You have 3 color receptors in your eyes, each of which has a bell curve of responsiveness to frequency. These bell curves overlap, allowing you to tease out quite a bit of information about color from the strength of these 3 signals. Most colors we see are themselves bell curves of emitted frequency, because most light sources are.
You could fake all this exactly with 3 colors, if you could chose the specific 3 colors emitted on the fly for each pixel (three variables, three unknowns). But since you have to pick the colors ahead of time, any 3 you pick will have issues. If you want the full spectrum, you need a light at either end of the spectrum, because you can't "synthesize" the endpoints form the middle. But those extremes aren't useful for most colors (the eye is barely responive there). As sibling posts have explained, you get real improvements with 4 and some improvement with 5 colors. I called out 6 for that "100%".
Because of the way the first layer of visual processing for the eye/brain works, it's really handy to have red, green, blue, and yellow, but there are other 4-color combinations that can work noticeably better than RGB as well. (Why those particular 4? The brain first turns raw color data into R+G, R-G, B+Y, and B-Y. This is why there's not a shade that mixes red and green, why red on a green background or vv sucks, etc. But the R/G effect is more important then the B/Y effect, making RGB the easy choice for 3-color emissive displays).
Fun bonus fact: across human cultures, there's little agreement on the boundary between colors, e.g., where blue-green becomes "green" instead of "blue", but lots of agreement on where colors are centered. It took linguists surprisingly long to figure this out when trying to understand the definition of a color word in a new language. Kind of an interesting problem, when you think about it.
Oh, I'm very sure some cryptocurrency will outlast some fiat currency, and vice versa. But the USD in particular is safer than BTC in particular.
Not to mention, I have fixed obligation in USD. That's not going to change any time soon. Thus I want my income and savings in USD, so that I don't find myself unable to meet those obligations due to daily exchange rate volatility.
If you have obligations in USD, it's really handy to have income and saving in USD. I have a friend with obligations in both USD and Yen, and he occasionally struggles to maintain a balance of USD/Yen income and savings, to avoid any nasty currency shocks.
It's quite bad to have your income and savings in a currency that has a volatile exchange rate with the one you have obligations in - even if you're making gains some in the exchange rate.
This is the difference-in-kind in BTC - it's hugely volatile. That makes it basically useless as a currency for savings, unless your alternative is a currency that's actually collapsing right now.
All investment is risk, but that's different from what people normally mean by gamble. Sure any investment bears risks such as global nuclear war, government/societal collapse, alien invasion, and so on, but the unexpected death of the investor is a higher risk than those sorts of things. Any investment is a risk somewhere on the scale between short-term US treasuries, and loaning money to a heroin addict, but that doesn't mean all risks are similar.
Also, volatility and risk are different things. At this point for BTC, I'd be much more concerned about its volatility than the risk it would go to 0, making it speculative regardless.
Well, I wouldn't go quite that far, but Pravda is certainly more entertaining than the NYT. They embraced their lack of credibility, and became something similar to Weekly World News. (I miss WWN - they alone carried the story of Saddam and Osama's gay marriage, and a year later their bouncing baby chimpanzee. They also broke the story in the 90s when Elvis finally died in a car crash.)
UCS-2, unless it changed after Win7. I think.NET and thus power shell are UTF-16, but all the win32/64 stuff is UCS-2. Bit of a mess, but in MS's defense, Unicode wasn't there when this mess got started. UCS-2 was an early attempt at a fixed-width character set. It nearly worked.
Yeah, to get it perfect you'd need 6 colors, not 3, including red and violet at the ends of the visible spectrum, and something near cyan and yellow. You can get quite close, however, with 3. Normal LCD is so bad when it comes to color that I welcome any new alternative, as my plasma screen is quite power hungry (and hot - 600W space heater).
The fundamental problem is the death spiral: young, healthy people don't want to pay for the high-expense folks, so simply drop insurance, causing rates to rise and more to drop.
The straightforward solution is a high risk pool, as we do for car insurance, but that doesn't stop the death spiral. The only remaining sane options are tax-funded: either medicaid for the high risk (which would be unpopular once people find out how bad doctors that take medicaid are), or, my prediction, government-as-re-insurer.
Single payer is Communism, as everyone knows, but move the solution to re-insurance and it's actually a good trade-off: same taxpayer subsidy, but we keep the variety of choice of insurers and plans.
The right will bitch and moan about the government spending, but since no one in the GOP actually wants to reduce spending, it's hardly a real obstacle.
I think a lot of folks who voted Trump and a Republican Congress are about to find that out with Obamacare, as it becomes clearer with each press conference that the Republicans have no actual plan, and are more than likely simply going to tinker with the ACA, and that the "great repeal" is going to be little more than a rebranding,
That's certainly what we're afraid of. But there are some hints the GOP is finding it's long-lost balls, and waking up to the fact that, since a big jump in exchange insurance rates played into last election, a big drop in rates would save their asses in the next.
Otherwise: fuck the GOP. I don't know a single conservative who actually likes the GOP, it's merely the barely lesser evil. The pendulum swing that brought us Trump has just begun, and unless the GOP is nimble, it won't survive as a party to the end of it all. And if the Dems aren't scared by the level of support Bernie got, they should wake up - that wave is still rising, too.
Yes, because the law is the only possible constraint. Ignore centuries of precedent; personal conscience, ethics, tradition and public morality were imaginary all along! It's the law or nothing!
I bet you're a small government conservative, too, aren't you?
As a small government conservative: laws.amendments that restrain the power of government are great! "Centuries of precedent; personal conscience, ethics, tradition" are worthless for protecting us from assholes. Of course, so is the Constitution once there are enough asshole in the SCOTUS.
+1 for this. Every time someone says they can't tell the difference between 1080p and 4K, I think to myself "Just how bad is that mofos eyes???" There's a huge difference!
I can set up a showroom so that you'd tally see the differece and be willing to pay for it, even though both screens were secretly identical. Never trust what you see in a showroom.
For the home, it all comes down to viewing distance. With 4K you can see a difference, but you have be closer than most people find comfortable. With my 65" screen I'd have to be within 8 feet. But that's a legitimate use case for plenty of people, especially for gaming and for PC monitors.
To see the difference between 4K and 8K OTOH, you have to be close enough that the TV exceeds your field of view. I could imagine doing that on purpose for some elaborate home theater set-up, but for almost everyone it's pointless. You can see the difference only by walking right up to the TV, not from any reasonable viewing distance, even close-ish for gaming.
The main advantage to good cables is simple mechanical reliability. But you can get $5-10 cables form Dayton (or in some cases Amazon Basics) that look to be made in the same factory as Monster cables.
Even for long runs for digital cables, where shielding and impedance matching barely matter, acceptable quality can actually get expensive as you need larger wire gauge (or a repeater) for long runs. Don't take the cheapest 50-foot HDMI cable, or you'll get one that works most days.
On the kernel side in MS-land there are a couple of macros named __try, __finally, and __leave. They're simple wrappers around goto, for no reason but slipping it past the censors.
Straight-line acceleration just isn't that important. The Tesla can't corner for shit, which makes the acceleration a bit dangerous. Seating 5 adults? Some people care I guess, but the interior is just less nice than any competing long wheelbase car (all of which have plenty of room). It compares quite poorly to something like an Audi S8+, Mercedes S-class AMG, or BWM Alpina B7.
Only in straight-line acceleration, but so does a kid's muscle car. It's not a luxury car in any way but "smoothness" (no engine vibration), and even there it's not much better than the high-end German cars. At both the $80k and $140k price-points, the competition is nicer inside, has more luxury car features, is more reliable, and handles much better.
The Model S keeps improving, and maybe one day it will reach parity in everything but cornering. Today, however, its primary appeal is "green". The Germans have been amazingly slow in bringing out competing models in that space. You'd expect at least a plug-in hybrid from Mercedes by now. Lot's of hybrids on the Japanese side, but still not plug-in hybrids or pure electrics in the luxury space, AFAIK.
How close is the dealership? Can you manage it on the way to work, or do you have to take a day off just to mess with something that should just work in the first place? This is the problem with any car repair - even if it's free, my time is valuable.
I was shocked to see my Infiniti make it onto CR's most reliable list; Nissan isn't exactly famous for reliability. But times change, I guess - Honda has slid far down from former glory, and Nissan seems to actually care, at least for the high end.
Windows 10 had Less vulnerabilities that linux and Mac... AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I'm not surprised by Windows doing well - MS go their act together around WIn7 time. (Too many Slashdotters are still stuck in the 90s.) I am surprised IE wasn't a top contender - maybe it's dwindling share protects it?
You don't find 1400 girls in sexual slavery, ongoing for years, in a modern nation newsworthy? If you haven't heard of it, you should really ask who suppressed the news - and why.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair point - I'd never really thought of UCS as "Unicode", but I guess it's no accident that it's so close to UTF-16.
Bitcoin as a payment/transfer system seems to be its primary use, from what I can see.
You have 3 color receptors in your eyes, each of which has a bell curve of responsiveness to frequency. These bell curves overlap, allowing you to tease out quite a bit of information about color from the strength of these 3 signals. Most colors we see are themselves bell curves of emitted frequency, because most light sources are.
You could fake all this exactly with 3 colors, if you could chose the specific 3 colors emitted on the fly for each pixel (three variables, three unknowns). But since you have to pick the colors ahead of time, any 3 you pick will have issues. If you want the full spectrum, you need a light at either end of the spectrum, because you can't "synthesize" the endpoints form the middle. But those extremes aren't useful for most colors (the eye is barely responive there). As sibling posts have explained, you get real improvements with 4 and some improvement with 5 colors. I called out 6 for that "100%".
Because of the way the first layer of visual processing for the eye/brain works, it's really handy to have red, green, blue, and yellow, but there are other 4-color combinations that can work noticeably better than RGB as well. (Why those particular 4? The brain first turns raw color data into R+G, R-G, B+Y, and B-Y. This is why there's not a shade that mixes red and green, why red on a green background or vv sucks, etc. But the R/G effect is more important then the B/Y effect, making RGB the easy choice for 3-color emissive displays).
Fun bonus fact: across human cultures, there's little agreement on the boundary between colors, e.g., where blue-green becomes "green" instead of "blue", but lots of agreement on where colors are centered. It took linguists surprisingly long to figure this out when trying to understand the definition of a color word in a new language. Kind of an interesting problem, when you think about it.
Oh, I'm very sure some cryptocurrency will outlast some fiat currency, and vice versa. But the USD in particular is safer than BTC in particular.
Not to mention, I have fixed obligation in USD. That's not going to change any time soon. Thus I want my income and savings in USD, so that I don't find myself unable to meet those obligations due to daily exchange rate volatility.
Sure, I can buy "more transparent".
WWN was more credible on their last issue then the NYT is now. I believe in Batboy more than I believe in Russian hackers at the DNC.
Well, we did have plenty of photographic evidence of Batboy, after all.
If you have obligations in USD, it's really handy to have income and saving in USD. I have a friend with obligations in both USD and Yen, and he occasionally struggles to maintain a balance of USD/Yen income and savings, to avoid any nasty currency shocks.
It's quite bad to have your income and savings in a currency that has a volatile exchange rate with the one you have obligations in - even if you're making gains some in the exchange rate.
This is the difference-in-kind in BTC - it's hugely volatile. That makes it basically useless as a currency for savings, unless your alternative is a currency that's actually collapsing right now.
All investment is risk, but that's different from what people normally mean by gamble. Sure any investment bears risks such as global nuclear war, government/societal collapse, alien invasion, and so on, but the unexpected death of the investor is a higher risk than those sorts of things. Any investment is a risk somewhere on the scale between short-term US treasuries, and loaning money to a heroin addict, but that doesn't mean all risks are similar.
Also, volatility and risk are different things. At this point for BTC, I'd be much more concerned about its volatility than the risk it would go to 0, making it speculative regardless.
That's going to make for one heck of a tax form, as your cost basis and BTC/USD value at time of sale will be needed for every transaction.
Google's old motto: "Don't, be evil" ... what's right?"
Google's new motto: "Duh
Pravda has more credibility.
Well, I wouldn't go quite that far, but Pravda is certainly more entertaining than the NYT. They embraced their lack of credibility, and became something similar to Weekly World News. (I miss WWN - they alone carried the story of Saddam and Osama's gay marriage, and a year later their bouncing baby chimpanzee. They also broke the story in the 90s when Elvis finally died in a car crash.)
I miss Usenet. It was too hard for idiots like you to use so idiots like you were not often encountered.
AC clearly never used Usenet! It was always idiots all the way down.
UCS-2, unless it changed after Win7. I think .NET and thus power shell are UTF-16, but all the win32/64 stuff is UCS-2. Bit of a mess, but in MS's defense, Unicode wasn't there when this mess got started. UCS-2 was an early attempt at a fixed-width character set. It nearly worked.
Yeah, to get it perfect you'd need 6 colors, not 3, including red and violet at the ends of the visible spectrum, and something near cyan and yellow. You can get quite close, however, with 3. Normal LCD is so bad when it comes to color that I welcome any new alternative, as my plasma screen is quite power hungry (and hot - 600W space heater).
The fundamental problem is the death spiral: young, healthy people don't want to pay for the high-expense folks, so simply drop insurance, causing rates to rise and more to drop.
The straightforward solution is a high risk pool, as we do for car insurance, but that doesn't stop the death spiral. The only remaining sane options are tax-funded: either medicaid for the high risk (which would be unpopular once people find out how bad doctors that take medicaid are), or, my prediction, government-as-re-insurer.
Single payer is Communism, as everyone knows, but move the solution to re-insurance and it's actually a good trade-off: same taxpayer subsidy, but we keep the variety of choice of insurers and plans.
The right will bitch and moan about the government spending, but since no one in the GOP actually wants to reduce spending, it's hardly a real obstacle.
I think a lot of folks who voted Trump and a Republican Congress are about to find that out with Obamacare, as it becomes clearer with each press conference that the Republicans have no actual plan, and are more than likely simply going to tinker with the ACA, and that the "great repeal" is going to be little more than a rebranding,
That's certainly what we're afraid of. But there are some hints the GOP is finding it's long-lost balls, and waking up to the fact that, since a big jump in exchange insurance rates played into last election, a big drop in rates would save their asses in the next.
Otherwise: fuck the GOP. I don't know a single conservative who actually likes the GOP, it's merely the barely lesser evil. The pendulum swing that brought us Trump has just begun, and unless the GOP is nimble, it won't survive as a party to the end of it all. And if the Dems aren't scared by the level of support Bernie got, they should wake up - that wave is still rising, too.
Yes, because the law is the only possible constraint. Ignore centuries of precedent; personal conscience, ethics, tradition and public morality were imaginary all along! It's the law or nothing!
I bet you're a small government conservative, too, aren't you?
As a small government conservative: laws.amendments that restrain the power of government are great! "Centuries of precedent; personal conscience, ethics, tradition" are worthless for protecting us from assholes. Of course, so is the Constitution once there are enough asshole in the SCOTUS.
I think you need a Schwarzenegger or Jesse Ventura candidacy for proper "Predator vs" politics.
+1 for this. Every time someone says they can't tell the difference between 1080p and 4K, I think to myself "Just how bad is that mofos eyes???" There's a huge difference!
I can set up a showroom so that you'd tally see the differece and be willing to pay for it, even though both screens were secretly identical. Never trust what you see in a showroom.
For the home, it all comes down to viewing distance. With 4K you can see a difference, but you have be closer than most people find comfortable. With my 65" screen I'd have to be within 8 feet. But that's a legitimate use case for plenty of people, especially for gaming and for PC monitors.
To see the difference between 4K and 8K OTOH, you have to be close enough that the TV exceeds your field of view. I could imagine doing that on purpose for some elaborate home theater set-up, but for almost everyone it's pointless. You can see the difference only by walking right up to the TV, not from any reasonable viewing distance, even close-ish for gaming.
The main advantage to good cables is simple mechanical reliability. But you can get $5-10 cables form Dayton (or in some cases Amazon Basics) that look to be made in the same factory as Monster cables.
Even for long runs for digital cables, where shielding and impedance matching barely matter, acceptable quality can actually get expensive as you need larger wire gauge (or a repeater) for long runs. Don't take the cheapest 50-foot HDMI cable, or you'll get one that works most days.
On the kernel side in MS-land there are a couple of macros named __try, __finally, and __leave. They're simple wrappers around goto, for no reason but slipping it past the censors.
Straight-line acceleration just isn't that important. The Tesla can't corner for shit, which makes the acceleration a bit dangerous. Seating 5 adults? Some people care I guess, but the interior is just less nice than any competing long wheelbase car (all of which have plenty of room). It compares quite poorly to something like an Audi S8+, Mercedes S-class AMG, or BWM Alpina B7.
Only in straight-line acceleration, but so does a kid's muscle car. It's not a luxury car in any way but "smoothness" (no engine vibration), and even there it's not much better than the high-end German cars. At both the $80k and $140k price-points, the competition is nicer inside, has more luxury car features, is more reliable, and handles much better.
The Model S keeps improving, and maybe one day it will reach parity in everything but cornering. Today, however, its primary appeal is "green". The Germans have been amazingly slow in bringing out competing models in that space. You'd expect at least a plug-in hybrid from Mercedes by now. Lot's of hybrids on the Japanese side, but still not plug-in hybrids or pure electrics in the luxury space, AFAIK.
How close is the dealership? Can you manage it on the way to work, or do you have to take a day off just to mess with something that should just work in the first place? This is the problem with any car repair - even if it's free, my time is valuable.
I was shocked to see my Infiniti make it onto CR's most reliable list; Nissan isn't exactly famous for reliability. But times change, I guess - Honda has slid far down from former glory, and Nissan seems to actually care, at least for the high end.
Windows 10 had Less vulnerabilities that linux and Mac... AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I'm not surprised by Windows doing well - MS go their act together around WIn7 time. (Too many Slashdotters are still stuck in the 90s.) I am surprised IE wasn't a top contender - maybe it's dwindling share protects it?
You don't find 1400 girls in sexual slavery, ongoing for years, in a modern nation newsworthy? If you haven't heard of it, you should really ask who suppressed the news - and why.