Kerry is down by 120,000 votes in Ohio, yet he still won't give it up. Anyone who has ever taken a statistics class will tell you that the probability of 120,000 of 175,000 votes going one way given that the sample of votes is split 50/50 is ZERO. And of course that doesn't take into account how many of these provisional ballots will even be accepted... a bunch of the provisional voters probably weren't even registered. Anyway, Kerry is finished.
Did anyone else think Edwards' "non-concession" speech was retarded?? He tried to pump up the crowd... but they knew it was over. Then he decided to dance around the stage giving thumbs up signs!!! LOL.
And it looks like he'll win the popular vote too. I know this won't be a popular decision on slashdot, but the fact is that America has spoken. If only techies had a right to vote then yes, Kerry would have won, but to become President you have to have widespread support.
To everyone pi$$ed off - the world isn't coming to an end, Bush isn't Hitler, the US isn't turning into Nazi Germany. Actually I think this country is pretty awesome, and I'm proud to be an American.
So I went to vote this morning in Riverside County, CA where we've been using electronic voting since 2000. People were checking in and given a smart card really quickly, but there was a line out the door to just use one of the 10 voting machines they had.
So instead of waiting 30 minutes I just ask for a paper ballot, which is required to be an option under California state law. Some guy in line says "YOU CAN USE A PAPER BALOT??" and then immediately like half the line comes over to get a paper balot. Kind of funny how most people don't even know state law, I was probably the first guy all day to ask for a paper balot...
I think that local issues like the propositions in California will have much more of an effect on your daily life than the result of the presidential race. There may be differences between Bush and Kerry, but on the really important issues they both agree -- we shouldn't cut deficit spending too much, we should continue to stay in Iraq, we should continue to fight terrorism agressively, we shouldn't draft anyone, etc...
Anyway, here's how I feel on some of the California Propositions, I encourage everyone in CA to do your research and come to your own conclusions:
Proposition 61 -- More bonds, but "think of the children"... voting NO, CA needs to tear up its credit cards!!!
Proposition 62 -- this will make our "open primaries" even more open. In our system now, you can vote for any primary candidate you want regardless of party, but your vote won't count if you aren't a member of that party. Prop 60 would reverse that, and make the top 2 vote getters square off together in the final election, regardless of political affiliation. This is a tough issue -- it can lead to extremists getting on the ballot if several popular candidates run and split the vote. Both major parties are opposed to prop 60, but Arnold is for it -- props to Arnold for standing up to the Republicrats. I'll be voting for it.
Proposition 63 -- more taxes to pay for loony farms?? Not in my state. Voting NO.
Proposition 66 -- this proposition would change the "3 strikes" law so that the final "strike" would have to be a violent felony... no more throwing people away for life for stealing a pizza and such. There are too many people in prison, so I support this and am voting YES. Everyone who is anyone opposes this proposition, including Arnold, but I hope it passes somehow.
Proposition 67 -- Phone taxes to pay for 911 system. Voting NO, our 911 system is already fine as is, no need to tax us even more.
Proposition 68 / 70 -- Prop 68 would legalize pretty much any type of gaming in California anywhere, not just on Indian reservations. 68 is supported by race tracks and the like who hope to build Vegas-style casinos. Prop 70 would remove any restriction from Indian gaming only, and force them to pay only the state tax on their profits, something like 5%. I'm voting against 68 because I don't want to see casinos in my city, and I'm voting against 70 because it would rip off the state. Think about it, every business in the US pays like 30% of its profits to the feds, but prop 70 would allow the Indians to just pay 5% to the state with no federal tax. On top of that, gambling is usually taxed MORE than other things, look at the Nevada casinos for example. The Indian casinos SHOULD pay more than a tiny 5%, and they are willing to pay more -- Arnold has already negotiated with several tribes to pay around 25%!! Prop 70 would screw California over.
Proposition 71 -- Grants to pay for stem cell research. While I hate borrowing money, I think this may be a worthy cause. Look at Silicon Valley, all the tech companies in the US concentrated in one area in one state. What if we could do the same for Biotechnology?? Voting YES.
Proposition 72 -- Will require medium to large businesses to provide health insurance to workers. Voting NO, this will only lead to businesses leaving California and/or laying off workers!!!
Seriously, I'm going to write in "Turd Sandwich" for my vote for president here in California, and I encourage other people in "non-swing" states to do the same if they are fed up with Kerry + Bush!! It will be cool to see "Turd Sandwich - 554 votes" in the official election results.
HOW THE FUCK IS THIS POST +5 INSIGHTFUL?? Has slashdot turned into fucking Al Jazeera now?
OSAMA BIN LADEN is a murderer, he targeted the World Trade Center, a CIVILIAN INSTITUTION. The World Trade Center was never a military building, it had nothing to do with the US military. Being "at war" is NO EXCUSE for targeting civilans. NONE.
To compare Osama's terrorism to the war in Iraq is BEYOND RIDICULOUS. You say 15k civilians in Iraq were killed... how many of these civilians were targeted by the US military?? That number would be ZERO. How many were killed by terrorist car bombs that seem to go off every day in Iraq? A LOT. How many people were being tortured, starved and gassed by Saddam when he was in power?? A WHOLE LOT MORE THAN 15K.
Read the interview, he calls college grants for low-income student "goverment-sponsored theft".
Without this "goverment-sponsored theft", I wouldn't be making $70K right now and contributing $20K per year to Uncle Sam... I might even be on welfare...
How many times do Bush and Kerry have to say "THERE WILL BE NO DRAFT" for you to believe them?? The reason they don't get rid of selective service is that it MIGHT be necessary in the future if there's another Pearl Harbor attack on America that starts WWIII.
THERE WILL BE NO DRAFT. Anyone who tells you to vote for a certain candidate because the other candidate "will draft you" is a FEAR MONGER and a LIAR, and they know it.
What are you paying on commission, $10 probably?? $20 to buy and sell, that's 10% right off the top you paid for your investment. I'm glad that it's worked out for you so far though.
My point is that you want to do HDTV, MPEG, etc... on an FPGA, and my point is that you won't be able to -- not on a $30 FPGA.
And about filling up PCI slots with FPGA cards to do number crunching -- you're going to have a hard time finding any real application that is parallelizable to the point where you'll be able to keep up with a new general purpose processor.
Dude, I don't mean to flame you, but you shouldn't be the one talking about crappy comments...
There's a reason that you don't find FPGAs on graphics cards. Xilinx's top Virtex2's top out at about 20 million quoted gates. Compare this to the 200 million+ transistor count on the new 6800s and you're already in the hole. And in general, you can't clock an FPGA nearly as fast as an equivalent ASIC. So you're giving up an order of magnitude as far as performance even in the best case.
Another thing -- have you checked the unit pricing on high-end FPGAs?? You're looking at at least a thousand dollars for a XC2VP100, and that's the 25,000 unit price. Yeah, you could use some device a few product generations old, but then you'll be seriously strained on chip space and your performance will go from bad to miserable.
Third, floating point and FPGAs don't mix well. Have you ever tried to place and route a 256 bit barrel shifter to an FPGA?? Even if you could get it to route by some miracle your performance would be worse than crap.
If you want to have 3D performance any better than software render then you're going to have to fabricate your own GPU, a general purpose processor won't cut it. It'll be in the millions to get a.13 micron design fabricated and tested.
1) There are many old graphics cards that are fully documented. These cards are just fine for 2D stuff for 95% of Linux users, excluding the few 3D gamers, OpenGL developers, and people who run insane screen resolutions.
2) It's just not feasible to implement a cutting edge 3D graphics processor -- it takes tens of thousands of man hours to just get a working + tested Verilog description and a layout. Then a fab spin at.13 micron will run you a few million dollars, then more testing...
So in conclusion, we already have 100% documented 2D cards that are "good enough" like the S3 ViRGE, and it's pretty much impossible for open source developers to produce a decent 3D card.
So I guess this is a huge Republican conspiracy right? I bet they paid this company millions of dollars to rip up... uh... ten ballots? And the company that did it was so stupid as to dump them in the trash rather than shredding/burning them??
It seems more likely to me that some leftwing wacco filled out a few voter forms, tore them up, and then came running to the press about "REPUBLICAN VOTER FRAUD!! OMG!!!!" Except the mainsteam media saw through the fraud, so the only place you'll find the story is on extreme liberal sites like Kos...
Nothing dude. Worst case these Paypal bugs cost Ebay a few million dollars, and it isn't likely to have any effect on their long term business. Yeah, you can say "someone might try to use paypal, get sick of it being down, and leave ebay FOREVER" but that really isn't realistic.
Ebay's market cap is in the tens of billions, so a few million dollars is really "nothing".
The poll you cited has a huge flaw - it was taken from an "informal poll of 100 academics" - ie college professors. We already know college professors in general are very anti-Republican, and sometimes very socialist (please don't flame me for this, if you ever went to college you'd know it's true).
The fact that a group of college professors don't like Bush is not surprising. I'm sure if you pollyed Biology professors, Physics professors, Psychology professors, etc, you'd get a poll with results just like the one you linked to.
I disagree with you on (A), I really don't think the deficit is on the mind of most people in America. If anything, deficit worries cause the dollar to lose value, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing, it helps our exports.
On (B) you're just wrong. How can you claim that consumers are holding back their spending when consumer spending and consumer debt are at an all-time high??
I'm leaning toward voting Bush, but I have heard Kerry and others attack Bush for "mismanaging the economy". It seems to me that none of this is really Bush's fault, the tech bubble was bound to colapse and actually began to fall apart in April 2000 when the Nasdaq tanked. And also that 9/11 thing.
Bush's deficit spending on defense has created jobs (at the expense of accumulated debt of course). But I'm surious to hear what you anti-Bush people think. Specifically, what has Bush done to mismanage the economy??
This whole story is bullshit. If I wanted to read liberal idiot propaganda then I'd visit moveon.org, NOT slashdot.
Posting a BS story like this has only one purpose - to try to get people to vote for Kerry. Browse all the comments here at +4 and you'll see a patern of modding even the most insane "BUSH=HITLER" liberal looney tunes up, while any dissenting opinion at all is modded down.
Guess what guys, it's not going to work. People aren't falling for the BS of either side - you aren't convincing anyone to change their vote, you're just wasting your time and looking like fools.
If you're going to keep posting stories like this then change your slogan to "Leftist politics for nerds. Stuff that matters."
That pretty much sums up the liberal idiot platform. "Bush=Hitler", and "VOTE KERRY OR YOU'LL BE DRAFTED!!!". NEITHER of these statements have any merit. If you're going to support Kerry over Bush, at least do it for factual reasons. Get a clue.
Can you look me in the eye and post that Kerry isn't full of crap half the time?? Like Kerry taking the president to task for starting the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time". Didn't Kerry vote FOR the war??
And then Kerry criticizes Bush because "the troops don't have body armor". Great job Mr. Kerry, didn't you vote against the funding to supply the troops with that armor??
Wake up man, you obviously can't debate this rationally.
Kerry is quick with his replies and speaks fluidly, but where's the content?? Bush has been slow and deliberate with his replies, but it takes time to dig up the truth. Unlike Kerry, Bush isn't just spewing lies out of his mouth at a million miles an hour.
Slashdot Mirror
Kerry is down by 120,000 votes in Ohio, yet he still won't give it up. Anyone who has ever taken a statistics class will tell you that the probability of 120,000 of 175,000 votes going one way given that the sample of votes is split 50/50 is ZERO. And of course that doesn't take into account how many of these provisional ballots will even be accepted... a bunch of the provisional voters probably weren't even registered. Anyway, Kerry is finished.
Did anyone else think Edwards' "non-concession" speech was retarded?? He tried to pump up the crowd... but they knew it was over. Then he decided to dance around the stage giving thumbs up signs!!! LOL.
And it looks like he'll win the popular vote too. I know this won't be a popular decision on slashdot, but the fact is that America has spoken. If only techies had a right to vote then yes, Kerry would have won, but to become President you have to have widespread support.
To everyone pi$$ed off - the world isn't coming to an end, Bush isn't Hitler, the US isn't turning into Nazi Germany. Actually I think this country is pretty awesome, and I'm proud to be an American.
So I went to vote this morning in Riverside County, CA where we've been using electronic voting since 2000. People were checking in and given a smart card really quickly, but there was a line out the door to just use one of the 10 voting machines they had.
So instead of waiting 30 minutes I just ask for a paper ballot, which is required to be an option under California state law. Some guy in line says "YOU CAN USE A PAPER BALOT??" and then immediately like half the line comes over to get a paper balot. Kind of funny how most people don't even know state law, I was probably the first guy all day to ask for a paper balot...
I think that local issues like the propositions in California will have much more of an effect on your daily life than the result of the presidential race. There may be differences between Bush and Kerry, but on the really important issues they both agree -- we shouldn't cut deficit spending too much, we should continue to stay in Iraq, we should continue to fight terrorism agressively, we shouldn't draft anyone, etc...
Anyway, here's how I feel on some of the California Propositions, I encourage everyone in CA to do your research and come to your own conclusions:
Proposition 61 -- More bonds, but "think of the children"... voting NO, CA needs to tear up its credit cards!!!
Proposition 62 -- this will make our "open primaries" even more open. In our system now, you can vote for any primary candidate you want regardless of party, but your vote won't count if you aren't a member of that party. Prop 60 would reverse that, and make the top 2 vote getters square off together in the final election, regardless of political affiliation. This is a tough issue -- it can lead to extremists getting on the ballot if several popular candidates run and split the vote. Both major parties are opposed to prop 60, but Arnold is for it -- props to Arnold for standing up to the Republicrats. I'll be voting for it.
Proposition 63 -- more taxes to pay for loony farms?? Not in my state. Voting NO.
Proposition 66 -- this proposition would change the "3 strikes" law so that the final "strike" would have to be a violent felony... no more throwing people away for life for stealing a pizza and such. There are too many people in prison, so I support this and am voting YES. Everyone who is anyone opposes this proposition, including Arnold, but I hope it passes somehow.
Proposition 67 -- Phone taxes to pay for 911 system. Voting NO, our 911 system is already fine as is, no need to tax us even more.
Proposition 68 / 70 -- Prop 68 would legalize pretty much any type of gaming in California anywhere, not just on Indian reservations. 68 is supported by race tracks and the like who hope to build Vegas-style casinos. Prop 70 would remove any restriction from Indian gaming only, and force them to pay only the state tax on their profits, something like 5%. I'm voting against 68 because I don't want to see casinos in my city, and I'm voting against 70 because it would rip off the state. Think about it, every business in the US pays like 30% of its profits to the feds, but prop 70 would allow the Indians to just pay 5% to the state with no federal tax. On top of that, gambling is usually taxed MORE than other things, look at the Nevada casinos for example. The Indian casinos SHOULD pay more than a tiny 5%, and they are willing to pay more -- Arnold has already negotiated with several tribes to pay around 25%!! Prop 70 would screw California over.
Proposition 71 -- Grants to pay for stem cell research. While I hate borrowing money, I think this may be a worthy cause. Look at Silicon Valley, all the tech companies in the US concentrated in one area in one state. What if we could do the same for Biotechnology?? Voting YES.
Proposition 72 -- Will require medium to large businesses to provide health insurance to workers. Voting NO, this will only lead to businesses leaving California and/or laying off workers!!!
Seriously, I'm going to write in "Turd Sandwich" for my vote for president here in California, and I encourage other people in "non-swing" states to do the same if they are fed up with Kerry + Bush!! It will be cool to see "Turd Sandwich - 554 votes" in the official election results.
HOW THE FUCK IS THIS POST +5 INSIGHTFUL?? Has slashdot turned into fucking Al Jazeera now?
OSAMA BIN LADEN is a murderer, he targeted the World Trade Center, a CIVILIAN INSTITUTION. The World Trade Center was never a military building, it had nothing to do with the US military. Being "at war" is NO EXCUSE for targeting civilans. NONE.
To compare Osama's terrorism to the war in Iraq is BEYOND RIDICULOUS. You say 15k civilians in Iraq were killed... how many of these civilians were targeted by the US military?? That number would be ZERO. How many were killed by terrorist car bombs that seem to go off every day in Iraq? A LOT. How many people were being tortured, starved and gassed by Saddam when he was in power?? A WHOLE LOT MORE THAN 15K.
Read the interview, he calls college grants for low-income student "goverment-sponsored theft".
Without this "goverment-sponsored theft", I wouldn't be making $70K right now and contributing $20K per year to Uncle Sam... I might even be on welfare...
How many times do Bush and Kerry have to say "THERE WILL BE NO DRAFT" for you to believe them?? The reason they don't get rid of selective service is that it MIGHT be necessary in the future if there's another Pearl Harbor attack on America that starts WWIII.
THERE WILL BE NO DRAFT. Anyone who tells you to vote for a certain candidate because the other candidate "will draft you" is a FEAR MONGER and a LIAR, and they know it.
2 shares?? Is that a typo?
What are you paying on commission, $10 probably?? $20 to buy and sell, that's 10% right off the top you paid for your investment. I'm glad that it's worked out for you so far though.
My point is that you want to do HDTV, MPEG, etc... on an FPGA, and my point is that you won't be able to -- not on a $30 FPGA.
And about filling up PCI slots with FPGA cards to do number crunching -- you're going to have a hard time finding any real application that is parallelizable to the point where you'll be able to keep up with a new general purpose processor.
Dude, I don't mean to flame you, but you shouldn't be the one talking about crappy comments...
There's a reason that you don't find FPGAs on graphics cards. Xilinx's top Virtex2's top out at about 20 million quoted gates. Compare this to the 200 million+ transistor count on the new 6800s and you're already in the hole. And in general, you can't clock an FPGA nearly as fast as an equivalent ASIC. So you're giving up an order of magnitude as far as performance even in the best case.
Another thing -- have you checked the unit pricing on high-end FPGAs?? You're looking at at least a thousand dollars for a XC2VP100, and that's the 25,000 unit price. Yeah, you could use some device a few product generations old, but then you'll be seriously strained on chip space and your performance will go from bad to miserable.
Third, floating point and FPGAs don't mix well. Have you ever tried to place and route a 256 bit barrel shifter to an FPGA?? Even if you could get it to route by some miracle your performance would be worse than crap.
If you want to have 3D performance any better than software render then you're going to have to fabricate your own GPU, a general purpose processor won't cut it. It'll be in the millions to get a .13 micron design fabricated and tested.
1) There are many old graphics cards that are fully documented. These cards are just fine for 2D stuff for 95% of Linux users, excluding the few 3D gamers, OpenGL developers, and people who run insane screen resolutions.
.13 micron will run you a few million dollars, then more testing...
2) It's just not feasible to implement a cutting edge 3D graphics processor -- it takes tens of thousands of man hours to just get a working + tested Verilog description and a layout. Then a fab spin at
So in conclusion, we already have 100% documented 2D cards that are "good enough" like the S3 ViRGE, and it's pretty much impossible for open source developers to produce a decent 3D card.
So I guess this is a huge Republican conspiracy right? I bet they paid this company millions of dollars to rip up... uh... ten ballots? And the company that did it was so stupid as to dump them in the trash rather than shredding/burning them??
It seems more likely to me that some leftwing wacco filled out a few voter forms, tore them up, and then came running to the press about "REPUBLICAN VOTER FRAUD!! OMG!!!!" Except the mainsteam media saw through the fraud, so the only place you'll find the story is on extreme liberal sites like Kos...
Oh, that's right, the Communist Party of America is supporting John Kerry!!
Communist Party of America - www.cpusa.org
Nothing dude. Worst case these Paypal bugs cost Ebay a few million dollars, and it isn't likely to have any effect on their long term business. Yeah, you can say "someone might try to use paypal, get sick of it being down, and leave ebay FOREVER" but that really isn't realistic.
Ebay's market cap is in the tens of billions, so a few million dollars is really "nothing".
The poll you cited has a huge flaw - it was taken from an "informal poll of 100 academics" - ie college professors. We already know college professors in general are very anti-Republican, and sometimes very socialist (please don't flame me for this, if you ever went to college you'd know it's true).
The fact that a group of college professors don't like Bush is not surprising. I'm sure if you pollyed Biology professors, Physics professors, Psychology professors, etc, you'd get a poll with results just like the one you linked to.
I disagree with you on (A), I really don't think the deficit is on the mind of most people in America. If anything, deficit worries cause the dollar to lose value, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing, it helps our exports.
On (B) you're just wrong. How can you claim that consumers are holding back their spending when consumer spending and consumer debt are at an all-time high??
I'm leaning toward voting Bush, but I have heard Kerry and others attack Bush for "mismanaging the economy". It seems to me that none of this is really Bush's fault, the tech bubble was bound to colapse and actually began to fall apart in April 2000 when the Nasdaq tanked. And also that 9/11 thing.
Bush's deficit spending on defense has created jobs (at the expense of accumulated debt of course). But I'm surious to hear what you anti-Bush people think. Specifically, what has Bush done to mismanage the economy??
This whole story is bullshit. If I wanted to read liberal idiot propaganda then I'd visit moveon.org, NOT slashdot.
Posting a BS story like this has only one purpose - to try to get people to vote for Kerry. Browse all the comments here at +4 and you'll see a patern of modding even the most insane "BUSH=HITLER" liberal looney tunes up, while any dissenting opinion at all is modded down.
Guess what guys, it's not going to work. People aren't falling for the BS of either side - you aren't convincing anyone to change their vote, you're just wasting your time and looking like fools.
If you're going to keep posting stories like this then change your slogan to "Leftist politics for nerds. Stuff that matters."
That pretty much sums up the liberal idiot platform. "Bush=Hitler", and "VOTE KERRY OR YOU'LL BE DRAFTED!!!". NEITHER of these statements have any merit. If you're going to support Kerry over Bush, at least do it for factual reasons. Get a clue.
It's good to know that all Bush supporters are facists, I guess that makes about 55% of the voters in America facists. Very interesting...
Wow it's Joey Knisch, a New York legend.
Yeah, I must be a freelance facist, that's it.
Can you look me in the eye and post that Kerry isn't full of crap half the time?? Like Kerry taking the president to task for starting the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time". Didn't Kerry vote FOR the war??
And then Kerry criticizes Bush because "the troops don't have body armor". Great job Mr. Kerry, didn't you vote against the funding to supply the troops with that armor??
Wake up man, you obviously can't debate this rationally.
Kerry is quick with his replies and speaks fluidly, but where's the content?? Bush has been slow and deliberate with his replies, but it takes time to dig up the truth. Unlike Kerry, Bush isn't just spewing lies out of his mouth at a million miles an hour.