One of the packages, anyways, lets you include PNGs, JPGs, etc. No problem. I include graphics all the time with LaTeX, very few of which are EPS. True, graphics import isn't as clean as I'd like (it's a bugger to remember all the different nuances of each type of graphics format you can use and through which package you need to use it with).
I also don't like the fact that vector images require you to master Asymptote, Metapost and an armful of other systems. This can - and should - be massively cleaned up.
So, whilst I agree that TeX has crappy image handling, it's not nearly as bad as you depict.
TeX has control elements for describing structure, since structure is a key part of typesetting. Since these elements are macros, they're programmable, although not truly abstract as in XML. About the only thing I can think of that XML can do for document structure that TeX cannot is out-of-order elements, and I'd argue that out-of-order is incompatible with structure.
In database terminology, XML is a key-data pair system. The data can be anywhere in the XML file and you need some sort of key to know where it is and/or when you've found it. (Since XML is not organized, you can't do random access to get at the key. You have to load it in and organize it, in which case it isn't XML, or you have to sequentially search it.)
TeX is a semi-sequential structure, with relationship links between specialized data tables. Again in database terms, it's a set of batch sequential files with crude but useful support for concrete data association. Because it's batch sequential, real-time usage gets hairy. Big deal. Those in the middle of writing should be concerned with the writing. It would be nice if editors had better error-detection, but it's not usually that critical.
Never had any problem writing books in LaTeX. The main difficulty has been in deciding whether I want a modern or medieval structure.
Docbook, on the other hand, I hated. I helped with the writing of a few chapters of the Linux Advanced Traffic Control book, which was abandoned in part because Docbook was such a disgusting system.
XML is useless for typesetting. It's not really that useful for organizing anything - you'll have used XML-driven databases, but you'll have never used an XML-driven database that had any performance or serious functionality. (LaTeX doesn't do databases, either, but it doesn't pretend to. It has external engines for databases, which are actually quite nice.)
Web pages? Never had any problem embedding HTML in LaTeX. In fact, I have very very rarely found ANY document style to be LaTeX-incompatible. Load up the correct document type, load up the appropriate stylesheets and you're good. Yes, spiral text is hard. Yes, embedding HDR images can be a pain. Yes, alpha blending isn't that hot. But how often do you use any of these for owner's manuals or contracts?
There are more table classes than I'd really like, and some of the style coding is scruffy, but I challenge anyone to find a genuine, common document type that LaTeX* cannot do as well as or better than any non-TeX wordprocessor, DTP solution or XML-based system. (Non-TeX means you can't compare TeX with Scientific Word, TeXmacs or any other engine that uses TeX behind the scenes.)
(To make it absolutely clear, "as well as or better than" can refer to any one or more parameters. So if I get better-quality output, that's better than. If I can achieve comparable results with cleaner, easier-to-maintain syntax, that's also better than. To win, your solution has to not merely equal but actually exceed what I can do on EVERY parameter, or you have failed to demonstrate something that supercedes.)
A bitcoin to anyone who can do this.
*I am including all dialects of LaTeX here, so LuaLaTeX, PDFTeX, etc, are all things I can consider on my side, as are all WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM editors, Metapost, supplemental services, style sheets, etc. Since this is versus a specific alternative, anything comparable for that specific alternative is fair game for you to use, but you can't mix in other alternatives. It has to be one versus the complete TeX family if you want to prove your point.
Well, with WebKit up the proverbial creek these days, a new rendering engine would make sense.
The question would be whether you could create a TeX-alike engine that supports the additional functions required in HTML and can convert any well-formed SGML document into a TeX-alike document. If you could, you can have one rendering engine and subsume HTML and XML entirely within it.
The benefits of doing this? The big drawback of style sheets is that no two browsers agree on units. TeX has very well-defined units that are already widely used. These also happen to be the units industry likes using. Eliminating browser-specific style sheets would be an incredible benefit.
The big drawback of the Semantic Web is that everyone, their brother, cat and goldfish have designed their own ontologies, none of which interoperate and few of which are any good for searching with SPARQL. LaTeX has a good collection of very standard, very clean methods for binding information together. Because it's standard, you can have a pre-existing ontology libraries which can be auto-populated. And because LaTeX is mostly maintained by uber-minds, rather than Facebook interns during their coffee break, those ontologies are likely to be very, very good. Also, microformats will DIE!!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
The big drawback with HTML 5 is that the W3C can't even decide if the standard is fixed, rolling or a pink pony. TeX is a very solid standard that actually exists.
Ok, what's the downside of TeX? There's no real namespace support, so conflicts between libraries are commonplace. I'm also not keen on having a mixture of tag logic, where some tags have content embedded and others have the content enclosed with an end tag. It's messy. Cleanliness is next to Linuxliness.
Parsing client-side is a mild irritant, but let's face it. AJAX is also parsing client-side, as is Flash, as are cascading style sheets, etc, etc. The client is already doing a lot (one reason nobody has a fast browser any more), so changing from one set of massive overheads to another really wouldn't be that much of a pain.
Ok, so if we consider TeX the underlying system, do we need a TeX tag? No. We would rather assume all parts of a document not enclosed by an SGML tag are TeX. This would be a transitory state, since you could then write SGML-to-TeX modules for Apache, IIS and other popularish web servers. The world would then become wholly TeXified, as it should be.
Whereas now, people are still not accustomed to seeing correctly typeset documents and are now completely used to vast numbers of typos, malformed web pages, poor indexing via the semantic web, gratuitous XML, excessively long style sheets, browser incompatibilities, Javascript...
Revelation says 1000 years of heaven (clearly a Linux install) followed by 1000 years of hell (a Windows revival?), and only after that is there eternal bliss (only assembly language coding is allowed).
You kill your cash cow IF your cash cow is lame and on life-support (basically the x86) AND you have a substitute cash cow that is so good, so novel and so ready that you can switch to it and gain more customers than you lose AND gain a time advantage over all your competitors of such magnitude that you'll have a very stable market before anyone is in a position to match you.
This does happen in the CPU world from time to time. The problem is that Intel has failed to make a new product of adequate maturity from the start, which is what it needs. If Intel had ditched its internal politics (which are horrible, BTW) and continued developing the Itanium until it got to where it is today BEFORE releasing it, it would have scored over big. (The extra time would have also been considerably shorter, as there would have been more designing, more working, less blaming and less avoidance.) Intel LOST a remarkable opportunity to eliminate the x86 market, because they had (and have) much the same culture as the old IBM, NASA and Lockheed Martin - pushing for good headlines rather than good products. I guess it's also the same as the Medieval Catholic Church. In the end, there is only one possible result - a catastrophic collapse in confidence and capability, where you go from market leader to borderline extinction in pretty much an afternoon. Sinkholes, rot and corporate failure all share one thing in common - you see nothing until it's all over.
ARM and MIPS have pretty much total control over the mobile world and the embedded world. However, the PC world isn't going to vanish. It will change, though. Why? Because there'll be more action in the ARM and MIPS toolchains, because people will want programs to work seamlessly across devices (not just talk, but actually run on multiple systems), because manufacturing is cheaper when you've a common base architecture, because software companies don't like supporting multiple architectures. And that means PCs will have to switch to the same architecture as the mobile/embedded world, albeit with performance considerations rather than power.
There are still a huge number of programs (especially for Windows) for which 32-bit versions are the only versions. This is by no means a good thing - and at this point, there is no excuse for it. (Size may have been a factor at one point, but if you're capable of running 64-bits, you're probably working with a memory that can cope with the larger pointer sizes.)
Firefox, for example, is threatening to abandon the 64-bit line. You lose 32-bit support, you lose Firefox support. Now, that might not be such a bad thing (it's bleedin' bloatware, it's slow, the distinction between plugins and extensions is annoying, I hate the menu tree layout, they release major releases too often, there's no UTF-32, and I'm sure there are other problems I could find if I could be bothered, and they should Get Off My Lawn!). However, Chrome and clones don't have enough plugins yet, Opera isn't the performance giant it was, and there's really no other browsers out there of much significance.
I would object to calling Intel's processors "the best". The best at what? I'd pit a MIPS64 CPU against an x64 CPU (equal cores, equal FPUs, equal bus speeds) for servers. I'd consider the T2 to be easier to radiation-proof than comparable Intel offerings. The AMULET processor series is the most original. For bus speeds, HyperTransport is still faster than PCI Express.
That doesn't mean Intel isn't "the best" at XYZ, what it means is that there is no generic "the best". There will ALWAYS be another processor that is better at something else.
How do you get 3? At 10k per pop, 1 mil allows 100 sequences to be performed. Divide by 3 sources, they should be able to do 33 sequences each. The cost of sequencing is further reduced if you just want SNPs, as you can use a microarray for that. . But sequencing the entire genome is cheap these days. The cost has fallen very rapidly and continues to do so. It really is at the point where garage enthusiasts can perform many of the basic steps and will be able to do at-home SNP discovery within a few years. Of course, at-home work isn't criminology-grade, but just as enthusiasts can do basic work for pocket money, crime labs can easily swallow the cost of a clean room plus an Illumina or Oxford Nanopore sequencer.
(Oxford says it can get costs down to $1k per sequence within a year or two. They also are working on sub-thousand disposable sequencers, which may be useful.)
The question has no meaning. By using a static spacetime diagram, there is no before or after. Time is merely a spacial dimension in this type of analysis.
Furthermore, "you" have no defined meaning in either of my two scenarios. In the first, simpler, framework, "you" can be either the individual particles in the body, the body as a collective whole, the instantaneous logical state of the brain, the collective logical state over a defined unit of time, or any combination thereof.
The Greek Ship paradox only occurs because you reuse the same label for utterly different aspects of a construct that is simultaneously logical and physical. By using a generic label, you can persuade yourself of almost anything. You must use specifics. And, yes, that means distinguishing object state from object dynamics from object encapsulation.
This is what I mean about uneducated. You lack the understanding necessary to comprehend my first post, you will doubtless fail to understand this one, and you cannot even be bothered to do the basic legwork to comprehend spacetime static waves (far simpler than m-theory, which I guarantee is as complex a model of existence as anyone has managed to achieve).
It is with nonsensical replies such as yours that I end up wondering if eugenics was such a bad concept. I still firmly believe better schooling would fix most examples of stupidity (I think 9 hours/day, compulsory between the ages of 3 and 23, narrow-band streaming per subject should suffice).
Science is not done by straw poll, so the views of most (uneducated, I might add) people is unimportant. What matters is that physicists and mathematicians take the possibility seriously and have published papers on how simulation affects QM.
Something "exists" IFF there is a defined energy matrix superimposed on a defined probability matrix where said matrices cover non-zero, finite space, and non-zero, finite time, and interact with other such matrices of equal or higher number of dimensions.
The universe can be described also as a single object, static in 5D, with all possibilities as branches, that lies at the intersection of two membranes.
The cost of sequencing is negligible these days (around $10k for a full genome). Buying a machine isn't cheap - I looked at the cost of one a year or so ago, and they were still multi-million dollar devices. (Why? Bcause I'm a geek! Having a sequencer of my own would be bloody amazing! Useless, but amazing!) Buying a slot at a lab that can run a full sequence - dirt cheap.
This would, however, mean using REAL data and not the 7-12 markers they currently use for criminology. (NB: Genetic genealogists looking to see if two people are closely related would need to perform in excess of 100 STRs and a dozen or so SNPs - if both are male, PLUS a whole load of markers off the autosomnal region, PLUS a full mitochondrial sequencing. And even then, accuracy isn't great and falls off sharply. Nobody in genetics, even those who are experts in the criminology aspect, takes current DNA testing by police seriously. The probability of coincidental matches is too high.)
Easy. Move to a system that focuses more on rehabilitation, retraining and (when an external element is a factor) removal of external factors contributing to the criminality. You still isolate from society (the sole benefit of prison) but with reduced or eliminated punitive element, there is no risk of punishing an innocent person who happens to be cojoined to someone who is guilty.
Even in the case of identical twins, the genome differs by many hundreds of markers.
The sequencing of the entire genome would cost around $10,000 (USD) each. That, by my calculation, makes $30,000 (one per guy and one for the DNA sample). The cost of finding the closest match is the cost of writing about 15 lines of C code.
I am trying to figure out where the rest of the money goes.
Look, this is very simple. We don't even know if THIS universe is a computer simulation. (See arXiv for constraints.) If this universe is a simulation, it is by definition a cyberspace. If cyberspace does not exist, then no law governing anything within this universe is possible.
Since laws governing this universe are possible, one of the statements in that chain must be false. The one most likely to be false is that cyberspace does not exist.
If cyberspace is true, then it is just as possible to establish laws in cyberspace.
However, and this is the incredibly annoying part, the assumption by the original article was that you couldn't have cyberlaws AND laws within nations. The cables have a physical location AND a logical location, and therefore must be subject to laws in both.
True, but it doesn't matter what the company is like. When people look at your resume in the future, be it on paper or on LinkedIn, they notice the names. Having Big Names on your resume is significant, and anyone applying for a job involving Linux is applying for a job at a company that knows Red Hat and probably uses their enterprise products.
In the end, a resume is all smoke and mirrors anyway. Accurate, yes. Truthful, yes. But market-speak just the same. It has no relationship to your ability to do things in the future, all it can ever do is summarize in hyper-compressed form what you have done in the past, in a context your future employers probably don't have, where the hyper-compression necessarily takes out much of the essential information as to what the starting point was and how the end point was achieved from there.
The employer knows this just as well as you do. So employers pay a lot of attention to brand names, in the hope that vendors with a good reputation to uphold will have hired and/or kept on employees who help maintain that reputation.
Again, this goes back to Marketing 101 - it doesn't matter what you know, it matters only who you know. (Which is why industry is such a mess.)
I do not, will not, customize a resume for Red Hat. The Starship Enterprise could be flying over and hiring, but they would get standard and that is that.
Those who have spent any serious time applying for jobs know that numbers matter. It is ALL a numbers game. There may be ten thousand, or maybe a hundred thousand, people who will apply for the position who technically qualify. The job market is overflowing with programmers who have "mad skillz" (and maybe even spelling skills). The odds of getting the job are very very slim and you will have taken 8 hours to customize the resume, format it perfectly, etc. It takes about 2 minutes to fire off the appropriate standard resume (I assume you've three or four standard resumes) and a marginally modified cover letter.
Assuming the probability of getting a specific job is about the same, you do the maths on which is the more productive approach.
Sure, Red Hat is a major prize, but so is the lottery. And you know how that is a really crappy investment.