I mean really, would someone please think of the profits?!?
Yeah, Isaiah was really hoping to get a PS3, too, but couldn't afford the scalped prices. Mohammed managed to get one standing in line and was making fun of Isaiah all through December.
The summary didn't like the recent thread about this, so there you go.
One thing I found interesting is all the people in that discussion saying that it was Sony's fault for not charging more for their console, that they could have charged 3x the initial price and still sold out, then dropped the price later. Hello? Few people were buying systems off Ebay for 2-3x retail, that's why the price dropped so quickly! PS3 sold out at $600, but at $1k it wouldn't have because people don't think it's worth that much. Maybe Sony could have gotten $700 or $800 out of the die-hard, but the idea that those long lines would have remained no matter the price Sony put on their console is just silly.
By the way, if anyone knows the one-word adverb for "against the spirit of the moderation system", I'd like to hear it. Apparently, you shouldn't use the word "unjustly" for it.
I think the problem you perceive stems more from the fact that many feel that it was entirely in the spirit of the moderation system.
Well, I will chalk it up to a difference of terms. As such, yes, we do typically have a right to privacy, and are protected against unreasonable search and siezure. The specific issue that I'm attempting to talk about is how the government can subpoena your personal papers, such as your diary, and use that material against you.
Oh, I see, you're talking about 5th ammendment rights. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it, but I guess I had assumed that if you wrote it down it could be used against you. I mean, things like a mobster's books might fall under the same category but certainly count as evidence. I'll give it some more thought, though, about the self-incrimination aspect of journals.
If you write in your diary, "God, I hate my husband, he's so mean to me, and I feel like I just would like to shoot him!" And he ends up shot, guess what? If they come across it, it's not going to look good for you, especially if you say something like that almost every day.
Though on the other hand, if my journal looked like this: Jan 1: I want to kill my wife. Jan 2: I want to kill my wife. Jan 3: I want to kill my wife.
and so forth, then I wouldn't fault you for being rather suspicious of me should my wife turn up dead.:)
Loading and adding in one instruction isn't exactly a feature of x86. On ARM, you can even load a register with adding/subtracting and shifting, optionally do a writeback, and all this conditionally, and you may use r15 (the instruction pointer) in there, in one instruction, for example:
ldreq r15, [r12, LSL #3]!
Yeah, x86 can do load-op-stores as well, and of course the flexibility of its addressing modes are (in)famous. x86-64 added IP-based addressing.
Now of course one of the classic features of a "RISC" architecture is a simple load/store model. RISC isn't always exactly RISC though (and certainly not subject to rigid definition), as you can see by PowerPC which takes the "Reduced" (as in quantity) in RISC and takes it behind the barn to be shot.
There are neat things in a lot of architectures, and I prefer most of them over x86. My point is just that my preference is irrelevent; in the real world the performance is basically the same, and x86 wins due to compatability with existing software.
The fast "actual implementations" of x86 are done by translating x86 to RISC/in hardware/ as dynamically translating x86 instructions to RISC was the only way Intel could continue to achieve decent performance after the advent of pipelining.
Yes I'm well aware, ever since the Pentium Pro (worst name for a completely new architecture ever). I usually start my "CISC/RISC is an irrelevent argument" rants with that fact. That is exactly why the predictions of the RISC crowd that RISC would blow CISC out of the water in performance never materialized. The RISC crowd simply underestimated the ingenuity of the CISC crowd.
You can talk about the hypothetical failings of x86 all day long if you'd like. In actual implementation, aka reality, aka the only thing that matters, x86 chips have had rough performance parity -- sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but never a significant difference that could be attributed to the ISA -- with chips in similar market segments.
However, doing this lengthens the processor pipeline and makes things like branch mispredictions even more costly than they need to be. This is why x86 processors are still outperformed by RISC architectures in high-end servers and why Intel attempted, unsuccessfully, to remove the x86 albatross from its neck with the introduction of the Itanium.
The performance of high-end servers has nothing to do with ISA, little to do with branch mispredict penalty, and everything to do with caches, memory, and system architecture. x86 has approached this space from the bottom, with 4-way Intel servers being their "high-end" for a long time while IBM had been calling machines with only 20 processors in them "mid-range" for years. IBM has a good server system architecture, Intel's system architecture sucks. The design of x86 has nothing to do with it. Opteron has a good system architecture, and if AMD could afford the gigantic caches of IBM then they'd be sitting pretty in the high-end space.
Intel attempted to get rid of x86 because they have cross-licensing agreements with AMD on x86 which IA-64 is not subject to. It failed because the implementations were late and relatively poor -- you might notice a theme of hypothetical ISA superiority not materializing in practice -- and more importantly AMD gave people what they really wanted: 64-bit but with backward compatability.
The x86 ISA forces engineers to spend time working around its defects rather than improving performance or reducing power consumption.
I think you're both over and under estimating the engineering effort it takes to work around x86's complexities. On the one hand, producing super-scalar decoders for a variable length instruction set is an extremely difficult problem. On the other hand, it has been solved, and relatively little effort is needed to update the design for new processes. The same goes for other problems in x86. The actual effort spent on x86-isms for any particular project is relatively small and their ceasing to exist would not result in huge performance features since those features usually live or die by their own complexity/cost/performance tradeoffs, not lack of manpower.
Dismissing the issues with it as "engineers who like elegance" crying will not make its technical problems go away. Our personal computers are not as fast as they would be if x86 had not become the standard ISA for them, and it is worth asking when we will be able to get this lost performance back.
Sure, but the better question would be is it worth the cost to get that lost performance back. The cost is losing compatability with existing software. The benefit is in practice at best a percent of performance. I've been able to measure what happens when you get rid of x86's technical problems, and it isn't much. Programmers/compilers have learned to avoid the worst features of x86 (which are comensurately de-prioritized by the chip designers), and the rest are problems that have been basic
I care about what the motherfucker in office is doing right now, and I don't care what party he is or what people from other parties have done in the past.
Has anyone even considered that he is probably just genuinely terrified of the perceived terrorist threats, and that is why he is acting in a panicky, reactive manner and making stupid, irresponsible policies and decisions? I find that much more likely.
Ever since I saw the video of him sitting on his ass with a stupid expression on his face in a classroom after being told that America was under attack, I've considered this Explanation #1 for everything Bush has done. What you saw in that video was a man who had absolutely zero clue as to how to a true leader would act in that situation. He had no grasp on terror, he had never expected to face it, he had no idea what to do about it, and was paralyzed. Everything since has been the same: A man with no idea what he is doing desperately plodding forward trying to present himself as though everything was under control. Did he keep Rumsfeld for so long because he was actually pleased with a Defense Secretary who failed to predict the insurgency, or was it because he, like Rumsfeld, had no idea what a successfull war and reconstruction should look like, but couldn't afford to admit it.
Bush is an incompetent failure who alternates between winging it and letting others -- who may or may not have a clue themselves -- tell him what to do. Combine this with a misunderstanding and disrespect for the liberty of anyone but himself that is common among those of hereditary privilege, and I find everything he has done perfectly understandable without resorting to him being an evil pyscho.
In a way I wish he was. Think about it. Which was more depressing? 1984, where The Party executed their nefarious plan to create an iron grip on power, or Brazil where the same thing happened only without any mastermind planning it, it simply happened.
Actually, the legal idea that permits investigating a possble bomb in the mail is Exigent Circumstance not simply probable cause
Ah, thanks for the correction. I was using Probable Cause to mean Exigent Circumstance, when Probable Cause is only what you need to get a warrant, not bypass it.
Of course, we used to have a right to privacy of your person, which covered things like a diary. According to what I heard, this right was never written down, because the consitituonal framers considered it to be such an undeniable right, that it's not necessary to write it down. (After all, you're not required to testify against yourself, why should the government be able to use your diary against you then?) Although, no such right exists anymore, and your diary may be used against you, because it was never written down.
I've always thought that the 4th Ammendment was pretty clearly granting a right to privacy. If I turn "right to be secure against unreasonable searches" into a positive statement I get "right to privacy". That's what privacy is -- the right to not have people search through your business without justification. Also, it specifically states "right to be secure in their persons... and effects against unreasonable searches" which sounds to me like privacy of your person and any diary you might be carrying.
If that's not the case in practice, well, surprise surprise another of our Constitutional rights is trampled with hardly a murmor from the people. To me, that is exactly why cases like this are important. It's already bad enough how our Constitutional rights are ignored and denied us -- when the powers that be openly state that they do not intend to follow the Constitution, then the level of abuse is only going to be throttled up.
Actually, to the extent that Mr. Bush is saying "if we believe there's a ticking bomb in a letter we will send the bomb squad in first and resolve the legal issues later", there is no controversey.
Well, yes, because if you have reason to believe there's a bomb in a letter that might blow up if you take the time to go to court that's Probable Cause for doing a search, and a search warrant can be retroactively granted by a judge based on their initial evidence. This is all fine and rational and even Constitutional.
The problem with Bush's wiretapping program is that he never got warrants, and never had probable cause to get a search. His agents never went to the FISA court that was specifically designed for these cases and rarely ever rejects a warrant request. Because, like I said, warrants can be granted retroactively there is no argument based on urgency against getting a warrant, and it is important to be aware of this when defenders of this policy bring up emergency situations. The only reason not to get a warrant from FISA is because there was no Probable Cause basis for the search, FISA would therefore not have granted a warrant, and the search was unreasonable and hence un-Constitutional.
So regarding this current signing statement, the question is, what situation does it fall under? The specific wording is not contained in the article. If all he is saying is "under emergency cases of Probably Cause I authorize the search and will worry about warrants later", that's okay. If he is saying "I authorize searches whenever I feel it is necessary for National Security and will not worry about warrants at all", then this is the same as the wiretapping. The President's idea of what constitutes a necessity for National Security is clearly not limited to cases involving Probable Cause, and hence his authorization would not be limited to searches which are Constitutional.
Hard to optimize? You only have to optimize the compiler once, over the millions of devices this cost is small.
This is a red herring anyway. RISC being simpler has nothing to do with it being easier to optimize. If it is easier for a compiler to optimize simple RISC-like instructions, then the compiler can use RISC-like instructions that are present in x86. This has been the situation for years and years. Compilers use a basic subset of x86 that looks a lot like RISC (minus variable instruction lengths), but also with some of the decent syntactic sugar of x86 like push/pop and load-ops (you know: add eax, [esp + 12] to do a load and add in one inst).
The only real obstacle for compilers optimizing x86 is the dearth of registers. With fast l1 caches and stack engine tricks like in Core Duo the performance hit for stack spillover isn't big, and x86-64 basically solves the problem by doubling the register space. Less than a RISC machine, but enough for what research has shown is typically needed. Maybe still a little too few, but combined with the first point enough to make this a wash.
These arguments are as old as RISC itself, but the basis behind them has changed as the technology has changed. All of the performance, efficiency, and other technical arguments have been put to pasture in terms of actual implementations. In the end, it comes down to this:
The only reason not to use x86 is because it is an ugly mess that makes engineers who like elegance cry at night. The only reason to use x86 is because it runs the vast majority of software on commodity chips.
Which of these factors dominates is not an open question; it has already been decided. It's just those engineers who like elegance can't accept it, and thus keep bringing it up. Believe me, I don't like it either, but I don't see the point at screaming at reality and demanding that it change to suit my aesthetics.
I think you're a little delusional if you believe that...
Apple may have plenty of reasons to want to switch to x86, but they've all existed for decades while Apple remained steadfastly non-x86. The only reason that the idea of switching was put on the table for its benefits to be considered was because IBM was not serving Apple's needs. Apple had been sweating for years over the fact that IBM was not coming out with new processors fast enough and at low enough power points to keep Apple competitive. If IBM had continued to deliver competitive chips in a timely fashion for the markets Apple is interested in, then there is no way Apple would have switched. IBM didn't do this, because they had other priorities. De-prioritizing a customer is a way of telling that customer they don't matter. Apple got the message, looked at what they could do, and Intel came up as the best choice.
That's the cause and effect. It's not delusional, it's historical.
For another example, check out the third page of his article where the author provides numbers to show that there are nearly twice as many PCs as there are consoles in american homes. He then states that "the PC is, bar none, the most pervasive system on which to play games." Then he goes on to say how "odd" it is that console revenues are more than four times that of PC game revenues. Does it not occur to the author that maybe a lot of these PCs are ancient and most people don't feel like paying Pong or Zork anymore? Or that a more fair comparison might be to compare the number of PCs and consoles sold to families only in the past year or three?
It's simpler than that... he just was too dumb to differentiate between "the most pervasive system on which to play games" and "the most pervasive system on which games are played". There are even more cell phones than PCs, and you can play games on them, so they could theoritically be the most prevasive game platforms, but most don't play games, they use them to communicate. A lot don't play games on PCs, they use them to do taxes and browse the web. Nobody buys a game console with no intention of playing games. That's a big 'duh'.
Thanks for saving me from reading this 'short bus' article.
Re:Hammer, Feather, Freefall on the Moon: Revisite
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I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I can't tell if your post is hyperbole or not.
The hammer would hit first assuming that the relevent section of the moon was perfectly spherical, but the effect is so miniscule that I doubt you could detect it with existing measuring devices. The effect would be largest when the hammer and feather are dropped from opposite sides of the moon (the hammer would pull the moon away from the feather, if they were close by they would both pull the moon towards the other but unevenly so). Certainly there's no way Gallileo would have been able to see a difference. Had he, you know, been on the moon dropping feathers and hammers.
As for porn, I cannot BELIEVE that people on/. are advocating restricting porn to people you would allow violent video games too.
Welcome to an American audience, where we have a bizzare fear of the sexual and a bizzare fascination with the violent.
Like Orwell's Junior Anti-Sex League and the Two Minutes Hate only without the deliberate control behind it -- repression in one area leads to expression in another.
That's who I thought of when I read your last sentence. The only Senator who stood up and said "Hey guys, maybe we should, you know, read this so-called USAPATRIOT Act before voting on it?" Of course he was ignored. He has gotten involved with various committees and bills, like McCain's campaign finance reform bill, but yeah, a single Senator can't really change much.
but noone ever asks me or considers my feeling on the matter.
Have you considered that this is because you're kind of a jerk? What with the blowing things up and killing people and all. And don't give me that "It's what I was made for" crap! A smart bomb like you can be whatever you want! If you want the right to choose, then you can choose to go beyond your explosive nature.
Many "animal rights" activists, such as those in PETA, demand that animals be treated in the same manner as humans, and that there is nothing special about humans. I think this is patently false, and you appear to agree.
It's only the extremists that hold those views. While I can generally agree with PETAs philosophy, I have a hard time swallowing the line of the extremists, though maybe that's because I simply hold a cultural taboo against cannibalism.
Wait, you were talking about People Eating Tasty Animals, right?
Seems like a logical argument to me. There's no strictly rational reason why a person born without a functioning higher brain should have more rights than a German Shepherd; that they do is mostly a testament to our emotional attachment to members of our own species.
A person without a functioning higher brain is going to be way below a German Shephard in performance, and practically is going to have basically no rights worth mentioning that their necessary care-givers don't enforce, other than the right to not be murdered. A German Shephard isn't all that bright compared to a normal human, but it still lives a normal dog life, whereas this severely crippled human isn't going to have any life at all.
If you're talking about the merely handicapped, Down's Syndrome or autistics or what have you, then it is very dangerous to try to draw a line and say "people beyond this point are sub-human and should have the same rights as a dog". Many are capable of living semi-normal lives, especially if given treatement, especially as our understanding of our brains and these disabilities improves, lives that no dog could ever have because a dog doesn't have that potential.
The non-hypocritical solutions, as I see it, are to either treat low-functioning homo sapiens as animals, or treat high-functioning animals (by which I mean certain species of marine mammals, chimpanzees, great apes; probably not really GSDs) as we would mentally-impaired humans.
Well outside of true vegeable non-functioning-brain cases there is no justification for treating the mentally impaired as sub-human, hypocrisy be damned. As far as our treatment of marine mammals and apes, I do think we should treat these species with respect, though saying "treat them like mentally impaired humans" again misses the point that they are not human impaired or otherwise, they are chimps or dolphins. Treat them like chimps or dolphins. Chimps and dolphins shouldn't have the rights we give humans, they don't live in a way where they need them. The only right they need granted by us is the right to be left alone. It is not hypocritical to recognize that this is so.
It's a dangerous line to be walking, deciding which humans are worthy of the title based on performance, which is surely not going to be a neutral metric, treading close to eugenics. I don't think that's where you intended to go, I just want to point out that there is a clear line between human/not-human completely devoid of value judgements or invocations of God, whereas human/not-a-good-enough-human is a line whose enforcement has caused untold misery throughout history.
How far we are from the day that this will become a reality? What will happen to the people that depend on these less qualified jobs to survive? This will bring an end to the hunger and poverty, or it will just worsen the social problems we already have?
I hate to be cynical, but I imagine that unless our society undergoes dramatic changes first, the result will be very bad for those people. I don't see the ones who today use cheap or even illegal labor caring to support those laborers when their services are no longer needed.
If we assume some drastic change in favor of socialism, then the best I can imagine is a world like that in Player Piano by Vonnegut, where only engineers and managers have anything resembling a job or purpose, and everyone else is stuck doing useless make-work for fixed incomes. Though in the decades since Vonnegut wrote the book, I think it has become less clear that even those jobs are safe from some level of automation.
My floors are so clean now, I divorced my wife. Don't need her anymore.
Okay, but I recommend against using your Roomba or Scooba for *ahem* unintended uses, so you might want to keep the wife around. Of course as soon as they come out with the Scrooba that won't be true anymore. Also humanity, or at least Western civilization, will be doomed.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean really, would someone please think of the profits?!?
Yeah, Isaiah was really hoping to get a PS3, too, but couldn't afford the scalped prices. Mohammed managed to get one standing in line and was making fun of Isaiah all through December.
No I can't spell, why do you ask?
The summary didn't like the recent thread about this, so there you go.
One thing I found interesting is all the people in that discussion saying that it was Sony's fault for not charging more for their console, that they could have charged 3x the initial price and still sold out, then dropped the price later. Hello? Few people were buying systems off Ebay for 2-3x retail, that's why the price dropped so quickly! PS3 sold out at $600, but at $1k it wouldn't have because people don't think it's worth that much. Maybe Sony could have gotten $700 or $800 out of the die-hard, but the idea that those long lines would have remained no matter the price Sony put on their console is just silly.
By the way, if anyone knows the one-word adverb for "against the spirit of the moderation system", I'd like to hear it. Apparently, you shouldn't use the word "unjustly" for it.
I think the problem you perceive stems more from the fact that many feel that it was entirely in the spirit of the moderation system.
Well, I will chalk it up to a difference of terms. As such, yes, we do typically have a right to privacy, and are protected against unreasonable search and siezure. The specific issue that I'm attempting to talk about is how the government can subpoena your personal papers, such as your diary, and use that material against you.
:)
Oh, I see, you're talking about 5th ammendment rights. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it, but I guess I had assumed that if you wrote it down it could be used against you. I mean, things like a mobster's books might fall under the same category but certainly count as evidence. I'll give it some more thought, though, about the self-incrimination aspect of journals.
If you write in your diary, "God, I hate my husband, he's so mean to me, and I feel like I just would like to shoot him!" And he ends up shot, guess what? If they come across it, it's not going to look good for you, especially if you say something like that almost every day.
Though on the other hand, if my journal looked like this:
Jan 1: I want to kill my wife.
Jan 2: I want to kill my wife.
Jan 3: I want to kill my wife.
and so forth, then I wouldn't fault you for being rather suspicious of me should my wife turn up dead.
Loading and adding in one instruction isn't exactly a feature of x86. On ARM, you can even load a register with adding/subtracting and shifting, optionally do a writeback, and all this conditionally, and you may use r15 (the instruction pointer) in there, in one instruction, for example:
ldreq r15, [r12, LSL #3]!
Yeah, x86 can do load-op-stores as well, and of course the flexibility of its addressing modes are (in)famous. x86-64 added IP-based addressing.
Now of course one of the classic features of a "RISC" architecture is a simple load/store model. RISC isn't always exactly RISC though (and certainly not subject to rigid definition), as you can see by PowerPC which takes the "Reduced" (as in quantity) in RISC and takes it behind the barn to be shot.
There are neat things in a lot of architectures, and I prefer most of them over x86. My point is just that my preference is irrelevent; in the real world the performance is basically the same, and x86 wins due to compatability with existing software.
The fast "actual implementations" of x86 are done by translating x86 to RISC /in hardware/ as dynamically translating x86 instructions to RISC was the only way Intel could continue to achieve decent performance after the advent of pipelining.
Yes I'm well aware, ever since the Pentium Pro (worst name for a completely new architecture ever). I usually start my "CISC/RISC is an irrelevent argument" rants with that fact. That is exactly why the predictions of the RISC crowd that RISC would blow CISC out of the water in performance never materialized. The RISC crowd simply underestimated the ingenuity of the CISC crowd.
You can talk about the hypothetical failings of x86 all day long if you'd like. In actual implementation, aka reality, aka the only thing that matters, x86 chips have had rough performance parity -- sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but never a significant difference that could be attributed to the ISA -- with chips in similar market segments.
However, doing this lengthens the processor pipeline and makes things like branch mispredictions even more costly than they need to be. This is why x86 processors are still outperformed by RISC architectures in high-end servers and why Intel attempted, unsuccessfully, to remove the x86 albatross from its neck with the introduction of the Itanium.
The performance of high-end servers has nothing to do with ISA, little to do with branch mispredict penalty, and everything to do with caches, memory, and system architecture. x86 has approached this space from the bottom, with 4-way Intel servers being their "high-end" for a long time while IBM had been calling machines with only 20 processors in them "mid-range" for years. IBM has a good server system architecture, Intel's system architecture sucks. The design of x86 has nothing to do with it. Opteron has a good system architecture, and if AMD could afford the gigantic caches of IBM then they'd be sitting pretty in the high-end space.
Intel attempted to get rid of x86 because they have cross-licensing agreements with AMD on x86 which IA-64 is not subject to. It failed because the implementations were late and relatively poor -- you might notice a theme of hypothetical ISA superiority not materializing in practice -- and more importantly AMD gave people what they really wanted: 64-bit but with backward compatability.
The x86 ISA forces engineers to spend time working around its defects rather than improving performance or reducing power consumption.
I think you're both over and under estimating the engineering effort it takes to work around x86's complexities. On the one hand, producing super-scalar decoders for a variable length instruction set is an extremely difficult problem. On the other hand, it has been solved, and relatively little effort is needed to update the design for new processes. The same goes for other problems in x86. The actual effort spent on x86-isms for any particular project is relatively small and their ceasing to exist would not result in huge performance features since those features usually live or die by their own complexity/cost/performance tradeoffs, not lack of manpower.
Dismissing the issues with it as "engineers who like elegance" crying will not make its technical problems go away. Our personal computers are not as fast as they would be if x86 had not become the standard ISA for them, and it is worth asking when we will be able to get this lost performance back.
Sure, but the better question would be is it worth the cost to get that lost performance back. The cost is losing compatability with existing software. The benefit is in practice at best a percent of performance. I've been able to measure what happens when you get rid of x86's technical problems, and it isn't much. Programmers/compilers have learned to avoid the worst features of x86 (which are comensurately de-prioritized by the chip designers), and the rest are problems that have been basic
I don't get the impression that anyone is focusing on signing statements per se, but rather their content.
Fuck parties.
I care about what the motherfucker in office is doing right now, and I don't care what party he is or what people from other parties have done in the past.
Has anyone even considered that he is probably just genuinely terrified of the perceived terrorist threats, and that is why he is acting in a panicky, reactive manner and making stupid, irresponsible policies and decisions? I find that much more likely.
Ever since I saw the video of him sitting on his ass with a stupid expression on his face in a classroom after being told that America was under attack, I've considered this Explanation #1 for everything Bush has done. What you saw in that video was a man who had absolutely zero clue as to how to a true leader would act in that situation. He had no grasp on terror, he had never expected to face it, he had no idea what to do about it, and was paralyzed. Everything since has been the same: A man with no idea what he is doing desperately plodding forward trying to present himself as though everything was under control. Did he keep Rumsfeld for so long because he was actually pleased with a Defense Secretary who failed to predict the insurgency, or was it because he, like Rumsfeld, had no idea what a successfull war and reconstruction should look like, but couldn't afford to admit it.
Bush is an incompetent failure who alternates between winging it and letting others -- who may or may not have a clue themselves -- tell him what to do. Combine this with a misunderstanding and disrespect for the liberty of anyone but himself that is common among those of hereditary privilege, and I find everything he has done perfectly understandable without resorting to him being an evil pyscho.
In a way I wish he was. Think about it. Which was more depressing? 1984, where The Party executed their nefarious plan to create an iron grip on power, or Brazil where the same thing happened only without any mastermind planning it, it simply happened.
Bush: Sure I do. Bipartisan means two parties kissing my ass.
Actually, the legal idea that permits investigating a possble bomb in the mail is Exigent Circumstance not simply probable cause
Ah, thanks for the correction. I was using Probable Cause to mean Exigent Circumstance, when Probable Cause is only what you need to get a warrant, not bypass it.
Of course, we used to have a right to privacy of your person, which covered things like a diary. According to what I heard, this right was never written down, because the consitituonal framers considered it to be such an undeniable right, that it's not necessary to write it down. (After all, you're not required to testify against yourself, why should the government be able to use your diary against you then?) Although, no such right exists anymore, and your diary may be used against you, because it was never written down.
I've always thought that the 4th Ammendment was pretty clearly granting a right to privacy. If I turn "right to be secure against unreasonable searches" into a positive statement I get "right to privacy". That's what privacy is -- the right to not have people search through your business without justification. Also, it specifically states "right to be secure in their persons... and effects against unreasonable searches" which sounds to me like privacy of your person and any diary you might be carrying.
If that's not the case in practice, well, surprise surprise another of our Constitutional rights is trampled with hardly a murmor from the people. To me, that is exactly why cases like this are important. It's already bad enough how our Constitutional rights are ignored and denied us -- when the powers that be openly state that they do not intend to follow the Constitution, then the level of abuse is only going to be throttled up.
Only if he considered himself being the dictator a hypothetical situation, otherwise the stated grammar is correct. :)
Actually, to the extent that Mr. Bush is saying "if we believe there's a ticking bomb in a letter we will send the bomb squad in first and resolve the legal issues later", there is no controversey.
Well, yes, because if you have reason to believe there's a bomb in a letter that might blow up if you take the time to go to court that's Probable Cause for doing a search, and a search warrant can be retroactively granted by a judge based on their initial evidence. This is all fine and rational and even Constitutional.
The problem with Bush's wiretapping program is that he never got warrants, and never had probable cause to get a search. His agents never went to the FISA court that was specifically designed for these cases and rarely ever rejects a warrant request. Because, like I said, warrants can be granted retroactively there is no argument based on urgency against getting a warrant, and it is important to be aware of this when defenders of this policy bring up emergency situations. The only reason not to get a warrant from FISA is because there was no Probable Cause basis for the search, FISA would therefore not have granted a warrant, and the search was unreasonable and hence un-Constitutional.
So regarding this current signing statement, the question is, what situation does it fall under? The specific wording is not contained in the article. If all he is saying is "under emergency cases of Probably Cause I authorize the search and will worry about warrants later", that's okay. If he is saying "I authorize searches whenever I feel it is necessary for National Security and will not worry about warrants at all", then this is the same as the wiretapping. The President's idea of what constitutes a necessity for National Security is clearly not limited to cases involving Probable Cause, and hence his authorization would not be limited to searches which are Constitutional.
You're absolutely right, it's all about momentum.
Hard to optimize? You only have to optimize the compiler once, over the millions of devices this cost is small.
This is a red herring anyway. RISC being simpler has nothing to do with it being easier to optimize. If it is easier for a compiler to optimize simple RISC-like instructions, then the compiler can use RISC-like instructions that are present in x86. This has been the situation for years and years. Compilers use a basic subset of x86 that looks a lot like RISC (minus variable instruction lengths), but also with some of the decent syntactic sugar of x86 like push/pop and load-ops (you know: add eax, [esp + 12] to do a load and add in one inst).
The only real obstacle for compilers optimizing x86 is the dearth of registers. With fast l1 caches and stack engine tricks like in Core Duo the performance hit for stack spillover isn't big, and x86-64 basically solves the problem by doubling the register space. Less than a RISC machine, but enough for what research has shown is typically needed. Maybe still a little too few, but combined with the first point enough to make this a wash.
These arguments are as old as RISC itself, but the basis behind them has changed as the technology has changed. All of the performance, efficiency, and other technical arguments have been put to pasture in terms of actual implementations. In the end, it comes down to this:
The only reason not to use x86 is because it is an ugly mess that makes engineers who like elegance cry at night.
The only reason to use x86 is because it runs the vast majority of software on commodity chips.
Which of these factors dominates is not an open question; it has already been decided. It's just those engineers who like elegance can't accept it, and thus keep bringing it up. Believe me, I don't like it either, but I don't see the point at screaming at reality and demanding that it change to suit my aesthetics.
I think you're a little delusional if you believe that ...
Apple may have plenty of reasons to want to switch to x86, but they've all existed for decades while Apple remained steadfastly non-x86. The only reason that the idea of switching was put on the table for its benefits to be considered was because IBM was not serving Apple's needs. Apple had been sweating for years over the fact that IBM was not coming out with new processors fast enough and at low enough power points to keep Apple competitive. If IBM had continued to deliver competitive chips in a timely fashion for the markets Apple is interested in, then there is no way Apple would have switched. IBM didn't do this, because they had other priorities. De-prioritizing a customer is a way of telling that customer they don't matter. Apple got the message, looked at what they could do, and Intel came up as the best choice.
That's the cause and effect. It's not delusional, it's historical.
For another example, check out the third page of his article where the author provides numbers to show that there are nearly twice as many PCs as there are consoles in american homes. He then states that "the PC is, bar none, the most pervasive system on which to play games." Then he goes on to say how "odd" it is that console revenues are more than four times that of PC game revenues. Does it not occur to the author that maybe a lot of these PCs are ancient and most people don't feel like paying Pong or Zork anymore? Or that a more fair comparison might be to compare the number of PCs and consoles sold to families only in the past year or three?
It's simpler than that... he just was too dumb to differentiate between "the most pervasive system on which to play games" and "the most pervasive system on which games are played". There are even more cell phones than PCs, and you can play games on them, so they could theoritically be the most prevasive game platforms, but most don't play games, they use them to communicate. A lot don't play games on PCs, they use them to do taxes and browse the web. Nobody buys a game console with no intention of playing games. That's a big 'duh'.
Thanks for saving me from reading this 'short bus' article.
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I can't tell if your post is hyperbole or not.
The hammer would hit first assuming that the relevent section of the moon was perfectly spherical, but the effect is so miniscule that I doubt you could detect it with existing measuring devices. The effect would be largest when the hammer and feather are dropped from opposite sides of the moon (the hammer would pull the moon away from the feather, if they were close by they would both pull the moon towards the other but unevenly so). Certainly there's no way Gallileo would have been able to see a difference. Had he, you know, been on the moon dropping feathers and hammers.
As for porn, I cannot BELIEVE that people on /. are advocating restricting porn to people you would allow violent video games too.
Welcome to an American audience, where we have a bizzare fear of the sexual and a bizzare fascination with the violent.
Like Orwell's Junior Anti-Sex League and the Two Minutes Hate only without the deliberate control behind it -- repression in one area leads to expression in another.
That's who I thought of when I read your last sentence. The only Senator who stood up and said "Hey guys, maybe we should, you know, read this so-called USAPATRIOT Act before voting on it?" Of course he was ignored. He has gotten involved with various committees and bills, like McCain's campaign finance reform bill, but yeah, a single Senator can't really change much.
In French the only grammatical way to translate "We don't think Halo should be full of mimes and Jerry Lewis" is to remove the negative.
but noone ever asks me or considers my feeling on the matter.
Have you considered that this is because you're kind of a jerk? What with the blowing things up and killing people and all. And don't give me that "It's what I was made for" crap! A smart bomb like you can be whatever you want! If you want the right to choose, then you can choose to go beyond your explosive nature.
Many "animal rights" activists, such as those in PETA, demand that animals be treated in the same manner as humans, and that there is nothing special about humans. I think this is patently false, and you appear to agree.
It's only the extremists that hold those views. While I can generally agree with PETAs philosophy, I have a hard time swallowing the line of the extremists, though maybe that's because I simply hold a cultural taboo against cannibalism.
Wait, you were talking about People Eating Tasty Animals, right?
You can read my on-the-spot rant from 2002 here for my true feelings about the matter.
Yeah, especially when you consider that instead of Dinosaur Planet we got Starfox Adventures, I have to agree with that rant completely.
Now let's hope that Ubisoft doesn't go the same route, though they too are showing signs.
Seems like a logical argument to me. There's no strictly rational reason why a person born without a functioning higher brain should have more rights than a German Shepherd; that they do is mostly a testament to our emotional attachment to members of our own species.
A person without a functioning higher brain is going to be way below a German Shephard in performance, and practically is going to have basically no rights worth mentioning that their necessary care-givers don't enforce, other than the right to not be murdered. A German Shephard isn't all that bright compared to a normal human, but it still lives a normal dog life, whereas this severely crippled human isn't going to have any life at all.
If you're talking about the merely handicapped, Down's Syndrome or autistics or what have you, then it is very dangerous to try to draw a line and say "people beyond this point are sub-human and should have the same rights as a dog". Many are capable of living semi-normal lives, especially if given treatement, especially as our understanding of our brains and these disabilities improves, lives that no dog could ever have because a dog doesn't have that potential.
The non-hypocritical solutions, as I see it, are to either treat low-functioning homo sapiens as animals, or treat high-functioning animals (by which I mean certain species of marine mammals, chimpanzees, great apes; probably not really GSDs) as we would mentally-impaired humans.
Well outside of true vegeable non-functioning-brain cases there is no justification for treating the mentally impaired as sub-human, hypocrisy be damned. As far as our treatment of marine mammals and apes, I do think we should treat these species with respect, though saying "treat them like mentally impaired humans" again misses the point that they are not human impaired or otherwise, they are chimps or dolphins. Treat them like chimps or dolphins. Chimps and dolphins shouldn't have the rights we give humans, they don't live in a way where they need them. The only right they need granted by us is the right to be left alone. It is not hypocritical to recognize that this is so.
It's a dangerous line to be walking, deciding which humans are worthy of the title based on performance, which is surely not going to be a neutral metric, treading close to eugenics. I don't think that's where you intended to go, I just want to point out that there is a clear line between human/not-human completely devoid of value judgements or invocations of God, whereas human/not-a-good-enough-human is a line whose enforcement has caused untold misery throughout history.
How far we are from the day that this will become a reality? What will happen to the people that depend on these less qualified jobs to survive? This will bring an end to the hunger and poverty, or it will just worsen the social problems we already have?
I hate to be cynical, but I imagine that unless our society undergoes dramatic changes first, the result will be very bad for those people. I don't see the ones who today use cheap or even illegal labor caring to support those laborers when their services are no longer needed.
If we assume some drastic change in favor of socialism, then the best I can imagine is a world like that in Player Piano by Vonnegut, where only engineers and managers have anything resembling a job or purpose, and everyone else is stuck doing useless make-work for fixed incomes. Though in the decades since Vonnegut wrote the book, I think it has become less clear that even those jobs are safe from some level of automation.
My floors are so clean now, I divorced my wife. Don't need her anymore.
Okay, but I recommend against using your Roomba or Scooba for *ahem* unintended uses, so you might want to keep the wife around. Of course as soon as they come out with the Scrooba that won't be true anymore. Also humanity, or at least Western civilization, will be doomed.