Those laws are equally wrong and should be challenged (in the case of WIC, it could be easily rewritten to refer to people who are or were recently pregnant, which given the current state of medical science does not absolutely exclude men.) Whether this actually happens or not... well, you take the victories where you can get them. Just because society is hopelessly wrong on X (polygamous marriage, for instance) doesn't mean that we should also give up the fight on Y if it's possible to win that fight.

That's just what I said. The op was saying that AMD has always played second fiddle, including (his words) 10 and 15 years ago. The developments I outlined (Athlon/Opteron/Duron beating the crap out of P4&PD/Xeon/Celeron) took place precisely during that era. I guess ~10 years of domination is a long time in the computing world but it's sad that slashdot's collective memory seems to be that short, particularly since it appears (as I've said) that we are fast approaching another fork in the road with fab resolution nearly maxed out and Intel busy uddying the waters like crazy between their different processor lines.

Err, I think that buying a truck because you like how it looks and not because you need a truck is one of the clearest cases of conspicuous consumption I've ever seen. It's a free country and all of that, but do you really think this sort of thing should pass uncommented on? It's a goddamn truck. It has shit mileage, shit road handling, and shit passenger space. If you buy a truck but you don't need any of its cargo/towing/offroad capabilities then I think people are entitled to shake their heads a little. And you're entitled to console yourself by... I don't know, doing whatever it is in your new truck that makes you smile. Everybody wins.

The P4 was in development 15 years ago, and the OP said "10 years" as well, so I think my point stands. Incidentally I had a K6-II as well and it was fairly awful... then again, we never upgraded from Windows 98 SE.

Um, your "15 years" bit is off the mark. 15 years ago Intel was so busy chasing the mhz marketing dollar with the Pentium 4 (and the derived Pentium D) that AMD was able to dethrone them at the top end, and for an encore they then turned around and demolished Intel's 64-bit Itanium server architecture with the backwards compatible AMD-64 (which Intel quickly licensed from them. And renamed.) For the hat trick, they absolutely destroyed low end Celeron with their AMD Duron. For several years there, Intel was the worse (and most expensive) option in every major market segment.

Of course at this point Intel pulled their heads out of their asses, reached a little deeper into their pocketbooks and used the Pentium M's design as the way forward instead of the hz-obese Pentium 4 / Pentium D, and AMD (which simply cannot compete on a research dollar level) has been playing catchup ever since. But they absolutely deserve credit for keeping Intel on their toes. Even VIA (formerly Cyrix, remember them?) deserves some credit for taking some important first steps towards x86 low power design and motherboard miniaturization, and being the first company to introduce hardware cryptography instruction sets (which to this day remain superior to AES-NI, though it was under-supported and it's now stuck in a very badly aging and overpriced processor lineup.)

Has Intel been the undisputed CPU performance king for the past few years? Of course. But this can easily change, particularly since we're so close to hitting the transistor quantum size barrier. In 5-10 years there is not going to be a single clear path forward any more, and it remains to be seen whether Intel will choose the correct path, particularly in light of their increasingly befuddling market segmentation tactics.

I just have to say that speaking as a Common Lisp fan, this sort of thing makes me choke a bit. C++ templates are a very hobbled, messy version of what you can do with a Lisp macro and/or a CLOS generic function. While it's true that optimized C will be 2x-3x faster than fully optimized Common Lisp (most people think it's orders of magnitudes, but it's not. CL is a very mature, fully compiled language with plenty of ways to optimize, including turning on static typing), I very much question whether the messy, verbose, and quite limited 'expressiveness' of C++ is worth it.

C++ and its bastard child Java are responsible for infecting the minds of countless computer programmers with all manner of horrible square-peg-round-hole paradigms, which are triumphantly proclaimed as "design patterns" instead of "hacky verbosity that makes self-documenting code much more difficult to write".

But your thread of logic is incomplete/broken here. The point isn't that marriage is an constitutional / inalienable right. The point is that equality before the law is an inalienable right.

So if some people want to ban state recognition of marriage, so be it. If you want to expand the legal benefits granted by marriage, so be it. The issue is when the government tries to grant privileges to only some people and not others. This is unconstitutional under the 14th amendment and (as I've argued elsewhere), also under the 9th for anyone with a shred of respect for what the founding fathers were trying to accomplish.

Look, I know it's not fashionable (several high profile justices have outright said that the ninth amendment cannot be used for anything, and almost everyone else relies almost exclusively on the equal protection clause in the 14th amendment), but the founding fathers anticipated this bullshit argument. There was, in fact, a huge debate over having a bill of rights at all because they did not want to provide ammunition to people like you who would argue, again and again, that people do not have any inalienable rights at all unless they are explicitly granted by the constitution.

So, in order to address this concern, they crafted a specific amendment--the ninth--which says "hey look, this isn't an exhaustive list!"

And then everyone decides to ignore it and keep using the exact argument it was designed to address. Your argument.

THEN THE COUNTRY WILL BE A MUCH BETTER PLACE. The right to privacy (ANY privacy, other than a physical search of papers) isn't in the constitution, either. I think the right for the government to keeps its nose out of my chromosomes and out of my crotch is also a pretty obvious, fundamental right. The ability to "make up" rights doesn't give the SCOTUS unlimited power; it only gives them the ability to limit the power of government, which is an ability that many people on both the right and the left greatly value.

Scalia is a hypocritical hyperreligious twat. Hubris is the quality exhibited by lawmakers (and their supporters) who think that the state should have the power to examine the chromosomes/genitals of its citizens in order to decide what rights they are entitled to.

High Fructose Corn Syrup has turned us into a nation too fat for everything from coffins to military service. numerous studies concur this isnt sugar. Links please. And please analyze the language of those studies to see how they are damning HFCS while rendering other sources of fructose-apples, grapes, etc.-- as harmless.

Ah nevermind, no need to bother. You are clearly just one of the neo-luddite brigade. Transfats are of course bad and the health officials responsible for pushing it should be taken to task, but the danger of "processed" foods is nothing compared to the danger posed by the marketing- and luddite-driven pro-"organic" movement.

Quick, I've noticed you've left aspartame off of your list! You'd better put it on there because it causes brain cancer! Wait no, that one was always bullshit. You'd better put it on there because it causes kidney damage! Wait, crap, also bullshit. You'd better put it on there because a recent small-scale preliminary animal study implied it might cause a gut flora alteration resulting in some weight gain! *Whew*, that was a close one. That one isn't conclusively disproven yet, so the organic stevia industry should be safe at least for another year or two.

How does this neoluddite shit keep getting modded up? If you're against sugar then fine, but the anti-HFCS movement is mostly completely fine with table sugar used as a substitute, and it appears that absolutely none of these blowhards are advocating treating the fructose in fruits the same as the fructose in corn.

If you're against HFCS but pro-grape juice (increasingly being used as a sweetener in some products that want to avoid HFCS cooties), you are either a Dr. Oz-loving neo-Luddite moron who needs to turn in his geek card immediately or you are sitting on some earthshaking unpublished scientific studies.

Really? This is really the shit that gets modded up to +5 these days, again and again? Do I even have to spell out what's wrong with it?

On your fructose rantings: your explanation, if true, vilifies almost all fruits just as much as it does HFCS. No doubt you'll come up with some anecdotal, pulled-out-of-your-ass justification for treating HFCS differently, though.

Also, let's just keep completely ignoring the fact that heart disease and stroke are top killers worldwide, even in countries where they have never heard of HFCS.

He didn't say C++ was worthless. He said it would be a pretty bad thing if it was "the best tool" or "the best we can do", and going by the rest of your comment I'm not sure if you'd completely disagree.

Take away its heritage advantages (libraries and compilers-- "it's popular for being popular"), and you are left with what exactly?

Let's see, you have almost-foolproof C compatibility... except most other languages can link to C code. Annnnnd... hmm. I can't really think of anything else. High performance OO maybe, but other languages can do that in more powerful ways (including Objective C).

I wasn't talking about the performance in one single instant in time'; I was talking about using the same piece of proprietary software (remember, this is FREE proprietary, not $$$-proprietary) over the course of several years. Do you have any examples of this working out for you? Because my experience is that free proprietary software does not say free, does not stay updated, does not stay malware-free and/or does not stay usable for very long.

I agree, although unfortunately a good chunk of your post exemplifies this. Corn and "starches" are bad, but fruit is good.... because the fructose in fruit is magically awesome but the fructose in corn is somehow tainted. And everyone knows that white rice is the most fatten of all foods, just ask the 3+ billion asians. Oh, wait.

There is certainly evidence that carbs were pushed way too hard in the 80s and 90s, but that doesn't mean that everything that comes out of the mouths of neo-Atkins/paleo/anti-corn/anti-gluten/anti-aspartame nutjobs should be believed. At the end of the day, it's about too many calories. While it's possible to alter one's metabolism a bit and/or feel fuller by eating different sorts of foods, any argument re: obesity that doesn't mention calories can be safely ignored as faddish nonsense.

We don't know exactly how rare solar flare EMPs are, but we know that they can be bad and we managed to miss another one bad one a few years ago. I would say this should be the primary reason for securing the power grid; resistance to nuclear EMPs is just a desirable side effect.

What are you talking about? This isn't astrology here; this is well-understood science. We have some EMP data from old atmospheric nuclear tests, and if need be we can create low level (non-nuclear) EMPs for further modeling. This is just electrical engineering. Of course we can make sound predictions about whether or not specific types of protection will work

North Korea has nuclear weapons and will soon have the ability to deliver one to the west coast of the USA. What we going to do about it? Mostly nothing, because China will be very annoyed if we invade and we know that Seoul could be utterly destroyed even by conventional weapons if the North Koreans tried.

Despite widespread mockery, nuclear disaster mitigation (yes, including duck and cover) can work, and if we're talking about realistic measures we can take to limit collateral damage I can think of nothing more important than preserving the power grid.

I'm not commenting on the costs involved or where this should be on our national priority list, but it's a sound idea.