Hmmm...if Nike sells shoes for a while advertising "we're now virtuous" but keeps the little kids working 84-hour weeks over Maim & Kill shoe machines at the factory, can they be hit with a class-action lawsuit by customers who say that Nike obtained their money under False Pretenses? (Or similar law - IANAL.)
Would it also be 1st-Amendment-protected free speach to call the Judge at home to inform her of one's own opinions on the right to privacy?
Or would that be harassment, since the victim would be one of the more-equal-than-us rich & powerful class, not a peon (like most of the folks suffering from endless telemarketing calls)?
My understanding (from a NY Times article if I recall right) is that NASA did not even try to inspect Columbia with several powerful ground-based telescopes (which had been used to inspect some earlier shuttles).
A better tool ain't no cure for "talked yourself out of bothering to try".
IANANP (...Nuclear Physicist), but it sounds like this reactor would be an extremely poor candidate for breeding plutonium. To sustain any reaction, it needs the moderation carefully tuned so that the neutrons fission U-238. That doesn't sound very compatible with neutrons moderated to be absorbed by U-238 (thus breeding it into Pu-239).
Ahhh...and since we're absolutely, 100.000% sure that no bad guy anywhere has gotten (or ever will get) his hands on plutonium, we have no need to control the ingredients that a bad guy could use to upgrade a bomb (extra bonus +250,000 people inside fireball, +1,000,000 people in radius of total distruction, etc.).
BTW, you know that T alone is good enough to build a "dirty bomb", right?
Deuterium, tritium, and lithium-6 are right behind plutonium on a nuclear bomb builder's shopping list. Especially if he wants to build a more efficient (powerful) bomb, or (really powerful) H-bomb. You can Google for details and bomb designs.
Deuterium is fairly available; tritium & lithium-6 are extremely hard to get...but a decent fusion reactor will give you an ample supply. I think some (hypothetical) types of fusion reactors are also great for breeding plutonium (from uranium).
"Dear N. Korea, If the mere 1/5 ton of Pu that we leaked was "missing" doesn't clue you in, please rest assured that you'll bitterly regret any nuclear mistakes in our direction. Your loving neighbor, Japan"
In other news, scientists have discovered a new species of glow-in-the-dark fish near the Oopsiliki Nuclear Facility...
Auditers caught 'em half-way between using fudged-upward numbers (to make productivity look good) and fudged-back-down numbers (to account for what actually ships). (This kind of stuff has happened in the U.S.A.)
Measuring & accounting so sloppy that there's no way to tell if the "missing" stuff ever existed...or if much more is missing.
Stolen by __________, who then did ___________with it
News flash one: Scientists conduct study and discover that dust and ash from a huge building that burned & collapsed can be found spread over a wide area.
News flash two: High-salary scientists are RIF'ed and replaced with ordinary, sensible housewives - who wouldn't need any fancy study to know such a simple thing.
Apple's Q1's are just not important...
on
Apple Reports Q1 Loss
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Apple's Q1 results are pretty much what the stock geeks expected. The whole industry is bad shape from the dot-com bubble burst, with sales & prices *way* down from "the good old days".
Apple's got over four billion dollars cash in the bank, good (& stable) leadership, an established (& loyal) market base, and an impressive R&D program. They're getting through the "Gigahertz Gap" and moving away from the chip supplier that caused it (Motorola).
Apple is not a massive-financial-leverage house of cards (Enron, WorldCom, etc.) that needs a high stock price. Apple stockholders are not a fast-buck-happy mob who'll burn the company's future for great numbers for a quarter or few.
Bottom line: Apple is far too healthy a company and far too sober a stock to need to care much about routine quarterly financials.
This IS worthy Slashdot Science Section news, but NOT because of the "first person from country X in space" angle.
The important science news here is all about political use of the Space Shuttle, the security problems created thereby (how many lives and $millions would certain terrorists happily give to sabotage or shoot down this Shuttle?), etc.
(Yes, i know that the whole Shuttle program is at least as much about pork spreading as space science, and that's *very* old news.)
Nobody M1'ed me down, but i was pretty flamey up there. Please accept my apologies for that. On the technical issues:
The extra P4 idle cycles (waiting on external RAM) are a direct result of the P4 designers' decision to favor "higher clock speeds" over "get more work done per clock tick". Those idle cycles become bubbles in the execution pipelines. Those bubbles (a problem when running single-thread) are the opportunity that HT takes advantage of (by filling in with work for the other thread). (If the "higher clock speeds" design decision isn't part of what you're using "P4 architecure" to mean, that's okay by me.)
I agree that "HT benefits from optimizations designed to exploit it" is true. However, "[insert name of any new technology added to CPU's to speed up computation] benefits from optimizations designed to exploit it" is *generally* true. I'd say that my 4 words ("HT requires OS support") convey much more useful information in less space (very good in a summary) at the price of misunderstanding (bad anywhere) if taken in a certain literal way. (Which gets into what "HT support" means in an OS. I'd say that advocates for any OS will use it in a way that minimizes the damage.)
FWIW, such keep-stopping-to-wait-for-memory code is clearly what i classified as INefficient on a P4, so it should benefit from HT. But to respond to the assertion after your example:
-and- The desired data IS often in the cache. Compare the cache latency of the 3GHz P4 (2 cycles L1, 18 cycles L2) to a 1.5GHz Itanium (1 cycle L1, 5 cycles L2). (Though the data could be in the Itanium's (12 cycle) L3 while the P4 is going to (far slower) RAM.) "...NOTHING to do with P4 architecture", right?
When the CPU does go to RAM for the data, i bet that a 3GHz P4 waits idle for about twice as many cycles as a 1.5GHz Itanium (given same-speed memory systems). "...NOTHING to do with P4 architecture", right?
So HT is useless if the OS doesn't recognize and use the (seeming) second CPU. Read the article, and you'll notice that HT gave a far larger benefit with the designed-specifically-for-HT kernel. You got a better 4-word summary of this than "HT requires OS support"?
"Any threaded app can benefit from HT" is plain wrong. There are many (generally very CPU-intensive) apps that do WORSE under HT because both threads are fighting for the same (maxed-out) resources. Flip-side, there are plenty of NON-threaded apps that can benefit from HT - all this takes is for the OS to try running two different apps on the two CPU's that it sees.
Summary: you can nit-pick okay, but i don't think you understand the technology or get the point of a short summary.
It depends. If both programs are P4-INefficient, then HT has a good chance of speeding up the combination. I'd guess this would be the case with most "light weight but lots of 'em" generic server code.
Two P4-efficient programs *might* get a minimal benefit from HT, but are more likely to perform much *worse* as they fight over the chip's maxed-out resources.
I'd guess that a mix of the two types would fall some place in between. Theories & benchmarks are nice, but in the end, performance on your actual programs, data, etc. is what matters.
(It would be nice if Intel's HT collected raw data to let the OS figure out when HT was & wasn't a good idea...anyone know if it does?)
If you're running code that's efficient on a P4 (few mis-predicted branches, low cache miss rate, good parallelism, etc.) then HT is pretty much useless.
If you're running code that's inefficient on a P4 (which pays for its high GHz with long pipelines, large latencies, a slow decode stage, and several other drawbacks), then HT can usually paper over a fair percentage of these problems. But remember that HT requires OS support, may require application support, and "your mileage will vary".
This sounds like a Junior High newspaper's bimbo social reporter trying to whip up a story about the lonely & hurt mystery-meatball-serving lunch lady watching students flock to the Friday Pizza Alternative. ZD really needs to get back on their meds.
IANAL, but with domain names "sold" for limited periods of time, at fixed costs per year, and quickly & surely lost if not renewed (and paid for again), they look like rented property to me.
It ain't exactly moral, but what legal rights does Joe's Gas Station have if the landlord doesn't let him renew the lease, then rents the location to Bob's Gas Station? How's this domain name mess any different?
(FWIW, the whole domain name thing looks totally screwed to me. Imagine losing your phone number because anyone dialing "EAST TOKYO HONDA" got connected to you. How many little roofing companies are there in just the U.S., what's special about the one who got "newroof.com", and why should folks in both LA and NYC be sent to that guy's web site? The basic idea behind the whole thing is just plain broken.)
If you're thinking "PowerHammer", "IBM Athlon", etc., then you REALLY don't get it. This is like GM and Ford cooperating on expensive research needed to meet new Federal safety & pollution standards:
- An engineer who used a saw to cut GM & Ford airbags or catalytic converters open a few years later could see similarities in the technology.
- Someone who was expecting to see a Pontiac Mustang or Lincoln DeVille would be SOL.
Lead makes great Pinewood Derby weight (dense, cheap, & easy to work), but be careful with it:
-Lead is poisonous, especially to kids. It causes brain damage. Infants, children, & pets are at greatest risk, but adults are not immune. Fine particles produced by sanding lead are perfect for getting into the body through the lungs, mouth, etc.
-Molten lead is damn hot. Have you ever enjoyed a 3rd degree burn or house fire? Molten lead also gives off lead fumes to breathe in and contaminate your work area.
-Any Pinewood Derby car containing lead is a hidden toxic waste issue. Where will it wind up? Burned with rubbish (producing lots of lead fumes & contaminated ash)? In a dump (with rainwater slowly leaching the lead into the soil)? Where? I'd bet that less than 1 lead-laced car in 1000 gets proper disposal.
Do a Google search on "lead poisoning" before you play with the stuff. Better yet, do that search together with your little Cub Scout.
Want an alternative to lead? Try iron or steel. They've got about 2/3 of the density, are cheaply available in many convenient shapes, and are effectively non-toxic.
Did they determine whether butter, olive oil, cream-based sauce, or tomato-based sauce was best for lubricating quake-prone faults to prevent "the big one"?
PowerMac - new, roughly 1.4GHz "loaded" unit at a loaded price (for bragging rights & rich customers). Little change on existing units.
XServe - 1.25GHz, bigger disks, other small stuff
XRAID - "shipping soon" announcement
iBall - System that looks like a pair of (flat panel) iMacs with their (flat) base bottoms glued together. Includes dual G4's, special (iBall only) 3-D glasses, iDeck virtual reality software, & some cool-if-basic 3-D games.
iWorm - security audit, remote admin, etc. software for OS X & OS X Server
iPair - software to migrate/duplicate a Windows PC to a Mac (converting files, etc.) via ethernet, firewire, USB, or ATA. With a credit card & $99.00, it allows any MS Office (Windows) to be upgraded to Office X.
iJobs - little red mini-CD filled with video clips of Steve Jobs proclaiming his MacWisdom to the MacFaithful. When spinning, Reality Distortion Field gets so intense that it may affect any computer it's loaded in like the Infinite Improbability Drive. One lucky MacFan will find his old Mac turned into a loaded quad-G5/3GHz; Windows PC's won't fare so well.
READ THE ARTICLE - it says that both sex and pregnancy add nerve cells to the part of the brain that handles SMELL. NOT IQ. NOT memory.
Maybe this explains morning sickness. Any why she starts bitching about your dirty clothes, room, etc. after a while. And why her perfume doesn't smell as cool as it used to.
Allow me to suggest you try a couple things before bashing NASA for spending a few dollars on this:
1. Spend a year living between a large (cattle) feedlot and the waste ponds of a modern (huge) pig farm. (Having a surgeon seal up your nose is not allowed.)
2. Spend your own money to launch a freezer filled with 1000 burger patties to Mars, dump 500 patties there, then return with the rest. (I'll even throw in the patties FOR FREE when you pay for the rocket, launch facility, etc. up front.)
(Yes, "a few dollars". Look at NASA's budget a bit before bashing - basic R&D is NOT where the $$$ is going.)
Before anybody gets too excited, check up on this RMS guy. I've talked to him, and he stupidly refuses to assign all his (now blatently UNfree) property and rights to my truly free Stalin Free Society. I recommend that you use only free SFS-owned & -approved languages, not his slaveware.
Make up a resouce book for good (vs. crappy "because so-and-so said so") science teachers. Fill it with cold facts, and LOTS of detailed "try it yourself and see" experiments (everything from photographing mini Xmas lights in the day (to see if stars should appear in lunar photos) up to bouncing a laser off a reflector on the moon).
Spell out very clearly that the resource book is aimed at honestly curious, open-minded people, NOT zealous "it was faked" believers, and NOT sensation-hungry reporters.
Specifically and repeatedly warn well-intentioned folks against trying to convince either reporters {who MUST have stories to have a job, and ONLY have a story if they say "it was faked") and zealots (who are no more interested in real facts than sports team fanatics).
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm...if Nike sells shoes for a while advertising "we're now virtuous" but keeps the little kids working 84-hour weeks over Maim & Kill shoe machines at the factory, can they be hit with a class-action lawsuit by customers who say that Nike obtained their money under False Pretenses? (Or similar law - IANAL.)
Would it also be 1st-Amendment-protected free speach to call the Judge at home to inform her of one's own opinions on the right to privacy?
Or would that be harassment, since the victim would be one of the more-equal-than-us rich & powerful class, not a peon (like most of the folks suffering from endless telemarketing calls)?
My understanding (from a NY Times article if I recall right) is that NASA did not even try to inspect Columbia with several powerful ground-based telescopes (which had been used to inspect some earlier shuttles).
A better tool ain't no cure for "talked yourself out of bothering to try".
IANANP (...Nuclear Physicist), but it sounds like this reactor would be an extremely poor candidate for breeding plutonium. To sustain any reaction, it needs the moderation carefully tuned so that the neutrons fission U-238. That doesn't sound very compatible with neutrons moderated to be absorbed by U-238 (thus breeding it into Pu-239).
Ahhh...and since we're absolutely, 100.000% sure that no bad guy anywhere has gotten (or ever will get) his hands on plutonium, we have no need to control the ingredients that a bad guy could use to upgrade a bomb (extra bonus +250,000 people inside fireball, +1,000,000 people in radius of total distruction, etc.).
BTW, you know that T alone is good enough to build a "dirty bomb", right?
Deuterium, tritium, and lithium-6 are right behind plutonium on a nuclear bomb builder's shopping list. Especially if he wants to build a more efficient (powerful) bomb, or (really powerful) H-bomb. You can Google for details and bomb designs.
Deuterium is fairly available; tritium & lithium-6 are extremely hard to get...but a decent fusion reactor will give you an ample supply. I think some (hypothetical) types of fusion reactors are also great for breeding plutonium (from uranium).
"Dear N. Korea,
If the mere 1/5 ton of Pu that we leaked was "missing" doesn't clue you in, please rest assured that you'll bitterly regret any nuclear mistakes in our direction.
Your loving neighbor,
Japan"
In other news, scientists have discovered a new species of glow-in-the-dark fish near the Oopsiliki Nuclear Facility...
Auditers caught 'em half-way between using fudged-upward numbers (to make productivity look good) and fudged-back-down numbers (to account for what actually ships). (This kind of stuff has happened in the U.S.A.)
Measuring & accounting so sloppy that there's no way to tell if the "missing" stuff ever existed...or if much more is missing.
Stolen by __________, who then did ___________with it
It's an off-the-books loan to CowboyNeal.
News flash one: Scientists conduct study and discover that dust and ash from a huge building that burned & collapsed can be found spread over a wide area. News flash two: High-salary scientists are RIF'ed and replaced with ordinary, sensible housewives - who wouldn't need any fancy study to know such a simple thing.
Apple's Q1 results are pretty much what the stock geeks expected. The whole industry is bad shape from the dot-com bubble burst, with sales & prices *way* down from "the good old days".
Apple's got over four billion dollars cash in the bank, good (& stable) leadership, an established (& loyal) market base, and an impressive R&D program. They're getting through the "Gigahertz Gap" and moving away from the chip supplier that caused it (Motorola).
Apple is not a massive-financial-leverage house of cards (Enron, WorldCom, etc.) that needs a high stock price. Apple stockholders are not a fast-buck-happy mob who'll burn the company's future for great numbers for a quarter or few.
Bottom line: Apple is far too healthy a company and far too sober a stock to need to care much about routine quarterly financials.
This IS worthy Slashdot Science Section news, but NOT because of the "first person from country X in space" angle.
The important science news here is all about political use of the Space Shuttle, the security problems created thereby (how many lives and $millions would certain terrorists happily give to sabotage or shoot down this Shuttle?), etc.
(Yes, i know that the whole Shuttle program is at least as much about pork spreading as space science, and that's *very* old news.)
Nobody M1'ed me down, but i was pretty flamey up there. Please accept my apologies for that. On the technical issues:
The extra P4 idle cycles (waiting on external RAM) are a direct result of the P4 designers' decision to favor "higher clock speeds" over "get more work done per clock tick". Those idle cycles become bubbles in the execution pipelines. Those bubbles (a problem when running single-thread) are the opportunity that HT takes advantage of (by filling in with work for the other thread). (If the "higher clock speeds" design decision isn't part of what you're using "P4 architecure" to mean, that's okay by me.)
I agree that "HT benefits from optimizations designed to exploit it" is true. However, "[insert name of any new technology added to CPU's to speed up computation] benefits from optimizations designed to exploit it" is *generally* true. I'd say that my 4 words ("HT requires OS support") convey much more useful information in less space (very good in a summary) at the price of misunderstanding (bad anywhere) if taken in a certain literal way. (Which gets into what "HT support" means in an OS. I'd say that advocates for any OS will use it in a way that minimizes the damage.)
FWIW, such keep-stopping-to-wait-for-memory code is clearly what i classified as INefficient on a P4, so it should benefit from HT. But to respond to the assertion after your example:
-and-
The desired data IS often in the cache. Compare the cache latency of the 3GHz P4 (2 cycles L1, 18 cycles L2) to a 1.5GHz Itanium (1 cycle L1, 5 cycles L2). (Though the data could be in the Itanium's (12 cycle) L3 while the P4 is going to (far slower) RAM.) "...NOTHING to do with P4 architecture", right?
When the CPU does go to RAM for the data, i bet that a 3GHz P4 waits idle for about twice as many cycles as a 1.5GHz Itanium (given same-speed memory systems). "...NOTHING to do with P4 architecture", right?
So HT is useless if the OS doesn't recognize and use the (seeming) second CPU. Read the article, and you'll notice that HT gave a far larger benefit with the designed-specifically-for-HT kernel. You got a better 4-word summary of this than "HT requires OS support"?
"Any threaded app can benefit from HT" is plain wrong. There are many (generally very CPU-intensive) apps that do WORSE under HT because both threads are fighting for the same (maxed-out) resources. Flip-side, there are plenty of NON-threaded apps that can benefit from HT - all this takes is for the OS to try running two different apps on the two CPU's that it sees.
Summary: you can nit-pick okay, but i don't think you understand the technology or get the point of a short summary.
It depends. If both programs are P4-INefficient, then HT has a good chance of speeding up the combination. I'd guess this would be the case with most "light weight but lots of 'em" generic server code.
Two P4-efficient programs *might* get a minimal benefit from HT, but are more likely to perform much *worse* as they fight over the chip's maxed-out resources.
I'd guess that a mix of the two types would fall some place in between. Theories & benchmarks are nice, but in the end, performance on your actual programs, data, etc. is what matters.
(It would be nice if Intel's HT collected raw data to let the OS figure out when HT was & wasn't a good idea...anyone know if it does?)
If you're running code that's efficient on a P4 (few mis-predicted branches, low cache miss rate, good parallelism, etc.) then HT is pretty much useless.
If you're running code that's inefficient on a P4 (which pays for its high GHz with long pipelines, large latencies, a slow decode stage, and several other drawbacks), then HT can usually paper over a fair percentage of these problems. But remember that HT requires OS support, may require application support, and "your mileage will vary".
This sounds like a Junior High newspaper's bimbo social reporter trying to whip up a story about the lonely & hurt mystery-meatball-serving lunch lady watching students flock to the Friday Pizza Alternative. ZD really needs to get back on their meds.
IANAL, but with domain names "sold" for limited periods of time, at fixed costs per year, and quickly & surely lost if not renewed (and paid for again), they look like rented property to me.
It ain't exactly moral, but what legal rights does Joe's Gas Station have if the landlord doesn't let him renew the lease, then rents the location to Bob's Gas Station? How's this domain name mess any different?
(FWIW, the whole domain name thing looks totally screwed to me. Imagine losing your phone number because anyone dialing "EAST TOKYO HONDA" got connected to you. How many little roofing companies are there in just the U.S., what's special about the one who got "newroof.com", and why should folks in both LA and NYC be sent to that guy's web site? The basic idea behind the whole thing is just plain broken.)
If you're thinking "PowerHammer", "IBM Athlon", etc., then you REALLY don't get it. This is like GM and Ford cooperating on expensive research needed to meet new Federal safety & pollution standards:
- An engineer who used a saw to cut GM & Ford airbags or catalytic converters open a few years later could see similarities in the technology.
- Someone who was expecting to see a Pontiac Mustang or Lincoln DeVille would be SOL.
Lead makes great Pinewood Derby weight (dense, cheap, & easy to work), but be careful with it:
-Lead is poisonous, especially to kids. It causes brain damage. Infants, children, & pets are at greatest risk, but adults are not immune. Fine particles produced by sanding lead are perfect for getting into the body through the lungs, mouth, etc.
-Molten lead is damn hot. Have you ever enjoyed a 3rd degree burn or house fire? Molten lead also gives off lead fumes to breathe in and contaminate your work area.
-Any Pinewood Derby car containing lead is a hidden toxic waste issue. Where will it wind up? Burned with rubbish (producing lots of lead fumes & contaminated ash)? In a dump (with rainwater slowly leaching the lead into the soil)? Where? I'd bet that less than 1 lead-laced car in 1000 gets proper disposal.
Do a Google search on "lead poisoning" before you play with the stuff. Better yet, do that search together with your little Cub Scout.
Want an alternative to lead? Try iron or steel. They've got about 2/3 of the density, are cheaply available in many convenient shapes, and are effectively non-toxic.
Did they determine whether butter, olive oil, cream-based sauce, or tomato-based sauce was best for lubricating quake-prone faults to prevent "the big one"?
PowerMac - new, roughly 1.4GHz "loaded" unit at a loaded price (for bragging rights & rich customers). Little change on existing units.
XServe - 1.25GHz, bigger disks, other small stuff
XRAID - "shipping soon" announcement
iBall - System that looks like a pair of (flat panel) iMacs with their (flat) base bottoms glued together. Includes dual G4's, special (iBall only) 3-D glasses, iDeck virtual reality software, & some cool-if-basic 3-D games.
iWorm - security audit, remote admin, etc. software for OS X & OS X Server
iPair - software to migrate/duplicate a Windows PC to a Mac (converting files, etc.) via ethernet, firewire, USB, or ATA. With a credit card & $99.00, it allows any MS Office (Windows) to be upgraded to Office X.
iJobs - little red mini-CD filled with video clips of Steve Jobs proclaiming his MacWisdom to the MacFaithful. When spinning, Reality Distortion Field gets so intense that it may affect any computer it's loaded in like the Infinite Improbability Drive. One lucky MacFan will find his old Mac turned into a loaded quad-G5/3GHz; Windows PC's won't fare so well.
READ THE ARTICLE - it says that both sex and pregnancy add nerve cells to the part of the brain that handles SMELL. NOT IQ. NOT memory.
Maybe this explains morning sickness. Any why she starts bitching about your dirty clothes, room, etc. after a while. And why her perfume doesn't smell as cool as it used to.
Maybe this ain't so good after all, eh?
Allow me to suggest you try a couple things before bashing NASA for spending a few dollars on this:
1. Spend a year living between a large (cattle) feedlot and the waste ponds of a modern (huge) pig farm. (Having a surgeon seal up your nose is not allowed.)
2. Spend your own money to launch a freezer filled with 1000 burger patties to Mars, dump 500 patties there, then return with the rest. (I'll even throw in the patties FOR FREE when you pay for the rocket, launch facility, etc. up front.)
(Yes, "a few dollars". Look at NASA's budget a bit before bashing - basic R&D is NOT where the $$$ is going.)
Before anybody gets too excited, check up on this RMS guy. I've talked to him, and he stupidly refuses to assign all his (now blatently UNfree) property and rights to my truly free Stalin Free Society. I recommend that you use only free SFS-owned & -approved languages, not his slaveware.
In another announcement, Disney said that they're eliminating the Uniformed Division of Theme Park Security in the near future to save money.
According to an unnamed source, "with a 12-foot-tall T. Robo Rex watching 'em, NOBODY is gonna make trouble".
Official sources denied any connection.
Make up a resouce book for good (vs. crappy "because so-and-so said so") science teachers. Fill it with cold facts, and LOTS of detailed "try it yourself and see" experiments (everything from photographing mini Xmas lights in the day (to see if stars should appear in lunar photos) up to bouncing a laser off a reflector on the moon).
Spell out very clearly that the resource book is aimed at honestly curious, open-minded people, NOT zealous "it was faked" believers, and NOT sensation-hungry reporters.
Specifically and repeatedly warn well-intentioned folks against trying to convince either reporters {who MUST have stories to have a job, and ONLY have a story if they say "it was faked") and zealots (who are no more interested in real facts than sports team fanatics).