Gotta start getting ready for 2012, just gotta do it, can't let those chinese show them up, right?
Perhaps the New Labour party is thinking if they become the laughing stock of security during 2012, they risk a quicker return to the wilderness years...
Some day one of our grandkids will have a study reporting that most people born before 2020 dream in 2D where all people born after dream in 3D. This will no doubt attributed to invention of the holodeck and 3d television. People will wonder if most people born before 1400 dreamt in 3D and we've been warping our brains into 2D for the last six centuries of entertainment options consisting of paintings, printed words television and youtube...
Then their great-great-grandkids will discover that in the past people didn't dream with a start, middle, and an end like most entertainment and we've all been figments of someone's imagination who was just dreaming for the last few million years... Now won't that be something;^)
Yet the truth is that more or less everything that happened in the Parable would have still happened with the same benefit if the store owner in question had payed the same money to improve his store, rather than simply repair it. A new skylight, or replace an old window with insulating double-pane, and so forth. If you can imagine breaking a window on purpose to create the resulting economic stimulus, surely you can imagine doing something beneficial and non-destructive with the same effect.
So while it's true that the Parable shows how a seemingly economic negative can result in an overall positive, on the one hand that doesn't help the shop keeper who may not have been able to afford a window repair in the first place, and on the other that does not make the destructive event is truly positive, it simply means there's a silver lining. Should we find ourselves in another true Depression, starting World War III is not the way we should try to get out of it if you see what I mean.
I don't think I was advocating WW-III as a shock, but more abstractly that there needs to be some sort of shock otherwize usually nothing happens. In the parable, the hidden variable is there doesn't seem to be any trigger event to give the impetus for shop keeper to improve his store with double pane glass or a skylight to cause this "positive" chain of events until the stone is thrown. I'm just hope we all survive whatever that shock happens that gets up going again (of course if the shock is WW-III many may not survive).
Sadly, there is probably a kernel of insight into the the part where a few hundered thousand are shoved in to the ocean and lost. It seems like every once in a while, something catastrophic happens (e.g. Black plague, 1918 influenza epidemic, WWII, etc) that kills off a whole bunch of people and causes a rebound effect which stimulates the economy.
I'm not sure this kind of extreme stuff is such a good idea, but it's talked about in the parable of the broken window. In a similar vein the stone soup style mechanism to stimulate the economy seems to also work. Ironically, these are both tricks that seem to take advantage of the fact that the economy is really not a zero sum game (despite what all the anti-fiat-currency folks would want you to believe).
If you can accept that these type of tricks can stimulate economic growth, it's not a small step to think that just about anything could be the accidental trigger for a macro-economic effect and we are just currently living though a "butterfly-effect" of some chain of events and we need a shock-stimulus to reset a normal rhythm. Certainly this kind of stuff seems very unscientific, but I'm guessing it'll be something like a shock which will probably get us out of our current mess and not some "smart" person figuring deep truth about the overly complicated global economic system. Hopefully whatever the shock is won't kill us, but will make us stronger;^)
Securitized mortgages aren't the cause of the current problem, the CDS "insurance" products that backed up the sub-prime securitized mortgages are the main problem. Followed by the rating agencies looking the other way.
Imagine if company "A" was tired of turning-over safe securitized mortgages for pidly profits and wanted to sell some stupid thing that would generate a higher return (e.g., sub-prime mortgages). The problem is that there is no market for these the stupid products (because of the risk).
Imagine if company "B" could sell an "insurance" product that wasn't really regulated as insurance so you could write simple business2business contracts to cover arbitrary credit defaults and collect a premium without any required reserve in case shit hit the fan.
Imagine now that company "A" thinks they can mitigate the risk of their new stupid sub-prime-securitized mortgage product by pairing them with company B's "insurance-like" CDS product. But that isn't really that great yet (since they have to pay the premium), so they chop up the security into various tranches (senior debt vs second-tier debt) because presumably only a fraction of the underlying mortgages will default. Company "A" suggests to the ratings agencies the senior tranches of this stupid product should be AAA-rated like US-treasuries because of course there could "never" be that many defaults. They can now sell this senior tranch with a really low interest rate (more money for them) and the second-tier debt at a higher interest rate. They make so much money on the senior tranch (because it's AAA) to cover up for the premium and the presumed risk-return of the second-tier debt.
Company "A" is happy because they created a new product that is more marketable since they mitigated the risk with this "insurance-like" product, Company "B" is happy because they are collecting this premium.
Now imagine if the standard terms for these contracts didn't require you to hold the actual primary credit risk that could be defaulted on (e.g., you could speculatively "bet" on someone elses default). Now imagine speculation on in that market for these contract. This allows this instrument to be used by hedge funds to partially hedge against buying all these stupid second-tier product and getting the high interest rate (so there are CDS on the primary credit and also hedges in the second-tier debt market).
Imagine now that shit has hit the fan and company "B" realizes that company "A" can't make good on their contract because there's no reserve. Not only did company "A" write these contracts on primary debt (which could presumably be "fixed" by guaranteeing the primary debt), but they have secondary exposure to the second-tier debt (the tail tranches that were really crappy mortgages that were expected to default first).
Now nobody wants to touch these stupid AAA-rated products because the CDS part of the product is really of unknown quality (probably insolvent companies) and the mortgages are also of unknown (probably bad) quality. This causes the credit freeze because nobody wants to lend money to a bank that has too many assest of this type (because they don't know if the company is solvent or not).
So the inventors of the CDS are the real villian. They allowed this stupid product to exist and were unregulated so that companies could write contracts that they really didn't have a reasonable reserve for. They ratings agencies are also to blame because they created a situation with a risk-return anomoly where a product could be sold which didn't have the proper risk-return allowing companies to make an unreasonable amount of profit selling the product (because they weren't paying out an interest rate to compensate for the risk).
So who invented this CDS idea? I don't know, but I bet it was one of those financial "geeks" or "quants". Who came up with the ideas for hedging with these products? Probably the same folks. Who allowed a CDS to not be classified as an insurance contract and thus regulated? Why our current bribe taking friends in congress of course...
I don't think I would define nationalized that way. For example, the post office (USPS) and Amtrack are nationalized. If for some reason there were massive lawsuits, (e.g., the USPS decided to convert their vehicles to burn on some fuel that turned out to destroy the planet), or massive debts, the US government would be forced to pay up.
The situation for FNM & FRE, is a convervatorship and it has promised to backstop their mortgage backed securities market (maybe not the full faith and credit, but a pretty big promise/contract) and actually put in capital to maintain their solvency. That's probably closer to a nationalization under a definition that most people would agree on.
It's my understanding that AIG is slightly different in that for AIG, that US Govt is basically a stockholder (admittedly a major shareholder), just like any other shareholders, the maximum liability is generally considered equal to the value of their investment. The $85B money is loaned to AIG, backed by its assets and a share in the company. The operations of AIG are not backed by the full faith and credit of the US and there is no commitment to maintain solvency.
You might argue that by putting "our" collective necks out for AIG, we will get sucked in if and when the AIG situation deteriorates to protect our initial $85B investement so it's more like a nationalization of AIG, but that's probably were you and I differ. I would argue that this is currently more like a loan with conditions (not structured very differently than what a private entity would do if the govt had it's way), and less like a nationalization. But it certainly could go that way eventually.
As I recall, BofA initially loaned Countrywide money, but eventually as conditions deteriorated, it was essentially forced to ingest Countrywide to protect its initial investment. But we collectively haven't gotten there with AIG. Yet.
As Richard Feynman once said "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts"
He also had this comment in his classic speech "Cargo Cult Science"
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of -- this history -- because it's apparent that people did things like this: when they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong -- and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves -- of having utter scientific integrity -- is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I don't think I'm as optimistic as Feynman that it's only a small group of scientists that don't have "that kind of disease"...
I don't "buy" that argument...
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I think historically, often early engineering solutions are adhoc and based on elementary math and physics. As the field matures, it taps into cutting edge physics and mathematics for furthur refinement. the limiting factors of adoption of refinements are often economic not technical. That's why they take so long, not because there are generally techical limitations.
For example, humans engineered bridges long before finite element solvers and vibrational modes were generally known and accounted for in the design. Even computers (e.g., mechanical or relay computers) were engineered before the physics behind transistors were discovered. Once the physics and mathematics were discovered, the real limitations behind the application of these refinements were economic velocity.
If anything has sped up in our world is the application of large scale economic leverage to problem. In the pre-modern world, finding large markets and mustering the capital to realize a technical advance was career in itself (think about the early explorers visiting kings and queens to get financial support to sail their boat to try and find the "passage-to-india"). The want was not the physics or math (the navigation technology and the boats were all available for years), but raising the financial backing was hard. Even in the so called industrial age, capital was still quite centralized to big corporations and governments and international markets were not very well developed often due to massive tariffs and other trade barriers.
Now with modern investment markets and international trading, people with good ideas (and some people that don't have good ideas), have unprecedented backing of capital and available markets to press forward with just about any application that is feasible. If it's true that the barriers to adoption of cutting edge stuff from math or physics are really only limited by economic factors (which may be as long as before if the technology is expensive and the market demand isn't present), the time should be shorter. It's not because the advances are a high level that they will take a long time to be developed, it's because they don't have any market or require excessive capital for the available market that they will have problems being adopted.
For example, if some cutting edge math or physics discovery resulted in a battery that was exponentially better (e.g., cheaper/ligher), than today, I'd bet it would be in an electric car and/or ipod in a matter of a few years as there would be massive investment made in that area to develop the engineering required. However, if we had a way to make $5billion microscopic black holes that nobody wanted, that would take quite a while to be available at radio-shack as a party favor or gag gift...
The original name of the chip (apparently) was Godson ( gou-shèng, roughly translates to dog scraps) and seems to still be refered to by that name in english. Actually, I think they changed the name of the chip to Loongson ( lóng-xin where x is pronounced like ~sh, roughly translates to dragon core or imperial chip).
Probably because gou-shèng it wasn't that great of a name and chinese have a habit of changing names of things to change their luck. Strangly, google still translates the new chinese name to Godson (I guess as a proper name instead of the new chinese pronunciation to be extra confusing to everyone).
However, coincidentally, word for dog is pronounced somewhat like god in chinese (actually gou). I wonder if that has some hidden meaning;^)
Perhaps you could use a number-theoretic fft (using modular arithmetic instead of fp arithmetic) on a gpu to avoid the errors accumulation. Although old gpus only processed single precision fp, new gpus can process 24-bit integer multiplication at full speed as well (at least for nvidia's cuda). You probably gain a little bit of accuracy using NTTs vs single precision FP FFTs (where you probabaly need a few guard bits to avoid subtraction errors) which is likely an exponental speedup with these types of algorithms.
Of course the double precision arithmetic is only somewhat slower than single precision on GPUs, but consumes twice the register space (so on actual algorithms, it runs quite a bit slower because of this). Right now, GPU ffts are quite a bit faster than CPU ffts, but not yet 10x (unless you have a very large GPU and a fairly ordinary CPU) if you copy the data back to the CPU every time after an fft, but if you leave the data in the GPU and code the rest of the digit-convolution algorithm on the GPU, I'll bet it isn't that far off of 10x on average.
Of course Bela Karolyi wolud think the age restriction is stupid. If he agreed with it, then he'd have to admit it was probably wrong that his star Nadia Comneci got a gold medal for her perfect 10 in 1976. Not that I agree with the age restriction either, but expecting Mr. Karolyi to present an unbiased view is kinda silly, no?
How accurately can you determine the age of a person that way? Especially around that age, when the body is changing rapidly and at different times for different people. Could you really develop a medical age test where the chance of false-positives is virtually nil but would actually catch anyone?
Actually, the doping tests basically have similar problems. They often keep the test mechanisms and thresholds basically arbitrary, sometimes secret, and not dependent on body parameters that are different for different people, so there is an unknown number of false-positives. A recent paper on this subject...
Of course the media reports such tests as unassailable, so when a rumor of a certain result surfaces, it basically becomes a pseudo-fact (instead of an interpretation of a test presented with other required evidence). Even though it's generally conceded that most of the atheletes are probably on the far extremes of the normal distributions in various attributes already, it seems that collectively people feel that there should be some sort of statistically valid test for various mechanism that people might use to physiologically "cheat" the system.
I doubt there could be any trustable test for age (including a passport or a birth certificate). But given the "anti-doping" mania, I don't doubt there will be someone that crawls out of the woodwork and gives people a test for what they are yammering for even if it isn't based on any sound scientific principles. The media will no doubt report it as a long awaited for "age-doping" test (or some other nonsensical name) panecea which will eventually get enough traction to revoke olymic medals, and overturn results of college and highschool athletics contests... Maybe we should all start an IPO watch on PWC-GMBH and CeresNano...
...working in today's market is not about innovating, producing or even being very creative. It's about covering your ass.
Change the following sentence to "working for someone as a serf is not about innovating, or being creative. It's about producing enough to cover you ass..." and then I'll agree.
The main part I disagree with about is that it isn't really just a choice between unions or flexible workforce. How about union ownership of companies? How about non-vertical integration of companies? What's with all these straw-man arguments that unions and anti-union folk spit up?
If you think your company is so mismanaged that they are promoting people that just cover their asses, perhaps you should start your own company and try to hire managers. The truth is most human beings like to cash paychecks and cover their asses. This applies to union members, non-union members, and managers, and most workers in general.
The other truth is that it's damn hard to make money, but once you figure it out, it usually seems easier to make more by "hiring" people. However, finding these mystical altruistic people that like to work hard is nearly impossible. Even if you found such a person, then you usually can't afford to pay them enough to stay and you don't really want to promote them either because either they probably aren't very good at managment, or promoting them to management gives them a meglomaniacal complex. Sadly as a manager-manager, you have to promote someone (because you can't manage everyone yourself). So as you start thinking like an ass-covering paycheck-cashing manager, manager, yourself, you do the safe thing and promote another ass-covering paycheck-casher that is the least of all evils to save your own butt. See how that works?
You talk about it as if this is somehow a new world order. They don't call it the rat-race for nothing. That term has been around for quite a few ages...
Why do you think so many people go out and start their own companies? Even in more modern times, you can talk about Fairchild and Intel, or HP and Apple. I don't think there were any unions or "flexible" workforces involved in either of those happenings.
Aren't interested in starting your own company yourself, well perhaps you aren't so different from us the ass-covering paycheck-cashing masses. Feel better now?;^)
But only one side invaded a sovereign nation in enforce their will upon it. That invader is by default the 'bad guy'
Britain invaded China (a sovereign nation) and basically enforced their will upon it during the first opium war. Does that make Britian (the invader) by default the 'bad guy'? Then Portugal took advantage of the situation and upgraded their claims on Macau, are they vultures?
Britain and France then invaded China again during the second opium war. Does that make them double 'bad guys'? Then Russia and the US took advantage of this second opium war and also took advantage (although they didn't actually invade), are they vultures?
Maybe we can wind this back all the way to Ghengis Khan and say that it's all payback? Yeah, I didn't think that would fly either...
Sorry, that's just how it goes.
I don't think so, the winners write the history books, right? Thus they decide who the bad guy is... (of course different history books are written/read by different peoples in different countries).
That's true, but global warming isn't about cleaner air. Global warming is the y2k of this decade.
So you are saying it is a very real problem (those extra digits didn't appear by magic) that with proper warning, foresight, and pre-emptive action can be mitigated such that it causes fewer problems. Well then, I must say I agree.
Of course just like Y2K, we must be wary of the quick-fixers that sell their Y2K snake-oil, or the consultants that oogle the pot of money allocated for this problem to offer their pie-in-the-sky unworkable solutions. Just like Y2K problem, it'll take hard work to fix the problems we've buried in our infrastructure, and a realistic view that we can't just throw out the infrastructure tomorrow and start anew (despite what the consultants say). The transition must be doable, not something that may be attractive and athestic, but something concrete and achievable in the required timeframe. We must also have realistic expectations that the solutions will be unique across the globe and no-one will come up with the same solution and there is no right answer and no wrong answer, and we should hope for the wisdom to realize that no matter what we do there will be unforseen problems that will need to be tackled one-by-one as they occur before we just abandon an attempt.
Or we can just winge about why nobody wants tackle this and is waiting for a magic bullet on internet postings... Maybe that will work.;^)
Arthur Anderson should have had its corporate charter revoked and those involve should be sitting in jail. It was a travesty of justice that they got away with only a disgracing.
Well, as I recall Arthur Anderson had their CPA licence revoked (federal and state), they lost all their clients, layed off 85,000 employees and are now just a series of zombie companies which are effectively dead (no clients). W/o a CPA licence and no clients, it's merely a technicality that their corporate charter isn't revoked (the government taskforce noted that it didn't want to waste it's money going the final step given the company was effectively defunct already).
Perhaps you are one of those that probably are miffed that David Duncan (the lead auditor for Enron) isn't sitting in jail. For a while, it seemed like he would be, but the Supreme Court overturned the obstruction of justice conviction of the company. I think this was overturned by the Supreme Court citing among other things it didn't think it was actually illegal to shred documents unless there was a court order preventing it and he had a legal opinion in hand to that effect that backed him up.
Yeah that's probably not justice, but the government didn't think it could win that case either given the laws in effect at that time. Now we have Sarbox, unless you are lobbying for ex-post facto laws, unfortunatly, we'll have to realize that's the problem with a linear time continuum... live and learn.
So she must have also been misrepresenting herself, yes??
Yes.
Which of course still lets MySpace off the hook (safe harbor), and makes it this 13 year old girl's benefactors unlikely to win in a tort-like lawsuit in front of a jury.
However, consider an alternate situation where someone walked across the street not at a crosswalk (jay walking), but someone driving a car saw this and deliberatly swerved in to hit the person. The mere fact that the person was jay walking doesn't eliminate all possible liability of the driver that deliberatly hit the person (the defense that the person shouldn't have been there in the first place so it shouldn't matter that they were killed by the driver of the car isn't gonna fly, right).
Of course the facts and circumstances are all important individualy, but shutter to think of the consequences if it were the case that people had a free pass to inflict deliberate and arbitrary "torts" on other people they saw violating a rule...
Sadly, this case is pretty much about the whole concept of safe harbor. Is there going to be any actual medium for free speech if the carriers of that speech will have to worry about liability? The way the media companies (in the abstract, the ones that provide the medium) can feasible provide the medium for free speech w/o constantly worrying about getting their asses sued off is to provide them some sort of safe harbor.
In this case, the safe harbor is that someone is violating their terms so it's not their fault. So whose fault is it? In the ideal world it's nobodys fault, but in our current litigous society, fault is going to pass to the user if they violate the terms of service (which keeps the media company out of the fault loop).
Suppose MySpace's terms of service was that you can lie about who you are and they don't care. Then everyone communicating in that medium should have the expectation that nobody is who they say they are. W/o that, I'd agree that it's nobodys fault. But without some implicit expectation, myspace isn't nearly as valuable a medium. However, that's all speculation because it's another parallel universe which we don't live in. For the record, the MySpace terms are as follows...
By using the MySpace Services, you represent and warrant that (a) all registration information you submit is truthful and accurate; (b) you will maintain the accuracy of such information; (c) you are 14 years of age or older; and (d) your use of the MySpace Services does not violate any applicable law or regulation.
Of course many may argue that it is irrational to expect all people to follow the terms of service, but it's also irrational that all retails will follow all rules that visa/mastercard has that keep them from defrauding people. Or that all companies will follow terms and conditions on aggregating websites.
So, imagine a situation where some company misrepresents themselves to some larger aggregating website (say like bizrate or amazon prime) as a small mom&pop company in New Hampshire, but is really an overseas front company for organized crime. On this aggregating website, they advertize products and when people order the products it leads them on for a while collecting all sorts of personal information and then when customers least expect it, they sell credit card info and all the personal information to the organized crime syndicate and the customer find a credit card bill of $30K and discovers multiple credit cards opened up in their name due to identity theft, it ruins their credit, causing a loan to fall through on a dream house they were trying to buy. And perhaps this person (being a bit fragile) kills themselves over it.
You could argue that anyone doing business with this go-for-nothing company should have been more careful, checked them out better before giving them your credit card and the other personal information, just get over it since there will be other houses and eventually their credit will be repaired and life will go on. But say it happened and the person killed themselves. Is the company that misrepresented itself liable? Damn strait!
So because this was Myspace and love and not bizrate and money, is it different? Are there any rights involved here on freedom of speech or privacy that I'm missing?
I can't comment if your description of a "node" is true for AMD or not, but the rest of the silicon industry (via the ITRS roadmap) labels technology nodes like 90nm, 65nm, 45nm, 32nm, 32nm, 16nm, etc, etc...
Historically, the ITRS used the term "technology node" to attempt to provide a single, simple indicator of overall industry progress in IC technology by defining it to be the smallest half-pitch of contacted metal lines on any product (usually DRAM), but they have since abandoned this practice of declaring technology nodes (because various parameters are now scaling at widely different rates). Nowdays, in the rest of the semiconductor industry a node often corresponds to some major process enabling technology (e.g., TSMC 45nm combined 193nm immersion photolithography, strained silicon and extreme low-k inter-metal dielectric material).
If you meant that AMD has 7-9 different nodes that evolved from the 45nm node, I guess that's consistant with this too, but not that consistant with everyone elses' use of "node", they would probably call that a "half-node". If you meant that AMD's 45nm technology uses up to 7 to 9 different scaling factors from other technology nodes I guess that is consistant with this too, but I don't think that's standard industry usage of the word "node".
AFAIK, the industry uses the term "half-node" when the somewhere between the main nodes (e.g., at TSMC, 40nm is considered a half-node from 45nm). Normally a half-node is created by some sort of parametric scaling of some of the features of a regular process node to achieve higher transistor density (generally something theoretically in-reach of a regular process node, by tweaking scaling by different amounts). Of course there are usually several different variety of 1/2 nodes (low leakage, high speed variants, etc) developed. But that's no different than the fact there are many different variants at a particular node in any case.
Often process technology folks design something like a 45nm technology node and after they are comfortable with being able to yield it, they spend some time to tweak it to see if they can get a shrink and if the tweakage good enough, they market it as another "half-node" design point. This is a pretty good tradeoff since they can offer a "shrink" to customer using the main node as a cost reduction exercise or a way to scale customized parts of their designs (e.g., cells, rams, I/O pads) w/o radical redesigns (which might happen between major technology shifts) giving a good !/$ for their engineering efforts.
The reason why many folks think it's weird to design something that probably has a lot of custom stuff like a CPU-GPU hybrid in a half-node is that new things take a long time to design and with processes technology a moving target, it's nice to be able to schedule in a "shrink" and get a low effort cost reduction during the useful sellable lifetime for a product. By starting production in a half-node, to get a cost reduction worth the engineering effort, you'll probably have to redesign/layout the chip in the next technology node (say 32nm which may have lots of different non-compatible features and take lots of effort like a new high-k gate dielectric).
You are missing the fact that all this "us and them" treatment is what fragments our society
Actually, I'm not missing that fact. I can't think of a single society that doesn't have "us" and "them". A society is naturally a fragment of a larger group. Are you saying that a society is not allowed to decide who is in the inclusion set and who is in the exclusion set? Sure that may be fragmenting, but that's what societies do. You may not like a particular fragmenting, but it isn't necessarily a goal of the society for all it's members to like the particular fragmentation. For instance, linux vs open BSD? GPL2 vs GPL3?
You may think it's always been about Dems and Rep in the US, but recall there were originally the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. As I recall both the Dems and Reps were orignally the group that came out of the Anti-Federalists. The Democractic-Republican party eventually came to power was mostly controlled by the southern slaveowners, and dropped the Republican name part of their name. The republicans came to pass by certain people's desire the resurect the old ideals of the Democratic-Republican Party (they called themselve Republicans) because they didn't like the power of the slave-owners. And so-on and so-forth. New "societies" spring forth from old societies by redefining the inclusion and exclusion criteria. I don't see how it has ever been any different.
This is what makes us susceptible to abominations of government such as the Bush administration, because they still have a fragment of unity while the rest of us have been divided and conquered.
I don't see a point here other than the observation some pluralistic situations allow a minority to dominate. What is your point? Are you suggesting that some "excluded" people put aside their differences to meet a common enemy? How is that more civilized? Isn't that the definition of just playing politics, putting aside some of your ideals?
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Gotta start getting ready for 2012, just gotta do it, can't let those chinese show them up, right?
Perhaps the New Labour party is thinking if they become the laughing stock of security during 2012, they risk a quicker return to the wilderness years...
Some day one of our grandkids will have a study reporting that most people born before 2020 dream in 2D where all people born after dream in 3D. This will no doubt attributed to invention of the holodeck and 3d television. People will wonder if most people born before 1400 dreamt in 3D and we've been warping our brains into 2D for the last six centuries of entertainment options consisting of paintings, printed words television and youtube...
Then their great-great-grandkids will discover that in the past people didn't dream with a start, middle, and an end like most entertainment and we've all been figments of someone's imagination who was just dreaming for the last few million years... Now won't that be something ;^)
Of course the french dream in Something Entirely Contrary to the American Method...
I don't think I was advocating WW-III as a shock, but more abstractly that there needs to be some sort of shock otherwize usually nothing happens. In the parable, the hidden variable is there doesn't seem to be any trigger event to give the impetus for shop keeper to improve his store with double pane glass or a skylight to cause this "positive" chain of events until the stone is thrown. I'm just hope we all survive whatever that shock happens that gets up going again (of course if the shock is WW-III many may not survive).
Sadly, there is probably a kernel of insight into the the part where a few hundered thousand are shoved in to the ocean and lost. It seems like every once in a while, something catastrophic happens (e.g. Black plague, 1918 influenza epidemic, WWII, etc) that kills off a whole bunch of people and causes a rebound effect which stimulates the economy.
I'm not sure this kind of extreme stuff is such a good idea, but it's talked about in the parable of the broken window. In a similar vein the stone soup style mechanism to stimulate the economy seems to also work. Ironically, these are both tricks that seem to take advantage of the fact that the economy is really not a zero sum game (despite what all the anti-fiat-currency folks would want you to believe).
If you can accept that these type of tricks can stimulate economic growth, it's not a small step to think that just about anything could be the accidental trigger for a macro-economic effect and we are just currently living though a "butterfly-effect" of some chain of events and we need a shock-stimulus to reset a normal rhythm. Certainly this kind of stuff seems very unscientific, but I'm guessing it'll be something like a shock which will probably get us out of our current mess and not some "smart" person figuring deep truth about the overly complicated global economic system. Hopefully whatever the shock is won't kill us, but will make us stronger ;^)
Securitized mortgages aren't the cause of the current problem, the CDS "insurance" products that backed up the sub-prime securitized mortgages are the main problem. Followed by the rating agencies looking the other way.
Imagine if company "A" was tired of turning-over safe securitized mortgages for pidly profits and wanted to sell some stupid thing that would generate a higher return (e.g., sub-prime mortgages). The problem is that there is no market for these the stupid products (because of the risk).
Imagine if company "B" could sell an "insurance" product that wasn't really regulated as insurance so you could write simple business2business contracts to cover arbitrary credit defaults and collect a premium without any required reserve in case shit hit the fan.
Imagine now that company "A" thinks they can mitigate the risk of their new stupid sub-prime-securitized mortgage product by pairing them with company B's "insurance-like" CDS product. But that isn't really that great yet (since they have to pay the premium), so they chop up the security into various tranches (senior debt vs second-tier debt) because presumably only a fraction of the underlying mortgages will default. Company "A" suggests to the ratings agencies the senior tranches of this stupid product should be AAA-rated like US-treasuries because of course there could "never" be that many defaults. They can now sell this senior tranch with a really low interest rate (more money for them) and the second-tier debt at a higher interest rate. They make so much money on the senior tranch (because it's AAA) to cover up for the premium and the presumed risk-return of the second-tier debt.
Company "A" is happy because they created a new product that is more marketable since they mitigated the risk with this "insurance-like" product, Company "B" is happy because they are collecting this premium.
Now imagine if the standard terms for these contracts didn't require you to hold the actual primary credit risk that could be defaulted on (e.g., you could speculatively "bet" on someone elses default). Now imagine speculation on in that market for these contract. This allows this instrument to be used by hedge funds to partially hedge against buying all these stupid second-tier product and getting the high interest rate (so there are CDS on the primary credit and also hedges in the second-tier debt market).
Imagine now that shit has hit the fan and company "B" realizes that company "A" can't make good on their contract because there's no reserve. Not only did company "A" write these contracts on primary debt (which could presumably be "fixed" by guaranteeing the primary debt), but they have secondary exposure to the second-tier debt (the tail tranches that were really crappy mortgages that were expected to default first).
Now nobody wants to touch these stupid AAA-rated products because the CDS part of the product is really of unknown quality (probably insolvent companies) and the mortgages are also of unknown (probably bad) quality. This causes the credit freeze because nobody wants to lend money to a bank that has too many assest of this type (because they don't know if the company is solvent or not).
So the inventors of the CDS are the real villian. They allowed this stupid product to exist and were unregulated so that companies could write contracts that they really didn't have a reasonable reserve for. They ratings agencies are also to blame because they created a situation with a risk-return anomoly where a product could be sold which didn't have the proper risk-return allowing companies to make an unreasonable amount of profit selling the product (because they weren't paying out an interest rate to compensate for the risk).
So who invented this CDS idea? I don't know, but I bet it was one of those financial "geeks" or "quants". Who came up with the ideas for hedging with these products? Probably the same folks. Who allowed a CDS to not be classified as an insurance contract and thus regulated? Why our current bribe taking friends in congress of course...
Here's the original...
Here's the source...
Surprise! GPU acceleration is already in version 8.x
I don't think I would define nationalized that way. For example, the post office (USPS) and Amtrack are nationalized. If for some reason there were massive lawsuits, (e.g., the USPS decided to convert their vehicles to burn on some fuel that turned out to destroy the planet), or massive debts, the US government would be forced to pay up.
The situation for FNM & FRE, is a convervatorship and it has promised to backstop their mortgage backed securities market (maybe not the full faith and credit, but a pretty big promise/contract) and actually put in capital to maintain their solvency. That's probably closer to a nationalization under a definition that most people would agree on.
It's my understanding that AIG is slightly different in that for AIG, that US Govt is basically a stockholder (admittedly a major shareholder), just like any other shareholders, the maximum liability is generally considered equal to the value of their investment. The $85B money is loaned to AIG, backed by its assets and a share in the company. The operations of AIG are not backed by the full faith and credit of the US and there is no commitment to maintain solvency.
You might argue that by putting "our" collective necks out for AIG, we will get sucked in if and when the AIG situation deteriorates to protect our initial $85B investement so it's more like a nationalization of AIG, but that's probably were you and I differ. I would argue that this is currently more like a loan with conditions (not structured very differently than what a private entity would do if the govt had it's way), and less like a nationalization. But it certainly could go that way eventually.
As I recall, BofA initially loaned Countrywide money, but eventually as conditions deteriorated, it was essentially forced to ingest Countrywide to protect its initial investment. But we collectively haven't gotten there with AIG. Yet.
Until I heard about this company
Before you click, be forwarned they have a live demo on their homepage which estimates your longitude and latitude based on your IP address...
Just wait until they get one of these databases going for RFID tags...
Okay, if you don't like 20 years, how 'bout this...
Transistor: 1948
Bikini: 1946
Velcro: 1948
Is that close enough? ;^)
As Richard Feynman once said "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts"
He also had this comment in his classic speech "Cargo Cult Science"
I don't think I'm as optimistic as Feynman that it's only a small group of scientists that don't have "that kind of disease"...
I think historically, often early engineering solutions are adhoc and based on elementary math and physics. As the field matures, it taps into cutting edge physics and mathematics for furthur refinement. the limiting factors of adoption of refinements are often economic not technical. That's why they take so long, not because there are generally techical limitations.
For example, humans engineered bridges long before finite element solvers and vibrational modes were generally known and accounted for in the design. Even computers (e.g., mechanical or relay computers) were engineered before the physics behind transistors were discovered. Once the physics and mathematics were discovered, the real limitations behind the application of these refinements were economic velocity.
If anything has sped up in our world is the application of large scale economic leverage to problem. In the pre-modern world, finding large markets and mustering the capital to realize a technical advance was career in itself (think about the early explorers visiting kings and queens to get financial support to sail their boat to try and find the "passage-to-india"). The want was not the physics or math (the navigation technology and the boats were all available for years), but raising the financial backing was hard. Even in the so called industrial age, capital was still quite centralized to big corporations and governments and international markets were not very well developed often due to massive tariffs and other trade barriers.
Now with modern investment markets and international trading, people with good ideas (and some people that don't have good ideas), have unprecedented backing of capital and available markets to press forward with just about any application that is feasible. If it's true that the barriers to adoption of cutting edge stuff from math or physics are really only limited by economic factors (which may be as long as before if the technology is expensive and the market demand isn't present), the time should be shorter. It's not because the advances are a high level that they will take a long time to be developed, it's because they don't have any market or require excessive capital for the available market that they will have problems being adopted.
For example, if some cutting edge math or physics discovery resulted in a battery that was exponentially better (e.g., cheaper/ligher), than today, I'd bet it would be in an electric car and/or ipod in a matter of a few years as there would be massive investment made in that area to develop the engineering required. However, if we had a way to make $5billion microscopic black holes that nobody wanted, that would take quite a while to be available at radio-shack as a party favor or gag gift...
The original name of the chip (apparently) was Godson ( gou-shèng, roughly translates to dog scraps) and seems to still be refered to by that name in english. Actually, I think they changed the name of the chip to Loongson ( lóng-xin where x is pronounced like ~sh, roughly translates to dragon core or imperial chip).
Probably because gou-shèng it wasn't that great of a name and chinese have a habit of changing names of things to change their luck. Strangly, google still translates the new chinese name to Godson (I guess as a proper name instead of the new chinese pronunciation to be extra confusing to everyone).
However, coincidentally, word for dog is pronounced somewhat like god in chinese (actually gou). I wonder if that has some hidden meaning ;^)
Perhaps you could use a number-theoretic fft (using modular arithmetic instead of fp arithmetic) on a gpu to avoid the errors accumulation. Although old gpus only processed single precision fp, new gpus can process 24-bit integer multiplication at full speed as well (at least for nvidia's cuda). You probably gain a little bit of accuracy using NTTs vs single precision FP FFTs (where you probabaly need a few guard bits to avoid subtraction errors) which is likely an exponental speedup with these types of algorithms.
Of course the double precision arithmetic is only somewhat slower than single precision on GPUs, but consumes twice the register space (so on actual algorithms, it runs quite a bit slower because of this). Right now, GPU ffts are quite a bit faster than CPU ffts, but not yet 10x (unless you have a very large GPU and a fairly ordinary CPU) if you copy the data back to the CPU every time after an fft, but if you leave the data in the GPU and code the rest of the digit-convolution algorithm on the GPU, I'll bet it isn't that far off of 10x on average.
Of course Bela Karolyi wolud think the age restriction is stupid. If he agreed with it, then he'd have to admit it was probably wrong that his star Nadia Comneci got a gold medal for her perfect 10 in 1976. Not that I agree with the age restriction either, but expecting Mr. Karolyi to present an unbiased view is kinda silly, no?
Actually, the doping tests basically have similar problems. They often keep the test mechanisms and thresholds basically arbitrary, sometimes secret, and not dependent on body parameters that are different for different people, so there is an unknown number of false-positives. A recent paper on this subject...
Of course the media reports such tests as unassailable, so when a rumor of a certain result surfaces, it basically becomes a pseudo-fact (instead of an interpretation of a test presented with other required evidence). Even though it's generally conceded that most of the atheletes are probably on the far extremes of the normal distributions in various attributes already, it seems that collectively people feel that there should be some sort of statistically valid test for various mechanism that people might use to physiologically "cheat" the system.
I doubt there could be any trustable test for age (including a passport or a birth certificate). But given the "anti-doping" mania, I don't doubt there will be someone that crawls out of the woodwork and gives people a test for what they are yammering for even if it isn't based on any sound scientific principles. The media will no doubt report it as a long awaited for "age-doping" test (or some other nonsensical name) panecea which will eventually get enough traction to revoke olymic medals, and overturn results of college and highschool athletics contests... Maybe we should all start an IPO watch on PWC-GMBH and CeresNano...
Change the following sentence to "working for someone as a serf is not about innovating, or being creative. It's about producing enough to cover you ass..." and then I'll agree.
The main part I disagree with about is that it isn't really just a choice between unions or flexible workforce. How about union ownership of companies? How about non-vertical integration of companies? What's with all these straw-man arguments that unions and anti-union folk spit up?
If you think your company is so mismanaged that they are promoting people that just cover their asses, perhaps you should start your own company and try to hire managers. The truth is most human beings like to cash paychecks and cover their asses. This applies to union members, non-union members, and managers, and most workers in general.
The other truth is that it's damn hard to make money, but once you figure it out, it usually seems easier to make more by "hiring" people. However, finding these mystical altruistic people that like to work hard is nearly impossible. Even if you found such a person, then you usually can't afford to pay them enough to stay and you don't really want to promote them either because either they probably aren't very good at managment, or promoting them to management gives them a meglomaniacal complex. Sadly as a manager-manager, you have to promote someone (because you can't manage everyone yourself). So as you start thinking like an ass-covering paycheck-cashing manager, manager, yourself, you do the safe thing and promote another ass-covering paycheck-casher that is the least of all evils to save your own butt. See how that works?
You talk about it as if this is somehow a new world order. They don't call it the rat-race for nothing. That term has been around for quite a few ages...
Why do you think so many people go out and start their own companies? Even in more modern times, you can talk about Fairchild and Intel, or HP and Apple. I don't think there were any unions or "flexible" workforces involved in either of those happenings.
Aren't interested in starting your own company yourself, well perhaps you aren't so different from us the ass-covering paycheck-cashing masses. Feel better now? ;^)
Britain invaded China (a sovereign nation) and basically enforced their will upon it during the first opium war. Does that make Britian (the invader) by default the 'bad guy'? Then Portugal took advantage of the situation and upgraded their claims on Macau, are they vultures?
Britain and France then invaded China again during the second opium war. Does that make them double 'bad guys'? Then Russia and the US took advantage of this second opium war and also took advantage (although they didn't actually invade), are they vultures?
Maybe we can wind this back all the way to Ghengis Khan and say that it's all payback? Yeah, I didn't think that would fly either...
I don't think so, the winners write the history books, right? Thus they decide who the bad guy is... (of course different history books are written/read by different peoples in different countries).
Of course just like Y2K, we must be wary of the quick-fixers that sell their Y2K snake-oil, or the consultants that oogle the pot of money allocated for this problem to offer their pie-in-the-sky unworkable solutions. Just like Y2K problem, it'll take hard work to fix the problems we've buried in our infrastructure, and a realistic view that we can't just throw out the infrastructure tomorrow and start anew (despite what the consultants say). The transition must be doable, not something that may be attractive and athestic, but something concrete and achievable in the required timeframe. We must also have realistic expectations that the solutions will be unique across the globe and no-one will come up with the same solution and there is no right answer and no wrong answer, and we should hope for the wisdom to realize that no matter what we do there will be unforseen problems that will need to be tackled one-by-one as they occur before we just abandon an attempt.
Or we can just winge about why nobody wants tackle this and is waiting for a magic bullet on internet postings... Maybe that will work. ;^)
Well, as I recall Arthur Anderson had their CPA licence revoked (federal and state), they lost all their clients, layed off 85,000 employees and are now just a series of zombie companies which are effectively dead (no clients). W/o a CPA licence and no clients, it's merely a technicality that their corporate charter isn't revoked (the government taskforce noted that it didn't want to waste it's money going the final step given the company was effectively defunct already).
Perhaps you are one of those that probably are miffed that David Duncan (the lead auditor for Enron) isn't sitting in jail. For a while, it seemed like he would be, but the Supreme Court overturned the obstruction of justice conviction of the company. I think this was overturned by the Supreme Court citing among other things it didn't think it was actually illegal to shred documents unless there was a court order preventing it and he had a legal opinion in hand to that effect that backed him up.
Yeah that's probably not justice, but the government didn't think it could win that case either given the laws in effect at that time. Now we have Sarbox, unless you are lobbying for ex-post facto laws, unfortunatly, we'll have to realize that's the problem with a linear time continuum... live and learn.
Yes.
Yes.
Which of course still lets MySpace off the hook (safe harbor), and makes it this 13 year old girl's benefactors unlikely to win in a tort-like lawsuit in front of a jury.
However, consider an alternate situation where someone walked across the street not at a crosswalk (jay walking), but someone driving a car saw this and deliberatly swerved in to hit the person. The mere fact that the person was jay walking doesn't eliminate all possible liability of the driver that deliberatly hit the person (the defense that the person shouldn't have been there in the first place so it shouldn't matter that they were killed by the driver of the car isn't gonna fly, right).
Of course the facts and circumstances are all important individualy, but shutter to think of the consequences if it were the case that people had a free pass to inflict deliberate and arbitrary "torts" on other people they saw violating a rule...
Sadly, this case is pretty much about the whole concept of safe harbor. Is there going to be any actual medium for free speech if the carriers of that speech will have to worry about liability? The way the media companies (in the abstract, the ones that provide the medium) can feasible provide the medium for free speech w/o constantly worrying about getting their asses sued off is to provide them some sort of safe harbor.
In this case, the safe harbor is that someone is violating their terms so it's not their fault. So whose fault is it? In the ideal world it's nobodys fault, but in our current litigous society, fault is going to pass to the user if they violate the terms of service (which keeps the media company out of the fault loop).
Suppose MySpace's terms of service was that you can lie about who you are and they don't care. Then everyone communicating in that medium should have the expectation that nobody is who they say they are. W/o that, I'd agree that it's nobodys fault. But without some implicit expectation, myspace isn't nearly as valuable a medium. However, that's all speculation because it's another parallel universe which we don't live in. For the record, the MySpace terms are as follows...
By using the MySpace Services, you represent and warrant that (a) all registration information you submit is truthful and accurate; (b) you will maintain the accuracy of such information; (c) you are 14 years of age or older; and (d) your use of the MySpace Services does not violate any applicable law or regulation.
Of course many may argue that it is irrational to expect all people to follow the terms of service, but it's also irrational that all retails will follow all rules that visa/mastercard has that keep them from defrauding people. Or that all companies will follow terms and conditions on aggregating websites.
So, imagine a situation where some company misrepresents themselves to some larger aggregating website (say like bizrate or amazon prime) as a small mom&pop company in New Hampshire, but is really an overseas front company for organized crime. On this aggregating website, they advertize products and when people order the products it leads them on for a while collecting all sorts of personal information and then when customers least expect it, they sell credit card info and all the personal information to the organized crime syndicate and the customer find a credit card bill of $30K and discovers multiple credit cards opened up in their name due to identity theft, it ruins their credit, causing a loan to fall through on a dream house they were trying to buy. And perhaps this person (being a bit fragile) kills themselves over it.
You could argue that anyone doing business with this go-for-nothing company should have been more careful, checked them out better before giving them your credit card and the other personal information, just get over it since there will be other houses and eventually their credit will be repaired and life will go on. But say it happened and the person killed themselves. Is the company that misrepresented itself liable? Damn strait!
So because this was Myspace and love and not bizrate and money, is it different? Are there any rights involved here on freedom of speech or privacy that I'm missing?
I can't comment if your description of a "node" is true for AMD or not, but the rest of the silicon industry (via the ITRS roadmap) labels technology nodes like 90nm, 65nm, 45nm, 32nm, 32nm, 16nm, etc, etc...
Historically, the ITRS used the term "technology node" to attempt to provide a single, simple indicator of overall industry progress in IC technology by defining it to be the smallest half-pitch of contacted metal lines on any product (usually DRAM), but they have since abandoned this practice of declaring technology nodes (because various parameters are now scaling at widely different rates). Nowdays, in the rest of the semiconductor industry a node often corresponds to some major process enabling technology (e.g., TSMC 45nm combined 193nm immersion photolithography, strained silicon and extreme low-k inter-metal dielectric material).
If you meant that AMD has 7-9 different nodes that evolved from the 45nm node, I guess that's consistant with this too, but not that consistant with everyone elses' use of "node", they would probably call that a "half-node". If you meant that AMD's 45nm technology uses up to 7 to 9 different scaling factors from other technology nodes I guess that is consistant with this too, but I don't think that's standard industry usage of the word "node".
AFAIK, the industry uses the term "half-node" when the somewhere between the main nodes (e.g., at TSMC, 40nm is considered a half-node from 45nm). Normally a half-node is created by some sort of parametric scaling of some of the features of a regular process node to achieve higher transistor density (generally something theoretically in-reach of a regular process node, by tweaking scaling by different amounts). Of course there are usually several different variety of 1/2 nodes (low leakage, high speed variants, etc) developed. But that's no different than the fact there are many different variants at a particular node in any case.
Often process technology folks design something like a 45nm technology node and after they are comfortable with being able to yield it, they spend some time to tweak it to see if they can get a shrink and if the tweakage good enough, they market it as another "half-node" design point. This is a pretty good tradeoff since they can offer a "shrink" to customer using the main node as a cost reduction exercise or a way to scale customized parts of their designs (e.g., cells, rams, I/O pads) w/o radical redesigns (which might happen between major technology shifts) giving a good !/$ for their engineering efforts.
The reason why many folks think it's weird to design something that probably has a lot of custom stuff like a CPU-GPU hybrid in a half-node is that new things take a long time to design and with processes technology a moving target, it's nice to be able to schedule in a "shrink" and get a low effort cost reduction during the useful sellable lifetime for a product. By starting production in a half-node, to get a cost reduction worth the engineering effort, you'll probably have to redesign/layout the chip in the next technology node (say 32nm which may have lots of different non-compatible features and take lots of effort like a new high-k gate dielectric).
Actually, I'm not missing that fact. I can't think of a single society that doesn't have "us" and "them". A society is naturally a fragment of a larger group. Are you saying that a society is not allowed to decide who is in the inclusion set and who is in the exclusion set? Sure that may be fragmenting, but that's what societies do. You may not like a particular fragmenting, but it isn't necessarily a goal of the society for all it's members to like the particular fragmentation. For instance, linux vs open BSD? GPL2 vs GPL3?
You may think it's always been about Dems and Rep in the US, but recall there were originally the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. As I recall both the Dems and Reps were orignally the group that came out of the Anti-Federalists. The Democractic-Republican party eventually came to power was mostly controlled by the southern slaveowners, and dropped the Republican name part of their name. The republicans came to pass by certain people's desire the resurect the old ideals of the Democratic-Republican Party (they called themselve Republicans) because they didn't like the power of the slave-owners. And so-on and so-forth. New "societies" spring forth from old societies by redefining the inclusion and exclusion criteria. I don't see how it has ever been any different.
I don't see a point here other than the observation some pluralistic situations allow a minority to dominate. What is your point? Are you suggesting that some "excluded" people put aside their differences to meet a common enemy? How is that more civilized? Isn't that the definition of just playing politics, putting aside some of your ideals?