(Daredevil, Elektra, The Incredible Hulk, come on).
I am pretty picky about movies, and I kind of liked The Incredible Hulk.
I'm not into comics and I never watched the show, so the way he was running around at mach 2 or whatever was dumb, but not a deal-breaker for me.
And I really, really liked the way they split the screen up into different frames like a comic book. That was really cool.
I enjoyed it more than, say, Spiderman, because Spiderman had better special effects and better acting (not to mention better nipples), but they were both mindless "summer movies", and the Hulk was at least entertaining. Spiderman was just boring to me. And the Green Goblin looked stupid.
You almost can't believe it's the same pattern in the different images... Against the orange-ish sand, against green foliage, or against a gray stone wall, it blends in great.
Well, according to the US economic census the total revenue of all sorts of entertainment and recreation was about $142 billion.
The total economy was over $18 trillion in 2002, so arts and entertainment represent about 0.7% of the total US economy in this census. I'd say the effectiveness of the tactic would be about nil.
Entertainment isn't the only thing benefitted by our IP laws. I'm pretty sure (although I'm just pulling this out of my ass) that the pharmaceuticals industry is the most profitable industry in the world. And the only reason they make any money is because of their patented formulas.
Patents and trademarks are the other two important parts of IP law. The US has a vision of an "information economy", but most information has no intrinsic value, and if the laws making it valuable were stricken, the effects would be devastating.
The parent is marked flaimbait, so I don't know how many people will read this, but these two lines stuck out at me:
You can't even get the simplest thing done now by an American without them screwing it up somehow, either because they think it's funny, just don't care, or are incompetent.
(emphasis mine)
Ever try sending something fragile through UPS? Hope you didn't mark it "FRAGILE". They'll probably drive a truck over it to make sure it's broken.
A friend of mine used to work loading UPS trucks. They did not treat the boxes very gently at all. It is UPS's official policy (one that makes sense, IMO), that the package has to be able to withstand a certain amount of abuse. Their automatic package sorting systems sometimes knock packages off of a conveyor belt to fall a story or two onto another belt.
The package handlers ignore the 'FRAGILE' stickers, and as a way of shock humor, (especially if there are new guys about), the FRAGILE packages are literally drop kicked into the truck, etc...
Hollywood studios have come up with an effective method of deterring Internet file-sharing of movies: Make movies that no one wants to pirate.
This is true.
I have a friend who is obsessed with pirating movies, mostly because he loves movies but has no taste (so he gobbles up all the shit hollywood spews out), and is too poor to go to the theater.
He downloads tons of them, and burns them to disc so he can watch them on his laptop.
He's always trying to pawn them off on me, but the movies are so horrible that I didn't want to see them in the first place, let alone watch a crappy-quality transcoded-to-divx version.
The business plans of these companies... to fund billion-dollar operations with the wallets of monied space geeks... is nothing more than Heinlein-addled wishful thinking.
I'd be surprised if the people running these private space companies really think that they're going to make all their money off of space tourism.
Space tourism is just a revenue stream. This revenue stream, along with rewards like the X-Prize, are right now the only "direct" revenue streams available to the private space industry.
(They might be able to capitalize off of new discoveries, like all the "Developed by NASA" stuff we have, but it will probably be awhile before they develop anything that isn't already "Developed by NASA").
The real reason these guys are doing the private space industry thing is because it's always been the hope that the private space industry will be incredibly profitable. (So profitable that it changes the basic economic values of things, if we for example find 20-km diameter asteroids composed 90% of some important metal).
So, to recap: Space tourism is just *a* revenue stream for the nascent private space industry. It's not *the* business model these guys are spending millions in R&D on.
That could be a problem if the results fed directly into the page rank. But it would seem more logical to use this to cull bad links from the top 10.
Also: people will keep on clicking on search results until they find what they were looking for. So, the last one clicked on most likely is the one that satisfies the user.
I tend to open a bunch of promising looking ones in firefox tabs, so in my case, you would say "one the last N clicked on was correct" and modify your weighting system accordingly.
If you charge your battery by plugging it in at the house, then you're cheating. MPG doesn't mean much when all the power doesn't come from the gas.
By this reasoning, I could build a car that has a little 1 horse power engine and a big bank of batteries which are charged by plugging it in at night. I could claim 1000 mpg, but that doesn't actually mean that my car is more efficient than any other car.
A friend of mine has a diesel VW Jetta which he has had converted to run on vegetable oil. He has a second gas tank where his spare tire used to be, and a switch on his console to change between normal diesel and veggie oil. You're not supposed to run the car on vegetable oil until it's warmed up (a second radiator in the veggie oil tank heats it up to the engine's temperaute, about 210F), so he needs to run it on diesel for a few minutes after he starts it and before he stops it (to flush out the system).
Anyway, he's always talking about how much MPG he's getting, but he's only talking about the diesel... He fills the veggie oil tank like 10 or 20 times per diesel tank, and brags about getting 3000 miles per tank, however much MPG that is... He doesn't get it when we say "It's cool that you run off veggie oil, and your gas is basically free, but really you're still getting 30 MPG"
This guy is basically doing the same thing, like you said, he's just got an extra "tank" in his car which is filled up by other means.
Which makes me wonder: Is he paying more to use his house electricity to charge his car batteries, or would he pay more for gasoline?
It's an interesting concept: "Everyone knows" gasoline is one of the best systems we have for energy storage. In terms of energy/lb, it has a dominating lead over batteries.
But how much are we paying for the convenience of being able to have a fuel tank in our car able to store enough fuel to travel 450 miles? (15 gallons * 30mpg, I guess it would be more like 150-200 miles for you SUV people...)
If you have a purely electric car which you have to plug into your house every night, and can only store enough charge to get you 60-100 miles, but it costs you $30 / month instead of $100 / month (I'm assuming 4 fillups, which is what I do for my car), is that a good tradeoff?
How much energy does an electric car draw off of your house, and how much does it cost to get your energy that way, instead of packed into a volatile liquid?
You don't need any license to use a GPL'd program.
Yes you do. The L in GPL does stand for 'license', after all.
A GPL'd program is a copyrighted piece of computer software.
Saying "you don't need a license to use it" is the same thing as saying you don't need a license to use any other copyrighted software, such as Windows, Oracle, etc...
You need a license to 'use' any piece of software. This is based on the (somewhat dumb, imo) concept that 'using' (ie running) the software involves making a copy (from permanent store to RAM), which you are not allowed to do since it's copyrighted.
It just happens that the GPL is not very restrictive about use.
Nice indignation here, with Liskov, component stereos and all.
But you've got it quite wrong, I'm afraid.
Nice snobbery there. But you're a patronizing prick, I'm afraid.
The GP meant "UnsupportedOperationException", not "MethodNotSupportedException", which is an easy mistake to make.
NoSuchMethodErrors only occur when you run code that wouldn't compile (such as when you remove a method, but forget to recompile users of that method).
And since you refuse to use the compiler, what's a poor runtime supposed to do when you call a non-existing method? Create one for you? Or install a new tuner?
Did you even bother to read his post? It certainly looks like you have no idea what he was talking about.
There is a pretty obvious disconnect when he's talking about the standard library throwing these exceptions, and you're spouting off about what "NoSuchMethodError" means and then strawmanning your way into berating him for not using the compiler (wtf?)
Every aspect of his post was correct. The concept of a method which exists on an interface but is "unsupported" by implementations is somewhat bad design.
...but seriously folks...could anyone see the whole Demolition Man cryo-prison thing coming to life?
No. The point of prison is to rehabilitate the criminal. How is someone going to rehabilitate if they jsut take a Rip van Winkle nap after getting caught?
Wal-Mart started out as a single store with a dirt floor (!). It was run extremely well by Walton, and he clawed his way to the top of an industry, beating out many established players.
While Walton was still around, Wal-Mart still seemed to have a heart. Now, it is hard to find a better example of the "soulless corporation" than Wal-Mart.
What's going to happen to Google when its "don't be evil" founders cash in their stock or retire?
The PC requirements are higher because most people are playing at a minimum of 1024x768 pixels
That's just plain wrong. You have entirely missed the point of "minimum requirements".
If you have the *choice* of which resolution you are playing at, then the *minimum requirements* for a game will reflect what's needed to run the game at the minimum level. 640x480 instead of 1024x768. Low quality textures instead of high quality.
Consoles are able to do more with less because they are dedicated hardware. When you put GTA into your PS2, your PS2's puny processor is running GTA. When you run it on your computer, your computer's processor is running 50-100 programs, the most important of which is GTA.
On a console, when the game needs to submit triangles to the graphics card, it writes to a specific section of memory and then instructs the graphics hardware to do it's thing. On your PC, there are layers of generality which are interfering with direct access to hardware. And to submit the job typically requires at least once context switch into kernel mode so the driver can do its thing.
Papers on the NVidia website point out the following: Due to the nature of Direct3D, and the way it interfaces with the drivers, a process can submit about 50,000 batches per second per 1GHZ of cpu.
So, assume a 2GHz cpu, that means 100,000 batches per second. If you want 60fps, that means 1666 batches per frame. If you submit batches that consist of 1 triangle each, then you can only draw 1666 triangles per frame if you want to maintain your 60fps.
Realize that this is just one of the latencies involved, and it's pure overhead. You are spending a lot of your cpu just keeping the graphics card busy. This latency happens before you're even talking about the card's triangles or pixels per second. High performance games on the PC are all about maximizing your "batch efficiency", the number of triangles per batch.
Consoles don't have restrictions like this, a game gets direct access to the hardware. The hardware on the PS2 is laughably weak compared to any gaming PC. But it more than holds its own.
Drinking and driving is definately putting other people at risk, but having a line of speed or coke at a party, or a joint while in a close social gathering isn't causing any harm - quite the opposite in fact.
I agree with this. And, I have no problem (in general) with the drugs you have listed. I know people that do lots of different kinds, and I've tried a few myself.
But, read my response to another comment on "drug induced psychosis". I do believe that some of the harder drugs make you a liability to others, if you take them enough. The drugs you have listed are mostly "party drugs", and I've heard that they can screw you up personally if you take too much, but I doubt you would be screwing anyone else up because of them.
Most drugs are recreational, and I have no problem with people taking them, and I think they should all be legal and taxed, with a huge penalty for providing them to minors.
I live in New Hampshire, and here, we have the cheapest alcohol in the states, pretty much. But, the liquor stores are a state-owned monopoly. So, our alcohol is cheaper, *and* the state makes more money off of each bottle than other states do.
If most drugs were legal and sold under the same model, then the US would be a better place. It would be a huge source of tax revenue, it would be safer to do them, and lots of crime (almost all drug-related) would disappear overnight.
The world would be a better place too. "Drug czars" would have to find a new line of work, when they can no longer expect $10,000 for a plant that costs as much to grow as a tomato plant.
Drinking AND Driving. AND is very important in that sentence. When you impair your faculties and then operate dangerous machinery, yes, there is a problem.
Of course it is. That's why I put the AND in there. I was not trying to argue that just "drinking" makes you a liability to others. (In fact, it does, at least somewhat, but not enough that we should ban it). But, there are some situations or combinations of actions you can engage in which are a liability to others.
Certain drugs make you an unacceptable liability to others just by taking them.
Have you ever heard of the expression "roid rage"? Sometimes guys who are taking steroids get their testosterone levels all out of whack and just flip out and beat the shit out of someone for a small (or imagined) slight.
Doing the same drug in your basement, alone, with no dangerous machinery, and you're no danger to anyone but yourself, and therefore NOT an automatic liability to others.
There are some drugs (among them, PCP) which, when taken repeatedly, will induce psychosis. Combine that with the fact that they are addictive, and it becomes the case that most addicts will eventually take enough to induce psychosis. (Which will affect different people in different ways, but (especially in the case of PCP) can mean turning them into crazy violent lunatics).
So, just taking these drugs makes you a liability to the rest of us.
Occasionally, when I wake up I'll experience a "waking hallucination". Usually I am imagining an insect or spider or something crawling on the bed or on the floor. I sometimes jump out of bed, hopping around trying to stomp the bug for 4 or 5 seconds before I'm fully awake.
One night, this happened when my girlfriend was sleeping next to me. I slapped her on the back and shoulders rather hard 3 or 4 times, trying to kill the "spider" before it crawled onto her head. These weren't "domestic abuse" type slaps, but you could see a faint bruise the next morning.
I'm an otherwise sane person, and these situations pass in a few seconds, once I finish waking up.
A psychotic person hallucinating or imagining things like this who is not coming to their senses in a few seconds is a liability to others.
I bet you $100 that more people are killed by drunks than PCP users, even after you excludie drink-related traffic accidents.
Normalize that to the number of people who drink (just about everybody, at least in america) vs the number of people who use PCP (very few), and I'll happily take your bet.
How exactly are "crack, PCP, etc" automatically liabilities to others?
In exactly the same way drinking and driving is a liability to others.
You're not going to run down some schoolkids every time you drive after a sixpack, and you're not going to kill random strangers every time you get juiced on PCP, but you're statistically an unacceptable liability.
But, that likely would be dismissed (because it makes sense).
No, it doesn't make sense. The whole point of marketing is to persuade people who did not know about your product that they should buy your product.
If someone is coming after you to buy your product, you don't really need to advertise very much.
If someone is not coming after you, you need to catch their attention. I use a virtual hosting service that I found out about through a slashdot ad.
If there is a bare link in the email, then nobody who isn't looking for your information already is going to click it.
In market-think, they want the spotaneous impression. They really believe that colorful flashing crap helps sales.
Because it does. It doesn't need to be colorful flashing crap, but it does need to be something that you are likely to read, that will grab your attention.
Do you really think that the trillions of dollars spent on marketing every year is just being thrown down the tubes? This is a big business, with results that get measured and evaluated.
You misunderstand evolution if you think it's not working.
The current situation, where everyone survives, works in favor of evolution.
You misunderstand evolution if you think evolution has a goal (and therefore any situation can "favor" it).
It means when the next catastrophe occurs (whether it be killer allergies, poison canaries, pollution, parasitic ants, whatever), we will have a hundredfold more diverse genetic pool than if we were thinned out because less people survived.
Read elsewhere in the comments about how intelligent people breed less, so the average IQ is dropping.
Now, when the next super-plague hits, would it be better for us to have a population of 10 billion idiots, some of which are naturally immune, or 10 super-geniuses who can engineer a cure/vaccine?
Re:Audio processesing using the GPU
on
GPU Gems 2
·
· Score: 1
I don't think you understand just what a processing monster current GPUs are.
I understand exactly what they are, it's my job.
But, look at the numbers: Current GPUs are around 60 GFLOPS tops. The ATI hardware going into the new xbox is 48GFLOPS.
Now tell me how a general purpose CPU is going to compete with that?
Calling the Cell a "general purpose CPU" is not really correct. A Cell chip is *a* general purpose (PowerPC) CPU and *8* very capable 32 GFLOPS vector CPUs on the same die. It's not like a P4 or an Athlon or a normal PowerPC, which is a "normal" cpu coupled with a "vector unit" which can handle certain SIMD instructions. The "APUs" on the Cell are independent processors on the same die.
Slashdot Mirror
(Daredevil, Elektra, The Incredible Hulk, come on).
I am pretty picky about movies, and I kind of liked The Incredible Hulk.
I'm not into comics and I never watched the show, so the way he was running around at mach 2 or whatever was dumb, but not a deal-breaker for me.
And I really, really liked the way they split the screen up into different frames like a comic book. That was really cool.
I enjoyed it more than, say, Spiderman, because Spiderman had better special effects and better acting (not to mention better nipples), but they were both mindless "summer movies", and the Hulk was at least entertaining. Spiderman was just boring to me. And the Green Goblin looked stupid.
Also, just check out the images of this awesome camoflage pattern:
http://www.multicampattern.com/IMAGES.htm
You almost can't believe it's the same pattern in the different images... Against the orange-ish sand, against green foliage, or against a gray stone wall, it blends in great.
Let's make an example of these kids too.
I'm not saying these kids should be sent to the gulag. I don't think they really did anything that wrong, and they *should* be let go.
I was just correcting the guy who said they didn't break the law.
what these kids committed was NOT a felony, but it did BREAK school rules/policies.
They gained unauthorized access (e.g. Administrator access) to computers they didn't own (the laptops which were on loan).
This IS against the law.
Well, according to the US economic census the total revenue of all sorts of entertainment and recreation was about $142 billion.
The total economy was over $18 trillion in 2002, so arts and entertainment represent about 0.7% of the total US economy in this census. I'd say the effectiveness of the tactic would be about nil.
Entertainment isn't the only thing benefitted by our IP laws. I'm pretty sure (although I'm just pulling this out of my ass) that the pharmaceuticals industry is the most profitable industry in the world. And the only reason they make any money is because of their patented formulas.
Patents and trademarks are the other two important parts of IP law. The US has a vision of an "information economy", but most information has no intrinsic value, and if the laws making it valuable were stricken, the effects would be devastating.
The parent is marked flaimbait, so I don't know how many people will read this, but these two lines stuck out at me:
You can't even get the simplest thing done now by an American without them screwing it up somehow, either because they think it's funny, just don't care, or are incompetent.
(emphasis mine)
Ever try sending something fragile through UPS? Hope you didn't mark it "FRAGILE". They'll probably drive a truck over it to make sure it's broken.
A friend of mine used to work loading UPS trucks. They did not treat the boxes very gently at all. It is UPS's official policy (one that makes sense, IMO), that the package has to be able to withstand a certain amount of abuse. Their automatic package sorting systems sometimes knock packages off of a conveyor belt to fall a story or two onto another belt.
The package handlers ignore the 'FRAGILE' stickers, and as a way of shock humor, (especially if there are new guys about), the FRAGILE packages are literally drop kicked into the truck, etc...
Hollywood studios have come up with an effective method of deterring Internet file-sharing of movies: Make movies that no one wants to pirate.
This is true.
I have a friend who is obsessed with pirating movies, mostly because he loves movies but has no taste (so he gobbles up all the shit hollywood spews out), and is too poor to go to the theater.
He downloads tons of them, and burns them to disc so he can watch them on his laptop.
He's always trying to pawn them off on me, but the movies are so horrible that I didn't want to see them in the first place, let alone watch a crappy-quality transcoded-to-divx version.
The business plans of these companies... to fund billion-dollar operations with the wallets of monied space geeks... is nothing more than Heinlein-addled wishful thinking.
I'd be surprised if the people running these private space companies really think that they're going to make all their money off of space tourism.
Space tourism is just a revenue stream. This revenue stream, along with rewards like the X-Prize, are right now the only "direct" revenue streams available to the private space industry.
(They might be able to capitalize off of new discoveries, like all the "Developed by NASA" stuff we have, but it will probably be awhile before they develop anything that isn't already "Developed by NASA").
The real reason these guys are doing the private space industry thing is because it's always been the hope that the private space industry will be incredibly profitable. (So profitable that it changes the basic economic values of things, if we for example find 20-km diameter asteroids composed 90% of some important metal).
So, to recap: Space tourism is just *a* revenue stream for the nascent private space industry. It's not *the* business model these guys are spending millions in R&D on.
That could be a problem if the results fed directly into the page rank. But it would seem more logical to use this to cull bad links from the top 10.
Also: people will keep on clicking on search results until they find what they were looking for. So, the last one clicked on most likely is the one that satisfies the user.
I tend to open a bunch of promising looking ones in firefox tabs, so in my case, you would say "one the last N clicked on was correct" and modify your weighting system accordingly.
If you charge your battery by plugging it in at the house, then you're cheating. MPG doesn't mean much when all the power doesn't come from the gas.
By this reasoning, I could build a car that has a little 1 horse power engine and a big bank of batteries which are charged by plugging it in at night. I could claim 1000 mpg, but that doesn't actually mean that my car is more efficient than any other car.
A friend of mine has a diesel VW Jetta which he has had converted to run on vegetable oil. He has a second gas tank where his spare tire used to be, and a switch on his console to change between normal diesel and veggie oil. You're not supposed to run the car on vegetable oil until it's warmed up (a second radiator in the veggie oil tank heats it up to the engine's temperaute, about 210F), so he needs to run it on diesel for a few minutes after he starts it and before he stops it (to flush out the system).
Anyway, he's always talking about how much MPG he's getting, but he's only talking about the diesel... He fills the veggie oil tank like 10 or 20 times per diesel tank, and brags about getting 3000 miles per tank, however much MPG that is... He doesn't get it when we say "It's cool that you run off veggie oil, and your gas is basically free, but really you're still getting 30 MPG"
This guy is basically doing the same thing, like you said, he's just got an extra "tank" in his car which is filled up by other means.
Which makes me wonder: Is he paying more to use his house electricity to charge his car batteries, or would he pay more for gasoline?
It's an interesting concept: "Everyone knows" gasoline is one of the best systems we have for energy storage. In terms of energy/lb, it has a dominating lead over batteries.
But how much are we paying for the convenience of being able to have a fuel tank in our car able to store enough fuel to travel 450 miles? (15 gallons * 30mpg, I guess it would be more like 150-200 miles for you SUV people...)
If you have a purely electric car which you have to plug into your house every night, and can only store enough charge to get you 60-100 miles, but it costs you $30 / month instead of $100 / month (I'm assuming 4 fillups, which is what I do for my car), is that a good tradeoff?
How much energy does an electric car draw off of your house, and how much does it cost to get your energy that way, instead of packed into a volatile liquid?
You don't need any license to use a GPL'd program.
Yes you do. The L in GPL does stand for 'license', after all.
A GPL'd program is a copyrighted piece of computer software.
Saying "you don't need a license to use it" is the same thing as saying you don't need a license to use any other copyrighted software, such as Windows, Oracle, etc...
You need a license to 'use' any piece of software.
This is based on the (somewhat dumb, imo) concept that 'using' (ie running) the software involves making a copy (from permanent store to RAM), which you are not allowed to do since it's copyrighted.
It just happens that the GPL is not very restrictive about use.
I don't like your sig.
Jerk.
Nice indignation here, with Liskov, component stereos and all.
But you've got it quite wrong, I'm afraid.
Nice snobbery there. But you're a patronizing prick, I'm afraid.
The GP meant "UnsupportedOperationException", not "MethodNotSupportedException", which is an easy mistake to make.
NoSuchMethodErrors only occur when you run code that wouldn't compile (such as when you remove a method, but forget to recompile users of that method).
And since you refuse to use the compiler, what's a poor runtime supposed to do when you call a non-existing method? Create one for you? Or install a new tuner?
Did you even bother to read his post? It certainly looks like you have no idea what he was talking about.
There is a pretty obvious disconnect when he's talking about the standard library throwing these exceptions, and you're spouting off about what "NoSuchMethodError" means and then strawmanning your way into berating him for not using the compiler (wtf?)
Every aspect of his post was correct. The concept of a method which exists on an interface but is "unsupported" by implementations is somewhat bad design.
...but seriously folks...could anyone see the whole Demolition Man cryo-prison thing coming to life?
No. The point of prison is to rehabilitate the criminal. How is someone going to rehabilitate if they jsut take a Rip van Winkle nap after getting caught?
Betamax was fun while it lasted.
RTFA
The ruling specifically mentions how this case differs from the Betamax case.
Once upon a time:
c+=c+++++c;
was a perfectly valid statement in the project.
This is always invalid C++. The resulting value of c is undefined.
Something to think about here is Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart started out as a single store with a dirt floor (!). It was run extremely well by Walton, and he clawed his way to the top of an industry, beating out many established players.
While Walton was still around, Wal-Mart still seemed to have a heart. Now, it is hard to find a better example of the "soulless corporation" than Wal-Mart.
What's going to happen to Google when its "don't be evil" founders cash in their stock or retire?
The PC requirements are higher because most people are playing at a minimum of 1024x768 pixels
That's just plain wrong. You have entirely missed the point of "minimum requirements".
If you have the *choice* of which resolution you are playing at, then the *minimum requirements* for a game will reflect what's needed to run the game at the minimum level. 640x480 instead of 1024x768. Low quality textures instead of high quality.
Consoles are able to do more with less because they are dedicated hardware. When you put GTA into your PS2, your PS2's puny processor is running GTA. When you run it on your computer, your computer's processor is running 50-100 programs, the most important of which is GTA.
On a console, when the game needs to submit triangles to the graphics card, it writes to a specific section of memory and then instructs the graphics hardware to do it's thing. On your PC, there are layers of generality which are interfering with direct access to hardware. And to submit the job typically requires at least once context switch into kernel mode so the driver can do its thing.
Papers on the NVidia website point out the following: Due to the nature of Direct3D, and the way it interfaces with the drivers, a process can submit about 50,000 batches per second per 1GHZ of cpu.
So, assume a 2GHz cpu, that means 100,000 batches per second. If you want 60fps, that means 1666 batches per frame. If you submit batches that consist of 1 triangle each, then you can only draw 1666 triangles per frame if you want to maintain your 60fps.
Realize that this is just one of the latencies involved, and it's pure overhead. You are spending a lot of your cpu just keeping the graphics card busy. This latency happens before you're even talking about the card's triangles or pixels per second. High performance games on the PC are all about maximizing your "batch efficiency", the number of triangles per batch.
Consoles don't have restrictions like this, a game gets direct access to the hardware. The hardware on the PS2 is laughably weak compared to any gaming PC. But it more than holds its own.
Drinking and driving is definately putting other people at risk, but having a line of speed or coke at a party, or a joint while in a close social gathering isn't causing any harm - quite the opposite in fact.
I agree with this. And, I have no problem (in general) with the drugs you have listed. I know people that do lots of different kinds, and I've tried a few myself.
But, read my response to another comment on "drug induced psychosis". I do believe that some of the harder drugs make you a liability to others, if you take them enough. The drugs you have listed are mostly "party drugs", and I've heard that they can screw you up personally if you take too much, but I doubt you would be screwing anyone else up because of them.
Most drugs are recreational, and I have no problem with people taking them, and I think they should all be legal and taxed, with a huge penalty for providing them to minors.
I live in New Hampshire, and here, we have the cheapest alcohol in the states, pretty much. But, the liquor stores are a state-owned monopoly. So, our alcohol is cheaper, *and* the state makes more money off of each bottle than other states do.
If most drugs were legal and sold under the same model, then the US would be a better place. It would be a huge source of tax revenue, it would be safer to do them, and lots of crime (almost all drug-related) would disappear overnight.
The world would be a better place too. "Drug czars" would have to find a new line of work, when they can no longer expect $10,000 for a plant that costs as much to grow as a tomato plant.
Drinking AND Driving. AND is very important in that sentence. When you impair your faculties and then operate dangerous machinery, yes, there is a problem.
Of course it is. That's why I put the AND in there. I was not trying to argue that just "drinking" makes you a liability to others. (In fact, it does, at least somewhat, but not enough that we should ban it). But, there are some situations or combinations of actions you can engage in which are a liability to others.
Certain drugs make you an unacceptable liability to others just by taking them.
Have you ever heard of the expression "roid rage"? Sometimes guys who are taking steroids get their testosterone levels all out of whack and just flip out and beat the shit out of someone for a small (or imagined) slight.
Doing the same drug in your basement, alone, with no dangerous machinery, and you're no danger to anyone but yourself, and therefore NOT an automatic liability to others.
Search on google for the concept drug induced psychosis
There are some drugs (among them, PCP) which, when taken repeatedly, will induce psychosis. Combine that with the fact that they are addictive, and it becomes the case that most addicts will eventually take enough to induce psychosis. (Which will affect different people in different ways, but (especially in the case of PCP) can mean turning them into crazy violent lunatics).
So, just taking these drugs makes you a liability to the rest of us.
Occasionally, when I wake up I'll experience a "waking hallucination". Usually I am imagining an insect or spider or something crawling on the bed or on the floor. I sometimes jump out of bed, hopping around trying to stomp the bug for 4 or 5 seconds before I'm fully awake.
One night, this happened when my girlfriend was sleeping next to me. I slapped her on the back and shoulders rather hard 3 or 4 times, trying to kill the "spider" before it crawled onto her head. These weren't "domestic abuse" type slaps, but you could see a faint bruise the next morning.
I'm an otherwise sane person, and these situations pass in a few seconds, once I finish waking up.
A psychotic person hallucinating or imagining things like this who is not coming to their senses in a few seconds is a liability to others.
I bet you $100 that more people are killed by drunks than PCP users, even after you excludie drink-related traffic accidents.
Normalize that to the number of people who drink (just about everybody, at least in america) vs the number of people who use PCP (very few), and I'll happily take your bet.
How exactly are "crack, PCP, etc" automatically liabilities to others?
In exactly the same way drinking and driving is a liability to others.
You're not going to run down some schoolkids every time you drive after a sixpack, and you're not going to kill random strangers every time you get juiced on PCP, but you're statistically an unacceptable liability.
But, that likely would be dismissed (because it makes sense).
No, it doesn't make sense. The whole point of marketing is to persuade people who did not know about your product that they should buy your product.
If someone is coming after you to buy your product, you don't really need to advertise very much.
If someone is not coming after you, you need to catch their attention. I use a virtual hosting service that I found out about through a slashdot ad.
If there is a bare link in the email, then nobody who isn't looking for your information already is going to click it.
In market-think, they want the spotaneous impression. They really believe that colorful flashing crap helps sales.
Because it does. It doesn't need to be colorful flashing crap, but it does need to be something that you are likely to read, that will grab your attention.
Do you really think that the trillions of dollars spent on marketing every year is just being thrown down the tubes? This is a big business, with results that get measured and evaluated.
You misunderstand evolution if you think it's not working.
The current situation, where everyone survives, works in favor of evolution.
You misunderstand evolution if you think evolution has a goal (and therefore any situation can "favor" it).
It means when the next catastrophe occurs (whether it be killer allergies, poison canaries, pollution, parasitic ants, whatever), we will have a hundredfold more diverse genetic pool than if we were thinned out because less people survived.
Read elsewhere in the comments about how intelligent people breed less, so the average IQ is dropping.
Now, when the next super-plague hits, would it be better for us to have a population of 10 billion idiots, some of which are naturally immune, or 10 super-geniuses who can engineer a cure/vaccine?
I don't think you understand just what a processing monster current GPUs are.
I understand exactly what they are, it's my job.
But, look at the numbers: Current GPUs are around 60 GFLOPS tops. The ATI hardware going into the new xbox is 48GFLOPS.
Now tell me how a general purpose CPU is going to compete with that?
Calling the Cell a "general purpose CPU" is not really correct. A Cell chip is *a* general purpose (PowerPC) CPU and *8* very capable 32 GFLOPS vector CPUs on the same die. It's not like a P4 or an Athlon or a normal PowerPC, which is a "normal" cpu coupled with a "vector unit" which can handle certain SIMD instructions. The "APUs" on the Cell are independent processors on the same die.