"Iraq supports terrorism" + "Terrorists attacked the US on 9/11" = "Iraq had a hand in 9/11"
is the conclusion many people make. The "supports terrorism" line was used heavily by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq and one would be naive to think they didn't anticipate the blurring of the lines between Iraqi-supported terrorists against Israel and the group inside Al-Queda who planned the 9/11 bombing.
The very fact that the war in Iraq has been referred to by the Bush administration as part of the "war on terror" further indicates the intentional attempts to pool the middle-east into one giant "brown people" group and thus, linking them all, conceptually, to the 9/11 attackers.
One would be naive to think that the Bush administration has been clear and consistent about its reasons for invading Iraq before, during, and after the invasion and blind to not have seen the subtle and not-so-subtle attempts to link Iraq to 9/11.
Re:Biggest myths of all have been around for ages.
on
Why Myths Persist
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· Score: 1
So I ask you - does someone who believes in an infinite, unifying principle beyond our current understanding sound to you like a cultist or a scientist?
Cultist. The key here is "believes in" rather than "can conceive of". The *key* to science has always been uncertainty. The minute you start "believing in" things, you've voided all right to claim yourself as a scientist at least with regard to that particular belief. I don't "believe in" gravitational force. I acknowledge that it has thus far, not been contradicted by observations made by humanity. I understand, and can fully conceive of, one day when throwing an apple in the air won't cause it to come back down to Earth. It's that little bit of doubt that separates scientists from religious nuts.
Don't be so quick to dismiss those who profess to be religious. Damn near all of the greatest scientific minds of the last thousand years fall into that category.
Erm, no. Damn near all of the greatest scientific minds were spiritual people. They were "Christian" in that one couldn't not be Christian without massive social consequences. Saying they're religious implies an entirely different thing...unless you have some special meaning of "religious" that the rest of us don't know, I'm going to assume you mean "subscribes to the views of the doctrine of the dominant religion at hand". In most cases of the Western world, this means subscribing to the doctrine of Christianity.
Even if you somehow meant "believes in an infinite, unifying principle beyond our understanding" by "religious" in some convoluted perversion of the English language, I'd still deny that any of our great scientific minds could be described that way. Refer to my argument about doubt above.
And yet...my computer can't realistically generate 3D images of people with flawless likeness./I want my f'ing holodeck//Would never come out///Guess what I'll be doing in there.
What if I don't like any of those options? I'm shocked how many people have forgotten how a basic sales transaction works.
Seller: "I want to make as much money as possible, here's what I have to offer." Consumer: "I don't like that. I want something else at a better price."
Somewhere, in the middle, an agreement is formed. What you're seeing here is the later part. You call it "whining" but without that, we'd all be totally screwed as it pretty much means the seller dictates all of the terms.
To be quite honest, the line "just choose one of the ways they offer and stop whining" is frighteningly indicative of being a corporate sheep.
Note that I'm simply talking about gripes of not being able to get the shows off of iTunes. As for downloading it through pirated means, that's another argument in and of itself.
Which version of the constitution do you have? Because the version I have says nothing about copyright laws....
In fact, the spreading of information, even if someone else came up with the idea first, could be considered free speech.
Patents/copyright/trademarks are legal concepts that were added later with the good intention of promoting innovation. But like any other legislation, it got perverted into a way to gain legal, government-enforced monopolies that allow corporations to abuse their dominance.
As it currently stands, I say we do away with the patent/copyright system and let the market sort it out. If you want to profit from a show, figure out a way to restrict access yourself. The government is not there to guarantee you profits.
Those are *not* very impressive figures for the embedded market. I imagined the whole 64-core chip would run below 100mW. If we're talking 12 to 19 watts for the chip, it is a beast in embedded terms. For reference, an SoC with 4 ARM cores, all of the peripherals that that thing has plus dedicated DSP/FPU units would still be under 4W.
FPGA's (particularly ones from Xilinx) that offer similar logic horsepower (assuming you had a digital designer to write your VHDL for your) for less than 500mW.
The latest Virtex 5 for DSP applications can provide the same processing capability these guys claim (2x H.264 streams) along with all the bells and whistles and on top of that, you have 2 PPC hardcore processors to act as arbitrators for slower functions.
Those things suck up up to 1W though and that's a lot of power for an embedded system.
Considering these things are MIPS cores, having C code compile to it wouldn't be hard at all I would say. It's utilizing the mesh network that's the problem.
Until I see some results of dynamically-compiled C code that runs really fast on this thing, I don't see it offering better solutions than, say, an FPGA. The exception would be if this was much lower-powered.
It's not theoretically impossible to do. Instead of treating it like a CPU, treat it like a network with micro-ops treated like packets. Run each sequence of micro-ops through something similar to a global routing algorithm and optimization should be fairly easy. This all, of course, assumes that you have something very parallelizable to begin with, like H.264 encoding.
This has been done. There was an article a while back about IBM being able to drill holes through their wafer to produce an interconnect to a second wafer on the bottom.
Intel did this a swell and redesigned the Pentium 4 on it.
The old method of bonding two wafers also works. Smart censors, for instance, bonds a photodetector material (a semiconductor like InGaAs or InSb) onto the top of a cmos chip. The bonding was very expensive, of course, but it is definitely possible to grow a semiconductor on top of existing metal/polysilicon.
This affects digital chips more than you think. Process variations are a huge problem as we get to smaller and smaller feature sizes. While analog circuits are much more sensitive to variations in threshold-voltage, capacitance and resistance (and cross inductance), keep in mind that all digital circuits are still analog. They are simply interpreted as 1's and 0's.
With this in mind, consider a digital circuit that's driving the output voltage from the voltage of a logical 0 (let's call it 0V) to logical 1 (let's say, 5V for early TTL lovers). That voltage isn't going to rise instantaneously. The time it takes to go from 0 to 5 volts will depend on:
1. The various capacitances of the circuit, both parasitic and device capacitance. 2. Resistance in various circuit elements. 3. Cross-inductance. 4. Threshold voltages for all of the transistors.
Having an accurate model to statistically predict these variations will allow chip designers to better estimate the speed of their digital circuits. So if the target goal of a chip is 10 GHz, they can know, before they commit to silicon, roughly how many chips in a batch will meet that target speed.
Other factors also play in as we get to lower and lower powered chips. With a VDD of 1.0V or below (as in ultra-low-voltage chips), cross-inductance, capacitance on the power rails, etc. can actually affect the stability of a digital circuit. Noise is injected that can turn a voltage that was meant to be a logical 0 into a logical 1. With modern chips turning voltages in regions of the chip on and off, the di/dt problem comes in. Without accurate predictions as to the impedances across the chip, reflections on the power rails can cause a voltage that's higher than VDD and, if the transistors weren't designed conservatively (to meet power and speed goals), they could burn out.
Looking at the PDF, it supposedly gathers profile data in the background (in local caches on the chip itself) and dumps periodically depending on the OS/application settings. This allows it to profile on-the-fly with very little impact on application performance.
The application can then gather the information, which is stored in its address space, and do with it what it will (optimize on-the-fly).
Of particular interest is that the OS can allow the profile information to be dumped to the address space of other threads/processes as well as the one that the data is collected on. The OS controls the switching of the cached profile information during a context switch.
This is both cool (in that a secondary core/thread can help optimize the first) and scary (one thread getting access to another's instruction address information). I predict there will be exactly 42 Windows patches released 3.734 days after the service pack that allows Windows to take advantage of this feature because of security reasons.
See, with single-die, multi-core solutions, the FSB becomes much less of a limitation. A smart caching system pretty much does away with most of the problems with the exception of streaming programs (like pixel processing).
Looking at the Core 2's memory bandwidth compared to that of an X-2, it doesn't seem like effectively latency/bandwidth is all that lacking.
As you scale to 8+ chips with separate cache pools, the difference will show, however.
Also, keep in mind that in a NUMA architecture, you don't have one big chunk of memory to do what you will with. You have pockets of memory and if the OS/application isn't smart enough to partition its data chunks (or if two threads share a single, fragmented data chunk and there's no replication), then you're not effectively getting more bandwidth. In fact, it will slow you down as you'd have to go over the core-to-core interconnect (high-latency Hypertransport link in the case of the AMD64's) to get to the memory you want.
At any rate, much as I don't like MS, I dunno if I'd blame MS here, other than for bending over. If the MPAA demands that kind of stupidity, either you comply, or you get to play no HD videos on that computer. So MS likely faced the lose-lose choice of either they implement that idiocy, or they get to tell some hundreds of millions of potential customers that Vista doesn't play HD media at all. You can probably see how the latter is a faster suicide.
I don't think the later will be a suicide at all. Microsoft currently has very little competition, even in media content software. WMP is pretty much the de-facto media player on most people's machines and XP and Vista are the de-facto OS's. The only major competition is Apple and even that's arguable.
No, if Microsoft decided not to downsample HD content and made Vista (and XP through a patch) unable to play HD content, the result would be that the providers of HD content will not be able to sell to PC owners who play HD on their computers. I don't see Apple yielding to the HD providers as their base customer is a very anti-establishment crowd who would lynch them for doing such a thing.
If the movie industry is willing to give up the entire PC media market, they can do that. If the cartel weren't so monopolistic, this would be a perfect demonstration of capitalism. One studio decides to make HD content that's playable on all PC's without the encryption requirement. Another studio is content to be stubborn. The former studio sells tons of HD-DVD's. The later doesn't.
All this is assuming, of course, that M$ gives a crap about inconveniencing the consumer by requiring them to have monitor's with HDMI inputs in order to view full-quality HD video. I don't think they do. They're way more interested in yielding to the entertainment industry in order to expand their software to the media market (having mediacenters in every home) and the only way to do that is to yield. This isn't a case of do-or-die. It's a case of do-or-don't-make-as-much-money-even-though-you-hav e-no-competition.
Isn't this only a problem if the OS doesn't manage the NUMA architecture well? Surely there is an OS out there smart enough to recognize separate processors with separate memory regions and assign physical addresses appropriately....
Erm, no. See, socialism, as a political system, gives control to the central government. Under a democracy, the central government (in theory) is controlled by the people. So in a social democracy, the people collectively control the wealth.
It isn't "watered down" in any way. The fact that nations who are currently social democracies may be described as "watered down" is simply because they realize the benefits of having *some* of their nation's wealth participate in a free, capitalist market.
Capitalism is a great way to given people incentives to invent new things, spend more money, etc. which in turn raises the quality of life because of these new inventions and distribution of wealth. It is *not* a good way to provide a social safety net so that even the dumbest and poorest in the nation doesn't starve. Such things may not be important to you but apparently to the Canadians, Swedish, and other social democracies, it is.
No, one cannot. And I'm surprised such a statement is marked "insightful". Astonishment at atrocities is absolutely no excuse for being incapable of performing rational thought.
Also, yours is a loaded question. It assumes that "communism and fascism" both killed tons of people. While I do believe that the attempt at the communist system caused many many to die, it is presumptuous to just lump the two together.
For instance, the acts of Stalin to execute his own people is caused by a fascist system. The starvation of people due to lack of resources is the result of a communist system. Any outrage of atrocities should be directed solely at the former political ideology and really has nothing to do with the later one, which is really just a poor economic system with no real malicious properties.
Nowhere in that definition do I see "allow businesses to cheat, steal, or engage in other illicit activity."
If I'm reading the definition correctly, it doesn't disallow such activities. In fact, it states that anything other than that which will harm individual liberty, peace, security and property rights is fair-game.
One can argue that copying is stealing intellectual property. But the idea of intellectual property is arguable so conclusively calling it "stealing" and "cheating" is a bit biased and, if I may say so, indicative of decades of corporate brainwashing and perversion of the original idea, which was simply to offer some incentive for invention.
That's what occurred to me at first too. You'd think they'd be taking the opposite approach for several reasons:
1. Music is a volume-based profit model. If fewer people buy it, you don't recoup the cost of development and distribution unless you charge higher prices. So the more popular music is, the less it should be priced because you're going to make up for that price difference in volume.
2. Piracy is mainly a "problem" with popular music. If you're into some obscure Indie rock band, you're probably one out of 10 people who will download it illegally. That's not a big deal. On the other hand, Sir Justin's latest album (he's still making music right?) will be downloaded by every teenage girl out there and many of them are going to download it from the "bad" sources. So it stands to reason that it's with the more popular stuff that you want to give consumers incentives to use your service vs, say, bit-torrent. A lower price is a primary incentive. Perhaps not free, but if you get 10 million downloads a day when Avril releases a new album and each was priced at $0.05, that's still $500k a day of income. Compare this to pricing it at $2 (I'm assuming this is the top cap), at which point, according to the music industry, the big bad pirates will come along and let those 10 million downloads be free (because we all know that everyone will choose to download for free vs buy and every who downloaded for free would've bought). That's $0 earned vs $500k/day earned.
3. Marketing costs less for bands that are already popular. If you were pushing some new-comer rock band that nobody knows, you'd have to spend a boatload of money to advertise. Compare this to the latest P'Ditty album, which will practically advertise itself. It only makes sense that less popular music will cost more to promote/create and therefore, should be charged more.
All of this is under the assumption that the music industry is trying to fairly price its products based on cost and market value. Of course, if they were unrealistic about how the world works, overly greedy, and thought that they could arbitrarily charge whatever they want and have government legislation grant them a legal monopoly, then they may not care about fair pricing and simply think:
profit = number of downloads * price-per-download
OMG, if I make price-per-download grow as number of downloads my profits will be exponential!!!!!!
Only things coming into the United States is subject to search and seizure. Things going outside may be searched with reasonable cause. That last part makes whoever does said search and seizure accountable.
A communication between a US Person and a foreign person is two way. What the foreign person says and is received by the US Person is subject to search and seizure. What the US Person says is not. This allow both to be monitored without restraint or accountability.
To add my own anecdotal evidence, I will speak of my workplace.
We're not IT, though we have a few on staff for the IT part that's necessary of any corporation and particularly ours. We're a microchip design company. RFIC's and signal processors. Half if not more of the *designers* here are women. Granted they all started their careers in engineering in the 70's-80's but that doesn't change the fact that they all like their jobs and are very good at it.
My previous job was at another semiconductor company but had very few women engineers. In fact, all of the electrical guys were male. Only a couple of the mechanical engineers were female.
The difference between these two work environments is stark. At my previous job, we were a skeleton crew given unrealistic deadlines, impossible budgets and expected to perform miracles. Yes, at the end, when our system worked (and by work, I mean is flying in a bunch of airplanes without any reported failures), we all felt pride in a job well done and forgot about the nights in the lab trying to track down what was causing signal attenuation. Oh, and we had to manage our own Solaris design network. No IT support because the company's IT didn't "work with Linux".
At my current work environment, we have state-of-the-art tools, a full IT support team that maintains our Red Hat design network as well as our multi-million-dollar-per-seat EDA tools, a panel of experts of everything from logic design to VLSI, and, most importantly, a company policy that lets all the working moms (and dads) do 30hrs/wk if they wanted to at reduced pay.
I can't imagine work places like my current one are very numerous in the tech fields. This, I would imagine, is especially true of the IT field. Perhaps we shouldn't be worrying about the decline of women in IT but rather, why there isn't a decline of men in IT. Are we all truly that thick-headed?
It's already moved there. It's called PCI-Express (or Hypertransport). Buy a modern motherboard. The various controller chips in there are connected via a multi-lane PCI-Express link.
I don't agree on the memory though. As far as I recall, memory interfaces are the one thing that have not gone link-based. We're still using Synchronous RAM and all of the major bus interfaces use synchronous interfaces. This makes sense as crossing clock domains takes time which adds memory latency. Packetizing it takes even more time (along with overhead) and, IIRC, no memory interface to day uses such a model.
Otherwise known as vector computing, MIMD is a generic term for VLIW architectures. I.e. instruction/data are bundled to be processed together in parallel.
The architecture being argued about here calls for parallelism on a higher level, very similar to Asymmetric Multiprocessing with the caveat that there is an arbitrator core.
I'm not sure how something that generic can be patented but then again, I think the patent system as it exists today is fairly screwed up.
Slashdot Mirror
"Iraq supports terrorism" + "Terrorists attacked the US on 9/11" = "Iraq had a hand in 9/11"
is the conclusion many people make. The "supports terrorism" line was used heavily by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq and one would be naive to think they didn't anticipate the blurring of the lines between Iraqi-supported terrorists against Israel and the group inside Al-Queda who planned the 9/11 bombing.
The very fact that the war in Iraq has been referred to by the Bush administration as part of the "war on terror" further indicates the intentional attempts to pool the middle-east into one giant "brown people" group and thus, linking them all, conceptually, to the 9/11 attackers.
One would be naive to think that the Bush administration has been clear and consistent about its reasons for invading Iraq before, during, and after the invasion and blind to not have seen the subtle and not-so-subtle attempts to link Iraq to 9/11.
So I ask you - does someone who believes in an infinite, unifying principle beyond our current understanding sound to you like a cultist or a scientist?
Cultist. The key here is "believes in" rather than "can conceive of". The *key* to science has always been uncertainty. The minute you start "believing in" things, you've voided all right to claim yourself as a scientist at least with regard to that particular belief. I don't "believe in" gravitational force. I acknowledge that it has thus far, not been contradicted by observations made by humanity. I understand, and can fully conceive of, one day when throwing an apple in the air won't cause it to come back down to Earth. It's that little bit of doubt that separates scientists from religious nuts.
Don't be so quick to dismiss those who profess to be religious. Damn near all of the greatest scientific minds of the last thousand years fall into that category.
Erm, no. Damn near all of the greatest scientific minds were spiritual people. They were "Christian" in that one couldn't not be Christian without massive social consequences. Saying they're religious implies an entirely different thing...unless you have some special meaning of "religious" that the rest of us don't know, I'm going to assume you mean "subscribes to the views of the doctrine of the dominant religion at hand". In most cases of the Western world, this means subscribing to the doctrine of Christianity.
Even if you somehow meant "believes in an infinite, unifying principle beyond our understanding" by "religious" in some convoluted perversion of the English language, I'd still deny that any of our great scientific minds could be described that way. Refer to my argument about doubt above.
And yet...my computer can't realistically generate 3D images of people with flawless likeness. /I want my f'ing holodeck //Would never come out ///Guess what I'll be doing in there.
What if I don't like any of those options? I'm shocked how many people have forgotten how a basic sales transaction works.
Seller: "I want to make as much money as possible, here's what I have to offer."
Consumer: "I don't like that. I want something else at a better price."
Somewhere, in the middle, an agreement is formed. What you're seeing here is the later part. You call it "whining" but without that, we'd all be totally screwed as it pretty much means the seller dictates all of the terms.
To be quite honest, the line "just choose one of the ways they offer and stop whining" is frighteningly indicative of being a corporate sheep.
Note that I'm simply talking about gripes of not being able to get the shows off of iTunes. As for downloading it through pirated means, that's another argument in and of itself.
Which version of the constitution do you have? Because the version I have says nothing about copyright laws....
In fact, the spreading of information, even if someone else came up with the idea first, could be considered free speech.
Patents/copyright/trademarks are legal concepts that were added later with the good intention of promoting innovation. But like any other legislation, it got perverted into a way to gain legal, government-enforced monopolies that allow corporations to abuse their dominance.
As it currently stands, I say we do away with the patent/copyright system and let the market sort it out. If you want to profit from a show, figure out a way to restrict access yourself. The government is not there to guarantee you profits.
Those are *not* very impressive figures for the embedded market. I imagined the whole 64-core chip would run below 100mW. If we're talking 12 to 19 watts for the chip, it is a beast in embedded terms. For reference, an SoC with 4 ARM cores, all of the peripherals that that thing has plus dedicated DSP/FPU units would still be under 4W.
FPGA's (particularly ones from Xilinx) that offer similar logic horsepower (assuming you had a digital designer to write your VHDL for your) for less than 500mW.
The latest Virtex 5 for DSP applications can provide the same processing capability these guys claim (2x H.264 streams) along with all the bells and whistles and on top of that, you have 2 PPC hardcore processors to act as arbitrators for slower functions.
Those things suck up up to 1W though and that's a lot of power for an embedded system.
Considering these things are MIPS cores, having C code compile to it wouldn't be hard at all I would say. It's utilizing the mesh network that's the problem.
Until I see some results of dynamically-compiled C code that runs really fast on this thing, I don't see it offering better solutions than, say, an FPGA. The exception would be if this was much lower-powered.
It's not theoretically impossible to do. Instead of treating it like a CPU, treat it like a network with micro-ops treated like packets. Run each sequence of micro-ops through something similar to a global routing algorithm and optimization should be fairly easy. This all, of course, assumes that you have something very parallelizable to begin with, like H.264 encoding.
This has been done. There was an article a while back about IBM being able to drill holes through their wafer to produce an interconnect to a second wafer on the bottom.
Intel did this a swell and redesigned the Pentium 4 on it.
The old method of bonding two wafers also works. Smart censors, for instance, bonds a photodetector material (a semiconductor like InGaAs or InSb) onto the top of a cmos chip. The bonding was very expensive, of course, but it is definitely possible to grow a semiconductor on top of existing metal/polysilicon.
I'm actually curious. Are you at Synopsys or Cadence?
This affects digital chips more than you think. Process variations are a huge problem as we get to smaller and smaller feature sizes. While analog circuits are much more sensitive to variations in threshold-voltage, capacitance and resistance (and cross inductance), keep in mind that all digital circuits are still analog. They are simply interpreted as 1's and 0's.
With this in mind, consider a digital circuit that's driving the output voltage from the voltage of a logical 0 (let's call it 0V) to logical 1 (let's say, 5V for early TTL lovers). That voltage isn't going to rise instantaneously. The time it takes to go from 0 to 5 volts will depend on:
1. The various capacitances of the circuit, both parasitic and device capacitance.
2. Resistance in various circuit elements.
3. Cross-inductance.
4. Threshold voltages for all of the transistors.
Having an accurate model to statistically predict these variations will allow chip designers to better estimate the speed of their digital circuits. So if the target goal of a chip is 10 GHz, they can know, before they commit to silicon, roughly how many chips in a batch will meet that target speed.
Other factors also play in as we get to lower and lower powered chips. With a VDD of 1.0V or below (as in ultra-low-voltage chips), cross-inductance, capacitance on the power rails, etc. can actually affect the stability of a digital circuit. Noise is injected that can turn a voltage that was meant to be a logical 0 into a logical 1. With modern chips turning voltages in regions of the chip on and off, the di/dt problem comes in. Without accurate predictions as to the impedances across the chip, reflections on the power rails can cause a voltage that's higher than VDD and, if the transistors weren't designed conservatively (to meet power and speed goals), they could burn out.
Looking at the PDF, it supposedly gathers profile data in the background (in local caches on the chip itself) and dumps periodically depending on the OS/application settings. This allows it to profile on-the-fly with very little impact on application performance.
The application can then gather the information, which is stored in its address space, and do with it what it will (optimize on-the-fly).
Of particular interest is that the OS can allow the profile information to be dumped to the address space of other threads/processes as well as the one that the data is collected on. The OS controls the switching of the cached profile information during a context switch.
This is both cool (in that a secondary core/thread can help optimize the first) and scary (one thread getting access to another's instruction address information). I predict there will be exactly 42 Windows patches released 3.734 days after the service pack that allows Windows to take advantage of this feature because of security reasons.
See, with single-die, multi-core solutions, the FSB becomes much less of a limitation. A smart caching system pretty much does away with most of the problems with the exception of streaming programs (like pixel processing).
Looking at the Core 2's memory bandwidth compared to that of an X-2, it doesn't seem like effectively latency/bandwidth is all that lacking.
As you scale to 8+ chips with separate cache pools, the difference will show, however.
Also, keep in mind that in a NUMA architecture, you don't have one big chunk of memory to do what you will with. You have pockets of memory and if the OS/application isn't smart enough to partition its data chunks (or if two threads share a single, fragmented data chunk and there's no replication), then you're not effectively getting more bandwidth. In fact, it will slow you down as you'd have to go over the core-to-core interconnect (high-latency Hypertransport link in the case of the AMD64's) to get to the memory you want.
At any rate, much as I don't like MS, I dunno if I'd blame MS here, other than for bending over. If the MPAA demands that kind of stupidity, either you comply, or you get to play no HD videos on that computer. So MS likely faced the lose-lose choice of either they implement that idiocy, or they get to tell some hundreds of millions of potential customers that Vista doesn't play HD media at all. You can probably see how the latter is a faster suicide.
v e-no-competition.
I don't think the later will be a suicide at all. Microsoft currently has very little competition, even in media content software. WMP is pretty much the de-facto media player on most people's machines and XP and Vista are the de-facto OS's. The only major competition is Apple and even that's arguable.
No, if Microsoft decided not to downsample HD content and made Vista (and XP through a patch) unable to play HD content, the result would be that the providers of HD content will not be able to sell to PC owners who play HD on their computers. I don't see Apple yielding to the HD providers as their base customer is a very anti-establishment crowd who would lynch them for doing such a thing.
If the movie industry is willing to give up the entire PC media market, they can do that. If the cartel weren't so monopolistic, this would be a perfect demonstration of capitalism. One studio decides to make HD content that's playable on all PC's without the encryption requirement. Another studio is content to be stubborn. The former studio sells tons of HD-DVD's. The later doesn't.
All this is assuming, of course, that M$ gives a crap about inconveniencing the consumer by requiring them to have monitor's with HDMI inputs in order to view full-quality HD video. I don't think they do. They're way more interested in yielding to the entertainment industry in order to expand their software to the media market (having mediacenters in every home) and the only way to do that is to yield. This isn't a case of do-or-die. It's a case of do-or-don't-make-as-much-money-even-though-you-ha
Isn't this only a problem if the OS doesn't manage the NUMA architecture well? Surely there is an OS out there smart enough to recognize separate processors with separate memory regions and assign physical addresses appropriately....
Erm, no. See, socialism, as a political system, gives control to the central government. Under a democracy, the central government (in theory) is controlled by the people. So in a social democracy, the people collectively control the wealth.
It isn't "watered down" in any way. The fact that nations who are currently social democracies may be described as "watered down" is simply because they realize the benefits of having *some* of their nation's wealth participate in a free, capitalist market.
Capitalism is a great way to given people incentives to invent new things, spend more money, etc. which in turn raises the quality of life because of these new inventions and distribution of wealth. It is *not* a good way to provide a social safety net so that even the dumbest and poorest in the nation doesn't starve. Such things may not be important to you but apparently to the Canadians, Swedish, and other social democracies, it is.
No, one cannot. And I'm surprised such a statement is marked "insightful". Astonishment at atrocities is absolutely no excuse for being incapable of performing rational thought.
Also, yours is a loaded question. It assumes that "communism and fascism" both killed tons of people. While I do believe that the attempt at the communist system caused many many to die, it is presumptuous to just lump the two together.
For instance, the acts of Stalin to execute his own people is caused by a fascist system. The starvation of people due to lack of resources is the result of a communist system. Any outrage of atrocities should be directed solely at the former political ideology and really has nothing to do with the later one, which is really just a poor economic system with no real malicious properties.
Nowhere in that definition do I see "allow businesses to cheat, steal, or engage in other illicit activity."
If I'm reading the definition correctly, it doesn't disallow such activities. In fact, it states that anything other than that which will harm individual liberty, peace, security and property rights is fair-game.
One can argue that copying is stealing intellectual property. But the idea of intellectual property is arguable so conclusively calling it "stealing" and "cheating" is a bit biased and, if I may say so, indicative of decades of corporate brainwashing and perversion of the original idea, which was simply to offer some incentive for invention.
That's what occurred to me at first too. You'd think they'd be taking the opposite approach for several reasons:
1. Music is a volume-based profit model. If fewer people buy it, you don't recoup the cost of development and distribution unless you charge higher prices. So the more popular music is, the less it should be priced because you're going to make up for that price difference in volume.
2. Piracy is mainly a "problem" with popular music. If you're into some obscure Indie rock band, you're probably one out of 10 people who will download it illegally. That's not a big deal. On the other hand, Sir Justin's latest album (he's still making music right?) will be downloaded by every teenage girl out there and many of them are going to download it from the "bad" sources. So it stands to reason that it's with the more popular stuff that you want to give consumers incentives to use your service vs, say, bit-torrent. A lower price is a primary incentive. Perhaps not free, but if you get 10 million downloads a day when Avril releases a new album and each was priced at $0.05, that's still $500k a day of income. Compare this to pricing it at $2 (I'm assuming this is the top cap), at which point, according to the music industry, the big bad pirates will come along and let those 10 million downloads be free (because we all know that everyone will choose to download for free vs buy and every who downloaded for free would've bought). That's $0 earned vs $500k/day earned.
3. Marketing costs less for bands that are already popular. If you were pushing some new-comer rock band that nobody knows, you'd have to spend a boatload of money to advertise. Compare this to the latest P'Ditty album, which will practically advertise itself. It only makes sense that less popular music will cost more to promote/create and therefore, should be charged more.
All of this is under the assumption that the music industry is trying to fairly price its products based on cost and market value. Of course, if they were unrealistic about how the world works, overly greedy, and thought that they could arbitrarily charge whatever they want and have government legislation grant them a legal monopoly, then they may not care about fair pricing and simply think:
profit = number of downloads * price-per-download
OMG, if I make price-per-download grow as number of downloads my profits will be exponential!!!!!!
Only things coming into the United States is subject to search and seizure. Things going outside may be searched with reasonable cause. That last part makes whoever does said search and seizure accountable.
A communication between a US Person and a foreign person is two way. What the foreign person says and is received by the US Person is subject to search and seizure. What the US Person says is not. This allow both to be monitored without restraint or accountability.
To add my own anecdotal evidence, I will speak of my workplace.
We're not IT, though we have a few on staff for the IT part that's necessary of any corporation and particularly ours. We're a microchip design company. RFIC's and signal processors. Half if not more of the *designers* here are women. Granted they all started their careers in engineering in the 70's-80's but that doesn't change the fact that they all like their jobs and are very good at it.
My previous job was at another semiconductor company but had very few women engineers. In fact, all of the electrical guys were male. Only a couple of the mechanical engineers were female.
The difference between these two work environments is stark. At my previous job, we were a skeleton crew given unrealistic deadlines, impossible budgets and expected to perform miracles. Yes, at the end, when our system worked (and by work, I mean is flying in a bunch of airplanes without any reported failures), we all felt pride in a job well done and forgot about the nights in the lab trying to track down what was causing signal attenuation. Oh, and we had to manage our own Solaris design network. No IT support because the company's IT didn't "work with Linux".
At my current work environment, we have state-of-the-art tools, a full IT support team that maintains our Red Hat design network as well as our multi-million-dollar-per-seat EDA tools, a panel of experts of everything from logic design to VLSI, and, most importantly, a company policy that lets all the working moms (and dads) do 30hrs/wk if they wanted to at reduced pay.
I can't imagine work places like my current one are very numerous in the tech fields. This, I would imagine, is especially true of the IT field. Perhaps we shouldn't be worrying about the decline of women in IT but rather, why there isn't a decline of men in IT. Are we all truly that thick-headed?
You go in wearing a skirt and he tells you to go away?
"And the general public likes to feel special."
This is my new favorite quote.
Well daylight, we had a good run. It's not you, it's me.
It's already moved there. It's called PCI-Express (or Hypertransport). Buy a modern motherboard. The various controller chips in there are connected via a multi-lane PCI-Express link.
I don't agree on the memory though. As far as I recall, memory interfaces are the one thing that have not gone link-based. We're still using Synchronous RAM and all of the major bus interfaces use synchronous interfaces. This makes sense as crossing clock domains takes time which adds memory latency. Packetizing it takes even more time (along with overhead) and, IIRC, no memory interface to day uses such a model.
That's not what MIMD means...
Otherwise known as vector computing, MIMD is a generic term for VLIW architectures. I.e. instruction/data are bundled to be processed together in parallel.
The architecture being argued about here calls for parallelism on a higher level, very similar to Asymmetric Multiprocessing with the caveat that there is an arbitrator core.
I'm not sure how something that generic can be patented but then again, I think the patent system as it exists today is fairly screwed up.