Neat theory - except I need you to actually prove that *ever* happened.
Because I was alive at the time, and I remember hearing the "In accordance with our policy of airing dissenting viewpoints" speech, and it was almost always a quick rebuttal to someone that had said something that was simply not factually correct.
So, basically, what I'm hearing is that "My God, it would take hours and hours to rebut all the factually incorrect BS spewed by Rush Limbaugh. Good Lord, if we took *responsibility* for the fact that this humongous moneytree spread lies across the airwaves, we would *never* make money from spreading propoganda!"
You would be amazed at my utter lack of sympathy for the argument.
Oh Oh - I know - we're not going to be able to prove what we *thought* we could prove with the logs we wanted . . . . So lets look for something we can use to show somebody from Googles thousands of employees *also* uploaded a video.
Cuz we only need one naive judge to buy into the argument that Google is 100% responsible for what *any* employee does to win!
Plus we can sell off all these [I *{heart}* apocryphal evidence!] bumperstickers!
Let's be clear about this. The Immunity was added this way because the administration says that while the Law Enforcement Tools were important, the immunity was more important. They were willing to turn down the law enforcement tools, to get the immunity.
I agree - it *is* more important to deny the principle that when the President orders you to break the law, you are allowed to break the law, than it is to stop another terrorist attack.
Let's make this clear - I lost friends in the Pentagon *and* the World Trade Center, and I would *rather* get hit by Al-Qaeda, *again*, than to have established that the President can order you to break the law.
Frankly, I consider this immunity an another in a series of absolute wrongs foisted on our country by cowards and traitors.
Okay - you're right - we will need to have some shows where liberals outnumber conservatives to even things up.
We can balance out the Wall Street Journal with a NYTimes roundtab . . . no, sorry, the NYtimes editorial staff has some conservatives on it, that won't work.
Um - you know, maybe Air America has some, but I'm really not aware of anything on PBS or the mainstream media that has all liberals on it.
Of course, the concept of giving people a chance to rebut each other seems to be a liberal value in and of itself, so maybe you can spin that we know it's a liberal media *because* it allows conservatives to have their say, but I'm not sure how that will play in Peoria.
NPR and PBS *has* conservatives on it. Sometimes more conservatives than liberals.
Example: I watch the McLaughlin Group - but it lately has three conservative guests and one Liberal (McLaughlin himself is unabashedly conservative) - {G}
Where is the conservative equivalent to the Wall Street Journal roundtable? Where is the conservative equivalent of giving Tucker Carlson his own show?
Sorry - I actually have enjoyed these shows, but when conservatives whine and gripe about the "Liberal Bias" when they have entire shows catering to them? When there is *nothing* equivalent on the conservative radio networks or Fox News?
The Fairness Doctrine, a doctrine that stated that any use of the public airwaves to broadcast either a liberal *or* a conservative viewpoint, had to also allow for access for an opposing viewpoint, is *censorship*?
Ah - Censorship is telling people they *can't* say something. The Fairness Doctrine is telling people they have a positive responsibility to say something.
If the fact that someone is going to have the chance to mention you're an idiot when you say something is stupid bothers you, then learn from the experience, don't whine "Help - I'm bein' repressed!"
Pug, contemplating adding to the violence inherent in the system.
I remember two things from a Bill Moyers probe into the media.
One was the fact that the McClatchy papers (evidently) had it dead on. They didn't have the sources other people did, so they had to investigate the facts, and the facts as being presented elsewhere didn't hang together.
The other was - although I didn't have the McClatchy newspapers available, very little they uncovered actually surprised me. *I* was already aware of 80+ percent of it - it wasn't buried, or even particularly hidden - it was all out there, but people were actively ignoring it.
Some of that was the media. A lot of it was us. You can't cheat an honest man, and the population did not *want* to be told about this stuff.
I knew about Bin Laden before September 11th - there was a Newsweek article talking about pressure from on high closing down 'politically touchy' investigations into the family months earlier. Yet obviously everyone else thought this was unrelated to the success of the attacks.
I knew about the Pentagon Office of Special Plans - there was all *sorts* of stuff about that in the press. Yet everyone else seems to have bought into the "The CIA Misinformed us" Mindset. Before the war, Cheney and his friends were bypassing the CIA because they were too circumspect, after the war, the CIA is to blame?
And it still goes on. To hear the mainstream opinion, they still act like know one could have known this was a bad idea. All *SORTS* of people knew this was a bad idea - but it's still more respectable to have been wrong than to have actually have been right.
And that's not all the media. A lot of it is a populace that deliberately listens to news filtered to make sure it already agrees with them.
Sigh - you have to love how the court's "Original Intent" philosophers explicitly state that there were three versions of the amendment written with the clause made specifically to individuals.
These three were rejected in favor of a version that put a definite purpose in front of it for a "properly regulated militia".
So obviously, this means the rejected versions are arguments *for* the right being an individual right.
Scalia and company are to the "Original Intent" argument what Fundamentalists are to the "Absolute truth of the Bible" - i.e., we *say* we believe in it word for word, but we ignore any phrasing or history that doesn't suit our purpose. But if you disagree with us you're an activist judge trying to legislate from the bench.
So, anyway, our originalist interpretation of "Well-regulated Militia" is that everyone is a member of the militia, and it's unconstitutional to regulate it in any way whatsoever.
TIFF is the old established "tried and true" (haw) standard, PDF is the new hotness. So I doubt anyone is moving backwards here.
Also courts have requirements for electronic document formats and there is nothing non-standard about a "image based pdf" (these also support searchable OCR full text).
No surprise for me sadly - Steve Buyer is a pretty much useless piece of shit. He voted against protecting the detainee's from torture too.
For myself - I voted for Obama in the Indiana Primary, and I will vote Democratic in the general. But I had Obama set up for five bucks a week in my banks autopay system, and I'm switching that over to http://www.actblue.com/page/fisa now, and I've emailed the Obama campaign and told them exactly why.
I don't want these bastard showing up in thirty years and trying to do this again. They came close in the 70's, they're coming closer this time around, and frankly, if we get their asses out of the Whitehouse, I'm damned if I want them doing this again to my kids and grandkids in another 30 years.
I love how you consider a "true standard format a dream at every company I work with" in the same posting in which you're complaining about a program that uses a true, standard format.
And of course, the person who's saying that they've had success *using* that standard format, must not be working in any sort of corporation.
Possibly he simply works for a corporation that decided that having a true, standard format was actually a priority?
It's not that I've never had an issue with an office document - but in the two or three years I've done Open Office, I only recall a couple, none severe. One begins to wonder if your definition of 'Trivial' is the same as mine - I mean, certainly in the grand scheme of things, excel spreadsheets for D&D characters are 'trivial', but that's hardly the same as unsophisticated, and I've been using OO for those for years without issue.
Wow - if only I had a science teacher that had gone into notions of falsifiability, testing, confirmation bias, and so on I might know something about that.
Oh - that's right, I did.
You are correct, in that string theory predictions are not falsifiable *at our current level of technology* - the predictions they make are at higher energies than currently feasible. But it *does* make predictions, and frankly, if you are sitting here claiming it doesn't, and then claiming you've followed this for years, I have some difficulty reconciling the two statements.
I will be the first to concede, there was a point where I was having vague notions that it was going to turn out string theory was homomorphic to all of mathematics or something, but that's been awhile, and seems (to me, as an interested layman) to be adequately addressed by M-theory.
But saying that it's not practical to test the predictions yet, doesn't dismiss it as not being a valid theory. Often theories aren't testable at the time - actually, the ones that come up and are immediately testable that day are the exceptions, not the rule.
Sooo . ..either there are no ways to distinguish quantum theories of gravity until we can build solar structures . . . or, we'll come up with something clever that allows us to distinguish them. Unless you intend to posit that we just shouldn't bother making theories about it until we reach dyson sphere tech, I really don't see the point of trying to scream that "String Theory = Intelligent Design", when they are philosophically different - one can be tested in principle - the other cannot, in principle, be proven wrong.
No, to be a theory it just has to make predictions that can conceivably be tested.
String theory makes predictions that can be tested - just not at energies that are within easy reach.
Just because this reminds me of it - I had a science teacher that explained it well with the 'faerie theory of gravity' - his pet theory that things were held to the earth by tiny faeries that grabbed on and flitted their wings.
Then he forced us to quit laughing and prove him wrong, based on the predictions of the faerie theory - i.e, that items with more surface area to grab should fall faster than items with less surface area, item in a vacuum shouldn't fall at all, etcetera.
As silly as it sounds, it was a pretty good intro into concepts of science philosophy, making predictions and testing them, the confirmation bias trap, that if the theory says one thing and the data another the theory needs to be altered, etcetera.
Not that I'm competent enough to have an educated opinion, but heck, never stopped me before.
But from what I have read of raytracing vs raster, it looks to me as if there are two major differences.
A) Raytracing automatically takes care of certian kinds of optical issues (eg, the looking up through water in the screenshots) which just simplifies life. If you have a mixture of items that some had these complications and others didn't, based on that alone, then it might make sense to use a hybrid solution.
B) Raytracing scales logarithmically, whereas rasterization scales linearly.
That second seems to me to be the determining factor in the long run - if you can double your resolution, but only increase your processing needs by log(2), then no matter how optimized your hybrid raster system is, at some resolution raytracing is going to be better *and* simpler.
I'm sure there is a window where Raster efficiency is still worth going after for specific things, but assuming Moore's Law holds for the next 20 years, just how long is that window going to be open and how much effort is it going to be to try to hit it?
That assumes I'm understanding the scaling issues correctly, but if so - is the return on this hybrid system going to be as long as one 18 month processor generation?
On the one hand - yeah, immediately after it became obvious that the administration was incompetent would have been nice.
On the other hand - yeah, it would only save us seven months. Given the average amount of damage this administration has caused in seven month periods, can you honestly say that saving seven months wouldn't be helpful?
Which brings before me a question I've wondered about before.
What are the costs of burning CD's and giving them away at stores? If AOL can fill every rubbish bin in 50 states, why can't we manage to mail out 100,000,000 copies of Ubuntu 8.4?
If you genuinely believe God will cure your son's pneumonia, and I genuinely believe a doctor will cure my daughters pneumonia, then only the survivors of our respective decisions will go on to reproduce.
As it happens, Pneumonia has a significantly lower mortality when treated than untreated.
Education is only the answer if you genuinely *like* those people. Alternatively, you can simply allow those that believe in science to reap the awards of science. Personally, I'm all for banning creationists from any technology *not* specifically mentioned as a good thing in the Bible.
Most industrialized countries run a system more efficient that what we have here, and there are a number of different ways to do so.
There is a quite useful Frontline that went over the benefits and trade-offs of several countries - Japan, UK, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Germany.
All of them had lower total healthcare costs, all of them took different approaches, and different trade-offs (and Frontline went into the deficiences of each system as well).
But yes, it turns out that systems that save you money, turn out to be easy to pay for - a strange financial that I've noticed often seems counter-intuitive to libertarians and conservatives, although I concede to having never entirely understood why.
I would suggest doing some research. You look like a putz when you make statements that something is inconceivable and stupid when people can point to obvious examples.
Slashdot Mirror
I was like, really concerned for a minute. I thought spammers had managed to access something *important* or something.
So, this is about someone that already knows my email address accessing the "name" that I show on every email I send out?
To quote "The Whole Nine Yards" -
*Oh* *My* *Gawd*!
Pug
Or so they tell us . . .
Neat theory - except I need you to actually prove that *ever* happened.
Because I was alive at the time, and I remember hearing the "In accordance with our policy of airing dissenting viewpoints" speech, and it was almost always a quick rebuttal to someone that had said something that was simply not factually correct.
So, basically, what I'm hearing is that "My God, it would take hours and hours to rebut all the factually incorrect BS spewed by Rush Limbaugh. Good Lord, if we took *responsibility* for the fact that this humongous moneytree spread lies across the airwaves, we would *never* make money from spreading propoganda!"
You would be amazed at my utter lack of sympathy for the argument.
Pug
Oh Oh - I know - we're not going to be able to prove what we *thought* we could prove with the logs we wanted . . . . So lets look for something we can use to show somebody from Googles thousands of employees *also* uploaded a video.
Cuz we only need one naive judge to buy into the argument that Google is 100% responsible for what *any* employee does to win!
Plus we can sell off all these [I *{heart}* apocryphal evidence!] bumperstickers!
Pug
Let's be clear about this. The Immunity was added this way because the administration says that while the Law Enforcement Tools were important, the immunity was more important. They were willing to turn down the law enforcement tools, to get the immunity.
I agree - it *is* more important to deny the principle that when the President orders you to break the law, you are allowed to break the law, than it is to stop another terrorist attack.
Let's make this clear - I lost friends in the Pentagon *and* the World Trade Center, and I would *rather* get hit by Al-Qaeda, *again*, than to have established that the President can order you to break the law.
Frankly, I consider this immunity an another in a series of absolute wrongs foisted on our country by cowards and traitors.
Pug
Okay - you're right - we will need to have some shows where liberals outnumber conservatives to even things up.
We can balance out the Wall Street Journal with a NYTimes roundtab . . . no, sorry, the NYtimes editorial staff has some conservatives on it, that won't work.
Um - you know, maybe Air America has some, but I'm really not aware of anything on PBS or the mainstream media that has all liberals on it.
Of course, the concept of giving people a chance to rebut each other seems to be a liberal value in and of itself, so maybe you can spin that we know it's a liberal media *because* it allows conservatives to have their say, but I'm not sure how that will play in Peoria.
Why exactly is this a Troll?
Why would it need to touch NPR?
NPR and PBS *has* conservatives on it. Sometimes more conservatives than liberals.
Example: I watch the McLaughlin Group - but it lately has three conservative guests and one Liberal (McLaughlin himself is unabashedly conservative) - {G}
Last weekends Guest list?
Mort Zuckerman
Monica Crowley
Michelle Bernard (of the Independent Womens Forum
Eleanor Clift {--Liberal
Where is the conservative equivalent to the Wall Street Journal roundtable? Where is the conservative equivalent of giving Tucker Carlson his own show?
Sorry - I actually have enjoyed these shows, but when conservatives whine and gripe about the "Liberal Bias" when they have entire shows catering to them? When there is *nothing* equivalent on the conservative radio networks or Fox News?
Y'all be whiny bitches.
Gee - I just love the initial spin here:
The Fairness Doctrine, a doctrine that stated that any use of the public airwaves to broadcast either a liberal *or* a conservative viewpoint, had to also allow for access for an opposing viewpoint, is *censorship*?
Ah - Censorship is telling people they *can't* say something. The Fairness Doctrine is telling people they have a positive responsibility to say something.
If the fact that someone is going to have the chance to mention you're an idiot when you say something is stupid bothers you, then learn from the experience, don't whine "Help - I'm bein' repressed!"
Pug, contemplating adding to the violence inherent in the system.
I remember two things from a Bill Moyers probe into the media.
One was the fact that the McClatchy papers (evidently) had it dead on. They didn't have the sources other people did, so they had to investigate the facts, and the facts as being presented elsewhere didn't hang together.
The other was - although I didn't have the McClatchy newspapers available, very little they uncovered actually surprised me. *I* was already aware of 80+ percent of it - it wasn't buried, or even particularly hidden - it was all out there, but people were actively ignoring it.
Some of that was the media. A lot of it was us. You can't cheat an honest man, and the population did not *want* to be told about this stuff.
I knew about Bin Laden before September 11th - there was a Newsweek article talking about pressure from on high closing down 'politically touchy' investigations into the family months earlier. Yet obviously everyone else thought this was unrelated to the success of the attacks.
I knew about the Pentagon Office of Special Plans - there was all *sorts* of stuff about that in the press. Yet everyone else seems to have bought into the "The CIA Misinformed us" Mindset. Before the war, Cheney and his friends were bypassing the CIA because they were too circumspect, after the war, the CIA is to blame?
And it still goes on. To hear the mainstream opinion, they still act like know one could have known this was a bad idea. All *SORTS* of people knew this was a bad idea - but it's still more respectable to have been wrong than to have actually have been right.
And that's not all the media. A lot of it is a populace that deliberately listens to news filtered to make sure it already agrees with them.
Pug
Sigh - you have to love how the court's "Original Intent" philosophers explicitly state that there were three versions of the amendment written with the clause made specifically to individuals.
These three were rejected in favor of a version that put a definite purpose in front of it for a "properly regulated militia".
So obviously, this means the rejected versions are arguments *for* the right being an individual right.
Scalia and company are to the "Original Intent" argument what Fundamentalists are to the "Absolute truth of the Bible" - i.e., we *say* we believe in it word for word, but we ignore any phrasing or history that doesn't suit our purpose. But if you disagree with us you're an activist judge trying to legislate from the bench.
So, anyway, our originalist interpretation of "Well-regulated Militia" is that everyone is a member of the militia, and it's unconstitutional to regulate it in any way whatsoever.
Pug
Postscript begs to differ - {G}.Also courts have requirements for electronic document formats and there is nothing non-standard about a "image based pdf" (these also support searchable OCR full text).
No surprise for me sadly - Steve Buyer is a pretty much useless piece of shit. He voted against protecting the detainee's from torture too.
For myself - I voted for Obama in the Indiana Primary, and I will vote Democratic in the general. But I had Obama set up for five bucks a week in my banks autopay system, and I'm switching that over to http://www.actblue.com/page/fisa now, and I've emailed the Obama campaign and told them exactly why.
I don't want these bastard showing up in thirty years and trying to do this again. They came close in the 70's, they're coming closer this time around, and frankly, if we get their asses out of the Whitehouse, I'm damned if I want them doing this again to my kids and grandkids in another 30 years.
I want these investigations to go forward dammit.
Pug
I love how you consider a "true standard format a dream at every company I work with" in the same posting in which you're complaining about a program that uses a true, standard format.
And of course, the person who's saying that they've had success *using* that standard format, must not be working in any sort of corporation.
Possibly he simply works for a corporation that decided that having a true, standard format was actually a priority?
Pug
It's not that I've never had an issue with an office document - but in the two or three years I've done Open Office, I only recall a couple, none severe. One begins to wonder if your definition of 'Trivial' is the same as mine - I mean, certainly in the grand scheme of things, excel spreadsheets for D&D characters are 'trivial', but that's hardly the same as unsophisticated, and I've been using OO for those for years without issue.
Pug
Wow - if only I had a science teacher that had gone into notions of falsifiability, testing, confirmation bias, and so on I might know something about that.
.either there are no ways to distinguish quantum theories of gravity until we can build solar structures . . . or, we'll come up with something clever that allows us to distinguish them. Unless you intend to posit that we just shouldn't bother making theories about it until we reach dyson sphere tech, I really don't see the point of trying to scream that "String Theory = Intelligent Design", when they are philosophically different - one can be tested in principle - the other cannot, in principle, be proven wrong.
Oh - that's right, I did.
You are correct, in that string theory predictions are not falsifiable *at our current level of technology* - the predictions they make are at higher energies than currently feasible. But it *does* make predictions, and frankly, if you are sitting here claiming it doesn't, and then claiming you've followed this for years, I have some difficulty reconciling the two statements.
I will be the first to concede, there was a point where I was having vague notions that it was going to turn out string theory was homomorphic to all of mathematics or something, but that's been awhile, and seems (to me, as an interested layman) to be adequately addressed by M-theory.
But saying that it's not practical to test the predictions yet, doesn't dismiss it as not being a valid theory. Often theories aren't testable at the time - actually, the ones that come up and are immediately testable that day are the exceptions, not the rule.
Sooo . .
Fundamental difference.
Pug
No, to be a theory it just has to make predictions that can conceivably be tested.
String theory makes predictions that can be tested - just not at energies that are within easy reach.
Just because this reminds me of it - I had a science teacher that explained it well with the 'faerie theory of gravity' - his pet theory that things were held to the earth by tiny faeries that grabbed on and flitted their wings.
Then he forced us to quit laughing and prove him wrong, based on the predictions of the faerie theory - i.e, that items with more surface area to grab should fall faster than items with less surface area, item in a vacuum shouldn't fall at all, etcetera.
As silly as it sounds, it was a pretty good intro into concepts of science philosophy, making predictions and testing them, the confirmation bias trap, that if the theory says one thing and the data another the theory needs to be altered, etcetera.
Pug
Not that I'm competent enough to have an educated opinion, but heck, never stopped me before.
But from what I have read of raytracing vs raster, it looks to me as if there are two major differences.
A) Raytracing automatically takes care of certian kinds of optical issues (eg, the looking up through water in the screenshots) which just simplifies life. If you have a mixture of items that some had these complications and others didn't, based on that alone, then it might make sense to use a hybrid solution.
B) Raytracing scales logarithmically, whereas rasterization scales linearly.
That second seems to me to be the determining factor in the long run - if you can double your resolution, but only increase your processing needs by log(2), then no matter how optimized your hybrid raster system is, at some resolution raytracing is going to be better *and* simpler.
I'm sure there is a window where Raster efficiency is still worth going after for specific things, but assuming Moore's Law holds for the next 20 years, just how long is that window going to be open and how much effort is it going to be to try to hit it?
That assumes I'm understanding the scaling issues correctly, but if so - is the return on this hybrid system going to be as long as one 18 month processor generation?
Pug
I'm thinking that, once the plane stops flying, it's going to no longer qualify as a "Non-Lethal Weapon"?
Pug
On the one hand - yeah, immediately after it became obvious that the administration was incompetent would have been nice.
On the other hand - yeah, it would only save us seven months. Given the average amount of damage this administration has caused in seven month periods, can you honestly say that saving seven months wouldn't be helpful?
Just sayin'
Pug
Which brings before me a question I've wondered about before.
What are the costs of burning CD's and giving them away at stores? If AOL can fill every rubbish bin in 50 states, why can't we manage to mail out 100,000,000 copies of Ubuntu 8.4?
Just curious - Pug
There is the rather ruthless approach as well.
If you genuinely believe God will cure your son's pneumonia, and I genuinely believe a doctor will cure my daughters pneumonia, then only the survivors of our respective decisions will go on to reproduce.
As it happens, Pneumonia has a significantly lower mortality when treated than untreated.
Education is only the answer if you genuinely *like* those people. Alternatively, you can simply allow those that believe in science to reap the awards of science. Personally, I'm all for banning creationists from any technology *not* specifically mentioned as a good thing in the Bible.
Pug
Particularly when the average wizard *swears* it's a +12, epic wand - .
Pug
Ah - No.
Most industrialized countries run a system more efficient that what we have here, and there are a number of different ways to do so.
There is a quite useful Frontline that went over the benefits and trade-offs of several countries - Japan, UK, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Germany.
All of them had lower total healthcare costs, all of them took different approaches, and different trade-offs (and Frontline went into the deficiences of each system as well).
But yes, it turns out that systems that save you money, turn out to be easy to pay for - a strange financial that I've noticed often seems counter-intuitive to libertarians and conservatives, although I concede to having never entirely understood why.
I would suggest doing some research. You look like a putz when you make statements that something is inconceivable and stupid when people can point to obvious examples.
Pug
Star Alliance Destinations
That was the entry listed that was not as cool as I thought it might be - {grin}
Pug