It's called memory protection and it's been in x86-based processors since the 386. It, too, requires software support because "process" is an operating system concept, not a hardware concept. The days where any process could access any region of memory at will are long, long, gone. Yet vulnerabilities persist, even though your magic bullet has been implemented. Perhaps it is more difficult than that?
'The vulnerability is caused due to an boundary error within the handling of animated cursors and can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow via a specially crafted animated cursor file', January 3, 2007
Assuming that Windows was running on NX-enabled hardware and had software support for NX, that still doesn't stop an overflow from spilling past the NX-marked stack into a non-NX region of memory.
A simple way to prevent that would be to have an unused page between the sack and any executable memory, and mark that page read-only so any overflow that tried to write past the end of the stack region would hit this page and cause an access violation.
That's all software, though, using mechanisms that again have been in place since the 386.
There's only so much hardware can do, and it's doing most of it. The problems and solutions are all in software.
Yeah, around here, the office lights are on all day anyway. I'd bet the majority of lighting energy use are in office buildings, not in private homes, for exactly this reason. So the new DST does fuck-all for that.
But what about at home? Well for me the difference is between getting home at dusk, or after dark. So I either turn the lights on immediately, or turn them on twenty minutes after I get home. The only lights I leave on if I'm not in the room are the living room lights, so we're talking one or two light bulbs for 20 minutes.
In some homes you could imagine it making a difference of several lightbulbs for as much as an hour, but that's still a small amount of energy in a house that is using the majority of its electricity in the form of heating/AC and running the refrigerator.
The whole thing was just busy-work for Congress, and frankly I think they have a lot more to get busy with. The fact that its major result is just to annoy IT people just puts the cherry on top of this Fuck-Up Sunday.
That was the GP's point, as he said: "You can even fit all the FFVII discs on a 4GB stick."
Did you hallucinate a "can't", or have you just been trained by the internet to always insert a snarky "last I checked" into every post even if you're agreeing?
*cough* So how do you explain that when x86-64 appeared, some benchmark showed that the shift from x86 mode and its 8 registers to x86-64 mode with its 16 registers improved the performance up to 20% on the same CPU?
Sure 20% is not earth shattering, but it's still a lot.
Yeah, the OP was wrong about that. Register renaming only allows you to have more than one instruction that writes to e.g. EAX in flight at one time. However no instruction can see both an "old" renamed version of EAX and a "new" version at the same time -- EAX always points to the most recent writer of EAX in the mapper. So as a programmer you still can only make use of as many different values in registers as there are architectural registers, and if you want to use more you have to 'spill' onto the stack.
The OP mentions "accesses near the top of the stack" which means memory which means cache. While L1 data caches are fast, they are almost always slower than register accesses. Even if they aren't in an ideal case, store-to-load-forwarding is a bizatch that can throw a kink in the works. So yeah, x86-64's additional 8 registers were a big help, vastly reducing one of the only remaining true deficiencies of x86. Most RISC architectures have 32 or more registers, but research I've seen suggests 16 is the sweet spot. Meaning x86-64 probably has slighly too few, but the penalty for that "slightly" is the reasonably fast L1 access.
The result is that the OP's overall point, which is that whatever minor inefficiencies are inherent to x86 are vastly overweighed by technological advancement, engineering cleverness, and economies of scale, is true.
As for the rest of your post, yes x86 complex encoding is useful to save memory and cache bandwidth, but ARM's Thumb2 encoding has a nearly similar 'compactness' and its decoding is still much simpler than x86's decoding I think: only two different size of instruction, load/store architecture, etc.
Load/store is less efficient storage wise than x86's load-op-store architecture, as you only have to encode the address once for a load - agu op - store trio, and you only have one opcode. That's probably a very tiny benefit, though, even smaller than the penalty for decoding x86. Which is a small penalty. If you're AMD or Intel who have spent years developing fast superscalar x86 decoders, the decoding of x86 is simply not a big deal. It's just not that big a penalty, and in the end this whole compactness of code/complexity of decode tradeoff vanishes in the wash.
You laugh, but yeah, that's half the point. What's the other half? Well, see, the French may like to run away, but they are pretty clever.
So here's the idea: Some army (lets say the Germans) are chasing after the French. The French all jump on board their super TGV, which takes off down the track. The Germans stop on the track and say "Ha ha! They are running away! We can't catch their train, but we can just follow it to wherever they went, the fools!" So they start racing down the track following the French train. Meanwhile, far down the track, the French stop the train and get off, and go hide in the woods. The last one to go sets the train in reverse and opens the throttle. Now the last thing the Germans would expect is for the French train to come back, so they're caught completely off guard by the 400MPH TRAIN IN THE KISSER!
When you are truly skilled at fleeing, you can turn a retreat into an offensive.
8 MONTHS later 40% of these children who saw that video for only TEN MINUTES still repeated the aggressive behavior.
That aggressive behavior being the bludgeoning of the Bobo Doll, which is of course what they were shown that the dolls were for.
I bet the GP's kid still liked killing Nazis in Wolfenstein 8 months later too!
Holy fuck, how retarded do you have to be to think that continued violence against a toy that was shown to be an outlet for aggression actually means anything about agression in general?
Next up: Football makes you violent because even months after having played football, most football players immediately show aggressive behavior when they next play football!
Next year: Increasing the entropy of the surroundings will constitute a violation of the Clean Air Act. Do your part to limit your entropy footprint.
Don't worry, I am. Every day I add another layer of blocks to my neatly ordered stack in the corner, creating order where before there was a chaotic bag of blocks, thereby offsetting my entropy.
however, anyone who thinks the usa is special does need a comeuppance: the usa is just as hypocritical as china or russia or india or the majority of every other country in the world. at the same time, that observation is a double edged sword: the usa is no better, and NO WORSE, than these countries. seriously, find a crime the usa does, and tell me the majority of other countries in the world aren't guilty of the same thing
Okay, so the USA is no better and no worse than any other country, they commit crimes that every other country commits as well.
But the USA is better enough that they can take unilateral action to remove governments and bring Democracy to people who never asked for it. So much better, that their intent can be assumed to be just and good, no matter the actual actions taken and their practical effects.
If the contradiction isn't obvious, let me spell it out: The problem is not being better or worse yet at the same time acting as though one is so much better that they can claim moral authority. This is not balanced, this is un-balanced, as in mentally disturbed. Don't deny it, either, as intent has always been your justification for doing what would, for anyone else, be a terrible affront to human dignity. Whereas Russia doing the same thing would get no such pass for "intent". But we're no better or worse, right? Wrong, you have a clear spot of superiority for the U.S., and worst of all this superiority is not in any way connected to actual actions.
Most people who disagree with the USAs actions do not hate the USA. They in fact have a balanced opinion of the USA. They take issue with the actions, not some ephemeral good/bad quality. The U.S. is acting with an assumed moral authority that it simply doesn't have, as a result it's efforts are failing and having the opposite effect of what we supposedly "intend", and that is the problem they are addressing. You see them hating you simply because you don't connect people's opinions with cause/effect.
Imagine Jesus, standing in front of the adultress, telling the gathered crowd "Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone". Then some dude picks up a rock and chucks it at her, striking her temple and knocking her dead.
The look Jesus and everyone else would have given that guy is the look we're getting from the rest of the world.
I can't believe I never showed you the bug. It was pretty painful to see up close in the darkened PC computer lab, but like that would have stopped me. Maybe I wanted to see if you would find it on your own? Or it just slipped my mind. No idea.
In high school I wrote a program for a physics project that showed electromagnetic wave propagation and interference. Nothing that special, the end result was basically a pretty screensaver with some relevence to physics. In light of that, one of the features I added was a pull-down menu for selecting what color you wanted to use. This was back in the VGA days with a 256 color pallette and manually poking the VGA frame buffer. Due to an off-by-one error in calculating the bounding box of the pull down menu, it was possible to select an invalid index for the color, so instead of selecting a row of the pallette with my nice color gradients set up, it was one of basically random colors. The result was really trippy, so when I discovered the bug, I decided to leave it in. At the open house where my program was running through a projector some bystander discovered the bug and thought it was indeed cool and trippy.
That's about it. Most of my bugs just break shit.:)
After the bloodbath, the new executives fired some rocket launchers at observing SWAT helicopters before brushing themselves off and giving their first press release.
Without even stopping at the Pay N' Spray to get the SWAT team off their backs? Talk about brass balls!
Then they all go outside and breathe air they can see.
Hey, at least now they can see through the air to see other objects. Talk to someone who lived in LA before they got strict with their emissions regulations in the 80s; I doubt they'll tell you that merely translucent air is anything but a vast improvement.
Seriously, CA's emissions standards have been highly effective. Yes there's still pollution -- seen when flying into LAX as a big stinky brown cloud floating over downtown obscuring the skyscrapers, utterly disgusting -- which is still much less than it used to be, showing both that the regulations have worked and that even more dilligence is still necessary.
their four seasons are Wildfire, Mudslide, Earthquake, and Smog
I can't for the life of me understand why California even considers doing business with Diebold any more.
Shouldn't the list of requirements for Calfornia's voting machine aquisitions have a clause about "Company should not have repeatedly lied to California legislators, covered up known flaws, nor violated deployment policies by modifying units in the field without validation of those modifications"?
Diebold has been in trouble with California before. The fact that they can continue to even try to offer voting machines in that state kinda surprises me.
OK, these new parallel chips aren't even out yet, and software has to get the hardware before SW can improve to exploit the HW. But the HW has all the momentum, as usual. SW for parallel computing is as rudimentary as a 16bit microprocessor.
True, true. Personally I'm just glad that the chicken-egg problem has finally been broken on the desktop, so now desktop writers can start assuming that a large percentage of users will have at least two available threads.
There's already a way forward. Compiler geeks should be incorporating features of VHDL and VeriLog, inherently parallel languages, into gcc.
VHDL and Verilog both feature extremely fine-grained parallelism, because that's the nature of hardware which is what these languages describe. You can perform as many logical operations in parallel as you can put down logic gates.
I do agree we need more language support for parallelism, but I don't think using a hardware design language as the foundation is a good idea. Program-thread based parallelism will always be coarse grained compared to hardware.
Well, do _you_ need to construct a strawman _you_ can deal with? The point isn't what _I_ believe, but the contradictions other people choose to believe at the same time. So what on Earth, other than some cheap attempt to derail the topic, would it serve to shift to a completely different topic of your choosing?
No, I don't need a strawman, that's why I asked what you believe instead of forcing an assumed belief system upon you.
This is a discussion, not a lecture, so you don't get to arbitrarily restrict the topic to what other people choose to believe. Don't accuse me of shifting the topic, as that is what you did when you ignored my simple two-point explanation of why this contradiction isn't. Don't worry, I'll go over it again.
Anyway, believe whatever you will, but it's not a straw man. A _lot_ of religious drivel has been written around the premise that Mary's pregnancy is something unique and inexplicable in any other way than divine intervention.
That modern-day semi-christians have no trouble taking the bible as just a metaphor, and as "yeah, well, so it happened more than once, big deal" is one thing, but talk to some genuine bible thumpers or look back in history and you'll see those notions taken a lot more literally, and a lot more rabidly as unique one-of-a-kind miracles. Just tell one of them your "ah well, see, lots of girls end up pregnant while technically virgin: e.g., via anal sex" or "yeah, well, lots of people woke from the dead without divine intervention" ideas, and see them start foaming at the mouth, not shruging it off as "yeah, so it is, just this time it was divine."
Yes, it has been perfectly clear that you are talking about fundamentalists/literalists. Thus I ignore most of the rest of your post which is about examples of blind faith and backwards beliefs, not contradiction, as a useless segway. I know fundamentalists believe strange things, would believe whatever their religious leaders told them, would go to war or burn witches because those leaders said it was just and holy. That is all true, and makes it more strange that you would need to devise a strawman to show a contradiction in their thinking, as I will show:
First, no fundamentalist believes that Mary was merely a technical virgin. The Biblical claim is that she never laid with a man, not that she only took it up the ass. It's the same statement used to describe men laying with men, and is clearly not limited to vaginal intercourse. You can't conflate technical virginity with the sexual purity that is attributed to Mary for the purposes of your argument, because no fundamentalist ever would and this is about what fundamentalists think. It doesn't say that the virgin birth was "unique", but it does claim that it is different from any natural fertilization involving a man's semen, and hence miraculous.
Second, the whole point of the Incubus myth was that the incubus slept with the woman, and thus this has absolutely nothing to do with virgin birth.
So the miracle of virgin birth is completely distinct from cases of non-vaginal-intercourse fertilization, and the Incubi had nothing to do with virgin birth at all. Thus the belief in the Virgin Mary and in Incubi are not contradictory. QED.
Now despite the fact that this is not an example of a contradiction, it still remains that most fundamentalists, especially the medeival ones you mention, had many strange and seemingly arbitrary non-biblical beliefs. Yet out of all that, you still had to make up a falacious example of contradictory thinking on their part.
Which brings me back to what you believe, and why you feel the need to make up strawmen to prove that fundamentalists believe contradictory things. This is what I meant when I said that some people believe that they are both rational and human. Rational thought is a useful trick that humans have taught themselves. It is not the natural mode in which our brains operate, a
It's not that outrageous, now that Sega is out of the hardware business. They seem to have formed very close ties with Nintendo since then. I know to those of us who remember those awesome Genesis vs SNES smear ads it is like Satan and Jesus sitting down for a nice game of scrabble, but times have changed.
I'm not saying _I_ am confused by that, I'm saying there are and were people whose religion involves believing things that directly contradict each other. Yes, it can be easily resolved by reducing it to "so both Mary and those 'incubus victims' were just girls who got laid by a man, not by some God or demon". But that's not a reduction that a bible thumper would do, or has done.
Okay, but your example was not something that a Bible thumper would do either. It was contrived and falacious. I was questioning your need to invent contradictions where none exist. If you're going to take issue with either of these legends, it made more sense to do it from your actual viewpoint, and take issue with the beliefs themselves rather than construct a strawman you can say contradicts itself.
At the end of the day, we all believe contradictions. For example, some believe both that they are rational beings and that they are human.
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to a refrigerator, heater/AC unit, all running 24/7, times every household.
No, it isn't a lot of energy.
As demonstrated by these results.
stops process A accessing process Bs memory
It's called memory protection and it's been in x86-based processors since the 386. It, too, requires software support because "process" is an operating system concept, not a hardware concept. The days where any process could access any region of memory at will are long, long, gone. Yet vulnerabilities persist, even though your magic bullet has been implemented. Perhaps it is more difficult than that?
'The vulnerability is caused due to an boundary error within the handling of animated cursors and can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow via a specially crafted animated cursor file', January 3, 2007
Assuming that Windows was running on NX-enabled hardware and had software support for NX, that still doesn't stop an overflow from spilling past the NX-marked stack into a non-NX region of memory.
A simple way to prevent that would be to have an unused page between the sack and any executable memory, and mark that page read-only so any overflow that tried to write past the end of the stack region would hit this page and cause an access violation.
That's all software, though, using mechanisms that again have been in place since the 386.
There's only so much hardware can do, and it's doing most of it. The problems and solutions are all in software.
Yeah, around here, the office lights are on all day anyway. I'd bet the majority of lighting energy use are in office buildings, not in private homes, for exactly this reason. So the new DST does fuck-all for that.
But what about at home? Well for me the difference is between getting home at dusk, or after dark. So I either turn the lights on immediately, or turn them on twenty minutes after I get home. The only lights I leave on if I'm not in the room are the living room lights, so we're talking one or two light bulbs for 20 minutes.
In some homes you could imagine it making a difference of several lightbulbs for as much as an hour, but that's still a small amount of energy in a house that is using the majority of its electricity in the form of heating/AC and running the refrigerator.
The whole thing was just busy-work for Congress, and frankly I think they have a lot more to get busy with. The fact that its major result is just to annoy IT people just puts the cherry on top of this Fuck-Up Sunday.
That was the GP's point, as he said: "You can even fit all the FFVII discs on a 4GB stick."
Did you hallucinate a "can't", or have you just been trained by the internet to always insert a snarky "last I checked" into every post even if you're agreeing?
Despite being almost as hairy, I'm not your mom.
*cough* So how do you explain that when x86-64 appeared, some benchmark showed that the shift from x86 mode and its 8 registers to x86-64 mode with its 16 registers improved the performance up to 20% on the same CPU?
Sure 20% is not earth shattering, but it's still a lot.
Yeah, the OP was wrong about that. Register renaming only allows you to have more than one instruction that writes to e.g. EAX in flight at one time. However no instruction can see both an "old" renamed version of EAX and a "new" version at the same time -- EAX always points to the most recent writer of EAX in the mapper. So as a programmer you still can only make use of as many different values in registers as there are architectural registers, and if you want to use more you have to 'spill' onto the stack.
The OP mentions "accesses near the top of the stack" which means memory which means cache. While L1 data caches are fast, they are almost always slower than register accesses. Even if they aren't in an ideal case, store-to-load-forwarding is a bizatch that can throw a kink in the works. So yeah, x86-64's additional 8 registers were a big help, vastly reducing one of the only remaining true deficiencies of x86. Most RISC architectures have 32 or more registers, but research I've seen suggests 16 is the sweet spot. Meaning x86-64 probably has slighly too few, but the penalty for that "slightly" is the reasonably fast L1 access.
The result is that the OP's overall point, which is that whatever minor inefficiencies are inherent to x86 are vastly overweighed by technological advancement, engineering cleverness, and economies of scale, is true.
As for the rest of your post, yes x86 complex encoding is useful to save memory and cache bandwidth, but ARM's Thumb2 encoding has a nearly similar 'compactness' and its decoding is still much simpler than x86's decoding I think: only two different size of instruction, load/store architecture, etc.
Load/store is less efficient storage wise than x86's load-op-store architecture, as you only have to encode the address once for a load - agu op - store trio, and you only have one opcode. That's probably a very tiny benefit, though, even smaller than the penalty for decoding x86. Which is a small penalty. If you're AMD or Intel who have spent years developing fast superscalar x86 decoders, the decoding of x86 is simply not a big deal. It's just not that big a penalty, and in the end this whole compactness of code/complexity of decode tradeoff vanishes in the wash.
GP: You can even fit all the FFVII discs on a 4GB stick.
You: FF7 was 3 discs, and each one was = 750MB. Last I checked, that's = 2.25GB for the whole game.
Me: What the hell was your point?
You laugh, but yeah, that's half the point. What's the other half? Well, see, the French may like to run away, but they are pretty clever.
So here's the idea: Some army (lets say the Germans) are chasing after the French. The French all jump on board their super TGV, which takes off down the track. The Germans stop on the track and say "Ha ha! They are running away! We can't catch their train, but we can just follow it to wherever they went, the fools!" So they start racing down the track following the French train. Meanwhile, far down the track, the French stop the train and get off, and go hide in the woods. The last one to go sets the train in reverse and opens the throttle. Now the last thing the Germans would expect is for the French train to come back, so they're caught completely off guard by the 400MPH TRAIN IN THE KISSER!
When you are truly skilled at fleeing, you can turn a retreat into an offensive.
8 MONTHS later 40% of these children who saw that video for only TEN MINUTES still repeated the aggressive behavior.
That aggressive behavior being the bludgeoning of the Bobo Doll, which is of course what they were shown that the dolls were for.
I bet the GP's kid still liked killing Nazis in Wolfenstein 8 months later too!
Holy fuck, how retarded do you have to be to think that continued violence against a toy that was shown to be an outlet for aggression actually means anything about agression in general?
Next up: Football makes you violent because even months after having played football, most football players immediately show aggressive behavior when they next play football!
Next year: Increasing the entropy of the surroundings will constitute a violation of the Clean Air Act. Do your part to limit your entropy footprint.
Don't worry, I am. Every day I add another layer of blocks to my neatly ordered stack in the corner, creating order where before there was a chaotic bag of blocks, thereby offsetting my entropy.
Given that the name of the conference is "E for All", I have a pretty good idea what your $50 gets you, and let's just say it's groovy.
however, anyone who thinks the usa is special does need a comeuppance: the usa is just as hypocritical as china or russia or india or the majority of every other country in the world. at the same time, that observation is a double edged sword: the usa is no better, and NO WORSE, than these countries. seriously, find a crime the usa does, and tell me the majority of other countries in the world aren't guilty of the same thing
Okay, so the USA is no better and no worse than any other country, they commit crimes that every other country commits as well.
But the USA is better enough that they can take unilateral action to remove governments and bring Democracy to people who never asked for it. So much better, that their intent can be assumed to be just and good, no matter the actual actions taken and their practical effects.
If the contradiction isn't obvious, let me spell it out: The problem is not being better or worse yet at the same time acting as though one is so much better that they can claim moral authority. This is not balanced, this is un-balanced, as in mentally disturbed. Don't deny it, either, as intent has always been your justification for doing what would, for anyone else, be a terrible affront to human dignity. Whereas Russia doing the same thing would get no such pass for "intent". But we're no better or worse, right? Wrong, you have a clear spot of superiority for the U.S., and worst of all this superiority is not in any way connected to actual actions.
Most people who disagree with the USAs actions do not hate the USA. They in fact have a balanced opinion of the USA. They take issue with the actions, not some ephemeral good/bad quality. The U.S. is acting with an assumed moral authority that it simply doesn't have, as a result it's efforts are failing and having the opposite effect of what we supposedly "intend", and that is the problem they are addressing. You see them hating you simply because you don't connect people's opinions with cause/effect.
Imagine Jesus, standing in front of the adultress, telling the gathered crowd "Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone". Then some dude picks up a rock and chucks it at her, striking her temple and knocking her dead.
The look Jesus and everyone else would have given that guy is the look we're getting from the rest of the world.
Hey there Chris!
I can't believe I never showed you the bug. It was pretty painful to see up close in the darkened PC computer lab, but like that would have stopped me. Maybe I wanted to see if you would find it on your own? Or it just slipped my mind. No idea.
In high school I wrote a program for a physics project that showed electromagnetic wave propagation and interference. Nothing that special, the end result was basically a pretty screensaver with some relevence to physics. In light of that, one of the features I added was a pull-down menu for selecting what color you wanted to use. This was back in the VGA days with a 256 color pallette and manually poking the VGA frame buffer. Due to an off-by-one error in calculating the bounding box of the pull down menu, it was possible to select an invalid index for the color, so instead of selecting a row of the pallette with my nice color gradients set up, it was one of basically random colors. The result was really trippy, so when I discovered the bug, I decided to leave it in. At the open house where my program was running through a projector some bystander discovered the bug and thought it was indeed cool and trippy.
:)
That's about it. Most of my bugs just break shit.
After the bloodbath, the new executives fired some rocket launchers at observing SWAT helicopters before brushing themselves off and giving their first press release.
Without even stopping at the Pay N' Spray to get the SWAT team off their backs? Talk about brass balls!
So by this logic, Martin Scorsese is probably up to no good? Perhaps he's beating someone to death with his Oscar as I type this?
I dunno, but I hear Quentin Tarentino and Uma Thurman have been on an international killing spree for quite a while now!
I'm sure Jack would take Rockstar living as a personal victory somehow, because he's a giant self-aggrandizing spinning ball of cook.
Then they all go outside and breathe air they can see.
Hey, at least now they can see through the air to see other objects. Talk to someone who lived in LA before they got strict with their emissions regulations in the 80s; I doubt they'll tell you that merely translucent air is anything but a vast improvement.
Seriously, CA's emissions standards have been highly effective. Yes there's still pollution -- seen when flying into LAX as a big stinky brown cloud floating over downtown obscuring the skyscrapers, utterly disgusting -- which is still much less than it used to be, showing both that the regulations have worked and that even more dilligence is still necessary.
their four seasons are Wildfire, Mudslide, Earthquake, and Smog
I liked that.
I can't for the life of me understand why California even considers doing business with Diebold any more.
Shouldn't the list of requirements for Calfornia's voting machine aquisitions have a clause about "Company should not have repeatedly lied to California legislators, covered up known flaws, nor violated deployment policies by modifying units in the field without validation of those modifications"?
Diebold has been in trouble with California before. The fact that they can continue to even try to offer voting machines in that state kinda surprises me.
OK, these new parallel chips aren't even out yet, and software has to get the hardware before SW can improve to exploit the HW. But the HW has all the momentum, as usual. SW for parallel computing is as rudimentary as a 16bit microprocessor.
True, true. Personally I'm just glad that the chicken-egg problem has finally been broken on the desktop, so now desktop writers can start assuming that a large percentage of users will have at least two available threads.
There's already a way forward. Compiler geeks should be incorporating features of VHDL and VeriLog, inherently parallel languages, into gcc.
VHDL and Verilog both feature extremely fine-grained parallelism, because that's the nature of hardware which is what these languages describe. You can perform as many logical operations in parallel as you can put down logic gates.
I do agree we need more language support for parallelism, but I don't think using a hardware design language as the foundation is a good idea. Program-thread based parallelism will always be coarse grained compared to hardware.
We used to call them "janitors", which is reasonably accurate.
Well, do _you_ need to construct a strawman _you_ can deal with? The point isn't what _I_ believe, but the contradictions other people choose to believe at the same time. So what on Earth, other than some cheap attempt to derail the topic, would it serve to shift to a completely different topic of your choosing?
No, I don't need a strawman, that's why I asked what you believe instead of forcing an assumed belief system upon you.
This is a discussion, not a lecture, so you don't get to arbitrarily restrict the topic to what other people choose to believe. Don't accuse me of shifting the topic, as that is what you did when you ignored my simple two-point explanation of why this contradiction isn't. Don't worry, I'll go over it again.
Anyway, believe whatever you will, but it's not a straw man. A _lot_ of religious drivel has been written around the premise that Mary's pregnancy is something unique and inexplicable in any other way than divine intervention.
That modern-day semi-christians have no trouble taking the bible as just a metaphor, and as "yeah, well, so it happened more than once, big deal" is one thing, but talk to some genuine bible thumpers or look back in history and you'll see those notions taken a lot more literally, and a lot more rabidly as unique one-of-a-kind miracles. Just tell one of them your "ah well, see, lots of girls end up pregnant while technically virgin: e.g., via anal sex" or "yeah, well, lots of people woke from the dead without divine intervention" ideas, and see them start foaming at the mouth, not shruging it off as "yeah, so it is, just this time it was divine."
Yes, it has been perfectly clear that you are talking about fundamentalists/literalists. Thus I ignore most of the rest of your post which is about examples of blind faith and backwards beliefs, not contradiction, as a useless segway. I know fundamentalists believe strange things, would believe whatever their religious leaders told them, would go to war or burn witches because those leaders said it was just and holy. That is all true, and makes it more strange that you would need to devise a strawman to show a contradiction in their thinking, as I will show:
First, no fundamentalist believes that Mary was merely a technical virgin. The Biblical claim is that she never laid with a man, not that she only took it up the ass. It's the same statement used to describe men laying with men, and is clearly not limited to vaginal intercourse. You can't conflate technical virginity with the sexual purity that is attributed to Mary for the purposes of your argument, because no fundamentalist ever would and this is about what fundamentalists think. It doesn't say that the virgin birth was "unique", but it does claim that it is different from any natural fertilization involving a man's semen, and hence miraculous.
Second, the whole point of the Incubus myth was that the incubus slept with the woman, and thus this has absolutely nothing to do with virgin birth.
So the miracle of virgin birth is completely distinct from cases of non-vaginal-intercourse fertilization, and the Incubi had nothing to do with virgin birth at all. Thus the belief in the Virgin Mary and in Incubi are not contradictory. QED.
Now despite the fact that this is not an example of a contradiction, it still remains that most fundamentalists, especially the medeival ones you mention, had many strange and seemingly arbitrary non-biblical beliefs. Yet out of all that, you still had to make up a falacious example of contradictory thinking on their part.
Which brings me back to what you believe, and why you feel the need to make up strawmen to prove that fundamentalists believe contradictory things. This is what I meant when I said that some people believe that they are both rational and human. Rational thought is a useful trick that humans have taught themselves. It is not the natural mode in which our brains operate, a
Shut up! The Canadians are listening!
It's not that outrageous, now that Sega is out of the hardware business. They seem to have formed very close ties with Nintendo since then. I know to those of us who remember those awesome Genesis vs SNES smear ads it is like Satan and Jesus sitting down for a nice game of scrabble, but times have changed.
I'm not saying _I_ am confused by that, I'm saying there are and were people whose religion involves believing things that directly contradict each other. Yes, it can be easily resolved by reducing it to "so both Mary and those 'incubus victims' were just girls who got laid by a man, not by some God or demon". But that's not a reduction that a bible thumper would do, or has done.
Okay, but your example was not something that a Bible thumper would do either. It was contrived and falacious. I was questioning your need to invent contradictions where none exist. If you're going to take issue with either of these legends, it made more sense to do it from your actual viewpoint, and take issue with the beliefs themselves rather than construct a strawman you can say contradicts itself.
At the end of the day, we all believe contradictions. For example, some believe both that they are rational beings and that they are human.