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Comment Re:Yes. What do you lose? But talk to lawyer first (Score 1) 734

I'm a Canadian who has worked in the US as a non-resident alien, so had to file an American return some years. My Canadian accountant had a tame American accountant she sent clients like me to for stuff like that: US tax law is just too complex for foreigners to bother with.

But taxes aren't the only issue. The OP says, correctly, "My son would have to register for the draft".

This is not a small thing. I know someone who grew up in the US in the '60's--a Canadian born to Canadian parents in Canada whose family had moved to the US--who was refused permission to leave the country at the age of 18 because he was draft-eligible. He got out eventually, but it was a big legal hassle.

The draft is on hiatus just now, but there is no certainty it always will be.

Comment Re:I'll be rich! (Score 1) 61

I knew the patent system was horribly broken but this is obscene. Perhaps I'll patent "Utilizing a multi-wheeled conveyance to traverse a network of engineered level surfaces to traverse from an origination point to a destination point". This patent doesn't seem to cover any real technology but the general idea of "launching from a land site and landing on an ocean platform".

It's rather like "Do X, but on the internet" patents. However it's "Do X, but at sea on a platform"

Comment Re:Breakthrough? (Score 4, Insightful) 445

Smart article yes, but it's still incredibly stupid to buy a lottery ticket.

Unless you think it's fun to play. Idle daydreaming about what you'd do if you won; the excitement as the numbers are called; the rollercoaster of emotion as you realize you may win - no you won't - oh but you did get a small price.

It's only stupid if you see it as an investment. See it as entertainment and it's no more dumb than paying to watch a movie.

Comment Re:Deja vu all over again (Score 1) 112

there is a linear relationship between code density and the functional bandwidth of the instruction caching at every level.

Even if this were true (which it isn't), and even if you were right that CISC has twice the code density of RISC (which it doesn't), it would still be a long way short of proving your claim that CISC gives better performance than RISC.

I don't presume to understand why ARM do what they do.

Certainly not 2X, that was normal slashdot hyperbole. 1.2-1.5X depending on what you compare with. But you are putting words in my mouth. Nowhere did I claim RISC was better than CISC or visa versa in any general sense. I said that compact instruction encodings are better than inefficient instructions encodings, which they clearly are for a broad class of CPU memory hierarchies that have been around in recent years. The decoding benefits of RISC were tangible for 1990 era CPUs, but the decoding overhead hasn't changed, while the rest of the CPU has got much bigger. So the decoding overhead is now negligible for the CPUs we put in phones and PCs, while the instruction bandwidth has a bottom line effect on performance. You can address it with wider buses and bigger caches, but then you can have wider buses and bigger caches with smaller instructions too.

I'm not seeking to prove a claim. It's just the way things are.

Accordingly a CPU with a real Huffman coded instruction set might be even better. Feel free to go implement one.

I don't need to presume, I know that they removed some complex instructions because they made the hardware more complex and reduced performance.

Which contradicts the evidence of the vast majority of CPUs ever made, which is they get faster as you throw more gates at them.

Comment Re:Uprising? (Score 1) 331

It's too many words to fit on a Marquee, and takes too long to say to the ticket vendor. By the time you say "One for The Man who went up a hill and came down a Mountain", the ticket agent has already given you your ticket, change, and is halfway through serving the next person in line.

But I did actually see that film. Making life easy for the marquee layout is clearly not the same thing as making money.

Comment Re:Politics aside for a moment. (Score 1) 538

I remember an interview from years back where she was asked if she used email and her response was along the lines of " Oh no. Emails are discoverable".
So yes, she knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it.

Emails are discoverable whether you use a public or a private email address.

Yes. That's what makes the current news interesting. She wasn't hiding them. She handed them over in response to a request. She wasn't not-allowed to use personal email. The rules had no such restriction. But her actions conflict with what I remember her saying was motivating her to not use email.

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