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i have to question the "wisdom" of interfering with traditional ways
of living, like this. i remember seeing a report somewhere that
said it was disgraceful that people in poor countries didn't have
lights, to which the answer is, "so you want to have people not only become dependent on electricity, but you also want them to stop living in tune with nature, make them deprive themselves of sleep, and place them in front of flickering light sources?"

in other words, they wanted to inflict the exact same kind of pain and suffering that the first world subjects itself to, onto the third world.

in this case, they seek to inflict non-traditional cooking routines and methods onto these people who have lived generations of lives eating at times which make sense in their environment.

_why_??

but anyone who takes money in return for absolutely no rights in the ownership of their work *is* a slave^H^H^H^H^Hemployee.

you want google web toolkit. it will allow you to stay in the shit world of single-inheritance java that you are used to dealing with, as well as give you a decent widget toolkit to work with. when you wake up from the insanity of fighting with java, and are happy to program in a decent compact language like python, there's always pyjamas. the advantage of taking this route is that the widget set API of pyjamas is near-identical to that of GWT 1.5, with bits of 1.6 and 1.7 thrown in.

this is a misrepresentation of what President Barack Obama actually said. he said he would *investigate*, by putting this guy's resume in front of companies and ask them the pointed question of why such skilled engineers are not being prioritised for jobs. he didn't say "i'll find you a job".

what was actually much more stunning to my mind was the fact that it appears that the U.S. has a President who is willing to say "I Don't Know The Answer Right Now". he did it incredibly subtly: he said something along the lines of "this is very interesting and i too would like to find out what the answer is", which is just... it takes my breath away that he could be that sensible.

i thought politicians were supposed to be ignorant, arrogant and had to pretend to have all the answers - or at least to be intelligent enough to give the impression of being arrogant. although i fully appreciate that in the case of George W. Bush (jr), his ultra-low IQ means that he really was genuinely ignorant ["if the president of Ireland needs anything, anything at all, he only has to ask, now excuse me i gotta go get a burger"].

ahh, i can just see the divorce settlement arguments already, over who owns the contract, who owns the bill, and who's going to pay for little johnny's excessive Minecraft and Runescape usage...

in fact, these kids got their research published without any references *at all*. http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/site/misc/BlackawtonBees.xhtml

i particularly like the section headings "once upon a time" and "the puzzle duh duh duhhhhh". i think however in the context of this article, the following exerpt from the background puts the corruption that has been highlighted by TFA to shame:

"So what follows is a novel study (scientifically and conceptually) in ‘kids speak’ without references to past literature, which is a challenge. Although the historical context of any study is of course important, including references in this instance would be disingenuous for two reasons. First, given the way scientific data are naturally reported, the relevant information is simply inaccessible to the literate ability of 8- to 10-year-old children, and second, the true motivation for any scientific study (at least one of integrity) is one's own curiousity, which for the children was not inspired by the scientific literature, but their own observations of the world. This lack of historical, scientific context does not diminish the resulting data, scientific methodology or merit of the discovery for the scientific and ‘non-scientific’ audience. On the contrary, it reveals science in its truest (most naive) form, and in this way makes explicit the commonality between science, art and indeed all creative activities."

the problem with _not_ enforcing GPL compliance is that if it goes on for long enough, companies may legitimately claim an "estoppel" defense, which summaries as "well you haven't bothered up until now, therefore you must not be bothered at all, go away". this is an *acceptable* legal defense, and it means that, by not enforcing Copyright, people are *losing* the right to that Copyright. that includes Google as much as anyone else, and the reason why i am singling them out is because a senior member of staff within Google specifically told me, when i pointed out the rampant GPL violations of the linux kernel source code inside Android, that "Google is not the world's GPL Cop".

the problem with the x86 architecture is that it was designed to be compact and space-saving: the escape-sequences that go up and up and up from 8086 to 80186 to 286 to 386 to 486 to 586 to 64-bit are incredibly efficiently encoded. *BUT*, there comes a massive performance penalty which is that the clock rate now has to be twice as fast as a RISC processor in order to achieve the same results. RISC processors, with the exception possibly of the Xtensa (which kinda cheats by allowing VLIW as well), tend to substitute larger memory requirements for less compact instructions; ARM cheats by actually compressing the instructions! (thumb).

so it's all quite horrendously complex, but the kicker is that power goes up in a square law with processor speed. double the speed you need FOUR times the power. so, if an x86 processor has to run twice as fast to achieve the same results as a lowly RISC core which is eating twice the amount of RAM as an x86, the x86 is using FOUR times the power in order to keep up with the RISC processor.

it's never that simple, though: ARM and other RISC cores also trade higher latency for lower power. _and_ there is the issue of trying to run a 64-bit or a 128-bit memory bus, off to a separate "Northbridge" chip: these RISC all-in-one SoCs with embedded GPUs and integrated I/O just don't have that problem, and they're not trying to drive massive amounts of external lines just to get access to memory [through a silly "Northbridge" chip].

but that's not the end of the story. with the advent of DDR3 and the introduction of 28nm, RISC cores are going to eat x86 for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as RISC CPU designs means can easily run at 2 to 2.5ghz in 28nm... and still only use 1 to 1.5 watts! and with DDR3 RAM being so fast, the "problem" of latency for RISC CPUs is *also* going away.

if AMD tells you they can do a 2 watt x86 CPU (like in TFA), they aren't exactly lying, but they're sailing pretty close to the wind.

bottom line is: if they're saying that they're architecture-agnostic, that basically saves their bacon. let's hope that they do a decent job, eh? it would be absolutely cool for them to put an ATI-based "Open" GPU with full and complete GPL'd source code along-side an ARM or any other CPU core.

i apologise for the smell. i know you're joking in some ways but i do actually genuinely know what you mean, and what you're referring to. it's a really strange phenomenon that i've encountered so many times now (over 15 years) that i've had enough empirical evidence to be able to summarise it as follows. any person who is genuine can encounter me (even if i say nothing) and they will react favourably towards me. any person who is *not* genuine - who is either deceitful or dishonest - will *automatically* try to attack me. they will find absolutely any way that they can to discredit or undermine everything and anything, in any way possible. sometimes their actions are so extreme that even they begin to notice that they are doing something wrong; sometimes they don't.

i'm a disruptive influence and an accelerator: what can i say? *shrugs*.