We don't need better video standards, we need better programming. And better films.
I suppose the ads will look REALLY GREAT on a setup like this. How will you be able to resist buying a new car when it is displayed at 4000 scan lines?
Will they be able to slap enough makeup on the newscasters to keep you from counting the pores on their foreheads?
So, my question is: How do any of these digtial media enhancements actually enhance Windows, how do the ADD VALUE to the product, what kind of USEFUL functionality will they provide? Very little if you ask me.
Precisely. This the the old upgrade treadmill, same as pumping features of questionable merit into Word to keep people upgrading to provide revenue for the company. Open source projects, which do not have a drive to make new releases, add features that seem to have value, and release when it is appropriate. At some point they probably STOP releasing, but a for-profit company can't do that. Oh, and every new feature is a potential security hole...
There seem to be two issues: one is whether the benchmarking approach used by Apple is any more corrupt than the approaches of other vendors, and the second issue seems to be the definition of "fastest personal computer".
I want to address the definition issue.
If your definition of "fastest personal computer" means "best performance of single-CPU/memory sub-system in integer operations using the most optimized compiler for each platform", then everyone's tests show this to be a P4, and the use of gcc on both platforms puts the P4 at an unfair disadvantage, and disabling the second G5 processor makes sense. This seems to be the point of the author of the original article. It seems to be a definition closer to "who has the faster CPU"?
You can grab IBM's numbers for the PPC970 @ 1.8 GHz from their web site:
SPECint2000 937
SPECfp2000 1051
Compare these to a P4 3.06 GHz as reported at specbench.org:
SPECint2000 1099
SPECfp2000 1077
One would imagine that a 2GHz PPC970 would narrow the gap a smidge, and we have no idea what compilers/optimizations were being used with the above numbers. It's probably fair to say that the P4 is the faster individual processor, but not by a lot. Did anyone else notice that Intel announced the 3.2 GHz P4 yesterday?
You could also try to define "fastest personal computer" as "best performance of the single/multiple-CPU/memory subsystem in a weighted comparison of integer and FP operations using the same compiler with similar optimizations", then using gcc makes sense, and it is only fair to compare the dual G4 to a single P4. It appears that Apple did not use "similar optimizations", but otherwise the comparison seems reasonable. They also compared against the dual Xeon platform, which also seems fair. This definition seems to be closer to "who has the fastest hardware".
It is also worth noting that commercial software is probably not optimally compiled, since it wants to run on a broad spectrum of similar processors, so they compile to a lowest-common-denominator.
The rest of us probably care more about application-level benchmarks, taking off-the-shelf software and running it in potentially useful ways. Apple found some tests that make it look good. They did not appear to be terribly contrived examples, certainly benchmarking Photoshop is useful for Mac users. Hopefully the various hardware review sites will give us some of these.
Finally, you can define "fastest personal computer" as "the benchmarks that make us look best", which is what you do if you are trying to market a new product.
Guess which definition Apple used?
I think the upshot, as far as we can tell without impartial reviewers (if there are any) getting their hands on the hardware, is that Apple is performance competitive. Are they the fastest? Their claims are no more tenuous than anyone else's, and maybe they can legitimately be called the fastest for a month or three.
a Linux For Schools distro could be put together that specializes in offering only the stuff people need for schoolwork: Open Office, Mozilla, etc.
I think that's a fine idea, to which I would add the ability to run from a bootable CD as does Knoppix. That would even remove the need to do an install. Or, if there was room on the CD, be able to either install from it or run from the bootable CD.
The government is subsidizing the cost of the hardware...
Sorry folks, I don't think the Thai government is going to pony up for the rest of us.
I suppose it would be out of the question to take $60 billion the recently-passed tax cut of something like $350 billion over however many years and provide a $200 subsidy to every man/woman/child in America to buy a Linux laptop. No way that would help the economy.
it's DOC format it zipped XML, and therefore not diffable
Neat. I didn't know that. I managed to unzip a.sxw file and got the content.xml file. Trivial, but the xml is all on two lines (one for the header, then the rest written as a single, huge string). When you diff something like that you will get nothing useful. I suppose all you would need is to insert newlines before and after each tag to chop the file into diff-able pieces. No need to re-assemble the original files, just diff with copies.
or they're incompetent when it comes to multiplatform development
Or, rather than "incompetent" we can, perhaps, say "inexperienced". I was trying to reverse-engineer one of the minor data files for NWN and I swear all they did was to unload their in-memory structures into a file - no attempt to convert to a portable format, like XDR, XML, or even plain old ASCII. I suspect that people who started programming in the last decade don't quite understand the issue of portability. It works on their Windoze box, so it must be OK. It may simply never ocurred to them that "portability" means something other than "making that other funny platform work like Windoze". Hence their missing the boat on sound and movies.
One of the reasons I bought this game was the promise of Linux, MacOS, and Windoze versions in the same box for one price. While it did not happen with NWN, it may be that by the end of this process BioWare will have a portability platform in place, and that future games will indeed be released at one time in one box. At least they are still putting effort into the Linux port.
Hmmm. 15 years ago we had X terminals. Now M$ comes up with a wireless X terminal (which does XP rather than X). Why, it's almost as good as the WebPad products from two years ago. Oh, wait, it IS a WebPad! Again, the M$ innovation is that they are the ones who get the money.
So, soon all new CDs will have copy protection which results in them failing to play in some players, including some that I own? No problem, I will just buy the CD and return it if it is defective. Oh, returns are no longer accepted? I'll just buy disks from other publishers which are guaranteed to work. Oh, there are no such disks anymore? Then I guess I will buy NOTHING. Dang, no new hippety-hoppity music. I'll be stuck listening to the Bach I already have.
I mostly listen to classical recordings. AFAIK, all significant works of Dead White Guys have been recorded, and excellant performances of most of them are available on uncrippled CDs, today. Over time, I would continue to accumulate them in uncrippled CD format. If the music cartels which own the rights to them choose to release them only in crippled format, I can accumulate them from the existing body of CDs. This would result in no revenue to the cartels, and would save me money besides.
It would be unfortunate if the creation of new music was stifled by crippled CD distribution, but the new music scene has held little appeal for me for decades. Maybe we should all take a century or two off to enjoy the music that has already been recorded, and let it all fall in to the public domain. Then we can think about creating/buying more.
There seems to be a disproportionate number of/. readers who, while technically and scientifically savvy, will reflexively state that exponential growth in a finite volume (Earth) is sustainable. More water use per capita, more energy use per capita, more miles driven, bigger houses, more sprawl, expanding economy, and more people every year, forever.
One post stating that environmentalists are "wackos" gets a 5:Insightful, one saying Earth can support "hundreds of billions of people" gets a 4:Interesting, while a carefully written post pointing out grazing patterns and water supply issues is labeled a "Troll". Go figure.
This is a fine forum to talk about tech, but a tough audience to talk about the non-artificial world. I suppose that too many are born, live, and die in cities where a lawn qualifies as "nature". Use/. for its strengths, and don't sweat the rest.
Will we soon get to a point where the total market size of gamers and/. people will not pay for another processor spin?
No, but I think we will soon be at a point where the market volume for high-end processors will not give enough economies of scale to make them affordable to consumers. In other words, we will be back to the personal computer / workstation dichotomy.
Where/with what do you listen to your music? People spend a lot of time listening to music in their cars, which are inherently noisy environments. Most peoples' homes are in noisy urban areas and have inadequate insulation. Many people listen to music coming from their computers, which have vacuum-cleaner-loud fans. Or you listen at work through open-air headphones with all that office noise in the background. How many of those environments benefit from 5.1 sound? Not the auto or the headphone. If you do listen to 5.1 sound in a suitable environment, such as your living room or from your computer, are you sitting at the focus of those speakers, or a few feet away where it is practical to put furniture?
Until you have an outstanding listening environment (think about the high-end listening room at a good electronics store), there is no reason to invest in audiophile-grade reproduction equipment. Without that equipment, the added quality on the new formats will be wasted. VERY few people have the location or the equipment to make use of anything beyond CD quality.
Oh, and you listen with your ears. Independant of any abuse (rock concerts, jet engines, heavy equipment, shooting, etc.) that your ears may suffer as time goes along, you lose the ability to hear high frequencies as you age (starting around age 20). The rule used to be that by the time you could afford a real stereo, you didn't need one any more.
These new formats are really solutions in search of a problem.
At least with regard to the iPOD, Apple was late to the game
Yes, they failed to jump in and define a new market (e.g. the Newton). Instead, this time, they waited for a market to develop, saw what was needed (instead of trying to predict it all), and came out with a clearly superior product, albeit at a premium price. No, not as innovative as inventing the portable MP3 player, but still innovative product design.
Short answer, for most home/SOHO users and cubicle warriors, it won't. Heck, most people have absolutely no use for a 2 GHz 32 bit processor, or a 120 GByte HD. All that for email and solitare?
Hardware has finally gotten ahead of software, something most of us thought would never happen.
64 bits is useful for directly addressing very large RAM (> 4GB). I run 256 MB RAM, and never come close to swapping. I simply can't imagine requiring 16 times as much RAM to get decent performance. I will take more than software bloat, it will take me running fundamentally different applications. There are certainly professional applications which require hordes of RAM, but Joe/Jane User simply does not need it.
64 bits is also useful in the financial arena, where in order to minimize roundoff errors they represent (for US currency) cents as 64ths of a cent (I believe). So one cent is 64, one dollar is 6400, etc. Now to represent the national debt you need much more than 32 bits. Nice to have it native. I find I can count my pennies with 32 bits.
Also, a 64 bit architecture is likely to have wider data busses, which is always nice when you have to move lots of data in real time, as for digital video. This was one of the selling points of the G4/Altivec architecture (it had a 128 bit internal bus, IIRC).
What you may see is a return to the PC/workstation dichotomy. I really don't see the use of 64 bits for a personal computer, 32 bits is more than adequate for the majority of personal uses. 64 bits may be the distinguishing feature of a workstation : substantially higher price point and much higher throughput.
A company like Apple may not be able to afford to produce both a personal computer line and a workstation/server line, and so may do 64 bits across the board. Also, in a few years 64 bit machines may not be substantially more expensive than 32 bit machines, so why not? Same reason that you can't buy a 4 GB HD today. You can't produce it for 1/30 the price of a 120 GB drive, so why bother?
I actually saw the meteor Monday night (very cool!). It was a large, green oval, perhaps a quarter of the size of a full moon, trailing orange sparks. I had been looking for somewhere to report it. Silly me, I should have just reported it to/.!
I followed the link from the Daily Camera to a site that was collecting info. Since most sightings indicated the meteor to the west, and I saw it to the east, maybe they can triangulate. I saw it near the horizon, so it may have been large enough to hit the ground.
How can you protect the rights of the author when anybody with a bit of patience or some programming skills can just print screen his / her blood, sweat and tears and give it away to free for anybody on a p2p network?
Are you concerned with protecting your rights (making sure that no copies are made) or with getting compensation (receiving $xx per hour for your time in creating your IP)?
The majority of copies made/downloaded DO NOT represent people who would otherwise have purchased your e-book. The people who are likely to purchase are unlikely to pirate, and vice-versa.
May studies show that those who pirate the most also buy the most. I believe, however, that is really applicable when you have a physical medium (paper book or plastic CD) rather than merely an electronic medium (e-book only).
a way to disable the print screen function in a windows app?/
Even then, your work can be photographed and either posted as a set of images or OCRed back to text.
"It shall not be a violation of this title to manufacture, distribute, or make non-infringing use of a hardware or software product capable of enabling significant noninfringing use of a copyrighted work."
This was the only section of this otherwise quite reasonable bill that I took exception to. The whole point of the **AA is that making a personal copy is an infringing use of a copyrighted work, so this clause does nothing. He needs language to spell out what we want: that making copies is to be legal, but that distributing them is still reserved to the copyright holder.
How many PC's in California (including server farms)? Turned on for how many hours per day? Each burning how many extra watts? Yes, that really is a factor in the California electricity crunch; along with many other factors.
The machine I am typing this on runs a Tualatin-core Celeron 1200 MHz rated at 28 watts, instead of a nifty P4/Athlon several GHz at, what, 60-70 watts? Or, for that matter, my old G3 400 MHz which, IIRC, was rated at about 5 watts.
How would California's electrical supply look if we cut 40 watts or so from every PC/server?
Their hunger to assimilate every last person on the planet is insatiable. If your tastes or working styles disagree from theirs, there is just no room for you. Microsoft's hunger for market domination is pathological.
Gates & Balmer are billionairs because of the M$ stock price. The stock price is based on a business growth rate which substantially exceeds the growth rate of the economy as a whole. Thus, in order to maintain their wealth they need to expand the M$ empire as a percentage of GDP.
They need to not only maintain/extend penetration in the markets they are currently in, they need to enter and dominate as many other markets as they can. They, of course, use the tools they have available, which is stinking Windoze and Office. They are more likely to be able to successfully enter the DRM/entertainment distribution market than they are to successfully enter the automobile manufacturing market (at least for now), so that is where they will go.
M$ management are no more or less pathological than anyone else that believes in endless exponential growth. Individually, they simply have a bigger stake than most senior management, and they have been more successful than most for a generation.
Flash disks seem to go by various names (also "thumb drives", "pen drives", etc.). I am talking about those 128 MByte flash memories with a USB connection that you carry on a keychain.
While your cell phone probably does not have a USB port, most other gadgets do.
Carrying your information with you would seem to mitigate the security concerns of keeping a central network-based repository.
Has anyone tried to put their email, bookmarks, contact info, etc. on a flash drive and use it across the various devices in their lives? My life is, as usual, a little more complicated since I run multiple OSes & apps, but it still seems feasible.
It is easier to understand if you keep in mind the historical context.
Centuries ago in Europe people were deeply religious. They burned the witches. They burned the Protestants. A new king would take the throne and they would burn the Catholics. Another new king and they were burning the Protestants again.
People who did not think that was sufficiently churchy came to the US for "religious freedom".
Slashdot Mirror
Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
We don't need better video standards, we need better programming. And better films. I suppose the ads will look REALLY GREAT on a setup like this. How will you be able to resist buying a new car when it is displayed at 4000 scan lines? Will they be able to slap enough makeup on the newscasters to keep you from counting the pores on their foreheads?
- So, my question is: How do any of these digtial media enhancements actually enhance Windows, how do the ADD VALUE to the product, what kind of USEFUL functionality will they provide? Very little if you ask me.
Precisely. This the the old upgrade treadmill, same as pumping features of questionable merit into Word to keep people upgrading to provide revenue for the company. Open source projects, which do not have a drive to make new releases, add features that seem to have value, and release when it is appropriate. At some point they probably STOP releasing, but a for-profit company can't do that. Oh, and every new feature is a potential security hole...If they tax my internet access I might be driven to trade music files to recoup my losses.
I want to address the definition issue.
If your definition of "fastest personal computer" means "best performance of single-CPU/memory sub-system in integer operations using the most optimized compiler for each platform", then everyone's tests show this to be a P4, and the use of gcc on both platforms puts the P4 at an unfair disadvantage, and disabling the second G5 processor makes sense. This seems to be the point of the author of the original article. It seems to be a definition closer to "who has the faster CPU"?
You can grab IBM's numbers for the PPC970 @ 1.8 GHz from their web site:
Compare these to a P4 3.06 GHz as reported at specbench.org:
One would imagine that a 2GHz PPC970 would narrow the gap a smidge, and we have no idea what compilers/optimizations were being used with the above numbers. It's probably fair to say that the P4 is the faster individual processor, but not by a lot. Did anyone else notice that Intel announced the 3.2 GHz P4 yesterday?
You could also try to define "fastest personal computer" as "best performance of the single/multiple-CPU/memory subsystem in a weighted comparison of integer and FP operations using the same compiler with similar optimizations", then using gcc makes sense, and it is only fair to compare the dual G4 to a single P4. It appears that Apple did not use "similar optimizations", but otherwise the comparison seems reasonable. They also compared against the dual Xeon platform, which also seems fair. This definition seems to be closer to "who has the fastest hardware".
It is also worth noting that commercial software is probably not optimally compiled, since it wants to run on a broad spectrum of similar processors, so they compile to a lowest-common-denominator.
The rest of us probably care more about application-level benchmarks, taking off-the-shelf software and running it in potentially useful ways. Apple found some tests that make it look good. They did not appear to be terribly contrived examples, certainly benchmarking Photoshop is useful for Mac users. Hopefully the various hardware review sites will give us some of these.
Finally, you can define "fastest personal computer" as "the benchmarks that make us look best", which is what you do if you are trying to market a new product.
Guess which definition Apple used?
I think the upshot, as far as we can tell without impartial reviewers (if there are any) getting their hands on the hardware, is that Apple is performance competitive. Are they the fastest? Their claims are no more tenuous than anyone else's, and maybe they can legitimately be called the fastest for a month or three.
- a Linux For Schools distro could be put together that specializes in offering only the stuff people need for schoolwork: Open Office, Mozilla, etc.
I think that's a fine idea, to which I would add the ability to run from a bootable CD as does Knoppix. That would even remove the need to do an install. Or, if there was room on the CD, be able to either install from it or run from the bootable CD.-
The government is subsidizing the cost of the hardware...
Sorry folks, I don't think the Thai government is going to pony up for the rest of us.
I suppose it would be out of the question to take $60 billion the recently-passed tax cut of something like $350 billion over however many years and provide a $200 subsidy to every man/woman/child in America to buy a Linux laptop. No way that would help the economy.- it's DOC format it zipped XML, and therefore not diffable
Neat. I didn't know that. I managed to unzip aOr, rather than "incompetent" we can, perhaps, say "inexperienced". I was trying to reverse-engineer one of the minor data files for NWN and I swear all they did was to unload their in-memory structures into a file - no attempt to convert to a portable format, like XDR, XML, or even plain old ASCII. I suspect that people who started programming in the last decade don't quite understand the issue of portability. It works on their Windoze box, so it must be OK. It may simply never ocurred to them that "portability" means something other than "making that other funny platform work like Windoze". Hence their missing the boat on sound and movies.
One of the reasons I bought this game was the promise of Linux, MacOS, and Windoze versions in the same box for one price. While it did not happen with NWN, it may be that by the end of this process BioWare will have a portability platform in place, and that future games will indeed be released at one time in one box. At least they are still putting effort into the Linux port.
Hmmm. 15 years ago we had X terminals. Now M$ comes up with a wireless X terminal (which does XP rather than X). Why, it's almost as good as the WebPad products from two years ago. Oh, wait, it IS a WebPad! Again, the M$ innovation is that they are the ones who get the money.
So, soon all new CDs will have copy protection which results in them failing to play in some players, including some that I own? No problem, I will just buy the CD and return it if it is defective. Oh, returns are no longer accepted? I'll just buy disks from other publishers which are guaranteed to work. Oh, there are no such disks anymore? Then I guess I will buy NOTHING. Dang, no new hippety-hoppity music. I'll be stuck listening to the Bach I already have.
It would be unfortunate if the creation of new music was stifled by crippled CD distribution, but the new music scene has held little appeal for me for decades. Maybe we should all take a century or two off to enjoy the music that has already been recorded, and let it all fall in to the public domain. Then we can think about creating/buying more.
One post stating that environmentalists are "wackos" gets a 5:Insightful, one saying Earth can support "hundreds of billions of people" gets a 4:Interesting, while a carefully written post pointing out grazing patterns and water supply issues is labeled a "Troll". Go figure.
This is a fine forum to talk about tech, but a tough audience to talk about the non-artificial world. I suppose that too many are born, live, and die in cities where a lawn qualifies as "nature". Use /. for its strengths, and don't sweat the rest.
No, but I think we will soon be at a point where the market volume for high-end processors will not give enough economies of scale to make them affordable to consumers. In other words, we will be back to the personal computer / workstation dichotomy.
Until you have an outstanding listening environment (think about the high-end listening room at a good electronics store), there is no reason to invest in audiophile-grade reproduction equipment. Without that equipment, the added quality on the new formats will be wasted. VERY few people have the location or the equipment to make use of anything beyond CD quality.
Oh, and you listen with your ears. Independant of any abuse (rock concerts, jet engines, heavy equipment, shooting, etc.) that your ears may suffer as time goes along, you lose the ability to hear high frequencies as you age (starting around age 20). The rule used to be that by the time you could afford a real stereo, you didn't need one any more.
These new formats are really solutions in search of a problem.
Yes, they failed to jump in and define a new market (e.g. the Newton). Instead, this time, they waited for a market to develop, saw what was needed (instead of trying to predict it all), and came out with a clearly superior product, albeit at a premium price. No, not as innovative as inventing the portable MP3 player, but still innovative product design.
Short answer, for most home/SOHO users and cubicle warriors, it won't. Heck, most people have absolutely no use for a 2 GHz 32 bit processor, or a 120 GByte HD. All that for email and solitare?
Hardware has finally gotten ahead of software, something most of us thought would never happen.
64 bits is useful for directly addressing very large RAM (> 4GB). I run 256 MB RAM, and never come close to swapping. I simply can't imagine requiring 16 times as much RAM to get decent performance. I will take more than software bloat, it will take me running fundamentally different applications. There are certainly professional applications which require hordes of RAM, but Joe/Jane User simply does not need it.
64 bits is also useful in the financial arena, where in order to minimize roundoff errors they represent (for US currency) cents as 64ths of a cent (I believe). So one cent is 64, one dollar is 6400, etc. Now to represent the national debt you need much more than 32 bits. Nice to have it native. I find I can count my pennies with 32 bits.
Also, a 64 bit architecture is likely to have wider data busses, which is always nice when you have to move lots of data in real time, as for digital video. This was one of the selling points of the G4/Altivec architecture (it had a 128 bit internal bus, IIRC).
What you may see is a return to the PC/workstation dichotomy. I really don't see the use of 64 bits for a personal computer, 32 bits is more than adequate for the majority of personal uses. 64 bits may be the distinguishing feature of a workstation : substantially higher price point and much higher throughput.
A company like Apple may not be able to afford to produce both a personal computer line and a workstation/server line, and so may do 64 bits across the board. Also, in a few years 64 bit machines may not be substantially more expensive than 32 bit machines, so why not? Same reason that you can't buy a 4 GB HD today. You can't produce it for 1/30 the price of a 120 GB drive, so why bother?
The first time I saw that message I hadn't eaten for 24 hours. Good user interface design!
I followed the link from the Daily Camera to a site that was collecting info. Since most sightings indicated the meteor to the west, and I saw it to the east, maybe they can triangulate. I saw it near the horizon, so it may have been large enough to hit the ground.
Are you concerned with protecting your rights (making sure that no copies are made) or with getting compensation (receiving $xx per hour for your time in creating your IP)?
The majority of copies made/downloaded DO NOT represent people who would otherwise have purchased your e-book. The people who are likely to purchase are unlikely to pirate, and vice-versa.
May studies show that those who pirate the most also buy the most. I believe, however, that is really applicable when you have a physical medium (paper book or plastic CD) rather than merely an electronic medium (e-book only).
Even then, your work can be photographed and either posted as a set of images or OCRed back to text.
This was the only section of this otherwise quite reasonable bill that I took exception to. The whole point of the **AA is that making a personal copy is an infringing use of a copyrighted work, so this clause does nothing. He needs language to spell out what we want: that making copies is to be legal, but that distributing them is still reserved to the copyright holder.
The machine I am typing this on runs a Tualatin-core Celeron 1200 MHz rated at 28 watts, instead of a nifty P4/Athlon several GHz at, what, 60-70 watts? Or, for that matter, my old G3 400 MHz which, IIRC, was rated at about 5 watts.
How would California's electrical supply look if we cut 40 watts or so from every PC/server?
Gates & Balmer are billionairs because of the M$ stock price. The stock price is based on a business growth rate which substantially exceeds the growth rate of the economy as a whole. Thus, in order to maintain their wealth they need to expand the M$ empire as a percentage of GDP.
They need to not only maintain/extend penetration in the markets they are currently in, they need to enter and dominate as many other markets as they can. They, of course, use the tools they have available, which is stinking Windoze and Office. They are more likely to be able to successfully enter the DRM/entertainment distribution market than they are to successfully enter the automobile manufacturing market (at least for now), so that is where they will go.
M$ management are no more or less pathological than anyone else that believes in endless exponential growth. Individually, they simply have a bigger stake than most senior management, and they have been more successful than most for a generation.
While your cell phone probably does not have a USB port, most other gadgets do.
Carrying your information with you would seem to mitigate the security concerns of keeping a central network-based repository.
Has anyone tried to put their email, bookmarks, contact info, etc. on a flash drive and use it across the various devices in their lives? My life is, as usual, a little more complicated since I run multiple OSes & apps, but it still seems feasible.
Centuries ago in Europe people were deeply religious. They burned the witches. They burned the Protestants. A new king would take the throne and they would burn the Catholics. Another new king and they were burning the Protestants again.
People who did not think that was sufficiently churchy came to the US for "religious freedom".