I think you can agree with me the FDA cannot approve this combination without data, so until they do these products under their jurisdiction cannot be sold.
I do not agree. In fact, I think the FDA cannot ban a combination without data showing a substantial risk. The null hypothesis ought to be that products made from safe ingredients (as opposed to novel additives) are safe until proven otherwise.
Just because two things are relatively safe does not make them safe in combination (given they are both drugs in the first place). I agree that beer companies shouldn't have the burden of proof- that is on the FDA, the beer companies just cannot release products pending FDA approval.
So if I want to sell wasabi-flavored icecream, I have to wait until the FDA approves the combination of wasabi and cream (or wasabi and sugar)? That's absurd. Wasabi is safe, ice cream is safe, therefore unless there is specific evidence that you ought not to combine them, the default ought to be that the combination is safe.
It's not like you are deprived of the right to mix your own drink if you really want one, and the beer companies are making plenty of money as-is, so I don't see the need to rush.
The only rush I see is a rush to ban the product before there is any real evidence that it is harmful.
These beers are subject to the regulation of the FDA, meaning people are trusting the products are safe by assuming the FDA okays them. The FDA does not have sufficient scientific evidence as to whether caffeine + alcohol has additional problems to be concerned about- until they do they cannot approve these products.
So, we don't know that it's dangerous and therefore it should be banned? How about we don't know that it's dangerous therefore it should be allowed until sufficient scientific evidence shows that it is harmful? The burden of proof should not be on the distributor of a beverage to disprove every hypothetical negative health effect, especially in the case where all the ingredients are already certified as Generally Recognized as Safe (the FDA classification for mundane ingredients that are used all the time -- it would be a totally different story if these drinks had novel or untested additives).
Just to be clear, I have nothing against doing the appropriate scientific research to explore the issue. That's the only way to really settle the issue. My position is that, in the absence of the evidence and given that all the ingredients are GRAS, the manufacturers should be in the clear until there is credible evidence of serious health risks. It doesn't have to be a slam dunk, but it does have to be more than the mere speculation that seems to be going on here.
Ok, we all agree that funneling NXDOMAIN responses to your advertising portal is wrong. It's evil, manipulative, blah blah, not going to defend it.
What really bothers me is his rationale for the first example -- using DNS responses to properly route content to the right node in your CDN. Sure, it increases the "floor" request time by eliminating cached response closer to the user, but it also greatly decreases the average request time by serving the content from the nearest node. It seems to me like it's a huge net win for the total amount of network traffic -- you lose by having a whole lot of extra (tiny) DNS requests and cache-misses but you win huge by having Microsoft's latest service pack (many MB) traverse the smallest possible number of hops.
His second complaint, that this is somehow lawsuit-fodder, is ridiculous on its face. Akamai works incredibly well for content providers that don't want to invest in lots of redundant distribution resources. They have every incentive to outsource it to a company that will provide the users with a much faster experience and virtually nothing to lose. Most users will give up on a website if it can't serve their requests in a reasonable amount of time and I don't see a revolution in user patience about to happen.
Finally, his "solution" -- that CDNs rely on dumb ("psuedorandom" is his fancy was of saying dumb) assignment of users to distribution nodes -- is a huge step backwards. It would mean more stress on the long-haul fiber for absolutely no good reason as requests were served geographically distance from their origin. By the way, it's interesting that he labels his dumb response "truthful", as if Akamai lied when they assign me to a different node than my Australian buddy because we live half a globe apart? That's ridiculous. We each asked for a server that can give us www.amd.com, we got a damn truthful answer. In fact, we each got the best possible answer we could. That's not lying, it's giving each of us a finer-grained optimal answer than we would have received under his lame suggestion.
Please don't confuse his (for the forgoing reasons, silly) rant against CDNs with his rightful indignation at NXDOMAIN redirects. They are totally different animals.
In the long run, I think there will be fiber everywhere just like there is copper everywhere now. You can't seriously expect them to deploy it everywhere all at once -- it makes sense to roll it out gradually, learning (and economizing) in the process.
Moreover, Like every other new last-mile technology, it has been deployed first in the easiest targets. Copper to the premises started in the cities and migrated outwards, as did the various flavors of DOCSIS and DSL. I chatted with the FIOS install guy and he said that the main reason they don't do downtown Boston (I live in a nearby suburb) is that underground installation takes almost 4 times longer than stringing it on the utility poles like they did out here. So Manhattan is way out just because it's a technical feat, although I'm sure eventually they will get around to it.
Finally, as to the FIOS price, I cannot compare it with anything because no one offers 20/20 residential service.
The real issue here is that building infrastructure like this requires such a huge amount of capital that it's a natural monopoly. There's really no way for competitors to come in without a huge investment in laying their own lines that is very much at risk and only serves to lessen their own profit margins.
Yeah, there's absolutely no way a company would spend $28 billion dollars laying the next generation of infrastructure lines in an area already served by Comcast. Definitely not typing on that network as we speak, no sir, couldn't possibly exist because you have a theory that says that it won't happen. Oh, and my area also gets RCN and a couple dozen flavors of DSL.
Oh, and by the way, FIOS is fantastic. Super low pings, massive bandwidth, no hiccups.
You are aware that in order for ping to work at all, it needs raw sockets so that it can write ICMP packets? Those are restricted because they allow you to spoof all sorts of network traffic (e.g., the ethernet address to IP address mapping) Which Would Be Bad.
This seems less bad than kludgy workarounds.
Network services should never trust that the packets sent to it are not forged. Ever. Session-based authentication If the network services were written with this caveat in mind (which can never really be eliminated anyways, since there's no way of knowing whether the client app is mangling packets) then there would be no problem letting userland programs have access to raw sockets.
Why not use something based of the Atom chip but massively parallel.
You are probably one of those guys that thinks that if you can get 36 women working together on making a baby, it will be ready in 1 week.
Not all problems can scale out to many cpus (or wombs, for that matter). Threading overhead, network latency/bandwidth, mutual exclusion (or the overhead on atomic data types) all conspire to defeat attempts to scale. This is, of course, if your problem is one that is even amenable to straightforward parallelization in the first place -- many problems (for instance, lattice simulations of Monte Carlo) are excruciating to scale to even 2 cpus.
In my own (informal) tests on our HPC (x64, Linux, see my post above for details), I concluded that you need to be able to discretize your work into independent (and NONBLOCKING) chunks of ~5ms in order to make spawning a pthread worth it. Of course, "worth it" is a relative term -- some people would be glad to double the cpu-time required for a 25% reduction in wall-clock time while others might not, so I'll concede that my measurement is biased. IIRC, I required a net-efficiency (versus the single-core version) of no worse than 85% -- e.g. spend less than 15% of your cpu-time dealing with thread overhead or waiting for a mutex. This was for 8 cores on the same motherboard by the way, if you are spawning MPI jobs over a network socket, expect much much worse.
... is almost always wrong. As one of the principals on a large-ish (not large by world standards, 1000 cores, mainly Nehalem so approximately 100 GFLOPS) cluster, I've been very pleased that we've done things as simply as possible. Sun Grid Engine and ROCKS running on commodity 1Us delivers an economical and effective solution (no, I don't work for Sun).
Most importantly, the environment does not unduly restrict what kind of compute jobs can be run. If it can be compiled on *nix, we can probably run it. We lose to specialized hardware (GPU-based, Cell-based,... ) in raw throughput but we make up for it in both initial price and ease of deployment. We don't even have a dedicated admin for the cluster -- we had one to set it up and he did such a good job we haven't needed to hire a replacement!
Ultimately, I feel like it's not worth paying extra in hardware and software-dev costs to save few dollars on cooling and power. Sure, you get credibility of running a "green" cluster (nevermind that you have to pay to feed and house those extra developers, which should legitimately come out of your carbon budget) but you end with with a far less useful product.
The irony is quite telling -- environmental regulations making it harder to build a renewable energy source. The most telling part of this (and recall that the New York Times was not a particular fan of this TX governor):
But here again, Texas and California have behaved very differently. Texas set a strong renewable energy requirement back in 1999 (when George W. Bush was governor) -- and quickly exceeded it. Last year, 5 percent of the state's electricity came from wind power. California set a very high bar, requiring big utilities to get 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources next year, although they are not expected to meet it.
That is, measured purely by results, the track record of the state that doesn't give a shit is miles ahead of the state that makes a big complicated deal about caring.
[ Aside: I'm not against environmental regulation by any means. At the very minimum, however, we ought to insist that the benefits a cleaner environment outweigh the costs of regulation. In cases like this where it seems like the regulations are actually counterproductive to the goals, well then the costs are truly wasted.]
Dang, I forgot to mention the most egregious error in your post (too caught up in explaining other stuff I suppose). Federal law in the United States is "one-party consent" -- anyone that is a legitimate party to a call may record it herself or give consent for it to be recorded by a third party. State laws vary, see the link.
Perhaps you can tell me the difference between a phone call and a email. Phone calls are protected by wiretapping laws, it is a criminal offence to listen in to private phone calls or record them without the permission of all parties involved.
Perhaps you can learn the difference between a statute and a constitutional provision? I'll help, but really you should read a bit more before calling other people idiots -- it's not polite if you are right and even worse when you are wrong.
Wiretapping is a crime because Congress decided to make it a crime (and, as it happens, they have the power to do so if the communication happens to be on a commercial interstate telecommunications network). If Congress wanted to, it could repeal that law altogether. That is, it is an exercise of statutory authority.
The Fourth Amendment, the provision at hand in the instant case, has nothing to do with statutory prohibition. Violating the fourth amendment is not, itself, a crime unless the violation is willful (that is, a police officer than makes an error about whether he can search a vehicle is not criminal just because he happened to get it wrong). The proper vehicle for violations of the Fourth is suppression of the evidence at criminal trial and, if the conduct is so egregious that it "shocks the conscience", then a suit monetary damages against the principals (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivens_v._Six_Unknown_Named_Agents).
TBB is available under the common OSS license GPL v2 with the libstdC++ Runtime Exception. This is the same license used for a variety of well-known OSS applications including MySQL, NetBeans, and the Linux kernel.
Intel Thread Building Blocks (http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/ is (are?) fantastic. Open source (GPL), works on any ISO-compliant C++ compiler and is fairly intuitive. It allows both high-level (parallel_for) and low level (task-based) parallelism. Particularly useful are the concurrent containers, since it saves you from reimplementing these basic structures.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki is great for finding out what the drives think about their own health. Things to look out for are spin-retry counts (which lead to that annoying 2-5 seconds freeze), high reallocated sector counts (never never never use chkdsk to attempt to fix a broken hard drive. With the robustness of modern journaling file systems (HFS, extN, NTFS), storage errors are almost always hardware errors. Running chkdsk stresses the drive just as it's failing and usually pushes it over the edge -- and then users complain that you can't recover their data.
Seriously. Can anyone with a legal background explain what part of corporate daily business requires that corporations be legally considered equivalent to people?
Because if Corporations didn't have First Amendment rights, Richard Nixon could have shut down the New York Times for publishing the Pentagon Papers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States). Similarly, organizations like the ACLU, NOW, NARAL, NRL, NRA,... (remember, most political advocacy organizations are incorporated) would be subject to restrictions on what they could say or publish in furtherance of their causes. The whole debate over the "7 deadly words" and FCC regulation of TV/radio would be a moot point if the corporations that hold those licenses had no legal right to any expression.
In the case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_College_v._Woodward) the legislature of NH decided that they have the right to unilaterally rewrite the charter of Dartmouth college and appoint their own trustees to manage it. Again, if the corporation had right to a binding contract, there would be no impediment to the fairly naked power grab attempted there. The power grab was even more blatant in Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts v. Town of Pawlet (http://supreme.justia.com/us/29/480/), in which the Town basically tried to seize land from an unpopular missionary group on the grounds that corporations have no right to property. Again, if corporations have no right, their property could just be taken with no compensation.
IMO, the protection of the rights of corporations is little more than protection of the right of individuals when they want to accomplish something larger than they can do by themselves. If you and I wanted to start a nerdrage business on the internet (nevermind the lack of a serious way to make profits), we should be able to do so and retain the rights that we do as individuals. The fact that you and I are cooperating on the matter does not detract from the fact that we still have those rights.
I'm tempted to quote soylent green here -- Corporations are made of PEOPLE.
Canceled out? Please review how subtraction works. You mean reduced, not cancelled.
The marginal increase in cost from the cooling is canceled out by the heating gains. That is, for every extra dollar I spend cooling heat that I produced with the light bulbs, I save at least an extra dollar off my heating bill.
If you replace your incandescents by CFL's or LED's you'll produce less heat from your lighting, so in winter you'll need to run the heater more. However the total electricity use will be the same.
Correct. Unfortunately, CFLs and LEDs are much more expensive upfront. Since I get approximately zero savings for 6 months of the year, the time to recoup is doubled (or, with a fixed horizon, the price differential at the critical point is halved).
Things will get better if you dump your electric heaters. They are expensive and there are shitloads of better systems available.
Again, large upfront costs and smaller continued costs. It would cost a small fortune to replace our 1950s oil boiler with something vaguely modern.
Oh, and I rent, so tearing stuff out is not an option.
So incandescent bulbs are a bad thing in most of the world for about a third of the year (summer) and in some of the world most of the year. If you happen to be running air-conditioning at the same time as an incandescent bulb, you're just pumping money out of the window.
(1) If you are using your electric heater at the same time as an incandescent bulb, the bulb is effectively free. Up here in New England, that season is 2-3 times longer than AC season and, not coincidentally, has almost twice as much darkness that needs to be lit up.
Even if we assume (incorrectly) that there is the same light usage in winter and summer, the marginal increase from paying double during the 2 months (maybe 3 during a bad summer) of AC are more than canceled out by 6 months where the bulb is redundant with the heater.
(2) Regardless of climate, most of the air-conditioning demand comes between 3PM and 6PM, not really peak hours for using any artificial lighting. Maybe for the basement dwellers, but their rooms are nice and cool anyway.
The case for CFLs just isn't that compelling in a house where more than 50% of my annual electrical bill is electric heaters.
Of note is the fact that, two years after Vista's release, not even 30 percent of PCs actually run it
No, not even 30% of the subset of PCs with this performance-monitoring software run it. In order to claim that not even 30% of PCs run Vista, you would need to establish that the sampling method is not biased, which is a pretty implausible claim.
It would not surprise me if the subset of technically savvy PC users are biased towards XP and that subset of "Windows is what comes on the computer from the store" have whatever the store put on it.
I'm not a lawyer, and am especially not a British lawyer... but if intercepted communication is not legal, then isn't getting information from a warrant based on intercepted communication not legal? I mean if a cop illegally searches my house, finds pot, then uses that as a basis for a warrant, it would be thrown out.
There is nothing in the US Constitution that requires the NSA not to spy on Brits. Similarly, there's nothing that requires MI6 not to spy on Americans. It would be quite an infringement on either nation's sovereignty to assert such restrictions on their ability to spy on foreigners.
As to your hypothetical, if a US cop breaks into your house in Mexico and hauls you out by force, you have no claim against him as far as US law, since the fourth amendment does not apply in Mexico http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Verdugo-Urquidez. Same with the NSA wiretaps -- they can only wiretap without a warrant if they have probable cause to believe that either end of the conversation is outside the US or not a citizen -- otherwise it's a trip to the FISA court.
A monopoly is one of those things there can really only be one of.
The fact that MS, Sony and Microsoft are viciously competing for video game market share (see, e.g. the recent price drops) is a sign of a fairly healthy and competitive market.
All good, except that "banned from doing X for life" is not a reasonable restriction. For cases where it seems reasonable, the person should clearly remain in prison.
That's your assertion but I think a white collar criminal that is banned for life from being an accountant after his 10 year fraud sentence definitely shouldn't remain in prison. He's not a danger to anyone so that's $40k/yr wasted on keeping some middle aged guy behind bars just because, if he got out, he might defraud someone again?
You really think it's more humane to keep him in jail for another 20 years?!
Politicians aren't in the business of being leaders -- they're in the business of getting elected, and the best way to do that is to mirror the sentiment of their electorate, no matter how uninformed or illogical that sentiment might be.
This sounds exactly right in a representative democracy. If the public demands an illogical policy, they (as Sovereign), are entitled to implement it.
That a politician would never admit this, let alone campaign on it, only means that it is the public's mind that needs to be changed, not the politicians'.
I submit to your the assertion that the public will never be convinced of the soundness of a policy that allows former felons to possess guns.
Ultimately, I guess, I have issues with people that assert that government is an exercise in logic or rational problem solving. It's neither of those things -- it's an exercise in implementing the will of The People, no more, no less.
If they aren't ready to be re-introduced into society then they shouldn't be, it should be as simple as that.
And how do you propose to determine, for each prisoner, when they are ready? Do you expect a little plastic pop-tab (like on your turkey) to come up when they are done? Prediction is hard -- especially about the future. We can't know in advance which prisoners are going to successfully reintegate and which aren't.
To condemn them all to life sentences because some fraction aren't ready offends our general sense of forgiveness and second-chances. On the other hand, to let them loose without restriction is to place all our of rights in danger.
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I think you can agree with me the FDA cannot approve this combination without data, so until they do these products under their jurisdiction cannot be sold.
I do not agree. In fact, I think the FDA cannot ban a combination without data showing a substantial risk. The null hypothesis ought to be that products made from safe ingredients (as opposed to novel additives) are safe until proven otherwise.
Just because two things are relatively safe does not make them safe in combination (given they are both drugs in the first place). I agree that beer companies shouldn't have the burden of proof- that is on the FDA, the beer companies just cannot release products pending FDA approval.
So if I want to sell wasabi-flavored icecream, I have to wait until the FDA approves the combination of wasabi and cream (or wasabi and sugar)? That's absurd. Wasabi is safe, ice cream is safe, therefore unless there is specific evidence that you ought not to combine them, the default ought to be that the combination is safe.
It's not like you are deprived of the right to mix your own drink if you really want one, and the beer companies are making plenty of money as-is, so I don't see the need to rush.
The only rush I see is a rush to ban the product before there is any real evidence that it is harmful.
These beers are subject to the regulation of the FDA, meaning people are trusting the products are safe by assuming the FDA okays them. The FDA does not have sufficient scientific evidence as to whether caffeine + alcohol has additional problems to be concerned about- until they do they cannot approve these products.
So, we don't know that it's dangerous and therefore it should be banned? How about we don't know that it's dangerous therefore it should be allowed until sufficient scientific evidence shows that it is harmful? The burden of proof should not be on the distributor of a beverage to disprove every hypothetical negative health effect, especially in the case where all the ingredients are already certified as Generally Recognized as Safe (the FDA classification for mundane ingredients that are used all the time -- it would be a totally different story if these drinks had novel or untested additives).
Just to be clear, I have nothing against doing the appropriate scientific research to explore the issue. That's the only way to really settle the issue. My position is that, in the absence of the evidence and given that all the ingredients are GRAS, the manufacturers should be in the clear until there is credible evidence of serious health risks. It doesn't have to be a slam dunk, but it does have to be more than the mere speculation that seems to be going on here.
The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start.
The order not to reprocess has nothing to do with terrorism, having been passed in Jimmy Carter's time. It was about proliferation.
Ok, we all agree that funneling NXDOMAIN responses to your advertising portal is wrong. It's evil, manipulative, blah blah, not going to defend it.
What really bothers me is his rationale for the first example -- using DNS responses to properly route content to the right node in your CDN. Sure, it increases the "floor" request time by eliminating cached response closer to the user, but it also greatly decreases the average request time by serving the content from the nearest node. It seems to me like it's a huge net win for the total amount of network traffic -- you lose by having a whole lot of extra (tiny) DNS requests and cache-misses but you win huge by having Microsoft's latest service pack (many MB) traverse the smallest possible number of hops.
His second complaint, that this is somehow lawsuit-fodder, is ridiculous on its face. Akamai works incredibly well for content providers that don't want to invest in lots of redundant distribution resources. They have every incentive to outsource it to a company that will provide the users with a much faster experience and virtually nothing to lose. Most users will give up on a website if it can't serve their requests in a reasonable amount of time and I don't see a revolution in user patience about to happen.
Finally, his "solution" -- that CDNs rely on dumb ("psuedorandom" is his fancy was of saying dumb) assignment of users to distribution nodes -- is a huge step backwards. It would mean more stress on the long-haul fiber for absolutely no good reason as requests were served geographically distance from their origin. By the way, it's interesting that he labels his dumb response "truthful", as if Akamai lied when they assign me to a different node than my Australian buddy because we live half a globe apart? That's ridiculous. We each asked for a server that can give us www.amd.com, we got a damn truthful answer. In fact, we each got the best possible answer we could. That's not lying, it's giving each of us a finer-grained optimal answer than we would have received under his lame suggestion.
Please don't confuse his (for the forgoing reasons, silly) rant against CDNs with his rightful indignation at NXDOMAIN redirects. They are totally different animals.
In the long run, I think there will be fiber everywhere just like there is copper everywhere now. You can't seriously expect them to deploy it everywhere all at once -- it makes sense to roll it out gradually, learning (and economizing) in the process.
Moreover, Like every other new last-mile technology, it has been deployed first in the easiest targets. Copper to the premises started in the cities and migrated outwards, as did the various flavors of DOCSIS and DSL. I chatted with the FIOS install guy and he said that the main reason they don't do downtown Boston (I live in a nearby suburb) is that underground installation takes almost 4 times longer than stringing it on the utility poles like they did out here. So Manhattan is way out just because it's a technical feat, although I'm sure eventually they will get around to it.
Finally, as to the FIOS price, I cannot compare it with anything because no one offers 20/20 residential service.
The real issue here is that building infrastructure like this requires such a huge amount of capital that it's a natural monopoly. There's really no way for competitors to come in without a huge investment in laying their own lines that is very much at risk and only serves to lessen their own profit margins.
Yeah, there's absolutely no way a company would spend $28 billion dollars laying the next generation of infrastructure lines in an area already served by Comcast. Definitely not typing on that network as we speak, no sir, couldn't possibly exist because you have a theory that says that it won't happen. Oh, and my area also gets RCN and a couple dozen flavors of DSL.
Oh, and by the way, FIOS is fantastic. Super low pings, massive bandwidth, no hiccups.
See also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/technology/19fios.html
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/08/19/technology/19fios.2.ready.html
http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios
You are aware that in order for ping to work at all, it needs raw sockets so that it can write ICMP packets? Those are restricted because they allow you to spoof all sorts of network traffic (e.g., the ethernet address to IP address mapping) Which Would Be Bad.
This seems less bad than kludgy workarounds.
Network services should never trust that the packets sent to it are not forged. Ever. Session-based authentication If the network services were written with this caveat in mind (which can never really be eliminated anyways, since there's no way of knowing whether the client app is mangling packets) then there would be no problem letting userland programs have access to raw sockets.
Why not use something based of the Atom chip but massively parallel.
You are probably one of those guys that thinks that if you can get 36 women working together on making a baby, it will be ready in 1 week.
Not all problems can scale out to many cpus (or wombs, for that matter). Threading overhead, network latency/bandwidth, mutual exclusion (or the overhead on atomic data types) all conspire to defeat attempts to scale. This is, of course, if your problem is one that is even amenable to straightforward parallelization in the first place -- many problems (for instance, lattice simulations of Monte Carlo) are excruciating to scale to even 2 cpus.
In my own (informal) tests on our HPC (x64, Linux, see my post above for details), I concluded that you need to be able to discretize your work into independent (and NONBLOCKING) chunks of ~5ms in order to make spawning a pthread worth it. Of course, "worth it" is a relative term -- some people would be glad to double the cpu-time required for a 25% reduction in wall-clock time while others might not, so I'll concede that my measurement is biased. IIRC, I required a net-efficiency (versus the single-core version) of no worse than 85% -- e.g. spend less than 15% of your cpu-time dealing with thread overhead or waiting for a mutex. This was for 8 cores on the same motherboard by the way, if you are spawning MPI jobs over a network socket, expect much much worse.
... is almost always wrong. As one of the principals on a large-ish (not large by world standards, 1000 cores, mainly Nehalem so approximately 100 GFLOPS) cluster, I've been very pleased that we've done things as simply as possible. Sun Grid Engine and ROCKS running on commodity 1Us delivers an economical and effective solution (no, I don't work for Sun).
Most importantly, the environment does not unduly restrict what kind of compute jobs can be run. If it can be compiled on *nix, we can probably run it. We lose to specialized hardware (GPU-based, Cell-based, ... ) in raw throughput but we make up for it in both initial price and ease of deployment. We don't even have a dedicated admin for the cluster -- we had one to set it up and he did such a good job we haven't needed to hire a replacement!
Ultimately, I feel like it's not worth paying extra in hardware and software-dev costs to save few dollars on cooling and power. Sure, you get credibility of running a "green" cluster (nevermind that you have to pay to feed and house those extra developers, which should legitimately come out of your carbon budget) but you end with with a far less useful product.
Long Live X86(_64)!
Of course, it's because a developer in Texas can just buy the land and build a wind farm.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18galbraith.html?_r=3
The irony is quite telling -- environmental regulations making it harder to build a renewable energy source. The most telling part of this (and recall that the New York Times was not a particular fan of this TX governor):
That is, measured purely by results, the track record of the state that doesn't give a shit is miles ahead of the state that makes a big complicated deal about caring.
[ Aside: I'm not against environmental regulation by any means. At the very minimum, however, we ought to insist that the benefits a cleaner environment outweigh the costs of regulation. In cases like this where it seems like the regulations are actually counterproductive to the goals, well then the costs are truly wasted.]
Dang, I forgot to mention the most egregious error in your post (too caught up in explaining other stuff I suppose). Federal law in the United States is "one-party consent" -- anyone that is a legitimate party to a call may record it herself or give consent for it to be recorded by a third party. State laws vary, see the link.
http://www.aapsonline.org/judicial/telephone.htm
Perhaps you can tell me the difference between a phone call and a email. Phone calls are protected by wiretapping laws, it is a criminal offence to listen in to private phone calls or record them without the permission of all parties involved.
Perhaps you can learn the difference between a statute and a constitutional provision? I'll help, but really you should read a bit more before calling other people idiots -- it's not polite if you are right and even worse when you are wrong.
Wiretapping is a crime because Congress decided to make it a crime (and, as it happens, they have the power to do so if the communication happens to be on a commercial interstate telecommunications network). If Congress wanted to, it could repeal that law altogether. That is, it is an exercise of statutory authority.
The Fourth Amendment, the provision at hand in the instant case, has nothing to do with statutory prohibition. Violating the fourth amendment is not, itself, a crime unless the violation is willful (that is, a police officer than makes an error about whether he can search a vehicle is not criminal just because he happened to get it wrong). The proper vehicle for violations of the Fourth is suppression of the evidence at criminal trial and, if the conduct is so egregious that it "shocks the conscience", then a suit monetary damages against the principals (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivens_v._Six_Unknown_Named_Agents).
To summarize, the protection you have in a phone call is NOT from Congress, but rather from Katz v. United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States).
From the FAQ - http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/wiki/index.php?title=Licensing:
Intel Thread Building Blocks (http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/ is (are?) fantastic. Open source (GPL), works on any ISO-compliant C++ compiler and is fairly intuitive. It allows both high-level (parallel_for) and low level (task-based) parallelism. Particularly useful are the concurrent containers, since it saves you from reimplementing these basic structures.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki is great for finding out what the drives think about their own health. Things to look out for are spin-retry counts (which lead to that annoying 2-5 seconds freeze), high reallocated sector counts (never never never use chkdsk to attempt to fix a broken hard drive. With the robustness of modern journaling file systems (HFS, extN, NTFS), storage errors are almost always hardware errors. Running chkdsk stresses the drive just as it's failing and usually pushes it over the edge -- and then users complain that you can't recover their data.
Seriously. Can anyone with a legal background explain what part of corporate daily business requires that corporations be legally considered equivalent to people?
Because if Corporations didn't have First Amendment rights, Richard Nixon could have shut down the New York Times for publishing the Pentagon Papers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States). Similarly, organizations like the ACLU, NOW, NARAL, NRL, NRA, ... (remember, most political advocacy organizations are incorporated) would be subject to restrictions on what they could say or publish in furtherance of their causes. The whole debate over the "7 deadly words" and FCC regulation of TV/radio would be a moot point if the corporations that hold those licenses had no legal right to any expression.
In the case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_College_v._Woodward) the legislature of NH decided that they have the right to unilaterally rewrite the charter of Dartmouth college and appoint their own trustees to manage it. Again, if the corporation had right to a binding contract, there would be no impediment to the fairly naked power grab attempted there. The power grab was even more blatant in Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts v. Town of Pawlet (http://supreme.justia.com/us/29/480/), in which the Town basically tried to seize land from an unpopular missionary group on the grounds that corporations have no right to property. Again, if corporations have no right, their property could just be taken with no compensation.
IMO, the protection of the rights of corporations is little more than protection of the right of individuals when they want to accomplish something larger than they can do by themselves. If you and I wanted to start a nerdrage business on the internet (nevermind the lack of a serious way to make profits), we should be able to do so and retain the rights that we do as individuals. The fact that you and I are cooperating on the matter does not detract from the fact that we still have those rights.
I'm tempted to quote soylent green here -- Corporations are made of PEOPLE.
Canceled out? Please review how subtraction works. You mean reduced, not cancelled.
The marginal increase in cost from the cooling is canceled out by the heating gains. That is, for every extra dollar I spend cooling heat that I produced with the light bulbs, I save at least an extra dollar off my heating bill.
If you replace your incandescents by CFL's or LED's you'll produce less heat from your lighting, so in winter you'll need to run the heater more. However the total electricity use will be the same.
Correct. Unfortunately, CFLs and LEDs are much more expensive upfront. Since I get approximately zero savings for 6 months of the year, the time to recoup is doubled (or, with a fixed horizon, the price differential at the critical point is halved).
Things will get better if you dump your electric heaters. They are expensive and there are shitloads of better systems available.
Again, large upfront costs and smaller continued costs. It would cost a small fortune to replace our 1950s oil boiler with something vaguely modern.
Oh, and I rent, so tearing stuff out is not an option.
So incandescent bulbs are a bad thing in most of the world for about a third of the year (summer) and in some of the world most of the year. If you happen to be running air-conditioning at the same time as an incandescent bulb, you're just pumping money out of the window.
(1) If you are using your electric heater at the same time as an incandescent bulb, the bulb is effectively free. Up here in New England, that season is 2-3 times longer than AC season and, not coincidentally, has almost twice as much darkness that needs to be lit up.
Even if we assume (incorrectly) that there is the same light usage in winter and summer, the marginal increase from paying double during the 2 months (maybe 3 during a bad summer) of AC are more than canceled out by 6 months where the bulb is redundant with the heater.
(2) Regardless of climate, most of the air-conditioning demand comes between 3PM and 6PM, not really peak hours for using any artificial lighting. Maybe for the basement dwellers, but their rooms are nice and cool anyway.
The case for CFLs just isn't that compelling in a house where more than 50% of my annual electrical bill is electric heaters.
Of note is the fact that, two years after Vista's release, not even 30 percent of PCs actually run it
No, not even 30% of the subset of PCs with this performance-monitoring software run it. In order to claim that not even 30% of PCs run Vista, you would need to establish that the sampling method is not biased, which is a pretty implausible claim.
It would not surprise me if the subset of technically savvy PC users are biased towards XP and that subset of "Windows is what comes on the computer from the store" have whatever the store put on it.
I'm not a lawyer, and am especially not a British lawyer... but if intercepted communication is not legal, then isn't getting information from a warrant based on intercepted communication not legal? I mean if a cop illegally searches my house, finds pot, then uses that as a basis for a warrant, it would be thrown out.
There is nothing in the US Constitution that requires the NSA not to spy on Brits. Similarly, there's nothing that requires MI6 not to spy on Americans. It would be quite an infringement on either nation's sovereignty to assert such restrictions on their ability to spy on foreigners.
As to your hypothetical, if a US cop breaks into your house in Mexico and hauls you out by force, you have no claim against him as far as US law, since the fourth amendment does not apply in Mexico http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Verdugo-Urquidez. Same with the NSA wiretaps -- they can only wiretap without a warrant if they have probable cause to believe that either end of the conversation is outside the US or not a citizen -- otherwise it's a trip to the FISA court.
Tera = 1
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A monopoly is one of those things there can really only be one of.
The fact that MS, Sony and Microsoft are viciously competing for video game market share (see, e.g. the recent price drops) is a sign of a fairly healthy and competitive market.
All good, except that "banned from doing X for life" is not a reasonable restriction. For cases where it seems reasonable, the person should clearly remain in prison.
That's your assertion but I think a white collar criminal that is banned for life from being an accountant after his 10 year fraud sentence definitely shouldn't remain in prison. He's not a danger to anyone so that's $40k/yr wasted on keeping some middle aged guy behind bars just because, if he got out, he might defraud someone again?
You really think it's more humane to keep him in jail for another 20 years?!
Politicians aren't in the business of being leaders -- they're in the business of getting elected, and the best way to do that is to mirror the sentiment of their electorate, no matter how uninformed or illogical that sentiment might be.
This sounds exactly right in a representative democracy. If the public demands an illogical policy, they (as Sovereign), are entitled to implement it.
That a politician would never admit this, let alone campaign on it, only means that it is the public's mind that needs to be changed, not the politicians'.
I submit to your the assertion that the public will never be convinced of the soundness of a policy that allows former felons to possess guns.
Ultimately, I guess, I have issues with people that assert that government is an exercise in logic or rational problem solving. It's neither of those things -- it's an exercise in implementing the will of The People, no more, no less.
If they aren't ready to be re-introduced into society then they shouldn't be, it should be as simple as that.
And how do you propose to determine, for each prisoner, when they are ready? Do you expect a little plastic pop-tab (like on your turkey) to come up when they are done? Prediction is hard -- especially about the future. We can't know in advance which prisoners are going to successfully reintegate and which aren't.
To condemn them all to life sentences because some fraction aren't ready offends our general sense of forgiveness and second-chances. On the other hand, to let them loose without restriction is to place all our of rights in danger.