Depending on which European country it's not necessarily forbidden. "Compliance reasons" may also mean "the company must pay overtime at the appropriate rate" and they just don't want to deal with that.

The fact that you're comparing CUDA to using triangles and shaders makes me think you might be confusing OpenCL with OpenGL.

OpenCL is meant for general computation (the C is for "computing") rather than graphics, like CUDA.

> Pixels are a unit of area like an acre or square meter.

Some computer graphics experts don't agree with this: http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf

I've skimmed the article, it's gunnuh take me a while to read it so that I can respond properly. In case I don't get around to it, thanks for the article. It's an interesting perspective.

> there is no mechanism to unionize wait staff, or kitchen staff, dishwashers etc. included

There is, however, a "union" of restaurant owners who lobbies against improving minimum wage and working conditions for restaurant workers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Restaurant_Associatio...

How well has that worked out?

Anyone interested in how GPUs work should read the series of blog posts by Fabian Giesen "A trip through the graphics pipeline": https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-...

Thanks for the pointer to zopfli. I've used p7zip in the past as a "better gzip", and it gets good results for this one too :D

  $ curl -s http://danlec.com/st4k | gzip -cd | 7z a -si -tgzip -mx=9 compressed.gz
  $ wc compressed.gz 
    14   84 4048 compressed.gz

I did the same for C++. I hate many aspects of the language, and it feels really ugly compared to newer languages like C#, or even D, but it's still my language of choice for some projects (mostly because the tools are mature and almost everywhere).

The GPU doesn't execute Javascript. It runs small programs called "shaders", written in GLSL (the OpenGL shading language), which are compiled on the fly by the graphics driver to something that can be actually executed on the GPU.

I think a valid, although not legal, motivation for that could be "I just want something Microsoft will activate because I want a clean (i.e.: without applying a random crack from the Internet which could install malware) Windows install, at the minimum possible cost".

I'm getting the same from 149.11.24.18 (home Internet connection, Spain) and te-4-4-gblx.sto1.se.portlane.net (from a US-based VPS).