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Rampant corruption in the US means that two planes HAD TO CRASH prior to anything being done.

Remember Ford Pinto?

Well, the Boeing 737 Max saga is a rehash of what happened back in the late 1970's.

https://users.wfu.edu/palmitar...

In both case NTSB didn't do nothing UNTIL massive backlash from the userland !!

https://users.wfu.edu/palmitar... Remember Ford Pinto. the defective car that ended up killing passengers? Boeing 737 Max Series is in the same league. Both the Boeing 737 Max Series and Ford Pinto have design defects and yet the manufacturers, Ford Motor Company and Boeing, never warned their customers of the defects. And when accidents happened and people being killed, the manufacturers put up a wall of denial , blaming the drivers / pilots for being the culprits, instead. And both companies, Ford Motors and Boeing, are American Companies , and both companies got the backing of the government of the United States of America . Both Ford Pinto and Boeing 737 Max Series were certified by the US government as being SAFE. And when news of the accidents spread, both companies got the backing of the US government in DENYING THEIR OWN FAULTS ! In other words, how can anyone put any more trust in the government of the United States of America ??

I'm going out in a limb here but maybe they were acting on the information

Try https://users.wfu.edu/palmitar...

You won't regret it.

> If you're saying they continued to roll out new flawed chips they had time to fix before release,
> that's a level of conspiracy theory that's hard to buy into without some concrete evidence.

Would not be the first such event. Ever heard of the Ford Pinto (and Mercury Bobcat)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Ford chose to continue to ship cars with defective fuel tanks, rather than spend $11 per car to fix the problem https://users.wfu.edu/palmitar...

> Although Ford had access to a new design which would decrease the
> possibility of the Ford Pinto from exploding, the company chose not to
> implement the design, which would have cost $11 per car, even though it had
> done an analysis showing that the new design would result in 180 less deaths.

This isn't a new idea. Kantorovich (one of the inventors of linear programming) considered this venue of economic optimization himself, but the technology of the day wasn't up to the task and the bureaucracy didn't want to be displaced either. Some of his suggestions inspired the reforms that later got implemented by Kosygin, but the Soviet economy was rather distorted by subsidies at that point, so a lot of those reforms got rolled back.

There was also the fear that linear programming, with its shadow prices, would covertly smuggle capitalism into communism. See also Red Plenty for a half-fictionalized account of Kantorovich's attempts (or the Crooked Timber post, In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You).

Beyond that, there's Towards a New Socialism which is an idea/plan of how to run a socialist centrally planned society with modern technology. It uses sparse linear programming for the plan construction part and is based on sortition for government to diminish the inevitable corruption that comes with concentrating economic power like any CPE does. Would it work? Who knows? It may be interesting in the utopian sense anyway.

Tangentially related (speaking of scientific communism/socialism), there's also Project Cybersyn, the project to use cybernetics to run socialist Chile. That wasn't based on linear programming, though. If linear programming is the neat route, Cybersyn would be the scruffy route. Again, who knows whether it would have worked; if Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is anything to go by, a considerable part of the problem was that of bureaucracy and what the people were used to. Managers didn't use the system because it felt cumbersome to do so, etc.

Now you're doing better, that's good.

The thing is, we aren't talking about the end of all crops here......we're talking about a winter where 200,000 people died in Europe, out of 200 million. That's with horrible farming practices, lousy distribution systems, and plenty of hoarding.

Our modern agriculture system is much more prepared to handle something like that.

The article starts with a picture that suggests it replaces the Esc key. (I can hear your screams of shock and pain from here.)

You're right. Initially I thought it was up in the uselss-wank row of keys that vendors like to put above the function keys, but it does appear to be replacing the Esc key. Assuming they then follow the Lenovo Carbon Gen 2 model of keyboard braindamage which is... well it's hard to describe in words, see for yourself (yes, someone actually did that on purpose, which is why you can buy Gen 2's on eBay for much less than the older Gen 1's), there'll be a quick subsequent release of a Model n+1 that undoes it all again.

You never hear about the good cops, except on slow news days.

Unfortunately, my life has led me to a point where I can never trust a cop or have love for law enforcement. I've met good cops, guys who truly believe they can do good with their badge and who often choose not to enforce laws they see as unnecessary (which, unfortunately, is a problem in and of itself). Bless them for trying to do good in society while so many are either apathetic or downright evil.

But, in the end, FTP because ACAB and 911 is a Joke. And I feel like more members of each new generation feel this way than the last, and I hope the powers that be understand they are on a collision course with historical truths, IE, what is outlined in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence or the opening words of Fighting For Our Lives.

I don't think I want to be in the western world when it collapses. I think we are such a violent bunch that even I might not survive, and I've spent years homeless, did time in Iraq, and so forth. I still don't have faith I'd be able to guide my family through the chaos of a societal meltdown in a culture which is so coddled and takes so much for granted. I think we need to GTFO here and definitely within the next ten years.

Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble

A corporation is the assembly of a number of people, called "shareholders", who have a certain common interest. The rights of a corporation are the rights of its owners.

Corporations are treated as persons in some respects because they have duties and obligations. If corporations didn't have those characteristics how would you enforce contracts? Who would you sue when you bought a car with a defective design?

Corporations have so much political strength not because they are rich, but because they really care about the issues they lobby for and against. For a media corporation, for instance, a certain detail about copyright law could mean the difference between profit or bankruptcy, for you it means paying a few bucks more to watch a film or listen to a song.

The only way to reduce the power corporations have in politics is to deregulate as much as possible. The more you regulate everything the more power you give to corporations

Have you ever used a touchscreen to play games? Constantly having your arm at attention and moving your hands around blocks screen real estate is a really big minus most people don't consider.

Have you ever used a touch-enabled device to play CARD GAMES? Touch-based devices offer more intuitive and easier-to-hit targets than the abstracted controls of something like a Nintendo hand held. Incidentally (not really), there is much anecdotal evidence that elderly people do very well with iPads. In some cases, iPads can also be used as an assistive device.

Regarding cost, iPads are right around $500. That's really not much for a device that may dramatically improve an elderly woman's quality of life. An iPad potentially be a more useful device than a Nintendo hand held, which I'm guessing would be disregarded after a few uses.

...they increase rear-end collisions, which have a low injury rate...

Unless you're riding in one of Lee Iacocca's specials

Keeping all lights red for a couple of seconds might reduce both..

When recording from any unfiltered analog source to a quantized digital format, frequencies above the sampling rate (which always exist in the unfiltered) become aliasing artifacts, similar to the moire sampling noise seen in the imaging world. The simple solution in the graphics world is to of course photograph in a higher resolution and then down-sample to the desired resolution. Going over 44.1khz in the audio field is the same general solution to this sampling problem.

The problem gets worse with small re-sampling adjustments that many computer users are doing without knowing it. Many motherboards come with 48khz DAC's so playing 44.1khz audio data (pretty much all audio data) is actually far less than ideal, "blurring out" the dynamics of the higher frequencies in the original.

Tell that to the people manslaughtered by the Ford Corporation when their Pinto cars blew-up. And yes accidents happen but the Corporation knew the fuel tanks were flawed and decided (as a whole), it was cheaper to just pay the dead people's families. That's practically premeditation. But what can you do?

Point out that in the case in question, the pinto had a missing gas cap and was hit at 55 mph by a van with a plank for a front bumper. It's unreasonable to expect a pijnto to survive that. The fact that they estimate a $11/unit design change would save 180 lives is offensive, but probably not relevant to the specific case.

You can argue both sides of this - cheaping out on something that makes a car safer causes an emotional response, but requiring a company to implement whatever it can to improve safety makes it impossible to produce cheap cars in the grey zone between dangerous and Volvo. Never mind that there's a very real potential for people to be more careless when more safety equipment is added, leading to the same level of risk.

Okay - so how do you POSSIBLY apply a statistical analysis on something as subjective as a womans physical attractiveness?

Actually, a study found that what men find attractive is rather consistent.

http://www.wfu.edu/news/release/2009.06.25.a.php

First Google hit:
http://www.wfu.edu/~palmitar/Law&Valuation/Papers/1999/Leggett-pinto.html

due to its ability to render funky typography. Its used because it separates the function of 'writing' from the function of 'typesetting'.

If you want to see a better explanation, see http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

- paragraph hyphenation is brain-dead one-line at a time
  - one must invoke commands to generate the ToC and Index and remember to re-invoke them if pagination changes
  - documents are non-portable / formatting is dependent on currently installed printer
  - graphics can be embedded and can be nightmarish to get out in a press-ready form
  - citations require third-party extensions which can interfere w/ importing / processing documents (hit Command shift F9 to convert all selected form fields to text)
  - There is no easy way to assign paragraph styles --- one has to build a custom toolbar to have them all available w/ a click, the arrangement of said toolbar is dependent on the _length_ of the stylenames --- why the outline view can't have some sort of pop-up menu or ability to assign more than Heading 1--n and Normal is beyond me
  - local formatting is insidious --- create an InDesign document, assign styles to everything, formatting everything w/ styles, take it into Word, then bring it back into InDesign and one will still have to clear over-rides to keep the text from being formatted as Times New Roman

and all of that doesn't consider stupid / ignorant users and the visually formatted, but not structured documents which they always create. Best indictment of that here:

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient by Allin Cottrell
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

If typography were easy, Word wouldn't be the foetid mess which it is.

One will also never use Word as the basis for back-end typesetting systems --- I've done them for customized children's stories and telephone directory line ads --- a co-worker (Jeff McArthur) at my previous workplace developed one which would do customized versions of the CIA World Factbook as a demo --- the original version did the typesetting for a 2,200 page register and the technology was customized and sold to several customers.

Also, to be fair and accurate, Quark XPress and several other DTP programs handle OpenType features in addition to InDesign and XeTeX/XeLaTeX http://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex and the nascent luatex, http://www.luatex.org/ (as well as ant http://ant.berlios.de/).

William
(who wrote a several thousand line WordBASIC macro to handle the formatting for a review journal for a major sci-med publisher so that the text could be pulled into Quark XPress 6, then 7, then finally InDesign CS3 --- I also wrote a xelatex package for typesetting the journal, but that was nixed by my boss 'cause if the journal had been done in TeX it would've been outsourced to India)

The more guns there are in a society the more intentional homicides, be it Somalia, USA, or Switzerland (three of the countries with the highest rates of gun violence and homicide anywhere in the world).

So, what's your solution then? A gun prohibition? I suspect that will work about as well as Alcohol Prohibition or the "War on Drugs", which is to say not at all.

The current arrangement in no way perfect. But there's no way to prove that a divisive campaign to rid the public of its arms wouldn't be worse. And even IF there are less bodies in the end, at some point one needs to consider how the people live rather than how many die. Being servants of the state or victims of the largest, meanest group aren't exactly desirable outcomes. And what about the will of the people? If the majority of voters see a place for firearms in private hands, why should they be denied that in a Democratic country? Because you know better? For their own good? Such is the mindset of an oligarch, an authoritarian.

-Grym

Unless you are co-authoring documents with other persons, exchanging word processor files in order to exchange information is just stupid. If its a quick note, tech them to just TYPE IT IN THE EMAIL CLIENT.

If its something formal, they should print it (either to real paper, or 'electronic' paper such as PDF)

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

1. Want to force customers to buy new, expensive players instead of minor DSP/Firmware upgrades to existing player designs

How expensive were DVD players when they first came out? What about DVD burners? You think Blu-Ray is going to be expensive forever?

2. Want to force customers to have a difficult time making their own HD media because Blu-Ray writable media and burners are too expensive.

Yes, because we all know if it's expensive technology now it will be expensive technology forever! Just look at the CD-ROM drive, just the other day I saw a 2x CD-ROM drive for $400! It did come with a fancy new SoundBlaster sound card (ISA), which my $3,000 IBM PS/2 lacks, but still, CD-ROM drives are far too expensive for the average person to ever afford. Although the same could be said for computers. [/sarcasm]

3. Believe that by making the size larger that pirates can't figure out how to transcode to a smaller formant before posting on the internet (and that 30G images are too big to download)

Yeah the 30 gig movie file is all padding, and compressing it down to 4 gigs does not degrade the picture or audio quality. Plus with high speed internet being so widely available, and massive hard drives being so cheap, it'd be impossible for pirates to download 30 gig movies.

4. Want to be able to ship many movies on a single disc... but that doesn't seem to be happening

Why would I buy a blu-ray disc for 10 DVD quality movies?

From your post I assume you're either too young to know how the whole system works (new technology = expensive at first) or you don't own a blu-ray player and a TV capable of showing you how nice the image really looks. I watched Lord of the Rings on my PS3 and my 56" TV, this was right after seeing my first blu-ray movie. The difference in quality between DVD and Blu-Ray is incredible. It's something you really have to see with your own eyes. Eventually when blu-ray comes down in price just like every other piece of new technology in history, you'll go down to Walmart and buy a $30 blu-ray player with some discount $5 blu-ray movies and see what all the fuss is about.

You're missing the point of using LaTeX. While it is true that LaTeX makes it very easy to add equations to a dissertation, the biggest problem with using Word is that you're constantly dealing with the formatting of your document rather than actually writing the content of your document.

This is a lie^H^H^Hbiased view of reality, which has been repeated over and over again ever since this pamphlet appeared about 10 years ago. I don't know what the state of affairs was at that time. Anyway, today it is perfectly possible to do structural markup in Word or any other decent word processor. You don't have to deal with formatting at all, you leave this to the designer of the template you are using. What you gain by choosing a word processor over 80s-style LaTeX is usability: you will actually see the text you are producing (and not an unreadable mixture of text and program code), and you will be able to add out-of-band comments to very specific parts of your product. You will also get an online help that is not powered by Google and mailing list archives. Try it, it works.

I'm surprised nobody has linked to this definitive essay: Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient: Says it all.

How to play Guitar by David [Jad] Fair

I taught myself to play guitar. It's incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That's all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that's pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you'd still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.

Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it's your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn't have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.

Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It's your guitar and you're the one playing it. It's completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound. In fact I don't tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they're all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple of reasons. First of all they don't depend on body resonating for the sound so it doesn't matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls.

The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn't matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I've never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you'd feel pretty foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn't to feel foolish. The idea is to put a pick in one hand and a guitar in the other and with a tiny movement rule the world.

There is no reason you can't both print out a 'document' for 'archival' (either to paper or to PDF) *and* seperately save it in an editable format for future re-use/modification, in some appropriate format. Also, for anything longer than a simple memo or short letter, consider the information at the link at the bottom of my post.

As far as me dealing with 'Word Docs' - feel free to point me at the RFC (or other 100% public non-NDA documentiation) that details this format to the bit-level, and I'll find someone that either has or can write some software for dealing with them. Absent that, I don't acknowledge its existence. ODF would be an appropriate format for sharing documents with others that you want both to retain the 'appearance' and want them to be able to change, UNLESS you agreed beforehand, with everyone you were going to collaborate with, on some other format. 'Word Docs' should never be posted on websites for public access, or emailed to someone that you aren't collaborating on that document with and have previously agreed with to use that format.

http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

What is really bullshit is writing documents purely in terms of appearance.

http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

Case in point : my wife filled in a job application last night. The application form was a Word document (as RTF, but RTF is just a different Word format). It took her about 3 hours, and the vast majority of the time was spent transcribing information out of her CV (also a Word document) and mucking about with the formatting. She didn't at any point write any new content ; the application just wanted the form filling in, and a copy of her CV, which contained most of the data in the form to start with. And this took three hours, lots of head scratching, brow furrowing and swearing at her laptop. Wifey is not a natural computer user, but I reckon I would still have taken about 2 hours doing the same thing, with most of the time difference accounted for by use of shortcut keys and my faster typing. I would not have been performing a different task set, since there really wasn't any clever magic that would have prevented me having to do the same thing and manually transcribe everything out of her CV into the form.

What SHOULD have happened is that either the form would have been aware of typical CV data, my wife would have had a CV written in a format that understands CV data, and a button click would have filled in the form from the CV file. Or even better, the job application would just take a CV file and a covering note. The process would have taken 5 minutes instead of 3 hours, and my wife could have gotten back to enjoying a glass of wine and an episode or two of Ugly Betty. Job applications are a well-understood application domain with millions of users, but the only support Word provides for a CV is a template that provides visual formatting and ONLY visual formatting.

When my wife writes documents she obsesses about the formatting during the writing. This disrupts her flow of composition and stresses her out immensely. I really think she would benefit from using TeX instead, especially since she mostly writes academic papers. But she's stuck with the WYSIWYG paradigm because that's all she knows, and she's not willing to make an investment in computer time to improve her productivity.

I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS at university, which was probably more productive than Word. A white-on-blue plaintext terminal screen, you concentrated solely on document structure. These days the vast majority of text I type goes into an IDE, a Notepad2 window, or one of the incarnations of vim. Using HTML, even in an HTML editor, would not improve matters for me at all.

The next great phase of office productivity will come from documents with intelligent markup that states what the content is and not just what it should look like.

The bottom line is that Joe Average just doesn't mind being pushed around as long as he's comfortable. Very discouraging for the future of free will, independent thinking, privacy, security, liberty and other non-socialist, non-communist ideals in the USA.

"Power conversion efficiencies from these cells are typically below 4% (eg. 1.8% original report, Sun et. al Nano Lett 3, 961). A good crystalline silicon cell will give you 12-15%."

2007/04/18: -> "Plastic solar cell efficiency breaks record at WFU nanotechnology center"

The global search for a sustainable energy supply is making significant strides at Wake Forest University as researchers at the university's Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials have announced that they have pushed the efficiency of plastic solar cells to more than 6 percent.

http://www.wfu.edu/news/release/2007.04.18.n.php

Because they are flexible and easy to work with, plastic solar cells could be used as a replacement for roof tiling or home siding products or incorporated into traditional building facades. These energy harvesting devices could also be placed on automobiles. Since plastic solar cells are much lighter than the silicon solar panels structures do not have to be reinforced to support additional weight.

This page (in German, scroll down for English version) has more about it, including citations from the original works by Chladni, more pictures of the famous figures on metal plates, and a link to http://www.wfu.edu/physics/demolabs/demos/avimov/w aves/chladni_plates/resonance_square.MPG/ (21MB) from Wake Forest University. This is the longer version of the experiments that can be seen in the video linked in the summary. There's also a link to http://www.phy.davidson.edu/StuHome/jimn/Java/mode s.html/ which has an interactive java applet to plot Chladni figures.

"Dr. Plunkett was under contract with the DuPont Company and was doing research on methods of creating non-toxic refrigerants that would have very specialized uses; however, upon beginning his original experiment he realized that he had a problem . When he went to open the tank of gaseous tetrafluoroethylene, no gas came out of the cylinder; instead the only thing that came from this was a great curiosity . What perplexed Plunkett was that the weight of the tank indicated that there should be a given amount of the fluorocarbon present in the tank, and that it simply hadn't leaked out. This puzzled Plunkett and caused him to investigate what was actually still in the "empty" tank; however, it was not until he sawed the tank open that he realized what had taken place. Inside the tank he found a white, waxy powder and concluded that these individual gas molecules had bonded together to form this incredible solid, teflon, that had some very promising chemical properties."

Source: http://users.wfu.edu/starbt5/Serendipity%20Project /website/Serendipity.htm

Actually, my dad was the one publishing a study demonstrating that rounding all cash transactions to the nearest nickel would result in just-about-0 net change for everyone involved. Google around for whaples penny. :)

"Word Processors" supporting (or not) different fonts doesnt even begin to compare.

http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

TFA doesn't mention one of the more interesting accidental (or serendipitous) discoveries, Teflon.

One day in his chemistry lab, Dr. Roy J. Plunkett went to open a tank of gaseous tetrafluoroethylene, but no gas came out. Many lab workers, even scientists, would simply replace the tank with a full one. But not Plunkett! He weighed the tank and mysteriously, it still weighed the same as when it was full of gas! Evidently the gas had *not* leaked out.

He investigated by actually sawing the gas tank open. Inside he found a white, waxy powder! The original gas molecules had bonded together to form this incredible solid, eventually named Teflon.

If he hadn't thought "Hmm, that's odd" and pursued it, he wouldn't have discovered Teflon.

See http://users.wfu.edu/starbt5/Serendipity%20Project /website/Serendipity.htm

Greedy lawyers ( http://users.wfu.edu/palmitar/Courses/SecReg-Palmi ter/Handout/Articles/Elkind-Lerach-King-Dead.htm ) and Wall Street vultures (sorry, "respected industry analysts") changed the companies' mentality to the short term one.

It is interesting that McNeely actually was objecting to the latest layoffs.

And you didn't install the OS yourself from something "known good" (or at least believed good, like a generic windows install CD bought at best buy or your other favorite local rip-off shop) you're an idiot.

Irrelevant.

BIOS has gotten to the point that it can "phone home" before you even get to the OS. A small modification to hardware or firmware can make it so the system inserts key packets into the network stream, sending covert messages out to the equivalent of electronic "dead drops".

We aren't talking about always-on-a-secure-network PCs, but laptops that'll be jacked into hotels, Starbucks and other insecure networks at some point.

Unless you jack those machines in behind a traffic analyzer/router that captures every packet, then analyze *each* packet that goes out of the machine, you'll never be 100% sure the hardware isn't trojaned.

Ping is nice and innocuous. Are you sure you know what that 56-byte payload contains? Have you ever looked? What about DNS requests? They happen ALL the time. Did you analyze each one to make sure they aren't requesting TXT-records that get forwarded over to a Chinese-owned server in the U.S.?

  -Charles

http://www.wfu.edu/~matthews/misc/DigPhotog/alias/

"That is a great example, because it actually shows one of Foveon's great strengths. yes to some extent false detail is presented. However what you convienently fail to mention is the alterantive in such cases that the Bayer chip presents - gray shapeless mush."

Well if you believe that, then it is the perfect camera for you. That is clear example of Aliasing error and it doesn't look in any way natural, it looks like moire to me. This seems to be the big deciding factor between those who prefer the Sigma. Those who like this false detail, prefer sigma images.

As far as your offerred comparisons, if you have seen any comparison discussions before, then you should know that it is totally pointless to compare completely differernt images.

Take comparable lenses, shoot the same subject under the same light in RAW mode.Then compare an 8MP bayer camera and it will capture marginally more detail than the sigma.

"They tell you the camera has 8MP, but "forget" to mention that in reality it has 4M green pixels and 2M of each red and blue. And there's a blurring filter in front of the sensor to reduce moire. So if you photograph fall foliage, your 8MP camera turns into a 2MP one at best. In the BEST case, it's a 4MP camera really, not 8MP.

The only sensor that takes full RGB readings at each sensor location is Foveon, but it suffers from inferior color reproduction and lower ISO sensitivity. It's also pretty low on "real" pixel count - currently at around 3.5MP (which in Canon/Nikon terminology would be called 10MP, because each pixel takes full RGB readout). Foveon pictures are extremely sharp, though, and render textures very well."

This utterly fails to take into account how the human visual system works. It also fails to take into account the necessity of filtering when sampling. It also fails to take into account the sophistication of current interpolation algorithms.

The Bayer pattern is actually just about the most efficient layout for capturing images for human perception. I have done dozens of camparison of images capture using the 6Million Bayer arrayed sensors, versus 10.2 Million layered sensors. In the end they are essentially equivalent. The bayer layout allows you to do more with less by taking into account the human image processing system that is heavily organized to toward luminance/green information.

It is utter fanboy nonsense to say a bayer 8MP camera turns into a 2MP when taking fall foliage shots. In any real world situation including fall foliage, an 8MP bayer camera like the Canon 350D will capture more detail than the Foveon sensored SD10 NEW 10.2 Million Pixels (3.4 Mp Red + 3.4 MP Green + 3.4 Mp Blue) (description from Sigma USA page).

As technical bunch we should be able to understand that optimization is sometimes better than brute force. By tilting the sensor toward green, it is tilted toward luminance capture and tilted toward the way humans view details.

In thousand of empirical comparison online, parity is reached when there is an approximately equal number of green sensors. So 6MP bayer (3MP green) where approximate equal to 10.2MP foveon chip with ~3MP green. Actual 10MP bayer (5MP green) cameras like Nikon D200 easily capture much more detail than Sigmas 10.2MP chip.

The sampling issue. The Sigma has no filter to prevent undersampling artifacts. It doesn't suffer from colour moire artifacts, but it has plenty of luminance moire. See here for an ancient comparison of the 6MP Canon D60 and the 10.2MP Sigma SD9:
http://www.wfu.edu/~matthews/misc/DigPhotog/alias/
Scroll to the photo comparison at the end. The only extra detail in the Foveon based image is Aliasing errors. These are extremely prevalent in Sigma images with sharp diagnals, or repeating patterns beyond the Nyquist frequency of the sensor.

In the end, bayer is an excellent engineering optimization to do more with less. The real comparison that counts is how does it compare with film. A 6mp Bayer sensor in an DSLR is already better than 35mm film. By 10MP it is significantly better.

The other important factor is how the bayer DPI translates in the printed image. I have found that around 240 DPI is close to optimal image quality. So a Canon 350D with a 3456 pixel image width can produce a superb quality image about 14 inches wide. Be aware this is not to say you can't print larger. This is highly subjective depending on source material, but with detailed material this is the point where I consider that you would be hard pressed to notice any improvement from more pixels.

So even if you only want to print 13"x19" I think you could still see improvement from more pixels if printing detailed subjects like landscapes.

You can argue the quandry of subject, material and view distance till the cows come when considering viable prints size. I mere wish to express what I consider the

http://webmasterdesignz.com/rphollenbeck/GradPortf olio/Papers/621-IP/

And this goes into much more detail about IP6 specifically than the article

http://www.cs.wfu.edu/~torgerse/Kokua/SGI/007-2860 -008/sgi_html/ch02.html#LE38116-PARENT

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The InterNet is a terrible thing to waste. Arrest Bill Gates and shut down Microsoft immediately.

Oh really? What non-Microsoft application is able to load and interpret MS-Word created 'DOC' files with anything approaching 100%? Which ones are available for non-MS OS platforms?

The point is that the format (MS's, that is) is *proprietary*, not openly and publically documented, which means if you want to write software that supports it, you either have to use an MS-supported binary only function library, or you are SOL.

Assuming OpenDoc is what I think it is, anyone anywhere, including freelancers, corps, can write software that supports it, and doesnt have to get anyones permission or license to do so.

That there is no currently popular open format is a testament to MS' current illegal monopoly control of this market.

And for good measure, I'll throw in:

http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

When you say his "source code" you mean this link, clicking on e-mail addresses right?

lame

Hmmm... sounds like a challenge to me. Let's see what we can dig up.

Step 1: Let's look at his user page

Ahh! He put in a website with his profile. Let's all go and check out http://fennec.homedns.org/

Hmm... looks like a personal page. Not too sure what to make of the comic. Anyway, let's move on to..

Step 2: Let's look at his author page. Some interesting stuff here, including three separate e-mail addresses (which I won't post here. You're welcome :)

A-ha! There is a link to his employer! It's Economic History Services. And what do you know... there are a significant number of pages (especially under abstracts and book reviews) that seem to come straight out of a word processor, only with extensive cleaning. A quick look at the source reveals something interesting. It's clean. Very clean. We're talking on the level of I-use-vim-for-my-webpage-editor clean. Nice job.

Anyway, it looks like it was done by hand. I'm not saying its not good work (quite to the contrary), but I can see your need for an automated solution.

At my university they do offer courses in the computer science department very similar to those you described, usually under the heading of CSC 191: Special Topics (examples this semester: "Unix Systems Administration" and a course on Perl). They're typically half a semester long, worth 1.5 credit-hours (normal classes are worth 3, sometimes 4) and are explicitly excluded from being counted towards the computer science major. They're purely elective.

Incidentally, they are now pushing Cingular Wireless phones with a "special" university offer every year at orientation (and with the mailings before) and looking (for the future) into some way to combine their wireless network with some PDA/phone they can give to all students as part of their "incoming freshman" technology package. There's nothing particularly exciting on that front yet, though...

I have never felt more unhealthy than when I was living within two miles of a COAL burning plant. Why the fuck are we still burning COAL for energy?

Yes, coal is so "safe" that in 2002, American Electric Power (AEP) had to buy an entire town in Ohio that was downwind of its plant.

I agree that OOo is a good replacement for MS Office, but the whole WYSIWYG idea sucks for writing anything more than a few pages. For longer, structured documents LaTeX or something similar is much better. It runs on Windows as well.

In my opinion, word processors are just glorified drawing programs, with a few special features added to make text processing easier. They tend to make the user more focused on the superficial presentation than the actual content/structure. Which is fine in some cases, but not when you're writing an essay, an academic thesis or something like those.

I also know from practical experience that word processors get painfully slow to use for large and complicated documents. Besides, no office software has the stability of simple text editors, and it would be annoying to lose your thesis because of a bug in your nice and shiny word processor.

Word processors are stupid and inefficient.

As a consequence, you can stick the titles under a blowtorch for an hour if you wanted, take them out, and a couple second later they'll be completely cool to the touch. They dissipate heat that fast.

My university had a (surprisingly sucky) course in "The Science in Science Fiction" (eh, it was a first-year seminar). However, after reading Prey we had an actual nanotechnologist-type guy come in; he discussed the state of the field and the novel. The gist of it was that even if we could mass-produce nanomachines (which isn't happening any time soon), most these nanotechnological threats in fiction are just about impossible given the sheer energy requirements - it's not easy to deliver energy to microscopic devices, and even if you could, the sheer heat generated by millions of these things in close proximity would easily be enough to melt them, if not explode them. (You think your Pentium IV has heat dissipation problems? What do you think intense heat does to something that's only a few dozen atoms wide?)

My school has a major contract with IBM, which I think we just renewed this year or last. This leaves me wondering what's going to happen now, since we buy several thousand IBM ThinkPads annually (for incoming freshman and replacements for the juniors... and professors, every other year). I certainly hope that the ThinkPad line won't suddenly plummet in quality with this move and leave us stuck with junk computers. And predictions with regards to quality here?

Ahh, I get it...

Word processors, specificaly WYSIWYG, are stupid and inefficient, we should all use TeX instead.
But the TeX commands and syntax are too complex, so use a nice program to generate the TeX. A WYSIWYG word processor, opps, I mean, a WYSIWYM document processor, that outputs TeX.

So, word processors are "stupid and inefficient", unless they output TeX and are called document processors?

Take for instance a section heading. So far as the logical structure of a document is concerned, all that matters is that a particular piece of text should be ``marked'' somehow as a section heading. One might for instance type \section{Text of heading}.