Very true. It was hard to convince my mom that her $149 point and shoot digital at 12MP couldn't match my old (ancient, in technology terms) Canon Digital Rebel XT that was "only" 8MP. The reality though is that despite having only 2/3's of the pixel count, my camera takes pictures that look WORLDS better. Side by side shots finally convinced her.
Just like the Mhz myth for processors, cameras also can't simply be measuring in megapixels.
Another huge factor is the quality of the glass. The lowest-noise, highest-contrast, most-linear, biggest Dmax sensor in the world isn't going to give you good results if it has a cheap-o plastic lens in front of it. (Unless you're looking for that effect, like you get with a Lens Baby.)
Futhermore, designing and manufacturing high-quality lenses is really quite difficult. Putting high-quality glass in a phone-sized device is, currently at least, impossible.
My brother purchased an iPhone when they first came out, and put his photos up on the social networking site Multiply. Downsampled, they looked pretty good. Then, I tried screwing around with them a little in Photoshop to understand more. Full resolution, they suck. Sure, they're not bad for a phone, but are worse than the contemporary point-and-shoot I was using, and far, far worse than my DSLR.
Like all propeller-driven craft, the power flow is from the craft to the propeller.
I do not see that as being true here, as there is no mechanical gain from the body to the air, and the claim is that the craft is moving faster than the prevailing wind, therefore there is a headwind on the chassis.
I look at Bing.com -- the main page -- almost every day. Once. The background images they put up are at worst good, usually excellent, and at times breath-taking. (The tool-tip factoids are dumb, though.)
I drink two pints first thing in the morning. 32oz * 3.5mg = 112mg. Then about 12oz/hr after that throughout the work day, and back to pint glasses when I get home.
Stop.
No, seriously, stop drinking that much Dr. Pepper. Ingesting that many calories from one source is a Really Bad Idea. Even if it's actually their diet version, ingesting that much of any one food source is a Really Bad Idea. It leads to all sorts of health issues, not the least of which will be vitamin deficiency. Seriously, this is a VERY BAD IDEA.
Taper down, quit cold turkey, whatever, but cut down on your intake and do it soon. If you're ingesting that much sugar, you are on a short bee-line to diabetes, and a long list of Very Bad Diseases to follow. If you're ingesting that much synthetic crap by drinking the diet version instead, the diseases are not as readily identifiable, but I'd put good money down are going to be at least as bad.
Seriously, stop. Anyone else here on Slashdot that is ingesting that much surgared soda, stop. Now. Diabetes, which is the most likely outcome (if not death from congestive heart failure) is a seriously bad disease, with complications like glaucoma that leads to blindness, chronic foot ulcers, gangrene, foot amputation, kidney failure, etc. Did you see that "blindness" part? Not joking. Preventing it is easy: stop drinking soda.
I find it hard to believe that this could be brewed naturally, i.e. using yeast to ferment the liquor. I find it hard to believe that a yeast can live in 50% alcohol, 27% was really pushing the limits.
How is this marked insightful when it is nothing but ignorant? The poster could not possibly have read the article because if they had, they would realize that it isn't beer straight out of the fermenter, but rather beer processed to extract and therefore concentrate the alcohol and most everything else. The interesting part is that freezing the beer to extract water is hard: you need to chill the beer to just the right temperature for just the right amount of time so that the ice crystals are just the right size so that they can be filtered out mechanically. The process is one of decreasing efficiency where the higher alcohol beers requiring over a dozen freeze/filtration/thaw cycles. I wonder why they don't use an immersion freezer instead and allow the crystals to grow arbitrarily large.
My brother (with a two-digit Slashdot ID) is a big fan of the Utiopias. Says it's the best beer ever. There's a barley wine that's made by a bewer locally here that's called Benevolance that I find amazing. It's a good time to like beer.
The fact that they barely interact with anything has nothing to do with the fact that they are nearly massless. Photons are massless and they interact with anything that carries an electric charge. Electrons are much lighter than muons, but they are just as likely to interact with something. The only force that gets weaker as the mass goes down is gravity, which is by far the weakest of the fundamental forces.
Good point, I should have been more expansive. There are definitely many more reasons that neutrinos are non-interactive.
How could something have mass and so weakly interact with normal matter?
Neutrinos are thought to have a very small mass. So exceedingly small that they barely interact with anything (they also have no charge, so they are even less likely to interact). But zero mass and really, really, really small but not zero mass, are two different things.
BP *WILL NOT* come out of this unscathed, if they come out at all.
Agreed. Since I first heard of the oil spill, I've been saying, "BP will not survive this disaster." It will need to spend a very large amount of its cash on hand to pay for the cleanup (the growth in the extent of which is showing no signs of slowing), the damages, and general remediation of what will probably be three or four states' worth of coastline. The American body politic will want heads to roll. Dismantling or nationalizing BP's US operations is, at this point, a distinct possibility.
The only good thing to come out of this disaster is that future offshore drilling operations in the US are likely to be safer.
We have anti-monopoly laws and investigators to deal with these kinds of things.
Hehe!
Oh dear, you were being sarcastic, right?
No, actually, the anti-monopoly laws were created to deal with Standard Oil and the robber-barons of the late 1890s. That's right kids, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (use Google and/or Wikipedia) was specifically targeted at the then-near-total monopoly of an oil company. The Act hasn't been used many times, but it is an exceedingly heavy and powerful hammer that allows the US Government to forcibly dismantle even the very largest corporations.
Um, do the maths. 100% effective in five monkeys scales out to 100% effective in 5 million monkeys in my arithmetic book. But then again my books are published in Texas....
This is a standard EE/CS/engineering view where everything is deterministic, or very nearly so.
As an EE-turned-biologist, one of the big things I had to get my head around is that like it or not, Biology is messy. Very messy. Whereas in Engineering, models that are accurate to 1% are considered adequate, and 0.1% good, in Biology, models that are accurate to merely 50% are considered good, and above that is excellent. Biology is messy. There are many, many, many uncontrolled variables, most of which are unobserved or not even contemplated.
Just because 100% of five monkeys were cured (which is a FARKING STUNNING result), it does not mean that the next five will also be cured. Or the five after that. Or the five done in another lab. Or the hundred after that. It gives a good indication that this will be the case, but assuming that 100% of five can be extrapolated to mean 100% of any number in Biology is going to get you in a lot of trouble.
Five is a very, very good start (and might well result in a Nobel prize for the first time we've cured a viral disease, if, in fact, it turns out the virus has been erradicated and not just suppressed or made dormant). I look forward to seeing the results replicated and extended.
... the scientific consensus was that the 11 year cycle was due to some kind of underlying fluctuation in the sun itself. Now that theory has to be revised (or maybe even rejected entirely) as this prolonged solar minimum continues.
I would seriously doubt that anyone is questioning whether the fluctuations are from an internal process.
We can barely -- barely -- predict weather on the *surface* of our globe for a period of a few days. We can't even accurately predict how many storms there will be in a given cyclone / hurricane season yet, and that's one of the biggest periodic features. To say that we have a good enough understanding (and therefore can predict) what amounts to three dimensional weather in a volume six orders of magnitude larger than the earth to be able to predict even the coarsest features to eleven years is mistaken hubris at best.
We have a few hundred years' worth of sunspot observation. Is it so shocking to think that there might be patterns that are on a longer timescale than our stretch of observations would reveal? Personally, I see no reason to think that the underlying mechanism is not still entirely within the sun. It certainly might be the case that it is due to external influences, but it would seem improbable.
Greek. Mod me troll, offtopic, whatever. Getting something like this wrong is a big deal. It is not a greek crisis, but a Greek crisis. It is a crisis of the national government of Greece. Moreover, since "greek" is rarely used as an adjective on Slashdot, it reads too easily as "geek" which is a common adjective here, so the submitter and editor would need to be extra careful to avoid confusion.
Yet another instance where an editor worth their salt would perform their appointed duties and correct submitted text, but a Slashdot editor fails to do so.
Does execution time really dominate updates / installs with yum for you? Network fetch time is the vastly larger fraction for me.
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
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H.264 and VP8 Compared
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· Score: 0, Troll
I hear people make this sort of claim all the time on Slashdot, and I have yet to see evidence for it. It also conveniently ignores one of the primary motivators for patents: defense of R&D. Creating a new object or technology costs a lot of money. In come cases many, many orders of magnitude more than when patent protection was created. Without the enticement of being able to reap the monetary rewards from a temporary, sanctioned monopoly on the invention, where is the motivation? It becomes a competitive *liability* to put money into R&D when your competitors can just wait for you to do the work and carry the development costs for them. With the current system, you aren't guaranteed protection if your competitor is developing the same ideas and patents first, but there is a good chance.
Without patents, we will have essentially no technological or scientific development at all, except where funded by the government (and, in case you didn't know, the US government profits handsomely from patents they fund). The current US Federal budget is woefully inadequate to take on that role.
The argument that every major advance came more-or-less simultaneously from multiple sources... evidence please? Let me just think of a few major advances: antibiotics, internal combustion, electrical motors, the light bulb, the electron tube, the transistor, the integrated circuit, plastics, x-ray and magnetic resonance imaging, PCR, refrigeration, feedback control, anesthetics, injection molding, etc. And how about all of the minor ones without which we would not enjoy nearly every facet of modern life? I'm thinking latex paint, radial tires, pyrex, autoclaves, velcro, computerized typesetting, robotic assembly lines, the sewing machine, radio, cathode-ray tubes, power tools, the bimetallic strip, epoxy, AM/FM/FSK encoding, etc.
It is, frankly, a naive and ill-conceived notion that we should eliminate patents, or equivalently, that intellectual property should not be protected by law just as physical property is. Pointing out one patent that should not have been issued does not prove the system is broken.
I wasn't trying to say that some photographs should be protected, and some shouldn't be by arbitrary external criteria, but that the vast majority of people do not care about their photographs, and thus fuel the prevailing attitudes about all photographic work. The people who do care, unfortunately, feel the negative impacts of this laissez-faire view.
I agree that the best position to take is one where all images are protected upon creation, and my understanding is that, at least some years ago, this was the case. I've also heard that there was a recent refinement of that position by the US Government, and that it is no longer true. I'd love to hear an informed view.
In terms of a search engine scraping images, one easy way to separate photos from people who care about protecting their images versus the rest is to examine EXIF data on JPEG files. Cameras don't add copyright information by default, to the best of my knowledge, but copyright information can be added in an EXIF field by those who care to protect their creation.
The problem is that most people who use a camera take snapshots, not photographs. Given the explosion in digital photography over the last decade, I'd wager that a vanishingly small number of times a shutter is pressed out of the billions total does it get pressed by someone who is trying to create art, whether commercial or otherwise.
Most people don't care about their photos, their snapshots. There's no effort to create them. There was no thought put into the composition, no setup to speak of.. it's just a snapshot. And, as such, most of the people do not understand why it is a big deal that anyone should care about photos. The public does not realize that it costs potentially a lot of money and time to create professional images. Witness some of the comments on this Slashdot thread.
I applaud the parent poster for caring enough to make that effort, and for taking the time to defend their work against dilution. It's a mark of professionalism and high quality that likely pervades the rest of his operation.
Can somebody explain to me why buying 10 fully loaded iPads with my gold Amex prevents me from selling them on the black market afterwards but paying for one in cash doesn't?
On a related note, where is this "black market"? Seems like has lots of awesome stuff for sale there.
You've missed the point: the refusal of cash for a purchase has nothing to do with limiting the number of iPads you can purchase (seriously, it's about as Orwellian as it gets when ideas are used to mean their exact opposite). The amount of cash you have on hand is far more limited, in practical terms, than the amount of money you have at your finger tips on a credit card. It is *easier* to buy ten iPads on a credit card; it is much harder and riskier to cart around the amount of cash necessary to do the same thing.
The difference, and that which Apple wants to avoid at all costs, is that when you use cash, you are effectively anonymous. You can return and buy again. And again. And again. With a credit card, there is an unquestionable and unique identification of the transaction. They know who owns the iPad you just bought, to the point that there is likely an association between the serial number of the device (I'm talking only partly out of my posterior here) and the payment method. The payment method, assuming it's yours, uniquely identifies you. Your ownership is no longer anonymous. Not only can they prevent you from purchasing another iPad (with that same credit card, or one with the same name), they know who owns that particular iPad.
I beg to differ. The amount of storage in a disk drive is directly related to the number of platter sides is in the disk, since that is the medium where the bits are stored. Since the number of platters sides is not a power of two (and neither is the areal density), disk drives come in sizes like, currently, 500 GB, 750 GB, 800 GB, 1000 GB, 1500 GB, etc. for 250 GB per platter side, and 320 GB, 640 GB, etc., for the larger 320 GB per platter side. Neither the 500 GB nor 320 GB platters themselves are sizes that match powers of two.
Unlike RAM memory, there is nothing inherently driving disk size to be a power of two.
You are perhaps mis-understanding the question to be one about the difference between 1000 bytes and 1024 bytes when measuring computer memory sizes. Yes, the disk drive manufacturers understood that they could advertise a slightly larger unformatted capacity using a 1000 byte base. But, frankly, I don't see the problem with that since with the current ease of availability of memory, both RAM and disk, at something above a few thousand bytes, the practical issues that drove counting in base two are irrelevant. Who cares if a file is actually 1000000 or 1024*1024 bytes when there is enough space for a million of them?
Finally, is there really a need for profanity in your reply?
Not when it comes to disk drives. The total storage in a spinning media drive is based on the number of platter sides used, which can range from 1 to 6 (or perhaps 8... does anyone still use four platters?), the areal density of storage on the surface, and how much of the surface is devoted to spare tracks to cover for manufacturing defects (and probably other factors I'm forgetting). None of these are based on powers of two phenomena.
Great. I have no fewer than three student email addresses, but because they all end in.edu.au, no dice. Thanks, Google.
No, give priority to students studying at American schools. Huge difference, as something like 20% of the US college and university student population are foreign nationals. Americans studying abroad are just as out of luck as you are.
We know Knuth was crazy to talk about paragraph-based hyphenation and justification, and it is madness that the Knuth-Plass algorithm remains the gold standard in H&J today...
I love the fact that Plass showed page breaking to be NP-complete in his PhD thesis at Stanford.
I hate the fact that the various Office-class word processors do not implement line breaking using the Knuth-Plass algorithm. It's not like there's any patent preventing them, and the result is *always* superior. Someday, perhaps we'll even get it in our web browsers. I can dream, can't I?
Because it's nearly all labor and hospital costs. When you go to the doctor to get a procedure done, the total bill is not your USD 10 or 15 co-pay, but rather a much larger sum that gets paid by your insurance company. There is no such thing as insurance for procedures done as part of a clinical trial, so the organization running the trial must pay the medical bills. Those costs really are very expensive because they are, in turn, mostly labor costs and liability coverage.
Money spent on e.g. breast cancer awareness goes towards raising awareness of breast cancer, not to finding a cure or even a treatment. It's the same with every other X cancer awareness non-profit charitable organization.
Also, the amount of money for awareness isn't very large compared to the amount of money required to do human-based research. My small research lab has a relatively modest budget of USD 250k per year (*thank* *you*, NIH, and *thank* *you* to all you taxpayers out there). The total cost my institution will bill the government for my lab over the five years of the grant I have is about $2.25 million, including overhead. Now a couple of million dollars is a gob-smacking amount of money by most individual people's scales, but it's just one small biology lab. We're working with test-tubes, not humans... at least not yet.
A hoo-ha-break-out-the-champagne fund raiser would net $1 million. That's a fantastically successful fund raiser. But it would only run my lab for about two years. If I wanted to do a Phase-I clinical trial, it would take two-to-three times that amount of money. Phase-II would be about ten times that. Phase-III is not something that could be done at my home institution alone.
So public-based fund raising for breast cancer, autism, kidney disease, coronary disease, glaucoma, what-have-you, is wonderful. But it's on the wrong scale to fund research or human drug testing. I'm deeply impressed that anyone was able to raise enough money for an independent drug trial.
Slashdot Mirror
Very true. It was hard to convince my mom that her $149 point and shoot digital at 12MP couldn't match my old (ancient, in technology terms) Canon Digital Rebel XT that was "only" 8MP. The reality though is that despite having only 2/3's of the pixel count, my camera takes pictures that look WORLDS better. Side by side shots finally convinced her.
Just like the Mhz myth for processors, cameras also can't simply be measuring in megapixels.
Another huge factor is the quality of the glass. The lowest-noise, highest-contrast, most-linear, biggest Dmax sensor in the world isn't going to give you good results if it has a cheap-o plastic lens in front of it. (Unless you're looking for that effect, like you get with a Lens Baby.)
Futhermore, designing and manufacturing high-quality lenses is really quite difficult. Putting high-quality glass in a phone-sized device is, currently at least, impossible.
My brother purchased an iPhone when they first came out, and put his photos up on the social networking site Multiply. Downsampled, they looked pretty good. Then, I tried screwing around with them a little in Photoshop to understand more. Full resolution, they suck. Sure, they're not bad for a phone, but are worse than the contemporary point-and-shoot I was using, and far, far worse than my DSLR.
Like all propeller-driven craft, the power flow is from the craft to the propeller.
I do not see that as being true here, as there is no mechanical gain from the body to the air, and the claim is that the craft is moving faster than the prevailing wind, therefore there is a headwind on the chassis.
I look at Bing.com -- the main page -- almost every day. Once. The background images they put up are at worst good, usually excellent, and at times breath-taking. (The tool-tip factoids are dumb, though.)
Then I go to Google to actually get work done.
I drink two pints first thing in the morning. 32oz * 3.5mg = 112mg. Then about 12oz/hr after that throughout the work day, and back to pint glasses when I get home.
Stop.
No, seriously, stop drinking that much Dr. Pepper. Ingesting that many calories from one source is a Really Bad Idea. Even if it's actually their diet version, ingesting that much of any one food source is a Really Bad Idea. It leads to all sorts of health issues, not the least of which will be vitamin deficiency. Seriously, this is a VERY BAD IDEA.
Taper down, quit cold turkey, whatever, but cut down on your intake and do it soon. If you're ingesting that much sugar, you are on a short bee-line to diabetes, and a long list of Very Bad Diseases to follow. If you're ingesting that much synthetic crap by drinking the diet version instead, the diseases are not as readily identifiable, but I'd put good money down are going to be at least as bad.
Seriously, stop. Anyone else here on Slashdot that is ingesting that much surgared soda, stop. Now. Diabetes, which is the most likely outcome (if not death from congestive heart failure) is a seriously bad disease, with complications like glaucoma that leads to blindness, chronic foot ulcers, gangrene, foot amputation, kidney failure, etc. Did you see that "blindness" part? Not joking. Preventing it is easy: stop drinking soda.
Is this really beer?
I find it hard to believe that this could be brewed naturally, i.e. using yeast to ferment the liquor. I find it hard to believe that a yeast can live in 50% alcohol, 27% was really pushing the limits.
How is this marked insightful when it is nothing but ignorant? The poster could not possibly have read the article because if they had, they would realize that it isn't beer straight out of the fermenter, but rather beer processed to extract and therefore concentrate the alcohol and most everything else. The interesting part is that freezing the beer to extract water is hard: you need to chill the beer to just the right temperature for just the right amount of time so that the ice crystals are just the right size so that they can be filtered out mechanically. The process is one of decreasing efficiency where the higher alcohol beers requiring over a dozen freeze/filtration/thaw cycles. I wonder why they don't use an immersion freezer instead and allow the crystals to grow arbitrarily large.
My brother (with a two-digit Slashdot ID) is a big fan of the Utiopias. Says it's the best beer ever. There's a barley wine that's made by a bewer locally here that's called Benevolance that I find amazing. It's a good time to like beer.
The fact that they barely interact with anything has nothing to do with the fact that they are nearly massless. Photons are massless and they interact with anything that carries an electric charge. Electrons are much lighter than muons, but they are just as likely to interact with something. The only force that gets weaker as the mass goes down is gravity, which is by far the weakest of the fundamental forces.
Good point, I should have been more expansive. There are definitely many more reasons that neutrinos are non-interactive.
How could something have mass and so weakly interact with normal matter?
Neutrinos are thought to have a very small mass. So exceedingly small that they barely interact with anything (they also have no charge, so they are even less likely to interact). But zero mass and really, really, really small but not zero mass, are two different things.
BP *WILL NOT* come out of this unscathed, if they come out at all.
Agreed. Since I first heard of the oil spill, I've been saying, "BP will not survive this disaster." It will need to spend a very large amount of its cash on hand to pay for the cleanup (the growth in the extent of which is showing no signs of slowing), the damages, and general remediation of what will probably be three or four states' worth of coastline. The American body politic will want heads to roll. Dismantling or nationalizing BP's US operations is, at this point, a distinct possibility.
The only good thing to come out of this disaster is that future offshore drilling operations in the US are likely to be safer.
We have anti-monopoly laws and investigators to deal with these kinds of things.
Hehe!
Oh dear, you were being sarcastic, right?
No, actually, the anti-monopoly laws were created to deal with Standard Oil and the robber-barons of the late 1890s. That's right kids, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (use Google and/or Wikipedia) was specifically targeted at the then-near-total monopoly of an oil company. The Act hasn't been used many times, but it is an exceedingly heavy and powerful hammer that allows the US Government to forcibly dismantle even the very largest corporations.
Um, do the maths. 100% effective in five monkeys scales out to 100% effective in 5 million monkeys in my arithmetic book. But then again my books are published in Texas....
This is a standard EE/CS/engineering view where everything is deterministic, or very nearly so.
As an EE-turned-biologist, one of the big things I had to get my head around is that like it or not, Biology is messy. Very messy. Whereas in Engineering, models that are accurate to 1% are considered adequate, and 0.1% good, in Biology, models that are accurate to merely 50% are considered good, and above that is excellent. Biology is messy. There are many, many, many uncontrolled variables, most of which are unobserved or not even contemplated.
Just because 100% of five monkeys were cured (which is a FARKING STUNNING result), it does not mean that the next five will also be cured. Or the five after that. Or the five done in another lab. Or the hundred after that. It gives a good indication that this will be the case, but assuming that 100% of five can be extrapolated to mean 100% of any number in Biology is going to get you in a lot of trouble.
Five is a very, very good start (and might well result in a Nobel prize for the first time we've cured a viral disease, if, in fact, it turns out the virus has been erradicated and not just suppressed or made dormant). I look forward to seeing the results replicated and extended.
... the scientific consensus was that the 11 year cycle was due to some kind of underlying fluctuation in the sun itself. Now that theory has to be revised (or maybe even rejected entirely) as this prolonged solar minimum continues.
I would seriously doubt that anyone is questioning whether the fluctuations are from an internal process.
We can barely -- barely -- predict weather on the *surface* of our globe for a period of a few days. We can't even accurately predict how many storms there will be in a given cyclone / hurricane season yet, and that's one of the biggest periodic features. To say that we have a good enough understanding (and therefore can predict) what amounts to three dimensional weather in a volume six orders of magnitude larger than the earth to be able to predict even the coarsest features to eleven years is mistaken hubris at best.
We have a few hundred years' worth of sunspot observation. Is it so shocking to think that there might be patterns that are on a longer timescale than our stretch of observations would reveal? Personally, I see no reason to think that the underlying mechanism is not still entirely within the sun. It certainly might be the case that it is due to external influences, but it would seem improbable.
Greek. Mod me troll, offtopic, whatever. Getting something like this wrong is a big deal. It is not a greek crisis, but a Greek crisis. It is a crisis of the national government of Greece. Moreover, since "greek" is rarely used as an adjective on Slashdot, it reads too easily as "geek" which is a common adjective here, so the submitter and editor would need to be extra careful to avoid confusion.
Yet another instance where an editor worth their salt would perform their appointed duties and correct submitted text, but a Slashdot editor fails to do so.
Does execution time really dominate updates / installs with yum for you? Network fetch time is the vastly larger fraction for me.
I hear people make this sort of claim all the time on Slashdot, and I have yet to see evidence for it. It also conveniently ignores one of the primary motivators for patents: defense of R&D. Creating a new object or technology costs a lot of money. In come cases many, many orders of magnitude more than when patent protection was created. Without the enticement of being able to reap the monetary rewards from a temporary, sanctioned monopoly on the invention, where is the motivation? It becomes a competitive *liability* to put money into R&D when your competitors can just wait for you to do the work and carry the development costs for them. With the current system, you aren't guaranteed protection if your competitor is developing the same ideas and patents first, but there is a good chance.
Without patents, we will have essentially no technological or scientific development at all, except where funded by the government (and, in case you didn't know, the US government profits handsomely from patents they fund). The current US Federal budget is woefully inadequate to take on that role.
The argument that every major advance came more-or-less simultaneously from multiple sources ... evidence please? Let me just think of a few major advances: antibiotics, internal combustion, electrical motors, the light bulb, the electron tube, the transistor, the integrated circuit, plastics, x-ray and magnetic resonance imaging, PCR, refrigeration, feedback control, anesthetics, injection molding, etc. And how about all of the minor ones without which we would not enjoy nearly every facet of modern life? I'm thinking latex paint, radial tires, pyrex, autoclaves, velcro, computerized typesetting, robotic assembly lines, the sewing machine, radio, cathode-ray tubes, power tools, the bimetallic strip, epoxy, AM/FM/FSK encoding, etc.
It is, frankly, a naive and ill-conceived notion that we should eliminate patents, or equivalently, that intellectual property should not be protected by law just as physical property is. Pointing out one patent that should not have been issued does not prove the system is broken.
In what way are photons travelling down a fiber not a traditional signal? Sure, they are entangled, but you still have to ship photons around.
I wasn't trying to say that some photographs should be protected, and some shouldn't be by arbitrary external criteria, but that the vast majority of people do not care about their photographs, and thus fuel the prevailing attitudes about all photographic work. The people who do care, unfortunately, feel the negative impacts of this laissez-faire view.
I agree that the best position to take is one where all images are protected upon creation, and my understanding is that, at least some years ago, this was the case. I've also heard that there was a recent refinement of that position by the US Government, and that it is no longer true. I'd love to hear an informed view.
In terms of a search engine scraping images, one easy way to separate photos from people who care about protecting their images versus the rest is to examine EXIF data on JPEG files. Cameras don't add copyright information by default, to the best of my knowledge, but copyright information can be added in an EXIF field by those who care to protect their creation.
The problem is that most people who use a camera take snapshots, not photographs. Given the explosion in digital photography over the last decade, I'd wager that a vanishingly small number of times a shutter is pressed out of the billions total does it get pressed by someone who is trying to create art, whether commercial or otherwise.
Most people don't care about their photos, their snapshots. There's no effort to create them. There was no thought put into the composition, no setup to speak of .. it's just a snapshot. And, as such, most of the people do not understand why it is a big deal that anyone should care about photos. The public does not realize that it costs potentially a lot of money and time to create professional images. Witness some of the comments on this Slashdot thread.
I applaud the parent poster for caring enough to make that effort, and for taking the time to defend their work against dilution. It's a mark of professionalism and high quality that likely pervades the rest of his operation.
We already have a way to uniquely and unquestionably identify a person. It’s called picture ID.
When was the last time you were required to show a picture ID when purchasing electronics?
Can somebody explain to me why buying 10 fully loaded iPads with my gold Amex prevents me from selling them on the black market afterwards but paying for one in cash doesn't?
On a related note, where is this "black market"? Seems like has lots of awesome stuff for sale there.
You've missed the point: the refusal of cash for a purchase has nothing to do with limiting the number of iPads you can purchase (seriously, it's about as Orwellian as it gets when ideas are used to mean their exact opposite). The amount of cash you have on hand is far more limited, in practical terms, than the amount of money you have at your finger tips on a credit card. It is *easier* to buy ten iPads on a credit card; it is much harder and riskier to cart around the amount of cash necessary to do the same thing.
The difference, and that which Apple wants to avoid at all costs, is that when you use cash, you are effectively anonymous. You can return and buy again. And again. And again. With a credit card, there is an unquestionable and unique identification of the transaction. They know who owns the iPad you just bought, to the point that there is likely an association between the serial number of the device (I'm talking only partly out of my posterior here) and the payment method. The payment method, assuming it's yours, uniquely identifies you. Your ownership is no longer anonymous. Not only can they prevent you from purchasing another iPad (with that same credit card, or one with the same name), they know who owns that particular iPad.
I beg to differ. The amount of storage in a disk drive is directly related to the number of platter sides is in the disk, since that is the medium where the bits are stored. Since the number of platters sides is not a power of two (and neither is the areal density), disk drives come in sizes like, currently, 500 GB, 750 GB, 800 GB, 1000 GB, 1500 GB, etc. for 250 GB per platter side, and 320 GB, 640 GB, etc., for the larger 320 GB per platter side. Neither the 500 GB nor 320 GB platters themselves are sizes that match powers of two.
Unlike RAM memory, there is nothing inherently driving disk size to be a power of two.
You are perhaps mis-understanding the question to be one about the difference between 1000 bytes and 1024 bytes when measuring computer memory sizes. Yes, the disk drive manufacturers understood that they could advertise a slightly larger unformatted capacity using a 1000 byte base. But, frankly, I don't see the problem with that since with the current ease of availability of memory, both RAM and disk, at something above a few thousand bytes, the practical issues that drove counting in base two are irrelevant. Who cares if a file is actually 1000000 or 1024*1024 bytes when there is enough space for a million of them?
Finally, is there really a need for profanity in your reply?
We are counting in binary are we not?
Not when it comes to disk drives. The total storage in a spinning media drive is based on the number of platter sides used, which can range from 1 to 6 (or perhaps 8 ... does anyone still use four platters?), the areal density of storage on the surface, and how much of the surface is devoted to spare tracks to cover for manufacturing defects (and probably other factors I'm forgetting). None of these are based on powers of two phenomena.
Great. I have no fewer than three student email addresses, but because they all end in .edu.au, no dice. Thanks, Google.
No, give priority to students studying at American schools. Huge difference, as something like 20% of the US college and university student population are foreign nationals. Americans studying abroad are just as out of luck as you are.
We know Knuth was crazy to talk about paragraph-based hyphenation and justification, and it is madness that the Knuth-Plass algorithm remains the gold standard in H&J today ...
I love the fact that Plass showed page breaking to be NP-complete in his PhD thesis at Stanford.
I hate the fact that the various Office-class word processors do not implement line breaking using the Knuth-Plass algorithm. It's not like there's any patent preventing them, and the result is *always* superior. Someday, perhaps we'll even get it in our web browsers. I can dream, can't I?
So why is it so horrendously inefficient?
Because it's nearly all labor and hospital costs. When you go to the doctor to get a procedure done, the total bill is not your USD 10 or 15 co-pay, but rather a much larger sum that gets paid by your insurance company. There is no such thing as insurance for procedures done as part of a clinical trial, so the organization running the trial must pay the medical bills. Those costs really are very expensive because they are, in turn, mostly labor costs and liability coverage.
Money spent on e.g. breast cancer awareness goes towards raising awareness of breast cancer, not to finding a cure or even a treatment. It's the same with every other X cancer awareness non-profit charitable organization.
Also, the amount of money for awareness isn't very large compared to the amount of money required to do human-based research. My small research lab has a relatively modest budget of USD 250k per year (*thank* *you*, NIH, and *thank* *you* to all you taxpayers out there). The total cost my institution will bill the government for my lab over the five years of the grant I have is about $2.25 million, including overhead. Now a couple of million dollars is a gob-smacking amount of money by most individual people's scales, but it's just one small biology lab. We're working with test-tubes, not humans ... at least not yet.
A hoo-ha-break-out-the-champagne fund raiser would net $1 million. That's a fantastically successful fund raiser. But it would only run my lab for about two years. If I wanted to do a Phase-I clinical trial, it would take two-to-three times that amount of money. Phase-II would be about ten times that. Phase-III is not something that could be done at my home institution alone.
So public-based fund raising for breast cancer, autism, kidney disease, coronary disease, glaucoma, what-have-you, is wonderful. But it's on the wrong scale to fund research or human drug testing. I'm deeply impressed that anyone was able to raise enough money for an independent drug trial.