Good point.

Point taken, you don't feel wasting 8 hours a day doing something you loathe is a waste of time, I do (8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 8 hours for the rest. I don't want to waste a third of my life like that, but I guess that's up to you). I guess we should agree to disagree.

Yes of course they do. The distinction I make is between design and implementation. Out in the real world, the tiny programs you create as a means to an end during your CS degree are completely worthless, and anyone who does programming for a living will tell you this. There is a very big difference between knowing C++ (or whatever other language you happen to be using) syntax and being able to design and document a system.

I'm by no means disbuting that some CS grads can program, they're just not taught very much design during the course of their education. If they're smart they pick it up from experience and realise that certain practises within programming produce far more maintainable code. But the tiny one-offs you create with each paper you turn in won't teach you this.

This has the unfortunate consequence that CS grads think they can program, when in reality they can't. Because there is so much more to producing a working system than typing code into an editor.

You are absolutely right. The only yardstick worth measuring with is the "are you happy with what you do".

On a side note: CS degrees arent supposed to be able to program, which is why they mostly can't - you need to go to a trade school for that. If you happen to bump into a CS grad who do know how to program, and not in the sense that they know C++ syntax, but can actually construct and document a system from scratch, they sure as hell didn't learn that in college.

So you can make it faster by adding more hardware or.... adding more hardware. Parallel and distributed are two very different things, and you cannot run a distributed anything on a single cluster, if you do, it would be properly named parallel. Anyways, the comparison is still valid - the RPI cluster failed to deliver; it was slower, was just as expensive as their benchmark x86 machine and probably 1000x as complex.

You're right in what you say about algorithms, but it only holds if you already have unused cores to run the new algorithm on - the actual reason we try to derive parallelizable algorithms is because at the moment, processors with multiple cores are cheaper than mutliple processors with one core. I'm sure the researchers had fun doing this, but there is little to be gained from this paper except to conclude that if you want to build a parallel cluster, don't use RPIs.

On a side note (not aimed at above poseter), if you build something like this and measure the power consumption, don't fucking add all those lights. This research looks like it would barely be worthy of a high school paper, and if that is the standard at Biose - oh.my.god. I mean, half the paper deals with installing packages on Linux. shut the fuck up, we know this already, do some actual research.

They can't know. And they shouldn't bother pondering that; what "they" need to focus on are sane password policies and proper salting. One of the conclusions of the article is that if password holders (sites you log in to) spent more time trying to secure their shit, there would be less work for end users. The only reason password strength can become a problem is if "they" get compromised and the user password database gets stolen. Fix that problem, and eveyrone can start logging in with "123" again.

Or not by accident. They can quadruple their years worth by just "leaking" a password database to the right people. Choosing the lowest bidder is not always a good idea, it lowers the corruption bar significantly.

I agree. That is almost spot on. I would add that we cannot be at the mercy of one single doctor. However, that is a far cry from having editorial rights to your own journal. Granted, I don't know of the case you're referring, but it sounds like the doctor wasn't competent; giving the woman in the example editorial rights to her journal does not solve the problem for the next poor sod who walks into his office. I would like to advocate that we try to solve the actual problem instead of trying to patch it to work for a single case.

Patents are created in legal jargon in order to hold up in court, not in technical jargon in order to share. Spot the difference?

Patent law does not foster any kind of sharing or "standing on shoulders of giants", this is a lie paid for by corporations who benefit from holding patents. Patent law creates artificial scarcity which a single entity gets to exploit for however long the law lets them. In the current model, nobody but the patent holder benefits (and perhaps an army of lawyers), but the patent holder can harm an arbitrary amount of people while holding the patent. Using my no-patent model, the inventor still benefits, but cannot harm anyone.

Being first to invent something is it's own reward, and the advantage that grants the inventor is enough. If the idea is good enough, the advantage will be massive. If the idea is but a tiny modification of someone else's work, the advantage will be almost none. This is how it should be. This will spur thinking outside the box rather than trying to reword everything to be "on a whatever-device".

I know because that was the fucking subject of the discussion. The islamic militias wanting a place to live being their motivation to go on a killing spree. What the tribes in the deep amazon does is none of my concern. What is my concern, and should be yours, is how all humans treat each other. If people wish to live in the jungle eating bananas, thats fine. If they wish to live in the jungle eating bananas while executing every other female child born, that is not fine. The distinction being that the right to live is being violated. That right is also regularly being violated in areas controlled by religious/political militias, and THAT is my focus.

It does not affect me. I'm just not that ego centered to be willing to accept that some people should live a life in absolute squalor before being killed by barbarians, by sheer coincidence of being born someplace different.

Indeed. Proof is everything, the rest are just words spoken by people who have no clue either way.

Elective is just that. I had an active childhood and broke my nose more times than i would care to count. This shows. I could elect to have that fixed, or continue on as usual. Having it fixed would be a choice on my part, and fall into the vanity category and as such not really covered. I'm fine with that.

The cost of health care going up has very little to do with people getting treatment, and alot more to do with the people providing the treatment and the drugs to fix stuff being profiteering gluttons. Fix that problem and the cost goes down.

Natural selection works when nobody but nature is selecting, natural selection stopped for the human species when sentience came about and started looking at the selection process.

You seem to think money is a natural element of the universe. I pity you, what a dark world to live in.

I think you're mixing "what is" and "what could be". Ideally borders would cease existing and we would all work together for the betterment of the human species, and as a side effect perhaps the entire Earth we inhabit. I'll settle for humans first though.

Whenever the discussion comes up about what we could/should/will/can do, someone goes and mentions economy or money as if they're natural components of the universe. Economy and money are artificial concepts invented to distinguish between have and have-not, simple as that. Do away with money and you have no incentive to do most of the shit humans do to each other. When the money (or the lack of) is not getting in the way of doing the right thing, we will start seeing improvement for everyone. Untill then, I will keep calling out the capitalists on their bullshit.

As for our (as in the first world) motivation for doing anything in the foerign policy arena, I'll call bullshit too. We might be invading countries to keep them from bombing us, but that does not make it anymore right than what these people have been doing to us. Violence breeds violence. If a group feels that they have no venue to speak in, that noone is listening, yes violence will ensue. That does not legitimize responding in kind. Not ever. Provide a venue for people to be heard and feel like they are being heard and I will promise you that the level of violence will drop.