Right now AMD is uncompetative as long as they are behind by one generation. Like for example an A8 is only HALF the performance of an i7.
In case you weren't aware, Amd A8/Llano is on 32nm as is Intel i7/sandybridge. Intel is shortly moving to the 22nm with Ivybridge...
If Amd abandons Global Foundaries, in the same timeframe, they would likely have tape out on TSMC's 28nm** technology. If Amd is going to wait, maybe they can use TSMC's new 20nm*** technology.
In general, so how is AMD supposed to keep up with Intel when they don't have access bleeding edge new process technology? This isn't just a "right now" problem, this is gonna be a problem for the forseeable future...
Rather AMD needs to build CPU's that cost less than the i7 but offer performance within a narrow band (eg 8%) of Intel parts at the same price, or half the TDP.
I'm sure they'd love to do that, but it doesn't seem to be in the cards. I think the fact they are abandoning GloFo is an admission that they can't compete in the high end server biz w/ GloFo as the fab. GloFo's process-tech-Fu doesn't compete with Intel's...
** TSMC's 28nm process is actually a 32nm node shrink. Since TSMC couldn't get their 32nm process node going, the decided to abandon it and concentrate on the 32nm 1/2 node "shrink" (aka 28nm with High-K metal gates). This is not unlike how TSMC didn't get 45nm working very well and then quickly moved everyone to 40nm 1/2 node process. Not saying this to bash TSMC, but to illustrate how good Intel is in comparsion to the rest of the fabs out there...
*** TSMC decided to pre-announce that they are skip 22nm and 18nm in advance and are rolling out only a 20nm process (I guess the history with 45nm and 32nm basically convinced them to concentrate their efforts on the 1/2 node). Details are slim, although they hinted at it will be Bulk (not Silicon on Insulator or SOI) and Planar (not 3D FinFET) which is less advanced than Intel's 22nm processor (SOI+FinFET).
A better question is when did Pierce Brosnan become a physicist?
I guess we know why he turned James Bond down.
Pierce Brosnan became a physicist in The World is not Enough... Of course the better questions are why did he quit doing that physicist gig to go sing ABBA songs and how in the hell did Denise Richards become a physicist?
So people wonder why there is the preponderance of people studying the likes of Homeopathy, Chinese Herbal Medicine, Accupuncture, Chiropractic Studies... But I don't think it's a mystery. It's really an extension of the primal "need" of societies to have shaman and oracles, and for people to aspire to be in those positions in society.
Staying alive is hard, staying healthly is even harder. There's no textbook that can tell you how to do those things. Sure, there are lots of theories and scientific practice that goes around, but of course none of it is 100% appplicable to your situation. So you seek out advice and treatments, from... and this is where it gets interesting.
Of course "western" medicine and science has conquered quite a bit of the big-ticket stuff that has ailed the human race, but you have to look under the hood a bit to see exactly how this has been done. Sure there's some anatomy and bio-chem going on, but to a large extent modern medicine has been just about refining protocols. The stereotypical protocol is something like this: if you have these symptoms, and I make this diagnosis, do this treatment (often a dose of a chemical) for this amount of time. How was the treatment found? Usually at first purely by trial and error (in fact many therapies are initially "off-label" drug use), and later by refinement using differential testing... That sounds very scientific, but the catch is, how was the diagnosis done? That's a big part of the protocol and then you start to realize that most of western medicine is really just probablisitic. If you have these poorly defined symptoms, you probably have this diagnosis and this treatment probably helps, but if it doesn't, this treatment probably helps, etc, etc.... You can't do a clinical trial on yourself, and not everyone is the same... In this light pseudo-science is just a different set of probablities, coupled with a strong history and the equally strong placebo effect (w/o the scientific backing). It's just like "western" GP dispensing anti-biotics for a cold (but probably less harmful)... If medicine was practiced by science instead of protocol, by they time the virus or bacteria was cultured and analysed, you'd be over it and on to your next ailment...
But that doesn't answer why do these alternative medical practioners exist at all? I personally believe it's a combination of two things: a certain segment of the population aspires to be the folk who are consulted for advice and the opportunity to "buy oneself" into a status profession like a medical profession. But what if you aspire to be "consulted", but don't have the money or the academic background to get into medicine? That's right, you get yourself into pseudo-medicine. It's almost the same status and you get to fulfil your need to be the authority consulted for advice on being healthy.
But why do the patients come to them (and the TV talk shows interview them)? It's because they tell the patients what they want to hear (as opposed to many "western" doctors which apparently aren't trained to listen very well and as a group tend to treat small ailments in binary fashion as either "in-your-head" or "we-have-to-order-lots-of-invasive-tests-to-make-a-diagnosis"). You can call it holistic medicine or whatever you want, but often folks are just seeking the small advice about staying healthy and loathe the binary decision tree protocol. If standard "western" medicine would do a better job at offering advice, these types of alternative medicine practices wouldn't be as successful as they are.
And for the the people wanting to give advice? They'd have to seek out some other status profession... Maybe pseudo-techno-geek?;^)
My favorite answer is that it is probably because it isn't worth it the expense (in energy) to travel here. If you had access to the energy it would likely take to traverse the distance you would likely be effectively be infinitely wealthy where you were. Why choose to send a few folks to be gods to a bunch of ants when there are much better things to spend your resources on locally? You'd think that the typcial/. poster would see the potential logic in this explanation as they often have everything they want delivered to thier home cave by UPS with 1-click of a mouse...
You'd think that, of all events, security conferences would have tight security.
Why?
I suspect the cost/hassle of doing more than basic security outweighs the benefit of catching a few people who didn't want to pay the $100 conference fee. I doubt the information being presented is secret and needs protecting. And I imagine of all conference organizers, the organizers of a security conference would have best grasp on this security cost/benefit.
Of course in many conference venues (like the moscone center where the RSA conference is held), you must use the approved contractors that use local union labor to handle things like setup, teardown, electrical, network installation, theatrical services, and security. You don't really get to customize stuff like this too much, so security is probably exactly the same as any other conference at the same venue.
Quick background: Currently clocks on most generic chips today are structured as trees. As you can imagine the fan-out of the clock trees is pretty large and thus require clock buffers/driver circuits which need to be balanced so that clock signal gets to the leaves at about the same time (in a typical design where you don't use a lot of physical design tricks). To ease balancing the propagation delay, the clock tree is often physically looks like a fractalized "H" (just imagine the root clock driving in the center of the crossbar out towards the leaves at the corners of the "H", the wire lengths of the clock tree segments are the same, then the corners the big H driving the center of a smaller "H", etc, etc). Of course at the leaves, there can be some residual imbalance due to small manufacturing variations and wire loading and that has to be accounted for in closing the timing for the chip (to avoid short paths), and ultimatly these imbalances limit the upper frequencies achievable by the chip.
Additional background: In any electrical circuit, there are some so-called resonant frequencies because of the distributed (or lumped) inductance and capacitances in the network. That is some frequencies experience a lot less energy loss than average (for the car analogy buffs, you can get your car to "bounce" quite easily if you bounce it at it's resonant frequency).
The basic idea of the Cyclos technology is to "short-circuit" the middle of the clock tree on the chip with a mesh to make sure all the middle of the clock tree is coordinated to be the same clock (as oppposed to a typical H tree clock, in every stage the jitter builds up from the root). That way you avoid some of the imbalances the limit the upper frequencies achievable by the chip. The reason I say "short-circuit" is that it really isn't a "short circuit". If you just arbitrarily put in a mesh in the middle of a clock tree, although it would tend to get the clocks aligned, it would presents a very large capacitive and inductive load to drive and would likely increase power greatly. **Except** if that mesh was designed so that it resonated at the frequency that you were going to drive the clock, then you can get the benefit of jitter reduction w/o the power cost. Since you get to pick the physical design parameters of the mesh (wire width, length, and grid spacing, and external tank circuit inductance) and the target frequency, theoretically you can design that mesh to be resonant (well, that remains to be seen).
The reason this idea hasn't been used to date is that it's a hard problem to create the mesh with the proper parameters and now the processor really has to just run at that frequency all the time (well, you can do clock cycle eating to approximate lower frequencies). Designers have gotten better at these things now and the area budgets for these types of things have gotten in the affordable range as transistors have gotten smaller.
FWIW, In a pipeline design (like a cpu), sometimes it's advantagous to have a clock-follows-signal clocking topology or even an async strategy instead of a clock tree, but there of course is a complication if there is a loop or cycle in the pipeline (often this happens at say a register file or a bypass path in the pipeline), so that trick is limited in appliciablity, where the mesh idea is really a more general solution to clock network jjitter problems.
I don't think Mr Buffett nor Mr Gates are particularly moral, they seem to be really just doing this to "pad" their future historical biography
Eh, I don't like this argument. If you go looking for it, you can find a potential ulterior motive for just about anything anyone does, and a reason to belittle anyone's efforts. But most people I know who choose to live their life from that perspective -- everyone is corrupt and in it for themselves; nothing is genuinely altruistic; everyone has a damning skeleton in their closet that proves they're really a worthless piece of crap; etc. -- wind up bitter and miserable at best.
If you are insinuating that I live my life finding ulterior motives, that's sad for you. I don't believe everyone is corrupt or in it for themselves at all. To the contrary, I believe in charity in all of its forms. My point was that for Messrs Gates and Buffett, money was likely a NOP. They were mostly the same people they were before money (no more moral to counter the point made by the parent post).
Everything we do in life is inevitably flawed and ridiculous; every effort we make to help is compromised by our own shortsightedness and humanity. But all that is still better than being so fixated on being "perfect" and unimpeachable that you never do anything positive at all, and turn into Waldorf & Statler instead.
Wow, bitter much? Although one might argue that the investement strategy of the BMG foundation is a bit suspect for an allegedly "moral" charity (although not out of line with their non-charitable investment strategies). Narcissistic is a probably a reflection of their own personalities (as opposed to say the multitude of anonymous Kmart layaway donations of the past holiday season). Is it your opinion is that anyone who dares to criticize the great Messr Gates and Buffett must be bitter and miserable at best and never do anything positive at all? (hey made some assumptions about me didn't you?)
Although it really isn't important to my point, personally, I like to make all my donations anonymously (I have no use for stupid chartity dinners recognition parties which just show up as fundraising overhead, nor walls of tiles or plaques which roll out for donors to clutter up architectural features of buildings). I don't have the resources of Messer Gates, or Buffett, but perhaps that kind of recognition is unavoidable at their level of charity... Maybe I'll find out someday (probably not, won't ever have that kind of money, and I value my privacy way too much).
Sure I'm not perfect either and maybe I've pick a wrong charity or two in the past but neither are they perfect and the fact that they "passed the billion mark", doesn't really make them more moral (the point of the original poster). Perhaps money just helps you find out what type of person you really are (that's what my opinon is, anyhow)...
Up to a point, then they become moral again because it no longer means as much. I think it occurs once you get past the billionaire mark: Examples: Warren Buffet, Bill Gates...
First, there are just as many counter examples Steve Jobs, Larry Elison, Donald Trump, etc, etc... Secondly, I don't think Mr Buffett nor Mr Gates are particularly moral, they seem to be really just doing this to "pad" their future historical biography (not unlike JD Rockefeller).
Apparently, Mr Buffett wanted to give his money for his wife to donate as she desired (as payback for his "cheating", well it's more complicated than that, but I digress). Since his wife died earlier than Mr Buffett and he didn't seem to trust his long term "girlfriend/housekeeper" with that role, he decided just do matching donations w/ the BMG Foundation with all that money he was saving for his wife. On the other hand, The BMG Foundation's investment philosophy (for the money they haven't spent yet as opposed to the money they are putting to use) is to maximize return which often put it at odds with the same people they are trying to help (high pollution companies, or big-pharma companies). A common gripe about the BMGF is that they seem to only pick-up high-profile healthcare issues which sometimes divert attention to basic healthcare which is also needed by the same population groups. Also, as I understand it, the BMG Foundation also isn't structured to last forever either. All money must be spent before the 50th anniversary of Bill and Melinda's death, so they basically have to spend it all pretty quickly and after the causes they are funding dry up, well, that's all they wrote...
Not saying that Mr Gates and/or Mr Buffett are moral or not, but I don't think these examples show that billionaires either as a group or as individuals become particularly more moral because of their inflated monetary status. In fact, these particular examples seem to show that for some, money is just a NOP. On the other hand, one might argue that they appear less moral that the person that spends 50% of their time helping a neighbor, or stops investing their money with companies that pollute the environment and perhaps a bit narcissistic for wanting specific credit for their donation of resources.
Hey, if they don't want us out drinking and driving, why do they not just BAN establishments outside the home from serving alcohol?
A bit of hypocrisy to allow establishments, who serve NOTHING but alcohol (the common bar) with large parking lots which allow people to drive there, and park their cars and go inside and partake of the product the bar is serving....and then get pissed off when those people get back in their cars to drive home or to another bar (or somewhere to get laid).
Of course, then people will just get trashed before they go to the dance clubs (where they don't serve alcohol)...
In my teens (when I was 18, so was the drinking age), knew plenty of people who used to do that all the time. To avoid the high cost of alcohol in the bars, for some heavy drinkers in the group it was often "one to get ready, two for the road". As the drinking age was slowly raised to 21, almost all the teeny bopper bars were segmented part dance club (18-up), part bar (drinking age and up), but that didn't stop the 18yo-ers from getting sloshed at home before going out. Although when I went out we always had plenty of designated drivers (most of the girls in my group of friends didn't drink), I imagine other groups (or people going out by themselves), didn't.
You did however touch on the real problem: money. Sporting events, Restaurants, and Clubs all serve because it makes a tidy profit. Bars just distill this down to the highest margin product. FWIW, Kansas tried that whole dry-thing you seem to be proposing until the mid '80s (only could be served liquor by-the-drink in private clubs, although you could literally drive a truck through that loophole). Didn't take long for the money train to overturn that... You can read about that whole Kansas thing here... I find it hard to believe that anyone is suggesting going back in that direction (even in sarcasm/jest)...
Of course, you could just BAN 20-somethings from driving after dark on the weekends. I'm pretty sure that would reduce the amount of people driving "high"... In big cities, people tend to take cabs and trains anyhow and bars that cater towards older crowds (dive bars), tend to have older regulars who know each other and barkeeps that know the clientele and are less likely to let folks drive home inebriated. The trend for the future is anti-car anyhow. Might as well get started w/ the 20-somethings today...
The problem is likely the "quiet assumption" built in to this automation.
Basically all of these automated identification techniques take mathematical transforms on segments of audio and video and map them down to a lower dimensional space and do some sort classification in that space. The problem is usually in the assumptions built into said classifer. Built in to most typical audio/video classifiers is the quiet assumption that the audio (or video) MUST match one owned by one of the participating copyright holders. All the classifer does is pick the "nearest" one (only when there's really no possible nearby match at all do most classifier algorithms give up). This assumption ignores the basic problem that the amount of copyrighted audio is a small fraction of all audio. Does their classifier fail the "null hypothesis" test?
No doubt google^W youtube is well aware of this problem is with the assumption, but will argue that they have to "tune" their classifer to make sure there are fewer false negatives to satisfy their corporate overlords. They will argue that the copyright infringers are really employing guerilla tactics (like hiding/blending into the population) and they are justified in burning down the villages to ferret the copyright infringers out. The problem with this quiet assumption is that the copyright holder that is identified really has no incentive to actually verify anything since they can always blame google^W youtube if in error, but if nobody complains the get money. Google^W youtube is the merc in this story. Guilty until proved innocent, the grand jury is backlogged and the trial docket is totally full. Blackwater^W Xe^W google^W youtube paid to do the dirtywork. Rumblefish make the weapons. That's basically a rigged system.
Technology likely offers a way to help with false positives, but I doubt anyone at google^W youtube really cares at all. When the money keeps coming in, everyone keeps thier mouths shut.
What you are describing are problems that are the intersection of NP-complete (NP problems whose solution can be verfied in polynomial time) and NP-hard (NP problems that are at least as hard as the hardest problem in NP).
AFAIK It is unknown at this time if all NP problems that are not also in "P" are NP-complete or if in the set of NP problems, there are some that are "simpler" than NP-hard problems that are still not in "P", and there is yet a subset of those that still cannot be verified in polynomial time. I don't think anyone thinks that is likely, but AFAIK it hasn't been proven yet. If all NP problems happen to also be in "P" (NP=P), then all of NP is in P and the postulated set of problems is the null set.
FWIW, this seems to be just the latest in research that has been coming out in the last few years that seem to add to the evidence that autism onset is really early or preterm.
For instance, that this paper that came out in 2005 attempted to more systematically document the early signs of autism by using a longitudinal study which comparing a set of high risk infants (who had an older sibling diagnosed w/ some ASD), with a control set at 6 months, 12 months, and 24 months.
Of course today, autism is defined in terms of behavior. The key is the origin or eitology of autism. Is this odd brain scan an indicator of the origin, or is it something else and this is merely correlated. Nobody knows.
However, we do seem to have strong indication of certain specific chromosomal problems that can lead to autistic behavior: FragileX, Rett Syndrome, and Tuberous Sclerosis. Fragile X and Rett's are X chromosome related. This is suspiciously related to the observation that incidence of ASD are higher in boys and boys only have 1 "X" chromosome. TS is not X related, but can cause calcium deposits to develop in the brain or in some cases tuber-like growths in the brain (as special case, since tuber-like growths occur all over the body w/ this condition).
Because of the accumulated research, many people speculate that there are actually many pathways to autistic behaviour. You might even think of autism as a symptom of many diseases and conditions (like a cough is a symptom of many diseases), so many experts are not optimistic that will be a "cure" for autism, but perhaps in the future there will be a way in some situations to blunt the symptoms early enough to avoid many of the problems in many of the common cases.
Reality is often much more complicated that the headlines.
Well by 2014 we're supposed to have pretty much all American troops out of Afghanistan. Even if mining companies were to get set up in the area, what are they going to do to protect themselves against insurgents and/or banditry? Hire a private army?
Just about diamond mine today has their own private army. Why would this mining operation be any different?
This is similar to what I did in university. I called it short-cycling back then and lived on a 12hour day (2-4 hours sleep). Usually sleeping some time between 6-10pm and 4am-8am which was just fine for a social life (although not so great for the 7:30am lecture class skipped every tuesday my sophomore year)...
I found the so-called biphasic sleep schedule to be very productive (and very helpful as I was taking lots of coursework and was editing the school newspaper at night). Being awake between lunch and dinner was good for school and between 10pm and 4am was great for studying and socialization.
My motivation for this was after researching Leonardo Davinci and Buckminster Fuller and how they allegedly slept only a few hours a night and took lots of catnaps to become more productive.
I fell back to the typical 6-8 hours at night after university (dinner got later after work and there wasn't much to do between 1am and 4am, but was amused to see that this whole thing was mentioned during an episode of Seinfield a few years after I graduated (didn't really work out for Kramer in the sitcom, though)
Unfortunatly, I have an infant to care for, it's sorta been forced back on me now and kinda works... With my current experience, my take away is that if humans weren't adapted to polyphasic sleep, the species would fail to survive.
Basically Mr Putnam advances a theory about a postulated metric of social capital and how much you claim that you trust your neighbor and how much that socally isolates you. The data is mostly extrapolated from aggregate data and the author even admits that many of the speculations do not follow from data that passes statistical significance as he makes the leap from corellating trust with aggregate neighborhood ethnic diversity.
Mr Putnam's earlier work was called "Bowling Alone" which essentially claimed (without the racist overtones), that this so called social capital has declined since the 1950's and blamed technology for that (just like many other sociologists prior to him). I guess blaming technology wasn't controversial enough, he had to blame ethnic diversity now.
Perhaps Mr Putnam should have just blamed reduced "social capital" on drug use, divorce rate, reduction in family size, reduction in prevalence of nearly extended family, dispersion of extended families to chase job opportunities. All seems like those are all just as likely to fit exactly the same data...
I haven't read Mr Schneier's new book yet, but hopefully he didn't stoop to this level.
No, the crate just bears some weight at the edges because the attraction between oranges is weak compared to gravity. Oranges in a crate are stacked just like carbon atoms in graphite, and graphite's certainly a solid.
Actually, oranges in a crate are stacked more like carbon atoms in C60 (a buckminster fullerene). The atoms in graphite (stacked graphene) are more akin to stacked egg cartons as graphite is organized in layers.
Oranges in a crate form a solid? I thought the crate still gave it the overall structure? Take away the crate, and the oranges all come tumbling down.
Perhaps piled like cannonballs is a better analogy. Although in a grocery store, you can see piles of oranges w/o a crate.
Of course "tumbling down" is just because the earth's gravitational forces are larger than the forces that bind the oranges to each other (electrostatic and gravitational). Without the earth's gravity, you don't get "down"...
BTW, theoretical work on this has been going on for a while, it's only the recent observation that is newsworthy...
I'm afraid that you don't understand the DoJ's purpose to avoid coming down "hard". There really isn't any enforcement of any monopoly laws by any administration w/o considering the economy. Say Intel does a no-no, do you just put them out of business because they've been bad? If you don't want to be re-elected you do that. The most you can consider doing is leveling the field again (hence the $1B payment).
Why? Not because the corporation that does the no-no has any inside influence about this, but because the corporations are 'public' meaning many investement funds and consequently many individual have money tied up in the stock price of major corporations. Corporations don't even have to pay any 'donations' to get this 'protection'.
It's like when one of your kids kicks your other kid, really hard so it causes actual damage. Despite the protestations of the kicked kid that you punish the offending kid by grounding them 'forever', or making them give up their favorite toy to them, the parents don't do that. Also, the parents don't go to the police and file assult charges against the offending kid even though perhaps in other situations social workers might have considered it. All the parents do is slap the offending kid in the hand and hope they learn, but w/o any real consequence. The offending kid doesn't really have to 'donate' anything to the parents for this leniency, all they have to do is know that the parent doesn't want to ruin their life.
This is really the state of affairs of DoJ anti-trust. All companies can do is avoid the confrontation with a monopoly if possible, it isn't a game with rules, it's a jungle out there.
On the other point, I don't think Intel is doing anything specifically to keep Amd around just to avoid anti-trust, it's Intel's largest customers (like HP). They fear the world of being dependent on the single supplier and always steer design wins to the underdog. Just enough to keep them alive, but not so much that they lose too much business to their smaller competitors that just put all their poker-chips in with the product with the best price/performance. Of course 'geeks' don't really care much about this type of nuanced product segmentation games, but it's the biggest thing keeping Amd alive over time.
If Amd gave up the ghost, I don't Intel would care that much. Anti-trust is only a problem with Intel when Amd is still alive and the Big customers are keeping Amd alive (just barely). Because Amd is alive, Intel still has to jump through the anti-trust hoops because the DoJ has to at least slap their hands from time to time.
If you get rid of the nickel, you essentially need to get rid of the quarter. You need to have all larger denomination coins divisible by at least one of the smaller denomination coins. Unless, of course, you are a sadist. Getting rid of the nickel seems like a non-starter. However, dumping the dime w/o getting rid of the nickel would probably work.
Doctors, of course, aren't always honest and often screw up. But Doctors are straw men (and women), in your argument which you are trying to tear down.
The argument about vaccines is not about having unquestionable faith in a singular human being (a doctor). I don't think anyone is suggesting that someone follow a singular doctor's advice about vaccines. Presumably, the doctor herself (or himself), is just folllowing the recommendations of the CDC which you can independently verify and research the information behind.
You might make the case that the CDC's recommendations for vaccines is not honest and screwed up for corrupt or political-agenda reasons, but is the source of your faith more reliable than them for the same reasons?
According to the anti-vax crowd, you are miscounting. Many injections are "multi-valent" now days (1 injection contains protiens coded for what would have been multiple vaccinations). Also, some like RotV are oral suspensions...
As a parent of a 1.5 year old child, here's a few question for you...
What about HepB? given at birth? 1 month? 2 months? Are you spreading those over 3-4 times that recommendation?
What about RotV? Both currently licensed version (Rotarix and Rotateq) are live virus in an oral suspension. The old "proven" one was discontinued in 1999 (apparently seemed to cause higher instances of intussusception), the CDC estimated that 500,000 infants die around the world each year from RotV.
What about DTaP? It's a mixed (only the "P" part is acellular) They recommend 5 doses of this puppy. Are you gonna stretch that one out 3-4x or take the old verisons seperatly? Because when you get older they usually use recommend a totally different one. Gonna test a new experimental vaccinee schedule on you kid?
What about Hib and PCV? They are generally polysac+protein vaccine (no live viri), but they recommend 4 does, up to age 1, are you going to stretch that out to age 4? or age 8 given separatly?
What about IPV? It's inactivated, and it's old, but who gets polo?
See the problem? It's easy to toss some platitude like "I'm not gonna give my kid any new vaccines" and "I'm gonna spread them out", but when you dig into the details, you see that many of the vaccinnes are necessary in short intervals bacause the baby's immune response is so weak and the recommended vaccines already either well tested, or manufactured using more modern (cellular/protein response oriented) techiques.
Also, If you spread them out even 2x, which of these terrible diseases are you willing to risk? I'm not doing this to ridicule anyone's position on vaccines, but after you look at the problem (since I've done this recently), you realize it really isn't about educated risk at all, it's about realizing that developing a new drug protocol or vaccine schedule for your own kid using your own limited knowledge is not probably a prudent thing to do, when the standard protocol has been well studied and has documented (but non-zero) risk. Should my child be a clinical trial of 1?
Part of wisdom is recognizing what you don't know. I really don't know this stuff at all, nor do I really know the reputations of any of the sources of data, so any calculations that I do with any accumulated data is likely garbage-in, garbage-out. I'm really just forced to apply occam's razor to the problem. Do I believe there is a global conspiracy concerning giving vaccines to infants and covering up all the negative evidence, or do I believe that the general good of vaccines is illustrated in the preponderance of the evidence and the existance of a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program for the small percentage of infants that have side effects. Applying this principle, the general good of vaccines seems a simpler explanation, and often simpler is more likely correct. That was enough for me. Your milage may vary.
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Uhm, I don't know where you live, but at least in my part of the universe, ringtones are generally not streamed...
Right now AMD is uncompetative as long as they are behind by one generation. Like for example an A8 is only HALF the performance of an i7.
In case you weren't aware, Amd A8/Llano is on 32nm as is Intel i7/sandybridge. Intel is shortly moving to the 22nm with Ivybridge...
If Amd abandons Global Foundaries, in the same timeframe, they would likely have tape out on TSMC's 28nm** technology.
If Amd is going to wait, maybe they can use TSMC's new 20nm*** technology.
In general, so how is AMD supposed to keep up with Intel when they don't have access bleeding edge new process technology? This isn't just a "right now" problem, this is gonna be a problem for the forseeable future...
Rather AMD needs to build CPU's that cost less than the i7 but offer performance within a narrow band (eg 8%) of Intel parts at the same price, or half the TDP.
I'm sure they'd love to do that, but it doesn't seem to be in the cards. I think the fact they are abandoning GloFo is an admission that they can't compete in the high end server biz w/ GloFo as the fab. GloFo's process-tech-Fu doesn't compete with Intel's...
** TSMC's 28nm process is actually a 32nm node shrink. Since TSMC couldn't get their 32nm process node going, the decided to abandon it and concentrate on the 32nm 1/2 node "shrink" (aka 28nm with High-K metal gates). This is not unlike how TSMC didn't get 45nm working very well and then quickly moved everyone to 40nm 1/2 node process. Not saying this to bash TSMC, but to illustrate how good Intel is in comparsion to the rest of the fabs out there...
*** TSMC decided to pre-announce that they are skip 22nm and 18nm in advance and are rolling out only a 20nm process (I guess the history with 45nm and 32nm basically convinced them to concentrate their efforts on the 1/2 node). Details are slim, although they hinted at it will be Bulk (not Silicon on Insulator or SOI) and Planar (not 3D FinFET) which is less advanced than Intel's 22nm processor (SOI+FinFET).
A better question is when did Pierce Brosnan become a physicist?
I guess we know why he turned James Bond down.
Pierce Brosnan became a physicist in The World is not Enough... Of course the better questions are why did he quit doing that physicist gig to go sing ABBA songs and how in the hell did Denise Richards become a physicist?
So people wonder why there is the preponderance of people studying the likes of Homeopathy, Chinese Herbal Medicine, Accupuncture, Chiropractic Studies... But I don't think it's a mystery. It's really an extension of the primal "need" of societies to have shaman and oracles, and for people to aspire to be in those positions in society.
Staying alive is hard, staying healthly is even harder. There's no textbook that can tell you how to do those things. Sure, there are lots of theories and scientific practice that goes around, but of course none of it is 100% appplicable to your situation. So you seek out advice and treatments, from... and this is where it gets interesting.
Of course "western" medicine and science has conquered quite a bit of the big-ticket stuff that has ailed the human race, but you have to look under the hood a bit to see exactly how this has been done. Sure there's some anatomy and bio-chem going on, but to a large extent modern medicine has been just about refining protocols. The stereotypical protocol is something like this: if you have these symptoms, and I make this diagnosis, do this treatment (often a dose of a chemical) for this amount of time. How was the treatment found? Usually at first purely by trial and error (in fact many therapies are initially "off-label" drug use), and later by refinement using differential testing... That sounds very scientific, but the catch is, how was the diagnosis done? That's a big part of the protocol and then you start to realize that most of western medicine is really just probablisitic. If you have these poorly defined symptoms, you probably have this diagnosis and this treatment probably helps, but if it doesn't, this treatment probably helps, etc, etc.... You can't do a clinical trial on yourself, and not everyone is the same... In this light pseudo-science is just a different set of probablities, coupled with a strong history and the equally strong placebo effect (w/o the scientific backing). It's just like "western" GP dispensing anti-biotics for a cold (but probably less harmful)... If medicine was practiced by science instead of protocol, by they time the virus or bacteria was cultured and analysed, you'd be over it and on to your next ailment...
But that doesn't answer why do these alternative medical practioners exist at all? I personally believe it's a combination of two things: a certain segment of the population aspires to be the folk who are consulted for advice and the opportunity to "buy oneself" into a status profession like a medical profession. But what if you aspire to be "consulted", but don't have the money or the academic background to get into medicine? That's right, you get yourself into pseudo-medicine. It's almost the same status and you get to fulfil your need to be the authority consulted for advice on being healthy.
But why do the patients come to them (and the TV talk shows interview them)? It's because they tell the patients what they want to hear (as opposed to many "western" doctors which apparently aren't trained to listen very well and as a group tend to treat small ailments in binary fashion as either "in-your-head" or "we-have-to-order-lots-of-invasive-tests-to-make-a-diagnosis"). You can call it holistic medicine or whatever you want, but often folks are just seeking the small advice about staying healthy and loathe the binary decision tree protocol. If standard "western" medicine would do a better job at offering advice, these types of alternative medicine practices wouldn't be as successful as they are.
And for the the people wanting to give advice? They'd have to seek out some other status profession... Maybe pseudo-techno-geek? ;^)
My favorite answer is that it is probably because it isn't worth it the expense (in energy) to travel here. /. poster would see the potential logic in this explanation as they often have everything they want delivered to thier home cave by UPS with 1-click of a mouse...
If you had access to the energy it would likely take to traverse the distance you would likely be effectively be infinitely wealthy where you were. Why choose to send a few folks to be gods to a bunch of ants when there are much better things to spend your resources on locally? You'd think that the typcial
You'd think that, of all events, security conferences would have tight security.
Why?
I suspect the cost/hassle of doing more than basic security outweighs the benefit of catching a few people who didn't want to pay the $100 conference fee. I doubt the information being presented is secret and needs protecting. And I imagine of all conference organizers, the organizers of a security conference would have best grasp on this security cost/benefit.
Of course in many conference venues (like the moscone center where the RSA conference is held), you must use the approved contractors that use local union labor to handle things like setup, teardown, electrical, network installation, theatrical services, and security. You don't really get to customize stuff like this too much, so security is probably exactly the same as any other conference at the same venue.
Quick background: Currently clocks on most generic chips today are structured as trees. As you can imagine the fan-out of the clock trees is pretty large and thus require clock buffers/driver circuits which need to be balanced so that clock signal gets to the leaves at about the same time (in a typical design where you don't use a lot of physical design tricks). To ease balancing the propagation delay, the clock tree is often physically looks like a fractalized "H" (just imagine the root clock driving in the center of the crossbar out towards the leaves at the corners of the "H", the wire lengths of the clock tree segments are the same, then the corners the big H driving the center of a smaller "H", etc, etc). Of course at the leaves, there can be some residual imbalance due to small manufacturing variations and wire loading and that has to be accounted for in closing the timing for the chip (to avoid short paths), and ultimatly these imbalances limit the upper frequencies achievable by the chip.
Additional background: In any electrical circuit, there are some so-called resonant frequencies because of the distributed (or lumped) inductance and capacitances in the network. That is some frequencies experience a lot less energy loss than average (for the car analogy buffs, you can get your car to "bounce" quite easily if you bounce it at it's resonant frequency).
The basic idea of the Cyclos technology is to "short-circuit" the middle of the clock tree on the chip with a mesh to make sure all the middle of the clock tree is coordinated to be the same clock (as oppposed to a typical H tree clock, in every stage the jitter builds up from the root). That way you avoid some of the imbalances the limit the upper frequencies achievable by the chip. The reason I say "short-circuit" is that it really isn't a "short circuit". If you just arbitrarily put in a mesh in the middle of a clock tree, although it would tend to get the clocks aligned, it would presents a very large capacitive and inductive load to drive and would likely increase power greatly. **Except** if that mesh was designed so that it resonated at the frequency that you were going to drive the clock, then you can get the benefit of jitter reduction w/o the power cost. Since you get to pick the physical design parameters of the mesh (wire width, length, and grid spacing, and external tank circuit inductance) and the target frequency, theoretically you can design that mesh to be resonant (well, that remains to be seen).
The reason this idea hasn't been used to date is that it's a hard problem to create the mesh with the proper parameters and now the processor really has to just run at that frequency all the time (well, you can do clock cycle eating to approximate lower frequencies). Designers have gotten better at these things now and the area budgets for these types of things have gotten in the affordable range as transistors have gotten smaller.
FWIW, In a pipeline design (like a cpu), sometimes it's advantagous to have a clock-follows-signal clocking topology or even an async strategy instead of a clock tree, but there of course is a complication if there is a loop or cycle in the pipeline (often this happens at say a register file or a bypass path in the pipeline), so that trick is limited in appliciablity, where the mesh idea is really a more general solution to clock network jjitter problems.
Here's a white paper that describes this idea... http://www.cyclos-semi.com/pdfs/time_to_change_the_clocks.pdf
I don't think Mr Buffett nor Mr Gates are particularly moral, they seem to be really just doing this to "pad" their future historical biography
Eh, I don't like this argument. If you go looking for it, you can find a potential ulterior motive for just about anything anyone does, and a reason to belittle anyone's efforts. But most people I know who choose to live their life from that perspective -- everyone is corrupt and in it for themselves; nothing is genuinely altruistic; everyone has a damning skeleton in their closet that proves they're really a worthless piece of crap; etc. -- wind up bitter and miserable at best.
If you are insinuating that I live my life finding ulterior motives, that's sad for you. I don't believe everyone is corrupt or in it for themselves at all. To the contrary, I believe in charity in all of its forms. My point was that for Messrs Gates and Buffett, money was likely a NOP. They were mostly the same people they were before money (no more moral to counter the point made by the parent post).
Everything we do in life is inevitably flawed and ridiculous; every effort we make to help is compromised by our own shortsightedness and humanity. But all that is still better than being so fixated on being "perfect" and unimpeachable that you never do anything positive at all, and turn into Waldorf & Statler instead.
Wow, bitter much? Although one might argue that the investement strategy of the BMG foundation is a bit suspect for an allegedly "moral" charity (although not out of line with their non-charitable investment strategies). Narcissistic is a probably a reflection of their own personalities (as opposed to say the multitude of anonymous Kmart layaway donations of the past holiday season). Is it your opinion is that anyone who dares to criticize the great Messr Gates and Buffett must be bitter and miserable at best and never do anything positive at all? (hey made some assumptions about me didn't you?)
Although it really isn't important to my point, personally, I like to make all my donations anonymously (I have no use for stupid chartity dinners recognition parties which just show up as fundraising overhead, nor walls of tiles or plaques which roll out for donors to clutter up architectural features of buildings). I don't have the resources of Messer Gates, or Buffett, but perhaps that kind of recognition is unavoidable at their level of charity... Maybe I'll find out someday (probably not, won't ever have that kind of money, and I value my privacy way too much).
Sure I'm not perfect either and maybe I've pick a wrong charity or two in the past but neither are they perfect and the fact that they "passed the billion mark", doesn't really make them more moral (the point of the original poster). Perhaps money just helps you find out what type of person you really are (that's what my opinon is, anyhow)...
Up to a point, then they become moral again because it no longer means as much. I think it occurs once you get past the billionaire mark: Examples: Warren Buffet, Bill Gates...
First, there are just as many counter examples Steve Jobs, Larry Elison, Donald Trump, etc, etc...
Secondly, I don't think Mr Buffett nor Mr Gates are particularly moral, they seem to be really just doing this to "pad" their future historical biography (not unlike JD Rockefeller).
Apparently, Mr Buffett wanted to give his money for his wife to donate as she desired (as payback for his "cheating", well it's more complicated than that, but I digress). Since his wife died earlier than Mr Buffett and he didn't seem to trust his long term "girlfriend/housekeeper" with that role, he decided just do matching donations w/ the BMG Foundation with all that money he was saving for his wife. On the other hand, The BMG Foundation's investment philosophy (for the money they haven't spent yet as opposed to the money they are putting to use) is to maximize return which often put it at odds with the same people they are trying to help (high pollution companies, or big-pharma companies). A common gripe about the BMGF is that they seem to only pick-up high-profile healthcare issues which sometimes divert attention to basic healthcare which is also needed by the same population groups. Also, as I understand it, the BMG Foundation also isn't structured to last forever either. All money must be spent before the 50th anniversary of Bill and Melinda's death, so they basically have to spend it all pretty quickly and after the causes they are funding dry up, well, that's all they wrote...
Not saying that Mr Gates and/or Mr Buffett are moral or not, but I don't think these examples show that billionaires either as a group or as individuals become particularly more moral because of their inflated monetary status. In fact, these particular examples seem to show that for some, money is just a NOP. On the other hand, one might argue that they appear less moral that the person that spends 50% of their time helping a neighbor, or stops investing their money with companies that pollute the environment and perhaps a bit narcissistic for wanting specific credit for their donation of resources.
Hey, if they don't want us out drinking and driving, why do they not just BAN establishments outside the home from serving alcohol?
A bit of hypocrisy to allow establishments, who serve NOTHING but alcohol (the common bar) with large parking lots which allow people to drive there, and park their cars and go inside and partake of the product the bar is serving....and then get pissed off when those people get back in their cars to drive home or to another bar (or somewhere to get laid).
Of course, then people will just get trashed before they go to the dance clubs (where they don't serve alcohol)...
In my teens (when I was 18, so was the drinking age), knew plenty of people who used to do that all the time. To avoid the high cost of alcohol in the bars, for some heavy drinkers in the group it was often "one to get ready, two for the road". As the drinking age was slowly raised to 21, almost all the teeny bopper bars were segmented part dance club (18-up), part bar (drinking age and up), but that didn't stop the 18yo-ers from getting sloshed at home before going out. Although when I went out we always had plenty of designated drivers (most of the girls in my group of friends didn't drink), I imagine other groups (or people going out by themselves), didn't.
You did however touch on the real problem: money. Sporting events, Restaurants, and Clubs all serve because it makes a tidy profit. Bars just distill this down to the highest margin product. FWIW, Kansas tried that whole dry-thing you seem to be proposing until the mid '80s (only could be served liquor by-the-drink in private clubs, although you could literally drive a truck through that loophole). Didn't take long for the money train to overturn that... You can read about that whole Kansas thing here... I find it hard to believe that anyone is suggesting going back in that direction (even in sarcasm/jest)...
Of course, you could just BAN 20-somethings from driving after dark on the weekends. I'm pretty sure that would reduce the amount of people driving "high"... In big cities, people tend to take cabs and trains anyhow and bars that cater towards older crowds (dive bars), tend to have older regulars who know each other and barkeeps that know the clientele and are less likely to let folks drive home inebriated. The trend for the future is anti-car anyhow. Might as well get started w/ the 20-somethings today...
The problem is likely the "quiet assumption" built in to this automation.
Basically all of these automated identification techniques take mathematical transforms on segments of audio and video and map them down to a lower dimensional space and do some sort classification in that space. The problem is usually in the assumptions built into said classifer. Built in to most typical audio/video classifiers is the quiet assumption that the audio (or video) MUST match one owned by one of the participating copyright holders. All the classifer does is pick the "nearest" one (only when there's really no possible nearby match at all do most classifier algorithms give up). This assumption ignores the basic problem that the amount of copyrighted audio is a small fraction of all audio. Does their classifier fail the "null hypothesis" test?
No doubt google^W youtube is well aware of this problem is with the assumption, but will argue that they have to "tune" their classifer to make sure there are fewer false negatives to satisfy their corporate overlords. They will argue that the copyright infringers are really employing guerilla tactics (like hiding/blending into the population) and they are justified in burning down the villages to ferret the copyright infringers out. The problem with this quiet assumption is that the copyright holder that is identified really has no incentive to actually verify anything since they can always blame google^W youtube if in error, but if nobody complains the get money. Google^W youtube is the merc in this story. Guilty until proved innocent, the grand jury is backlogged and the trial docket is totally full. Blackwater^W Xe^W google^W youtube paid to do the dirtywork. Rumblefish make the weapons. That's basically a rigged system.
Technology likely offers a way to help with false positives, but I doubt anyone at google^W youtube really cares at all. When the money keeps coming in, everyone keeps thier mouths shut.
pedantic squared:
What you are describing are problems that are the intersection of NP-complete (NP problems whose solution can be verfied in polynomial time) and NP-hard (NP problems that are at least as hard as the hardest problem in NP).
AFAIK It is unknown at this time if all NP problems that are not also in "P" are NP-complete or if in the set of NP problems, there are some that are "simpler" than NP-hard problems that are still not in "P", and there is yet a subset of those that still cannot be verified in polynomial time. I don't think anyone thinks that is likely, but AFAIK it hasn't been proven yet. If all NP problems happen to also be in "P" (NP=P), then all of NP is in P and the postulated set of problems is the null set.
Obligitory http://xkcd.com/37/
FWIW, this seems to be just the latest in research that has been coming out in the last few years that seem to add to the evidence that autism onset is really early or preterm.
For instance, that this paper that came out in 2005 attempted to more systematically document the early signs of autism by using a longitudinal study which comparing a set of high risk infants (who had an older sibling diagnosed w/ some ASD), with a control set at 6 months, 12 months, and 24 months.
Of course today, autism is defined in terms of behavior. The key is the origin or eitology of autism. Is this odd brain scan an indicator of the origin, or is it something else and this is merely correlated. Nobody knows.
However, we do seem to have strong indication of certain specific chromosomal problems that can lead to autistic behavior: FragileX, Rett Syndrome, and Tuberous Sclerosis. Fragile X and Rett's are X chromosome related. This is suspiciously related to the observation that incidence of ASD are higher in boys and boys only have 1 "X" chromosome. TS is not X related, but can cause calcium deposits to develop in the brain or in some cases tuber-like growths in the brain (as special case, since tuber-like growths occur all over the body w/ this condition).
Because of the accumulated research, many people speculate that there are actually many pathways to autistic behaviour. You might even think of autism as a symptom of many diseases and conditions (like a cough is a symptom of many diseases), so many experts are not optimistic that will be a "cure" for autism, but perhaps in the future there will be a way in some situations to blunt the symptoms early enough to avoid many of the problems in many of the common cases.
Reality is often much more complicated that the headlines.
Well by 2014 we're supposed to have pretty much all American troops out of Afghanistan. Even if mining companies were to get set up in the area, what are they going to do to protect themselves against insurgents and/or banditry? Hire a private army?
Just about diamond mine today has their own private army. Why would this mining operation be any different?
http://www.iss.co.za/pubs/books/peaceprofitplunder/chap9.pdf
This is similar to what I did in university. I called it short-cycling back then and lived on a 12hour day (2-4 hours sleep). Usually sleeping some time between 6-10pm and 4am-8am which was just fine for a social life (although not so great for the 7:30am lecture class skipped every tuesday my sophomore year)...
I found the so-called biphasic sleep schedule to be very productive (and very helpful as I was taking lots of coursework and was editing the school newspaper at night). Being awake between lunch and dinner was good for school and between 10pm and 4am was great for studying and socialization.
My motivation for this was after researching Leonardo Davinci and Buckminster Fuller and how they allegedly slept only a few hours a night and took lots of catnaps to become more productive.
I fell back to the typical 6-8 hours at night after university (dinner got later after work and there wasn't much to do between 1am and 4am, but was amused to see that this whole thing was mentioned during an episode of Seinfield a few years after I graduated (didn't really work out for Kramer in the sitcom, though)
Unfortunatly, I have an infant to care for, it's sorta been forced back on me now and kinda works... With my current experience, my take away is that if humans weren't adapted to polyphasic sleep, the species would fail to survive.
Here you go http://www.utoronto.ca/ethnicstudies/Putnam.pdf
Is this racist dribble? Dunno, maybe.
Basically Mr Putnam advances a theory about a postulated metric of social capital and how much you claim that you trust your neighbor and how much that socally isolates you. The data is mostly extrapolated from aggregate data and the author even admits that many of the speculations do not follow from data that passes statistical significance as he makes the leap from corellating trust with aggregate neighborhood ethnic diversity.
Mr Putnam's earlier work was called "Bowling Alone" which essentially claimed (without the racist overtones), that this so called social capital has declined since the 1950's and blamed technology for that (just like many other sociologists prior to him). I guess blaming technology wasn't controversial enough, he had to blame ethnic diversity now.
Perhaps Mr Putnam should have just blamed reduced "social capital" on drug use, divorce rate, reduction in family size, reduction in prevalence of nearly extended family, dispersion of extended families to chase job opportunities. All seems like those are all just as likely to fit exactly the same data...
I haven't read Mr Schneier's new book yet, but hopefully he didn't stoop to this level.
No, the crate just bears some weight at the edges because the attraction between oranges is weak compared to gravity. Oranges in a crate are stacked just like carbon atoms in graphite, and graphite's certainly a solid.
Actually, oranges in a crate are stacked more like carbon atoms in C60 (a buckminster fullerene). The atoms in graphite (stacked graphene) are more akin to stacked egg cartons as graphite is organized in layers.
Oranges in a crate form a solid? I thought the crate still gave it the overall structure? Take away the crate, and the oranges all come tumbling down.
Perhaps piled like cannonballs is a better analogy. Although in a grocery store, you can see piles of oranges w/o a crate.
Of course "tumbling down" is just because the earth's gravitational forces are larger than the forces that bind the oranges to each other (electrostatic and gravitational). Without the earth's gravity, you don't get "down"...
BTW, theoretical work on this has been going on for a while, it's only the recent observation that is newsworthy...
I'm afraid that you don't understand the DoJ's purpose to avoid coming down "hard". There really isn't any enforcement of any monopoly laws by any administration w/o considering the economy. Say Intel does a no-no, do you just put them out of business because they've been bad? If you don't want to be re-elected you do that. The most you can consider doing is leveling the field again (hence the $1B payment).
Why? Not because the corporation that does the no-no has any inside influence about this, but because the corporations are 'public' meaning many investement funds and consequently many individual have money tied up in the stock price of major corporations. Corporations don't even have to pay any 'donations' to get this 'protection'.
It's like when one of your kids kicks your other kid, really hard so it causes actual damage. Despite the protestations of the kicked kid that you punish the offending kid by grounding them 'forever', or making them give up their favorite toy to them, the parents don't do that. Also, the parents don't go to the police and file assult charges against the offending kid even though perhaps in other situations social workers might have considered it. All the parents do is slap the offending kid in the hand and hope they learn, but w/o any real consequence. The offending kid doesn't really have to 'donate' anything to the parents for this leniency, all they have to do is know that the parent doesn't want to ruin their life.
This is really the state of affairs of DoJ anti-trust. All companies can do is avoid the confrontation with a monopoly if possible, it isn't a game with rules, it's a jungle out there.
On the other point, I don't think Intel is doing anything specifically to keep Amd around just to avoid anti-trust, it's Intel's largest customers (like HP). They fear the world of being dependent on the single supplier and always steer design wins to the underdog. Just enough to keep them alive, but not so much that they lose too much business to their smaller competitors that just put all their poker-chips in with the product with the best price/performance. Of course 'geeks' don't really care much about this type of nuanced product segmentation games, but it's the biggest thing keeping Amd alive over time.
If Amd gave up the ghost, I don't Intel would care that much. Anti-trust is only a problem with Intel when Amd is still alive and the Big customers are keeping Amd alive (just barely). Because Amd is alive, Intel still has to jump through the anti-trust hoops because the DoJ has to at least slap their hands from time to time.
It can be recycled.
Don't tell that to the copper thieves... And no, they aren't even smart enough to save their own pitiful lives...
If you get rid of the nickel, you essentially need to get rid of the quarter. You need to have all larger denomination coins divisible by at least one of the smaller denomination coins. Unless, of course, you are a sadist. Getting rid of the nickel seems like a non-starter. However, dumping the dime w/o getting rid of the nickel would probably work.
Logical falacy. Strawman.
Doctors, of course, aren't always honest and often screw up. But Doctors are straw men (and women), in your argument which you are trying to tear down.
The argument about vaccines is not about having unquestionable faith in a singular human being (a doctor). I don't think anyone is suggesting that someone follow a singular doctor's advice about vaccines. Presumably, the doctor herself (or himself), is just folllowing the recommendations of the CDC which you can independently verify and research the information behind.
You might make the case that the CDC's recommendations for vaccines is not honest and screwed up for corrupt or political-agenda reasons, but is the source of your faith more reliable than them for the same reasons?
According to the anti-vax crowd, you are miscounting. Many injections are "multi-valent" now days (1 injection contains protiens coded for what would have been multiple vaccinations). Also, some like RotV are oral suspensions...
Here's a pointer to the current CDC recommendations... http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/downloads/child/0-6yrs-schedule-pr.pdf
As a parent of a 1.5 year old child, here's a few question for you...
What about HepB? given at birth? 1 month? 2 months? Are you spreading those over 3-4 times that recommendation?
What about RotV? Both currently licensed version (Rotarix and Rotateq) are live virus in an oral suspension. The old "proven" one was discontinued in 1999 (apparently seemed to cause higher instances of intussusception), the CDC estimated that 500,000 infants die around the world each year from RotV.
What about DTaP? It's a mixed (only the "P" part is acellular) They recommend 5 doses of this puppy. Are you gonna stretch that one out 3-4x or take the old verisons seperatly? Because when you get older they usually use recommend a totally different one. Gonna test a new experimental vaccinee schedule on you kid?
What about Hib and PCV? They are generally polysac+protein vaccine (no live viri), but they recommend 4 does, up to age 1, are you going to stretch that out to age 4? or age 8 given separatly?
What about IPV? It's inactivated, and it's old, but who gets polo?
See the problem? It's easy to toss some platitude like "I'm not gonna give my kid any new vaccines" and "I'm gonna spread them out", but when you dig into the details, you see that many of the vaccinnes are necessary in short intervals bacause the baby's immune response is so weak and the recommended vaccines already either well tested, or manufactured using more modern (cellular/protein response oriented) techiques.
Also, If you spread them out even 2x, which of these terrible diseases are you willing to risk? I'm not doing this to ridicule anyone's position on vaccines, but after you look at the problem (since I've done this recently), you realize it really isn't about educated risk at all, it's about realizing that developing a new drug protocol or vaccine schedule for your own kid using your own limited knowledge is not probably a prudent thing to do, when the standard protocol has been well studied and has documented (but non-zero) risk. Should my child be a clinical trial of 1?
Part of wisdom is recognizing what you don't know. I really don't know this stuff at all, nor do I really know the reputations of any of the sources of data, so any calculations that I do with any accumulated data is likely garbage-in, garbage-out. I'm really just forced to apply occam's razor to the problem. Do I believe there is a global conspiracy concerning giving vaccines to infants and covering up all the negative evidence, or do I believe that the general good of vaccines is illustrated in the preponderance of the evidence and the existance of a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program for the small percentage of infants that have side effects. Applying this principle, the general good of vaccines seems a simpler explanation, and often simpler is more likely correct. That was enough for me. Your milage may vary.