Well, as a life-long US citizen, I can truthfully say that most people don't even care about politics...
Even now, relatively few realize what the Patriot Act means.
The mainstream news sources will never come right out and show/say how our rights are being affected. They always maintain a neutral stance. In some respects that is good, but there is also a time when I think they should speak out. Most news stories are fluff, like which dog won the local dog show.
The public is so used to everything being 'okay', that anyone who speaks radical ideas (such as any of rights are being taken away) is usually labeled as a wacko. Yes, there are many wackos shouting nonsense on public tv, and they are generally ignored. Some of these wackos even try to profit from their position. So sadly, if a genuine reasoned person were to logically show what is going on, the public wouldn't care. Too much crying wolf...
- Cheney's hunting accident got 10x more press coverage than the Patriot Act.
- Except for slashdotters, I would wager that the result of the US doesn't even know who or what the Electronic Frontiers Federation (EFF) is. And they probably wouldn't care.
- The only stories that get recurring coverage (such as over many ways or even a coupe of weeks) are murders... Governmental things are generally mentioned briefly once and rarely again.
Heck, in my state capital city, people don't even plainly talk about propositions coming up for a vote. Relatively evil contents are put inside the clean box of some shiny catch-phrases and people will vote based upon the catchphrase, not the contents...
It turns out that these environmentally friendly propositions are behind put forth by `environmental groups' whose sponsors consist of those who are completely against enviromental protection... [But the public doesn't see it because of their name and because the public doesn't read the proposition text].
When I play Tribes online, I often enjoy taking a few shots at teammates [like when they have the flag].... Blowing up a few blastwalls and defensive turrets (especially when my team is way ahead)... My teammates don't even catch on until my score turns negative.... Unfortunately in the real-world, the same thing is happening...
And the common public is (blindly) supporting it!
The problem with politics is that the general public doesn't see its relevance to their daily lives. They would rather spend their efforts keeping track which gas station is offering gas $0.10 cheaper than think about how to use less gas (or buy a smaller car).... And certainly contemplating exactly where the oil comes from, who is profiting by it, or at what price is completely outside general consideration.
In short, most people are ignorant and/or apathetic. Of those that aren't, many/most profit from this general ignorance/apathy.
Forgive me if I'm missing something completely obvious here, but why is progress in fusion research still progressing so slowly? Sources generally cite estimates in the 2050-2060 range for when we'll be actually using fusion power.
Well, wasn't the US supposed to only be using HDTV by when 1997? 2000? ROTFL. Long range predictions tend to be wrong, but people forget about that.
On the other hand, 2050 is long enough for the current generations to not care. (I won't have many years left in 2050). All leaders today will be dead by then. So they can squander as much as they want and someone else will have to answer in 2050 as to why things aren't finished.
Have you ever listened to an illegally copied record/cd/tape?
Have you ever seen anyone with an illegally copied record/cd/tape?
Have you ever used a product in a manner that was inconsistent with its labeling?
Have you ever torn the tag off your couch cushion and then later gave away/sold the couch?
Have you ever took your kid and the neighbors to an out-of-state camping trip/vacation/drive/etc without explicit written permission from the parents?
Have you ever flattened a coin on a railroad track?
Have you pissed on the side of a federally maintained road?
Well guess what buddy? You have violated federal laws!!! You should be convicted and sent to "pound-me-in-the-ass prison". Where the DNA can be collected in the manner you suggested (in the parent post)....
I've even explained how interrupt handlers work in regards to a USB joystick to a Lawyer... He was so happy in the way I explained it to him, he kept asking more and more questions until I told him I have to go:P
Ah great.... Now your lawyer is going to wager a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all USB devices for illegal discrimination and unfair employment practices by the interrupt controller. The PCI bus will be named as a conspirator and the CPU will be charged with negligence. The PCI sound card will be the chief witness.
t the very least ask your state representative(s) to call for a constitutional convention. If 38 states call for one, we can try to get back on the right track to liberty and a government more respectful of those liberties.
Interesting idea, but would we get that effect? It must just be a means to squash the remaining impediments to the current direction of things...
After a few dozen false alarms, maybe they'll learn to stop invading customer privacy.
After a few dozen false alarms, **YOU** would be deemed a threat to national security (after all, you're DOSing the justice system) and the corresponding consequences would follow.
The only difference is we're not talking about sniffing powdered sugar in front of a police station.... We're talking about a legal item (dvd) being used in a common & legal way (transporting through mail).
And what happens when the queues fill up? That's when things get interesting... (avoidance of deadlock, etc, etc)
Couldn't a program be "blocked" trying to issue a request when the queue is full and at the same time, it wouldn't be able to accept the "Reply" from a previous request do to this?
Sounds like a resource-based deadlock even though the requests themselves do not create deadlock.
I have participated in the ACM Regional Programming Contest (and placed!). I have also been a TA at a university for a while....
This is what I have noticed.
In US undergraduate education: 1) Programming courses focus on syntax, not readability, not efficiency.
2) Little is learned from the "algorithms" course that is supposed to teach what a binary tree is, etc, etc... I Even worse, this is course isn't taken until the Junior/Senior year of college (if at all). I bet 80% of a graduating CS/CE class wouldn't be able to implement a sorting algorithm if their life dependend on it (at least not an algorithm other than BubbleSort)
3) Programs are never complicated enough to require any substantial "debugging" effort.
So when people graduate, they don't know how to write efficient code, don't know how to debug a program, and they barely have had any experience with algorithms...
In programming classes that I have been a TA, I have seen this:
- Students don't even know what neatly written code looks like. They don't understand why it should be neat. - Students don't bother with debugging (write the program, compile, run, scratch their head as to why it doesn't work). - *Computer Engineering* students have no concept as to why integer divison is slower than integer addition, etc, etc... [WTF!] - Global variables are used out of laziness.... Even the index variables in a "for loop" are often made global!
Hopefully these skills get developed during coroprate employment.... But I bet the employers aren't too thrilled at waiting 2-3 years for their new hires to actually become average coders.
I would like to see a course where students are given a pre-written broken program and they are asked to make it work. They might actually learn something then.
I have actually seen commercial software use O(n^2) sorting algorithms... Instead of an operation taking 3-4 seconds on a similar program, it took 5-6 MINUTES with an O(n^2) sorting algorithm...
And to anyone who thinks programming contests are silly: Yes, the idea of implementing 3-4 small programs in an 4 hour period is a bit unusual... But how long is your employer going to allow? Especially when a hard deadline approaches? A programming contest should be a lot less pressure than when the welfare of your family, job, and paycheck are on the line...
It seems likely that a large percentage of the people who get this service will end up violating the agreement without even thinking about it, just because it's habit.
Boy, I bet the T-Mobile lawyers are real upset about this.
I'll say one thing: At least Western ignorance is rather inventive.
Many of those 'Western Inventions' were due to easterners living/working/studing in the west...
Try visiting a communications (engineering) research group at a local university.... You will be lucky to see a non-zero number of Americans there.... (besides the janitoral staff). And if you are lucky, then you should be buying lottery tickets if the one you see is pursuing a PhD.
Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman!
on
Gadgets, Then & Now
·
· Score: 1
Grandparent was talking about orders of magnitude, not processor-level optimizations. Besides, you're not seriously suggesting that such a program would execute faster on 80s processors than on today's...!
The difference between a program with excellent cache performance and one with poor cache performance **IS** a few orders of magnitude in execution time....
Even for a given program, just re-ordering (nothing else), the way it accesses a list of data can improve execution time by a factor of 10... They don't teach that in Physics...
Is a factor of 10 significant? Well, if one is spending days/week/months running a simulation on 1000 nodes, I think it is.... A 10000 node cluster may not be within their research budget! And even if they have a 64k node BlueGene.... It will be a while before they invent a 640K-node BlueGene, so yes a factor of 10 still matters.
Of course todays processors will beat those of the 80s... The question is: by how much?
Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman!
on
Gadgets, Then & Now
·
· Score: 1
Most good programmers are not physicsts... Which one do you want implementing the program? Fast and inaccurate or slow and accurate?
Large programs written in the early 80s may not be written in a manner that executes well on today's deeply pipelined superscalar processors.... [use of linked lists, etc, etc].
And many government research groups only hire citizens....
The only reason they didn't do it all at once was to try and avoid a revolutionary backlash,(especially in the US where anti fascist "tools" are still in common ownership) as in an actual physical revolution.
Would these "tools" happen to be guns?
Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman!
on
Gadgets, Then & Now
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Remember when computers looked like this?
For those that don't know, "computer" used to be a job description. They were typically women that did parallel processing and redundant calculations by hand for places like NASA and the government.
Its amazing, at least to me how fast computation has gotten, and how slow computation is still for scientists and engineers today....
I think part of that is these "scientists" salivate too much on how many nodes they can build and don't give much thought into making their algorithms more efficient, lower complexity, etc, etc....
They are still using parallel processing to do REDUNDANT calculations... Just like the old days.
Come on Taco, you know as well as I do this is a worthless advertisement at best.
You must be new around here...
Taco likes posting articles that will either generate ad revenue (imflammatory articles generate lots of page views, or ones that are flat-out ads [kickback??])
What's missing? Gobs and gobs of metadata about every keystroke, ever action, every cursor positioning.
I think it also contains info about previous computer name and usernames that edited the file....
Interesting, shortly after 9/11, some govt agency issued a release as a Ms Word document.... Slashdotters quickly realized who actually saw the file (which was contrary to what was pubicly said). Of course, it didn't make the news....
Slashdot Mirror
Hi Ol Chap,
Well, as a life-long US citizen, I can truthfully say that most people don't even care about politics...
Even now, relatively few realize what the Patriot Act means.
The mainstream news sources will never come right out and show/say how our rights are being affected. They always maintain a neutral stance. In some respects that is good, but there is also a time when I think they should speak out. Most news stories are fluff, like which dog won the local dog show.
The public is so used to everything being 'okay', that anyone who speaks radical ideas (such as any of rights are being taken away) is usually labeled as a wacko. Yes, there are many wackos shouting nonsense on public tv, and they are generally ignored. Some of these wackos even try to profit from their position. So sadly, if a genuine reasoned person were to logically show what is going on, the public wouldn't care. Too much crying wolf...
- Cheney's hunting accident got 10x more press coverage than the Patriot Act.
- Except for slashdotters, I would wager that the result of the US doesn't even know who or what the Electronic Frontiers Federation (EFF) is. And they probably wouldn't care.
- The only stories that get recurring coverage (such as over many ways or even a coupe of weeks) are murders... Governmental things are generally mentioned briefly once and rarely again.
Heck, in my state capital city, people don't even plainly talk about propositions coming up for a vote. Relatively evil contents are put inside the clean box of some shiny catch-phrases and people will vote based upon the catchphrase, not the contents...
It turns out that these environmentally friendly propositions are behind put forth by `environmental groups' whose sponsors consist of those who are completely against enviromental protection... [But the public doesn't see it because of their name and because the public doesn't read the proposition text].
When I play Tribes online, I often enjoy taking a few shots at teammates [like when they have the flag].... Blowing up a few blastwalls and defensive turrets (especially when my team is way ahead)... My teammates don't even catch on until my score turns negative.... Unfortunately in the real-world, the same thing is happening...
And the common public is (blindly) supporting it!
The problem with politics is that the general public doesn't see its relevance to their daily lives. They would rather spend their efforts keeping track which gas station is offering gas $0.10 cheaper than think about how to use less gas (or buy a smaller car).... And certainly contemplating exactly where the oil comes from, who is profiting by it, or at what price is completely outside general consideration.
In short, most people are ignorant and/or apathetic. Of those that aren't, many/most profit from this general ignorance/apathy.
Forgive me if I'm missing something completely obvious here, but why is progress in fusion research still progressing so slowly? Sources generally cite estimates in the 2050-2060 range for when we'll be actually using fusion power.
Well, wasn't the US supposed to only be using HDTV by when 1997? 2000? ROTFL. Long range predictions tend to be wrong, but people forget about that.
On the other hand, 2050 is long enough for the current generations to not care. (I won't have many years left in 2050). All leaders today will be dead by then. So they can squander as much as they want and someone else will have to answer in 2050 as to why things aren't finished.
Have you ever copied a music record/cd/tape?
Have you ever listened to an illegally copied record/cd/tape?
Have you ever seen anyone with an illegally copied record/cd/tape?
Have you ever used a product in a manner that was inconsistent with its labeling?
Have you ever torn the tag off your couch cushion and then later gave away/sold the couch?
Have you ever took your kid and the neighbors to an out-of-state camping trip/vacation/drive/etc without explicit written permission from the parents?
Have you ever flattened a coin on a railroad track?
Have you pissed on the side of a federally maintained road?
Well guess what buddy? You have violated federal laws!!! You should be convicted and sent to "pound-me-in-the-ass prison". Where the DNA can be collected in the manner you suggested (in the parent post)....
Wait... politics aside, are you suggesting Dick Cheney could charm his way into anything?
Of course not... He's much too capable with a shotgun to resort to charms...
This is because I also do not trust my employer. The notebook is theirs, but not all the data is.
Would your life be a lot simpler if you stored only company data on the company laptop and non-company data on a non-company laptop/storage device???
I've even explained how interrupt handlers work in regards to a USB joystick to a Lawyer... He was so happy in the way I explained it to him, he kept asking more and more questions until I told him I have to go :P
Ah great.... Now your lawyer is going to wager a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all USB devices for illegal discrimination and unfair employment practices by the interrupt controller. The PCI bus will be named as a conspirator and the CPU will be charged with negligence. The PCI sound card will be the chief witness.
t the very least ask your state representative(s) to call for a constitutional convention. If 38 states call for one, we can try to get back on the right track to liberty and a government more respectful of those liberties.
Interesting idea, but would we get that effect? It must just be a means to squash the remaining impediments to the current direction of things...
After a few dozen false alarms, maybe they'll learn to stop invading customer privacy.
After a few dozen false alarms, **YOU** would be deemed a threat to national security (after all, you're DOSing the justice system) and the corresponding consequences would follow.
The only difference is we're not talking about sniffing powdered sugar in front of a police station.... We're talking about a legal item (dvd) being used in a common & legal way (transporting through mail).
And what happens when the queues fill up? That's when things get interesting... (avoidance of deadlock, etc, etc)
Couldn't a program be "blocked" trying to issue a request when the queue is full and at the same time, it wouldn't be able to accept the "Reply" from a previous request do to this?
Sounds like a resource-based deadlock even though the requests themselves do not create deadlock.
I have participated in the ACM Regional Programming Contest (and placed!). I have also been a TA at a university for a while....
This is what I have noticed.
In US undergraduate education:
1) Programming courses focus on syntax, not readability, not efficiency.
2) Little is learned from the "algorithms" course that is supposed to teach what a binary tree is, etc, etc... I Even worse, this is course isn't taken until the Junior/Senior year of college (if at all). I bet 80% of a graduating CS/CE class wouldn't be able to implement a sorting algorithm if their life dependend on it (at least not an algorithm other than BubbleSort)
3) Programs are never complicated enough to require any substantial "debugging" effort.
So when people graduate, they don't know how to write efficient code, don't know how to debug a program, and they barely have had any experience with algorithms...
In programming classes that I have been a TA, I have seen this:
- Students don't even know what neatly written code looks like. They don't understand why it should be neat.
- Students don't bother with debugging (write the program, compile, run, scratch their head as to why it doesn't work).
- *Computer Engineering* students have no concept as to why integer divison is slower than integer addition, etc, etc... [WTF!]
- Global variables are used out of laziness.... Even the index variables in a "for loop" are often made global!
Hopefully these skills get developed during coroprate employment.... But I bet the employers aren't too thrilled at waiting 2-3 years for their new hires to actually become average coders.
I would like to see a course where students are given a pre-written broken program and they are asked to make it work. They might actually learn something then.
I have actually seen commercial software use O(n^2) sorting algorithms... Instead of an operation taking 3-4 seconds on a similar program, it took 5-6 MINUTES with an O(n^2) sorting algorithm...
And to anyone who thinks programming contests are silly: Yes, the idea of implementing 3-4 small programs in an 4 hour period is a bit unusual... But how long is your employer going to allow? Especially when a hard deadline approaches? A programming contest should be a lot less pressure than when the welfare of your family, job, and paycheck are on the line...
It seems likely that a large percentage of the people who get this service will end up violating the agreement without even thinking about it, just because it's habit.
Boy, I bet the T-Mobile lawyers are real upset about this.
As soon as those packets get wrapped in IPSec, T-Mobile can do nothing about it...
Well, T-Mobile can DROP them... Problem solved.
It's a tad overkill ofr VOIP too!
I'll say one thing: At least Western ignorance is rather inventive.
Many of those 'Western Inventions' were due to easterners living/working/studing in the west...
Try visiting a communications (engineering) research group at a local university.... You will be lucky to see a non-zero number of Americans there.... (besides the janitoral staff). And if you are lucky, then you should be buying lottery tickets if the one you see is pursuing a PhD.
Was this guy pissing in a bottle or something?
Eight hours without going isn't difficult...
In fact, the biggest issue has been callers sticking gum in my CD drives.
Wow!! Now THAT's REMOTE ACCESS!!!
Or was it the person answering the phone that put the gum in the drives?
Erm no....
It's the world's third android...
Its the second one to be named Ever.
Grandparent was talking about orders of magnitude, not processor-level optimizations. Besides, you're not seriously suggesting that such a program would execute faster on 80s processors than on today's...!
The difference between a program with excellent cache performance and one with poor cache performance **IS** a few orders of magnitude in execution time....
Even for a given program, just re-ordering (nothing else), the way it accesses a list of data can improve execution time by a factor of 10... They don't teach that in Physics...
Is a factor of 10 significant? Well, if one is spending days/week/months running a simulation on 1000 nodes, I think it is.... A 10000 node cluster may not be within their research budget! And even if they have a 64k node BlueGene.... It will be a while before they invent a 640K-node BlueGene, so yes a factor of 10 still matters.
Of course todays processors will beat those of the 80s... The question is: by how much?
Most good programmers are not physicsts... Which one do you want implementing the program? Fast and inaccurate or slow and accurate?
Large programs written in the early 80s may not be written in a manner that executes well on today's deeply pipelined superscalar processors.... [use of linked lists, etc, etc].
And many government research groups only hire citizens....
The hammer is first to hit the ground.
That may be, but the time difference between the hammer hitting the ground and the feather hitting the ground probably won't be observable to us....
Nah... That's bound to be cheap....
That spacesuit is not an Armani.
The only reason they didn't do it all at once was to try and avoid a revolutionary backlash,(especially in the US where anti fascist "tools" are still in common ownership) as in an actual physical revolution.
Would these "tools" happen to be guns?
Remember when computers looked like this?
...
For those that don't know, "computer" used to be a job description. They were typically women that did parallel processing and redundant calculations by hand for places like NASA and the government.
Its amazing, at least to me how fast computation has gotten, and how slow computation is still for scientists and engineers today.
I think part of that is these "scientists" salivate too much on how many nodes they can build and don't give much thought into making their algorithms more efficient, lower complexity, etc, etc....
They are still using parallel processing to do REDUNDANT calculations... Just like the old days.
Come on Taco, you know as well as I do this is a worthless advertisement at best.
You must be new around here...
Taco likes posting articles that will either generate ad revenue (imflammatory articles generate lots of page views, or ones that are flat-out ads [kickback??])
I wonder what Taco's cut is...
What's missing? Gobs and gobs of metadata about every keystroke, ever action, every cursor positioning.
I think it also contains info about previous computer name and usernames that edited the file....
Interesting, shortly after 9/11, some govt agency issued a release as a Ms Word document.... Slashdotters quickly realized who actually saw the file (which was contrary to what was pubicly said). Of course, it didn't make the news....