Like the article says; "... intervention and rescue of people being held, forced to work or provide sex against their will...". Of course these same people are in denial of the fact that many people deliberately get into "sexual slavery" (i.e. prostitution) because the money is good.
I've never heard of anyone counting voluntary, "entrepreneurial" prostitutes as "sex slaves." That term has a specific meaning, which involves... well, slavery. That is, keeping someone for labor against their will. In the case of sex slavery, it usually involves transporting women to someplace far beyond the reach of their family or loved ones and keeping them in conditions that make escape impossible, such as being under constant guard and subjected to coerced drug addiction, violent beatings, and rape. If you're using the fact that some people choose to be prostitutes as an excuse to ignore these kinds of crimes, you're either a little warped or you just don't understand what people mean when they talk about sex slavery.
Oh... and FWIW, if both men and women grow accustomed to instant gratification (and I might agree), that doesn't seem to support the idea that the market for prostitution is increasing. Rather the opposite; it would seem to mean that both men and women now have easier access to recreational sex than in eras when prevailing morals made obtaining gratification more difficult.
I didn't have time to listen to the audio interviews you linked, but I don't think the Catholic News Agency story you linked necessarily shows a causal relationship between use of pornography and use of prostitution.
Some of the data points -- such as the prostitutes reporting that pornography was made of them -- don't seem related at all. (Sex workers find themselves involved in the sex industry, news at 11.)
I think it's true that hardcore porn is more pervasive now, but that's mainly because it's available over the Internet, which allows people to access it in the privacy of their own homes. More people are more likely to access such material when they're convinced no one else will find out. Going out and paying for prostitutes still seems like a lot harder thing to rationalize for your typical Joe.
Anecdotal evidence: I know a lot of people who've looked at hardcore porn. Maybe all of my friends have; it wouldn't surprise me. I only know one person who has admitted to visiting a prostitute, though, and then only once. I find it unlikely that the rest of them are all doing it in secret.
On a side note, my own main concern about the prevalence of pornography is simply that it seems to give young people unrealistic or warped expectations about sex. I don't base this on what the guys I've met say -- guys have always bragged about a lot of things -- but the young women I talk to sometimes seem to have a lot of issues around what they perceive is expected of them in the bedroom, and it leads me to believe they're probably not having very good sex.
Prostitution is not "evil", it is a way to make money.
Except in many cases it's a way for a pimp to make money, not for the prostitutes to make money. A prostitute working the street for a pimp is typically expected to hand over 100 percent of the money given her in a night. The pimp "holds onto her share for her," because "she knows she's no good with money." In these cases the prostitutes are very clearly being exploited and they are often victimized by violence and being coerced into drug addiction. I'd say these things are -- since we've brought up the term -- at least a little evil.
The average performance ratio of Java/Server vs C/C++ is 1.56 / 1.045 = 1.492823... or in other words... 49.2823 % slower.
I'm not sure I understand your math. You seem to be demonstrating that C is 49 percent faster, not that Java is 49 percent slower.
A score of 1 is 50 percent slower than a score of 2. Obvious, no? A score of 1 is only 33 percent slower than a score of 1.5. Still slower, but not as much as you claim.
And as for your comments about best and worst days, that's just hyperbole, and as I said elsewhere, benchmarks do nothing to represent either of those conditions. They only demonstrate benchmarks.
I honestly don't understand how you're interpreting the English language.
You said: Java is at least 50% slower on its best day than C/C++ on its worst day. I said: [Java cannot] execute code on its absolute best day with performance that's half as good as C++ on C++'s worst day.
Pray, what is the difference between these two statements, other than length? I have no emotional attachment to Java or any programming language.
There is no need for numbers. Performance depends on today's architectures mostly depends on cache friendliness, and Java does not allow object layouts that are cache friendly.
If someone tells me "no VM can execute code on its absolute best day with performance that's half as good as C++ on C++'s worst day," I think there's need for numbers. Because that sounds like absolute B.S. to me. At best it's totally subjective, in the sense that the true performance and scalability of a Web app like Facebook might not be reflected by raw C++ benchmarks. At worst, it sounds like someone has missed out on the last couple decades of VM technology.
The Zend Engine license seems contradictory to me. On the one hand, Clause 3 says you're forbidden from using the terms "Zend" or "Zend Engine" to endorse or promote your product. On the other hand, Clauses 5 and 6 say you're absolutely required to use the term "Zend Engine" to endorse and promote your product. Seems like someone took the classic BSD license and bolted a commercial land grab onto it, which seems to honor neither the letter nor the spirit of the original.
Which is at least 50% slower on its best day, than C/C++ on it's worst day.
Got any numbers to back that up, or are you just pulling it out of thin air?
It's the VM part that kills performance. The Java VM, and presumably, the PHP VM, do not execute native machine instructions, but instead, use an intermediary format, as opposed to, native cpu instructions.
You don't seem to understand how a JIT works. Many portions of Java programs are indeed executed as native machine instructions.
Combine that with the remarkable similarity between PHP syntax and C ( but without the speed )
I wouldn't call the similarity "remarkable." "Superficial" might be a word I'd use, in the sense that Java syntax is also similar to C.
Which is a complete step backwards if their goal is performance.
Not really. JIT technology is pretty advanced these days. (It's good enough for Java, anyway.) More importantly, though, my understanding is that static compilation forced them to heavily restrict their coding style. PHP being a dynamic language, there were a lot of features they had to leave on the table to make it work that way.
I think the Readme on GitHub is a placeholder. They took the Readme from HipHop, aka hphpc, which was the earlier project. This is HipHop VM, which is something different. Read the "more technical description," linked at the top, to get the picture. Basically, HipHop goes PHP-->Abstract Syntax Tree-->C++-->x64. HipHop VM goes PHP-->AST-->Bytecode, then runs the bytecode through a JIT.
And when they are finally done optimizing it, squeezing every last bit of performance out of it, adding the ability to compile to a native binary, they will have achieved the remarkable accomplishment of having re-invented the C compiler.
They did that already. They're moving away from static compilation in favor of running it in a VM with a JIT.
I'm curious what bothers you about the "relatively unobtrusive Google ads". I have a rough hunch a lot of people have a built-in bias against online advertising in general just because it's been so. terrible. in the past and has such a poor reputation in general.
I guess it's the targeting. The very thing that advertisers claim makes them so valuable is what makes them annoying to me. I find they seldom match any of my actual interests, no matter how precisely matched to my search terms they may be. I don't want to buy what they're selling, so the whole pitch takes on this quality of, "Yo dawg, we heard you like..." (Mind you, Google serves a lot of different kinds of advertising, so it's difficult to pinpoint specific examples because I haven't seen any of them in so long.)
Even worse are those little ads in the margins of Facebook. Similarly unobtrusive, no banners... but say a friend posts, "The wife was being a real bitch this morning," and I comment with, "Oh boo hoo, here I'll send you some flowers," and all of a sudden a little ad for a florist pops up. That's not helpful, it's just lame, and it gives you the creepy feeling of being spied on.
It appears to be licensed under a combination of the PHP license and the Zend license. Both are BSD-like, but the Zend license has a clause that requires you to advertise for Zend if you advertise for a product built with the Zend Engine, which I don't much care for.
In general, I don't think people are hostile to all advertising. They're hostile to poor, obnoxious, irrelevant advertising.
Well, that's a pretty difficult category to define. I'm sure there are some people who will never understand why TV ads are so obnoxious to me. To them, the ads are actually part of the entertainment of watching TV (see: Super Bowl).
Personally, I'm pretty darn hostile to advertising. I'm certainly hostile to pretty much all of the forms I've seen on the Web, including the relatively unobtrusive Google ads.
On the other hand, now that I think about it, ads in magazines really don't bother me. I sometimes actually even look at them. If some clever Web advertiser could figure out the psychology of that and make it work for Web ads, they might be onto something.
I don't think TANSTAAFL really applies. I mean, so my lunch isn't free. OK. What's the price? I suffer? Because, ads or no ads, no money is changing hands here. People who cry that Web sites get money from ads always make the false connection that merely by having me look at ads, the advertiser benefits. That simply isn't the case. That seems like the same argument as the people who claim that every time someone downloads a copy of CS 5.5 from BitTorrent, Adobe loses $1,200. No, it doesn't quite work that way.
Example: Car ads. I don't have a driver's license. No matter how many ads for cars they show me, I won't be buying a car. It might not even be legal for me to buy one (I'm not sure). So watching a 20-second video clip of a CG car driving around some fictitious Autobahn is not only wasting my time, it's also wasting the advertiser's money to show it to me.
Also, maybe I get so tired of seeing the same car ad every 10 minutes in a Hulu video that I start to hate that car and its manufacturer?
I'm sure some Web site owners say, "I don't give a shit about any of that. My contract just says I have to show you the ad." But to me, that's shortsighted thinking. In the long run, advertisers are only going to want to advertise where it's effective. If some people are so hostile to advertising that they use AdBlock, why not leave them alone? How is wasting that person's time and causing them more frustration going to pay for that Not-Free Lunch? The only people who really benefit are the middlemen -- the ad agencies -- and you know what Bill Hicks said about them.
You talk as if crack has gone away, or is more expensive than it was in the 80s. If anything, powder cocaine has become cheaper and more widely available, so people are less likely to mess around with crack, which has always carried more social stigma.
Also, legal drugs don't necessarily have to be cheaper. If you could just go to Rite Aid and buy your drugs instead of going to some shitty neighborhood and buying them off a guy who looks like he lives on the street, wouldn't you? Even if you had to pay the same price?
In some cases, dispensaries may have a supply advantage (grow operation) but they also have to supply a high quality product that its more expensive to produce and also seem to provide a lot of high quality variety which, again, comses from a constrained and illicit supply.
As I understand it, the dispensaries buy from private growers, who assume all of the (financial) risk themselves. The dispensaries only want the highest-quality product, true; but if that's not what you're selling, they just don't buy it. Grow a bad crop and you're stuck selling it to the street yourself.
4. Drug dealers, runners, and general baddies are not going to suddenly because good citizens just because drugs can be purchased over the counter. The sell this shit for money, cause they want money... See #2 and #3 - they won't be out of a job anyways.
No shit. We're talking about people who have no problem committing mass murder, rape, and mutilation just to "send a message" to their rivals. And we think they're going to have second thoughts about tax evasion?
I tend to think the reach and power of Mexican drug cartels to drive up to the Beltway and assassinate U.S. politicians is exaggerated. They have a lot of crazy fuckers playing on their teams, but last I heard they don't have any T-800s yet.
And yet... every urban street dealer loves the movie Scarface. That scene where they put a bomb under the guy's car? That was because he was on his way to the U.N. to give a speech about legalizing drugs. Not cracking down on drugs, but legalizing them. I think everyone involved in the drug business knows on an instinctive level that legalizing it would be the worst thing that could happen to them -- and that there are far, far too many people with a stake in that business (on both sides of the law) for it to ever happen.
Check out the cast list sometimes of the big blockbusters. They almost always feature unknown people these days. Maybe one headliner, but that's it. Having a movie with more than one celebrity is getting rarer and rarer.
Care to cite an example? Most movies tend to have at least a male and female lead.
Anyone should have been able to tell that New Year's Eve would be a dud, if not the disastrous bomb it turned out to be, and they went ahead with, what? Eight name celebrities on one bill?
Well, except that Microsoft often changes keyboard shortcuts in their software in localized versions.
I can't really speak to localized versions but this seems like a separate issue. In the English version, nothing significant has changed with the key commands in the last ten years.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the article says; "... intervention and rescue of people being held, forced to work or provide sex against their will...". Of course these same people are in denial of the fact that many people deliberately get into "sexual slavery" (i.e. prostitution) because the money is good.
I've never heard of anyone counting voluntary, "entrepreneurial" prostitutes as "sex slaves." That term has a specific meaning, which involves ... well, slavery. That is, keeping someone for labor against their will. In the case of sex slavery, it usually involves transporting women to someplace far beyond the reach of their family or loved ones and keeping them in conditions that make escape impossible, such as being under constant guard and subjected to coerced drug addiction, violent beatings, and rape. If you're using the fact that some people choose to be prostitutes as an excuse to ignore these kinds of crimes, you're either a little warped or you just don't understand what people mean when they talk about sex slavery.
Oh ... and FWIW, if both men and women grow accustomed to instant gratification (and I might agree), that doesn't seem to support the idea that the market for prostitution is increasing. Rather the opposite; it would seem to mean that both men and women now have easier access to recreational sex than in eras when prevailing morals made obtaining gratification more difficult.
I didn't have time to listen to the audio interviews you linked, but I don't think the Catholic News Agency story you linked necessarily shows a causal relationship between use of pornography and use of prostitution.
Some of the data points -- such as the prostitutes reporting that pornography was made of them -- don't seem related at all. (Sex workers find themselves involved in the sex industry, news at 11.)
I think it's true that hardcore porn is more pervasive now, but that's mainly because it's available over the Internet, which allows people to access it in the privacy of their own homes. More people are more likely to access such material when they're convinced no one else will find out. Going out and paying for prostitutes still seems like a lot harder thing to rationalize for your typical Joe.
Anecdotal evidence: I know a lot of people who've looked at hardcore porn. Maybe all of my friends have; it wouldn't surprise me. I only know one person who has admitted to visiting a prostitute, though, and then only once. I find it unlikely that the rest of them are all doing it in secret.
On a side note, my own main concern about the prevalence of pornography is simply that it seems to give young people unrealistic or warped expectations about sex. I don't base this on what the guys I've met say -- guys have always bragged about a lot of things -- but the young women I talk to sometimes seem to have a lot of issues around what they perceive is expected of them in the bedroom, and it leads me to believe they're probably not having very good sex.
Prostitution is not "evil", it is a way to make money.
Except in many cases it's a way for a pimp to make money, not for the prostitutes to make money. A prostitute working the street for a pimp is typically expected to hand over 100 percent of the money given her in a night. The pimp "holds onto her share for her," because "she knows she's no good with money." In these cases the prostitutes are very clearly being exploited and they are often victimized by violence and being coerced into drug addiction. I'd say these things are -- since we've brought up the term -- at least a little evil.
The average performance ratio of Java/Server vs C/C++ is 1.56 / 1.045 = 1.492823 ... or in other words ... 49.2823 % slower.
I'm not sure I understand your math. You seem to be demonstrating that C is 49 percent faster, not that Java is 49 percent slower.
A score of 1 is 50 percent slower than a score of 2. Obvious, no?
A score of 1 is only 33 percent slower than a score of 1.5. Still slower, but not as much as you claim.
And as for your comments about best and worst days, that's just hyperbole, and as I said elsewhere, benchmarks do nothing to represent either of those conditions. They only demonstrate benchmarks.
I honestly don't understand how you're interpreting the English language.
You said: Java is at least 50% slower on its best day than C/C++ on its worst day.
I said: [Java cannot] execute code on its absolute best day with performance that's half as good as C++ on C++'s worst day.
Pray, what is the difference between these two statements, other than length? I have no emotional attachment to Java or any programming language.
Should we give everyone a CB radio like long haul truckers use? Because apparently that's never been as dangerous as talking on a cell phone.
So based on this chart, the assertion that the best Java program will be half as fast as the worst C++ program is false.
There is no need for numbers. Performance depends on today's architectures mostly depends on cache friendliness, and Java does not allow object layouts that are cache friendly.
If someone tells me "no VM can execute code on its absolute best day with performance that's half as good as C++ on C++'s worst day," I think there's need for numbers. Because that sounds like absolute B.S. to me. At best it's totally subjective, in the sense that the true performance and scalability of a Web app like Facebook might not be reflected by raw C++ benchmarks. At worst, it sounds like someone has missed out on the last couple decades of VM technology.
The Zend Engine license seems contradictory to me. On the one hand, Clause 3 says you're forbidden from using the terms "Zend" or "Zend Engine" to endorse or promote your product. On the other hand, Clauses 5 and 6 say you're absolutely required to use the term "Zend Engine" to endorse and promote your product. Seems like someone took the classic BSD license and bolted a commercial land grab onto it, which seems to honor neither the letter nor the spirit of the original.
Which is at least 50% slower on its best day, than C/C++ on it's worst day.
Got any numbers to back that up, or are you just pulling it out of thin air?
It's the VM part that kills performance. The Java VM, and presumably, the PHP VM, do not execute native machine instructions, but instead, use an intermediary format, as opposed to, native cpu instructions.
You don't seem to understand how a JIT works. Many portions of Java programs are indeed executed as native machine instructions.
Combine that with the remarkable similarity between PHP syntax and C ( but without the speed )
I wouldn't call the similarity "remarkable." "Superficial" might be a word I'd use, in the sense that Java syntax is also similar to C.
Which is a complete step backwards if their goal is performance.
Not really. JIT technology is pretty advanced these days. (It's good enough for Java, anyway.) More importantly, though, my understanding is that static compilation forced them to heavily restrict their coding style. PHP being a dynamic language, there were a lot of features they had to leave on the table to make it work that way.
I think the Readme on GitHub is a placeholder. They took the Readme from HipHop, aka hphpc, which was the earlier project. This is HipHop VM, which is something different. Read the "more technical description," linked at the top, to get the picture. Basically, HipHop goes PHP-->Abstract Syntax Tree-->C++-->x64. HipHop VM goes PHP-->AST-->Bytecode, then runs the bytecode through a JIT.
And when they are finally done optimizing it, squeezing every last bit of performance out of it, adding the ability to compile to a native binary, they will have achieved the remarkable accomplishment of having re-invented the C compiler.
They did that already. They're moving away from static compilation in favor of running it in a VM with a JIT.
I'm curious what bothers you about the "relatively unobtrusive Google ads". I have a rough hunch a lot of people have a built-in bias against online advertising in general just because it's been so. terrible. in the past and has such a poor reputation in general.
I guess it's the targeting. The very thing that advertisers claim makes them so valuable is what makes them annoying to me. I find they seldom match any of my actual interests, no matter how precisely matched to my search terms they may be. I don't want to buy what they're selling, so the whole pitch takes on this quality of, "Yo dawg, we heard you like..." (Mind you, Google serves a lot of different kinds of advertising, so it's difficult to pinpoint specific examples because I haven't seen any of them in so long.)
Even worse are those little ads in the margins of Facebook. Similarly unobtrusive, no banners... but say a friend posts, "The wife was being a real bitch this morning," and I comment with, "Oh boo hoo, here I'll send you some flowers," and all of a sudden a little ad for a florist pops up. That's not helpful, it's just lame, and it gives you the creepy feeling of being spied on.
Is FB's JIT PHP open sourced?
It appears to be licensed under a combination of the PHP license and the Zend license. Both are BSD-like, but the Zend license has a clause that requires you to advertise for Zend if you advertise for a product built with the Zend Engine, which I don't much care for.
I'd like to launch this discussion by making a snide remark about PHP.
In general, I don't think people are hostile to all advertising. They're hostile to poor, obnoxious, irrelevant advertising.
Well, that's a pretty difficult category to define. I'm sure there are some people who will never understand why TV ads are so obnoxious to me. To them, the ads are actually part of the entertainment of watching TV (see: Super Bowl).
Personally, I'm pretty darn hostile to advertising. I'm certainly hostile to pretty much all of the forms I've seen on the Web, including the relatively unobtrusive Google ads.
On the other hand, now that I think about it, ads in magazines really don't bother me. I sometimes actually even look at them. If some clever Web advertiser could figure out the psychology of that and make it work for Web ads, they might be onto something.
I don't think TANSTAAFL really applies. I mean, so my lunch isn't free. OK. What's the price? I suffer? Because, ads or no ads, no money is changing hands here. People who cry that Web sites get money from ads always make the false connection that merely by having me look at ads, the advertiser benefits. That simply isn't the case. That seems like the same argument as the people who claim that every time someone downloads a copy of CS 5.5 from BitTorrent, Adobe loses $1,200. No, it doesn't quite work that way.
Example: Car ads. I don't have a driver's license. No matter how many ads for cars they show me, I won't be buying a car. It might not even be legal for me to buy one (I'm not sure). So watching a 20-second video clip of a CG car driving around some fictitious Autobahn is not only wasting my time, it's also wasting the advertiser's money to show it to me.
Also, maybe I get so tired of seeing the same car ad every 10 minutes in a Hulu video that I start to hate that car and its manufacturer?
I'm sure some Web site owners say, "I don't give a shit about any of that. My contract just says I have to show you the ad." But to me, that's shortsighted thinking. In the long run, advertisers are only going to want to advertise where it's effective. If some people are so hostile to advertising that they use AdBlock, why not leave them alone? How is wasting that person's time and causing them more frustration going to pay for that Not-Free Lunch? The only people who really benefit are the middlemen -- the ad agencies -- and you know what Bill Hicks said about them.
You talk as if crack has gone away, or is more expensive than it was in the 80s. If anything, powder cocaine has become cheaper and more widely available, so people are less likely to mess around with crack, which has always carried more social stigma.
Also, legal drugs don't necessarily have to be cheaper. If you could just go to Rite Aid and buy your drugs instead of going to some shitty neighborhood and buying them off a guy who looks like he lives on the street, wouldn't you? Even if you had to pay the same price?
In some cases, dispensaries may have a supply advantage (grow operation) but they also have to supply a high quality product that its more expensive to produce and also seem to provide a lot of high quality variety which, again, comses from a constrained and illicit supply.
As I understand it, the dispensaries buy from private growers, who assume all of the (financial) risk themselves. The dispensaries only want the highest-quality product, true; but if that's not what you're selling, they just don't buy it. Grow a bad crop and you're stuck selling it to the street yourself.
4. Drug dealers, runners, and general baddies are not going to suddenly because good citizens just because drugs can be purchased over the counter. The sell this shit for money, cause they want money... See #2 and #3 - they won't be out of a job anyways.
No shit. We're talking about people who have no problem committing mass murder, rape, and mutilation just to "send a message" to their rivals. And we think they're going to have second thoughts about tax evasion?
I tend to think the reach and power of Mexican drug cartels to drive up to the Beltway and assassinate U.S. politicians is exaggerated. They have a lot of crazy fuckers playing on their teams, but last I heard they don't have any T-800s yet.
And yet... every urban street dealer loves the movie Scarface. That scene where they put a bomb under the guy's car? That was because he was on his way to the U.N. to give a speech about legalizing drugs. Not cracking down on drugs, but legalizing them. I think everyone involved in the drug business knows on an instinctive level that legalizing it would be the worst thing that could happen to them -- and that there are far, far too many people with a stake in that business (on both sides of the law) for it to ever happen.
Check out the cast list sometimes of the big blockbusters. They almost always feature unknown people these days. Maybe one headliner, but that's it. Having a movie with more than one celebrity is getting rarer and rarer.
Care to cite an example? Most movies tend to have at least a male and female lead.
Anyone should have been able to tell that New Year's Eve would be a dud, if not the disastrous bomb it turned out to be, and they went ahead with, what? Eight name celebrities on one bill?
Well, except that Microsoft often changes keyboard shortcuts in their software in localized versions.
I can't really speak to localized versions but this seems like a separate issue. In the English version, nothing significant has changed with the key commands in the last ten years.