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Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 878

It kills innocent people? You sure that's the reason? Drug laws kill innocent people: 8 out of every drug related death is an innocent, yet we still have drug laws.

And how do you assess "speeding"? If we all drive at 5mph there would be no road deaths. None. So whats your point? If granddad is ok to drive at 55 in his '75 buick with bouncing suspension, then I'm ok to do 90 thanks: including reaction time, I can stop in the same distance.

Speed limits were introduced to save GAS not LIVES. Now they are there to save money.

Around schools and through residential areas, 5mph should be the limit if you want to save lives. You up for that?

Comment Re:The problem with that approach (Score 1) 281

Capitalism isnt the problem. Our fiat currency is the problem. If we were on the gold standard we'd have sent all the gold overseas, the dollar would be worthless, and US manufacturing would be competitive. In the absence of the gold standard we could actually require that China stops "managing" its currency, or we could just impose "fair" trade regulations, or best of all we could get rid of bullshit income tax so that the Chinese wouldn't want dollars: the dollar's only value is that our government will come to our house and take our stuff if we refuse to keep paying back the money we owe the Chinese bond holders. We are Chinese slaves. You have to admire the way China won world war 3 without anyone even knowing.

Comment Sony, Microsoft? (Score 4, Insightful) 422

Why no complaints about Sony and Microsoft? They both have a number of machines for which you must pass a draconian test to even get a dev kit. Basically, if Apple made the devkit $10k then you'd all be happy? Locked in systems have been around for more than a decade. The difference with Apple is that the devkit is $100 and anyone can publish on them.

I've had games rejected by Sony and Microsoft: you fix the problem and send it back. No different on the Apple store. Apple is usually quicker tho.

Comment Re:If only. (Score 1) 468

Get a clue. If it is accepted by the populace, or at least the judicial system, that a "trained security officer" can spot a terrorist just by looking at him, then that means that They can lock you up and hold you indefinitely based purely on the say-so of an individual.

No due process, no evidence, just "He's a terrorists - lock him up". Ultimate Police State power. You are NOT free if at any time, on a single persons word, you can be locked up indefinitely.

Comment Gynecology? (Score 1) 704

"How do you keep them interested if the only thing they can do after a week is..."

Then keeping them interested is not your problem. Getting them interested in the first place is your problem. Would you ask a football player if they want a career mowing the lawn, or laying the chalk? When he learns to drive a car, are you going to suggest he becomes a mechanic? How about when he calls his girlfriend? Are you going to suggest being a telecoms engineer or a gynecologist?

My dad bought a computer when I was 11. I wrote my first text-based adventure game when I was 11. When I was 14 I made my dad drive me 50 miles to the only place in the country (the UK) that sold a hardware debugger for my computer so I could debug assembly language properly.

I've worked programmers who didn't start programming till college. Their heart just isn't into it and it shows. I get frustrated with them, and they get confused by my passion and excitement.

Comment Re:That's very nice of you Adobe (Score 1) 515

Except that they wont tell you how, (the documentation is not detailed enough), and if you reverse engineer theirs then they can sue you.

Do you actually believe words posted on a corporate website? Forget even basic fact checking, you're telling me you're default setting is "believe"?

1. I Believe
2. Take with a pinch of salt.
3. Will fact check.
4. Its probably corporate bullshit, but will fact-check.
5. It all evil corporate lies

You're at 1 on this scale are you?

Comment Re:This depends on the site... (Score 1) 515

Uh huh. Yes we all remember how great Flash ran on Linux from the get-go. For a while you had more luck running win32 apps on linux than a flash app. So I disagree with your statement that they have a point. It may be that it currently runs on all PC-based platforms, at this present time but that was not always the case, and is unlikely to be the case in the future. It certainly runs like ass on OSX, and leaks like hell.

When you talk about apple, you seem to be suggesting that what they are doing is bad. So Apple driving people to their platform is bad, but Adobe driving people to their platform is good? How odd.

Flash is a platform, just like win32, windows forms, silverlight, Carbon, Cocoa, X etc are platforms. Some are open, most are not. Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, all want to drive you to their platform because that is how they make money. This is capitalism. But you don't have to buy any of the bullshit any more than you have to buy their products. I find it odd that you like that taste of Adobe's. Apparently even people who eat shit like to argue about whose tastes better...

Comment Except that GPUs arent CPUs (Score 1) 250

The reason GPUs are so fast at raw number crunching is the same reason that they are bad at general purpose CPU work: they delete everything from the die except what they need for doing the same instruction on many cores at once.

They don't handle random memory access, they don't branch effeciently, and most importantly, they don't do any of this for a single core: a single core executes the exact same instruction stream as 16 or more of its neighbors.

The result is much less cache, and much less instruction logic, which means many more cores per GPU. But all that extra logic is exactly what makes a CPU good at doing what it does. Running apache on a GPU?? Forget it.

Now there are certainly some interesting and esoteric things that we can do with processor and software design to make a massively parallel apache server possible, but turning the CPU into a GPU isn't one of them.

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