It isn't a slap in the face because only a compete whiny bitch would think that others being allowed to enjoy the content that they themselves had over a year's head start on was somehow a personal insult directed at them. It's like a Bentley owner thinking it's a "slap in the face" that middle-class people are allowed to buy a Lexus.
Oh, but your other reasons are completely valid too.;)
More things that were supposed to be dark matter that turned out to be pretty ordinary matter.
No, that's not true. We already knew there was "ordinary" matter we hadn't found, we knew it wasn't "dark" matter, we just didn't know where it was. Now we found a bunch of it.
I am all for renewable energy, but I disagree with the idea of economic incentives. There have been a large number of potential renewable energy sources, and many people seem to have one that is their favorate. None of these (except hydroelectricity) have become major sources of power, due to various obstacles that still must be overcome. I think that once these ideas are economically feasable (*if* they are feasable) they will get investment and be implemented.
Well the concept behind incentives is that sometimes you have a chicken-and-egg problem where the technology is advanced enough to give a good return, but is only truly economically feasible once mass-production lowers the price. But you can't get mass production until there's lesser production, but at lesser production it's not profitable. The incentive is designed to get around this problem, so it's profitable now, and once the price lowers due to mass production, it becomes feasible without the incentive.
You know that hydroelectric was based on "incentives", right? The Hoover Dam was entirely a government-funded project. You can't exactly mass-produce dams, so this isn't a totally analogue example, but it is an example of successful alternative energy implementation based on government subsidies, no?
Corn ethanol would be an example of a bad subsidy, to be sure, but pretty much everything to do with agriculture in our country is fucked up by the corn lobby. The lesson is not that government subsidies are bad as an idea. It means that like most things some implementations are bad, some good.
If wind mills are only economical with subsidies now -- I'm not convinced that's the case any more, but even still if it gets more built -- then that sounds like a fine use of taxpayer money to me, since of all the alternative energy sources wind power has the fewest drawbacks of any of them. In fact the worst thing you can say about it is that it won't replace all of our coal plants. Big woop, it's a step in the right direction.
Apparently, it does. Entangled particles *always* have opposite angular momentum. This has been observed experimentally. It may not be accurate to say that one particle is "transmitting" to another. It may be more accurate to say that each particle is independently reading the same variable in some higher dimension. But something is happening. It's not a trick.
No, it doesn't transmit information. Any and all information was transmitted along with the particles themselves when you separated them initially at sub-light speeds.
Yet at the same time, as you say, the "spooky action at a distance", i.e. an interaction faster than light, is actually occurring as it has been observed. Which just makes the situation even stranger. It implies that "information" in and of itself has physical properties that constrain behaviors in the universe, and FTL is okay as long as it doesn't bring any information with it.
Whether or not we can use this information to transmit information of our choosing is another issue entirely.
And one that appears to be as impossible as actually traveling faster than light. If you can send information faster than light, then it is possible to violate causality -- i.e. with the help of a few message relays traveling at relativistic speeds, you could send a message into your own past. Imagine you were in a ship that was rigged to blow up when it received a signal. By using these relays to send the signal, you could cause the ship to explode before you sent the signal.
Causality -- "effects" happening after "causes" according to all reference frames -- is an assumption of Relativity, but it's a pretty solid one if you think about it. So far we've been able to describe our universe as being paradox-free. It is always possible that assumption is wrong, but it isn't clear how you'd even reason about such a universe.
This is why quantum entanglement can be used in a quantum crypto system that can protect your data from being intercepted, but cannot be used to actually send messages faster than light.
Oh yeah, no doubt. But you eventually beat the encounter, didn't you?
Then you did it again the next week.
And the next week.
And again.
And again.
And no you're not even close to getting all the gear out of the raid yet (why won't [insert item here] drop?!), so you do it again.
And then again.
And I've only typed out a month and a half of "agains", and I'm not even close to how many times most raiders have repeated the same content, am I?
My raiding experience is limited, ZG in the old world, Kara and Gruul in the new one, but in both cases it's months and months and months of beating the same bosses over and over to get the gear because you have to contend with the RNG and 10-25 people needing gear. Sure in the first month you're getting to new bosses you haven't beat before, but the everything you do up to the new boss is repetition of previous attempts, and from thereafter it's doing the same thing over and over and over to try to get everyone in the raid geared up.
OP was spot on. WoW end game is about doing the same content over and over. They occasionally add something new, which is great, but especially for the "bleeding edge guilds" that you clearly consider yourself part of, that doesn't last for long and you know it.
It sounds like you're basically saying that you're upset because you want others to have to suffer as you did; i.e. classic Sophomore Syndrome.
If you're still playing, I'd suggest that you definitely want to quit before the next expansion, since nothing you're doing now will matter in 5 levels.
That's pretty standard in a lot of "RISCy" architectures, though. The POWER instruction set has a lot of ALU instructions that look like multiple operations jammed together. It has one particularly complicated shifting and masking instruction that makes me think that they decided to add programmatic access to the load data aligner in the data cache. I've always wondered if they regretted that as they changed the micro-architecture, and most likely the DC ended up being farther away from the integer scheduler. Maybe a similar motivation is behind the shifting on every alu op in ARM; I don't really know.
Ultimately, though, I think "RISC" is still a pretty valid description. Sure the complexity of some instructions strains the ideals behind RISC philosophy, but it certainly has what I consider the most important aspects of a RISC ISA: 1) Fixed instruction width. Makes superscalar instruction fetch and decode a breeze. 2) Pure load/store design. Instructions are -either- a load, a store, or an operation on registers. This makes dispatch and scheduling simpler.
These I consider critical to being "RISC", and they're also solid and easily definable characteristics. "Complexity of instructions" is subjective. Personally if I had to draw a hard and fast line, I'd say any ISA that can be completely implemented without microcode, and still follows the above two rules, qualifies as not being "too complex". I mean, it's relative, right? And since some x86 instructions get decoded into hundreds of micro-ops, I don't think a mere conjoining of two alu operations is all that bad.
Well... there's also the whole issue of writing drivers optimized for benchmarks exclusively. Both nVidia and ATI have a history of doing this kind of shit.
Oh yeah, and it'd only get worse if there was a true industry standard set of benchmarks rather than an ad-hoc and de-facto standard used on enthusiast sites. You see it all the time in SPEC submissions, where they will use all kinds of crazy compiler tricks to optimize only for one benchmark in spec. The Intel compiler used to be considered useless outside of spec submissions since it made crazy-fast code, but couldn't compile everything. Other companies used all other kinds of dirty tricks too, completely changing algorithms in ways no general purpose compiler could ever do validly, but because they knew exactly what program they were compiling they could.
In the end, just like SPEC is useful despite all the problems, I think the industry really needs a standard for measuring system performance. It's just a road with so many political and business pot holes that I doubt anyone, especially relatively small and vulnerable AMD, wants to go down it.
That's a total of multiple bulbs, I'm certain. Which isn't that uncommon around bathroom mirrors or living/dinning room tables. E.g. the ceiling fan at my house (rarely used) has 3 100W bulbs.
My suggestion is to slap a number on your standards. e.g. PC Gaming Score: 710 for this years Ultra, and 920 for next years. Every last mouth breather out there knows that higher numbers are usually better and will assume so, even when they aren't.
Now, it's important to note that these numbers aren't quite like a benchmark. Having one really fast component shouldn't quality a system for a number high enough to play a game when it has other components that will make that game unplayable. These numbers can't be mindless metrics that come out of a benchmark. It has to take all components into consideration, especially the bottlenecks. The goal is to provide a single number that a user can look at and say: Okay, the required number on gameX is lower, so I can play it. No worries.
AMD wanted to do exactly that, and talked a lot about it back in the day when they first started using the modelhertz ratings on their processors. They wanted to have a full-system performance number in several areas (i.e. business, content, games) that would let customers choose rigs based on what they wanted. But there were ultimately 2 huge problems and a 3rd relatively minor problem:
1) OEMs didn't like it. OEMs prefer to be able to market based on the processor, the amount of RAM, and a couple other basic specs. They don't want the effect of things like the cheaper, high-CAS latency RAM and the craptacular chipset they used to become blatantly obvious via low scores and thus explain why their offering is $100 cheaper than a competitor's with superficially equal specs. They would have been okay only using it on high-end gaming rigs, but that mostly defeats the purpose.
2) Intel. Intel was never going to buy in to an AMD-concocted perf rating scheme, especially not in a period where AMD held a performance advantage, but realistically not even when Intel was ahead. And when your number rating scheme misses 80-90% of the market, it's pretty useless. About all it would do is point out above-mentioned performance deficiencies in some AMD-based products, while leaving the Best Buy clerk perfectly free to answer the question of "well how does this Intel-based PC [with equal number of cut corners] perform?" with "Great!"
3) Picking benchmarks. You have to change them over time, because a game perf score based on Quake 3 (the FPS benchmark du jour back when this was all being proposed) would be a ludicrous way to rate a modern PC, but then you have problems with the relative scores of old PCs changing. And the politics. You may be aware of the politicking that goes on at SPEC, now imagine if SPEC CPU numbers were the primary metric used in consumer-level marketing. When you're only rating your own parts, you can make whatever changes you want. Which is why ultimately AMD's modelhertz ratings and now their supposed system-wide scores are only going to apply to systems with AMD and only AMD parts in them.
Since then, AMD has pretty much completely shut up about the issue. Now what they're talking about is superficially the same idea, but as you noticed from the branding, it is not going to be very helpful for a wide number of customers. I don't expect this to be a hit with the OEMs either, maybe restricted solely to their high-end gaming lines if anything.
Oh, and seriously, AMD needs to learn to stop putting sentence punctuation into proper nouns. It makes no sense.
The thing is, that is quite frankly bogus - thanks to differing age limits, it's illegal to possess photos which are of people who are over the age of consent and which don't involve any sort of abuse. (There are cases of 16/17 year olds being convicted for taking nude photos of themselces possessing nude photos of their similarly-aged boyfriend/girlfriend.)
Yes that's absolutely true, and the law absolutely needs to be made sane with regards to this kind of thing. And it really isn't all that hard, either, you usually only need to add a buffer around a child's age of 1-3 years to keep the slightly-but-not-creepily older boyfriend/girlfriend out of trouble, and do the obvious thing of not making anything the person does to themselves illegal. Sadly, with as emotionally charged as this issue is, even adding some measure of sanity to the law can be spun as "Congressman So-and-so loves child predators!"
Notwithstanding the above plea for sanity, I still think that using an actual child's likeness to create faux porn is a form of abuse. Not nearly to the extent of direct physical and sexual abuse (and any recordings of such), but still worse than your average photoshop of Britney. If you want to draw a cartoon of an underage character, go ahead, nobody is hurt. Using a real child's image? No, that is a violation of the child's rights, and a despicable one at that.
Because the black crime/poverty/violence problem crosses cultures, and even pervades black countries, the onus is on you to prove that the problem is external.
No, wrong, there is no "default" point of view that is someone's onus to dispel, except the null hypothesis that it's all due to chance. Someone has posed the hypothesis that the difference in incarceration rates is due to society and culture, someone else said it's racial. The onus is on anyone putting forth one of these hypothesis. If they fail to do so, that doesn't make someone else's hypothesis true.
And I think you'll find that if you start looking at the socio-economics across countries, especially if you start looking at crime in non-black communities and countries, you'll find that economics first, and politics second, are the dominating factors, not race.
Furthermore, for your point to be useful, you must show that the "society and culture" problem is solvable.
I don't know that it is, but you completely missed what society they were talking about. We're talking about the society of the United States, of which blacks are just one part, and you therefore can't consider black culture in the U.S. in isolation. And if you think the society as it arose was an automatic effect of them being here, I think you've got your history backwards. Besides, go back in time, and we could just as easily be talking about violence in Italian American or Irish American communities. Think that's an inherent problem of those people too?
And if all cultures are indeed equivalent, yet some cultures fail miserably, it must be because another culture is holding them down, right?
Right, so you are questioning the idea that a culture failing implies that it was held down by another. This is a logical.
But do you also question the idea that a culture holding down another culture implies that the oppressed culture is more likely to fail? Because that would be completely illogical.
And in many cases of what you're calling "automatic", history is completely clear that such oppression has occurred. Not all, but a great, great many. Your rhetorical question only makes sense in the absence of any evidence one way or the other.
And if you want to look even farther back in time to find a way to blame any failure on inherent inferiority, asking why it was that Europeans were able to oppress Africans and Native Americans, I recommend this book.
Would you withhold it from them in order to prop up your belief that the races are identical?
Haha, this sounds just like the "women don't want to work with computers!" If this is your tack, step one is ask what they want, not assume that their desires just happen to perfectly match your social biases.
What does the intent of the law cover that is not covered by existing laws on this topic? Under what justification do you classify that as "Child Porn"-- a sex offense and very Serious Issue(tm) as opposed to something more mundane?
The existing law would treat this as trademark or copyright infringement or whatever. Yet in the same way in which this is not the same as photographing actual abuse, neither is it the same as merely using a child's picture in an advertisement without consent. Because it is child porn, but not child porn of the type that is also coincident with child sexual abuse. It's more mundane than child abuse, less mundane than your typical abuse of a person's image.
Like I said, I highly doubt the law makes the distinction, it already is mostly oblivious to any distinctions in the nature of the crime. I just think that there is also a distinction between this and truly mundane crimes that is worth making.
On that topic, is it somehow substantially different if someone modifies a picture of a 17 year old vs. a picture of a 18 year old or a 50 year old?
Maybe there isn't but there sure is if it's a picture of an 8 year old. You have to draw a line somewhere. 18 is arbitrary, to be sure, but on the other hand remember that 18 is not the age at which we assume you magically become mature and unexploitable. It's the age at which we, as a society, have decided that we stop caring if you aren't.
I'm not completely opposed to changing the age, either. More important to me, though, as long as we are talking about closing "loopholes", is bringing some sanity to the way in which the limit is applied, such that girls can no longer be made criminals for taking a picture of themselves for example.
So who are they trying to protect, exactly? I thought the whole rational basis for the prohibition of child pornography is the very legitimate concern over the children that are abused to make it.
If there is no abuse, and, indeed, no actual children involved, then what the hell is the justification?
Well there are actual children involved, the ones whose photos are used to create the faux-porn. Instead of the child being directly abused, it's their image that is being abused. We already have laws regarding using someone's likeness without their consent, your face is considered something you own and its unwelcomed use a violation of our privacy, and that's for adults. Think about how you'd feel if you saw your child's picture pasted onto porn, or how the child would feel, and I think there are legitimate, rational issues regarding the child's rights here. That's what we should be trying to protect.
Now I used the word "abuse" in the last paragraph, but clearly it isn't the same kind of abuse. I don't think the penalties for this form of privacy violation should match those of child rape or having recordings of child rape. We should be vigilant protecting a child's rights, but not with same force with which we protect their person.
The question is: while I agree in some ways with the intent of the law, can I expect that it will actually be sanely written? Or is this simply going to broaden the brush with which the color "sex offender" is painted? I don't know, haven't read the law, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the latter.
You got me there until poor box office sales: in fact, kids *loved* Phantom Menance and *that* sold movie (race was just worth that). Ohh, your childhood memories are ruined. How pitty. Your problem:)
You're right, it would have at least made money. Compared to the box office sales it got being a Star Wars prequel? No, not even close, and you know it. The name Star Wars was the reason so many parents took their kids. Otherwise, pick your mediocre for-kids CGI summer movie whose name you can't even remember, and PM would have done no better.
But if you "got me", then you understand that I'm not saying my childhood memories are ruined. No, indeed, those memories are the only thing that elevated this movie above complete crap, but they also put the difference in quality into sharp relief.
It was entertaining if you didn't took it too seriously.
So is 90% of CGI schlock. But not very entertaining; most of that movie is boring, and would be doubly so without Star Wars backing up those scenes. The pod race and light saber battle are the only things in that movie that are worth watching.
Obviously, for fans who have imagined their own version of Star Wars that was huge problem.
And for fans with low standards it was no problem, but they're unwilling to admit that had this not been Star Wars, they wouldn't be defending it because they wouldn't have cared about this movie at all because it was not a good movie.
(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public Uh, that comma is not an "or". It means that distribution of a work by making it available on a computer network is a crime. Yet until distribution has actually occurred, then the terms of that clause are not satisfied. "Making it available on a computer network" is by itself not sufficient. The "distribution" part is not optional.
And the 8th District Court of Appeals agrees with me, so while IANAL, I'm going to go with what they say.
(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, Uh, that comma is not an "or". It means that distribution of a work by making it available on a computer network is a crime. Yet until distribution has actually occurred, then the terms of that clause are not satisfied. "Making it available on a computer network" is by itself not sufficient. The "distribution" part is not optional.
And the 8th District Court of Appeals agrees with me, so while IANAL, I'm going to go with what they say.
But then again, my favourite Matrix movie was the second one, so what do I know... For what it's worth, Ebert agrees with me.
Comparing that review to his review of The Matrix, it seems to me more like that by the time he watched the second movie, the things that bothered him with the first one like the lack of an answer to all the intriguing questions presented and settling everything through a kung-fu and gun battle cliche that's effectively just a video game fight, simply stopped bothering him and he went along for the ride. Doesn't mean he actually likes the movie more, and he never says he does. He chides The Matrix by comparing it to similar films like Dark City that go all the way and provide a transformative ending, saying that he wants a "Third Act", something which Reloaded certainly doesn't provide.
But hey, let's find out what he really thinks in his review of Matrix Revolutions. Therein he says:
The first "Matrix" was the best because it really did toy with the conflict between illusion and reality -- between the world we think we inhabit, and its underlying nature. The problem of "Matrix Reloaded" and "Matrix Revolutions" is that they are action pictures that are forced to exist in a world that undercuts the reality of the action. So there we go. Ebert, like most of us, found The Matrix to be the best and most intriguing film, with Reloaded a fun action romp whose philosophical "speeches provide not meaning, but the effect of meaning", and with Revolutions a pretty CGI fest but ultimately disappointing.
Most people disliked SR because they got bored with the flashy graphics after 30mins or so, and after that the movie didn't offer them anything else they liked.
Hell, I got bored with SR halfway through the trailer.
Well if "NOOOOOOO!" wasn't a reference to the end of Ep. III, then the tiny bit of humor created by repetition of idiotic lines is gone, leaving nothing. Hm.
Great, now I had to explain to my non-nerdy wife what the hell "rick rolling" is, so she could understand my loud outburst of laughter.
I can only assume you did so by lying and saying it was like a special kind of pastry or something, and had her click a youtube link to see how it was made...
Well I'm not going to defend his acting ability, but even Natalie Portman gave bad performances in those movies, and I know she can act. I blame bad directing.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this isn't a slap in the face, here's why.
;)
It isn't a slap in the face because only a compete whiny bitch would think that others being allowed to enjoy the content that they themselves had over a year's head start on was somehow a personal insult directed at them. It's like a Bentley owner thinking it's a "slap in the face" that middle-class people are allowed to buy a Lexus.
Oh, but your other reasons are completely valid too.
More things that were supposed to be dark matter that turned out to be pretty ordinary matter.
No, that's not true. We already knew there was "ordinary" matter we hadn't found, we knew it wasn't "dark" matter, we just didn't know where it was. Now we found a bunch of it.
I am all for renewable energy, but I disagree with the idea of economic incentives. There have been a large number of potential renewable energy sources, and many people seem to have one that is their favorate. None of these (except hydroelectricity) have become major sources of power, due to various obstacles that still must be overcome. I think that once these ideas are economically feasable (*if* they are feasable) they will get investment and be implemented.
Well the concept behind incentives is that sometimes you have a chicken-and-egg problem where the technology is advanced enough to give a good return, but is only truly economically feasible once mass-production lowers the price. But you can't get mass production until there's lesser production, but at lesser production it's not profitable. The incentive is designed to get around this problem, so it's profitable now, and once the price lowers due to mass production, it becomes feasible without the incentive.
You know that hydroelectric was based on "incentives", right? The Hoover Dam was entirely a government-funded project. You can't exactly mass-produce dams, so this isn't a totally analogue example, but it is an example of successful alternative energy implementation based on government subsidies, no?
Corn ethanol would be an example of a bad subsidy, to be sure, but pretty much everything to do with agriculture in our country is fucked up by the corn lobby. The lesson is not that government subsidies are bad as an idea. It means that like most things some implementations are bad, some good.
If wind mills are only economical with subsidies now -- I'm not convinced that's the case any more, but even still if it gets more built -- then that sounds like a fine use of taxpayer money to me, since of all the alternative energy sources wind power has the fewest drawbacks of any of them. In fact the worst thing you can say about it is that it won't replace all of our coal plants. Big woop, it's a step in the right direction.
Well with a little initiative on your part, exciting things like that could happen in your parking lot every day.
I'm just sayin'.
Apparently, it does. Entangled particles *always* have opposite angular momentum. This has been observed experimentally. It may not be accurate to say that one particle is "transmitting" to another. It may be more accurate to say that each particle is independently reading the same variable in some higher dimension. But something is happening. It's not a trick.
No, it doesn't transmit information. Any and all information was transmitted along with the particles themselves when you separated them initially at sub-light speeds.
Yet at the same time, as you say, the "spooky action at a distance", i.e. an interaction faster than light, is actually occurring as it has been observed. Which just makes the situation even stranger. It implies that "information" in and of itself has physical properties that constrain behaviors in the universe, and FTL is okay as long as it doesn't bring any information with it.
Whether or not we can use this information to transmit information of our choosing is another issue entirely.
And one that appears to be as impossible as actually traveling faster than light. If you can send information faster than light, then it is possible to violate causality -- i.e. with the help of a few message relays traveling at relativistic speeds, you could send a message into your own past. Imagine you were in a ship that was rigged to blow up when it received a signal. By using these relays to send the signal, you could cause the ship to explode before you sent the signal.
Causality -- "effects" happening after "causes" according to all reference frames -- is an assumption of Relativity, but it's a pretty solid one if you think about it. So far we've been able to describe our universe as being paradox-free. It is always possible that assumption is wrong, but it isn't clear how you'd even reason about such a universe.
This is why quantum entanglement can be used in a quantum crypto system that can protect your data from being intercepted, but cannot be used to actually send messages faster than light.
Encounters when they first come out are HARD.
Oh yeah, no doubt. But you eventually beat the encounter, didn't you?
Then you did it again the next week.
And the next week.
And again.
And again.
And no you're not even close to getting all the gear out of the raid yet (why won't [insert item here] drop?!), so you do it again.
And then again.
And I've only typed out a month and a half of "agains", and I'm not even close to how many times most raiders have repeated the same content, am I?
My raiding experience is limited, ZG in the old world, Kara and Gruul in the new one, but in both cases it's months and months and months of beating the same bosses over and over to get the gear because you have to contend with the RNG and 10-25 people needing gear. Sure in the first month you're getting to new bosses you haven't beat before, but the everything you do up to the new boss is repetition of previous attempts, and from thereafter it's doing the same thing over and over and over to try to get everyone in the raid geared up.
OP was spot on. WoW end game is about doing the same content over and over. They occasionally add something new, which is great, but especially for the "bleeding edge guilds" that you clearly consider yourself part of, that doesn't last for long and you know it.
It sounds like you're basically saying that you're upset because you want others to have to suffer as you did; i.e. classic Sophomore Syndrome.
If you're still playing, I'd suggest that you definitely want to quit before the next expansion, since nothing you're doing now will matter in 5 levels.
Who puts a halogen floor lamp in their bathroom?
That's pretty standard in a lot of "RISCy" architectures, though. The POWER instruction set has a lot of ALU instructions that look like multiple operations jammed together. It has one particularly complicated shifting and masking instruction that makes me think that they decided to add programmatic access to the load data aligner in the data cache. I've always wondered if they regretted that as they changed the micro-architecture, and most likely the DC ended up being farther away from the integer scheduler. Maybe a similar motivation is behind the shifting on every alu op in ARM; I don't really know.
Ultimately, though, I think "RISC" is still a pretty valid description. Sure the complexity of some instructions strains the ideals behind RISC philosophy, but it certainly has what I consider the most important aspects of a RISC ISA:
1) Fixed instruction width. Makes superscalar instruction fetch and decode a breeze.
2) Pure load/store design. Instructions are -either- a load, a store, or an operation on registers. This makes dispatch and scheduling simpler.
These I consider critical to being "RISC", and they're also solid and easily definable characteristics. "Complexity of instructions" is subjective. Personally if I had to draw a hard and fast line, I'd say any ISA that can be completely implemented without microcode, and still follows the above two rules, qualifies as not being "too complex". I mean, it's relative, right? And since some x86 instructions get decoded into hundreds of micro-ops, I don't think a mere conjoining of two alu operations is all that bad.
Well ... there's also the whole issue of writing drivers optimized for benchmarks exclusively. Both nVidia and ATI have a history of doing this kind of shit.
Oh yeah, and it'd only get worse if there was a true industry standard set of benchmarks rather than an ad-hoc and de-facto standard used on enthusiast sites. You see it all the time in SPEC submissions, where they will use all kinds of crazy compiler tricks to optimize only for one benchmark in spec. The Intel compiler used to be considered useless outside of spec submissions since it made crazy-fast code, but couldn't compile everything. Other companies used all other kinds of dirty tricks too, completely changing algorithms in ways no general purpose compiler could ever do validly, but because they knew exactly what program they were compiling they could.
In the end, just like SPEC is useful despite all the problems, I think the industry really needs a standard for measuring system performance. It's just a road with so many political and business pot holes that I doubt anyone, especially relatively small and vulnerable AMD, wants to go down it.
That's a total of multiple bulbs, I'm certain. Which isn't that uncommon around bathroom mirrors or living/dinning room tables. E.g. the ceiling fan at my house (rarely used) has 3 100W bulbs.
My suggestion is to slap a number on your standards. e.g. PC Gaming Score: 710 for this years Ultra, and 920 for next years. Every last mouth breather out there knows that higher numbers are usually better and will assume so, even when they aren't.
Now, it's important to note that these numbers aren't quite like a benchmark. Having one really fast component shouldn't quality a system for a number high enough to play a game when it has other components that will make that game unplayable. These numbers can't be mindless metrics that come out of a benchmark. It has to take all components into consideration, especially the bottlenecks. The goal is to provide a single number that a user can look at and say: Okay, the required number on gameX is lower, so I can play it. No worries.
AMD wanted to do exactly that, and talked a lot about it back in the day when they first started using the modelhertz ratings on their processors. They wanted to have a full-system performance number in several areas (i.e. business, content, games) that would let customers choose rigs based on what they wanted. But there were ultimately 2 huge problems and a 3rd relatively minor problem:
1) OEMs didn't like it. OEMs prefer to be able to market based on the processor, the amount of RAM, and a couple other basic specs. They don't want the effect of things like the cheaper, high-CAS latency RAM and the craptacular chipset they used to become blatantly obvious via low scores and thus explain why their offering is $100 cheaper than a competitor's with superficially equal specs. They would have been okay only using it on high-end gaming rigs, but that mostly defeats the purpose.
2) Intel. Intel was never going to buy in to an AMD-concocted perf rating scheme, especially not in a period where AMD held a performance advantage, but realistically not even when Intel was ahead. And when your number rating scheme misses 80-90% of the market, it's pretty useless. About all it would do is point out above-mentioned performance deficiencies in some AMD-based products, while leaving the Best Buy clerk perfectly free to answer the question of "well how does this Intel-based PC [with equal number of cut corners] perform?" with "Great!"
3) Picking benchmarks. You have to change them over time, because a game perf score based on Quake 3 (the FPS benchmark du jour back when this was all being proposed) would be a ludicrous way to rate a modern PC, but then you have problems with the relative scores of old PCs changing. And the politics. You may be aware of the politicking that goes on at SPEC, now imagine if SPEC CPU numbers were the primary metric used in consumer-level marketing. When you're only rating your own parts, you can make whatever changes you want. Which is why ultimately AMD's modelhertz ratings and now their supposed system-wide scores are only going to apply to systems with AMD and only AMD parts in them.
Since then, AMD has pretty much completely shut up about the issue. Now what they're talking about is superficially the same idea, but as you noticed from the branding, it is not going to be very helpful for a wide number of customers. I don't expect this to be a hit with the OEMs either, maybe restricted solely to their high-end gaming lines if anything.
Oh, and seriously, AMD needs to learn to stop putting sentence punctuation into proper nouns. It makes no sense.
The thing is, that is quite frankly bogus - thanks to differing age limits, it's illegal to possess photos which are of people who are over the age of consent and which don't involve any sort of abuse. (There are cases of 16/17 year olds being convicted for taking nude photos of themselces possessing nude photos of their similarly-aged boyfriend/girlfriend.)
Yes that's absolutely true, and the law absolutely needs to be made sane with regards to this kind of thing. And it really isn't all that hard, either, you usually only need to add a buffer around a child's age of 1-3 years to keep the slightly-but-not-creepily older boyfriend/girlfriend out of trouble, and do the obvious thing of not making anything the person does to themselves illegal. Sadly, with as emotionally charged as this issue is, even adding some measure of sanity to the law can be spun as "Congressman So-and-so loves child predators!"
Notwithstanding the above plea for sanity, I still think that using an actual child's likeness to create faux porn is a form of abuse. Not nearly to the extent of direct physical and sexual abuse (and any recordings of such), but still worse than your average photoshop of Britney. If you want to draw a cartoon of an underage character, go ahead, nobody is hurt. Using a real child's image? No, that is a violation of the child's rights, and a despicable one at that.
Because the black crime/poverty/violence problem crosses cultures, and even pervades black countries, the onus is on you to prove that the problem is external.
No, wrong, there is no "default" point of view that is someone's onus to dispel, except the null hypothesis that it's all due to chance. Someone has posed the hypothesis that the difference in incarceration rates is due to society and culture, someone else said it's racial. The onus is on anyone putting forth one of these hypothesis. If they fail to do so, that doesn't make someone else's hypothesis true.
And I think you'll find that if you start looking at the socio-economics across countries, especially if you start looking at crime in non-black communities and countries, you'll find that economics first, and politics second, are the dominating factors, not race.
Furthermore, for your point to be useful, you must show that the "society and culture" problem is solvable.
I don't know that it is, but you completely missed what society they were talking about. We're talking about the society of the United States, of which blacks are just one part, and you therefore can't consider black culture in the U.S. in isolation. And if you think the society as it arose was an automatic effect of them being here, I think you've got your history backwards. Besides, go back in time, and we could just as easily be talking about violence in Italian American or Irish American communities. Think that's an inherent problem of those people too?
And if all cultures are indeed equivalent, yet some cultures fail miserably, it must be because another culture is holding them down, right?
Right, so you are questioning the idea that a culture failing implies that it was held down by another. This is a logical.
But do you also question the idea that a culture holding down another culture implies that the oppressed culture is more likely to fail? Because that would be completely illogical.
And in many cases of what you're calling "automatic", history is completely clear that such oppression has occurred. Not all, but a great, great many. Your rhetorical question only makes sense in the absence of any evidence one way or the other.
And if you want to look even farther back in time to find a way to blame any failure on inherent inferiority, asking why it was that Europeans were able to oppress Africans and Native Americans, I recommend this book.
Would you withhold it from them in order to prop up your belief that the races are identical?
Haha, this sounds just like the "women don't want to work with computers!" If this is your tack, step one is ask what they want, not assume that their desires just happen to perfectly match your social biases.
What does the intent of the law cover that is not covered by existing laws on this topic? Under what justification do you classify that as "Child Porn"-- a sex offense and very Serious Issue(tm) as opposed to something more mundane?
The existing law would treat this as trademark or copyright infringement or whatever. Yet in the same way in which this is not the same as photographing actual abuse, neither is it the same as merely using a child's picture in an advertisement without consent. Because it is child porn, but not child porn of the type that is also coincident with child sexual abuse. It's more mundane than child abuse, less mundane than your typical abuse of a person's image.
Like I said, I highly doubt the law makes the distinction, it already is mostly oblivious to any distinctions in the nature of the crime. I just think that there is also a distinction between this and truly mundane crimes that is worth making.
On that topic, is it somehow substantially different if someone modifies a picture of a 17 year old vs. a picture of a 18 year old or a 50 year old?
Maybe there isn't but there sure is if it's a picture of an 8 year old. You have to draw a line somewhere. 18 is arbitrary, to be sure, but on the other hand remember that 18 is not the age at which we assume you magically become mature and unexploitable. It's the age at which we, as a society, have decided that we stop caring if you aren't.
I'm not completely opposed to changing the age, either. More important to me, though, as long as we are talking about closing "loopholes", is bringing some sanity to the way in which the limit is applied, such that girls can no longer be made criminals for taking a picture of themselves for example.
So who are they trying to protect, exactly? I thought the whole rational basis for the prohibition of child pornography is the very legitimate concern over the children that are abused to make it.
If there is no abuse, and, indeed, no actual children involved, then what the hell is the justification?
Well there are actual children involved, the ones whose photos are used to create the faux-porn. Instead of the child being directly abused, it's their image that is being abused. We already have laws regarding using someone's likeness without their consent, your face is considered something you own and its unwelcomed use a violation of our privacy, and that's for adults. Think about how you'd feel if you saw your child's picture pasted onto porn, or how the child would feel, and I think there are legitimate, rational issues regarding the child's rights here. That's what we should be trying to protect.
Now I used the word "abuse" in the last paragraph, but clearly it isn't the same kind of abuse. I don't think the penalties for this form of privacy violation should match those of child rape or having recordings of child rape. We should be vigilant protecting a child's rights, but not with same force with which we protect their person.
The question is: while I agree in some ways with the intent of the law, can I expect that it will actually be sanely written? Or is this simply going to broaden the brush with which the color "sex offender" is painted? I don't know, haven't read the law, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the latter.
You got me there until poor box office sales: in fact, kids *loved* Phantom Menance and *that* sold movie (race was just worth that). Ohh, your childhood memories are ruined. How pitty. Your problem :)
You're right, it would have at least made money. Compared to the box office sales it got being a Star Wars prequel? No, not even close, and you know it. The name Star Wars was the reason so many parents took their kids. Otherwise, pick your mediocre for-kids CGI summer movie whose name you can't even remember, and PM would have done no better.
But if you "got me", then you understand that I'm not saying my childhood memories are ruined. No, indeed, those memories are the only thing that elevated this movie above complete crap, but they also put the difference in quality into sharp relief.
It was entertaining if you didn't took it too seriously.
So is 90% of CGI schlock. But not very entertaining; most of that movie is boring, and would be doubly so without Star Wars backing up those scenes. The pod race and light saber battle are the only things in that movie that are worth watching.
Obviously, for fans who have imagined their own version of Star Wars that was huge problem.
And for fans with low standards it was no problem, but they're unwilling to admit that had this not been Star Wars, they wouldn't be defending it because they wouldn't have cared about this movie at all because it was not a good movie.
Ah well that makes sense.
And the 8th District Court of Appeals agrees with me, so while IANAL, I'm going to go with what they say.
And the 8th District Court of Appeals agrees with me, so while IANAL, I'm going to go with what they say.
Comparing that review to his review of The Matrix, it seems to me more like that by the time he watched the second movie, the things that bothered him with the first one like the lack of an answer to all the intriguing questions presented and settling everything through a kung-fu and gun battle cliche that's effectively just a video game fight, simply stopped bothering him and he went along for the ride. Doesn't mean he actually likes the movie more, and he never says he does. He chides The Matrix by comparing it to similar films like Dark City that go all the way and provide a transformative ending, saying that he wants a "Third Act", something which Reloaded certainly doesn't provide.
But hey, let's find out what he really thinks in his review of Matrix Revolutions. Therein he says: The first "Matrix" was the best because it really did toy with the conflict between illusion and reality -- between the world we think we inhabit, and its underlying nature. The problem of "Matrix Reloaded" and "Matrix Revolutions" is that they are action pictures that are forced to exist in a world that undercuts the reality of the action. So there we go. Ebert, like most of us, found The Matrix to be the best and most intriguing film, with Reloaded a fun action romp whose philosophical "speeches provide not meaning, but the effect of meaning", and with Revolutions a pretty CGI fest but ultimately disappointing.
I knew he had better taste than that.
Most people disliked SR because they got bored with the flashy graphics after 30mins or so, and after that the movie didn't offer them anything else they liked.
Hell, I got bored with SR halfway through the trailer.
Well if "NOOOOOOO!" wasn't a reference to the end of Ep. III, then the tiny bit of humor created by repetition of idiotic lines is gone, leaving nothing. Hm.
Great, now I had to explain to my non-nerdy wife what the hell "rick rolling" is, so she could understand my loud outburst of laughter.
I can only assume you did so by lying and saying it was like a special kind of pastry or something, and had her click a youtube link to see how it was made...
Well I'm not going to defend his acting ability, but even Natalie Portman gave bad performances in those movies, and I know she can act. I blame bad directing.