MMOs, of course, get to sting you twice in this respect. Not only do you get a social circle within the game, but if you're not careful, they also start pulling you away from your real-life social circle.
Please define "real life social circle", and why it is bad to give more weight to your online social life than that? Because, to put it bluntly, I very much doubt that most casual acquaintainces care about you more than the people who chat with you on the Internet, and many even less.
So just like a library or book store does with its reading material, lets make it MANDATORY we only allow porn sites to reside on.SEX &.XXX top level domains.
wrote Neptunes_Trident, and the exercise of power made him harden as he clicked on "Submit". He hollered, and his maid came running, her bare perky breasts bouncing delightfully, for she only wore a skirt. As her soft lips encircled his pulsating manhood, his mind soared; but as it did so, he realized the obvious problem with his proposal, and it withered like a sunflower in winters gale. "Begone, wench!" he hollered in frustration, and the sobbing nubile girl fled to a kitchen, where her dog was ready and willing to give its canine comfort rod to her doggy-style.
When will this problem be solved logically, without turning our ISP into the internet police.
How do you propose making anything MANDATORY without doing just that?
Out of curiosity, when it comes to material goods, would you describe yourself as a capitalist? Because, absent artificial scarcity, how else can an author or programmer make money?
You know, I'm not making any money from these Slashdot comments. Does that mean that Slashdot is communistic, and that there should be a law requiring you to pay the poster before reading the comment?
The key idea of capitalism is that people will end up working on whatever gets them most money (which, due to the law of supply and demand, is often whatever the society find most valuable), not that they do something that doesn't make any money and whine that the government should pass laws helping them profit. In fact the latter is a clear example of a (badly) planned economy, or "communism" if you will.
So, if your livelihood depends on copyright law, you aren't a capitalist but a dirty commie demanding that the Central Committee comes to your rescue when market forces crush your company. Which makes the pirates freedom fighters risking everything to resist the oppressive regime. But the Empire has secretly created a superweapon, ACTA, with legal firepower enough to destroy entire countries, and only the leaked documents, which might reveal some weakness, can save us now!
I could rant for days about the rate at which freedom is being compromised in every nation on this planet, but most you/.'ers are technical folk who've had the need for critical thought thrust upon you, and therefore clearly see the decline, and hence are of like mind.
"You're smart, so you'll agree with me (and if you don't, it's because you can't think critically)."
Also, "You're better than the common peasant." Classic divide-and-conquor.
You see, programmers and electrical engineers hold in their mathematical war-chests, technological battle-axes that can return power to the people.
If you truly think that "Most people don't possess the ability to think critically or abstractly", why would you want to give them power?
Hell, Most Europeans don't understand the EU structure
That's intentional. That way, when a national government wants to pass unpopular (and usually stupid) legislation, they can blame it on "EU directives".
There is plenty you can do to keep you resume full while out of work.
Or you could rest, relax, and enjoy life, rather than make it more likely that you'll be hired somewhere you're expected to work 14-hour days with 8-hour pay.
The whole point of working for a living, as opposed to being an enterpreneur, is guaranteed pay and not having to worry about work at your free time. If you're doing unpaid work just on the off chance it'll help your career (as opposed to, for example, simply finding some OSS project interesting), then you're getting the worst of both worlds. Stop running the Red Queen's Race and decide: do you want to get rich, in which case you should go the enterpreneur route (and accept you might crash and burn), or do you not care, in which case stop worrying about it and slack off in your free time to your heart's content.
Either go for the win or stop running the race. Simply "staying competitive" might help the national economy and its overlords, but it won't do any good to you.
Well, no educated person except a couple of billion buddhists and hinduists. But I suppose they're not educated, since they don't believe in our God.
But if you're a hindu or buddhist and think of Swastika as a good-luck symbol or whatever, why would you ask if you can use it? You'd simply use it. The very fact that these people asked implies that they are thinking of the Nazi connection. And while it's possible that they are simply polite people who think of Swastika mainly as a religious(?) symbol but are aware of the darker associations so they wanted to make sure, that seems incompatible with arguing about the answer.
So, the simplest explanation seems to be that these are simply contrarians who love to argue - in other words, trolls.
A college degree is a statement that you can attempt a large and difficult and often times dreary task and stick through it to the end, and actually see it through to the end. A degree says determination. Employers love determination. That's what gets projects done on time.
What college degree says is debt, and a lot of it. Employers love huge debts, since desperate people are easier to force work 14 hours a day with 8 hour pay. That is what gets projects done on time and gets the boss a bonus.
I think Wehrner Vom Braun refused to design man rated vehicles with a solid rocket stage (he mustn't have been responsible for the Redstone I guess).
"Even a slave labour using Nazi SS-Major like Von Braun refused to strap someone on a solid rocket booster! But perhaps you think Hitler was too soft, Herr Hatch?"
It's politics. Sling mud. Especially when it's well deserved.
Of course it inhibits piracy or they wouldn't do it.
If a CEO orders the use of DRM and the game gets pirated (as it will), it's not his fault, since he got the best protection money could buy (even if it was equivalent to none). If a CEO doesn't order the use of DRM, and the game gets pirated (as it will), it's his fault for not getting protection (even if it was equivalent to none). Therefore, ass-covering mandates the use of DRM. And DRMoil salesmen are, of course, more than happy to spread this idea.
Imagine your word processor reformatting a 500 page document on 1000 cores. It's just not going to work very well.
Format every paragraph in parallel, then simply paste them into the page list one after another. Now, a more fancy layout's going to require more fancy algorithms, but this actual problem is nonetheless a good candidate for parallelization.
How about the operating system ? 1000 different cores all trying to access a file system on a single physical drive. How are you going to run that efficiently ?
If they're actually going to hit the disk, it doesn't matter since it's going to take a virtual eternity for the disk to respond. If they'll stay in cache, it's just the matter of finding the node responsible for the file you want and then getting that.
In any case, you can make a shared-memory system on top of 1000 message-passing cores, it's simply going to suck for programs that have poor locality of reference - but then again, modern CPUs already suck for them.
And at an electrical engineer, I'm going t o make the guess that the highest performance will always come from registers, simple because they are located closer to the ALU.
Please note that the instruction set and the actual physical implementation of the processor are two different things. Even if the latter includes registers, there's no reason why the former should expose this detail; the processor's instruction decoder and scheduler are far more qualified to worry about such technical details than the compiler (which might have been written before the processor even existed).
Err, did you just claim cache is as fast as a register access?
A register set is nothing more than cache with a special namespace for its memory locations. Why should it be handled differently than all other caches (that is, transparently to the program)?
All you need is a library that gives you worker threads, queues and synchronization primitives.
And then either your application runs very slowly, because you synchronize too much and get lock contention or even deadlocks, or contains lots of bugs that are near-impossible to debug because you started doing "clever" things with synchronization.
A multithreaded program is for all intents and purposes like an OS without memory protection, and inherently unstable for the exact same reason: everything is shared unless specifically declared nonshared, and there's no way to enforce the rules. It's also slow because of lock contention at both application and CPU level. We need a better model, where only the things that need to be shared are shared and errors can be tolerated and recovered from. A transactional memory system, perhaps?
No problemo, they'll be limited by external bandwidth and bulk storage bandwidth.
They'll be limited by memory bandwidth. Even current computers already are, and have been for quite some time. Because of that, and the heat problem, I suspect a future PC will be a NUMA cluster.
No matter if you use 1 core to decode all the frames or 600 cores each decoding one frame of video for the next ten seconds, you'll still only output one frame every 1/60 of a second, so heat load should remain constant.
Of course, that means that even current computers are plenty fast enough to do so, so it doesn't really make a good example.
The idea of being able to run a processor at 100% capacity forever might simply die. Each core will be thermally designed to sleep 99% of the time, although I guarantee marketing will focus on what all 1000 cores could theoretically do at magical 100% utilization for a couple milliseconds.
Unfortunately, that means that this processor is no more powerful than a properly-cooled 10-core machine. Also, having neighbouring cores activate and deactivate constantly will cause thermal stresses on the die, which distort it and play havoc on the fine-scale structures needed to fit all those cores on it.
Of course, we could simply develop more efficient transistors, or at least ones that can take more heat. Forget LEDs, the future CPU will glow on its own:).
Facebook isn't under any kind of obligation to link to your torrent, legal or not.
And that rises a related and interesting question: should it be?
The separation between "private business" and "government" made sense when the former was mainly small operations, and lack fo effective communication and fast travel made the world a huge place. As corporations have grown to rival power of nation-states, and world has become small enough for a single company to reach you anywhere, the difference has become unclear at best.
Can we afford to have huge concentrations of power that have no obligations whatsoever? If Facebook wants to get to the letter-delivery business, why should they be allowed to alter the messages? Isn't that forgery? Why should censorship be acceptable if it's done by a company you can never hope to defeat rather than a government you can never hope to defeat?
I propose we give up the black-and-white division to a bound government and totally free companies, and switch to a graduated one where the stronger you grow, the more tightly your operations are restricted. On one extreme there's the individual person and on the other the government, and all the companies on a sliding scale between them, each bound and restricted according to the measure of harm they might do if, for example, they engage in censorship.
The current era of ever-strenghtening corporate overlords will end with either them bound, or us.
these are apparently well skilled people that possibly may stay longer and create prosperity in the visited country also when they stop visiting and become citizens for real.
They won't do that. The whole reason they are "competitive" is that they are going back to their homeland with a lower quality and cost of living, thus allowing them to get more bang for their buck. This, in turn, allows employers to depress wages using them as an excuse.
What is wrong with that?
As I said, the practice lowers wages for everyone. Good for the owning class, bad for the working class.
It is definitely better than having unskilled immigrants polluting labor market at low end.
You could simply refuse both, and use tariffs to protect domestic industry from offshoring.
Do you enjoy hurting people who would have been better off had you given them all of your money (and since you didn't, you stole their potential profit)?
I'll never understand why "scalping" is illegal in the first place.
Nothing they did seems unethical or immoral to me.
Scalpers are parasites who monopolize a resource they had no part in making or excavating, then charge others for access to it. They are, in effect, charging a private tax for transactions between two other parties. They're like high-frequency traders in that regard.
Think of it this way: would you object if I bought all the food within hundred miles of your home, then offered to resell it for twice the price?
If people are willing to pay more for a ticket, good for them.
However, it's not good for the economy to reward parasitic behaviour.
If one dollar buys one candy bar, why should that change if there are more dollars? Nothing has really changed in terms of the candy bar's production costs. The only reason the price would go up is if the shopkeeper decides I'm going to gouge the buyer because he suddenly has more money.
It takes some effort to produce a candy bar, thus there's a limited supply of them. If there's a limited supply of delicious candy, then I and everyone else who wants them will compete to get them, and try to outbid each other. This continues until the price reaches the level where nobody's willing to rise their bid for this particular item, thus determining the final selling price. This is known as "supply and demand", and is the cornerstone of a market economy.
As for the shopkeeper "gouging" his customers, of course he will. He isn't keeping the shop for the goodness of his heart, he's keeping it to get money. It's his job, and he wants as much pay as possible for his effort. And that means that if his customers are willing to pay more for whatever reason, he will charge them more. The same is true for suppliers, and their suppliers, and so on.
Another point to note is that if everyone has more money, yet everything costs the same as it ever did, then everyone can buy more, and thus use more resources, yet the economy as a whole doesn't have any more resources than it used to - production hasn't increased. Since stuff doesn't just appear from thin air, something has to give, and it's usually prices. This viewpoint stresses the role of money as controlling access to resources: how much of them are you allowed to spend?
Slashdot Mirror
This gives a whole new meaning to the term "contagious meme" :).
Please define "real life social circle", and why it is bad to give more weight to your online social life than that? Because, to put it bluntly, I very much doubt that most casual acquaintainces care about you more than the people who chat with you on the Internet, and many even less.
wrote Neptunes_Trident, and the exercise of power made him harden as he clicked on "Submit". He hollered, and his maid came running, her bare perky breasts bouncing delightfully, for she only wore a skirt. As her soft lips encircled his pulsating manhood, his mind soared; but as it did so, he realized the obvious problem with his proposal, and it withered like a sunflower in winters gale. "Begone, wench!" he hollered in frustration, and the sobbing nubile girl fled to a kitchen, where her dog was ready and willing to give its canine comfort rod to her doggy-style.
How do you propose making anything MANDATORY without doing just that?
However accidentally watching slutty nurse cut one up and eat it while beating off a horse, yeah, that will cause trauma...
How could it? That's not sex, that's violence.
Yes. We kinda noticed from your posts.
You know, I'm not making any money from these Slashdot comments. Does that mean that Slashdot is communistic, and that there should be a law requiring you to pay the poster before reading the comment?
The key idea of capitalism is that people will end up working on whatever gets them most money (which, due to the law of supply and demand, is often whatever the society find most valuable), not that they do something that doesn't make any money and whine that the government should pass laws helping them profit. In fact the latter is a clear example of a (badly) planned economy, or "communism" if you will.
So, if your livelihood depends on copyright law, you aren't a capitalist but a dirty commie demanding that the Central Committee comes to your rescue when market forces crush your company. Which makes the pirates freedom fighters risking everything to resist the oppressive regime. But the Empire has secretly created a superweapon, ACTA, with legal firepower enough to destroy entire countries, and only the leaked documents, which might reveal some weakness, can save us now!
"You're smart, so you'll agree with me (and if you don't, it's because you can't think critically)."
Also, "You're better than the common peasant." Classic divide-and-conquor.
You see, programmers and electrical engineers hold in their mathematical war-chests, technological battle-axes that can return power to the people.
If you truly think that "Most people don't possess the ability to think critically or abstractly", why would you want to give them power?
That's intentional. That way, when a national government wants to pass unpopular (and usually stupid) legislation, they can blame it on "EU directives".
Or you could rest, relax, and enjoy life, rather than make it more likely that you'll be hired somewhere you're expected to work 14-hour days with 8-hour pay.
The whole point of working for a living, as opposed to being an enterpreneur, is guaranteed pay and not having to worry about work at your free time. If you're doing unpaid work just on the off chance it'll help your career (as opposed to, for example, simply finding some OSS project interesting), then you're getting the worst of both worlds. Stop running the Red Queen's Race and decide: do you want to get rich, in which case you should go the enterpreneur route (and accept you might crash and burn), or do you not care, in which case stop worrying about it and slack off in your free time to your heart's content.
Either go for the win or stop running the race. Simply "staying competitive" might help the national economy and its overlords, but it won't do any good to you.
But if you're a hindu or buddhist and think of Swastika as a good-luck symbol or whatever, why would you ask if you can use it? You'd simply use it. The very fact that these people asked implies that they are thinking of the Nazi connection. And while it's possible that they are simply polite people who think of Swastika mainly as a religious(?) symbol but are aware of the darker associations so they wanted to make sure, that seems incompatible with arguing about the answer.
So, the simplest explanation seems to be that these are simply contrarians who love to argue - in other words, trolls.
What college degree says is debt, and a lot of it. Employers love huge debts, since desperate people are easier to force work 14 hours a day with 8 hour pay. That is what gets projects done on time and gets the boss a bonus.
"Even a slave labour using Nazi SS-Major like Von Braun refused to strap someone on a solid rocket booster! But perhaps you think Hitler was too soft, Herr Hatch?"
It's politics. Sling mud. Especially when it's well deserved.
If a CEO orders the use of DRM and the game gets pirated (as it will), it's not his fault, since he got the best protection money could buy (even if it was equivalent to none). If a CEO doesn't order the use of DRM, and the game gets pirated (as it will), it's his fault for not getting protection (even if it was equivalent to none). Therefore, ass-covering mandates the use of DRM. And DRMoil salesmen are, of course, more than happy to spread this idea.
Format every paragraph in parallel, then simply paste them into the page list one after another. Now, a more fancy layout's going to require more fancy algorithms, but this actual problem is nonetheless a good candidate for parallelization.
If they're actually going to hit the disk, it doesn't matter since it's going to take a virtual eternity for the disk to respond. If they'll stay in cache, it's just the matter of finding the node responsible for the file you want and then getting that.
In any case, you can make a shared-memory system on top of 1000 message-passing cores, it's simply going to suck for programs that have poor locality of reference - but then again, modern CPUs already suck for them.
Please note that the instruction set and the actual physical implementation of the processor are two different things. Even if the latter includes registers, there's no reason why the former should expose this detail; the processor's instruction decoder and scheduler are far more qualified to worry about such technical details than the compiler (which might have been written before the processor even existed).
A register set is nothing more than cache with a special namespace for its memory locations. Why should it be handled differently than all other caches (that is, transparently to the program)?
And then either your application runs very slowly, because you synchronize too much and get lock contention or even deadlocks, or contains lots of bugs that are near-impossible to debug because you started doing "clever" things with synchronization.
A multithreaded program is for all intents and purposes like an OS without memory protection, and inherently unstable for the exact same reason: everything is shared unless specifically declared nonshared, and there's no way to enforce the rules. It's also slow because of lock contention at both application and CPU level. We need a better model, where only the things that need to be shared are shared and errors can be tolerated and recovered from. A transactional memory system, perhaps?
Radeon 5870 already has 1600 shader cores.
They'll be limited by memory bandwidth. Even current computers already are, and have been for quite some time. Because of that, and the heat problem, I suspect a future PC will be a NUMA cluster.
Of course, that means that even current computers are plenty fast enough to do so, so it doesn't really make a good example.
Unfortunately, that means that this processor is no more powerful than a properly-cooled 10-core machine. Also, having neighbouring cores activate and deactivate constantly will cause thermal stresses on the die, which distort it and play havoc on the fine-scale structures needed to fit all those cores on it.
Of course, we could simply develop more efficient transistors, or at least ones that can take more heat. Forget LEDs, the future CPU will glow on its own :).
And that rises a related and interesting question: should it be?
The separation between "private business" and "government" made sense when the former was mainly small operations, and lack fo effective communication and fast travel made the world a huge place. As corporations have grown to rival power of nation-states, and world has become small enough for a single company to reach you anywhere, the difference has become unclear at best.
Can we afford to have huge concentrations of power that have no obligations whatsoever? If Facebook wants to get to the letter-delivery business, why should they be allowed to alter the messages? Isn't that forgery? Why should censorship be acceptable if it's done by a company you can never hope to defeat rather than a government you can never hope to defeat?
I propose we give up the black-and-white division to a bound government and totally free companies, and switch to a graduated one where the stronger you grow, the more tightly your operations are restricted. On one extreme there's the individual person and on the other the government, and all the companies on a sliding scale between them, each bound and restricted according to the measure of harm they might do if, for example, they engage in censorship.
The current era of ever-strenghtening corporate overlords will end with either them bound, or us.
They won't do that. The whole reason they are "competitive" is that they are going back to their homeland with a lower quality and cost of living, thus allowing them to get more bang for their buck. This, in turn, allows employers to depress wages using them as an excuse.
As I said, the practice lowers wages for everyone. Good for the owning class, bad for the working class.
You could simply refuse both, and use tariffs to protect domestic industry from offshoring.
Yes.
The obvious solution is to not sell tickets beforehand, but simply charge for entry.
Scalpers are parasites who monopolize a resource they had no part in making or excavating, then charge others for access to it. They are, in effect, charging a private tax for transactions between two other parties. They're like high-frequency traders in that regard.
Think of it this way: would you object if I bought all the food within hundred miles of your home, then offered to resell it for twice the price?
However, it's not good for the economy to reward parasitic behaviour.
It takes some effort to produce a candy bar, thus there's a limited supply of them. If there's a limited supply of delicious candy, then I and everyone else who wants them will compete to get them, and try to outbid each other. This continues until the price reaches the level where nobody's willing to rise their bid for this particular item, thus determining the final selling price. This is known as "supply and demand", and is the cornerstone of a market economy.
As for the shopkeeper "gouging" his customers, of course he will. He isn't keeping the shop for the goodness of his heart, he's keeping it to get money. It's his job, and he wants as much pay as possible for his effort. And that means that if his customers are willing to pay more for whatever reason, he will charge them more. The same is true for suppliers, and their suppliers, and so on.
Another point to note is that if everyone has more money, yet everything costs the same as it ever did, then everyone can buy more, and thus use more resources, yet the economy as a whole doesn't have any more resources than it used to - production hasn't increased. Since stuff doesn't just appear from thin air, something has to give, and it's usually prices. This viewpoint stresses the role of money as controlling access to resources: how much of them are you allowed to spend?