The Russian, French and Chinese revolutions would be good counterexamples. So are the original Luddites. I suppose you could claim that most of the wars in Europe for the last thousand years were in the name of God because the divine right of kings was invoked to get people to fight, but it's a bit of a stretch. The first and second world wars both had huge death tolls and neither side was religiously motivated.
Yup, they've been making quad-core 64-bit chips for a little while. They're an interesting company to work with if you get the chance - they're much smaller than their surviving competitors and so focus incredibly hard on developer productivity. They've incorporated formal verification into their continuous integration systems at quite a few levels.
At the moment, the only major powers in possession of nuclear weapons that stand for common sense and restraint, are China, UK and France
I'd drop the UK from that list. We've had a lot of rhetoric in the UK because the leader of the opposition had the audacity to say that he wouldn't be willing to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike. The Tories have been shouting loudly that they would and that it's important for security that no one knows what threshold would trigger a nuclear strike.
Wars are only fought when BOTH sides think they can win.
It's probably more true that they're fought when one side thinks it can win and the other side thinks it doesn't have an alternative. In the first world war, Germany thought that it could win against the enemies that it picked, but didn't expect the treaties that required others to join in would be respected. In the second world war, it was far from clear to the British leadership that they could win, but the other alternative was submit to Nazi occupation and that didn't seem like a valid option.
Humans are perfectly capable of attaching religious fervour to anything, irrespective of its connection to deities of philosophy. Remove religion and people will go to war over access to resources, their favourite king, economic system, or text editor.
That's not a new prediction. This is precisely what happened in The Time Machine: the morlocks were the descendants of the people who maintained the machines and eventually the rest of the population just became food for them.
The difference isn't some sharp qualitative difference, it's a quantitative difference that's happened each time. Automation always goes for the low skilled jobs and pushes people towards higher-skilled jobs. The problem is that the jobs that people are being pushed to now are either the ones that are next on the list to be automated, or ones that already have skills shortages. You're not going to be fired from a menial job and go and work in a skilled profession, because if you had the skills to do so then you wouldn't be working in the unskilled and poorly paid job to start with.
Not exactly. She was in favour of remaining part of the information sharing agreements with spy agencies in the rest of the EU, but opposed to remaining bound by the decisions of any international courts. Basically, she wanted power without oversight. She's now decided that Brexit is a good way of achieving this.
You mean directives, passed by the European Commission, under instructions from the Council of Ministers, which is made up entirely of members of the cabinets of the member states?
On the creosote ban, it was specifically because creosote was found to be significantly more carcinogenic than previously believed. Do you stain those hundreds of yards of fencing yourself? If so, that directive has significantly reduced your likelihood of dying of lung cancer. If not, then it's reduced your ability to employ someone else to work in unsafe conditions. Which of these do you object to?
They can always control any company that wants to do business in their country. Do you think Facebook wants to pull out of the UK? If they did, then that's a big incentive for a UK-based competitor to start up. If other countries see that they can get Facebook to pull out, do you think that they wouldn't follow suit? It's not like Facebook is paying a lot of tax in, say, France or Germany. By attempting to centralise the Internet, companies like Facebook and Google have made it a lot easier to control. People always seem to forget when they build concentrations of power that other people may end up with access to them.
While I can't speak for GP, I haven't really seen anybody who wants to ban all immigration, rather just illegal immigration.
Illegal immigration is already banned - that's why they call it illegal. The changes that people want to make are making legal immigration harder and enforcing laws against illegal immigration more strongly. The problem with these policies is twofold. The first is that the people who advocate them often benefit from low-priced labour as a result of illegal immigration. The second is that they're often using immigrants as a scapegoat for something else: For example in the UK, in the run up to the referendum, we saw that a lot of communities that were 1% or less immigrant were blaming immigrants for the lack of jobs: even if they deported all of the immigrants, it would make no meaningful difference to unemployment rates. But blaming the problems on immigrants is far easier for politicians than addressing the various root causes of inequality (in this case, that there's a huge amount of direct and indirect subsidy on companies in London, which pulls jobs away from the rest of the country).
As with any law or convention, there's a balance between probability of detection and penalty. Nuclear weapons are an interesting one, because for a small country having nuclear weapons has often been the difference between being invaded by a superpower and not being. The worst-case penalty for not having nuclear weapons is an invasion, the penalty for having them is economic sanctions. There's therefore a big problem in enforcement. Heinlein's (fictional) Space Patrol was a non-national entity that had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and was empowered to enforce this monopoly by deploying nuclear weapons against anyone who violated it: in this situation there's no benefit to owning nuclear weapons, but creating this situation is very hard.
In terms of 'cyber weapons' (horrible term), the penalty for not owning them is much lower. You're unlikely to have ones that are capable of crippling the supply lines of the conventional armed forces of a superpower. You can use them for economic ends, but if you get caught then the penalties are much worse than the benefits.
It doesn't really matter if a country is stockpiling vulnerabilities, it matters if they start using them (and leaking them so that they're used by third parties counts here). The correct response here would be to hold the NSA, and by extension the US government, responsible for all costs associated with this ransomware and then do the same to the next malware that comes from a similar source. If the cost of stockpiling vulnerabilities has the potential to be billions or trillions of dollars if they're leaked, then there's suddenly a big incentive to work with vendors to get them fixed quickly.
There's not much difference between an emulator that runs in the firmware and running natively. If you want to make that distinction, no x86 chip since the 80286 has executed x86 natively.
Intel has a history of this. Every decade, they come out with a new ISA that is impossible for compilers to target efficiently. The iAPX432, the i860, Itanium, and now their GPUs (two-dimensional register sets sound really neat on paper, but trying to write a register allocator for them is very exciting and requires very tight coupling between instruction selection and register allocation).
It was a completely different architecture so adding native i386 support would have required to add a complete i386 compute core to the chips
Someone has a poor memory. The first generation of Itaniums were advertised as being able to run x86 code and came with an x86 emulator for backwards compatibility. It was a key selling point of the architecture: code that was recompiled got all of the shiny new benefits, but legacy code would continue to work. Unfortunately, the emulator performed so badly that the second generation ended up sticking a Pentium on die to run IA32 code. This, of course, drove the price up and made Itanium even less competitive.
Quebec is a fairly special case, because of the abundance of hydro. Quebec has, on average, 14.8 people per square kilometre, whereas Germany has 229.4. This gives Quebec a much larger area to devote to hydroelectric dams per person. They also have geography that is particularly well suited to hydro power.
Modern binary translation is very fast. MAMBO, for example, translates AArch32 to AArch64 and performs better than native on the same chip. The main problem is that it consumes extra RAM. The approach taken by Transitive Technologies (which Apple licensed and branded as Rosetta) involves generating small trampolines to allow calling native code. Rosetta's emulation wasn't very good in comparison to the state of the art, but it didn't matter because most desktop apps spend 50-90% of their CPU time in system libraries and these were all native code.
Now if they were trying to emulate ARM on Intel, that would be much more interesting, especially if Intel got involved and provided microcode to directly run ARM machine code..... can't do that in ARM.
In general, it's easier to emulate a more CISCy ISA on a more RISCy one, so they're doing it exactly the right way around.
Maybe it's because I don't use Google and so it isn't trained for me, but I switched to DDG a few years back (originally because they had a better UI, the privacy was a nice bonus) and it's been about 18 months since I failed to find what I wanted on DDG and did on Google. If you type !google into your DDG search box, it will send you to Google so it's easy to fall back to Google if you don't get the results you want first time. My partner switched about a year ago and she hasn't noticed any decline in search result quality. I suspect that a big part of this is that people spend a lot of money trying to game Google, but don't bother so much with smaller search engines.
I have noticed one big difference though: Google lies about search results a lot more. If DDG doesn't find anything relevant, it will say so. Google will give me hundreds of pages of completely irrelevant results to wade through.
As for barriers to entry, set up a server and a web crawler, and you're a competitor
Do you have any idea how big that server needs to be and how much bandwidth that web crawler needs? Or how much processing power you need to even simple graph analytics like the original PageRank algorithm on a data set the size of a snapshot of the web? In particular, do you have any idea of the rate at which new content is added to the web and how quickly users expect it to appear in search result? When Google started, they licensed a big chunk of their initial data set from Yahoo! rather than spidering everything and it took weeks for new pages to appear in the index. That would be completely unacceptable for anyone starting to compete now.
I have, yes. It's just about possible, though not especially comfortable on any aircraft other than a 787. On the 787, I managed to get a good 6 hours of productive work done on a transatlantic flight.
I don't really care about having access to my laptop during a flight, but I don't trust the airline and the baggage handlers. I'd be perfectly willing to fly if they would cover the costs of all loss, including loss of data and of trade secrets resulting from from any loss or damage to my laptop while in the hold though. The value can't be more than a few million per customer, and I'm sure that the US government will reimburse them...
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The Russian, French and Chinese revolutions would be good counterexamples. So are the original Luddites. I suppose you could claim that most of the wars in Europe for the last thousand years were in the name of God because the divine right of kings was invoked to get people to fight, but it's a bit of a stretch. The first and second world wars both had huge death tolls and neither side was religiously motivated.
Yup, they've been making quad-core 64-bit chips for a little while. They're an interesting company to work with if you get the chance - they're much smaller than their surviving competitors and so focus incredibly hard on developer productivity. They've incorporated formal verification into their continuous integration systems at quite a few levels.
At the moment, the only major powers in possession of nuclear weapons that stand for common sense and restraint, are China, UK and France
I'd drop the UK from that list. We've had a lot of rhetoric in the UK because the leader of the opposition had the audacity to say that he wouldn't be willing to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike. The Tories have been shouting loudly that they would and that it's important for security that no one knows what threshold would trigger a nuclear strike.
Wars are only fought when BOTH sides think they can win.
It's probably more true that they're fought when one side thinks it can win and the other side thinks it doesn't have an alternative. In the first world war, Germany thought that it could win against the enemies that it picked, but didn't expect the treaties that required others to join in would be respected. In the second world war, it was far from clear to the British leadership that they could win, but the other alternative was submit to Nazi occupation and that didn't seem like a valid option.
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time
and
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Humans are perfectly capable of attaching religious fervour to anything, irrespective of its connection to deities of philosophy. Remove religion and people will go to war over access to resources, their favourite king, economic system, or text editor.
That's not a new prediction. This is precisely what happened in The Time Machine: the morlocks were the descendants of the people who maintained the machines and eventually the rest of the population just became food for them.
The difference isn't some sharp qualitative difference, it's a quantitative difference that's happened each time. Automation always goes for the low skilled jobs and pushes people towards higher-skilled jobs. The problem is that the jobs that people are being pushed to now are either the ones that are next on the list to be automated, or ones that already have skills shortages. You're not going to be fired from a menial job and go and work in a skilled profession, because if you had the skills to do so then you wouldn't be working in the unskilled and poorly paid job to start with.
How much would McDonnell-Douglas lose if the unemployed masses couldn't afford to buy jet fighters?
You mean if the governments had to either increase unemployment benefits and cut defence spending or risk revolutions?
FYI, May was a Bremainer
Not exactly. She was in favour of remaining part of the information sharing agreements with spy agencies in the rest of the EU, but opposed to remaining bound by the decisions of any international courts. Basically, she wanted power without oversight. She's now decided that Brexit is a good way of achieving this.
On the creosote ban, it was specifically because creosote was found to be significantly more carcinogenic than previously believed. Do you stain those hundreds of yards of fencing yourself? If so, that directive has significantly reduced your likelihood of dying of lung cancer. If not, then it's reduced your ability to employ someone else to work in unsafe conditions. Which of these do you object to?
They can always control any company that wants to do business in their country. Do you think Facebook wants to pull out of the UK? If they did, then that's a big incentive for a UK-based competitor to start up. If other countries see that they can get Facebook to pull out, do you think that they wouldn't follow suit? It's not like Facebook is paying a lot of tax in, say, France or Germany. By attempting to centralise the Internet, companies like Facebook and Google have made it a lot easier to control. People always seem to forget when they build concentrations of power that other people may end up with access to them.
While I can't speak for GP, I haven't really seen anybody who wants to ban all immigration, rather just illegal immigration.
Illegal immigration is already banned - that's why they call it illegal. The changes that people want to make are making legal immigration harder and enforcing laws against illegal immigration more strongly. The problem with these policies is twofold. The first is that the people who advocate them often benefit from low-priced labour as a result of illegal immigration. The second is that they're often using immigrants as a scapegoat for something else: For example in the UK, in the run up to the referendum, we saw that a lot of communities that were 1% or less immigrant were blaming immigrants for the lack of jobs: even if they deported all of the immigrants, it would make no meaningful difference to unemployment rates. But blaming the problems on immigrants is far easier for politicians than addressing the various root causes of inequality (in this case, that there's a huge amount of direct and indirect subsidy on companies in London, which pulls jobs away from the rest of the country).
As with any law or convention, there's a balance between probability of detection and penalty. Nuclear weapons are an interesting one, because for a small country having nuclear weapons has often been the difference between being invaded by a superpower and not being. The worst-case penalty for not having nuclear weapons is an invasion, the penalty for having them is economic sanctions. There's therefore a big problem in enforcement. Heinlein's (fictional) Space Patrol was a non-national entity that had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and was empowered to enforce this monopoly by deploying nuclear weapons against anyone who violated it: in this situation there's no benefit to owning nuclear weapons, but creating this situation is very hard.
In terms of 'cyber weapons' (horrible term), the penalty for not owning them is much lower. You're unlikely to have ones that are capable of crippling the supply lines of the conventional armed forces of a superpower. You can use them for economic ends, but if you get caught then the penalties are much worse than the benefits.
It doesn't really matter if a country is stockpiling vulnerabilities, it matters if they start using them (and leaking them so that they're used by third parties counts here). The correct response here would be to hold the NSA, and by extension the US government, responsible for all costs associated with this ransomware and then do the same to the next malware that comes from a similar source. If the cost of stockpiling vulnerabilities has the potential to be billions or trillions of dollars if they're leaked, then there's suddenly a big incentive to work with vendors to get them fixed quickly.
There's not much difference between an emulator that runs in the firmware and running natively. If you want to make that distinction, no x86 chip since the 80286 has executed x86 natively.
Intel has a history of this. Every decade, they come out with a new ISA that is impossible for compilers to target efficiently. The iAPX432, the i860, Itanium, and now their GPUs (two-dimensional register sets sound really neat on paper, but trying to write a register allocator for them is very exciting and requires very tight coupling between instruction selection and register allocation).
It was a completely different architecture so adding native i386 support would have required to add a complete i386 compute core to the chips
Someone has a poor memory. The first generation of Itaniums were advertised as being able to run x86 code and came with an x86 emulator for backwards compatibility. It was a key selling point of the architecture: code that was recompiled got all of the shiny new benefits, but legacy code would continue to work. Unfortunately, the emulator performed so badly that the second generation ended up sticking a Pentium on die to run IA32 code. This, of course, drove the price up and made Itanium even less competitive.
Quebec is a fairly special case, because of the abundance of hydro. Quebec has, on average, 14.8 people per square kilometre, whereas Germany has 229.4. This gives Quebec a much larger area to devote to hydroelectric dams per person. They also have geography that is particularly well suited to hydro power.
Now if they were trying to emulate ARM on Intel, that would be much more interesting, especially if Intel got involved and provided microcode to directly run ARM machine code..... can't do that in ARM.
In general, it's easier to emulate a more CISCy ISA on a more RISCy one, so they're doing it exactly the right way around.
Who said anything about evil? We're talking about natural monopolies.
or even one hundredth as good as google's engine.
Maybe it's because I don't use Google and so it isn't trained for me, but I switched to DDG a few years back (originally because they had a better UI, the privacy was a nice bonus) and it's been about 18 months since I failed to find what I wanted on DDG and did on Google. If you type !google into your DDG search box, it will send you to Google so it's easy to fall back to Google if you don't get the results you want first time. My partner switched about a year ago and she hasn't noticed any decline in search result quality. I suspect that a big part of this is that people spend a lot of money trying to game Google, but don't bother so much with smaller search engines.
I have noticed one big difference though: Google lies about search results a lot more. If DDG doesn't find anything relevant, it will say so. Google will give me hundreds of pages of completely irrelevant results to wade through.
As for barriers to entry, set up a server and a web crawler, and you're a competitor
Do you have any idea how big that server needs to be and how much bandwidth that web crawler needs? Or how much processing power you need to even simple graph analytics like the original PageRank algorithm on a data set the size of a snapshot of the web? In particular, do you have any idea of the rate at which new content is added to the web and how quickly users expect it to appear in search result? When Google started, they licensed a big chunk of their initial data set from Yahoo! rather than spidering everything and it took weeks for new pages to appear in the index. That would be completely unacceptable for anyone starting to compete now.
I have, yes. It's just about possible, though not especially comfortable on any aircraft other than a 787. On the 787, I managed to get a good 6 hours of productive work done on a transatlantic flight.
Nope, I'll fly to Canada and have the US people meet me there.
I don't really care about having access to my laptop during a flight, but I don't trust the airline and the baggage handlers. I'd be perfectly willing to fly if they would cover the costs of all loss, including loss of data and of trade secrets resulting from from any loss or damage to my laptop while in the hold though. The value can't be more than a few million per customer, and I'm sure that the US government will reimburse them...