Not so. Scientifically, a barely-fertilized egg is a full compliment of genetic material and cellular support; within the womb, it can grow into a fully developed person. Even without that kind of technical information, we cannot deny the abstract concept that sex creates life. In either case, however, we need to decide exactly when life begins. Religiously we say when the soul enters the body; scientifically, well, actually it's immediately life. Still, science is of no help here: we want to know when HUMAN life begins, which means we have to decide when we accept a clump of cells as a person.
Now we've entered a very fuzzy problem. Philosophically speaking, you made it, it's your responsibility, from the moment it's the first cell. Then again, philosophically speaking, mistakes like that can destroy a person's life and second chances are a rare blessing, aren't they? We sure don't want to destroy a human life though; so when is the thing human? Maybe not so much when it's a clump of cells. What about when it's a developed embryo? It has organs, a brain, yet an empty and undeveloped brain? Hell, when a baby is born it's not really a "person" so much as a "screaming ugly ball reflexively reacting on pure wired instinctual response to stimulus"; maybe it's not even "a person" until around 4 years old (do you remember anything before you were 4? Could you remember being 3 when you were 6?).
Philosophy deals with all the questions direct physical science cannot answer. To say we can define the moment in time an embryo becomes a "person" is ridiculous and delusional. To say we should consider it living at one point or another and treat it as if it has rights is the same sort of ridiculous as saying some people are bad because they steal and get away with it.
Politics is the application of philosophy to... political gain.
What about legalized abortion? Is a fertilized egg a person? Or a blastocyst? More importantly, what kind of impact on society would allowing people the wanton irresponsibility of uncontrolled unprotected sex without the fear of pregnancy? It removes the immense cost of unwanted pregnancies, which happen even to responsible couples; but at what cost considering it also removes the risk of pregnancy for people having irresponsible unprotected sex?
Politics is the imposition of philosophy. It's where you convince people that you shouldn't be forced to pay for other peoples' welfare; or you convince people that society has a moral obligation to pay for every person's welfare. These are philosophical questions; convincing people that you're correct is political.
Philosophy has gone from something generally valuable to the community, to something that's pretty much only important within it's own academic community.
No, it's just that the study of philosophy has been perverted.
The real study of philosophy would be a great boon to our troubled society. We focus too much on science, on economy, on wealth. We spend our days talking about all the advances we can make to medical science, to cars and safety, to airport security. All that gibberish.
We never stop to consider the greater impacts of our efforts. We have anti-lock brakes and traction control and safety systems in cars... but why do we let drivers on the road without a comprehensive driving program and a full road test? The safety systems won't make an idiot safe. Does everyone have a right to drive, and so we may as well just stick them in a car they barely know how to operate? How does this help the state of society?
It's the same with health care or terrorism. Health care... everyone wants it, nobody wants to pay for it; but we are wholly concerned with "saving everybody" and damn the economics of it, we'll argue over those. Terrorism... we try to prevent terrorists from killing hostages, instead of simply reacting violently and reclaiming anyone still standing in the end. What are the greater impacts of this? We consider it heartless and uncaring to discount peoples' lives in the short term, and ignore the long term benefits. To that end we set up all kinds of stripping of rights and all kinds of horrible forms of harassment "to make people safe," and even if we save a dozen lives a day how much damage does that do to the quality of life of everyone else?
These aren't even deep or complex questions; they're surface reactions to bullshit. The deeper questions all come to individual personal responsibility: is violence universally bad? If so, then you should never learn to fight, never fight back against an attacker, and never attack someone to prevent them from harming another person. Do we all have a right to some sort of happiness? Yes, perhaps; but does that mean we all have a responsibility to help those who haven't had the opportunity? Yes, perhaps; but then, does that mean we should be FORCED into it (welfare state)? Are you ENTITLED to have society pick you up from the ground and give you a chance you never had, or once had and lost? Or are some people going to simply learn the world isn't fair and you're entitled to absolutely nothing?
Philosophical questions like these tend to lead people to the belief that they are supposed to defend themselves and those around them... or away from that and to the belief that society should supply police to do this instead. They force you to make quick decisions about who is good and who is bad, sometimes in situations more complicated than "I need to go down that alley and beat the shit out of that guy that is raping that woman at knife point." They lead society as a whole to decide whether they should have universal healthcare or not. They lead individuals in a non-welfare society to see people on the street and say, "It is not the responsibility of society and thus the state to support these people; but it is the responsibility of each of us to render aid as individuals to those in need," and go out of their way to help people instead of paying a tax and letting someone else deal with the street rats.
Of course I'm personally on the side of putting responsibility on the individual and not on society. We need police; but I believe we should take personal responsibility in what happens around us, and that we should protect those who need it when necessary instead of hiding off in the corner. I don't think we need a welfare state; that develops a heartless population that throws tax money into a pot and says, "See? I pay for social services to care for the sick and poor and homeless. I am now morally above them and can stick my nose up and ignore them as they beg for
The whole "Anonymous" group is a bunch of idiot fourteen year old superhackers that downloaded a portscanner and used it to DDOS someone by having five of their friends run it with nmap -T5.
I have met these people on the net. They are basically huge assholes. The fact that scientology attracts huge assholes both as members and as bitter enemies does not change this. They're jumping on any big issue they can whine about so they can cry for attention.
The trick is the casinos keep a good percentage of the money they keep (10% is a lot!). They do shift the money around though. If you happen to play conservatively and win a modest amount, they're fine with you really; if you seem to be WELL outside the statistical bounds due to visible behavior (card counting etc), they may be a little irritated. If you're caught cheating, they will be PISSED.
I've considered learning all kinds of card counting and keeping the winnings to a minimum, then tossing some 50% of my winnings on the table if I make out good and telling everyone else to have fun. If the pit boss approaches me I'll just tell them, hey, I get my entertainment running every card counting strategy I can find, play small ($200 bankroll), win modest (double my money), and toss some back. I'd think they'd mostly not have a problem with me as long as A) I don't teach anyone ELSE to card count; and B) I don't come around to make this week's wages. Plus throwing chips back appeases the other players and keeps them around longer (to spend someone else's money) so hell, why not?
The poker tables would be the only other fun place to play, really, with the dealer out of it. House rules take on rake, I get 95% of the pot and the house keeps 5%. They don't care if I'm winning as long as I'm not cheating. I don't see why they don't do table blackjack the same way, split the pot between winners based on bet-in. House takes 5% of the pot, automatically. For each person that wins, add up the percentage that they put into the pot and the house takes 50% of what's left; split the remaining 50% between the other two. Minimum bet is always going to be something like 10% of the total pot. Then the house can't lose and card counters can go wild.
But I don't think Sun Tzu ever spoke in English....
Aside, I've wanted a copy of The Art of War in the original Chinese for a while now, though I can't read it. If I want to read it that bad, I'll have to learn the language; I don't want to read a bunch of bullshit interpretation (translation is hard) just so I can say "oh, I've read The Art of War, 'cause I'm cool." I read stuff like that for understanding, not for the ability to quote things and shout loudly.
I can never find the original... that and Musashi's Book of Five Rings in Japanese (I'm far more interested in this than Art of War). And, more interesting, Toshiro Kageyama's Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go in the original Japanese.
You'd need G type engines to reach that height or bigger, and you need a special license to acquire those and you need to clear with FAA on the date, time, and place you're going to launch them.
Everyone wants as much of your money as they can get for as little effort possible. Every advertisement, next generation, latest product, up sized combo meal, two for one, discount coupon, payment plan, three easy payment, subscription service, limited time offer all have the ultimate goal of getting as much money from you as possible. So why so much hate for the casinos?
This is what I'm talking about. All the god damn time. This is why I want to move to the Japanese countryside. The whole pre-modern China/Japan thing is dead; but the countryside still looks nice, there are no giant god damn televisions plastering the streets, the language is otherworldly to an American, and it lets me get the hell AWAY and live somewhere trapped in an earlier period of time until I DIE. A period when quality was important, not just money and shiny bullshit. Where I can relax and look outside to see a nice yard, a fence, and beyond it a nice landscape.
Gambling is just a game, with real money. It's a perfectly fine hobby. You spend $200 to go jetskiing for a weekend; why not spend $200 to go gambling? Play the cards, play the slots, play the dice. If you win, you win; if you lose, you go home happy because the games are fun.
It's when you're betting your house and your shirt and ten minutes with your wife trying to win big that it gets to be a problem. People go in with $200 thinking they're going to win big; they don't go in with $200 thinking they're going to spend $200 in exchange for entertainment. If I had a good poker group (see Poker Night at the Inventory... i.e. people amusing to watch banter), I'd probably throw a $200 buy-in on the table once in a while or a $50 buy-in every weekend to play last man standing. Sure it costs me; but hey what the hell, I get to sit around, have some whiskey, and bullshit for a couple hours. It's fun, I get to watch money move around, I might get busted out early once in a while but oh well. I'll probably lose every night, but that's okay because the money is buy-in and not my little nest egg.
I'd prefer better farms, no CAFOs, and heavier sledgehammers to bash cows' heads in with (they have hard skulls) or some method of quick decapitation (better to drain the blood that way). Maybe halal beef?
People who don't eat meat have trouble digesting meat en masse. It's an adaptation mechanism. People who try to switch off meat into veganism suddenly find out that they can't get the nutrients they want, or find out that their body is very bad at working it out of the vegetables. All anybody cares about is protein (hence beans beans beans), but there are other nutrients that need attention.
Most of us aren't entirely sure what voodoo goes into food; in fact I've always been told that meat has zero vitamins and minerals, and is wholly composed of fat and protein. I think meat might have like... vitamin B or something... who knows. We're always told that vegetables have vitamins and meat has nothing; but nobody can grasp that your digestive system has to do things with things to get nutrients. Eating kiwis for example increases your ability to digest meat (raw kiwi contains an enzyme that breaks down meat), did you know that?
Is it any surprise people read a book, put together salads and bean soups to get "all the proteins I need," then find out their body simply doesn't work like that? It won't liberate the nutrients from plants. A slow transition might work better; even better might be reducing the amount of meat you consume, but not eliminating it. Who knows?
To me, diets are in general stupid. Atkins, veganism, whatever. I don't eat vegetables because they often make me sick (eating a cooked green pepper makes my tummy feel funny...raw is okay) and I just don't like 'em; but I'll eat all that stuff on a burger or a fajita or tacos. My diet doesn't subsist entirely on chicken and steak, although I consider my vegetable intake "low." The closest thing I'll do to a diet is adjust variety, and that has the beneficial side effect of improving my enjoyment of food (more ingredients, more balance, more diverse flavors); if I need to "get more of something" in my diet, I'll do that. Tweaking, not "following a diet plan."
"Half a billion" is not "Billions." "Billions" implies plural. If I cut you in half and threw your legs out the window, I wouldn't have "people" left, I'd have "Half a person."
I don't need a study. I stop eating meat, I start dying. All of your "facts" and "science" work about as well as voo-doo magic and chiropractic cancer cures: I can stand here and keep "believing" while my body rots away, and then I'll die; or I can tell you to shut the fuck up. I didn't claim that not eating meat causes horrible immunodeficiency and scurvy and eventual dermal necrosis; I claimed that if I don't get meat in my diet, that shit happens to ME. I have found a simple solution to that problem.
Uh yeah, SSE instructions do SPECIALIZED work for special corner cases. This is like talking about how AES is faster because of AES instructions; or more related, talking about how the Intel CPU has an FPU and so is way faster doing floating point.
However, a MOV instruction for register to register is 1 cycle; a MOV instruction memory into register is 2-3 cycles; a MOV instruction on unaligned memory is about 5 cycles; and a cache miss is like 200 cycles--it happens, cache exists for a reason. ADD, SUB, MUL, etc, several cycles depending on instruction. The manual outlines all this stuff so that compiler designers can weight instructions by how much pipeline they waste (it's fine to have a 30 cycle DIV if you can shove the next insn in the pipeline 1 cycle later; not so much if it's 10 cycles later, so consider SHR for dividing by powers of 2).
Almost all the base instructions in ARM, in all forms, run in a single cycle. You can prefix them all to avoid small bits of logic becoming too complex, and they still run in 1 cycle. It's a general-purpose CPU optimized for a general-purpose case, not a "general-purpose CPU" trying to optimize a lot for special-purpose cases.
Yeah, the other issue is that ARM code is "bigger" but somehow a 900MHz ARM outruns a 1500MHz x86... hmm, why so much faster? The answer turns out to involve small decisions and branches, which on x86 et al involve load-compare-branch (mov %eax... cmp %eax... jne), whereas on ARM you have compare-prefix (mov %r1... cmp %r1... SUBGT, SUBLT, MOVEQ, BNE, etc) that don't take an extra cycle, i.e. MOVGT takes 1 cycle and MOV takes 1 cycle.
This means a lot of simple code compiles to simple instructions, whereas on x86 you have a huge amount of branching to do. A lot of 'if' and 'select' statements can be reorganized to just do one comparison and then drop through a bunch of instructions that are prefixed for simple cases.
This kind of thing reduces the performance penalty of not having a branch predictor--that's right, ARM performs as well as it does with no branch prediction. ARM has a huge number of registers (something like 16 with identical general purpose use and access times, vs x86 4 GPRs), lack of support for mis-aligned memory access (simple, fast data access paths), and a few cherry-picked things like a built-in barrel shifter in any arithmetic instruction (you can i.e. add numbers with shift left/right as part of the instruction). Also most instructions run in 1 cycle--even really crazy ones like conditional-arithmetic-shift (i.e. SUBGT Ra, Ri, Rj, LSL #2)-- whereas stuff like x86 runs an average of 2-3 clock cycles per instruction, with some very long. That means that a 2.5GHz x86 is about as fast as a 1GHz ARM.
ARM is a large amount of compensation for not implementing complex features. They look hard and say, "Well... this is a general good performance feature..." and do that; whereas CISC is like, "Here's a special case we should do... and oh, branch prediction would let us try to speed up branches... and we could add instructions for manipulating ASCIIZ strinsg..." RISC is more like, "Well, let's try to do everything in 1 cycle... let's prefix instructions so that we can avoid branching... let's add a ton of registers... let's not make a slow decoder... let's restrict memory access to avoid performance hits in cache misses..."
When I was like 8 I looked at RISC vs CISC And I was like, "Why are we doing this? RISC looks better..." RISC processing was going to change everything, and we went with CISC. 20 years later, we're going back to a prefixed RISC processor.
What about the huge catalogue of win32 applications?
If I was to believe the anti-linux trolling of the last decade or so, that's the major reason people won't ever, ever switch!
On a more serious note, I know.Net stuff stands a good chance of working fine, but there's a hell of a lot of windows stuff people use that isn't.Net and I can't see a translation engine or emulation working that great on ARM stuff.
An emulator would work great for ARM/Windows for two reasons:
We have all the relevant libraries, so basically just the program and any libraries it brings get emulated; the linker links non-native and native libraries, of course. The tricky part is call-backs to function pointers, since "get me the address of $function" is a pretty raw machine activity and not a call to a facility somewhere.
We're addicted to JIT these days, so of course we could just JITter the code to ARM. Callbacks via function pointer would work.
We have drip pots at work that make coffee in bulk; and I can get french presses that make some 12-15 cups of coffee in 4 minutes. Trust me, sometimes you need the giant fucking french press; it's way bigger than a regular coffee pot, and sometimes I've seen people hit the coffee area and brew 4 pots at a time, rebrewing after under a minute because the herd just took away ALL four pots of coffee. In mugs.
Honestly, the 4 pots brewed at a time model is faster here than individual k-cups. Nobody has to fish around and examine individual cups for anything.
But they sell programmable Keureg machines for home use, for about $200. My parents got one. Compare to this or this but do you drink that much coffee in 20 minutes? How about this for home? (Apparently a "Cup" is now 4.5 ounces)
Amusingly, it takes longer to make a pot of coffee in the drip machine (about 2 minutes for it to fill water and heat it, then 5 more minutes to make the pot) than it does to make an 8 cup french press carafe. Keeping four of these carafes at work would work out pretty well for our extremely high volume coffee output, methinks.
No, video on flash sucks on linux, I don't have perfect video. But try this: Firefox for Windows, under Wine, with Flash for Windows. Try it. Try it and see what happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so. Scientifically, a barely-fertilized egg is a full compliment of genetic material and cellular support; within the womb, it can grow into a fully developed person. Even without that kind of technical information, we cannot deny the abstract concept that sex creates life. In either case, however, we need to decide exactly when life begins. Religiously we say when the soul enters the body; scientifically, well, actually it's immediately life. Still, science is of no help here: we want to know when HUMAN life begins, which means we have to decide when we accept a clump of cells as a person.
Now we've entered a very fuzzy problem. Philosophically speaking, you made it, it's your responsibility, from the moment it's the first cell. Then again, philosophically speaking, mistakes like that can destroy a person's life and second chances are a rare blessing, aren't they? We sure don't want to destroy a human life though; so when is the thing human? Maybe not so much when it's a clump of cells. What about when it's a developed embryo? It has organs, a brain, yet an empty and undeveloped brain? Hell, when a baby is born it's not really a "person" so much as a "screaming ugly ball reflexively reacting on pure wired instinctual response to stimulus"; maybe it's not even "a person" until around 4 years old (do you remember anything before you were 4? Could you remember being 3 when you were 6?).
Philosophy deals with all the questions direct physical science cannot answer. To say we can define the moment in time an embryo becomes a "person" is ridiculous and delusional. To say we should consider it living at one point or another and treat it as if it has rights is the same sort of ridiculous as saying some people are bad because they steal and get away with it.
Politics is the application of philosophy to ... political gain.
What about legalized abortion? Is a fertilized egg a person? Or a blastocyst? More importantly, what kind of impact on society would allowing people the wanton irresponsibility of uncontrolled unprotected sex without the fear of pregnancy? It removes the immense cost of unwanted pregnancies, which happen even to responsible couples; but at what cost considering it also removes the risk of pregnancy for people having irresponsible unprotected sex?
Politics is the imposition of philosophy. It's where you convince people that you shouldn't be forced to pay for other peoples' welfare; or you convince people that society has a moral obligation to pay for every person's welfare. These are philosophical questions; convincing people that you're correct is political.
Philosophy has gone from something generally valuable to the community, to something that's pretty much only important within it's own academic community.
No, it's just that the study of philosophy has been perverted.
The real study of philosophy would be a great boon to our troubled society. We focus too much on science, on economy, on wealth. We spend our days talking about all the advances we can make to medical science, to cars and safety, to airport security. All that gibberish.
We never stop to consider the greater impacts of our efforts. We have anti-lock brakes and traction control and safety systems in cars... but why do we let drivers on the road without a comprehensive driving program and a full road test? The safety systems won't make an idiot safe. Does everyone have a right to drive, and so we may as well just stick them in a car they barely know how to operate? How does this help the state of society?
It's the same with health care or terrorism. Health care... everyone wants it, nobody wants to pay for it; but we are wholly concerned with "saving everybody" and damn the economics of it, we'll argue over those. Terrorism... we try to prevent terrorists from killing hostages, instead of simply reacting violently and reclaiming anyone still standing in the end. What are the greater impacts of this? We consider it heartless and uncaring to discount peoples' lives in the short term, and ignore the long term benefits. To that end we set up all kinds of stripping of rights and all kinds of horrible forms of harassment "to make people safe," and even if we save a dozen lives a day how much damage does that do to the quality of life of everyone else?
These aren't even deep or complex questions; they're surface reactions to bullshit. The deeper questions all come to individual personal responsibility: is violence universally bad? If so, then you should never learn to fight, never fight back against an attacker, and never attack someone to prevent them from harming another person. Do we all have a right to some sort of happiness? Yes, perhaps; but does that mean we all have a responsibility to help those who haven't had the opportunity? Yes, perhaps; but then, does that mean we should be FORCED into it (welfare state)? Are you ENTITLED to have society pick you up from the ground and give you a chance you never had, or once had and lost? Or are some people going to simply learn the world isn't fair and you're entitled to absolutely nothing?
Philosophical questions like these tend to lead people to the belief that they are supposed to defend themselves and those around them... or away from that and to the belief that society should supply police to do this instead. They force you to make quick decisions about who is good and who is bad, sometimes in situations more complicated than "I need to go down that alley and beat the shit out of that guy that is raping that woman at knife point." They lead society as a whole to decide whether they should have universal healthcare or not. They lead individuals in a non-welfare society to see people on the street and say, "It is not the responsibility of society and thus the state to support these people; but it is the responsibility of each of us to render aid as individuals to those in need," and go out of their way to help people instead of paying a tax and letting someone else deal with the street rats.
Of course I'm personally on the side of putting responsibility on the individual and not on society. We need police; but I believe we should take personal responsibility in what happens around us, and that we should protect those who need it when necessary instead of hiding off in the corner. I don't think we need a welfare state; that develops a heartless population that throws tax money into a pot and says, "See? I pay for social services to care for the sick and poor and homeless. I am now morally above them and can stick my nose up and ignore them as they beg for
what the fuck is animal husbandry?
I believe that when the sheep bite, the farmer has lamb chops.
This.
The whole "Anonymous" group is a bunch of idiot fourteen year old superhackers that downloaded a portscanner and used it to DDOS someone by having five of their friends run it with nmap -T5.
I have met these people on the net. They are basically huge assholes. The fact that scientology attracts huge assholes both as members and as bitter enemies does not change this. They're jumping on any big issue they can whine about so they can cry for attention.
To be fair, theory and practice are in theory identical; in practice, not so much.
The trick is the casinos keep a good percentage of the money they keep (10% is a lot!). They do shift the money around though. If you happen to play conservatively and win a modest amount, they're fine with you really; if you seem to be WELL outside the statistical bounds due to visible behavior (card counting etc), they may be a little irritated. If you're caught cheating, they will be PISSED.
I've considered learning all kinds of card counting and keeping the winnings to a minimum, then tossing some 50% of my winnings on the table if I make out good and telling everyone else to have fun. If the pit boss approaches me I'll just tell them, hey, I get my entertainment running every card counting strategy I can find, play small ($200 bankroll), win modest (double my money), and toss some back. I'd think they'd mostly not have a problem with me as long as A) I don't teach anyone ELSE to card count; and B) I don't come around to make this week's wages. Plus throwing chips back appeases the other players and keeps them around longer (to spend someone else's money) so hell, why not?
The poker tables would be the only other fun place to play, really, with the dealer out of it. House rules take on rake, I get 95% of the pot and the house keeps 5%. They don't care if I'm winning as long as I'm not cheating. I don't see why they don't do table blackjack the same way, split the pot between winners based on bet-in. House takes 5% of the pot, automatically. For each person that wins, add up the percentage that they put into the pot and the house takes 50% of what's left; split the remaining 50% between the other two. Minimum bet is always going to be something like 10% of the total pot. Then the house can't lose and card counters can go wild.
But I don't think Sun Tzu ever spoke in English....
Aside, I've wanted a copy of The Art of War in the original Chinese for a while now, though I can't read it. If I want to read it that bad, I'll have to learn the language; I don't want to read a bunch of bullshit interpretation (translation is hard) just so I can say "oh, I've read The Art of War, 'cause I'm cool." I read stuff like that for understanding, not for the ability to quote things and shout loudly.
I can never find the original... that and Musashi's Book of Five Rings in Japanese (I'm far more interested in this than Art of War). And, more interesting, Toshiro Kageyama's Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go in the original Japanese.
You'd need G type engines to reach that height or bigger, and you need a special license to acquire those and you need to clear with FAA on the date, time, and place you're going to launch them.
No, people who quote Sun Tzu are almost always speaking Chinese.
No, but model rocket hobbyists are plotting ways to missile this motherfucker right out of the sky.
People play slots because it involves no skill and no thought. Poker and blackjack are skill games.
Everyone wants as much of your money as they can get for as little effort possible. Every advertisement, next generation, latest product, up sized combo meal, two for one, discount coupon, payment plan, three easy payment, subscription service, limited time offer all have the ultimate goal of getting as much money from you as possible. So why so much hate for the casinos?
This is what I'm talking about. All the god damn time. This is why I want to move to the Japanese countryside. The whole pre-modern China/Japan thing is dead; but the countryside still looks nice, there are no giant god damn televisions plastering the streets, the language is otherworldly to an American, and it lets me get the hell AWAY and live somewhere trapped in an earlier period of time until I DIE. A period when quality was important, not just money and shiny bullshit. Where I can relax and look outside to see a nice yard, a fence, and beyond it a nice landscape.
Gambling is just a game, with real money. It's a perfectly fine hobby. You spend $200 to go jetskiing for a weekend; why not spend $200 to go gambling? Play the cards, play the slots, play the dice. If you win, you win; if you lose, you go home happy because the games are fun.
It's when you're betting your house and your shirt and ten minutes with your wife trying to win big that it gets to be a problem. People go in with $200 thinking they're going to win big; they don't go in with $200 thinking they're going to spend $200 in exchange for entertainment. If I had a good poker group (see Poker Night at the Inventory ... i.e. people amusing to watch banter), I'd probably throw a $200 buy-in on the table once in a while or a $50 buy-in every weekend to play last man standing. Sure it costs me; but hey what the hell, I get to sit around, have some whiskey, and bullshit for a couple hours. It's fun, I get to watch money move around, I might get busted out early once in a while but oh well. I'll probably lose every night, but that's okay because the money is buy-in and not my little nest egg.
It does not bring the public into existence in the same way that foreign policy brings a political situation into existence.
I'd prefer better farms, no CAFOs, and heavier sledgehammers to bash cows' heads in with (they have hard skulls) or some method of quick decapitation (better to drain the blood that way). Maybe halal beef?
People who don't eat meat have trouble digesting meat en masse. It's an adaptation mechanism. People who try to switch off meat into veganism suddenly find out that they can't get the nutrients they want, or find out that their body is very bad at working it out of the vegetables. All anybody cares about is protein (hence beans beans beans), but there are other nutrients that need attention.
Most of us aren't entirely sure what voodoo goes into food; in fact I've always been told that meat has zero vitamins and minerals, and is wholly composed of fat and protein. I think meat might have like... vitamin B or something... who knows. We're always told that vegetables have vitamins and meat has nothing; but nobody can grasp that your digestive system has to do things with things to get nutrients. Eating kiwis for example increases your ability to digest meat (raw kiwi contains an enzyme that breaks down meat), did you know that?
Is it any surprise people read a book, put together salads and bean soups to get "all the proteins I need," then find out their body simply doesn't work like that? It won't liberate the nutrients from plants. A slow transition might work better; even better might be reducing the amount of meat you consume, but not eliminating it. Who knows?
To me, diets are in general stupid. Atkins, veganism, whatever. I don't eat vegetables because they often make me sick (eating a cooked green pepper makes my tummy feel funny...raw is okay) and I just don't like 'em; but I'll eat all that stuff on a burger or a fajita or tacos. My diet doesn't subsist entirely on chicken and steak, although I consider my vegetable intake "low." The closest thing I'll do to a diet is adjust variety, and that has the beneficial side effect of improving my enjoyment of food (more ingredients, more balance, more diverse flavors); if I need to "get more of something" in my diet, I'll do that. Tweaking, not "following a diet plan."
"Half a billion" is not "Billions." "Billions" implies plural. If I cut you in half and threw your legs out the window, I wouldn't have "people" left, I'd have "Half a person."
I don't need a study. I stop eating meat, I start dying. All of your "facts" and "science" work about as well as voo-doo magic and chiropractic cancer cures: I can stand here and keep "believing" while my body rots away, and then I'll die; or I can tell you to shut the fuck up. I didn't claim that not eating meat causes horrible immunodeficiency and scurvy and eventual dermal necrosis; I claimed that if I don't get meat in my diet, that shit happens to ME. I have found a simple solution to that problem.
Uh yeah, SSE instructions do SPECIALIZED work for special corner cases. This is like talking about how AES is faster because of AES instructions; or more related, talking about how the Intel CPU has an FPU and so is way faster doing floating point.
However, a MOV instruction for register to register is 1 cycle; a MOV instruction memory into register is 2-3 cycles; a MOV instruction on unaligned memory is about 5 cycles; and a cache miss is like 200 cycles--it happens, cache exists for a reason. ADD, SUB, MUL, etc, several cycles depending on instruction. The manual outlines all this stuff so that compiler designers can weight instructions by how much pipeline they waste (it's fine to have a 30 cycle DIV if you can shove the next insn in the pipeline 1 cycle later; not so much if it's 10 cycles later, so consider SHR for dividing by powers of 2).
Almost all the base instructions in ARM, in all forms, run in a single cycle. You can prefix them all to avoid small bits of logic becoming too complex, and they still run in 1 cycle. It's a general-purpose CPU optimized for a general-purpose case, not a "general-purpose CPU" trying to optimize a lot for special-purpose cases.
Yeah, the other issue is that ARM code is "bigger" but somehow a 900MHz ARM outruns a 1500MHz x86... hmm, why so much faster? The answer turns out to involve small decisions and branches, which on x86 et al involve load-compare-branch (mov %eax ... cmp %eax ... jne), whereas on ARM you have compare-prefix (mov %r1 ... cmp %r1 ... SUBGT, SUBLT, MOVEQ, BNE, etc) that don't take an extra cycle, i.e. MOVGT takes 1 cycle and MOV takes 1 cycle.
This means a lot of simple code compiles to simple instructions, whereas on x86 you have a huge amount of branching to do. A lot of 'if' and 'select' statements can be reorganized to just do one comparison and then drop through a bunch of instructions that are prefixed for simple cases.
This kind of thing reduces the performance penalty of not having a branch predictor--that's right, ARM performs as well as it does with no branch prediction. ARM has a huge number of registers (something like 16 with identical general purpose use and access times, vs x86 4 GPRs), lack of support for mis-aligned memory access (simple, fast data access paths), and a few cherry-picked things like a built-in barrel shifter in any arithmetic instruction (you can i.e. add numbers with shift left/right as part of the instruction). Also most instructions run in 1 cycle--even really crazy ones like conditional-arithmetic-shift (i.e. SUBGT Ra, Ri, Rj, LSL #2)-- whereas stuff like x86 runs an average of 2-3 clock cycles per instruction, with some very long. That means that a 2.5GHz x86 is about as fast as a 1GHz ARM.
ARM is a large amount of compensation for not implementing complex features. They look hard and say, "Well... this is a general good performance feature..." and do that; whereas CISC is like, "Here's a special case we should do... and oh, branch prediction would let us try to speed up branches... and we could add instructions for manipulating ASCIIZ strinsg..." RISC is more like, "Well, let's try to do everything in 1 cycle... let's prefix instructions so that we can avoid branching... let's add a ton of registers... let's not make a slow decoder... let's restrict memory access to avoid performance hits in cache misses..."
Out-linking is awesome and from a business sense brings more eyeballs wanting quality. Today's business model is cult following and bullshit.
When I was like 8 I looked at RISC vs CISC And I was like, "Why are we doing this? RISC looks better..." RISC processing was going to change everything, and we went with CISC. 20 years later, we're going back to a prefixed RISC processor.
What about the huge catalogue of win32 applications?
If I was to believe the anti-linux trolling of the last decade or so, that's the major reason people won't ever, ever switch!
On a more serious note, I know .Net stuff stands a good chance of working fine, but there's a hell of a lot of windows stuff people use that isn't .Net and I can't see a translation engine or emulation working that great on ARM stuff.
An emulator would work great for ARM/Windows for two reasons:
We have drip pots at work that make coffee in bulk; and I can get french presses that make some 12-15 cups of coffee in 4 minutes. Trust me, sometimes you need the giant fucking french press; it's way bigger than a regular coffee pot, and sometimes I've seen people hit the coffee area and brew 4 pots at a time, rebrewing after under a minute because the herd just took away ALL four pots of coffee. In mugs.
Honestly, the 4 pots brewed at a time model is faster here than individual k-cups. Nobody has to fish around and examine individual cups for anything.
But they sell programmable Keureg machines for home use, for about $200. My parents got one. Compare to this or this but do you drink that much coffee in 20 minutes? How about this for home? (Apparently a "Cup" is now 4.5 ounces)
Amusingly, it takes longer to make a pot of coffee in the drip machine (about 2 minutes for it to fill water and heat it, then 5 more minutes to make the pot) than it does to make an 8 cup french press carafe. Keeping four of these carafes at work would work out pretty well for our extremely high volume coffee output, methinks.
No, video on flash sucks on linux, I don't have perfect video. But try this: Firefox for Windows, under Wine, with Flash for Windows. Try it. Try it and see what happens.