Organic matter can mean a lot of different things. Simple organic molecules may form in the gas clouds in space which give origin to planetary systems.
More complex molecules are a different thing, many of those require liquid water to form. The most plausible answer is that compounds such as methane were formed in space and accreted into earth and the other planets.
Then chemistry in the earth atmosphere and oceans built those into more and more complicated structures until life began.
All patent-holders would need to be "justly compensated" for this taking of property.
That's the problem with using loaded terms like "intellectual property". Patents are not "property". According to the Constitution which you mentioned (Section 8 - Powers of Congress):
"The Congress shall have power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
An "exclusive right" is not a property. Car analogy: if I park my car at a vacant spot, I have the exclusive right to that spot as long as parking regulations allow, but I do not have property rights on that spot of the street.
The guy who tried to blow up the truck in Times Square didn't fit any of the current profiles used for this kind of bomber. He was educated, from a well-off family
The US will have either the Democrats or Republicans in office until a armed revolt introduces proportional representation.
I live in Brazil where the representatives are elected according to a system where votes in the whole state are considered for each candidate and party. I wish we had district voting like the USA.
The problem with proportional voting is that representatives are elected by special interests. This means that each church has its representative, each labor union, even soccer teams have elected representatives in the Brazilian congress. And then there are "protest" representatives, people who get elected only because they look crazy, talk crazy, and act crazy. People say "WTF, those crooks are all the same, I will vote for the crazy guy to send a message".
The result is that people who are elected for special interests pool together their votes in congress. The representatives of the teachers union exchanges votes with representatives of the churches, so that teachers will get early retirement benefits and churches will get exemption from environment protection laws.
If bipartidarism is the price for getting rid of the football players and reverends in congress I would gladly pay it.
The actors, set builders, makeup artists, visual effects people, caterers, property managers, etc. all need to be paid.
Except for a few actors, the other people you mention belong to the "lower middle class" set of professions and can be hired for relatively small costs.
No, the highest cost in making a movie is not making the props or paying the wages, the biggest cost is in bookkeeping
our stereo equipment is WAAAY better then that theater shit system that has one speaker "flapping" with bass.
And our image quality is better too. When the local theater first advertised "Now with *DIGITAL* projection!!!" I went to see the movie with great expectations. What I saw was washed out colors, lower contrast, much lower resolution. I don't plan to go there again until they advertise *FILM* projection.
The far newer stuff (mainly from China) lasts 3-4 years max.
How many people do you know who buy a new car and keep it longer than that? The manufacturer sells to the first buyer, that's where his profit comes from. There's no sense in making a product that will last longer than that.
Making something better than necessary costs money and benefits no one. If a car has excellent durability the resale value will increase, it's true, but only to a point. At the same price, most people will prefer to buy a new car with more features than a higher quality used car.
As for other consumer items, lower priced than cars, the situation is still worse. I still have a Casio calculator that I bought in 1981, it's working fine and has all the functions one needs in a pocket calculator. What this means is that I haven't bought a calculator from Casio (or any other manufacturer) in nearly 30 years. If it weren't for new functions, all consumer electronics manufacturers would have gone out of business long ago.
It's sad but true, the Chinese are doing the only sensible thing, unless you sell at the lowest possible price, even if this means lower quality, there's no way a manufacturing company can keep the volume of sales it needs to survive.
This data comes from UN. I suspect that your country, which probably has some strong representation, would object if there were any serious discrepancies
The simple fact that Cuba has such a sustainable economy itself raises doubts about the validity of the HDI. Cuba doesn't have a sustainable economy because they recycle materials or use "green" technologies. Cuba has a sustainable economy because Cubans are poor and very few have cars.
The fact that one has to wait twenty minutes at a line whenever one has to catch a bus isn't counted on the HDI. Or the fact that Cubans are unable to travel on weekends and vacations, first because they have so many transportation problems but also because they have so much difficulty in traveling abroad.
In conclusion, that graphic you presented on the GP post showing Cuba as the only nation that has both a sustainable economy and high human development is a lie of the third category, as in "lies, damn lies, and statistics".
If a country that has been ruled by a single-party dictatorship for the last 50 years has such a high HDI, then that index is highly suspect. Even more so considering that all statistical data about the standard of living of the Cuban population is collected by the Cuban government itself.
If no independent journalists are allowed in the country, how can one be so sure about the true illiteracy rate, infant mortality, etc.
Academia has a culture, and this culture can create biases
Maybe. Now go look at the changes in the human condition since the scientific method was created in the 17th century and compare the evolution in these 400 years with the 40000 years that preceded it.
Scientists sure like to doctor their research to get more funding, they are like exxon.
Except that if there are $X available for grants, scientist A is competing against scientist B to get those funds, while Exxon and British Petroleum are united in their quest to deny reality for their own economic interests.
I still want to hear statisticians weigh in on the time period of data compared to the history of the earth. And some better assessment of the margins of error for the various sampling methods.
I don't get this whole global-warming thing. Could someone explain it with a car analogy?
OK. Imagine a planet with big gas-guzzling SUVs that emit a lot of CO2. What would be the result? The atmosphere in that planet would absorb more infrared radiation and the climate would get warmer.
all those theories that are trying to explain the past. Climate change is trying to predict the future
*ALL* science is about predicting the future. If you have a theory that cannot make predictions, then it's not a scientific theory, it's not right, it's not even wrong.
(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.
(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.
Exactly.
The problem is political, not scientific. Exxon & Co. have managed to convince the tin-foil-hat gang that all scientists are united in a vast conspiracy against people who own SUVs.
Scientists are scientists, not marketeers, how can they convince people who believe the world is 6000 years old that CO2 does absorb infrared radiation?
The right to remain silent is meant to make sure no one can be forced to speak under torture. It does not mean you have a right to keep authorities from getting evidence against you. This means, for instance, that police can force you to take a breath or blood alcohol test.
If it weren't for the right to remain silent, the police could tell you "say you are drunk or I will break all your teeth" but it would be meaningless for them to say "breath here with a BAC of 0.20 or I will break your teeth".
when they do not compensate someone for what they produce, when that person is not giving the product away, is a form of theft
Which means that when you did not buy the software I produced you stole it from me. I'm not accusing you of making a copy of that software, I don't care if you copied it or not, all I know is that I was not compensated for my work, that's the only thing that matters to me.
You wouldn't like it if someone took something of yours without being compensated
Well, if you take it away from me, that's a different thing. Now I don't have it anymore, that makes a lot of difference to me.
The first thing you have to learn is that market economy works this way, if you try to sell something no one is under any obligation to buy it. It's your duty to give enough value for the price that people will want to exchange some of their money for your product.
tightly-focused visible wavelength beams did not suffer from the Inverse square
That is true only in so-called "near field" conditions. The only reason a laser pointer seems so "tightly focused" to you is because the diameter of the beam is so much larger than the wavelength. Look at the diameter of a laser pointer beam a mile away, then two miles away and you will see that the beam is now twice as wide.
A flashlight, on the other hand, disperses light much faster than a laser while it's still, theoretically, in near field conditions because the light is emitted in random directions by a filament that's much larger than the wavelength.
Hell, theres STILL stuff he came up with that we have no understanding of. Yet.
Which means he was just another lunatic. A genius NEVER works totally alone, he "stands on the shoulders of giants".
In TFA it's mentioned that Tesla said "So far only electric waves have been used which have been quickly dampened out in their passage through the air. It is possible, however, to transmit electric current of enormous power for thousands of miles without diminishing their energy". In this sentence Tesla proved he did not understand one of the most basic laws of the universe, the inverse square of distance law, first proposed by Newton and never disproved by anyone.
It's very easy to say a scientist was wrong, like the pope said of Galileo and Tesla said of Newton, but the burden of proof falls on anyone who tries to disprove a theory that produces working applications.
Tesla said over a hundred years ago that the principle of power falling with the inverse square of distance is not true. So far, no one, neither Tesla nor anyone who came after him, ever managed to transmit any form of energy through free space whose power did not fall with the square of distance.
If you predict something and it later happens, then you are a genius. If you predict something that never happens, then you are indistinguishable from a lunatic, but you *could* be a genius, who knows.
If you write something that most people find impossible to understand, but which eventually the greatest scholars of the field manage to understand, then you are certainly a genius. If you write something that no one ever is capable to understand, then you are certainly a lunatic.
Why learn one language for image processing algorithms when you still have to learn other languages to do everything else? Better have one language that does everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Organic matter can mean a lot of different things. Simple organic molecules may form in the gas clouds in space which give origin to planetary systems.
More complex molecules are a different thing, many of those require liquid water to form. The most plausible answer is that compounds such as methane were formed in space and accreted into earth and the other planets.
Then chemistry in the earth atmosphere and oceans built those into more and more complicated structures until life began.
That's the problem with using loaded terms like "intellectual property". Patents are not "property". According to the Constitution which you mentioned (Section 8 - Powers of Congress):
"The Congress shall have power ...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
An "exclusive right" is not a property. Car analogy: if I park my car at a vacant spot, I have the exclusive right to that spot as long as parking regulations allow, but I do not have property rights on that spot of the street.
Wikipedia says that in 9/11 "the hijackers were well-educated, mature adults, whose belief systems were fully formed".
The only problem with profiling is that the profile isn't what you were expecting.
I live in Brazil where the representatives are elected according to a system where votes in the whole state are considered for each candidate and party. I wish we had district voting like the USA.
The problem with proportional voting is that representatives are elected by special interests. This means that each church has its representative, each labor union, even soccer teams have elected representatives in the Brazilian congress. And then there are "protest" representatives, people who get elected only because they look crazy, talk crazy, and act crazy. People say "WTF, those crooks are all the same, I will vote for the crazy guy to send a message".
The result is that people who are elected for special interests pool together their votes in congress. The representatives of the teachers union exchanges votes with representatives of the churches, so that teachers will get early retirement benefits and churches will get exemption from environment protection laws.
If bipartidarism is the price for getting rid of the football players and reverends in congress I would gladly pay it.
Except for a few actors, the other people you mention belong to the "lower middle class" set of professions and can be hired for relatively small costs.
No, the highest cost in making a movie is not making the props or paying the wages, the biggest cost is in bookkeeping
And our image quality is better too. When the local theater first advertised "Now with *DIGITAL* projection!!!" I went to see the movie with great expectations. What I saw was washed out colors, lower contrast, much lower resolution. I don't plan to go there again until they advertise *FILM* projection.
How many people do you know who buy a new car and keep it longer than that? The manufacturer sells to the first buyer, that's where his profit comes from. There's no sense in making a product that will last longer than that.
Making something better than necessary costs money and benefits no one. If a car has excellent durability the resale value will increase, it's true, but only to a point. At the same price, most people will prefer to buy a new car with more features than a higher quality used car.
As for other consumer items, lower priced than cars, the situation is still worse. I still have a Casio calculator that I bought in 1981, it's working fine and has all the functions one needs in a pocket calculator. What this means is that I haven't bought a calculator from Casio (or any other manufacturer) in nearly 30 years. If it weren't for new functions, all consumer electronics manufacturers would have gone out of business long ago.
It's sad but true, the Chinese are doing the only sensible thing, unless you sell at the lowest possible price, even if this means lower quality, there's no way a manufacturing company can keep the volume of sales it needs to survive.
There is plenty of criticism about the HDI.
The simple fact that Cuba has such a sustainable economy itself raises doubts about the validity of the HDI. Cuba doesn't have a sustainable economy because they recycle materials or use "green" technologies. Cuba has a sustainable economy because Cubans are poor and very few have cars.
The fact that one has to wait twenty minutes at a line whenever one has to catch a bus isn't counted on the HDI. Or the fact that Cubans are unable to travel on weekends and vacations, first because they have so many transportation problems but also because they have so much difficulty in traveling abroad.
In conclusion, that graphic you presented on the GP post showing Cuba as the only nation that has both a sustainable economy and high human development is a lie of the third category, as in "lies, damn lies, and statistics".
If a country that has been ruled by a single-party dictatorship for the last 50 years has such a high HDI, then that index is highly suspect. Even more so considering that all statistical data about the standard of living of the Cuban population is collected by the Cuban government itself.
If no independent journalists are allowed in the country, how can one be so sure about the true illiteracy rate, infant mortality, etc.
Past events, future discoveries. Many paleontologists have created theories that were proved false after more fossils were discovered.
Maybe. Now go look at the changes in the human condition since the scientific method was created in the 17th century and compare the evolution in these 400 years with the 40000 years that preceded it.
Except that if there are $X available for grants, scientist A is competing against scientist B to get those funds, while Exxon and British Petroleum are united in their quest to deny reality for their own economic interests.
I suggest you start here
OK. Imagine a planet with big gas-guzzling SUVs that emit a lot of CO2. What would be the result? The atmosphere in that planet would absorb more infrared radiation and the climate would get warmer.
*ALL* science is about predicting the future. If you have a theory that cannot make predictions, then it's not a scientific theory, it's not right, it's not even wrong .
TFA says:
Exactly.
The problem is political, not scientific. Exxon & Co. have managed to convince the tin-foil-hat gang that all scientists are united in a vast conspiracy against people who own SUVs.
Scientists are scientists, not marketeers, how can they convince people who believe the world is 6000 years old that CO2 does absorb infrared radiation?
I fully agree with that. Most songs played over the radio are no good at all.
The right to remain silent is meant to make sure no one can be forced to speak under torture. It does not mean you have a right to keep authorities from getting evidence against you. This means, for instance, that police can force you to take a breath or blood alcohol test.
If it weren't for the right to remain silent, the police could tell you "say you are drunk or I will break all your teeth" but it would be meaningless for them to say "breath here with a BAC of 0.20 or I will break your teeth".
Which means that when you did not buy the software I produced you stole it from me. I'm not accusing you of making a copy of that software, I don't care if you copied it or not, all I know is that I was not compensated for my work, that's the only thing that matters to me.
Well, if you take it away from me, that's a different thing. Now I don't have it anymore, that makes a lot of difference to me.
The first thing you have to learn is that market economy works this way, if you try to sell something no one is under any obligation to buy it. It's your duty to give enough value for the price that people will want to exchange some of their money for your product.
That is true only in so-called "near field" conditions. The only reason a laser pointer seems so "tightly focused" to you is because the diameter of the beam is so much larger than the wavelength. Look at the diameter of a laser pointer beam a mile away, then two miles away and you will see that the beam is now twice as wide.
A flashlight, on the other hand, disperses light much faster than a laser while it's still, theoretically, in near field conditions because the light is emitted in random directions by a filament that's much larger than the wavelength.
Which means he was just another lunatic. A genius NEVER works totally alone, he "stands on the shoulders of giants".
In TFA it's mentioned that Tesla said "So far only electric waves have been used which have been quickly dampened out in their passage through the air. It is possible, however, to transmit electric current of enormous power for thousands of miles without diminishing their energy". In this sentence Tesla proved he did not understand one of the most basic laws of the universe, the inverse square of distance law, first proposed by Newton and never disproved by anyone.
It's very easy to say a scientist was wrong, like the pope said of Galileo and Tesla said of Newton, but the burden of proof falls on anyone who tries to disprove a theory that produces working applications.
Tesla said over a hundred years ago that the principle of power falling with the inverse square of distance is not true. So far, no one, neither Tesla nor anyone who came after him, ever managed to transmit any form of energy through free space whose power did not fall with the square of distance.
If you predict something and it later happens, then you are a genius. If you predict something that never happens, then you are indistinguishable from a lunatic, but you *could* be a genius, who knows.
If you write something that most people find impossible to understand, but which eventually the greatest scholars of the field manage to understand, then you are certainly a genius. If you write something that no one ever is capable to understand, then you are certainly a lunatic.
Well, that's exactly my experience. I tried Yggdrasil in 1995, but it was only with Slackware, in 1998, that I started using Linux seriously.
Today, unless there are specific reasons to do otherwise, I install Ubuntu and forget about the system.
I certainly hope they have perfect voice recognition systems before they have the perfect nanoassembler.
Otherwise we will start seeing a lot of eleven inch pianists everywhere.
Let's hope it comes with the 302 engine
Closing blockquotes!
challenge accepted
Why learn one language for image processing algorithms when you still have to learn other languages to do everything else? Better have one language that does everything.