Your control of what you make ends when you sell it to someone else. In the digital age, this means selling something opens you up to that person having an infinite number of copies. The only difference is that the government believes selling what you bought is reason enough to strip you of your "god-given rights" it claims to provide, to steal all that you have worked for, to take away freedom and inflict permanent harm.

What about the poor author then?

There are many means of making money without harming others. The first is to not sell something unless you get the price you desire (this is what developers do as do book authors when you consider that most books are out of print within 5 years). The second is patronage by someone interested in your continued creation of works (a very ancient and proven tradition). The third (and particularly relevant to musicians) is to offer performances for a fee. There are alternatives, but using the government as your personal mafia is a much lazier solution for corrupt artists and businessmen.

The team who made alphago deserve credit, but their approach (from a high level) isn't so revolutionary. Go AI devs moved away from solely using brute force tree pruning (like what deep blue used) a long time ago.

The first big change was to use pattern recognition (matching sub-sections of the game with already known patterns) to prune faster. The second (and far more revolutionary) change was to apply an upper confidence bound based on a monte carlo simulation. This is where computers gained the ability to bypass those billions of moves with a margin for error. The third was the use of neural nets as a way to balance between brute force and pattern matching while managing the confidence levels of the monte carlo simulations.

The biggest difference with Alphago is corporate backing. I don't know how many people Google hired for the job, but the paper lists 20 (so probably more than that). Buying and running supercomputers is extremely expensive as well. With the exception of darkforest (Facebook's go machine which, as expected, appears to use a similar design), most teams consist of a very few people on small budgets without someone willing to spend millions to buy and run supercomputers for them.

I believe the official Guinness record is 8.429GHz on an AMD pre-release bulldozer in 2011. Another record was set at 8.723GHz on an AMD FX-8370 in 2013, but I don't recall it being "official".

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/bulldozer-amd-overclock-guinness-record,13431.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/02/amd_fx_series/

Companies don't pay FICA taxes (the contractor pays all of them instead instead of splitting them 50/50 with the employer). Some states don't require companies to pay workers comp on contractors instead. Contractors also don't get overtime, travel compensation, 401k matching, insurance benefits, etc (there's not even a minimum wage)

If a contractor works for anywhere close to the same hourly as an equivalent employee, that contractor will be making a lot less.

Ah, the old Hans Reiser retirement plan.

New joke

Person A: "What's 0.1 + 0.2?"
Person B: "Let me check my computer, one sec... OK, looks like around 0.30000000000000004."

I forgot to mention Nvidia's Denver core. They dropped it in favor of A57 and I don't think we'll be seeing it again for a while. The original reason for making it seemed to be for x86 emulation (literally the next generation of transmeta), but their lawsuit settlement with Intel sunk that ship leaving them to repurpose the architecture for ARM. I like the transmeta idea, but like bulldozer it seems a little less good in practice at present. I think we'll see something similar return in a few years, but for now I think fixed-function reigns supreme.

Looking at the latest in the ARM landscape, we have Apple A9, Qualcomm Kryo, ARM A57, ARM A72, and AMD A12. We can probably expect a small jump in Apple's performance next year along with a second revision of Kryo, but nothing competitive with Intel. A57 is being dropped for the fixed A72 since Apple screwed over ARM (tl;dr Apple shipped a new architecture in 2 years while ARM took almost 4 years for an inferior product -- everyone in the industry knows that design to shipping a new architecture is 4-5 years indicating either ARM screwed over all their non-apple partners (and themselves) by giving Apple a head start or Apple forced ARM to adopt a new ISA when they'd already had a couple years to work on int). Of all these architectures, I think only A72, AMD's A57 implementation, and AMD's A12 are worth focusing on.

A72 is supposedly close to the performance of Intel's core M processors, but I'm willing to bet that the default A72 can't actually compete with Skylake's wide dispatch, SMT, and vector units. The biggest question in this area isn't actually the CPU so much as all the "uncore" parts surrounding it. Even if it could have these things in theory, the companies controlling most of the patents in this area aren't using the A72 (AMD, Intel, IBM, Oracle, etc).

AMD's first generation of ARM processor (launching next year) is an A57 server part, but is probably going to be faster than most A72s in practice because it can be manufactured on a high-performance (rather than bulk) fab process and will have faster buses, faster memory, much larger caches, and even some parts of the core (like the branch predictor) may well be replaced with better systems while AMD's reworking the entire architecture for the new fab. This chip will probably be competitive in the low-power server market, but most likely won't be aimed at anything mobile.

Not much is known about AMD's A12, but for the first time, an ARM company seems to be moving into the higher-performance mobile segment. AMD failed with bulldozer (and has taken the heat for beating that dead horse for the past few years), but they at least had the sense to hire Jim Keller to help them make a couple new, next-gen architectures. While AMD has money troubles, it's in the intellectual property sweet spot to be able to put together a competitive chip. This is the chip I think Linus is wanting, but it's been pushed to 2017.

The complete unknown is Intel. They bought DEC and StrongARM was along for the ride, but they sold it in '97. They then made XScale only to sell it to Marvell in '06. I find it hard to believe that Intel's not experimenting with ARM design again. Even if they could make x86 compete in the low-end (atom has been a failure in that regard), convincing companies to switch will probably prove impossible as the current situation with lots of competing CPU providers works to their fiscal advantage. Apple won't be giving up the freedom to make their own chips (nor will Samsung). That said, I don't think we'll be seeing an Intel ARM chip before 2018-19.

tl;dr -- the current chips can't compete with Intel. The ones that can don't launch until 2017 or later.

The XD at the end of the URL made me think it wasn't real.... I should have known better

While success is desirable, all the companies that signed deals with Marvell are required to make a movie every few years to avoid the movie rights reverting back to Marvell.

We saw this same thing happen with the Sony reboot of Spiderman. It was cheaper to make a couple of terrible films than to have the rights revert back to Disney where Sony would never get a chance at the intellectual property again.

RooshV is a PUA (pick-up artist), masculanist, and anti-MRA and has been for years (see http://www.rooshv.com/mens-rig... or http://www.rooshv.com/the-mens...)

No matter which side you support (or if you're an Egalitarian like me) researching and fact-checking are important. Just because a group that hates MRA says RooshV is one does not make it so. The fact that those sources are either mis-informed or are deliberately mis-characterizing should raise questions about what they say in the future.

EDIT: to clarify my position, I am Egalitarian and see that both men and women have problems, but unlike many people, I'm not afraid of examining all sides just because some of them are slandered or they disagree with my current perceptions. Facts over buzzwords...

Return of Kings is anti-MRA anyway. He's a pickup artist and believes that men's rights is a lost cause and everyone should be scamming women instead.

For those who want a thousand-foot overview: The fact is that men and women have problems. Men have far bigger family problems and a huge percent of men regularly get screwed over by the legal system (just ask any divorce or family court lawyer or look at the statistics). When men find out just how bad the situation is (both this and other issues) and what a big risk relationships with women are, they do one of three things: opt out of relationships (the majority and becoming a huge social force), become pick-up artists (second most popular), or lobby for change as MRAs/Egalitarians.

The problem is multi-sided. PUA (pickup artists) consider MGTOW (opt-out) and MRA to be losers. MGTOW consider PUA to be risky and MRA to be trying to solve an unsolvable problem. MRA consider MGTOW to be passively protesting and consider PUA to be scum that hurt the cause by constantly mistreating and slandering women.

Feminists (to be clear, the rather extreme ones that control much of the media, not the ones like most of the planet) consider MGTOW to be losers, ignore MRA, and claim PUAs abuse is actually from the MRA. These Extremist-Feminists make things worse by actively and loudly fighting against the MRAs legitimate concerns (shared parenting, family court reform, male genital mutilation, criminal justice equality, recognizing male victims, etc). The fact that you are reading an article claiming a PUA is an MRA (despite his stating many times that he despises MRA) shows that either no research or mis-characterization is at work here. This only fuels the MRA to focus on the Extreme Feminists in power as the primary obstacle and the fight continues (when in fact, most MRA agree with many women's issues).

When politics control social equality, everyone loses (except the politicians and their spokespeople).

But we do negotiate over toothpaste, gas, etc.

If a company starts charging more than we think it's worth, we go with another brand of toothpaste. When items become more expensive and more specialized, this form of indirect negotiation becomes very unsatisfactory (you don't have identical IT jobs next to each other in the local supermarket).

A much better solution for MS would be to build on top of BSD like Apple did. That would allow them to keep charging the big businesses for their software. They could also do things like offering the "home edition" as open source and then selling a "pro version" with all the additional features. BSD would also give them a competitive edge over the Linux GPL which is viewed as bad by a lot of businesses.

There's a big difference between physical things that have limits (land, food, water, etc) and 'intellectual property' which can be copied any number of times at virtually no cost. Until physical items are limitless or there is overwhelming cost to reproduce ideas, GPL and communism will be incomparable.