Except there is no "code". This is in fact the point. The lawyers abhor the "revised" versions and thus they are not easily available. Instead a series of "diffs" is published in volume upon volume. Then there is the "interperetation" aka. the "case" law, which also accumulates case upon case and has overriding impact during trials. The complete construct is utterly unmanageable and incomprehensible, even to the priesthood itself. Why do you think fancy lawyers have all these massive bookshelves full of books in their offices? Do you think they were just covers with blank pages inside? These days for practical use they have terabyte online databases they access to browse this wart on the face of civilization we call modern "law".
Total bullshit. Here is the Canadian Health Act (single-payer and all). You will notice a significant shortfall from 1100 pages... even though the "issue" is, well, exactly the same.
The only difference is that the Canadian lawmakers were somewhat less besieged by lobbyists and their multi-billion-dollar "vested interests" and had a tad more integrity at the time...
Shorter you: "Waaah, life is complicated! We can't deal with it without the Holy Priesthood of Law to talk to the Legal Gods for us and to interpret their Holy Verdicts from the patterns of fish-guts! Where would we be without their benevolent assistance! They work sooooo hard ruling us... for our own good!"
And speaking of complexity of software: if programmers wrote programs the way lawyers make laws, a
would be written as a 20 pages of code, at least. They would make graduates of 3-month programming courses from diploma-mills look like Knuth and Dijkstra-level gurus.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with any justice or keeping corporations (legal constructs themselves - funny you mention them) or anyone really for that matter from doing harm or evil or anything of the sort. The same effect could have been achieved by much simpler laws, written in a way that does not require an anointed priest to "interpret" them for you.
One can write "killing a person is forbidden by law" or one can write "henceforth, section 12.3 notwithstanding, with the exception of points 1.3 and 1.23, in reference to clause 2-33, this passage nullifies the article 3.1, hereby replacing the passage 'if of and thereof' with 'if of or thereof' followed by..." which is how nearly all laws are written. There is no conveivable reason to do so in this fashion other then creation of incomprehensible gibberish meant to offer employment for legal tea-leaf-readers-for-hire and room for maneuver for corrupt judges.
2900. Oh dear! I was sooo wrong! I mean, how did these people-loving geniuses manage to fit all of that deep thought into mere 2900 pages!?
Given that "not knowing the law is no excuse", I assume there will be a reprint of the whole thing distributed with every US newspaper and read live on TV any day now, won't it?
Surely, memorizing 2900 puny pages should be by now a mere trifle for the citizenry, what after having already memorized over a million of pages of existing "active" federal laws, not to mention state and city ordinances, no?
Or would they, per-chance, require some "guidance" and "interpretation" and "assistance" (for a itsy-bitsy tiny fee) from the legal priesthood with this?
I believe the lawyers are going to win no matter what.
In fact this is the whole point of byzantine "law" as featured in all "developed" countries and their associated parasitic, multi-trillion-dollar legal industries. It is no coincidence that most of the "lawmakers" world-over are former or current lawyers who very deliberately create laws in ways that benefit only their particular caste first and any supposed intended "social" effect is considered by them a mere excuse, an insignificant secondary concern. Just witness the recent 1100 page US "health reform" bill. Anyone who believes that its true purpose has anything whatsoever to do with "health" or "reform" rather then the lawyer-enrichment-program (followed closely by the lawyer-cum-lobbyist-enrichment-program, followed closely by lawyer-cum-insurance-company-CEO-enrichment-program... ) should have his/her head examined.
Well, yes, it might be that there are cities in the US and Canada where my observation is not applicable as well as different commuting patterns where the stick has some conceivable advantage but by your own admission they are few and far between. In a typical North American city stick gets most of its users no performance advantage to speak of and it demands additional actions by the driver, which by any objective measure constitutes a net loss.
My personal experience is that under these conditions the use of manual transmission becomes a "style statement" rather then a decision predicated upon practicalities. And unfortunately this quickly leads to what one can only describe as "fanboyism" where all reason is left promptly behind to be replaced by emotions.
Manual transmissions have their place where the conditions either make them outperform automatics by a certain minimal margin (to offset the convenience factor) or in situations where they are outright required (racing etc). Having said so, even the most extreme users of manual transmissions, i.e. the racing crowd, long since abandoned pure manual transmissions and is now exclusively using electrically operated semi-automatics connected to wheel paddles (Formula 1 etc.) or up-down shifters (Rally etc.). This alone should give a hint to all of these desperate and rather belligerent manual transmission fashionistas.
Why don't you complain about the color of my socks too? Clearly you have nothing useful to add and the defense of the thugs in that Apache as well as that of the GP post is patently impossible with any arguments even approaching sanity. And so you are reduced to pathetic whining about my handle (one of reasons for which incidentally is to flush out idiots like you).
Please identify a real world example of a "natural monopoly that exists because of "natural monopoly" conditions, not because of government regulation. I am unaware of any.
That is because most of such major "natural" monopolies (at least geography based) are pre-empted via the means of "eminent domain". No city today would allow a capitalist to own the only viable land access to it. The local government simply punches a hole through any such attempt to allow the denizens of the city an escape route.
Without "eminent domain", a wealthy industrialist could simply buy a circle of land around, say, Dallas and demand an astronomical toll to cross it. Such an action would have immediately created a "natural" monopoly, without any recourse on the part of the denizens of the city (note that he would have also owned rights to all air access above his land and tunnels below - today these are again examples of monopoly-busting "eminent domains").
At around 6:53 on the LiveLeak version of the video, you can also clearly see an AK-47 on the ground by them. It looks like yet another case where Reuter's "journalists" have embedded with insurgent forces - who don't wear uniforms making the journalists indistinguishable - and then cry foul when they're shot along with their buddies. More of their buddies then show up in a van along with their kids, and get shot, too.
Ah the usual apologist crap.
May I point out to you that AK47s are perfectly legal in Iraq and that pretty much every household has one?
Even if there were weapons held by one or two (out of at least a dozen) people, were they being used? Were they even pointed at some US asset that could even most remotely be in danger? (it took the ground forces 10 minutes to arrive on the scene of the slaughter and the Apache - according to its own gun sight readouts - was so far out that no small weapons fire could have even scratched it and that includes any conceivable variant of RPG-7 that the insurgents have). The journalists (without the quotes) in question had to use huge telephoto lenses to take pictures of the actual combat happening nearly a kilometer away.
In fact there is absolutely no action these people could have taken to not get blown up by some blood-thirsty American yahoos that would not get some apologists to crawl out of the woodwork to blather about "decision at the time" and "fog of war" and other nonsense. Their crime was simply breathing-air-while-an-Iraqi (a sub species of Homo-non-Americanus-Inferiorus) and therefore "legitimate" targets by mere association with the "bad guys" (i.e. every other Iraqi who dares to oppose the Righteous and Glorious Liberators, Bringers of Light, Shock and Awe).
They stand: they get shot for "aggressive posture", they lie down: "they are taking cover", they run away: "they are regrouping for counter-attack", they try to crawl away after getting their arms and legs blown off: "they are taking evasive action", they kneel and pray: "they are attempting communication with possible reinforcements" or "they are manipulating unseen devices between their legs", they arrive to help long-time good neighbors bleeding on the ground in the middle of their street: "reinforcements have arrived, light them up, Boys!". Their only choice once selected by some moron in a gunner seat of an Apache to be the Sacrifice to The Eternal Glory of America is to die, their families to die, their children to die, or all of them to die more painfully.
In short the murderous yahoos in the chopper, the vicious thugs at the command post with the TV monitors and the venomous, despicable apologists like you all pretty much agree on this point. Or "America #1 #1, Right or Wrong! Its these Iraqis own damn fault that we decided to play God to them! How dare they live in an America-made War Zone!? Serves them right whatever they get! Yiiiihaaaa!".
Any monopoly that was created due to geographical or physical constraints is a "natural" monopoly. For example a city in a desert built around a single oasis (which has a single owner) makes that person a de-facto monopolist as far as the supply of water is concerned - all the alternatives are orders of magnitude more expensive (no water to be had even in deep wells and a pipeline requires up-front multi-billion dollar investment as do any humidity recovery systems). Similar scenarios involve toll roadways in places where geography prevents building alternate routes, for example a location surrounded by mountain ranges with the only passable valley leading outside being owned by the said monopolist.
Note that to achieve a functional monopoly one does not have to prevent other means of achieving the same goal as the one being monopolized, only to create sufficiently expensive "barrier to entry" for all competitors. Thus while air travel is possible, even with the toll road priced at 100x the national average it still does not constitute "competition". Similarly with the water supply in the previous example.
Other examples involve finite resources such as radio frequencies (even without government involvement some sort of monopolization of certain most useful bands would have occured - lest no one could use any radio technology at all due to cross-talk and interference) and even artificial resources such as Internet where naturally self-consolidation occurs due to inherently centralizing technologies such as DNS and would have resulted in monopolies controlling these areas irrespective if they are private or governmental.
I'm not sure how Iraqis can oppose the presence of US forces while still wanting them to stay and also thinking that the invasion was justified, but there ya have it. Might have lost something in the translation.
The explanation is obvious. You are simply forgetting that Iraq is a country full of newly "liberated" religious fanatics: the majority (i.e. Shias) hated Saddam (a secular Sunni) with a passion and still believe that any means whatsoever of getting rid of him to replace him with some sort of Shia Islamic Republic were justified. But at the same time they hate the guts of Americans for a long list of reasons, chief amongst them being that Americans are "dirty infidels" who dared to humiliate the "faithful". Hence the conflicting results. If the question asked was "would a meteor impact that blows up half of Iraq (as long as it kills all the Sunnis too) be justified to get rid of Saddam" their answer would have been cheerful, unqualified "yes!", which given the Shia numbers would have easily reached 47% of the vote.
Spoken like a true AT fan. Have you ever even tried driving stick?
Yes I did. And I hate the thing with a passion. If you are a teenage kid all about "speed" and "drifting" and stuff, or some professional 18 wheeler driver, stick is just a general nuissance in backed up, bumper to bumper city traffic. Every doofus out there with a stick in front of me or behind me is always late shifting (cause they always just have to go to neutral at every stop) into gear (usually followed by jerky, panicky jump forward) when the traffic gets moving.
Furthermore, stick requires you to have one hand pretty much reserved for shifting and therefore for all practical purposes, in the city where slowing down and starting up is constant, you end up effectively driving with one hand (which in the US is the left hand).
I could go on, but whining about people (a vast majority in North America) using something that is useful and convenient just because your "sporty" (and much cheaper and simpler to make - and that is the true reason why a lot of the world uses it) manual transmission tickles your "speed demon" sense is just plain stupid.
But texting? My goodness, talk about over-engineering a problem! Why go through all that when you can just use an indicator light?
I think a 128db klaxon, flashing fire-engine-style lights and a deep synthesized voice combining to something like "Auuugah! Auuugah! Warning! Warning! Undergarments Breach! Fluid levels critical! Eject! Eject! Abandon Depends! Auuuugah! Auuugah!" would be more in line with sound engineering practice...
Let me get this straight... they've found 20,000 people downloading Uwe Boll's film?
If I were a defense lawyer, all I would do is play the thing for the judge - nay, I would insist that he sees it from beginning to end - and then I would watch the lawsuit getting dismissed with prejudice.... and all the poor sods sued ordered compensation for the mental anguish caused by mere insinuation of having downloaded the thing, all the involved lawyers getting disbarred, charged with cruelty to judges and odious crimes against humanity, declared terrorists etc and so on...
If he is in orbit above the opposite side of the planet, we are actually looking down on him. Or when in the John we are even peeing down or poo-pooing down or.... you get the idea.
Absolutely! Just follow the examples of IBM, Standard Oil, Ford Motors or perhaps a telco or two. Nothing seems as erection inducing for the CEOs and "free marketers" of all stripes as profits from being able to supply both your side and the enemy's in a war, surely. Because greed and profit is all that counts in this universe, no?
Allowing a jury to determine whether the law *should* be followed or not undermines the criminal justice system, and is a bad suggestion.
That is because all laws are Divine and Unassailable, clearly. For example, a law (of the time) stating that if a dark-skinned-non-person dares to drink from a water fountain clearly labeled "Whites Only" requires to be whipped witin an inch of his/her life, the only option of the 12 law-abiding Citizens in the jury box is to (oh-so-sorrowfully, tear-dropping-regretfully) convict.
Cue in a reporter interviewing juror "Corbets" after he steps out of the court-house and onto the square with the whipping-post: "Well, we didn't like it... [muffled due to the sound of the whip and screams of agony in the background].... but... but... the law" - here Corbets straightens up and puts his fist on his heart and his eye gleams - "said so. We had no choice. If we did not, the entire criminal justice system would be undermined!" - a visage of fear and terror enters Corbets' (and the reporter's) face at this ghastly thought...
And then great cheering and applause from assorted Fascists and KKK members all around for jury-man Corbets raises from the lynch-mob on the square - for the great man Corbets understood that it is the letter of the law, not some flimsy concepts of "justice" or "right and wrong" that counts!
... the law, as written... and the Jury is not told that this is an option...
Well if the crooks running the scam tell you to do something, particularly if it enhances their power over everyone else (including you) and enriches them in the process... well, that means of course that an upstanding, justice-loving Canadian citizen should obey immediately and then salute and sing Oh Canada while standing at attention, no?
Should we rename this place to Sheepland, baaaaah?
Juries don't know the law. They aren't expected to.
This alone nullifies the entire so-called "justice" system and is pretty much a license to a violent revolt. If juries do not (cannot in fact) know the law (because no one is capable of following the byzantine religious scripture that makes the Complete Encyclopedia Britannica look like a single copy of Cliff Notes) and at the same time the old canard of "not knowing the law is not an excuse" is applied to the defendant... well, you work it out.
But this of course is a historical constant. Every corrupt political regime had this going on, Hitler and Stalin had their show trials, South American tin-pot dictators had their kangaroo courts, Middle-eastern "royalty" have their "creative" interpretation of Sharia law complete with hand-picked judges... and the USA (and some other Western nations) have their multi-trillion-dollar "legal industry". In fact I think a tin-pot tyrant with his military "courts" is preferable because his ham-handed, crude method of application of evil is so obvious as contrasted to the oh-so-refined (and how profitable!) way of dispensation of evil that the Western "justice system" has evolved into.
The majority of people in Israel, a democratic country, seem to want Palestine to remain contained as long as Palestinians engage in terrorism against Israel.
Which of course is the very cause of the "terrorism" - by the US/Israeli definition of "terrorism", Polish and French Resistance movements were a bunch of "terrorists" too. Incidentally, "terroristen" was also the actual term used by the occupying Nazis...
So again, how does "Israel" have the power to stop wanting that and thus change the situation?
Israel has the "power" in the very same way all the other belligerent bullies have... the Israelis can simply come to their senses and do something sane for a change. Their ability (and thus "power") to do so is far greater then that of the Palestinians simply because of their relative military position, finances etc. This is all pretty damn obvious, but like any good Israeli apologist you instead choose to engage in disingenuous (and blatantly erroneous) hair-splitting of the semantics of the word "power". Anything really to avoid facing the simple truth. Then again, this is par for the course...
Damn, good one, you really zinged me by calling me a wise white man. And being so sarcastic. Great argument.
I also note that you've avoided facing the (again pretty obvious) consequences of your "proposals", which I was highlighting through all that sarcasm.
You're the supremacist here. Apparently white men are not as qualified as others to opine on international conflicts?
Again, more sophistry. The difference is that your "opinions" all involve enforcing brutal dictates on one (ethnically and culturally different from yours) side of the conflict without any regard for the opinions of those to be so "helped" by you and the likes of you. The reference to "white men" is historical, as it is the rather very white men who instigated the whole fiasco by first invading the area (the pastry-white nobles of the British Empire) and then the white men (or to be exact countries governed by them at the time - note the lovely admiration for this plan in the whole of Middle East and other Muslim nations) of the 1947 UN General Assembly enhanced the glorious cluster-fuck exponentially by installing the brand spanking new country for European Jewry there. And so in this case "white men" are seen (and justifiably so) as the least qualified to be helpful... particularly in the form of more draconian mass purges and resettlements at gun-point which seems to be your favorite (and apparently only) strategy.
You have debased yourself by talking to someone on the internet, who you don't know, making all sorts of negative assumptions
There is no need for any "assumptions".. your words define you pretty accurately.
and never presenting a coherent argument (let alone being friendly or extending good faith) regarding the facts or what I said.
You would not recognize a coherent argument if you tripped over one and broke all your teeth...
Also how one can propose mass pogroms and deportations and expect "friendliness" for it from strangers eludes me... perhaps you revolve in exclusively Zionist circles and thus you are so used to the echo-chamber effect that the real world comes as a shock to you.
Anyways, enjoy your life of hating white people who dare to stick their noses into "your" international business.
Right. Enjoy burning those straw-men. This and sophistry seem to be your favorite hobbies...
"Israel" is not a single person with a clear will, it's a bunch of people who want different things.
Oh give it up. When one talks about "Israel", "France", "USA" etc. doing something, it is clear that it is a reference to the people in power in these countries and not the abstract entities of "nations" themselves. And in the case of governments, single unified will is the usual outcome, be it a dictatorial decree or a result of a democratic vote.
By definition it does not have the power to do things it doesn't want to do, and that was my point.
Rarely do I get to see a more convoluted pretzel of cognitive dissonance.
So we should let all the serial murderers out because, as per your brilliant logic, they "do not want" to stop slashing prostitutes with machetes and therefore they, poor sods, are "powerless" to stop it, right?
Israel has no more power than Palestine in that regard.
Right, so the schoolyard bully has "no more" power than the nerd kid he is beating up for his lunch money as the fight can be stopped two ways, the bully can stop being a thieving jackass or the nerd can cough up his lunch money! Therefore, by your genius deduction, they are equals! Ah the glorious "equality" of power, Israel style!
That's demonstrably wrong, because I proposed just such a solution and my design was not to consciously dis-enfranchise one side. I think both sides would benefit more by stopping the violence than either side would lose by having to change around their borders.
Except of course in this entire disingenuous proposal the wholly arbitrary "changing of borders" as dictated by The Oh So Wise White Men from High Upon The Mountain would inevitably lead to far more violence - this time involving Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as additional direct, as opposed to merely passively hostile, combatants!
My reasoning is that two wrongs in quick succession may be less wrong overall than one wrong that is dragged out for decades upon decades. Feel free to criticize it in terms of its likelihood of success, but don't bother trying to label me a racist because I'm not.
You are definitely a Supremacist. Racism may or may not play a role in that, but that is largely irrelevant. You are a Supremacist because you believe that one group of nations (Western ones in this case) is somehow more entitled to making decisions for denizens of other nations of a different cultural and ethnic background without any concern whatsoever about the opinions of those to be so treated. And all of that in a situation where one side in the conflict is much closer to your cultural background (i.e. Israel which is nearly wholly settled by people recently arrived from Europe and the US).
This is not much different from what Germans were doing, believing that their "superior" culture was somehow a justification for subjugation of all "inferior" others, "for their own good" - with the exception of Jews whom they designated the Bogeymen #1. Racial elements were added to the Nazi doctrine merely as an explanation for that "superiority".
Your entire paragraph added nothing to the discussion except to make it clear that you will happily dismiss things for the wrong reasons, which only debases yourself.
Rejecting Supremacist arguments and philosophies out of hand is hardly "debasing oneself".
Most of the data in the GPU memory is textures, vertex buffers, and shader fragments. None of these have anything to do with state.
That is actually a very definition of a "state", i.e. each call to "upload" a texture, vertex etc alters the state of the GPU. That state is preserved between calls, i.e. it is persistent from the point of view of the API.
The stateful parts of the OpenGL API are things like the current value set in glColor, the contents of the matrix stack, and lighting parameters. A lot of this stuff never even crosses into GPU memory in the first place, it is handled on the CPU by the OpenGL libraries. And a lot of it has been removed in newer versions of the API.
That is merely the non-GPU portion of the state of the API. Sure, that portion can be removed but the fundamental state-oriented properties of the GPU cannot be so easily gotten rid of and so in the end the API as a whole will remain stateful no matter what you do.
What you guys are talking about is more independent rendering pipelines that can be utilized in parallel with each other (and results of which can fed back into the main pipeline as textures, stereo views and what not) rather then "contexts" or "stateless" API. The GPU still contains all the "state" data, i.e. the current textures, light positions and what not that are used in the final "render" call for each pipeline, but you simply want to access them independently...
None of this alters the fundamental state-based nature of the GPU.
Slashdot Mirror
Except there is no "code". This is in fact the point. The lawyers abhor the "revised" versions and thus they are not easily available. Instead a series of "diffs" is published in volume upon volume. Then there is the "interperetation" aka. the "case" law, which also accumulates case upon case and has overriding impact during trials. The complete construct is utterly unmanageable and incomprehensible, even to the priesthood itself. Why do you think fancy lawyers have all these massive bookshelves full of books in their offices? Do you think they were just covers with blank pages inside? These days for practical use they have terabyte online databases they access to browse this wart on the face of civilization we call modern "law".
Total bullshit. Here is the Canadian Health Act (single-payer and all). You will notice a significant shortfall from 1100 pages... even though the "issue" is, well, exactly the same.
The only difference is that the Canadian lawmakers were somewhat less besieged by lobbyists and their multi-billion-dollar "vested interests" and had a tad more integrity at the time...
Shorter you: "Waaah, life is complicated! We can't deal with it without the Holy Priesthood of Law to talk to the Legal Gods for us and to interpret their Holy Verdicts from the patterns of fish-guts! Where would we be without their benevolent assistance! They work sooooo hard ruling us ... for our own good!"
And speaking of complexity of software: if programmers wrote programs the way lawyers make laws, a
would be written as a 20 pages of code, at least. They would make graduates of 3-month programming courses from diploma-mills look like Knuth and Dijkstra-level gurus.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with any justice or keeping corporations (legal constructs themselves - funny you mention them) or anyone really for that matter from doing harm or evil or anything of the sort. The same effect could have been achieved by much simpler laws, written in a way that does not require an anointed priest to "interpret" them for you.
One can write "killing a person is forbidden by law" or one can write "henceforth, section 12.3 notwithstanding, with the exception of points 1.3 and 1.23, in reference to clause 2-33, this passage nullifies the article 3.1, hereby replacing the passage 'if of and thereof' with 'if of or thereof' followed by ..." which is how nearly all laws are written. There is no conveivable reason to do so in this fashion other then creation of incomprehensible gibberish meant to offer employment for legal tea-leaf-readers-for-hire and room for maneuver for corrupt judges.
2900. Oh dear! I was sooo wrong! I mean, how did these people-loving geniuses manage to fit all of that deep thought into mere 2900 pages!?
Given that "not knowing the law is no excuse", I assume there will be a reprint of the whole thing distributed with every US newspaper and read live on TV any day now, won't it?
Surely, memorizing 2900 puny pages should be by now a mere trifle for the citizenry, what after having already memorized over a million of pages of existing "active" federal laws, not to mention state and city ordinances, no?
Or would they, per-chance, require some "guidance" and "interpretation" and "assistance" (for a itsy-bitsy tiny fee) from the legal priesthood with this?
I believe the lawyers are going to win no matter what.
In fact this is the whole point of byzantine "law" as featured in all "developed" countries and their associated parasitic, multi-trillion-dollar legal industries. It is no coincidence that most of the "lawmakers" world-over are former or current lawyers who very deliberately create laws in ways that benefit only their particular caste first and any supposed intended "social" effect is considered by them a mere excuse, an insignificant secondary concern. Just witness the recent 1100 page US "health reform" bill. Anyone who believes that its true purpose has anything whatsoever to do with "health" or "reform" rather then the lawyer-enrichment-program (followed closely by the lawyer-cum-lobbyist-enrichment-program, followed closely by lawyer-cum-insurance-company-CEO-enrichment-program ... ) should have his/her head examined.
Well, yes, it might be that there are cities in the US and Canada where my observation is not applicable as well as different commuting patterns where the stick has some conceivable advantage but by your own admission they are few and far between. In a typical North American city stick gets most of its users no performance advantage to speak of and it demands additional actions by the driver, which by any objective measure constitutes a net loss.
My personal experience is that under these conditions the use of manual transmission becomes a "style statement" rather then a decision predicated upon practicalities. And unfortunately this quickly leads to what one can only describe as "fanboyism" where all reason is left promptly behind to be replaced by emotions.
Manual transmissions have their place where the conditions either make them outperform automatics by a certain minimal margin (to offset the convenience factor) or in situations where they are outright required (racing etc). Having said so, even the most extreme users of manual transmissions, i.e. the racing crowd, long since abandoned pure manual transmissions and is now exclusively using electrically operated semi-automatics connected to wheel paddles (Formula 1 etc.) or up-down shifters (Rally etc.). This alone should give a hint to all of these desperate and rather belligerent manual transmission fashionistas.
Why don't you complain about the color of my socks too? Clearly you have nothing useful to add and the defense of the thugs in that Apache as well as that of the GP post is patently impossible with any arguments even approaching sanity. And so you are reduced to pathetic whining about my handle (one of reasons for which incidentally is to flush out idiots like you).
That is because most of such major "natural" monopolies (at least geography based) are pre-empted via the means of "eminent domain". No city today would allow a capitalist to own the only viable land access to it. The local government simply punches a hole through any such attempt to allow the denizens of the city an escape route.
Without "eminent domain", a wealthy industrialist could simply buy a circle of land around, say, Dallas and demand an astronomical toll to cross it. Such an action would have immediately created a "natural" monopoly, without any recourse on the part of the denizens of the city (note that he would have also owned rights to all air access above his land and tunnels below - today these are again examples of monopoly-busting "eminent domains").
Ah the usual apologist crap.
May I point out to you that AK47s are perfectly legal in Iraq and that pretty much every household has one?
Even if there were weapons held by one or two (out of at least a dozen) people, were they being used? Were they even pointed at some US asset that could even most remotely be in danger? (it took the ground forces 10 minutes to arrive on the scene of the slaughter and the Apache - according to its own gun sight readouts - was so far out that no small weapons fire could have even scratched it and that includes any conceivable variant of RPG-7 that the insurgents have). The journalists (without the quotes) in question had to use huge telephoto lenses to take pictures of the actual combat happening nearly a kilometer away.
In fact there is absolutely no action these people could have taken to not get blown up by some blood-thirsty American yahoos that would not get some apologists to crawl out of the woodwork to blather about "decision at the time" and "fog of war" and other nonsense. Their crime was simply breathing-air-while-an-Iraqi (a sub species of Homo-non-Americanus-Inferiorus) and therefore "legitimate" targets by mere association with the "bad guys" (i.e. every other Iraqi who dares to oppose the Righteous and Glorious Liberators, Bringers of Light, Shock and Awe).
They stand: they get shot for "aggressive posture", they lie down: "they are taking cover", they run away: "they are regrouping for counter-attack", they try to crawl away after getting their arms and legs blown off: "they are taking evasive action", they kneel and pray: "they are attempting communication with possible reinforcements" or "they are manipulating unseen devices between their legs", they arrive to help long-time good neighbors bleeding on the ground in the middle of their street: "reinforcements have arrived, light them up, Boys!". Their only choice once selected by some moron in a gunner seat of an Apache to be the Sacrifice to The Eternal Glory of America is to die, their families to die, their children to die, or all of them to die more painfully.
In short the murderous yahoos in the chopper, the vicious thugs at the command post with the TV monitors and the venomous, despicable apologists like you all pretty much agree on this point. Or "America #1 #1, Right or Wrong! Its these Iraqis own damn fault that we decided to play God to them! How dare they live in an America-made War Zone!? Serves them right whatever they get! Yiiiihaaaa!".
Any monopoly that was created due to geographical or physical constraints is a "natural" monopoly. For example a city in a desert built around a single oasis (which has a single owner) makes that person a de-facto monopolist as far as the supply of water is concerned - all the alternatives are orders of magnitude more expensive (no water to be had even in deep wells and a pipeline requires up-front multi-billion dollar investment as do any humidity recovery systems). Similar scenarios involve toll roadways in places where geography prevents building alternate routes, for example a location surrounded by mountain ranges with the only passable valley leading outside being owned by the said monopolist.
Note that to achieve a functional monopoly one does not have to prevent other means of achieving the same goal as the one being monopolized, only to create sufficiently expensive "barrier to entry" for all competitors. Thus while air travel is possible, even with the toll road priced at 100x the national average it still does not constitute "competition". Similarly with the water supply in the previous example.
Other examples involve finite resources such as radio frequencies (even without government involvement some sort of monopolization of certain most useful bands would have occured - lest no one could use any radio technology at all due to cross-talk and interference) and even artificial resources such as Internet where naturally self-consolidation occurs due to inherently centralizing technologies such as DNS and would have resulted in monopolies controlling these areas irrespective if they are private or governmental.
The explanation is obvious. You are simply forgetting that Iraq is a country full of newly "liberated" religious fanatics: the majority (i.e. Shias) hated Saddam (a secular Sunni) with a passion and still believe that any means whatsoever of getting rid of him to replace him with some sort of Shia Islamic Republic were justified. But at the same time they hate the guts of Americans for a long list of reasons, chief amongst them being that Americans are "dirty infidels" who dared to humiliate the "faithful". Hence the conflicting results. If the question asked was "would a meteor impact that blows up half of Iraq (as long as it kills all the Sunnis too) be justified to get rid of Saddam" their answer would have been cheerful, unqualified "yes!", which given the Shia numbers would have easily reached 47% of the vote.
Yes I did. And I hate the thing with a passion. If you are a teenage kid all about "speed" and "drifting" and stuff, or some professional 18 wheeler driver, stick is just a general nuissance in backed up, bumper to bumper city traffic. Every doofus out there with a stick in front of me or behind me is always late shifting (cause they always just have to go to neutral at every stop) into gear (usually followed by jerky, panicky jump forward) when the traffic gets moving.
Furthermore, stick requires you to have one hand pretty much reserved for shifting and therefore for all practical purposes, in the city where slowing down and starting up is constant, you end up effectively driving with one hand (which in the US is the left hand).
I could go on, but whining about people (a vast majority in North America) using something that is useful and convenient just because your "sporty" (and much cheaper and simpler to make - and that is the true reason why a lot of the world uses it) manual transmission tickles your "speed demon" sense is just plain stupid.
Subversion is merely a tactic during hostilities i.e. war.
I think a 128db klaxon, flashing fire-engine-style lights and a deep synthesized voice combining to something like "Auuugah! Auuugah! Warning! Warning! Undergarments Breach! Fluid levels critical! Eject! Eject! Abandon Depends! Auuuugah! Auuugah!" would be more in line with sound engineering practice...
Hold on.
Let me get this straight ... they've found 20,000 people downloading Uwe Boll's film?
If I were a defense lawyer, all I would do is play the thing for the judge - nay, I would insist that he sees it from beginning to end - and then I would watch the lawsuit getting dismissed with prejudice .... and all the poor sods sued ordered compensation for the mental anguish caused by mere insinuation of having downloaded the thing, all the involved lawyers getting disbarred, charged with cruelty to judges and odious crimes against humanity, declared terrorists etc and so on...
Well, that depends.
If he is in orbit above the opposite side of the planet, we are actually looking down on him. Or when in the John we are even peeing down or poo-pooing down or .... you get the idea.
Absolutely! Just follow the examples of IBM, Standard Oil, Ford Motors or perhaps a telco or two. Nothing seems as erection inducing for the CEOs and "free marketers" of all stripes as profits from being able to supply both your side and the enemy's in a war, surely. Because greed and profit is all that counts in this universe, no?
That is because all laws are Divine and Unassailable, clearly. For example, a law (of the time) stating that if a dark-skinned-non-person dares to drink from a water fountain clearly labeled "Whites Only" requires to be whipped witin an inch of his/her life, the only option of the 12 law-abiding Citizens in the jury box is to (oh-so-sorrowfully, tear-dropping-regretfully) convict.
Cue in a reporter interviewing juror "Corbets" after he steps out of the court-house and onto the square with the whipping-post: "Well, we didn't like it ... [muffled due to the sound of the whip and screams of agony in the background] .... but ... but ... the law" - here Corbets straightens up and puts his fist on his heart and his eye gleams - "said so. We had no choice. If we did not, the entire criminal justice system would be undermined!" - a visage of fear and terror enters Corbets' (and the reporter's) face at this ghastly thought ...
And then great cheering and applause from assorted Fascists and KKK members all around for jury-man Corbets raises from the lynch-mob on the square - for the great man Corbets understood that it is the letter of the law, not some flimsy concepts of "justice" or "right and wrong" that counts!
Well if the crooks running the scam tell you to do something, particularly if it enhances their power over everyone else (including you) and enriches them in the process ... well, that means of course that an upstanding, justice-loving Canadian citizen should obey immediately and then salute and sing Oh Canada while standing at attention, no?
Should we rename this place to Sheepland, baaaaah?
This alone nullifies the entire so-called "justice" system and is pretty much a license to a violent revolt. If juries do not (cannot in fact) know the law (because no one is capable of following the byzantine religious scripture that makes the Complete Encyclopedia Britannica look like a single copy of Cliff Notes) and at the same time the old canard of "not knowing the law is not an excuse" is applied to the defendant ... well, you work it out.
But this of course is a historical constant. Every corrupt political regime had this going on, Hitler and Stalin had their show trials, South American tin-pot dictators had their kangaroo courts, Middle-eastern "royalty" have their "creative" interpretation of Sharia law complete with hand-picked judges ... and the USA (and some other Western nations) have their multi-trillion-dollar "legal industry". In fact I think a tin-pot tyrant with his military "courts" is preferable because his ham-handed, crude method of application of evil is so obvious as contrasted to the oh-so-refined (and how profitable!) way of dispensation of evil that the Western "justice system" has evolved into.
Which of course is the very cause of the "terrorism" - by the US/Israeli definition of "terrorism", Polish and French Resistance movements were a bunch of "terrorists" too. Incidentally, "terroristen" was also the actual term used by the occupying Nazis ...
Israel has the "power" in the very same way all the other belligerent bullies have ... the Israelis can simply come to their senses and do something sane for a change. Their ability (and thus "power") to do so is far greater then that of the Palestinians simply because of their relative military position, finances etc. This is all pretty damn obvious, but like any good Israeli apologist you instead choose to engage in disingenuous (and blatantly erroneous) hair-splitting of the semantics of the word "power". Anything really to avoid facing the simple truth. Then again, this is par for the course ...
I also note that you've avoided facing the (again pretty obvious) consequences of your "proposals", which I was highlighting through all that sarcasm.
Again, more sophistry. The difference is that your "opinions" all involve enforcing brutal dictates on one (ethnically and culturally different from yours) side of the conflict without any regard for the opinions of those to be so "helped" by you and the likes of you. The reference to "white men" is historical, as it is the rather very white men who instigated the whole fiasco by first invading the area (the pastry-white nobles of the British Empire) and then the white men (or to be exact countries governed by them at the time - note the lovely admiration for this plan in the whole of Middle East and other Muslim nations) of the 1947 UN General Assembly enhanced the glorious cluster-fuck exponentially by installing the brand spanking new country for European Jewry there. And so in this case "white men" are seen (and justifiably so) as the least qualified to be helpful ... particularly in the form of more draconian mass purges and resettlements at gun-point which seems to be your favorite (and apparently only) strategy.
There is no need for any "assumptions" .. your words define you pretty accurately.
You would not recognize a coherent argument if you tripped over one and broke all your teeth...
Also how one can propose mass pogroms and deportations and expect "friendliness" for it from strangers eludes me ... perhaps you revolve in exclusively Zionist circles and thus you are so used to the echo-chamber effect that the real world comes as a shock to you.
Right. Enjoy burning those straw-men. This and sophistry seem to be your favorite hobbies ...
Oh give it up. When one talks about "Israel", "France", "USA" etc. doing something, it is clear that it is a reference to the people in power in these countries and not the abstract entities of "nations" themselves. And in the case of governments, single unified will is the usual outcome, be it a dictatorial decree or a result of a democratic vote.
Rarely do I get to see a more convoluted pretzel of cognitive dissonance.
So we should let all the serial murderers out because, as per your brilliant logic, they "do not want" to stop slashing prostitutes with machetes and therefore they, poor sods, are "powerless" to stop it, right?
Right, so the schoolyard bully has "no more" power than the nerd kid he is beating up for his lunch money as the fight can be stopped two ways, the bully can stop being a thieving jackass or the nerd can cough up his lunch money! Therefore, by your genius deduction, they are equals! Ah the glorious "equality" of power, Israel style!
Except of course in this entire disingenuous proposal the wholly arbitrary "changing of borders" as dictated by The Oh So Wise White Men from High Upon The Mountain would inevitably lead to far more violence - this time involving Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as additional direct, as opposed to merely passively hostile, combatants!
You are definitely a Supremacist. Racism may or may not play a role in that, but that is largely irrelevant. You are a Supremacist because you believe that one group of nations (Western ones in this case) is somehow more entitled to making decisions for denizens of other nations of a different cultural and ethnic background without any concern whatsoever about the opinions of those to be so treated. And all of that in a situation where one side in the conflict is much closer to your cultural background (i.e. Israel which is nearly wholly settled by people recently arrived from Europe and the US).
This is not much different from what Germans were doing, believing that their "superior" culture was somehow a justification for subjugation of all "inferior" others, "for their own good" - with the exception of Jews whom they designated the Bogeymen #1. Racial elements were added to the Nazi doctrine merely as an explanation for that "superiority".
Rejecting Supremacist arguments and philosophies out of hand is hardly "debasing oneself".
That is actually a very definition of a "state", i.e. each call to "upload" a texture, vertex etc alters the state of the GPU. That state is preserved between calls, i.e. it is persistent from the point of view of the API.
That is merely the non-GPU portion of the state of the API. Sure, that portion can be removed but the fundamental state-oriented properties of the GPU cannot be so easily gotten rid of and so in the end the API as a whole will remain stateful no matter what you do.
What you guys are talking about is more independent rendering pipelines that can be utilized in parallel with each other (and results of which can fed back into the main pipeline as textures, stereo views and what not) rather then "contexts" or "stateless" API. The GPU still contains all the "state" data, i.e. the current textures, light positions and what not that are used in the final "render" call for each pipeline, but you simply want to access them independently...
None of this alters the fundamental state-based nature of the GPU.