"A rule of thumb is that if the aesthetic quality of a photo is obvious to most people, it may not be worthwhile to seek Acquine's opinion on it because Acquine may assign funny scores in such cases." So in cases where the correct score is obvious, Acquine's score can't be trusted?
I noticed this with a picture I took in France that everybody praises. It got 6.9. I did the smallest possible change in color, darkening it imperceptibly. The new version got 35.7. Doing a selective gaussian blur also tends to raise the result a lot.
My rating of their algorithm is 0.01 star, which can be summarized as "it sucks".
presence of "M$" and "correlation is not causation" get flagged "insightful"
That's not how Slashdot really works. Due to the number of astroturfers here, anything critical of Microsoft, no matter how true it is, is usually modded "Overrated", while "Vista works fine for me" gets "Informative".
It seems like the summary writer didn't understand TFA. Quoting from ESA:
Planck is designed to 'see' the microwaves and, in practice, it will detect them by measuring temperature. That temperature is already known to be about 2.7K (which is very cold, about 270C, near absolute zero). It has been measured to be 2.726K all over the sky to three decimal figures. This degree of accuracy in the measurement may seem good enough, but much more precise measurements are needed.
The older measurements that Planck is trying to improve already are accurate to 0.1%.
It seems like someone got confused with the coincidence that the temperature of the universe, 2.7 K, is about 1% of the temperature of freezing water, 270 K.
Using the inflation-adjusted figures you provided, we can see that while the industry made $59 million in profits from Dr. No, they made $500 million in profits from Casino Royale
Perhaps I didn't make myself quite clear. "Dr. No" made $60 million in 1962 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, "Dr. No" cost $8.4 million and got $420 million in profits, "Casino Royale" cost $140 million and got $500 million in profits.
Go to any industry executive and ask, is it better to get $420 milion in profits from a $8.4 million investment, or is it better to get $500 million in profits from a $140 million investment?
Doctorow is a writer so his problem may be slightly different, but it seems to me that for much of the media industry today the problem is more of too high costs than too low income, no matter what "pirates" do.
To make a standardized measurement, let's limit ourselves to one well-defined segment: 007. Look at this graph. Investment in James Bond films has gone steadily up without a corresponding return in profits. The first 007 movie, "Dr. No", cost $1 million to make ïn 1962 and got $60 million in the box office, a 60:1 ratio. "Casino Royale" cost $100 million and got $600 million, ten times less.
One could argue that James Bond jumped the shark, but in adjusted dollars "Dr. No" got about as much income as "Casino Royale", yet cost 1/16th as much adjusted for inflation. People are still paying as much to see James Bond today as they paid in 1962.
The main problem, IMHO, is not reduced income for intellectual property owners, the problem is reduced creativity. They not only seem unable to create a character to replace 007, they also need to spend sixteen times as much to create the same level of special effects.
Is your application CPU-limited? If so, is it *the* fastest language? Those are the questions one should be asking when picking a programming language.
If your application is limited by the CPU, only the fastest language, C, will do for some routines. You may even consider using assembly or machine-optimized code such as Atlas
If your application isn't limited by the CPU, then development speed is more important than execution speed. A rule of thumb I use is how big is the development team. If there are just a few people, or if the developers work more or less independent of each other, I'd recommend Python.
Java development, in my experience, is more laborious than Python or Ruby. Unless you have big teams of developers who must work close together, I wouldn't recommend Java for anything.
That has nothing to do with how efficient compilers have become in the last years.
If God exists, and if he's omniscient and omnipotent
You forgot a third quality without which God is not God: He should also be infinitely good, he does not like us to suffer.
That goes against (a) and (c) in your argument, leaving only (b) he does not exist, at least not with those three qualities.
Raymond Chandler had one of his characters in his 1958 novel "Playback" say: "If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn't have bothered to make the Universe at all."
I think the simple fact that we exist shows that God, if he does exist, is not omniscient and omnipotent. Why create the Universe if you already know exactly how everything will happen?
You mix 16 parts of warm grease, 6 parts of water, 2.3 parts of lye, mix five minutes in a blender, pour into molds (it will not stick, it shrinks as it hardens) let stand a couple of weeks. Good for washing pots and dishes, never buy kitchen soap again.
This would bolster the advocates of national health care and create another (unwritten) constitutional right.
That wouldn't be a right, it would be an entitlement. A right is something that you already have and no one can take away. An entitlement is something that you don't have and someone must give it to you.
Problem with entitlements: someone must pay. A government that's totally broke may still respect your rights but entitlements must be planned into the budget.
Think of that Canadian pilot whom invented a way to put a jetliner in a slip to lose altitude to land at an abandoned military field when the plane ran out of gas because of metric/imperial issues.
But it's also important to note that this happened because it was the pilot who miscalculated the fuel to begin with. His flying licence was suspended as a result.
Another example of a pilot who ran out of fuel due to his own error was Varig flight 254 in 1989, when the pilot made a decimal point mistake and entered a 270 degrees heading instead of 27.0 in the autopilot, and ran out of fuel over the Amazon jungle.
Recycle/reprocess as much as possible. The rest you vitrify and bury in abyssal plains. A glass cylinder buried under a hundred meters of mud beneath 5000 meters of ocean is as safe as anything can be.
If they replace the electrons with muons the nuclei will be much closer together, therefore the matter will be much denser. That's the only way I can imagine this could work.
They used to sit on mountains of cash until stockholders got pissed about it
Correction: they used to sit on mountains of cash while their market price was rising. After they realized they wouldn't reach again their peak prices of 2000, they tried to buy stock to force prices up, but that strategy failed.
Your calculations are correct, but they only look at a project that pays for itself. How much did the US interstate road system cost? Who paid for it?
Let's say car drivers should pay for the roads they use. Let's say each of the cars going through the I-10 in Phoenix paid $10. That would be $3 million a day. Charge each of those cars arriving at Tucson another $10, that's $1.8 million a day. And charge $10 to each of those going through Casa Grande, in between Phoenix and Tucson, that's another $440 thousand.
There, you have $5 million a day paid by people travelling between Phoenix and Tucson every day. If only car drivers actually paid for the roads they use, instead of depending on government handouts for building the roads.
One "horsepower", the obsolete power unit normally used for cars, equals 736 watts. This means that 110 MW is equal to 150,000 horsepower. I don't know exactly what would be the power needed to run that train, but I know that trains are at least five times more efficient than cars. So, lets assume that 500 hp would be needed to run a train at 220 mph. This means that with 110 MW they could run 300 trains at the same time.
f you are consuming services and content for free that you could easily afford to pay for somebody is losing money
OTOH, if I pay for services and content that I can get for free then *I* am losing money. Guess who is more important for me, myself or some anonymous person?
Just because you are spending the money you save, by pirating digital content and software, to stimulate other parts of the economy, that doesn't make you any less of a harmful parasite to the people whose hard work you are ripping off
By stimulating other parts of the economy I'm contributing to get the creative artists free of the worst kind of parasites that are leeching them off: media industry executives.
at the end of the Cold War, Western elites consider us at the End of History. Our present form of government is perfect now, and for a thousand years hence.
When you believe have a perfect state, it logically follows that everything should be in the state, for the state, and of the state. Any element that goes against the wishes of the state must be wrong and evil, for the state is perfect and good.
This is the theme of Anthony Boucher's novelette "Barrier". In that story, a time traveler went to the future to find a world where even irregular verbs were banned, because anything irregular would detract from perfection. The government form was an absolute dictatorship, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding, I tried it with the url http://www.goatse.fr/hello.jpg and got 76.1
I see Slashdot at work here. Well, I also clicked in the rightmost star in the "How do you rate its Aesthetic Quality", of course...
I noticed this with a picture I took in France that everybody praises. It got 6.9. I did the smallest possible change in color, darkening it imperceptibly. The new version got 35.7. Doing a selective gaussian blur also tends to raise the result a lot.
My rating of their algorithm is 0.01 star, which can be summarized as "it sucks".
That's not how Slashdot really works. Due to the number of astroturfers here, anything critical of Microsoft, no matter how true it is, is usually modded "Overrated", while "Vista works fine for me" gets "Informative".
It seems like the summary writer didn't understand TFA. Quoting from ESA:
The older measurements that Planck is trying to improve already are accurate to 0.1%.
It seems like someone got confused with the coincidence that the temperature of the universe, 2.7 K, is about 1% of the temperature of freezing water, 270 K.
Perhaps I didn't make myself quite clear. "Dr. No" made $60 million in 1962 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, "Dr. No" cost $8.4 million and got $420 million in profits, "Casino Royale" cost $140 million and got $500 million in profits.
Go to any industry executive and ask, is it better to get $420 milion in profits from a $8.4 million investment, or is it better to get $500 million in profits from a $140 million investment?
Doctorow is a writer so his problem may be slightly different, but it seems to me that for much of the media industry today the problem is more of too high costs than too low income, no matter what "pirates" do.
To make a standardized measurement, let's limit ourselves to one well-defined segment: 007. Look at this graph. Investment in James Bond films has gone steadily up without a corresponding return in profits. The first 007 movie, "Dr. No", cost $1 million to make ïn 1962 and got $60 million in the box office, a 60:1 ratio. "Casino Royale" cost $100 million and got $600 million, ten times less.
One could argue that James Bond jumped the shark, but in adjusted dollars "Dr. No" got about as much income as "Casino Royale", yet cost 1/16th as much adjusted for inflation. People are still paying as much to see James Bond today as they paid in 1962.
The main problem, IMHO, is not reduced income for intellectual property owners, the problem is reduced creativity. They not only seem unable to create a character to replace 007, they also need to spend sixteen times as much to create the same level of special effects.
Until they develop Industrialization and the cities start creating Riflemen.
Is your application CPU-limited? If so, is it *the* fastest language? Those are the questions one should be asking when picking a programming language.
If your application is limited by the CPU, only the fastest language, C, will do for some routines. You may even consider using assembly or machine-optimized code such as Atlas
If your application isn't limited by the CPU, then development speed is more important than execution speed. A rule of thumb I use is how big is the development team. If there are just a few people, or if the developers work more or less independent of each other, I'd recommend Python.
Java development, in my experience, is more laborious than Python or Ruby. Unless you have big teams of developers who must work close together, I wouldn't recommend Java for anything.
That has nothing to do with how efficient compilers have become in the last years.
You forgot a third quality without which God is not God: He should also be infinitely good, he does not like us to suffer.
That goes against (a) and (c) in your argument, leaving only (b) he does not exist, at least not with those three qualities.
Raymond Chandler had one of his characters in his 1958 novel "Playback" say: "If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn't have bothered to make the Universe at all."
I think the simple fact that we exist shows that God, if he does exist, is not omniscient and omnipotent. Why create the Universe if you already know exactly how everything will happen?
When they mentioned bringing the natural predator from another continent, I imagined this.
Now, that would be a cool animal to set loose in Texas!
You mix 16 parts of warm grease, 6 parts of water, 2.3 parts of lye, mix five minutes in a blender, pour into molds (it will not stick, it shrinks as it hardens) let stand a couple of weeks. Good for washing pots and dishes, never buy kitchen soap again.
That wouldn't be a right, it would be an entitlement. A right is something that you already have and no one can take away. An entitlement is something that you don't have and someone must give it to you.
Problem with entitlements: someone must pay. A government that's totally broke may still respect your rights but entitlements must be planned into the budget.
I live in a tropical country, you insensitive clod!
But it's also important to note that this happened because it was the pilot who miscalculated the fuel to begin with. His flying licence was suspended as a result.
Another example of a pilot who ran out of fuel due to his own error was Varig flight 254 in 1989, when the pilot made a decimal point mistake and entered a 270 degrees heading instead of 27.0 in the autopilot, and ran out of fuel over the Amazon jungle.
You mean, like pipes?
Yes, calling it the "thirty millitesla" would avoid a lot of confusion...
Recycle/reprocess as much as possible. The rest you vitrify and bury in abyssal plains. A glass cylinder buried under a hundred meters of mud beneath 5000 meters of ocean is as safe as anything can be.
If they replace the electrons with muons the nuclei will be much closer together, therefore the matter will be much denser. That's the only way I can imagine this could work.
Correction: they used to sit on mountains of cash while their market price was rising. After they realized they wouldn't reach again their peak prices of 2000, they tried to buy stock to force prices up, but that strategy failed.
After a 50% drop in value over six months they are trying to do something about it again.
Your calculations are correct, but they only look at a project that pays for itself. How much did the US interstate road system cost? Who paid for it?
Let's say car drivers should pay for the roads they use. Let's say each of the cars going through the I-10 in Phoenix paid $10. That would be $3 million a day. Charge each of those cars arriving at Tucson another $10, that's $1.8 million a day. And charge $10 to each of those going through Casa Grande, in between Phoenix and Tucson, that's another $440 thousand.
There, you have $5 million a day paid by people travelling between Phoenix and Tucson every day. If only car drivers actually paid for the roads they use, instead of depending on government handouts for building the roads.
One "horsepower", the obsolete power unit normally used for cars, equals 736 watts. This means that 110 MW is equal to 150,000 horsepower. I don't know exactly what would be the power needed to run that train, but I know that trains are at least five times more efficient than cars. So, lets assume that 500 hp would be needed to run a train at 220 mph. This means that with 110 MW they could run 300 trains at the same time.
$25 billion seems like a lot, but it used to be more than that.
The important thing to note here is the trend, not the current value.
Then let the better UI win. Will it be one that's Java-only, or one that can be used in its native C++ environment or with Python, Ruby, or even Java?
Even if it were true, and with about half of the smartphones in the world running Symbian I don't think it is, what has that to do with Qt?
Huh? There are more platforms than ever for Qt to run. Do you mean Microsoft isn't delivering operating systems anymore?
OTOH, if I pay for services and content that I can get for free then *I* am losing money. Guess who is more important for me, myself or some anonymous person?
By stimulating other parts of the economy I'm contributing to get the creative artists free of the worst kind of parasites that are leeching them off: media industry executives.
This is the theme of Anthony Boucher's novelette "Barrier". In that story, a time traveler went to the future to find a world where even irregular verbs were banned, because anything irregular would detract from perfection. The government form was an absolute dictatorship, of course.