It's almost as if they're setting up a strawman for the purpose of bashing the more moderate people with legitimate concerns about anthropogenic climate change. But then there's Poe's law...
Never mind, it was written by an intern. Less "Poe's law" and more "Hanlon's razor":-)
Short story: not only that, they're quite potent too - much more so than CO2 (for the same concentration). The only reason they haven't received as much attention in this context as CO2 is that the international community has been quite successful at curbing their atmospheric concentrations and thus their impact on the climate. Which cannot be said about CO2.
On the subject of getting attention: am I the only one who finds the theoutline.com link in TFS offensive? Not only did they succeed to combine the worst of late-2010s and early-1990s web design (scrolling site + white-on-black wall of text = teeth gnashing) but it's just a thoroughly sensationalized duplicate of the earlier TIME story. Complete with shamelessly copied misleading image of "largest Antarctic ozone hole ever recorded (September 2006)", but now with complimentary misleading caption "who did this?"
It's almost as if they're setting up a strawman for the purpose of bashing the more moderate people with legitimate concerns about anthropogenic climate change. But then there's Poe's law...
* "Function of wavelength" and "function of frequency" are indeed interchangeable, so that part is correct.
* The index of refraction is not a function of angle of incidence; rather, it is a constant that can be used to predict the angle of refraction for any angle of incidence through Snell's law.
* To get more to the point, yes, the cut is very important in making a gem look good; a cheap mass-produced rhinestone with a proper cut may looks like a spectacular gemstone while a small diamond in the rough will often look like a pebble.
* The small diamonds an ordinary guy might buy for his fiancée are simply cut according to one of a handful standard cuts that optimize aesthetically desirable attributes. It only becomes a real art when talking about the large and expensive gems in the hands of museums and the super-rich.
* Even cutting a small diamond into a standard cut requires considerable craftmanship because the material is hard and brittle and has crystal planes (sometimes also referred to as cleavage planes) which have to be skilfully taken into account when turning an irregular shape into a gemstone. I've read diamond cutters actually take a good amount of time devising a strategy before starting the work. It doen't always work out equally well, which is why small diamonds with a near-perfect cut can demand far higher prices that the same size of diamond with a less accurate cut.
* The difficulty in cutting is to some degree specific to diamond; I believe softer and cheaper materials like the aforementioned rhinestones are largely cut by machines (which are more wasteful with the material, but it matters less).
* Despite the last 3 points, sufficiently large natural diamonds are so rare that the cost of the material is typically higher than the compensation of the cutter (or so I believe; I could easily be wrong about this last one).
Half right. The optical dispersion is equally important, a.k.a. the variation of the refractive index as a function of the wavelength, a.k.a. the material's ability to "pull the colors apart" when used as a prism. A hypothetical gemstone with a high refractive index but little optical dispersion would show the "black and white faces" of diamond when lit with a white spotlight, but none of the "rainbows" (which the gemstone lovers call "fire").
One of the measures for optical dispersion is the difference in refractive index between 686.7 nm and 430.8 nm. Values: diamond 0.044; cubic zirconia ~0.06; silicon carbide ~0.1; fused silica glass ~0.01; corundrum 0.018 (and the latter has a refractive index of 1.77).
To visually pass for a diamond in the eyes of an expert, a stone needs to have a refractive index not too far from diamond AND an optical dispersion not too far from diamond AND not too much birefringence. Slilicon carbide fails quite badly at the latter 2 criteria and visually is a worse substitute for diamond than cubic zirconia. Some people claim that the latter still has "too much flame", but I'm quite sceptical that many people would be able to visually tell the difference, even with good lightning and magnification. I believe I once read jewelers pick out cubic zirconia based on its material properties (density and/or thermal conductivity, which are both very different from diamond - more so than silicon carbide).
Of course, if you don't care that a gem passes for a diamond, only that it looks good, then one could argue "the more dispersion, the better". Though some would object that too much color would make it look tacky. There's no accounting for taste (and neither for BS people perpetuate to sound "refined").
A strawman argument consists of painting the opponent's views as different - commonly more extreme - than they actually are. I think GP's obvious parody is pretty much equally extreme as GGP's ignorant, long-debunked talking points. If you're going to yawn at something, yawn at those.
I came here to write this (or something along these lines). Cautious behaviour after a traumatic experience exists in very primitive animals, so it would seem plausible off the bat that a (relatively) simple biochemical mechanism would be behind it. According to my reading, the experiment corroborates this hypothesis - nothing more. The suggestion that a memory was transferred (in the conventional sense) does not stand up to Ocam's razor.
I'm sure preschoolers would find your your little sock puppet theatre hilarious. But since you appear to be able to form written sentences, there has got to be something better you can do with your time.
So we should go back to RTF? Or heaven forbid... back to plain text? How about we go the whole nine yards... where email was a command from FTP? Fix the problem don't complain about implementation!
It would appear that you are trying to make the point for introducing an "uninsightful" mod option.
* In what parallel universe has RTF ever been a widely accepted standard for e-mail content?
* In what parallel universe has e-mail ever been a command from FTP? The "file transfer protocols" referred to in your link have very little to do with FTP. Or are you confusing FTP with a command-line? Either way, you're sounding like you're using a couple of historical sources out of context to puzzle together a totally distorted version of a reality many of us lived through. Now get off my lawn. And leave your geek card.
* Last but not least, what's so "heaven forbid" about plain text anyway? And if that's your opinion, what are you doing on a site whose markup is so limited that it annoys even me? Plain text is an efficient mode of communication that avoids a great many issues (even when creating some itself). I'd go out on a limb and say that a vast majority of modern textual communication is being performed without allowing the nearly unlimited markup options of html e-mail. Think the instant-message-fad-du-jour, cell phone text messages, twitter, all kinds of discussion forums, reddit, disqus, the youtube comments sections,... In the specific case of discussion forums, it is merely a natural adaptation to the fact that html has unlimited abuse potential. As seen in e-mail...
/"\
\ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign .X against HTML e-mail
/ \
Actually, that's completely wrong. Most animals have the ability to consciously sense decreasing O2 levels (in addition to increasing CO2). We humans (and possibly some other primates) somehow lost the former ability, so that we only get a suffocating feeling when our CO2 levels increase, and are largely oblivious to oxygen displacement.
This is also why olsmeister's "Should be simple enough to try it on animals" turns out be... well not quite that simple. Common lab animals such as rats will actually show the same signs of distress when exposed to high levels of CO2 as N2, while this is well known not to be the case with humans.
Of course, you could propose to test it on primates that have the same "defect" as humans, but ethical requirements to get that approved are stricter than for rats, and include demonstrating that you're sufficiently advancing humanity to warrant the animal suffering you're causing.
Add to that that the death penalty in and by itself is considered deeply unethical in most of the world (mostly because of its irreversible nature), insofar that pharma companies wilfully make approved compounds for lethal injections hard to obtain simply to avoid the public backlash of being complicit in the death penalty. Then one can see that it will be hard to find a scientist even considering to propose testing this. Most of them are more than happy to point out the method is "unproven", without much willingness to change that.
My opinion on the matter is that while N2 asphyxiation will doubtlessly turn out to have disadvantages, the evidence currently available makes it highly likely to be superior to lethal injection, and it's without a shadow of a doubt superior to the electric chair that some states are attempting to fall back to. That said, if policymakers can prevent a good number of executions altogether by playing the "unproven" card, I'm personally not feeling terribly compelled to make a lot of noise about this being somewhat dishonest. In an ideal world, I would be, but in the world we're living in, it's all about lawyering, and one sometimes has to play along a bit.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you follow good security practices, the odds of having an unpatched 'next-generation' CPU flaw on a PC in your house (as opposed to a cloud server) actually being exploited in a way that causes you significant discomfort are in the same ballpark as the odds of buying a piece of second-hand equipment with a hard-to-find and/or hard-to-patch (potential) backdoor. The latter is not very likely, I know, but neither is the former.
... but protection for lighting and for EMP are technically different exercises and require significantly different approaches. So EMP isn't all that much "like lighting"...
You appear to be talking about lightning entering equipment through a conductor. Under that assumption, what you wrote is correct. However, TFA appears to describe an event where the path of the lightning did not include the damaged equipment, so the damage can only be attributed to its EMP.
And yes, a nearby lightning strike does generate a potent EMP that is an important threat to nearby battery-operated equipment; I've experienced incidents myself, and there's more of that in different threads in this discussion. When I read TFA, my first reaction was: "well duh, something like this was bound to happen some time." Which of course doesn't excuse poor EMP (or, where applicable, surge) protection in safety-critical equipment.
The items marketed as TVs generally have a large size and low resolution because they're meant to be viewed at a longer distance than computer screens (and because most content viewed on a TV doesn't surpass 1080p anyway). Conversely, the items marketed as computer monitors are generally smaller; as you say, sitting at arm's length from a 40" screen won't allow you to keep everything in the usable portion of your field of view (technically, the macula and its immediate surroundings). Computer monitors (for office use, as opposed to entertainment) also typically have higher resolutions than TV in order to allow you to make the most of said usable-portion-of-FOV.
You probably had your tongue planted in your cheek when writing the post I originally replied to, but just in case you didn't, I'd like to point out that if you insist on using a TV for a computer monitor, you don't get to complain about an almost-too-big viewing area and horrible jaggies. It is also an incredibly poor choice specifically for "writing, programming, doing CAD work". Do yourself a favor and get an actual computer monitor (if at all possible); my head starts hurting just to think about anyone having to do that kind of work on a 1080p 40" TV. I can't stand to sit in front of something lower than 80 ppi the whole day (you're at 55...), and 80 ppi is already well below the point where most people would be inclined to zoom out or decrease their font size, but cannot because the pixels are too coarse. By that logic, 1080p displays don't gain any (for-work) usefulness above 25". Personally, I go for 25" or 27" QHD to get a fair working experience without breaking the bank.
This. DAAMIT graphics cards are blacklisted from all procurement processes I get a say in (personal and professional) because of consistently discontinuing driver support far too early. Good luck finding an ATI proprietary driver that supports a reasonably recent version of the Linux kernel and a >2-years-old graphics card at the same time (with the possible exception of some really popular models they really can't get away with discontinuing early).
Of course, you can go with the open-source driver. If you don't mind the latest several iterations of OpenGL and other standards being implemented mostly in software, if at all. At least, the proprietary driver lets you get the most out of the hardware. When not hampered by bugs, that is.
For all its evil, Nvidia does far better with the proprietary driver support. I can imagine this is a bit of a thankless job marketing-wise because the public narrative is mostly controlled by open-source zealots who blissfully ignore the proprietary drivers in favor of the open-source ones, but sales-wise, they seem to be doing good. I'm guessing there's a quiet demographic that cares about doing new stuff with old cards and that is large enough to justify putting some organisational effort into into actively maintaining long-lived/legacy driver versions.
Slashdot Mirror
Here, and I thought I saw it passing by much more recently on /. as well.
That makes 2 stale stories in a row. *Pours bucket of water on msmash.* Wake up man, you're in the driver's seat!
It's almost as if they're setting up a strawman for the purpose of bashing the more moderate people with legitimate concerns about anthropogenic climate change. But then there's Poe's law...
Never mind, it was written by an intern. Less "Poe's law" and more "Hanlon's razor" :-)
Short story: not only that, they're quite potent too - much more so than CO2 (for the same concentration). The only reason they haven't received as much attention in this context as CO2 is that the international community has been quite successful at curbing their atmospheric concentrations and thus their impact on the climate. Which cannot be said about CO2.
Longer story at Wikipedia.
On the subject of getting attention: am I the only one who finds the theoutline.com link in TFS offensive? Not only did they succeed to combine the worst of late-2010s and early-1990s web design (scrolling site + white-on-black wall of text = teeth gnashing) but it's just a thoroughly sensationalized duplicate of the earlier TIME story. Complete with shamelessly copied misleading image of "largest Antarctic ozone hole ever recorded (September 2006)", but now with complimentary misleading caption "who did this?"
It's almost as if they're setting up a strawman for the purpose of bashing the more moderate people with legitimate concerns about anthropogenic climate change. But then there's Poe's law...
* "Function of wavelength" and "function of frequency" are indeed interchangeable, so that part is correct.
* The index of refraction is not a function of angle of incidence; rather, it is a constant that can be used to predict the angle of refraction for any angle of incidence through Snell's law.
* To get more to the point, yes, the cut is very important in making a gem look good; a cheap mass-produced rhinestone with a proper cut may looks like a spectacular gemstone while a small diamond in the rough will often look like a pebble.
* The small diamonds an ordinary guy might buy for his fiancée are simply cut according to one of a handful standard cuts that optimize aesthetically desirable attributes. It only becomes a real art when talking about the large and expensive gems in the hands of museums and the super-rich.
* Even cutting a small diamond into a standard cut requires considerable craftmanship because the material is hard and brittle and has crystal planes (sometimes also referred to as cleavage planes) which have to be skilfully taken into account when turning an irregular shape into a gemstone. I've read diamond cutters actually take a good amount of time devising a strategy before starting the work. It doen't always work out equally well, which is why small diamonds with a near-perfect cut can demand far higher prices that the same size of diamond with a less accurate cut.
* The difficulty in cutting is to some degree specific to diamond; I believe softer and cheaper materials like the aforementioned rhinestones are largely cut by machines (which are more wasteful with the material, but it matters less).
* Despite the last 3 points, sufficiently large natural diamonds are so rare that the cost of the material is typically higher than the compensation of the cutter (or so I believe; I could easily be wrong about this last one).
Half right. The optical dispersion is equally important, a.k.a. the variation of the refractive index as a function of the wavelength, a.k.a. the material's ability to "pull the colors apart" when used as a prism. A hypothetical gemstone with a high refractive index but little optical dispersion would show the "black and white faces" of diamond when lit with a white spotlight, but none of the "rainbows" (which the gemstone lovers call "fire").
One of the measures for optical dispersion is the difference in refractive index between 686.7 nm and 430.8 nm. Values: diamond 0.044; cubic zirconia ~0.06; silicon carbide ~0.1; fused silica glass ~0.01; corundrum 0.018 (and the latter has a refractive index of 1.77).
To visually pass for a diamond in the eyes of an expert, a stone needs to have a refractive index not too far from diamond AND an optical dispersion not too far from diamond AND not too much birefringence. Slilicon carbide fails quite badly at the latter 2 criteria and visually is a worse substitute for diamond than cubic zirconia. Some people claim that the latter still has "too much flame", but I'm quite sceptical that many people would be able to visually tell the difference, even with good lightning and magnification. I believe I once read jewelers pick out cubic zirconia based on its material properties (density and/or thermal conductivity, which are both very different from diamond - more so than silicon carbide).
Of course, if you don't care that a gem passes for a diamond, only that it looks good, then one could argue "the more dispersion, the better". Though some would object that too much color would make it look tacky. There's no accounting for taste (and neither for BS people perpetuate to sound "refined").
Whereas, in the US, cops harass, fine, paper-check, even jail people for having a beer on the beach (perfectly normal in most of Europe).
You forgot "beat up".
A strawman argument consists of painting the opponent's views as different - commonly more extreme - than they actually are. I think GP's obvious parody is pretty much equally extreme as GGP's ignorant, long-debunked talking points. If you're going to yawn at something, yawn at those.
Or better yet fork/maintain Gnome 2, if you wish to.
I'm speaking as KDE user.
It shows.
GOES-17 meant to become "GOES-West."
Gee, looks like they should have called it "GOES-South".
I'll get my coat.
I came here to write this (or something along these lines). Cautious behaviour after a traumatic experience exists in very primitive animals, so it would seem plausible off the bat that a (relatively) simple biochemical mechanism would be behind it. According to my reading, the experiment corroborates this hypothesis - nothing more. The suggestion that a memory was transferred (in the conventional sense) does not stand up to Ocam's razor.
I'm sure preschoolers would find your your little sock puppet theatre hilarious. But since you appear to be able to form written sentences, there has got to be something better you can do with your time.
Amen to that, brother.
So we should go back to RTF? Or heaven forbid... back to plain text? How about we go the whole nine yards... where email was a command from FTP? Fix the problem don't complain about implementation!
It would appear that you are trying to make the point for introducing an "uninsightful" mod option.
* In what parallel universe has RTF ever been a widely accepted standard for e-mail content?
* In what parallel universe has e-mail ever been a command from FTP? The "file transfer protocols" referred to in your link have very little to do with FTP. Or are you confusing FTP with a command-line? Either way, you're sounding like you're using a couple of historical sources out of context to puzzle together a totally distorted version of a reality many of us lived through. Now get off my lawn. And leave your geek card.
* Last but not least, what's so "heaven forbid" about plain text anyway? And if that's your opinion, what are you doing on a site whose markup is so limited that it annoys even me? Plain text is an efficient mode of communication that avoids a great many issues (even when creating some itself). I'd go out on a limb and say that a vast majority of modern textual communication is being performed without allowing the nearly unlimited markup options of html e-mail. Think the instant-message-fad-du-jour, cell phone text messages, twitter, all kinds of discussion forums, reddit, disqus, the youtube comments sections,... In the specific case of discussion forums, it is merely a natural adaptation to the fact that html has unlimited abuse potential. As seen in e-mail...
\ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
/ \
Actually, that's completely wrong. Most animals have the ability to consciously sense decreasing O2 levels (in addition to increasing CO2). We humans (and possibly some other primates) somehow lost the former ability, so that we only get a suffocating feeling when our CO2 levels increase, and are largely oblivious to oxygen displacement.
This is also why olsmeister's "Should be simple enough to try it on animals" turns out be... well not quite that simple. Common lab animals such as rats will actually show the same signs of distress when exposed to high levels of CO2 as N2, while this is well known not to be the case with humans.
Of course, you could propose to test it on primates that have the same "defect" as humans, but ethical requirements to get that approved are stricter than for rats, and include demonstrating that you're sufficiently advancing humanity to warrant the animal suffering you're causing.
Add to that that the death penalty in and by itself is considered deeply unethical in most of the world (mostly because of its irreversible nature), insofar that pharma companies wilfully make approved compounds for lethal injections hard to obtain simply to avoid the public backlash of being complicit in the death penalty. Then one can see that it will be hard to find a scientist even considering to propose testing this. Most of them are more than happy to point out the method is "unproven", without much willingness to change that.
My opinion on the matter is that while N2 asphyxiation will doubtlessly turn out to have disadvantages, the evidence currently available makes it highly likely to be superior to lethal injection, and it's without a shadow of a doubt superior to the electric chair that some states are attempting to fall back to. That said, if policymakers can prevent a good number of executions altogether by playing the "unproven" card, I'm personally not feeling terribly compelled to make a lot of noise about this being somewhat dishonest. In an ideal world, I would be, but in the world we're living in, it's all about lawyering, and one sometimes has to play along a bit.
... X.Org? Or Wayland?
craigslist and second hand PC shops
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you follow good security practices, the odds of having an unpatched 'next-generation' CPU flaw on a PC in your house (as opposed to a cloud server) actually being exploited in a way that causes you significant discomfort are in the same ballpark as the odds of buying a piece of second-hand equipment with a hard-to-find and/or hard-to-patch (potential) backdoor. The latter is not very likely, I know, but neither is the former.
... but protection for lighting and for EMP are technically different exercises and require significantly different approaches. So EMP isn't all that much "like lighting"...
You appear to be talking about lightning entering equipment through a conductor. Under that assumption, what you wrote is correct. However, TFA appears to describe an event where the path of the lightning did not include the damaged equipment, so the damage can only be attributed to its EMP.
And yes, a nearby lightning strike does generate a potent EMP that is an important threat to nearby battery-operated equipment; I've experienced incidents myself, and there's more of that in different threads in this discussion. When I read TFA, my first reaction was: "well duh, something like this was bound to happen some time." Which of course doesn't excuse poor EMP (or, where applicable, surge) protection in safety-critical equipment.
Utter BS from start to finish. Parent is the thermodynamic equivalent of the "Gorilla Warfare/Navy Seal" copypasta. Only the latter is ironic.
The items marketed as TVs generally have a large size and low resolution because they're meant to be viewed at a longer distance than computer screens (and because most content viewed on a TV doesn't surpass 1080p anyway). Conversely, the items marketed as computer monitors are generally smaller; as you say, sitting at arm's length from a 40" screen won't allow you to keep everything in the usable portion of your field of view (technically, the macula and its immediate surroundings). Computer monitors (for office use, as opposed to entertainment) also typically have higher resolutions than TV in order to allow you to make the most of said usable-portion-of-FOV.
You probably had your tongue planted in your cheek when writing the post I originally replied to, but just in case you didn't, I'd like to point out that if you insist on using a TV for a computer monitor, you don't get to complain about an almost-too-big viewing area and horrible jaggies. It is also an incredibly poor choice specifically for "writing, programming, doing CAD work". Do yourself a favor and get an actual computer monitor (if at all possible); my head starts hurting just to think about anyone having to do that kind of work on a 1080p 40" TV. I can't stand to sit in front of something lower than 80 ppi the whole day (you're at 55...), and 80 ppi is already well below the point where most people would be inclined to zoom out or decrease their font size, but cannot because the pixels are too coarse. By that logic, 1080p displays don't gain any (for-work) usefulness above 25". Personally, I go for 25" or 27" QHD to get a fair working experience without breaking the bank.
I currently have a 40" 1080p screen,
That's called a TV. You must have bought it at the wrong section in Best Buy. Understandable mistake, now that the connectors are the same. :-D
I want them to render with fewer "jaggies", which makes an enormous difference in comfort when writing
Pah! You young people have it easy. In my days, the jaggies were as large as a grown man's head. And they went uphill both ways!
Stormy wasn't on Trump's payroll.
FTFY.
I change GPU about every 3 years, so that'd be about 5 cards. Not a problem.
Seems plausible, and good for you. The problems precisely come crawling out of the woodwork when you're not willing change GPU "about every 3 years".
This. DAAMIT graphics cards are blacklisted from all procurement processes I get a say in (personal and professional) because of consistently discontinuing driver support far too early. Good luck finding an ATI proprietary driver that supports a reasonably recent version of the Linux kernel and a >2-years-old graphics card at the same time (with the possible exception of some really popular models they really can't get away with discontinuing early).
Of course, you can go with the open-source driver. If you don't mind the latest several iterations of OpenGL and other standards being implemented mostly in software, if at all. At least, the proprietary driver lets you get the most out of the hardware. When not hampered by bugs, that is.
For all its evil, Nvidia does far better with the proprietary driver support. I can imagine this is a bit of a thankless job marketing-wise because the public narrative is mostly controlled by open-source zealots who blissfully ignore the proprietary drivers in favor of the open-source ones, but sales-wise, they seem to be doing good. I'm guessing there's a quiet demographic that cares about doing new stuff with old cards and that is large enough to justify putting some organisational effort into into actively maintaining long-lived/legacy driver versions.
Of course, because there exists nothing in-between anarcho-capitalism and communist dictatorship.</sarcasm>
I call strawman argument.