3. If the cells that precede the formation of a human being that will never grow to become even a fetus, much less a fully formed infant, can be used to save lives
Why will these never grow to become a fetus or a fully formed infant? Because their lives are cut off. I don't know where you get the 80% figure for zygotes failing to implant- the research I've seen quotes something in the range of 1/3 or so- but even granting your figure, the fact that some fertilized embryos die naturally doesn't provide any justification for killing them by the boatload for research which, despite all the messianic talk from Democratic politicians looking to make political hay since 2001, hasn't shown that using embryonic cells rather than adult cells will result in major cures.
4. All of these things can be taken into consideration without devaluing conscious human life, because conscious human life this is not.
So the only human life that matters is conscious human life? The next time you fall asleep it's time to harvest your organs.
And besides, we can get plenty of cells from elsewhere so the debate is now largely moot save for those few situations where adult cells may not suffice.
If that's so, why the profane attacks on those who think we ought to tread carefully in using embryonic cells?
Just change your prefs- under Index/General uncheck "Beta Index" and check "simple design" and "low bandwidth." With those prefs Slashdot loads almost instantly on my somewhat aged machine (P4 2.4) and is still usable on a 700MHz P3.
Apple isn't claiming their entire rendering engine is 30x as fast as IE's Trident and 3x as fast as FF's Gecko- they're saying their JavaScript implementation is 30x as fast as IE's and 3x as fast as FF's (that would be the SpiderMonkey 3.0.x JS performance, not the 3.1 Tracemonkey performance which is also a lot faster than 3.0.x). That's an entirely reasonable claim.
SSDs gradually gain more and more sophisticated controllers which do more and more to try to make the SSD seem like an ordinary hard drive, but at the end of the day the differences are great enough that they can't all be plastered over that way (the fragmentation/long term use problems the story linked to are a good example). I know that (at present- this could and should be fixed) making these things run on a regular hard drive interface and tolerate being used with a regular FS is important for Windows compatibility, but it seems like a lot of cost could be avoided and a lot of performance gained by having a more direct flash interface and using flash-specific filesystems like UBIFS, YAFFS2, or LogFS. I have to wonder why vendors aren't pursuing that path.
Already there are lots of people making silly comments about how stupid the state must be to fall for a 419 scam. But this wasn't a 419 scam or anything like it- the fraudsters submitted paperwork to change the bank account information for a group with which the state already did business and then submitted a bunch of fake invoices. The state paid the bills. They should have had more things in place to protect against these kinds of fraud, but this wasn't a case of idiotic gullibility or greed.
As people push for smaller laptops with longer battery life and as flash memory continues to drop in price and power requirements and to gain in raw performance, it makes less and less sense for people to use mechanical hard drives in laptops. But as this article shows, the drive's logic can only do so much to try to maintain performance while appearing to the OS to be just a regular hard drive. Using a direct flash interface and a flash file system like UBIFS, YAFFS2, or LogFS should provide Linux netbooks etc with a serious performance advantage while costing only a fraction of what the higher-end SSDs cost. Since Windows users are fairly tied down to NTFS or FAT, this seems to me to be a good opportunity for Linux to snag marketshare.
Modern English has only been around for a few centuries, so that is a long time for an English word. If you excise all words which are less than 300 years old and all words whose etymology had some kind of political influence, you can say goodbye to most of the language. Arguing against the use of the word "piracy" to denote copyright infringement only makes you look foolish. Taking away the name for the deed and giving it another one isn't going to make the deed any more ethical, and it's kind of pompous of people to declare that centuries of language use should be overturned to fit their literalistic whims.
Phoronix is a funny site. Though they do a good job of collecting a lot of news on a handful of topics which most other sites don't address too well, their own journalism is pretty comical- headlines along the lines of
"350 DAYS AND STILL NO LINUX UT3 CLIENT" and then "UT3- 351 DAYS AND NO CLIENT; USERS EXPRESS FRUSTRATION" and "AFTER 352 DAYS, ANGRY MOBS CRY FOR UT3 CLIENT"
"HORROR STRIKES LINUX COMMUNITY- X.ORG MISSES SCHEDULED RELEASE DATE- APOCALYPSE APPARENTLY NIGH AT HAND"
"NOUVEAU DRIVER TEAM MAKES A SVN COMMIT, SAYS 3D ACCELERATION ANTICIPATED WITHIN CENTURY"
The best of course are their reviews, which consist of 20 pages each with one bar graph (and no commentary) comparing results which are usually within a couple of percent of each other (this manufacturer shipped us two practically identical cards! let's do a comparison between the two! with benchmarks from each version of ubuntu released since 2005!) and then a conclusion page which says something entirely unsupported by the data.
Ok, so I may have exaggerated a bit.
It's not nuts; it's the only sane thing.
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1, Troll
It's anything but nuts. Sodomists and perverts want to have their actions not only legitimized by the government by calling things what they are not (a marriage) but subsidized by others' tax money (all the benefits which society gives to real marriages because it's in society's best interest to promote healthy families) and have anyone who voices an opinion that their actions are wrong jailed for "hate speech". A government which steals from the majority to sponsor abominations and decay deserves nothing short of open rebellion.
I have relatives who lived in Massachusetts. When it became apparent that their son, who was approaching school age, would be taught in school a *mandatory curriculum* promoting homosexuality as normal and giving homosexual "couples" as examples of what families are, they decided to move. In Europe, major inroads have been made in curtailing the freedom of speech to fit the will of the homosexual agenda (cf the Åke Green case) and many similar things are happening here in America.
Note that generally when the homosexual agenda has made progress, it has not been through democratic processes or the rule of law. Instead it happens when people like Mayor Newsom flout the law, when corrupt courts take sovereignty out of the hands of the people and decide to make their own legislation, etc. Behind it all you can see the powerful homosexual special-interest groups and how they've had a vastly disproportionate power over American politics for decades. Returning power to the people and bringing communities and states liberty and self-responsibility is definitely worth fighting for.
HydrogenAudio has done all kinds of listening tests over the years with various different codecs, including multiple encoders and rates for all of the major lossy formats. Their public tests are well designed blind tests-they give you the various samples but don't tell you which is from which encoder, and you're asked to use ABC/HR which is a program designed specifically for blind testing of audio.This one just happens to be 128 kbps MP3.
This is particularly of interest to a lot of people because
MP3 is still the most popular and most compatible lossy format out there
with the best encoders, 128kbps should be very close to perceptual transparency for most listeners on most samples while still being very usable for portable devices
MP3 encoder comparisons based on valid scientific and statistical principles (blind tests, ANOVA, etc) aren't too common; as the title says, it's been 4 1/2 years since Roberto Amorin's test.
I think you must mean you want to work for S3's driver team- it's the drivers which are laughable. S3's hardware is- like many other things VIA and its subsidiaries have come up with, such as the Envy and the Nano- good engineering.
S3 cards have done fairly well in benchmarks compared to parts from nV and AMD/ATI of the same classes (midrange and low end- S3 doesn't bother with the high end)- an impressive achievement considering that 800-lb gorilla Intel has consistently failed to even come anywhere close to the low end parts from ATI and nV. IIRC, they also usually have a smaller silicon budget, lower power consumption, and narrower memory interfaces than their cards' ATI/nV competitors- which makes it even more impressive and shows that the designs have room to grow performance-wise.
However, VIA keeps dropping the ball in getting perfectly good products from the design finished/announcement stage to the production and sales stage and in doing the other things (driver development, marketing, going after design wins/the oem market, doing what it takes to get developers to code with their products in mind, etc) which are necessary for any product- no matter how well engineered- to really take off. With this tendency it is amazing (especially since their Intel and AMD chipset business dried up) that VIA is still surviving.
I didn't watch much TV growing up but did do a lot of reading, and I find that (at least in regard to the dreams I'm aware of having had) my dreams are usually not visual. I'm aware of what surroundings I'm in in the dream and might be able to describe them in terms one would expect to correspond to sight, but I don't really "see" anything. Reading this article makes me realize that this non-visual sense in my dreams has much in common with imagination as I read.
Of course, plenty of people dreamt in visual color long before TV was around- but perhaps that reflects the fact that before TV most kids' perceptions of the world were less influenced by various media and more influenced by interaction with the outside physical world.
Hilbert's problems were stated fairly precisely. The Millenium Prize problems have detailed statements written by experts in the fields involved. Most of these DARPA questions could use some clarification as to what they're asking for. Hopefully that will be forthcoming.
One contributing factor to the continued awfulness which is Linux audio is that ALSA and PortAudio are very much not designed with compatibility with other unices in mind. For something to really get traction it would help if it were a standard.
Intel and AMD both do a fair amount of contributing to GCC and go to some lengths to be sure it optimizes for their processors well. In the past, VIA/Centaur haven't been too participative in GCC or forthcoming with relevant information; among the results is, as the gcc documentation says,
c3-2: Via C3-2 CPU with MMX and SSE instruction set support. (No scheduling is implemented for this chip.)
Will detailed specifications dealing with the Isaiah/Nano pipeline etc be released? How will VIA/Centaur be working with GCC developers in the future?
If nV really were getting QPI in exchange for this, then this would be a big win for consumers all around. However, the news I'm seeing says otherwise, for instance this bit from Tech Report:
[nV spokesman Tom] Petersen also told us Intel wasn't a party to Nvidia's decision to allow SLI on the X58, so there's no apparent quid pro quo here.
Nvidia does not plan to abandon its chipset business entirely and will continue to make core-logic products for other Intel platforms, like the current Core 2 one.
So "we'll keep making chipsets, but only for old technology which soon won't be manufactured any more." Sounds like the death knell for 3rd party chipsets- a huge loss for consumers.
I'm sure there are many people out there who are saying "I'll upgrade when the AwesomeBar can be made to behave like the old location bar in 3.1 and no sooner," not to mention the late-adopters who are more than happy to let the rest of the world do their beta testing for them.
BTW, does anybody know the reason behind the large jump in download size from 2.x to 3.x? Not that I really mind, but I remember the download size being one of the main reasons cited for pulling the Mozilla Suite (which I had been happily using since M7) and going with Firefox instead.
The demise of the third-party chipset market is bad news for consumers. I don't know why Intel and AMD are both doing all they can to sabotage their partners.
The 1.3+ GHz Nano consumes only 8W under load and would perform about the same as the 1.6 GHz Atom; you could fit three of those in the 1.8 GHz Nano's 25W power budget. With a NVidia chipset provided by NVidia's partnership with VIA, the Nano will also do a lot better on the video decode and gaming tests. I think VIA has a winner on its hands here and just hope they don't drop the ball as they've done with a few other promising technologies.
In other words, current kernels and userland are likely to be compatible with your hardware if and only if your hardware is
more than one and less than six years old (yes, newer kernels and userland still work with some old hardware, but there's still all kinds of grief to get stuff working with 2.6, recent X, $soundsystem_of_the_month, etc which worked just fine back in 2.2 or 2.4 days)
"mainstream"- what does that mean, purchased by at least fifty million people?
and lucky enough to either have open specs, be reverse-engineered, or get a binary blob.
Hitchhiker's Guide is good, but one of the books- So Long and Thanks for All the Fish- contains a few chapters which are very much inappropriate for preteens. Just something you should be aware of.
Mozilla stopped supporting Firefox 1.5 in May 2007- 7 months after 2.0 was released. I'd imagine support for the 2.0 branch may be a bit longer than that but it certainly wouldn't be more than a year. FF3 may not be supported in 3 years but by the time it isn't getting security updates from Mozilla Hardy Heron will be close to EOL anyway.
One thing which the Ubuntu and Fedora releases show is that having regularly scheduled releases does not always work out for the best. Both have shipped with a primary browser still in beta (FF3 is a big leap ahead, but it still has some issues to be shaken out), and Ubuntu will be doing long-term support for an outdated GCC version which misses out on a lot of improvements while Fedora uses a brand new.0 compiler. Seems like both projects might have had better releases a month or so later.
Does anybody have some insights on how this will affect those not using Linux kernels with this patch? Are the *BSDs and commercial Unices planning on similar work? Will support for modesetting eventually be dropped from X drivers?
Nonsense. They're suggesting that the relevant effects from pollution aren't just local in the area of the polluters. Furthermore, colony collapse disorder, which is the crisis you refer to, affects both wild and domestic bees and is very poorly understood - it's certainly not been proven to be due to disease or mites, and there's no good reason to immediately jump to the conclusion that the problem mentioned in the study isn't a major or even dominant factor in colony collapse disorder.
Slashdot Mirror
Why will these never grow to become a fetus or a fully formed infant? Because their lives are cut off. I don't know where you get the 80% figure for zygotes failing to implant- the research I've seen quotes something in the range of 1/3 or so- but even granting your figure, the fact that some fertilized embryos die naturally doesn't provide any justification for killing them by the boatload for research which, despite all the messianic talk from Democratic politicians looking to make political hay since 2001, hasn't shown that using embryonic cells rather than adult cells will result in major cures.
So the only human life that matters is conscious human life? The next time you fall asleep it's time to harvest your organs.
If that's so, why the profane attacks on those who think we ought to tread carefully in using embryonic cells?
Just change your prefs- under Index/General uncheck "Beta Index" and check "simple design" and "low bandwidth." With those prefs Slashdot loads almost instantly on my somewhat aged machine (P4 2.4) and is still usable on a 700MHz P3.
Apple isn't claiming their entire rendering engine is 30x as fast as IE's Trident and 3x as fast as FF's Gecko- they're saying their JavaScript implementation is 30x as fast as IE's and 3x as fast as FF's (that would be the SpiderMonkey 3.0.x JS performance, not the 3.1 Tracemonkey performance which is also a lot faster than 3.0.x). That's an entirely reasonable claim.
SSDs gradually gain more and more sophisticated controllers which do more and more to try to make the SSD seem like an ordinary hard drive, but at the end of the day the differences are great enough that they can't all be plastered over that way (the fragmentation/long term use problems the story linked to are a good example). I know that (at present- this could and should be fixed) making these things run on a regular hard drive interface and tolerate being used with a regular FS is important for Windows compatibility, but it seems like a lot of cost could be avoided and a lot of performance gained by having a more direct flash interface and using flash-specific filesystems like UBIFS, YAFFS2, or LogFS. I have to wonder why vendors aren't pursuing that path.
Already there are lots of people making silly comments about how stupid the state must be to fall for a 419 scam. But this wasn't a 419 scam or anything like it- the fraudsters submitted paperwork to change the bank account information for a group with which the state already did business and then submitted a bunch of fake invoices. The state paid the bills. They should have had more things in place to protect against these kinds of fraud, but this wasn't a case of idiotic gullibility or greed.
As people push for smaller laptops with longer battery life and as flash memory continues to drop in price and power requirements and to gain in raw performance, it makes less and less sense for people to use mechanical hard drives in laptops. But as this article shows, the drive's logic can only do so much to try to maintain performance while appearing to the OS to be just a regular hard drive. Using a direct flash interface and a flash file system like UBIFS, YAFFS2, or LogFS should provide Linux netbooks etc with a serious performance advantage while costing only a fraction of what the higher-end SSDs cost. Since Windows users are fairly tied down to NTFS or FAT, this seems to me to be a good opportunity for Linux to snag marketshare.
Modern English has only been around for a few centuries, so that is a long time for an English word. If you excise all words which are less than 300 years old and all words whose etymology had some kind of political influence, you can say goodbye to most of the language. Arguing against the use of the word "piracy" to denote copyright infringement only makes you look foolish. Taking away the name for the deed and giving it another one isn't going to make the deed any more ethical, and it's kind of pompous of people to declare that centuries of language use should be overturned to fit their literalistic whims.
Phoronix is a funny site. Though they do a good job of collecting a lot of news on a handful of topics which most other sites don't address too well, their own journalism is pretty comical- headlines along the lines of
The best of course are their reviews, which consist of 20 pages each with one bar graph (and no commentary) comparing results which are usually within a couple of percent of each other (this manufacturer shipped us two practically identical cards! let's do a comparison between the two! with benchmarks from each version of ubuntu released since 2005!) and then a conclusion page which says something entirely unsupported by the data.
Ok, so I may have exaggerated a bit.
It's anything but nuts. Sodomists and perverts want to have their actions not only legitimized by the government by calling things what they are not (a marriage) but subsidized by others' tax money (all the benefits which society gives to real marriages because it's in society's best interest to promote healthy families) and have anyone who voices an opinion that their actions are wrong jailed for "hate speech". A government which steals from the majority to sponsor abominations and decay deserves nothing short of open rebellion.
I have relatives who lived in Massachusetts. When it became apparent that their son, who was approaching school age, would be taught in school a *mandatory curriculum* promoting homosexuality as normal and giving homosexual "couples" as examples of what families are, they decided to move. In Europe, major inroads have been made in curtailing the freedom of speech to fit the will of the homosexual agenda (cf the Åke Green case) and many similar things are happening here in America.
Note that generally when the homosexual agenda has made progress, it has not been through democratic processes or the rule of law. Instead it happens when people like Mayor Newsom flout the law, when corrupt courts take sovereignty out of the hands of the people and decide to make their own legislation, etc. Behind it all you can see the powerful homosexual special-interest groups and how they've had a vastly disproportionate power over American politics for decades. Returning power to the people and bringing communities and states liberty and self-responsibility is definitely worth fighting for.
HydrogenAudio has done all kinds of listening tests over the years with various different codecs, including multiple encoders and rates for all of the major lossy formats. Their public tests are well designed blind tests-they give you the various samples but don't tell you which is from which encoder, and you're asked to use ABC/HR which is a program designed specifically for blind testing of audio.This one just happens to be 128 kbps MP3.
This is particularly of interest to a lot of people because
I think you must mean you want to work for S3's driver team- it's the drivers which are laughable. S3's hardware is- like many other things VIA and its subsidiaries have come up with, such as the Envy and the Nano- good engineering.
S3 cards have done fairly well in benchmarks compared to parts from nV and AMD/ATI of the same classes (midrange and low end- S3 doesn't bother with the high end)- an impressive achievement considering that 800-lb gorilla Intel has consistently failed to even come anywhere close to the low end parts from ATI and nV. IIRC, they also usually have a smaller silicon budget, lower power consumption, and narrower memory interfaces than their cards' ATI/nV competitors- which makes it even more impressive and shows that the designs have room to grow performance-wise.
However, VIA keeps dropping the ball in getting perfectly good products from the design finished/announcement stage to the production and sales stage and in doing the other things (driver development, marketing, going after design wins/the oem market, doing what it takes to get developers to code with their products in mind, etc) which are necessary for any product- no matter how well engineered- to really take off. With this tendency it is amazing (especially since their Intel and AMD chipset business dried up) that VIA is still surviving.
I didn't watch much TV growing up but did do a lot of reading, and I find that (at least in regard to the dreams I'm aware of having had) my dreams are usually not visual. I'm aware of what surroundings I'm in in the dream and might be able to describe them in terms one would expect to correspond to sight, but I don't really "see" anything. Reading this article makes me realize that this non-visual sense in my dreams has much in common with imagination as I read.
Of course, plenty of people dreamt in visual color long before TV was around- but perhaps that reflects the fact that before TV most kids' perceptions of the world were less influenced by various media and more influenced by interaction with the outside physical world.
Hilbert's problems were stated fairly precisely. The Millenium Prize problems have detailed statements written by experts in the fields involved. Most of these DARPA questions could use some clarification as to what they're asking for. Hopefully that will be forthcoming.
One contributing factor to the continued awfulness which is Linux audio is that ALSA and PortAudio are very much not designed with compatibility with other unices in mind. For something to really get traction it would help if it were a standard.
Intel and AMD both do a fair amount of contributing to GCC and go to some lengths to be sure it optimizes for their processors well. In the past, VIA/Centaur haven't been too participative in GCC or forthcoming with relevant information; among the results is, as the gcc documentation says,
Will detailed specifications dealing with the Isaiah/Nano pipeline etc be released? How will VIA/Centaur be working with GCC developers in the future?
So "we'll keep making chipsets, but only for old technology which soon won't be manufactured any more." Sounds like the death knell for 3rd party chipsets- a huge loss for consumers.
BTW, does anybody know the reason behind the large jump in download size from 2.x to 3.x? Not that I really mind, but I remember the download size being one of the main reasons cited for pulling the Mozilla Suite (which I had been happily using since M7) and going with Firefox instead.
The demise of the third-party chipset market is bad news for consumers. I don't know why Intel and AMD are both doing all they can to sabotage their partners.
The 1.3+ GHz Nano consumes only 8W under load and would perform about the same as the 1.6 GHz Atom; you could fit three of those in the 1.8 GHz Nano's 25W power budget. With a NVidia chipset provided by NVidia's partnership with VIA, the Nano will also do a lot better on the video decode and gaming tests. I think VIA has a winner on its hands here and just hope they don't drop the ball as they've done with a few other promising technologies.
That doesn't add up to good hardware support.
Hitchhiker's Guide is good, but one of the books- So Long and Thanks for All the Fish- contains a few chapters which are very much inappropriate for preteens. Just something you should be aware of.
Mozilla stopped supporting Firefox 1.5 in May 2007- 7 months after 2.0 was released. I'd imagine support for the 2.0 branch may be a bit longer than that but it certainly wouldn't be more than a year. FF3 may not be supported in 3 years but by the time it isn't getting security updates from Mozilla Hardy Heron will be close to EOL anyway.
One thing which the Ubuntu and Fedora releases show is that having regularly scheduled releases does not always work out for the best. Both have shipped with a primary browser still in beta (FF3 is a big leap ahead, but it still has some issues to be shaken out), and Ubuntu will be doing long-term support for an outdated GCC version which misses out on a lot of improvements while Fedora uses a brand new .0 compiler. Seems like both projects might have had better releases a month or so later.
Does anybody have some insights on how this will affect those not using Linux kernels with this patch?
Are the *BSDs and commercial Unices planning on similar work? Will support for modesetting eventually be dropped from X drivers?
Nonsense. They're suggesting that the relevant effects from pollution aren't just local in the area of the polluters. Furthermore, colony collapse disorder, which is the crisis you refer to, affects both wild and domestic bees and is very poorly understood - it's certainly not been proven to be due to disease or mites, and there's no good reason to immediately jump to the conclusion that the problem mentioned in the study isn't a major or even dominant factor in colony collapse disorder.