That would make it a once-in-a-solar-system event. There's nothing to say this isn't a common occurrence elsewhere. Unless of course you've observed the complete planetary composition of many other solar systems, which no one else has.
The point I was trying to make is that we need not adjust our likelihood estimate (whatever that may be) based on a supposed Martian impact, because in fact there IS no large moon around Mars. I think it's likely that somewhere, there is a planet with a Moon like ours.
people used to think having a huge Moon like ours was a once-in-a-universe event.
And I should hope that they still think so, seeing as Mars does not have a huge Moon like ours... Despite evidence of an impact that COULD have created one, and yet didn't.
Basically when you have rules you ought to (or "must" unless you want magical bugs) follow that are not enforced by the compiler, the language is flawed. Like when you oveload new but not delete and thus have incompatible memory management. Or you return a reference to a method-local (auto) string object.
These things could be addressed by the standard. Strict modes exist in other languages, I don't see why we couldn't have one in C++. I realize this sort of "in the sky" argument doesn't help anybody right now. But it's not as if the language is unfixable.
I think C# made a few good steps in the right direction, but I still hate garbage collection. Some people see RAII in C++ as a hack to get around the lack of GC, I tend to see it the opposite way. What the language needs is stronger enforcement of some of these basic principles. C# would be a great deal more attractive to me if it provided the same power in generics as C++ templates give you.
Good book, but I don't see how some minor nuances translate to insurmountable design flaws. It's true that proper use of C++ requires a level of expertise beyond what's required for many other languages. IMHO, that just makes real C++ programmers more valuable.
My point is that the Minoans didn't understand the intricacies of the ecosystem (although in fairness, they probably wouldn't have cared even if they had). The consequences of certain actions really can't be understood except in hindsight. The mechanics don't directly map to Alaskan oil drilling, but I think in general all ecosystems function as part of complex systems that we can't fully understand until we watch how they collapse after our interference. If anybody thinks that drilling in Alaska will reduce the price of gas, they are being hopelessly wishful. But what we might end up losing could extend far beyond what appears to be just a barren plain. One thing is certain, the other is not. I think we should stick with what we understand, not a bunch of unknowns.
I think he was trying to counter my point that I "like Alaska the way it is," and seems to assume that I would not place aesthetic value on an area that's essentially flat and frozen. Except that he has no basis at all to judge my aesthetics. I was specifically trying to LEAVE ASIDE the issue of environmental impact and appeal to simple human selfishness. Problem is, he assumed wrong. I think those photographs are beautiful, and I can't imagine marring those scenes.
You do realize that the area they want opened for drilling (an area the size of Dulles International Airport, about 2000 acres, in an area covering over 19.5 million acres) are quite literally empty, right? Nine months of the year they're ice and three months of the year they're mud. Nothing non-microbial makes its habitat there. It's nothing paradisaical and talking about it as if it were does not make it true.
The oil is going to magically transport itself from said area to the coast for shipment? How's it going to do that? Seems to me a giant freaking pipeline will be required. Even leaving aside the possibility of a pipeline spill, that requires massive human activity and movement of heavy equipment, construction of roads, etc. It has already been shown that the weight of heavy vehicles changes the soil in the long term.
However, oil spills it hasn't done as badly with. And nuclear it seems to be doing quite well with.
I'm not aware of any species or ecosystems being driven to extinction from oil spills, but that's no reason not to take every possible precaution against them.
I agree (basically) about nuclear power. Radioactive waste is dangerous precisely because it is so energetic. We should be working on ways to extract more of this potential energy, not burying it. I think we need to be careful though, as our supplies of fissionable material are not infinite any more than oil is. The power is certainly much cleaner than oil.
In fact, I agree basically with everything you said in this post. I just don't disagree with your sweeping statement that the environment will recover from anything we might do to it in "20-40 years." We're not going to wipe out life, but it's going to look a hell of a lot different, and I happen to LIKE the way it looks now. I don't want to stop oil drilling in Alaska because I'm afraid for the "cute widdle animals" but because that place is a paradise and I want to enjoy it for what it is. What we need (not necessarily what we want) is a major population die-off, and it looks like it might be coming -- unfortunately it will be the poorest and least-at-fault who will suffer from it the hardest.
Who cares about the environment, it can recover in 20-40 years.
Where do you get this crap? Take a look at the island of Crete. This island used to be almost completely covered in forest. Then the Minoans began clear-cutting it for lumber to build ships. This continued for several generations. When the forest was clear cut, there was no longer any mechanism for the top soil to be held in place. It washed into the sea. The isle of Crete is now a wasteland in terms of the ability to grow forest -- solid forest has not grown there in thousands years.
You are naive, ignorant, short sighted, and have an offensive disregard for the natural world.
Or you could use JBIG2 while preserving the original appearance of the document absolutely. Your typical letter-sized page of 600 DPI information (over 33 million pixels) will compress to anywhere between 30-150 kilobytes, and that's in a lossless mode. The (theoretically) smaller size of a vector representation is not worth the loss of the original data.
A scan? Do you have some suggestion how to convert a SCAN to a vector format and magically synthesize information that was never there in the first place?
For raster archival, 600 DPI is good enough. Nobody is suggesting archiving rasters at screen resolution.
Except that the best censorship is censorship you are not aware is happening. Clearly, if you want to censor "Topic X," then it seems you must actually DISSEMINATE Topic X, otherwise, how would people know that they were not allowed to discuss it? It takes a sharper mind to figure out how to censor without A) Actually spreading around the very information you want to block and B) Stopping spread of knowledge of the censorship itself.
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't happening. That's... sort of the point... isn't it? And I'm not "the Left."
I'm not sure what your point is. Had the exhibit been censored, how would we have known about it? It would be pointless to make this effort only to be prevented from displaying it. It's irony, not stupidity.
but to assert that it "takes balls" (again, I hate that crude expression)
Wow dude -- I used the term because YOUR post referred to "ball of steel."
Is it "years of agony" or isn't it? If it is indeed traumatic or agonizing then there's nothing brave about running away from it.
If you characterize making a sweeping life change as "running away" then you're a fool, plain and simple. According to you, we aren't allowed to completely re-invent ourselves, because this is just being cowardly. Here, let me print out your artificial definition of bravery... and wipe my ass with it.
Of course, giving up material possessions is hard. Just imagine for a second what would happen if he announced that he was giving away everything he owned FOR FREE to the first person to be deemed "worthy" or even the first person to arrive at his doorstep? It only takes a few minutes of pondering to see that this would not work, and in fact might actually put him in a life-threatening situation.
SELLING all your belongings to go acquire other belongings is not shunning materialism in any way shape or form, unless this guy plans to take $300k in cash and go wander around like David Caradine in Kung Fu.
What if he does? It's what I would do. $300k would be enough for me to explore the mountains for the rest of my life. In fact, it's probably more than enough.
Or are you just saying, use TIFF if you follow the spec?
Yes, I stopped my explanation too soon. If you stick to what's actually written (not implied by the existence of viewers that are already out there) in the Baseline TIFF specification, your file will be viewable everywhere. As far as text metadata, the curse is also the beauty, because TIFF easily lets you place tagged data in a file and it will be ignored by any reader which doesn't understand that tag.
MS's searchable TIFF is your typical MS creation, but at least it's a working example of embedding text in TIFF. If the community would come together and develop a simple, standard format for embedding text, I see no reason why we shouldn't all start using it.
The advantage of a raster format like TIFF is that it guarantees the result down to the pixel level. While this is achievable in PDF/A as well by using raster images as the sole graphical elements, the standard does not enforce this, and allows far too much. IMHO, if you need validation tools just to check if your document is compliant to a certain spec, then that spec is too complex for something as important as long-term archival.
I was not recommending Microsoft's TIFF+Text, but rather some easily maintained combination of TIFF+text. If that is Microsoft's extension, then that's what it is. I see no loss of functionality due to the storage format not being vector-based. An archival format is going to be looked at on the screen, searched, and possibly printed. There is no benefit to vector graphics except perhaps a size argument, which is obviated by technologies like JBIG2 (if they'd ever get off their butts and formalize the JBIG2-in-TIFF spec).
The only argument I've ever heard for vector graphics is that "When I zoom way, way, WAY in, it still looks all smooth and pretty." Now what the hell are you trying to look at a document from a distance of 0.0002 inches for? It's a non-complaint.
TIFF, on the other hand, is a simple raster format with enormously wide support. You don't have to worry about how one rasterizer is going to look different from another -- every pixel is precisely defined. The document will appear exactly as it was intended to. Consider the difference in codebase size between a simple TIFF reader and a full-blown vector rendering engine. There is enormous complexity with no benefit.
Your paranoia is amusing. I wasn't "slamming" TIFF, merely pointing out that the fact that the spec is open and available is no reason to believe that all files conform to that spec. I was not recommending TIFF in all of its many incarnations, but in specific forms. I suppose I should have been more explicit. Use basic TIFF, with a 0=white photometric, with G4 compression. Stick to that and any viewer will open it.
If you'd like to see some actual pimping of the product I ACTUALLY work on, see www.swiftview.com.
But size does not have anything to do with it. TIFF is far simpler in structure than PDF and has therefore better compatibility. TIFF is also well documented. Of course, they would have to use raw tiff to get the advantages. The storage-space argument is secondary and matters only insofar as larger data sets have a higher irsk of corruption.
I dispute the "well documented" claim. The TIFF standard is quite clear. Unfortunately, almost nobody adheres precisely to the standard. I work extensively with TIFF and PDF, and I have to say that the consistency I see in PDF is about 100 times more than what I see in TIFF. Your typical TIFF reader will contain thousands of hacks and workarounds for oddities that are produced by major players in the industry. While there is slightly non-compliant PDF, I have never seen things that even begin approaching the strangeness I see in TIFF on a daily basis. Having said that, I recommend TIFF plus search text metadata for archival, not PDF.
If they're images, then you should use TIFF (or perhaps PNG). However, it doesn't make sense for them to be "multi-page." If they're documents, then PDF is appropriate.
Multi-page TIFF is well supported in the industry. There is nothing "weird" about it. It even supports embedded, searchable text (a Microsoft addition, but something that actually adds value). PDF archival can be difficult to do correctly. At the very least you want to use a product which supports PDF/A, followed up with some serious validation to make sure the results are actually compliant. Otherwise you may get bitten decades down the road. Searchable TIFF, on the other hand, will be around for freaking ever.
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What difference is the PIN going to make when the way they were acquired in the first place was by breaking into a database?
This problem is already solved. It's called an RSA dongle. "Oh, but it's a pain!" So is having your checking account cleared out.
That would make it a once-in-a-solar-system event. There's nothing to say this isn't a common occurrence elsewhere. Unless of course you've observed the complete planetary composition of many other solar systems, which no one else has.
The point I was trying to make is that we need not adjust our likelihood estimate (whatever that may be) based on a supposed Martian impact, because in fact there IS no large moon around Mars. I think it's likely that somewhere, there is a planet with a Moon like ours.
people used to think having a huge Moon like ours was a once-in-a-universe event.
And I should hope that they still think so, seeing as Mars does not have a huge Moon like ours... Despite evidence of an impact that COULD have created one, and yet didn't.
I reboot Linux every night. I don't do this because it's unstable, I do it because I turn my computer off...
Yeah, sure. It was a "setup and a prank" that was entered into DoJ evidence and Bill Gates saw no reason to contest its veracity. I'm sure that's it.
Basically when you have rules you ought to (or "must" unless you want magical bugs) follow that are not enforced by the compiler, the language is flawed. Like when you oveload new but not delete and thus have incompatible memory management. Or you return a reference to a method-local (auto) string object.
These things could be addressed by the standard. Strict modes exist in other languages, I don't see why we couldn't have one in C++. I realize this sort of "in the sky" argument doesn't help anybody right now. But it's not as if the language is unfixable.
I think C# made a few good steps in the right direction, but I still hate garbage collection. Some people see RAII in C++ as a hack to get around the lack of GC, I tend to see it the opposite way. What the language needs is stronger enforcement of some of these basic principles. C# would be a great deal more attractive to me if it provided the same power in generics as C++ templates give you.
Good book, but I don't see how some minor nuances translate to insurmountable design flaws. It's true that proper use of C++ requires a level of expertise beyond what's required for many other languages. IMHO, that just makes real C++ programmers more valuable.
* No standardized pragmas
Part of the definition of pragma is "compiler-specific."
* Macros after-thought and not type safe
Macros are obviated by inline functions.
* No 24, and 32 bit (unicode) chars
Why should some specific UTF encoding be built into a language? Unicode is a character set, not an encoding. Why limit yourself?
* Still has float / double crap, instead of being properly deprecated and f32, f64, f80 used instead
And on a machine with a 71 bit float, what the hell are we supposed to use?
* Still has short / long crap, instead of being properly deprecated, and i8, i16, i32, i64, i128, u8, etc...
What about 9 bit words?
* No distinction between typedefs and aliases
What the hell do you need that for?
* Inconsistent left-to-right declarations
Historical, due to backward compatibility with C. Deal with it.
* Compilers still limited to ASCII source
Legitimate gripe.
* No binary constant prefix (even octal has one?!)
We're COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS. We understand HEXADECIMAL. Binary is pointlessly verbose. Learn the basics.
* No standard way to assign NaN, +Inf, -Inf to floating point constants at compile time
Legitimate gripe.
Back that statement up, buddy.
My point is that the Minoans didn't understand the intricacies of the ecosystem (although in fairness, they probably wouldn't have cared even if they had). The consequences of certain actions really can't be understood except in hindsight. The mechanics don't directly map to Alaskan oil drilling, but I think in general all ecosystems function as part of complex systems that we can't fully understand until we watch how they collapse after our interference. If anybody thinks that drilling in Alaska will reduce the price of gas, they are being hopelessly wishful. But what we might end up losing could extend far beyond what appears to be just a barren plain. One thing is certain, the other is not. I think we should stick with what we understand, not a bunch of unknowns.
I think he was trying to counter my point that I "like Alaska the way it is," and seems to assume that I would not place aesthetic value on an area that's essentially flat and frozen. Except that he has no basis at all to judge my aesthetics. I was specifically trying to LEAVE ASIDE the issue of environmental impact and appeal to simple human selfishness. Problem is, he assumed wrong. I think those photographs are beautiful, and I can't imagine marring those scenes.
And I suppose the oil will be transported from the wells to the rest of civilization... by teleporter? Scotty, please beam up the oil.
You do realize that the area they want opened for drilling (an area the size of Dulles International Airport, about 2000 acres, in an area covering over 19.5 million acres) are quite literally empty, right? Nine months of the year they're ice and three months of the year they're mud. Nothing non-microbial makes its habitat there. It's nothing paradisaical and talking about it as if it were does not make it true.
The oil is going to magically transport itself from said area to the coast for shipment? How's it going to do that? Seems to me a giant freaking pipeline will be required. Even leaving aside the possibility of a pipeline spill, that requires massive human activity and movement of heavy equipment, construction of roads, etc. It has already been shown that the weight of heavy vehicles changes the soil in the long term.
However, oil spills it hasn't done as badly with. And nuclear it seems to be doing quite well with.
I'm not aware of any species or ecosystems being driven to extinction from oil spills, but that's no reason not to take every possible precaution against them.
I agree (basically) about nuclear power. Radioactive waste is dangerous precisely because it is so energetic. We should be working on ways to extract more of this potential energy, not burying it. I think we need to be careful though, as our supplies of fissionable material are not infinite any more than oil is. The power is certainly much cleaner than oil.
In fact, I agree basically with everything you said in this post. I just don't disagree with your sweeping statement that the environment will recover from anything we might do to it in "20-40 years." We're not going to wipe out life, but it's going to look a hell of a lot different, and I happen to LIKE the way it looks now. I don't want to stop oil drilling in Alaska because I'm afraid for the "cute widdle animals" but because that place is a paradise and I want to enjoy it for what it is. What we need (not necessarily what we want) is a major population die-off, and it looks like it might be coming -- unfortunately it will be the poorest and least-at-fault who will suffer from it the hardest.
Who cares about the environment, it can recover in 20-40 years.
Where do you get this crap? Take a look at the island of Crete. This island used to be almost completely covered in forest. Then the Minoans began clear-cutting it for lumber to build ships. This continued for several generations. When the forest was clear cut, there was no longer any mechanism for the top soil to be held in place. It washed into the sea. The isle of Crete is now a wasteland in terms of the ability to grow forest -- solid forest has not grown there in thousands years.
You are naive, ignorant, short sighted, and have an offensive disregard for the natural world.
Or you could use JBIG2 while preserving the original appearance of the document absolutely. Your typical letter-sized page of 600 DPI information (over 33 million pixels) will compress to anywhere between 30-150 kilobytes, and that's in a lossless mode. The (theoretically) smaller size of a vector representation is not worth the loss of the original data.
A scan? Do you have some suggestion how to convert a SCAN to a vector format and magically synthesize information that was never there in the first place?
For raster archival, 600 DPI is good enough. Nobody is suggesting archiving rasters at screen resolution.
Except that the best censorship is censorship you are not aware is happening. Clearly, if you want to censor "Topic X," then it seems you must actually DISSEMINATE Topic X, otherwise, how would people know that they were not allowed to discuss it? It takes a sharper mind to figure out how to censor without A) Actually spreading around the very information you want to block and B) Stopping spread of knowledge of the censorship itself.
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't happening. That's... sort of the point... isn't it? And I'm not "the Left."
I'm not sure what your point is. Had the exhibit been censored, how would we have known about it? It would be pointless to make this effort only to be prevented from displaying it. It's irony, not stupidity.
but to assert that it "takes balls" (again, I hate that crude expression)
Wow dude -- I used the term because YOUR post referred to "ball of steel."
Is it "years of agony" or isn't it? If it is indeed traumatic or agonizing then there's nothing brave about running away from it.
If you characterize making a sweeping life change as "running away" then you're a fool, plain and simple. According to you, we aren't allowed to completely re-invent ourselves, because this is just being cowardly. Here, let me print out your artificial definition of bravery... and wipe my ass with it.
Of course, giving up material possessions is hard. Just imagine for a second what would happen if he announced that he was giving away everything he owned FOR FREE to the first person to be deemed "worthy" or even the first person to arrive at his doorstep? It only takes a few minutes of pondering to see that this would not work, and in fact might actually put him in a life-threatening situation.
SELLING all your belongings to go acquire other belongings is not shunning materialism in any way shape or form, unless this guy plans to take $300k in cash and go wander around like David Caradine in Kung Fu.
What if he does? It's what I would do. $300k would be enough for me to explore the mountains for the rest of my life. In fact, it's probably more than enough.
Or are you just saying, use TIFF if you follow the spec?
Yes, I stopped my explanation too soon. If you stick to what's actually written (not implied by the existence of viewers that are already out there) in the Baseline TIFF specification, your file will be viewable everywhere. As far as text metadata, the curse is also the beauty, because TIFF easily lets you place tagged data in a file and it will be ignored by any reader which doesn't understand that tag.
MS's searchable TIFF is your typical MS creation, but at least it's a working example of embedding text in TIFF. If the community would come together and develop a simple, standard format for embedding text, I see no reason why we shouldn't all start using it.
The advantage of a raster format like TIFF is that it guarantees the result down to the pixel level. While this is achievable in PDF/A as well by using raster images as the sole graphical elements, the standard does not enforce this, and allows far too much. IMHO, if you need validation tools just to check if your document is compliant to a certain spec, then that spec is too complex for something as important as long-term archival.
I was not recommending Microsoft's TIFF+Text, but rather some easily maintained combination of TIFF+text. If that is Microsoft's extension, then that's what it is. I see no loss of functionality due to the storage format not being vector-based. An archival format is going to be looked at on the screen, searched, and possibly printed. There is no benefit to vector graphics except perhaps a size argument, which is obviated by technologies like JBIG2 (if they'd ever get off their butts and formalize the JBIG2-in-TIFF spec).
The only argument I've ever heard for vector graphics is that "When I zoom way, way, WAY in, it still looks all smooth and pretty." Now what the hell are you trying to look at a document from a distance of 0.0002 inches for? It's a non-complaint.
TIFF, on the other hand, is a simple raster format with enormously wide support. You don't have to worry about how one rasterizer is going to look different from another -- every pixel is precisely defined. The document will appear exactly as it was intended to. Consider the difference in codebase size between a simple TIFF reader and a full-blown vector rendering engine. There is enormous complexity with no benefit.
Your paranoia is amusing. I wasn't "slamming" TIFF, merely pointing out that the fact that the spec is open and available is no reason to believe that all files conform to that spec. I was not recommending TIFF in all of its many incarnations, but in specific forms. I suppose I should have been more explicit. Use basic TIFF, with a 0=white photometric, with G4 compression. Stick to that and any viewer will open it.
If you'd like to see some actual pimping of the product I ACTUALLY work on, see www.swiftview.com.
But size does not have anything to do with it. TIFF is far simpler in structure than PDF and has therefore better compatibility. TIFF is also well documented. Of course, they would have to use raw tiff to get the advantages. The storage-space argument is secondary and matters only insofar as larger data sets have a higher irsk of corruption.
I dispute the "well documented" claim. The TIFF standard is quite clear. Unfortunately, almost nobody adheres precisely to the standard. I work extensively with TIFF and PDF, and I have to say that the consistency I see in PDF is about 100 times more than what I see in TIFF. Your typical TIFF reader will contain thousands of hacks and workarounds for oddities that are produced by major players in the industry. While there is slightly non-compliant PDF, I have never seen things that even begin approaching the strangeness I see in TIFF on a daily basis. Having said that, I recommend TIFF plus search text metadata for archival, not PDF.
If they're images, then you should use TIFF (or perhaps PNG). However, it doesn't make sense for them to be "multi-page." If they're documents, then PDF is appropriate.
Multi-page TIFF is well supported in the industry. There is nothing "weird" about it. It even supports embedded, searchable text (a Microsoft addition, but something that actually adds value). PDF archival can be difficult to do correctly. At the very least you want to use a product which supports PDF/A, followed up with some serious validation to make sure the results are actually compliant. Otherwise you may get bitten decades down the road. Searchable TIFF, on the other hand, will be around for freaking ever.