Sorry for my earlier rant. As far as abstracting at the compiler level, here are the types of things I can imagine abstracting:
Sorting and other large well-defined O(n+) category operations.
Identifying segments of code to automatically perform what would in perl be the async block prefix. async { doFoo(); } async { doBar(); } Theoretically a compiler could see a large path of execution and define a pool of worker threads equal to the number of CPUs so as to handle this.. The problem is that in the above, how reliable are the linking of those doXX functions such that the compiler can GUARANTEE thread-safety by magically splitting the code up. The answer is zero, because every language I'm aware of allows dynamic swapping out of function invocation - Short of that function being declared inline.
High level language (like Perl/Ruby/Python) where simple operations really perform a dozen function calls (or inline macros, as the case may be). Such code could theoretically 'delay' operations. In perl, for example, every variable assignment triggers a dereference and a potential garbage collection. If this were deferred to a dealloc queue, then along with revamping the perl malloc, you could be executing in parallel with fewer application pauses. There are serious challenges - as you'd have MT safety issues with your destructors, as well as contention with malloc and you may quickly run out of memory if you're not careful. Other places are regular expression matching. In perl, you could theoretically delegate to a peer thread all reg-exes, then the next usage would implicitly use a latch. If you knew this, you could write your code so that you do the re-ex'es early in the while-loop or function call, then use the result of the reg-ex at a later point. $x =~ s/pattern1/sub1/; # delegates to thread 2 $y =~ s/pattern2/sub2/; # delegates to thread 3 # do busy work print $x,$y; # blocks until substitution is done. 3 threads total
There are fewer cases where language-level parallelism make sense - and the lower level the language, the less possible it is.
Another possibility is taken from fortran - give hint to interpreter to use parallel for loops: async: for my $item (@items) { processItem($item); }
Of all the above, there is a single place where the COMPILER is actually involved (auto async block discovery).. EVERYTHING else is API driven (meaning YOU wrote it one way or another). Moreover, spawning threads is expensive, you need to pool the them, and this leaves a magic wing of an app that can be a problem child.
I think we've found the problem right here. You seem to view multi-threading like I view Javascript. A necessary evil that we wish we could just abstract away (using template frameworks that use it in a well defined, non-buggy, multi-platform environment, but where I never have to see it's revolting head).
But I've been programming in a java environment for years, and am in LOVE with multi-threaded programming. We regularly install our apps on 8 core machines and use every ounce of CPU. Moreover, I love the ugly cousin of multi-threading: clustering (though clustering and MT exercise two different parts of the brain). Clustering requires symmetric divide and conquer programming whereas MT can allow efficiently crafted coordination (using latches, semaphores, atomic-integers, mutex's, etc).
Once you've been doing MT long enough, every global variable you see, you consider it's MT-safeness. Even with local variables, if I want to hand this variable off to a queue that will be read in by a separate thread.. OK, let me think; what fields will that system use. Were there any database transactions open? Are there counters that I need to convert to 'AtomicInteger' or do I need to add synchronized sections? What is my usage pattern for this map/dictionary? Single write, multiple concurrent read? Mixed ratios of reads/writes?
When you do it long enough, you think in the above terms even if you know the app will be single threaded. You build 'value-objects' (which are immuteable) not because it's MT-safe, but because it reduces bugs.
These techniques can be applied to most languages, but the problem with C/C++ is that it was designed from the ground up without MT eyeballs. There are far too many APIs that use global variables in an unprotectable manner.
Hell, I've seen programmers that can't get their heads around EVENT driven programming, which is an order of magnitude simpler. Take a web server that uses a singleton object. Nothing more than a series of global variables. All you have to do is remember to re-initialize those variables at the beginning of the event call (the web service entry point for example). Never mind the fact that you need to protect / synchronize or move those variables as locals (possibly using a transient wrapper object so you can maintain data-hiding). It boggles my mind the linear tunnel vision that most programmers have. Programming with global variables should require a government court-order. That would solve half the damn bugs in the world.. People should be forced to use lisp or some such craziness.
We had an old saying.. The limit of an engineer as his GPA approaches zero is a Computer Scientist.
This isn't to knock com-sci people - they were generally really smart.. But it was impossible to breeze through an engineering degree, whereas, you could usually pick concentrations and hire tutors that would let you retain almost nothing about the science of computers, yet acquire the degree.
In the late 90's I experienced massive grade inflation in the engineering classes that I'd typically only ever seen in my regular bachelor-of-science classes (such as general chemistry/physics/calc). Most bachelor-of-arts classes had no need for massive grade inflation because they just gave you really easy tests (accounting, econ, history, philosophy, etc). I'm defining grade inflation here as a 30% correct exam equating to a 4.0 due to the curve.
Whatever happened to the weed-out courses? The college is really doing you a favor by failing you your freshman year. Find a major that is really worth your intense concentration - both because of your skillset and because of your personal excitement about the program. You really only need one of the two.
belief: 1) something believed; an opinion or conviction 2) confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof 3) confidence; faith; trust
At what point in a geometric proof do we use the phrase, 'I am now confident that the sum of all sides of a triangle equate to 180 degrees'? Generally you skip that step in the proof because it's superfluous.. It's like saying 'I'm done'.
Consider three postulates: 1 The physical world is comprised of factual events 2 Facts require empirical evidence (as defined by Kant: A fact requires a time and a place) 3 God has no empirical evidence
I feel safe in suggesting that whatever the derivation an Atheist may have taken, the above three summarize the closest to self evident facts (axioms) as are needed in the matter of Divinity.
Lets further this with a modern extension of Descartes' reasoning: 1 All empirical facts are manifest as perceived facts (by the observer). 2 All empirical facts are filtered by the observer (their orientation to the event, their susceptibility to the fields at work, etc) 3 It may be possible to mask any fact as an alternate fact, given sufficient filtering. 4 The measure of the potency of an actor is in their measureable ability to affect events/facts. 5 The more facts that can be affected, the more potent an actor 6 As the potency of an actor approaches infinity, so too does the ability to affect any conceivable change approach infinity 8 Filtering the observation of a fact for an observer is indistinguishable from affecting the fact directly 9 As the potency of an actor approaches infinity, so too does the ability to filter a fact for an observer 10 As the probability of the existence of a nearly infinitely potent actor approaches 1, the probability of an unfiltered universe approaches zero 11 Thus there is an inverse relationship between the probability of the existence of a God-like actor and the existence of fully-trust-worthy facts 12 Any evidence of a God-like actor necessitates the possibility of an equally untrust-worthy universe. The stronger the evidence for God, the less likely the evidence your seeing is authentic.
God is inherently incompatible with empirical evidence by the very nature of their definitions. The God concept is one that has the ability to affect reality in any conceivable manner.
Descarte basically says, nothing can be known to exist, except ultimately the knowledge of the existance of a question in the presence of asking that very question. Everything else is subject to uncertainty. Specifically Descartes elects the 'Malignant Deamon' as the demi-god, or semi-infinite-power with a contrary purpose to that of God. While an ultimate truth MAY exist, that truth may equally be masked by detractors, disguising that truth. As an observer, you can not distinguish between the two - truth and perverted truth. Nor truth and devinely 'clarified' truth.
For a scientific mind, the issue is simple. We are trained to trust repeatable evidence. God simply dissapears in history as people become scientifically minded. The 'Miracles' of the past don't hold up to the early versions of the scientific method. We do not follow the doctrine of the flying spagetti monster, because mindless silly assertions serve no purpose, except for the benefitors of the flying spagetti monster.
Consider Ocums Razor for 3 cases: Option 1) God does not exist. But the rationale for a god does exist. People craft God in many alternate ways. Those crafts compete and kill one another off over time. Eventually the underlying rationale dissapears for large segments of the population. Option 2) God does exist, but acts in a complicated manner identical to the above, because God wishes to weed out the people that didn't follow a specific lineage of rationale (that is neither obvious nor available to all people at all points in time) Option 3) God does exist, but is not represented by Judao/Christian/Islamic
So why include a deprecated text in the Christian collection of books at all? Oh wait, because the new testament doesn't make any sense without the old testament. Nice to know that the 'Word of God' is packaged as a choose-your-own-adventure HOWTO instruction booklet.
And I'd like to take exception to the phrase '[Jesus had a] sin-free life'. Do you say this because you were taught to say this? Is your world view contingent upon this single phrase being a fact? Is this spoken by you because there is empirical or otherwise factual evidence supporting this phrase? Or were writers acting completely free of poetic license 50 years after the enscribed events, during a time when exaggeration and ass kissing were standard practice in literature.
Consider that people of Jesus' day would not have characterized Jesus as being 'sin free'. He was a vandal, a vagrant, a political dissident, he did not respect his elders, nor his family's culture, he was ultimately put down as a common criminal. And this is all from the text that exults him. Never mind the suppressed documents.
The party line response to the above is that Jesus was held to a higher standard - God's standard.. Which completely ignores the fact that God likely has not directly told you this, nor is God the vendor that sold you or your preacher's translated copy of the bible (e.g. at best a filtered and imperfect view of history). Never mind the fact that Jesus presumably broke the existing highly detailed standard of God's law. So all this argument does is move the implausibility of "sin-free", to the implausibility of a pair of 1,948 to 1,928 year removed messenger-of-God manuscripts (amongst a likely thousands of other suppressed documents) (aside - yes by this I mean that there are only two distinct texts in the gospel). The party line response to this is that God wouldn't allow his word to be corrupted - for he is the light of the world. This is further 'reinforced' by the knowledge that his light will win out in the end times.. Since that wouldn't be possible if all knowledge of the truth were lost along the way - and how could his followers know the path without such a passage, then certainly this otherwise circular logic MUST be true. Of course the Mormons have a way out - Hidden documents and other modern-day revelations to remind us of lost historical truths.
Finally, as for 'the law must be fulfilled, and then He fulfilled it..' - you're essentially asserting that the symbolic fullfillment of physically prophesized events has significance.. Then fine, I will symbolically end world hunger by dramatically finishing my yogurt - their souls will no longer hunger at least (ask a Jehova's witness if that stings a little).
I respect your frustration with the hypocritical usage of Deuteronomy. I rarely hear that from (what I assume you might consider yourself) the devout.
But in that same vein, I'm surprised to hear your primary distinction between Islam and Christianity as being the Literal v.s. the inspired word. FAR too many people on the Christian right are proud to affirm that the bible is the Literal word of God; That every word is true. Moreover, entire Christian colleges are founded on the idea that through detailed analysis of the word, you can 'reveal' hidden truths.
Hell, Sir Isac Neutron spent a large portion of his life trying to extract, via numerology, hidden truths.
Of course, a few crazies (my words), does not deminish a larger truth (be it as it may). But I think my point is that Muslims would make the same argument about Suicide bombers. The Quaran has a lot of hurtful wording and judgements for outsiders. It's not hard for a devout Muslim to justify acting upon them. Their taking theology into what is really just a political war is the same as economic Republicans leveraging Homosexuals and abortion to rally their political needs. Or perhaps a less hostile comparison is a 3'rd world dictator claiming equality and Christian values for all, so they can usurp power.
Can I extend, out of morbid curiosity, your phrase "by what word of Paul or of Jesus did we decide to" to ask how we derived Sunday as the day of worship. Namely, the forcing of all Christians since Constantine to pervert one of the 10 commandments from Yaweh-worship to Sun (masked as Son) worship? Not that Constantine was an originator. Nor was this the most radical representation - the Gnostics were pretty insane. But so were the Nazareans. But that opens up another can of worms. I'd also ask the larger question of how 'son of God' became unified with God to a non western roman catholic, but the symbolic descriptions are vague enough to give any non-empiracist solace.
Gravity is zero at the center of any spheroid, either solid or hollow (because you have an equal amount of mass pulling you in every direction. The only difference between hollow and solid spheres, is that in a solid spheroid, you have the pressure of the density of the medium. In the case of earth, it would be like being really deep in the Ocean, but obviously much worse (you should have seen enough horror movies to figure out what happens there). If, instead you were able to somehow produce a tunnel through the center of the earth and keep it open, you could jump downwards, and just like a pendulum, get almost to the tip of the other end of the earth before you start falling back down again, until you eventually returned to your starting point, over and over.. Course even with the relieved pressure in this hollow tube, you'd cook like in a microwave oven as you passed on through.
There are all sorts of plans for rebates and prebates to lessen the burden, but that's just getting rid of Complex System 1 in favor of Complex System 2.
There are many problems with the "Fair Tax", but I don't think regressiveness or complexity are the two main reasons. Namely the Fair tax is tremendously cheaper to implement, and involves significantly less corruption, and almost guarantees to properly tax all income levels at spending time. This is given the fact that we already have a sales-tax system in place, so there's very low implementation costs, and high conformity levels. It gives a justification for taxing internet sales (since dollar for dollar, the middle-class would have already paid that money). It catches a lot of tax-defrauding businesses (of which I've met many in the computer industry alone). It catches milti-millionaires that have tax-havens.
The various prebate systems I've heard of are no different than Bush's $300 / social security number that paid taxes. Sure fewer people might die in a given year, but that's no different than the number of people 'spending a year dead for tax reasons'. Depending on the final particulars it also may mean that babies get a cut, encouraging over population in poor communities (similar to welfare families).
As for the rich getting a tax-break. They're currently at 30 something percent.. They would come down to 23% or so, true, but you can find other ways to tax them. A federal estate tax (as another poster suggested), a luxury tax on certain goods (like States already do).
The main reasons I'm not crazy about the Fair tax is that it locks your ability to raise federal revenue to a single number. While I would much prefer a smaller government, the reality is that these bastards in congress are going to spend every possible penny, and that is going to mean continued rate hikes. Another lesser reason is that it hurts tourism - making tourism by foreigners suddenly 23% more expensive on day one. Finally it reduces a large segment of social engineering potential - college rebates for low-income families, and other such oddities like farmers subsidies (which I don't personally like, but conceivably there would be a time when it is necessary again). You can still get clever with these approaches, but then it does bring in your notion of Complex system substitution.
I'd like to see a progressive tax on liquid assets such that interest accrued and "asset tax" balance out to a steady state at some arbitrarily large number, perhaps $100 million, but above that amount the tax would exponentially grow such that any assets will be taxed away after say 30 years.
Well, interest is taxed as income (less the Social Security), so it is already graduated. And property is at 1 to 5% depending on where you live and what type of property (boat, car, house, land). Though that's at the state-level (and it probably makes the most sense to leave it taxed that way).
I don't see any advantage of taxing interest on a separate scale from income, but you could easily do that, it's already on a separate IRS form.
That only leaves the property taxes (including boats). What I deduce you're arguing then is that properties over $100M are taxed at higher rates (since it doesn't make too much sense to combine this with your income level). But then you're back to state-to-state differences.... People would register their boats in cheaper states, etc. So next is the idea of a Federal property tax, which would uniformly share ownership across all states, and would represent real Federal income.
Even putting a 1% federal land-property tax everywhere with some graduated scale would probably work, though it would be hard to get through congress. It would be chaotic to get people to re-register all their cars/boats, along with a federal valuation process full of horrors.
I don't think usury laws help any. Personally I could care less if someone wants to go to a Loan shark.. They STILL do this when their credit is shot. The point is that when people go to a loan shark, they KNOW they're putting their life on the line.. When people max out 28% credit cards (because they absolutely can't find another way to make a payment), they're basically ending their life at 35. Even bankruptsy doesn't get them out of many types of debt. People don't understand simple math.. That taking out these large credit rates are only prolonging the inevitable.. But more damagingly.. They STILL BUY CRAP!!! If they they get a $1,000 extension on a credit card, they'll think it's free money and burn it! Nobody wants to take their holiday bonus and pay down their existing debts. They simply don't understand math. They're in denial about the end of their middle-class life-styles.
Consider that we're in a major crisis, that people in high risk categories are a big part of the credit defaulting market - it's not just the home mortgages that are collapsing the banks around us.
Limiting high interest rates doesn't really hurt the banks, because they're never going to see that money from many people no matter what.. There's only a small group that will EVENTUALLY pay their debts off that the 28% is going to bring actual profits for. But instead, it can REDUCE the number of consumer bankrupsties that WILL occur across the industry. Granted most people in that horrendous category are already limited by new bankruptsy law.
Free markets are great, and black markets WILL intervene to fill in the gaps.. But many banks are in denial about their solvency, and they can only make local optimizations in their cash flow.
Consider the worst case for a segment of consumers:
If you already have a credit card at 28%, you're NOT going to get a new one anyway.. So your being a credit risk doesn't hurt you any further. The mandate would help this segment (again reducing the number of actual defaults by some small percentage).
If you're an average joe and miss your credit payment, the credit company will automatically push you to the highest legal value. And in fact, to average out profits, the prime rate will likely rise (or cards will base themselves off a higher offset of prime), so well-meaning middle-class will get hurt somewhat by this. But you're NOT SUPPOSED TO PAY INTEREST anyway. Interest is supposed to be a short-term debt of no more than a couple months to tide you over. Making bad life decisions that produce persistent credit debt can not go on forever as it is a positive feedback loop.
Finally, the main issue that needs to be resolved is not the actual interest rate, but the predetory lending. Credit cards that specifically target high risk people, giving them teaser rates that will jump at the first late payment. This sort of thing CAN be regulated easily and still support a relatively free market.
If, as you claim, religion is an invention of Man that has proven useful to his survival over generations, then what you are really disgusted with is human nature.
Yes and no. It's not that I'm disgusted with the worst in mankind, I have no problem with 'a few bad apples' who take action on their impulses - statistically this is an almost certainty. I have a problem with the endorsement, adoption, and the arrogance of self-riteousness for something that a person with not too much intellect and consideration can see right through.. I'm frustrated that so many DON'T see right through, and subsequently become indoctrinated.
Once they're indoctrinated, I no longer fault them. There have been several articles on slashdot about the human need to make their world-view true, no matter what the facts say.. To rationalize the short-comings of their world-view. To see their opposition as complete opponents that should never be given a break. Republican v.s. Democrat.. One religion v.s. another. So once you're in a religious circle, all the short-comings that upset me so greatly are only minor details, easy to wisk away.
But while I don't fault the inductee, I DO see right through many of the pastors and politicians who in all likelyhood are NOT indoctrinated, but are abusing the mindset of the flock for personal gain. This is just insult to injury to me. The tel-evangalist who solicits millions, in donations that go to their gold-plated bath-tubs. The politicians who pander to the cultists, yet don't act in any way that sounds religious (no humility, no reverence, no generosity, no forgiveness, no respect for members outside their mindset). Granted many politicians are genuinely religious (several were pastors or from a religious background).
I have no problem with a person being indoctrinated - maybe their life has been really miserable, and religion is the only thing that's ever given them hope. I don't want to take that away from people. But I do wish to fight in the public circle against political and public-school-system indoctrination. It's as if we were being forced to all play (and pay for) the lottery, so that the few that 'need the hope of a better tomorrow' can be placated.
The main delicate issue here is that a person that IS part of the indoctrinated circle doesn't want their child's mind 'perverted' with other mind-sets. A happy child is a naieve child (as I can personally attest to). So the four options that can appease everybody: Segregate the classes (religious-focused science classes/hard-core science classes), make religious people home school, make the atheists home-school, or don't teach the contentious topics, and say this is for your homework, take book A or book B home with you and work with your parents. Finally we can do what we do now, which is fight to force one side or the other to compromise.
I believe a CD-ROM is 150KBps (1x). This is the audio rate - I don't recall what the video-CD rates were. The significance of an initial data-rate is not how fast you can spin up the drive in the future, but what the data-format is rated at. Your 40x CD today is not time-dependent media, but opaque binary packets for file-transfers. But AC3 or whatever audio and video codec is specifically rate limited. The higher the rate a codec requires, the better quality it can support. In this case what it means is that if you have a 90% dark screen with very small color variations and an almost still image, you don't need ANY real bandwidth. But if you have a VERY high contrast, extremely motion oriented scene, a lower-bandwidth codec is going to cap out, and you will see a LOT of artifacts or a lot of color bleeding, bluring.
The last codec I studied was AC3, and it basically supported two modes; high resolution, or high rate-of-change. While you might have imagined that the tremendously faster bandwith rating of HD-DVD/Bluray would overcome this issue, it hasn't because you've tremendously increased the number of pixels the compressed data has to represent. Likewise with the massive audio frequency range (and for what purpose?).
Faith has logic, based on axioms such as the existence of God and so forth.
I disagree. There have been incredible minds in history that NEEDED to apply logic to the basis of their existence, so they BROUGHT logic to Religion. But religion was free of logic long before and after their collective contributions.
Religion is, quite frankly the father telling his son a bed-time story.. The story is NOT intended to be logical, but to convey significance. It is meant to be remembered, it is meant to impart guidelines, it is meant to bring race-pride (to foster loyalty, etc). I'm generalizing all religions.
In the bed-time saga, the target audience is the inquisitive youth - religion is always the 'master speaking to his flock', or the elder speaking to the community, or the parents/grand-parents teaching their children. In this, there is an implicit respect (otherwise there wouldn't have been a conversation), such that we 'trust' our elders and that what they have to say was important for their survival, and thus is likely important in our own.
Further, elders don't just spout the history of the bible.. They impart useful info - dating advice, how to cook, how to hunt. My great great grand-daddy built this farm with this bare two hands.. And don't worry about lying to your wife just then.. God will forgive you.. See Jesus sacrificed himself knowing that each of us is flawed, but he loved us so much.. And so on.
It's all part of a cultural acceptance for each successive generation. It's not: 1) God created the world 2) God gets angry 3) God punishes bad people 4) The first person was bad 5) God punished all his children 6) God gets over his anger and makes promises to avoid punishing us in the future 7) Jesus's sacrifice represented a new covanant where God will not punish those that honor the sacrifice 8) You should do whatever the f*#k I say because I've accepted Jesus, so I'm going to heaven, and you might not.
That's a logical progression (with a LOT of assumptions of course). But who in church ever talks like this? People would tune out the pastor. Religion, is a series of unrelated assertions - where you trust the lecturer. Dawkins book talks about this phenomena. Basically that it is biologically important for children to absorb their parent's instructions without question (at least until a certain age). It is also biologically important for us to work as a team (group-think). This combination leads to a meta-life-form. Legends, rituals, etc. Religion is one of the ultimate forms of meta-life-forms that Hawking describes (quite offensively) as a parasite, living entirely off it's hosts; surviving from generation to generation.. Slightly evolving to fit the environmental changes, or dieing, in the face of natural selection.
What I find significant about this meta-life-form perspective is that we can never be free of such parasites entirely.. Look at Christmas - it is now expected of us to act crazy on Black-Friday through past new years in the US. It's a culturalism that has grown out of a complex series of unrelated historical events and will likely continue to evolve for another thousand years into something as yet unrecognizable. The ramifications have extended to most countries around the world, because need to be part of the economic event. We are in a generation that can not ignore the phenomena (if you are a business owner at least). Much like the founding generations of other religions. If the whole community necessitated a cultural series of actions (for weddings, funerals, child-bearing, what-have-you), you couldn't afford to isolate yourself... Judeo-Islamo-Christianity is getting the hard stuff now because it's actually possible to live in non-religious communities. It's possible to not baptize your children now or what-ever, and not be effectively stoned to death or burned at the stake. How many thousands of years did that take? 5?
Further, I rather loved the Segan movie 'contact', for the part wher
Why is it so difficult to believe that the Chinese government is serious about this, that it really wants to improve?
Because then they'd have a free press. Consider the direction of the information. In a free press, the information moves from the people through the controlled media back to the people. The degree of control is inversely proportional to the number of media outlets - a government can not quickly curtail embarrasing information across thousands of independent news channels and news papers, but it can, for example, control the BBC or any other state-run institution. I'm not implying that control IS exerted, just probability of effective control.
Now, consider a taddle-tale web site. Who sees the information? Not the public. It's not a blog (unless I'm mistaken). Information moves from the people to the government - it's a form of free information gathering (as opposed to expensive spying efforts). Command and Control oriented socities always want to have their pulse on the attitudes of it's citizenry. Ever play a civ-city type game? Lack of knowledge of your own people is fatal.
I applaud this web site, because, if for no other reason, the government will have a new avenue of information gathering which will allow them to make more informed decisions, and thus more optimal.. The remaining questions are of their goals and intentions. As other posters have stated, any political party wishes to hide embarrasing information.. Party leaders who embarass the party are - well, to say the lease, removed. There is no further embarrasement that a 'secret' ballot like this can provide, but it would shed light on potentially embarrasing activities of regional governors. The rule is passed down through the command heirarchy of what is acceptible behavior, and when tattled on, members are brought into line more quickly. But I don't imagine that all agregious offenses would trigger punishment. Despotic rule which quells uprisings, for example would trigger taddle-tales, but the heirarchy would smile on such feedback and likely reward the governor.. So the public's interest is not fully at interest here. At least, not to the same degree that other feedback systems might provide.
Can somebody please explain what the heck is going on? Perhaps you're new to the American education system. America is by far and wide a religious Christian state (with a sufficient amount of Religious ambiguity so as not to offend the Jewish population). It is very hard to run for office without praising a [Christian] God, and therefore your policies must reflect this affirmation. I'm not talking about most Federally elected positions (though that's where you'll see most of the ironically hypocritical self promoting God worship). I'm talking about at the local levels. School-boards, etc.
These are the levels that affect the curriculum, and the contents of our text-books.. There are entire review boards which inspect every page of a history book, or a science book. As a publisher, you're interest is in getting into as many schools as possible, so even though there are districts which would love a religiously absent suite of literature, a publisher would also like to hit the bible-belt. So by playing to the least-common-denominator, the bible belt has a strong influence on education - especially because they can be amongst the most out-spoken.
Now take into account adverse selection on these school boards.. The people with the strongest opinions push the hardest to get into positions of power, where they can enforce their will on the masses (whether they're in the majority or not). This goes the same for Jewish and Atheistic proponents.. Stripping out 'Under God', or removing 'school prayer', etc, where the masses certainly wished to retain those practices.
You have to understand the minds of an indoctrinated citizen. Some people come from small towns, wherein their culture was homogeneous - people that didn't worship in the same way were outsiders. You liked your Sunday-School, and morning prayers, and certainly your school prayers. You were respectful of religion at work. You mama often only lived only a couple blocks away from you - if not in the same house. The general atmosphere is family-oriented.. And God played an important role in virtually every aspect.
Now watch on TV in horror as people want to strip that out.. You're school principle can't expouse the 'moral fiber of Jesus the almighty' before a football match. Your elected official can't allow a warm and [homogeneous] community building Nativity scene in the town-square each year. Some Atheistic commie-bastard is trying to strip God out of the pledge (which of course, was only put there as a spit-in-the-face to communism after WWII). Queers are infecting our schools - how dare they take this good Christian boy-scout, who's really good at sports and the girls really like him, and make him take Theater.. Sissy-assed breeding ground if you ask me.
It's like watching your whole world crumble before your eyes.. The thing that brought you several great wars, thousands of years of oppression, slavery, a life of sinful masterbation, and confession-reconciled adultry (man home-life was stable before woman's lib). These are certainly the times of the end times...
And what by chance do the end times mean? A day of reconciliation, when God and the Devil will fight.. Who's side will you be on? Well that's a no brainer, burn the queers like in Sodom and Gamora. Lynch the n*grs - They're not part of the chosen people anyway (somehow whites think they're of Jewish ancenstry - go figure). Fire of the war in Armegeddon (by putting them A-rabs into their place).
A single person may or may not come to these conclusions on their own.. But reinforce this with cultural icons.. Fox-news, Rush Limbauh, G-gordon liddy, the air-america radio network. Have your local preacher re-inforce the ideals of society. Have people tell you over and over and over and over that these are the signs of the end times (which I can't imagine any religious-figurehead in the past 3 thousand years has NOT used as part of their motivational speaches - yes, end-times is not original to Christianity). It all forms a normalizin
I haven't even gotten to the kids part (but that's coming). I willfully chose to live an hour away from work because the city life was not how I wanted to die the rest of my life. At lest in the hour ride, I can listen to NPR and 'relax', and culture myself, but YMMV. The main problem that many people (probably outside of the tech industry) face is social commitments.. Some people join groups, some do community service, personally I'm learning a foreign language to communicate with extended family.
But the fact of the matter is, once you leave collage, SOMETHING will soak up your time. And commitments beget commitments.
I lament how much collage study-time I wasted by doing open-source project work - lament not being able to make those trade-offs anymore. I don't know if this is fact or fiction, but most if not all of the greatest scientists were said to have not done any remarkable work after marriage+kids.
C/C++ have stack-variables, and I agree, there's nothing more memory efficient than this. Allocation/De-allocation rivals even the performance of a copying-collector's malloc, since you aggregate several allocations in a single stack-pointer increment with compile-time offsets into the memory frame. But it's VERY hard to write generalized code that takes in pointers, and still avoid memory leaks (or in this worse case, stale pointer references)..
To guarantee no memory leaks/stale-pointer-references, you have to A) NEVER keep a cached reference to any passed in pointers, which limits the types of algorithms available to you, as well as the performance possibilities. B) NEVER link one object graph to another (as you've affectively just cached references as in A) C) NEVER allocate new memory and attach it to the input object graphs.
Doing any of the above would violate good defensive programming practices - you would be relying on the caller to properly maintain your memory, or to keep your memory references alive. This is not to say that you CANT do these things.. But you must have faith in God and your partner coder that they're not going to miss the fact that they have to manage your memory.
Both with C++ and in reference-counted memory managers (like perl), you have the additional problem of circular references. C++ has the advantage of knowing that a doublely-linked list should all be freed at once. But the generalized problem still exists.. If class A has a bi-directional reference with class B (which is generally bad coding practice), then in which order can you safely destruct? The destructor of B might dereference A and thus access corrupted memory.. (since traditional malloc overwrites the allocated memory to store free-list pointers).
While A B is generally bad. In symmetric code, this is usually pretty common (parent/child relationships for example) and thus a necessary, but managed evil. But the key is when you generalize the relationship enough such that you have indirect cycles. Say A has a cache of objects which can hold something that ultimately points back to A.
You simply can't handle this sort of object-graph traversal w/o dynamic memory. And cycle-management MUST be explicitly maintained.. This maintanance is a programming-contract/policy-contract. Once you share this code with outsiders, that contract is free to be violated (due to lack of understanding or too quick of a reading).
C++ forces you to become an expert in the shared library module. But in languages that have strictness in programming safety - especially those with pre-defined generalized APIs that are trivial to conform to (Maps, IO, Transfomers, etc), then you need only become an expert in the generalized API, while still being able to handle a LARGE variety of coding interconnections with minimal coding/memory concerns. The lesser the impedance mismatch between two APIs, the greater the synergy. In Perl, all functions use dynamically resizable reference-stacks. In Java absolutely everything can be an Object (though primitives auto-boxing wasn't until JDK 1.5), and thus used by any generalized IO/Data-type/Transformer. And with zero concern about memory leaks. I think Lisp just uses the same-size memory objects for everything.
Granted, explicit caching is still a concern. Especially for idiots that still use static variables (both in Perl and Java) - We're in the inversion-of-control era for God's sake.
In a GC environment, you are MOSTLY free to avoid memory allocation and thus GC pausing.. Use inversion-of-control to pre-allocate all of your domain/model/service classes. Keep references to the model object graphs in the worker threads main loops. Reuse thread-safe static references to large byte-arrays (such as StringBuilders, ArrayLists, etc). The transient references that 3'rd party libraries instantiate should be trivial to GC, as your semi-permanent objects will quickly be tenured. So long as there are few static variables, and you have only a f
Agreed, but it also depends on the programming model. If you use agile/XP/test-driven-development, then hell, 30 minutes might be a sufficient turn-around for most any project. Course this also assumes a web-services model where shipping or on site maintenance isn't a concern.
Point taken - this restores him to hero status for me. But someone at the time obviously pushed for it in the constitution. Now I have a weekend project.
Letting someone borrow your copy is legal. Letting someone borrow your copy while you use your "backup" copy, not so much.
Agreed, but I know in my own experience, I've often never gone through the effort of making more than 1 or two copies of any song, if at all. So given the full knowledge of the frustration and cost of high volume duplication, I suspect that the laws of the time didn't even provide disclaimers other than 'backups _for personal use_'. My guess (as a non-lawyer) is that the law primarily dealt with the resale.. So you couldn't make two backups, then _sell_ all three tapes. The giving away for free may or may not have been part of the law.
Moreover, I'm curious what the law says about recording over-the-air broadcasts.. I use to tape-record hours of radio broadcast and listen to them over and over. I seem to recall something about over-the-air being public domain (someone tried to publish DECSS over the air once to make it public forever - granted they were not the original copyright holders). If a song is over-the air, then at the very least, the quality of the medium from that recording should be perfectly reproduceable in a legal manner.
Granted, the issue is that it is the pristine CD media that's being reproduced. Usually there are significant differences between the two tracks (probably for this very reason), so you could easily track dessemination of non-broadcast material.
Yo shmuck.. Read the details.. She owned 500 legal CDs. That's $9,000. Think the publicity this creates is going to encourage anyone to contribute any more money to these immoral bastards? Think the record company is going to see a dime of that $200k? This is like Bush saying he's a compasionate conservative, and wanting to give a strong message to all those would-do-harmers out there, then ineptly invading a country.
Consider what likely went on in this woman's mind. She was an avid fan of music. She has acquired music probably with no real issue with the market prices. She most likely bought both albums and singles - a perfect music-industry customer. Then a new medium arrived where you can community-build.. Share interests.. Share similar tastes in music.. Sure it's free, but if anything else, the medium is more attractive.. Less restrictive than portable physical medium.
As any good netizen, she wants to contribute.. So while she may very well have downloaded quite a bit.. She was more than happy to share what she had (considering the neglegable cost to her - just setup time).
Consider that she's probably spent her whole life making mix-tapes.. Copying a CD or VHS to family and friends. We've had 20 years of built up social 'morals' with respect to sharing with friends. All perfectly legal.
So now RIAA starts tries to define the rules of this new media. US Court enforced 'backup copy' protection is in uncharted territory. People aren't profiting on piracy, they're merely part of a social network. The term Piracy is a horrible bastardization.. Piracy is when you pilfer (often via death) the wares of other sea-goers that are helpless. You then sell the pirated goods (boot-leg) at various ports.. People come to know that if you want cheap 'knock offs' you go to a port and buy from the pirate and their minions. There's an obvious moral imperative when you buy such boot-leg, because you must know that someone probably died to provide these cheap goods to you.. So using the terms Piracy and Boot-legging are supposed to associate large amounts of guilt.
So later boot-legging was the audio-taping of concerts against the permission of the artists. This was really an arbitrary determination by artists and labels that is akin to no 3'rd party food in a Theater. No moral obligation, merely an attempted monopoly by the vendor. If they can do it fine.. But I strongly oppose federal laws that encourage this behaviour - such that a Movie theater could hand a citizen over to the police for eating cokes bought at home.. Or likewise bringing a tape-recorder to a concert.
Back to our lady. Does she see the various RIAA advertisements? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps she's a perfectly naive and innocent girl. Maybe she knew full well that the RIAA was cracking down on Kazza, and she had the 'stick it to the evil empire' mentality.. Many rock-fans and alternative-fans were made to think this way through the very music that they're being sued for. Bitter Irony I would say. Most likely, however, she acted indifferently, much like the selection of our presidents are a matter of indifference to most Americans. The RIAA is slowly becoming irrelevant, and we are watching it's death-throws. US music is abominable compared to the rest of the world. The quality of work has continously degraded for the past century - thanks to the ability to amplify profits through brain-washing (repeated paid-for spots on radio/TV). Audiences develop a taste through repeated use.. And it's sad, but taste Americans are developing is mostly bland (with a few category exceptions). Singers have less and less attractive sound. Music is extremely repetative from one song to the next (if not already synthesized). Lyrics are a joke. The message is less and less condusive to society building or even renewing (even older angry Rap represented a contemporary cry for change).
This debate is endless. I don't expect to convince others that Patents and Copy-Right are evil capitalistic ventures of the old British Empire that unfortunately worked their way through the likes of Benjamin Franklin and others into the US.
It wouldn't be the downloading of the game, as that's TCP not UDP, and it very likely isn't connectivity to the internet, because that would have nothing to do with access to the central UNIX servers - Local networks are always faster than internet connections, thus, unless the summary of the article was lying, it was purely a HUB/Switch UDP network hog, and any good sys-admin of a massive local network would have done the same thing.
Consider a percentage of 10,000 hosts playing the game.. All sending multi-cast UDP packets. You have say 1,000 hosts sending several packets per second to every network that multicast is configured to broadcast to. So you have several thousand packets per second going to at least every network card in the dorms, and probably to/from all the student-accessible computer labs to boot.
While the central servers most likely were on isolated (non-broadcastable) networks, all the client-host accessible points were choked.
Same could be said about petrol. Which is a heavily subsidized commodity if you count the hundreds of billions of US military dollars spent to keep shipments flowing. Or the billions in interest payments exported to foreign countries each year due to trade-deficit spending of foreign countries into US treasuries.
I'm not disagreeing with you.. Just saying that there are many secondary and tertiary levels of costs. It's generally just easier to put a heafty tax right on top - then let uncle same bear the burden 20 years from now.
and why shouldn't desktop users get that extra fps? Ok, lets return to reality for a second here.
FPS games are SINGLE-THREADED! Thereby schedulers are meaningless. They do not perform disk-IO - they pre-load the entire level into memory; so tread-contention with the swapper/flusher daemons are not an issue. They use direct-to-video-frame-buffer operations, so socket calls to X are meaningless. They make very few system-calls (aside from the calls to video drivers).
If you consider that a scheduler will give you better FPS, then I think you should first determine that shutting down evolution, firefox (with CNN on auto-refresh) and spamd are going to give you better response rates. This is the exact same thing windows people have been doing for decades. There is also the concept of single-user-mode in Linux.
If we're talking a more responsive UI, here too we are not talking about heavy thread contention. The only real slowdown left these days are the multiple levels of file-system abstraction that you go through before hitting the disk. Or perhaps the selinux security checks.. Or things like that. X, itself is of course no performance deamon (due to it's network centric design), but you can't change X without breaking X-compatibility - basically it would be something else entirely.
These layers of abstraction do detract from performance, but that's not really what's being discussed here.. You can run ext2 instead of ext3, or reiserfs (don't know how fast you can get it). You can run stripped RAID. Hell, you can twm instead of gnome... Or.. You can spend an extra $200 on beefier memory + CPU on a desktop (sadly not as fortune on a laptop - get jipped $500 to upgrade the CPU there).
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Sorry for my earlier rant. As far as abstracting at the compiler level, here are the types of things I can imagine abstracting:
Sorting and other large well-defined O(n+) category operations.
Identifying segments of code to automatically perform what would in perl be the async block prefix.
async { doFoo(); }
async { doBar(); }
Theoretically a compiler could see a large path of execution and define a pool of worker threads equal to the number of CPUs so as to handle this.. The problem is that in the above, how reliable are the linking of those doXX functions such that the compiler can GUARANTEE thread-safety by magically splitting the code up. The answer is zero, because every language I'm aware of allows dynamic swapping out of function invocation - Short of that function being declared inline.
High level language (like Perl/Ruby/Python) where simple operations really perform a dozen function calls (or inline macros, as the case may be). Such code could theoretically 'delay' operations. In perl, for example, every variable assignment triggers a dereference and a potential garbage collection. If this were deferred to a dealloc queue, then along with revamping the perl malloc, you could be executing in parallel with fewer application pauses. There are serious challenges - as you'd have MT safety issues with your destructors, as well as contention with malloc and you may quickly run out of memory if you're not careful. Other places are regular expression matching. In perl, you could theoretically delegate to a peer thread all reg-exes, then the next usage would implicitly use a latch. If you knew this, you could write your code so that you do the re-ex'es early in the while-loop or function call, then use the result of the reg-ex at a later point.
$x =~ s/pattern1/sub1/; # delegates to thread 2
$y =~ s/pattern2/sub2/; # delegates to thread 3
# do busy work
print $x,$y; # blocks until substitution is done. 3 threads total
There are fewer cases where language-level parallelism make sense - and the lower level the language, the less possible it is.
Another possibility is taken from fortran - give hint to interpreter to use parallel for loops:
async: for my $item (@items) { processItem($item); }
Of all the above, there is a single place where the COMPILER is actually involved (auto async block discovery).. EVERYTHING else is API driven (meaning YOU wrote it one way or another). Moreover, spawning threads is expensive, you need to pool the them, and this leaves a magic wing of an app that can be a problem child.
I think we've found the problem right here. You seem to view multi-threading like I view Javascript. A necessary evil that we wish we could just abstract away (using template frameworks that use it in a well defined, non-buggy, multi-platform environment, but where I never have to see it's revolting head).
But I've been programming in a java environment for years, and am in LOVE with multi-threaded programming. We regularly install our apps on 8 core machines and use every ounce of CPU. Moreover, I love the ugly cousin of multi-threading: clustering (though clustering and MT exercise two different parts of the brain). Clustering requires symmetric divide and conquer programming whereas MT can allow efficiently crafted coordination (using latches, semaphores, atomic-integers, mutex's, etc).
Once you've been doing MT long enough, every global variable you see, you consider it's MT-safeness. Even with local variables, if I want to hand this variable off to a queue that will be read in by a separate thread.. OK, let me think; what fields will that system use. Were there any database transactions open? Are there counters that I need to convert to 'AtomicInteger' or do I need to add synchronized sections? What is my usage pattern for this map/dictionary? Single write, multiple concurrent read? Mixed ratios of reads/writes?
When you do it long enough, you think in the above terms even if you know the app will be single threaded. You build 'value-objects' (which are immuteable) not because it's MT-safe, but because it reduces bugs.
These techniques can be applied to most languages, but the problem with C/C++ is that it was designed from the ground up without MT eyeballs. There are far too many APIs that use global variables in an unprotectable manner.
Hell, I've seen programmers that can't get their heads around EVENT driven programming, which is an order of magnitude simpler. Take a web server that uses a singleton object. Nothing more than a series of global variables. All you have to do is remember to re-initialize those variables at the beginning of the event call (the web service entry point for example). Never mind the fact that you need to protect / synchronize or move those variables as locals (possibly using a transient wrapper object so you can maintain data-hiding). It boggles my mind the linear tunnel vision that most programmers have. Programming with global variables should require a government court-order. That would solve half the damn bugs in the world.. People should be forced to use lisp or some such craziness.
We had an old saying..
The limit of an engineer as his GPA approaches zero is a Computer Scientist.
This isn't to knock com-sci people - they were generally really smart.. But it was impossible to breeze through an engineering degree, whereas, you could usually pick concentrations and hire tutors that would let you retain almost nothing about the science of computers, yet acquire the degree.
In the late 90's I experienced massive grade inflation in the engineering classes that I'd typically only ever seen in my regular bachelor-of-science classes (such as general chemistry/physics/calc). Most bachelor-of-arts classes had no need for massive grade inflation because they just gave you really easy tests (accounting, econ, history, philosophy, etc). I'm defining grade inflation here as a 30% correct exam equating to a 4.0 due to the curve.
Whatever happened to the weed-out courses? The college is really doing you a favor by failing you your freshman year. Find a major that is really worth your intense concentration - both because of your skillset and because of your personal excitement about the program. You really only need one of the two.
belief:
1) something believed; an opinion or conviction
2) confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof
3) confidence; faith; trust
At what point in a geometric proof do we use the phrase, 'I am now confident that the sum of all sides of a triangle equate to 180 degrees'? Generally you skip that step in the proof because it's superfluous.. It's like saying 'I'm done'.
Consider three postulates:
1 The physical world is comprised of factual events
2 Facts require empirical evidence (as defined by Kant: A fact requires a time and a place)
3 God has no empirical evidence
I feel safe in suggesting that whatever the derivation an Atheist may have taken, the above three summarize the closest to self evident facts (axioms) as are needed in the matter of Divinity.
Lets further this with a modern extension of Descartes' reasoning:
1 All empirical facts are manifest as perceived facts (by the observer).
2 All empirical facts are filtered by the observer (their orientation to the event, their susceptibility to the fields at work, etc)
3 It may be possible to mask any fact as an alternate fact, given sufficient filtering.
4 The measure of the potency of an actor is in their measureable ability to affect events/facts.
5 The more facts that can be affected, the more potent an actor
6 As the potency of an actor approaches infinity, so too does the ability to affect any conceivable change approach infinity
8 Filtering the observation of a fact for an observer is indistinguishable from affecting the fact directly
9 As the potency of an actor approaches infinity, so too does the ability to filter a fact for an observer
10 As the probability of the existence of a nearly infinitely potent actor approaches 1, the probability of an unfiltered universe approaches zero
11 Thus there is an inverse relationship between the probability of the existence of a God-like actor and the existence of fully-trust-worthy facts
12 Any evidence of a God-like actor necessitates the possibility of an equally untrust-worthy universe. The stronger the evidence for God, the less likely the evidence your seeing is authentic.
God is inherently incompatible with empirical evidence by the very nature of their definitions. The God concept is one that has the ability to affect reality in any conceivable manner.
Descarte basically says, nothing can be known to exist, except ultimately the knowledge of the existance of a question in the presence of asking that very question. Everything else is subject to uncertainty. Specifically Descartes elects the 'Malignant Deamon' as the demi-god, or semi-infinite-power with a contrary purpose to that of God. While an ultimate truth MAY exist, that truth may equally be masked by detractors, disguising that truth. As an observer, you can not distinguish between the two - truth and perverted truth. Nor truth and devinely 'clarified' truth.
For a scientific mind, the issue is simple. We are trained to trust repeatable evidence. God simply dissapears in history as people become scientifically minded. The 'Miracles' of the past don't hold up to the early versions of the scientific method. We do not follow the doctrine of the flying spagetti monster, because mindless silly assertions serve no purpose, except for the benefitors of the flying spagetti monster.
Consider Ocums Razor for 3 cases:
Option 1) God does not exist. But the rationale for a god does exist. People craft God in many alternate ways. Those crafts compete and kill one another off over time. Eventually the underlying rationale dissapears for large segments of the population.
Option 2) God does exist, but acts in a complicated manner identical to the above, because God wishes to weed out the people that didn't follow a specific lineage of rationale (that is neither obvious nor available to all people at all points in time)
Option 3) God does exist, but is not represented by Judao/Christian/Islamic
So why include a deprecated text in the Christian collection of books at all?
Oh wait, because the new testament doesn't make any sense without the old testament. Nice to know that the 'Word of God' is packaged as a choose-your-own-adventure HOWTO instruction booklet.
And I'd like to take exception to the phrase '[Jesus had a] sin-free life'. Do you say this because you were taught to say this? Is your world view contingent upon this single phrase being a fact? Is this spoken by you because there is empirical or otherwise factual evidence supporting this phrase? Or were writers acting completely free of poetic license 50 years after the enscribed events, during a time when exaggeration and ass kissing were standard practice in literature.
Consider that people of Jesus' day would not have characterized Jesus as being 'sin free'. He was a vandal, a vagrant, a political dissident, he did not respect his elders, nor his family's culture, he was ultimately put down as a common criminal. And this is all from the text that exults him. Never mind the suppressed documents.
The party line response to the above is that Jesus was held to a higher standard - God's standard.. Which completely ignores the fact that God likely has not directly told you this, nor is God the vendor that sold you or your preacher's translated copy of the bible (e.g. at best a filtered and imperfect view of history). Never mind the fact that Jesus presumably broke the existing highly detailed standard of God's law. So all this argument does is move the implausibility of "sin-free", to the implausibility of a pair of 1,948 to 1,928 year removed messenger-of-God manuscripts (amongst a likely thousands of other suppressed documents) (aside - yes by this I mean that there are only two distinct texts in the gospel). The party line response to this is that God wouldn't allow his word to be corrupted - for he is the light of the world. This is further 'reinforced' by the knowledge that his light will win out in the end times.. Since that wouldn't be possible if all knowledge of the truth were lost along the way - and how could his followers know the path without such a passage, then certainly this otherwise circular logic MUST be true. Of course the Mormons have a way out - Hidden documents and other modern-day revelations to remind us of lost historical truths.
Finally, as for 'the law must be fulfilled, and then He fulfilled it..' - you're essentially asserting that the symbolic fullfillment of physically prophesized events has significance.. Then fine, I will symbolically end world hunger by dramatically finishing my yogurt - their souls will no longer hunger at least (ask a Jehova's witness if that stings a little).
I respect your frustration with the hypocritical usage of Deuteronomy. I rarely hear that from (what I assume you might consider yourself) the devout.
But in that same vein, I'm surprised to hear your primary distinction between Islam and Christianity as being the Literal v.s. the inspired word. FAR too many people on the Christian right are proud to affirm that the bible is the Literal word of God; That every word is true. Moreover, entire Christian colleges are founded on the idea that through detailed analysis of the word, you can 'reveal' hidden truths.
Hell, Sir Isac Neutron spent a large portion of his life trying to extract, via numerology, hidden truths.
Of course, a few crazies (my words), does not deminish a larger truth (be it as it may). But I think my point is that Muslims would make the same argument about Suicide bombers. The Quaran has a lot of hurtful wording and judgements for outsiders. It's not hard for a devout Muslim to justify acting upon them. Their taking theology into what is really just a political war is the same as economic Republicans leveraging Homosexuals and abortion to rally their political needs. Or perhaps a less hostile comparison is a 3'rd world dictator claiming equality and Christian values for all, so they can usurp power.
Can I extend, out of morbid curiosity, your phrase "by what word of Paul or of Jesus did we decide to" to ask how we derived Sunday as the day of worship. Namely, the forcing of all Christians since Constantine to pervert one of the 10 commandments from Yaweh-worship to Sun (masked as Son) worship? Not that Constantine was an originator. Nor was this the most radical representation - the Gnostics were pretty insane. But so were the Nazareans. But that opens up another can of worms. I'd also ask the larger question of how 'son of God' became unified with God to a non western roman catholic, but the symbolic descriptions are vague enough to give any non-empiracist solace.
Sorry if I went all over the place here.
Gravity is zero at the center of any spheroid, either solid or hollow (because you have an equal amount of mass pulling you in every direction. The only difference between hollow and solid spheres, is that in a solid spheroid, you have the pressure of the density of the medium. In the case of earth, it would be like being really deep in the Ocean, but obviously much worse (you should have seen enough horror movies to figure out what happens there). If, instead you were able to somehow produce a tunnel through the center of the earth and keep it open, you could jump downwards, and just like a pendulum, get almost to the tip of the other end of the earth before you start falling back down again, until you eventually returned to your starting point, over and over.. Course even with the relieved pressure in this hollow tube, you'd cook like in a microwave oven as you passed on through.
There are all sorts of plans for rebates and prebates to lessen the burden, but that's just getting rid of Complex System 1 in favor of Complex System 2.
There are many problems with the "Fair Tax", but I don't think regressiveness or complexity are the two main reasons. Namely the Fair tax is tremendously cheaper to implement, and involves significantly less corruption, and almost guarantees to properly tax all income levels at spending time. This is given the fact that we already have a sales-tax system in place, so there's very low implementation costs, and high conformity levels. It gives a justification for taxing internet sales (since dollar for dollar, the middle-class would have already paid that money). It catches a lot of tax-defrauding businesses (of which I've met many in the computer industry alone). It catches milti-millionaires that have tax-havens.
The various prebate systems I've heard of are no different than Bush's $300 / social security number that paid taxes. Sure fewer people might die in a given year, but that's no different than the number of people 'spending a year dead for tax reasons'. Depending on the final particulars it also may mean that babies get a cut, encouraging over population in poor communities (similar to welfare families).
As for the rich getting a tax-break. They're currently at 30 something percent.. They would come down to 23% or so, true, but you can find other ways to tax them. A federal estate tax (as another poster suggested), a luxury tax on certain goods (like States already do).
The main reasons I'm not crazy about the Fair tax is that it locks your ability to raise federal revenue to a single number. While I would much prefer a smaller government, the reality is that these bastards in congress are going to spend every possible penny, and that is going to mean continued rate hikes. Another lesser reason is that it hurts tourism - making tourism by foreigners suddenly 23% more expensive on day one. Finally it reduces a large segment of social engineering potential - college rebates for low-income families, and other such oddities like farmers subsidies (which I don't personally like, but conceivably there would be a time when it is necessary again). You can still get clever with these approaches, but then it does bring in your notion of Complex system substitution.
I'd like to see a progressive tax on liquid assets such that interest accrued and "asset tax" balance out to a steady state at some arbitrarily large number, perhaps $100 million, but above that amount the tax would exponentially grow such that any assets will be taxed away after say 30 years.
Well, interest is taxed as income (less the Social Security), so it is already graduated. And property is at 1 to 5% depending on where you live and what type of property (boat, car, house, land). Though that's at the state-level (and it probably makes the most sense to leave it taxed that way).
I don't see any advantage of taxing interest on a separate scale from income, but you could easily do that, it's already on a separate IRS form.
That only leaves the property taxes (including boats). What I deduce you're arguing then is that properties over $100M are taxed at higher rates (since it doesn't make too much sense to combine this with your income level). But then you're back to state-to-state differences.... People would register their boats in cheaper states, etc. So next is the idea of a Federal property tax, which would uniformly share ownership across all states, and would represent real Federal income.
Even putting a 1% federal land-property tax everywhere with some graduated scale would probably work, though it would be hard to get through congress. It would be chaotic to get people to re-register all their cars/boats, along with a federal valuation process full of horrors.
I don't think usury laws help any.
Personally I could care less if someone wants to go to a Loan shark.. They STILL do this when their credit is shot. The point is that when people go to a loan shark, they KNOW they're putting their life on the line.. When people max out 28% credit cards (because they absolutely can't find another way to make a payment), they're basically ending their life at 35. Even bankruptsy doesn't get them out of many types of debt. People don't understand simple math.. That taking out these large credit rates are only prolonging the inevitable.. But more damagingly.. They STILL BUY CRAP!!! If they they get a $1,000 extension on a credit card, they'll think it's free money and burn it! Nobody wants to take their holiday bonus and pay down their existing debts. They simply don't understand math. They're in denial about the end of their middle-class life-styles.
Consider that we're in a major crisis, that people in high risk categories are a big part of the credit defaulting market - it's not just the home mortgages that are collapsing the banks around us.
Limiting high interest rates doesn't really hurt the banks, because they're never going to see that money from many people no matter what.. There's only a small group that will EVENTUALLY pay their debts off that the 28% is going to bring actual profits for. But instead, it can REDUCE the number of consumer bankrupsties that WILL occur across the industry. Granted most people in that horrendous category are already limited by new bankruptsy law.
Free markets are great, and black markets WILL intervene to fill in the gaps.. But many banks are in denial about their solvency, and they can only make local optimizations in their cash flow.
Consider the worst case for a segment of consumers:
If you already have a credit card at 28%, you're NOT going to get a new one anyway.. So your being a credit risk doesn't hurt you any further. The mandate would help this segment (again reducing the number of actual defaults by some small percentage).
If you're an average joe and miss your credit payment, the credit company will automatically push you to the highest legal value. And in fact, to average out profits, the prime rate will likely rise (or cards will base themselves off a higher offset of prime), so well-meaning middle-class will get hurt somewhat by this. But you're NOT SUPPOSED TO PAY INTEREST anyway. Interest is supposed to be a short-term debt of no more than a couple months to tide you over. Making bad life decisions that produce persistent credit debt can not go on forever as it is a positive feedback loop.
Finally, the main issue that needs to be resolved is not the actual interest rate, but the predetory lending. Credit cards that specifically target high risk people, giving them teaser rates that will jump at the first late payment. This sort of thing CAN be regulated easily and still support a relatively free market.
If, as you claim, religion is an invention of Man that has proven useful to his survival over generations, then what you are really disgusted with is human nature.
Yes and no. It's not that I'm disgusted with the worst in mankind, I have no problem with 'a few bad apples' who take action on their impulses - statistically this is an almost certainty. I have a problem with the endorsement, adoption, and the arrogance of self-riteousness for something that a person with not too much intellect and consideration can see right through.. I'm frustrated that so many DON'T see right through, and subsequently become indoctrinated.
Once they're indoctrinated, I no longer fault them. There have been several articles on slashdot about the human need to make their world-view true, no matter what the facts say.. To rationalize the short-comings of their world-view. To see their opposition as complete opponents that should never be given a break. Republican v.s. Democrat.. One religion v.s. another. So once you're in a religious circle, all the short-comings that upset me so greatly are only minor details, easy to wisk away.
But while I don't fault the inductee, I DO see right through many of the pastors and politicians who in all likelyhood are NOT indoctrinated, but are abusing the mindset of the flock for personal gain. This is just insult to injury to me. The tel-evangalist who solicits millions, in donations that go to their gold-plated bath-tubs. The politicians who pander to the cultists, yet don't act in any way that sounds religious (no humility, no reverence, no generosity, no forgiveness, no respect for members outside their mindset). Granted many politicians are genuinely religious (several were pastors or from a religious background).
I have no problem with a person being indoctrinated - maybe their life has been really miserable, and religion is the only thing that's ever given them hope. I don't want to take that away from people. But I do wish to fight in the public circle against political and public-school-system indoctrination. It's as if we were being forced to all play (and pay for) the lottery, so that the few that 'need the hope of a better tomorrow' can be placated.
The main delicate issue here is that a person that IS part of the indoctrinated circle doesn't want their child's mind 'perverted' with other mind-sets. A happy child is a naieve child (as I can personally attest to). So the four options that can appease everybody: Segregate the classes (religious-focused science classes/hard-core science classes), make religious people home school, make the atheists home-school, or don't teach the contentious topics, and say this is for your homework, take book A or book B home with you and work with your parents.
Finally we can do what we do now, which is fight to force one side or the other to compromise.
No really good solution, I would say.
I believe a CD-ROM is 150KBps (1x). This is the audio rate - I don't recall what the video-CD rates were. The significance of an initial data-rate is not how fast you can spin up the drive in the future, but what the data-format is rated at. Your 40x CD today is not time-dependent media, but opaque binary packets for file-transfers. But AC3 or whatever audio and video codec is specifically rate limited. The higher the rate a codec requires, the better quality it can support. In this case what it means is that if you have a 90% dark screen with very small color variations and an almost still image, you don't need ANY real bandwidth. But if you have a VERY high contrast, extremely motion oriented scene, a lower-bandwidth codec is going to cap out, and you will see a LOT of artifacts or a lot of color bleeding, bluring.
The last codec I studied was AC3, and it basically supported two modes; high resolution, or high rate-of-change. While you might have imagined that the tremendously faster bandwith rating of HD-DVD/Bluray would overcome this issue, it hasn't because you've tremendously increased the number of pixels the compressed data has to represent. Likewise with the massive audio frequency range (and for what purpose?).
Faith has logic, based on axioms such as the existence of God and so forth.
I disagree. There have been incredible minds in history that NEEDED to apply logic to the basis of their existence, so they BROUGHT logic to Religion. But religion was free of logic long before and after their collective contributions.
Religion is, quite frankly the father telling his son a bed-time story.. The story is NOT intended to be logical, but to convey significance. It is meant to be remembered, it is meant to impart guidelines, it is meant to bring race-pride (to foster loyalty, etc). I'm generalizing all religions.
In the bed-time saga, the target audience is the inquisitive youth - religion is always the 'master speaking to his flock', or the elder speaking to the community, or the parents/grand-parents teaching their children. In this, there is an implicit respect (otherwise there wouldn't have been a conversation), such that we 'trust' our elders and that what they have to say was important for their survival, and thus is likely important in our own.
Further, elders don't just spout the history of the bible.. They impart useful info - dating advice, how to cook, how to hunt. My great great grand-daddy built this farm with this bare two hands.. And don't worry about lying to your wife just then.. God will forgive you.. See Jesus sacrificed himself knowing that each of us is flawed, but he loved us so much.. And so on.
It's all part of a cultural acceptance for each successive generation. It's not:
1) God created the world
2) God gets angry
3) God punishes bad people
4) The first person was bad
5) God punished all his children
6) God gets over his anger and makes promises to avoid punishing us in the future
7) Jesus's sacrifice represented a new covanant where God will not punish those that honor the sacrifice
8) You should do whatever the f*#k I say because I've accepted Jesus, so I'm going to heaven, and you might not.
That's a logical progression (with a LOT of assumptions of course). But who in church ever talks like this? People would tune out the pastor. Religion, is a series of unrelated assertions - where you trust the lecturer. Dawkins book talks about this phenomena. Basically that it is biologically important for children to absorb their parent's instructions without question (at least until a certain age). It is also biologically important for us to work as a team (group-think). This combination leads to a meta-life-form. Legends, rituals, etc. Religion is one of the ultimate forms of meta-life-forms that Hawking describes (quite offensively) as a parasite, living entirely off it's hosts; surviving from generation to generation.. Slightly evolving to fit the environmental changes, or dieing, in the face of natural selection.
What I find significant about this meta-life-form perspective is that we can never be free of such parasites entirely.. Look at Christmas - it is now expected of us to act crazy on Black-Friday through past new years in the US. It's a culturalism that has grown out of a complex series of unrelated historical events and will likely continue to evolve for another thousand years into something as yet unrecognizable. The ramifications have extended to most countries around the world, because need to be part of the economic event. We are in a generation that can not ignore the phenomena (if you are a business owner at least). Much like the founding generations of other religions. If the whole community necessitated a cultural series of actions (for weddings, funerals, child-bearing, what-have-you), you couldn't afford to isolate yourself... Judeo-Islamo-Christianity is getting the hard stuff now because it's actually possible to live in non-religious communities. It's possible to not baptize your children now or what-ever, and not be effectively stoned to death or burned at the stake. How many thousands of years did that take? 5?
Further, I rather loved the Segan movie 'contact', for the part wher
Why is it so difficult to believe that the Chinese government is serious about this, that it really wants to improve?
Because then they'd have a free press. Consider the direction of the information. In a free press, the information moves from the people through the controlled media back to the people. The degree of control is inversely proportional to the number of media outlets - a government can not quickly curtail embarrasing information across thousands of independent news channels and news papers, but it can, for example, control the BBC or any other state-run institution. I'm not implying that control IS exerted, just probability of effective control.
Now, consider a taddle-tale web site. Who sees the information? Not the public. It's not a blog (unless I'm mistaken). Information moves from the people to the government - it's a form of free information gathering (as opposed to expensive spying efforts). Command and Control oriented socities always want to have their pulse on the attitudes of it's citizenry. Ever play a civ-city type game? Lack of knowledge of your own people is fatal.
I applaud this web site, because, if for no other reason, the government will have a new avenue of information gathering which will allow them to make more informed decisions, and thus more optimal.. The remaining questions are of their goals and intentions. As other posters have stated, any political party wishes to hide embarrasing information.. Party leaders who embarass the party are - well, to say the lease, removed. There is no further embarrasement that a 'secret' ballot like this can provide, but it would shed light on potentially embarrasing activities of regional governors. The rule is passed down through the command heirarchy of what is acceptible behavior, and when tattled on, members are brought into line more quickly. But I don't imagine that all agregious offenses would trigger punishment. Despotic rule which quells uprisings, for example would trigger taddle-tales, but the heirarchy would smile on such feedback and likely reward the governor.. So the public's interest is not fully at interest here. At least, not to the same degree that other feedback systems might provide.
That someone reads sensitive data from his unprotected wireless network, or that he is killed in a complete random traffic accident?
Or C) that an industrious/bored male techno-teenager lives within his wifi range
Can somebody please explain what the heck is going on?
Perhaps you're new to the American education system. America is by far and wide a religious Christian state (with a sufficient amount of Religious ambiguity so as not to offend the Jewish population). It is very hard to run for office without praising a [Christian] God, and therefore your policies must reflect this affirmation. I'm not talking about most Federally elected positions (though that's where you'll see most of the ironically hypocritical self promoting God worship). I'm talking about at the local levels. School-boards, etc.
These are the levels that affect the curriculum, and the contents of our text-books.. There are entire review boards which inspect every page of a history book, or a science book. As a publisher, you're interest is in getting into as many schools as possible, so even though there are districts which would love a religiously absent suite of literature, a publisher would also like to hit the bible-belt. So by playing to the least-common-denominator, the bible belt has a strong influence on education - especially because they can be amongst the most out-spoken.
Now take into account adverse selection on these school boards.. The people with the strongest opinions push the hardest to get into positions of power, where they can enforce their will on the masses (whether they're in the majority or not). This goes the same for Jewish and Atheistic proponents.. Stripping out 'Under God', or removing 'school prayer', etc, where the masses certainly wished to retain those practices.
You have to understand the minds of an indoctrinated citizen. Some people come from small towns, wherein their culture was homogeneous - people that didn't worship in the same way were outsiders. You liked your Sunday-School, and morning prayers, and certainly your school prayers. You were respectful of religion at work. You mama often only lived only a couple blocks away from you - if not in the same house. The general atmosphere is family-oriented.. And God played an important role in virtually every aspect.
Now watch on TV in horror as people want to strip that out.. You're school principle can't expouse the 'moral fiber of Jesus the almighty' before a football match. Your elected official can't allow a warm and [homogeneous] community building Nativity scene in the town-square each year. Some Atheistic commie-bastard is trying to strip God out of the pledge (which of course, was only put there as a spit-in-the-face to communism after WWII). Queers are infecting our schools - how dare they take this good Christian boy-scout, who's really good at sports and the girls really like him, and make him take Theater.. Sissy-assed breeding ground if you ask me.
It's like watching your whole world crumble before your eyes.. The thing that brought you several great wars, thousands of years of oppression, slavery, a life of sinful masterbation, and confession-reconciled adultry (man home-life was stable before woman's lib). These are certainly the times of the end times...
And what by chance do the end times mean? A day of reconciliation, when God and the Devil will fight.. Who's side will you be on? Well that's a no brainer, burn the queers like in Sodom and Gamora. Lynch the n*grs - They're not part of the chosen people anyway (somehow whites think they're of Jewish ancenstry - go figure). Fire of the war in Armegeddon (by putting them A-rabs into their place).
A single person may or may not come to these conclusions on their own.. But reinforce this with cultural icons.. Fox-news, Rush Limbauh, G-gordon liddy, the air-america radio network. Have your local preacher re-inforce the ideals of society. Have people tell you over and over and over and over that these are the signs of the end times (which I can't imagine any religious-figurehead in the past 3 thousand years has NOT used as part of their motivational speaches - yes, end-times is not original to Christianity). It all forms a normalizin
I haven't even gotten to the kids part (but that's coming). I willfully chose to live an hour away from work because the city life was not how I wanted to die the rest of my life. At lest in the hour ride, I can listen to NPR and 'relax', and culture myself, but YMMV. The main problem that many people (probably outside of the tech industry) face is social commitments.. Some people join groups, some do community service, personally I'm learning a foreign language to communicate with extended family.
But the fact of the matter is, once you leave collage, SOMETHING will soak up your time. And commitments beget commitments.
I lament how much collage study-time I wasted by doing open-source project work - lament not being able to make those trade-offs anymore. I don't know if this is fact or fiction, but most if not all of the greatest scientists were said to have not done any remarkable work after marriage+kids.
C/C++ have stack-variables, and I agree, there's nothing more memory efficient than this. Allocation/De-allocation rivals even the performance of a copying-collector's malloc, since you aggregate several allocations in a single stack-pointer increment with compile-time offsets into the memory frame. But it's VERY hard to write generalized code that takes in pointers, and still avoid memory leaks (or in this worse case, stale pointer references)..
To guarantee no memory leaks/stale-pointer-references, you have to
A) NEVER keep a cached reference to any passed in pointers, which limits the types of algorithms available to you, as well as the performance possibilities.
B) NEVER link one object graph to another (as you've affectively just cached references as in A)
C) NEVER allocate new memory and attach it to the input object graphs.
Doing any of the above would violate good defensive programming practices - you would be relying on the caller to properly maintain your memory, or to keep your memory references alive. This is not to say that you CANT do these things.. But you must have faith in God and your partner coder that they're not going to miss the fact that they have to manage your memory.
Both with C++ and in reference-counted memory managers (like perl), you have the additional problem of circular references. C++ has the advantage of knowing that a doublely-linked list should all be freed at once. But the generalized problem still exists.. If class A has a bi-directional reference with class B (which is generally bad coding practice), then in which order can you safely destruct? The destructor of B might dereference A and thus access corrupted memory.. (since traditional malloc overwrites the allocated memory to store free-list pointers).
While A B is generally bad. In symmetric code, this is usually pretty common (parent/child relationships for example) and thus a necessary, but managed evil. But the key is when you generalize the relationship enough such that you have indirect cycles. Say A has a cache of objects which can hold something that ultimately points back to A.
You simply can't handle this sort of object-graph traversal w/o dynamic memory. And cycle-management MUST be explicitly maintained.. This maintanance is a programming-contract/policy-contract. Once you share this code with outsiders, that contract is free to be violated (due to lack of understanding or too quick of a reading).
C++ forces you to become an expert in the shared library module. But in languages that have strictness in programming safety - especially those with pre-defined generalized APIs that are trivial to conform to (Maps, IO, Transfomers, etc), then you need only become an expert in the generalized API, while still being able to handle a LARGE variety of coding interconnections with minimal coding/memory concerns. The lesser the impedance mismatch between two APIs, the greater the synergy. In Perl, all functions use dynamically resizable reference-stacks. In Java absolutely everything can be an Object (though primitives auto-boxing wasn't until JDK 1.5), and thus used by any generalized IO/Data-type/Transformer. And with zero concern about memory leaks. I think Lisp just uses the same-size memory objects for everything.
Granted, explicit caching is still a concern. Especially for idiots that still use static variables (both in Perl and Java) - We're in the inversion-of-control era for God's sake.
In a GC environment, you are MOSTLY free to avoid memory allocation and thus GC pausing.. Use inversion-of-control to pre-allocate all of your domain/model/service classes. Keep references to the model object graphs in the worker threads main loops. Reuse thread-safe static references to large byte-arrays (such as StringBuilders, ArrayLists, etc). The transient references that 3'rd party libraries instantiate should be trivial to GC, as your semi-permanent objects will quickly be tenured. So long as there are few static variables, and you have only a f
Agreed, but it also depends on the programming model. If you use agile/XP/test-driven-development, then hell, 30 minutes might be a sufficient turn-around for most any project. Course this also assumes a web-services model where shipping or on site maintenance isn't a concern.
Point taken - this restores him to hero status for me. But someone at the time obviously pushed for it in the constitution. Now I have a weekend project.
Letting someone borrow your copy is legal. Letting someone borrow your copy while you use your "backup" copy, not so much.
Agreed, but I know in my own experience, I've often never gone through the effort of making more than 1 or two copies of any song, if at all. So given the full knowledge of the frustration and cost of high volume duplication, I suspect that the laws of the time didn't even provide disclaimers other than 'backups _for personal use_'. My guess (as a non-lawyer) is that the law primarily dealt with the resale.. So you couldn't make two backups, then _sell_ all three tapes. The giving away for free may or may not have been part of the law.
Moreover, I'm curious what the law says about recording over-the-air broadcasts.. I use to tape-record hours of radio broadcast and listen to them over and over. I seem to recall something about over-the-air being public domain (someone tried to publish DECSS over the air once to make it public forever - granted they were not the original copyright holders). If a song is over-the air, then at the very least, the quality of the medium from that recording should be perfectly reproduceable in a legal manner.
Granted, the issue is that it is the pristine CD media that's being reproduced. Usually there are significant differences between the two tracks (probably for this very reason), so you could easily track dessemination of non-broadcast material.
Yo shmuck.. Read the details.. She owned 500 legal CDs. That's $9,000. Think the publicity this creates is going to encourage anyone to contribute any more money to these immoral bastards? Think the record company is going to see a dime of that $200k? This is like Bush saying he's a compasionate conservative, and wanting to give a strong message to all those would-do-harmers out there, then ineptly invading a country.
Consider what likely went on in this woman's mind. She was an avid fan of music. She has acquired music probably with no real issue with the market prices. She most likely bought both albums and singles - a perfect music-industry customer. Then a new medium arrived where you can community-build.. Share interests.. Share similar tastes in music.. Sure it's free, but if anything else, the medium is more attractive.. Less restrictive than portable physical medium.
As any good netizen, she wants to contribute.. So while she may very well have downloaded quite a bit.. She was more than happy to share what she had (considering the neglegable cost to her - just setup time).
Consider that she's probably spent her whole life making mix-tapes.. Copying a CD or VHS to family and friends. We've had 20 years of built up social 'morals' with respect to sharing with friends. All perfectly legal.
So now RIAA starts tries to define the rules of this new media. US Court enforced 'backup copy' protection is in uncharted territory. People aren't profiting on piracy, they're merely part of a social network. The term Piracy is a horrible bastardization.. Piracy is when you pilfer (often via death) the wares of other sea-goers that are helpless. You then sell the pirated goods (boot-leg) at various ports.. People come to know that if you want cheap 'knock offs' you go to a port and buy from the pirate and their minions. There's an obvious moral imperative when you buy such boot-leg, because you must know that someone probably died to provide these cheap goods to you.. So using the terms Piracy and Boot-legging are supposed to associate large amounts of guilt.
So later boot-legging was the audio-taping of concerts against the permission of the artists. This was really an arbitrary determination by artists and labels that is akin to no 3'rd party food in a Theater. No moral obligation, merely an attempted monopoly by the vendor. If they can do it fine.. But I strongly oppose federal laws that encourage this behaviour - such that a Movie theater could hand a citizen over to the police for eating cokes bought at home.. Or likewise bringing a tape-recorder to a concert.
Back to our lady. Does she see the various RIAA advertisements? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps she's a perfectly naive and innocent girl. Maybe she knew full well that the RIAA was cracking down on Kazza, and she had the 'stick it to the evil empire' mentality.. Many rock-fans and alternative-fans were made to think this way through the very music that they're being sued for. Bitter Irony I would say. Most likely, however, she acted indifferently, much like the selection of our presidents are a matter of indifference to most Americans. The RIAA is slowly becoming irrelevant, and we are watching it's death-throws. US music is abominable compared to the rest of the world. The quality of work has continously degraded for the past century - thanks to the ability to amplify profits through brain-washing (repeated paid-for spots on radio/TV). Audiences develop a taste through repeated use.. And it's sad, but taste Americans are developing is mostly bland (with a few category exceptions). Singers have less and less attractive sound. Music is extremely repetative from one song to the next (if not already synthesized). Lyrics are a joke. The message is less and less condusive to society building or even renewing (even older angry Rap represented a contemporary cry for change).
This debate is endless. I don't expect to convince others that Patents and Copy-Right are evil capitalistic ventures of the old British Empire that unfortunately worked their way through the likes of Benjamin Franklin and others into the US.
It wouldn't be the downloading of the game, as that's TCP not UDP, and it very likely isn't connectivity to the internet, because that would have nothing to do with access to the central UNIX servers - Local networks are always faster than internet connections, thus, unless the summary of the article was lying, it was purely a HUB/Switch UDP network hog, and any good sys-admin of a massive local network would have done the same thing.
Consider a percentage of 10,000 hosts playing the game.. All sending multi-cast UDP packets. You have say 1,000 hosts sending several packets per second to every network that multicast is configured to broadcast to. So you have several thousand packets per second going to at least every network card in the dorms, and probably to/from all the student-accessible computer labs to boot.
While the central servers most likely were on isolated (non-broadcastable) networks, all the client-host accessible points were choked.
Same could be said about petrol. Which is a heavily subsidized commodity if you count the hundreds of billions of US military dollars spent to keep shipments flowing. Or the billions in interest payments exported to foreign countries each year due to trade-deficit spending of foreign countries into US treasuries.
I'm not disagreeing with you.. Just saying that there are many secondary and tertiary levels of costs. It's generally just easier to put a heafty tax right on top - then let uncle same bear the burden 20 years from now.
and why shouldn't desktop users get that extra fps?
Ok, lets return to reality for a second here.
FPS games are SINGLE-THREADED! Thereby schedulers are meaningless. They do not perform disk-IO - they pre-load the entire level into memory; so tread-contention with the swapper/flusher daemons are not an issue. They use direct-to-video-frame-buffer operations, so socket calls to X are meaningless. They make very few system-calls (aside from the calls to video drivers).
If you consider that a scheduler will give you better FPS, then I think you should first determine that shutting down evolution, firefox (with CNN on auto-refresh) and spamd are going to give you better response rates. This is the exact same thing windows people have been doing for decades. There is also the concept of single-user-mode in Linux.
If we're talking a more responsive UI, here too we are not talking about heavy thread contention. The only real slowdown left these days are the multiple levels of file-system abstraction that you go through before hitting the disk. Or perhaps the selinux security checks.. Or things like that. X, itself is of course no performance deamon (due to it's network centric design), but you can't change X without breaking X-compatibility - basically it would be something else entirely.
These layers of abstraction do detract from performance, but that's not really what's being discussed here.. You can run ext2 instead of ext3, or reiserfs (don't know how fast you can get it). You can run stripped RAID. Hell, you can twm instead of gnome... Or.. You can spend an extra $200 on beefier memory + CPU on a desktop (sadly not as fortune on a laptop - get jipped $500 to upgrade the CPU there).