Huge parts of American law don't work in certain circumstances. Thank God for checks and balances, appeals processes and pardons. That doesn't excuse us from being a nation of laws, it says that we need other laws to deal with the problems of the first laws. =)
So, we could, as a matter of policy, decide to grant the Gitmo detainees additional legal rights.
I'd put that slightly differently. I'd say that we could, as a matter of policy, decide to recognize the unalienable Rights of the men in Gitmo, endowed in them by their Creator. If our form of government has failed to secure them their rights, I think we need to alter it and institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to us shall seem most likely to effect our safety, happiness and reputation in the international community.
I just think we're more disposed to see our fellow man suffer evil than to right the situation by abolishing the situation to which we have become accustomed. It's up to us to change that and do what is right. Can you seriously argue that holding men indefinitely with no charges is right?
The history of the present President of America [George II] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of himself as the Decider, the Commander In Chief of an eternal War on Terror. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
I think the Bush Administration is trampling like crazy. You would too, if you were wrongly held in Gitmo.
Sorry if this all sounds like a crazy rant, but you really ticked me off with your use of the word "grant". You sounded like a cat playing with a mouse, very proud of your place in the food chain, very magnanimous in your decision to "grant" these men some rights, "as a matter of policy." That sounds like whimsical tyranny to me, not an honest effort to live by the rule of law, and I think the Bush Administration feels the exact same way.
You're presuming they're guilty of waging war (etc). I'd rather we tried to establish it in a court, and until then, we grant them a writ of habeas corpus. I think we're a nation of laws, and I think you've justified our treatment of "the terrorists" without bothering to establish whether a given person is or isn't "a terrorist." That's the whole problem, right there.
You're right, but you're wrong (on a couple counts). Re-read what Gonzales said:
"The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus."
That's damned sloppy of him. The Constitution absolutely does assure habeas corpus. You're right, it doesn't grant it, and it's not a right, but on all other counts, Gonzales is wrong.
You've lost me. As soon as someone ELSE contributes to a work, there is no longer a sole author. The "original author" can no more change the copyright than the "new author" could. They would have to agree.
If Novell is one of the contributors, they would have to agree exclude themselves...?
The GPL cuts both ways. It prevents "users" from modifying and hiding their changes, and it prevents "authors" from changing the license out from under the "users."...right?
I saw Ethan Galstad talk about his experiences with quitting his day job to run Nagios development. He was an incredible speaker, very motivational. I tried to convince him to write a book about it, actually. He seemed very approachable, so I would just email him your specific questions.
How about if you say "An operating system is the interface between resources and software that virtualizes the specific characteristics of the resources, allowing software to be written generically."
There's no problem that can't be solved by introducing another layer of abstraction. Calling it a WebOS is a pretty easy way to introduce the topic to the largest audiences you care about: end users, and to a lesser degree, application developers.
If the term offends your purist sensibilities, that's basically just too bad. At least they didn't call it iOS or OSpod.
I have moderator points, but they unfortunately don't have "Ignorant" as one of my choices, so I thought instead I'd respond to you.
Then you must have something to hide?
I'd like your credit card number, all of your tax forms, and I'd like to know what lies you've told to your friends, what thoughts of criminal activities you've had, what crimes you have been accused of, precisely what your blood alcohol level was before you drove, every instance of cruelty or indifference you've ever committed, and exactly which products you buy and stocks you invest in - oh, and what you're getting your spouse and kids for the holidays. This of course is for your job interview - and so I can ruin the surprise of your gifts for the holidays. Everyone has something to hide, except people who are 100% self-sufficient or barter for all of the goods and services they need.
If you do not have violent pornography, you would not need encryption or stegnagrophy... Encryption can hide pornography, but has no use if you're not doning anything illegal.
First off, it's "steganography." Do banks have legitimate need of encryption to protect your ATM withdrawls? Do you have legitimate need of a PIN to access your funds? Have you ever wanted to have a diary, but were afraid someone who lives with you might read it? Does your front door, car door, and safety deposit box have a lock? Why? WHAT ARE YOU HIDING?
Here in America, we are allowed to do what we want.
I would say, "Here in the United States, we are a nation of laws. We are free to act within those laws." (By and large. When that breaks down, I like to get out and protest.)
Violent pornography hurts poeple so it should be illegal.
Think of a movie with a love scene. Top Gun. Dirty Dancing. Eight Mile. You do understand that the actors (probably) didn't actually have sex while they filmed that scene, don't you? It's acting.
Now think about other sex scenes. Shawshank Redemption. Sleepers. The Accused. Bad Lieutenant. Sybil. Far less pleasant, right? But, probably, none of the actors were actually hurt while those rape scenes were being filmed. (Or at least, not physically hurt more than in filming any normal "fight scene.") Are those still "good movies," or do you just categorically call them bad and harmful to society? I happen to think Shawshank is one of the best movies ever made, and a ton of people - including the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, The American Cinema Editors, the American Society of Cinematographers, the Directors Guild of America, the Golden Globes, the Grammy's, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America all agree with me.
Do you want to tell me what, precisely, is the difference between the rape scenes in Shawshank Redemption and this violent pornography that you're defending us all from?
Put another way - if a dude spanks a chick's ass while they're simulating sex (just for the sake of argument) in front of a camera, is that violent pornography or is it not? I frankly don't see the harm in it.
Is it the violence that really bothers you, or is it the pornography? Or is it some mix of the two? Look, just because I think something should be legal doesn't mean I endorse it, or think it's a good idea. I hate alcohol with a passion, but I don't think prohibition is the solution to drunk drivers. I blame the f-ing drunk drivers. Do you think the portrayal of violence in pornography is disgusting and bad, or do you really think owning it should be illegal?
Do you really want to go after the portrayal of sadism and masochism? You think that stuff hurts people? I mean, you think it hurts them in ways they don't like?
I don't mean to make light of times when people are the victims of violence or rape - that's very serious, and there are already a ton of laws on the books. But, do you think we're doing well enough against actual violence and rape, that
You're over-simplifying! You're presuming that "scene complexity" is equivalent to "scene geometry," and that's not true. There are more effective techniques for scaling up the quality of your output image which work just fine, such as procedural textures, or even just texture look-ups. When you use those textures for such things as displacement mapping, you're really talking.
AC, I can't begin to understand your assesment that GPUs are just now 'catching up' to what a CPU can do speed-wise. You can't run Doom 3 on a CPU alone at the same speed as on a GPU. It can't do it. No way, no how. For specialized rendering tasks, a CPU isn't even close to a GPU.
Raster graphics have always sucked? Seriously? You think that Ice Age 2 looks better than The Incredibles? If anything, I think it's the other way around.
And by the way, having a reduced instruction set and adding a ton of processors is exactly what a GPU is.
But there is no reason at all why a CPU couldn't produce the exact same quality rendering as a GPU, its just too expensive at the moment.
The problem with your logic is that the effective performance of CPUs is doubling every 18 months, and the effective performance of GPUs is doubling every 12 months. This holds over a period as long as GPUs have been in production. In other words, it will always be less expensive to produce a rendered image on a GPU than on a CPU. Now, if you can invent some image calculations that only a CPU is capable of (photonic wavelet, blah, blah, blah), then you shift the argument - but only for as long as it takes some geek to figure out how to do it on a GPU. Even if the CPU is then four times as fast as the GPU at it, it will only take a couple years for the GPU to catch up.
And by the way, calling current generation GPUs "fixed-function" is ridiculous. Look at gpgpu.org, for instance.
They're not meant to be bought by individuals or families, but rather by governments. The plan is to make them ubiquitous, so that they're a completely commodity - in other words, there's no point in stealing them, and there's no value in selling them.
Yes, if they get busted, that's a problem - that's why they're as rugged as possible. Probably the kid just exchanges it for a working one. (If they break several, then you've got a problem kid, I guess...)
Funny, that's precisely what drew me to Eve Online. It's not so much the fact that there was a jerk in the game, but that the type of interactions with other players was intense, that it caused those kinds of emotions - that it was ALLOWED and even enforced by the game mechanics... Very cool.
It also says: don't go in alone, kid - you'll get hurt.
This is a story of deception, intrigue, and doublecrossing. It is a story of liars, bandits, and greed. It is a story of the worst of the human condition, and how the motive for profit will drive a normally nice guy to the deepest depths of evil and betrayal.
You need to watch, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," or read the book. It spells it out - Enron found every loophole in the "deregulated" energy market, and gamed the system for profits, by, for instance, telling power plants to perform unplanned maintenance so that they could charge higher rates for the completely artificially lower supply.
I have a computer under my desk. If you go backwards in time, computers get worse and worse. Until, finally, you reach this interesting point, where, if you look at the aggregate computation power of every computer on the planet in active use, my single computer arguably has them all collectively beat. In terms, say, of mathematical operations per second. I'd like to know what year that is. It's going to be later than 1950, 1960, 1970... Could it be as high as 1980? Higher?
There were on the order of 100's of millions of people 10000 years ago, and there are on the order of 6 billion people living on the planet now.
The question is not global extinction for humans (as the GP indicated), the question is how many people are going to die, and how much suffering is there going to be?
The problem with industrialization is that if you take it away, people die because they've become dependant on it.
Al Gore talks about this in "An Inconvenient Truth," people who jump immediately from disbelief to dispair, without pausing to do something inbetween.
By your numbers, it's possible we could be long on the path to solve this in 20 years! My god! That's fantastic! And yet, you treat that like an incredibly negative outcome.
You're also blaming individual contributions (auto) more than industrial contributions. That's probably not entirely fair.
According to Gore et al, the US is responsible for something like 32% of the world's human-caused carbon emissions. That means we 300,000,000 Americans can have a gigantic impact on the lives of 6,200,000,000 people. I find that empowering.
I also doubt your numbers. I strongly suspect that more than half of the cars on the road are less than 8 years old.
Flip to page 103 for Figure 10-6: Model-based estimates of global sufrface temperature compared to observational estimates with contributions of natural (volcanic and solar) and anthropogenic forcings for 25-year periods shown as color bars.
The anthropogenic bar in the last 25 years totally dominates all of the other bars. I haven't read the entire article, but it sounds to me like you haven't even bothered to read any of it and yet you feel totally comfortable spouting off about it.
Scientists will never clame to PROVE anything, so stop using political motivations to attack scientific findings.
The top of that article alone is worth reproducing here:
The consensus among climate researchers is outlined by the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
Human activities... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.
This conclusion is endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and its parent organization, the American Institute of Physics, the national science academies of the G8 nations, Brazil, China, and India. and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
How can specifically Gore be an emberrasment to science if all of these others back him? Sounds like if anything, there's honest debate. But then the next paragraph from this page utterly destroys that possibility:
The consensus was quantified in a Science study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes (Dec. 2004) in which she surveyed 928 scientific journal articles that matched the search [global climate change] at the ISI Web of Science. Of these, according to Oreskes, 75% agreed with the consensus view (either implicitly or explicitly), 25% took no stand one way or the other, and none rejected the consensus.
Re:DICOM Part 10 image viewer - in ASCII
on
ASCII World Cup
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This is an incredibly easy way to do it:
Select a mono-space font, like Courier. This makes things infinitely easier.
Figure out the size of a character in pixels, in the font size you're going to render at.
The next thing you do is to make an array of every single ASCII character that you want to use, and order it based on intensity of the characters in the font you're going to render in. (Start with space, period, little-o, capital-X, to make things easy for yourself.)
Figure out your display area, say 1280x1024.
Figure out your display area in characters (divide your display area by your character size), this is your ACTUAL resolution.
You might want to make a 2D-array of characters to store an intermediate version of your output image in textual form, at that ACTUAL resolution (probably something like 80x80, or so.)
Produce a greyscale image, with window/level, pan, zoom, etc. at your ACTUAL resolution. Subsampling works, but resampling works better. Doesn't really matter if you do 8-bit, 16-bit, etc. You might as well do everything unsigned, since you don't care about absolute values (like negatives), just the relative intensities.
Map the intensities onto your ASCII table. In my trivial example (four possible output characters), you'd shift everything right 6 bits for 8-bit input, or 14 bits for 16-bit input. Do your table look-up. Either render that character immediately, or put it into an array of characters to be rendered later...
Pretty simple, no? It worked much better than I thought it would - especially if you allow the user to pan, zoom, window/level - that really "sells" the ASCII renderings. This isn't doing anything to try to match ASCII characters against the actual contours in your image, like the visual difference between | and - is ignored, but at a gross level, it works quite nicely.
Re:DICOM Part 10 image viewer - in ASCII
on
ASCII World Cup
·
· Score: 1
Yikes! I hadn't even thought of it. You scare me. Go away!
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it wouldn't work in certain cases.
Huge parts of American law don't work in certain circumstances. Thank God for checks and balances, appeals processes and pardons. That doesn't excuse us from being a nation of laws, it says that we need other laws to deal with the problems of the first laws. =)
So, we could, as a matter of policy, decide to grant the Gitmo detainees additional legal rights.
I'd put that slightly differently. I'd say that we could, as a matter of policy, decide to recognize the unalienable Rights of the men in Gitmo, endowed in them by their Creator. If our form of government has failed to secure them their rights, I think we need to alter it and institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to us shall seem most likely to effect our safety, happiness and reputation in the international community.
I just think we're more disposed to see our fellow man suffer evil than to right the situation by abolishing the situation to which we have become accustomed. It's up to us to change that and do what is right. Can you seriously argue that holding men indefinitely with no charges is right?
The history of the present President of America [George II] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of himself as the Decider, the Commander In Chief of an eternal War on Terror. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
I think the Bush Administration is trampling like crazy. You would too, if you were wrongly held in Gitmo.
Sorry if this all sounds like a crazy rant, but you really ticked me off with your use of the word "grant". You sounded like a cat playing with a mouse, very proud of your place in the food chain, very magnanimous in your decision to "grant" these men some rights, "as a matter of policy." That sounds like whimsical tyranny to me, not an honest effort to live by the rule of law, and I think the Bush Administration feels the exact same way.
You're presuming they're guilty of waging war (etc). I'd rather we tried to establish it in a court, and until then, we grant them a writ of habeas corpus. I think we're a nation of laws, and I think you've justified our treatment of "the terrorists" without bothering to establish whether a given person is or isn't "a terrorist." That's the whole problem, right there.
You're right, but you're wrong (on a couple counts). Re-read what Gonzales said:
"The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus."
That's damned sloppy of him. The Constitution absolutely does assure habeas corpus. You're right, it doesn't grant it, and it's not a right, but on all other counts, Gonzales is wrong.
Maybe Alaska would play game and disbar him. It looks like the AG practiced law there, if I'm reading his bio right.
You've lost me. As soon as someone ELSE contributes to a work, there is no longer a sole author. The "original author" can no more change the copyright than the "new author" could. They would have to agree.
...right?
If Novell is one of the contributors, they would have to agree exclude themselves...?
The GPL cuts both ways. It prevents "users" from modifying and hiding their changes, and it prevents "authors" from changing the license out from under the "users."
I saw Ethan Galstad talk about his experiences with quitting his day job to run Nagios development. He was an incredible speaker, very motivational. I tried to convince him to write a book about it, actually. He seemed very approachable, so I would just email him your specific questions.
How about if you say "An operating system is the interface between resources and software that virtualizes the specific characteristics of the resources, allowing software to be written generically."
There's no problem that can't be solved by introducing another layer of abstraction. Calling it a WebOS is a pretty easy way to introduce the topic to the largest audiences you care about: end users, and to a lesser degree, application developers.
If the term offends your purist sensibilities, that's basically just too bad. At least they didn't call it iOS or OSpod.
Shouldn't this guy just get a trench coat, a T-shirt, a baseball cap and a packet of cigarettes? That way he can play Silent Bob.
The guy's an exact duplicate of Kevin Smith!
Has someone bothered to calculate how long it takes to go from press release to Best Buy for new technologies in different areas?
I have moderator points, but they unfortunately don't have "Ignorant" as one of my choices, so I thought instead I'd respond to you.
Then you must have something to hide?
I'd like your credit card number, all of your tax forms, and I'd like to know what lies you've told to your friends, what thoughts of criminal activities you've had, what crimes you have been accused of, precisely what your blood alcohol level was before you drove, every instance of cruelty or indifference you've ever committed, and exactly which products you buy and stocks you invest in - oh, and what you're getting your spouse and kids for the holidays. This of course is for your job interview - and so I can ruin the surprise of your gifts for the holidays. Everyone has something to hide, except people who are 100% self-sufficient or barter for all of the goods and services they need.
If you do not have violent pornography, you would not need encryption or stegnagrophy... Encryption can hide pornography, but has no use if you're not doning anything illegal.
First off, it's "steganography." Do banks have legitimate need of encryption to protect your ATM withdrawls? Do you have legitimate need of a PIN to access your funds? Have you ever wanted to have a diary, but were afraid someone who lives with you might read it? Does your front door, car door, and safety deposit box have a lock? Why? WHAT ARE YOU HIDING?
Here in America, we are allowed to do what we want.
I would say, "Here in the United States, we are a nation of laws. We are free to act within those laws." (By and large. When that breaks down, I like to get out and protest.)
Violent pornography hurts poeple so it should be illegal.
Think of a movie with a love scene. Top Gun. Dirty Dancing. Eight Mile. You do understand that the actors (probably) didn't actually have sex while they filmed that scene, don't you? It's acting.
Now think about other sex scenes. Shawshank Redemption. Sleepers. The Accused. Bad Lieutenant. Sybil. Far less pleasant, right? But, probably, none of the actors were actually hurt while those rape scenes were being filmed. (Or at least, not physically hurt more than in filming any normal "fight scene.") Are those still "good movies," or do you just categorically call them bad and harmful to society? I happen to think Shawshank is one of the best movies ever made, and a ton of people - including the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, The American Cinema Editors, the American Society of Cinematographers, the Directors Guild of America, the Golden Globes, the Grammy's, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America all agree with me.
Do you want to tell me what, precisely, is the difference between the rape scenes in Shawshank Redemption and this violent pornography that you're defending us all from?
Put another way - if a dude spanks a chick's ass while they're simulating sex (just for the sake of argument) in front of a camera, is that violent pornography or is it not? I frankly don't see the harm in it.
Is it the violence that really bothers you, or is it the pornography? Or is it some mix of the two? Look, just because I think something should be legal doesn't mean I endorse it, or think it's a good idea. I hate alcohol with a passion, but I don't think prohibition is the solution to drunk drivers. I blame the f-ing drunk drivers. Do you think the portrayal of violence in pornography is disgusting and bad, or do you really think owning it should be illegal?
Do you really want to go after the portrayal of sadism and masochism? You think that stuff hurts people? I mean, you think it hurts them in ways they don't like?
I don't mean to make light of times when people are the victims of violence or rape - that's very serious, and there are already a ton of laws on the books. But, do you think we're doing well enough against actual violence and rape, that
You're over-simplifying! You're presuming that "scene complexity" is equivalent to "scene geometry," and that's not true. There are more effective techniques for scaling up the quality of your output image which work just fine, such as procedural textures, or even just texture look-ups. When you use those textures for such things as displacement mapping, you're really talking.
AC, I can't begin to understand your assesment that GPUs are just now 'catching up' to what a CPU can do speed-wise. You can't run Doom 3 on a CPU alone at the same speed as on a GPU. It can't do it. No way, no how. For specialized rendering tasks, a CPU isn't even close to a GPU.
Raster graphics have always sucked? Seriously? You think that Ice Age 2 looks better than The Incredibles? If anything, I think it's the other way around.
And by the way, having a reduced instruction set and adding a ton of processors is exactly what a GPU is.
But there is no reason at all why a CPU couldn't produce the exact same quality rendering as a GPU, its just too expensive at the moment.
The problem with your logic is that the effective performance of CPUs is doubling every 18 months, and the effective performance of GPUs is doubling every 12 months. This holds over a period as long as GPUs have been in production. In other words, it will always be less expensive to produce a rendered image on a GPU than on a CPU. Now, if you can invent some image calculations that only a CPU is capable of (photonic wavelet, blah, blah, blah), then you shift the argument - but only for as long as it takes some geek to figure out how to do it on a GPU. Even if the CPU is then four times as fast as the GPU at it, it will only take a couple years for the GPU to catch up.
And by the way, calling current generation GPUs "fixed-function" is ridiculous. Look at gpgpu.org, for instance.
They're not meant to be bought by individuals or families, but rather by governments. The plan is to make them ubiquitous, so that they're a completely commodity - in other words, there's no point in stealing them, and there's no value in selling them.
Yes, if they get busted, that's a problem - that's why they're as rugged as possible. Probably the kid just exchanges it for a working one. (If they break several, then you've got a problem kid, I guess...)
Funny, that's precisely what drew me to Eve Online. It's not so much the fact that there was a jerk in the game, but that the type of interactions with other players was intense, that it caused those kinds of emotions - that it was ALLOWED and even enforced by the game mechanics... Very cool.
It also says: don't go in alone, kid - you'll get hurt.
For anyone remotely curious about Eve Online, this story is a must read:
http://static.circa1984.com/the-big-scam.html
From the intro:
This is a story of deception, intrigue, and doublecrossing. It is a story of liars, bandits, and greed. It is a story of the worst of the human condition, and how the motive for profit will drive a normally nice guy to the deepest depths of evil and betrayal.
This is the story of my life in Eve Online.
You need to watch, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," or read the book. It spells it out - Enron found every loophole in the "deregulated" energy market, and gamed the system for profits, by, for instance, telling power plants to perform unplanned maintenance so that they could charge higher rates for the completely artificially lower supply.
So, here's the metric I want to know...
I have a computer under my desk. If you go backwards in time, computers get worse and worse. Until, finally, you reach this interesting point, where, if you look at the aggregate computation power of every computer on the planet in active use, my single computer arguably has them all collectively beat. In terms, say, of mathematical operations per second. I'd like to know what year that is. It's going to be later than 1950, 1960, 1970... Could it be as high as 1980? Higher?
There were on the order of 100's of millions of people 10000 years ago, and there are on the order of 6 billion people living on the planet now.
The question is not global extinction for humans (as the GP indicated), the question is how many people are going to die, and how much suffering is there going to be?
The problem with industrialization is that if you take it away, people die because they've become dependant on it.
Al Gore talks about this in "An Inconvenient Truth," people who jump immediately from disbelief to dispair, without pausing to do something inbetween.
By your numbers, it's possible we could be long on the path to solve this in 20 years! My god! That's fantastic! And yet, you treat that like an incredibly negative outcome.
You're also blaming individual contributions (auto) more than industrial contributions. That's probably not entirely fair.
According to Gore et al, the US is responsible for something like 32% of the world's human-caused carbon emissions. That means we 300,000,000 Americans can have a gigantic impact on the lives of 6,200,000,000 people. I find that empowering.
I also doubt your numbers. I strongly suspect that more than half of the cars on the road are less than 8 years old.
Dear "The Voice of Fairness and Reason,"
Download this: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html
Flip to page 103 for Figure 10-6: Model-based estimates of global sufrface temperature compared to observational estimates with contributions of natural (volcanic and solar) and anthropogenic forcings for 25-year periods shown as color bars.
The anthropogenic bar in the last 25 years totally dominates all of the other bars. I haven't read the entire article, but it sounds to me like you haven't even bothered to read any of it and yet you feel totally comfortable spouting off about it.
Scientists will never clame to PROVE anything, so stop using political motivations to attack scientific findings.
Signed,
The Voice of Telling You To RTFA
The top of that article alone is worth reproducing here:
... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.
The consensus among climate researchers is outlined by the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
Human activities
This conclusion is endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and its parent organization, the American Institute of Physics, the national science academies of the G8 nations, Brazil, China, and India. and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
How can specifically Gore be an emberrasment to science if all of these others back him? Sounds like if anything, there's honest debate. But then the next paragraph from this page utterly destroys that possibility:
The consensus was quantified in a Science study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes (Dec. 2004) in which she surveyed 928 scientific journal articles that matched the search [global climate change] at the ISI Web of Science. Of these, according to Oreskes, 75% agreed with the consensus view (either implicitly or explicitly), 25% took no stand one way or the other, and none rejected the consensus.
This is an incredibly easy way to do it:
Select a mono-space font, like Courier. This makes things infinitely easier.
Figure out the size of a character in pixels, in the font size you're going to render at.
The next thing you do is to make an array of every single ASCII character that you want to use, and order it based on intensity of the characters in the font you're going to render in. (Start with space, period, little-o, capital-X, to make things easy for yourself.)
Figure out your display area, say 1280x1024.
Figure out your display area in characters (divide your display area by your character size), this is your ACTUAL resolution.
You might want to make a 2D-array of characters to store an intermediate version of your output image in textual form, at that ACTUAL resolution (probably something like 80x80, or so.)
Produce a greyscale image, with window/level, pan, zoom, etc. at your ACTUAL resolution. Subsampling works, but resampling works better. Doesn't really matter if you do 8-bit, 16-bit, etc. You might as well do everything unsigned, since you don't care about absolute values (like negatives), just the relative intensities.
Map the intensities onto your ASCII table. In my trivial example (four possible output characters), you'd shift everything right 6 bits for 8-bit input, or 14 bits for 16-bit input. Do your table look-up. Either render that character immediately, or put it into an array of characters to be rendered later...
Pretty simple, no? It worked much better than I thought it would - especially if you allow the user to pan, zoom, window/level - that really "sells" the ASCII renderings. This isn't doing anything to try to match ASCII characters against the actual contours in your image, like the visual difference between | and - is ignored, but at a gross level, it works quite nicely.
Yikes! I hadn't even thought of it. You scare me. Go away!