SanguineV (1197225) wrote, "GPUs are massively parallel handling hundreds of cores and tens of thousands of threads. The drawbacks are they have limited instruction sets and don't support a lot of the arbitrary jumping, memory loading, etc. that CPUs do."
In other words, the GPU is a single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) device. It matches well simple, regular computations like that which occurs in digital signal processing, image processing, computer-generated graphics, etc.
The modern-day GPU is the difference between "Asteroids" (a video game from the 1980s) and Unreal Tournament 2004 (an intense 3D-graphics game of the 21st century).
Being nearly devoid of natural resources, Japan has traditional cuisine that tends to focus on appearance instead of flavor. The classic example is sushi. It is the sliced flesh of raw fish. Plates of sushi are adorned with other colorful edibles: sea weed, fish eggs, etc.
Making sushi is efficient in terms of energy and resources. Sushi does not require fuel to be expended for cooking.
Plates of sushi are colorful and pretty. The aim is to create a delightful appearance. The aim is appearance, not taste.
Hence, we can understand the news article that is the focus of this thread of discussion. Most customers who eat sushi cannot "taste" the fish in the sushi. "Taste" is not the point of sushi. "Appearance" is. So, a restaurant could deliberately or accidentally substitute non-tuna flesh for tuna flesh in tuna-based sushi. A customer would never perceive the difference. Fish just tastes like fish: it tastes fishy.
Contrast Chinese cuisine to Japanese cuisine. Preparing Chinese cuisine requires expending a lot of resources: e. g., fuel. Before the advent of Westernization (enabling Japan to import all that it needs) in Japan in the late 1800s, China had a huge advantage in an abundance of natural resources. China was a rich nation. It created cuisine that placed equal emphasis on appearance and flavor. Think of roasted pork (that was prepared by marinating the skin for hours) served on a plate adorned with pineapple slices. It is the food of the gods.
The reporter at the "New York Times" completely misses the big picture. If Bing is censoring only simplified Chinese queries, then anyone in mainland China can do a search in any other language and obtain the full uncensored results.
In other words, Microsoft has cleverly created a big hole (in its agreement with Beijing) that allows uncensored information to flood into China. The only catch is that the query must be in some language (e. g., English) that is not simplied Chinese.
By contrast, Google censors everything in China, regardless of the language used for the query.
Besides, Microsoft's scheme will encourage ordinary Chinese to learn a foreign language: English., Japanese, etc. Doing so is always positive as many Western languages means many channels by which foreign ideas can enter China, thus modernizing it.
The traditional approach toward dealing with Chinese hackers is to fortify all the computers in a company or institute. Fortification takes time and money.
A better approach may be to rig some computers so that they are easy to hack. We install some deliberately malicious software on those fake computers. Then, we disperse those fake computers among the real computers.
Here is the ideal scenario. A typical Chinese hacker will probe all the computers at the Department of Defense. The probe will easily succeed in penetrating one of the rigged computers. He downloads plenty of software. He will then try to run them. One of the ill-gotten applications then replicates itself and spreads throughout the Chinese Ministry of War.
The rogue application disables the safety mechanism in a Chinese nuclear warhead. On the anniversary of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the warhead explodes. It melts (literally) the entire military base and kills thousands of Chinese citizens in the nearby town.
On the day of that fire ball, the Chinese hackers will cease their activities for several months.
Why do we need to conduct an experiement to determine whether space travel can muscles to atrophy? Common sense tells us that muscles in space will certainly atrophy.
We see this atrophy in hospital patients who are confined to bed for years in a coma. These patients never exercise their muscles, and they simply atrophy. Being in space is worse than being in bed. Lack of gravity means that your muscles are not constantly being exercised. Your muscles will waste away.
The fix for this problem is to use only astronauts who have a natural genetic mutation that causes muscles to be large, durable, and strong. A few Europeans do have this mutation.
Perhaps, Khan -- the character in Star Trek -- was right. A race of genetic supermen is best suited for space travel.
What Madrid is doing is basically what is being done in super-free market, the United States of America. American phone companies are required by state regulators to provide low-cost land-line phone service to citizens whom state laws consider to be indigent. This government subsidy is necessary because the phone is necessary to live adequately in modern society. The phone connects you to emergency services via 911. The phone connects you to the manager (who works you like a slave). The phone connects you to your family. The phone is nearly as important as food, shelter, and clothing.
With the coming of age of the Internet, it will soon be as important as phone service. With the Internet, you can get legal information about registering your vehicle, and about smog-check stations, about filing a complaint with the relevant state agency. You can get information about universities. You can check whether your jury group is required to appear in court on a particular day.
10 years ago, the Internet was an exciting fad. Now, the Internet is an indispensable tool for living in modern society.
Of course, the best use of the Internet is to read articles on Slashdot.
The ability to live forever is not necessarily something that everyone wants.
Suppose that you put yourself into cryogenic suspenion until the day that medical science is so advanced that it can revive you and restore you to the functionality of a 20-year-old adult. Would you want such a life? All your friends are dead. All the reference points -- music, politics, bridge game on Saturday, local Buddhist temple on Sunday, etc. -- that gave you a sense of fitting into your society are long extinct or dead. Would you want this life?
I would not. I would choose death with the people of my generation over eternal life without meaning.
The fact of the matter is that drug criminalization never works. If people want to pop, snort, or inject drugs, then they will do so. If the FDA bans the caffeine-spiked beer, then it will just be available in the black market.
So, the FDA should allow anything to be consumed by anyone under 1 caveat: feeding, selling, or offering FDA-determined unhealthy substances (e. g., heroin, tobacco, alcohol, and the like) to anyone under the age of 21 should be treated as a felony -- with a mandatory minimum penalty of 10 years in prison. Once you reach the age of 21, you are an adult in the eyes of the law, and you are free to destroy your body in any way that you want. What you do with yourself is none of society's business. Since health care is not guaranteed in the USA, medical treatment for your sickness (due to your deliberate consumption of unhealthy substances) will not be paid by the other taxpayers.
The "Just say no." campaign never worked. The "You are free to inject until you die at your own expense." campaign will work.
If someone can start a fund for his legal defense, I will contribute money to it.
If he should lose the legal fight against the local and national governments of Russia, I will contribute money to any effort helping him to flee Russia.
Most of us Slashdotters are arm-chair political analysts opining about the world. We should get out of our chairs and -- this time -- make a difference in that world. Let us stop talking. Let us start doing. We should help this guy.
Ars Technica writes, "A video illustrates just how fast compilation is: the entire language, 120K lines, compiles in under 10 sec. on a laptop."
If this language becomes as popular as Perl, then 120,000 lines will soon become 1,200,000 lines. That is exactly what happened to the Perl interpreter and compiler.
Also, just like Java, the new Go language (due to the immense respect for Google's scientific prowess) will likely receive accolades: "it is the best, final language that we will ever need". The same was said for Java. It was sold as the ultimate final language built on 50 years of accumulated knowledge of language design and computer architecture. Upon the introduction of Java, company after company blindly adopted it.
Was Java the final language satisfying humankind's computing needs? No. Was adopting it worth the cost? Maybe.
Now, we have Go. Is it a massive improvement over C and Java, thus justifying spending milions of dollars to train programmers? Only the future will tell.
The trouble began when "60 Minutes" (of CBS News) broadcast a story about a woman who killed her son when she accidentally pressed the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. Her son was standing in front of the car. The woman, refusing to admit guilt, accused Audi of producing a defective car which accelerates automatically without driver intervention. She even filed a lawsuit against Audi. (Later, the court determined that she was at fault, but that fact was never broadcast in the original "60 Minutes" program.)
The sales of Audi vehicles fell dramatically after that "60 Minutes" program.
The Audi 5000S was never defective, but it did have 1 minor inconvenience. The accelerator pedal and the brake pedal were much closer to each other than they were in a traditional American car. This closeness was something to which a small subset of American drivers could not become accustomed. They sometimes did press the accelerator pedal when they intended to press the brake pedal.
As for the Toyota Camry, is it defective? The probability of it being defective is higher than the probability of the Audi 5000S being defective. Consumer-safety standards in Japan are lower than the standards in the European Union.
Even from an engineering perspective, the Toyota Camry is a dangerous design. For example, the transmission is mechanically separated from the automatic-transmission lever (that the driver uses to change gears). The lever is connected to an electronic box that sends some electrical signals -- along copper wires -- to the tranmission to control it: the process is drive-by-wire. Supposedly, Toyota used 2 identical sets of wires (for reasons of fault tolerance) from the electronic box to the transmission.
Another participant in this discussion claims that Toyota also mechanically separated the accelerator pedal from the fuel line. Toyota appears to have used drive-by-wire throughout the design to eliminate some metal -- thus saving money.
Do not trust the fault tolerance in mass-merchandise products. Fault tolerance is expensive and is meant to be expensive. Toyota likely tried to save some money on the fault tolerance, and it was not able to protect the vehicle from the 1-in-1,000,000 chance of a transient fault in the electronic circuits. The chance of a glitch is low, but the probability that it occurs exactly once among 200,000 vehicles is high.
The fact that only a handful of people have been affected by the freak accelerations matches a distribution of a low-probability electrical glitch. If you own a Toyota Camry, I suggest that you sell it as quickly as possible and get an old-fashioned-technology vehicle without the drive-by-wire. The Ford Fusion exceeds the quality of the Toyota Camry, does not use drive-by-wire, and costs much less than the Toyota deathtrap. Think about it.
I found the article by "The Economist". The article debunks the claim that increasing wealth results in a decreasing population. The implications for excessive population growth are alarming.
Sorry. I have a typo. The last paragraph should be changed to "Although modernization may appear to reduce the population, a recent article in 'The Economist' claims that modernization does not necessarily do so. I will try to find the article if I have time. Perhaps, you in the SlashDot community can help me to find the article. It was published this year.".
Brian Gordon (987471) wrote, "Not that blowing it into the atmosphere is much better, but doesn't diesel exhaust contain all sorts of nasty toxins? If he's polluting his ground water then in a few years he'll have more to worry about than his dying crops..".
Here's another angle of the problem.
Suppose that humankind made a concerted attempt to voluntarily produce less children. Our population declines from 6 billion to 3 billion. Then, humankind does not need so much food and so much energy. The farmer in this thread of discussion can shutdown his farm and engage in another activity.
However, talk of overpopulation is taboo. It is too closely tied to immigration. The current mantra is that growing the population is good, and immigration is the best way to grow the population. So, the population continues to grow, pressing against the limits of sustainability -- for the developed world.
Pro-immigration (and pro-population-growth) fans claim that the issue is merely transferring some people from one country to another country and that, hence, immigration results in a net gain of zero to the world's population.
Not quite. The actual problems are twofold. The environment of the country receiving the immigrants is placed under stress. (Currently, California has no additional land for farming or ranching to meet the needs of the ballooning population.) The freeing up of resources in the home country (from which the immigrants fled) now encourages more population growth. What we have now is population growth in the target country (which receive the immigrants) and additional growth in the home country.
Wait. Now, you ask, "How will banning immigration help?" First, the population of the target country stops growing. Although the popuation in the impoverished home country may continute to grow, at some point, malnutrition and starvation will ensure that the population reaches some maximum value, or (more likely) the angry and starving mobs will wage a civil war, killing plenty of the population. The end result is a form of brutal population control. Malnutrition (and starvation) or civil war. Take your pick. The end result is the same: population control.
I point out this brutal logic without any relish. The hard facts of life are that a finite system like planet earth cannot sustain infinite population growth. We in the developed world should deal with the issue now before the Four Horsemen bring their own solution.
Although modernization may appear to slow the growth, a recent article in "The Economist" claims that modernization does not necessarily do so. I will try to find the article if I have time. Perhaps, you in the SlashDot community can help me to find the article. It was published this year.
Too often, religion interferes with science. Here, "religion" is not merely the traditional ones: Christianity, Buddhism, etc.
Religion is any collection of assertions that are prohibited from being questioned or verified. We simply assume them to be true.
In the case of medicine, one type of religion is the assertion that both men and women exhibit no differences in responding to treatment by the same drugs. About 15 years ago, the medical community admitted that this assertion is false. Congress began deliberately funding the development of drugs that specifically help women.
The grip of religion on medicine has still not been broken. Nowadays, the politically correct religion is the assertion that all ethnic groups and all racial groups are genetically identical. Therefore, researchers should not study ethnic or racial differences in the efficacy of various drugs.
When will we admit that there are genetic differences? For example, most East Asians suffer from lactose intolerance. Europeans do not.
The current attempt to use a person's genes to determine the efficacy of anti-cancer drugs is a first step in breaking this politically correct religion.
What is great about Geocities is its simplicity. It enabled you to create a simple Web page to share with the world. The startup costs in terms of money and the amount of time to learn how to use Geocities is roughly zero.
We arrive back at the same old argument: basic tool that meets the need versus a fancy tool that provides more than what you need. Geocities, Windows XP, and the Chevrolet Cobalt are in the 1st category. Facebook (and MySpace), Windows 7, and BMW 328 are in the second category.
About 45 years ago, the Beatles took America by storm. They inspired a generation of pop-music writers and singers.
Now, ARM -- another British invention -- has established a small beachhead in the notebook market (which includes netbooks). Can ARM do what SPARC, MIPS, Precision Architecture, and PowerPC failed to do? Can ARM actually reach 50% of the processor market for notebooks -- and eventually desktops?
I hope so. I admit that I am biased and love cheering the underdog.
Intel developed its x86 architecture by pumping globs of monopolistic profits into research and development. Too, the massive federal funding (via university research grants) and corporate funding furthered the development of both SPARC and MIPS. By contrast, ARM was developed on a shoestring budget. The goal was modest: low power and average performance.
All the American processors are Goliaths. ARM is David. I hope that David slays the biggest Goliath: x86.
The issue of viruses infecting Linux from a Windows program running via Wine is really a non-issue. Nowadays, you can spend a small amount of money and buy a Parallels application that emulates a real Windows machine. This virtual machine is fully isolated from the rest of the Linux system.
I use Parallels Desktop 4.0. It works great on my MacBook Pro. I can run almost any Windows program. The downside is that, of course, the Windows virtual machine is slower than a real Windows box. However, what is important to me is that Windows viruses are trapped inside the virtual machine.
I like to say, "The Power of Mac. The Utility of Windows. Thanks to Parallels." No. I don't work for Parallels, but I love this product.
Fears that Toyota will own 100% of the American market were and are exaggerated. Toyota is now exhibiting the symptoms of a dominant company that has reached the limits of its growth. Just recently, Toyota issued the largest recall in its history. The defect was an improperly installed floor mat.
Now, Toyota has been convicted of infringing some hybrid-technology patents and is allegedly infringing on even more hybrid-technology patents.
Before we start sympathizing with Toyota instead of the "mean, money-hungry" patent holder, we should note that patents on solid, useful technologies are valid and are vital to spurring innovation. If we lived in a society when any corporate giant can just steal anyone's ideas, then we will diminish the spirit of innovation.
However, even more is at stake here. Toyota has used its lawyers to force Ford (and now General Motors) to pay royalties to Toyota for hybrid-technology patents that it supposedly invented. A consequence of this new patent-infringement case may be that Ford has been paying the wrong business entity, and Toyota should refund all the royalties back to Ford. Such a situation would level the playing field for Ford.
Note that Ford took a Japanese-designed vehicle, the Mazda 6, and both transformed it into the Fusion and elevated the Fusion to the quality level of a Toyota Camry. At Ford, quality is now really job #1 -- after the market brutally taught Ford managers and their unionized workers a lesson that they will never forget.
According to a startling report just issued by the "New York Times", "senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired 'sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable' atom bomb." In 2007, American intelligence erroneously concluded that Tehran in 2003 stopped further research into designing [a] nuclear bomb. This [American] conclusion was contradicted by Germany, French, and Israeli intelligence. Recently, London has concluded that the American assessment is incorrect.
So, here we are. The Iranians have the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb and have been working relentlessly to perfect its design. Tehran is now creating the parts (e. g., enriched unranium) that can be assembled into such a weapon.
Meanwhile, Jerusalem is justifiably on the verge of ordering its military to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. Will Paris offer military support to the Israelis? A bombing mission against Iran is a difficult military operation and needs the assistance of the French superpower."
The "Twilight Zone" is an example of good writing, acting, and directing. So, this television show remains popular even after 50 years.
In recent years, many directors have forgotten that slick special effects do not compensate for poor storytelling. Consider "Star Trek V" (directed by William Shatner) and "Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace" (directed by George Lucas). Both movies are packed with colorful special effects generated by sophisticated computers.
Yet, I prefer the black-and-white story of the "Twilight Zone".
The truth is that illegal aliens lie to any extent in order to stay in a country. These lies then enable them to say in Great Britain (GB) because they create a fake story that meets the legal threshold for staying in GB.
Should the authorities simply look the other way and allow GB to be flooded with illegal aliens who refuse to assimilate into British society?
The answer is, of course, "no". The electorate in both France and Germany said, "no", when voters elected pro-Western politicians to run the government.
Let's be clear on this matter. Uncontrolled immigration wrecks a society. France now has large ghettos of Middle Easterners and Africans who refuse to assimilate into French society. They should be deported.
At this point, someone will cry, "racism". The correct rebuttal is to highlight the French of East-Asian ancestry. They readily assimilate and do not pose a problem for the French. In much the same way, Americans of East-Asian ancestry have assimilated and contributed significantly to American society. During World War II, Japanese-Americans volunteered to fight against both German and Japan -- yes, Japan. The 442 battalion of Nissei was the most decorated battalion in the U. S. Army. The Nissei showed their valor when they rescued a group of American soldiers who had been trapped in the Battle of the Bulge.
Every nation in Europe has the right (1) to determine who can enter a European country and (2) to favor some immigrants over others. I applaud the British government for its recent tough stance against uncontrolled immigration from Africa and the Middle East.
The 2008 Vehicle Dependability Study by J. D. Powers indicates that both Buick (of GM) and Lincoln-Mercury (of Ford) have reached parity with Toyota and Honda.
Note that the scores in the chart for Lexus (at 120) and Toyota (at 159) differ by about 30% even though both brands are built by the same company and by the same process. In other words, if two brands have scores that differ by, at most 30%, then they should be considered equal in quality.
Hence, any brand with a score of 210.675 (= 159 / 120 * 159) matches the quality of the Toyota brand. In other words, both brands produced by Ford Motor Company now equal the Toyota brand in quality. Also, Chevrolet, the core brand produced by General Motors, continues to be inferior to the Toyota brand.
Best of all, the price of a Ford vehicle is less, by several thousand dollars, than the price of a Toyota vehicle. If you value your hard-earned money, then buy a Ford Fusion instead of a Toyota Camry.
Cuisine indicates the wealth of past civilizations. Consider Chinese food. It has complex procedures requiring a wide variety of ingredients. Only a wealthy civilization -- with abundant natural resources -- can afford to create this kind of cuisine.
During the Tong Dynasty, China was definitely a wealthy kingdom in the heart of Asia. Here, "wealthy" is a relative term. Though China of that era is likely poorer than Soviet Russia, China was still the richest nation during the time of the Tong Dynasty.
Now, look at Japanese food. It has simple procedures that require few ingredients. Having few resources, the inhabitants of Japan created cuisine that minimized the use of natural resources.
Consider raw fish, which was a common food item in ancient Japan. Raw fish requires little preparation beyond just slicing off the flesh.
Here is an exercise for the reader. The Big Mac is the quintessential item in the American cuisine. What does the Big Mac tell us about American civilization?
The reporter who wrote the news article says, "But all reported they had come out largely unscathed from the storm, one of the worst on record."
These worst-on-record, high-energy climatic phenomena -- hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, dust storms, etc. -- tell the real story of global warming. Burning fossil fuels emits energy into the atmosphere. Over a long period of time, that energy dissipates into the "cold" of outer space.
Over the past century, this injection of energy into the atmosphere was caused by the (very) roughly 1 billion Westerners. In the current century, there will be roughly 3 billion (including the Indians and the Chinese, who are buying cars left and right) apes who are injecting energy into the atmosphere.
Will the "cold" of outer space absorb enough surplus heat from the atmosphere at a sufficiently fast rate? Is anyone using a supercomputer to model this heat equation?
What sort of climatic catastrophy will occur when 3 billion apes -- with their automobiles, power plants, lawn mowers, etc. -- inject a daily, massive pulse of energy into the atmosphere?
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, the GPU is a single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) device. It matches well simple, regular computations like that which occurs in digital signal processing, image processing, computer-generated graphics, etc.
The modern-day GPU is the difference between "Asteroids" (a video game from the 1980s) and Unreal Tournament 2004 (an intense 3D-graphics game of the 21st century).
Making sushi is efficient in terms of energy and resources. Sushi does not require fuel to be expended for cooking.
Plates of sushi are colorful and pretty. The aim is to create a delightful appearance. The aim is appearance, not taste.
Hence, we can understand the news article that is the focus of this thread of discussion. Most customers who eat sushi cannot "taste" the fish in the sushi. "Taste" is not the point of sushi. "Appearance" is. So, a restaurant could deliberately or accidentally substitute non-tuna flesh for tuna flesh in tuna-based sushi. A customer would never perceive the difference. Fish just tastes like fish: it tastes fishy.
Contrast Chinese cuisine to Japanese cuisine. Preparing Chinese cuisine requires expending a lot of resources: e. g., fuel. Before the advent of Westernization (enabling Japan to import all that it needs) in Japan in the late 1800s, China had a huge advantage in an abundance of natural resources. China was a rich nation. It created cuisine that placed equal emphasis on appearance and flavor. Think of roasted pork (that was prepared by marinating the skin for hours) served on a plate adorned with pineapple slices. It is the food of the gods.
In other words, Microsoft has cleverly created a big hole (in its agreement with Beijing) that allows uncensored information to flood into China. The only catch is that the query must be in some language (e. g., English) that is not simplied Chinese.
By contrast, Google censors everything in China, regardless of the language used for the query.
Besides, Microsoft's scheme will encourage ordinary Chinese to learn a foreign language: English., Japanese, etc. Doing so is always positive as many Western languages means many channels by which foreign ideas can enter China, thus modernizing it.
A better approach may be to rig some computers so that they are easy to hack. We install some deliberately malicious software on those fake computers. Then, we disperse those fake computers among the real computers.
Here is the ideal scenario. A typical Chinese hacker will probe all the computers at the Department of Defense. The probe will easily succeed in penetrating one of the rigged computers. He downloads plenty of software. He will then try to run them. One of the ill-gotten applications then replicates itself and spreads throughout the Chinese Ministry of War.
The rogue application disables the safety mechanism in a Chinese nuclear warhead. On the anniversary of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the warhead explodes. It melts (literally) the entire military base and kills thousands of Chinese citizens in the nearby town.
On the day of that fire ball, the Chinese hackers will cease their activities for several months.
We see this atrophy in hospital patients who are confined to bed for years in a coma. These patients never exercise their muscles, and they simply atrophy. Being in space is worse than being in bed. Lack of gravity means that your muscles are not constantly being exercised. Your muscles will waste away.
The fix for this problem is to use only astronauts who have a natural genetic mutation that causes muscles to be large, durable, and strong. A few Europeans do have this mutation.
Perhaps, Khan -- the character in Star Trek -- was right. A race of genetic supermen is best suited for space travel.
With the coming of age of the Internet, it will soon be as important as phone service. With the Internet, you can get legal information about registering your vehicle, and about smog-check stations, about filing a complaint with the relevant state agency. You can get information about universities. You can check whether your jury group is required to appear in court on a particular day.
10 years ago, the Internet was an exciting fad. Now, the Internet is an indispensable tool for living in modern society.
Of course, the best use of the Internet is to read articles on Slashdot.
Suppose that you put yourself into cryogenic suspenion until the day that medical science is so advanced that it can revive you and restore you to the functionality of a 20-year-old adult. Would you want such a life? All your friends are dead. All the reference points -- music, politics, bridge game on Saturday, local Buddhist temple on Sunday, etc. -- that gave you a sense of fitting into your society are long extinct or dead. Would you want this life?
I would not. I would choose death with the people of my generation over eternal life without meaning.
So, the FDA should allow anything to be consumed by anyone under 1 caveat: feeding, selling, or offering FDA-determined unhealthy substances (e. g., heroin, tobacco, alcohol, and the like) to anyone under the age of 21 should be treated as a felony -- with a mandatory minimum penalty of 10 years in prison. Once you reach the age of 21, you are an adult in the eyes of the law, and you are free to destroy your body in any way that you want. What you do with yourself is none of society's business. Since health care is not guaranteed in the USA, medical treatment for your sickness (due to your deliberate consumption of unhealthy substances) will not be paid by the other taxpayers.
The "Just say no." campaign never worked. The "You are free to inject until you die at your own expense." campaign will work.
If he should lose the legal fight against the local and national governments of Russia, I will contribute money to any effort helping him to flee Russia.
Most of us Slashdotters are arm-chair political analysts opining about the world. We should get out of our chairs and -- this time -- make a difference in that world. Let us stop talking. Let us start doing. We should help this guy.
If this language becomes as popular as Perl, then 120,000 lines will soon become 1,200,000 lines. That is exactly what happened to the Perl interpreter and compiler.
Also, just like Java, the new Go language (due to the immense respect for Google's scientific prowess) will likely receive accolades: "it is the best, final language that we will ever need". The same was said for Java. It was sold as the ultimate final language built on 50 years of accumulated knowledge of language design and computer architecture. Upon the introduction of Java, company after company blindly adopted it.
Was Java the final language satisfying humankind's computing needs? No. Was adopting it worth the cost? Maybe.
Now, we have Go. Is it a massive improvement over C and Java, thus justifying spending milions of dollars to train programmers? Only the future will tell.
About 20 years ago, the Audi 5000S had the same supposed problem. You can read about the problem at the "New York Times", the "Los Angeles Times", and the "Business & Media Institute".
The trouble began when "60 Minutes" (of CBS News) broadcast a story about a woman who killed her son when she accidentally pressed the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. Her son was standing in front of the car. The woman, refusing to admit guilt, accused Audi of producing a defective car which accelerates automatically without driver intervention. She even filed a lawsuit against Audi. (Later, the court determined that she was at fault, but that fact was never broadcast in the original "60 Minutes" program.)
The sales of Audi vehicles fell dramatically after that "60 Minutes" program.
The Audi 5000S was never defective, but it did have 1 minor inconvenience. The accelerator pedal and the brake pedal were much closer to each other than they were in a traditional American car. This closeness was something to which a small subset of American drivers could not become accustomed. They sometimes did press the accelerator pedal when they intended to press the brake pedal.
As for the Toyota Camry, is it defective? The probability of it being defective is higher than the probability of the Audi 5000S being defective. Consumer-safety standards in Japan are lower than the standards in the European Union.
Even from an engineering perspective, the Toyota Camry is a dangerous design. For example, the transmission is mechanically separated from the automatic-transmission lever (that the driver uses to change gears). The lever is connected to an electronic box that sends some electrical signals -- along copper wires -- to the tranmission to control it: the process is drive-by-wire. Supposedly, Toyota used 2 identical sets of wires (for reasons of fault tolerance) from the electronic box to the transmission.
Another participant in this discussion claims that Toyota also mechanically separated the accelerator pedal from the fuel line. Toyota appears to have used drive-by-wire throughout the design to eliminate some metal -- thus saving money.
Do not trust the fault tolerance in mass-merchandise products. Fault tolerance is expensive and is meant to be expensive. Toyota likely tried to save some money on the fault tolerance, and it was not able to protect the vehicle from the 1-in-1,000,000 chance of a transient fault in the electronic circuits. The chance of a glitch is low, but the probability that it occurs exactly once among 200,000 vehicles is high.
The fact that only a handful of people have been affected by the freak accelerations matches a distribution of a low-probability electrical glitch. If you own a Toyota Camry, I suggest that you sell it as quickly as possible and get an old-fashioned-technology vehicle without the drive-by-wire. The Ford Fusion exceeds the quality of the Toyota Camry, does not use drive-by-wire, and costs much less than the Toyota deathtrap. Think about it.
I found the article by "The Economist". The article debunks the claim that increasing wealth results in a decreasing population. The implications for excessive population growth are alarming.
Sorry. I have a typo. The last paragraph should be changed to "Although modernization may appear to reduce the population, a recent article in 'The Economist' claims that modernization does not necessarily do so. I will try to find the article if I have time. Perhaps, you in the SlashDot community can help me to find the article. It was published this year.".
Here's another angle of the problem.
Suppose that humankind made a concerted attempt to voluntarily produce less children. Our population declines from 6 billion to 3 billion. Then, humankind does not need so much food and so much energy. The farmer in this thread of discussion can shutdown his farm and engage in another activity.
However, talk of overpopulation is taboo. It is too closely tied to immigration. The current mantra is that growing the population is good, and immigration is the best way to grow the population. So, the population continues to grow, pressing against the limits of sustainability -- for the developed world.
Pro-immigration (and pro-population-growth) fans claim that the issue is merely transferring some people from one country to another country and that, hence, immigration results in a net gain of zero to the world's population.
Not quite. The actual problems are twofold. The environment of the country receiving the immigrants is placed under stress. (Currently, California has no additional land for farming or ranching to meet the needs of the ballooning population.) The freeing up of resources in the home country (from which the immigrants fled) now encourages more population growth. What we have now is population growth in the target country (which receive the immigrants) and additional growth in the home country.
Wait. Now, you ask, "How will banning immigration help?" First, the population of the target country stops growing. Although the popuation in the impoverished home country may continute to grow, at some point, malnutrition and starvation will ensure that the population reaches some maximum value, or (more likely) the angry and starving mobs will wage a civil war, killing plenty of the population. The end result is a form of brutal population control. Malnutrition (and starvation) or civil war. Take your pick. The end result is the same: population control.
I point out this brutal logic without any relish. The hard facts of life are that a finite system like planet earth cannot sustain infinite population growth. We in the developed world should deal with the issue now before the Four Horsemen bring their own solution.
Although modernization may appear to slow the growth, a recent article in "The Economist" claims that modernization does not necessarily do so. I will try to find the article if I have time. Perhaps, you in the SlashDot community can help me to find the article. It was published this year.
Religion is any collection of assertions that are prohibited from being questioned or verified. We simply assume them to be true.
In the case of medicine, one type of religion is the assertion that both men and women exhibit no differences in responding to treatment by the same drugs. About 15 years ago, the medical community admitted that this assertion is false. Congress began deliberately funding the development of drugs that specifically help women.
The grip of religion on medicine has still not been broken. Nowadays, the politically correct religion is the assertion that all ethnic groups and all racial groups are genetically identical. Therefore, researchers should not study ethnic or racial differences in the efficacy of various drugs.
When will we admit that there are genetic differences? For example, most East Asians suffer from lactose intolerance. Europeans do not.
The current attempt to use a person's genes to determine the efficacy of anti-cancer drugs is a first step in breaking this politically correct religion.
We arrive back at the same old argument: basic tool that meets the need versus a fancy tool that provides more than what you need. Geocities, Windows XP, and the Chevrolet Cobalt are in the 1st category. Facebook (and MySpace), Windows 7, and BMW 328 are in the second category.
Now, ARM -- another British invention -- has established a small beachhead in the notebook market (which includes netbooks). Can ARM do what SPARC, MIPS, Precision Architecture, and PowerPC failed to do? Can ARM actually reach 50% of the processor market for notebooks -- and eventually desktops?
I hope so. I admit that I am biased and love cheering the underdog.
Intel developed its x86 architecture by pumping globs of monopolistic profits into research and development. Too, the massive federal funding (via university research grants) and corporate funding furthered the development of both SPARC and MIPS. By contrast, ARM was developed on a shoestring budget. The goal was modest: low power and average performance.
All the American processors are Goliaths. ARM is David. I hope that David slays the biggest Goliath: x86.
Cheerio.
I use Parallels Desktop 4.0. It works great on my MacBook Pro. I can run almost any Windows program. The downside is that, of course, the Windows virtual machine is slower than a real Windows box. However, what is important to me is that Windows viruses are trapped inside the virtual machine.
I like to say, "The Power of Mac. The Utility of Windows. Thanks to Parallels." No. I don't work for Parallels, but I love this product.
Now, Toyota has been convicted of infringing some hybrid-technology patents and is allegedly infringing on even more hybrid-technology patents.
Before we start sympathizing with Toyota instead of the "mean, money-hungry" patent holder, we should note that patents on solid, useful technologies are valid and are vital to spurring innovation. If we lived in a society when any corporate giant can just steal anyone's ideas, then we will diminish the spirit of innovation.
However, even more is at stake here. Toyota has used its lawyers to force Ford (and now General Motors) to pay royalties to Toyota for hybrid-technology patents that it supposedly invented. A consequence of this new patent-infringement case may be that Ford has been paying the wrong business entity, and Toyota should refund all the royalties back to Ford. Such a situation would level the playing field for Ford.
Note that Ford took a Japanese-designed vehicle, the Mazda 6, and both transformed it into the Fusion and elevated the Fusion to the quality level of a Toyota Camry. At Ford, quality is now really job #1 -- after the market brutally taught Ford managers and their unionized workers a lesson that they will never forget.
According to a startling report just issued by the "New York Times", "senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired 'sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable' atom bomb." In 2007, American intelligence erroneously concluded that Tehran in 2003 stopped further research into designing [a] nuclear bomb. This [American] conclusion was contradicted by Germany, French, and Israeli intelligence. Recently, London has concluded that the American assessment is incorrect.
So, here we are. The Iranians have the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb and have been working relentlessly to perfect its design. Tehran is now creating the parts (e. g., enriched unranium) that can be assembled into such a weapon.
Meanwhile, Jerusalem is justifiably on the verge of ordering its military to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. Will Paris offer military support to the Israelis? A bombing mission against Iran is a difficult military operation and needs the assistance of the French superpower."
In recent years, many directors have forgotten that slick special effects do not compensate for poor storytelling. Consider "Star Trek V" (directed by William Shatner) and "Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace" (directed by George Lucas). Both movies are packed with colorful special effects generated by sophisticated computers.
Yet, I prefer the black-and-white story of the "Twilight Zone".
Should the authorities simply look the other way and allow GB to be flooded with illegal aliens who refuse to assimilate into British society?
The answer is, of course, "no". The electorate in both France and Germany said, "no", when voters elected pro-Western politicians to run the government.
Let's be clear on this matter. Uncontrolled immigration wrecks a society. France now has large ghettos of Middle Easterners and Africans who refuse to assimilate into French society. They should be deported.
At this point, someone will cry, "racism". The correct rebuttal is to highlight the French of East-Asian ancestry. They readily assimilate and do not pose a problem for the French. In much the same way, Americans of East-Asian ancestry have assimilated and contributed significantly to American society. During World War II, Japanese-Americans volunteered to fight against both German and Japan -- yes, Japan. The 442 battalion of Nissei was the most decorated battalion in the U. S. Army. The Nissei showed their valor when they rescued a group of American soldiers who had been trapped in the Battle of the Bulge.
Every nation in Europe has the right (1) to determine who can enter a European country and (2) to favor some immigrants over others. I applaud the British government for its recent tough stance against uncontrolled immigration from Africa and the Middle East.
Note that the scores in the chart for Lexus (at 120) and Toyota (at 159) differ by about 30% even though both brands are built by the same company and by the same process. In other words, if two brands have scores that differ by, at most 30%, then they should be considered equal in quality.
Hence, any brand with a score of 210.675 (= 159 / 120 * 159) matches the quality of the Toyota brand. In other words, both brands produced by Ford Motor Company now equal the Toyota brand in quality. Also, Chevrolet, the core brand produced by General Motors, continues to be inferior to the Toyota brand.
Best of all, the price of a Ford vehicle is less, by several thousand dollars, than the price of a Toyota vehicle. If you value your hard-earned money, then buy a Ford Fusion instead of a Toyota Camry.
During the Tong Dynasty, China was definitely a wealthy kingdom in the heart of Asia. Here, "wealthy" is a relative term. Though China of that era is likely poorer than Soviet Russia, China was still the richest nation during the time of the Tong Dynasty.
Now, look at Japanese food. It has simple procedures that require few ingredients. Having few resources, the inhabitants of Japan created cuisine that minimized the use of natural resources. Consider raw fish, which was a common food item in ancient Japan. Raw fish requires little preparation beyond just slicing off the flesh.
Here is an exercise for the reader. The Big Mac is the quintessential item in the American cuisine. What does the Big Mac tell us about American civilization?
These worst-on-record, high-energy climatic phenomena -- hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, dust storms, etc. -- tell the real story of global warming. Burning fossil fuels emits energy into the atmosphere. Over a long period of time, that energy dissipates into the "cold" of outer space.
Over the past century, this injection of energy into the atmosphere was caused by the (very) roughly 1 billion Westerners. In the current century, there will be roughly 3 billion (including the Indians and the Chinese, who are buying cars left and right) apes who are injecting energy into the atmosphere.
Will the "cold" of outer space absorb enough surplus heat from the atmosphere at a sufficiently fast rate? Is anyone using a supercomputer to model this heat equation?
What sort of climatic catastrophy will occur when 3 billion apes -- with their automobiles, power plants, lawn mowers, etc. -- inject a daily, massive pulse of energy into the atmosphere?