Fascinating - may I ask how you know they accessed your data? It would be extremely helpful, and I didn't see it in the article (though I only skimmed it), if there was a way to find out if FB has this specific set of data on each of us. I am under the impression that you can request a dump of all the data they have on you, but pouring through that much information just to find out if they have phone call & SMS metadata seems like a lot of work:/
Not all of us have garages - certainly not most folks in apartments, and even many homeowners (myself included). Plus, there are pretty cheap ways for thieves to hack electronic garage doors too:
Fair enough - I guess you can make voice calls through it too. I know video calls are restricted to the non-Lite app, and I've never wanted / had a reason to make a voice call through Facebook before, so I wasn't thinking about that aspect of it.
I've never had much trouble with it on mobile, but I do sometimes find it starts to scroll through the newsfeed upon opening, until you scroll up to stop it. Not a huge deal, though.
However, it just occurred to me that they probably pull the same permission crap on the Messenger app. I use the "Lite" version, since it at least doesn't hog resources as badly, and checking the app permissions - sure enough, SMS, Phone, and Microphone are all listed there - despite there being no reason for such things in a text-based messaging app. I went ahead and turned those off on my own phone, which hopefully helps. I left Camera and Storage on so I can take and send pictures to contacts, and Contacts as well since that seems safe enough.
This makes me wonder, though, how many other app vendors are also pulling similar tricks? Maybe I'll go through all my installed apps at some point and turn off the things that don't seem like they should be necessary:/
Facebook is also available as a website, so why bother installing an app for it that just intrudes more on your privacy? If you must use it, just use the mobile website within a browser like Chrome. That way they should not be able to monitor what is going on outside of the website. Or is there some way that they can still access that info, even from inside a web browser, which I am not aware of?
Photoscan and other photogrammetry applications, when working with large image sets (1000+ photos) and high quality settings.
After Effects uses RAM to store rendered frames, so increasing from 64 to 128GB means you can have twice as many frames stored in RAM preview at a time.
Video editing with 6K and 8K footage, though usually in those situations you would want a CPU with more cores anyway (so a Core X processor, which can already support 128GB of memory without more dense modules.
That is just what I can think of off the top of my head, and that others in this thread haven't already mentioned.
What nonsense is this? The first colonies of Europeans in what is now the United States were a combination of business ventures (like Jamestown) seeking wealth and religious groups (like the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay) seeking a different way of life and belief. Later colonies, and especially those further south (below New England) did indeed have large populations of indentured labor... but even then, it wasn't like there were whole colonies of criminals - which is what the term "penal colony" usually indicates. Most indentured servants were not in that position because of criminal conviction. That was not how or why this place got started:)
Regardless, this doesn't seem to have any bearing on the topic at hand. Were you just trying to add in some (slightly mistaken) history? Or was the idea of there being some criminals sent to the New World supposed to have a bigger impact on the discussion above?
Many elements of US law are drawn from where our nation originated (as colonies of England) - yes - but we also have a lot of legal protections which are not provided to citizens of other countries by their laws. The extent of our free speech rights, for example, or the right to keep and bear arms. I wasn't sure off the top of my head if presumption of innocence might have been another element that was added on top of or increased from what was brought over from England.
Moreover, I would point out that it isn't like the English came up with all of those legal concepts completely on their own. Almost all legal systems inherit aspects of the societies that came before them, all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi (and possibly before, since that may have drawn on other oral traditional). So should I start in on a tirade about how English laws developed as a merging of Anglo-Saxon and Norman tradition, along with some influence from the Catholic Church and Roman history? I think I'll pass on that, and certainly on the use of unnecessary colorful metaphors:)
I have no idea of the laws in play there in the UK, hence my use of the term "I think". I would hope that most civilized folks would agree that just being accused of a crime, and unable to prove your innocence, does not make you guilty.
Read the article - they are working with Facebook on that, but it takes a lot longer. Now, though, they should have 14 months to get it done.
What I wonder, though, is what sort of stuff could be in the account that would incriminate him? Surely the parents of the victim cooperated and provided *her* FB password, which would have given them access to any mutual communication?
Oh, interesting! I am not well read about things like this outside the US. Interestingly, the AMC A-List thing is only about the cost of 2 tickets a month... which is why I could justify it. Prior to joining I only saw about 2 movies a month, sometimes less.
I wonder if they will see the failure of MoviePass as a chance to (slowly) increase the price of A-List over time? The cost of 5 tickets a month would be closer to $50 or $60 most places here in the US, maybe even more if you figure in the higher price of premium movies (Imax, 3D, etc).
AMC Stubs A-List. If you aren't familiar, it is AMC's own version of a subscription plan, and at more survivable pricing. $20 a month for 3 movies a week, for yourself only, with no blackouts or limits on the type of movie (3D, Imax, etc). If you watch even 2 movies a month it should break even, and anything more nets you a savings... while it isn't so dirt cheap that it will kill AMC. I would love it if they'd add an upgrade for another, say, $10 a month that would allow you to use the 3-per-week to cover others (as long as you were with them)... but that may be more niche than they want to go, or it might not be justified price-wise. If I take my family to the movies, AMC still gets a lot of month (wife + 3 kids) even if my ticket is already covered under the A-List plan. Plus any food we buy. I don't think AMC would have come up with this idea if it weren't for the competition from MoviePass.
As I mentioned, my reply was not so much directed at the original question as at the comment above mine (the original "None" comment).
Regarding the original Ask Slashdot question, I am sure if I am qualified to answer... but it seems to me that the question is pretty wide-ranging and not very focused. The query includes mention of 2D and 3D visual content creation, consumer software, VR, graphics research, patents, and more. I would think that checking out conferences like SIGGRAPH and GTC would showcase a lot of the ongoing research and development in these fields, but I don't follow any publications (which is what the question ended with a request for).
Oh for Pete's sake... so does that mean nothing NVIDIA or Intel says can be true, just because they sell GPUs / CPUs?
Sure, a company selling something certainly might stretch the truth to try and get folks to buy things - but that doesn't mean that all the stuff said (or written) by anyone selling a product is automatically incorrect. Where I work we actually don't do much advertising, or make crazy claims: we actually run real-life software to see how it performs, and then publish the results publicly. We could keep the info to ourselves, if we wanted to only benefit our company and our customers, but we don't. We could also make wild claims without backing them up, but again we talk about what we test, how we test it, and then let the results speak for themselves.
I'm not even going to plug the name of the company or link to our website again, since that isn't even the point of the conversation we were having. I didn't bring it up until you tried to accuse me of just being "an IT guy who reads Intel's marketing" (effectively claiming I don't really know what I am talking about, and that I am not qualified to comment on this stuff). Linking to my extensive writings and research was the fastest way I knew of to prove you wrong.
Now, can we all just go back to being civilized? Computer hardware has made huge advancements, but you have a fair point that for an average, basic computer user it hasn't be a hugely dramatic shift in the last 10 years. I would compare that to cars: we've got huge advancements in electric and hybrid tech (especially batteries) going on, as well as the beginnings of smart / self-driving cars, but the vast majority of drivers are still using gas-powered vehicles that aren't all that different from the cars of 10 years ago. So car tech *is* constantly being researched and improved, but that trickles down to most folks on a much slower timetable. Is that sort of the idea you were trying to get across?
LOL - nice try. Check out the plethora of articles I write on a regular basis, looking specifically at performance of different computer hardware in high-end applications:
That is just my personal system, which is actually running a CPU from ~ 4 generations ago (so about 5 years old). I'm on the cusp of an upgrade (likely this year) to a 6-core at over 4GHz, and if I were into any applications that benefited from higher core counts I could get a 16-core AMD or 18-core Intel processor. It all comes down to what an individual user needs, wants, and of course can afford.
If your point was more along the lines of "basic Internet and office application usage isn't any more complex today than it was 10 years ago, so a computer with similar specs will still do the trick" - then you'd have actually been fairly correctly. But many areas of computer use can and do use far more powerful hardware today: gaming, video editing, 3D rendering, photogrammetry, machine learning, and more. Since the original question was about graphics advancements, it isn't really fair to come back with an answer that 'nothing much has changed' (a rough paraphrase of your comment).
As I noted, my comment was just in regards to the sweeping - and very incorrect - statement made by 110010001000. I work with computers, but I do not personally perform research to design new hardware or software approaches to graphics. The original question is also very wide-open, so much so that I do not feel I can directly answer it... but I didn't want to leave such a disparaging comment about computer technology unchallenged.
Could you perhaps enlighten me as to what you think I missed regarding the original "article" (really just a user-submitted question)?
The top-end desktop CPUs in 2008 from Intel were the first generation of the Core i7 series. The maximum amount of RAM that CPU supported was 24GB. Today, the top-end Intel and AMD desktop processors support 128GB of memory (Core X series and Threadripper both) - and if you go over to the single-socket Xeon W you can get 512GB. Dual-socket CPUs support more now, and supported more back then, but we are looking at ~5 times the RAM capacities today that were available then. 2-4GB was typical for an average desktop back then, if you don't want to look at the high-end, and now 16GB is easy to get while many systems have even more.
On the GPU side, as an AC also noted below, memory capacity has gone up substantially. The top-end desktop GPUs in 2008 had 1GB of video memory, while top-end cards today are at 11 or 12GB (depending on whether you consider the Titan series to still be desktop cards, or if you consider that to max-out at the 1080 Ti). Workstation cards go even higher, with capacities double what you find on consumer cards (24GB on the Quadro P6000, for example).
And to debunk your statement that "The computer you had in 2008 is essentially the same as you have now in 2018":
In 2008, I had a dual-core CPU running ~2.5GHz with 8GB of memory, a GPU with 512MB of memory, and a brand-new 80GB Intel SSD that could push about 250MB/s read and write speeds.
Today I have a quad-core CPU running at ~3.4GHz with 32GB of memory, a GPU with 8GB of memory, and two SSDs (500GB at ~550MB/s and 400GB at over 1500MB/s).
So my CPU has doubled in core count, increased over 50% in clock speed, and is several times faster overall thanks to a myriad of other improvements. My GPU is on the order of 30 times faster with 16 times the amount of memory. My SSDs have over 10 times the total capacity and are almost 2 to 6 times faster (and I don't have cutting-edge SSDs, myself).
Oh, and generational changes? They do still average 18-24 months from Intel on the CPU side and NVIDIA on the GPU side. Sometimes a little longer, sometimes shorter. From 2008 to 2018 we've had ~8 generations in the Core series from Intel. NVIDIA has gone from Tesla to Fermi, then to Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, and now Volta (though that has only shown up on GPU-compute oriented cards thus far). So 8 generations over 10 years from Intel breaks down to about 1.25 years per generation, or 15 months. 6 generations over 10 years for NVIDIA is an average of 1.66666... years, or 20 months.
GPUs have increased many-fold in performance since 10 years ago. Not even the fastest video card from back then could power a VR headset today, or support modern gaming on a 4K monitor. CPUs have made less of an increase in raw clock speeds, but have made huge jumps in core count and instructions per clock (especially in specialized areas, like vector units). RAM capacities have gone through the roof. Drive technology has made the jump from HDD to SSD, and then from SATA-based SSDs to PCI-Express.
Yes, from one generation to another is usually a relatively small difference - but with generational changes every 18 to 24 months, over the course of a decade you are looking at much bigger improvements than your comment stated. And this is all without talking about things like using GPUs for general-purpose computation, which has vastly improved performance in many areas of computing.
By the way, this is intended more as to refute the parent comment - not as a direct answer to the subject of the main post.
'Bullshit' - that is exactly what I thought, with my inner voice! But you transcribed it, so you must be able to read my mind... so this invention must really work! Even when I wasn't wearing it...;)
Once conception has taken place, the newly formed human *is* a person. It has its own DNA, different from (but a combination of) its parents. If not killed in the womb, he or she will go on to live their own life - with their own thoughts, opinions, experiences, etc.
Is that new human life dependent on its mother for several months during development (before birth)? Yes - but it will still be dependent on other, older humans for many years after birth as well. We don't (and shouldn't) allow people to kill their young children just because they no longer want them, and neither should we allow that in the womb.
Many people say that "its a woman's body, let her decide" - but it isn't. As I pointed out, it is a unique human from the moment the egg and sperm join and combine their DNA. It is *attached* to the mother's body (via the umbilical cord), and resides inside her until birth, but it is not *part* of her body.
Also, no, I am not a Catholic... though I am a Christian. I have no problem (as Catholics do, I think) with any efforts to prevent conception / fertilization of the egg - condoms, spermicides, etc - so long as they would not interfere with normal development of a human after conception. If you don't want to potentially make a baby when having sex, there are numerous options available with varying degrees of reliability. Failure to use such a method, or the low chance of failure associated with the selected method, does not (in my opinion) give people the right to kill another human - regardless of how far along their physical development is.
Maybe it is just because I am used to 4-way stops, and not roundabouts, but the few that have been put in around my town in recent years mess me up *far* more than the way a 4-way stop works. Yes, 4-way stops may be a bit slower... but they just feel more natural to me, especially when you get into multi-lane roundabouts (shudder).
With that said, I do agree with you 100% regarding people walking in the street. That doesn't happen a lot in my part of the US, but when it does I always shake my head. I am under the impression that pedestrians only have the right-of-way at marked crossings and intersections (whether marked or not)... but sometimes people just wander all over, or try to sprint across a multi-lane road, or even just saunter out in front of traffic 50 or 100 feet from a legit crossing / intersection. I don't understand it:(
Slashdot Mirror
Fascinating - may I ask how you know they accessed your data? It would be extremely helpful, and I didn't see it in the article (though I only skimmed it), if there was a way to find out if FB has this specific set of data on each of us. I am under the impression that you can request a dump of all the data they have on you, but pouring through that much information just to find out if they have phone call & SMS metadata seems like a lot of work :/
Not all of us have garages - certainly not most folks in apartments, and even many homeowners (myself included). Plus, there are pretty cheap ways for thieves to hack electronic garage doors too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Fair enough - I guess you can make voice calls through it too. I know video calls are restricted to the non-Lite app, and I've never wanted / had a reason to make a voice call through Facebook before, so I wasn't thinking about that aspect of it.
I've never had much trouble with it on mobile, but I do sometimes find it starts to scroll through the newsfeed upon opening, until you scroll up to stop it. Not a huge deal, though.
However, it just occurred to me that they probably pull the same permission crap on the Messenger app. I use the "Lite" version, since it at least doesn't hog resources as badly, and checking the app permissions - sure enough, SMS, Phone, and Microphone are all listed there - despite there being no reason for such things in a text-based messaging app. I went ahead and turned those off on my own phone, which hopefully helps. I left Camera and Storage on so I can take and send pictures to contacts, and Contacts as well since that seems safe enough.
This makes me wonder, though, how many other app vendors are also pulling similar tricks? Maybe I'll go through all my installed apps at some point and turn off the things that don't seem like they should be necessary :/
Facebook is also available as a website, so why bother installing an app for it that just intrudes more on your privacy? If you must use it, just use the mobile website within a browser like Chrome. That way they should not be able to monitor what is going on outside of the website. Or is there some way that they can still access that info, even from inside a web browser, which I am not aware of?
Photoscan and other photogrammetry applications, when working with large image sets (1000+ photos) and high quality settings.
After Effects uses RAM to store rendered frames, so increasing from 64 to 128GB means you can have twice as many frames stored in RAM preview at a time.
Video editing with 6K and 8K footage, though usually in those situations you would want a CPU with more cores anyway (so a Core X processor, which can already support 128GB of memory without more dense modules.
That is just what I can think of off the top of my head, and that others in this thread haven't already mentioned.
What nonsense is this? The first colonies of Europeans in what is now the United States were a combination of business ventures (like Jamestown) seeking wealth and religious groups (like the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay) seeking a different way of life and belief. Later colonies, and especially those further south (below New England) did indeed have large populations of indentured labor... but even then, it wasn't like there were whole colonies of criminals - which is what the term "penal colony" usually indicates. Most indentured servants were not in that position because of criminal conviction. That was not how or why this place got started :)
Regardless, this doesn't seem to have any bearing on the topic at hand. Were you just trying to add in some (slightly mistaken) history? Or was the idea of there being some criminals sent to the New World supposed to have a bigger impact on the discussion above?
Many elements of US law are drawn from where our nation originated (as colonies of England) - yes - but we also have a lot of legal protections which are not provided to citizens of other countries by their laws. The extent of our free speech rights, for example, or the right to keep and bear arms. I wasn't sure off the top of my head if presumption of innocence might have been another element that was added on top of or increased from what was brought over from England.
Moreover, I would point out that it isn't like the English came up with all of those legal concepts completely on their own. Almost all legal systems inherit aspects of the societies that came before them, all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi (and possibly before, since that may have drawn on other oral traditional). So should I start in on a tirade about how English laws developed as a merging of Anglo-Saxon and Norman tradition, along with some influence from the Catholic Church and Roman history? I think I'll pass on that, and certainly on the use of unnecessary colorful metaphors :)
Moreover, it does appear that presumption of innocence ("innocent until proven guilty") is a part of English law:
https://www.quora.com/In-the-U...
I have no idea of the laws in play there in the UK, hence my use of the term "I think". I would hope that most civilized folks would agree that just being accused of a crime, and unable to prove your innocence, does not make you guilty.
Read the article - they are working with Facebook on that, but it takes a lot longer. Now, though, they should have 14 months to get it done.
What I wonder, though, is what sort of stuff could be in the account that would incriminate him? Surely the parents of the victim cooperated and provided *her* FB password, which would have given them access to any mutual communication?
I'm all for hanging murderers and rapists, but I think the burden of proof is on the accusers (government, I assume, in this case) not the accused.
Oh, interesting! I am not well read about things like this outside the US. Interestingly, the AMC A-List thing is only about the cost of 2 tickets a month... which is why I could justify it. Prior to joining I only saw about 2 movies a month, sometimes less.
I wonder if they will see the failure of MoviePass as a chance to (slowly) increase the price of A-List over time? The cost of 5 tickets a month would be closer to $50 or $60 most places here in the US, maybe even more if you figure in the higher price of premium movies (Imax, 3D, etc).
AMC Stubs A-List. If you aren't familiar, it is AMC's own version of a subscription plan, and at more survivable pricing. $20 a month for 3 movies a week, for yourself only, with no blackouts or limits on the type of movie (3D, Imax, etc). If you watch even 2 movies a month it should break even, and anything more nets you a savings... while it isn't so dirt cheap that it will kill AMC. I would love it if they'd add an upgrade for another, say, $10 a month that would allow you to use the 3-per-week to cover others (as long as you were with them)... but that may be more niche than they want to go, or it might not be justified price-wise. If I take my family to the movies, AMC still gets a lot of month (wife + 3 kids) even if my ticket is already covered under the A-List plan. Plus any food we buy. I don't think AMC would have come up with this idea if it weren't for the competition from MoviePass.
As I mentioned, my reply was not so much directed at the original question as at the comment above mine (the original "None" comment).
Regarding the original Ask Slashdot question, I am sure if I am qualified to answer... but it seems to me that the question is pretty wide-ranging and not very focused. The query includes mention of 2D and 3D visual content creation, consumer software, VR, graphics research, patents, and more. I would think that checking out conferences like SIGGRAPH and GTC would showcase a lot of the ongoing research and development in these fields, but I don't follow any publications (which is what the question ended with a request for).
Oh for Pete's sake... so does that mean nothing NVIDIA or Intel says can be true, just because they sell GPUs / CPUs?
Sure, a company selling something certainly might stretch the truth to try and get folks to buy things - but that doesn't mean that all the stuff said (or written) by anyone selling a product is automatically incorrect. Where I work we actually don't do much advertising, or make crazy claims: we actually run real-life software to see how it performs, and then publish the results publicly. We could keep the info to ourselves, if we wanted to only benefit our company and our customers, but we don't. We could also make wild claims without backing them up, but again we talk about what we test, how we test it, and then let the results speak for themselves.
I'm not even going to plug the name of the company or link to our website again, since that isn't even the point of the conversation we were having. I didn't bring it up until you tried to accuse me of just being "an IT guy who reads Intel's marketing" (effectively claiming I don't really know what I am talking about, and that I am not qualified to comment on this stuff). Linking to my extensive writings and research was the fastest way I knew of to prove you wrong.
Now, can we all just go back to being civilized? Computer hardware has made huge advancements, but you have a fair point that for an average, basic computer user it hasn't be a hugely dramatic shift in the last 10 years. I would compare that to cars: we've got huge advancements in electric and hybrid tech (especially batteries) going on, as well as the beginnings of smart / self-driving cars, but the vast majority of drivers are still using gas-powered vehicles that aren't all that different from the cars of 10 years ago. So car tech *is* constantly being researched and improved, but that trickles down to most folks on a much slower timetable. Is that sort of the idea you were trying to get across?
LOL - nice try. Check out the plethora of articles I write on a regular basis, looking specifically at performance of different computer hardware in high-end applications:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/a...
(any written by William George are mine, in case that wasn't obvious from my /. username)
That is just my personal system, which is actually running a CPU from ~ 4 generations ago (so about 5 years old). I'm on the cusp of an upgrade (likely this year) to a 6-core at over 4GHz, and if I were into any applications that benefited from higher core counts I could get a 16-core AMD or 18-core Intel processor. It all comes down to what an individual user needs, wants, and of course can afford.
If your point was more along the lines of "basic Internet and office application usage isn't any more complex today than it was 10 years ago, so a computer with similar specs will still do the trick" - then you'd have actually been fairly correctly. But many areas of computer use can and do use far more powerful hardware today: gaming, video editing, 3D rendering, photogrammetry, machine learning, and more. Since the original question was about graphics advancements, it isn't really fair to come back with an answer that 'nothing much has changed' (a rough paraphrase of your comment).
As I noted, my comment was just in regards to the sweeping - and very incorrect - statement made by 110010001000. I work with computers, but I do not personally perform research to design new hardware or software approaches to graphics. The original question is also very wide-open, so much so that I do not feel I can directly answer it... but I didn't want to leave such a disparaging comment about computer technology unchallenged.
Could you perhaps enlighten me as to what you think I missed regarding the original "article" (really just a user-submitted question)?
The top-end desktop CPUs in 2008 from Intel were the first generation of the Core i7 series. The maximum amount of RAM that CPU supported was 24GB. Today, the top-end Intel and AMD desktop processors support 128GB of memory (Core X series and Threadripper both) - and if you go over to the single-socket Xeon W you can get 512GB. Dual-socket CPUs support more now, and supported more back then, but we are looking at ~5 times the RAM capacities today that were available then. 2-4GB was typical for an average desktop back then, if you don't want to look at the high-end, and now 16GB is easy to get while many systems have even more.
On the GPU side, as an AC also noted below, memory capacity has gone up substantially. The top-end desktop GPUs in 2008 had 1GB of video memory, while top-end cards today are at 11 or 12GB (depending on whether you consider the Titan series to still be desktop cards, or if you consider that to max-out at the 1080 Ti). Workstation cards go even higher, with capacities double what you find on consumer cards (24GB on the Quadro P6000, for example).
And to debunk your statement that "The computer you had in 2008 is essentially the same as you have now in 2018":
In 2008, I had a dual-core CPU running ~2.5GHz with 8GB of memory, a GPU with 512MB of memory, and a brand-new 80GB Intel SSD that could push about 250MB/s read and write speeds.
Today I have a quad-core CPU running at ~3.4GHz with 32GB of memory, a GPU with 8GB of memory, and two SSDs (500GB at ~550MB/s and 400GB at over 1500MB/s).
So my CPU has doubled in core count, increased over 50% in clock speed, and is several times faster overall thanks to a myriad of other improvements. My GPU is on the order of 30 times faster with 16 times the amount of memory. My SSDs have over 10 times the total capacity and are almost 2 to 6 times faster (and I don't have cutting-edge SSDs, myself).
Oh, and generational changes? They do still average 18-24 months from Intel on the CPU side and NVIDIA on the GPU side. Sometimes a little longer, sometimes shorter. From 2008 to 2018 we've had ~8 generations in the Core series from Intel. NVIDIA has gone from Tesla to Fermi, then to Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, and now Volta (though that has only shown up on GPU-compute oriented cards thus far). So 8 generations over 10 years from Intel breaks down to about 1.25 years per generation, or 15 months. 6 generations over 10 years for NVIDIA is an average of 1.66666... years, or 20 months.
Ha ha ha ha... wow, that is... wow, so wrong.
GPUs have increased many-fold in performance since 10 years ago. Not even the fastest video card from back then could power a VR headset today, or support modern gaming on a 4K monitor. CPUs have made less of an increase in raw clock speeds, but have made huge jumps in core count and instructions per clock (especially in specialized areas, like vector units). RAM capacities have gone through the roof. Drive technology has made the jump from HDD to SSD, and then from SATA-based SSDs to PCI-Express.
Yes, from one generation to another is usually a relatively small difference - but with generational changes every 18 to 24 months, over the course of a decade you are looking at much bigger improvements than your comment stated. And this is all without talking about things like using GPUs for general-purpose computation, which has vastly improved performance in many areas of computing.
By the way, this is intended more as to refute the parent comment - not as a direct answer to the subject of the main post.
The length of the US coastline is equal to... 1 US Coastline. Good luck with conversions to metric, though - we hate that here in the States ;)
'Bullshit' - that is exactly what I thought, with my inner voice! But you transcribed it, so you must be able to read my mind... so this invention must really work! Even when I wasn't wearing it... ;)
Once conception has taken place, the newly formed human *is* a person. It has its own DNA, different from (but a combination of) its parents. If not killed in the womb, he or she will go on to live their own life - with their own thoughts, opinions, experiences, etc.
Is that new human life dependent on its mother for several months during development (before birth)? Yes - but it will still be dependent on other, older humans for many years after birth as well. We don't (and shouldn't) allow people to kill their young children just because they no longer want them, and neither should we allow that in the womb.
Many people say that "its a woman's body, let her decide" - but it isn't. As I pointed out, it is a unique human from the moment the egg and sperm join and combine their DNA. It is *attached* to the mother's body (via the umbilical cord), and resides inside her until birth, but it is not *part* of her body.
Also, no, I am not a Catholic... though I am a Christian. I have no problem (as Catholics do, I think) with any efforts to prevent conception / fertilization of the egg - condoms, spermicides, etc - so long as they would not interfere with normal development of a human after conception. If you don't want to potentially make a baby when having sex, there are numerous options available with varying degrees of reliability. Failure to use such a method, or the low chance of failure associated with the selected method, does not (in my opinion) give people the right to kill another human - regardless of how far along their physical development is.
Maybe it is just because I am used to 4-way stops, and not roundabouts, but the few that have been put in around my town in recent years mess me up *far* more than the way a 4-way stop works. Yes, 4-way stops may be a bit slower... but they just feel more natural to me, especially when you get into multi-lane roundabouts (shudder).
With that said, I do agree with you 100% regarding people walking in the street. That doesn't happen a lot in my part of the US, but when it does I always shake my head. I am under the impression that pedestrians only have the right-of-way at marked crossings and intersections (whether marked or not)... but sometimes people just wander all over, or try to sprint across a multi-lane road, or even just saunter out in front of traffic 50 or 100 feet from a legit crossing / intersection. I don't understand it :(