Well, it's reasonable, but it seems wrong. I don't think saying the many people who have to recognize faces on CCTV for the past few decades have never made mistakes that got them into trouble is a claim extraordinary enough to require specific cited evidence. I think claiming no one ever has is the kind of dramatically counterintuitive claim that would need backing up.
Conversely, I think that trusting authorities with the track records we know about to never let these machines make automatic decisions without human intervention is just as counterintuitive.
CCTV cameras don't make decisions about who is who. People watching their monitors do, and get in trouble (or ought to) when they make mistakes. These face recognition machines aren't replacing the cameras, they're replacing the people.
I don't know about Walker, Andrews or Bear (though Bear is not a very good writer), but Pournelle and Niven (the past 20 years) are warmongers, especially Pournelle. Their books are filled with fighting to boost the testosterone, even if it's not very strategic or ever really wins.
Sounds like the Terror War marketers have got the perfect match for their own security theater scripts, instead of just CATCHING OSAMA and forcing Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban.
Civil War: Lincoln (R) Spanish/American: Roosevelt (R) WWI: Wilson (D) WWII: Roosevelt/Truman (D) Korea: Truman/Eisenhower (D/R) Vietnam: Johnson/Nixon/Ford (D/R) Central America: Reagan/Bush (R) Iraq Sr: Bush Sr (R) Kosovo: Clinton (D) Afghanistan: Bush Jr (R) Iraq Jr: Bush Jr (R)
The "Philippines war" was the Spanish/American War that I itemized, and I explicitly mentioned the Philippinos killed in it. I did not say anything about Grenada or Panama - you did. Nixon's inheriting Vietnam doesn't ignore that he made it his own, and his vast escalation of it to win reelection in 1972 dwarfs any possible scaledown in his web of lies.
Iraq War Sr, as I pointed out, was only half won, or hadn't you noticed that Clinton had to keep fighting it and that we're now badly losing its Jr version. Unless you think we won Iraq War Jr, and we're now "losing the peace". Much like the half-won (R) Korean War that we've been fighting a half century, and lately have begun to start seriously losing (R).
All of this is very relevant, especially to the totally wrong point made by the poster to which I replied, who claimed "Democrats start the wars, Republicans win them", which is exactly backwards, especially when analyzing the exceptions to the real rule.
What you are indulging in is blind bipartisanism. The Republican backup propaganda that "they're both the same", when Republicans are much, much worse. The kind of broken logic that I expect in a post that replies to mine with perfectly false allegations that I missed the Philippines War and included Grenada and Panama.
What is most disturbing about these debates is that I can be right 100% of the time about points that can be proven, but the people I'm proving wrong will still make the most wild claims that have yet to be proven, and refuse to respect my proven superior judgement. That is what is wrong with the people in this country, and which is exploited by both parties, but much more by Republicans, to put us into a state of permanent war and being wrong.
No, it's not a twisted view, because I responded to a nonsensical claim that mentioned only FDR, but ignored even the most recent and the subsequent Democrats. That is a twisted view, mainly because it's so incorrect.
But as long as you want to talk about Kennedy/Johnson and Vietnam, well, Nixon. Most of those dead were killed by Nixon, who would have killed even more if he hadn't been impeached for the typical Republican high crimes and misdemeanors. Even Ford, the next Republican, spent years actually ending Vietnam, even though it was already over.
OK, all you've got is flamewar and flamebait (and whining about the + mods of the post you're arguing with). But here's some history, so you aren't so lonely.
Let's look at the wars since there have been both Democrat and Republican parties: Civil War: Lincoln (R) Spanish/American: Roosevelt (R) WWI: Wilson (D) WWII: Roosevelt/Truman (D) Korea: Truman/Eisenhower (D/R) Vietnam: Johnson/Nixon/Ford (D/R) Central America: Reagan/Bush (R) Iraq Sr: Bush Sr (R) Kosovo: Clinton (D) Afghanistan: Bush Jr (R) Iraq Jr: Bush Jr (R)
OK, let's tally them up. 6/11, or 54%, Republican, 3/11, or 27%, Democratic, 2/11, or 18%, shared. Looks like Republicans are the war party. But let's look closer - not all wars are entirely bad. Lincoln's Civil War might have been the least bad option, even if it's still going on in elections today, but he was a long time ago (the first Republican president), and Bush is no Lincoln. Roosevelt's Spanish American War hooked up America, but it killed over a million Phillipinos unnecessarily, among surely many other atrocities never even recorded - and started off with the US blowing up the Maine in Cuba, like bombing Pearl Harbor ourselves. Nice cashin, but just about the warringest, and all Republican. WWI was Democratic, but as beneficial and probably as necessary by the time we joined, like the best parts of the Civil and Spanish/American wars, courtesy of a Democrat. WWII also a "good war", and all Democratic - despite Republicans siding with appeasement, and then trying to flip the script for the rest of history. Truman's Korean War was a Democratic boondoggle, but Republican Eisenhower didn't fix it: we're still at war there, and now they're nuclear, and probably our greatest threat, thanks to Republican Bush (despite Democrat Clinton actually containing them). At best a tie. Vietnam is definitely a tie between warmongers Johnson and Nixon, and even Republican Ford took years to wind it down after it was over. Reagan/Bush waged war across Central America without even admitting it, illegally. Probably the most Republican war of all. Clinton won his Kosovo war without even a single American casualty, and stopped another genocide in Europe. Iraq Sr was created by Bush Sr, baited by Bush Sr, and half-ended by Bush Sr: another (bad) point for Republicans. OK, Afghanistan should have been a sadly "good" war, but Bush abandoned it, after ignoring all his chances to prevent it while "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US". Abandoned it for the Iraq War, which, on further reflection, does take the crown as the Republicanest war of all.
So not only are Republicans much more warring than Democrats. Their warring is both more unnecessary and immoral than Democratic warring, and much more losing. Republicans haven't really won a war since Roosevelt, while Democrats haven't lost one.
So no wonder you still think McCain's "maverick" persona could have been something more than just an act. You've drunk the Republican koolaid. I guess that you're developing a tolerance. If only you had developed a similar resistance to war, or at least Republican war history.
Ah, the Anonymous Republican Coward says Bush a liberal, and then wants to be taken seriously as he quotes Rush Limbo. Limbo, is that you?
Let's see, Clinton made the budget, and the policies that stoked the Internet bubble into real growth, but somehow Republicans made all that surplus. Debatable, but then how come they squandered it all, the moment they got a Republican president to go with their congressional majority? The answer is that it was Clinton who not only fixed the budget that 12 years of Reagan/Bush had driven into more debt than ever before all put together. Simple deduction settles the debate: Clinton made the surplus, even more a triumph considering the subsequent debt Republicans created once they had full control: even more than the 12 Reagan/Bush debt years.
According to A.Republican.C, Clinton firing missiles at Osama was a way to distract us from Monica, but the Republican Congress impeaching him over Monica wasn't a way to stop him from fighting Osama. That kind of logic only makes sense to a person seeking an excuse to talk about Monica's vagina and a cigar for more than a decade.
Clinton's Attorney General botched an attack on Texas theocrats armed to the teeth, somehow casting doubt on Clinton's surplus (the only subject that isn't a strawman in this discussion), but Bush Jr's AG rigging the DoJ for a "Permanent Republican Majority" on America's public time doesn't bear mention. Funny how "Clinton's" CIA and FBI ignored Clinton's attempts to kill Osama, but somehow the same agencies helped Bush invade Iraq without your noticing. It's almost as if they cared more about their budgets the Republican Congress fed them across both administrations. I guess the Pentagon's playing the same game was hard for you to notice, but more likely trying to pretend the Pentagon obeyed a Democrat instead of the Republicans is too hard for even an Anonymous Republican Coward to spew on Slashdot.
I'm not even going to address your mass of strawmen about Carter, except to say that he wasn't nearly as bad as Bush, either Sr or Jr, or Reagan, who multiplied (many times) the relatively small economic problems Carter inherited from Nixon/Ford's combo of Vietnam, Watergate, and OPEC. Oh, and Carter's SEC was run by Bill Casey, who then ran Reagan's campaign and his CIA.
Then you call Bush a liberal. Priceless.
Wading through more gibberish that shows you were molested by a priest in the early 1990s, and can't separate its reality from your rambling strawman fantasies...
Trapped in that nightmare with you is indeed Bush Sr's gambit to bait Iraq into a war we could wage against them, which war has never ended (you heard about Iraq this century, right?). Funny how Clinton managed to disarm Saddam and reduce his military to one we could invade and defeat in a week.
But since I've got my marbles, I remember how Carter protected the Shah who was kicked out by a revolution caused by 25 years of the CIA colluding with him to torture. Funny how Carter deposing him looked just like Carter offering him refuge, and getting targeted by the Ayatollah who did depose the Shah. And funny how you hate Carter as much as one of these Iranians you imagine you know something about. Khomeini, is that you?
Finally, you do score points for catching Brzezinski's confession that he helped create the Qaeda for Carter - but not as many as for spelling his name right. But of course you ignore the fact that Brzezinski's gambit worked, accelerating the doom of the Soviet Union, while the Qaeda could have then been shut down by the incoming Reagan CIA/Pentagon. But instead, while Robert Gates wasn't too busy covering up Iran/Contra for your boys, he was busy turning the Qeystone Qaeda into a trained, armed, funded, propagandized permanent fixture that took over Afghanistan when Gates' bestest nuclear spy buddies in Pakistan's secret police deposed the old government for them. Whew! Even when you're right, Anonymous Republican Coward, you're wrong. Robert Gates, is that you?
Which leftist media would that be? You mean the one that's ignoring all the Mideastern men jailed, tortured and killed in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the CIA's global network of secret torture prisons, without even face recognition?
The rest you got right. Except the part where the media doesn't report the programmer's warning or the politician ignoring it.
The last Democrat, Clinton, won a war in Europe with zero American casualties. And the next Democrat after FDR, Truman, ended WWII with a couple of atomic bombs.
You Republicans are so insecure about your repressed gayness that you'll invade anything that moves. That's a pansy move that gets us killed, and destroys our country. But you're so obsessed with blowing things (up, mostly) that you forgot about the last war, which we won, and the way the rest of the one you kinda remember went. You really don't know anything but Republican propaganda, do you? No point then schooling you in any more history than you can handle.
Thanks for representing, Anonymous Republican Coward.
What makes you so sure it will be used so responsibly? Our jails have thousands of people who didn't commit the crimes that sent them there. Hundreds of innocent people have been freed by DNA evidence after years of jail, while prosecutors still resist the evidence. And that's the results of using technology and techniques with hundreds of years of being challenged.
Why do you give our justice system, which has recently incorporated even more egregious abuses (like discarding Habeas Corpus), the benefit of the "doubt"?
Which Democrat lied us into a war (since Johnson, over 40 years ago)? Which Democrat lied us into unsupportable debt? Clinton led us into an unprecedented surplus that Bush and his Republicans converted into unsupportable debt. Are you really going to compare Democrats' mixed corporatism with Republicans' effective fascism?
The "present government" has already turned around some of the Republican monopoly government's last 6 years, after only a few months. That Republican government showed that there is a choice between the two parties, even if only between bad and unacceptably atrocious.
When a human makes a mistake recognizing a face, they suffer the results. If that's identifying a criminal, they can be cross-examined, or even sued or jailed, depending on what they said that face did.
When computers mis-ID a face, do we cross-examine and maybe punish its programmers?
McCain is neither naive nor libertarian. He's a liar. He wants to be president so bad he's embraced Bush, even as Bush tortured prisoners the way McCain was tortured, and says we never should. McCan embraced Bush, even though Bush's 2000 "dirty tricks" stole a likely Republican nomination from McCain, by sliming McCain's adopted daughter.
Now McCain is ignoring the telco cartels that want Net Doublecharge, because they're paying him to. With McCain so deep in bed with Bush, is there any surprise that McCain is just lying through his teeth to appear "libertarian" now that Republicans are the party of the biggest, most invasive government ever, that provides the least protection from corporate attacks on consumers?
Come on. After so many years watching McCain and his Republican Party lie us into war, unsupportable debt, corporate serfdom, and just an endless stream of lies that get people killed and broke, what is the point of listening to them on any single point? They can be trusted only to screw us.
Apple's policy reminds me of the joke about the nervous dental patient letting the dentist drill only once the patient had grabbed the dentist's balls, saying "this is gonna hurt you more than it's gonna hurt me".
Anyone you share your music with has to be trusted to protect your personal info. If they can't, they probably can't be trusted with Apple's music info. Not a bad strategy for making privacy mutual.
Now if copyright law would just do the same. Anyone who copies my personal info outside the transaction for which I sent the personal info should be in violation of my copyright and the limited copyright under which I sent the info. Too clever - it will take a Constitutional Privacy Amendment to give laws like that the momentum they need to get passed.
The PS3 is already "usable" by developers. It runs Ubuntu 7.04/Feisty right now. There are devkits for parallel DSP development. With the latest firmware and kernel, it seems that all the PS3 hardware, including Blu-Ray, WiFi and Bluetooth, is supported. With the exception of the RSX video chip, which is a glaring omission.
But though that chip's inaccessibility means 1800GFLOPS is sitting unused in each Linux PS3, there's still 200GFLOPS available in the DSPs. That's plenty of power, much more than in any other host for the price (or close to it), and more than multiple realtime video processing requires. Porting "CPU hog functions", like transcoding and mixing multimedia streams, to the DSPs, is precisely the model the PS3 is suited to. The PPC is for complex application and HW integration logic, pre/post processing the media computation that the DSPs handle.
So go check the PS3 Linux sites, including the DSP devkits and the projects using it. The platform is available now, but it won't produce apps unless people do something with it. That's what open source, like MythTV, is all about. Do something for yourself, share it, and the community will mutually benefit from the combinations.
Ah, the SEO angle seems most compelling. I don't think the low-end porn sites I've seen get as much return from more precise selection history, because they're not responding with more precise or accurate offers. And the multiple attempts to sell blur into an experience where the offers blend together and become more easily ignored, not less. But the SEO from multiple interconnects increases the chances that their site will be the one where you finally break down and buy something, wandering around in their hall of mirrors rather than starting a new search.
I don't understand what yo mean by "not to offer support for any application, not just MythTV".
Sure it would be better to write Cell DSP codecs that any app can use than just writing codecs for MythTV. AFAIK, writing those codecs for MythTV makes them available to any app, not just MythTV.
And the DSP functionality is exposed in the Cell for any app to use, if the codec code is written to use the functionality by running on the DSPs.
I don't know if it's "easy" to code for, but it's easier than other parallel DSP platforms.
In any case, the PS3 is not that great a PVR unless codecs run on its DSPs, not just its PPC. MythTV includes the bulk of PVR functions, so Cell DSP codecs are nearly all that's necessary to make the PS3 a great PVR using MythTV. Even if those codecs support only MythTV, if that's a lot easier to make than general-purpose Cell DSP codecs, then that's the way to start. Then, later, people can make those codecs more general purpose. That's how open source works. Waiting for the perfect is the enemy of getting the merely good.
Because MythTV does everything else (or at least is a better platform with its other comprehensive features). The user features are much more than the necessary codecs.
Bennett continues on if you're willing to click the link.
Clicking a link doesn't send your email address to anyone (unless you're already infected with spyware), unless perhaps it's an FTP URL and you gave your browser your email address to use as your FTP username (very unusual). If you don't send your email address, the server can't use it to spam you (with email; IM spam can use your IP# from clicking an HTTP URL).
So why do so many porn sites offer thumbnails that just lead to yet another porn thumbnail page? I could see them pushing some mutual advertising, but most of the clicks are to other sites, which doesn't seem to advertise anything well. Why do they spend so much resources just redirecting to other redirect pages?
That table would be really interesting if it could recharge devices laid on it, with "wireless power". Using magnetic induction, device batteries would have to include little rotors to "rewind" little charging dynamos pushed by rotating magnetic fields generated by the table. But that setup could banish incompatible, inefficient and schleppy wired power adapters. Devices wouldn't need to include charger HW in the product, so the entire mobile device economy could become more efficient. And portable "universal batteries" could recharge any mobile device, perhaps even allowing idle devices to export unused power to a dying device's battery.
People might check into hotels just to "recharge their batteries", literally, not just a shower and a nap like today. Hourly hotel rates could be a lot less sleazy.
But the point of the Cell architecture is that the PPC doesn't paint the video - the DSPs do that. There's no reason the DSPs can't pipeline to mix video layers into the resulting frames. In fact, their parallel architecture is very well suited to exactly that. The PPC doesn't even have to ship the frames to the framebuffer: the DMA and bus do that without any compute overhead, and practically no latency.
Your Mac might indeed serve well as a PVR at about the same price as a PS3, without a lot of effort parallelizing the DSP tasks. But the PS3 has so much parallel compute power for tasks exactly like this that it would run circles around a Mac PVR. With real benefits like recording multiple channels simultaneously, while displaying multiple channels in PiP, and switching among them without latency, for live replays and jumping. From extreme channel surfing to cheap HD video editing to reliable surveillance, the PS3 can be a cheap video nerve center for apps that the Mac HW will never support.
But of course that requires the overhead of porting the codecs to Cell DSP. But at least with these MythTV projects, there's a platform which requires only the DSP porting, by people in a large community.
Linux runs on the Cell's embedded Power RISC, which is not very fast running Linux apps, especially at video processing, especially compared to its lightning-fast DSPs. That's the point of running Linux on the PS3, unless it's just a geek trick. Porting the codecs to the DSPs will make a PS3 an excellent $600 HDMI PVR, with many picture-in-picture features, and even plenty of previously unseen editing features.
Sony won't be improving Linux's video support, but rather it's up to us to port apps to the parallel DSPs Sony sells us so cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
You Anonymous lying fuck Coward, the US has been torturing prisoners to death for years in Bush's Terror War. Go Cheney yourself, Mr Vice President.
Well, it's reasonable, but it seems wrong. I don't think saying the many people who have to recognize faces on CCTV for the past few decades have never made mistakes that got them into trouble is a claim extraordinary enough to require specific cited evidence. I think claiming no one ever has is the kind of dramatically counterintuitive claim that would need backing up.
Conversely, I think that trusting authorities with the track records we know about to never let these machines make automatic decisions without human intervention is just as counterintuitive.
True - Roosevelt was just a commander in the war. McKinley is an even better example of a warring Republican.
CCTV cameras don't make decisions about who is who. People watching their monitors do, and get in trouble (or ought to) when they make mistakes. These face recognition machines aren't replacing the cameras, they're replacing the people.
I don't know about Walker, Andrews or Bear (though Bear is not a very good writer), but Pournelle and Niven (the past 20 years) are warmongers, especially Pournelle. Their books are filled with fighting to boost the testosterone, even if it's not very strategic or ever really wins.
Sounds like the Terror War marketers have got the perfect match for their own security theater scripts, instead of just CATCHING OSAMA and forcing Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban.
The "Philippines war" was the Spanish/American War that I itemized, and I explicitly mentioned the Philippinos killed in it. I did not say anything about Grenada or Panama - you did. Nixon's inheriting Vietnam doesn't ignore that he made it his own, and his vast escalation of it to win reelection in 1972 dwarfs any possible scaledown in his web of lies.
Iraq War Sr, as I pointed out, was only half won, or hadn't you noticed that Clinton had to keep fighting it and that we're now badly losing its Jr version. Unless you think we won Iraq War Jr, and we're now "losing the peace". Much like the half-won (R) Korean War that we've been fighting a half century, and lately have begun to start seriously losing (R).
All of this is very relevant, especially to the totally wrong point made by the poster to which I replied, who claimed "Democrats start the wars, Republicans win them", which is exactly backwards, especially when analyzing the exceptions to the real rule.
What you are indulging in is blind bipartisanism. The Republican backup propaganda that "they're both the same", when Republicans are much, much worse. The kind of broken logic that I expect in a post that replies to mine with perfectly false allegations that I missed the Philippines War and included Grenada and Panama.
What is most disturbing about these debates is that I can be right 100% of the time about points that can be proven, but the people I'm proving wrong will still make the most wild claims that have yet to be proven, and refuse to respect my proven superior judgement. That is what is wrong with the people in this country, and which is exploited by both parties, but much more by Republicans, to put us into a state of permanent war and being wrong.
No, it's not a twisted view, because I responded to a nonsensical claim that mentioned only FDR, but ignored even the most recent and the subsequent Democrats. That is a twisted view, mainly because it's so incorrect.
But as long as you want to talk about Kennedy/Johnson and Vietnam, well, Nixon. Most of those dead were killed by Nixon, who would have killed even more if he hadn't been impeached for the typical Republican high crimes and misdemeanors. Even Ford, the next Republican, spent years actually ending Vietnam, even though it was already over.
OK, all you've got is flamewar and flamebait (and whining about the + mods of the post you're arguing with). But here's some history, so you aren't so lonely.
Let's look at the wars since there have been both Democrat and Republican parties:
Civil War: Lincoln (R)
Spanish/American: Roosevelt (R)
WWI: Wilson (D)
WWII: Roosevelt/Truman (D)
Korea: Truman/Eisenhower (D/R)
Vietnam: Johnson/Nixon/Ford (D/R)
Central America: Reagan/Bush (R)
Iraq Sr: Bush Sr (R)
Kosovo: Clinton (D)
Afghanistan: Bush Jr (R)
Iraq Jr: Bush Jr (R)
OK, let's tally them up. 6/11, or 54%, Republican, 3/11, or 27%, Democratic, 2/11, or 18%, shared. Looks like Republicans are the war party.
But let's look closer - not all wars are entirely bad. Lincoln's Civil War might have been the least bad option, even if it's still going on in elections today, but he was a long time ago (the first Republican president), and Bush is no Lincoln. Roosevelt's Spanish American War hooked up America, but it killed over a million Phillipinos unnecessarily, among surely many other atrocities never even recorded - and started off with the US blowing up the Maine in Cuba, like bombing Pearl Harbor ourselves. Nice cashin, but just about the warringest, and all Republican. WWI was Democratic, but as beneficial and probably as necessary by the time we joined, like the best parts of the Civil and Spanish/American wars, courtesy of a Democrat. WWII also a "good war", and all Democratic - despite Republicans siding with appeasement, and then trying to flip the script for the rest of history. Truman's Korean War was a Democratic boondoggle, but Republican Eisenhower didn't fix it: we're still at war there, and now they're nuclear, and probably our greatest threat, thanks to Republican Bush (despite Democrat Clinton actually containing them). At best a tie. Vietnam is definitely a tie between warmongers Johnson and Nixon, and even Republican Ford took years to wind it down after it was over. Reagan/Bush waged war across Central America without even admitting it, illegally. Probably the most Republican war of all. Clinton won his Kosovo war without even a single American casualty, and stopped another genocide in Europe. Iraq Sr was created by Bush Sr, baited by Bush Sr, and half-ended by Bush Sr: another (bad) point for Republicans. OK, Afghanistan should have been a sadly "good" war, but Bush abandoned it, after ignoring all his chances to prevent it while "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US". Abandoned it for the Iraq War, which, on further reflection, does take the crown as the Republicanest war of all.
So not only are Republicans much more warring than Democrats. Their warring is both more unnecessary and immoral than Democratic warring, and much more losing. Republicans haven't really won a war since Roosevelt, while Democrats haven't lost one.
So no wonder you still think McCain's "maverick" persona could have been something more than just an act. You've drunk the Republican koolaid. I guess that you're developing a tolerance. If only you had developed a similar resistance to war, or at least Republican war history.
Ah, the Anonymous Republican Coward says Bush a liberal, and then wants to be taken seriously as he quotes Rush Limbo. Limbo, is that you?
Let's see, Clinton made the budget, and the policies that stoked the Internet bubble into real growth, but somehow Republicans made all that surplus. Debatable, but then how come they squandered it all, the moment they got a Republican president to go with their congressional majority? The answer is that it was Clinton who not only fixed the budget that 12 years of Reagan/Bush had driven into more debt than ever before all put together. Simple deduction settles the debate: Clinton made the surplus, even more a triumph considering the subsequent debt Republicans created once they had full control: even more than the 12 Reagan/Bush debt years.
According to A.Republican.C, Clinton firing missiles at Osama was a way to distract us from Monica, but the Republican Congress impeaching him over Monica wasn't a way to stop him from fighting Osama. That kind of logic only makes sense to a person seeking an excuse to talk about Monica's vagina and a cigar for more than a decade.
Clinton's Attorney General botched an attack on Texas theocrats armed to the teeth, somehow casting doubt on Clinton's surplus (the only subject that isn't a strawman in this discussion), but Bush Jr's AG rigging the DoJ for a "Permanent Republican Majority" on America's public time doesn't bear mention. Funny how "Clinton's" CIA and FBI ignored Clinton's attempts to kill Osama, but somehow the same agencies helped Bush invade Iraq without your noticing. It's almost as if they cared more about their budgets the Republican Congress fed them across both administrations. I guess the Pentagon's playing the same game was hard for you to notice, but more likely trying to pretend the Pentagon obeyed a Democrat instead of the Republicans is too hard for even an Anonymous Republican Coward to spew on Slashdot.
I'm not even going to address your mass of strawmen about Carter, except to say that he wasn't nearly as bad as Bush, either Sr or Jr, or Reagan, who multiplied (many times) the relatively small economic problems Carter inherited from Nixon/Ford's combo of Vietnam, Watergate, and OPEC. Oh, and Carter's SEC was run by Bill Casey, who then ran Reagan's campaign and his CIA.
Then you call Bush a liberal. Priceless.
Wading through more gibberish that shows you were molested by a priest in the early 1990s, and can't separate its reality from your rambling strawman fantasies...
Trapped in that nightmare with you is indeed Bush Sr's gambit to bait Iraq into a war we could wage against them, which war has never ended (you heard about Iraq this century, right?). Funny how Clinton managed to disarm Saddam and reduce his military to one we could invade and defeat in a week.
But since I've got my marbles, I remember how Carter protected the Shah who was kicked out by a revolution caused by 25 years of the CIA colluding with him to torture. Funny how Carter deposing him looked just like Carter offering him refuge, and getting targeted by the Ayatollah who did depose the Shah. And funny how you hate Carter as much as one of these Iranians you imagine you know something about. Khomeini, is that you?
Finally, you do score points for catching Brzezinski's confession that he helped create the Qaeda for Carter - but not as many as for spelling his name right. But of course you ignore the fact that Brzezinski's gambit worked, accelerating the doom of the Soviet Union, while the Qaeda could have then been shut down by the incoming Reagan CIA/Pentagon. But instead, while Robert Gates wasn't too busy covering up Iran/Contra for your boys, he was busy turning the Qeystone Qaeda into a trained, armed, funded, propagandized permanent fixture that took over Afghanistan when Gates' bestest nuclear spy buddies in Pakistan's secret police deposed the old government for them. Whew! Even when you're right, Anonymous Republican Coward, you're wrong. Robert Gates, is that you?
No, of cour
Which leftist media would that be? You mean the one that's ignoring all the Mideastern men jailed, tortured and killed in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the CIA's global network of secret torture prisons, without even face recognition?
The rest you got right. Except the part where the media doesn't report the programmer's warning or the politician ignoring it.
The last Democrat, Clinton, won a war in Europe with zero American casualties. And the next Democrat after FDR, Truman, ended WWII with a couple of atomic bombs.
You Republicans are so insecure about your repressed gayness that you'll invade anything that moves. That's a pansy move that gets us killed, and destroys our country. But you're so obsessed with blowing things (up, mostly) that you forgot about the last war, which we won, and the way the rest of the one you kinda remember went. You really don't know anything but Republican propaganda, do you? No point then schooling you in any more history than you can handle.
Thanks for representing, Anonymous Republican Coward.
What makes you so sure it will be used so responsibly? Our jails have thousands of people who didn't commit the crimes that sent them there. Hundreds of innocent people have been freed by DNA evidence after years of jail, while prosecutors still resist the evidence. And that's the results of using technology and techniques with hundreds of years of being challenged.
Why do you give our justice system, which has recently incorporated even more egregious abuses (like discarding Habeas Corpus), the benefit of the "doubt"?
How is that fair?
Which Democrat lied us into a war (since Johnson, over 40 years ago)?
Which Democrat lied us into unsupportable debt? Clinton led us into an unprecedented surplus that Bush and his Republicans converted into unsupportable debt.
Are you really going to compare Democrats' mixed corporatism with Republicans' effective fascism?
The "present government" has already turned around some of the Republican monopoly government's last 6 years, after only a few months. That Republican government showed that there is a choice between the two parties, even if only between bad and unacceptably atrocious.
When a human makes a mistake recognizing a face, they suffer the results. If that's identifying a criminal, they can be cross-examined, or even sued or jailed, depending on what they said that face did.
When computers mis-ID a face, do we cross-examine and maybe punish its programmers?
McCain is neither naive nor libertarian. He's a liar. He wants to be president so bad he's embraced Bush, even as Bush tortured prisoners the way McCain was tortured, and says we never should. McCan embraced Bush, even though Bush's 2000 "dirty tricks" stole a likely Republican nomination from McCain, by sliming McCain's adopted daughter.
Now McCain is ignoring the telco cartels that want Net Doublecharge, because they're paying him to. With McCain so deep in bed with Bush, is there any surprise that McCain is just lying through his teeth to appear "libertarian" now that Republicans are the party of the biggest, most invasive government ever, that provides the least protection from corporate attacks on consumers?
Come on. After so many years watching McCain and his Republican Party lie us into war, unsupportable debt, corporate serfdom, and just an endless stream of lies that get people killed and broke, what is the point of listening to them on any single point? They can be trusted only to screw us.
Apple's policy reminds me of the joke about the nervous dental patient letting the dentist drill only once the patient had grabbed the dentist's balls, saying "this is gonna hurt you more than it's gonna hurt me".
Anyone you share your music with has to be trusted to protect your personal info. If they can't, they probably can't be trusted with Apple's music info. Not a bad strategy for making privacy mutual.
Now if copyright law would just do the same. Anyone who copies my personal info outside the transaction for which I sent the personal info should be in violation of my copyright and the limited copyright under which I sent the info. Too clever - it will take a Constitutional Privacy Amendment to give laws like that the momentum they need to get passed.
The PS3 is already "usable" by developers. It runs Ubuntu 7.04/Feisty right now. There are devkits for parallel DSP development. With the latest firmware and kernel, it seems that all the PS3 hardware, including Blu-Ray, WiFi and Bluetooth, is supported. With the exception of the RSX video chip, which is a glaring omission.
But though that chip's inaccessibility means 1800GFLOPS is sitting unused in each Linux PS3, there's still 200GFLOPS available in the DSPs. That's plenty of power, much more than in any other host for the price (or close to it), and more than multiple realtime video processing requires. Porting "CPU hog functions", like transcoding and mixing multimedia streams, to the DSPs, is precisely the model the PS3 is suited to. The PPC is for complex application and HW integration logic, pre/post processing the media computation that the DSPs handle.
So go check the PS3 Linux sites, including the DSP devkits and the projects using it. The platform is available now, but it won't produce apps unless people do something with it. That's what open source, like MythTV, is all about. Do something for yourself, share it, and the community will mutually benefit from the combinations.
Ah, the SEO angle seems most compelling. I don't think the low-end porn sites I've seen get as much return from more precise selection history, because they're not responding with more precise or accurate offers. And the multiple attempts to sell blur into an experience where the offers blend together and become more easily ignored, not less. But the SEO from multiple interconnects increases the chances that their site will be the one where you finally break down and buy something, wandering around in their hall of mirrors rather than starting a new search.
I don't understand what yo mean by "not to offer support for any application, not just MythTV".
Sure it would be better to write Cell DSP codecs that any app can use than just writing codecs for MythTV. AFAIK, writing those codecs for MythTV makes them available to any app, not just MythTV.
And the DSP functionality is exposed in the Cell for any app to use, if the codec code is written to use the functionality by running on the DSPs.
I don't know if it's "easy" to code for, but it's easier than other parallel DSP platforms.
In any case, the PS3 is not that great a PVR unless codecs run on its DSPs, not just its PPC. MythTV includes the bulk of PVR functions, so Cell DSP codecs are nearly all that's necessary to make the PS3 a great PVR using MythTV. Even if those codecs support only MythTV, if that's a lot easier to make than general-purpose Cell DSP codecs, then that's the way to start. Then, later, people can make those codecs more general purpose. That's how open source works. Waiting for the perfect is the enemy of getting the merely good.
Because MythTV does everything else (or at least is a better platform with its other comprehensive features). The user features are much more than the necessary codecs.
Clicking a link doesn't send your email address to anyone (unless you're already infected with spyware), unless perhaps it's an FTP URL and you gave your browser your email address to use as your FTP username (very unusual). If you don't send your email address, the server can't use it to spam you (with email; IM spam can use your IP# from clicking an HTTP URL).
So why do so many porn sites offer thumbnails that just lead to yet another porn thumbnail page? I could see them pushing some mutual advertising, but most of the clicks are to other sites, which doesn't seem to advertise anything well. Why do they spend so much resources just redirecting to other redirect pages?
That table would be really interesting if it could recharge devices laid on it, with "wireless power". Using magnetic induction, device batteries would have to include little rotors to "rewind" little charging dynamos pushed by rotating magnetic fields generated by the table. But that setup could banish incompatible, inefficient and schleppy wired power adapters. Devices wouldn't need to include charger HW in the product, so the entire mobile device economy could become more efficient. And portable "universal batteries" could recharge any mobile device, perhaps even allowing idle devices to export unused power to a dying device's battery.
People might check into hotels just to "recharge their batteries", literally, not just a shower and a nap like today. Hourly hotel rates could be a lot less sleazy.
But the point of the Cell architecture is that the PPC doesn't paint the video - the DSPs do that. There's no reason the DSPs can't pipeline to mix video layers into the resulting frames. In fact, their parallel architecture is very well suited to exactly that. The PPC doesn't even have to ship the frames to the framebuffer: the DMA and bus do that without any compute overhead, and practically no latency.
Your Mac might indeed serve well as a PVR at about the same price as a PS3, without a lot of effort parallelizing the DSP tasks. But the PS3 has so much parallel compute power for tasks exactly like this that it would run circles around a Mac PVR. With real benefits like recording multiple channels simultaneously, while displaying multiple channels in PiP, and switching among them without latency, for live replays and jumping. From extreme channel surfing to cheap HD video editing to reliable surveillance, the PS3 can be a cheap video nerve center for apps that the Mac HW will never support.
But of course that requires the overhead of porting the codecs to Cell DSP. But at least with these MythTV projects, there's a platform which requires only the DSP porting, by people in a large community.
Anonymous Coward hasn't learned to read.
Shut your fucking face for the good of the readers.
Linux runs on the Cell's embedded Power RISC, which is not very fast running Linux apps, especially at video processing, especially compared to its lightning-fast DSPs. That's the point of running Linux on the PS3, unless it's just a geek trick. Porting the codecs to the DSPs will make a PS3 an excellent $600 HDMI PVR, with many picture-in-picture features, and even plenty of previously unseen editing features.
Sony won't be improving Linux's video support, but rather it's up to us to port apps to the parallel DSPs Sony sells us so cheap.