With regards to (1), that's not really surprising. Computer science isn't really about coding at all, it's about computational science. You can be a great computer scientist while being a mediocre programmer.
My foreign aid point would make much more sense if I had remembered to point out that the actual US foreign aid budget is less than 1%. The public's perception is actually way out of line with reality. That's why governing by polls is a dumb idea.
Polls don't mean more than objective analysis. Seriously, individuals don't have an objective outlook on the situation as a whole. Let me use a simple example: polls show that most Americans think that the US should spend less on foreign aid. Why? Because they think that the US spends 20% of it's budget on foreign aid! They think 5% is a much more reasonable figure. Simply: people don't know jack shit. Objective studies have a much better chance of at least being in the ballpark of reality.
Um, what? That made no sense. Yes, babies grow up to be taxpayers. But more of our babies die before age 5, as a percentage, than theirs. That's my whole point...
Pulling our troops out of Vietnam was the Right Thing (TM) to do. We cannot call ourselves a just democracy if we contiue to go around trying to remake other countries in our image. Evangelism is contrary to the fundemental principles of our Republic.
Why are these terrorists attacking Iraqi government *What* Iraqi government? The American-sponsored one? The one operating under a constitution created by a group of people hand-picked by the United States?
Why are they kidnapping and slowly beheading civilians while chanting to allah? While that's a deplorable tactic, it's not exactly an unusual one in the context of other such situations like in Ireland. In retrospect, most people have realized that while the IRA were indeed terrorists, they were also fighting for their country. The totality of their existance, just like with the Iraqi "insurgents", consists of both their attrocious attacks on civilians, and their fundemental defense of their country against foreign occupation.
PS: We have 45 *million* people without health insurance. Clearly Canada's health system isn't perfect (it's ranked 30th, after all), but they aren't the ones with the 7.2 per 1000 child mortality rate.
Except that the actual statistics don't bear that out. The health indicators show Canada's overall care is slightly better than ours, and they pay less. But sure, your personal examples are so much more convincing than WHO studies...
I don't see what that has to do with anything. In terms of absolute dollars, our privetized healthcare still costs us $4000 a year, and their socialized healthcare still costs only $2000 a year. Now, if you want to factor in cost of living, then you can say their's costs less because salaries are 30% lower, but that still leaves you with an $800 margin. Of course, that's assuming that 100% of healthcare costs are salaries, which it isn't. The absolute value of medical supplies and medicine is still the same. So in reality, the real margin is probably well over $1000 a year.
There you go what? It's not some sort of belief I have. It's just how the world works. I'd love it if philosophers and artists had more value in this world, and that people would get into the profession because they could make a living off it. Hell, I'd love to throw away this engineering degree, and study European history, but that's not exactly commercially tenable is it?
Economics is a self-balancing equillibrium. It is foolish for people to believe they can, in a free society, alter it. Sure, you could make a law saying that you must go to an American doctor, but the extra money has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? I mean, the $190,000 that somebody pays to get heart surgery in the US, over what they'd pay in India --- somebody is losing a job to save that doctor's.
So I guess you're in favor of destroying the value of someone going to medical school? I'm saying that it's not in anybody's power to decide the value of anybody else. The market decides that. Who am I to say that American doctors are worth 20x as much as Indian doctors, and that we should force people to go to American doctors? In increasing the value of American doctors, what gives me the right to devalue Indian doctors?
Are you saying that doctors have no value to society beyond their short-term commercial potential? No profession has any value to society beyond their commercial potential. People in many professions have had to bear this reality. Unemployed history phds are everywhere. Now, it's a different category of people dealing with the reality, that's all.
An MD is only worth what other people are willing to pay for it. If you artificially jack up the "value" of an MD by limiting supply, you'll just lose money somewhere else.
I'd say the WHO is qualified to answer that question, and based on health indicators in the two countries, they rank Canada 30th worldwide (France is 1st), compared to the US which is ranked 37th. Of course, they pay half as much per person to get that 30th ranking!
To add to my previous statement: don't think that you aren't paying for it too. Canadians spend about $2000 per capita per year on healthcare, while we spend $4000 per capita per year on healthcare. Sure, for Canadians that money is spent in the form of taxes, and for us it's in the form of health insurance payments, but at the end of the day, that's an extra $2000USD out of your pocket every year.
Yes, the Canadian healthcare system is less responsive overall. No, that doesn't change the fact that their healthcare indicators are better overall. For the *vast* majority of people, good access to regular preventive healthcare services has a far larger impact on overall health than the responsiveness of emergency services.
He get's away with it because most Americans assume that the US is the best in the world at everything. So when he says that, nobody thinks to double-check it, because people accept it at face value.
It is interesting to note, that health care indicators, limited as they are by the laws of biology, tend to show the US's real propserity more so than something like per-capita GDP. While the US has the highest per-capita GDP in the world, the distribution of income is also phenomenally uneven. That means that outliers tend to bring up the average significantly, distorting the real prosperity of most Americans. Healthcare statistics aren't so easily distorted. A rich man doesn't live 10x as long as a poor man. As a result, the outliers don't have as much an effect, and you get a real picture of what the situation is.
The cost of malpractice insurance is a bit of a boogyman. In 2002, the cost of malpractice insurance to doctors was about $6.3bn. That's a small fraction of the total cost of healthcare, which ran to $1.6tn in 2002. Compare that to the ~$300bn consumed by administrative costs in the same period.
Well, there is obviously a lot of waste there. Americans spend more on healthcare, as a percentage of GDP, than anybody in the world. 13.6% of GDP goes towards healthcare. The other high-income countries in the world (Western Europe, Japan, Australia) all have universal healthcare, and spend from 5.9% (Luxumbourgh), to 10.6% (Germany) on healthcare. Meanwhile, our healthcare system get's beat on most of the critical indicators. Our infant mortality rate, for example, is 7.2%, compared to France's 4.6%, or Germany's 4.9%. Our healthcare system is ranked the most *responsive* system in the world, but in terms of overall healthcare indicators is ranked 37th.
So we spend more, and we get less. Clearly, something is wrong. It's the job of our public officials to figure out what that is, not make derisive remarks about others who obviously have this healthcare thing figured out better than we do.
That'd be nothing more than political misinformation. To give the real picture, you'd have to, along with those wages, also give a detailed break-down of cost-of-living in the area where the lowest-wage job was, and also include statistics about how that low-wage offset what would otherwise be unemployment in that area.
You're talking fill rates while I'm talking the texturing and mapping abilities of the consoles. What the hell do you think fill rate measures? It measures how many textured pixels the console can draw at once.
The PS2, in this regard, simply can't handle it. Yes, the PS2 supports less special effects. But that doesn't change the fact that the PS2 has more computational capability.
Like the Xbox, though, the GC can use it's main system RAM for graphics as well. So can the PS2. It's designed to be a streaming architecture.
The GC has a faster CPU The PS2's CPU is faster. The "CPU" is the main CPU + VU0. Heck, VU0 by itself is more powerful than the core CPU in the gamecube.
faster GPU The PS2's GPU has 1.2-2.4 gpixels/sec compared to the GC's 600 mpixels/sec. The pixels don't look as good, because the PS2 doesn't have the dedicated hardware to do extra special effects, but it has much more pixel throughput.
and more main system RAM The main system ram on the GC is 24MB, and the PS2's main system memory is 32MB. The 16MB of A-RAM on the GC is so slow (81MB/sec), it's really only fast enough to use for storing fmv and audio.
only site that seems to magically have the numbers that Nintendo has never released to the press The numbers are from the gamecube's SDK. I think ArsTechnica had them too. There is a PDF of part of the docs floating around on the internet, and there is a PDF of the PS2 manual as well.
And, as per your other comment: if you aren't a gamer, why are you so adamant about touting the PS2's raw power? Because the original comment was about power, not about how games look.
It's been shown that the PS2 is the WEAKEST console in this gen many times over. The main cause of performance problems is underutilization of the hardware. An SCEE study showed that most games only utilizes 8% of VU0. That's wasting a huge fraction of the console's power. Good study of PS2's performance.
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With regards to (1), that's not really surprising. Computer science isn't really about coding at all, it's about computational science. You can be a great computer scientist while being a mediocre programmer.
My foreign aid point would make much more sense if I had remembered to point out that the actual US foreign aid budget is less than 1%. The public's perception is actually way out of line with reality. That's why governing by polls is a dumb idea.
Polls don't mean more than objective analysis. Seriously, individuals don't have an objective outlook on the situation as a whole. Let me use a simple example: polls show that most Americans think that the US should spend less on foreign aid. Why? Because they think that the US spends 20% of it's budget on foreign aid! They think 5% is a much more reasonable figure. Simply: people don't know jack shit. Objective studies have a much better chance of at least being in the ballpark of reality.
Um, what? That made no sense. Yes, babies grow up to be taxpayers. But more of our babies die before age 5, as a percentage, than theirs. That's my whole point...
Pulling our troops out of Vietnam was the Right Thing (TM) to do. We cannot call ourselves a just democracy if we contiue to go around trying to remake other countries in our image. Evangelism is contrary to the fundemental principles of our Republic.
Why are these terrorists attacking Iraqi government
*What* Iraqi government? The American-sponsored one? The one operating under a constitution created by a group of people hand-picked by the United States?
Why are they kidnapping and slowly beheading civilians while chanting to allah?
While that's a deplorable tactic, it's not exactly an unusual one in the context of other such situations like in Ireland. In retrospect, most people have realized that while the IRA were indeed terrorists, they were also fighting for their country. The totality of their existance, just like with the Iraqi "insurgents", consists of both their attrocious attacks on civilians, and their fundemental defense of their country against foreign occupation.
PS: We have 45 *million* people without health insurance. Clearly Canada's health system isn't perfect (it's ranked 30th, after all), but they aren't the ones with the 7.2 per 1000 child mortality rate.
Except that the actual statistics don't bear that out. The health indicators show Canada's overall care is slightly better than ours, and they pay less. But sure, your personal examples are so much more convincing than WHO studies...
I don't see what that has to do with anything. In terms of absolute dollars, our privetized healthcare still costs us $4000 a year, and their socialized healthcare still costs only $2000 a year. Now, if you want to factor in cost of living, then you can say their's costs less because salaries are 30% lower, but that still leaves you with an $800 margin. Of course, that's assuming that 100% of healthcare costs are salaries, which it isn't. The absolute value of medical supplies and medicine is still the same. So in reality, the real margin is probably well over $1000 a year.
There you go what? It's not some sort of belief I have. It's just how the world works. I'd love it if philosophers and artists had more value in this world, and that people would get into the profession because they could make a living off it. Hell, I'd love to throw away this engineering degree, and study European history, but that's not exactly commercially tenable is it?
Economics is a self-balancing equillibrium. It is foolish for people to believe they can, in a free society, alter it. Sure, you could make a law saying that you must go to an American doctor, but the extra money has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? I mean, the $190,000 that somebody pays to get heart surgery in the US, over what they'd pay in India --- somebody is losing a job to save that doctor's.
So I guess you're in favor of destroying the value of someone going to medical school?
I'm saying that it's not in anybody's power to decide the value of anybody else. The market decides that. Who am I to say that American doctors are worth 20x as much as Indian doctors, and that we should force people to go to American doctors? In increasing the value of American doctors, what gives me the right to devalue Indian doctors?
Are you saying that doctors have no value to society beyond their short-term commercial potential?
No profession has any value to society beyond their commercial potential. People in many professions have had to bear this reality. Unemployed history phds are everywhere. Now, it's a different category of people dealing with the reality, that's all.
An MD is only worth what other people are willing to pay for it. If you artificially jack up the "value" of an MD by limiting supply, you'll just lose money somewhere else.
I'd say the WHO is qualified to answer that question, and based on health indicators in the two countries, they rank Canada 30th worldwide (France is 1st), compared to the US which is ranked 37th. Of course, they pay half as much per person to get that 30th ranking!
To add to my previous statement: don't think that you aren't paying for it too. Canadians spend about $2000 per capita per year on healthcare, while we spend $4000 per capita per year on healthcare. Sure, for Canadians that money is spent in the form of taxes, and for us it's in the form of health insurance payments, but at the end of the day, that's an extra $2000USD out of your pocket every year.
Yes, the Canadian healthcare system is less responsive overall. No, that doesn't change the fact that their healthcare indicators are better overall. For the *vast* majority of people, good access to regular preventive healthcare services has a far larger impact on overall health than the responsiveness of emergency services.
He get's away with it because most Americans assume that the US is the best in the world at everything. So when he says that, nobody thinks to double-check it, because people accept it at face value.
It is interesting to note, that health care indicators, limited as they are by the laws of biology, tend to show the US's real propserity more so than something like per-capita GDP. While the US has the highest per-capita GDP in the world, the distribution of income is also phenomenally uneven. That means that outliers tend to bring up the average significantly, distorting the real prosperity of most Americans. Healthcare statistics aren't so easily distorted. A rich man doesn't live 10x as long as a poor man. As a result, the outliers don't have as much an effect, and you get a real picture of what the situation is.
The cost of malpractice insurance is a bit of a boogyman. In 2002, the cost of malpractice insurance to doctors was about $6.3bn. That's a small fraction of the total cost of healthcare, which ran to $1.6tn in 2002. Compare that to the ~$300bn consumed by administrative costs in the same period.
Well, there is obviously a lot of waste there. Americans spend more on healthcare, as a percentage of GDP, than anybody in the world. 13.6% of GDP goes towards healthcare. The other high-income countries in the world (Western Europe, Japan, Australia) all have universal healthcare, and spend from 5.9% (Luxumbourgh), to 10.6% (Germany) on healthcare. Meanwhile, our healthcare system get's beat on most of the critical indicators. Our infant mortality rate, for example, is 7.2%, compared to France's 4.6%, or Germany's 4.9%. Our healthcare system is ranked the most *responsive* system in the world, but in terms of overall healthcare indicators is ranked 37th.
So we spend more, and we get less. Clearly, something is wrong. It's the job of our public officials to figure out what that is, not make derisive remarks about others who obviously have this healthcare thing figured out better than we do.
Study from whence I got my statistics.
That'd be nothing more than political misinformation. To give the real picture, you'd have to, along with those wages, also give a detailed break-down of cost-of-living in the area where the lowest-wage job was, and also include statistics about how that low-wage offset what would otherwise be unemployment in that area.
Huh? Encoding information can increase processing overhead, but processing overhead can be greatly overshadowed by inefficient use of the link.
$500 to beta test, and to get up to a $600 hardware discount. If you're in the market for a Mac, you come out way ahead.
Saying that Lieberman is a democrat is like, well, saying that Zell Miller is a democrat...
I wouldn't really count Lieberman in with the rest of the party. He's just a big conservative asshole posing as a democrat.
You're talking fill rates while I'm talking the texturing and mapping abilities of the consoles.
What the hell do you think fill rate measures? It measures how many textured pixels the console can draw at once.
The PS2, in this regard, simply can't handle it.
Yes, the PS2 supports less special effects. But that doesn't change the fact that the PS2 has more computational capability.
Like the Xbox, though, the GC can use it's main system RAM for graphics as well.
So can the PS2. It's designed to be a streaming architecture.
The GC has a faster CPU
The PS2's CPU is faster. The "CPU" is the main CPU + VU0. Heck, VU0 by itself is more powerful than the core CPU in the gamecube.
faster GPU
The PS2's GPU has 1.2-2.4 gpixels/sec compared to the GC's 600 mpixels/sec. The pixels don't look as good, because the PS2 doesn't have the dedicated hardware to do extra special effects, but it has much more pixel throughput.
and more main system RAM
The main system ram on the GC is 24MB, and the PS2's main system memory is 32MB. The 16MB of A-RAM on the GC is so slow (81MB/sec), it's really only fast enough to use for storing fmv and audio.
only site that seems to magically have the numbers that Nintendo has never released to the press
The numbers are from the gamecube's SDK. I think ArsTechnica had them too. There is a PDF of part of the docs floating around on the internet, and there is a PDF of the PS2 manual as well.
And, as per your other comment: if you aren't a gamer, why are you so adamant about touting the PS2's raw power?
Because the original comment was about power, not about how games look.
It's been shown that the PS2 is the WEAKEST console in this gen many times over.
The main cause of performance problems is underutilization of the hardware. An SCEE study showed that most games only utilizes 8% of VU0. That's wasting a huge fraction of the console's power.
Good study of PS2's performance.
It's quite possible to bind POSIX to any language. Many Lisps can natively call C API using the platform's C calling convention.