To disprove anybody who thinks there's even a positive correlation between violent video games, music, movies, etc and the violent crime rate in this country, simply ask them about the White House crime statistics, or even go to the horses mouth and ask the US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The rise of exceptionally violent and explicit media, starting in the early to mid 90's, is actually inversely related to the violent crime rates. That's right - as media has gotten more violent, actual violent crime has provably gone down.
Anybody trying to claim that violent media is responsible for any objective worsening of American society doesn't have a single iota of evidence in their favor.
Isn't it some kind of war crime to intentionally TRY to inflict collateral damage?
I thought there was an obligation to try to minimize collateral damage? That rule is moot for quite a number of reasons. See firebombing of Dresden. And remember, the term "war crimes" is either an oxymoron or redundant, depending on how you look at it.
Firstly, I would like to say that I work for a major games label, and I have specific knowledge of why we do put DRM on the discs, and I call bull on this CEO. I dislike DRM just as much as the next/.er, but we actually do have a damn good reason for DRM, and it has nothing to do with preventing you from making copies of the game for backup, or your friends, or putting it up on a BitTorrent tracker - honestly, we don't care about the individual small-scale pirates. That's why there is not Game-Developer-IAA hunting after college kids.
What we do care about is when somebody in the mastering lab, or somewhere else along the line in between when the title goes to manufacturing and when it hits shelves, decides to take the game to a wholesale bootlegger. What we do care about is when a bootlegger makes half a million copies of our game and gets wide distribution to retail stores that either don't know any better or don't care. This is a major problem in Asia, particularly China. Bootleg retail copies hurt us in two ways: (1) Obviously, we lose revenue, but just as importantly (2) Customers tend to blame us, and not the bootleggers, when something goes wrong with a store-bought game because it was a bootleg (CD's that start flaking, etc) - it's a major problem for the brand-name.
Yes, it sucks that backup copies are collateral damage in this battle. But you tell me a better method for us to guarantee that no wholesale bootlegging will occur, and I'll take it to my superiors.
Robot locomotion of that quality is probably one of the most difficult problems to solve - the robustness of that thing was quite impressive - it survived rubble, snow, ice, and a solid kick that sent it tumbling. I'd really like to know how they did it, if they just managed to perfect current techniques with enough DARPA money or came up with something new - I would imagine it required some very accurate sensors and actuators, and a super-high-precision inverse-kinematics solver. If they can couple that together with a super-accurate local navigation system - which I imagine would be the easy half in comparison - then they've got a huge platform to launch consumer-grade robots if they get to a low enough price (and they do something about the noise). Maybe I will have a robot butler in my lifetime, but it looks like the military gets their mules first.
It is not just the class libraries which are a problem. The idea of using a garbage collected language in a production environment for a large project is just plain silly, for the simple fact that garbage collection does not scale well and it introduces nondeterminism in your code - two things which are fundamentally opposed to the proper operation of a large software system. Not to mention all the bad programming practices it encourages. It's great if you're trying to teach some concepts to students or whip up a small program quickly, but it just plain sucks beyond that.
Seriously, what's wrong with smart pointers? Are the managed-code monkeys really that afraid of how to work with class and function templates? Garbage collection in both Java and C# strikes me more as a feature to keep inexperienced programmers (read: those who don't understand memory management) from hurting themselves, but in any non-trivial software, does a whole lot more harm than good (I'm speaking from significant experience). What we need are better software engineers, not a tool to enable the proliferation of crappy software engineers. Garbage collection is a band-aid solution to the problems that a well written program would not have in the first place.
If more people would refuse to vote for more of the same, then we might actually get politicians with integrity that follow and uphold the rule of law. You cannot get politicians, third party or not, with "integrity" as long as there are silly criminal laws on the books. And by silly, I mean laws that may evoke some sense of morality or social norm emotionally, but that really should not be codified in the legal system (the American one, anyway). Gambling, drugs, and prostitution come immediately to mind - threatening people with jail is not a significant deterrent to these vices, so it ends up just making a whole lot of people so-far-uncaught criminals - including way more politicians than have been caught.
No, you'll never get a politician with integrity as long as you have silly laws, because making laws that man can not and will not obey serves to bring all laws into contempt [elizabeth cady stanton]. Once consenting adults can do as they wish in their own privacy without fear of breaking the law, then we will all get quite a bit of integrity back, and so will our politicians.
more and more console games are being released with bugs to be patched later. Because it takes a month, give or take, to go from Gold to actually getting the discs on shelves across the world. There are classes of bugs that will prevent a game from being released - look up the Microsoft TCR or the Sony equivalent - but if you pass those certifications, you can spend that month making all the final bug fixes, then it essentially allows you to release a month earlier than you would otherwise. It's a way to save some money when development costs are skyrocketing, and it makes it easier to skit by before the end of a fiscal quarter - just a reality of the business.
Software that's custom made for the cell chip barely exploits all the parallel compute power, so I doubt gcc would compile Linux to make use of it (if it can even compile to cell, which I'm not sure of). IOW, you have no idea what you're talking about.:-) There are out-of-the-box distributions of Linux for Cell platforms (Yellow Dog, Fedora, Ubuntu even), and the gcc supplied in IBM's SDK is quite happy to compile for the PPE and SPE cores. Yes, I've played with all this on the PS/3. PCI and Blade hardware is available from Mercury and IBM, but it's pricey... you could drop one of Mercury's Cell PCI cards into a small IBM xSeries...
Anyway, I agree with the OP, this is a killer chip for many many of the applications we use today, and IBM should talk Lenovo (or, oh please, SUN) into selling a Cell-based Linux (or, oh please, Solaris) workstation. That would be ridiculous for software development if it had a Java SDK to go with it. You're both half-wrong. Yes, you can get Linux running on a Cell just fine. No, software that was not written specifically with the Cell in mind (read: almost everything) uses the co-processors (SPU/SPE whatever) anywhere near capacity. And in fact, almost all of the software that is written for the Cell processor still doesn't use the co-processors anywhere near capacity. It is a very difficult platform to program for, and because of the inherent design of the Cell, it simply performs poorly compared to SMP for a large class of problems. And by difficult, I mean that you have to sit there trying to figure out how to fit your 17k of code and 512k of data into a unified 256k buffer (information theory comes in handy), because going outside the local buffer and using DMA is not only a huge pain in the ass to code up, it is also a huge performance hit. Programming for the Cell is a step backwards from the ideal computer science goal of abstracting the hardware from the code.
I work in the games industry, and I recently saw the performance timer graphs of a very popular racing game that was very recently released for the PS3, a second-generation PS3 title. It was using the co-processors at about 10% of their capacity, and that only came in regular-interval spikes. And this is a piece of software that the Cell was specifically designed to run.
Trust me, you do not want to be programming for the Cell. Stay happy with SMP on the desktop and above, leave the Cell to die in the PS3 as it should. Yes, it's a bit of a technical marvel, but quite frankly, it is not worth all the secondary costs.
The United States got by for over 200 years without electronic voting. We should not switch to electronic voting simply because there is no functional problem with older methods of counting and there are no compelling benefits to justify switching. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Oh wait, it's because ScuttleMonkey is an absolutely shitty editor. Go back to today's (1/19/08, 2:40AM Pacific) front page, and observe that out of the 15 stories ScuttleMonkey has posted, 13 of them have only a single link to source information.
But, the whole reason to GO to a University, is to get the skills/education to make more money when finished, than you would have if you had not gone. That is absolutely wrong. You go to a University for undergraduate education so that you can learn how to learn in your field of choice, so that you can be equally well footed to learn anything in your field, be it further in academia or in industry. If you want to be directly taught the things that will "make more money" without regard for academics, you go to Vocational School.
We are once again experiencing the century-old practice of Yellow Journalism. In fact, I would say that media's role in how the Spanish-American War was sold to the public is disturbingly parallel to that of the invasion of Iraq, just with Karl Rove at the helm instead of William Randolph Hearst. What we think is this new medium of "infotainment" is simply an update of sensationalism.
Unfortunately, history and civics education in the US are so atrocious that I would not expect many Americans to remember any of this, making us doomed to repeat mistakes from a hundred years ago.
Academia is a whole other dimension - mostly because the question is... "what competition"? Sure, there is a level of competitiveness, but not in any organized sense of the concept.
I'm sorry, what? Have you never heard of a Grade Point Average? Valedictorian? Magna cum laude? The Fields Medal? How competitive it can be to get a position, from student through professor, at a prestigious school? How competitive it can be to get research funding?
There is plenty of organized competitiveness in academia. Just none of it is on the publicity scale of professional sports.
Click on their poll link at the end of their article, and this is what passes off:
What are your thoughts on Google now that it designed a logo for veterans?
Fantastic! Google has had its head up its search engine for more than 7 years!
I'm glad to see the change of heart, and I'll use Google more often
I still have major gripes with Google, but at least this is a small step in the right direction
Looks like someone reminded people at Google they live in the U.S. and enjoy freedoms soldiers have shed blood fighting for
1 lonely logo for veterans since 1999? Whoopidy-freakin-doo!
Google's logos are irrelevant
Google only did it to get WND off its back
Must have been the new guy who did the design. He's not hip to the anti-American company rules yet
Google is still evil, and must be shunned at all costs
Other
And I RTFA'd too. No, these people don't have any sort of bias against the Googles. . . Put this WorldNetDaily.com on your list of propaganda websites that are too stupid to even try to appear objective.
I don't consider your post Funny - if I had mod points, I'd rate you as Insightful. I was going to write a post exactly like yours, but you beat me to it. Powerpoint itself is a powerful communications tool in the hands of a skilled presenter. Powerpoint is a dose of sulfur stench which refuses to exit your nostrils even after leaving the auditorium when in the hands of a poor presenter. Unfortunately, far too many people equate "I can create a Powerpoint slideshow" with "I know how to present to a group of people" and "my presentation is ready." Your presentation is not ready when you make that final save to the PPT.
The best presentations I have seen (and given) have pointedly not been ones which used Powerpoint, but used pure speech, speech plus whiteboard, or speech plus drawing on transparencies on an overhead projector. Powerpoint handicaps both the presenter's and audience's thought flow by conforming to a rigid structure, where the next point of discussion is always predetermined, which is completely counterproductive to the interactive learning and discussion a live presentation seeks to encourage in the first place. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of communication problems Powerpoint introduces.
Powerpoint is a bit like an F1 car in that particular respect: Give it to somebody who knows what they're doing in the particular (rare) scenario where it is appropriate, and you may see some incredible feats. Under any other circumstances it will lead to a crash and burn just trying to get off the starting line.
Let's get this straight: AMD is a company working for profit. They are at least afforded the right to decide what kind of information about unreleased products will be made available to the market. If information (or, heaven forbid, disinformation by the media!) is released that was not part of AMD's market strategy, product strategy, or competitive strategy, it could severely damage their business.
For example, if AMD was targeting 32 TB/s of memory bandwith at 2ms latencies for their year 2 target, that would be quite a sensitive strategy. Make Intel, or any number of small semiconductor companies, aware of this, and there is a strong possibility that instead of joining AMD, they'll fight, and damage AMD's market position.
If a company wants a reporter to sign an NDA, the reporter can sign it, or the reporter can refuse to - it's not like AMD goombas twisted their arm to sign it. Bravo on not being a corporate pawn, but that's where it stops.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. I hold several (opposing) points of view on the "right to bare arms" (or was it the right to arm bears?). But the fundamental problem with how the Constitution is written is the grammar. It is simply not proper English in the formal grammar sense, a point which only became clear as I reread the Second Amendment as you (and the interwebs) quote. Which may or may not make you mistaken.
There are four separate implicit subject-predicate pairs in the single sentence, separated neatly by commas (at least the Fathers had that much sense). While the first two and last two make sense as single clauses, the entire sentence itself is flawed. Is it saying that (a) A well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a state, or is it saying (b) the right of the people to keep and bear Arms [exclude comma] shall not be infringed? If you're following, you see that the question itself is flawed: you cannot divide this sentence as such. It does not constitute a well formed clause - the first and second halves cannot simply be two separate clauses separated by parenthetical comma, as such reasoning would invalidate much else of the Constitution, and that's not what's at question. If it was, we would immediately invalidate the entire document - read it, every 5 words there's a potential parenthetical statement to have an argument about. Socrates' field day.
So why the grammatical ambiguity? It's not as it seems: Punctuation is quite an important part of English grammar. Commas separate partial ideas, while periods end whole ideas, and a paragraph ends a series of ideas or facts. The Second Amendment, like all the other enumerations on the Bill of Rights and the following amendments, is only ideas, and contains no facts. The Second Amendment was such a powerful statement that it commanded an entire paragraph on its own sentence - and just like all the others, was meant to be understood as a simple syllogism, or so the Framers envisioned. Don't take it lightly: Our right to shoot our guns off is only preceded by our right to shoot our mouths off.
Therefore, we must have a Militia, it must be well regulated, and citizens must be allowed to have guns if they so choose - and this is all because we must secure our free State. Against tyranny and oppression. [Oh, wait? What?] But the expanded clause does have a crux, it has a because. If you want to attack the Second Amendment, that's what you go for: Will these measures secure our free State?
The rest of this amicus curiae is left as an exercise to the reader.
North Carolina-raised MC Phonte, one-third of Little Brother, and Dutch producer Nicolay formed the duo and crafted the ethereally lush hip-hop album without ever meeting face-to-face. Using the marvels of modern technology, the group traded verses and tracks over the Internet.
Maybe we aren't crying salty tears for Dell, but this sounds like exactly the sort of silly, greedy, "protect my constitutional right to get something for nothing" lawsuit that these arbitration clauses are intended to head off.
Here's the irony: Mandatory arbitration clauses were introduced to cut down on the ever increasing legal costs during the 1980's in the financial industry, but through the 1990s to today they have been finding their way into every form contract. Their initial goal was good: cut down on the cost and burden to the courts and parties. But they have resulted in something worse: Arbitration necessarily precludes class-action lawsuits, which are the only way for a group of individual, damaged small parties to seek recompense against a large offender, such as a large public corporation. This has led to many of these large corporations realizing that they can get away with small fraud on a massive scale, because the only way to fight that is through class-action lawsuits.
Take the following hypothetical: In 1980, if MegaCorp scammed an extra $10 from 1 million of its customers, then the customers rightly may bring a class action lawsuit for $10 million in damages. Each individual customer would have little effort in the actual lawsuit beyond signing an acceptance to the class, and at some later date (given competent attorneys), might receive some or all of their money back. However, in 2007, with a mandatory arbitration clause in the contract, it means that MegaCorp cannot be pursued by a class. Each individual customer who was scammed $10 must go through arbitration as an individual - and who would waste days or weeks of their time to get back a measly $10? Not to mention that with arbitration, the individual legal fees can far exceed the individual monetary amount in question, defeating the purpose. In its new, abused form, mandatory arbitration attempts to completely stifle the power of individual consumers to act as a group to correct a grievance.
I work in the games industry, and I assure you, the industry is moving towards taking full advantage of multi-core machines. In fact, the move is good, because it coincides well with the XBox 360 and the PS3 - the 360 has 3 hyper-threaded cores, with 5 hardware threads available for the game, and 1 for the OS. The PS3 has the central processor, and 7 coprocessors which all run independently. PC Hardware moving in this same parallelization direction makes life a little bit easier for game software developers, because we can use similar software architecture now for both the HD consoles and the PC.
Expect the first mass-market software that takes advantage of these processors to really start picking up within the next 12-24 months in the games industry. In fact, I do believe that FEAR was one of the first PC games built with MT in mind, and I'd wager that you can see significant performance differences with that game between a single and dual core PC.
Before you cry afoul in agreement that the ISP's don't want to invest in new infrastructure and are greedy bastards, remember for one second that in telecommunications terms, the Internet is still very young. Before this, the last major jumps in the sector were television and satellites, 50 years ago. Before that was the radio a half century earlier, and another half century back gets us the telegraph. The Internet in its current form is barely 15 years old, and at most you could peg it at 20.
Much of the infrastructure was laid down during the dot-com boom days of the late 1990's, so much of the hardware itself is only a decade old, and at the time was quite expensive - there's a reason that Cisco is huge. The ISP's just have not seen the return on hardware investment in the Internet that they had in the phone business before undertaking any massive overhaul of the underlying network, as a transition to IPv6 would be.
The whole tiered internet system is (surprise!) purely motivated by the money to be made, of course. Yes, it might end up sucking balls for the home user, but then again, maybe they'll have the monetary incentive (or when it becomes viable, perhaps some startup company will) to upgrade the network, which is good for everybody - after all, they do need some kind of bandwidth to push more digital HD channels.
Personally, I would dislike my packets being lower priority than somebody else's. I'm just saying that you need to think about it from a utilities business perspective, not a technology business perspective - their business is a service, not a product as such.
Slashdot Mirror
The rise of exceptionally violent and explicit media, starting in the early to mid 90's, is actually inversely related to the violent crime rates. That's right - as media has gotten more violent, actual violent crime has provably gone down.
Anybody trying to claim that violent media is responsible for any objective worsening of American society doesn't have a single iota of evidence in their favor.
I thought there was an obligation to try to minimize collateral damage? That rule is moot for quite a number of reasons. See firebombing of Dresden. And remember, the term "war crimes" is either an oxymoron or redundant, depending on how you look at it.
Firstly, I would like to say that I work for a major games label, and I have specific knowledge of why we do put DRM on the discs, and I call bull on this CEO. I dislike DRM just as much as the next /.er, but we actually do have a damn good reason for DRM, and it has nothing to do with preventing you from making copies of the game for backup, or your friends, or putting it up on a BitTorrent tracker - honestly, we don't care about the individual small-scale pirates. That's why there is not Game-Developer-IAA hunting after college kids.
What we do care about is when somebody in the mastering lab, or somewhere else along the line in between when the title goes to manufacturing and when it hits shelves, decides to take the game to a wholesale bootlegger. What we do care about is when a bootlegger makes half a million copies of our game and gets wide distribution to retail stores that either don't know any better or don't care. This is a major problem in Asia, particularly China. Bootleg retail copies hurt us in two ways: (1) Obviously, we lose revenue, but just as importantly (2) Customers tend to blame us, and not the bootleggers, when something goes wrong with a store-bought game because it was a bootleg (CD's that start flaking, etc) - it's a major problem for the brand-name.
Yes, it sucks that backup copies are collateral damage in this battle. But you tell me a better method for us to guarantee that no wholesale bootlegging will occur, and I'll take it to my superiors.
Robot locomotion of that quality is probably one of the most difficult problems to solve - the robustness of that thing was quite impressive - it survived rubble, snow, ice, and a solid kick that sent it tumbling. I'd really like to know how they did it, if they just managed to perfect current techniques with enough DARPA money or came up with something new - I would imagine it required some very accurate sensors and actuators, and a super-high-precision inverse-kinematics solver. If they can couple that together with a super-accurate local navigation system - which I imagine would be the easy half in comparison - then they've got a huge platform to launch consumer-grade robots if they get to a low enough price (and they do something about the noise). Maybe I will have a robot butler in my lifetime, but it looks like the military gets their mules first.
It is not just the class libraries which are a problem. The idea of using a garbage collected language in a production environment for a large project is just plain silly, for the simple fact that garbage collection does not scale well and it introduces nondeterminism in your code - two things which are fundamentally opposed to the proper operation of a large software system. Not to mention all the bad programming practices it encourages. It's great if you're trying to teach some concepts to students or whip up a small program quickly, but it just plain sucks beyond that.
Seriously, what's wrong with smart pointers? Are the managed-code monkeys really that afraid of how to work with class and function templates? Garbage collection in both Java and C# strikes me more as a feature to keep inexperienced programmers (read: those who don't understand memory management) from hurting themselves, but in any non-trivial software, does a whole lot more harm than good (I'm speaking from significant experience). What we need are better software engineers, not a tool to enable the proliferation of crappy software engineers. Garbage collection is a band-aid solution to the problems that a well written program would not have in the first place.
No, you'll never get a politician with integrity as long as you have silly laws, because making laws that man can not and will not obey serves to bring all laws into contempt [elizabeth cady stanton]. Once consenting adults can do as they wish in their own privacy without fear of breaking the law, then we will all get quite a bit of integrity back, and so will our politicians.
Anyway, I agree with the OP, this is a killer chip for many many of the applications we use today, and IBM should talk Lenovo (or, oh please, SUN) into selling a Cell-based Linux (or, oh please, Solaris) workstation. That would be ridiculous for software development if it had a Java SDK to go with it. You're both half-wrong. Yes, you can get Linux running on a Cell just fine. No, software that was not written specifically with the Cell in mind (read: almost everything) uses the co-processors (SPU/SPE whatever) anywhere near capacity. And in fact, almost all of the software that is written for the Cell processor still doesn't use the co-processors anywhere near capacity. It is a very difficult platform to program for, and because of the inherent design of the Cell, it simply performs poorly compared to SMP for a large class of problems. And by difficult, I mean that you have to sit there trying to figure out how to fit your 17k of code and 512k of data into a unified 256k buffer (information theory comes in handy), because going outside the local buffer and using DMA is not only a huge pain in the ass to code up, it is also a huge performance hit. Programming for the Cell is a step backwards from the ideal computer science goal of abstracting the hardware from the code.
I work in the games industry, and I recently saw the performance timer graphs of a very popular racing game that was very recently released for the PS3, a second-generation PS3 title. It was using the co-processors at about 10% of their capacity, and that only came in regular-interval spikes. And this is a piece of software that the Cell was specifically designed to run.
Trust me, you do not want to be programming for the Cell. Stay happy with SMP on the desktop and above, leave the Cell to die in the PS3 as it should. Yes, it's a bit of a technical marvel, but quite frankly, it is not worth all the secondary costs.
The United States got by for over 200 years without electronic voting. We should not switch to electronic voting simply because there is no functional problem with older methods of counting and there are no compelling benefits to justify switching. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Why this is front page Slashdot news?
Oh wait, it's because ScuttleMonkey is an absolutely shitty editor. Go back to today's (1/19/08, 2:40AM Pacific) front page, and observe that out of the 15 stories ScuttleMonkey has posted, 13 of them have only a single link to source information.
Seriously, you've got to be fucking kidding me.
The phrase "innocent until proven guilty" is not a statement of what is the truth. It is a statement of legal status.
We are once again experiencing the century-old practice of Yellow Journalism. In fact, I would say that media's role in how the Spanish-American War was sold to the public is disturbingly parallel to that of the invasion of Iraq, just with Karl Rove at the helm instead of William Randolph Hearst. What we think is this new medium of "infotainment" is simply an update of sensationalism.
Unfortunately, history and civics education in the US are so atrocious that I would not expect many Americans to remember any of this, making us doomed to repeat mistakes from a hundred years ago.
I'm sorry, what? Have you never heard of a Grade Point Average? Valedictorian? Magna cum laude? The Fields Medal? How competitive it can be to get a position, from student through professor, at a prestigious school? How competitive it can be to get research funding?
There is plenty of organized competitiveness in academia. Just none of it is on the publicity scale of professional sports.
Why point to the C-Net version of the article when the original article is freely available online here?
- Fantastic! Google has had its head up its search engine for more than 7 years!
- I'm glad to see the change of heart, and I'll use Google more often
- I still have major gripes with Google, but at least this is a small step in the right direction
- Looks like someone reminded people at Google they live in the U.S. and enjoy freedoms soldiers have shed blood fighting for
- 1 lonely logo for veterans since 1999? Whoopidy-freakin-doo!
- Google's logos are irrelevant
- Google only did it to get WND off its back
- Must have been the new guy who did the design. He's not hip to the anti-American company rules yet
- Google is still evil, and must be shunned at all costs
- Other
And I RTFA'd too. No, these people don't have any sort of bias against the Googles. . . Put this WorldNetDaily.com on your list of propaganda websites that are too stupid to even try to appear objective.I don't consider your post Funny - if I had mod points, I'd rate you as Insightful. I was going to write a post exactly like yours, but you beat me to it. Powerpoint itself is a powerful communications tool in the hands of a skilled presenter. Powerpoint is a dose of sulfur stench which refuses to exit your nostrils even after leaving the auditorium when in the hands of a poor presenter. Unfortunately, far too many people equate "I can create a Powerpoint slideshow" with "I know how to present to a group of people" and "my presentation is ready." Your presentation is not ready when you make that final save to the PPT.
The best presentations I have seen (and given) have pointedly not been ones which used Powerpoint, but used pure speech, speech plus whiteboard, or speech plus drawing on transparencies on an overhead projector. Powerpoint handicaps both the presenter's and audience's thought flow by conforming to a rigid structure, where the next point of discussion is always predetermined, which is completely counterproductive to the interactive learning and discussion a live presentation seeks to encourage in the first place. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of communication problems Powerpoint introduces.
Powerpoint is a bit like an F1 car in that particular respect: Give it to somebody who knows what they're doing in the particular (rare) scenario where it is appropriate, and you may see some incredible feats. Under any other circumstances it will lead to a crash and burn just trying to get off the starting line.
What possessed you to post in English on an English-mostly place, when the link is in Finnish? You're an ass, and Shirke is a poor "editor."
You elected the politicians to write laws, but that's another topic.
Let's get this straight: AMD is a company working for profit. They are at least afforded the right to decide what kind of information about unreleased products will be made available to the market. If information (or, heaven forbid, disinformation by the media!) is released that was not part of AMD's market strategy, product strategy, or competitive strategy, it could severely damage their business.
For example, if AMD was targeting 32 TB/s of memory bandwith at 2ms latencies for their year 2 target, that would be quite a sensitive strategy. Make Intel, or any number of small semiconductor companies, aware of this, and there is a strong possibility that instead of joining AMD, they'll fight, and damage AMD's market position.
If a company wants a reporter to sign an NDA, the reporter can sign it, or the reporter can refuse to - it's not like AMD goombas twisted their arm to sign it. Bravo on not being a corporate pawn, but that's where it stops.
There are four separate implicit subject-predicate pairs in the single sentence, separated neatly by commas (at least the Fathers had that much sense). While the first two and last two make sense as single clauses, the entire sentence itself is flawed. Is it saying that (a) A well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a state, or is it saying (b) the right of the people to keep and bear Arms [exclude comma] shall not be infringed? If you're following, you see that the question itself is flawed: you cannot divide this sentence as such. It does not constitute a well formed clause - the first and second halves cannot simply be two separate clauses separated by parenthetical comma, as such reasoning would invalidate much else of the Constitution, and that's not what's at question. If it was, we would immediately invalidate the entire document - read it, every 5 words there's a potential parenthetical statement to have an argument about. Socrates' field day.
So why the grammatical ambiguity? It's not as it seems: Punctuation is quite an important part of English grammar. Commas separate partial ideas, while periods end whole ideas, and a paragraph ends a series of ideas or facts. The Second Amendment, like all the other enumerations on the Bill of Rights and the following amendments, is only ideas, and contains no facts. The Second Amendment was such a powerful statement that it commanded an entire paragraph on its own sentence - and just like all the others, was meant to be understood as a simple syllogism, or so the Framers envisioned. Don't take it lightly: Our right to shoot our guns off is only preceded by our right to shoot our mouths off.
Therefore, we must have a Militia, it must be well regulated, and citizens must be allowed to have guns if they so choose - and this is all because we must secure our free State. Against tyranny and oppression. [Oh, wait? What?] But the expanded clause does have a crux, it has a because. If you want to attack the Second Amendment, that's what you go for: Will these measures secure our free State?
The rest of this amicus curiae is left as an exercise to the reader.
North Carolina-raised MC Phonte, one-third of Little Brother, and Dutch producer Nicolay formed the duo and crafted the ethereally lush hip-hop album without ever meeting face-to-face. Using the marvels of modern technology, the group traded verses and tracks over the Internet.
Your move, Elton.
Here's the irony: Mandatory arbitration clauses were introduced to cut down on the ever increasing legal costs during the 1980's in the financial industry, but through the 1990s to today they have been finding their way into every form contract. Their initial goal was good: cut down on the cost and burden to the courts and parties. But they have resulted in something worse: Arbitration necessarily precludes class-action lawsuits, which are the only way for a group of individual, damaged small parties to seek recompense against a large offender, such as a large public corporation. This has led to many of these large corporations realizing that they can get away with small fraud on a massive scale, because the only way to fight that is through class-action lawsuits.
Take the following hypothetical: In 1980, if MegaCorp scammed an extra $10 from 1 million of its customers, then the customers rightly may bring a class action lawsuit for $10 million in damages. Each individual customer would have little effort in the actual lawsuit beyond signing an acceptance to the class, and at some later date (given competent attorneys), might receive some or all of their money back. However, in 2007, with a mandatory arbitration clause in the contract, it means that MegaCorp cannot be pursued by a class. Each individual customer who was scammed $10 must go through arbitration as an individual - and who would waste days or weeks of their time to get back a measly $10? Not to mention that with arbitration, the individual legal fees can far exceed the individual monetary amount in question, defeating the purpose. In its new, abused form, mandatory arbitration attempts to completely stifle the power of individual consumers to act as a group to correct a grievance.
I work in the games industry, and I assure you, the industry is moving towards taking full advantage of multi-core machines. In fact, the move is good, because it coincides well with the XBox 360 and the PS3 - the 360 has 3 hyper-threaded cores, with 5 hardware threads available for the game, and 1 for the OS. The PS3 has the central processor, and 7 coprocessors which all run independently. PC Hardware moving in this same parallelization direction makes life a little bit easier for game software developers, because we can use similar software architecture now for both the HD consoles and the PC.
Expect the first mass-market software that takes advantage of these processors to really start picking up within the next 12-24 months in the games industry. In fact, I do believe that FEAR was one of the first PC games built with MT in mind, and I'd wager that you can see significant performance differences with that game between a single and dual core PC.
Before you cry afoul in agreement that the ISP's don't want to invest in new infrastructure and are greedy bastards, remember for one second that in telecommunications terms, the Internet is still very young. Before this, the last major jumps in the sector were television and satellites, 50 years ago. Before that was the radio a half century earlier, and another half century back gets us the telegraph. The Internet in its current form is barely 15 years old, and at most you could peg it at 20.
Much of the infrastructure was laid down during the dot-com boom days of the late 1990's, so much of the hardware itself is only a decade old, and at the time was quite expensive - there's a reason that Cisco is huge. The ISP's just have not seen the return on hardware investment in the Internet that they had in the phone business before undertaking any massive overhaul of the underlying network, as a transition to IPv6 would be.
The whole tiered internet system is (surprise!) purely motivated by the money to be made, of course. Yes, it might end up sucking balls for the home user, but then again, maybe they'll have the monetary incentive (or when it becomes viable, perhaps some startup company will) to upgrade the network, which is good for everybody - after all, they do need some kind of bandwidth to push more digital HD channels.
Personally, I would dislike my packets being lower priority than somebody else's. I'm just saying that you need to think about it from a utilities business perspective, not a technology business perspective - their business is a service, not a product as such.