Not fully, is correct, but the IA-64 DID have x86 transfer instructions, which allowed an on-board x86 chip to execute them.. I Think this was slightly similar to the old 8086 FPU instructions which were ignored by the main processor and triggered activation on the co-processor. I think this explicit support was to allow libraries or emulated context switches. Don't recall. Was slower than a P3 at the time either way.
IA-64, iirc was slower than x86 when compiled with primitive compilers (read gcc).
A lot of the advancements were in floating point, which is still meaningless to most people except gamers (which wouldn't be using the platform) and special interest companies. Namely, branch-prediction's were more accurate for instructions which take 32 to 64 clock-ticks (64bit sqrt, divide, etc).
The advancements of the VLIW were negated by very-large prefetched instructions with cached pre-compiled op-codes.
The branch predictions only gave you a theoretical advantage over the very large branch-prediction buffers, and in some circumstances the branch-predictors gave you better decisions (hot code could pre-guess a direction before a predicate register was even populated - the Itanium would have to execute both paths, but the branch-predictor choose the hottest path). Further Alpha laughed at Itanium, saying they've had branch-prediction hint op-code variants for years(without predicates), and they showed many synthetic algorithms which would produce better alpha code than Itanium.. Basically saying for most algorithms, predicate-registers produce less efficient code than other alternatives (just happens that x86 didn't have any such instructions - but that would have been easy to correct with yet another op-code prefix). Note i686 did introduce the conditional move instruction, which goes a long way to small but common branch avoidance.
Register windows (a la sparc's) are a neat idea, but with register renaming on the x86, a tight function-call loop can be just as fast. Plus the spilling of registers into memory often is mitigated with the high speed cache. Further, many arguments against the small register set of the x86-32 are avoided in the x86-64's much larger register pool. Lastly, if you only have 16 registers (of which only 8 are hot), then you can efficiently utilize a pool of 256 rename-registers. If, however, you have an explicit 128 register addressibility (most of which is statistically cold), it's difficult and inefficient to remap them in future versions of the architecture. Note that every power of two register-size causes slow-downs in register interconnects - to say nothing of the real-estate and power-drain.
Then there's the fact that a program that only needs 2Gig of RAM will generally work better in 32bit than 64 due to the half-sized mem-pointers. More fits into your cache. Note other unrelated optimizations in x86-64 may counter-balance this (though this is independent of the 64bit design), so YMMV. I know that SUN's JDK 32bit runs faster, more smoothly than the 64bit version for most of our apps. Yes there are some CPU instruction optimizations for x86-64, but memory in java tends to be the limiting factor.. The same server app will consume 400Meg on a 32bit version and sometimes breaks a gig on the 64bit version. The GC times are measurably slower.
The explicit register rotation used in tight-loops - allowing a 6 op-code loop to execute every op in every stage of the loop, thus degrading a loop to at most n clock cycles is nice in theory. But what if your loop is more complex than a trivial inc/dec. And what if you need one more op-code than the architecture supports? Moreover, there's no technical reason why a CPU can't detect such a loop after k iterations and allocate register-renaming to do the exact same thing. With a hot-spot detector (part of branch-prediction), a subsequent access could fire up the loop immediately. But more importantly, future versions of the CPU could support even larger loop-lengths, as you're not explicitly limited by the bit-lengths, or the originally staticly compiled code.
The sad part is that the explicit compilation of CPU hints, and minimization of register spilling that are the hall-marks of the Itanium should theoretically lead to a slimmer, lower-power, higher-theoretical-clock CPU.. But due to other engineering decisions, the exact opposite is true. Lower clock, bigger silicon, higher power.
x86 CPUs have a horrid amount of data to page-out on a context switch - and to boot, some of the data is not byte-aligned if I recall correctly. The amount of work necessary to perform a to-memory context switch dwarfs the internal register renaming/flushing of a CPU mode transition.
Further, I've heard people incorrectly post that switching to the OS constitutes a context-switch. This isn't true in any CPU that I'm aware of.. A user-space -> kernel-space switch changes some CPU registers - opens up the address space/protected instructions, etc. But the x86 segment registers are unaffected. The main registers including the stack pointers are unaffected.
The kernel has to explicitly trigger a CPU -> memory, memory -> CPU dump/restore when initiating a context switch. Otherwise the kernel has little overhead more than a function call (saving local registers that it's going to modify, etc).
Please someone correct me if I'm wrong about the performance implications, and certainly different CPUs have different volumes of data to passivate/activate obviously, but just about any CPU since the early 90's is very kernel-switch performance sensitive.
Consider that I typically see only 3000 ctx-switch/sec in linux, but I can call 800k 'time' OS calls / sec in Java of all things.
Crap - lost my initial reply. Well, from what I remember, I thanked you for an in depth analysis and discussion.
I talked about how abortion is a moral gradient - that if you really look at the wonder and complexity of all cells, it is mind boggling that an egg/sperm/zygote have any greater significance to white-blood cells, tissue, even hair. If there is anything that can be called Sacrad on earth, the cell would be it. And it is mind boggling that in this day and age, we still squabble about the moment 'life starts' - life is all around us, and I am frustrated by 4,000 year old thinking dictating modern policy - because with the knowledge of how fragile yet vigilant micro-biology is, we also know that death is a natural part of survival. That 'planned parenthood' is every bit as important for the survival of the family unit (and thus society and thus all of the human species) as the 3'rd trimester baby. My argument on this part is that humans are to monkeys with bacteria A is to bacteria B.. Meaning in the grand scheme of things, we're barely even note-worthy. BUT, we carry with us the most prescious things on earth - cells. We need to be respectful of life as I'm sure there's no debate, BUT we also need to be accepting of death.
This isn't a logical proof, so much as an apeal to a practical sense of proportionality.
The rest is involved with disputes about Christian beliefs.
I agree with you that Christians TODAY start with the affirmation that Jesus is the 'Son of God', that he is our 'Savior', that all we need is to 'believe in him' and be saved. However, this is really a 2,000 year evolution of a specific faith.
Originally, it was that Jesus was the Savior of the Jewish people - ever denied their promised land. He was their savior because he fullfilled various Jewish prophesies. (Not really, but if you squinted really hard - and called it all symbolic). Nothing changed for the Jews and the story starts growing legs...
Eventually it was Paul, and Paul alone that decided the message was applicable to NON-jews. This was a MAJOR rewriting of Christianity.. Now it had to be told in a manner that was genericly applicable. The philosophy was still Jewish centric (why should a zorastrian care about Jewish prophesies?), but the notion that all you needed to do to gain entrance into heaven was to believe in Jesus (without a full qualification of what that means).
Gnostics went so far as to believe Jesus wasn't even man, but a material shell around God - basically an avatar (basically throwing away any remaining Jew-centrism).
Eventually the tables completely turned when the Sun God representative of Rome set policy for the masses to be Christian tolerant (Constantine). Later Roman leaders would actually start merging Christianity with the THOUSANDS of regional religions - to guarantee generations-beyond accepting the merged rituals.
Note that Rome and the middle-east were replete with rituals. Nazarene, zorastrian, hellenism, etc. If it wasn't a mystical rite of passage, it wasn't a religion. That included Judaism and early Christian sects.
The Roman re-established path-of-peter (peter is the rock on which the church will be built) gave civil control of Christians back to the Romans, and the ritual merging brought conquored lands into this central control.
During this period, books were banned or exhaulted based on whether they worked for the Roman control. For most people in authority it was liken until a modern senator voting for more senatorial restrictions/pay-cuts.
Soon the trinity view became dominant. With a thousand demi-gods for Angles and Saints. People praying to the demi-gods more than to the figurehead.
You don't hear a lot of objection during the 1,000 years or of church rule. Is it because of the punishing of heresy by death? Is it the burning of books? Hard to say. For most people, it gave structure and happiness.
Eventually the rifts with the church started with depictions of corruption. Later politi
Summary: A) Aliens come to eat us B) Aliens might contradict our world-view C) Aliens probably can't/won't communicate with us, so it just adds more inconclusive doubt. Which only brings us pain. D) To non-believers, aliens represent an 'I told you so!!!' moment. E) Believers are put-off by the 'I'm sure I can say I told you so!!!!' movement
Details: Great question. But here's my take: You might vote republican because it's pro-life, anti-stem-cell-research, anti-gay
You are pro-life/ anti-stem-cell because abortion is soul abuse
Abortion is soul-abuse because 'God says so'
'God says so' because that's how you were brought up. (Killing is wrong) - (even though it's technically Murder that is wrong - specifically subject to human interpretation)
You know that's how you were brought up because you and your peers are reminded of it in church weekly.
Your church is right because it is 2,000 years old. (or otherwise derived from an Angel affirming the truth to 1 recent historic figure)
So now if you start showing how your church was historically wrong, you can start backing out the logic until Christopher Reves can be saved!!
Obviously you're stuck until the 'feeling right' part is overcome. Religion is more-often a justification for your personal world-views. That's often why people change their religion.
So Lets take a separate path.
The church is correct because it 'feels' right [to me].
The church might feel right because of its simple mantra: Jesus Christ is my personal savior.
Jesus is my personal savior because I need to be saved.
Jesus CAN save us because people say he performed certain random semi-useful miracles (though 60 to 100 years after the events)
I need to be saved because I'm a sinner.
Alternately, I need to be saved, because I'm insecure and need to feel the safety net of a super-power taking care of me during my time of need. There is no biblical justification to this. In fact, Jesus parables specifically contradict this (believers are destined an even harder and more arduous life). It is always people that perform miracles in the New Testament. Natural miracles were part of the old Testament. People were later embued with Jesus-like-powers. Yet they weren't saviors themselves, just messengers who re-affirm the gotta-believe-in-Jesus mantra.
I am a sinner because I screw up a lot (Great 4,000 years ago, but doesn't sit well today, so lets try again)
I am a sinner because of original sin.
Original sin exists because of Adam and Eve.
Adam and eve exist because of the bible is the word of God and is NOT metaphorical. It is a historical record guided by the hand of God, and worthy of extrapolating truths by reading in between the lines.
So miracles aside. So now if you start mucking with the truths of this or that, you obviously can't read in between the lines. A sane/rational person thus would ignore ALL texts not explicitly outlined when presented with factual errors in the bible. Though original sin and homophobia are clearly layed out - so you could still argue that point. Most people, however, will still read in between the lines when it's convenient to promote their cause (cognitive dissidence).
For example, homosexuality is one of MANY punishable by death sins in the old testiment. Put right next to eating a cheese-burger. Yet we 'ignore' the cheese-burger death-sentence through the 'personal savior' clause - fulfilling the old testament.. Yet even though Homosexuality is a death-filled God vengence, it is never mentioned again in the new testament, it's conveniently allowed to survive, while cheese-burgers are silently acquitted. Ultimately 'common sense'
Well, how would you better describe the following sets of facts:
* Media industry lobbying a consumer tax (supposedly out of necessity) * Consumer tax being distributed unrelated to the quality-of-product, quantity-of-product potentially sellability, unlimited number of recipients in the tax-pool.
It's social welfare, but without the moral imperative. And moreover subverts everything that is useful about capitalism (fight or flight, only strongest survive, demands cost-efficiencies, guaranteed mutually beneficial exchange between buyer and seller, natural/efficient/practically-free pricing-structuring).
The only part of capitalism that remains are the evil parts: monopolies ream customers in the ass, only the wealthy get wealthier - the poor get poorer over time, you start off with a lot of employees to build the industry, then fire everyone as once you transition the business model to pure licensing (e.g. the lawyers game). You spawn entire sub-industries that create nothing.
Oh, and starving artists are lucky to see a penny - since they didn't invest into the lobbying legal fees.
I would argue that the two reasons to choose a language these days are A) Syntax B) Libraries. If the syntax frustrates you, is bloated, makes it difficult to write large apps (VB, COBOL, XML-languages, etc), you'll demonize it. However, even if you have a clean syntax, if there are insufficient libraries (that are practically trusted across different platforms), then you can't do much more then trivial hello-world apps, or bind tightly to a handful of platforms.
The fact that you can't reliably say, I'm at least version X, and thus I can make use of this suite of features is extremely disappointing in this day and age.. The XML processing library (which is a large part of data-exchange these days, like it or not), the insecurity of using the much cleaner data-exchange format of JSON. The nightmare that is the javascript event model (elegant on a handful of browsers, but nearly impractical in the open-wild).
Argue all you want about how the 'language' transcends these web-centric features - how do you initialize an app? How do you chain-load 'includes', how do you perform IPC, how do you push data-streams into and out of the VM, how do you access files, how do you handle threading (inside or outside the VM), how do you deal with syntax errors (abort, roll back before processing the new script, or skip the lines that failed - possibly to the end of the file (like browsers do)), how do you deal with unicode, how do you deal with date formating (yes there are some primitive routines build in), how do you deal with regular expressions (there is a built-in routine but it has browser differences - which one do you choose).
Ignoring the fact that the stock toolkit is a mixed bread mutt, is like handing off C with no reliable standard header files.. fopen works differently on different UNICIES.. shudder...
That being said, I think javascript is more than adequate for a given plugin.. I use grovy, beanshell,velocity for simple DB-stored/dynamically-modified scripts; no reason to not use javscript there as well.. But these scripting languages are assumed to be relearned from scratch every time they're put into use, because different microversions might have dramatically different ways of interfacing with them. More importantly, your container treats the script like a leperous child.. You carefully massage it's context both before and after execution (fearing memory leaks). It's easier to inject objects with callbacks into the native language than to trust most of it's built-in data processing capabilities.. God help us if they treat dates or matching expressions in an unexpected way. Easier to code something complex into a 'helper' object.
As for most known language 'javascript', I would argue that most people (myself included) do 90% of their javascript coding in copy/paste mode, or have only deeply memorized/internalized trivial onEvent='return myfunc();' where myfunc may be a thin wrapper around someone else's library. So I would hardly say there's a large 'expert' javascript community.
Javascript has a good C/Java base syntax, morphed into dynamic scripting. Has some more modern foreach syntax, but it would be nice to incorporate some ruby concepts.
My main point is that you can't really transfer javascript programming knowledge from the web over to system-programming. You're pretty much starting from scratch. So Javascript doesn't provide any advantage over other existing scripting languages.
The 'black box' used in the phrase 'a good xxx will optimize it away for me' is exactly what's wrong with many new developers I come across.. They don't comprehend that what they're asking is impossible to do in less than (O^n). They instead need to ask different questions.
Databases don't spontaneously create/destroy indexes on the fly. Each index effectively replicates the total disk space requirements and can take half an hour to create on existing datasets. That's always been an operator or designer's job. Many DBs will cache queries, but there's a big difference. Caching can only be affected by your recent history. Indexing is a contract between you and your data such that future requests have an upper-bound cost.
As for transactions, your comment shows you don't understand the point of ACID. That each transaction requires disk synchronization (by definition). If you don't need ACID (e.g. you're not dealing with financial data or other unrecoverable data), then maybe you don't necessarily need transactions. I just feel 'undo' is more useful than the performance cost. If you think battery-backedup RAID controllers get around the ACID sync issue. You still have to wrap the individual operations in disk blocks and call an fsync. Typically you need to adjust a double-buffer while you're at it. I'm merely objecting your expression of a 'shitty RDBMS'.
Ignoring RDBMS for a moment as you requested. There's still the issue of what data-structures people use. Manually sorted arrays v.s. hashmaps v.s. trees v.s. unorganized bags. Do you explicitly maintain caches v.s. keeping transient working memory sets v.s. recomputing on the fly. If you use caches, do you make them thread-safe? Do you store externally so you can support arbitrary sized data? This is the stuff of pre-optimization that we're talking about.. If you're simply the in the habit of using the data-structures that your native library supports, then it's more of a common best-practice than a overt pre-optimized code (which classically has the potential of introducing bugs). For example, in java, ehcache is a trivial (to use) tool which handles almost all these concerns (except for tree/ordered lists). It's pretty bug free, easy to use and is well behaved in most environments. The trick is newbies several years out of college would have no clue. 5 minutes of a seasoned programmer could make a data-set operate in O(n*log(n)) instead of O(n^2).. No amount of hardware can be thrown at the problem to scale the naive solution.
In a sense I agree with you about black box tool kits (DB indexing, ehcache hash-maps, library data-structures). But I profoundly believe that every developer needs to apply big-O analysis to their work as they code. not as an afterthought or during the profiling stages.
Simple rules: Never [directly] use global variables. Never use gotos Never use O(N^2) or otherwise unbounded O(n * m) algorithms.
umm.. hardly. This isn't fancy. No more so than sarchasm is to english.
Ever write SQL statements? There is a constant trade-off between the number of indexes on a table and the most complex query you'd want to write. Note that the number of joins increases the effective order of your efficiency. If you have a mere 3 joins, you have n * m * o potential operations (which maxes out at n^3). indexes reduce a given join to n * log(n) ops. So the full indexed join would be n + n * log(m) + n * log(o) DB table comparisons to fully render a 3 table join. For n >> m and o, then it smells a lot like O(n). But as m and often o approach n, it's closer to O(n*log(n)) with high constant overhead. Disk access usually helps things by using something like log base 256 disk accesses per n. And of course DBs cache the hell out of recent seeks and often defer disk writes - though transactions completely undo this.
So a naive programmer that THINKS they know SQL very well might not batch operations into transactions (forcing k * n * log(n) disk writes, where k is the number of indexes). On a query, they may unknowingly use a function/mutator which undoes an index.
select t1.* from t1 join t2 on t1.day=date(t2.date_time) where t1.col1=? order by t1.col2
If col1 is a boolean or an otherwise horribly distributed column (such as a varchar that is an effectively enumerated value), then your first index is practically useless (closer to n operations; O(n / k) == n). Your join is on a mutated value of t2.date_time and therefore it's index is completely thrown away. Then finally your col2 sorting represents an n*log(n) disk sort with a worst case of n^2 if quicksort is used by the DB. So for datasets approximately the size of the DB table, you're effectively replicating the table on disk before outputting. Now all this being fully mem-cached might go pretty quickly. But once you put it on a web site where you could get hundreds of simultaneous identical queries, your cache can't fit all the temp-buffers and you spill out to disk for all the writes.. Then you have k * n disk IO operations (for k threads). From all in-mem to all on-disk due to parallel load.
The fastest you COULD make this is to create a date column on t2 separate from date_time and index it. Create a double-index col1,col2 such that a good DB will not only filter on col1 but be pre-sorted for col2. Note that's separate from a col2 index, which now increases your insert/update overhead.
So you had n^2 + n * m => O(n^2) for something that SEEMED properly indexed, and in most test cases would be instantaneous (since tests leave the DB cache nice and hot). It isn't until t2 becomes too large to fully fit in cache/memory that the repeated sequence scans almost guarantee a full disk zipping for each matched value of t1.
And this is a highly trivial query. Many specialized reports can have a dozen or so joins with complex relationships. People often say, well, we know it's 'probably' a slow query so run it at night. It's the queries that are still running in the morning that are killer.
And my point is that if you have a good working knowledge of HOW these indexes apply to the big-O scheme of things, you can avoid these pitfalls as you write the code.
Other things where big-O saves the day are when diagnosing WHY something is slow. Often the nested looping is hidden due to the abstracted code.
Hibernate, for example does a linear processing of all records in the local transaction on every flush. O(n). But if you are batch processing a large file and forget about this fact. Lets say you think you're being clever and run 32 operations in a transaction, then close the transaction.. BUT you decide to reuse your hibernate DB connection/session because.. well.. why not? Turns out hibernate retains the transacted records in an L1 cache between unrelated transactions.. So instead of flushing 32 items once per outer loop, you're really doing O(n^2). Simple mistake, but knowing that the O(n^2) would
If you quick and dirty code has any N^2 operations you could throw $1,000,000,000 of 10 year from now hardware and still not have it go fast enough.
Almost all N^2 and N^3 algorithms are fast as lightning in small test cases. But the junior programmer throws his hands in the air and gives up when it explodes one day for no obvious reason. 11 hits per second for 2 hours instead of the normal 10 hits per second that youlve gotten for the past year. It is very hard to stress test a system sufficiently to reveal all the critical masses needed for catostrophic collapse.
But the real point is that hardware won't do squat in many inappropriately applied algorithms.
Consider simple DB nightly maintanance. After a day of high volume you might reveal such a polynomic algorithm such that shutting down mysql with kill -9 is the only way out. If you had 10x faster hard drives or more memory, it would only take an extra 5% of extra volume to oversaturate you again.
It isn't just O(N^2) you have to worry about. You have synchronization points in code which cause backup just like normal car traffic jams. DB operations. Mutex's. Rpc calls. All need to be carefully considered. You need these thoughts AS you code, not after a profiler or busy day reveals them.
Huh? How is quicksort non parallelizable? It and merge sort can have n/8 possible parallel threads using divide and conqor. mergesort can farm out threads initially then slowly merge in smaller number of threads (the bottleneck) while quicksort needs to pivot first (the bottleneck) then rapidly farm out threads.
The problem is that the memory load becomes killer. If the mem blocks are cache-aligned when partitioned then you can get away with threads == the number of cores. You definitelydon't want to encounter MESI (sp?) cache coherance locking among other things.
Though I actually hate that show. Random mindless facts. I knew someone that was on the show, and he says he'd forgotten 90% of what he'd memorized during his build-up.
Personally, I'd rather see a debate show.. As this is a battle of logic, and often can involve science. Sadly, most debates are poorly moderated, and become trivial shouting / talking-points for various advocacies.
Still, most of the TV/radio that I watch/listen-to is actually debate oriented. So maybe I am living out my dream.:)
Supply and demand do, of course exist both in the scientific, educational and sporting industries. But not fully in the ways that you suggest.
There is no 'shortage' of HIGHLY skilled actors, singers, or athletes. It is a shortage of 'slots'. You can only honor '10' artists a week (40 in any given quarter), say 5 to 20 atheletes in any given field in a year. 2 to 10 actors in a year, etc.
These numbers are specifically designed by their respective industries, synthetically. How else can a over-abundance of supply with few slots not produce price-pressures downward. The olympics, for example, pays little.. It is only the secondary income that makes this pay off. The olympics is more about skill than industry, and truer economics applies.
It's the same as the oil industry and diamond industry.. By artificially reducing the supply, they can control the finances. If left as a truely competative market, the focus of the population would not be nearly as profitable, the ranking would be not as nearly valuable, and thus salaries for the very tops of the pyramid would not be a matter of discussion.
It is the salaries that are the topic here, and to a certain degree, the 'life style' which includes but not restricted-to the salary, motivates young people to focus their lives. But if you look at world sporting events, the payout isn't nearly as great, yet the general participation is much higher than in the US, so I don't know that even the life-style argument really is all that true either.
The problem is that 'business partners' of which I am one, don't care about Verizon, and would just assume they would go out of business. But until they do, their customers are unreachable except through this service fee increase. All carriers (tmobile, sprint, AT&T, and hundreds of others both in the US and around the world) all charge service fees for sending traffic on their network.. Most are volume-based pricing, and most carriers heavily audit the traffic to avoid fraud and unsolicited or otherwise deceitful messages.
The issue is that a value-added partner often is facilitating a service for a client (say Obama in his 3am message). You are only useful if you can reach 90+% of the market.. But if 1/3 of the reachable market charges 600% more than the rest of the market, then pricing for the client becomes frustrated if not impossible.
And this is to say nothing of 'free' services such as google.
It's certainly within Verizon's right to charge whatever they want for their network. Just recognize that the US has the most backwards phone network in the world, and I do business with Latin America, Europe and Africa for comparison. This trend (if it is one) doesn't bode well for the US cell industry is all I'm saying.
The chevy volt is more like a diesel-electric train. It runs 100% on electric motors, NO drive-shaft. The diesel engine is merely an electric generator.. This allows for high torque low-rpm travel not otherwise possible with direct crank.
I'm surprised the chevy volt is going to be gas instead of diesel based for the same reason.. You'd want as high-efficiency electric generator as possible. I guess the louder, heavier, harder to find fuel, were going to detract from sales in their minds - so much for being a leader. Europeans are already producing a diesel type car of this category - but they already accept diesel over there.
Back to your comment, the expression 'true hybrid' is a little silly, as anything that is a compromise of two pure technologies is a hybrid. The expression gas-electric or diesel electric has a pre-existing connotation as above. Hybrid these days has the connotation of direct-crank + electric power assist. Plugin is god-knows-what.
I hate Apple's brick walls around their platform which is anti to what Apple once stood for.
Funny, I always thought of Apple as a walled off isolationistic company. Where have you been? Granted they make GREAT products in their walled garden, but that was always the barrier to entry.. Apple's way or the highway. Yes I understand you probably mean programming for the desktop, but you could only ever extend so much - you had to work with what was given. IANAMP (I Am Not A Mac Programmer)
Light isn't a cannon ball. It's a wave that easily disperses as it comes in contact with matter/gravity. i.e. even a finely focused laser will scatter in ALL available directions as it passes through cosmic dust.
Thus, no matter how curved your horizon is, if there are connecting points between any two regions - no matter how far apart - then their interaction will warp light and other radiating forces such that at least some percentage WILL point back to you - the observer.
So if I can see Point A, and Point A can see Point B, then unless Point A 100% obscures point B, then I'll eventually be able to see direct evidence of Point B. The fact that we observe perturbations of Point A that can be explained by the possible existence of Point B yet can not see Point B is a serious anomaly.
I've watched countless debates on big-bang v.s. steady-state theory, and yes, I understand the evidence against steady-state (it's flawed), BUT I've never been convinced that COBE and other projects offer definitive proof the single-origin universe.
The response to evidence outside our expansion frame is typically called the multi-verse. Or multiple unconnected big-bangs.. Possibly recursive or as part of an outer eather that intrinsicly spawns universes.
But the more abstract that multiverses and extra boundries get, the more LIKE steady-state the description of our universe gets.
Just because there was a local event that is bounded by the speed of light, doesn't mean it encompasses the entire universe. If you were a fly inside an internal combustion engine and your entire life was defined by a single stroke of the engine, you might be inclined to define the entire universe as the confines of the cylinder walls. But living outside the cylinder walls, we'd consider that largely lacking in knowledge.
The point is largely moot unless we (the fly) can determine a way of practically effecting matter as far away as we can observe. Then the cylinder walls become a limiting factor. But we're having trouble getting past the boundry of our solar system right now.
The classical argument against steady-state is that the universe can't be both infinitely old and infinitely large, because the sky would be white. Elementary school level reasoning (INAP). My argument against that was that you're assuming certain properties about radiation. Consider that an electron is bounded oscilating energy. Likewise, a galaxy is bounded/cohesive energy. Yes it emits a certain waste radiation (that's how we see it), but is mostly contained. A galaxy is on a larger scale than the surrounding electron region. Why not consider even larger scales, might E&M radiation act differently on even larger scales - curving in on itself like we speculate happens in a black-hole (in constrained scales). Might gravity have tremendously different characteristics on these larger scales? We already speculate that they are particle based (GR not withstanding), that they propagate as waves at the speed of light. Thus they radiate. If radiation can be bounded, even in only parts, which we KNOW it can. Then disconnected REGIONS of the universe should be natural and numerous. What we call the expansion of the visible universe is really the warping of the internal confines of our region of space. Which would be analogous to the warping of electron bonds given outside excitation - in extremely slow motion.
This is baseless speculation except that it directs research attention to the properties of radiation at extreme scales - specifically bounded/oscilating/vortexing large-scale radiating bodies.
Allow me to repost the critical element which addresses your post: "How was Russia a threat to our way of life?"
Let me then paraphrase the rest: I've never seen a logical or practical example of how they were a threat to our way of life.
I challenge anyone to provide a credible argument to the contrary.
And a further ramble which probably won't gain traction here: I HAVE heard various destabalizing and possiblly life-threatening situations that existed during the cold war (most of which I listed). But hopefully I have demonstrated that they were strategic counter-measures of CHOICE - often originated by the US and thus it is fully understandable that a competing world power would try and match our strategic position, if not occasionally exceed it - in a modern chess game.
The one thing I understood since I was young was that MAD kept us safe moreso than anything else. 3'rd party nations had to choose sides or risk being conqured by one of the two sides. For some reason neither side really went after the middle east after a series of power exchanges left them as wild-cards.
While I can see how you label my article as moral relativism, I am merely trying to give an unbiased historical account - the focus of which is to attempt to break down the notion that the US has seriously ever been under threat. Even durring WWII the US had no credible short-term threat. It was only with the possibility that Asia and or Europe would fall under an single authoritarian rule that our future would be at risk. Germany in WWI and Germany and Japan in WWII only ever attacked us in attempts to keep us out of the war - if only temporarily.
How was Russia a threat to our way of life? I've never understood this argument.
1) Russia kept territory it re-invaded during WWII. The argument at the time seemed at least logical, if not convenient - to prevent Germany from attacking a 3'rd time and decimating Russia proper. Later the logical excuse was a buffer against NATO - give a longer delay from fired nukes that the US enjoys due to the atlantic.
2) Russia sent lots of spies in the US. Exactly the same as the US sent into Russia.
3) Russia supported proxy wars, with the implication that the supported side would adopt communism. Exactly the same that the US did in Central/South America and in S.E. Asia but with non-socialized small-government groups (we liked to call them democracies, but guess what, you vote for communist leaders too; we don't even live in a democracy, but it's a marketable paraphrase).
4) Russia had nukes pointed at the US. We had nuclear capable bombers that regularly did fly-bys of the Russian international waters. Russia had more mobile ground nukes, and we had more bombers. Our side had the advantage because when you want to make a political point, it's safer to put the nukes right into their back-yard and say 'dare me to pull the trigger' than to have passive nukes power-up half a world away. We also had lots of fixed position nukes, but that was just stupid - because they were expensive and were less menacing than mobile nukes. Only advantage was that they had greater range and were slightly faster to deploy from scratch.
5) There were honest to goodness Communist parties in the US. Later those parties were arrested, disbanded, financially ostricized (who'd employ a card carrying communist). It was later replaced by the socialist party - hard to ostracize most of our NATO allies at least. Conversely, there were free-marketing, term-limiting, checks-and-balance decreeing, private-ownership promoting citizens in Russia. And many of them DID win. There was lots of private enterprise in Russia before it's financial and political collapse, just as there's free markets in communist china (thanks to Hong Kong's prior British rule). Our 'card carrying communist' rhetoric was matched with 'capitalist pigs', where the few immoral corporations run everything. We've got those people here too, but we just call them 'evil corporations' and don't tend to attribute it to the government.
My point is not that we were just as bad as the Russians (though we were), it's that there isn't a legitimate cause-and-effect as US patriots would like to imply. Russia didn't do all these things and then we reacted by creating 'peace keeper missiles'. Historically it was a back and forth game, where many of the threatening aspects of the cold war were produced in tandem. You could not morally blame one side more than the other. Thus communism and Russia were not the root of the treat.
And hopefully I've addressed your fear of socialism comment. Most of our allies support it - we don't fear them.. And in fact, the UK is doing better educationally and financially (both for the average citizen and for the government as a whole) than we are. And the war costs would only account for the Federal US financial woes.
I'm not advocating socialism and certainly not the lack of private ownership (pure communism), but they are well thought out forms of government that when implemented correctly, and in the correct scale, have great potential. But mismanagement will get you every time - just like in US capitalism.
Sure, the common base idea would also include republicans. It's called we pick a few people to manage a lot of people - e.g. government. Unless you are an anarchist, you have something in common with Hitler.. Yeah You F*ING Hitler supporter!!!
My slightly altered response is that your association of social programs makes an implication that they were: A) Bad policies B) Bad policies because the outcomes of 3 of the 5 groups are culturally considered bad, evil, failed. Thus whatever they supported must also be bad, evil and a failure.
Nice deduction.
Personally I believe there is an ever changing sweet-spot in the degree of social support that the government needs to provide.. I do recognize, however, that it's very hard to take away that which you've given/promised. That's why car manufacturers have an MSRP. They almost never sell at that price - they always give some temporary discounts.. Perhaps that's how we need to sell social programs to the US public. As temporary with regular visible periods of sales and expensive times. Then you relax and future proof short-term solutions to social/economic crisises.
To be fair. The economy meltdown started in the Clinton years. Clinton approved the law allowing two year residency to exempt a property from capital gains sales (which spawned MASSIVE house flipping). Clinton's years had the deregulation of banks (he signed it into law, in my understanding). And I don't think Clinton would have disapproved of lowering interest rates after 9/11.
The only thing Bush did (other than allow low interest rates) was lower taxes, which raised our deficit spending - which is too short term to have had an effect.. US treasuries are still AAA, though they are currently being re-evaluated.
Note, I say this as an ABB (Anybody But Bush). I think having a puppet run the country is a bad idea, no matter what party. It's easier to replace a man than a lobying group.
One might argue that Bush leveraged the justice department by specifically NOT enforcing various regulatory laws. It's possible, but I doubt it, that remaining regulatory bodies could have done more. But my understanding is that it was mostly legitimate exploitation of speculators and people that don't read the fine print - or at least are really really really bad at math.
Consider for oil, a legitimate futures market can be gamed during a time of war for profit. Consider that many people are opting out of health-care plans willfully - hoping for the best. Consider the concept of naked short-selling - something no administration has yet cracked down on: I say I'm going to borrow a stock from somebody (a locate) then sell it. Then in x days, if you need the stock, I'll buy it back from the original owner. Otherwise I'll buy it back from you and give it back to him. That's short-selling.. But what if I short-sell 1,000 shares, but only have a locate on 10 shares. I can stall in actuating my claims. I can buy back 10 shares, hand them over as proof, still stalling on the rest.. Then as you bug me, I can buy those shares back again and again until I've given you the full 1,000 shares - perhaps months later. The key is that I'm selling 990 shares that don't exist, and I'm reselling the same shares over and over. Also consider sketchy intermediate firms. They outright lie about having a locate of shares. So the investor short-sells shares that don't exist. Then the intermediate firm fudges the numbers in a larger pool of transactions so that nobody can or would bother to verify that stocks have been fictitiously created. This is highly traceable, but only in retrospect. The original outside investor (who might have been a partner in this scandal) could have walked away with billions, letting the intermediate firm get caught one day and take full blame (probably because the current administrators don't know anything about it). This has happened more than once in the past 10 years. The problem is that even after tracing the origin of the fictitious locates, bad stocks are still floating out on the exchange - and can't be identified again. You've permanently diluted the shares of some poor company.
I can see it. Imagine two neighbors that are bitter rivals. One day you're on a boat and the other team is in charge of the boat - you don't have a say. Then they accidentally sink the boat (but you feel it was their fault).
Then when you feel that you've almost drowned to death, you see a life-raft, but the other team is fighting to be in control again. So you panic, and race to get to the boat first so that you can prevent them from continuing the same actions. When you honestly feel that the other team might win and you honestly feel that they're going to sink the boat AGAIN. Your blood is going to rail.
Now the only two things the republicans actually did which I believe in retrospect we can blame them for, is deregulation (blindly trust in greed - yeah, that's a safe bet), and unfunded military action. The whole cowboy diplomacy thing hasn't really had an effect one way or another (though they'll argue it's kept us safe - hard to prove a negative). Other legislation and policy hasn't really had as much of an effect. Note that the low interest rate strategy was a gamble, and the same guy in charge (Greenspan) was a champion of the Clinton administration as well, so you can't blame or credit either side on this topic. Interest rates aren't exactly a partisan issue, but regulation and diplomacy tactics are.
Well, for a long while, it was a fear that it would happen to YOUR children. There is a certain disappointment when your child turns out different than you or your hopes no matter what. Since society of old labeled homosexuality as a sin, it is compounded in their minds.. No less than the early days of left-handed people (which were considered cursed, or the work of the devil). And much like wrong-handedness, there has been a historic tendency to correct for the 'defect'.
But this was a largely embarrassing and highly personal matter for virtually all families. Often, guilt was used to reinforce in the child that they need to act different than their sinful tendencies. This 'closeting' was mostly family and community but also obviously professional (I'm speaking out of my hand here, so feel free to disagree).
Other than the obvious sodomy laws, there were also outdoors group sex endeavors which were locked down by laws. Note that outdoors sex among any gender is generally considered a crime, but it's a local affair.
Eventually people started to debate as to whether homosexuality was inherent or rather a peer influence phenomena. Many of these stricken families hoped for the ability to change the environment to 'bring them back into the light'. Consider that bisexuality obviously allows for the exploration of homosexuality, and statistically many might favor the easier-to-adopt homosexuality (men are less reserved in their sexual escapades and thus have less anxiety during the dating phase). So bisexuality is certainly a gateway for the curious, or the truly homosexual who have been self-repressing. Next is group-sex. It is easier to justify various cross gender activities when there is a massive wealth of heated-passion; one could always justify to one's self it was an act in the 'heat of the moment'. Such 'safe' exploration can lead to bisexuality. And thus is a gateway. Manage a toi is a lesser version for male homosexuality, but certainly a potential gateway for female homosexuality - as culturally female intimacy is considered erotic. As a stretch, you could find that general promiscuity is a gateway to manage a toi or group sex. Thus teen sex, experimental sex, sex outside of a commitment (casual sex), or to some degree sex outside of marriage, can all be considered gateways.. Though I doubt anything below sexual promiscuity would be identified in anyone's mind as a gateway to homosexuality by the average citizen.
Finally, you have the 'unknown'.. He's different, so let's stone him to death. The unknown could be anything. He must be different for a REASON.. Maybe he's sick.. I don't want my kids around a sick person. Maybe he's a pedophile. I CERTAINLY don't want my kids around him. Maybe he's a sadist - who knows what kind of sick (untraditional) things he likes. If he's deviant, maybe he's a satanist - he certainly isn't a good 'catholic'. Best keep my kids away JUST IN CASE.
So back to the unhappy family unit with the gay-leaning child. They are obviously going to do everything within their power to keep the home sexually straight and 'safe'. But then there was the outside world, filled with it's 'evils'. And this is classically where government steps in.. The government can pass ordinances, or higher up with laws. And thus the political debate of homosexuality begins.
Once you are politicized, you are immediately going to produce STRONG emotional sentiment about what is right or wrong.. And remarkably, you're going to get a massive divergence created out of thin air.. People with no prior opinion on the topic become crusaders for one side or another. People that have never met a homosexual (that they knew of) suddenly want to pass legislation at a higher up level (even though their local laws are already preventing the 'gateway' behavior).
Homosexual marriage is only recent in this historical story. Previously, the right to have a gay bar. The right to BE known as gay (still a factor in the military). Were all milestones which had political enemies.
Your depiction of Liberals represents a typical right-wing narrow minded bias (not that you hold this opinion, but it's the party line). Consider this scenario.
Country A is backed by the US, and feels it can get away with quite a bit. Country A then picks on country B in a small way, picking a fight. Country B over-reacts and acts punitively. The US doesn't see the squabbling, but doesn't like Country B very much, and thus in the vacuum of facts, assumes that Country B is merely acting aggressively against Country A. The US then exonerates Country A of "whatever squabbles may have started" and focuses on the over-reaction of Country B. The political policy is therefore to rally political will against the overt-aggressiveness of Country B.
Consider you're in elementary school and the US is the teacher, and the two countries are Roudy students.. Country B is often sited as being a cut-up, and thus the teacher is going to tend to put the blame on him.
Facts aside (on purpose because that's the point of this exercise). You have two possible political psychological as the teacher (or political philosophies as the head of the US). Set an example to others, single out the trouble makers, create an atmosphere of you're with us or against us. Black and white. The specific act isn't as important as the loyalty and trust of and in the students. Namely, can the teacher be assured that they can go about her business of teaching instead of acting as the referee. It's a legitimate philosophy, and it's rather effective. But quickly, one by one, the students who were singled out will distrust the teacher.. More importantly they will resent her. They may form their own coalitions and conspiracies.. They may T-Pee her house, cut class, make dirty remarks. Make rumors.. etc. This is the cost of the singling-out, black-and-white philosphy.
An alternative approach is the nurturing, reasoning, fairness approach. The problem is that without objective information (which neither child is going to provide, and studies have shown that group reactions will be just as biased as the teacher), you are subject to being manipulated and ultimately making the problem worse. The pro of this 'reasoning' 'debative' 'argumentative' approach is that nobody has reason to feel that they were being oppressed, being neglected, that they weren't cared about. There is no 'HATRED', 'resentment' nor need for retaliation. Now it's possible that someone is unfairly punished in the process, but logic would stand that without conclusive evidence against the student, the punishment is somewhat muted. Now the cons of this approach are that you can lose the respect of stronger willed students. You're viewed as a wimp. You might be able to be manipulated (either in their mind or in reality). The deliberation process can be tedous and people can become frustrated and not like you as a result. Students may not respect your commands - not having any reason to fear you.
It is MUCH harder to successfully employ the second approach, because there are many more cons. President Carter is widely viewed as having most of the cons, BUT, Clinton was viewed as a strong and wise leader by many foreign countries. It certainly is possible, and personally, I prefer the challenge which has greater risks, but much greater rewards. Such that it isn't luck that determines the outcome.
If you want proof of a diliberating body, consider the US court system. It is very different than the subjective court systems in say France. We use case-law, so at lower-court levels, it's almost always black-and-white as to whether someone is breaking the law, so long as the facts are known. The issue, is of course, and exactly as with Country A and B, that the facts are almost NEVER known. But our court system does not reward speculative punitive measures. Higher courts almost always overturn such action.. There is a very real system of checks and balances that works. The benefit of the doubt is always given to the defendant.. The reason is th
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Not fully, is correct, but the IA-64 DID have x86 transfer instructions, which allowed an on-board x86 chip to execute them.. I Think this was slightly similar to the old 8086 FPU instructions which were ignored by the main processor and triggered activation on the co-processor. I think this explicit support was to allow libraries or emulated context switches. Don't recall. Was slower than a P3 at the time either way.
IA-64, iirc was slower than x86 when compiled with primitive compilers (read gcc).
A lot of the advancements were in floating point, which is still meaningless to most people except gamers (which wouldn't be using the platform) and special interest companies. Namely, branch-prediction's were more accurate for instructions which take 32 to 64 clock-ticks (64bit sqrt, divide, etc).
The advancements of the VLIW were negated by very-large prefetched instructions with cached pre-compiled op-codes.
The branch predictions only gave you a theoretical advantage over the very large branch-prediction buffers, and in some circumstances the branch-predictors gave you better decisions (hot code could pre-guess a direction before a predicate register was even populated - the Itanium would have to execute both paths, but the branch-predictor choose the hottest path). Further Alpha laughed at Itanium, saying they've had branch-prediction hint op-code variants for years(without predicates), and they showed many synthetic algorithms which would produce better alpha code than Itanium.. Basically saying for most algorithms, predicate-registers produce less efficient code than other alternatives (just happens that x86 didn't have any such instructions - but that would have been easy to correct with yet another op-code prefix). Note i686 did introduce the conditional move instruction, which goes a long way to small but common branch avoidance.
Register windows (a la sparc's) are a neat idea, but with register renaming on the x86, a tight function-call loop can be just as fast. Plus the spilling of registers into memory often is mitigated with the high speed cache. Further, many arguments against the small register set of the x86-32 are avoided in the x86-64's much larger register pool. Lastly, if you only have 16 registers (of which only 8 are hot), then you can efficiently utilize a pool of 256 rename-registers. If, however, you have an explicit 128 register addressibility (most of which is statistically cold), it's difficult and inefficient to remap them in future versions of the architecture. Note that every power of two register-size causes slow-downs in register interconnects - to say nothing of the real-estate and power-drain.
Then there's the fact that a program that only needs 2Gig of RAM will generally work better in 32bit than 64 due to the half-sized mem-pointers. More fits into your cache. Note other unrelated optimizations in x86-64 may counter-balance this (though this is independent of the 64bit design), so YMMV. I know that SUN's JDK 32bit runs faster, more smoothly than the 64bit version for most of our apps. Yes there are some CPU instruction optimizations for x86-64, but memory in java tends to be the limiting factor.. The same server app will consume 400Meg on a 32bit version and sometimes breaks a gig on the 64bit version. The GC times are measurably slower.
The explicit register rotation used in tight-loops - allowing a 6 op-code loop to execute every op in every stage of the loop, thus degrading a loop to at most n clock cycles is nice in theory. But what if your loop is more complex than a trivial inc/dec. And what if you need one more op-code than the architecture supports? Moreover, there's no technical reason why a CPU can't detect such a loop after k iterations and allocate register-renaming to do the exact same thing. With a hot-spot detector (part of branch-prediction), a subsequent access could fire up the loop immediately. But more importantly, future versions of the CPU could support even larger loop-lengths, as you're not explicitly limited by the bit-lengths, or the originally staticly compiled code.
The sad part is that the explicit compilation of CPU hints, and minimization of register spilling that are the hall-marks of the Itanium should theoretically lead to a slimmer, lower-power, higher-theoretical-clock CPU.. But due to other engineering decisions, the exact opposite is true. Lower clock, bigger silicon, higher power.
Basically th
x86 CPUs have a horrid amount of data to page-out on a context switch - and to boot, some of the data is not byte-aligned if I recall correctly. The amount of work necessary to perform a to-memory context switch dwarfs the internal register renaming/flushing of a CPU mode transition.
Further, I've heard people incorrectly post that switching to the OS constitutes a context-switch. This isn't true in any CPU that I'm aware of.. A user-space -> kernel-space switch changes some CPU registers - opens up the address space/protected instructions, etc. But the x86 segment registers are unaffected. The main registers including the stack pointers are unaffected.
The kernel has to explicitly trigger a CPU -> memory, memory -> CPU dump/restore when initiating a context switch. Otherwise the kernel has little overhead more than a function call (saving local registers that it's going to modify, etc).
Please someone correct me if I'm wrong about the performance implications, and certainly different CPUs have different volumes of data to passivate/activate obviously, but just about any CPU since the early 90's is very kernel-switch performance sensitive.
Consider that I typically see only 3000 ctx-switch /sec in linux, but I can call 800k 'time' OS calls / sec in Java of all things.
Crap - lost my initial reply. Well, from what I remember, I thanked you for an in depth analysis and discussion.
I talked about how abortion is a moral gradient - that if you really look at the wonder and complexity of all cells, it is mind boggling that an egg/sperm/zygote have any greater significance to white-blood cells, tissue, even hair. If there is anything that can be called Sacrad on earth, the cell would be it. And it is mind boggling that in this day and age, we still squabble about the moment 'life starts' - life is all around us, and I am frustrated by 4,000 year old thinking dictating modern policy - because with the knowledge of how fragile yet vigilant micro-biology is, we also know that death is a natural part of survival. That 'planned parenthood' is every bit as important for the survival of the family unit (and thus society and thus all of the human species) as the 3'rd trimester baby. My argument on this part is that humans are to monkeys with bacteria A is to bacteria B.. Meaning in the grand scheme of things, we're barely even note-worthy. BUT, we carry with us the most prescious things on earth - cells. We need to be respectful of life as I'm sure there's no debate, BUT we also need to be accepting of death.
This isn't a logical proof, so much as an apeal to a practical sense of proportionality.
The rest is involved with disputes about Christian beliefs.
I agree with you that Christians TODAY start with the affirmation that Jesus is the 'Son of God', that he is our 'Savior', that all we need is to 'believe in him' and be saved. However, this is really a 2,000 year evolution of a specific faith.
Originally, it was that Jesus was the Savior of the Jewish people - ever denied their promised land. He was their savior because he fullfilled various Jewish prophesies. (Not really, but if you squinted really hard - and called it all symbolic). Nothing changed for the Jews and the story starts growing legs...
Eventually it was Paul, and Paul alone that decided the message was applicable to NON-jews. This was a MAJOR rewriting of Christianity.. Now it had to be told in a manner that was genericly applicable. The philosophy was still Jewish centric (why should a zorastrian care about Jewish prophesies?), but the notion that all you needed to do to gain entrance into heaven was to believe in Jesus (without a full qualification of what that means).
Gnostics went so far as to believe Jesus wasn't even man, but a material shell around God - basically an avatar (basically throwing away any remaining Jew-centrism).
Eventually the tables completely turned when the Sun God representative of Rome set policy for the masses to be Christian tolerant (Constantine). Later Roman leaders would actually start merging Christianity with the THOUSANDS of regional religions - to guarantee generations-beyond accepting the merged rituals.
Note that Rome and the middle-east were replete with rituals. Nazarene, zorastrian, hellenism, etc. If it wasn't a mystical rite of passage, it wasn't a religion. That included Judaism and early Christian sects.
The Roman re-established path-of-peter (peter is the rock on which the church will be built) gave civil control of Christians back to the Romans, and the ritual merging brought conquored lands into this central control.
During this period, books were banned or exhaulted based on whether they worked for the Roman control. For most people in authority it was liken until a modern senator voting for more senatorial restrictions/pay-cuts.
Soon the trinity view became dominant. With a thousand demi-gods for Angles and Saints. People praying to the demi-gods more than to the figurehead.
You don't hear a lot of objection during the 1,000 years or of church rule. Is it because of the punishing of heresy by death? Is it the burning of books? Hard to say. For most people, it gave structure and happiness.
Eventually the rifts with the church started with depictions of corruption. Later politi
Summary:
A) Aliens come to eat us
B) Aliens might contradict our world-view
C) Aliens probably can't/won't communicate with us, so it just adds more inconclusive doubt. Which only brings us pain.
D) To non-believers, aliens represent an 'I told you so!!!' moment.
E) Believers are put-off by the 'I'm sure I can say I told you so!!!!' movement
Details:
Great question. But here's my take:
You might vote republican because it's pro-life, anti-stem-cell-research, anti-gay
You are pro-life/ anti-stem-cell because abortion is soul abuse
Abortion is soul-abuse because 'God says so'
'God says so' because that's how you were brought up. (Killing is wrong) - (even though it's technically Murder that is wrong - specifically subject to human interpretation)
You know that's how you were brought up because you and your peers are reminded of it in church weekly.
Your church is right because it is 2,000 years old. (or otherwise derived from an Angel affirming the truth to 1 recent historic figure)
So now if you start showing how your church was historically wrong, you can start backing out the logic until Christopher Reves can be saved!!
Obviously you're stuck until the 'feeling right' part is overcome. Religion is more-often a justification for your personal world-views. That's often why people change their religion.
So Lets take a separate path.
The church is correct because it 'feels' right [to me].
The church might feel right because of its simple mantra: Jesus Christ is my personal savior.
Jesus is my personal savior because I need to be saved.
Jesus CAN save us because people say he performed certain random semi-useful miracles (though 60 to 100 years after the events)
I need to be saved because I'm a sinner.
Alternately, I need to be saved, because I'm insecure and need to feel the safety net of a super-power taking care of me during my time of need. There is no biblical justification to this. In fact, Jesus parables specifically contradict this (believers are destined an even harder and more arduous life). It is always people that perform miracles in the New Testament. Natural miracles were part of the old Testament. People were later embued with Jesus-like-powers. Yet they weren't saviors themselves, just messengers who re-affirm the gotta-believe-in-Jesus mantra.
I am a sinner because I screw up a lot (Great 4,000 years ago, but doesn't sit well today, so lets try again)
I am a sinner because of original sin.
Original sin exists because of Adam and Eve.
Adam and eve exist because of the bible is the word of God and is NOT metaphorical. It is a historical record guided by the hand of God, and worthy of extrapolating truths by reading in between the lines.
So miracles aside. So now if you start mucking with the truths of this or that, you obviously can't read in between the lines. A sane/rational person thus would ignore ALL texts not explicitly outlined when presented with factual errors in the bible. Though original sin and homophobia are clearly layed out - so you could still argue that point. Most people, however, will still read in between the lines when it's convenient to promote their cause (cognitive dissidence).
For example, homosexuality is one of MANY punishable by death sins in the old testiment. Put right next to eating a cheese-burger. Yet we 'ignore' the cheese-burger death-sentence through the 'personal savior' clause - fulfilling the old testament.. Yet even though Homosexuality is a death-filled God vengence, it is never mentioned again in the new testament, it's conveniently allowed to survive, while cheese-burgers are silently acquitted. Ultimately 'common sense'
Well, how would you better describe the following sets of facts:
* Media industry lobbying a consumer tax (supposedly out of necessity)
* Consumer tax being distributed unrelated to the quality-of-product, quantity-of-product potentially sellability, unlimited number of recipients in the tax-pool.
It's social welfare, but without the moral imperative. And moreover subverts everything that is useful about capitalism (fight or flight, only strongest survive, demands cost-efficiencies, guaranteed mutually beneficial exchange between buyer and seller, natural/efficient/practically-free pricing-structuring).
The only part of capitalism that remains are the evil parts: monopolies ream customers in the ass, only the wealthy get wealthier - the poor get poorer over time, you start off with a lot of employees to build the industry, then fire everyone as once you transition the business model to pure licensing (e.g. the lawyers game). You spawn entire sub-industries that create nothing.
Oh, and starving artists are lucky to see a penny - since they didn't invest into the lobbying legal fees.
I would argue that the two reasons to choose a language these days are A) Syntax B) Libraries. If the syntax frustrates you, is bloated, makes it difficult to write large apps (VB, COBOL, XML-languages, etc), you'll demonize it. However, even if you have a clean syntax, if there are insufficient libraries (that are practically trusted across different platforms), then you can't do much more then trivial hello-world apps, or bind tightly to a handful of platforms.
The fact that you can't reliably say, I'm at least version X, and thus I can make use of this suite of features is extremely disappointing in this day and age.. The XML processing library (which is a large part of data-exchange these days, like it or not), the insecurity of using the much cleaner data-exchange format of JSON. The nightmare that is the javascript event model (elegant on a handful of browsers, but nearly impractical in the open-wild).
Argue all you want about how the 'language' transcends these web-centric features - how do you initialize an app? How do you chain-load 'includes', how do you perform IPC, how do you push data-streams into and out of the VM, how do you access files, how do you handle threading (inside or outside the VM), how do you deal with syntax errors (abort, roll back before processing the new script, or skip the lines that failed - possibly to the end of the file (like browsers do)), how do you deal with unicode, how do you deal with date formating (yes there are some primitive routines build in), how do you deal with regular expressions (there is a built-in routine but it has browser differences - which one do you choose).
Ignoring the fact that the stock toolkit is a mixed bread mutt, is like handing off C with no reliable standard header files.. fopen works differently on different UNICIES.. shudder...
That being said, I think javascript is more than adequate for a given plugin.. I use grovy, beanshell,velocity for simple DB-stored/dynamically-modified scripts; no reason to not use javscript there as well.. But these scripting languages are assumed to be relearned from scratch every time they're put into use, because different microversions might have dramatically different ways of interfacing with them. More importantly, your container treats the script like a leperous child.. You carefully massage it's context both before and after execution (fearing memory leaks). It's easier to inject objects with callbacks into the native language than to trust most of it's built-in data processing capabilities.. God help us if they treat dates or matching expressions in an unexpected way. Easier to code something complex into a 'helper' object.
As for most known language 'javascript', I would argue that most people (myself included) do 90% of their javascript coding in copy/paste mode, or have only deeply memorized/internalized trivial onEvent='return myfunc();' where myfunc may be a thin wrapper around someone else's library. So I would hardly say there's a large 'expert' javascript community.
Javascript has a good C/Java base syntax, morphed into dynamic scripting. Has some more modern foreach syntax, but it would be nice to incorporate some ruby concepts.
My main point is that you can't really transfer javascript programming knowledge from the web over to system-programming. You're pretty much starting from scratch. So Javascript doesn't provide any advantage over other existing scripting languages.
Thank you.. You've just proven my point.
The 'black box' used in the phrase 'a good xxx will optimize it away for me' is exactly what's wrong with many new developers I come across.. They don't comprehend that what they're asking is impossible to do in less than (O^n). They instead need to ask different questions.
Databases don't spontaneously create/destroy indexes on the fly. Each index effectively replicates the total disk space requirements and can take half an hour to create on existing datasets. That's always been an operator or designer's job. Many DBs will cache queries, but there's a big difference. Caching can only be affected by your recent history. Indexing is a contract between you and your data such that future requests have an upper-bound cost.
As for transactions, your comment shows you don't understand the point of ACID. That each transaction requires disk synchronization (by definition). If you don't need ACID (e.g. you're not dealing with financial data or other unrecoverable data), then maybe you don't necessarily need transactions. I just feel 'undo' is more useful than the performance cost. If you think battery-backedup RAID controllers get around the ACID sync issue. You still have to wrap the individual operations in disk blocks and call an fsync. Typically you need to adjust a double-buffer while you're at it. I'm merely objecting your expression of a 'shitty RDBMS'.
Ignoring RDBMS for a moment as you requested. There's still the issue of what data-structures people use. Manually sorted arrays v.s. hashmaps v.s. trees v.s. unorganized bags. Do you explicitly maintain caches v.s. keeping transient working memory sets v.s. recomputing on the fly. If you use caches, do you make them thread-safe? Do you store externally so you can support arbitrary sized data? This is the stuff of pre-optimization that we're talking about.. If you're simply the in the habit of using the data-structures that your native library supports, then it's more of a common best-practice than a overt pre-optimized code (which classically has the potential of introducing bugs). For example, in java, ehcache is a trivial (to use) tool which handles almost all these concerns (except for tree/ordered lists). It's pretty bug free, easy to use and is well behaved in most environments. The trick is newbies several years out of college would have no clue. 5 minutes of a seasoned programmer could make a data-set operate in O(n*log(n)) instead of O(n^2).. No amount of hardware can be thrown at the problem to scale the naive solution.
In a sense I agree with you about black box tool kits (DB indexing, ehcache hash-maps, library data-structures). But I profoundly believe that every developer needs to apply big-O analysis to their work as they code. not as an afterthought or during the profiling stages.
Simple rules:
Never [directly] use global variables.
Never use gotos
Never use O(N^2) or otherwise unbounded O(n * m) algorithms.
Doesn't seem like too much to ask.
umm.. hardly. This isn't fancy. No more so than sarchasm is to english.
Ever write SQL statements? There is a constant trade-off between the number of indexes on a table and the most complex query you'd want to write. Note that the number of joins increases the effective order of your efficiency. If you have a mere 3 joins, you have n * m * o potential operations (which maxes out at n^3). indexes reduce a given join to n * log(n) ops. So the full indexed join would be n + n * log(m) + n * log(o) DB table comparisons to fully render a 3 table join. For n >> m and o, then it smells a lot like O(n). But as m and often o approach n, it's closer to O(n*log(n)) with high constant overhead. Disk access usually helps things by using something like log base 256 disk accesses per n. And of course DBs cache the hell out of recent seeks and often defer disk writes - though transactions completely undo this.
So a naive programmer that THINKS they know SQL very well might not batch operations into transactions (forcing k * n * log(n) disk writes, where k is the number of indexes). On a query, they may unknowingly use a function/mutator which undoes an index.
select t1.* from t1 join t2 on t1.day=date(t2.date_time) where t1.col1=? order by t1.col2
If col1 is a boolean or an otherwise horribly distributed column (such as a varchar that is an effectively enumerated value), then your first index is practically useless (closer to n operations; O(n / k) == n). Your join is on a mutated value of t2.date_time and therefore it's index is completely thrown away. Then finally your col2 sorting represents an n*log(n) disk sort with a worst case of n^2 if quicksort is used by the DB. So for datasets approximately the size of the DB table, you're effectively replicating the table on disk before outputting. Now all this being fully mem-cached might go pretty quickly. But once you put it on a web site where you could get hundreds of simultaneous identical queries, your cache can't fit all the temp-buffers and you spill out to disk for all the writes.. Then you have k * n disk IO operations (for k threads). From all in-mem to all on-disk due to parallel load.
The fastest you COULD make this is to create a date column on t2 separate from date_time and index it. Create a double-index col1,col2 such that a good DB will not only filter on col1 but be pre-sorted for col2. Note that's separate from a col2 index, which now increases your insert/update overhead.
So you had n^2 + n * m => O(n^2) for something that SEEMED properly indexed, and in most test cases would be instantaneous (since tests leave the DB cache nice and hot). It isn't until t2 becomes too large to fully fit in cache/memory that the repeated sequence scans almost guarantee a full disk zipping for each matched value of t1.
And this is a highly trivial query. Many specialized reports can have a dozen or so joins with complex relationships. People often say, well, we know it's 'probably' a slow query so run it at night. It's the queries that are still running in the morning that are killer.
And my point is that if you have a good working knowledge of HOW these indexes apply to the big-O scheme of things, you can avoid these pitfalls as you write the code.
Other things where big-O saves the day are when diagnosing WHY something is slow. Often the nested looping is hidden due to the abstracted code.
Hibernate, for example does a linear processing of all records in the local transaction on every flush. O(n). But if you are batch processing a large file and forget about this fact. Lets say you think you're being clever and run 32 operations in a transaction, then close the transaction.. BUT you decide to reuse your hibernate DB connection/session because.. well.. why not? Turns out hibernate retains the transacted records in an L1 cache between unrelated transactions.. So instead of flushing 32 items once per outer loop, you're really doing O(n^2). Simple mistake, but knowing that the O(n^2) would
If you quick and dirty code has any N^2 operations you could throw $1,000,000,000 of 10 year from now hardware and still not have it go fast enough.
Almost all N^2 and N^3 algorithms are fast as lightning in small test cases. But the junior programmer throws his hands in the air and gives up when it explodes one day for no obvious reason. 11 hits per second for 2 hours instead of the normal 10 hits per second that youlve gotten for the past year. It is very hard to stress test a system sufficiently to reveal all the critical masses needed for catostrophic collapse.
But the real point is that hardware won't do squat in many inappropriately applied algorithms.
Consider simple DB nightly maintanance. After a day of high volume you might reveal such a polynomic algorithm such that shutting down mysql with kill -9 is the only way out. If you had 10x faster hard drives or more memory, it would only take an extra 5% of extra volume to oversaturate you again.
It isn't just O(N^2) you have to worry about. You have synchronization points in code which cause backup just like normal car traffic jams. DB operations. Mutex's. Rpc calls. All need to be carefully considered. You need these thoughts AS you code, not after a profiler or busy day reveals them.
Huh? How is quicksort non parallelizable? It and merge sort can have n/8 possible parallel threads using divide and conqor. mergesort can farm out threads initially then slowly merge in smaller number of threads (the bottleneck) while quicksort needs to pivot first (the bottleneck) then rapidly farm out threads.
The problem is that the memory load becomes killer. If the mem blocks are cache-aligned when partitioned then you can get away with threads == the number of cores. You definitelydon't want to encounter MESI (sp?) cache coherance locking among other things.
Ever heard of Jeapordy?
Though I actually hate that show. Random mindless facts. I knew someone that was on the show, and he says he'd forgotten 90% of what he'd memorized during his build-up.
Personally, I'd rather see a debate show.. As this is a battle of logic, and often can involve science. Sadly, most debates are poorly moderated, and become trivial shouting / talking-points for various advocacies.
Still, most of the TV/radio that I watch/listen-to is actually debate oriented. So maybe I am living out my dream. :)
I take difference with your argument.
Supply and demand do, of course exist both in the scientific, educational and sporting industries. But not fully in the ways that you suggest.
There is no 'shortage' of HIGHLY skilled actors, singers, or athletes. It is a shortage of 'slots'. You can only honor '10' artists a week (40 in any given quarter), say 5 to 20 atheletes in any given field in a year. 2 to 10 actors in a year, etc.
These numbers are specifically designed by their respective industries, synthetically. How else can a over-abundance of supply with few slots not produce price-pressures downward. The olympics, for example, pays little.. It is only the secondary income that makes this pay off. The olympics is more about skill than industry, and truer economics applies.
It's the same as the oil industry and diamond industry.. By artificially reducing the supply, they can control the finances. If left as a truely competative market, the focus of the population would not be nearly as profitable, the ranking would be not as nearly valuable, and thus salaries for the very tops of the pyramid would not be a matter of discussion.
It is the salaries that are the topic here, and to a certain degree, the 'life style' which includes but not restricted-to the salary, motivates young people to focus their lives. But if you look at world sporting events, the payout isn't nearly as great, yet the general participation is much higher than in the US, so I don't know that even the life-style argument really is all that true either.
IANASF (I am not a sports fan), so YMMV
The problem is that 'business partners' of which I am one, don't care about Verizon, and would just assume they would go out of business. But until they do, their customers are unreachable except through this service fee increase. All carriers (tmobile, sprint, AT&T, and hundreds of others both in the US and around the world) all charge service fees for sending traffic on their network.. Most are volume-based pricing, and most carriers heavily audit the traffic to avoid fraud and unsolicited or otherwise deceitful messages.
The issue is that a value-added partner often is facilitating a service for a client (say Obama in his 3am message). You are only useful if you can reach 90+% of the market.. But if 1/3 of the reachable market charges 600% more than the rest of the market, then pricing for the client becomes frustrated if not impossible.
And this is to say nothing of 'free' services such as google.
It's certainly within Verizon's right to charge whatever they want for their network. Just recognize that the US has the most backwards phone network in the world, and I do business with Latin America, Europe and Africa for comparison. This trend (if it is one) doesn't bode well for the US cell industry is all I'm saying.
The chevy volt is more like a diesel-electric train. It runs 100% on electric motors, NO drive-shaft. The diesel engine is merely an electric generator.. This allows for high torque low-rpm travel not otherwise possible with direct crank.
I'm surprised the chevy volt is going to be gas instead of diesel based for the same reason.. You'd want as high-efficiency electric generator as possible. I guess the louder, heavier, harder to find fuel, were going to detract from sales in their minds - so much for being a leader. Europeans are already producing a diesel type car of this category - but they already accept diesel over there.
Back to your comment, the expression 'true hybrid' is a little silly, as anything that is a compromise of two pure technologies is a hybrid. The expression gas-electric or diesel electric has a pre-existing connotation as above. Hybrid these days has the connotation of direct-crank + electric power assist. Plugin is god-knows-what.
I hate Apple's brick walls around their platform which is anti to what Apple once stood for.
Funny, I always thought of Apple as a walled off isolationistic company. Where have you been? Granted they make GREAT products in their walled garden, but that was always the barrier to entry.. Apple's way or the highway. Yes I understand you probably mean programming for the desktop, but you could only ever extend so much - you had to work with what was given. IANAMP (I Am Not A Mac Programmer)
Light isn't a cannon ball. It's a wave that easily disperses as it comes in contact with matter/gravity. i.e. even a finely focused laser will scatter in ALL available directions as it passes through cosmic dust.
Thus, no matter how curved your horizon is, if there are connecting points between any two regions - no matter how far apart - then their interaction will warp light and other radiating forces such that at least some percentage WILL point back to you - the observer.
So if I can see Point A, and Point A can see Point B, then unless Point A 100% obscures point B, then I'll eventually be able to see direct evidence of Point B. The fact that we observe perturbations of Point A that can be explained by the possible existence of Point B yet can not see Point B is a serious anomaly.
I've watched countless debates on big-bang v.s. steady-state theory, and yes, I understand the evidence against steady-state (it's flawed), BUT I've never been convinced that COBE and other projects offer definitive proof the single-origin universe.
The response to evidence outside our expansion frame is typically called the multi-verse. Or multiple unconnected big-bangs.. Possibly recursive or as part of an outer eather that intrinsicly spawns universes.
But the more abstract that multiverses and extra boundries get, the more LIKE steady-state the description of our universe gets.
Just because there was a local event that is bounded by the speed of light, doesn't mean it encompasses the entire universe. If you were a fly inside an internal combustion engine and your entire life was defined by a single stroke of the engine, you might be inclined to define the entire universe as the confines of the cylinder walls. But living outside the cylinder walls, we'd consider that largely lacking in knowledge.
The point is largely moot unless we (the fly) can determine a way of practically effecting matter as far away as we can observe. Then the cylinder walls become a limiting factor. But we're having trouble getting past the boundry of our solar system right now.
The classical argument against steady-state is that the universe can't be both infinitely old and infinitely large, because the sky would be white. Elementary school level reasoning (INAP). My argument against that was that you're assuming certain properties about radiation. Consider that an electron is bounded oscilating energy. Likewise, a galaxy is bounded/cohesive energy. Yes it emits a certain waste radiation (that's how we see it), but is mostly contained. A galaxy is on a larger scale than the surrounding electron region. Why not consider even larger scales, might E&M radiation act differently on even larger scales - curving in on itself like we speculate happens in a black-hole (in constrained scales). Might gravity have tremendously different characteristics on these larger scales? We already speculate that they are particle based (GR not withstanding), that they propagate as waves at the speed of light. Thus they radiate. If radiation can be bounded, even in only parts, which we KNOW it can. Then disconnected REGIONS of the universe should be natural and numerous. What we call the expansion of the visible universe is really the warping of the internal confines of our region of space. Which would be analogous to the warping of electron bonds given outside excitation - in extremely slow motion.
This is baseless speculation except that it directs research attention to the properties of radiation at extreme scales - specifically bounded/oscilating/vortexing large-scale radiating bodies.
Allow me to repost the critical element which addresses your post:
"How was Russia a threat to our way of life?"
Let me then paraphrase the rest:
I've never seen a logical or practical example of how they were a threat to our way of life.
I challenge anyone to provide a credible argument to the contrary.
And a further ramble which probably won't gain traction here:
I HAVE heard various destabalizing and possiblly life-threatening situations that existed during the cold war (most of which I listed). But hopefully I have demonstrated that they were strategic counter-measures of CHOICE - often originated by the US and thus it is fully understandable that a competing world power would try and match our strategic position, if not occasionally exceed it - in a modern chess game.
The one thing I understood since I was young was that MAD kept us safe moreso than anything else. 3'rd party nations had to choose sides or risk being conqured by one of the two sides. For some reason neither side really went after the middle east after a series of power exchanges left them as wild-cards.
While I can see how you label my article as moral relativism, I am merely trying to give an unbiased historical account - the focus of which is to attempt to break down the notion that the US has seriously ever been under threat. Even durring WWII the US had no credible short-term threat. It was only with the possibility that Asia and or Europe would fall under an single authoritarian rule that our future would be at risk. Germany in WWI and Germany and Japan in WWII only ever attacked us in attempts to keep us out of the war - if only temporarily.
How was Russia a threat to our way of life? I've never understood this argument.
1) Russia kept territory it re-invaded during WWII. The argument at the time seemed at least logical, if not convenient - to prevent Germany from attacking a 3'rd time and decimating Russia proper. Later the logical excuse was a buffer against NATO - give a longer delay from fired nukes that the US enjoys due to the atlantic.
2) Russia sent lots of spies in the US. Exactly the same as the US sent into Russia.
3) Russia supported proxy wars, with the implication that the supported side would adopt communism. Exactly the same that the US did in Central/South America and in S.E. Asia but with non-socialized small-government groups (we liked to call them democracies, but guess what, you vote for communist leaders too; we don't even live in a democracy, but it's a marketable paraphrase).
4) Russia had nukes pointed at the US. We had nuclear capable bombers that regularly did fly-bys of the Russian international waters. Russia had more mobile ground nukes, and we had more bombers. Our side had the advantage because when you want to make a political point, it's safer to put the nukes right into their back-yard and say 'dare me to pull the trigger' than to have passive nukes power-up half a world away. We also had lots of fixed position nukes, but that was just stupid - because they were expensive and were less menacing than mobile nukes. Only advantage was that they had greater range and were slightly faster to deploy from scratch.
5) There were honest to goodness Communist parties in the US. Later those parties were arrested, disbanded, financially ostricized (who'd employ a card carrying communist). It was later replaced by the socialist party - hard to ostracize most of our NATO allies at least. Conversely, there were free-marketing, term-limiting, checks-and-balance decreeing, private-ownership promoting citizens in Russia. And many of them DID win. There was lots of private enterprise in Russia before it's financial and political collapse, just as there's free markets in communist china (thanks to Hong Kong's prior British rule). Our 'card carrying communist' rhetoric was matched with 'capitalist pigs', where the few immoral corporations run everything. We've got those people here too, but we just call them 'evil corporations' and don't tend to attribute it to the government.
My point is not that we were just as bad as the Russians (though we were), it's that there isn't a legitimate cause-and-effect as US patriots would like to imply. Russia didn't do all these things and then we reacted by creating 'peace keeper missiles'. Historically it was a back and forth game, where many of the threatening aspects of the cold war were produced in tandem. You could not morally blame one side more than the other. Thus communism and Russia were not the root of the treat.
And hopefully I've addressed your fear of socialism comment. Most of our allies support it - we don't fear them.. And in fact, the UK is doing better educationally and financially (both for the average citizen and for the government as a whole) than we are. And the war costs would only account for the Federal US financial woes.
I'm not advocating socialism and certainly not the lack of private ownership (pure communism), but they are well thought out forms of government that when implemented correctly, and in the correct scale, have great potential. But mismanagement will get you every time - just like in US capitalism.
Sure, the common base idea would also include republicans. It's called we pick a few people to manage a lot of people - e.g. government. Unless you are an anarchist, you have something in common with Hitler.. Yeah You F*ING Hitler supporter!!!
My slightly altered response is that your association of social programs makes an implication that they were:
A) Bad policies
B) Bad policies because the outcomes of 3 of the 5 groups are culturally considered bad, evil, failed. Thus whatever they supported must also be bad, evil and a failure.
Nice deduction.
Personally I believe there is an ever changing sweet-spot in the degree of social support that the government needs to provide.. I do recognize, however, that it's very hard to take away that which you've given/promised. That's why car manufacturers have an MSRP. They almost never sell at that price - they always give some temporary discounts.. Perhaps that's how we need to sell social programs to the US public. As temporary with regular visible periods of sales and expensive times. Then you relax and future proof short-term solutions to social/economic crisises.
To be fair. The economy meltdown started in the Clinton years. Clinton approved the law allowing two year residency to exempt a property from capital gains sales (which spawned MASSIVE house flipping). Clinton's years had the deregulation of banks (he signed it into law, in my understanding). And I don't think Clinton would have disapproved of lowering interest rates after 9/11.
The only thing Bush did (other than allow low interest rates) was lower taxes, which raised our deficit spending - which is too short term to have had an effect.. US treasuries are still AAA, though they are currently being re-evaluated.
Note, I say this as an ABB (Anybody But Bush). I think having a puppet run the country is a bad idea, no matter what party. It's easier to replace a man than a lobying group.
One might argue that Bush leveraged the justice department by specifically NOT enforcing various regulatory laws. It's possible, but I doubt it, that remaining regulatory bodies could have done more. But my understanding is that it was mostly legitimate exploitation of speculators and people that don't read the fine print - or at least are really really really bad at math.
Consider for oil, a legitimate futures market can be gamed during a time of war for profit. Consider that many people are opting out of health-care plans willfully - hoping for the best. Consider the concept of naked short-selling - something no administration has yet cracked down on:
I say I'm going to borrow a stock from somebody (a locate) then sell it. Then in x days, if you need the stock, I'll buy it back from the original owner. Otherwise I'll buy it back from you and give it back to him. That's short-selling.. But what if I short-sell 1,000 shares, but only have a locate on 10 shares. I can stall in actuating my claims. I can buy back 10 shares, hand them over as proof, still stalling on the rest.. Then as you bug me, I can buy those shares back again and again until I've given you the full 1,000 shares - perhaps months later. The key is that I'm selling 990 shares that don't exist, and I'm reselling the same shares over and over. Also consider sketchy intermediate firms. They outright lie about having a locate of shares. So the investor short-sells shares that don't exist. Then the intermediate firm fudges the numbers in a larger pool of transactions so that nobody can or would bother to verify that stocks have been fictitiously created. This is highly traceable, but only in retrospect. The original outside investor (who might have been a partner in this scandal) could have walked away with billions, letting the intermediate firm get caught one day and take full blame (probably because the current administrators don't know anything about it). This has happened more than once in the past 10 years. The problem is that even after tracing the origin of the fictitious locates, bad stocks are still floating out on the exchange - and can't be identified again. You've permanently diluted the shares of some poor company.
I can see it. Imagine two neighbors that are bitter rivals. One day you're on a boat and the other team is in charge of the boat - you don't have a say. Then they accidentally sink the boat (but you feel it was their fault).
Then when you feel that you've almost drowned to death, you see a life-raft, but the other team is fighting to be in control again. So you panic, and race to get to the boat first so that you can prevent them from continuing the same actions. When you honestly feel that the other team might win and you honestly feel that they're going to sink the boat AGAIN. Your blood is going to rail.
Now the only two things the republicans actually did which I believe in retrospect we can blame them for, is deregulation (blindly trust in greed - yeah, that's a safe bet), and unfunded military action. The whole cowboy diplomacy thing hasn't really had an effect one way or another (though they'll argue it's kept us safe - hard to prove a negative). Other legislation and policy hasn't really had as much of an effect. Note that the low interest rate strategy was a gamble, and the same guy in charge (Greenspan) was a champion of the Clinton administration as well, so you can't blame or credit either side on this topic. Interest rates aren't exactly a partisan issue, but regulation and diplomacy tactics are.
Well, for a long while, it was a fear that it would happen to YOUR children. There is a certain disappointment when your child turns out different than you or your hopes no matter what. Since society of old labeled homosexuality as a sin, it is compounded in their minds.. No less than the early days of left-handed people (which were considered cursed, or the work of the devil). And much like wrong-handedness, there has been a historic tendency to correct for the 'defect'.
But this was a largely embarrassing and highly personal matter for virtually all families. Often, guilt was used to reinforce in the child that they need to act different than their sinful tendencies. This 'closeting' was mostly family and community but also obviously professional (I'm speaking out of my hand here, so feel free to disagree).
Other than the obvious sodomy laws, there were also outdoors group sex endeavors which were locked down by laws. Note that outdoors sex among any gender is generally considered a crime, but it's a local affair.
Eventually people started to debate as to whether homosexuality was inherent or rather a peer influence phenomena. Many of these stricken families hoped for the ability to change the environment to 'bring them back into the light'. Consider that bisexuality obviously allows for the exploration of homosexuality, and statistically many might favor the easier-to-adopt homosexuality (men are less reserved in their sexual escapades and thus have less anxiety during the dating phase). So bisexuality is certainly a gateway for the curious, or the truly homosexual who have been self-repressing. Next is group-sex. It is easier to justify various cross gender activities when there is a massive wealth of heated-passion; one could always justify to one's self it was an act in the 'heat of the moment'. Such 'safe' exploration can lead to bisexuality. And thus is a gateway. Manage a toi is a lesser version for male homosexuality, but certainly a potential gateway for female homosexuality - as culturally female intimacy is considered erotic. As a stretch, you could find that general promiscuity is a gateway to manage a toi or group sex. Thus teen sex, experimental sex, sex outside of a commitment (casual sex), or to some degree sex outside of marriage, can all be considered gateways.. Though I doubt anything below sexual promiscuity would be identified in anyone's mind as a gateway to homosexuality by the average citizen.
Finally, you have the 'unknown'.. He's different, so let's stone him to death. The unknown could be anything. He must be different for a REASON.. Maybe he's sick.. I don't want my kids around a sick person. Maybe he's a pedophile. I CERTAINLY don't want my kids around him. Maybe he's a sadist - who knows what kind of sick (untraditional) things he likes. If he's deviant, maybe he's a satanist - he certainly isn't a good 'catholic'. Best keep my kids away JUST IN CASE.
So back to the unhappy family unit with the gay-leaning child. They are obviously going to do everything within their power to keep the home sexually straight and 'safe'. But then there was the outside world, filled with it's 'evils'. And this is classically where government steps in.. The government can pass ordinances, or higher up with laws. And thus the political debate of homosexuality begins.
Once you are politicized, you are immediately going to produce STRONG emotional sentiment about what is right or wrong.. And remarkably, you're going to get a massive divergence created out of thin air.. People with no prior opinion on the topic become crusaders for one side or another. People that have never met a homosexual (that they knew of) suddenly want to pass legislation at a higher up level (even though their local laws are already preventing the 'gateway' behavior).
Homosexual marriage is only recent in this historical story. Previously, the right to have a gay bar. The right to BE known as gay (still a factor in the military). Were all milestones which had political enemies.
Your depiction of Liberals represents a typical right-wing narrow minded bias (not that you hold this opinion, but it's the party line). Consider this scenario.
Country A is backed by the US, and feels it can get away with quite a bit. Country A then picks on country B in a small way, picking a fight. Country B over-reacts and acts punitively. The US doesn't see the squabbling, but doesn't like Country B very much, and thus in the vacuum of facts, assumes that Country B is merely acting aggressively against Country A. The US then exonerates Country A of "whatever squabbles may have started" and focuses on the over-reaction of Country B. The political policy is therefore to rally political will against the overt-aggressiveness of Country B.
Consider you're in elementary school and the US is the teacher, and the two countries are Roudy students.. Country B is often sited as being a cut-up, and thus the teacher is going to tend to put the blame on him.
Facts aside (on purpose because that's the point of this exercise). You have two possible political psychological as the teacher (or political philosophies as the head of the US). Set an example to others, single out the trouble makers, create an atmosphere of you're with us or against us. Black and white. The specific act isn't as important as the loyalty and trust of and in the students. Namely, can the teacher be assured that they can go about her business of teaching instead of acting as the referee. It's a legitimate philosophy, and it's rather effective. But quickly, one by one, the students who were singled out will distrust the teacher.. More importantly they will resent her. They may form their own coalitions and conspiracies.. They may T-Pee her house, cut class, make dirty remarks. Make rumors.. etc. This is the cost of the singling-out, black-and-white philosphy.
An alternative approach is the nurturing, reasoning, fairness approach. The problem is that without objective information (which neither child is going to provide, and studies have shown that group reactions will be just as biased as the teacher), you are subject to being manipulated and ultimately making the problem worse. The pro of this 'reasoning' 'debative' 'argumentative' approach is that nobody has reason to feel that they were being oppressed, being neglected, that they weren't cared about. There is no 'HATRED', 'resentment' nor need for retaliation. Now it's possible that someone is unfairly punished in the process, but logic would stand that without conclusive evidence against the student, the punishment is somewhat muted. Now the cons of this approach are that you can lose the respect of stronger willed students. You're viewed as a wimp. You might be able to be manipulated (either in their mind or in reality). The deliberation process can be tedous and people can become frustrated and not like you as a result. Students may not respect your commands - not having any reason to fear you.
It is MUCH harder to successfully employ the second approach, because there are many more cons. President Carter is widely viewed as having most of the cons, BUT, Clinton was viewed as a strong and wise leader by many foreign countries. It certainly is possible, and personally, I prefer the challenge which has greater risks, but much greater rewards. Such that it isn't luck that determines the outcome.
If you want proof of a diliberating body, consider the US court system. It is very different than the subjective court systems in say France. We use case-law, so at lower-court levels, it's almost always black-and-white as to whether someone is breaking the law, so long as the facts are known. The issue, is of course, and exactly as with Country A and B, that the facts are almost NEVER known. But our court system does not reward speculative punitive measures. Higher courts almost always overturn such action.. There is a very real system of checks and balances that works. The benefit of the doubt is always given to the defendant.. The reason is th