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Comment Motorola owns the patent (Score 2) 54

A colleague of mine working for Motorola patented encrypted memory sometime in the 2006-2010 timeframe. Maybe Motorola figured out that AMD was violating their patent and negotiated royalties privately with AMD. I don't know; I don't work at Motorola, but if AMD had to suddenly start paying royalties, it makes sense that they'd remove the feature from lower end, lower margin processors.

Comment Re:a step too far (Score 1) 346

you sir, are blind, war is never good

What an utterly naive interpretation of world history you have. I can assure you, if you'd been a Jew being rounded up for extermination in WW2 you'd have a different opinion. Likewise, if you were Chinese or Korean being subjugated by Imperial Japan, you'd have a different perspective. There is such a thing as a "just war" even though you somehow ignore the concept. It's usually when your opponent starts the war and is hell bent on eradicating you and your way of life.

Alas, you sit there in perfect safety and comfort, passing judgement on those who sacrificed fa more than you can ever imagine so you could impugn their sacrifices.

Comment Re:Oh look. (Score 1) 346

For now, people can worry about what type of weapons to use and whether or not certain types should be banned.

But in the future, all the debates will be about will be "how do we pick just the right grid squares in which to Kill All Humans?"

Banned for who? And who's going to enforce this ban?

You have to remember any treaty (a) must have signatories that agree to follow it and (b) there must be a method of enforcement. If you lack either of these two conditions, the treaty has no effect.

Comment Re: Oh look. (Score 1) 346

If there was a "total war" America would not exist anymore.

Not sure how you think you could pull that off, but whatever.

We sink your carriers, then we siege your cities.

Again...exactly how do you plan to accomplish this? It's not like Iran hasn't been firing missiles at our carriers this whole time. Yeah, it's a halfhearted effort by the Iranians, but what exactly do you think would happen to Iran if you managed to even damage one of our carriers, much less sink one? I can describe it thusly: the American gloves would come off. Iran would be plastered into oblivion via conventional bombardment, and there's very little Iran could do to stop it. Sure, we'd take losses, but the Iranian regime would cease to exist in totality. America has had this option available to it since day one. We haven't exercised it. Not because we couldn't do it but because we chose not to. Do not mistake restraint for a lack of capability.

Comment Re: It's all about definitions. (Score 1) 177

Grading on a curve was meant to hide the fact that some teachers couldn't teach, some could, some wouldn't, and others would. It protected the professor at the expense of the students' education.

And it ruins grades as a marker of achievement or ability. From a student's perspective, if I pay for a course, the result should be that my grade reflects the degree to which I've mastered the material, not the variations between the quality of the students and the quality of the instruction. Grading on a curve allows a deadbeat professor and a deadbeat class to essentially turn the class into a credential mill without the necessity of education.

Students can safely assume that courses graded on a curve are staffed by incompetent or lazy professors, taken by lazy or incompetent students, or quite possibly both. When I was in university, this type of grading was used most often in the general education electives, where the professors didn't really care about the students, and the students didn't care about the subject. To adopt the same approach for mainline courses is to transform the entire university from a place of learning into a credentials broker or diploma mill.

Comment Re: Well "just" vibe code you a new API, then eh? (Score 3, Informative) 46

The biggest problem with replicating CUDA is not the technical aspects, but finding VC with enough brains to know whom to hire. Most CS grads have the knowledge, but not the drive. Most liberal arts grads have the drive, the creativity, but not the knowledge. You need to find one with both, because creating the next Nvidia killer will require someone who is boring enough to reinvent the wheel, but has enough creativity to find novel solutions to performance problems.

The computer science and hardware engineering behind the hardware and software (Nvidia/CUDA) have been known for decades. The Nvidia hardware could be replicated with FPGAs - notwithstanding any patents Nvidia might have. The software API could be replicated rather easily; parallelism has been known and studied in computer engineering (again) for decades now. What Nvidia did was political - they provided both the hardware and the API to easily use it in one package which could be understood by the C-Suite class. The challenge was never technical, but marketing.

More specifically, you'd need to understand how compilers work, and how to use YACC or bison, or something similar to generate the compiler code for you. You'd have to understand digital logic and how to create logic functions with NAND gates. If you see an FPGA development kit, know what it is, and think to yourself, "What I could do with that..." you're probably a good fit for the job. And you'd need someone willing to bankroll your project until you could demonstrate that you beat Nvidia on something marketable - like floating point performance. Or power consumption.

From an engineering standpoint, what Nvidia has done is trivial - because the solution could be reproduced by an engineer using already known techniques. But what Nvidia did was to combine technical knowledge with an understanding of their market to produce the dominant position they have today. Any computer engineer worth his diploma could produce a design with FPGAs that would beat Nvidia GPUs, but Nvidia did it first.

Comment It's simpler than that. (Score 1) 114

In the military, the mission - and only the mission - matters.

Most of the officers in the position to observe a UFO are not in the position to order an investigation. Even if they were, they'd have to justify the use of taxpayer dollars to support what could easily be characterized as a "curiosity" rather than the fundamental mission of air power. The best most of them can do is record their experience in the debrief, and rely on civilian scientists to investigate it further.

Comment Re:diverse? a woman? a person of color? a canuck? (Score 1) 203

Can we stop pretending that America is still stuck in the 1960's? The overwhelming majority of Americans no longer have a Jim Crow mindset, and no longer regard as remarkable when a woman or "person of color" (i.e., an ordinary person) does something that white people have been doing for years. Diversity is ordinary now, and has been for the past few decades.

Diversity is like a religion with some people - no matter how much you (Americans) repent, you are still a sinner and in need of grace and forgiveness from TPB.

Comment Re:*facepalm* (Score 1) 177

This was always going to end this way. Sorry Ofcom but 4chan is 100% in the right here. Your authority extends only to requesting it be blocked in your country. Nothing more.

This isn't a multinational company and it is not in any way subject to any laws other than US law.

The US should think and act the same way: activities, companies and individuals outside the borders of the US are not subject to US laws. America is not the world's police force, as much as it likes to think it is. Mind your own business, and the rest of the world should do the same.

Allow me to posit the following: we could very well be minding our own business but still strongly influence the rest of the world. For example, if a company wishes to do business in America -- the world's largest and most lucrative commercial market -- they must comply with US laws. This is no different than any other country. You may not like it, but that's how commercial business works, and it'd be no different if someone like North Korea had the market everyone wanted. You'd just be complaining about a different country.

Don't like it? Don't do business in the US and you're free to do whatever you want. You'll be excluding yourself from probably 70% of the available market, but you're free to make that choice.

Don't forget, your argument can be turned around quite easily: you could mind your own business and stop trying to tell the US how to do business according to your wants/needs. Funny how that works.

Comment Re:UK folks went to 4chan, 4chan did not go to UK (Score 2) 177

they are no longer in the UK and UK laws no longer apply.

You're blissfully unaware of how laws work.

There are certain crimes that can be prosecuted and punished in the UK even if they were committed in Thailand or Antarctica. It is sufficient that they can get to you somehow, for example via an Interpol arrest request or an extradition order or by freezing your assets, etc.

Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

You're blissfully unaware of how national sovereignty works.

Good luck getting the US to accommodate an Interpol extradition request for 4chan and its personnel. There's no reason the US would agree to it since 4chan has violated no US law. So long as 4chan operates in the US exclusively and violates no US laws, they are effectively beyond the reach of the UK government. They could presumably nab some 4chan executive if they ever visited the UK, but all one has to do to avoid that is just not visit the UK.

This is how international legal disputes have been handled since the dawn of international legal disputes. Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

Comment Admitting the obvious (Score 5, Insightful) 184

It's about time they admitted to something that was obvious to almost everyone: nuclear power is the only effective path to carbon-free base load power generation. Wind and solar make good intermittent sources, but base load has to be utterly reliable regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That's nuclear.

Getting rid of the nukes was a knee-jerk reaction, not a smart technological decision. The pivot to depending on oil and gas from a potential hostile neighbor just added to the madness.

Comment Re:New American Revolutionaries take note... (Score 1) 45

He spent 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers on YouTube. That's as sucked in as you can get to the system. He is very much a large part of the system you think he should be raging against.

He financed, produced, starred in, and distributed the film completely independent from the "Hollywood System". For God's sake, how much less "sucked in" can a person be and still have the means to do it at all???

Give the man some credit.

Comment Re:Seems like this mostly hurts rural/minority are (Score 1, Funny) 171

Or perhaps they instead voted for a better economy, and this was a part of the package deal, whether they wanted it or not.

We have a republic, not a democracy. We didn't vote for this, but for the person who would occupy the office of the President. How much different would our country be if legislation proposed by congress had to be passed by national referendum? It's not the 18th century anymore. The bills are published on the Internet. We could create an electronic voting system which would allow the public to vote every spring and fall for proposed legislation, except for the fact that such a system would take power out of the hands of the politicians and return it to the people.

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