You might have to spend $600.00 or whatever it is to get Photoshop, and get used to the idea that you'll have to run it in Vista whether you want it or not.
Or you could run photoshop OS X, the one true platform.
Being able to simply say "the order in which these tasks are made doesn't matter" lets you run a lot of tasks in parallel right there.
Mucking around with language design and implementation highlights some of the deep problems that the "parallize-everything" crowd often don't know about.
In your example, the loop can only be efficently parallized if it doesn't have any side-effects. If any variables are written to out of scope of the loop, then they are exposed to race conditions in both the read and write direction. It's still possible to parallize the code if the machine code doesn't take advantage of the memory model of your architecture, and no other thread is modifying those variables, and it doesn't matter in which order the variables are modified, and modifications are atomic. As an implementation detail, memory reads and write will be signficiantly slower, and sychronization of atomic operations is also not without cost. So much in fact, that you'd probably be better off just running the loop on a single thread. Your code will be more predictable regardless.
At the moment, it seems that effective parallization requires some planning and effort on behalf of the programmer. The bugs can be extraordinarily subtle, impossible to debug and difficult to reason about. Expect single-threaded programming models to be around for a long time.
Like they can't take a single bit of criticism of their precious middle kingdom and it's 5000 (actually 50) year great history.
They can't take criticism, because they are suppressing so much shame. It's the natural human condition - when you feel that pain inside of you, you reach for pleasant dreams and feelings of superiority to make it go away. The louder the racist/nationalist, the bigger the mental image they are attached to. People create that mental image for a reason.
Looking at it from our individualistic perspective, it seems like abused.
On the other hand, from a Chinese collectivist, 'end's justify the means' perspective, why does it matter if 1.5 million drones are relocated?
For some reason people don't own up to one perspective being better or worse than the other. This mediocrity in critical thinking presumably greases the wheels, so I'm not saying it's a bad thing.
However... the Chinese perspective is equally valid if, and only if, conflict is an equally valid activity as harmony.
I don't understand this highly negative reaction. People are disenfranchised with the government, so surely it's a good thing that the government wants to find better ways for people to have a voice? It's really a question of communication, not control. That is, unless you believe this is a veiled way for government thought police to get into your brain. (Dons tinfoil hat.)
Your reaction reminds me of the typical paranoid position. If someone helps you they are interfering unnecessarily. If they don't help you, then they are conspiring to do you in. If they offer you the choice then they are manipulating you.
So the real question is - how would you like your opinion heard on issues that matter to you, such as the M$ hemogony or network neutrality? Or are you willing to take a stand and say that an ideal unobtrusive government does not need your opinion.
What you are talking about quickly becomes the rule of the strong, and an honour culture. I most definitely do *not* want to live in an honour culture. The invention of trial by jury was a significant leap forward in the human endeavor. Same with the separation of powers.
So instead of teaching others to fear you, perhaps one could teach others to respect you because of who you are. The first will manifest in conflict, and the second in harmony.
While the US certainly has its indoctrination process, they still fundamentally believe in the right of free speech and assembly. It is interesting that china apologists most frequently reach for the "you're bad too" argument. If something happens and you're critical to a person, and then they look at you coldly and say "you're no better than me" - that highlights a pretty poor moral development. Kohlberg's stages of moral development would rank this at stage 2, self-interest orientation. That's one level better than "obedience and punishment orientation".
There is a relationship between morality and harmony, and transitively to happiness. Concerned onlookers see Chinese people suffering so much that they risk there livelihoods to express their bitter dissatisfaction. Other Chinese people are beating them into shape, and in turn, reinforcing the idea of destroying problems, instead of recognizing opportunities. This is a vicious cycle and the suffering is completely unnecessary. Still, it's impossible to talk to most Chinese about it, because they tend to be so defensive, and quickly resort to attacking the misdeeds of others. It seems they don't want some basic intelligence to interfere with their misery.
If you are in doubt about the types of things that Chinese censorship tries to cover up, then it is worth exploring why they'd bother doing it in the first place. But that's dangerous talk within China, isn't that so? But if you just let go of the whole damn thing and you'll be fine. It's simple - you treat each other well, and then there's nothing to cover up, and nobody gets pissed off.
China can best prove itself a great nation by showing that it knows how to live in harmony.
The author is basically saying, the system is flawed because it does not take into account certain facts about human nature,
I'd argue that it's impossible to build a system that will work when people don't respect it. For example - the third-party payola loophole farce. Another example - democracy might work when people respect it, but the rules mean nothing to "I have a PhD in violence" Mugabe.
In essenence, the rules themselves are only useful if they are followed in spirit. When they are not followed in spirit, then we need more clarifying rules until we come down to some basic rules that are followed in spirit. That's why are law books are so large - and it's still not large enough for people like Darl McBride... proof that the more we disrespect each other, the bigger the rule book needs to become.
The traditional solution is to turn your back to people fail to follow the spirit of the rules. You just tell them that they can go bother someone else. You can't force other people to learn ethics, and there'll always be that fuzzy area where the amorale can do horrible but legal things like deliberately spread disinformation about global warming. These people should be charged with treason, because they are subverting the public good.
When an untrustworthy entity enters a situation where a certain level of trust is already assumed (M$ and ISO), then the rulebook needs to catch up *a lot*.
Lately the world's been trying to undermine China who is looking like the next superpower. Western leaders are continually meeting with the Dalai Lama to make them mad. Soon there will be Olympic boycotts.
Western leaders meet with the Dalai Lama because he is a religious leader to many people, and an advocate of peace. He does have the Nobel Peace Prize. That was not awarded as some anti-chinese conspiracy. Not everything about the Dalai Lama is about China - despite what the Chinese will try to assert. Just another example of how China does it's best to control-control-control *our* dialog. It is extremely ego-centric.
If the Chinese had done *nothing wrong*, then they would have *nothing* to censor, and would not be concerned about managing our perception of them. Their censorship in the Tibet matter speaks volumes.
There must be some cognitive disfunction when we talk about free-thinking. For example, I've seen Chinese people get extremely defensive when you talk about censorship. This country lashes out at the west for ridiculous things, such as talking to people. What type of paranoid person tries to control who other people talk to. Do the Chinese not understand free association?
The west has made many mistakes on human rights issues, and wishes that China would learn from history. So far, the Chinese have been busy revising history to create some sort of false image - a situation analogous to a person who dwells in dreams.
The west doesn't want to undermine China at all. The west just doesn't want to be tarnished by chinese crimes against it's own citizens while it greedily buys chinese goods. All this violence and censorship is entirely unnecessary.
Marketing will work out how best to charge the customer to maximise revenue for a product. There is a lot of wisdom in that - however - the best companies repect their customers for a reason.
Selling crippleware is an artifact of really poor thinking. It is much more sane to either sell the feature, or not. All those versions of Vista are confusing the market right? Well, perhaps M$ sees themselves selling "Windows", and you add on the features you want. In this way they might get more revenue by selling to customers precisely what they want... effectively having many *hundreds* of price-points, suitable for all of their customers.
None of your suggestions will fly, so long as OS X, Linux-desktop and friends are around the corner.
The real cost is in all of the different GUI elements that want to use event information and then respond in turn with their own events. This creates a deterministic event propagation model where one thing leads to another. Parallel programming just makes the deterministic aspect harder, while gaining pretty much nothing on the propagation side of things. That's because Widget A must finish processing the event before Widget B gets it's hands on it.
GUI toolkits have evolved towards dynamic encapsulation of logic for a reason. QT even went to the onerous trouble of extending the C++ language such that signals and slots could be used instead of clunky callbacks. GUI programming is much more straight-forward in dynamic languages such as smalltalk and flex.
Static binding of event callbacks might save you a few hundred nano seconds, at the expense of a few 1000 extra lines of code. And, you still haven't made the argument that performance can be improved by threading the event propagation model.
There are two problems: thread sychronization, and race conditions.
Race conditions
A modern CPU architecture uses multiple levels of cache, which aggrivate the race condition scenario. For a programmer to code multi-threaded code, and "not-worry", then the architecture must always read and write every value to memory. This worst case scenario is only needed in a tiny fraction of cases. So the compiler can do much better by working with the memory model of the architecture, instead of assuming that no memory model is in place.
Any significant improvement in speed will require solving the race condition problem. I believe research into transactional memory may be the way to go - but it is still half the speed of normal memory access.
The synchronization problem
This requires that the programmer reason about multiple threads (at least two). It doesn't really matter what buildling blocks you're using, you simply must be aware that two pieces of code are effectively executing at the same time - or at least their cpu slices are interwoven. This type of reasoning significantly raises the bar for writing bug-free code, because a whole new class of subtle problems arise. The mind must wrap itself around something that is simply more complex, and we have trouble enough with single threaded programs.
I like the flex/javascript solution. Just one thread - with asynchronous-like behaviour through events. It means there are no race conditions, and you can get enough async behaviour to get the job done. I hope, in the future, that both these technologies allow you to create a seperate "process" (thread but with different memory context) that executes asychronously and returns the results on the main event queue. It's a bit clunky, but at the same time it's much more idiot proof. And I'm speaking as someone who's done a reasonable amount of parallel programming.
M$ bought a huge chunk of Corel, and probably control the company these days. I'm never seen any analysis of the fallout of this deal, it was a while ago.
on the bumfuck other side of the planet from everyone else
I believe that the prime-ministerial term is "ass-end of the world". A proud moment for all Australians =), although, Colin Carpenter made us prouder when he said that Melbourne was the Paris end of the ass-end of the world.
Your point is well taken - the paper's findings are not bullet proof.
But your point about the "gods of research" is disingenuous... that is unless you believe that one is better off putting their faith in intelligent designers and corporate-science-sophistry. It's true that science could be *more* conservative with declaring findings, but really it's a question of who is more credible with the facts, and more pliable when it comes to standing corrected.
A siddha is someone who recognizes the illusion of believing in ones own thoughts. For example - you seem to believe in something right? Perhaps you think you're correct on some point? A siddha recognizes such things as an illusion. Believing you're correct about something is revealed by a subtle pervasive discomfort that something isn't quite right.
In tantric buddhism, there is a lot of talk about wisdom energies. These are based on deep drives that can be (I believe) traced back to the reptilian brain (see evolutionary psychology). There are two aspects to these energies - the male and female. The division is made, perhaps, because of subconscious obsessions with sex-roles that are imprinted on us when we are infants. Regardless of the origins of such a practice, the male is associated with action, and the female is associated with the wisdom that directs that action. Taken together, the male and female aspects are often shown in wrathful form and in sexual union with each other. The female is called the "consort" of the male. This points to a male orientation in the Tibetan culture.
Tantric buddhists practice visualizing various imaginary deities, to connect themselves with the deepest levels of their own consciousness. They imagine the confused and wise aspects of, for example, anger.
Youth has a role to play in these imaginations, simply because human beings associate youth with playfulness and purity. For example, a common practice is to visualize oneself as an eight-year old boy, who is perfectly pure and wise.
These practices are visualizations. I'm sure some crazy monk somewhere has something horrible because of their own neurosis - but one bad egg doesn't make every egg in the world bad.
It is an absurd misrepresentation to look at paintings that represent the inner workings of ones own mind, and then accuse people of doing something in the outer world. Tibetan monks and nuns are chaste unless they are married. If they are married, then they monogamous. Sure some people break societal rules like that - but they do so at the risk of being ostracized by society.
Most of the evidence from the 60s and 70s comes from eye-witness accounts, as well as letters. Mao himself did not deny that atrocities were being committed, and said that it was for the good of the Tibetan people. They were being purged and transformed into communists. This is how he did it:
Monks and nuns were forcibly married and/or raped. Many monks were imprisoned; some were castrated and killed; a few abbots were killed by having their ears drilled with a brace and bit and molten lead poured into their brains, or by having their eyes scooped out with spoons and their brains scooped out through the eye sockets. Popular piety was suppressed. Pilgrimage, prostration, prayer flags on one's house, or speaking "OM Mani Padme Hum" -- all brought death. Perhaps a million tibetans, out of six million, were killed or exiled. Tens of thousands of widows were rape-married to Chinese soldiers.
If you really are interested in learning about what Chinese censorship is covering up, then I can recommend a book by a chinese woman called "Wild Swans". This book is not about Tibet, but rather about life for a Han Chinese woman. Chinese government atrocities are not limited to Tibet - they are widespread and ongoing.
Perhaps you think I've had my thinking adjusted by anti-communist propaganda? It's just that the Chinese are the ones who practice widespread censorship and historical revisionism. We do not have thought police where I live. I can think and say what I want about my government - and the government must account for its actions at election time. Chinese people who live here recognize that. Those that I've spoken to do not want to go back to China, precisely because of thought police.
Here's a link to a video of Chinese soldiers murdering Tibetans fleeing the regime. If China was doing the Tibetans such a grand favour, then why do soldiers have to kill people to encourage them not to flee their own homes?
Well it sounds to me like you're in some kind of hell. You think you got all your logic worked out, and you think you're in heaven, but to be honest - it sounds like you're suffering a lot right now. Suffering is a message about your life - it comes from within.
It is painfully obvious that a moral person does not justify their misdeeds by pointing to the misdeeds of others. You can never justify misdeeds - that is why they are called misdeeds. The world is what we make it. Lets make it a better place with human dignity. That means respecting other peoples thinking and livelihood.
Well, the Dalai Lama wrote to Mao, requesting that Mao order chinese atrocities to stop. Mao did not bother denying the atrocities and said they were good for the Tibetans cultural transformation.
Whatever land claims China had over Tibet, it interesting how someone could possibly use that to justify rape and murder. I guess the Chinese have their fear of free thinking, otherwise they wouldn't bother censor and revising history. Why do you care so much about controlling other people's thinking? Wake up.
Misconduct is obvious. It means that if are going to have sexual relations with someone, that you are true to them. It also means that you do not cause harm to others by interfering in their relationships. You also to not cause harm to others with inappropriate behaviour in the workplace and elsewhere.
Or what? Or there will be violence, is my guess.
There are other ways to solve problems than violence. Where I live, people talk to each other. There is also significant trust in the legal system. Look to Newfoundland in Canada, which has the lowest death rate of pretty much any nation.
Obviously not as violently as the Chinese army; but at the core of it, the intention is the same: you get to decide how she will express her sexuality.
By western standards, it is obviously unfair for a father and mother to dictate the sexual activities of their sons and daughters until they are married. Nonetheless, if a young women wants to leave her culture she won't be locked up as is common in some cultures. I know a traditional tibetan lady who recently got married and first moved to the west just a few years ago. She has lived a very different life to western women, and is also very kind.
Have you ever met a native Tibetan? I have met many. The views of Kim Lewis are one data point. I'm sure there were plenty of Tibetan people who were disenfrancised.
I am 100% sure, the Chinese army would not do that.
Then you have rose tinted glasses about armies and war. The Dalai lama wrote to Mao saying basically: "How can the tibetan people accept rule as liberation when their homes are being burnt, and people are being raped and murdered." Mao wrote back (officially) and said that these crimes would subside, and it's all for the best of the Tibetan people.
Tantra means "continuity", and points to some sort of continuity of experience. Tantra is practiced because it is considered expedient in fulfilling the bodhisattva vow. Bodhisattva means "enlightened hero", and the vow is about working *ceaselessly* for the benefit of *all* sentient beings. If there were such a thing as an evil spirit, the boshisattva would be concerned about its liberation from suffering.
The famous Tibetan yogi, Milarepa, practiced black magic when he was a young man. He became ashamed and afraid that he was destined for a hell realm. He then sought out the great translator Marpa and asked to be taught how to work with his bad karma. Milarepa put aside all evil deeds and reconciled himself with his past, and went on to right thousands of songs about liberation from suffering. His story highlights two things about Tibetan buddhism: + Wrong deeds of the past (such as using black magic) can be rectified + Evil is not an inherit trait like goodness. If you aspire to be evil, you will suffer, but if you aspire to be good, you can find liberation from suffering.
Your understanding of tantric buddhism is misguided at best. It is completely plausible that someone can believe that they are knowledgeable about a subject, yet completely miss the mark. That's a topic addressed by cognitive bias.
Slashdot Mirror
You might have to spend $600.00 or whatever it is to get Photoshop, and get used to the idea that you'll have to run it in Vista whether you want it or not.
Or you could run photoshop OS X, the one true platform.
Perhaps it'll work on X11
Being able to simply say "the order in which these tasks are made doesn't matter" lets you run a lot of tasks in parallel right there.
Mucking around with language design and implementation highlights some of the deep problems that the "parallize-everything" crowd often don't know about.
In your example, the loop can only be efficently parallized if it doesn't have any side-effects. If any variables are written to out of scope of the loop, then they are exposed to race conditions in both the read and write direction. It's still possible to parallize the code if the machine code doesn't take advantage of the memory model of your architecture, and no other thread is modifying those variables, and it doesn't matter in which order the variables are modified, and modifications are atomic. As an implementation detail, memory reads and write will be signficiantly slower, and sychronization of atomic operations is also not without cost. So much in fact, that you'd probably be better off just running the loop on a single thread. Your code will be more predictable regardless.
At the moment, it seems that effective parallization requires some planning and effort on behalf of the programmer. The bugs can be extraordinarily subtle, impossible to debug and difficult to reason about. Expect single-threaded programming models to be around for a long time.
Like they can't take a single bit of criticism of their precious middle kingdom and it's 5000 (actually 50) year great history.
They can't take criticism, because they are suppressing so much shame. It's the natural human condition - when you feel that pain inside of you, you reach for pleasant dreams and feelings of superiority to make it go away. The louder the racist/nationalist, the bigger the mental image they are attached to. People create that mental image for a reason.
Looking at it from our individualistic perspective, it seems like abused.
On the other hand, from a Chinese collectivist, 'end's justify the means' perspective, why does it matter if 1.5 million drones are relocated?
For some reason people don't own up to one perspective being better or worse than the other. This mediocrity in critical thinking presumably greases the wheels, so I'm not saying it's a bad thing.
However... the Chinese perspective is equally valid if, and only if, conflict is an equally valid activity as harmony.
I don't understand this highly negative reaction. People are disenfranchised with the government, so surely it's a good thing that the government wants to find better ways for people to have a voice? It's really a question of communication, not control. That is, unless you believe this is a veiled way for government thought police to get into your brain. (Dons tinfoil hat.)
Your reaction reminds me of the typical paranoid position. If someone helps you they are interfering unnecessarily. If they don't help you, then they are conspiring to do you in. If they offer you the choice then they are manipulating you.
So the real question is - how would you like your opinion heard on issues that matter to you, such as the M$ hemogony or network neutrality? Or are you willing to take a stand and say that an ideal unobtrusive government does not need your opinion.
Simplify the rules, simplify the consequences.
What you are talking about quickly becomes the rule of the strong, and an honour culture. I most definitely do *not* want to live in an honour culture. The invention of trial by jury was a significant leap forward in the human endeavor. Same with the separation of powers.
So instead of teaching others to fear you, perhaps one could teach others to respect you because of who you are. The first will manifest in conflict, and the second in harmony.
While the US certainly has its indoctrination process, they still fundamentally believe in the right of free speech and assembly. It is interesting that china apologists most frequently reach for the "you're bad too" argument. If something happens and you're critical to a person, and then they look at you coldly and say "you're no better than me" - that highlights a pretty poor moral development. Kohlberg's stages of moral development would rank this at stage 2, self-interest orientation. That's one level better than "obedience and punishment orientation".
There is a relationship between morality and harmony, and transitively to happiness. Concerned onlookers see Chinese people suffering so much that they risk there livelihoods to express their bitter dissatisfaction. Other Chinese people are beating them into shape, and in turn, reinforcing the idea of destroying problems, instead of recognizing opportunities. This is a vicious cycle and the suffering is completely unnecessary. Still, it's impossible to talk to most Chinese about it, because they tend to be so defensive, and quickly resort to attacking the misdeeds of others. It seems they don't want some basic intelligence to interfere with their misery.
If you are in doubt about the types of things that Chinese censorship tries to cover up, then it is worth exploring why they'd bother doing it in the first place. But that's dangerous talk within China, isn't that so? But if you just let go of the whole damn thing and you'll be fine. It's simple - you treat each other well, and then there's nothing to cover up, and nobody gets pissed off.
China can best prove itself a great nation by showing that it knows how to live in harmony.
The author is basically saying, the system is flawed because it does not take into account certain facts about human nature,
I'd argue that it's impossible to build a system that will work when people don't respect it. For example - the third-party payola loophole farce. Another example - democracy might work when people respect it, but the rules mean nothing to "I have a PhD in violence" Mugabe.
In essenence, the rules themselves are only useful if they are followed in spirit. When they are not followed in spirit, then we need more clarifying rules until we come down to some basic rules that are followed in spirit. That's why are law books are so large - and it's still not large enough for people like Darl McBride... proof that the more we disrespect each other, the bigger the rule book needs to become.
The traditional solution is to turn your back to people fail to follow the spirit of the rules. You just tell them that they can go bother someone else. You can't force other people to learn ethics, and there'll always be that fuzzy area where the amorale can do horrible but legal things like deliberately spread disinformation about global warming. These people should be charged with treason, because they are subverting the public good.
When an untrustworthy entity enters a situation where a certain level of trust is already assumed (M$ and ISO), then the rulebook needs to catch up *a lot*.
Lately the world's been trying to undermine China who is looking like the next superpower. Western leaders are continually meeting with the Dalai Lama to make them mad. Soon there will be Olympic boycotts.
Western leaders meet with the Dalai Lama because he is a religious leader to many people, and an advocate of peace. He does have the Nobel Peace Prize. That was not awarded as some anti-chinese conspiracy. Not everything about the Dalai Lama is about China - despite what the Chinese will try to assert. Just another example of how China does it's best to control-control-control *our* dialog. It is extremely ego-centric.
If the Chinese had done *nothing wrong*, then they would have *nothing* to censor, and would not be concerned about managing our perception of them. Their censorship in the Tibet matter speaks volumes.
There must be some cognitive disfunction when we talk about free-thinking. For example, I've seen Chinese people get extremely defensive when you talk about censorship. This country lashes out at the west for ridiculous things, such as talking to people. What type of paranoid person tries to control who other people talk to. Do the Chinese not understand free association?
The west has made many mistakes on human rights issues, and wishes that China would learn from history. So far, the Chinese have been busy revising history to create some sort of false image - a situation analogous to a person who dwells in dreams.
The west doesn't want to undermine China at all. The west just doesn't want to be tarnished by chinese crimes against it's own citizens while it greedily buys chinese goods. All this violence and censorship is entirely unnecessary.
Marketing will work out how best to charge the customer to maximise revenue for a product. There is a lot of wisdom in that - however - the best companies repect their customers for a reason.
Selling crippleware is an artifact of really poor thinking. It is much more sane to either sell the feature, or not. All those versions of Vista are confusing the market right? Well, perhaps M$ sees themselves selling "Windows", and you add on the features you want. In this way they might get more revenue by selling to customers precisely what they want... effectively having many *hundreds* of price-points, suitable for all of their customers.
None of your suggestions will fly, so long as OS X, Linux-desktop and friends are around the corner.
The real cost is in all of the different GUI elements that want to use event information and then respond in turn with their own events. This creates a deterministic event propagation model where one thing leads to another. Parallel programming just makes the deterministic aspect harder, while gaining pretty much nothing on the propagation side of things. That's because Widget A must finish processing the event before Widget B gets it's hands on it.
GUI toolkits have evolved towards dynamic encapsulation of logic for a reason. QT even went to the onerous trouble of extending the C++ language such that signals and slots could be used instead of clunky callbacks. GUI programming is much more straight-forward in dynamic languages such as smalltalk and flex.
Static binding of event callbacks might save you a few hundred nano seconds, at the expense of a few 1000 extra lines of code. And, you still haven't made the argument that performance can be improved by threading the event propagation model.
There are two problems: thread sychronization, and race conditions.
Race conditions
A modern CPU architecture uses multiple levels of cache, which aggrivate the race condition scenario. For a programmer to code multi-threaded code, and "not-worry", then the architecture must always read and write every value to memory. This worst case scenario is only needed in a tiny fraction of cases. So the compiler can do much better by working with the memory model of the architecture, instead of assuming that no memory model is in place.
Any significant improvement in speed will require solving the race condition problem. I believe research into transactional memory may be the way to go - but it is still half the speed of normal memory access.
The synchronization problem
This requires that the programmer reason about multiple threads (at least two). It doesn't really matter what buildling blocks you're using, you simply must be aware that two pieces of code are effectively executing at the same time - or at least their cpu slices are interwoven. This type of reasoning significantly raises the bar for writing bug-free code, because a whole new class of subtle problems arise. The mind must wrap itself around something that is simply more complex, and we have trouble enough with single threaded programs.
I like the flex/javascript solution. Just one thread - with asynchronous-like behaviour through events. It means there are no race conditions, and you can get enough async behaviour to get the job done. I hope, in the future, that both these technologies allow you to create a seperate "process" (thread but with different memory context) that executes asychronously and returns the results on the main event queue. It's a bit clunky, but at the same time it's much more idiot proof. And I'm speaking as someone who's done a reasonable amount of parallel programming.
Name a single real world problem that doesn't parallelize.
Handling event propagation through a hierachy of user interface elements.
M$ bought a huge chunk of Corel, and probably control the company these days. I'm never seen any analysis of the fallout of this deal, it was a while ago.
on the bumfuck other side of the planet from everyone else
I believe that the prime-ministerial term is "ass-end of the world". A proud moment for all Australians =), although, Colin Carpenter made us prouder when he said that Melbourne was the Paris end of the ass-end of the world.
Your point is well taken - the paper's findings are not bullet proof.
But your point about the "gods of research" is disingenuous... that is unless you believe that one is better off putting their faith in intelligent designers and corporate-science-sophistry. It's true that science could be *more* conservative with declaring findings, but really it's a question of who is more credible with the facts, and more pliable when it comes to standing corrected.
A siddha is someone who recognizes the illusion of believing in ones own thoughts. For example - you seem to believe in something right? Perhaps you think you're correct on some point? A siddha recognizes such things as an illusion. Believing you're correct about something is revealed by a subtle pervasive discomfort that something isn't quite right.
In tantric buddhism, there is a lot of talk about wisdom energies. These are based on deep drives that can be (I believe) traced back to the reptilian brain (see evolutionary psychology). There are two aspects to these energies - the male and female. The division is made, perhaps, because of subconscious obsessions with sex-roles that are imprinted on us when we are infants. Regardless of the origins of such a practice, the male is associated with action, and the female is associated with the wisdom that directs that action. Taken together, the male and female aspects are often shown in wrathful form and in sexual union with each other. The female is called the "consort" of the male. This points to a male orientation in the Tibetan culture.
Tantric buddhists practice visualizing various imaginary deities, to connect themselves with the deepest levels of their own consciousness. They imagine the confused and wise aspects of, for example, anger.
Youth has a role to play in these imaginations, simply because human beings associate youth with playfulness and purity. For example, a common practice is to visualize oneself as an eight-year old boy, who is perfectly pure and wise.
These practices are visualizations. I'm sure some crazy monk somewhere has something horrible because of their own neurosis - but one bad egg doesn't make every egg in the world bad.
It is an absurd misrepresentation to look at paintings that represent the inner workings of ones own mind, and then accuse people of doing something in the outer world. Tibetan monks and nuns are chaste unless they are married. If they are married, then they monogamous. Sure some people break societal rules like that - but they do so at the risk of being ostracized by society.
Most of the evidence from the 60s and 70s comes from eye-witness accounts, as well as letters. Mao himself did not deny that atrocities were being committed, and said that it was for the good of the Tibetan people. They were being purged and transformed into communists. This is how he did it:
Monks and nuns were forcibly married and/or raped. Many monks were imprisoned; some were castrated and killed; a few abbots were killed by having their ears drilled with a brace and bit and molten lead poured into their brains, or by having their eyes scooped out with spoons and their brains scooped out through the eye sockets. Popular piety was suppressed. Pilgrimage, prostration, prayer flags on one's house, or speaking "OM Mani Padme Hum" -- all brought death. Perhaps a million tibetans, out of six million, were killed or exiled. Tens of thousands of widows were rape-married to Chinese soldiers.
If you really are interested in learning about what Chinese censorship is covering up, then I can recommend a book by a chinese woman called "Wild Swans". This book is not about Tibet, but rather about life for a Han Chinese woman. Chinese government atrocities are not limited to Tibet - they are widespread and ongoing.
Perhaps you think I've had my thinking adjusted by anti-communist propaganda? It's just that the Chinese are the ones who practice widespread censorship and historical revisionism. We do not have thought police where I live. I can think and say what I want about my government - and the government must account for its actions at election time. Chinese people who live here recognize that. Those that I've spoken to do not want to go back to China, precisely because of thought police.
Here's a link to a video of Chinese soldiers murdering Tibetans fleeing the regime. If China was doing the Tibetans such a grand favour, then why do soldiers have to kill people to encourage them not to flee their own homes?
How does this sound to you!
Well it sounds to me like you're in some kind of hell. You think you got all your logic worked out, and you think you're in heaven, but to be honest - it sounds like you're suffering a lot right now. Suffering is a message about your life - it comes from within.
It is painfully obvious that a moral person does not justify their misdeeds by pointing to the misdeeds of others. You can never justify misdeeds - that is why they are called misdeeds. The world is what we make it. Lets make it a better place with human dignity. That means respecting other peoples thinking and livelihood.
Evidence??
Well, the Dalai Lama wrote to Mao, requesting that Mao order chinese atrocities to stop. Mao did not bother denying the atrocities and said they were good for the Tibetans cultural transformation.
Whatever land claims China had over Tibet, it interesting how someone could possibly use that to justify rape and murder. I guess the Chinese have their fear of free thinking, otherwise they wouldn't bother censor and revising history. Why do you care so much about controlling other people's thinking? Wake up.
What's "misconduct"?
Misconduct is obvious. It means that if are going to have sexual relations with someone, that you are true to them. It also means that you do not cause harm to others by interfering in their relationships. You also to not cause harm to others with inappropriate behaviour in the workplace and elsewhere.
Or what? Or there will be violence, is my guess.
There are other ways to solve problems than violence. Where I live, people talk to each other. There is also significant trust in the legal system. Look to Newfoundland in Canada, which has the lowest death rate of pretty much any nation.
Obviously not as violently as the Chinese army; but at the core of it, the intention is the same: you get to decide how she will express her sexuality.
By western standards, it is obviously unfair for a father and mother to dictate the sexual activities of their sons and daughters until they are married. Nonetheless, if a young women wants to leave her culture she won't be locked up as is common in some cultures. I know a traditional tibetan lady who recently got married and first moved to the west just a few years ago. She has lived a very different life to western women, and is also very kind.
Have you ever met a native Tibetan? I have met many. The views of Kim Lewis are one data point. I'm sure there were plenty of Tibetan people who were disenfrancised.
I am 100% sure, the Chinese army would not do that.
Then you have rose tinted glasses about armies and war. The Dalai lama wrote to Mao saying basically: "How can the tibetan people accept rule as liberation when their homes are being burnt, and people are being raped and murdered." Mao wrote back (officially) and said that these crimes would subside, and it's all for the best of the Tibetan people.
Tantra means "continuity", and points to some sort of continuity of experience. Tantra is practiced because it is considered expedient in fulfilling the bodhisattva vow. Bodhisattva means "enlightened hero", and the vow is about working *ceaselessly* for the benefit of *all* sentient beings. If there were such a thing as an evil spirit, the boshisattva would be concerned about its liberation from suffering.
The famous Tibetan yogi, Milarepa, practiced black magic when he was a young man. He became ashamed and afraid that he was destined for a hell realm. He then sought out the great translator Marpa and asked to be taught how to work with his bad karma. Milarepa put aside all evil deeds and reconciled himself with his past, and went on to right thousands of songs about liberation from suffering. His story highlights two things about Tibetan buddhism:
+ Wrong deeds of the past (such as using black magic) can be rectified
+ Evil is not an inherit trait like goodness. If you aspire to be evil, you will suffer, but if you aspire to be good, you can find liberation from suffering.
Your understanding of tantric buddhism is misguided at best. It is completely plausible that someone can believe that they are knowledgeable about a subject, yet completely miss the mark. That's a topic addressed by cognitive bias.