that night we eventually gave him his keys along with a "f**k off home, I hope you die on the way". Needless to say he's now banned from mum's house and not permitted to drink at mine.:P )
The problem is that idiots who drive whilst drunk cannot be relied upon to only harm themselves.
How about Adobe Creative Suite 3? The professionals using it are the most likely to buy quad- or 8-core systems, but CS3 only supports up to two cores.
This demonstrates one of the problems with writing parallel programs. It's difficult to write for an arbitary number of "cores". Even though 4 and 8 are multiples of 2. There is also the issue that an application shouldn't have to know details about the physical hardware/it should be capable of running in a virtual machine which may or may not have any similarity to the actual hardware.
This is OK as a way of defining semantics, but not for execution in a truly parallel environment. In essence, the semantic model says that running computation A in parallel with computation B is the same as executing "A" then "B" or "B" then "A". Notice that the parallelism has been removed to make the semantics easier to reason about.
The thing to consider also is that the number of permutations is N! where N is the number of tasks you want to run in parallel. Thus even as few as 8 tasks means you have more than 40 thousand cases you need to be sure are actually independent.
Infact it is very hard to do even stuff in parallell that is *far* away from our abilities.
Moving your left foot in a circle is trivial to do. Drawing a square on a piece of paper is trivial to do (aslong as neither needs to be perfect), now try doing both simultaneously.
On the other hand most people can walk and eat at the same time or make hand gestures whilst talking. Since these are examples of parallelism which were useful in helping our ancestors survive. Being able to draw different geometic shapes with different limbs at the same time, however, is of little practical use. If it were then people would learn to do it, in the same way that people can learn to drive cars or fly helicopters.
Aside from my usual lament that people already call themselves programmers when they can fire up Visual Studio, parallelizing your tasks opens quite a few cans of worms. Many things can't be done simultanously, many side effects can occur if you don't take care and generally, programmers don't really enjoy multithreaded applications, for exactly those reasons.
For tasks to be done in parallel they need to be independent of each other. Things also get further complicated where the number of parallel tasks is not a multiple of the number of execution units available and/or the tasks themselves are non identical.
I've seen enough lies come from the government to consider them every bit as credible as the your conspiracy theorists.
If anything a third party conspiracy theory is likely to be slightly credible than a conspiracy theory put out by the US Government. Unless that third party is also a habitual lier. Then the theory can be examined on it's own merits and how well it fits the facts.
But we are to believe that the laws of physics were suspended that day?
Congratulations on turning Occam's razor into a logical fallacy: The simplest explanation is not always the truth.
Or that claimed "simplist" explanation isn't. The idea that terrorists (of unknown identity) planted explosives and arranged for the planes to be hijacked and crashed as a distraction (especially if flight 93 was intended for WTC7) is a rather "simpler" explanation than that the laws of physics were suspended over part of Manhatten for s few hours.
The SIMPLEST explaination is that jetliners slamming into the towers and the resulting fire caused the collapse.
Only if you ignore the laws of physics...
I don't need to concoct an idiotic story involving aliens, shadow government conspiracy, Elvis and the Illuminati to draw my conclusions.
But stories involving "hijackers" who turn up alive after the event, documents which magically survive fire, baggage which just happened to not make it onto a plane, etc are not "idiotic".
The "natural thing to do" is to apply some common sense, not waste my time on bogus "evidence".
A great pity the US Government decided to to the exact opposite, in the process killing lots of people.
In other words: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but when extraordinary evidence exists, even extraordinary claims may well be the ones that you should accept as the most likely alternative.
What about an extraordinary claim which lacks extraordinary evidence but which is advocated by government and/or media? How about one where disagreement is likely to result in a prison sentence? Examples of these exist right now.
Yup...lost me there too. The whole thing stinks of conspiracy theorists. Hasn't ANYONE heard of Occams razor?
You mean with things like "Iran is building nuclear weapons", "Iraq has WMDs", "Iraq is connected to Al-Quada", "Al-Quada" itself (as a global terrorist conspiracy).
If you look back in history, newspapers have always been scrappy corrupt sources of news. There was no 'golden age' of newspapers when they were non-aligned and diligent providers of 'the truth.'
But if you have enough of them (and they have different biases) you can probably get something resembling the truth by looking at a selection of them.
There was an overpass that recently collapsed after a tanker truck accident. The steel and concrete melted and that was with 1/6 the amount of fuel that a 747 carries.
This might be relevent if the structure in question was 1/6th the size of WTC1 or WTC2. Not only is that not the case steel reinforced concrete is more vulnerable to fire than steel alone. Steel is a good conductor of heat whereas concrete is a poor conductor of heat.
Keep in mind the steel doesn't have to "melt" just soften. You ever see ye-old smithy making horseshoes? He doesn't melt them into a mold, he heats them up so the can be bent easily with a hammer.
A blacksmith generally heats them up by placing them in a furnace. In ye olde fashioned forge there'd be at least one other person operating a set of bellows. If it were possible to get the metal hot enough by applying a candle flame to one end then that's what they would have done.
The official story is so strange it makes anyone with a brain wonder.
The official story is also a classic "conspiracy theory". Though to be honest it is hard to find a way of getting four planes hijacked on the same day, with two of them being flown into adjacent buildings, which does not involve conspiracy.
For the first time ever has a building (designed to withstand planes crashing into it) collapses due to fire, officially due to weakening of the steel frame because the fire could never have risen above the melting point of steel. Yet we see a pool of molten steel right there at ground zero.
As well as a lack of investigation of the structure. Usually in a building collapse you'd have people examining the wreckage very carefully to see if anything can be done to prevent other buildings collapsing in a similar way.
And what of WTC building 7 - the third one that collpases into its own footprint (at free fall speed) yet was never hit by a plane?
WTC7 was to all intents and purposes a "surrounding building". It wasn't on the same plot as the other 6 and was built at a different time.
As broadcast still dominates the public perception, you should be very worried that broadcast is dominated by a very small number of companies that can easily be bullied/bribed by their federal masters.
These may not be bullied/bribed at all. They may be pushing their own political adgenda, with or without any actual conspiracy between the companies concerned. With the ammount of corporate lobbying which goes on it isn't always obvious exactly who is "master".
I don't see anything wrong with ignoring crackpot conspiracy theories that have already been thoroughly debunked.
Thing is that in this case it's the debunking which is being ignored. Whereas the "crackpot conspiracy theories" which fit with the neocon world view continue to be pushed at full volume.
Speaking of bacteria, sure some can be bad, but the current trend of disinfecting all the food is becoming a bit extreme (and is likely causing immune system-related diseases).
As well as the possibility of breeding very tough pathogens.
The problems is that more chemicals are invented than tested. Because we now eat so many different chemicals, there's simply no way to determine their long-term side effects.
It's actually a few orders of magnitude worst that it first appears. Since what can matter is combinations, rather than individual chemicals. Not just those combinations in a specific product, but also those which could result from people's eating habits.
The mass hysteria about kids' safety (child molesters, etc.) hadn't started.
IIRC, even with this hysteria, the number of actual cases has been fairly static for decades.
I do not know of any kid at this school who has ever gotten hurt walking or cycling to or from school. I do know of one kid who got hit by a car after school, because her parents were sitting, double-parked, in their air-conditioned SUV on the other side of the street, beckoning her to run across the street and get in.
Whereas the number of children killed and injured on the road has increased. Possibly due to the "school run". The air pollution probably dosn't help either. In the case you describe it sounds like both the child and her parents know little about basic road safety. Which appears all too common, I've seen one of these "parent taxis" trying to play "chicken" with a large truck.
Think of an Oil Refinery. I will use a fire as an example since so many people don't get how this could be helpful.
A fire breaks out in part of the refinery. When the fire fighters get there they would know where everybody that got clear of the fire was instantly because there tags would be near safe and functions base stations. Anyone that might still be in danger you would have at least their last known location to start looking for them.
If the plant is well run they will already have a mechanism for knowing where people are working, fire assembly points, etc. If it isn't well run throwing technology at the problem is unlikely to be much help.
Sure; during a fire or emergency sounds like a great time to be snooping around to see where particular students are. Fire alarms seem to be much more helpful than tracking techniques for real emergencies;
The sort of sensors you'd want in an emergency would be those which can identify people who are both trapped and alive (no point sending firefighters in to retrieve people who are already dead) regardless of if they have a tracking device.
All one has to do is remember - just how many students have we lost to unexpected school fires over the years? This isn't a problem. Period. They're *inventing* a problem that has never existed in order to justify their insanity.
Try this system for stupidity. All the lifts in a building are connected to the fire alarm, such that when it sounds they go to the ground floor and open the doors. To prevent wheelchair users being trapped in a burning building there are several "call points" (effectivly a wall mounted hands free telephone) on the upper floor. These are for all practical purposes useless since the only place they can contact is an office in the same building. The people who designed the system apparently didn't realise that it would have made more sense to put the other end of the system at a fire assembly point.
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that night we eventually gave him his keys along with a "f**k off home, I hope you die on the way". Needless to say he's now banned from mum's house and not permitted to drink at mine. :P )
The problem is that idiots who drive whilst drunk cannot be relied upon to only harm themselves.
Ten years ago, it was difficult to justify because most computers had a single processor.
Plenty of multi processor computers around 10 years ago. Even quite a few 20 years ago. e.g. The Sequent Symmetry
How about Adobe Creative Suite 3? The professionals using it are the most likely to buy quad- or 8-core systems, but CS3 only supports up to two cores.
This demonstrates one of the problems with writing parallel programs. It's difficult to write for an arbitary number of "cores". Even though 4 and 8 are multiples of 2. There is also the issue that an application shouldn't have to know details about the physical hardware/it should be capable of running in a virtual machine which may or may not have any similarity to the actual hardware.
This is OK as a way of defining semantics, but not for execution in a truly parallel environment. In essence, the semantic model says that running computation A in parallel with computation B is the same as executing "A" then "B" or "B" then "A". Notice that the parallelism has been removed to make the semantics easier to reason about.
The thing to consider also is that the number of permutations is N! where N is the number of tasks you want to run in parallel. Thus even as few as 8 tasks means you have more than 40 thousand cases you need to be sure are actually independent.
Our brains are massively parallel, but we do not consciously attend to more than a couple of things at a time.
That's probably because the massively parallel functionality actually evolved to control a complex body.
Infact it is very hard to do even stuff in parallell that is *far* away from our abilities.
Moving your left foot in a circle is trivial to do. Drawing a square on a piece of paper is trivial to do (aslong as neither needs to be perfect), now try doing both simultaneously.
On the other hand most people can walk and eat at the same time or make hand gestures whilst talking. Since these are examples of parallelism which were useful in helping our ancestors survive. Being able to draw different geometic shapes with different limbs at the same time, however, is of little practical use. If it were then people would learn to do it, in the same way that people can learn to drive cars or fly helicopters.
Aside from my usual lament that people already call themselves programmers when they can fire up Visual Studio, parallelizing your tasks opens quite a few cans of worms. Many things can't be done simultanously, many side effects can occur if you don't take care and generally, programmers don't really enjoy multithreaded applications, for exactly those reasons.
For tasks to be done in parallel they need to be independent of each other. Things also get further complicated where the number of parallel tasks is not a multiple of the number of execution units available and/or the tasks themselves are non identical.
and who's Osama been working for for the last 25 years? And probably STILL is?
Possibly no one, considering that there are claims that he is dead. Together with a lack of any evidence that is is alive.
I've seen enough lies come from the government to consider them every bit as credible as the your conspiracy theorists.
If anything a third party conspiracy theory is likely to be slightly credible than a conspiracy theory put out by the US Government. Unless that third party is also a habitual lier. Then the theory can be examined on it's own merits and how well it fits the facts.
But we are to believe that the laws of physics were suspended that day?
Congratulations on turning Occam's razor into a logical fallacy: The simplest explanation is not always the truth.
Or that claimed "simplist" explanation isn't. The idea that terrorists (of unknown identity) planted explosives and arranged for the planes to be hijacked and crashed as a distraction (especially if flight 93 was intended for WTC7) is a rather "simpler" explanation than that the laws of physics were suspended over part of Manhatten for s few hours.
And never before or since has a fully-fueled Boeing jetliner crashed into a high-rise building.
So presumably WTC7 was hit by an invisible airliner... For 3 building collapses you'd need 3 plane crashes.
The SIMPLEST explaination is that jetliners slamming into the towers and the resulting fire caused the collapse.
Only if you ignore the laws of physics...
I don't need to concoct an idiotic story involving aliens, shadow government conspiracy, Elvis and the Illuminati to draw my conclusions.
But stories involving "hijackers" who turn up alive after the event, documents which magically survive fire, baggage which just happened to not make it onto a plane, etc are not "idiotic".
The "natural thing to do" is to apply some common sense, not waste my time on bogus "evidence".
A great pity the US Government decided to to the exact opposite, in the process killing lots of people.
In other words: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but when extraordinary evidence exists, even extraordinary claims may well be the ones that you should accept as the most likely alternative.
What about an extraordinary claim which lacks extraordinary evidence but which is advocated by government and/or media? How about one where disagreement is likely to result in a prison sentence? Examples of these exist right now.
Yup...lost me there too. The whole thing stinks of conspiracy theorists. Hasn't ANYONE heard of Occams razor?
You mean with things like "Iran is building nuclear weapons", "Iraq has WMDs", "Iraq is connected to Al-Quada", "Al-Quada" itself (as a global terrorist conspiracy).
If you look back in history, newspapers have always been scrappy corrupt sources of news. There was no 'golden age' of newspapers when they were non-aligned and diligent providers of 'the truth.'
But if you have enough of them (and they have different biases) you can probably get something resembling the truth by looking at a selection of them.
There was an overpass that recently collapsed after a tanker truck accident. The steel and concrete melted and that was with 1/6 the amount of fuel that a 747 carries.
This might be relevent if the structure in question was 1/6th the size of WTC1 or WTC2. Not only is that not the case steel reinforced concrete is more vulnerable to fire than steel alone. Steel is a good conductor of heat whereas concrete is a poor conductor of heat.
Keep in mind the steel doesn't have to "melt" just soften. You ever see ye-old smithy making horseshoes? He doesn't melt them into a mold, he heats them up so the can be bent easily with a hammer.
A blacksmith generally heats them up by placing them in a furnace. In ye olde fashioned forge there'd be at least one other person operating a set of bellows. If it were possible to get the metal hot enough by applying a candle flame to one end then that's what they would have done.
The official story is so strange it makes anyone with a brain wonder.
The official story is also a classic "conspiracy theory". Though to be honest it is hard to find a way of getting four planes hijacked on the same day, with two of them being flown into adjacent buildings, which does not involve conspiracy.
For the first time ever has a building (designed to withstand planes crashing into it) collapses due to fire, officially due to weakening of the steel frame because the fire could never have risen above the melting point of steel. Yet we see a pool of molten steel right there at ground zero.
As well as a lack of investigation of the structure. Usually in a building collapse you'd have people examining the wreckage very carefully to see if anything can be done to prevent other buildings collapsing in a similar way.
And what of WTC building 7 - the third one that collpases into its own footprint (at free fall speed) yet was never hit by a plane?
WTC7 was to all intents and purposes a "surrounding building". It wasn't on the same plot as the other 6 and was built at a different time.
As broadcast still dominates the public perception, you should be very worried that broadcast is dominated by a very small number of companies that can easily be bullied/bribed by their federal masters.
These may not be bullied/bribed at all. They may be pushing their own political adgenda, with or without any actual conspiracy between the companies concerned.
With the ammount of corporate lobbying which goes on it isn't always obvious exactly who is "master".
I don't see anything wrong with ignoring crackpot conspiracy theories that have already been thoroughly debunked.
Thing is that in this case it's the debunking which is being ignored. Whereas the "crackpot conspiracy theories" which fit with the neocon world view continue to be pushed at full volume.
Speaking of bacteria, sure some can be bad, but the current trend of disinfecting all the food is becoming a bit extreme (and is likely causing immune system-related diseases).
As well as the possibility of breeding very tough pathogens.
The problems is that more chemicals are invented than tested. Because we now eat so many different chemicals, there's simply no way to determine their long-term side effects.
It's actually a few orders of magnitude worst that it first appears. Since what can matter is combinations, rather than individual chemicals. Not just those combinations in a specific product, but also those which could result from people's eating habits.
27kg of expended material to generate 4kg of hydrogen doesn't sound like a good idea.
Especially if it produces 23 kilos of (unidentified) waste which needs to be removed from the tank in order to refuel.
The mass hysteria about kids' safety (child molesters, etc.) hadn't started.
IIRC, even with this hysteria, the number of actual cases has been fairly static for decades.
I do not know of any kid at this school who has ever gotten hurt walking or cycling to or from school. I do know of one kid who got hit by a car after school, because her parents were sitting, double-parked, in their air-conditioned SUV on the other side of the street, beckoning her to run across the street and get in.
Whereas the number of children killed and injured on the road has increased. Possibly due to the "school run". The air pollution probably dosn't help either. In the case you describe it sounds like both the child and her parents know little about basic road safety. Which appears all too common, I've seen one of these "parent taxis" trying to play "chicken" with a large truck.
Think of an Oil Refinery. I will use a fire as an example since so many people don't get how this could be helpful. A fire breaks out in part of the refinery. When the fire fighters get there they would know where everybody that got clear of the fire was instantly because there tags would be near safe and functions base stations. Anyone that might still be in danger you would have at least their last known location to start looking for them.
If the plant is well run they will already have a mechanism for knowing where people are working, fire assembly points, etc. If it isn't well run throwing technology at the problem is unlikely to be much help.
Sure; during a fire or emergency sounds like a great time to be snooping around to see where particular students are. Fire alarms seem to be much more helpful than tracking techniques for real emergencies;
The sort of sensors you'd want in an emergency would be those which can identify people who are both trapped and alive (no point sending firefighters in to retrieve people who are already dead) regardless of if they have a tracking device.
All one has to do is remember - just how many students have we lost to unexpected school fires over the years? This isn't a problem. Period. They're *inventing* a problem that has never existed in order to justify their insanity.
Try this system for stupidity. All the lifts in a building are connected to the fire alarm, such that when it sounds they go to the ground floor and open the doors. To prevent wheelchair users being trapped in a burning building there are several "call points" (effectivly a wall mounted hands free telephone) on the upper floor. These are for all practical purposes useless since the only place they can contact is an office in the same building. The people who designed the system apparently didn't realise that it would have made more sense to put the other end of the system at a fire assembly point.