Eventually we might finally have the power for raytracing.
Developers would be happy. Raytracing algorithms are really simple - all the complexity in modern graphics comes from having to carefully calculate things like shadows, occlusion and shading that emerge naturally from the mathematics of raytracing. Just needs a ridiculous amount of processing power to pull it off in real time.
I wrote a mod (Yes, you can have it if you ask) for UT2K4 that disables cleanup of decals, gibs and corpses. It's actually quite tricky - the code that does that is quite low-level, beyond the reach of unrealscript, so I had to use some hackery.
I called it 'Knee Deep in the Dead,' an expression any gamer should recognise. The game handles it perfectly on modern hardware. Not only does it look a lot of fun, but it also impacts gameplay. You can get a good idea for where the danger zones are by the amount of gore plastering the walls and the presence of bullet holes.
The only problem is an interaction with a certain other mod I made that creates comedically huge amounts of gore. Not so much knee deep in the dead as submerged. The two together can create enough load to strain the C2D laptop one of the gaming group uses.
Lots of uses. Voxel reconstruction is a good one. The algorithms that run the 3D modes on every medical ultrasound, CAT and MRI scanner. They also brute-force problems in more elementary physics - quantum mechanical simulations. Convolution processing used in image and video filtering - not worth the effort if you are just trying to de-blur a photo, handy if you want to de-blur a 4K video feed.
Clock maxed out. Multicore will take you only so far before you run out of space and hit problems with coherency.
I expect the future is going to involve a lot more specialised silicon. Scientific number-crunching will move onto GPUs or things like the Phi designed just for that type of workload. Mobile processors will start featuring even more single-task accelerators like those already used for video decoding. While general-purpose processors of today become the things that tie all the other parts together, handing the calculations too complex to run efficiently elsewhere and coordinating the shunting around of data.
Considering the American media's love of all things scandalous and sexual? All you need to ask is this: Has any member of congress *never* looked at porn on the internet?
It's a stable system, though. There's no incentive to vote outside the big two other than the vague hope that maybe, if enough people follow, it might break the duopoly ten or twenty years from now. Whereas right now, it's a certainty that if you don't support the lesser evil today, it'll hand an advantage to the greater evil.
It should be possible to secure a cable. Just put an encryptor-decryptor at each end, transport the keys via physical key. There are algorithms the NSA can't break, and there is no complicated issue of key exchange and authentication to deal with.
It'd be expensive though. WAN fiber links generally *start* at 10Gb/s. It takes dedicated hardware to keep up with that at an acceptable latency.
Even a partial defense would mean the drone would need to get closer and track more accurately, for longer. Increasing the chance of making it through.
Perhaps they can go straight from 'subsistence agriculture' to 'high-tech clean economy', and skip the 'soot-belching factories and smog' stage that the now-developed world needed to pass through to reach that state.
One thing we can be sure of is that if the prime minister is still trying to pressure the guardian into silence, he must have his reasons. So somewhere, he must at least *believe* there is a huge secret that could be exposed. That doesn't mean that it is in the documents Snowden managed to grab, just that the prime minister believes there is a possibility something of that nature is in there just waiting to be revealed to the world.
The obvious answer is that there is something even worse they know of, and are concerned will be revealed soon. It'd have to be something really big - a career-ending scandal. I can only imagine three possibilities that could scare Cameron. - Someone has been using the intelligence services to spy on or suppress political opponents domestically. Watergate all over again. - Someone has been using the intelligence services to advantage domestic economic interests, perhaps by giving important illicit information to corporations. Just like China is widely believed to do, but without conclusive proof. - Someone has been using the intelligence services to actively intervene in the political process of another country - eg, by tapping the calls of a politician and passing information on their campaign to an opponent, or anonymously sending scandalous information to the media.
The leaks so far include the UK and US working together to tap emails and phone lines used by heads of allied states, and a US attempt to intercept the diplomatic lines at the UN. It's hard to imagine what could come out next to top that one. The only possibilities I can see would be using the intelligence services for political advantage (Watergate-style), using them for commercial advantage to domestic companies (China-style) or using them to deliberately manipulate the politics of another country. Those are juicy possibilities, certainly, because they'd clearly reveal the 'protecting our country from terrorist threat' line as a big lie.
It's worse than that. Attempts at rehabilitation are actually politically unpopular. Treat prisoners anything like human beings, and you'll see angry calls accusing someone of being 'soft on crime.' So instead prisons just chuck them all in together and let the prison gangs form.
It doesn't help that the US is in the embarassing position of having one of the highest number of prisoners per capita in the world.
The big one was the religious exception for contraception coverage and the prohibition on abortion coverage.
Both of which they still aren't happy about. The right is outraged because the contraception exception only applies to openly religious organisations, not private companies that happen to have a religious CEO, and they are equally upset because even though the government coverage can't include abortion some government money still goes into collective pools which are in turn subsidising programs by private insurance companies that do.
Social conservatives. Give them what they want, and they'll take it - then deny you gave it to them at all, and demand more.
Don't underestimate the fun of political games. Before a year had passed, at least one state would have passed a law making it a crime for any medical facility to apply for payment from the program.
Take a look at the contract and policy documents for health insurance some time. They can be the size of a novel, and the industry is infamous for finding any excuse to screw the customers over. There are some cases where a vital surgery is covered, but the anasthetic is not - so the patient has to pay that bit out of pocket.
The issue isn't bankrupt-vs-continue. It's bankrupt-vs-throwing-tax-money-at-it, and the latter option comes with no guarantee it will do anything more than keep the company around for a few more years. While manufacturing capability is a strategic asset, there's a limit to how much the government can spend.
The real question to ask is why the manufacturing capability is no longer self-sustaining. Unfortunately the answer is not at all helpful: The less developed world isn't hampered by a high cost of living for workers, safety regulations or environmental protection laws. American manufacturing is a victim of its own success.
That's always been the issue with loans: Those who most need money are always the risky investments.
Law can be a silly thing. There was a period in the UK when not only was human cloneing legal, but it was entirely unregulated: Our law on the subject defined embryo for legal purposes as 'an egg fertilised by a sperm.' Clones didn't count. We've revised that one now, though.
Yes. Doctors hate it because they don't get paid nearly as much as they can on private work. Governnment making good use of tax money. Shame they can't be so efficient with drugs purchases - there's a tendency to purchase overpriced brand-name drugs even when cheap generics are available.
They seem to have a sort of informal conspiracy going. There's a set of generally agreed-upon 'public issues' that they put on a big show of fighting over. Abortion and gay marriage are the big ones. But at the same time, there are far more issues which they do agree on and seem to make a point of never, ever bringing up for debate. Copyright policy, agricultural subsidies. I'm not saying there is some smoke-filled room where the ruling elite get together and make a list of the forbidden issues, just that most politicians in the US realise that it is in the best interests of themselves and their parties to keep a things like that off the table.
Health care seems to be a rare case of someone in a posltion of real power defying the convention, but even that by the time it passed ended up as little more than insurance subsidies.
Slashdot Mirror
Eventually we might finally have the power for raytracing.
Developers would be happy. Raytracing algorithms are really simple - all the complexity in modern graphics comes from having to carefully calculate things like shadows, occlusion and shading that emerge naturally from the mathematics of raytracing. Just needs a ridiculous amount of processing power to pull it off in real time.
I wrote a mod (Yes, you can have it if you ask) for UT2K4 that disables cleanup of decals, gibs and corpses. It's actually quite tricky - the code that does that is quite low-level, beyond the reach of unrealscript, so I had to use some hackery.
I called it 'Knee Deep in the Dead,' an expression any gamer should recognise. The game handles it perfectly on modern hardware. Not only does it look a lot of fun, but it also impacts gameplay. You can get a good idea for where the danger zones are by the amount of gore plastering the walls and the presence of bullet holes.
The only problem is an interaction with a certain other mod I made that creates comedically huge amounts of gore. Not so much knee deep in the dead as submerged. The two together can create enough load to strain the C2D laptop one of the gaming group uses.
Lots of uses. Voxel reconstruction is a good one. The algorithms that run the 3D modes on every medical ultrasound, CAT and MRI scanner. They also brute-force problems in more elementary physics - quantum mechanical simulations. Convolution processing used in image and video filtering - not worth the effort if you are just trying to de-blur a photo, handy if you want to de-blur a 4K video feed.
Clock maxed out. Multicore will take you only so far before you run out of space and hit problems with coherency.
I expect the future is going to involve a lot more specialised silicon. Scientific number-crunching will move onto GPUs or things like the Phi designed just for that type of workload. Mobile processors will start featuring even more single-task accelerators like those already used for video decoding. While general-purpose processors of today become the things that tie all the other parts together, handing the calculations too complex to run efficiently elsewhere and coordinating the shunting around of data.
Considering the American media's love of all things scandalous and sexual? All you need to ask is this: Has any member of congress *never* looked at porn on the internet?
It's a stable system, though. There's no incentive to vote outside the big two other than the vague hope that maybe, if enough people follow, it might break the duopoly ten or twenty years from now. Whereas right now, it's a certainty that if you don't support the lesser evil today, it'll hand an advantage to the greater evil.
It should be possible to secure a cable. Just put an encryptor-decryptor at each end, transport the keys via physical key. There are algorithms the NSA can't break, and there is no complicated issue of key exchange and authentication to deal with.
It'd be expensive though. WAN fiber links generally *start* at 10Gb/s. It takes dedicated hardware to keep up with that at an acceptable latency.
Also, even if it is illegal, nothing will come of the illegality. At most it might be made retroactively legal to save face.
That is what the internet is for.
So I heard - but by the time the police arrived not only were they gone, but the entire coffee shop was missing.
No reason you can't have both: A white ablative coating.
Even a partial defense would mean the drone would need to get closer and track more accurately, for longer. Increasing the chance of making it through.
Perhaps they can go straight from 'subsistence agriculture' to 'high-tech clean economy', and skip the 'soot-belching factories and smog' stage that the now-developed world needed to pass through to reach that state.
That is also a possibility.
One thing we can be sure of is that if the prime minister is still trying to pressure the guardian into silence, he must have his reasons. So somewhere, he must at least *believe* there is a huge secret that could be exposed. That doesn't mean that it is in the documents Snowden managed to grab, just that the prime minister believes there is a possibility something of that nature is in there just waiting to be revealed to the world.
The obvious answer is that there is something even worse they know of, and are concerned will be revealed soon. It'd have to be something really big - a career-ending scandal. I can only imagine three possibilities that could scare Cameron.
- Someone has been using the intelligence services to spy on or suppress political opponents domestically. Watergate all over again.
- Someone has been using the intelligence services to advantage domestic economic interests, perhaps by giving important illicit information to corporations. Just like China is widely believed to do, but without conclusive proof.
- Someone has been using the intelligence services to actively intervene in the political process of another country - eg, by tapping the calls of a politician and passing information on their campaign to an opponent, or anonymously sending scandalous information to the media.
The leaks so far include the UK and US working together to tap emails and phone lines used by heads of allied states, and a US attempt to intercept the diplomatic lines at the UN. It's hard to imagine what could come out next to top that one. The only possibilities I can see would be using the intelligence services for political advantage (Watergate-style), using them for commercial advantage to domestic companies (China-style) or using them to deliberately manipulate the politics of another country. Those are juicy possibilities, certainly, because they'd clearly reveal the 'protecting our country from terrorist threat' line as a big lie.
Check the cost of components on the apple store. Hard drives, memory. Official apple-endorsed upgrades are clearly overpriced.
It's worse than that. Attempts at rehabilitation are actually politically unpopular. Treat prisoners anything like human beings, and you'll see angry calls accusing someone of being 'soft on crime.' So instead prisons just chuck them all in together and let the prison gangs form.
It doesn't help that the US is in the embarassing position of having one of the highest number of prisoners per capita in the world.
The big one was the religious exception for contraception coverage and the prohibition on abortion coverage.
Both of which they still aren't happy about. The right is outraged because the contraception exception only applies to openly religious organisations, not private companies that happen to have a religious CEO, and they are equally upset because even though the government coverage can't include abortion some government money still goes into collective pools which are in turn subsidising programs by private insurance companies that do.
Social conservatives. Give them what they want, and they'll take it - then deny you gave it to them at all, and demand more.
Don't underestimate the fun of political games. Before a year had passed, at least one state would have passed a law making it a crime for any medical facility to apply for payment from the program.
Take a look at the contract and policy documents for health insurance some time. They can be the size of a novel, and the industry is infamous for finding any excuse to screw the customers over. There are some cases where a vital surgery is covered, but the anasthetic is not - so the patient has to pay that bit out of pocket.
The issue isn't bankrupt-vs-continue. It's bankrupt-vs-throwing-tax-money-at-it, and the latter option comes with no guarantee it will do anything more than keep the company around for a few more years. While manufacturing capability is a strategic asset, there's a limit to how much the government can spend.
The real question to ask is why the manufacturing capability is no longer self-sustaining. Unfortunately the answer is not at all helpful: The less developed world isn't hampered by a high cost of living for workers, safety regulations or environmental protection laws. American manufacturing is a victim of its own success.
That's always been the issue with loans: Those who most need money are always the risky investments.
Law can be a silly thing. There was a period in the UK when not only was human cloneing legal, but it was entirely unregulated: Our law on the subject defined embryo for legal purposes as 'an egg fertilised by a sperm.' Clones didn't count. We've revised that one now, though.
Yes. Doctors hate it because they don't get paid nearly as much as they can on private work. Governnment making good use of tax money. Shame they can't be so efficient with drugs purchases - there's a tendency to purchase overpriced brand-name drugs even when cheap generics are available.
They seem to have a sort of informal conspiracy going. There's a set of generally agreed-upon 'public issues' that they put on a big show of fighting over. Abortion and gay marriage are the big ones. But at the same time, there are far more issues which they do agree on and seem to make a point of never, ever bringing up for debate. Copyright policy, agricultural subsidies. I'm not saying there is some smoke-filled room where the ruling elite get together and make a list of the forbidden issues, just that most politicians in the US realise that it is in the best interests of themselves and their parties to keep a things like that off the table.
Health care seems to be a rare case of someone in a posltion of real power defying the convention, but even that by the time it passed ended up as little more than insurance subsidies.