But you will know. They will not be able to listen in without you knowing.
How so? They use a National Security Letter to order a wiretap, which in this case means implanting a backdoor. Similar tactics have been used on other people offering encyrption software. Unless you build and program the phone yourself from trusted parts, you're at the mercy of your provider, and the provider is at the mercy of government.
You really can't expect anything different from the same government that secretly (though with ISP help) installed taps onto all of the major ISPs, can you?
"Unless you can come back and tell me why Google should be able to profit from spreading false information and have no obligation to correct or remove then you don't have an argument."
So, I'm curious why you think that argument a straw man.
I've already explained it numerous times, but since you are a different poster I will try once more:
Definition: "a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted "
The EU case is not quite that, since the information published was true,
Oh look, you already know! Since this case is not about libel, I do not have to defend Google being able to profit from libel. I could have a position against that or not. It is irrelevant to this debate.
but it's still a matter of publishing information that legally should not be published.
No, not quite. The same court that ruled that Google couldn't index the site also ruled that the newspaper hosting the information did not have to take it down, as it was a matter of public record, as I quoted from the article in my original post.
If you wouldn't post strawmen arguments, I wouldn't have to waste my time calling them as such.
As I said before, this word isn't a get out clause for situations of "Shit, I can't rationally refute that point".
I refuted them in that I showed they misrepresented my argument. You haven't shown otherwise.
But it's not simply being indexed is it? It's being made searchable, it's being used for analytics, it's being used to sell ads. You really think Google exists purely for the public good? Of course not, it's a profit making organisation and this is it's profit bread and butter.
Well duh, of course the index is to allow for searches. That Google allows searches of the public Web isn't in dispute. That they are a commercial entity also isn't in dispute. The newspaper that is allowed to publish the so-called public record is also a commercial entity that I presume sells ads and does all the nefarious-sounding things that you make profit sound like. The difference is that one is allowed to publish this so-called public information, and another is not allowed to index to it. We've been over this.
You've avoided my question as to why someone should not retrospectively be afforded the right to privacy if someone has had their information publicised against their will even though you presumably believe you have the right to keep stuff secret.
I didn't avoid it. I correctly labeled it as a strawman, and I explicitly told you that what's under concern here is not a secret, but a matter of public record. Try reading the responses and responding to the actual argument. You can't argue this is a secret when one site is allowed to publish it on the Web. It is then absurd to compare this to any unpublished, private secrets that I may hold.
Since you can't make a cogent argument, and I'm repeating myself a lot, I'm done here.
But it's just not being indexed, unless you get the definition of data processor as in data protection law then I don't know how else I can explain to you why this is different.
It's simply being indexed. Your claim is that because the information is about a person, even though it is "public" it shouldn't be allowed to be indexed.
I understand the point of the data protection laws, but I feel that they are being stretched to extreme cases. It's one thing to argue that private business shouldn't aggregate all your transactions and browsing history, as commonly occurs in the United States. It's quite another to say something can be published as a matter of public record by one entity, but not allowed to be indexed by another.
Yes really. It's used like a word that we're automatically supposed to say "Oh well, Reanex said it was censorship so he automatically wins the argument and is right". Yes that's a fucking fallacy, and a very tired one on Slashdot.
No, it's not a fallacy. It does not automatically win the argument, but it's a valid concern that deserves careful consideration. The arguments given as to why this particular censorship is ok are lacking.
So I guess you can't actually justify it then given that you're dodging the bullet with another classic cry of "strawman" without apparently understanding what that even means?
I perfectly understand what strawman means, and it applies to you. Rather than addressing why your argument wasn't a strawman, you just try to pin the label on me instead. Your argument was a strawman because you were arguing about libel, though this case was about true information that is a matter of public record.
Your argument thus far boils down to the idea that freedom of speech trumps all, your view must therefore logically be that no one should have a secret card pin, password, non-public finances, private sexuality, private contact details and so on.
And again you demonstrate a classic strawman fallacy. I never stated such a position, and in fact I said, "sometimes censorship is acceptable".
I really don't think you've thought your argument through unless you can justify why your details should remain secret, but others should not also enjoy that right if it's been taken away from them against their will.
The issue here is that one website publishes a matter of public record for all the world to see (not secret), yet this same information is not allowed to be indexed, just like any library has searchable indexes into their archives. Try to argue what's actually under debate instead of your strawman positions.
In contrast, Google has none of this. Would your preference instead be that Google's search facilities are declared public record but it can be sued for libel for everything wrong it indexes about someone?
For this case, it is irrelevant. The information is true, not libel, and already ruled and acknowledged by you to be public record, and the newspaper can leave the page online. Yet you hold that this same "public record" information cannot be indexed by a search engine. That's a farce.
Okay there is censorship going on, but there's always censorship going on. Using censorship as a go to argument against everything is one of the worst fallacies Slashdot is prone to.
At least now you admit there is censorship occurring. And really, censorship is the one of the worst fallacies on Slashdot? Gee, that freedom of speech, so unimportant, hardly worth consideration! Let's just brush the issue under the rug because sometimes censorship is acceptable.
Unless you can come back and tell me why Google should be able to profit from spreading false information and have no obligation to correct or remove then you don't have an argument.
See, now this is one of the worst arguments on Slashdot. Your classic strawman.
The information is public, anyone who kept a copy or who can be bothered to visit the library and scan through microfiche can find it, but that doesn't give them a right to use it commercially without that person's consent.
It's public but it isn't. Right.
You have to remember that in the EU corporations are not people. They don't get the same freedoms and rights that people do.
A completely irrelevant point, as point the newspaper in question and Google are commercial entities. It's just that one was allowed to keep their page up as a matter of public record, and was disallowed to index it, which is absurd.
Newspapers have long been deemed to be public record, and so of course it shouldn't be censored. Public record can comfortably sit behind the public interest defence. But Google is a business that makes money providing services based on public record, that does not in itself make it public record, and so it becomes difficult for it to make a case for public interest - it's tried to make this case and failed, hence the ruling.
This argument is absurd. Newspapers (when not state run) are also commercial interests. One entity publishes things in the public record, and another makes those things searchable. To argue that what Google does is so different and doesn't deserve protection is preposterous, even more so to claim that there isn't censorship going on.
What it does, is gives you the right to go to a company, that is storing information on you, and ask that they remove it. Nothing more, nothing less. That means if Google has indexed search results and their index includes information on you they simply have to remove that from their index - they do not have to go to the sites they indexed and asked them to remove the information too or any such thing, it's up to you to contact each specific company and the company must oblige.
Oh, is that all? So the data is still there, except the most popular search engine on the planet can't list it. Wow, that's a relief. Here I thought there was censorship of public information going on, but clearly there isn't. (For the impaired, yes, this is sarcasm.)
From the article:
The case itself occurred after a Spanish man (Mario Costeja Gonzalez) complained that the detail of an auction notice for his former home, which was repossessed after he failed to pay his taxes, appeared in Google's search results.
The notice itself was made public on the third-party website (twice via a newspaper called La Vanguardia) and Mr Gonzalez wanted the source material edited and the Google result removed because the proceedings concerning him had been fully resolved for a number of years, thus he felt as though the reference to them was now "entirely irrelevant".
Mercifully the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) rejected the complaint against La Vanguardia, which correctly ruled that the information in question had been lawfully published by it. But the AEPD then ruled that Google should still delete the related references to the page, which Google perhaps understandably viewed as unfair because the information was already in the public domain, and so began the court battle until today's ECJ verdict.
"Outcome: The reverse engineering and emulating of the Blizzard software violated the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA. This ruling has been widely criticized as making it impossible to create new programs that interoperate with older ones and squeezing consumer choice out of the marketplace by essentially allowing companies to outlaw competitors' products that interact with their own."
So as long as your friends are going against your core principles, you lead by example and join them? You're a nutter, and even you can't follow your nutty ideas.
Haha! That's pretty explicit backpedaling, there. Are you familiar with the concept of quotation marks? Because it kinda, sorta means that's EXACTLY what you said.
Are you? That's why I quoted what I actually said, versus what you said I said. Speed is not the same word as performance. I've been buying computers all along, and I know performance has improved somewhat for single-threaded tasks.
What my point was, and the article made clear, was that the amazing exponential performance gains that occurred regularly because of clock speed gains were gone. You haven't refuted that. All you did was make a fool of yourself by misreading a graph.
And you have no answer for the paragraph I quoted. It's what I was referring to all along. It's a clear-cut example of exponential progress that did not continue, despite having occurred for decades. As I said, the issue is well-documented.
Go ahead, answer it: "Throughout the 80's and 90's, CPUs were able to run virtually any kind of software twice as fast every 18-20 months. The rate of change was incredible. Your 486SX-16 was almost obsolete by the time you got it through the door. But eventually, at some point in the mid-2000's, progress slowed down considerably for single-threaded software -- which was most software."
You can't, because it's true, and your position, exactly quoted (not paraphrased) was bullshit: "And processor speed increases just slightly slowing for a few years is an insignificant blip."
No, it was a dramatic slowdown, and a well-documented one.
When you start talking about how the user feels and using buzzwords like "Holistic" and "paradigm" over just finding out if a user can understand it without assistance you have a serious problem.
We have to leverage holistic paradigms to incentivise platform consumers to meet our time to market challenges.
Your claims were that single-core performance did "stop progressing" and even "gone down".
Let's quote what I actually said, and pay attention to the details, because I never said single-core performance stopped progressing or went down:
"Just look at processor speeds. For decades they were exponentially improving -- until they hit a wall around 2002. Now we have multicores and more transistors, but it's not the same."
And let's look at your followup:
"And processor speed increases just slightly slowing for a few years is an insignificant blip."
So now that we are on the same page, I demonstrated that CPU speed (and I mean frequency, and you know it, since we've been arguing about the "Megahertz Myth") increases did indeed have a drastic reduction from the previous decades, and in many cases they have indeed gone backwards to save on power.
The graphs also show that speed increases were never "exponentially improving" but only linearly increasing.
If you had any skill in these matters (or even just read the article carefully), you'd realize they were plotted on a logarithmic scale. A straight line indicates exponential increases. The graphs clearly show a sharp deviation from that straight line.
Now read the opening paragraph of the article:
Throughout the 80's and 90's, CPUs were able to run virtually any kind of software twice as fast every 18-20 months. The rate of change was incredible. Your 486SX-16 was almost obsolete by the time you got it through the door. But eventually, at some point in the mid-2000's, progress slowed down considerably for single-threaded software -- which was most software.
Instead of all your bullshit wordplay, all you need to do is look up some benchmarks. They'll prove your assertions wrong in 30 seconds flat.
The bullshit wordplay is on your end by repeating "Megahertz Myth" like a mantra. You have NO answer for why both Intel and AMD abandoned decades worth of exponential clock increases and instead focused on multicore. As I said, it's well documented. That article includes benchmarks.
Clock increases are not performance increases. Intel figured that out when the P4 got trounced
When clock speeds are sustained at an exponential pace, they are performance increases. The problem with Pentium's Netburst was that they couldn't continue scaling up their CPU speeds. If they could have, the Megahertz Myth would have been the Gigahertz Reality, and we'd be running crazy-fast processors by now and happy to have them.
and now everyone is TRYING to keep clock speeds low, precisely because higher clocks waste energy for no benefit, and performance improvements are happening at a decent clip even while they lower clock speeds
Both AMD and Intel moved away from higher clock speeds because they couldn't sustain them, and they moved into multicore to compensate. This is well documented, and just repeating the mantra of Megahertz Myth only showcases your ignorance. You think they gave up on decades of exponential clock increases because it didn't gain anything?
The main reason for the US to nuke the USSR was their overwhelming superiority in ground forces. That's completely and totally different than the scenario here, of two massively mismatched forces.
Then consider a country like Pakistan as I mentioned in my previous post. The nuclear genie is out of the bottle. Eventually all the countries that you scoff at, like the entire continent of Africa, can go nuclear if they wanted to. That's the whole reason we have the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
This is just the MHz myth in full force... The performance of a processor core can be improved DRAMATICALLY, even while REDUCING the clock frequency.
I don't give a shit what your architecture is, when you forgo exponential clock increases for a decade because of technological limits, there is no myth. You've hit a wall.
The USSR was very closely matched with the US. It's an utterly different scenario than I outlined.
The US had a several-year head start. And if you want to talk about Africa, now that the genie is out of the bottle, a determined country can get nukes. Just look at countries like Pakistan or North Korea. Pakistan is even scarier than North Korea having nukes, given all the Muslim extremism they harbor.
And processor speed increases just slightly slowing for a few years is an insignificant blip.
Give me a break. It's been over a decade, and the speed increases haven't slowed "just slightly". I grew up with an 8MHz PC in the 80s. Ten years later and CPU speeds were in the hundreds of MHz, and another ten years it was GHz. Then they hit a wall, with over ten years of non-exponential CPU speed increases. If anything, they have gone down as they have focused on multicore and reducing power requirements.
Progress has been exponential for centuries now, and there's no reason to believe it will stop.
Just like there was no reason to believe CPU speeds would stop progressing, based on decades of history.
Do you feel an uncontrollable desire to nuke the African continent? If not, I can't see why a superior alien species would want to destroy our planet.
At one point the US had a significant lead on the USSR in nuclear warfare. There were arguments that the US should preemptively strike, most famously by Von Neumann. This was a very real debate that took place in policy circles. An alternative history where the United States did so is quite plausible.
And why wouldn't their technology continue to develop just as quickly as ours, so that they continue to maintain their vast superiority?
That assumes you can keep a constant rate going. Despite Ray Kurzweil's "Rapture of the Nerds" (Singularity) ideas, it doesn't hold up. Just look at processor speeds. For decades they were exponentially improving -- until they hit a wall around 2002. Now we have multicores and more transistors, but it's not the same.
Look at nuclear warfare. Once the Russians caught up, we couldn't maintain the initial vast supremacy.
The pressurized wood is only 10lbs more. Not that any of this matters, since you're making up shit anyways. People on constructions sites don't throw heavy pieces of lumber at each other for the other person to catch. Anybody with a functioning brain would throw it on the ground next to the person, jackass.
Each beam alone is plus 70 pounds if its not a 2x4.
So you say.
Yes, I do, same way we caught 50 and 100lb bags of rice just tossed off the back of the freight truck when I was 15 working at an oriental market as the stock boy.
A bag of rice is not a solid and edgy piece of wood, and I'm sure it was dropped into your body with outstretched arms and not launched at your head.
The joys of ignorant people who have very little life experience. I just look at you and shake my head at your poor sheltered life.
The joys of jackasses who talk stupid shit on the Internet.
Nothing there looks like it weighs 70+ pounds. I'm also guessing you don't catch them when they are thrown in your direction, either. I tell you what. Put 40 pounds of weight in a box and have somebody launch it at your head, and then attempt to catch it. Please video. You could probably make a few bucks selling it on one of those "jackasses get hurt" shows.
Slashdot Mirror
Harbison & Steele, "C, A Reference Manual" [..] which really helped my comprehension
Yup, I loved this book. C was a very weird and fuzzy language until I read this. OK, C is still weird and fuzzy, but not mysteriously so.
But you will know. They will not be able to listen in without you knowing.
How so? They use a National Security Letter to order a wiretap, which in this case means implanting a backdoor. Similar tactics have been used on other people offering encyrption software. Unless you build and program the phone yourself from trusted parts, you're at the mercy of your provider, and the provider is at the mercy of government.
You really can't expect anything different from the same government that secretly (though with ISP help) installed taps onto all of the major ISPs, can you?
Some authors just keep using what they started with and refuse to progress over a sense of self-superiority.
It's like these dinosaurs that still use overhead projectors.
"Unless you can come back and tell me why Google should be able to profit from spreading false information and have no obligation to correct or remove then you don't have an argument."
So, I'm curious why you think that argument a straw man.
I've already explained it numerous times, but since you are a different poster I will try once more:
Definition: "a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted "
The EU case is not quite that, since the information published was true,
Oh look, you already know! Since this case is not about libel, I do not have to defend Google being able to profit from libel. I could have a position against that or not. It is irrelevant to this debate.
but it's still a matter of publishing information that legally should not be published.
No, not quite. The same court that ruled that Google couldn't index the site also ruled that the newspaper hosting the information did not have to take it down, as it was a matter of public record, as I quoted from the article in my original post.
"Strawman strawman strawman!"
If you wouldn't post strawmen arguments, I wouldn't have to waste my time calling them as such.
As I said before, this word isn't a get out clause for situations of "Shit, I can't rationally refute that point".
I refuted them in that I showed they misrepresented my argument. You haven't shown otherwise.
But it's not simply being indexed is it? It's being made searchable, it's being used for analytics, it's being used to sell ads. You really think Google exists purely for the public good? Of course not, it's a profit making organisation and this is it's profit bread and butter.
Well duh, of course the index is to allow for searches. That Google allows searches of the public Web isn't in dispute. That they are a commercial entity also isn't in dispute. The newspaper that is allowed to publish the so-called public record is also a commercial entity that I presume sells ads and does all the nefarious-sounding things that you make profit sound like. The difference is that one is allowed to publish this so-called public information, and another is not allowed to index to it. We've been over this.
You've avoided my question as to why someone should not retrospectively be afforded the right to privacy if someone has had their information publicised against their will even though you presumably believe you have the right to keep stuff secret.
I didn't avoid it. I correctly labeled it as a strawman, and I explicitly told you that what's under concern here is not a secret, but a matter of public record. Try reading the responses and responding to the actual argument. You can't argue this is a secret when one site is allowed to publish it on the Web. It is then absurd to compare this to any unpublished, private secrets that I may hold.
Since you can't make a cogent argument, and I'm repeating myself a lot, I'm done here.
But it's just not being indexed, unless you get the definition of data processor as in data protection law then I don't know how else I can explain to you why this is different.
It's simply being indexed. Your claim is that because the information is about a person, even though it is "public" it shouldn't be allowed to be indexed.
I understand the point of the data protection laws, but I feel that they are being stretched to extreme cases. It's one thing to argue that private business shouldn't aggregate all your transactions and browsing history, as commonly occurs in the United States. It's quite another to say something can be published as a matter of public record by one entity, but not allowed to be indexed by another.
Yes really. It's used like a word that we're automatically supposed to say "Oh well, Reanex said it was censorship so he automatically wins the argument and is right". Yes that's a fucking fallacy, and a very tired one on Slashdot.
No, it's not a fallacy. It does not automatically win the argument, but it's a valid concern that deserves careful consideration. The arguments given as to why this particular censorship is ok are lacking.
So I guess you can't actually justify it then given that you're dodging the bullet with another classic cry of "strawman" without apparently understanding what that even means?
I perfectly understand what strawman means, and it applies to you. Rather than addressing why your argument wasn't a strawman, you just try to pin the label on me instead. Your argument was a strawman because you were arguing about libel, though this case was about true information that is a matter of public record.
Your argument thus far boils down to the idea that freedom of speech trumps all, your view must therefore logically be that no one should have a secret card pin, password, non-public finances, private sexuality, private contact details and so on.
And again you demonstrate a classic strawman fallacy. I never stated such a position, and in fact I said, "sometimes censorship is acceptable".
I really don't think you've thought your argument through unless you can justify why your details should remain secret, but others should not also enjoy that right if it's been taken away from them against their will.
The issue here is that one website publishes a matter of public record for all the world to see (not secret), yet this same information is not allowed to be indexed, just like any library has searchable indexes into their archives. Try to argue what's actually under debate instead of your strawman positions.
In contrast, Google has none of this. Would your preference instead be that Google's search facilities are declared public record but it can be sued for libel for everything wrong it indexes about someone?
For this case, it is irrelevant. The information is true, not libel, and already ruled and acknowledged by you to be public record, and the newspaper can leave the page online. Yet you hold that this same "public record" information cannot be indexed by a search engine. That's a farce.
Okay there is censorship going on, but there's always censorship going on. Using censorship as a go to argument against everything is one of the worst fallacies Slashdot is prone to.
At least now you admit there is censorship occurring. And really, censorship is the one of the worst fallacies on Slashdot? Gee, that freedom of speech, so unimportant, hardly worth consideration! Let's just brush the issue under the rug because sometimes censorship is acceptable.
Unless you can come back and tell me why Google should be able to profit from spreading false information and have no obligation to correct or remove then you don't have an argument.
See, now this is one of the worst arguments on Slashdot. Your classic strawman.
The information is public, anyone who kept a copy or who can be bothered to visit the library and scan through microfiche can find it, but that doesn't give them a right to use it commercially without that person's consent.
It's public but it isn't. Right.
You have to remember that in the EU corporations are not people. They don't get the same freedoms and rights that people do.
A completely irrelevant point, as point the newspaper in question and Google are commercial entities. It's just that one was allowed to keep their page up as a matter of public record, and was disallowed to index it, which is absurd.
Newspapers have long been deemed to be public record, and so of course it shouldn't be censored. Public record can comfortably sit behind the public interest defence. But Google is a business that makes money providing services based on public record, that does not in itself make it public record, and so it becomes difficult for it to make a case for public interest - it's tried to make this case and failed, hence the ruling.
This argument is absurd. Newspapers (when not state run) are also commercial interests. One entity publishes things in the public record, and another makes those things searchable. To argue that what Google does is so different and doesn't deserve protection is preposterous, even more so to claim that there isn't censorship going on.
What it does, is gives you the right to go to a company, that is storing information on you, and ask that they remove it. Nothing more, nothing less. That means if Google has indexed search results and their index includes information on you they simply have to remove that from their index - they do not have to go to the sites they indexed and asked them to remove the information too or any such thing, it's up to you to contact each specific company and the company must oblige.
Oh, is that all? So the data is still there, except the most popular search engine on the planet can't list it. Wow, that's a relief. Here I thought there was censorship of public information going on, but clearly there isn't. (For the impaired, yes, this is sarcasm.)
From the article:
The case itself occurred after a Spanish man (Mario Costeja Gonzalez) complained that the detail of an auction notice for his former home, which was repossessed after he failed to pay his taxes, appeared in Google's search results.
The notice itself was made public on the third-party website (twice via a newspaper called La Vanguardia) and Mr Gonzalez wanted the source material edited and the Google result removed because the proceedings concerning him had been fully resolved for a number of years, thus he felt as though the reference to them was now "entirely irrelevant".
Mercifully the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) rejected the complaint against La Vanguardia, which correctly ruled that the information in question had been lawfully published by it. But the AEPD then ruled that Google should still delete the related references to the page, which Google perhaps understandably viewed as unfair because the information was already in the public domain, and so began the court battle until today's ECJ verdict.
Reverse engineering the server protocol from the client for creating a compatible server is almost certainly protected.
You missed the Blizzard v. BNETD link from the grandparent post. This ruling was a big setback:
"Outcome: The reverse engineering and emulating of the Blizzard software violated the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA. This ruling has been widely criticized as making it impossible to create new programs that interoperate with older ones and squeezing consumer choice out of the marketplace by essentially allowing companies to outlaw competitors' products that interact with their own."
So as long as your friends are going against your core principles, you lead by example and join them? You're a nutter, and even you can't follow your nutty ideas.
Haha! That's pretty explicit backpedaling, there. Are you familiar with the concept of quotation marks? Because it kinda, sorta means that's EXACTLY what you said.
Are you? That's why I quoted what I actually said, versus what you said I said. Speed is not the same word as performance. I've been buying computers all along, and I know performance has improved somewhat for single-threaded tasks.
What my point was, and the article made clear, was that the amazing exponential performance gains that occurred regularly because of clock speed gains were gone. You haven't refuted that. All you did was make a fool of yourself by misreading a graph.
And you have no answer for the paragraph I quoted. It's what I was referring to all along. It's a clear-cut example of exponential progress that did not continue, despite having occurred for decades. As I said, the issue is well-documented.
Go ahead, answer it: "Throughout the 80's and 90's, CPUs were able to run virtually any kind of software twice as fast every 18-20 months. The rate of change was incredible. Your 486SX-16 was almost obsolete by the time you got it through the door. But eventually, at some point in the mid-2000's, progress slowed down considerably for single-threaded software -- which was most software."
You can't, because it's true, and your position, exactly quoted (not paraphrased) was bullshit: "And processor speed increases just slightly slowing for a few years is an insignificant blip."
No, it was a dramatic slowdown, and a well-documented one.
When you start talking about how the user feels and using buzzwords like "Holistic" and "paradigm" over just finding out if a user can understand it without assistance you have a serious problem.
We have to leverage holistic paradigms to incentivise platform consumers to meet our time to market challenges.
Your claims were that single-core performance did "stop progressing" and even "gone down".
Let's quote what I actually said, and pay attention to the details, because I never said single-core performance stopped progressing or went down:
"Just look at processor speeds. For decades they were exponentially improving -- until they hit a wall around 2002. Now we have multicores and more transistors, but it's not the same."
And let's look at your followup:
"And processor speed increases just slightly slowing for a few years is an insignificant blip."
So now that we are on the same page, I demonstrated that CPU speed (and I mean frequency, and you know it, since we've been arguing about the "Megahertz Myth") increases did indeed have a drastic reduction from the previous decades, and in many cases they have indeed gone backwards to save on power.
The graphs also show that speed increases were never "exponentially improving" but only linearly increasing.
If you had any skill in these matters (or even just read the article carefully), you'd realize they were plotted on a logarithmic scale. A straight line indicates exponential increases. The graphs clearly show a sharp deviation from that straight line.
Now read the opening paragraph of the article:
Throughout the 80's and 90's, CPUs were able to run virtually any kind of software twice as fast every 18-20 months. The rate of change was incredible. Your 486SX-16 was almost obsolete by the time you got it through the door. But eventually, at some point in the mid-2000's, progress slowed down considerably for single-threaded software -- which was most software.
(bold mine)
Instead of all your bullshit wordplay, all you need to do is look up some benchmarks. They'll prove your assertions wrong in 30 seconds flat.
The bullshit wordplay is on your end by repeating "Megahertz Myth" like a mantra. You have NO answer for why both Intel and AMD abandoned decades worth of exponential clock increases and instead focused on multicore. As I said, it's well documented. That article includes benchmarks.
Clock increases are not performance increases. Intel figured that out when the P4 got trounced
When clock speeds are sustained at an exponential pace, they are performance increases. The problem with Pentium's Netburst was that they couldn't continue scaling up their CPU speeds. If they could have, the Megahertz Myth would have been the Gigahertz Reality, and we'd be running crazy-fast processors by now and happy to have them.
and now everyone is TRYING to keep clock speeds low, precisely because higher clocks waste energy for no benefit, and performance improvements are happening at a decent clip even while they lower clock speeds
Both AMD and Intel moved away from higher clock speeds because they couldn't sustain them, and they moved into multicore to compensate. This is well documented, and just repeating the mantra of Megahertz Myth only showcases your ignorance. You think they gave up on decades of exponential clock increases because it didn't gain anything?
The main reason for the US to nuke the USSR was their overwhelming superiority in ground forces. That's completely and totally different than the scenario here, of two massively mismatched forces.
Then consider a country like Pakistan as I mentioned in my previous post. The nuclear genie is out of the bottle. Eventually all the countries that you scoff at, like the entire continent of Africa, can go nuclear if they wanted to. That's the whole reason we have the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
This is just the MHz myth in full force... The performance of a processor core can be improved DRAMATICALLY, even while REDUCING the clock frequency.
I don't give a shit what your architecture is, when you forgo exponential clock increases for a decade because of technological limits, there is no myth. You've hit a wall.
The USSR was very closely matched with the US. It's an utterly different scenario than I outlined.
The US had a several-year head start. And if you want to talk about Africa, now that the genie is out of the bottle, a determined country can get nukes. Just look at countries like Pakistan or North Korea. Pakistan is even scarier than North Korea having nukes, given all the Muslim extremism they harbor.
And processor speed increases just slightly slowing for a few years is an insignificant blip.
Give me a break. It's been over a decade, and the speed increases haven't slowed "just slightly". I grew up with an 8MHz PC in the 80s. Ten years later and CPU speeds were in the hundreds of MHz, and another ten years it was GHz. Then they hit a wall, with over ten years of non-exponential CPU speed increases. If anything, they have gone down as they have focused on multicore and reducing power requirements.
Progress has been exponential for centuries now, and there's no reason to believe it will stop.
Just like there was no reason to believe CPU speeds would stop progressing, based on decades of history.
Do you feel an uncontrollable desire to nuke the African continent? If not, I can't see why a superior alien species would want to destroy our planet.
At one point the US had a significant lead on the USSR in nuclear warfare. There were arguments that the US should preemptively strike, most famously by Von Neumann. This was a very real debate that took place in policy circles. An alternative history where the United States did so is quite plausible.
And why wouldn't their technology continue to develop just as quickly as ours, so that they continue to maintain their vast superiority?
That assumes you can keep a constant rate going. Despite Ray Kurzweil's "Rapture of the Nerds" (Singularity) ideas, it doesn't hold up. Just look at processor speeds. For decades they were exponentially improving -- until they hit a wall around 2002. Now we have multicores and more transistors, but it's not the same.
Look at nuclear warfare. Once the Russians caught up, we couldn't maintain the initial vast supremacy.
There was a online poll this week hosted by the largest radio station for Southern Maryland, and the result was >94% would leave if they could.
Sounds like a rabble-rousing "poll".
The pressurized wood is only 10lbs more. Not that any of this matters, since you're making up shit anyways. People on constructions sites don't throw heavy pieces of lumber at each other for the other person to catch. Anybody with a functioning brain would throw it on the ground next to the person, jackass.
Each beam alone is plus 70 pounds if its not a 2x4.
Oh, and just to inject some reality into this discussion:
Dimensions: 3 9/16" x 3 9/16" x 8' Actual
Shipping Dimensions: 96.0 x 3.5 x 3.5
Shipping Weight: 20.0 lbs
But keep on thinking you're tossing around and catching 70+ pounds of wood. Jackass.
Each beam alone is plus 70 pounds if its not a 2x4.
So you say.
Yes, I do, same way we caught 50 and 100lb bags of rice just tossed off the back of the freight truck when I was 15 working at an oriental market as the stock boy.
A bag of rice is not a solid and edgy piece of wood, and I'm sure it was dropped into your body with outstretched arms and not launched at your head.
The joys of ignorant people who have very little life experience. I just look at you and shake my head at your poor sheltered life.
The joys of jackasses who talk stupid shit on the Internet.
Nothing there looks like it weighs 70+ pounds. I'm also guessing you don't catch them when they are thrown in your direction, either. I tell you what. Put 40 pounds of weight in a box and have somebody launch it at your head, and then attempt to catch it. Please video. You could probably make a few bucks selling it on one of those "jackasses get hurt" shows.