Those 40 million were required already to be treated by emergency rooms.
Let me explain something to you. ER treatment is very costly to the patient. But quite aside from cost, ER care doesn't address problems like cancer, diabetes, etc. What the ER is obligated to do is stabilize you. Not cure you, or develop a course of care for you, or really much of anything else. You go there, they'll treat the obvious -- broken bones, bullet holes -- you'll get one dose of a drug that will stabilize you in the opinion of the ER doc if in fact that is needed, an expensive prescription that you probably can't afford to fill anyway, and then you're out the door. It is a huge error to think that ER care is the equivalent of responsible medical treatment.
If, for instance, you have bad knees, or poor vision, or bad teeth, or an allergy to something, or a hernia that isn't strangulated at the moment, or diabetes that hasn't yet caused your eyes to rot or your feet to fall off... the ER will do you absolutely no good whatsoever. Other than gifting yourself with a whopping bill for walking in there. Get it? ER care is NOT a viable replacement for adequate medical care for a huge range of issues. And then let's go back to cost: ER care is far more expensive than proper preventive care, particularly for many disease processes caught early and treated early; if that is done, much less money is spent than allowing the disease to get chronic, and then trying to treat it. No matter where you treat it.
One last thing: You DO pay for ER care, ineffective and small-spectrum as it is. The hospital has to pay for the care, but since the patient doesn't, that cost either goes to the government under some program or other -- meaning, you pay for it -- or else it goes into increased prices for services at the hospital -- which means you pay for it -- and if you're insured, the insurance company gets larger bills, which translates into more costs for the insurance company -- which means you're going to pay for it. So what you should want, if your wish is for the least money to be taken from you, is care that is most cost-effective, which is NOT, I guarantee you, ER care. You want early preventive treatment; you want people to be healthy so they can work and pay taxes and so reduce your legitimate tax burden; you want them not to be walking around, sick, untreated with communicable diseases running rampant in their systems so you and yours can catch them --- instead, you want them recuperating at home, not concerned that they are going to go bankrupt if they miss one paycheck.
It seems obvious to me that a healthy country is as much in everyone's selfish self-interest as an educated one is.
But can you think of a reason to vote Obama back in again?
Yeah... although I'd prefer Ron Paul, I *can* think of reasons to vote Obama back in again:
Due in some degree to Obama himself: Medical care for 40 million or so people who otherwise wouldn't have it; gays being allowed to serve openly in the military; the pro-consumer pushback against the credit card companies; the end of the Iraq war; the limited engagement with Libya instead of spending our soldiers lives for no reason (again!); he signed the closure order for Guantanamo; and good odds that in his second term, when he doesn't have to concern himself with re-election, that he will turn his attention to some of his other campaign promises.
Due to other factors: Romney is an out-of-touch rich idiot; Newt is a scumbag; Paul isn't going to be supported by the republicans because they prefer an idiot or a scumbag to an actual conservative who would try to obey the constitution. Which, I guess, is why I'm seriously thinking about voting for Obama. Again. The republicans have done an *outstanding* job of shooting themselves in the foot this time around.
Is Obama perfect? Hell, no. Is he better than Romney or Gingrich? Yes, in fact, so much so that it's a slam dunk to vote for him, if those are the choices. On the other hand, on the (very) off chance that the republicans wake up and put Paul up against Obama, I'd vote for Paul simply because he says he'd bring our soldiers home and close all those foreign bases. And as president, he'd actually have the power to do it (and very little else on his agenda, so I don't worry about that other stuff much.) But let's face it: the repubs are going to put up one of the clowns, not Paul, and consequently, they're going to lose *really* badly.
There's a grain (or at least a germ) of truth in each of those posts. Kind of a cereal furrow of truthiness, just plowing along, planting seeds of doubt, perhaps to just lie farro, but then again, maybe knot.
The really interesting thing, is that with the hardware price so low, it suddenly means you could make a physical product based upon their hardware, your software and sell it for a reasonable price.
Not once the FCC gets through with you, you couldn't. Just a heads up. Sorry.
Ok, fair enough. It's still cache-based. I did read it wrong. Too bad. I hope someday we get ram up to CPU speed. Lots of things in the way, at least as long as we use electrons for signaling. Oh well, was nice to think about, even if wrong.:)
Lol... No, you can't say the same about theism. Theism is the base of various conceptual trees; it is an active assertion with consequences that stem *directly* from the assertion. Atheism is not an active assertion.
Claiming "There is a god or gods." doesn't say "stone the unbelievers" or "go to church" or anything
Yes, I'm afraid it does. I picked mostly from Christian theism; but these various active assertions come right from the holy books of those particular theist trees, as well as from the various figureheads of those religions, in the name of, and justified by, those religions. This does not happen with atheism.
Atheists still ascribe to values, morals, tenets, etc. They aren't directly from atheism, just like the values, morals, etc. of theists aren't from Theism but from their religion, but all people ascribe to some kind of values.
Atheists get their morals, values etc. from sources other than atheism -- of course, since atheism doesn't specify or imply any. Theists get their morals, values etc. from their religion in the form of directives in their various holy religious books, where the behavior that is expected from them, from eating shellfish, to scouring female slaves' mouths with a quart of salt, to not eating cows, to beheading the infidels, to not stepping on bugs, is laid out for them in painstaking detail.
Simply ask *which* god or gods a theist believes in, and now you know which religion defines their theism, and further, you'll know which book lays out the next lowest branches of their behavior. You now have the basic map of their moral and ethical tree. You'll know if they have been told to go for one wife or many; if they can eat cows or not; if they should turn the other cheek or behead the opposition, and many more things as well.
Turn that around, note that someone is atheist, and you still know absolutely nothing else about them other than they don't hold a belief in a god or gods. You don't have any way to ask them something atheism-related that will help you learn, either. They might be a "smiter", they might be a vegetarian, they might eat burgers, they might be a peace-nik, they might be supportive of polygamy, they might be chaste by nature -- atheism tells you nothing about anything else in a person's mindset -- that's the point. Theists often make this point themselves, though in a rather clueless way, ridiculously claiming that atheism leads to, or is, nihilism -- but of course it isn't/doesn't do that, either, any more than it is, or leads to, a path towards pretending a cracker is someone's body. Atheism is a lack of belief in a god or gods. That's all it is.
Theism, on the other hand, is, like it or not, a hotbed of behavior control -- very specific behaviors follow directly from adhering to the religious ideas that actually make up each variety of theism. Atheism is absolutely null in this regard.
Feel free to have the last word. I've explained the facts three times, and I'm pretty sure that doing so again won't convince anyone who still feels otherwise of a single thing. It reminds me quite strongly of something... oh, yes, of course: Theism.
.NET? No, I generally code in straight C, and stay away from system libraries and OS dependencies and more specialized languages and GPL as much I can. Generally I write under OS X, but am almost always no more than a recompile away from working on some other platform. Consequently I have a very large library of my own code I can call upon, and rarely suffer from Other People's Bugs. My bugs, of course, are another matter -- but at least I can generally fix them.
My memory bandwidth problems typically arise from doing things to data elements that (a) can be spread across multiple cores and (b) don't take many CPU cycles per data element and (c) where the data elements come from, and must be restored to, data element arrays that are far too large for cache to do them any significant good.
How can you do a reciprocal without a divide? Unless you had predetermined "divisors"?
Ok, two approaches. First, if you know the divisor, but not the dividend, then in your assembly code you can write, conceptually:
dividend * (1.0 / divisor)
Since the right side of that contains only known values, there's only a multiply to be done at run time; the assembler can prepare the rest at assembly time.
Second, if you don't know the divisor or the dividend, you can prepare a table, conceptually like this:
1/1
1/2
1/3
1/4 ....
1/N
Then, when the time comes for division, you do it like this:
x = y * table[z]
It's a hair slower than just multiplication, because it includes a table lookup.
There are some technical things involved in this, like accounting for width of the various inputs and where the binary point lands within your results, but these are really implementation details and don't change the overall idea.
I should also point out that using tables, you can pre-compute results for many arbitrary inputs, so that execution time is essentially the table lookup, sometimes with an interpolation stage. You can do sines, cosines, logs, etc. this way. If memory is cheap and fast, then the need for an FPU may simply go away. Simple example: If you have a 16 bit float, then a 64k entry table can contain the sine value for every possible floating point input. Zero compute time at run time. You want fast, there it is.
But as it turns out, a lot of times, the need for floating point isn't what we think it is. Let's say you want to rotate an image, so you scan through it pixel by pixel. Naively, rotation is:
newx = (x * sin(theta)) - (y * cos(theta));
newy = (x * cos(theta)) + (y * sin(theta));
So, you look at that and you think, wow, two FP sines and two FP cosines and four FP multiplies and an FP add and an FP subtract PER PIXEL!
But, work it out, and this is what you want to actually execute per pixel:
newx = xxs - yyc; newy = xxc + yys;
xxs += s;
xxc += c;
That's three FP adds and one FP subtract per pixel. All of the sine, cosine and multiply stuff is gone. There are also two more FP adds per line. It's hella fast, and 100% accurate.
How one gets from the naive approach to the fast one, I leave as an exercise for the reader. Unless someone is really curious -- in which case, I'll blog it and point you to it, it's a little esoteric, even for this place.
You completely miss the point. There are no "atheistic ideologies." Ideologies may include atheism, but atheism itself includes nothing. Atheism stands alone. It has no opinions; there is no mental lever provided by the atheist stance to start anything. It's just a lack of belief in an absurd proposition. It causes nothing. It's not an active stance. It's a lack of one.
Atheism doesn't say "eat this but not that." Atheism says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't say "stone the unbelievers", it says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't say "whip one's self until bloody", it says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't say "fly the aircraft into the building", it says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't say "Give 20% of your money to the church", it says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't even say "don't go to church." it says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't say "memorize this book." There is no book. There isn't even a paragraph. Here is the whole atheist ball of wax, nothing left out at all: "without a belief in a god or gods." That's it. Finis. Exit stage left. Whoosh.
However, religions -- theism, the opposite of atheism -- are active stances; stances that uniformly, in and of themselves, have and promote (often insist upon) tenets, dogmas, rules, authorities, entire books of ridiculous claims and instructions for behavior. These often include instructions to deal harshly with people. Atheism has no such instructions; it's philosophically, ethically and morally empty and cause-free: it describes nothing more than the fact that the atheist doesn't believe in a god or gods.
Whereas theism... the crusades. Witch burnings. Blood libel. Galileo's incarceration. Bruis' burning at the stake. Beheadings. Hangings. The inquisitions. Abortion clinic bombings. 9/11. Excommunication. Sexual repression. Can't buy beer on Sunday. Can't marry this religion, or that sex, or X number of spouses. Also, propositions like "the earth is 6000 years old."
Tenets are to religion as hair color is to hair. There are lots of colors; hair color is integral to the idea of hair. You can't say hair doesn't have a color. But atheism... it's like being bald. You can't describe a hair color for a bald person -- the idea is meaningless. Just as ascribing tenets to atheism is meaningless. There aren't any. When a person who is an atheist ascribes to any tenet, proposition, dogma, etc.... it's a 100% guarantee that said concept didn't come from atheism, but from something else. So please, stop trying to assign wrongheaded ideas to atheism. Atheism is the lack of adherence to one very specific idea, no more than that, and therefore doesn't drive adherence to any set of behaviors at all.
That's a bit shifty, don't you think? I don't mean to negate your point, but too, it's beyond my power to complement you -- I'm somewhat over a barrel. Perhaps if you add one to your argument, we'd have something else. Logically speaking. HCF.
Actually, theism is the belief in a god or gods; a-theism is the lack of a belief in a god or gods, and agnosticism attempts to circumvent the belief question by moving the goalposts to "knowledge" -- but that doesn't actually answer the question that the theist/atheist concept poses: Do you hold a belief in a god or gods, or do you not?
In the end, for every agnostic, they either hold a belief, however small, that there is a god or gods -- or they don't -- and therefore they are either theist or atheist.
Answering "Agnosticism" when queried on theism is like answering floating point coprocessors when queried on the smell of a rose, except it is either sneaky or stupid rather than an obvious non sequitur. Declared agnosticism WRT theism/atheism represents either intellectual cowardice, or cognitive failure.
No, you're bewildered. The atheist position is no more than "I don't hold a belief in a god or gods." That's it -- ALL of it.
You're confusing yourself by conflating atheism with anti-religious thoughts and actions; with the dislike of having religious actions forced upon one's self (such as "swearing" on a bible, such as having to pay one's debts with a paper that contains nonsensical tripe like "in gawd we trust", as if one did, when one doesn't... get it now? Atheism doesn't say "there is no god", atheism is simply the observation that reality isn't saying "there is a god."
If someone wants to believe there exists a god or gods, I have no problem with that. It's when they try to make me follow those beliefs, or the consequences of those beliefs, that I get upset. This is not because I am atheist. This is because I don't think other people have the right to tell me I have to attest to truth by acknowledging an imaginary being while pawing a book that is obviously full of lies, that my kids should have to hear the fairy tale that the earth is only 6000 years old in school, that I can't buy beer on Sunday, or that I'm not supposed to eat shellfish, etc. Their reason for doing so then comes into play, and I begin to take an anti-religious stance... because they are directly fucking with me. Not because I hold no belief in a god or gods, but because these people cannot seem to keep their sanctimonious bullshit to themselves.
Atheism has no dogma; no catechism; no rules, no tenets, no nothing. All atheism consists of is a lack of belief in a god or gods. That's it.
The attempt to link atheism to the acts of Hitler, Pol pot, etc., is simply a (very poor) attempt to lessen the obvious responsibility of religion, for myriad religiously-driven murder sprees. It doesn't work unless the listener isn't paying attention. It's lame.
Hitler and pol pot and etc. did what they did because they were murdering assholes. Not because they were atheist, even assuming they were (highly doubtful in Hitler's case, for instance.)
Useless? My key question would be does it have decent speed integer multiply and perhaps even divide instructions. A whole heck of a lot can be achieved if you have, say, the basic instruction set of a 6809, but fast and wide (and it didn't even have a divide... so we built multiply-by-reciprocal macros to substitute, that works too.)
I know everyone's used to having FP right at hand, but I'm telling you, fast integer code and table tricks can cover a lot more bases than one might initially think. A lot of my high performance stuff -- which is primarily image processing and software defined radio -- is currently limited considerably more by how fast I can move data in and out of main memory than it is by actually needing FP operations. On a dual 4-core machine, I can saturate the memory bus without half trying with code that would otherwise be considerably more efficient, if it could actually get to the memory when it needs to.
Another thing... when you're coding with C, for instance, the various FP ops can just as easily be buried in a library, then who cares why or how they get done anyway, as long as they are? With lots-o-RAM, you can write whatever you need to and it'd be the same code you'd write for another platform. Just mostly faster, because for many things, FP just isn't required, or critical. Fixed point isn't very bard to build either and can cover a wide range of needs (and then there's BCD code... better than FP for accounting, for instance.)
Signed, old assembly language programmer guy who actually admits he likes asm...
But the reality is, it will be a *very* long time before the current generation(s) get into a position to directly control the taxman. The old people are living longer, the rich old people are exceeding even that, and they retain a very tight control over our government. That's quite aside from the very true observation that kids today really don't care anyway -- they already let the government stomp all over pretty much every right they used to have without doing so much as getting out and throwing down a vote. Too busy posting to Facebook, no doubt.
The US government serves the corporations, because the corporations control the flow of the vast majority of the monies that reach congress. Until the corporations can be made to care about an issue, there will be no significant change in the stance of the US government. So if you want something done, you'd better figure out how to make it matter to the people that control the lobbyists in Washington, or all you're doing is expelling (more) heated air.
You just had a big hint -- that Internet blackout actually put a monkey wrench in SOPA/PIPA. Corporations don't like threats to their bottom line, and they told the politicians it was a no-go... and in ONE day, those bills were no longer supported. The question is, will the public do anything worthwhile with the answer that is staring them in the face?
Somehow, I doubt it. While the IT community is smart enough to recognize that extra-judicial, arbitrary power applied to their livelihood is a very bad deal, we already know that extra-judicial force in the form of the EPA, the FCC, the IRS and many more arms of our TLA-ridden government has been casually accepted by the general public -- I don't see any Internet blackouts happening in response to the public abuse exemplified by the very existence of those equally odious institutions.
Because polygamy is always about power and abuse, never about love.
That is such utter horseshit. As if you had ANY way to read the mind of everyone in a poly relationship. Just like every other flavor of relationship, there are good poly arrangements and there are poor ones. It's not about partner count or gender; it's about being decent human beings and not a whole lot else. FYI, "decent" doesn't mean "heterosexual" or "monogamous."
Well, see, everybody isn't happy. The homophobics, and many of the superstitious (often the same folks) aren't happy at all when confronted with anything outside their comfort zone.
You can be happy, see, but only if you do it their way. Otherwise, you're a bad person. Get it now?
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Let me explain something to you. ER treatment is very costly to the patient. But quite aside from cost, ER care doesn't address problems like cancer, diabetes, etc. What the ER is obligated to do is stabilize you. Not cure you, or develop a course of care for you, or really much of anything else. You go there, they'll treat the obvious -- broken bones, bullet holes -- you'll get one dose of a drug that will stabilize you in the opinion of the ER doc if in fact that is needed, an expensive prescription that you probably can't afford to fill anyway, and then you're out the door. It is a huge error to think that ER care is the equivalent of responsible medical treatment.
If, for instance, you have bad knees, or poor vision, or bad teeth, or an allergy to something, or a hernia that isn't strangulated at the moment, or diabetes that hasn't yet caused your eyes to rot or your feet to fall off... the ER will do you absolutely no good whatsoever. Other than gifting yourself with a whopping bill for walking in there. Get it? ER care is NOT a viable replacement for adequate medical care for a huge range of issues. And then let's go back to cost: ER care is far more expensive than proper preventive care, particularly for many disease processes caught early and treated early; if that is done, much less money is spent than allowing the disease to get chronic, and then trying to treat it. No matter where you treat it.
One last thing: You DO pay for ER care, ineffective and small-spectrum as it is. The hospital has to pay for the care, but since the patient doesn't, that cost either goes to the government under some program or other -- meaning, you pay for it -- or else it goes into increased prices for services at the hospital -- which means you pay for it -- and if you're insured, the insurance company gets larger bills, which translates into more costs for the insurance company -- which means you're going to pay for it. So what you should want, if your wish is for the least money to be taken from you, is care that is most cost-effective, which is NOT, I guarantee you, ER care. You want early preventive treatment; you want people to be healthy so they can work and pay taxes and so reduce your legitimate tax burden; you want them not to be walking around, sick, untreated with communicable diseases running rampant in their systems so you and yours can catch them --- instead, you want them recuperating at home, not concerned that they are going to go bankrupt if they miss one paycheck.
It seems obvious to me that a healthy country is as much in everyone's selfish self-interest as an educated one is.
It is still very much better than having to pay full price. Don't throw out the good in search of the perfect, which is often unattainable.
Yeah... although I'd prefer Ron Paul, I *can* think of reasons to vote Obama back in again:
Due in some degree to Obama himself: Medical care for 40 million or so people who otherwise wouldn't have it; gays being allowed to serve openly in the military; the pro-consumer pushback against the credit card companies; the end of the Iraq war; the limited engagement with Libya instead of spending our soldiers lives for no reason (again!); he signed the closure order for Guantanamo; and good odds that in his second term, when he doesn't have to concern himself with re-election, that he will turn his attention to some of his other campaign promises.
Due to other factors: Romney is an out-of-touch rich idiot; Newt is a scumbag; Paul isn't going to be supported by the republicans because they prefer an idiot or a scumbag to an actual conservative who would try to obey the constitution. Which, I guess, is why I'm seriously thinking about voting for Obama. Again. The republicans have done an *outstanding* job of shooting themselves in the foot this time around.
Is Obama perfect? Hell, no. Is he better than Romney or Gingrich? Yes, in fact, so much so that it's a slam dunk to vote for him, if those are the choices. On the other hand, on the (very) off chance that the republicans wake up and put Paul up against Obama, I'd vote for Paul simply because he says he'd bring our soldiers home and close all those foreign bases. And as president, he'd actually have the power to do it (and very little else on his agenda, so I don't worry about that other stuff much.) But let's face it: the repubs are going to put up one of the clowns, not Paul, and consequently, they're going to lose *really* badly.
lol
Christ who? You mean the magical character with zero proof of existence in the work of historical fiction called the bible?
My hamster style will beat your.... ok, never mind. I was gonna go all Mormon on you, but thought better of it.
There's a grain (or at least a germ) of truth in each of those posts. Kind of a cereal furrow of truthiness, just plowing along, planting seeds of doubt, perhaps to just lie farro, but then again, maybe knot.
Not once the FCC gets through with you, you couldn't. Just a heads up. Sorry.
Ok, fair enough. It's still cache-based. I did read it wrong. Too bad. I hope someday we get ram up to CPU speed. Lots of things in the way, at least as long as we use electrons for signaling. Oh well, was nice to think about, even if wrong. :)
Lol... No, you can't say the same about theism. Theism is the base of various conceptual trees; it is an active assertion with consequences that stem *directly* from the assertion. Atheism is not an active assertion.
Yes, I'm afraid it does. I picked mostly from Christian theism; but these various active assertions come right from the holy books of those particular theist trees, as well as from the various figureheads of those religions, in the name of, and justified by, those religions. This does not happen with atheism.
Atheists get their morals, values etc. from sources other than atheism -- of course, since atheism doesn't specify or imply any. Theists get their morals, values etc. from their religion in the form of directives in their various holy religious books, where the behavior that is expected from them, from eating shellfish, to scouring female slaves' mouths with a quart of salt, to not eating cows, to beheading the infidels, to not stepping on bugs, is laid out for them in painstaking detail.
Simply ask *which* god or gods a theist believes in, and now you know which religion defines their theism, and further, you'll know which book lays out the next lowest branches of their behavior. You now have the basic map of their moral and ethical tree. You'll know if they have been told to go for one wife or many; if they can eat cows or not; if they should turn the other cheek or behead the opposition, and many more things as well.
Turn that around, note that someone is atheist, and you still know absolutely nothing else about them other than they don't hold a belief in a god or gods. You don't have any way to ask them something atheism-related that will help you learn, either. They might be a "smiter", they might be a vegetarian, they might eat burgers, they might be a peace-nik, they might be supportive of polygamy, they might be chaste by nature -- atheism tells you nothing about anything else in a person's mindset -- that's the point. Theists often make this point themselves, though in a rather clueless way, ridiculously claiming that atheism leads to, or is, nihilism -- but of course it isn't/doesn't do that, either, any more than it is, or leads to, a path towards pretending a cracker is someone's body. Atheism is a lack of belief in a god or gods. That's all it is.
Theism, on the other hand, is, like it or not, a hotbed of behavior control -- very specific behaviors follow directly from adhering to the religious ideas that actually make up each variety of theism. Atheism is absolutely null in this regard.
Feel free to have the last word. I've explained the facts three times, and I'm pretty sure that doing so again won't convince anyone who still feels otherwise of a single thing. It reminds me quite strongly of something... oh, yes, of course: Theism.
Dude, whoosh. Look at what the story is about here -- a CPU with lots of very fast ram -- and no cache.
Well, because no one's offering that yet? :)
My memory bandwidth problems typically arise from doing things to data elements that (a) can be spread across multiple cores and (b) don't take many CPU cycles per data element and (c) where the data elements come from, and must be restored to, data element arrays that are far too large for cache to do them any significant good.
Ok, two approaches. First, if you know the divisor, but not the dividend, then in your assembly code you can write, conceptually:
dividend * (1.0 / divisor)
Since the right side of that contains only known values, there's only a multiply to be done at run time; the assembler can prepare the rest at assembly time.
Second, if you don't know the divisor or the dividend, you can prepare a table, conceptually like this:
1/1
1/2
1/3
1/4
....
1/N
Then, when the time comes for division, you do it like this:
x = y * table[z]
It's a hair slower than just multiplication, because it includes a table lookup.
There are some technical things involved in this, like accounting for width of the various inputs and where the binary point lands within your results, but these are really implementation details and don't change the overall idea.
I should also point out that using tables, you can pre-compute results for many arbitrary inputs, so that execution time is essentially the table lookup, sometimes with an interpolation stage. You can do sines, cosines, logs, etc. this way. If memory is cheap and fast, then the need for an FPU may simply go away. Simple example: If you have a 16 bit float, then a 64k entry table can contain the sine value for every possible floating point input. Zero compute time at run time. You want fast, there it is.
But as it turns out, a lot of times, the need for floating point isn't what we think it is. Let's say you want to rotate an image, so you scan through it pixel by pixel. Naively, rotation is:
newx = (x * sin(theta)) - (y * cos(theta));
newy = (x * cos(theta)) + (y * sin(theta));
So, you look at that and you think, wow, two FP sines and two FP cosines and four FP multiplies and an FP add and an FP subtract PER PIXEL!
But, work it out, and this is what you want to actually execute per pixel:
newx = xxs - yyc;
newy = xxc + yys;
xxs += s;
xxc += c;
That's three FP adds and one FP subtract per pixel. All of the sine, cosine and multiply stuff is gone. There are also two more FP adds per line. It's hella fast, and 100% accurate.
How one gets from the naive approach to the fast one, I leave as an exercise for the reader. Unless someone is really curious -- in which case, I'll blog it and point you to it, it's a little esoteric, even for this place.
You completely miss the point. There are no "atheistic ideologies." Ideologies may include atheism, but atheism itself includes nothing. Atheism stands alone. It has no opinions; there is no mental lever provided by the atheist stance to start anything. It's just a lack of belief in an absurd proposition. It causes nothing. It's not an active stance. It's a lack of one.
Atheism doesn't say "eat this but not that." Atheism says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't say "stone the unbelievers", it says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't say "whip one's self until bloody", it says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't say "fly the aircraft into the building", it says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't say "Give 20% of your money to the church", it says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't even say "don't go to church." it says "I don't believe there is a god or gods." Atheism doesn't say "memorize this book." There is no book. There isn't even a paragraph. Here is the whole atheist ball of wax, nothing left out at all: "without a belief in a god or gods." That's it. Finis. Exit stage left. Whoosh.
However, religions -- theism, the opposite of atheism -- are active stances; stances that uniformly, in and of themselves, have and promote (often insist upon) tenets, dogmas, rules, authorities, entire books of ridiculous claims and instructions for behavior. These often include instructions to deal harshly with people. Atheism has no such instructions; it's philosophically, ethically and morally empty and cause-free: it describes nothing more than the fact that the atheist doesn't believe in a god or gods.
Whereas theism... the crusades. Witch burnings. Blood libel. Galileo's incarceration. Bruis' burning at the stake. Beheadings. Hangings. The inquisitions. Abortion clinic bombings. 9/11. Excommunication. Sexual repression. Can't buy beer on Sunday. Can't marry this religion, or that sex, or X number of spouses. Also, propositions like "the earth is 6000 years old."
Tenets are to religion as hair color is to hair. There are lots of colors; hair color is integral to the idea of hair. You can't say hair doesn't have a color. But atheism... it's like being bald. You can't describe a hair color for a bald person -- the idea is meaningless. Just as ascribing tenets to atheism is meaningless. There aren't any. When a person who is an atheist ascribes to any tenet, proposition, dogma, etc.... it's a 100% guarantee that said concept didn't come from atheism, but from something else. So please, stop trying to assign wrongheaded ideas to atheism. Atheism is the lack of adherence to one very specific idea, no more than that, and therefore doesn't drive adherence to any set of behaviors at all.
That's a bit shifty, don't you think? I don't mean to negate your point, but too, it's beyond my power to complement you -- I'm somewhat over a barrel. Perhaps if you add one to your argument, we'd have something else. Logically speaking. HCF.
Actually, theism is the belief in a god or gods; a-theism is the lack of a belief in a god or gods, and agnosticism attempts to circumvent the belief question by moving the goalposts to "knowledge" -- but that doesn't actually answer the question that the theist/atheist concept poses: Do you hold a belief in a god or gods, or do you not?
In the end, for every agnostic, they either hold a belief, however small, that there is a god or gods -- or they don't -- and therefore they are either theist or atheist.
Answering "Agnosticism" when queried on theism is like answering floating point coprocessors when queried on the smell of a rose, except it is either sneaky or stupid rather than an obvious non sequitur. Declared agnosticism WRT theism/atheism represents either intellectual cowardice, or cognitive failure.
No, you're bewildered. The atheist position is no more than "I don't hold a belief in a god or gods." That's it -- ALL of it.
You're confusing yourself by conflating atheism with anti-religious thoughts and actions; with the dislike of having religious actions forced upon one's self (such as "swearing" on a bible, such as having to pay one's debts with a paper that contains nonsensical tripe like "in gawd we trust", as if one did, when one doesn't... get it now? Atheism doesn't say "there is no god", atheism is simply the observation that reality isn't saying "there is a god."
If someone wants to believe there exists a god or gods, I have no problem with that. It's when they try to make me follow those beliefs, or the consequences of those beliefs, that I get upset. This is not because I am atheist. This is because I don't think other people have the right to tell me I have to attest to truth by acknowledging an imaginary being while pawing a book that is obviously full of lies, that my kids should have to hear the fairy tale that the earth is only 6000 years old in school, that I can't buy beer on Sunday, or that I'm not supposed to eat shellfish, etc. Their reason for doing so then comes into play, and I begin to take an anti-religious stance... because they are directly fucking with me. Not because I hold no belief in a god or gods, but because these people cannot seem to keep their sanctimonious bullshit to themselves.
Atheism has no dogma; no catechism; no rules, no tenets, no nothing. All atheism consists of is a lack of belief in a god or gods. That's it.
The attempt to link atheism to the acts of Hitler, Pol pot, etc., is simply a (very poor) attempt to lessen the obvious responsibility of religion, for myriad religiously-driven murder sprees. It doesn't work unless the listener isn't paying attention. It's lame.
Hitler and pol pot and etc. did what they did because they were murdering assholes. Not because they were atheist, even assuming they were (highly doubtful in Hitler's case, for instance.)
Useless? My key question would be does it have decent speed integer multiply and perhaps even divide instructions. A whole heck of a lot can be achieved if you have, say, the basic instruction set of a 6809, but fast and wide (and it didn't even have a divide... so we built multiply-by-reciprocal macros to substitute, that works too.)
I know everyone's used to having FP right at hand, but I'm telling you, fast integer code and table tricks can cover a lot more bases than one might initially think. A lot of my high performance stuff -- which is primarily image processing and software defined radio -- is currently limited considerably more by how fast I can move data in and out of main memory than it is by actually needing FP operations. On a dual 4-core machine, I can saturate the memory bus without half trying with code that would otherwise be considerably more efficient, if it could actually get to the memory when it needs to.
Another thing... when you're coding with C, for instance, the various FP ops can just as easily be buried in a library, then who cares why or how they get done anyway, as long as they are? With lots-o-RAM, you can write whatever you need to and it'd be the same code you'd write for another platform. Just mostly faster, because for many things, FP just isn't required, or critical. Fixed point isn't very bard to build either and can cover a wide range of needs (and then there's BCD code... better than FP for accounting, for instance.)
Signed, old assembly language programmer guy who actually admits he likes asm...
But the reality is, it will be a *very* long time before the current generation(s) get into a position to directly control the taxman. The old people are living longer, the rich old people are exceeding even that, and they retain a very tight control over our government. That's quite aside from the very true observation that kids today really don't care anyway -- they already let the government stomp all over pretty much every right they used to have without doing so much as getting out and throwing down a vote. Too busy posting to Facebook, no doubt.
The US government serves the corporations, because the corporations control the flow of the vast majority of the monies that reach congress. Until the corporations can be made to care about an issue, there will be no significant change in the stance of the US government. So if you want something done, you'd better figure out how to make it matter to the people that control the lobbyists in Washington, or all you're doing is expelling (more) heated air.
You just had a big hint -- that Internet blackout actually put a monkey wrench in SOPA/PIPA. Corporations don't like threats to their bottom line, and they told the politicians it was a no-go... and in ONE day, those bills were no longer supported. The question is, will the public do anything worthwhile with the answer that is staring them in the face?
Somehow, I doubt it. While the IT community is smart enough to recognize that extra-judicial, arbitrary power applied to their livelihood is a very bad deal, we already know that extra-judicial force in the form of the EPA, the FCC, the IRS and many more arms of our TLA-ridden government has been casually accepted by the general public -- I don't see any Internet blackouts happening in response to the public abuse exemplified by the very existence of those equally odious institutions.
That is such utter horseshit. As if you had ANY way to read the mind of everyone in a poly relationship. Just like every other flavor of relationship, there are good poly arrangements and there are poor ones. It's not about partner count or gender; it's about being decent human beings and not a whole lot else. FYI, "decent" doesn't mean "heterosexual" or "monogamous."
Well, see, everybody isn't happy. The homophobics, and many of the superstitious (often the same folks) aren't happy at all when confronted with anything outside their comfort zone.
You can be happy, see, but only if you do it their way. Otherwise, you're a bad person. Get it now?
Yeah, not like they'd have any reason to scare you into buying a floodlight, is it?
Taken with a Canon EOS 50D camera -- no telescope.
These too, though you have to be somewhat northerly to see this stuff.
THAT is what YOU could see, if you could get your town to turn off the lights.
Streetlights? Phooey. Just carry a flashlight. They also make special lamps that don't reflect a lot of light upwards if you must have light (why???)
You -- and especially your kids, if you have any -- are missing a heck of a lot if you live, as most do, in the midst of light pollution.
Trust me on this one: Outdoor artificial lighting is overrated.