My point Einstein, is that C is the language that CUDA, Cell, OpenCL and OpenGL SL are derived from. So it's a rather useful property of MagicNewLanguage if it is similar to what people are accustomed to already, preferably allowing them to express the same concepts in a terser but similar form.
And how, exactly speaking, would the MagicNewLanguage do that? Because we can probably assume that OpenCL etc. were written by people who knew what they were doing, and are thus already as or nearly ast good as a C-like interface to GPU gets. And that means that MagicNewLanguage either introduces some MagicNewConcept to the mix, or is redundant.
A much better long term saving would be to fire the person who signed that plan.
The only thing firing people for making mistakes does is make everyone concentrate mostly on covering their asses rather than doing their job. And the most efficient way to do that is to avoid being responsible for anything, the end result being that only corruption gets done.
You rarely get people who can show that sort of nous, effectiveness, ruthlessness and pragmatism in one individual, and I bet very few people would survive, let alone thrive with the sort of irrational, hateful opposition that man sees.
Dunno if Obama is particularly ruthless or not, but in any case it's a character fault, not a virtue, especially for someone in a position of power.
Remember, we're in the midst of a once-in-a-century global economic crisis, and the West is fighting wars on two separate fronts, and Cold Wars on others.
Economy is in a crisis, like it always is. And "the West" isn't fighting any wars; the US is fighting a Cold War on its own citizens and the rest of the world simultaneously, and occasionally invading random countries.
Maybe they did realize that during this tough economic time (that will probably go on forever since we only consume and don't actually produce anything) it might be a bad thing to force businesses to offer health insurance that is rapidly rising..
I seriously doubt having your population unable to afford healthcare will exactly help the economy. Weak slaves produce few bricks, to paraphrase a movie.
But no "intelligently designed" fluid-distribution system has just one pump. A distributed set of small, specialized pumps (and a redundant pipe system that can route around pump failures) is how any halfway-intelligent engineer would do the job.
You're forgetting one thing: you're mobile. That means that either those extra pumps are redundant, in which case you're wasting precious space and weight lugging around needless baggage, or they're not, in which case a multi-pump design simply multiplies the chances of (cascade) failure.
Furthermore, heart receives constant maintenance. If it fails, it's usually because of some sort of metabolic problem - which would affect all pumps equally - or trauma - which would likely cause massive bleeding and kill you that way, no matter how many hearts you have running dry. Cutoff valves to stop bleeding? More dead weight, with new and interesting failure modes - let's not forget that your current bleed-clotting mechanism can actually kill you if it misfires.
Leave unions be, just don't let them lobby the state in any way.
Thus violating both the First Amendment and various human right treaties by denying union members their right to assemble and petition the government. But that's a small price to pay for keeping the dirty peasants from getting uppity with their lords, amirite?
He probably could work backwards from the observable patterns in the simple games of the day to some kind of understanding of the math and/or code behind them.
It's not like current game AI is really any more complex with some rare expections. Graphics are prettier, and levels are usually at least semi-3D, but the enemies are still dumb and your own allies dumber automatons.
And that's the way it's going to stay, too, since the gameplay balance depends on it.
Hint: It doesnt matter what velocity the craft is going relative to any arbitrary reference frame, be it 0.001mm/s or 299792458km/s.. its still going to on average collide with the same amount of shit.
So what is the craft's swept volume in its own reference frame?
But to use your analogy, imagine for a moment that the FDA required all beef - even that mixed with pork or chicken products - to be marked as kosher.
"Kosher" is a term specific to Jewish dietary laws, while "marriage" is not specific to abrahamic religions. Furthermore, marking everything kosher would make it difficult to avoid pork, while calling gay marriage marriage makes it no more difficult for you to avoid marrying someone of your gender than it already was. Your analogy is flawed to the point of irrelevance.
Or, to put it another way: selling something as "kosher" when it's not is false advertising and falls under (secular) consumer protection laws, while calling gay marriage marriage does not, since no one's trying to sell you something.
Christians, Jews, and Muslims consider marriage an act of God, not of mankind. Surely you've heard the term, "A match made in Heaven", which alludes to God's involvement in bringing a man and a woman together. To call two men or two women married profanes a relationship considered sacred, and reduces marriage to mean, more or less, that two people are simply fucking each other on a permanent basis.
To call some relationship a marriage in no way affects any other relationship. How could it, if they are "acts of God" and "matches made in Heaven"?
It reduces the societal esteem of all marriages, because marriage no longer means that something sacred and wonderful has occurred between a man and a woman, but only that two people have decided to live with one another.
So basically, what this really comes down to is that high school never ends?
Also, it occurs to me that judging the same thing to be either sacred or profane based solely on the shape of the genitals of the people involved seems very much like something a mortal meatbag, rather than an eternal spirit, would do.
To further put this in perspective, consider how offensive it would be, if a police officer were to inquire about your wife, "Is that your bitch, or is she someone else's ho?" If it would be offensive to regard your relationship with your wife as nothing more meaningful than that of a prostitute, how much more offensive is it that the Supreme Court of the United States considers your marriage to be roughly analagous to two men committing sodomy.
Except, of course, no one has claimed that people having sex is the same as people getting married. Beyond that, you're a human being. Gays are human beings. Should we declare that gays are not, in fact, human beings, since otherwise someone might think that you are roughly analogous to them?
I believe there's a rule in the US, wherein if someone likes their job that indicates a management mistake. Whenever my job starts to not suck, management messes with it so it sucks again.
It's not really specific to the US, and it actually makes sense from a certain point of view: if someone is enjoying their job, they're not being squeezed as hard as they could be, thus you could make them do more and fire someone else. Of course you end up destroying motivation, loyalty and long-term productivity, but you've long since cashed your bonus check by then, and the shareholders have got their bumb'n'dump opportunity.
Basically, everything sucking as hard as it can is the price of economic efficiency, and in fact is pretty much its definition.
I'm sure the civil-liberties obsessives here would hate the idea of ubiquitous ANPR, but the practicality of the situation is that it works.
The practicality of the situation is that we don't know if it works. No, a single datapoint featuring particularly dumb terrorists doesn't prove anything, nor does the rather inane slippery slope of "avoid taxes today, murder people tomorrow". If anything, you'd imagine that someone transporting a bomb would be more likely to ensure their vehicle is squaky clean.
On the other hand, the expression you used - "civil-liberties obsessives" - does reliably flag you as a threat. Just look at Europe's not-so-distant history to see what happens when people start giving their leaders more and more power in the name of security. Or do you perhaps think that this time power will miraculously fail to corrupt and end up at the hands of a homicidal tyrant?
But I guess it's inevitable that the same shit will begin again as the generation that got the lesson hammered into them by artillery dies off.
But redefining marriage to specifically include immoral relationships is particularly prejudicial against Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and infringes on their rights to live according to their faith.
Gays marrying no more infringes on the rights of those who think it's immoral than me eating pork and washing it down with beer infringes on the rights of Jews and Muslims.
Others speculate that he's only going to Moscow in transit to Iceland (which has offered him asylum) or some other place.
Can Iceland offer him an effective asylum? It's a (pretty remote) island in Atlantic, with low population and almost no military. What, exactly speaking, would stop the US from simply taking him? It does have a history of invading small countries for whatever reason, and both R and D have plenty of reason to scare other whistleblowers into silence.
Humans are tribal, so "us persons" matter while "them persons" don't. This is especially true for something ligh the NSA which is specifically tasked with defending Us from Them.
Or, put another way, the people who sit around my campfire are real since I can see them with my own eyes, while the people who allegedly sit around some other campfire somewhere are vaguely human-shaped mythical beings that may or may not even exist. Why worry about them, any more than you would about fairies or unicorns?
Basically, if the point of the incarceration isnt "what is deserved", but "is he cured", then there is no grounds for objecting to even an indefinite incarceration-- so long as it can be shown that the inmate is not yet "cured".
And like I said, that point is bullshit, as evidenced by the fact that justice systems aiming for rehibilitation over punishment don't, as a matter of fact, hand over indefinite sentences except for things like murder. Imprisonment still acts as a punishment, even if that is not its main goal, so of course its maximum length is limited by the nature of the crime itself.
Also, "to rehibilitate" is not the same as "to cure". A rehibilitated criminal was not necessarily (or even likely) ill. He was simply a criminal and no longer is.
The only thing which allows for a discussion on "does the punishment fit the crime" is the concept of retributive punishment-- that we will punish you as far as and no further than your crime deserves.
Now let me introduce you to the concept of "holding back" - that we aim to rehabilitate the perp, but will not inflict on him any more punishment than his crime deserves. That is, we have a goal but will take care not to cross a line while pursuing it. Both you and Lewis are assuming that aiming to rehabilitate means a monomanic obsession on rehabilitation at any price, which is an absurd strawman.
You know...when are we in the western world, going to finally have enough of these 'peace loving' islamic asshats, and just start stomping them...HARD?
Hopefully never, since the stomping won't stop there. Once you have your jackboots on, everything starts to look like a human face.
Remind me, is it called the "justice" system or the "rehabilitative" system?
North Korea calls itself Democratic People's Republic. That doesn't make it so.
Historically, has the focus been on "just and deserved punishment", or "rehabilitation"?
Historically, the focus has been on neither but on the divine right of absolute monarchs to punish or reward whoever they will, however they will, for whatever they will.
You should read CS Lewis' essay on The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment (warning, PDF). I think he makes an excellent case why straying away from a "retributive" or "punitive" justice system is about the least humane and most dangerous thing you could do. Do you really want the government deciding when your prison term is up / "justice has been served" based on whether they think you have been rehabilitated or not?
Why do you think that the aim of rehabiliting criminals somehow implies unspecified terms of incarceration? For that matter, the essay you linked to seems to be making the rather ridiculous assertion that being more concerned about rehabilitation than punishment removes justice from the consideration altogether, leading to a dystopia where jaywalkers are brainwashed to "cure" them or executed as a warning to others, except when it simply declares innocent people criminals just so it can punish them as such a warning.
In other words, your argument is rubbish, the essay you linked to fights absurd strawmen, and I have a very hard time believing you're arguing in good faith.
So you put value in the system by which they are distributed and controlled. So it's actually the system that is worth something and not the actual coin itself. That makes perfect sense. They should license it out. Bet they could make a killing. Oh wait... they can't because it's tied to the coin itself, which still has nothing other than the time invested for value.
Maybe this makes it easier to understand: a hundred-dollar bill doesn't derive its value from the effort used to manufacture it, it derives its value from its usability for trade, which in turn derives from everyone who accept it as a payment and the ease you can send it to them with. Bitcoins are already very fast, cheap and easy to send, so as the number of parties that accept Bitcoin as a payment method increases, so does the value of Bitcoin.
They don't experience joy or sorrow: they're just programmed to emulate it.
Claims like this are equivalent to claiming that philosophical zombies can exist. That's a rather nasty can of worms there, especially since there's little reason why we couldn't make the same argument about the various aliens, humans, or even each other: you do not have experience, you just act like you did.
Droids are quite simply not alive. They're a simulacrum of life (and a particularly good one), but that is not the same as life.
What, exactly speaking, is the difference between a living thing and a simulacrum? The lack of soft flesh? Both ghost-Kenobi and spectre-Yoda lack it yet get treated as living things.
It's easy to make assertions, but you're not backing yours with anything.
Slashdot Mirror
And how, exactly speaking, would the MagicNewLanguage do that? Because we can probably assume that OpenCL etc. were written by people who knew what they were doing, and are thus already as or nearly ast good as a C-like interface to GPU gets. And that means that MagicNewLanguage either introduces some MagicNewConcept to the mix, or is redundant.
The only thing firing people for making mistakes does is make everyone concentrate mostly on covering their asses rather than doing their job. And the most efficient way to do that is to avoid being responsible for anything, the end result being that only corruption gets done.
Dunno if Obama is particularly ruthless or not, but in any case it's a character fault, not a virtue, especially for someone in a position of power.
Economy is in a crisis, like it always is. And "the West" isn't fighting any wars; the US is fighting a Cold War on its own citizens and the rest of the world simultaneously, and occasionally invading random countries.
I seriously doubt having your population unable to afford healthcare will exactly help the economy. Weak slaves produce few bricks, to paraphrase a movie.
Lungs and kidneys, and lungs share the musculature.
It's possible, just inefficient and - in the case of human body - pretty much pointless for reasons I already stated.
You're forgetting one thing: you're mobile. That means that either those extra pumps are redundant, in which case you're wasting precious space and weight lugging around needless baggage, or they're not, in which case a multi-pump design simply multiplies the chances of (cascade) failure.
Furthermore, heart receives constant maintenance. If it fails, it's usually because of some sort of metabolic problem - which would affect all pumps equally - or trauma - which would likely cause massive bleeding and kill you that way, no matter how many hearts you have running dry. Cutoff valves to stop bleeding? More dead weight, with new and interesting failure modes - let's not forget that your current bleed-clotting mechanism can actually kill you if it misfires.
If you can design a pump that can be maintained while operating normally, you'll likely become - or at least make someone else - quite rich.
That poor bastard must have died young indeed.
Thus violating both the First Amendment and various human right treaties by denying union members their right to assemble and petition the government. But that's a small price to pay for keeping the dirty peasants from getting uppity with their lords, amirite?
It's not like current game AI is really any more complex with some rare expections. Graphics are prettier, and levels are usually at least semi-3D, but the enemies are still dumb and your own allies dumber automatons.
And that's the way it's going to stay, too, since the gameplay balance depends on it.
So what is the craft's swept volume in its own reference frame?
Tautologies don't imply anything.
Liberal Crime Squad?
"Kosher" is a term specific to Jewish dietary laws, while "marriage" is not specific to abrahamic religions. Furthermore, marking everything kosher would make it difficult to avoid pork, while calling gay marriage marriage makes it no more difficult for you to avoid marrying someone of your gender than it already was. Your analogy is flawed to the point of irrelevance.
Or, to put it another way: selling something as "kosher" when it's not is false advertising and falls under (secular) consumer protection laws, while calling gay marriage marriage does not, since no one's trying to sell you something.
To call some relationship a marriage in no way affects any other relationship. How could it, if they are "acts of God" and "matches made in Heaven"?
So basically, what this really comes down to is that high school never ends?
Also, it occurs to me that judging the same thing to be either sacred or profane based solely on the shape of the genitals of the people involved seems very much like something a mortal meatbag, rather than an eternal spirit, would do.
Except, of course, no one has claimed that people having sex is the same as people getting married. Beyond that, you're a human being. Gays are human beings. Should we declare that gays are not, in fact, human beings, since otherwise someone might think that you are roughly analogous to them?
Grow up.
It's not really specific to the US, and it actually makes sense from a certain point of view: if someone is enjoying their job, they're not being squeezed as hard as they could be, thus you could make them do more and fire someone else. Of course you end up destroying motivation, loyalty and long-term productivity, but you've long since cashed your bonus check by then, and the shareholders have got their bumb'n'dump opportunity.
Basically, everything sucking as hard as it can is the price of economic efficiency, and in fact is pretty much its definition.
The practicality of the situation is that we don't know if it works. No, a single datapoint featuring particularly dumb terrorists doesn't prove anything, nor does the rather inane slippery slope of "avoid taxes today, murder people tomorrow". If anything, you'd imagine that someone transporting a bomb would be more likely to ensure their vehicle is squaky clean.
On the other hand, the expression you used - "civil-liberties obsessives" - does reliably flag you as a threat. Just look at Europe's not-so-distant history to see what happens when people start giving their leaders more and more power in the name of security. Or do you perhaps think that this time power will miraculously fail to corrupt and end up at the hands of a homicidal tyrant?
But I guess it's inevitable that the same shit will begin again as the generation that got the lesson hammered into them by artillery dies off.
Gays marrying no more infringes on the rights of those who think it's immoral than me eating pork and washing it down with beer infringes on the rights of Jews and Muslims.
But the same things are not poisonous to all life-forms.
Humans are tribal, so "us persons" matter while "them persons" don't. This is especially true for something ligh the NSA which is specifically tasked with defending Us from Them.
Or, put another way, the people who sit around my campfire are real since I can see them with my own eyes, while the people who allegedly sit around some other campfire somewhere are vaguely human-shaped mythical beings that may or may not even exist. Why worry about them, any more than you would about fairies or unicorns?
And like I said, that point is bullshit, as evidenced by the fact that justice systems aiming for rehibilitation over punishment don't, as a matter of fact, hand over indefinite sentences except for things like murder. Imprisonment still acts as a punishment, even if that is not its main goal, so of course its maximum length is limited by the nature of the crime itself.
Also, "to rehibilitate" is not the same as "to cure". A rehibilitated criminal was not necessarily (or even likely) ill. He was simply a criminal and no longer is.
Now let me introduce you to the concept of "holding back" - that we aim to rehabilitate the perp, but will not inflict on him any more punishment than his crime deserves. That is, we have a goal but will take care not to cross a line while pursuing it. Both you and Lewis are assuming that aiming to rehabilitate means a monomanic obsession on rehabilitation at any price, which is an absurd strawman.
Hopefully never, since the stomping won't stop there. Once you have your jackboots on, everything starts to look like a human face.
Maybe this makes it easier to understand: a hundred-dollar bill doesn't derive its value from the effort used to manufacture it, it derives its value from its usability for trade, which in turn derives from everyone who accept it as a payment and the ease you can send it to them with. Bitcoins are already very fast, cheap and easy to send, so as the number of parties that accept Bitcoin as a payment method increases, so does the value of Bitcoin.
Claims like this are equivalent to claiming that philosophical zombies can exist. That's a rather nasty can of worms there, especially since there's little reason why we couldn't make the same argument about the various aliens, humans, or even each other: you do not have experience, you just act like you did.
What, exactly speaking, is the difference between a living thing and a simulacrum? The lack of soft flesh? Both ghost-Kenobi and spectre-Yoda lack it yet get treated as living things.
It's easy to make assertions, but you're not backing yours with anything.