tonysdg

Maybe a typo for RISC-V? Still doesn't make a lot of sense though...

Maybe a Pentium IV then? I don't think RISC-V -- or any processor really -- gets taken seriously in the desktop/laptop space unless it can compete with one of Intel's earlier chips.

You yourself repeat a very common misconception and false analogy.

Intel and AMD start new microarchitecture design work every 2-3 years because (Intel, at least) base their sales on offering the latest and greatest. They seek peak performance, which is exactly what gamers/scientists/prosumers want.

But for large swaths of the market, you don't need that. Think of your average consumer/small business owner. By and large, most of them are using 3-5 year old PCs, and even then the processors within those 3-5 year old PCs were probably last-gen when they were purchased.

Or think military -- the ability to have a home-grown, openly-vetted processor that you can tape out with a trusted domestic supplier would eliminate a number of security concerns.

Don't let great be the enemy of good here. If you can build a decent RISC-V core that can compete with an Intel Core 2 Duo, you've got all the horsepower you need for the average consumer.

"...be real shame if someone was to acquire it, force it to produce twice as many eggs on half the feed, create a half-baked digital platform on which you could watch it lay eggs in real-time, watch as its health slowly declined in the face of insurmountable odds, notice the new Platinum-producing Pig making headlines in town, acquire that animal too, then sell what's left of the goose to a local French bistro to make gold-encrusted foie gras for the same someone to enjoy while watching House of Cards for the 3rd time on Netflix."

May be of interese (see "See Also" for James Madison stuff too): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selected_Papers_of_John_...

I'd argue that it's because (true/hard) AI represents, in many ways, the "final frontier" of scientific research. Not in a literal sense -- they'll always be something else to study. But the notion of creating a thinking machine is, in many ways, the ultimate goal of studying nature and the world around us: to allow us to understand the processes and phenomenon at work well-enough to be able to capture/manipulate/recreate them at will.

This isn't new though -- "thinking machines" have captivated audiences for millenia. See the Antikythera mechanism [1], the Turk [2], and so on. The ability to replicate the capabilities of our own brains is intoxicating -- it finally signals that we, homo sapiens, understand our own minds well-enough to recreate their abilities at will.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

> we as American's have been brainwashed to believe that we are all just 'down-on-our-luck millionaires'

I'm not sure I'd say "brainwashed" -- this is a founding mythos of the United States. It's embedded in our most sacred documents -- the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, etc. -- that the individual (in theory) reigns supreme and (in theory) has ultimate control over his/her life.

It's a noble ideal, truly, but also a damn convienent excuse for those in power ("I/my ancestors didn't get lucky, they made smart decisions and worked hard, and so did I, so I succeeded") and those in poverty ("I can win if I just work harder/emulate those more successful than I -- ultimately I'm in control and nothing else matters").

It's both our ace-in-the-hole and our fatal flaw IMO.

I'm aware of the fact that you don't use floating point math for finance -- for exactly the reason you described -- but the academic in me wonders if you could formally specify a high-enough degree of precision -- and all the corner cases -- to allow FP math for even just a subset of transactions. This would (in theory) allow to programmers to bypass the Decimal classes in your favorite OO language (or GMP if you're a C fan).

Again, purely an academic inquiry :-)

For financial transactions, it would certainly allow for fast high-precision floating point math. Imagine IEEE 754 4096-bit floats. Not sure anyone would actually use this, and you'd still have to standardize the rounding precision, but it might be an interesting vein of research.

Still, I agree with you -- what the OP described is not a 4096-bit processor.

Now highly-synchronized VMs -- that's an entirely different matter. Probably a boatload of use cases for those.

Switch to DDG as your default, and you can search using Google semi-anonymously in even fewer keystrokes by just typing "g! <search query here>" (or just using DDG as-is).

Ahem I believe you mean to say that it's a decentralized donation that uses cutting-edge, game-changing BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES that will REVOLUTIONIZE the world as we know it. /s

Andy Weir (author of The Martian) wrote a fun little sci-fi novel titled Artemis, which depicts almost exactly that -- the first lunar colony (largely) dependent on a single company. Great book with a fun heist plot.

Hey, I've heard of worse retirement plans.

Yeah, they dropped the ball a bit on SWTOR. I'd have loved to see a single-player KOTOR 3. Ah well, Bioware's slowly dying, so it's up to new companies to innovate on the stories.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (another Bioware IP) might be an even better example -- the story swings rather dramatically on how you play the game, with the potential to kill (or save) multiple characters.

You get 30+ hours of ad-free gameplay (that's > 60 half-hour TV shows), PLUS the chance to replay and experience a new story. (Good) RPGs are the best bang for your buck entertainment-wise.

My issue with bundling of news specifically is that it becomes bland and generic. The bundler starts trying to guess what I want -- which defeats the purpose of why I read the news. I subscribe to the NY Times and the WSJ separately precisely because I want multiple angles on the same (and different) events.

Besides, bundling usually means someone down the pipeline -- usially the producers -- are getting royally screwed.

I'm curious -- does she use that newfangled Windows Surface Knob thingy? How does it work if so? And what's her setup if not (e.g., does she use a separate drawing tablet)?

Someone get this girl a scholarship, stat.

I'm not sure I saw any signs that they're "reconsidering" on this ticket -- just that they're now aware of how many corner cases they have.

I can easily see Google saying, "eh, that's your problem, learn to whitelist your site with us."

IIRC, part of the argument against is that you're allowing biotech/pharma companies to test on vulnerable populations. Here's a story on NPR about the pros and cons: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/03/5177969...

That minority controls a non-trivial portion of the nation's political power -- just look at the 2016 presidential election for evidence. I'm 100% for clean energy and reducing/eliminating fossil fuel use, but I also recognize the reality that electric vehicles just don't yet have the capability -- and more importantly, infrastructure -- to replace gas- and diesel-powered cars/buses/trucks. Telling rural Americans to piss off is just as bad as asking urban Americans to deal with the smog IMO.

Technical arguments aside, props for the Avatar: The Last Airbender reference.

Personally, I'd argue there's only one concept -- pass-by-value -- with a whole lot of language-specific syntactic sugar as to what is getting passed by value. But I'll call myself out on that being even more pedantic than the current discussion.

I'll second this. As someone who spends most of their time flipping between C and Python, the details of how parameters get passed between functions is intimately related to each language, and keeping it all clear meant having to understand the nuances.

Plus, I'd argue it's a lot easier to teach the nuances from the beginning rather than have to break someone's assumptions 4 years down the line (e.g. the traditional time of an undergrad CS education).

Follow-up story: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2017/12/16/seven-days-...

Gods above, "tremendous" is an understatement. I don't think I'd be strong enough to work on a story like that.

Wasn't part of the promise of Bitcoin that no single entity or cabal would control it? It would be a distributed platform, owned by the masses?

Easy -- U.S. citizens don't care about who their government spies on/if the spies get hacked. But the notion of some Russian/North Korean/Chinese/Choose-Your-Favorite-Bad-Guy hacker messing with your money? Unacceptable!

Isn't that basically what they did in Atomic Blonde with the crowd and the umbrellas?

> an electric cattle prod that is wired up to the mains (three phase)

"Have you seen the boss's new toy?" "Yeah. Coincidentally, I'll be working remotely moving forward. Good luck!"