When you get to that kind of difference it really does become a moral imperative. You're using more than your share, and you're not even *trying* to get down to what your share might be. Moral and therefore religious and therefore none of your or the government's goddamn business.
Quantum electrodynamics is science. The theory was formulated to explain natural phenomena, and its testable predictions have been confirmed by everyone who has taken the time to test them. Notice you never hear of scientists 'taking sides' on the issue of quantum electrodynamics, precisely because it is science fact---disagreeing with something as testable as QED is akin to disagreeing that '2 + 2 = 4'. Yeah, there are people who do that, but we don't call them scientists.
Now contrast that with a doomsday prediction 100 years into the future based on a questionable, mathematical model of a fundamentally chaotic system, whose 'advocates'[1] openly urge people to repent, change their ways, or pay in a kind of hell on earth for the consequences of their decadent, sinful lifestyles.
You tell me if that's science. I call it moralizing (when I'm in a particularly charitable mood).
Computers in general, and the 'models' that are simulated on them, have become the modern, socially acceptable incarnation of the crystal ball---a way for people to disguise their agenda under the cloak of divination. 'Look! Behold your impending doom and change your ways before it's too late!!!' No thanks.
I'll stick with science, myself, which consists of facts and figures, equations and postulates, and which is wholly and blessedly free from moral imperatives and subjective values.
[1] QED has no 'advocates'; it doesn't need them. Nor does any scientifically established 'fact'. And I quote the word 'fact' only because science is always open to revision---even to later, contradictory theories. It's only dogma that isn't.
Quantum electrodynamics is science. The theory was formulated to explain natural phenomena, and its testable predictions have been confirmed by everyone who has taken the time to test them. Notice you never hear of scientists 'taking sides' on the issue of quantum electrodynamics, precisely because it is science fact---disagreeing with something as testable as QED is akin to disagreeing that '2 + 2 = 4'. Yeah, there are people who do that, but we don't call them scientists.
Now contrast that with a doomsday prediction 100 years into the future based on a questionable, mathematical model of a fundamentally chaotic system, whose 'advocates'[1] openly urge people to repent, change their ways, or pay in a kind of hell on earth for the consequences of their decadent, sinful lifestyles.
You tell me if that's science. I call it moralizing (when I'm in a particularly charitable mood).
Computers in general, and the 'models' that are simulated on them, have become the modern, socially acceptable incarnation of the crystal ball---a way for people to disguise their agenda under the cloak of divination. 'Look! Behold your impending doom and change your ways before it's too late!!!'
No thanks. I'll stick with science, myself, which consists of facts and figures, equations and postulates, and which is wholly and blessedly free from moral imperatives and subjective values.
[1] QED has no 'advocates'; it doesn't need them. Nor does any scientifically established 'fact'. And I quote the word 'fact' only because science is always open to revision---even to later, contradictory theories. It's only dogma that isn't.
And Jesus is coming back in the year 2010.
Seriously, people don't trust the weather report 5 days from now, and yet they're perfectly willing to impose an economic cost on the USA amounting to trillions of dollars, for what is (in effect) a weather report ONE-FREAKIN'-HUNDRED years out? Where has the skepticism, gone, people?!? This isn't science, it's fear mongering based on the personal moral agenda of those who view humans as a sinful stain on God's pure earth---and the irony is, these people don't even believe in God. Welcome your new puritanical atheist overlords.
So raising petrol taxes in the United States is going to reduce the cost of gasoline? This is yet another attempt to disguise a moral imperative (energy efficiency) as an economic imperative, but one uncommonly transparent. The fact of the matter is that the market inevitably tends toward optimal economic efficiency, which in this case comes at the cost of energy efficiency. You may not like it, you may say it's wrong, but that's a value judgement; don't try and say the world would be a better place if only the market were forced to live by your code of ethics.
They're talking about 4 or 8 cores on a single CPU, which might be nice for blades but not so useful for a laptop or a gamer.
I hear this so often it makes me sick.
My company is designing a lowly text editor. Yet, at any given time, this editor has at least 10 persistent threads running, often as many as 30, doing heavy-duty tasks in the background like file indexing, automatic formatting, Baysian-based autocompletion, and peer-to-peer voice conferencing. We'd be doing more than that but we're already hitting the limits of today's computers (keeping in mind the damn users want to run more than one program at a time).
When the average users get ahold of a multicore processor, they will see a speedup in the performance of our editor. In fact, our editor will run faster on a multicore system than a single core system with a significantly faster clock rate. And I'm betting we're not alone here.
The only programmers who aren't writing multithreaded programs these days are the stupid and lazy ones (or those planning on career changes in the near future, because they won't be employable two years from now unless they can write rock-solid concurrent applications; not trivial by any means).
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When you get to that kind of difference it really does become a moral imperative. You're using more than your share, and you're not even *trying* to get down to what your share might be.
Moral and therefore religious and therefore none of your or the government's goddamn business.
Now contrast that with a doomsday prediction 100 years into the future based on a questionable, mathematical model of a fundamentally chaotic system, whose 'advocates'[1] openly urge people to repent, change their ways, or pay in a kind of hell on earth for the consequences of their decadent, sinful lifestyles.
You tell me if that's science. I call it moralizing (when I'm in a particularly charitable mood).
Computers in general, and the 'models' that are simulated on them, have become the modern, socially acceptable incarnation of the crystal ball---a way for people to disguise their agenda under the cloak of divination. 'Look! Behold your impending doom and change your ways before it's too late!!!' No thanks.
I'll stick with science, myself, which consists of facts and figures, equations and postulates, and which is wholly and blessedly free from moral imperatives and subjective values.
[1] QED has no 'advocates'; it doesn't need them. Nor does any scientifically established 'fact'. And I quote the word 'fact' only because science is always open to revision---even to later, contradictory theories. It's only dogma that isn't.
Quantum electrodynamics is science. The theory was formulated to explain natural phenomena, and its testable predictions have been confirmed by everyone who has taken the time to test them. Notice you never hear of scientists 'taking sides' on the issue of quantum electrodynamics, precisely because it is science fact---disagreeing with something as testable as QED is akin to disagreeing that '2 + 2 = 4'. Yeah, there are people who do that, but we don't call them scientists. Now contrast that with a doomsday prediction 100 years into the future based on a questionable, mathematical model of a fundamentally chaotic system, whose 'advocates'[1] openly urge people to repent, change their ways, or pay in a kind of hell on earth for the consequences of their decadent, sinful lifestyles. You tell me if that's science. I call it moralizing (when I'm in a particularly charitable mood). Computers in general, and the 'models' that are simulated on them, have become the modern, socially acceptable incarnation of the crystal ball---a way for people to disguise their agenda under the cloak of divination. 'Look! Behold your impending doom and change your ways before it's too late!!!' No thanks. I'll stick with science, myself, which consists of facts and figures, equations and postulates, and which is wholly and blessedly free from moral imperatives and subjective values. [1] QED has no 'advocates'; it doesn't need them. Nor does any scientifically established 'fact'. And I quote the word 'fact' only because science is always open to revision---even to later, contradictory theories. It's only dogma that isn't.
And Jesus is coming back in the year 2010. Seriously, people don't trust the weather report 5 days from now, and yet they're perfectly willing to impose an economic cost on the USA amounting to trillions of dollars, for what is (in effect) a weather report ONE-FREAKIN'-HUNDRED years out? Where has the skepticism, gone, people?!? This isn't science, it's fear mongering based on the personal moral agenda of those who view humans as a sinful stain on God's pure earth---and the irony is, these people don't even believe in God. Welcome your new puritanical atheist overlords.
So raising petrol taxes in the United States is going to reduce the cost of gasoline? This is yet another attempt to disguise a moral imperative (energy efficiency) as an economic imperative, but one uncommonly transparent. The fact of the matter is that the market inevitably tends toward optimal economic efficiency, which in this case comes at the cost of energy efficiency. You may not like it, you may say it's wrong, but that's a value judgement; don't try and say the world would be a better place if only the market were forced to live by your code of ethics.
My company is designing a lowly text editor. Yet, at any given time, this editor has at least 10 persistent threads running, often as many as 30, doing heavy-duty tasks in the background like file indexing, automatic formatting, Baysian-based autocompletion, and peer-to-peer voice conferencing. We'd be doing more than that but we're already hitting the limits of today's computers (keeping in mind the damn users want to run more than one program at a time).
When the average users get ahold of a multicore processor, they will see a speedup in the performance of our editor. In fact, our editor will run faster on a multicore system than a single core system with a significantly faster clock rate. And I'm betting we're not alone here.
The only programmers who aren't writing multithreaded programs these days are the stupid and lazy ones (or those planning on career changes in the near future, because they won't be employable two years from now unless they can write rock-solid concurrent applications; not trivial by any means).