sublimeguile

When the noise reached us a second later, we recognized it as the loudest any of us had ever heard, louder of course than thunder, jets, and the explosive charges set off in quarries, the concentrated energies of tens of millions of years of solar energy being released in an instant. We recognized that we were caught up in an irreproducible and irrepresentable event.Moreover, what lent the scene its particular drama, though it would invariably be omitted from later accounts, was our terror as to what would happen next, for it seemed unlikely that there could ever be a sane, bloodless conclusion to the cataclysm.

The rocket rose, and there was a collective gasp, a most naive, amazed Ahh, inarticulate and primordial, as all of us for a moment forgot ourselves — our education, manners, and sense of irony - to follow the fine white javelin on its ascent through the southern skies.

At a first glance this may appear like a cool locking free operation that makes possible to perform a lot of higher level atomic operations without locking. Unfortunately if you study a bit more in depth the semantic it turns out that CAS is a weak, ill conceived, form of locking. Basically when CAS returns that it was not able to perform the operation because some client updated the key in the meantime you need to redo the operation again: this is like waiting for a lock, but with two main drawbacks:

- You will find that the lock was not obtained after you already did all the work to create the new value, issued and transfered the new value, and so on…

- There is no serialization of all the clients waiting for a key. […]

So IMHO CAS appears to be cool but it sucks.

To most of us it seems extraordinary that Silvio Berlusconi is still prime minister of Italy. There can’t be many politicians who could survive the sort of scandals he’s been through: accusations of perjury, perverting the course of justice, proximity to the Mafia, accusations of membership of a sinister masonic lodge, of tax evasion and of corrupting public officials. And now, on top of all that, it has been discovered that he’s been enjoying Dionysian parties with dozens of young girls at both of his Sardinian and Roman villas.

This time he doesn’t even deny the central allegations. Not surprisingly, perhaps, since there’s overwhelming evidence of what went on: there are photographs of topless girls in G-strings lounging around his villa, there are wiretaps of businessmen lining up escort girls for Silvio’s parties. One escort has revealed she was given only half her “appearance fee” because she didn’t stay the night (she didn’t make that mistake again). The question isn’t did he or didn’t he, but simply: how on earth does he get away with it? How is it that a country we think of as a close neighbour, which we all think we know so well, has such a different morality to ours?

If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it’s biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it’s nature’s way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature’s way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it’s evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.

The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn’t real.