And how should one compensate HBO for Game of Thrones without compensating Disney for ESPN, an unwanted service?
So if you're at the store where they sell boxes of mixed chocolates and you really like the dark chocolate and nougats but hate the creamy and vanilla chocolate what is your idea of fair compensation? Because your other points were pretty good but that you don't like the commercial bundle is something quite different than "the author is neither giving the work away nor selling it".
I also don't spend much of my "day job's" time on my personal stuff. I don't mind spending a bit of it, though, as they DEFINITELY benefit from my extracurricular work.
Just don't ever let the company lawyer see that post...
There's no work place in the US that isn't under OSHA and a bunch of other regulations, so by libertard logic the free market has never really been tried. No matter what regulation is lifted, the problem is always the regulation that remains even if it's obvious reducing regulation made everything worse. It's like cutting yourself with a knife, it hurts and the deeper you cut the more it hurts but the libertard insists that if you just cut deep enough, the pain will go away. I guess that's true, after a fashion... And I see you're defending a convicted monopolist as not actually being a monopoly, meaning it's only a monopoly if someone puts a gun to your head (hence point 2). I'm sure you feel you won the argument, but only because you're preaching to the choir.
Heh, the entire group I was on fell for this trick question recently: "How many of each kind did Moses bring on the Ark?" as nobody noticed they didn't actually say Noah.
Sounds about right to me, it's the same response I get when I get when I compare anything else that is per person, per square kilometer or anything like that "hurr durr the US is bigger, therefore 5% 2%"
And the reason is consumers don't register price drops nearly as much as price hikes. The company that drops the price a dollar only to raise it a bit later with a dollar again will lose more customers than those that just stay flat, even if they've offered an equal or better deal the entire time. That is also why food companies are notorious at reducing package size rather than increase the sticker price until they eventually release another big "economy size" package. And over time most companies want to increase prices due to inflation in their own costs just to stay even in real dollars, but people react on the nominal sticker price.
The result is that any price hike you can blame externally you take and keep to avoid the PR hit of raising them later. Of course it also helps your margins which is another reason, but the main reason is psychological, not only directly but also of the brand. If you just raise prices, "you" raised prices. If you can blame it on some external factor then "you" were not at fault, everybody understands that if your costs go up your prices must go up as well. Of course then people should ask "Why have you NOT lowered your prices?" but what didn't happen doesn't get anywhere the same attention as the price hike that did happen.
No, just Telenor. I have Altibox and downloaded a ~500GB torrent in three days + whatever else I downloaded that month, no complaints. For the Americans I'll explain, remember those crappy monopoly/duopoly choices you have? Well, Telenor is like that except we have more choices, but some choose to use them anyway...
Perhaps, I've seen many claims but no reliable studies that conclusively say they can't - but even if the writable areas are unreadable, remapped sectors etc. aren't overwritten. Of course that'll be a bunch of random 4096 byte (or 512 byte, if old) sectors from random spots on the drive but if you can get any crucial information in 4096 bytes like the names of undercover sleeping agents, foreign informants, top secret programs, classified details on weapons capabilities or whatever then physical destruction is still going to be the gold standard, unless you have some low level format to really wipe every physical sector of the disk. This is far more obvious and explicit on SSDs where there's a huge spare area and only a low level format or secure erase of the whole disk will really overwrite everything.
It's all going BYOD. As much as I hate it, its all going BYOD. Bad move, Dell.
I really doubt that, a few high-profile incidents where BYOD caused big losses and that idea will die a quick death, not that it was ever alive in many lines of business. The better question is what's the difference between a consumer and enterprise computers, except software? Nothing. My employer-issued smart phone is a regular Android phone, they've just set it up with policies like wiping itself if you enter the PIN incorrectly a few times. There's also a use agreement which says I can't let anyone else gain knowledge of the PIN or operate it - no letting your kids play on it folks - and I'm bearing the full risk of what any non-IT approved application could do to their data. It's a pretty safe bet I won't be installing any.
I'll be a cold day in hell before they go BYOD on terms that I could accept as well, doesn't even matter if we both pick the same model I'm going to have mine and theirs. But it's a pretty good chance that theirs is going to be a consumer model that I pick. I've heard much the same story with tablets, people like and want to use it but when it comes to putting business critical data on it the requirements often crash and they start looking at corporate issued tablets instead. There'll be less "You can have any color phone you want, as long as it's black" standard issue but it's always going to be trouble for one piece of hardware to have two masters.
Making your point about your views on the matter on a blog, or in a newspaper/newsletter, in a letter to the editor, or just on the street corner to whoever will listen is free speech. Picketing the funeral of elementary school students is more than just rude, it is disruptive of a privately funded memorial service. This is hardly anything foreign to our free speech protections; you can picket outside of a politician's home, but if you're doing it at 3 AM with a bullhorn, or sitting outside and shining in a strobe so as to disrupt the occupants of the house, you're not so protected.
Not to troll or anything, but isn't that the logic behind the "free speech zones"? You can protest this G8 summit, but not at a distance that in any way disrupts the summit so we're going to take you far away where nobody will notice you. It'd be an extreme limitation on free speech if you couldn't protest on public ground outside the private store or organization or workplace you're protesting against. They shouldn't be allowed to interfere with the memorial service with bull horns and strobe lights but as you say, just picketing is not illegal. That someone finds their mere presence disruptive is not enough, or the first Muslim conservative who finds any woman not wearing a burqa disruptive would set society back 100 years or more.
This doesn't mean I feel like "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." it's more that you don't kill evil by becoming evil yourself, even if it's a lesser evil. Restricting their speech would be wrong. What they're doing is even more wrong, but that doesn't make it right. The same way I support the 8th amendment and don't think any human being should torture another, yet I'd very much like to resurrect the Sandy Hook killer and have him die a very slow and very painful death. And I wouldn't have any sympathy with him because I think he's earned it and more, but doing it would tarnish us. It would tarnish society. Once you start justifying wrong by not being as bad as the bad guys, then you've lost sight of what is right. And nobody ever said doing what is right would be easy.
One of the article's commenters spoke about the govt. can't limit free speech but individuals can. In 2010, at a Topeka demonstration by the WBC, church members found their tires slashed, and no one in town would sell church members replacement tires.
By illegal means sure, as the slashing of the tires was. If staying within the law is not a requirement then you could also just gun them down, that'd silence them too. Everyone else just refused to assist people they found despicable, which is perfectly within their rights.
which led to his brother and his wife recognizing Kaczynski's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto
It's a whole different thing to recognize a person's beliefs - if possibly in a more extreme form - than what they've written on an entirely different subject. Quite possibly they recognized specific examples, theories, arguments or conclusions he had used as well. I'd wager this was 99% content and 1% style which really clinched that it wasn't some other crazy nut bag with the same ideas. I recently ran into one online that had some rather unique conspiracy theories, if they started showing up anywhere else it'd 99.99% sure be the same guy. He could write a whole book and I wouldn't recognize him on writing style alone though.
Who gives a damn if you own a piece of hardware, but don't have access to the full software stack required to operate and maintain it. (...) Thus, as for being proud of the GPU vendors Intel is the only brand on my list that's (moderately) relevant today.
You are aware that this article is about the radeon open source driver improvements, not the proprietary driver right? You have access to the full stack. Of course you could wish that AMD would get fully behind an open source stack, but they're one step down from Intel and a hundred steps over nVidia in open source support. I hope there's more than one company that'll have an interest in a high performance open source graphics stack on Linux. because the reasons you're in a community is mostly sharing of the work.
Of course I won't forget the people who work on these projects but affiliated with other companies or individual volunteers either, but my ideal end state would be one where Intel, AMD and nVidia all work on that stack to sell their hardware. Much like the Linux kernel isn't dominated by one single company, there's many who each contribute 15% or less. Of course much of this is driver code for their own hardware, but they all contribute to make the common parts stronger. Same with graphics cards, sure there's plenty card specific work but there's also plenty work to do on the common stack.
Interlacing was a wonderful thing in the analog days. TV would have looked (literally) half as good without it. But those days are passed: It is time to let interlacing die. It just gets in the way now and complicates things needlessly.
Yes, sadly neither the ATSC, BluRay or AVCHD 1.0 standard defined a indisputably superior progressive picture, you can have either 1080p30 or 1080i60 but no 1080p60 giving you both the full resolution and smoothness. Why interlaced seemed like a good idea at the time I don't know, interlaced monitors had long since died an early death with computers. But on the bright side 1080p60 is now standard on most $300+ cameras so interlacing is clearly going away - even if you still have to send it interlaced you'll be filming in progressive. And moving to 4K I've not seen any camera anywhere that shoots 4K interlaced, so that's probably not even going to be an option.
Actually the "ultimate" would be 600 fps so the European broadcasts could have a clean 25/50 fps downgrade too. But as a European let me be the first to say screw that, 120 Hz would be great. Perfect for normal LCDs (60 Hz) and if you really wanted to then you could run all 120 Hz on a 120 Hz TN panel. Personally I have a 60 fps camera that I think is great, but I understand that when you're dealing with a huge installed base of 24 fps cinemas then 48 fps is an easier sell.
There certainly have been excesses in the recording industry's past, but these days the record industry -- record labels, recording studios, and most importantly music artists -- are just struggling to survive.
I guess that's why Nielsen Soundscan is reporting that overall music sales were up 4% in first half of 2012 compared to same time last year. And the 2011 report said overall music sales were up 6.9% and: "For the first time, total music purchases reached the 1.6 Billion mark for the year." And there's still more than 75000 albums released per year so there's no mass death of artists, the rumors of the impending doom of the music industry are wildly exaggerated.
They say you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. I guess he's the exception to the rule then.
So... Your Cox has been down more than you'd like, and you can't get your Cox to stay up? Getting rid of it entirely is an option, I suppose, but I keep hearing about medications that claim to keep your Cox up any time you want it up.
Well his email is down, so he hasn't been getting any of the many, many, many offers to fix this.
That's your idea of news, that nobody gives a crap and continue to not give a crap about IPv6? Personally I feel the last oh... decade? or so of IPv6 stories have been flogging the same dead horse.
Out of curiosity (and I ask because I genuinely don't know), how many flops/watt do modern smartphones do? What about the GPU coprocessors in them? Modern GPU's are great, but they're not even optimized that strongly for power consumption.
I would think GPUs are actually worked more on for peak efficiency because top cards have been consuming hundreds of watts and particularly workstation and compute cards will often run at 100% when in use for a big render/compute job. Smartphones are much more about dynamic power, adjusting clocks and voltages and tons of sleep modes, if you're doing 100% load on all cores then none of that will have an effect. Sure they care about power usage at peak too, but I don't think more than GPUs.
Yeah, and if a kid comes into a store and wants to buy a porn magazine with his allowance then clearly the parents are just coasting on the law instead of parenting, so we should just take away the law. No matter how much you parent, kids will sometimes refuse to comply. If they don't want to brush their teeth before they go to bed, explaining it and leaving the choice up to them isn't good parenting. Sometimes you just have to hit that override switch and say either you're brushing your teeth or I'm brushing your teeth, but you're not going to go to bed without brushing your teeth and that is final. A filtering tool wouldn't be the first tool I'd resort to, but I wouldn't say I'd never use it either.
This son of a bitch walked into a school with a weapon and used it. The weapon itself is interchangeable - although it was a gun this time, it just as easily could have been a bomb, poison gas, or a well-aimed car. Our choice as a society is whether we want to enumerate and ban all the things people can use as weapons, or if we'd rather figure out why people want to use weapons in the first place.
You make it out as if it's an either-or situation. Would you like to give every member of Al-Qaeda a megaton nuke? Sure, working on the culture so we don't have a single brainwashed fundamentalist nutcase would be great. In the meanwhile - or should I rather say in the real world - we accept that certain people are completely crazy and try to limit the damage they can do to other people. That criminals could get guns regardless, is a completely different thing from saying criminals would get guns regardless. The mentally unstable wouldn't go searching for a gun if they didn't own one, they'd go crazy with the closest possible weapon. And unless you're protected by the Secret Service or something, you'll probably die if you're the first victim which is plenty if they just want to kill their ex-wife or ex-boss, it just doesn't turn into a killing spree because it's easy.
And that's for the murders, where people want to kill someone but that's normally not the case. It might be a robbery turned murder, a burglary turned murder, an assault turned murder or any other number of circumstances where it simply escalated beyond their control and intent. One part of it is the ability to disengage, if I happen to surprise a burglar and we both have knives it's fairly certain he'll turn and flee as none of us want to be the aggressor. Had we instead both been carrying guns there's a pretty good chance someone would get shot, as killing is much easier than dodging bullets. Even in the worst case where you only have a knife and they have a gun, you're not worse off than if they got the drop on you. In fact, the less you pose a threat to them the less they want to kill you.
Part of that is of course the law, you can make gun crime much harder punished than similar non-gun related crime. If you make burglary with a handgun far more dangerous than burglary without, then burglars won't be packing when they go out burgling. In total these make up far more than a massacre that I agree would be at least one murder in the non-gun world too. Gun control laws are not there to stop killers, they're mostly there to stop other crime from escalating into killing.
Consider "Right to Work" as a simple example, it is NOT the case that these laws repealed some requirement that all unions contract be exclusive by law. Those exclusivity terms were negotiated between two free groups. Instead these laws scratch out, by government fiat, parts of existing contracts and make it illegal for two parties to agree these terms.
Because you are creating a monopoly that under very similar circumstances between companies would run afoul of antitrust legislation. Market collusion is also voluntary among all the companies engaged in price fixing, would you like to make that 100% legal? Competition is not a natural state, the natural state is that someone goes all-in and captures the market and it stays captive through lock-in and anti-competitive practices. It's like claiming a one-party state is democracy because you can always choose not to vote.
(...) partly because they are more "human" units. No-one ever said "I'm going down the pub for a 0.57 of a litre".
For the same reason we say 4 GiB of RAM, not 4.294967296 GB except beer sizes are arbitrary. Here in Norway the usual size is the "halvliter" - literally half a liter. The other usual size for beer bottles is 0.33L - for all practical purposes a third.of a liter. British pints are for me just oversize beer, like on tap some offer 0.4/0.6L as small/large beer instead. There's absolutely nothing more natural about the pint than old habit. Besides, we all have our oddities even though we're pretty much all metric TVs are measured in inches. I have a 60 inch TV but except when I was sizing my TV desk - which is metric - I don't ever think about or talk about it in metric. I guess it's also a round number effect, multiply with 2.54 and I get 152.4 cm. I guess if it'd been 150 cm flat I'd probably say that instead. P.S. Is buying a pint of milk more natural than a liter of milk?
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And how should one compensate HBO for Game of Thrones without compensating Disney for ESPN, an unwanted service?
So if you're at the store where they sell boxes of mixed chocolates and you really like the dark chocolate and nougats but hate the creamy and vanilla chocolate what is your idea of fair compensation? Because your other points were pretty good but that you don't like the commercial bundle is something quite different than "the author is neither giving the work away nor selling it".
I also don't spend much of my "day job's" time on my personal stuff. I don't mind spending a bit of it, though, as they DEFINITELY benefit from my extracurricular work.
Just don't ever let the company lawyer see that post...
There's no work place in the US that isn't under OSHA and a bunch of other regulations, so by libertard logic the free market has never really been tried. No matter what regulation is lifted, the problem is always the regulation that remains even if it's obvious reducing regulation made everything worse. It's like cutting yourself with a knife, it hurts and the deeper you cut the more it hurts but the libertard insists that if you just cut deep enough, the pain will go away. I guess that's true, after a fashion... And I see you're defending a convicted monopolist as not actually being a monopoly, meaning it's only a monopoly if someone puts a gun to your head (hence point 2). I'm sure you feel you won the argument, but only because you're preaching to the choir.
Heh, the entire group I was on fell for this trick question recently: "How many of each kind did Moses bring on the Ark?" as nobody noticed they didn't actually say Noah.
Sounds about right to me, it's the same response I get when I get when I compare anything else that is per person, per square kilometer or anything like that "hurr durr the US is bigger, therefore 5% 2%"
And the reason is consumers don't register price drops nearly as much as price hikes. The company that drops the price a dollar only to raise it a bit later with a dollar again will lose more customers than those that just stay flat, even if they've offered an equal or better deal the entire time. That is also why food companies are notorious at reducing package size rather than increase the sticker price until they eventually release another big "economy size" package. And over time most companies want to increase prices due to inflation in their own costs just to stay even in real dollars, but people react on the nominal sticker price.
The result is that any price hike you can blame externally you take and keep to avoid the PR hit of raising them later. Of course it also helps your margins which is another reason, but the main reason is psychological, not only directly but also of the brand. If you just raise prices, "you" raised prices. If you can blame it on some external factor then "you" were not at fault, everybody understands that if your costs go up your prices must go up as well. Of course then people should ask "Why have you NOT lowered your prices?" but what didn't happen doesn't get anywhere the same attention as the price hike that did happen.
No, just Telenor. I have Altibox and downloaded a ~500GB torrent in three days + whatever else I downloaded that month, no complaints. For the Americans I'll explain, remember those crappy monopoly/duopoly choices you have? Well, Telenor is like that except we have more choices, but some choose to use them anyway...
Perhaps, I've seen many claims but no reliable studies that conclusively say they can't - but even if the writable areas are unreadable, remapped sectors etc. aren't overwritten. Of course that'll be a bunch of random 4096 byte (or 512 byte, if old) sectors from random spots on the drive but if you can get any crucial information in 4096 bytes like the names of undercover sleeping agents, foreign informants, top secret programs, classified details on weapons capabilities or whatever then physical destruction is still going to be the gold standard, unless you have some low level format to really wipe every physical sector of the disk. This is far more obvious and explicit on SSDs where there's a huge spare area and only a low level format or secure erase of the whole disk will really overwrite everything.
Not to mention making people think something is the next big thing is a pretty big part of making something the next big thing...
It's all going BYOD. As much as I hate it, its all going BYOD. Bad move, Dell.
I really doubt that, a few high-profile incidents where BYOD caused big losses and that idea will die a quick death, not that it was ever alive in many lines of business. The better question is what's the difference between a consumer and enterprise computers, except software? Nothing. My employer-issued smart phone is a regular Android phone, they've just set it up with policies like wiping itself if you enter the PIN incorrectly a few times. There's also a use agreement which says I can't let anyone else gain knowledge of the PIN or operate it - no letting your kids play on it folks - and I'm bearing the full risk of what any non-IT approved application could do to their data. It's a pretty safe bet I won't be installing any.
I'll be a cold day in hell before they go BYOD on terms that I could accept as well, doesn't even matter if we both pick the same model I'm going to have mine and theirs. But it's a pretty good chance that theirs is going to be a consumer model that I pick. I've heard much the same story with tablets, people like and want to use it but when it comes to putting business critical data on it the requirements often crash and they start looking at corporate issued tablets instead. There'll be less "You can have any color phone you want, as long as it's black" standard issue but it's always going to be trouble for one piece of hardware to have two masters.
Making your point about your views on the matter on a blog, or in a newspaper/newsletter, in a letter to the editor, or just on the street corner to whoever will listen is free speech. Picketing the funeral of elementary school students is more than just rude, it is disruptive of a privately funded memorial service. This is hardly anything foreign to our free speech protections; you can picket outside of a politician's home, but if you're doing it at 3 AM with a bullhorn, or sitting outside and shining in a strobe so as to disrupt the occupants of the house, you're not so protected.
Not to troll or anything, but isn't that the logic behind the "free speech zones"? You can protest this G8 summit, but not at a distance that in any way disrupts the summit so we're going to take you far away where nobody will notice you. It'd be an extreme limitation on free speech if you couldn't protest on public ground outside the private store or organization or workplace you're protesting against. They shouldn't be allowed to interfere with the memorial service with bull horns and strobe lights but as you say, just picketing is not illegal. That someone finds their mere presence disruptive is not enough, or the first Muslim conservative who finds any woman not wearing a burqa disruptive would set society back 100 years or more.
This doesn't mean I feel like "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." it's more that you don't kill evil by becoming evil yourself, even if it's a lesser evil. Restricting their speech would be wrong. What they're doing is even more wrong, but that doesn't make it right. The same way I support the 8th amendment and don't think any human being should torture another, yet I'd very much like to resurrect the Sandy Hook killer and have him die a very slow and very painful death. And I wouldn't have any sympathy with him because I think he's earned it and more, but doing it would tarnish us. It would tarnish society. Once you start justifying wrong by not being as bad as the bad guys, then you've lost sight of what is right. And nobody ever said doing what is right would be easy.
One of the article's commenters spoke about the govt. can't limit free speech but individuals can. In 2010, at a Topeka demonstration by the WBC, church members found their tires slashed, and no one in town would sell church members replacement tires.
By illegal means sure, as the slashing of the tires was. If staying within the law is not a requirement then you could also just gun them down, that'd silence them too. Everyone else just refused to assist people they found despicable, which is perfectly within their rights.
Quoting from that WP page:
which led to his brother and his wife recognizing Kaczynski's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto
It's a whole different thing to recognize a person's beliefs - if possibly in a more extreme form - than what they've written on an entirely different subject. Quite possibly they recognized specific examples, theories, arguments or conclusions he had used as well. I'd wager this was 99% content and 1% style which really clinched that it wasn't some other crazy nut bag with the same ideas. I recently ran into one online that had some rather unique conspiracy theories, if they started showing up anywhere else it'd 99.99% sure be the same guy. He could write a whole book and I wouldn't recognize him on writing style alone though.
Who gives a damn if you own a piece of hardware, but don't have access to the full software stack required to operate and maintain it. (...) Thus, as for being proud of the GPU vendors Intel is the only brand on my list that's (moderately) relevant today.
You are aware that this article is about the radeon open source driver improvements, not the proprietary driver right? You have access to the full stack. Of course you could wish that AMD would get fully behind an open source stack, but they're one step down from Intel and a hundred steps over nVidia in open source support. I hope there's more than one company that'll have an interest in a high performance open source graphics stack on Linux. because the reasons you're in a community is mostly sharing of the work.
Of course I won't forget the people who work on these projects but affiliated with other companies or individual volunteers either, but my ideal end state would be one where Intel, AMD and nVidia all work on that stack to sell their hardware. Much like the Linux kernel isn't dominated by one single company, there's many who each contribute 15% or less. Of course much of this is driver code for their own hardware, but they all contribute to make the common parts stronger. Same with graphics cards, sure there's plenty card specific work but there's also plenty work to do on the common stack.
Interlacing was a wonderful thing in the analog days. TV would have looked (literally) half as good without it. But those days are passed: It is time to let interlacing die. It just gets in the way now and complicates things needlessly.
Yes, sadly neither the ATSC, BluRay or AVCHD 1.0 standard defined a indisputably superior progressive picture, you can have either 1080p30 or 1080i60 but no 1080p60 giving you both the full resolution and smoothness. Why interlaced seemed like a good idea at the time I don't know, interlaced monitors had long since died an early death with computers. But on the bright side 1080p60 is now standard on most $300+ cameras so interlacing is clearly going away - even if you still have to send it interlaced you'll be filming in progressive. And moving to 4K I've not seen any camera anywhere that shoots 4K interlaced, so that's probably not even going to be an option.
Actually the "ultimate" would be 600 fps so the European broadcasts could have a clean 25/50 fps downgrade too. But as a European let me be the first to say screw that, 120 Hz would be great. Perfect for normal LCDs (60 Hz) and if you really wanted to then you could run all 120 Hz on a 120 Hz TN panel. Personally I have a 60 fps camera that I think is great, but I understand that when you're dealing with a huge installed base of 24 fps cinemas then 48 fps is an easier sell.
There certainly have been excesses in the recording industry's past, but these days the record industry -- record labels, recording studios, and most importantly music artists -- are just struggling to survive.
I guess that's why Nielsen Soundscan is reporting that overall music sales were up 4% in first half of 2012 compared to same time last year. And the 2011 report said overall music sales were up 6.9% and: "For the first time, total music purchases reached the 1.6 Billion mark for the year." And there's still more than 75000 albums released per year so there's no mass death of artists, the rumors of the impending doom of the music industry are wildly exaggerated.
They say you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. I guess he's the exception to the rule then.
So... Your Cox has been down more than you'd like, and you can't get your Cox to stay up? Getting rid of it entirely is an option, I suppose, but I keep hearing about medications that claim to keep your Cox up any time you want it up.
Well his email is down, so he hasn't been getting any of the many, many, many offers to fix this.
IPv6 isn't adopted yet.
That's your idea of news, that nobody gives a crap and continue to not give a crap about IPv6? Personally I feel the last oh... decade? or so of IPv6 stories have been flogging the same dead horse.
Out of curiosity (and I ask because I genuinely don't know), how many flops/watt do modern smartphones do? What about the GPU coprocessors in them? Modern GPU's are great, but they're not even optimized that strongly for power consumption.
I would think GPUs are actually worked more on for peak efficiency because top cards have been consuming hundreds of watts and particularly workstation and compute cards will often run at 100% when in use for a big render/compute job. Smartphones are much more about dynamic power, adjusting clocks and voltages and tons of sleep modes, if you're doing 100% load on all cores then none of that will have an effect. Sure they care about power usage at peak too, but I don't think more than GPUs.
Yeah, and if a kid comes into a store and wants to buy a porn magazine with his allowance then clearly the parents are just coasting on the law instead of parenting, so we should just take away the law. No matter how much you parent, kids will sometimes refuse to comply. If they don't want to brush their teeth before they go to bed, explaining it and leaving the choice up to them isn't good parenting. Sometimes you just have to hit that override switch and say either you're brushing your teeth or I'm brushing your teeth, but you're not going to go to bed without brushing your teeth and that is final. A filtering tool wouldn't be the first tool I'd resort to, but I wouldn't say I'd never use it either.
This son of a bitch walked into a school with a weapon and used it. The weapon itself is interchangeable - although it was a gun this time, it just as easily could have been a bomb, poison gas, or a well-aimed car. Our choice as a society is whether we want to enumerate and ban all the things people can use as weapons, or if we'd rather figure out why people want to use weapons in the first place.
You make it out as if it's an either-or situation. Would you like to give every member of Al-Qaeda a megaton nuke? Sure, working on the culture so we don't have a single brainwashed fundamentalist nutcase would be great. In the meanwhile - or should I rather say in the real world - we accept that certain people are completely crazy and try to limit the damage they can do to other people. That criminals could get guns regardless, is a completely different thing from saying criminals would get guns regardless. The mentally unstable wouldn't go searching for a gun if they didn't own one, they'd go crazy with the closest possible weapon. And unless you're protected by the Secret Service or something, you'll probably die if you're the first victim which is plenty if they just want to kill their ex-wife or ex-boss, it just doesn't turn into a killing spree because it's easy.
And that's for the murders, where people want to kill someone but that's normally not the case. It might be a robbery turned murder, a burglary turned murder, an assault turned murder or any other number of circumstances where it simply escalated beyond their control and intent. One part of it is the ability to disengage, if I happen to surprise a burglar and we both have knives it's fairly certain he'll turn and flee as none of us want to be the aggressor. Had we instead both been carrying guns there's a pretty good chance someone would get shot, as killing is much easier than dodging bullets. Even in the worst case where you only have a knife and they have a gun, you're not worse off than if they got the drop on you. In fact, the less you pose a threat to them the less they want to kill you.
Part of that is of course the law, you can make gun crime much harder punished than similar non-gun related crime. If you make burglary with a handgun far more dangerous than burglary without, then burglars won't be packing when they go out burgling. In total these make up far more than a massacre that I agree would be at least one murder in the non-gun world too. Gun control laws are not there to stop killers, they're mostly there to stop other crime from escalating into killing.
Consider "Right to Work" as a simple example, it is NOT the case that these laws repealed some requirement that all unions contract be exclusive by law. Those exclusivity terms were negotiated between two free groups. Instead these laws scratch out, by government fiat, parts of existing contracts and make it illegal for two parties to agree these terms.
Because you are creating a monopoly that under very similar circumstances between companies would run afoul of antitrust legislation. Market collusion is also voluntary among all the companies engaged in price fixing, would you like to make that 100% legal? Competition is not a natural state, the natural state is that someone goes all-in and captures the market and it stays captive through lock-in and anti-competitive practices. It's like claiming a one-party state is democracy because you can always choose not to vote.
(...) partly because they are more "human" units. No-one ever said "I'm going down the pub for a 0.57 of a litre".
For the same reason we say 4 GiB of RAM, not 4.294967296 GB except beer sizes are arbitrary. Here in Norway the usual size is the "halvliter" - literally half a liter. The other usual size for beer bottles is 0.33L - for all practical purposes a third.of a liter. British pints are for me just oversize beer, like on tap some offer 0.4/0.6L as small/large beer instead. There's absolutely nothing more natural about the pint than old habit. Besides, we all have our oddities even though we're pretty much all metric TVs are measured in inches. I have a 60 inch TV but except when I was sizing my TV desk - which is metric - I don't ever think about or talk about it in metric. I guess it's also a round number effect, multiply with 2.54 and I get 152.4 cm. I guess if it'd been 150 cm flat I'd probably say that instead. P.S. Is buying a pint of milk more natural than a liter of milk?