No, you retard. A republic would have laws in place that had the interests of ALL parties deciding what's for dinner.
How? What is so special about a republic that ensures that those laws are put in place where they wouldn't be in another form of government?
A republic tends to give special interests more power to sway a small number of representatives. I don't see how this necessarily ensures more equitable laws.
That's less than 1/1000th of one percent of the estimated number of P2P users worldwide."
I think that this statement comes from the "glass is 99,999/100,000 empty" viewpoint. I'm more of an optimist, and I prefer to look at it as 1e-5 full.
they were suing because the web site was deceptive and encouraged people to make false/fraudulent/inaccurate submissions that don't qualify for the settlement.
This was a large class action lawsuit. Therefore, there is a simple one-question test to determine if you qualify to benefit from the settlement:
Were you an attorney involved with this lawsuit?
If yes, you qualify. If not, you do not qualify.
Any websites that imply that a member of the public may benefit other than as outlined above are making deceptive and false statements.
It also talks about the low-cost technology being used and the charged xenon (ion) propulsion system.
I hate those self-important A-holes who have those xenon propulsion systems. It seems like every night that I go for a short trip in low earth orbit, at least one schmuck has to fly by with those damned things turned on. How am I supposed to see where I'm going when I'm being blinded by the obnoxious blue glare that they spew? If they're the only ones who can see anything, it's not making things any safer overall.
I swear, I'm going to start flashing these jokers with my laser range finder if they don't get more considerate and stop using those damned xenon units in congested orbits.
It looks like he was just in 'a panel of experts', which would suggest he was on his own.
However, right at the top of the report the author list includes "Daniel Geer, Sc.D - Chief Technical Officer, @Stake". When I read the report, I was under the impression that the company was involved with it or had at least approved it prior to publication.
Even though I agreed with just about every point in the report, I could see that if the report does not reflect the (public) views of the company, then they would have a legitimate reason to fire him. The paper makes strongly worded criticisms of Microsoft, its monopoly status, its business practices, its lock-in tactics and its technical abilities, and a company with a lot of Microsoft-using clients would be nervous being too closely associated with it. If he put his name (along with the name of his company) on this particular paper without clearing it with them up front, that just wasn't very smart. (Or maybe it was smart; it could be a bid for fame and notoriety. I certainly didn't know who this guy was until yesterday.)
That's too readable. Translations posted here are supposed to be compter-generated. Here it is again after English -> German -> English courtesy of Google:
Like opinion of the basic linguistics specialists of the map at a nameless, university looks sufficient in British Colombia and oppositely to the doubtful requirements of the not quoted research, a simple, mechanical conversion of the internal letters to confuse the daily Onlooker.
That's the funny theory. The actual theory I've seen is that the tall buildings disrupt the airflows that are necessary to feed a tornado. A long time ago I saw an article about this theory that plotted the paths of all tornadoes in the Chicago metropolitan area. The downtown area seemed to be magically spared from getting hit.
there have been for years....there is nothing you can do to keep someone from spying on you or tracking you if they really want to do so
Yes, and up until now only deranged stalkers would bother to track a person's every movement, and given the scarcity of deranged stalkers, only a very few would be subject to such scrutiny. Now, everyone will always be stalked by the government, who will claim that they are helping protect us from a few deranged stalkers by doing the same thing. And don't forget the amplifying power of the network effect: the value of stalking data rises as the square of the number of people you simultaneously stalk.
get over it...no one cares THAT much about you anyway
No person cares, but computers do. That data will most likely be passed around betweeen government agencies an/or sold to private interests and mined for tidbits of information. The government and private interests will also buy information was collected from private sources, and correlate this data as well. You may never be directly singled out, but it may one day affect your "score" on computer-generated assesments that will become increasingly utilized to regulate the every-day transactions you take part in. You may think that sounds paranoid, but we've already seen similar situations start to happen in headlines in the real world.
The importance of the network effect can not be overemphasized. Gathering extensive information on everybody, correlating it together and putting it in a central database is totally different from - and orders of magnitude more powerful than - just individual following one person around. Ignoring this difference is like saying: "So what if North Korea is trying to develop nuclear wapons? They're only bombs, and even a high school kid can make a bomb."
Even moreso, vehicular event recorders should hold at least 30 minutes of data, including video data, and be downloadable at distance by law enforcement.
That's fine by me, but only so long as I'm allowed to remotely download the black box of any police car whenever I choose.
A good Krakatoa size eruption can dwarf 100 years of human output in a day, concerning CO release.
Reality check:
I can't seem to find direct figures on CO2 release from Krakatoa. However, we can do a ballpark estimate. Various sources state that it ejected 5 cubic miles of material. Other sources indicate that magma saturated with volatile compounds holds up to 6% compressed gasses, most of it water. Let's assume that Krakatoa's magma was 2% CO2. So that's 2% of 5*1609^3 = 416 million cubic meters of CO2. At 1070 kg/m^3 (liquid phase), that's 445 megatons of CO2.
Even if my estimates are off by a factor of 10, Krakatoa spewed no more than a few thousand megatons of CO2.
As for human emissions, the estimates I find are 6,500 megatons of carbon per year (about 1 ton per person on the planet), which when combined with oxygen make about 24,000 megatons of CO2.
So you say that the Krakatoa eruption dwarfs 100 years of human activity, and I calculate that Krakatoa ~== 1 week of human activity. My estimates would have to be off by 3-1/2 orders of magnitude if your statement were correct. If you can find any numbers to back up your assertion, I would be happy to see them.
AAA = ASCII Adjust after Add
AAS = ASCII Adjust after Subtract
They are for binary coded decimal math; they allow you to directly add numbers encoded in the ASCII characters '0' to '9'. If you add two such values into the AL register, the carry flags and the AH register are adjusted if there was a carry past the value 9 to prepare for adding the next digits.
To do a pointless thing like updating these instructions to support Unicode, these opcodes would need to be extended to use 16-bit registers.
Ok, ok, people. +5 informative... Thanks, but it was supposed to be a stinkin' joke. I guess nobody remembers what the AAA and AAS opcodes do. (They were introduced around the 8080-era and not much used since. Hint: A is for ASCII.)
Clock speed is the ONLY thing keeping current x86 CPUs in competition. If there was an Itanium 2 or Power4 CPU running at the same clockspeed as a P4, with the same amount of cache, the x86 chip would not be able to compete.
And why isn't there an Itanium 2 or Power4 running at the same clockspeed as the P4? It's because they can't. To do more work per clock, they use more logic, and that takes more time. Don't you think that Intel would have a 3.2 GHz Itanium on the market now if it were technically feasible?
All of these CPUs use similar fabrication technology. This technology is capable of a certain number of fundamental logic operations per second per square millimeter. The P4 uses high clockspeeds only because it is marketed to users who think that MHz==performance. If marketing requirements were different, the P4 would have been designed to get the same performance out of 1/10th the clock speed with the same die size and the same manufacturing cost.
There originally were concerns about this sale by the DoD/ DOHS but, by what I assume to be much behind-the-scenes negotiating, such concerns have been alleviated.
Here are the ammended contract terms finally approved by DoD/DOHS:
Cable Maintenence: Purchaser acknowledges that the communications system comprises many thousands of miles of optical fiber, and that this fiber will require periodic maintenence.
ADDENDUM: Purchaser's employees may from time to time encounter a splice in said optical fiber. These splices may occasionally connect to black boxes and/or satellite dishes, or other equipment or devices. Purchaser acknowledges that such equipment or devices are NOT included in this transaction and are NOT the property of the purchaser. Purchaser agrees that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE THE PURCHASERS EMPLOYEES TO DISTURB, DISABLE, INTERFERE WITH OR DISCLOSE THESE DEVICES TO ANY PARTY. Purchaser's employees will at all times ignore these devices and deny their existence to any party that may inquire about such devices. If purchaser violates the terms of this clause, purchaser acknowledges that the entire communications network may be vaporized by a controlling third party without notice and without any compensation to the purchaser, and the security deposit will not be refunded.
The logic to convert x86 instructions to micro-ops takes up space on the die and uses extra power.
However, the compact legacy CISC instruction set does conserve on instruction cache space. This offsets much of the cost of the conversion logic. Moreover, it allows custom optimizations for the exact architecture du jour without affecting binary compatibility.
And any way you look at it, you have to read from memory a lot more often with 8 "general purpose" registers than 32 real GPRs, which is what most sane CPUs have.
Many modern X86 CPUs have more than 32 real GPRs which are utilized by register renaming. Like quantum mechanics, the processor state for any given instruction is smeared out over time and space, and the CPU is operating on many instructions simultaneously. The number of visible registers just doesn't matter as much as it would seem on the surface.
Itanium doesn't have to do this, PowerPC doesn't have to do this, no modern ISA requires this nonsense.
They will when somebody figures out the next architecture trick that doesn't match the assumption of the designers of their ISAs. Take a look at history; remember when MIPS stood for "Microprocessor Without Interlocked Pipeline Stages"? What did the R4000 introduce? Could it be - interlocked pipeline stages? Exposing CPU implementation details to the software is not something that wears well over time.
It doesn't just "scrape out a lead" in floating-point benchmarks, it absolutely destroys the x86 competition.
That's because the FPU has not been very important in the X86 market up to this point. Business and multimedia apps just don't need it. If AMD or Intel put their efforts into an X86 with ultimate FPU performance, it could match or beat the Itanium.
I suspect that Intel took advantage of the huge schedule delays in the Itanium to throw in more FPU horsepower because it had to beat the consumer-grade chips on something.
And oh yeah, its running at what, half the clockspeed of the P4? If Itanium had the same economies of scale behind it at this point, there would be no competition.
As I said, the cache and memory architecture is the primary factor in the performance of CPUs today. Clockspeed, instruction set, registers... who cares? Everything that's not cache is only a small fraction of the die size.
All of that hardware architecture stuff is a red herring. Worrying about those non-issues has caused the Itanium schedule to slip nearly a decade while they desperately tried to write a C compiler that could statically wring out performance from their brittle concurrent execution model without the benefits of the run-time statistics information available to the X86 code translators.
You're guess is basically on the right track. I don't want to violate any NDAs, but let me just say that the AAA and AAS opcodes will now support Unicode.
But look at the PC architecture...the same outdated CISC architecture that was used in 1981 is still there in today's PC's.
You do realize that there has been no such thing as a "CISC processor" since the Pentium Pro came out. Underneath the X86 bytecode VM, Pentium IVs, Athlons, etc. are highly advanced RISC cores with multiple concurrent execution units.
The main reason that the huge expensive power sucking Itanium scrapes out a small lead in benchmarks over X86 CPUs is because of its expensive huge power sucking cache.
The average heat generation of a fuel bundle at this point (one year) is about 60 W -- comparable to a household lightbulb.
The article you referenced also said that there are 1 million fuel bundles in Canada. That's 60 megawatts of heat. If you actually stacked that much thermal power into a "hockey rink, 3 meters deep" and properly shielded it, it would indeed melt if not cooled.
I didn't claim that it couldn't be passively cooled, I just pointed out that it would have to be spread out quite a bit more than the highly dense packing you imply when talking about "football fields".
And the same danger comes when a terrorist flies a plane into the bottom of the CN tower.
No, the fallout of a tall building falling is localized to within a few blocks. See recent events.
No sense in worrying about things that aren't preventable.
But it is preventable; just don't build the power plant.
Oh wait, they won't happen here because, in general, the world doesn't hate us.:-)
Maybe nobody in the world hates you now, but will that always be true over the next 50 years? Will your country never have internal strife either?
Find me a CANDU reactor that's a danger, and I'll show you a liar.
Oh, the reactor is probably fine. The danger comes when a suicide terrorist commando squad attacks the spent fuel storage pond.
BTW: All the world's plutonium output from those CANDU reactors will fit in a few football fields, IIRC.
Right. But you forgot to mention that these football fields are going to require a high-tech cooling system 24x7 for the forseeable future so that they don't melt into pools of plutonium-laced magma.
Slashdot Mirror
How? What is so special about a republic that ensures that those laws are put in place where they wouldn't be in another form of government?
A republic tends to give special interests more power to sway a small number of representatives. I don't see how this necessarily ensures more equitable laws.
So you propose that it's preferrable to have one hungry wolf and two sheep decide what's for dinner.
I don't see much difference other than increased carnage.
But, but... you're talking about carrying coals to Newcastle!
I think that this statement comes from the "glass is 99,999/100,000 empty" viewpoint. I'm more of an optimist, and I prefer to look at it as 1e-5 full.
This was a large class action lawsuit. Therefore, there is a simple one-question test to determine if you qualify to benefit from the settlement:
Were you an attorney involved with this lawsuit?
If yes, you qualify. If not, you do not qualify.
Any websites that imply that a member of the public may benefit other than as outlined above are making deceptive and false statements.
I hate those self-important A-holes who have those xenon propulsion systems. It seems like every night that I go for a short trip in low earth orbit, at least one schmuck has to fly by with those damned things turned on. How am I supposed to see where I'm going when I'm being blinded by the obnoxious blue glare that they spew? If they're the only ones who can see anything, it's not making things any safer overall.
I swear, I'm going to start flashing these jokers with my laser range finder if they don't get more considerate and stop using those damned xenon units in congested orbits.
It depends on each abacus's architecture. For example, a typical toy abacus with 10 rows has 10*ln(10)/ln(2) = 33.2192 bits.
( ) Red zippered Michael Jackson jacket
( ) Star Trek shirt
( ) Loverboy style headband
( ) Pink knit Izod shirt
( ) 15-foot long Tom Baker scarf
However, right at the top of the report the author list includes "Daniel Geer, Sc.D - Chief Technical Officer, @Stake". When I read the report, I was under the impression that the company was involved with it or had at least approved it prior to publication.
Even though I agreed with just about every point in the report, I could see that if the report does not reflect the (public) views of the company, then they would have a legitimate reason to fire him. The paper makes strongly worded criticisms of Microsoft, its monopoly status, its business practices, its lock-in tactics and its technical abilities, and a company with a lot of Microsoft-using clients would be nervous being too closely associated with it. If he put his name (along with the name of his company) on this particular paper without clearing it with them up front, that just wasn't very smart. (Or maybe it was smart; it could be a bid for fame and notoriety. I certainly didn't know who this guy was until yesterday.)
Like opinion of the basic linguistics specialists of the map at a nameless, university looks sufficient in British Colombia and oppositely to the doubtful requirements of the not quoted research, a simple, mechanical conversion of the internal letters to confuse the daily Onlooker.
That was kind of strange. OTOH, Fort Worth looks like it only seems to have half a dozen tall buildings. It's not exactly another Chicago.
That's the funny theory. The actual theory I've seen is that the tall buildings disrupt the airflows that are necessary to feed a tornado. A long time ago I saw an article about this theory that plotted the paths of all tornadoes in the Chicago metropolitan area. The downtown area seemed to be magically spared from getting hit.
Yes, and up until now only deranged stalkers would bother to track a person's every movement, and given the scarcity of deranged stalkers, only a very few would be subject to such scrutiny. Now, everyone will always be stalked by the government, who will claim that they are helping protect us from a few deranged stalkers by doing the same thing. And don't forget the amplifying power of the network effect: the value of stalking data rises as the square of the number of people you simultaneously stalk.
get over it...no one cares THAT much about you anyway
No person cares, but computers do. That data will most likely be passed around betweeen government agencies an/or sold to private interests and mined for tidbits of information. The government and private interests will also buy information was collected from private sources, and correlate this data as well. You may never be directly singled out, but it may one day affect your "score" on computer-generated assesments that will become increasingly utilized to regulate the every-day transactions you take part in. You may think that sounds paranoid, but we've already seen similar situations start to happen in headlines in the real world.
The importance of the network effect can not be overemphasized. Gathering extensive information on everybody, correlating it together and putting it in a central database is totally different from - and orders of magnitude more powerful than - just individual following one person around. Ignoring this difference is like saying: "So what if North Korea is trying to develop nuclear wapons? They're only bombs, and even a high school kid can make a bomb."
That's fine by me, but only so long as I'm allowed to remotely download the black box of any police car whenever I choose.
Reality check:
I can't seem to find direct figures on CO2 release from Krakatoa. However, we can do a ballpark estimate. Various sources state that it ejected 5 cubic miles of material. Other sources indicate that magma saturated with volatile compounds holds up to 6% compressed gasses, most of it water. Let's assume that Krakatoa's magma was 2% CO2. So that's 2% of 5*1609^3 = 416 million cubic meters of CO2. At 1070 kg/m^3 (liquid phase), that's 445 megatons of CO2.
Even if my estimates are off by a factor of 10, Krakatoa spewed no more than a few thousand megatons of CO2.
As for human emissions, the estimates I find are 6,500 megatons of carbon per year (about 1 ton per person on the planet), which when combined with oxygen make about 24,000 megatons of CO2.
So you say that the Krakatoa eruption dwarfs 100 years of human activity, and I calculate that Krakatoa ~== 1 week of human activity. My estimates would have to be off by 3-1/2 orders of magnitude if your statement were correct. If you can find any numbers to back up your assertion, I would be happy to see them.
AAS = ASCII Adjust after Subtract
They are for binary coded decimal math; they allow you to directly add numbers encoded in the ASCII characters '0' to '9'. If you add two such values into the AL register, the carry flags and the AH register are adjusted if there was a carry past the value 9 to prepare for adding the next digits.
To do a pointless thing like updating these instructions to support Unicode, these opcodes would need to be extended to use 16-bit registers.
Ok, ok, people. +5 informative... Thanks, but it was supposed to be a stinkin' joke. I guess nobody remembers what the AAA and AAS opcodes do. (They were introduced around the 8080-era and not much used since. Hint: A is for ASCII.)
And why isn't there an Itanium 2 or Power4 running at the same clockspeed as the P4? It's because they can't. To do more work per clock, they use more logic, and that takes more time. Don't you think that Intel would have a 3.2 GHz Itanium on the market now if it were technically feasible?
All of these CPUs use similar fabrication technology. This technology is capable of a certain number of fundamental logic operations per second per square millimeter. The P4 uses high clockspeeds only because it is marketed to users who think that MHz==performance. If marketing requirements were different, the P4 would have been designed to get the same performance out of 1/10th the clock speed with the same die size and the same manufacturing cost.
Here are the ammended contract terms finally approved by DoD/DOHS:
Cable Maintenence: Purchaser acknowledges that the communications system comprises many thousands of miles of optical fiber, and that this fiber will require periodic maintenence.
ADDENDUM: Purchaser's employees may from time to time encounter a splice in said optical fiber. These splices may occasionally connect to black boxes and/or satellite dishes, or other equipment or devices. Purchaser acknowledges that such equipment or devices are NOT included in this transaction and are NOT the property of the purchaser. Purchaser agrees that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE THE PURCHASERS EMPLOYEES TO DISTURB, DISABLE, INTERFERE WITH OR DISCLOSE THESE DEVICES TO ANY PARTY. Purchaser's employees will at all times ignore these devices and deny their existence to any party that may inquire about such devices. If purchaser violates the terms of this clause, purchaser acknowledges that the entire communications network may be vaporized by a controlling third party without notice and without any compensation to the purchaser, and the security deposit will not be refunded.
However, the compact legacy CISC instruction set does conserve on instruction cache space. This offsets much of the cost of the conversion logic. Moreover, it allows custom optimizations for the exact architecture du jour without affecting binary compatibility.
And any way you look at it, you have to read from memory a lot more often with 8 "general purpose" registers than 32 real GPRs, which is what most sane CPUs have.
Many modern X86 CPUs have more than 32 real GPRs which are utilized by register renaming. Like quantum mechanics, the processor state for any given instruction is smeared out over time and space, and the CPU is operating on many instructions simultaneously. The number of visible registers just doesn't matter as much as it would seem on the surface.
Itanium doesn't have to do this, PowerPC doesn't have to do this, no modern ISA requires this nonsense.
They will when somebody figures out the next architecture trick that doesn't match the assumption of the designers of their ISAs. Take a look at history; remember when MIPS stood for "Microprocessor Without Interlocked Pipeline Stages"? What did the R4000 introduce? Could it be - interlocked pipeline stages? Exposing CPU implementation details to the software is not something that wears well over time.
It doesn't just "scrape out a lead" in floating-point benchmarks, it absolutely destroys the x86 competition.
That's because the FPU has not been very important in the X86 market up to this point. Business and multimedia apps just don't need it. If AMD or Intel put their efforts into an X86 with ultimate FPU performance, it could match or beat the Itanium.
I suspect that Intel took advantage of the huge schedule delays in the Itanium to throw in more FPU horsepower because it had to beat the consumer-grade chips on something.
And oh yeah, its running at what, half the clockspeed of the P4? If Itanium had the same economies of scale behind it at this point, there would be no competition.
As I said, the cache and memory architecture is the primary factor in the performance of CPUs today. Clockspeed, instruction set, registers ... who cares? Everything that's not cache is only a small fraction of the die size.
All of that hardware architecture stuff is a red herring. Worrying about those non-issues has caused the Itanium schedule to slip nearly a decade while they desperately tried to write a C compiler that could statically wring out performance from their brittle concurrent execution model without the benefits of the run-time statistics information available to the X86 code translators.
s/you're/your/
You're guess is basically on the right track. I don't want to violate any NDAs, but let me just say that the AAA and AAS opcodes will now support Unicode.
You do realize that there has been no such thing as a "CISC processor" since the Pentium Pro came out. Underneath the X86 bytecode VM, Pentium IVs, Athlons, etc. are highly advanced RISC cores with multiple concurrent execution units.
The main reason that the huge expensive power sucking Itanium scrapes out a small lead in benchmarks over X86 CPUs is because of its expensive huge power sucking cache.
The article you referenced also said that there are 1 million fuel bundles in Canada. That's 60 megawatts of heat. If you actually stacked that much thermal power into a "hockey rink, 3 meters deep" and properly shielded it, it would indeed melt if not cooled.
I didn't claim that it couldn't be passively cooled, I just pointed out that it would have to be spread out quite a bit more than the highly dense packing you imply when talking about "football fields".
And the same danger comes when a terrorist flies a plane into the bottom of the CN tower.
No, the fallout of a tall building falling is localized to within a few blocks. See recent events.
No sense in worrying about things that aren't preventable.
But it is preventable; just don't build the power plant.
Oh wait, they won't happen here because, in general, the world doesn't hate us. :-)
Maybe nobody in the world hates you now, but will that always be true over the next 50 years? Will your country never have internal strife either?
Oh, the reactor is probably fine. The danger comes when a suicide terrorist commando squad attacks the spent fuel storage pond.
BTW: All the world's plutonium output from those CANDU reactors will fit in a few football fields, IIRC.
Right. But you forgot to mention that these football fields are going to require a high-tech cooling system 24x7 for the forseeable future so that they don't melt into pools of plutonium-laced magma.