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With two thirds of the field scoring thirty three points or better and thirty nine points not even making it into the top three, it was going to take an exceptional score to win the day. The Scandinavian mythical “Narcken”, who is said to have lived in the sea, must have drowned as a couple of Aussies and Shane Te-Lee ... |
On Saturday there was more rewriting of the history books as England beat Sweden 2-0 and reached the semi finals of the World Cup for the first time since 1990. Amazingly, today, Sweden’s Robert Bjorkvist also lost to England’s Richard Talbot at Pattavia. Richard, returning from an injury was like poetry in motion as h... |
What's Arabic for "You're No Atticus Finch"? |
A group of "leading conservative lawyers" -- a phrase never confused with "U.S. Marines" -- has produced an embarrassingly pompous letter denouncing Liz Cheney for demanding the names of attorneys at the Justice Department who formerly represented Guantanamo detainees. |
"The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams' representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre." |
Yes, but even John Adams didn't take a job with the government for another 19 years after defending the British guards -- who, in 1770, were "the police." He also didn't take a position with the U.S. government that involved processing British murder suspects. |
I'd be more interested in hearing about the sacred duty of lawyers to defend "unpopular clients" if we were talking about clients who are unpopular with anyone lawyers know. |
Every white shoe law firm in the country has been clamoring to take the cases of Guantanamo detainees, while young associates line up to be put on the case. This is even more fun than defending Ted Bundy! |
As The Wall Street Journal put it in a 2007 article, a list of the law firms representing Guantanamo detainees "reads like a who's who of America's most prestigious law firms" -- which conveniently doubles as Santa's "naughty" list. |
The terrorists' lawyers have included Shearman and Sterling, Arnold & Porter; Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr; Covington & Burling; Hunton & Williams; Sullivan & Cromwell; Debevoise & Plimpton; King & Spalding; Cleary Gottlieb, Morrison & Foerster; Jenner & Block; O'Melveny & Myers and Sidley Austin. |
At least 34 of the 50 largest firms in the United States have performed pro bono work on behalf of Guantanamo detainees. |
I didn't hear a peep about the august "American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients" back then. |
Like Hollywood actresses, lawyers need to believe they're noble and courageous to help them forget that they are corporate drones doing soul-destroying work, which mostly consists of making photocopies. |
Defending terrorists gives status-conscious attorneys a chance to get standing ovations at the annual ABA convention -- much like promoting "global warming" makes climatologists feel like they're saving the world, rather than studying water vapor. |
It took me exactly one Nexis search for "ABA," "award" and "Guantanamo" to find that the 2006 "Outstanding Scholar Award" at the ABA annual banquet was given to New York University law professor Anthony G. Amsterdam for his "extensive pro bono practice, litigating cases that range from civil rights claims, to death pen... |
A rule I have is: You're not defending an unpopular client if you're getting awards from the ABA, particularly if the award mentions "courage." |
You'll never see a pompous letter like the one attacking Liz Cheney on behalf of any lawyer defending clients who are unpopular with lawyers, which terrorists are not. |
Ken Starr, a signatory to the "Please God, Let This Get Me a Good Obituary in The New York Times" letter, once, totally by mistake, had a case unpopular with the establishment: Bill Clinton's impeachment. |
He's shown his mettle by saying that if he met Clinton today, he'd say "I'm sorry." Because isn't that what Jesus said? Be very concerned with the opinion of the world! |
Speaking of which, I also never heard any testimonials to the sacred duty of lawyers to defend unpopular causes when every lawyer working on the Clinton impeachment was being smeared as a "tobacco lawyer." |
Tobacco companies, being wildly unpopular, are in need of a lot of legal services. Scratch any litigator from a big law firm and you'll find someone who, if necessary, could be slimed as a "tobacco lawyer." |
You will notice a pattern developing: We only hear paeans to the "American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients" when it's being used to defend causes popular with liberals -- serial killers, terrorists and a horny hick who promised to save partial-birth abortion. |
Lawyers want to be congratulated for their courage in defending "unpopular" clients, while taking cases that are utterly noncontroversial in their social circles. |
They'd be scared to death to take the case of an anti-abortion activist. Defending the guy who killed George Tiller the Baby Killer won't make them a superstar at the next ABA convention. |
Not only do Americans have a right to know the legal backgrounds of lawyers setting detainee policy at the Department of Justice, but I personally demand the right not to have to listen to Eddie Haskell lawyers constantly claiming to be Atticus Finch. |
Colombia: 100 Human Rights Activists Killed in 2017, According to U.N. | Democracy Now! |
Colombia: 100 Human Rights Activists Killed in 2017, According to U.N. |
In Colombia, the United Nations says more than 100 human rights activists and community leaders have been murdered this year. The United Nations says most of the activists killed were Afro-Colombian and indigenous, and that the most dangerous regions are places where the FARC has withdrawn from power, following a peace... |
On Saturday, May 7, the Kübb Krawl will bring an ancient Scandinavian game that’s sort of the Viking version of bocce ball to parks and ballparks throughout the Twin Cities. |
The event is a multi-venue kübb tournament in which 32 teams will be given Metro Transit day passes for the Green Line with stops along the way to play kübb. |
Pronounced “koob,” it’s a sort of lawn game that involves tossing wood sticks to topple over an opposing team’s line of wood block men. |
The Kübb Krawl competition will run from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. and will include matches at the Target Field Plaza Station, Marquette Plaza and Gold Medal Park in Minneapolis, and the Minnesota state Capitol grounds and CHS Field in St. Paul. At 6 p.m., there will be a Kübb Party at CHS Field open to sponsors, vendors an... |
Registration for teams of three to six players costs $60 per team. |
The party is free and open to the public, and there will be additional kübb pitches set up for non-Krawl participants. Free kübb sets will be raffled off, and there will be Summit beer and live music from Music in Mears. For details, see facebook.com/saintpaulkubbsociety or minnesotakubb.com. |
There's no two ways around it: The PC is slowing down with age. |
That may be a bit harsh—computers are faster and smaller than ever before—but processor performance simply isn't advancing at its past breakneck pace. At one time, 50 to 60 percent leaps in year-to-year performance were commonplace. Now, 10 to 15 percent improvements are the norm. |
Luckily, five-plus-year-old computers can still tackle everyday tasks just fine, so the performance slowdown isn't a huge issue. Plus, it's nice not having to replace your PC every other year during a down economy. But technology doesn't advance by sticking to the status quo. The future needs speed! |
"I don't think there's any ifs or buts about this. Heterogeneous architectures are the way of the future." |
Fortunately, the biggest names in PC processors aren't satisfied with the status quo. Chip makers are working furiously to solve the problems posed by a slowing Moore's Law and the rise of the power wall, in a bid to keep the performance pedal to the metal. |
So what kinds of radical tricks do they have up their sleeves? Several different kinds, actually—and each holds great potential for the future. Let's take a look behind the curtain. |
Can we chalk up today's paltry performance gains to a breakdown in Moore's Law? Not quite. Moore's legendary line might be frequently misquoted to talk about CPU performance, but the letter of the Law revolves around the number of transistors on a circuit doubling every two years. |
While other chip makers have struggled to shrink transistors and squeeze more of them onto a chip, Intel—the company Moore himself cofounded—has kept pace with Moore's Law since its utterance, an achievement that can be laid at the feet of Intel's small army of engineers. Not just any engineers, though. Clever engineer... |
As transistors become more tightly packed, heat and power-efficiency concerns become major problems. Now that transistors are reaching almost infinitesimally small sizes—each of the billion-plus transistors in Intel's Ivy Bridge chips measure 22 nanometers (nm), or roughly 0.000000866 inch—conquering those woes takes c... |
"There's no doubt it's getting hard," Intel technical manufacturing manager Chuck Mulloy said in a phone interview. "Really, really hard. I mean, we're at the atomic level." |
To keep progress a-rollin', Intel has made some significant changes to the base design of transistors over the past decade. In 2002, the company announced that it was switching to so-called "strained silicon," which increased chip performance by 10 to 20 percent by slightly deforming the structure of silicon crystals. |
Mo' power means mo' problems, though. Specifically, as transistors continue to shrink, they suffer from increased electron "leakage," which makes them far less efficient. Two recent tweaks combat that leakage in novel ways. |
Without getting too geeky, the company started by swapping out the transistors' standard silicon dioxide insulators in favor of more efficient "high-k metal-gate" insulators during its shift to the 45nm manufacturing process. It sounds simple, but it was actually a big deal. That was followed by an even more monumental... |
Traditional "planar" transistors have a pair of "gates" on either side of the channels that carry electrons. Tri-gate transistors shattered that two-dimensional thinking with the addition of a third gate over the channel, connecting the two side gates. The design improves efficiency by reducing leakage while lowering p... |
So what's next for Intel? The company isn't telling. In fact, Mulloy says that any technology the company might use—like, say, the next-gen extreme ultraviolet lithography fabrication process—goes into a PR "black hole" years before Intel introduces it in its chips. But, he stressed, the past improvements discussed abo... |
"People tend to think 'Intel used this, now they're on to the next thing,'" Mulloy said. "Strained silicon did not go away when we added the capabilities of high-k metal gate. High-k metal gate didn't go away when we went to tri-gate transistors—we're still building and improving on that. We're at the fourth generation... |
The best chip technology out there just keeps getting better, in other words. |
Oh, and for what it's worth, Intel thinks Moore's Law will continue unabated for at least two more transistor-shrink generations. |
Intel isn't the only chip maker in town, though. Rather than betting purely on improvements to transistor technology, rival AMD thinks the future of performance hinges on cutting CPUs some slack by shifting some of the workload to other processors that might be better suited for particular tasks. Graphics processors, f... |
Ever heard of parallel computing? That's what we're talking about. |
The design of an AMD APU built to HSA standards. |
"Going into smaller nodes on the transistor side increases [CPU] performance by 6 to 8 to maybe 10 percent, year to year," says Sasa Marinkovic, a senior technology marketing manufacturer at AMD. "But adding a GPU with GPU compute capabilities gives much larger gains. For example, for Internet Explorer 8 to IE9 the per... |
"We see that type of performance leap playing within today's power envelope, or you can greatly lower the power envelope and see the same performance [you have today]," Marinkovic says. |
AMD has been inching toward a heterogeneous system architecture—as the method of distributing the workload amongst several processors on a single chip is called—in its popular accelerated processing units, or APUs, including the one powering the upcoming PlayStation 4 gaming console. APUs contain traditional CPU cores ... |
AMD isn't the only chip maker backing the idea of parallel computing. The company was a founding member of the HSA Foundation, a consortium of top chip makers—albeit sans Intel and Nvidia—that are working together to create standards that should hopefully make programming for parallel computing easier in the future. |
It's a good thing that industry-leading companies provide the backbone of the HSA Foundation's vision, because in order for the grand heterogeneous future of parallel computing to come to fruition, programs and applications need to be specifically written to take advantage of the hardware designs. |
"Software is the key," Marinkovic admits. "When you look at APUs with [full HSA compatibility] and without full HSA, the software will have to change. But it will be a change for the better…Where we want to get to is code-once, and use everywhere. Once you have the HSA architecture across all these different HSA Founda... |
You can already find application processing interfaces (APIs) that enable parallel GPU computing, such as Nvidia's GeForce-centric CUDA platform, the DirectCompute API baked into DirectX 11 on Windows system, and OpenCL, an open-source solution managed by the Khronos Group. |
Support for hardware acceleration is picking up among software developers, though most of the programs handle intensive graphics in some way. Internet Explorer and Flash are on the bandwagon, for instance. Just last week, Adobe announced it was adding OpenCL support for the Windows version of Premiere Pro. According to... |
"I don't think there's any ifs or buts about this," Marinkovic says. "Heterogeneous architectures are the way of the future." |
OPEL: So long, silicon, hello, gallium arsenide! |
But is that future based on silicon technology, as today's computing is? |
Definitely, for the short term. Definitely not, in the long term. Sometime in the future—experts don't know exactly when—silicon will reach its limits and simply won't be able to be pushed any further. Chip makers will have to switch to another material. |
The view of an indium gallium arsenide transistor fabricated by MIT researchers. |
That day is a long way off, but researchers are already exploring alternatives. Graphene processors receive a lot of hype as a potential silicon successor, but OPEL Technologies thinks the future lies in gallium arsenide. |
OPEL has been fine-tuning the gallium arsenide technology at the heart of its POET (Planar Opto Electronic Technology) platform for more than 20 years, and the company has worked with BAE and the U.S. Department of Defense (among others) to validate it. While past processor forays into gallium arsenide have ended in mi... |
OPEL only recently exited the R&D stage and hasn't tried to make itty-bitty transistors at Ivy Bridge's 20nm size, but the company claims that at 800nm, gallium arsenide processors are faster than today's silicon and use roughly half as much voltage. |
"If you wanted to match the speed of today's silicon processors, at roughly a 3GHz clock rate, you wouldn't have to go all the way down to 20 or 30 nanometers," says OPEL chief scientist Dr. Geoffrey Taylor. "Heck, you could probably hit that at 200nm." And that's using planar technology, not 3D transistors. |
One of the biggest problems any silicon alternative faces is that silicon is the most cutting-edge technology in the world, with billions invested in manufacturing silicon processors to maximum efficiency. It's going to be hard to convince Intel, AMD, ARM, and the HSA Foundation to drop all that for a new material. OPE... |
"It's scalable, and it's bolt-on to CMOS," says executive director Peter Copetti. "That's very important. In our discussions with different foundries and semiconductor companies, the first thing they ask is 'Do I have to retool my facilities?' The investment here is minimal because our system is complementary to what's... |
A European Space Agency clean room for chip fabrication. |
The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors has identified gallium arsenide as a potential silicon replacement sometime between 2018 and 2026. There is still a ton of testing and transitioning to be done before gallium arsenide captures any of the mainstream PC processor market, but if even a fraction of OP... |
So, after all that—whew!—you have a better idea of where the future of PC performance is headed. The initiatives from Intel, AMD, and OPEL each tackle big problems in decidedly different ways, but that's a good thing. You don't want all of your potential eggs in a single basket, after all. |
And best of all, if all those disparate pieces of the PC performance puzzle prove successful, they could theoretically merge in Voltron-like fashion to create an uber-powerful, GPU-assisted, tri-gate gallium arsenide processor that could blow the pants off even the beefiest of today's Core i7 processors. |
Today's performance curve may be flattening out, but the future has never looked so beastly. |
those people who have been marked off the list have Ebola. |
watch list, including fiancee at the first patient diagnosed in the U.S. |
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I`m freed. Ebola-free. |
we can`t get into hysteria or fear. |
sneeze or some, or cough, some of the airborne particles can be infectious. |
HAYES: Then, the kissing congressman tries for a comeback. |
Plus, some unexpected hope for Democrats in red states. |
And, the great pumpkin riot of 2014. |
off the list have Ebola. They were in contact with a person who had Ebola. |
they are -- they do not have Ebola. |
other family members when he passed away on October 8th. |
Troh`s pastor her state of mind this morning on "The Today Show". |
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mixed emotions, I suppose, is still the right thing. |
have contracted Ebola, but today, today is a good day. |
not to let fear affect that treatment of those kids. |
may not understand them or may think that they have some problem. |
contracted the disease from him, we have yet to see another case of Ebola. |
the apartment with contaminated items after he tested positive. |
Today, those people are officially Ebola-free. |
have been saying all along. Ebola is relatively difficult to transmit. |
we know how to stamp it out. |
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