So now INTEL and the i86 are facing intrusion from the bottom, because the ARM cpu is a RISC design that provides better performance due to a more efficient architecture with fewer gates AT LOW POWER CONSUMPTION.
What are you talking about? ARM provides lower performance at lower power consumption.
I work on high performance clusters (usually SGE/ROCKS not Beowulf, sorry guys) dedicated to physical and biological simulations and there is just no chance the ARM is taking over. We are pushing the bounds of our chips (all Nehalem-based Xeons) already, going to back to PIII-era performance would be a huge setback. There's just not a lot of competition with superscalar out-of-order x86-64, although specialized machines are really cool.
Oh, and for those that say just use more of the lower-power chips, efficient parallelization is really ****ing hard, even in the simulation world. We routinely push the latency bounds of our interconnects (infiniband, usually) when farming out even large jobs. Telling my boss that we can achieve some power savings at the cost of buying 4x more expensive networking gear is going to lead to either a hearty laugh or a pink slip (or both!).
Competitions like these are great, but they (and games like SCII) really make me pine for an RTS with a robust in-game scripting language. I would like to write complex auto-executing instructions for my units like "Pursue but never enter the firing zone of a known enemy turret or siege tank" or "If your energy > X and enemy of type Y in range R, cast spell S" or "If you are unit type X, always position yourself between friendly unit type Y and the enemy". You could confine the script to some reasonable specifications (say, no more than 1000 queries and 100 orders given per second) if you want to deter brute-force approaches.
This is a totally different problem than writing a good AI, you would be focused on writing powerful tools that aid, not replace, a human player by letting him specify his intent on a higher level than "go here" or "attack that". Better visualization of what's happening would be an integral part of this too. I would love to have SCII give me an overview of what units/building I have, what they are doing/queued to do -- even better if they are grouped into functional 'squadrons'. Being able to have multiple panes/monitors looking at different things would help to.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm old and slow and want to leverage my experience writing rule-based logic to beat the whippersnappers that can click faster than I can and keep more things going in their heads at once:-P.
There is public good in not permitting a fire from growing, regardless of whether or not someone payed their municipal fees. As such, fire protection should be a public service guaranteed to all citizens, funded through taxes
First, there are no municipal fees, this is the county we are talking about. Second, the voters of Fulton County considered this argument and decided they would rather not have yet another tax assessed on their houses when the city provides the same service for less. Maybe now they will reconsider, but there's nothing unreasonable in saying "It would cost us $200/house in taxes to set up our own fire dept but the city agreed to provide it for $75." In fact, getting fire service for $75 instead of $200 and avoiding unnecessary duplication in equipment, training and organization is an unalloyed public good.
The wrinkle is that since the city doesn't have the authority to tax country residents outside city limits and the county cannot tax the residents and give the money to the city, it has to be organized as a voluntary subscription. So I'm not sure if your argument here is "the county should tax the residents and set up a duplicative fire dept." or "the county should be allowed to tax its residents and give the money to the city in lieu of setting up it's own fire dept". The latter makes sense, the former is total bollocks.
Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?"
Not until they backport this project to work with kernel 2.2.19, which was current when XP was released 9 years ago. Failing that, they should at least be honest and compare support among current implementations.
It's one thing for people to chose XP for their recent builds -- more power to them for choosing whatever they like best. But when you deliberately chose a 9 year old OS, you lose the right to complain that you cannot run the latest DirectX in the same fashion that people still on kernel 2.2 (I'm sure there are in-use servers still running that) can complain they cannot run the CFS.
Since when is the market bearing a cost a justification for over pricing? No business has a right to massive profits, especially when it's the result of maintaining a oligopoly over the particular market.
What massive profits are you talking about? If you had even remotely bothered to type in a few search keywords, you would know that Sprint is losing money $250M every month. The claim that they are charging above-market prices or maintaining an oligopoly is absolutely inconsistent with the facts.
If anything, a company that's consistently (five straight quarters) posting losses should be raising prices or cutting costs since obviously they cannot burn through money forever. What's more, Sprint spent billions deploying WiMax, so it's sort of silly to accuse them of failing to keep up infrastructure. If anything, they are desperately trying to capitalize on their first-to-market status on 4G.
[ Market pricing or not, they should fix the Epic's upload problem. I was responding to the narrow and entirely incorrect (and trivially verifiable!) claim that Sprint is making massive profits, when in fact they have posted a loss in the last 5 quarters. On a personal note to the OP, please verify your claims -- at least where it's trivial to do so. ]
By 'most people' he means those who have a basic understanding of mathematics, geometry, algebra, calculus, physics and most importantly possessing the curiosity to learn.
And this is a perfectly honest thing to say, if by 'perfectly honest' I mean a statement that is technically true only because they use a pathological definition of a common phrase.
Under most normal definitions of 'most people', most people believe the statement "God created man in his current form in the last 10k years". Of course, I could say nearly everyone believes that, if by 'nearly everyone' I mean those that believe the bible is the inerrant and literal truth.
We all have a perverse tendency to think that everyone is somewhat like us, probably fed in part by the fact that we spend a lot of time with people really are a lot like us. It's a rather straightforward kind of sampling bias that leads to absurd results such as extremists on both sides of the political spectrum (now we have the righties acting up, a few years ago the lefties were writing BusHitler and BuckFush) seriously and earnestly believing that they represent the views of the majority of Americans.
[ Disclaimer: I am a physicist. Not that I think it's relevant to the linguistic gymnastics I'm complaining about here, but disclosure is disclosure. ]
What good is having GPU acceleration that only works on one platform? The -entire- point of the trend of doing things in-browser is to make cross-platform compatibility a reality. If I wanted a game to work just on Windows, why wouldn't I just make an application that did that?
How is this at all insightful? What makes HTML+Javascript 'cross-platform' is that there exist (nearly) standards-compliant applications to render that content on (nearly) every platform. I write a browser-based application, it works on Firefox, Safari, Chrome and IE. If I did it right, it work in every future browser that implements those standards.
There is nothing in this that at all makes me give half a **** about whether IE computes some image processing thing in the GPU or the CPU. I don't care if Firefox hires a team of Oompa-Loompas to work out where CSS elements go or if Safari implements their javascript using a Dwarf Fortress. The concept of a cross-platform web standards says absolutely positively nothing about how each particular platform should accomplish the goal and is concerned only with the result.
When I write 'document.images[0].style.height = "800"' that means only 'resize this image to 800 pixels high'. If IE wants to implement them in the GPU, I see no reason to stop them. Image resizing will work exactly the same way in IE (maybe faster) and will work exactly the same as it always did in Firefox.
Nothing has been added or subtracted from any other platform.
So you are saying the response to the criticism that the law is dumb is because the law says what it says?
No, I'm saying that criticism of a judge's decision to uphold the law on the grounds that the law is dumb is misdirected. It's not a matter of a bad argument (in fact, as I noted above, I think the law is quite dumb) but rather a good argument made in the wrong forum.
The proper venue for this line of reasoning is in Congress, who is the branch of government specifically empowered to make rules regarding the receipt of Federal money. The courts cannot hear arguments that the law is stupid, that's not their job -- they can only decide where the decision comports with the law as it exists.
Oh, the statute doesn't distinguish between destroying or discarding embryos, or not doing that? Really? I think it does!
It delineates an entire category of research that cannot be funded -- research in which an embryo is destroyed or discarded. It does not say anything about what happens outside of Federal funding.
Stem cell research is still being conducted on lines over a decade old. They have not been discarded. Individual cells have been, but the statute does not say that individual cells of an embryo cannot be discarded.
So if I tell you "Do not destroy or discard this computer", your theory is that you can take it apart and destroy/discard the individual parts and still be faithfully following my instructions?
There is nothing linguistic about my argument.
There is. You are changing the syntax "Do not fund X" to "Do not fund X unless X was already going to happen." You changed the semantics from "Congress disapproves of research that destroys embryos and does not want to fund any part of it" to "Congress disapproves of destroying embryos and wants to minimize the number destroyed but is OK with funding research so long as it does not add to the net number of embryos destroyed or so long as the funding is directly in the part of the research in which the embryo is created or destroyed".
The second Obama argues that he can authorize the continued funding of stem cell research because whether or not the law actually prohibits his actions it doesn't matter because he's the President, then that will be comparable.
I think it's far more insidious to pretend to obey the law but really violate it's clear intent than to publicly state it doesn't apply. The latter is disgusting, to be sure, but at least it's intellectually honest.
Not 7 years ago, Bush decided that because US Law defines (prohibited) torture as severe paint he could authorize interrogators to use pain that was not severe, and then he could turn around and define 'severe' in such a way that it included everything he wanted to do. That was a neat linguistic argument (turning on the question of "severe relative to what?") that distinguished between pain that was prohibited and pain that was legal. It also conveniently distinguish all of his desired techniques into the latter category.
If Obama has the power to 'distinguish' between embryos in such a fashion then Bush has the power to 'distinguish' between what pain qualifies as 'severe' and what pain is somewhat less than severe. FWIW, if I were drafting the statute I would remove the modifier 'severe' and prohibit all interrogations involving physical pain. That's not what 18USC2340 says, unfortunately.
I will never sacrifice my ability to reason and distinguish, no matter how much you or anyone else repeats the "everything is the same, distinguishing is just personal bias" nonsense.
I don't ask you to. Personal bias (otherwise known as 'opinions') are a fine thing! I actually share your personal opinion on the matter of stem cell research. If I were a Congressman (shudder), I would vote for it.
What I ask is that, when reading the statute, you put aside your opinion and make a good faith effort to read the statute as Congress intended not as you would have intended. "Put aside" does not mean "discard", it means realize that it's not relevant to this very specific question. You opinion is relevant to what law Congress should enact. It is not relevant to whether decision X comports with law Y.
The angst over this decision would be better directed at lobbying Congress to repeal the amendment entirely.
I disagree. Exercise the ability to distinguish, and it is clear how this is not research in which embryos are destroyed, but research in which they are allowed to live when they would otherwise be destroyed.
This is absurd reasoning. Congress does not empower the Executive to distinguish, it bans funding to all research in which the embryo is destroyed or discarded, even if it means they are allowed to live longer than they would otherwise. That distinction just isn't in the statute and the President is not allowed to insert it just because he feels it makes better policy. If the embryo is destroyed or discarded then no Federal money can be used. It's not a difficult concept.
It's very tempting to bend the law to suit your own policy ends, especially when you can rationalize it in some putative linguistic way. If you are willing to grant all Presidents the same leeway, then at least you are making a cogent argument about Executive power. If, on the other hand, you were opposing Reagan and Bush's lawyerly evasion of the law back when they were in power then it's nothing but hypocrisy to start allowing Obama to make 'distinctions'.
It's another manifestation of the normal 'for me but not for thee'-ism that pervades American politics. Both sides routinely excoriate the other for things they have shamelessly done when it suited them. It's utterly predictable and utterly asinine.
Federal funds used to conduct research on embryos that would otherwise be destroyed anyway... Why distinguish?
Because it was the manifest and obvious intent of Congress to forbid the Federal funding of such research. See, e.g. the dickey amendment which provides in no uncertain terms that no funds are to be expended on research in which embryos are destroyed irrespective of the origin or fate of those embryos.
SEC. 509. (a) None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for-- (1) the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or (2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero under 45 CFR 46.208(a)(2) and Section 498(b) of the Public Health Service Act [1](42 U.S.C. 289g(b)) (Title 42, Section 289g(b), United States Code). (b) For purposes of this section, the term "human embryo or embryos" includes any organism, not protected as a human subject under 45 CFR 46 (the Human Subject Protection regulations) . . . that is derived by fertilization, parthenogenesis, cloning, or any other means from one or more human gametes (sperm or egg) or human diploid cells (cells that have two sets of chromosomes, such as somatic cells).
It is absolutely galling that Obama (& his subordinates at HHS/NIH, for whom he is responsible) would just ignore the clear language of the statute and decide to fund this research. There is just no way to square it with the statute.
[ As an aside, as a personal political matter, I would vote against such an amendment and for unrestricted funding for stem cell research. As a legal matter before the court here, the question is whether the NIH policy comports with the law not whether the law is a good, or even coherent, one. ]
The existing WikiLeaks documents contain 10-digit grid-squares, allowing people to know the location of various military resources down to the square meter. This is absolutely not required for any sort of public purpose -- the public would be just as informed if you would omit the grid-squares and replace them with a vague location/district.
This can be done without wasting any manpower, something like this regex pattern will redact all collections of more than 5 numerical digits: sed -r s/'[0-9]{5,}'/'REDACTED'/g
If the grid-squares are broken into chunks with a delimiter, say '-', you can try: sed -r s/'[0-9\\-]{5,}'/'REDACTED'/g
As usual with regex, grep out the first 1000 or so matches for casual perusal before you let them loose.
There is really no excuse, including lack of manpower, for removing these sorts of details that add nothing to public's knowledge but reveal very useful operational details.
Look, you either have a: freedom of the press, or b: you give it up for "safety of civilians". There isn't an imbetween.
Wow, talk about false dilemma! You have a serious lack of imagination if you cannot think of any way the press could responsibly report on the actual conduct of the war without endangering operational details and local friendlies? Let's try this:
American troops swept into this village in NW Afghanistan today after receiving information about a Taliban arms cache. Three insurgents were killed, as was a civilian caught in the crossfire.
versus
The 23rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne (strength 120 men, two APCs, 10 HMMVs), based in gridsquare* 423-12 sent a single platoon (strength 18 men, 4 HHMVs) swept into the village of Almar after receiving a tip from local tribal elder Khalifa Abdullah. Three insurgents were killed after they called in Apache support that is 16 minutes away from the airbase at 412-22 in Herat, as well as one civilian. The soldiers seized 12 AK-47s and 4 RPG-7s and an IED kit that was reverse-engineered and so now they are jamming the particular RF bands used to trigger it.
Do you see the difference? There's just no need for that kind of detail, especially where it's irrelevant to reporting the actual story. I will be the first to say that I don't trust the Army not to overclassify the hell out of the operation and generally apply a coating of whitewash. The logic that means that therefore it's OK to release sensitive operational details, however, escapes me entirely.
*I read the Wikileaks documents, most of them had 10-digit grids. I have no idea how anyone could consider that having locations down to the centimeter is at all relevant to the journalistic story. The events happened, the American public absolutely deserves to get the clean truth. I'm not disputing that bit.
The possibility of these sources being murdered? How about the actual fact of at least one Afghan tribal elder -- Khalifa Abdullah -- who was murdered because one E3 did not appreciate the actual risk to real life human beings from releasing these documents.
I am quite sympathetic to the argument that the documents needed be redacted. The American public needs to know about the nature and results of the operations. They do not, however, need to know exactly which grid-square they took place on, the composition and distribution of our forces or the names of the locals brave enough to cooperate with us. Those details are irrelevant to the policy questions.
In an ideal world, the government would redact the documents appropriately and the American public would be given a clear and accurate picture of what was going on without revealing operational information. It is utterly unenviable that we must chose between the palpably bad choices between the status quo (classifying everything and presenting the public with a Potemkin Village) or the Wikileaks solution (revealing operational details that endanger our troops and allies).
You are welcome to bet against the US repaying all its debts on time and as promised. That's the beauty of the stock market -- for every position there is a counter position betting on the opposite result. What's more, the contrarian that is right makes huge profits. Given that the US Treasury has no problem auctioning off large batches of US securities at crazy-low interest rates, there are lot of people quite confident in that full and on-time repayment so you stand to make a mint if you bet against them and are correct.
$20 says you aren't going to put your money where you mouth is though.
A smart lobsterman will not sit idly by but will sell futures on his haul (before he leaves0 at $3.75, guaranteeing him that price (up to some quantity) instead of trying to sell on the spot market. Or he'll refuse to sell to the trader at $3 and hold on to the lobsters (they don't go bad overnight ya know) and leave the trader on the hook for his put option with no supplier. In fact, he can probably gouge the trader out of $4.50 because the trader absolutely has to make good on his contract or else face a fairly stiff penalty (unless the buyer is a rube).
Any way you look at it, the trader is screwed. He has no leverage and no arbitrage. The only he has is an obligation to sell something that he may not be able to deliver.
"The heart of the system is a library of trajectories," says Tedrake. "Wall-mounted cameras report on the glider's position and the control system looks up a trajectory that will take it to the perch." [emph added]
It is very difficult for a glider to accurately figure out the distance to an approaching power line for fairly obvious reasons -- the arc subtended doesn't increase all that much as you approach until you are right up on top of it. You can use multiple cameras but that only nets you a resolution bonus proportional to the inverse of the vertical distance between the cameras. Using cameras external to the glider is an obvious improvement but it does sort of negate the idea that this is an independent flying system.
That said, I don't mean to discount the achievement by pointing out the limitation of having an external camera. Technology progresses incrementally and all that.
Buying abroad is not an option since we have our own very specific keyboard layout.
You can't just change the mapping in software? If anything, having the wrong label on the keys is a big plus -- it forces the user to learn to touch-type and has the added benefit of preventing unsuitable people from wanting to use your laptop. I would love to get a Das Keyboard (http://www.mygamer.com/news_images/3508SquallSnake7.jpg) but they don't come in the ergonomic split-keyboard variety.
Or did you mean that there's actually a different physical arrangement of key sizes and shapes?
Businesses aren't stupid: If you get a letter from the authorities saying your computer might have terrorist information on it, it's probably best to launch it into space now instead of risking the public hysteria or government's heavy-handed tactics that could land you, your family, and your friends all in jail on "suspicion" of one thing or another.
Or perhaps the business thinks that complying with the request is the right thing to do under the circumstances. I know I would likely do the same thing under those conditions -- look at the content and decide whether I want to be hosting it. I would just as surely fight a court order if the content was legit as I would pull the plug if it wasn't.
It is not beyond possibility that a business owner might decide that, even if were legal to do so (and in this case it's probably not, although we'll never find out for sure) he's not going to offer his services to further the cause of something he finds abhorrent. It's not inconceivable that the government actually convinced him they were factually correct that the site was used by Al Qaeda. The conclusion that he must have been threatened is absurd on its face because it does not account for the many ways that a reasonable person might chose to cooperate.
No cultural victory? Really? You can't walk down the street in Mumbai without seeing bootleg DVDs of Hollywood movies, TV shows and American pop music.
Obama might be a popular fellow, but Lady Gaga probably commands twice his worldwide audience.
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." -- Benjamin Franklin
But that usually means that it is better that 1 innocent person should go to jail than 101 guilty people be let free (at least if we assume you are making the strongest argument you could of the form, which is the convention). There are always going to be false convictions unless there are no convictions at all -- putting a number on the fact only obscures that fact behind some quantitative-sounding reasoning that gives you very little insight into how to actually construct a criminal justice system that reliably imprisons the guilty and acquits the innocent.
As to the instant case, if the police have the evidence to seize the content of a safe inside your castle (presumably pursuant to a warrant issued by a neutral magistrate upon showing of probable caused by a sworn affiant) then they should have the right to look inside an encrypted hard drive. It's hard to see why the analogy doesn't hold over, especially since we have seen robust judicial supervision of such physical searches over the past 30 years (since the Warren Court).
If we canceled all the subsidies to petrofuels like oil, coal, gas and nukes, we'd see even faster conversion as a freer market finally played on a leveled playing field.
Nuclear fuel has nothing whatsoever to do with petroleum.
These are the same "Taliban" that the US funded for decades and for whom they provided training and other non-munition resources.
Yes, and that was a mistake. It was a worse mistake than that -- we gave them training in weapons and explosives as well. Much of the know-how in Taliban IEDs traces its source to the CIA. That said, the fact that we made mistakes in the 1980s does not preclude us from ever acting in Afghanistan again. If anything, it increases our duty to eliminate the monsters we created.
It is beyond question that American foreign policy over the past 50 years has been a mixed bag. To my mind, that truth does not help one whit in making policy for today. The consequences of those mistakes are real and we need to make policy based on what will lead to the best outcome given the facts as they are now, not how the facts may have been if we had done things differently (even if, as I've said numerous times here, we absolutely should have done things differently).
The history of the US is one of hypocrisy and so many double standards that I wonder if you are on no one elses side other than your own perverted sense of morality and ethics.
Like every other country, we bungle incompetently from time to time. Our imperfection is not the same as perverted morality -- had we foreseen in the 1980s what would come of supporting Bin Laden and the Taliban, we would have declined to get involved.
The intersection of morality and the fog of war -- the inability to reliably predict the likely outcomes of any particular act or strategy -- is a complex one. In retrospect, the War in Vietnam was profoundly immoral both in conception and execution (and the vast majority of moderate America concurs in that sentiment). Placing yourself, however, behind JFK's (that neoconservative monster!) desk and restricting yourself to the facts that he knew at the time, however, and the calculus changes.
You offer the guy a deal for parole when he first gets in the system. Seems like an easy logical choice right? Then when he violates it (an incredibly common affair), you get to shove him in jail for the parole violation with no trial, no plea, no nothing. IANAL, but this is what a practicing lawyer in CA has told me. It's more than slightly ridiculous, but that's what happens when you're hamstrung by a retarded 3 strikes law among other things.
(1) The guy doesn't have to take parole if he doesn't want to. Parole is voluntary.
(2) You would think that he could abide the terms of parole given that the State could lawfully be holding him in jail. What is the thought process: "They are letting me out of my passed sentence on the condition that I don't drink and drive but I think I'll pound a few beers and drive home anyway"?
(3) 3 strikes is retarded in implementation but not in concept. People thrice convicted of bona-fide violent crimes (assault, robbery, rape) should get 25-life. People thrice convicted of shoplifting should get a weekend in jail and a vocational class. The idea that we cannot distinguish between those obviously different crimes is absurd.
Hence people like me are in the ridiculous position of having to defend the concept of 3S while concurrently explaining that shoplifting and other minor crimes were never part of our plan. People that repeatedly violate the fundamental human rights of others (to wit, the rights not to be robbed, raped or beaten) need to be imprisoned.
Slashdot Mirror
So now INTEL and the i86 are facing intrusion from the bottom, because the ARM cpu is a RISC design that provides better performance due to a more efficient architecture with fewer gates AT LOW POWER CONSUMPTION.
What are you talking about? ARM provides lower performance at lower power consumption.
I work on high performance clusters (usually SGE/ROCKS not Beowulf, sorry guys) dedicated to physical and biological simulations and there is just no chance the ARM is taking over. We are pushing the bounds of our chips (all Nehalem-based Xeons) already, going to back to PIII-era performance would be a huge setback. There's just not a lot of competition with superscalar out-of-order x86-64, although specialized machines are really cool.
Oh, and for those that say just use more of the lower-power chips, efficient parallelization is really ****ing hard, even in the simulation world. We routinely push the latency bounds of our interconnects (infiniband, usually) when farming out even large jobs. Telling my boss that we can achieve some power savings at the cost of buying 4x more expensive networking gear is going to lead to either a hearty laugh or a pink slip (or both!).
Competitions like these are great, but they (and games like SCII) really make me pine for an RTS with a robust in-game scripting language. I would like to write complex auto-executing instructions for my units like "Pursue but never enter the firing zone of a known enemy turret or siege tank" or "If your energy > X and enemy of type Y in range R, cast spell S" or "If you are unit type X, always position yourself between friendly unit type Y and the enemy". You could confine the script to some reasonable specifications (say, no more than 1000 queries and 100 orders given per second) if you want to deter brute-force approaches.
This is a totally different problem than writing a good AI, you would be focused on writing powerful tools that aid, not replace, a human player by letting him specify his intent on a higher level than "go here" or "attack that". Better visualization of what's happening would be an integral part of this too. I would love to have SCII give me an overview of what units/building I have, what they are doing/queued to do -- even better if they are grouped into functional 'squadrons'. Being able to have multiple panes/monitors looking at different things would help to.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm old and slow and want to leverage my experience writing rule-based logic to beat the whippersnappers that can click faster than I can and keep more things going in their heads at once :-P.
Hard to find on newegg? What?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007617%20600012349&IsNodeId=1&name=1920%20x%201200
There is public good in not permitting a fire from growing, regardless of whether or not someone payed their municipal fees. As such, fire protection should be a public service guaranteed to all citizens, funded through taxes
First, there are no municipal fees, this is the county we are talking about. Second, the voters of Fulton County considered this argument and decided they would rather not have yet another tax assessed on their houses when the city provides the same service for less. Maybe now they will reconsider, but there's nothing unreasonable in saying "It would cost us $200/house in taxes to set up our own fire dept but the city agreed to provide it for $75." In fact, getting fire service for $75 instead of $200 and avoiding unnecessary duplication in equipment, training and organization is an unalloyed public good.
The wrinkle is that since the city doesn't have the authority to tax country residents outside city limits and the county cannot tax the residents and give the money to the city, it has to be organized as a voluntary subscription. So I'm not sure if your argument here is "the county should tax the residents and set up a duplicative fire dept." or "the county should be allowed to tax its residents and give the money to the city in lieu of setting up it's own fire dept". The latter makes sense, the former is total bollocks.
Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?"
Not until they backport this project to work with kernel 2.2.19, which was current when XP was released 9 years ago. Failing that, they should at least be honest and compare support among current implementations.
It's one thing for people to chose XP for their recent builds -- more power to them for choosing whatever they like best. But when you deliberately chose a 9 year old OS, you lose the right to complain that you cannot run the latest DirectX in the same fashion that people still on kernel 2.2 (I'm sure there are in-use servers still running that) can complain they cannot run the CFS.
Since when is the market bearing a cost a justification for over pricing? No business has a right to massive profits, especially when it's the result of maintaining a oligopoly over the particular market.
What massive profits are you talking about? If you had even remotely bothered to type in a few search keywords, you would know that Sprint is losing money $250M every month. The claim that they are charging above-market prices or maintaining an oligopoly is absolutely inconsistent with the facts.
If anything, a company that's consistently (five straight quarters) posting losses should be raising prices or cutting costs since obviously they cannot burn through money forever. What's more, Sprint spent billions deploying WiMax, so it's sort of silly to accuse them of failing to keep up infrastructure. If anything, they are desperately trying to capitalize on their first-to-market status on 4G.
[ Market pricing or not, they should fix the Epic's upload problem. I was responding to the narrow and entirely incorrect (and trivially verifiable!) claim that Sprint is making massive profits, when in fact they have posted a loss in the last 5 quarters. On a personal note to the OP, please verify your claims -- at least where it's trivial to do so. ]
By 'most people' he means those who have a basic understanding of mathematics, geometry, algebra, calculus, physics and most importantly possessing the curiosity to learn.
And this is a perfectly honest thing to say, if by 'perfectly honest' I mean a statement that is technically true only because they use a pathological definition of a common phrase.
Under most normal definitions of 'most people', most people believe the statement "God created man in his current form in the last 10k years". Of course, I could say nearly everyone believes that, if by 'nearly everyone' I mean those that believe the bible is the inerrant and literal truth.
We all have a perverse tendency to think that everyone is somewhat like us, probably fed in part by the fact that we spend a lot of time with people really are a lot like us. It's a rather straightforward kind of sampling bias that leads to absurd results such as extremists on both sides of the political spectrum (now we have the righties acting up, a few years ago the lefties were writing BusHitler and BuckFush) seriously and earnestly believing that they represent the views of the majority of Americans.
[ Disclaimer: I am a physicist. Not that I think it's relevant to the linguistic gymnastics I'm complaining about here, but disclosure is disclosure. ]
What good is having GPU acceleration that only works on one platform? The -entire- point of the trend of doing things in-browser is to make cross-platform compatibility a reality. If I wanted a game to work just on Windows, why wouldn't I just make an application that did that?
How is this at all insightful? What makes HTML+Javascript 'cross-platform' is that there exist (nearly) standards-compliant applications to render that content on (nearly) every platform. I write a browser-based application, it works on Firefox, Safari, Chrome and IE. If I did it right, it work in every future browser that implements those standards.
There is nothing in this that at all makes me give half a **** about whether IE computes some image processing thing in the GPU or the CPU. I don't care if Firefox hires a team of Oompa-Loompas to work out where CSS elements go or if Safari implements their javascript using a Dwarf Fortress. The concept of a cross-platform web standards says absolutely positively nothing about how each particular platform should accomplish the goal and is concerned only with the result.
When I write 'document.images[0].style.height = "800"' that means only 'resize this image to 800 pixels high'. If IE wants to implement them in the GPU, I see no reason to stop them. Image resizing will work exactly the same way in IE (maybe faster) and will work exactly the same as it always did in Firefox.
Nothing has been added or subtracted from any other platform.
So you are saying the response to the criticism that the law is dumb is because the law says what it says?
No, I'm saying that criticism of a judge's decision to uphold the law on the grounds that the law is dumb is misdirected. It's not a matter of a bad argument (in fact, as I noted above, I think the law is quite dumb) but rather a good argument made in the wrong forum.
The proper venue for this line of reasoning is in Congress, who is the branch of government specifically empowered to make rules regarding the receipt of Federal money. The courts cannot hear arguments that the law is stupid, that's not their job -- they can only decide where the decision comports with the law as it exists.
Oh, the statute doesn't distinguish between destroying or discarding embryos, or not doing that? Really? I think it does!
It delineates an entire category of research that cannot be funded -- research in which an embryo is destroyed or discarded. It does not say anything about what happens outside of Federal funding.
Stem cell research is still being conducted on lines over a decade old. They have not been discarded. Individual cells have been, but the statute does not say that individual cells of an embryo cannot be discarded.
So if I tell you "Do not destroy or discard this computer", your theory is that you can take it apart and destroy/discard the individual parts and still be faithfully following my instructions?
There is nothing linguistic about my argument.
There is. You are changing the syntax "Do not fund X" to "Do not fund X unless X was already going to happen." You changed the semantics from "Congress disapproves of research that destroys embryos and does not want to fund any part of it" to "Congress disapproves of destroying embryos and wants to minimize the number destroyed but is OK with funding research so long as it does not add to the net number of embryos destroyed or so long as the funding is directly in the part of the research in which the embryo is created or destroyed".
The second Obama argues that he can authorize the continued funding of stem cell research because whether or not the law actually prohibits his actions it doesn't matter because he's the President, then that will be comparable.
I think it's far more insidious to pretend to obey the law but really violate it's clear intent than to publicly state it doesn't apply. The latter is disgusting, to be sure, but at least it's intellectually honest.
Not 7 years ago, Bush decided that because US Law defines (prohibited) torture as severe paint he could authorize interrogators to use pain that was not severe, and then he could turn around and define 'severe' in such a way that it included everything he wanted to do. That was a neat linguistic argument (turning on the question of "severe relative to what?") that distinguished between pain that was prohibited and pain that was legal. It also conveniently distinguish all of his desired techniques into the latter category.
If Obama has the power to 'distinguish' between embryos in such a fashion then Bush has the power to 'distinguish' between what pain qualifies as 'severe' and what pain is somewhat less than severe. FWIW, if I were drafting the statute I would remove the modifier 'severe' and prohibit all interrogations involving physical pain. That's not what 18USC2340 says, unfortunately.
I will never sacrifice my ability to reason and distinguish, no matter how much you or anyone else repeats the "everything is the same, distinguishing is just personal bias" nonsense.
I don't ask you to. Personal bias (otherwise known as 'opinions') are a fine thing! I actually share your personal opinion on the matter of stem cell research. If I were a Congressman (shudder), I would vote for it.
What I ask is that, when reading the statute, you put aside your opinion and make a good faith effort to read the statute as Congress intended not as you would have intended. "Put aside" does not mean "discard", it means realize that it's not relevant to this very specific question. You opinion is relevant to what law Congress should enact. It is not relevant to whether decision X comports with law Y.
The angst over this decision would be better directed at lobbying Congress to repeal the amendment entirely.
I disagree. Exercise the ability to distinguish, and it is clear how this is not research in which embryos are destroyed, but research in which they are allowed to live when they would otherwise be destroyed.
This is absurd reasoning. Congress does not empower the Executive to distinguish, it bans funding to all research in which the embryo is destroyed or discarded, even if it means they are allowed to live longer than they would otherwise. That distinction just isn't in the statute and the President is not allowed to insert it just because he feels it makes better policy. If the embryo is destroyed or discarded then no Federal money can be used. It's not a difficult concept.
It's very tempting to bend the law to suit your own policy ends, especially when you can rationalize it in some putative linguistic way. If you are willing to grant all Presidents the same leeway, then at least you are making a cogent argument about Executive power. If, on the other hand, you were opposing Reagan and Bush's lawyerly evasion of the law back when they were in power then it's nothing but hypocrisy to start allowing Obama to make 'distinctions'.
It's another manifestation of the normal 'for me but not for thee'-ism that pervades American politics. Both sides routinely excoriate the other for things they have shamelessly done when it suited them. It's utterly predictable and utterly asinine.
Federal funds used to conduct research on embryos that would otherwise be destroyed anyway...
Why distinguish?
Because it was the manifest and obvious intent of Congress to forbid the Federal funding of such research. See, e.g. the dickey amendment which provides in no uncertain terms that no funds are to be expended on research in which embryos are destroyed irrespective of the origin or fate of those embryos.
SEC. 509. (a) None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for--
(1) the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or
(2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero under 45 CFR 46.208(a)(2) and Section 498(b) of the Public Health Service Act [1](42 U.S.C. 289g(b)) (Title 42, Section 289g(b), United States Code).
(b) For purposes of this section, the term "human embryo or embryos" includes any organism, not protected as a human subject under 45 CFR 46 (the Human Subject Protection regulations) . . . that is derived by fertilization, parthenogenesis, cloning, or any other means from one or more human gametes (sperm or egg) or human diploid cells (cells that have two sets of chromosomes, such as somatic cells).
It is absolutely galling that Obama (& his subordinates at HHS/NIH, for whom he is responsible) would just ignore the clear language of the statute and decide to fund this research. There is just no way to square it with the statute.
[ As an aside, as a personal political matter, I would vote against such an amendment and for unrestricted funding for stem cell research. As a legal matter before the court here, the question is whether the NIH policy comports with the law not whether the law is a good, or even coherent, one. ]
The existing WikiLeaks documents contain 10-digit grid-squares, allowing people to know the location of various military resources down to the square meter. This is absolutely not required for any sort of public purpose -- the public would be just as informed if you would omit the grid-squares and replace them with a vague location/district.
This can be done without wasting any manpower, something like this regex pattern will redact all collections of more than 5 numerical digits:
sed -r s/'[0-9]{5,}'/'REDACTED'/g
If the grid-squares are broken into chunks with a delimiter, say '-', you can try:
sed -r s/'[0-9\\-]{5,}'/'REDACTED'/g
As usual with regex, grep out the first 1000 or so matches for casual perusal before you let them loose.
There is really no excuse, including lack of manpower, for removing these sorts of details that add nothing to public's knowledge but reveal very useful operational details.
Look, you either have a: freedom of the press, or b: you give it up for "safety of civilians". There isn't an imbetween.
Wow, talk about false dilemma! You have a serious lack of imagination if you cannot think of any way the press could responsibly report on the actual conduct of the war without endangering operational details and local friendlies? Let's try this:
American troops swept into this village in NW Afghanistan today after receiving information about a Taliban arms cache. Three insurgents were killed, as was a civilian caught in the crossfire.
versus
The 23rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne (strength 120 men, two APCs, 10 HMMVs), based in gridsquare* 423-12 sent a single platoon (strength 18 men, 4 HHMVs) swept into the village of Almar after receiving a tip from local tribal elder Khalifa Abdullah. Three insurgents were killed after they called in Apache support that is 16 minutes away from the airbase at 412-22 in Herat, as well as one civilian. The soldiers seized 12 AK-47s and 4 RPG-7s and an IED kit that was reverse-engineered and so now they are jamming the particular RF bands used to trigger it.
Do you see the difference? There's just no need for that kind of detail, especially where it's irrelevant to reporting the actual story. I will be the first to say that I don't trust the Army not to overclassify the hell out of the operation and generally apply a coating of whitewash. The logic that means that therefore it's OK to release sensitive operational details, however, escapes me entirely.
*I read the Wikileaks documents, most of them had 10-digit grids. I have no idea how anyone could consider that having locations down to the centimeter is at all relevant to the journalistic story. The events happened, the American public absolutely deserves to get the clean truth. I'm not disputing that bit.
The possibility of these sources being murdered? How about the actual fact of at least one Afghan tribal elder -- Khalifa Abdullah -- who was murdered because one E3 did not appreciate the actual risk to real life human beings from releasing these documents.
I am quite sympathetic to the argument that the documents needed be redacted. The American public needs to know about the nature and results of the operations. They do not, however, need to know exactly which grid-square they took place on, the composition and distribution of our forces or the names of the locals brave enough to cooperate with us. Those details are irrelevant to the policy questions.
In an ideal world, the government would redact the documents appropriately and the American public would be given a clear and accurate picture of what was going on without revealing operational information. It is utterly unenviable that we must chose between the palpably bad choices between the status quo (classifying everything and presenting the public with a Potemkin Village) or the Wikileaks solution (revealing operational details that endanger our troops and allies).
Yes, because $1.5E12 deficits are not a problem.
You are welcome to bet against the US repaying all its debts on time and as promised. That's the beauty of the stock market -- for every position there is a counter position betting on the opposite result. What's more, the contrarian that is right makes huge profits. Given that the US Treasury has no problem auctioning off large batches of US securities at crazy-low interest rates, there are lot of people quite confident in that full and on-time repayment so you stand to make a mint if you bet against them and are correct.
$20 says you aren't going to put your money where you mouth is though.
A smart lobsterman will not sit idly by but will sell futures on his haul (before he leaves0 at $3.75, guaranteeing him that price (up to some quantity) instead of trying to sell on the spot market. Or he'll refuse to sell to the trader at $3 and hold on to the lobsters (they don't go bad overnight ya know) and leave the trader on the hook for his put option with no supplier. In fact, he can probably gouge the trader out of $4.50 because the trader absolutely has to make good on his contract or else face a fairly stiff penalty (unless the buyer is a rube).
Any way you look at it, the trader is screwed. He has no leverage and no arbitrage. The only he has is an obligation to sell something that he may not be able to deliver.
From TFA:
"The heart of the system is a library of trajectories," says Tedrake. "Wall-mounted cameras report on the glider's position and the control system looks up a trajectory that will take it to the perch." [emph added]
It is very difficult for a glider to accurately figure out the distance to an approaching power line for fairly obvious reasons -- the arc subtended doesn't increase all that much as you approach until you are right up on top of it. You can use multiple cameras but that only nets you a resolution bonus proportional to the inverse of the vertical distance between the cameras. Using cameras external to the glider is an obvious improvement but it does sort of negate the idea that this is an independent flying system.
That said, I don't mean to discount the achievement by pointing out the limitation of having an external camera. Technology progresses incrementally and all that.
Buying abroad is not an option since we have our own very specific keyboard layout.
You can't just change the mapping in software? If anything, having the wrong label on the keys is a big plus -- it forces the user to learn to touch-type and has the added benefit of preventing unsuitable people from wanting to use your laptop. I would love to get a Das Keyboard (http://www.mygamer.com/news_images/3508SquallSnake7.jpg) but they don't come in the ergonomic split-keyboard variety.
Or did you mean that there's actually a different physical arrangement of key sizes and shapes?
Businesses aren't stupid: If you get a letter from the authorities saying your computer might have terrorist information on it, it's probably best to launch it into space now instead of risking the public hysteria or government's heavy-handed tactics that could land you, your family, and your friends all in jail on "suspicion" of one thing or another.
Or perhaps the business thinks that complying with the request is the right thing to do under the circumstances. I know I would likely do the same thing under those conditions -- look at the content and decide whether I want to be hosting it. I would just as surely fight a court order if the content was legit as I would pull the plug if it wasn't.
It is not beyond possibility that a business owner might decide that, even if were legal to do so (and in this case it's probably not, although we'll never find out for sure) he's not going to offer his services to further the cause of something he finds abhorrent. It's not inconceivable that the government actually convinced him they were factually correct that the site was used by Al Qaeda. The conclusion that he must have been threatened is absurd on its face because it does not account for the many ways that a reasonable person might chose to cooperate.
No cultural victory? Really? You can't walk down the street in Mumbai without seeing bootleg DVDs of Hollywood movies, TV shows and American pop music.
Obama might be a popular fellow, but Lady Gaga probably commands twice his worldwide audience.
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." -- Benjamin Franklin
But that usually means that it is better that 1 innocent person should go to jail than 101 guilty people be let free (at least if we assume you are making the strongest argument you could of the form, which is the convention). There are always going to be false convictions unless there are no convictions at all -- putting a number on the fact only obscures that fact behind some quantitative-sounding reasoning that gives you very little insight into how to actually construct a criminal justice system that reliably imprisons the guilty and acquits the innocent.
As to the instant case, if the police have the evidence to seize the content of a safe inside your castle (presumably pursuant to a warrant issued by a neutral magistrate upon showing of probable caused by a sworn affiant) then they should have the right to look inside an encrypted hard drive. It's hard to see why the analogy doesn't hold over, especially since we have seen robust judicial supervision of such physical searches over the past 30 years (since the Warren Court).
See also (no affil w/ author): http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm
If we canceled all the subsidies to petrofuels like oil, coal, gas and nukes, we'd see even faster conversion as a freer market finally played on a leveled playing field.
Nuclear fuel has nothing whatsoever to do with petroleum.
These are the same "Taliban" that the US funded for decades and for whom they provided training and other non-munition resources.
Yes, and that was a mistake. It was a worse mistake than that -- we gave them training in weapons and explosives as well. Much of the know-how in Taliban IEDs traces its source to the CIA. That said, the fact that we made mistakes in the 1980s does not preclude us from ever acting in Afghanistan again. If anything, it increases our duty to eliminate the monsters we created.
It is beyond question that American foreign policy over the past 50 years has been a mixed bag. To my mind, that truth does not help one whit in making policy for today. The consequences of those mistakes are real and we need to make policy based on what will lead to the best outcome given the facts as they are now, not how the facts may have been if we had done things differently (even if, as I've said numerous times here, we absolutely should have done things differently).
The history of the US is one of hypocrisy and so many double standards that I wonder if you are on no one elses side other than your own perverted sense of morality and ethics.
Like every other country, we bungle incompetently from time to time. Our imperfection is not the same as perverted morality -- had we foreseen in the 1980s what would come of supporting Bin Laden and the Taliban, we would have declined to get involved.
The intersection of morality and the fog of war -- the inability to reliably predict the likely outcomes of any particular act or strategy -- is a complex one. In retrospect, the War in Vietnam was profoundly immoral both in conception and execution (and the vast majority of moderate America concurs in that sentiment). Placing yourself, however, behind JFK's (that neoconservative monster!) desk and restricting yourself to the facts that he knew at the time, however, and the calculus changes.
You offer the guy a deal for parole when he first gets in the system. Seems like an easy logical choice right? Then when he violates it (an incredibly common affair), you get to shove him in jail for the parole violation with no trial, no plea, no nothing. IANAL, but this is what a practicing lawyer in CA has told me. It's more than slightly ridiculous, but that's what happens when you're hamstrung by a retarded 3 strikes law among other things.
(1) The guy doesn't have to take parole if he doesn't want to. Parole is voluntary.
(2) You would think that he could abide the terms of parole given that the State could lawfully be holding him in jail. What is the thought process: "They are letting me out of my passed sentence on the condition that I don't drink and drive but I think I'll pound a few beers and drive home anyway"?
(3) 3 strikes is retarded in implementation but not in concept. People thrice convicted of bona-fide violent crimes (assault, robbery, rape) should get 25-life. People thrice convicted of shoplifting should get a weekend in jail and a vocational class. The idea that we cannot distinguish between those obviously different crimes is absurd.
Hence people like me are in the ridiculous position of having to defend the concept of 3S while concurrently explaining that shoplifting and other minor crimes were never part of our plan. People that repeatedly violate the fundamental human rights of others (to wit, the rights not to be robbed, raped or beaten) need to be imprisoned.