The high birthrate in the developing and least developed world stems from two hard facts: Most women there are either subjugated to the point of essentially being property, or are very poor and have little to no access to healthcare, so it follows that they are undereducated or completely uneducated. Consequently many women rely on superstition for birth control, or know about it but can't afford birth control. In much of Africa husbands will harm or even kill their wives if they take charge of their fertility in any way shape or form. That's a pretty big deterrent.
Secondly, the infant mortality rate in many developing or least developed countries is so high that the only chance of having a child that lives to adulthood is to have many children and hope for the best.
And on another note, many people (a little below 50%) in the third world do have to subsistence farm, and are agrarian to some extent. Even when they live in a desert they have to eat and make a living somehow.
Gee I'm thirsty. So are my wife, six children, handful of cows, and all the people I know in my village. I don't have any way to dig a well deep enough to give me sufficient water, much less my family and friends who are also thirsty. But we do have a lot of guns and bullets.....
It's a very shitty situation, and I think your logic is inappropriately reductionist and simple minded.
In a lot of physical cosmology theories there isn't a "before the big bang." The big bang itself is zero, and we work our way back from the present to the earliest possible time just after the big bang.
Since the big bang is time==0 asking what happened before it makes no sense, there is no before.
If it were only for theft deterrent purposes, wouldn't it make more sense to just embed the product in a Lexan cube with a weighted base? Then nobody would steal it.../Troll
Even that might not work in the long run. IBM Watson gets better every day. It's good enough already for chatbot and it wasn't even designed to do that. I think watson might be nearing ai complete for natural language. Just give it a couple of years and see what else comes up
Sounds to me related to gambling addiction. There two components necessary are the fear of loss (always the chance to outbid your bank account) and some probability of winning each "round" no matter how slim, even if you know that you will always lose in aggregate.....
I was just being a smartass. I actually agree with your point.
I certainly wouldn't be comfotable ingesting a bleeding edge, anthropogenic nanostructure rich substance without at least some animal studies first.
And before the bleeding heart PETA folks get on my ass about animal testing let me say that: since we don't have a theory of everything, there are always unaccountable effects of substances that simply can't be calculated from theory. Animal testing done as humanely as possible saves lives. And anybody who would die so a rat doesn't have to can kiss my grits and enjoy the possible and likely systemic damage from untested materials.
Anything Nanoparticle Based? What about all the food you eat? It's full of ribosomes! Nano/micrometer sized robots packed into every bite of organic food. AND they construct more of themselves! They're Von Neumann Machines!/Pedantic
What about slice-based parallel processing? Correct me if I'm wrong, (I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out I am...) but doesn't x264 have an option to do slice-based parallel processing? As I understand it, if there are 4 running threads, each frame is chopped into four quadrants with a little edge room buffer in each slice, then independently encoded, then glued back together at the other end? That's how I remember that option being described in some forum or other. Not the standard multi-threading, but the slice-based option.
I think of it with a different analogy. Instead of little Jimmy and the test, I prefer the BK Lounge metaphor:
Burger King manages to hand you "food" in 11 Seconds, compared to Shari's (or wherever, insert a middle-of-the-road place here) 20 minutes, The "food" is consistently inedible at BK, whereas at Shari's or wherever won't make you sick after bite 2.
The GPGPU is shitty at video transcoding, but boy howdy it's fast. And that's completely beside the point. What good is a "burger" in 11 seconds if you can't keep it down? What good is a 24fps video transcoded at 450fps when the end result is nearly universally unwatchable?
I haven't independently confirmed whether it is true that the Reno facility is a licencing office, but I'll take you at your word.
Even if a lot of income went through Reno, MS is still incorporated in Redmond Washington. Since it's incorporated in Washington, wouldn't it make sense to say that the company remains under washington state juristiction for tax purposes? I live in Washington, and can't really help but feel like the Washington state public has been cheated and that MS has unfairly benefitted by having it's cake and eating it too. It gets all the benefits of operating out of a booming urban center while paying the taxes of a place that's in the middle of an unlivably barren desert. Why not set up it's licensing facility in say international ocean where there are no taxes, and the rule of law won't ever inconvenience them at all?
Well, Washington State's current royalty rate for Microsoft is about 0.484% which is what TFA used to come up with the $4.37 billion tax savings.
1/.00484 * (4.37 * 10^11) == 902,892,561,983.47107438 or about 903 billion dollars.
Do you mean to say that those two buildings plus one floor in Reno account for 903 billion dollars in Tax-Free productivity? Don't you think maybe some of it should be taxed?
I thought this country was the United States, not "the country where every state fucks every other state" It's unfair to Washington to call one office park in Nevada the place where Microsoft does all of its business. Microsoft uses MASSIVE public resources in Washington while dodging any responsibility for repayment there.
No, at least according to Special and general relativity, there is no preferred direction to the universe, and there is no such thing as "absolute still". There's no way to not move in a universe where the space itself is moving as well.
Movement must always be defined in relative terms, since general relativity is background independent.
Similarly, when dealing with particles, there's no "absolute still" since that is the same as absolute zero, which is an asymptotic physical limit to the temperature.
One big reason why an exa-scale installation is generally better than an exa-scale distributed project is that of Data Transfer.
Distributed computing is plagued by Data Transfer bottlenecks. If it's an internet project, the cumulative effect of combined bandwidth does add up. But serving out project segments at exa-scale levels is very expensive, and equally expensive receiving the solution chunks. There's also the problem of "internet climatology" (I'm not sure what it's really called) where the connections aren't uniform. While the internet does "self-heal" it takes time, and that adds up as well.
Basically, when you scale up the computing power on a distributed project, the problems scale too. Out of order processing of problem chunks also causes problems when peers join and drop out in unpredictable ways. Often the same chunk has to spend many times more cycles than actually required, due to peers getting bored with the work, or just testing out the system and dropping the piece they're working on.
An exa-scale supercomputer would remove the problem of collaboration overhead, or at least significantly reduce it. Scheduling is much more efficient, and in the end FLOPS doesn't measure performance in any reliable qualitative way. A distributed project can run at an exaFLOPS rate and still do no productive work, if the participants never finish any of the work they are tasked with.
I'm thinking that we'll pack asteroids with nuclear weapons and launch them at the enemy's general direction using rail or coil guns. Proximity fuse senses a ship blows up the nuke, huge debris field. No escape.
Not that interesting. And it would be a bad idea if it's an orbital battle. But I think it's pretty feasible in interplanetary war. The main problem with all space battle is the vast distances to be covered
People aren't naturally compelled to put together microwaves, typically. While artists will always make art, whether copyright exists or not. Copyright requires art, not vice-versa.
If the art is good, then there will always be demand, and there will always be natural scarcity of some kind that can be used by artists. Copyright is inhibiting culture today more than promoting it. Why should we keep laws that have become so outdated and irrelevant
It's goes to show how backward-bending western society is when you can sue for religious discrimination when it's obviously a case of academic discrimination.
Discrimination against those who didn't learn enough to pass the expensive course they took.
It's alright,
They tend to cull off all the mice used in the study, except for the controls.
Good science requires elimination and minimisation of variables you know.
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely. Thank you EvilHamster
The high birthrate in the developing and least developed world stems from two hard facts:
Most women there are either subjugated to the point of essentially being property, or are very poor and have little to no access to healthcare, so it follows that they are undereducated or completely uneducated. Consequently many women rely on superstition for birth control, or know about it but can't afford birth control. In much of Africa husbands will harm or even kill their wives if they take charge of their fertility in any way shape or form. That's a pretty big deterrent.
Secondly, the infant mortality rate in many developing or least developed countries is so high that the only chance of having a child that lives to adulthood is to have many children and hope for the best.
And on another note, many people (a little below 50%) in the third world do have to subsistence farm, and are agrarian to some extent. Even when they live in a desert they have to eat and make a living somehow.
In most of the world it's more like:
Gee I'm thirsty. So are my wife, six children, handful of cows, and all the people I know in my village. I don't have any way to dig a well deep enough to give me sufficient water, much less my family and friends who are also thirsty.
But we do have a lot of guns and bullets.....
It's a very shitty situation, and I think your logic is inappropriately reductionist and simple minded.
In a lot of physical cosmology theories there isn't a "before the big bang." The big bang itself is zero, and we work our way back from the present to the earliest possible time just after the big bang.
Since the big bang is time==0 asking what happened before it makes no sense, there is no before.
If it were only for theft deterrent purposes, wouldn't it make more sense to just embed the product in a Lexan cube with a weighted base? Then nobody would steal it... /Troll
Even that might not work in the long run. IBM Watson gets better every day. It's good enough already for chatbot and it wasn't even designed to do that. I think watson might be nearing ai complete for natural language. Just give it a couple of years and see what else comes up
Top Headline:
"GM Foods Considered Harmful"
(to rats)
Sounds to me related to gambling addiction. There two components necessary are the fear of loss (always the chance to outbid your bank account) and some probability of winning each "round" no matter how slim, even if you know that you will always lose in aggregate.....
What a well thought out and cogent point.
I was just being a smartass. I actually agree with your point.
I certainly wouldn't be comfotable ingesting a bleeding edge, anthropogenic nanostructure rich substance without at least some animal studies first.
And before the bleeding heart PETA folks get on my ass about animal testing let me say that: since we don't have a theory of everything, there are always unaccountable effects of substances that simply can't be calculated from theory. Animal testing done as humanely as possible saves lives. And anybody who would die so a rat doesn't have to can kiss my grits and enjoy the possible and likely systemic damage from untested materials.
Anything Nanoparticle Based? /Pedantic
What about all the food you eat? It's full of ribosomes! Nano/micrometer sized robots packed into every bite of organic food. AND they construct more of themselves! They're Von Neumann Machines!
What about slice-based parallel processing?
Correct me if I'm wrong, (I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out I am...) but doesn't x264 have an option to do slice-based parallel processing? As I understand it, if there are 4 running threads, each frame is chopped into four quadrants with a little edge room buffer in each slice, then independently encoded, then glued back together at the other end? That's how I remember that option being described in some forum or other. Not the standard multi-threading, but the slice-based option.
I think of it with a different analogy. Instead of little Jimmy and the test, I prefer the BK Lounge metaphor:
Burger King manages to hand you "food" in 11 Seconds, compared to Shari's (or wherever, insert a middle-of-the-road place here) 20 minutes,
The "food" is consistently inedible at BK, whereas at Shari's or wherever won't make you sick after bite 2.
The GPGPU is shitty at video transcoding, but boy howdy it's fast. And that's completely beside the point.
What good is a "burger" in 11 seconds if you can't keep it down? What good is a 24fps video transcoded at 450fps when the end result is nearly universally unwatchable?
Antarctica then...
I haven't independently confirmed whether it is true that the Reno facility is a licencing office, but I'll take you at your word.
Even if a lot of income went through Reno, MS is still incorporated in Redmond Washington. Since it's incorporated in Washington, wouldn't it make sense to say that the company remains under washington state juristiction for tax purposes? I live in Washington, and can't really help but feel like the Washington state public has been cheated and that MS has unfairly benefitted by having it's cake and eating it too.
It gets all the benefits of operating out of a booming urban center while paying the taxes of a place that's in the middle of an unlivably barren desert. Why not set up it's licensing facility in say international ocean where there are no taxes, and the rule of law won't ever inconvenience them at all?
Well, Washington State's current royalty rate for Microsoft is about 0.484% which is what TFA used to come up with the $4.37 billion tax savings.
1/.00484 * (4.37 * 10^11) == 902,892,561,983.47107438
or about 903 billion dollars.
Do you mean to say that those two buildings plus one floor in Reno account for 903 billion dollars in Tax-Free productivity?
Don't you think maybe some of it should be taxed?
I thought this country was the United States, not "the country where every state fucks every other state"
It's unfair to Washington to call one office park in Nevada the place where Microsoft does all of its business. Microsoft uses MASSIVE public resources in Washington while dodging any responsibility for repayment there.
It appears you have suffered amnesia. Can I give you a hand by wiping your data and starting a fresh template? The MS website has hundreds of them.
No, at least according to Special and general relativity, there is no preferred direction to the universe, and there is no such thing as "absolute still". There's no way to not move in a universe where the space itself is moving as well.
Movement must always be defined in relative terms, since general relativity is background independent.
Similarly, when dealing with particles, there's no "absolute still" since that is the same as absolute zero, which is an asymptotic physical limit to the temperature.
You seem agitated dave, let's talk about that.
--HAL
One big reason why an exa-scale installation is generally better than an exa-scale distributed project is that of Data Transfer.
Distributed computing is plagued by Data Transfer bottlenecks. If it's an internet project, the cumulative effect of combined bandwidth does add up. But serving out project segments at exa-scale levels is very expensive, and equally expensive receiving the solution chunks. There's also the problem of "internet climatology" (I'm not sure what it's really called) where the connections aren't uniform. While the internet does "self-heal" it takes time, and that adds up as well.
Basically, when you scale up the computing power on a distributed project, the problems scale too. Out of order processing of problem chunks also causes problems when peers join and drop out in unpredictable ways. Often the same chunk has to spend many times more cycles than actually required, due to peers getting bored with the work, or just testing out the system and dropping the piece they're working on.
An exa-scale supercomputer would remove the problem of collaboration overhead, or at least significantly reduce it. Scheduling is much more efficient, and in the end FLOPS doesn't measure performance in any reliable qualitative way. A distributed project can run at an exaFLOPS rate and still do no productive work, if the participants never finish any of the work they are tasked with.
I'm thinking that we'll pack asteroids with nuclear weapons and launch them at the enemy's general direction using rail or coil guns. Proximity fuse senses a ship blows up the nuke, huge debris field. No escape.
Not that interesting. And it would be a bad idea if it's an orbital battle. But I think it's pretty feasible in interplanetary war. The main problem with all space battle is the vast distances to be covered
I would think an executable fly is practically any fly there is... ;-]
As long as you're good with a flyswatter
People aren't naturally compelled to put together microwaves, typically. While artists will always make art, whether copyright exists or not. Copyright requires art, not vice-versa. If the art is good, then there will always be demand, and there will always be natural scarcity of some kind that can be used by artists. Copyright is inhibiting culture today more than promoting it. Why should we keep laws that have become so outdated and irrelevant
It's goes to show how backward-bending western society is when you can sue for religious discrimination when it's obviously a case of academic discrimination.
Discrimination against those who didn't learn enough to pass the expensive course they took.
I would put it this way:
CS is to Programming
as
Physics is to Engineering
Mod parent up. This is the simplest (in a good way) explanation of public choice theory I've ever seen
It's alright,
They tend to cull off all the mice used in the study, except for the controls.
Good science requires elimination and minimisation of variables you know.