It's a lot easier to make 4 cores into a 2 GHz chip and have one process run on one core, than to make an 8 GHz chip and let software take up 25% of that processor's time. It's both hard in terms of making that 8 GHz chip and also of getting software vendors and the OS to agree on allocation. Also, some software might want more than that 25% timeslice. And the user, being in agreement, would want that as well. It is then a simple matter of a register setting to let that process use more on the 8 GHz chip, not so with the multi-core chip.
Have you ever taken an EE course? The impedence of a digital device does not "compensate". Whatever load your transistors exhibit depending on the input voltage is whatever load it exhibits and it usually varies very little (which is why they're transistors to begin with) when voltage changes *except* at the threshold when it goes from short-like behavior to open-like behavior. The ideal case, of course, is that it behaves like a short when the input is above the threshold and open when it's below. Not being ideal, silicon manufacturers would at least try to get close to this behavior.
That would mean that, for a given set of transistor states (as well as transistor switching sequences), the impedence through the chip does not really change much with the core voltage (or should not). You'd have to look at the specific I-V curve under different operating conditions and extrapolate the impedence values but they should not change much. Temperature probably causes a large change in impedence than input voltage.
That being said, I'm not sure how good an idea undervolting a chip can be. You certainly won't damage anything but digital systems are made with a threshold voltage in mind. For silicon, this should be around 0.7V. Usually, the core voltage should be somewhat higher than the rail to rail signal voltages so lowering your core voltage could cause quite a bit of instability as your transistors would not be able to switch as fast or at all even. I suppose you have a bit of wiggle room as the manufacturer almost always leaves headroom, but that headroom is there for a reason.
It's about shared cache and timing cache hits and misses. One thread can monitor the cache hits and misses of another thread (because access to a cache miss takes more time) and infer how that thread operated. This is as much of a problem on dual-core (with shared cache) as any SMT implementation. As noted in the paper, it's even a problem on normal systems that use paging.
One final point, and I'm giving this up. You have this predilection towards the idea that all groups and decisions made by them are mobs. You consider even that the supreme court is swayed by popular opinion. Why is this so? Would you prefer that one person make all decisions that affect society?
The supreme court does not make law, it judges whether laws fit. Congress makes the laws and they are most definitely swayed by the masses. And yes, when whatever the masses feel are made into law, that's by definition mob rule.
1) In some ways the supreme court doesn't determine morality. But not every case that goes before the supreme court is a constitutional question. Actually, most are not - specifically, those we are talking about are not. Mostly, they test cases about lower than constitutional law. You don't think that deciding what is lawful and what is not is an issue of morality? Is morality some esoteric thing that can't be defined for you?
As I said, the Supreme Court did not make those laws, they simply test whether it fits the previously established legal framework. And they do. The Supreme Court absolutely does not have the power to say "this law is not moral in our opinion and should be revoked". That would make every law subjective based on what those people thought was moral. They take a law that has already been passed (by Congress) and check whether it's legally allowed under the current framework. Whether they morally agree with it is not part of the decision.
2) I spent three paragraphs explaining it, but you clearly didn't follow me. "Self-evident," or "natural" when used in this sense doesn't mean "decided by a mob." It means, roughly "true because of itself." The fact that 1=1, for example, is self-evident, naturally true. You don't have to decide that this is true. It is true no matter what.
You specifically mentioned "If you ask anyone", which is by definition and appeal to the masses. Now, as far as "self-evident", that is again, subjective. What is "self-evident" to one person may not be recognizable to another. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not a universally recognized thing. Nevertheless, as a member of the Western society, I feel it is a fundamental truth, call me ethnocentric.
Operationally speaking, the way you test to find that something is self-evident is by making sure that everyone (and I know that "everyone" means "mob" to you, but I don't mean just a majority - I mean everyone with the cognitive ability to understand the concepts involved) would inherently know it to be true - it would be that obvious.
You'd have very little truths, if any, when concerning morality then.
So everyone capable of doing so does not agree that a postulate is true, then it must not be self-evident. It is not naturally true. Therefore, because everyone does not agree that the "natural rights" defined by the constitution are natural rights (i.e. they are not inherent; it is not self-evident that they are true), they must not be natural rights.
We are obviously operating on different definitions of morality, and of what constitutes rights given under "Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness."
I think that's the key issue here. You see human freedoms as something to be "given". I think it is quite the opposite, it is something that we all have. Governments did not always exist, it was formed, and with that, certain freedoms were taken away. That is the social contract. You want to live in a society, you don't kill people in it, etc. Human freedoms and rights isn't just a specified list of "things you can freely do". It's rather just the opposite. There's a list of things you *can't* do and anything other than that, you're free to do. I think this is how law itself works. Anything that isn't outlawed or specifically legislated to not be a right is, then, something you can do.
Now let's examine why things are outlawed, and then move on to why things *should* be outlawed. One can say that something that harms others should be illegal. And from that, you can derive many different restrictions on human freedom. However, is popular opinion one of these? Should the fact that the majority feel something is wrong, even though it does not actually impose on the freedoms of others, be justification enough to legislate? That is by definition mob rule.
I think I'm in the right here in saying that those things we talked about aren't part of this. Who decides that this is true? The best we have are supreme court justices as far as not being swayed by the mob.
I think I've already stated that what is legislated is not neccessarily what is moral. The supreme court's job is not to determine morality, it's to determine whether legislation fits under the current constitutional framework. And to that end, they're absolutely right in that having arbitrary age limits in which people who would otherwise be free to do something are restricted. They're also right in that you can outlaw gay sex, etc.
They decided that I'm right. I'm arguing using an authority here. Who do you have besides yourself and what you consider morality to give your argument more weight than mine? Why is your argument not subjective and swayed by some personal agenda?
"They" have decided that the current laws do not violate the constitutional framework. That's really all "they" do. Morality is an entirely different issue. Keep in mind the supreme court does not legislate, they simply check that the legislation is consistent. Congress, and the people who vote for congressmen, legislate. They create the laws drawing an arbitrary age line between "competent" and "non-competent" and they are entirely influenced by mob rule.
As far as what I base my moral statements off of, well, morality is subjective as far as I can tell and I can only hope that we at least start off at the same point. That point, obviously, is that human freedoms aren't something that are granted by a governing body, they are inherent and the only justification for taking any of them away is if it will impose on another's personal freedom. I don't ask that you agree with that, but as I've outlined above, it fits well with how governments and social rules (and hence the lost of freedoms) came about in the first place.
As to what I personally believe, it is that everyone should treat others as they would prefer to be treated if they were in the other person's position, though I don't see this as a natural right. I think a natural right should be one that is obvious and for which there is no reason to deny it.
The problem is, there is always a reason to deny something. There are reasons to deny someone of life itself. There are people who think being gay is reason enough to kill someone. The question is, when are those reasons actually valid? Should my thinking that someone naked is offensive be reason enough to outlaw him from being naked?
Again, this is not emperical data so I can't really do anything but as
Look, this isn't about justice, and it's pretty much always been true of children. Children have never had the rights that their parents have had. You may think otherwise, but you'd be wrong.
I disagree, something concerning the removal of human rights *is* plainly about justice. And your argument of "it's how it's always been" does not make it any more morally right. Plenty of things have "always" been, from stealing to killing to slavery (up until a century or two ago), it doesn't make those things right.
Up until the last two hundred years or so all responsibility was given to the parents. Today educators have the same power that parents do. Civil authorities do not have these same rights.
The question is what right these people have of deciding everything. While I think we can practically decide that all children at some point are too immature to make their own decisions, arbitrarily deciding that all of them under a magical age fit that profile is a systematic violation of human rights.
As to your other "civil rights," I don't see anything about "the right to marry/have sex at with anyone" or "the right to stand on someone else's private property when they don't want you there," or any reasonable facsimile in the constitution. These are not rights as defined by our government. They are priveleges. Further, there are lots of clear-cut cases for the existence of these laws, such as statutory rape, and using gas stations as gang turf grounds (frightening away the customers). However, this is beside the real point.
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Do you subscribe that only things which are legislated are right or that principles of human freedom take precedence?
There are logical and legal reasons to derive that someone should not be allowed to stand on someone else's property without permission, but "have sex with anyone" has no logical reason that would allow it to be *systematically* banned for anyone under some arbitrarily chosen age.
At the very least, you either had horrible parents, are too young, have a particularly bad memory, or haven't completely thought this through. Do you think most children would be better off, or that the world would be more just if they did not have legally allowed boundaries imposed upon their behaviour by their parents?
The question is one of morality, not practicality. Arguably, it would be "better off" for society if everyone were tracked and monitored. Crimes would be cut down significantly. Is it morally right to do so? I sure as hell don't think so.
Go talk to some adults about this. It is a very widely agreed upon principal worldwide that children should have more boundaries than adults.
Legislating something based on popular opinion is the definition of mob rule. If it's morally correct, you should be able to demonstrate so without the use of "because the majority of people who made the law thinks so".
The problem here is, who the hell gave *you* or the group of people over the magical age (be it 18 or 21) to decide for *everyone* who's competent or not to make their own decisions? Moral issues with generalization (everyone under 18 is an immature idiot) asside, that's an issue. Who's this "we"? Did people under a certain age (magical 18) get to decide in this "we"? No? They didn't get a vote? So pretty much you have one group of people, deciding laws for *everyone*, without giving a certain group a say in any of it. That's not a gross violation of human rights or anything....
Yes, *human* rights. Not human above the age of 18 rights. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, if you're over the age of 18.
For me, I think the question isn't whether you *want* your children to skip class but rather, do you have a right to *force* them to attend.
There are 2 sides to my argument, practical and moral.
On the practical note, I think children turn out better if they were *motivated* but are allowed to *freely choose* whether they attend class, so that when they're there, they are there to learn, and not just forced to sit there. This is much more difficult for the parent to achieve, yes, because they might actually have to do some *gasp* good parenting and be a role model for their children. But nobody ever said parenting was easy, if you can't cut it, perhaps you should've considered that before having kids.
The moral objection I have is whether you have the *right* to force a person (even a person under this arbitrarily chosen age of 18) to do something he/she doesn't want to. Now, I can fully understand how some children are immature and their decisions need to be made for them, however, systematically deciding that all people under an arbitrarily chosen age are considered less than humans (and have basic human freedoms) is morally abhorrent IMO. If you wish to take away someone's freedom, you're going to have to prove that *that* person, not an age group, is not competent enough to make his/her own decisions. Then and only then, do you have any moral right to take away their personal freedom.
Now, granted my moral objections would not be practically satisfiable in modern society, but that doesn't change the fact that I view it as an evil, even if it is a neccessary evil.
When did school stop being about learning and start being a nursery to drop your kids off at so you can shed responsibility for the better part of the day? It seems we're so focused on "disciplining" and by disciplining, I mean keeping track and controlling the actions of, kids that we hardly even teach them stuff anymore. What percentage of high school kids come out of there even knowing basic calculus? How many actually *understand* newtonian physics? How many can grasp simple economics? I blame it on lazy parents who don't want to discipline their kids, so they make the school responsible for it.
Schools already have the right to track students. They take role and exercise punishment if the student is not present. RFID tracking merely allows a more efficient form of this.
If you think of school as an institution instead of a public place, it makes legal sense. The contract for entering and attending a school is that you follow their rules for attendance and tracking. Once you leave the school, you won't need to wear these badges.
If parents really get upset about this, they could just keep their kid out of school and hire a private tutor/homeschool the kid. He would probably turn out better since you're actually paying attention to him rather than sending him off to some institution. If you ask me, public schooling is just irresponsible on the parent's part, especially the state of public school in the US nowadays.
The problem with making the later part of that argument (i.e. they're not competent enough to deserve civil rights), is that it could easily by applied to anyone. There are plenty of adults out there who are not competent enough or have the mental maturity to handle guns, etc. Does that mean I have the right to just legislate it away? No.
This kind of "they're guilty before they even do anything" argument is against all forms of justice known in the modern world. Your civil rights can only be taken away if and when you've demonstrated that you would cause harm to others if given them. Not just because someone else "doesn't trust you", which is entirely their opinion.
If public opinion were all that's required to strip someone of their civil rights, well.....publically unpopular people would have their civil rights taken away. Wait.....that would explain bans on gay couples in certain states, age of consent and stupid laws against loitering....
On second thought, maybe there is precedent for that kind of thing after all. If the masses don't like it, even if there's no logical or legal reason, legislate it. Mob rule has worked out so well in the past....
I don't know what architecture classes you took, but pipelining was a trend that saw relatively no end, limited only by how advanced the branch predictors were. I see nothing more "wrong" with moving to ~20 stages that Netburst had from 10 than say moving from the ~5 stages older MIPS and RISC processors had to the 10 or 14 (in the case of the PPC G4) or even 16 (on the PPC 970) in modern MPU's. Yes you'd suffer more clockcycles for branch penalties and you do have more overhead (especially in OoOE processors), but your end result is better performance (30% loss in clock-for-clock performance, 100% increase in clockspeed, you do the math). Granted you can take this too far (which Prescott did) but the basic concept is still there.
Actually looking at the benchmarks between the the FX (1MB of cache) and the normal series (equivalent clockspeeds) don't seem to indicate *that* much of a difference. See:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2249&p=4
This makes sense as the K8's integrated memory controller makes it much less reliant on caching. As we've also seen with the Celeron-M (P-M with 512KB cache), The difference isn't all that much either.
Chess is very branchy. It's unpredictable branches as well. Not something as simple as loops or traversing data structures. This would reak havok with any branch prediction algorithm. I wouldn't be surprised if the Pentium-M performed much worse than an equivalently clocked P3 (as its pipeline is 50% longer).
The difference between two generational releases (Let's just say the K7 and K8) made at most a 50% increase in a few games (X3 IIRC because of just how memory-intensive it is and the K8 with its memory controller...). The difference between an 5800 Ultra and a 6800 Ultra is far more than 50%. Often it can be multiple folds....
The bottleneck here is obvious...
No, if you look at:
http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2308 &p=9
The compilation speed (a task which generally involves a lot of context switching) on the Pentium-M is simply horrible. Both the K7 and the P4 are much more capable (with the P4 more so due to Hyperthreading). Comparing a P3 to a P-M is a very very bad call as about the only thing the two share is a similar execution core. Banias has a lot of things the P6 core didn't and I'm guessing one of those things are causing the poor context switching performance.
I wouldn't let Prescott be the poster boy of any fab process. A look at Dothan on 90nm and strained silicon should provide a more accurate example of just how the process helps. Prescott is limited by its thermal properties and is a very transistor-wasteful design that the finest manufacturing process out there can't help. Given a more...sane design (say, Northwood, Banias, K8, PPC, etc.), the process definitely helps. Again, Dothan is a great example of a perfect process shrink and migration to strained silicon.
They are used, but just as fluidic dynamics doesn't require water molecules to move (or at least, move much), electronic signals do not require electrons to move very rapidly. The change in the electric field (the voltage) will propogate at the speed of light. That is how 1's and 0's are measured, by voltage, not current.
Yes, however, but the same argument, electrons don't neccessarily need to flow too far inside an electric circuit. Merely the shift in electric field is neccessary to indicate an on (5V let's say) or off(0V) state. Very little current actually needs to flow. Changes in the electric field propogates at the speed of light, so modern CPU's do, indeed, operate at the speed of light.
So your argument is......the American public can't be trusted to vote soundly? Why then even have people vote? The electoral college isn't a "buffer" for common sense or anything. It doesn't give people extra time to think about their vote rather than jumping the gun. All it does (in this day and age) is decrease the granularity of the voting power.
No electoral college will (realistically) vote against the party which it was selected to vote for. That's a given. The current way it works only disproportionally favors the votes of certain people (people in the "swing states") more than other people (people in the "blue" or "red" states). For example, I live in California, my vote will essentially count for nothing in the larger picture because California will vote Democrat. The minority who voted Republican or Green or whatever is pretty much tossed asside and their votes discarded. The entire voting power of California goes the way of the majority.
Someone else, however, who lives in say Florida, will have much more power to his vote than mine. His/her vote will actually statistically affect the outcome.
Voting is an individual thing, it follows that the system which counts votes should have the fine granularity to the level of the individual.
So......there's a Full Screen Edition and a Widescreen Edition? They couldn't just put them in one box? So if you currently have a 4:3 screen and want it to be full-screen, you buy the Full Screen, but then you miss out on some of the "theatre experience" and if you were to later get a widescreen TV (or watch it on your widescreen laptop), you're SOL.
So then you pop $40 for the Widescreen Edition as well? That just seems a bit absurd to me.
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the internet is not limited by physical space constraints.
It's a lot easier to make 4 cores into a 2 GHz chip and have one process run on one core, than to make an 8 GHz chip and let software take up 25% of that processor's time. It's both hard in terms of making that 8 GHz chip and also of getting software vendors and the OS to agree on allocation. Also, some software might want more than that 25% timeslice. And the user, being in agreement, would want that as well. It is then a simple matter of a register setting to let that process use more on the 8 GHz chip, not so with the multi-core chip.
Have you ever taken an EE course? The impedence of a digital device does not "compensate". Whatever load your transistors exhibit depending on the input voltage is whatever load it exhibits and it usually varies very little (which is why they're transistors to begin with) when voltage changes *except* at the threshold when it goes from short-like behavior to open-like behavior. The ideal case, of course, is that it behaves like a short when the input is above the threshold and open when it's below. Not being ideal, silicon manufacturers would at least try to get close to this behavior. That would mean that, for a given set of transistor states (as well as transistor switching sequences), the impedence through the chip does not really change much with the core voltage (or should not). You'd have to look at the specific I-V curve under different operating conditions and extrapolate the impedence values but they should not change much. Temperature probably causes a large change in impedence than input voltage. That being said, I'm not sure how good an idea undervolting a chip can be. You certainly won't damage anything but digital systems are made with a threshold voltage in mind. For silicon, this should be around 0.7V. Usually, the core voltage should be somewhat higher than the rail to rail signal voltages so lowering your core voltage could cause quite a bit of instability as your transistors would not be able to switch as fast or at all even. I suppose you have a bit of wiggle room as the manufacturer almost always leaves headroom, but that headroom is there for a reason.
It's about shared cache and timing cache hits and misses. One thread can monitor the cache hits and misses of another thread (because access to a cache miss takes more time) and infer how that thread operated. This is as much of a problem on dual-core (with shared cache) as any SMT implementation. As noted in the paper, it's even a problem on normal systems that use paging.
One final point, and I'm giving this up. You have this predilection towards the idea that all groups and decisions made by them are mobs. You consider even that the supreme court is swayed by popular opinion. Why is this so? Would you prefer that one person make all decisions that affect society?
The supreme court does not make law, it judges whether laws fit. Congress makes the laws and they are most definitely swayed by the masses. And yes, when whatever the masses feel are made into law, that's by definition mob rule.
1) In some ways the supreme court doesn't determine morality. But not every case that goes before the supreme court is a constitutional question. Actually, most are not - specifically, those we are talking about are not. Mostly, they test cases about lower than constitutional law. You don't think that deciding what is lawful and what is not is an issue of morality? Is morality some esoteric thing that can't be defined for you?
As I said, the Supreme Court did not make those laws, they simply test whether it fits the previously established legal framework. And they do. The Supreme Court absolutely does not have the power to say "this law is not moral in our opinion and should be revoked". That would make every law subjective based on what those people thought was moral. They take a law that has already been passed (by Congress) and check whether it's legally allowed under the current framework. Whether they morally agree with it is not part of the decision.
2) I spent three paragraphs explaining it, but you clearly didn't follow me. "Self-evident," or "natural" when used in this sense doesn't mean "decided by a mob." It means, roughly "true because of itself." The fact that 1=1, for example, is self-evident, naturally true. You don't have to decide that this is true. It is true no matter what.
You specifically mentioned "If you ask anyone", which is by definition and appeal to the masses. Now, as far as "self-evident", that is again, subjective. What is "self-evident" to one person may not be recognizable to another. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not a universally recognized thing. Nevertheless, as a member of the Western society, I feel it is a fundamental truth, call me ethnocentric.
Operationally speaking, the way you test to find that something is self-evident is by making sure that everyone (and I know that "everyone" means "mob" to you, but I don't mean just a majority - I mean everyone with the cognitive ability to understand the concepts involved) would inherently know it to be true - it would be that obvious.
You'd have very little truths, if any, when concerning morality then.
So everyone capable of doing so does not agree that a postulate is true, then it must not be self-evident. It is not naturally true. Therefore, because everyone does not agree that the "natural rights" defined by the constitution are natural rights (i.e. they are not inherent; it is not self-evident that they are true), they must not be natural rights.
Refer to my above statement.
We are obviously operating on different definitions of morality, and of what constitutes rights given under "Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness."
I think that's the key issue here. You see human freedoms as something to be "given". I think it is quite the opposite, it is something that we all have. Governments did not always exist, it was formed, and with that, certain freedoms were taken away. That is the social contract. You want to live in a society, you don't kill people in it, etc. Human freedoms and rights isn't just a specified list of "things you can freely do". It's rather just the opposite. There's a list of things you *can't* do and anything other than that, you're free to do. I think this is how law itself works. Anything that isn't outlawed or specifically legislated to not be a right is, then, something you can do.
Now let's examine why things are outlawed, and then move on to why things *should* be outlawed. One can say that something that harms others should be illegal. And from that, you can derive many different restrictions on human freedom. However, is popular opinion one of these? Should the fact that the majority feel something is wrong, even though it does not actually impose on the freedoms of others, be justification enough to legislate? That is by definition mob rule.
I think I'm in the right here in saying that those things we talked about aren't part of this. Who decides that this is true? The best we have are supreme court justices as far as not being swayed by the mob.
I think I've already stated that what is legislated is not neccessarily what is moral. The supreme court's job is not to determine morality, it's to determine whether legislation fits under the current constitutional framework. And to that end, they're absolutely right in that having arbitrary age limits in which people who would otherwise be free to do something are restricted. They're also right in that you can outlaw gay sex, etc.
They decided that I'm right. I'm arguing using an authority here. Who do you have besides yourself and what you consider morality to give your argument more weight than mine? Why is your argument not subjective and swayed by some personal agenda?
"They" have decided that the current laws do not violate the constitutional framework. That's really all "they" do. Morality is an entirely different issue. Keep in mind the supreme court does not legislate, they simply check that the legislation is consistent. Congress, and the people who vote for congressmen, legislate. They create the laws drawing an arbitrary age line between "competent" and "non-competent" and they are entirely influenced by mob rule.
As far as what I base my moral statements off of, well, morality is subjective as far as I can tell and I can only hope that we at least start off at the same point. That point, obviously, is that human freedoms aren't something that are granted by a governing body, they are inherent and the only justification for taking any of them away is if it will impose on another's personal freedom. I don't ask that you agree with that, but as I've outlined above, it fits well with how governments and social rules (and hence the lost of freedoms) came about in the first place.
As to what I personally believe, it is that everyone should treat others as they would prefer to be treated if they were in the other person's position, though I don't see this as a natural right. I think a natural right should be one that is obvious and for which there is no reason to deny it.
The problem is, there is always a reason to deny something. There are reasons to deny someone of life itself. There are people who think being gay is reason enough to kill someone. The question is, when are those reasons actually valid? Should my thinking that someone naked is offensive be reason enough to outlaw him from being naked?
Again, this is not emperical data so I can't really do anything but as
Look, this isn't about justice, and it's pretty much always been true of children. Children have never had the rights that their parents have had. You may think otherwise, but you'd be wrong.
I disagree, something concerning the removal of human rights *is* plainly about justice. And your argument of "it's how it's always been" does not make it any more morally right. Plenty of things have "always" been, from stealing to killing to slavery (up until a century or two ago), it doesn't make those things right.
Up until the last two hundred years or so all responsibility was given to the parents. Today educators have the same power that parents do. Civil authorities do not have these same rights.
The question is what right these people have of deciding everything. While I think we can practically decide that all children at some point are too immature to make their own decisions, arbitrarily deciding that all of them under a magical age fit that profile is a systematic violation of human rights.
As to your other "civil rights," I don't see anything about "the right to marry/have sex at with anyone" or "the right to stand on someone else's private property when they don't want you there," or any reasonable facsimile in the constitution. These are not rights as defined by our government. They are priveleges. Further, there are lots of clear-cut cases for the existence of these laws, such as statutory rape, and using gas stations as gang turf grounds (frightening away the customers). However, this is beside the real point.
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Do you subscribe that only things which are legislated are right or that principles of human freedom take precedence?
There are logical and legal reasons to derive that someone should not be allowed to stand on someone else's property without permission, but "have sex with anyone" has no logical reason that would allow it to be *systematically* banned for anyone under some arbitrarily chosen age.
At the very least, you either had horrible parents, are too young, have a particularly bad memory, or haven't completely thought this through. Do you think most children would be better off, or that the world would be more just if they did not have legally allowed boundaries imposed upon their behaviour by their parents?
The question is one of morality, not practicality. Arguably, it would be "better off" for society if everyone were tracked and monitored. Crimes would be cut down significantly. Is it morally right to do so? I sure as hell don't think so.
Go talk to some adults about this. It is a very widely agreed upon principal worldwide that children should have more boundaries than adults.
Legislating something based on popular opinion is the definition of mob rule. If it's morally correct, you should be able to demonstrate so without the use of "because the majority of people who made the law thinks so".
The problem here is, who the hell gave *you* or the group of people over the magical age (be it 18 or 21) to decide for *everyone* who's competent or not to make their own decisions? Moral issues with generalization (everyone under 18 is an immature idiot) asside, that's an issue. Who's this "we"? Did people under a certain age (magical 18) get to decide in this "we"? No? They didn't get a vote? So pretty much you have one group of people, deciding laws for *everyone*, without giving a certain group a say in any of it. That's not a gross violation of human rights or anything....
Yes, *human* rights. Not human above the age of 18 rights. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, if you're over the age of 18.
Morality must *not* give way to practicality.
For me, I think the question isn't whether you *want* your children to skip class but rather, do you have a right to *force* them to attend.
There are 2 sides to my argument, practical and moral.
On the practical note, I think children turn out better if they were *motivated* but are allowed to *freely choose* whether they attend class, so that when they're there, they are there to learn, and not just forced to sit there. This is much more difficult for the parent to achieve, yes, because they might actually have to do some *gasp* good parenting and be a role model for their children. But nobody ever said parenting was easy, if you can't cut it, perhaps you should've considered that before having kids.
The moral objection I have is whether you have the *right* to force a person (even a person under this arbitrarily chosen age of 18) to do something he/she doesn't want to. Now, I can fully understand how some children are immature and their decisions need to be made for them, however, systematically deciding that all people under an arbitrarily chosen age are considered less than humans (and have basic human freedoms) is morally abhorrent IMO. If you wish to take away someone's freedom, you're going to have to prove that *that* person, not an age group, is not competent enough to make his/her own decisions. Then and only then, do you have any moral right to take away their personal freedom.
Now, granted my moral objections would not be practically satisfiable in modern society, but that doesn't change the fact that I view it as an evil, even if it is a neccessary evil.
When did school stop being about learning and start being a nursery to drop your kids off at so you can shed responsibility for the better part of the day? It seems we're so focused on "disciplining" and by disciplining, I mean keeping track and controlling the actions of, kids that we hardly even teach them stuff anymore. What percentage of high school kids come out of there even knowing basic calculus? How many actually *understand* newtonian physics? How many can grasp simple economics? I blame it on lazy parents who don't want to discipline their kids, so they make the school responsible for it.
Schools already have the right to track students. They take role and exercise punishment if the student is not present. RFID tracking merely allows a more efficient form of this.
If you think of school as an institution instead of a public place, it makes legal sense. The contract for entering and attending a school is that you follow their rules for attendance and tracking. Once you leave the school, you won't need to wear these badges.
If parents really get upset about this, they could just keep their kid out of school and hire a private tutor/homeschool the kid. He would probably turn out better since you're actually paying attention to him rather than sending him off to some institution. If you ask me, public schooling is just irresponsible on the parent's part, especially the state of public school in the US nowadays.
The problem with making the later part of that argument (i.e. they're not competent enough to deserve civil rights), is that it could easily by applied to anyone. There are plenty of adults out there who are not competent enough or have the mental maturity to handle guns, etc. Does that mean I have the right to just legislate it away? No.
This kind of "they're guilty before they even do anything" argument is against all forms of justice known in the modern world. Your civil rights can only be taken away if and when you've demonstrated that you would cause harm to others if given them. Not just because someone else "doesn't trust you", which is entirely their opinion.
If public opinion were all that's required to strip someone of their civil rights, well.....publically unpopular people would have their civil rights taken away. Wait.....that would explain bans on gay couples in certain states, age of consent and stupid laws against loitering....
On second thought, maybe there is precedent for that kind of thing after all. If the masses don't like it, even if there's no logical or legal reason, legislate it. Mob rule has worked out so well in the past....
I think he was talking about TNG, the one that got it right...
I thought that was what Voyager was about...except it was still a Federation ship but just "really far away so they can do whatever they want"
I don't know what architecture classes you took, but pipelining was a trend that saw relatively no end, limited only by how advanced the branch predictors were. I see nothing more "wrong" with moving to ~20 stages that Netburst had from 10 than say moving from the ~5 stages older MIPS and RISC processors had to the 10 or 14 (in the case of the PPC G4) or even 16 (on the PPC 970) in modern MPU's. Yes you'd suffer more clockcycles for branch penalties and you do have more overhead (especially in OoOE processors), but your end result is better performance (30% loss in clock-for-clock performance, 100% increase in clockspeed, you do the math). Granted you can take this too far (which Prescott did) but the basic concept is still there.
Actually looking at the benchmarks between the the FX (1MB of cache) and the normal series (equivalent clockspeeds) don't seem to indicate *that* much of a difference. See:? i=2249&p=4
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
This makes sense as the K8's integrated memory controller makes it much less reliant on caching. As we've also seen with the Celeron-M (P-M with 512KB cache), The difference isn't all that much either.
Chess is very branchy. It's unpredictable branches as well. Not something as simple as loops or traversing data structures. This would reak havok with any branch prediction algorithm. I wouldn't be surprised if the Pentium-M performed much worse than an equivalently clocked P3 (as its pipeline is 50% longer).
The difference between two generational releases (Let's just say the K7 and K8) made at most a 50% increase in a few games (X3 IIRC because of just how memory-intensive it is and the K8 with its memory controller...). The difference between an 5800 Ultra and a 6800 Ultra is far more than 50%. Often it can be multiple folds.... The bottleneck here is obvious...
No, if you look at: http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2308 &p=9
The compilation speed (a task which generally involves a lot of context switching) on the Pentium-M is simply horrible. Both the K7 and the P4 are much more capable (with the P4 more so due to Hyperthreading). Comparing a P3 to a P-M is a very very bad call as about the only thing the two share is a similar execution core. Banias has a lot of things the P6 core didn't and I'm guessing one of those things are causing the poor context switching performance.
I wouldn't let Prescott be the poster boy of any fab process. A look at Dothan on 90nm and strained silicon should provide a more accurate example of just how the process helps. Prescott is limited by its thermal properties and is a very transistor-wasteful design that the finest manufacturing process out there can't help. Given a more...sane design (say, Northwood, Banias, K8, PPC, etc.), the process definitely helps. Again, Dothan is a great example of a perfect process shrink and migration to strained silicon.
A stairmaster where the thing actually moves with you. We'll reduce the obesity problem in the US yet.
They are used, but just as fluidic dynamics doesn't require water molecules to move (or at least, move much), electronic signals do not require electrons to move very rapidly. The change in the electric field (the voltage) will propogate at the speed of light. That is how 1's and 0's are measured, by voltage, not current.
Yes, however, but the same argument, electrons don't neccessarily need to flow too far inside an electric circuit. Merely the shift in electric field is neccessary to indicate an on (5V let's say) or off(0V) state. Very little current actually needs to flow. Changes in the electric field propogates at the speed of light, so modern CPU's do, indeed, operate at the speed of light.
So your argument is......the American public can't be trusted to vote soundly? Why then even have people vote? The electoral college isn't a "buffer" for common sense or anything. It doesn't give people extra time to think about their vote rather than jumping the gun. All it does (in this day and age) is decrease the granularity of the voting power. No electoral college will (realistically) vote against the party which it was selected to vote for. That's a given. The current way it works only disproportionally favors the votes of certain people (people in the "swing states") more than other people (people in the "blue" or "red" states). For example, I live in California, my vote will essentially count for nothing in the larger picture because California will vote Democrat. The minority who voted Republican or Green or whatever is pretty much tossed asside and their votes discarded. The entire voting power of California goes the way of the majority. Someone else, however, who lives in say Florida, will have much more power to his vote than mine. His/her vote will actually statistically affect the outcome. Voting is an individual thing, it follows that the system which counts votes should have the fine granularity to the level of the individual.
So......there's a Full Screen Edition and a Widescreen Edition? They couldn't just put them in one box? So if you currently have a 4:3 screen and want it to be full-screen, you buy the Full Screen, but then you miss out on some of the "theatre experience" and if you were to later get a widescreen TV (or watch it on your widescreen laptop), you're SOL. So then you pop $40 for the Widescreen Edition as well? That just seems a bit absurd to me.