I'm curious - in the first paragraph, you advocate a model based on preventing criminals from reoffending (hence, a driving ban is mor than sufficient for death by driving), yet in the second paragraph, you advocate extra unpleasantness (i.e., beyond what prison in itself entails normally) for those who are behind bars.
If unpleasantness is needed for reasons such as deterrance, why shouldn't people who kill by willful reckless negligence such as texting not receive some level of extra unpleasantness, and not simply a fine and driving ban?
Don't get me wrong - I agree with you that prison seems to be used all too easily, but I wouldn't say that killing someone for texting when driving is any kind of light crime.
That would only get you 256x improvement, surely (2^(6*12/9))? I make it more like just under 8 months.
And that "slightly longer period" is more like 18 months, which only leads to 16x improvements in 6 years. If it turns out that the doubling time itself more than halves, then great, but it's quite a change...
Yes, I'll look forward to my NVIDIA card with 6.7x performance in 6 years' time.
For everyone else hoping for 570x improvement, they'll be needing more like 570^(1/6)-1 = 188% per year. Way ahead of the Moore's Law trend of about 59% per year.
As I said in my reply to this poster, you can't just arbitrarily claim there are two such trends!
I mean, why stop there? "CPU/GPUs can get faster by either having more transisters, making them more efficient, or making the algorithms more efficient. I'm going to claim we have a 2x increase every 18 months, independently for all three of these, therefore in 6 years we'll have an increase of 4096 times!!!"
It's nonsense - there's only a 2x increase for number of transisters, and it's that increase which is used for "more efficiency". And increase in efficiency of algorithms isn't anywhere near 2x every 18 months. But if you're allowed to make stuff up, I guess anything's possible!
Which is close enough to their estimate that it could be how they arrived at this figure.
Indeed, and given they're pushing GPUs for GPGPU, it seems rather misleading to claim it will outdo CPUs. If an algorithm is suitable for GPGPU, then it should also benefit from adding multiple CPU cores. If an algorithm is hard to parallelise on a CPU, I don't see how a GPU will help.
No, you can't just magically have get both extra efficiency and doing smaller size, out of the same increase.
Moore's law has meant you can get double the number of transisters per 18 months - and it's this which has given the extra efficiency we've been seeing. There isn't a second "increase of efficiency" trend! You may note that chips generally haven't actually been getting smaller, because people would generally prefer the increased performance. You either choose between same number of transisters in a smaller area, or twice as many transisters in the same area. You can't count it twice!
In fact, it's only been in recent years that increasing transister counts as been used to add multiple cores, but that comes at the expense of increased efficiency of any given core. Don't think that just because we've been going to dual and quad cores, that somehow means we're increasing at a faster rate than before...
One presumes that predictions like these are "for a given cost", or at the least, on a single chip - just as is the case of Moore's law. No one claims that Moore's law was beaten when they started putting hundreds of CPUs together in a supercomputer.
I don't see how it's cheating if you can do it on a single chip, or at the same price - modern day GPUs already have tens or hundreds of cores, and CPUs have multiple cores too. Do you disable all but one of them on your computer, because it's "cheating"?
The problem with this argument is that there is a great deal of inconsistency in any apparent "rules" in English. Consider - do you really pronounce "dough" in "doughnut" the same way you pronounce "plough"? And what about "cough"?
Do you think that "donor" is incorrect too, and should be "doughnor"?
By that reasoning, why shouldn't he be suspicious of someone wanting to keep hold of his bag? He said he had a lot of sensitive information, as well as the cost of the laptop of course - why give it to someone who might turn out to be a criminal? There could be a dodgy employee who works there, or maybe the security is bad, and it gets stolen by one of the many criminal non-employees that you refer to.
Same thing with carrying a gun - laws are there to protect law-abiding people.
Well I'm not sure I understand the analogy, but I wouldn't shop anywhere that decided to point a gun at me, either.
Yes, obviously places like China, N Korea etc have a different opinion. But that doesn't change what the OP said - that the US Constitution enumerates a subset of natural rights. I'm not sure the fact that places with appalling human rights records disagree with the US Constitution is somehow putting the US Constitution in bad light...
Agreed that encryption is a good idea, but does it help using a separate drive - couldn't they just take that too or instead? I don't know how common such seizures are.
And losing one's laptop would still be a pain and a cost, even if you don't suffer data loss. (I wonder how that works for insurance? "Hello, I've had my laptop stolen by the US Government", although sadly I wonder that they might claim you're not covered if it's done by a state. I think something's going wrong with security enforcement if you'd be better off being a victim of crime compared to the TSA.)
Apple claims that creative individuals will be able to make their own SiGNS for free
Ah, you had me going until this bit - for free? Not for "only $99", which will then need Apple approval to see whether you're allowed to put up your SiGNS?
I thought the meme was "Windows 95 == Mac 89" (I'm not sure why 89 was chosen in particlar)?
Which we then pointed out in turn was equal to Amiga 85.
(The claim for Mac OS might make sense for the UI alone, but in other areas, such as offering preemptive multitasking, it lagged behind Windows 95, and in fact it never got that feature.)
I'd happily not have a taskbar, if there were other ways to do it (e.g., workspaces). The UI hasn't really changed much since long before Windows 95 - in the 80s there were plenty of GUIs (AmigaOS, MacOS etc).
I mean, after all, they've sold/given away over a billion apps and have approved over 65,000 apps, but hey, their track record for app approval should be a bit better, right?
Yes, let's compare them to other platforms.
*checks*
Oh wait, there isn't any data for how many apps are approved for other platforms, because you don't have to in the first place.
The issue isn't how many they have approved - whether it's 100, 10,000, or 100 billion. The issue is that they can - and do - refuse to approve an application. If a desktop platform said you couldn't run Firefox, pleading "But they've approved 65,000 other applications" is beside the point.
But, yeah, let's continue hating on Apple because that's the cool thing geeks do now.
Not here on Slashdot. And I see you make the Japan-fallacy again - that anyone who doesn't praise Apple must be doing so out of irrational hatred.
Comparing it to Microsoft's Windows is ridiculous at best. Windows is a monopoly while, even though there a sh*tload of iPhones around, the iPhone isn't.
There are a "sh*tload" of Windows installations around too. I don't think that sentence says what you mean it to say?
Anyhow - are you seriously saying that you are only bothered about your applications requiring approval if it's MS? That if Apple did this for their desktop machines too, they'd still be just as good a platform?
Remember, no one is discussing legality or antitrust issues here (which is the only point where MS being a monopoly is relevant), the question is, is a platform where apps have to be approved by the company a good thing? Whether it's Windows, or niche desktop and mobile platforms like Iphone OS?
Also, consider if Apple did become a monopoly in the area of mobile computing - are you saying it's fine to only then worry, when the damage is done? That the problem will be solved with an antitrust case (because we know how successful that was with Microsoft!)?
Also, Microsoft has the same track record, though maybe not as obvious as the App store. Microsoft has done countless attempts to deal with these competitors and have locked them out on multiple occasions through not opening up all information and pushing their own services to the user (msie or msn anyone?). How is that any different?
Yes quite, how is it any different? MS are routinely bashed around here for those things, and rightly so, so why is it that Apple can do no wrong? How is what they do any different?
If you don't like the services that are available on the iPhone, then don't buy an iPhone and get one of the many other neat smart phones out there
Exactly - and how are people going to know about the problems with the Iphone? That's right, by telling people about the problems. But all the time that the BBC and even Slashdot only tell people about the Iphone, and not the other phones, we risk a future where eventually, the Iphone will be the only choice. Why is Slashdot helping to promote such a closed and locked down future for mobile computing? Imagine if Slashdot only posted stories about Windows, with no coverage of OS X or Linux - is that the open-loving Slashdot we used to know?
Hard sales figures show there are plenty of more popular phone manufacturers though (I'd post a reference, but last time I did that I just got modded down for posting a fact that didn't toe the pro-Apple line that the clique of mods have these days). So if that's the case, if your hypothesis is true, we should be seeing regular news stories on Slashdot and the BBC for popular applications released on all these other mobile phones too. Are we?
And you two are missing the point aswell. The whole story isn't about how surprised everyone are that Apple accepted it, but that spotify is now actually released for iPhone too.
No, "application released for one make of phone" is not newsworthy. How many BBC and Slashdot news stories are there for applications released for Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android, or most notably J2ME (which has a platform of about a billion or so phones)? It's only newsworthy due to the requirement of corporate approval for the Iphone platform, which is AFAIK unique among both mobile and desktop computing platforms. But fortunately for Apple (and unfortunately for us who don't want a future where all of mobile computing is controlled by a single company), even negative publicity is good publicity, because it perpetuates the myth that the Iphone is the only mobile phone that does these things (which ironically seems to be more common here than among non-geeks - even my mum knows that she can browse the web on her bog standard phone, and even though she's yet to work out how to use the phone's address book to store numbers, she happily accesses the Internet).
On second thoughts, you are right - since "On Your Iphone" makes any story newsworthy. After all, there was that Slashdot story "You can now read a webpage on your iphone" a few months back, and "spinning graphic application on the iphone" got free advertising by the BBC. Hmm, I pay the BBC licence fee - I wonder if they'll give me free advertising for an application I'm writing for Windows?
Will we get BBC coverage when Spotify is released for Symbian, Windows Mobile or Android too?
You better believe it. Personally I used to be sceptical over such claims, but only this week here in the UK, the Video Recordings Act 1984 was found to have never been enacted. Well I tell you what - it's the end of civilization here. Just as MP Barbara Follett feared as she suggested censoring the news about the law not being valid, the market has been flooded with unclassified DVDs, and it's led to crime rates going through the roof, with rioting up and down the country.
I tried to pop into my local video store to see if I could get hold of a copy of one of these "video nasty" snuff films that are now on sale, but couldn't fight my way past the horde of children who were purchasing hardcore porn, and immediately afterwards as a result, they started raping each other. Apparently the porn that they download for free on the Internet just doesn't have the same effect on them. Me, I was lucky to get out alive.
This is a national emergency. The Government has been handing emergency "blinkers", so that adult citizens can go about their daily business, whilst minimising the risk that they might see a non-Government approved image and then turn into a criminal.
And all this comes after the UK experienced 7 months of not a single incident of violent crime, thanks to Liz Longhurst who single-handedly criminalised possession of adult porn that she doesn't like. Let's hope the Government remembered to tell Europe about that law, otherwise I don't think there will be anyone left alive.
Rose (because I can easily believe that she's thick enough not to understand that a planet can orbit a black hole).
ISTR that she was the first one to exclaim that it was impossible (or at least, she realised at the same time as the Doctor), merely by looking at it.
That's the thing that's annoying - if the Doctor says it's impossible, I can believe it[*]. Perhaps it's to do with how it couldn't have formed, or perhaps the planet isn't actually orbiting, but is just stationary. But Rose? If she got it right, it was for completely the wrong reasons.
[*] Having said that, ISTR that the Doctor went through a phase in season 2-ish of saying "But that's impossible!" to almost every strange thing he came across, which sort of made the phrase lose its impact.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious - in the first paragraph, you advocate a model based on preventing criminals from reoffending (hence, a driving ban is mor than sufficient for death by driving), yet in the second paragraph, you advocate extra unpleasantness (i.e., beyond what prison in itself entails normally) for those who are behind bars.
If unpleasantness is needed for reasons such as deterrance, why shouldn't people who kill by willful reckless negligence such as texting not receive some level of extra unpleasantness, and not simply a fine and driving ban?
Don't get me wrong - I agree with you that prison seems to be used all too easily, but I wouldn't say that killing someone for texting when driving is any kind of light crime.
But even so, is 15 years excessive? In the UK, involuntary manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of life ( http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/sentencing_manual/involuntary_manslaughter/ ). And death by dangerous driving carries up to 14 years, only 1 year less than proposed here ( http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/sentencing_manual/death_by_dangerous_driving/ ).
Is it so different in the US?
The murderer kills the person who surprised him when he entered his house looking for something to steal.
Fixed that for you.
Seriously, if you don't think heroin addiction affects others, you are as deluded than the texter.
Well by that reasoning, any item that's ever been bought as a result of funds raised from crime, "affects others". And you say he's deluded?
About cost of the individual transistors.
For cost of the fab plants, you may be thinking of Rock's law, although yes, you are right that this does may put an economic limit on Moore's law.
That would only get you 256x improvement, surely (2^(6*12/9))? I make it more like just under 8 months.
And that "slightly longer period" is more like 18 months, which only leads to 16x improvements in 6 years. If it turns out that the doubling time itself more than halves, then great, but it's quite a change...
Yes, I'll look forward to my NVIDIA card with 6.7x performance in 6 years' time.
For everyone else hoping for 570x improvement, they'll be needing more like 570^(1/6)-1 = 188% per year. Way ahead of the Moore's Law trend of about 59% per year.
Nope, I make that just under 24x improvement.
As I said in my reply to this poster, you can't just arbitrarily claim there are two such trends!
I mean, why stop there? "CPU/GPUs can get faster by either having more transisters, making them more efficient, or making the algorithms more efficient. I'm going to claim we have a 2x increase every 18 months, independently for all three of these, therefore in 6 years we'll have an increase of 4096 times!!!"
It's nonsense - there's only a 2x increase for number of transisters, and it's that increase which is used for "more efficiency". And increase in efficiency of algorithms isn't anywhere near 2x every 18 months. But if you're allowed to make stuff up, I guess anything's possible!
Which is close enough to their estimate that it could be how they arrived at this figure.
I seriously hope not.
Indeed, and given they're pushing GPUs for GPGPU, it seems rather misleading to claim it will outdo CPUs. If an algorithm is suitable for GPGPU, then it should also benefit from adding multiple CPU cores. If an algorithm is hard to parallelise on a CPU, I don't see how a GPU will help.
No, you can't just magically have get both extra efficiency and doing smaller size, out of the same increase.
Moore's law has meant you can get double the number of transisters per 18 months - and it's this which has given the extra efficiency we've been seeing. There isn't a second "increase of efficiency" trend! You may note that chips generally haven't actually been getting smaller, because people would generally prefer the increased performance. You either choose between same number of transisters in a smaller area, or twice as many transisters in the same area. You can't count it twice!
In fact, it's only been in recent years that increasing transister counts as been used to add multiple cores, but that comes at the expense of increased efficiency of any given core. Don't think that just because we've been going to dual and quad cores, that somehow means we're increasing at a faster rate than before...
One presumes that predictions like these are "for a given cost", or at the least, on a single chip - just as is the case of Moore's law. No one claims that Moore's law was beaten when they started putting hundreds of CPUs together in a supercomputer.
I don't see how it's cheating if you can do it on a single chip, or at the same price - modern day GPUs already have tens or hundreds of cores, and CPUs have multiple cores too. Do you disable all but one of them on your computer, because it's "cheating"?
The problem with this argument is that there is a great deal of inconsistency in any apparent "rules" in English. Consider - do you really pronounce "dough" in "doughnut" the same way you pronounce "plough"? And what about "cough"?
Do you think that "donor" is incorrect too, and should be "doughnor"?
By that reasoning, why shouldn't he be suspicious of someone wanting to keep hold of his bag? He said he had a lot of sensitive information, as well as the cost of the laptop of course - why give it to someone who might turn out to be a criminal? There could be a dodgy employee who works there, or maybe the security is bad, and it gets stolen by one of the many criminal non-employees that you refer to.
Same thing with carrying a gun - laws are there to protect law-abiding people.
Well I'm not sure I understand the analogy, but I wouldn't shop anywhere that decided to point a gun at me, either.
Yes, obviously places like China, N Korea etc have a different opinion. But that doesn't change what the OP said - that the US Constitution enumerates a subset of natural rights. I'm not sure the fact that places with appalling human rights records disagree with the US Constitution is somehow putting the US Constitution in bad light...
Agreed that encryption is a good idea, but does it help using a separate drive - couldn't they just take that too or instead? I don't know how common such seizures are.
And losing one's laptop would still be a pain and a cost, even if you don't suffer data loss. (I wonder how that works for insurance? "Hello, I've had my laptop stolen by the US Government", although sadly I wonder that they might claim you're not covered if it's done by a state. I think something's going wrong with security enforcement if you'd be better off being a victim of crime compared to the TSA.)
Apple claims that creative individuals will be able to make their own SiGNS for free
Ah, you had me going until this bit - for free? Not for "only $99", which will then need Apple approval to see whether you're allowed to put up your SiGNS?
I thought the meme was "Windows 95 == Mac 89" (I'm not sure why 89 was chosen in particlar)?
Which we then pointed out in turn was equal to Amiga 85.
(The claim for Mac OS might make sense for the UI alone, but in other areas, such as offering preemptive multitasking, it lagged behind Windows 95, and in fact it never got that feature.)
I'd happily not have a taskbar, if there were other ways to do it (e.g., workspaces). The UI hasn't really changed much since long before Windows 95 - in the 80s there were plenty of GUIs (AmigaOS, MacOS etc).
I think you just did.
I mean, after all, they've sold/given away over a billion apps and have approved over 65,000 apps, but hey, their track record for app approval should be a bit better, right?
Yes, let's compare them to other platforms.
*checks*
Oh wait, there isn't any data for how many apps are approved for other platforms, because you don't have to in the first place.
The issue isn't how many they have approved - whether it's 100, 10,000, or 100 billion. The issue is that they can - and do - refuse to approve an application. If a desktop platform said you couldn't run Firefox, pleading "But they've approved 65,000 other applications" is beside the point.
But, yeah, let's continue hating on Apple because that's the cool thing geeks do now.
Not here on Slashdot. And I see you make the Japan-fallacy again - that anyone who doesn't praise Apple must be doing so out of irrational hatred.
Comparing it to Microsoft's Windows is ridiculous at best. Windows is a monopoly while, even though there a sh*tload of iPhones around, the iPhone isn't.
There are a "sh*tload" of Windows installations around too. I don't think that sentence says what you mean it to say?
Anyhow - are you seriously saying that you are only bothered about your applications requiring approval if it's MS? That if Apple did this for their desktop machines too, they'd still be just as good a platform?
Remember, no one is discussing legality or antitrust issues here (which is the only point where MS being a monopoly is relevant), the question is, is a platform where apps have to be approved by the company a good thing? Whether it's Windows, or niche desktop and mobile platforms like Iphone OS?
Also, consider if Apple did become a monopoly in the area of mobile computing - are you saying it's fine to only then worry, when the damage is done? That the problem will be solved with an antitrust case (because we know how successful that was with Microsoft!)?
Also, Microsoft has the same track record, though maybe not as obvious as the App store. Microsoft has done countless attempts to deal with these competitors and have locked them out on multiple occasions through not opening up all information and pushing their own services to the user (msie or msn anyone?). How is that any different?
Yes quite, how is it any different? MS are routinely bashed around here for those things, and rightly so, so why is it that Apple can do no wrong? How is what they do any different?
If you don't like the services that are available on the iPhone, then don't buy an iPhone and get one of the many other neat smart phones out there
Exactly - and how are people going to know about the problems with the Iphone? That's right, by telling people about the problems. But all the time that the BBC and even Slashdot only tell people about the Iphone, and not the other phones, we risk a future where eventually, the Iphone will be the only choice. Why is Slashdot helping to promote such a closed and locked down future for mobile computing? Imagine if Slashdot only posted stories about Windows, with no coverage of OS X or Linux - is that the open-loving Slashdot we used to know?
Hard sales figures show there are plenty of more popular phone manufacturers though (I'd post a reference, but last time I did that I just got modded down for posting a fact that didn't toe the pro-Apple line that the clique of mods have these days). So if that's the case, if your hypothesis is true, we should be seeing regular news stories on Slashdot and the BBC for popular applications released on all these other mobile phones too. Are we?
And you two are missing the point aswell. The whole story isn't about how surprised everyone are that Apple accepted it, but that spotify is now actually released for iPhone too.
No, "application released for one make of phone" is not newsworthy. How many BBC and Slashdot news stories are there for applications released for Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android, or most notably J2ME (which has a platform of about a billion or so phones)? It's only newsworthy due to the requirement of corporate approval for the Iphone platform, which is AFAIK unique among both mobile and desktop computing platforms. But fortunately for Apple (and unfortunately for us who don't want a future where all of mobile computing is controlled by a single company), even negative publicity is good publicity, because it perpetuates the myth that the Iphone is the only mobile phone that does these things (which ironically seems to be more common here than among non-geeks - even my mum knows that she can browse the web on her bog standard phone, and even though she's yet to work out how to use the phone's address book to store numbers, she happily accesses the Internet).
On second thoughts, you are right - since "On Your Iphone" makes any story newsworthy. After all, there was that Slashdot story "You can now read a webpage on your iphone" a few months back, and "spinning graphic application on the iphone" got free advertising by the BBC. Hmm, I pay the BBC licence fee - I wonder if they'll give me free advertising for an application I'm writing for Windows?
Will we get BBC coverage when Spotify is released for Symbian, Windows Mobile or Android too?
You better believe it. Personally I used to be sceptical over such claims, but only this week here in the UK, the Video Recordings Act 1984 was found to have never been enacted. Well I tell you what - it's the end of civilization here. Just as MP Barbara Follett feared as she suggested censoring the news about the law not being valid, the market has been flooded with unclassified DVDs, and it's led to crime rates going through the roof, with rioting up and down the country.
I tried to pop into my local video store to see if I could get hold of a copy of one of these "video nasty" snuff films that are now on sale, but couldn't fight my way past the horde of children who were purchasing hardcore porn, and immediately afterwards as a result, they started raping each other. Apparently the porn that they download for free on the Internet just doesn't have the same effect on them. Me, I was lucky to get out alive.
This is a national emergency. The Government has been handing emergency "blinkers", so that adult citizens can go about their daily business, whilst minimising the risk that they might see a non-Government approved image and then turn into a criminal.
And all this comes after the UK experienced 7 months of not a single incident of violent crime, thanks to Liz Longhurst who single-handedly criminalised possession of adult porn that she doesn't like. Let's hope the Government remembered to tell Europe about that law, otherwise I don't think there will be anyone left alive.
It's a feature, not a bug - the parents have just fitted their children with a more technological version of blinkers.
Rose (because I can easily believe that she's thick enough not to understand that a planet can orbit a black hole).
ISTR that she was the first one to exclaim that it was impossible (or at least, she realised at the same time as the Doctor), merely by looking at it.
That's the thing that's annoying - if the Doctor says it's impossible, I can believe it[*]. Perhaps it's to do with how it couldn't have formed, or perhaps the planet isn't actually orbiting, but is just stationary. But Rose? If she got it right, it was for completely the wrong reasons.
[*] Having said that, ISTR that the Doctor went through a phase in season 2-ish of saying "But that's impossible!" to almost every strange thing he came across, which sort of made the phrase lose its impact.