Mod Parent Up!

This is what people don't understand. If I hold a clearance, I can disagree with some things that are deemed "classified". But it is not my place to choose to release it. Ask yourself if you think it would be okay for nuclear scientists to unilaterally decide that certain aspects of their work should not be classified and just released it to a newspaper? THere is a very good reason why doing so is expressly and hugely illegal. What he did is no different.

I get that he is something of a whistleblower, and that the NSA programs are hugely controversial. I disagree with what they are doing. Public knowledge has created outrage, but has public knowledge actually changed any of that? Could it? DO you really think, even if the director of the NSA stepped down, and they officially abandoned all the projects that Snowden leaked, that they wouldn't just rebrand it all and start again in secret if they wanted to? There are those in congress opposed to such things (ironically, one of the most stalwart voices against such programs was Sen. Udall in Colorado, who was voted out last election in favor of a tea partier who has nothing to say about it. You know, the tea party people who say they are all against government overreach?), and I actually believe this stuff will die at some point. But I don't think Snowden helped at all.

For once, I agree with circle.

Taking a hard drug isn't really a big deal until it is. At a moment of weakness, (not necessarily teenagers) pretty much anyone could try them. And many people may even never try them again. But a few people will think, "Hey, that was fun, and I'm not even lying in a gutter. I can keep control of that, let's do that again". And that's the trap.

You are right that drugs have always been with us, but you are wrong that they have never led to severe and crippling effects on society as a whole. Opium was available in China for centuries, but in the early 19th century availability (due to increased trade with the rest of the world) skyrocketed. Chinese civilization was paralyzed for the better part of a century, and a huge outpouring of its wealth occurred. They traded away most of their valuable resources at the time to keep the juice coming. Their leaders recognized the problem and tried to stop the importation of opium, leading the "Opium Wars", which they were ill-equiped to fight, and led to the British seizure of Hong Kong. It wasn't until the Maost revolution that Chinese leaders were able rid the country of its opium dependence.

My immediate thought is that perhaps the 1st gen users are just cycling to their next car? Why do we assume that people will always buy the exact same type of car again? THat actually seems unreasonable to me... Hybrids and EVs tend to be smaller vehicles, and there is some natural tendency to get something "different" when you get a new car. How many people who last owned a compact car bought the same class of vehicle again? How many went on to buy SUVs/trucks? That is important info if we want to make a proper comparison.

Anecdotal example: I drive a pickup truck, and I have owned it for 11 years. It is on its way out soon, and I can't wait to get a small car as I am tired of having something that costs so much to fill up, has bad traction on snow/ice, and is hard to navigate in tight parking lots. But then maybe after xx years in a compact, I'll buy another truck...

Caveat: I don't usually agree with you much.

However, I've honestly never thought about the war on drugs in this way, and your comments are insightful. I'm not 100% sure I agree with it, but mod parent up as a point of view that is certainly worthwhile of discussion.

I think the whole point though, is how do we reduce the number of people who become 'imprisoned' in this way. I believe that most people who try harder drugs do so with the attitude of "That won't happen to me", and so the imprisonment, while self-inflicted, is not wholly voluntary. We should, as a society, try to help these people and prevent future victime.

Some countries with looser drug laws provide data which seems to suggest that legalization actually decreases addiction. More studies needed, I know. Would you support legalization if it was conclusively shown to actually decrease abuse and addiction? Truly curious.

Further caveat: I'm a daily adderall user, for legit reasons. I hate taking it and will welcome with open arms any other treatment for ADD that works half as well. If they told me standing on my head for an hour every day would have the same effect on my ability to complete work and not forget half the stuff I'm supposed to do every day, I'd be more than willing to try that instead.

Possibly, but it would depend on how the law was written.

The purchase of 10000 shares of company X, or even the outright purchase of a corner bicycle shop, could very well be considered "consumption". Granted this class of "consumption" could be given special tax status (much like capital gains already does) due to the risk inherent and the general societal desire to encourage this kind of investment. Profit would be gravy if we no longer tax income, and losses could be weighted against future purchases to lower tax burden. It could actually work, but we'd still be arguing over the same old stuff. How much should the rate be set at? Should there be different tax rates for different amounts of annual stock/bond purchases? Should the tax rate be different for private vs. public company purchases? What if you sold shares immediately after a purchase and took a loss? SHould you get refunded your tax, as if you returned a shirt to the Gap? Sould you still get to use that loss as a weight against a future purchase? But that might encourage short-term trading and micro-trading, which is probably not what anybody wants... I could go on.

So in the end, it might be just as complex, and a long and complicated form for anyone who has non-trivial finances might still be necessary. It's why I'm generally against changing everything to a federal sales/consumption tax. It would certainly change things, and it could very well work, but I'm not sure it would actually make much difference in the end.

Would use mod points if I had them. An 'expert driver' on an easy-to-use car does not an automotive engineer make.

I went to a Society of Petroleum Engineering conference once where there was a booth from a major oil services firm staffed exclusively by blond women in bikinis. In Denver, on a 60 degree day. So yeah, I think your dictionary definition actually fits. Let's see:

Especially in regards to a woman? Check.

sexually promiscuous OR provocative? Don't know about promiscuous, but double check on the provocative. DOn't care how things are in your country. This is the US, and whether you think we are puritanical or not, context matter, and it is out of the ordinary and provocative to wear revealing swimsuits indoors in a land-locked state at a trade show that is not for hot tubs.

especially in a manner regarded as vulgar or distasteful? Interestingly, the definition appeals to a cultural sense of vulgarity. So, again, context matters and your opinion/norms of your culture is moot. Whether YOU regard their attire as appropriate does not matter. Would it be okay to say they were dressed 'slutty' if it was a random person near the beach in Miami or San Diego? Culturally that attire in those places is perfectly acceptable, so no, you couldn't say that. But inside a trade conference in Denver? They are blatantly appealing to the women's sexuality to sell product. It is not *ME* who looks at the woman and sees only sex and shame on me for being a dirty pervert man who can't see past attire choices I disagree with. It is THEM who are blatantly bringing sex into the equation and forcing me to think about it. So vulgar or distasteful? Check on both.

So what is your problem again? You think it is disrepectful to women to say a woman is dressed "slutty" at a major trade expo when the textbook definition fits? But you think major corporations using young women's bodies and paying them probably only a few hundred dollars to attract a dominantly male customer base which has huge purchasing power is OK in a supposedly professional setting? Are you sure you are complaining about the right thing? Why is it assumed that the men will primarily be making product purchasing decisions? Even if it is a good assumption, WHY is that the case? Isn't that a bigger problem? And isn't it possible that this type of behavior reinforces that problem?

Just FYI, I am a man, and I find this stuff very insulting to all of the professional men and women that attend these things. I can get my kicks on my own time.

I'm sort of with you... And I am all for election reform, maybe 'ranking' your choices or something of that nature that has been described. But you are negelecting that many people in many states/voting districts really don't have a choice.

For example, in Oklahoma (I lived there for a time), they only have two candidates for president on the ballot. One democrat, one republican. No write-ins. You simply MUST pick, or leave it blank. There are literally no third-party options (there is a law on how a third party candidate can get on the ballot, but it is so onerous that nobody has done it since maybe Ross Perot). So what is someone supposed to do in this case? Not vote at all? Cede the last remnant of puny power that they have?

I have always thought that the primary process and local elections are where the real power is. Voting for people at that level that are amenable to changing these broken processes. And yet, these are precisely the elections that usually don't generate much interest.

I don't live in Oklahoma anymore, and typically I have a few more options. But tell me exactly why I should vote for someone who is only even on the ballot in 36 states?? I may as well write in Mickey Mouse in that case. It's just not going to happen without changing the way that elections are held. I really don't think it's worthwhile to blame voters for doing the most logical thing by voting for their favorite of the two candidates who are 100% guaranteed to win, rather than who they would like to have in some fantasy world...

Understood. That's why I said maybe it was in AZ and not CA...

Huh, good to know. But I know I've seen that sign several times on I-8 in the mountains. Maybe I'm confused, and it's in the mountains outside of Yuma in AZ. Either that, or it's a fake/old sign.

Me too. I see cops all the time by abandoned roadside gas stations in the desert. Do they really think they are incospicuous there? I don't intentionally speed, but I know if I see a car a mile up the road at the deserted gas station that it is a cop, and I double-check my speedometer.

On the article... I've always thought these aircraft enforcement signs were usually baloney anyways. There's one of these signs on Interstate 8 outside of San Diego up in the mountains. The road is windy, in a deep canyon, and has a heck of a grade on it for an interstate. I always thought that the idea of an aircraft flying around up there reliably tracking cars past markers and getting plate numbers was kind of fishy.

Faster than serial ?! Of course! I only meant to compare it to a traditional parallel procssing environment. And you can definitely write a simple parallel algorithm for any O/PDE that will work on GPUs. What I meant was that there are an awful lot of claims about how wicked fast GPU processing can be. Some people tout it as much faster than traditional computing. This can be true, but to get a GPU to actually perform at that level, it requires particular structure to your data. Unstructured meshes are known to be particularly nasty. Doesn't mean you can't compute anyway. It just may or may not be any better than traditional methods.

I don't mean to poo-poo GPU computing in general. I admittedly haven't followed this field closely in a year or two, so it's possible there have been some newer agorithms for unstructured meshes that have improved the situation. And without knowing more about your particular problem, I won't speculate and tell you how it should or shouldn't work. Maybe you figured out a decent implementation on your own. In which case, publish it already!

"There is almost no chance that a $100 board can be designed to have a memory interface that can keep 64 cores well fed at this point in time. "

I agree with you 100% on that. If the cache isn't terrible, it might be okay if you have a problem amenable to openMP. But mainly I view these low-end things as kind of fun toys.

That said, there is a market for something reasonably compact and affordable in between a 4-8 core desktop and a large scale cluster. I occasionally test and debug problems on my desktop that seem to work fine, but when I scale it to 200 processors and put it on the cluster, all hell breaks loose and it can be hard to debug. A cheapo 64 core board, even if slow, could help bridge that gap, assuming I can use mpich/openMP on this thing.

Otherwise it is for hobbyists or as a learning tool.

Sorry, forgot to also post link to the OpenMP tutorial:
https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/openMP/

There is a high barrier to entry for piddling around with graphic cards. Fortunately, most home computers are already parallel (2-8 cores). I do extensive parallel programming, and I do most of the testing (for small problems, anyhow) on my desktop or laptop, which each have 8 cores.

There is simply a set of "parallel" function calls which can be built directly into your code. You then just need to compile your code with the proper libraries, usually either mpich or OpenMP. I believe both are available in the ubuntu repository. Pick the one that is most promising for your problem. They are fundamentally two distinct approaches to parallelism, each useful at times. Lawrence Livermore has a great tutorial site, including loads of example fortran and C codes of both openMP and mpich. THey are ready to compile and run on your home computer. Happy computing!

Tutorial: https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/mpi/
Example codes: https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/mpi/exercise.html#Exercise1