In somewhat related news, a man lost his driver's license after he hold his doctor he drinks a 6-pack every day.
And New Mexico almost passed a law requiring all vehicles to be equipped with ignition interlock devices requiring the driver to test their breath every 10 minutes, regardless of the driver's record!!!
Insurance companies offering discounts for safe drivers is okay with me, even if it involves using tracking technology, but what about the state going after drivers before they even pose a danger to others?
Dissassociative Identity Disorder / MPD is a fad that passed away during the 90s, since it made psychiatry's real goal of social control impossible, because too many personalities were getting away with committing crimes, and there was no way to punish the real criminal and still hold on to the MPD belief. Unlike other "mental illnesses" which can be used to justify involuntary drugging and committment, MPD presents a patient who does not play into the game, and does not provide the necessary resistance. i.e., "It was just my other personality. I'm okay with you. I like you." To which there is no logical response which can hold on to the MPD hypothesis.
No! I have not watched television in over 5 years. Back then I only watched reruns of my favorite shows.
I refuse to support cable TV or satellite TV. So I'll only buy DSL, for example.
Today, watching TV is more disgusting than any pornography, and worse than seeing real Iraq war photos. It is so infantilizing, shallow, banal, transparent, and scripted.
There's so little time left, why waste it on TV./. has more technical information than all TV networks combined.
But to get back on topic, I use Privoxy with great success. It already downloads images before filtering them sometimes (depending on filter rule), and so ad banners which attempt to detect whether they are being blocked don't know they're being blocked. I'm sure it can be extended to popups too. If the practice of "detecting" blocking becomes common, the Privoxy team will defeat it on the next release.
I've seen some sites get so ad-crazy that they use browser-specific (read: IE) techniques which break pages on other browsers, or which do not display right when filtered. I just move on to another site when this happens. There's almost always another available for the same purpose, with fewer ads.
But how many web surfers are aware of Privoxy or similar tools? Not many (this forum excepted of course), which is why advertising works.
"TV is like spraying black paint in your eye" --
Bill Hicks
Norelo (a division of Philips) had their patented "lift and cut" system of rotary blades, the patent of which just ran out recently (you now see no-name brands of razors in discount stores which look just like Norelcos -- with 3 rotary heads).
Personally I never liked Norelcos, since their rotary blades irritate my skin and don't even cut close enough.
Which is why, like Victor Kiam, I prefer Remingtons.
The Quill Corp. v. North Dakota (1992) case is the decision most often cited when arguing that mail-order and internet companies without a "substantial nexus" in the buyer's state should not be required to collect the buyer's state's sales/use taxes.
There's a four-prong "Complete Auto" test which has been used as a criterion for the validity of state taxes on interstate commerce:
The tax must be applied to an activity with a "substantial nexus" with the taxing state
The tax must provide fair apportionment between the states
The tax must not discriminate against interstate commerce
The tax must be fairly related to services provided by the taxing state
Relevant quotes from the cases:
State taxation falling on interstate commerce... can only be justified as designed to make such commerce bear a fair share of the cost of the local government whose protection it enjoys.
... The Court has never held that a State may impose the duty of use tax collection and payment upon a seller whose only connection with customers in the State is by common carrier or the United States mail.
... If Illinois can impose such burdens, so can every other State, and so, indeed, can every municipality, every school district, and every other political subdivision throughout the Nation with power to impose sales and use taxes.
The very purpose of the Commerce Clause was to ensure a national economy free from such unjustifiable local entanglements. Under the Constitution, this is a domain where Congress alone has the power of regulation and control.
A compiler can't do it, because as you suspected it won't know what's dependent both in data and in order of execution.
Actually, some compilers can do it. They can break apart a user's program into multiple threads which execute in parallel, without the user giving any source code directives or hints.
Automatic parallelization, array disambiguation, loop dependence analysis, etc. are not new.
Despite apparent dependencies in code between instructions, high-level optimizers can often do dependence analysis which can detect higher-level patterns which are independent and thus can be executed in parallel, even though the code generator's individual instructions seem purely sequential.
If the compiler cannot be sure about data dependencies or control dependencies, then there are still sometimes devices to help it optimize in spite of these possible dependencies, e.g. speculative and advanced loads on Itanium.
How can you have a Jury on a patent trial??
Of course eBay lost...what person off the street would be able to realise how stupid a patent like this is.
Then eBay got what it deserved by choosing a jury, although the judge reduced the damages.
Jury: "Holy crap! That guy wasn't 100% certain. Not guilty!"
This is a civil case, not a criminal one. There is no "guilt" or "innocence" -- simply damages awarded to either side.
Don't be silly. This guy is guilty because of two actions which, though individually are non-criminal, taken together become
criminal. It is ok to have a discussion about making explosives. It is ok to advocate removing the government. Placing both
discussions in the same context is not.
In other words, guilt by association?
The reason he took the plea is that he didn't believe that he could convince even one of twelve people that his intent was not
to promote murder and mayhem. Inciting violence is a crime, and that was clearly his intent.
I don't know what his real reasons were for taking the plea, but even if he could convince a juror to find him innocent, he still might not want to go through the process, for financial, emotional, or other reasons.
I personally think inciting violence should be legal. Only actually engaging in violence should be illegal, and not for the ones encouraging it, but those committing it.
I've often thought of putting up a website titled "how to make a bomb", just to see who it attracts. It wouldn't actually have bomb-making instructions, but would be a commentary on our society. We build "bombs" every day in our social system (schools, prisons, etc.), and every once and a while they explode (as in Columbine, Oklahoma City). Here's how to make a bomb:
Mix and egg and sperm. Allow mixture 8 months to develop.
Punish organism's auditory disturbances with
physical stimulation.
Ignore organism's prodding.
After organism has been exposed to the environment for 5-6 years, subject it to behaviorial conditioning for at least 8 hours a day for 12 years.
If organism does not remain docile, force it to injest Ritalin.
Beware that organism becomes volatile 15 years after creation, due to internal chemical reactions.
After 18 years, throw organism into an abyss and expect it to survive on its own. If it doesn't, breed some more and try again.
If organism is ever caught injesting the wrong substances, physically confine subject immediately and administer emergency behaviorial therapy.
If organism is ever caught expressing behaviors or thoughts inconsistent with the program, apply religion.
Keep organism away from other organisms which transfer memes inconsistent with the program.
If an organism is caught transferring memes inconsistent with the program to other organisms,
segregate it from the rest of the organisms.
Be very careful, as the organism has a tendency to explode.
Licensing software engineers would kill innovation, and amounts to a protectionistic measure for current jobholders against competition, both foreign and domestic.
It does not protect the public against bad engineering. When it is advanced for this purpose, it amounts to paternalism: You will pay for the costs of making this software satisfy some group's QA criteria, even if you are willing to put up with a few bugs in order to pay much less.
The capital costs of software development would increase tremendously. You would be able to hire only "registered" or "licensed" programmers, or become one yourself, and you would (eventually) need to satisfy some state-imposed QA criteria, which requires a lot more testing and costs much more than techniques like alpha or beta testing and customer feedback do today.
Software is unique in that it requires only a small, finite amount of capital -- one teenage hacker and a PC, for example -- to produce a lot of return. In many respects it's similar to art. (After all, Knuth's books are called the The Art of Computer Programming, not The Science of Computer Programming.)
Software engineering licensing is unenforcible in free software, so if it were adopted it would only be applied to commercial software, and to employees of software companies. As long as the free software movement stayed alive, there would be economic incentives against making commercial software have this disadvantage.
(Under some wacko conspiracy theory, I suppose that mandatory DRM hardware could try to stop people from using unregistered compilers, or doing any kind of programming without a license key, but that's too far off at this point to even be considered.)
Programming is one of the last refuges for free-marketeers. If protectionistic measures such as licensing programmers or software engineers was started, many people with bright ideas would never become programmers.
Unfortunately today's economic climate is exactly the kind where these regulations are most often started, to "protect" jobs. American programmers are feeling competition from India and elsewhere.
Some therefore jump at the opportunity to add regulations in an attempt to protect their jobs.
I'd rather be free to program without a license and without bureaucratic regulations, even if it required changing employers more often or taking a pay cut.
I am sorry but to me, really, Doom was just the "step up" from Wolfenstein, nothing revolutionary.
It was revolutionary in its ability to combine
both single-player and multiplayer gameplay in
ways that satisfied many different users; it was revolutionary in its marketing strategy (E1 was shareware; the rest was only $40, which was still less than most games at that time); and it had the right market timing.
(not as apparent in Doom, but in D2 and Heretic when you can look up)
You mean Heretic and Hexen. Doom 2 did not have look up/down.
Descent, AFAIK, was the first *real* 3D game, and it ran on 486s with 8M of ram;
The first real 3-d FPS game I saw on PCs, was
Continuum
by Data East. It ran on 386s with
640 KB of RAM. It came out in 1990, 3 years before
Doom or Descent.
Descent may have had better 3-d graphics, but Doom had better textures and better gameplay, especially for single-player, and at the time, not everyone had networking or even modems, so good single-player gameplay was critical.
In Germany, where I live, there is no meaningful public policy about smoking in public places. As a result, there are no restaurants that are non-smoking, and precious few (none in my city) where there is a separate seating section for non-smokers.
I don't think the lack of non-smoking restaurants is a result of there being no meaningful public policy about smoking in public places.
Also, a privately owned restaurant, while open to the public, is not a "public place" where public policy, democratic rule, or government laws should govern smoking policy. A privately owned and operated business should be allowed to invite its patrons to smoke, or forbid them from smoking.
Employees should be allowed to choose to work in either smoking or non-smoking jobs with informed
consent.
You might be able to argue that the negative health effects of second hand smoke are unproven (and then again you might sound like a tobacco-company scion if you do), but most non-smokers also find cigarrette smoke
*unpleasant*. Which means I go out to eat less, and nearly never go into bars, where I otherwise would.
That is your choice. If the benefits of voluntary exchange with a bar are not to your liking, find a smoke-free bar, complain to the bar, open your own bar, or avoid bars.
What gives you the right to come into a bar and
tell the owner he has to put out everyone's cigarettes? He did not force you to come in. You cannot force him to serve you to your liking.
I don't have the power to change that, and it leads to a feedback effect where more people get addicted because it's necessary to enjoy socializing in certain settings.
Smoking is not necessary to enjoy socializing. Lots of people enjoy socializing without smoke, and some people (at least in the USA) even have anti-smoking parties, where smoking is ridiculed and only non-smokers are invited.
As for addiction, that is your choice. Maybe you value the companionship, the alcohol, and other things that go with socializing at bars and other places. If you hate the smoke but continue to go, or even smoke yourself in order to "fit in", then that indicates that you value the experience enough to overcome your opposition to smoking.
The more choices are available to you, the better. This means smoke-free bars and restaurants,
smokeless nicotine sources, other drugs, etc.
But those choices stop being choices when they are controlled by law.
Maybe you will come up with an innovative way to
do what you and your friends enjoy, but without the smoke. But if non-smoking is imposed by fiat, all motivation for such innovation will go away.
When government steps in and sets rules about smoking on privately-owned property that's open to the general public, is it restricting those choices to an arbitrary few. This prevents the "feedback" mechanism you're talking about from converging to a solution that is beneficial and
voluntary to all, and tends to divide people into classes, like "all smokers go here" and "all non-smokers go here". It needs to be voluntary, self-directed, and up to individuals and private businesses, how this policy is carried out. Not government fiat.
And in the USA, it goes against the principle of "freedom of association", so there are almost always loopholes out of anti-smoking or anti-drinking laws. If the bar is called a "private club", which you must pay a token fee to join, then it is exempt from the anti-smoking or anti-drinking laws, which were unjust to start with. All it does is divide up people into socioeconomic classes in which richer people continue to enjoy drinking and smoking because they can afford "club dues", while poorer people can't. It does nothing to decrease smoking or drinking, and it shouldn't, because those are private individual choices.
More smokers means more costs for the state.
Not if individuals were truly held responsible
for their health choices, and paid for their own health care.
Even in the USA, we have socialized medicine. It makes people expect health care for free, and ends up creating a runaway system which actually encourages sickness. So if you ban smoking or put up artificial costs on it to it to try to counteract these natural economic forces resulting from socialized medicine, you are in essence putting price controls on peoples' choices. Sooner or later, the system will crack. A black market in cigarettes will develop, the health care system will collapse, there will be a shortage of doctors, etc.
Public health *should be* an issue of public policy -- because it is connected to public costs.
But these public costs are artificial, and imposed by government or other policy. They are not the natural costs of individuals' voluntary decisions. So people try to rationalize them.
If you get sick as a result of smoking, that does not "cost" anything. Rather, if you want to get a treatment for an illness caused by smoking, that treatment costs money. But disease and treatment are not corollary -- you can have disease without treatment, and still be okay. Socialized medicine chains the two together unnecessarily, making people think that every disease requires treatment, and therefore every disease costs money, which in socialized medicine is felt not by the individual but by society. But this is not necessary or desirable. Individuals can and should pay for their own health care, and then there is a private incentive for most people not to smoke.
As the old saying goes: your right to swing your fist stops at the tip of my nose. As I say: your right to smoke should stop at the entrance to a public establishment containing my airspace.
As I say, your right to smoke should start or stop at the entrance to my establishment.
I should have the right to not smoke in public places.
I should have the right to set the smoking policy on my property, even if it's open to the public.
This is true whether I allow smoking or forbid it.
In the case of government buildings, policy should carefully balance the interests of smokers and non-smokers alike, without appearing to favor one or the other. Most would agree with there being designated smoking areas outside of government buildings, but forbidding smoking inside of them.
To me it is folly to tie the health effects of
tobacco, good or bad,
with public policy.
Individuals should be free to smoke, but be held
responsible for the natural consequences.
This holds for "good tobacco" or "bad tobacco",
as well as other drugs.
(Full disclosure: Non-smoker. Ex-smoker, but not against smoking where permitted by property
owners.)
This story is part of a striped disk array,
which is why its content looks similar, but not identical, to the other stripe,
which was discovered a week ago.
Yeah it's cache-coherent; otherwise it couldn't run a single OS image.
Cache coherence in hardware is not necessary to
run a single OS image. Software can synchronize
and flush the caches, but of course that's much
slower.
It uses a similar interconnect as the Origin
3000, which has been described in the literature.
Yes, but it may be dropping the cache coherence.
Cache coherence requires special hardware
protocols running all the way from the CPU to the furthest shared memory, and the further this
goes out -- the larger the number of CPUs --
the slower this coherency mechanism becomes on the entire system.
Supporting a 512-CPU system with cache coherence,
without losing intranode performance, would be a major feat.
Since
they are not using Intel's chipsets, and are
dropping the Itanium 2 into their Origin chipset,
they may also be dropping cache coherence.
I could find nothing in the datasheets which
implies cache coherence.
They use the term "NUMA" in several places, but
never "CCNUMA".
Methinks/. has been fooled by SGI marketing.
This machine is not as fantastic as you may be
led to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
And New Mexico almost passed a law requiring all vehicles to be equipped with ignition interlock devices requiring the driver to test their breath every 10 minutes, regardless of the driver's record!!!
Insurance companies offering discounts for safe drivers is okay with me, even if it involves using tracking technology, but what about the state going after drivers before they even pose a danger to others?
Dissassociative Identity Disorder / MPD is a fad that passed away during the 90s, since it made psychiatry's real goal of social control impossible, because too many personalities were getting away with committing crimes, and there was no way to punish the real criminal and still hold on to the MPD belief. Unlike other "mental illnesses" which can be used to justify involuntary drugging and committment, MPD presents a patient who does not play into the game, and does not provide the necessary resistance. i.e., "It was just my other personality. I'm okay with you. I like you." To which there is no logical response which can hold on to the MPD hypothesis.
No! I have not watched television in over 5 years. Back then I only watched reruns of my favorite shows.
I refuse to support cable TV or satellite TV. So I'll only buy DSL, for example.
Today, watching TV is more disgusting than any pornography, and worse than seeing real Iraq war photos. It is so infantilizing, shallow, banal, transparent, and scripted.
There's so little time left, why waste it on TV. /. has more technical information than all TV networks combined.
But to get back on topic, I use Privoxy with great success. It already downloads images before filtering them sometimes (depending on filter rule), and so ad banners which attempt to detect whether they are being blocked don't know they're being blocked. I'm sure it can be extended to popups too. If the practice of "detecting" blocking becomes common, the Privoxy team will defeat it on the next release.
I've seen some sites get so ad-crazy that they use browser-specific (read: IE) techniques which break pages on other browsers, or which do not display right when filtered. I just move on to another site when this happens. There's almost always another available for the same purpose, with fewer ads.
But how many web surfers are aware of Privoxy or similar tools? Not many (this forum excepted of course), which is why advertising works.
Norelo (a division of Philips) had their patented "lift and cut" system of rotary blades, the patent of which just ran out recently (you now see no-name brands of razors in discount stores which look just like Norelcos -- with 3 rotary heads).
Personally I never liked Norelcos, since their rotary blades irritate my skin and don't even cut close enough.
Which is why, like Victor Kiam, I prefer Remingtons.
Kiam bought Remington from Sperry before Sperry joined with Burroughs to become Unisys.
Today, Rayovac, the battery maker, owns Remington.
Quite frankly I was shocked to see that OpenBSD was so secure. I was certain Linux was the most secure OS.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/dec03/191454.as p
Quill essentially affirms Bellas Hess.
There's a four-prong "Complete Auto" test which has been used as a criterion for the validity of state taxes on interstate commerce:
Relevant quotes from the cases:
Other references:
Annette Nellen's Home Page, especially Timeline Review of Activities Related to Discussions on Internet Taxation
Sales and Use Taxation of Internet Transactions
In other news, Barnes & Noble Inc. has offered to buy back the shares of BN.com -- could this eventually mean BN.com will have to collect sales taxes on internet sales to all states which have Barnes & Noble retail stores?
Then we'd arguably not need an internet tax.
Actually, some compilers can do it. They can break apart a user's program into multiple threads which execute in parallel, without the user giving any source code directives or hints.
Automatic parallelization, array disambiguation, loop dependence analysis, etc. are not new. Despite apparent dependencies in code between instructions, high-level optimizers can often do dependence analysis which can detect higher-level patterns which are independent and thus can be executed in parallel, even though the code generator's individual instructions seem purely sequential.
If the compiler cannot be sure about data dependencies or control dependencies, then there are still sometimes devices to help it optimize in spite of these possible dependencies, e.g. speculative and advanced loads on Itanium.
Then eBay got what it deserved by choosing a jury, although the judge reduced the damages.
Jury: "Holy crap! That guy wasn't 100% certain. Not guilty!"
This is a civil case, not a criminal one. There is no "guilt" or "innocence" -- simply damages awarded to either side.
In other words, guilt by association?
The reason he took the plea is that he didn't believe that he could convince even one of twelve people that his intent was not to promote murder and mayhem. Inciting violence is a crime, and that was clearly his intent.
I don't know what his real reasons were for taking the plea, but even if he could convince a juror to find him innocent, he still might not want to go through the process, for financial, emotional, or other reasons.
I personally think inciting violence should be legal. Only actually engaging in violence should be illegal, and not for the ones encouraging it, but those committing it.
I've often thought of putting up a website titled "how to make a bomb", just to see who it attracts. It wouldn't actually have bomb-making instructions, but would be a commentary on our society. We build "bombs" every day in our social system (schools, prisons, etc.), and every once and a while they explode (as in Columbine, Oklahoma City). Here's how to make a bomb:
Since when have you had any obligation to follow RedHat defaults when deciding what software goes into YOUR computer?
One says "Gary Valentine" is the owner, while the other says "Robert Ballantine".
Either one of the reports has the wrong name, or we're talking about different incidents.
Since "Ballantine" appears in a handwritten police report, it is more credible.
More complete story: http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/storyprintfriendl y/0,1887,188522,00.html?
Also see this thread.
It does not protect the public against bad engineering. When it is advanced for this purpose, it amounts to paternalism: You will pay for the costs of making this software satisfy some group's QA criteria, even if you are willing to put up with a few bugs in order to pay much less.
The capital costs of software development would increase tremendously. You would be able to hire only "registered" or "licensed" programmers, or become one yourself, and you would (eventually) need to satisfy some state-imposed QA criteria, which requires a lot more testing and costs much more than techniques like alpha or beta testing and customer feedback do today.
Software is unique in that it requires only a small, finite amount of capital -- one teenage hacker and a PC, for example -- to produce a lot of return. In many respects it's similar to art. (After all, Knuth's books are called the The Art of Computer Programming, not The Science of Computer Programming.)
Software engineering licensing is unenforcible in free software, so if it were adopted it would only be applied to commercial software, and to employees of software companies. As long as the free software movement stayed alive, there would be economic incentives against making commercial software have this disadvantage.
(Under some wacko conspiracy theory, I suppose that mandatory DRM hardware could try to stop people from using unregistered compilers, or doing any kind of programming without a license key, but that's too far off at this point to even be considered.)
Programming is one of the last refuges for free-marketeers. If protectionistic measures such as licensing programmers or software engineers was started, many people with bright ideas would never become programmers.
Unfortunately today's economic climate is exactly the kind where these regulations are most often started, to "protect" jobs. American programmers are feeling competition from India and elsewhere. Some therefore jump at the opportunity to add regulations in an attempt to protect their jobs.
I'd rather be free to program without a license and without bureaucratic regulations, even if it required changing employers more often or taking a pay cut.
The DoD is a joke.
Sun's Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming
And another:
NASA Study Finds Increasing Solar Trend That Can Change Climate
It was revolutionary in its ability to combine both single-player and multiplayer gameplay in ways that satisfied many different users; it was revolutionary in its marketing strategy (E1 was shareware; the rest was only $40, which was still less than most games at that time); and it had the right market timing.
(not as apparent in Doom, but in D2 and Heretic when you can look up)
You mean Heretic and Hexen. Doom 2 did not have look up/down.
Descent, AFAIK, was the first *real* 3D game, and it ran on 486s with 8M of ram;
The first real 3-d FPS game I saw on PCs, was Continuum by Data East. It ran on 386s with 640 KB of RAM. It came out in 1990, 3 years before Doom or Descent.
Descent may have had better 3-d graphics, but Doom had better textures and better gameplay, especially for single-player, and at the time, not everyone had networking or even modems, so good single-player gameplay was critical.
Why is he sticking with DOOM, of all things?
Ease of editing? Doom familiarity? Doom fan base?
IE 6 ways to spell Microsoft as an Internet Explorer?
I don't think the lack of non-smoking restaurants is a result of there being no meaningful public policy about smoking in public places.
Also, a privately owned restaurant, while open to the public, is not a "public place" where public policy, democratic rule, or government laws should govern smoking policy. A privately owned and operated business should be allowed to invite its patrons to smoke, or forbid them from smoking.
Employees should be allowed to choose to work in either smoking or non-smoking jobs with informed consent.
That is your choice. If the benefits of voluntary exchange with a bar are not to your liking, find a smoke-free bar, complain to the bar, open your own bar, or avoid bars.
What gives you the right to come into a bar and tell the owner he has to put out everyone's cigarettes? He did not force you to come in. You cannot force him to serve you to your liking.
Smoking is not necessary to enjoy socializing. Lots of people enjoy socializing without smoke, and some people (at least in the USA) even have anti-smoking parties, where smoking is ridiculed and only non-smokers are invited.
As for addiction, that is your choice. Maybe you value the companionship, the alcohol, and other things that go with socializing at bars and other places. If you hate the smoke but continue to go, or even smoke yourself in order to "fit in", then that indicates that you value the experience enough to overcome your opposition to smoking.
The more choices are available to you, the better. This means smoke-free bars and restaurants, smokeless nicotine sources, other drugs, etc. But those choices stop being choices when they are controlled by law.
Maybe you will come up with an innovative way to do what you and your friends enjoy, but without the smoke. But if non-smoking is imposed by fiat, all motivation for such innovation will go away.
When government steps in and sets rules about smoking on privately-owned property that's open to the general public, is it restricting those choices to an arbitrary few. This prevents the "feedback" mechanism you're talking about from converging to a solution that is beneficial and voluntary to all, and tends to divide people into classes, like "all smokers go here" and "all non-smokers go here". It needs to be voluntary, self-directed, and up to individuals and private businesses, how this policy is carried out. Not government fiat.
And in the USA, it goes against the principle of "freedom of association", so there are almost always loopholes out of anti-smoking or anti-drinking laws. If the bar is called a "private club", which you must pay a token fee to join, then it is exempt from the anti-smoking or anti-drinking laws, which were unjust to start with. All it does is divide up people into socioeconomic classes in which richer people continue to enjoy drinking and smoking because they can afford "club dues", while poorer people can't. It does nothing to decrease smoking or drinking, and it shouldn't, because those are private individual choices.
Not if individuals were truly held responsible for their health choices, and paid for their own health care.
Even in the USA, we have socialized medicine. It makes people expect health care for free, and ends up creating a runaway system which actually encourages sickness. So if you ban smoking or put up artificial costs on it to it to try to counteract these natural economic forces resulting from socialized medicine, you are in essence putting price controls on peoples' choices. Sooner or later, the system will crack. A black market in cigarettes will develop, the health care system will collapse, there will be a shortage of doctors, etc.
But these public costs are artificial, and imposed by government or other policy. They are not the natural costs of individuals' voluntary decisions. So people try to rationalize them.
If you get sick as a result of smoking, that does not "cost" anything. Rather, if you want to get a treatment for an illness caused by smoking, that treatment costs money. But disease and treatment are not corollary -- you can have disease without treatment, and still be okay. Socialized medicine chains the two together unnecessarily, making people think that every disease requires treatment, and therefore every disease costs money, which in socialized medicine is felt not by the individual but by society. But this is not necessary or desirable. Individuals can and should pay for their own health care, and then there is a private incentive for most people not to smoke.
As I say, your right to smoke should start or stop at the entrance to my establishment.
I should have the right to set the smoking policy on my property, even if it's open to the public. This is true whether I allow smoking or forbid it.
In the case of government buildings, policy should carefully balance the interests of smokers and non-smokers alike, without appearing to favor one or the other. Most would agree with there being designated smoking areas outside of government buildings, but forbidding smoking inside of them.
To me it is folly to tie the health effects of tobacco, good or bad, with public policy.
Individuals should be free to smoke, but be held responsible for the natural consequences. This holds for "good tobacco" or "bad tobacco", as well as other drugs.
(Full disclosure: Non-smoker. Ex-smoker, but not against smoking where permitted by property owners.)
This story is part of a striped disk array, which is why its content looks similar, but not identical, to the other stripe, which was discovered a week ago.
It would hurt an already depressed market.
Cache coherence in hardware is not necessary to run a single OS image. Software can synchronize and flush the caches, but of course that's much slower.
It uses a similar interconnect as the Origin 3000, which has been described in the literature.
Yes, but it may be dropping the cache coherence.
Cache coherence requires special hardware protocols running all the way from the CPU to the furthest shared memory, and the further this goes out -- the larger the number of CPUs -- the slower this coherency mechanism becomes on the entire system.
Supporting a 512-CPU system with cache coherence, without losing intranode performance, would be a major feat.
Since they are not using Intel's chipsets, and are dropping the Itanium 2 into their Origin chipset, they may also be dropping cache coherence.
I could find nothing in the datasheets which implies cache coherence.
They use the term "NUMA" in several places, but never "CCNUMA".
Methinks /. has been fooled by SGI marketing.
This machine is not as fantastic as you may be
led to believe.