Unless he is doing something really novel, like relying on computational power elsewhere to do the compression.
I have seen articles about algorithms that allow you to calculate the value of any decimal place in Pi.
Plus, additional ones that allow you to prove (in a mathematical way) that any given string of characters you care to wish for are present in some location somewhere in the Pi decimal string.
SO the first point allows you to decompress knowing the beginning and ending values, and the second point allows you to pick some pretty long strings.
This works really well, so long as the data you want to store happens to be the value of Pi.
Unfortunately, if you want to store anything else, you get no saving; the number of bits required to store the starting and ending positions in the sequence of Pi works out to be at least as much as the number of bits required to store your original data.
Try it. Let's say you want to store the digit 0. Now, let's find the position of the first instance of 0 in the decimal expansion of Pi... it's the 37th digit after the decimal point. So instead of just storing 0, we have to store 37.
The adage about If it sounds too good to be true... holds double for compression algorithms.
Sorry, you've fallen into the same trap. Not 250,000 colours (which sounds vaguely feasible), but 250,000 bits of colour resolution, which is of course impossible.
As you say, the true colour resolution of good printers is around 300dpi, so the caculation is really off by a factor of 100,000,000 or so.
You are an idiot because: You ignored the one and only thing he/did/ say, which was that he was doing something differently.
Bzzt.
Encoding data using dots is the most efficient method possible. He has to print the image somehow, and scan it back in again. No combination of triangles and circles can circumvent the resolution limit, which is what is being calculated here.
By showing that the claim exceeds all practical limits of optical resolution (and probably the absolute physical limits), we show that what we have is just another magical compression scam.
He says that he's "doing something differently"; we've proved that what he claims to be doing is impossible. End of story.
For the sake of argument, let's say that the printer and scanner can reliably print and scan colour at 24-bit fidelity (which is nonsense, but makes the numbers nice and tidy): 900 million pixels per square inch.
That's 30,000 dpi.
That means you'd have to print and scan pixels less than a micron across. In full colour.
As I said, if anyone thought this was viable, he would be buried in funding. A working fusion reactor is the solution to half the world's problems. (For the other half, you need to bang people's heads together.)
There is enormous interest in any solutions, from all directions. Governments, militaries, all sorts of big business.
No-one thinks Bussard has anything.
As for being a nutcase: The tell-tales are all there; read his rant on JREF. And the power output scales according to the 7th power of the radius? Give me a break.
As for the funding: When all you have is an idea, and you need a grant for basic research, money is hard to come by. Been there. When you have something that demonstrates your idea, even in principle, and there's big money in it, then the development funds come knocking on your door. I've been there, as well.
I don't think Bussard is a deliberate fraud, not at all. I just think he's been chasing a dream too long.
I had quite a late model A1000, and the message was still there. Ctrl key, both shift keys, both Amiga keys, pop the disk out and then push it back in. (This was *not* easy.) And it only displayed the message for an instant, so you had to really slow the machine down to be able to read it. Running 30 copies of the blitter demos did the trick.
Copyright is essentially a taxation right and the effect it has on the economy is comparable to other forms of taxation. The whole issue is much easier to analyze if you simply consider the above-market price exacted through monopoly pricing to be a form of VAT. For example, for a CD costing $15 you can assign $14 to copyright VAT, and $1 to production (and theoretical free market pricing) cost.
It's neither worse nor better than the disease, it's the same disease with another name.
What utter baloney.
With copyrighted products, even DRM'd ones, I choose where to spend my money.
As such, it becomes a simple question of wether the current form of public financing of the IP industries is the most efficient way, or wether the public would be better served by incorporating the IP systems within the ordinary state budgets.
NO. It becomes a simple question of whose money it is.
What you are suggesting is good old-fashioned forcible redistribution. That never works out well.
Not to mention the rather minor point that the US broke international law by invading Iraq in the first place.
It's a "minor point" because it's not true. As much of a mess as international law is, the Coalition did not break any such laws with the 2003 invasion. In no small part because they were still at war with Iraq from the last time, and Iraq had committed innumerable breaches of the ceasefire conditions.
Sorry. You can claim that the invasion was a bad idea, but it was not in any way illegal.
Humans naturally and correctly respond more strongly to intentional attacks than to accidents.
Accidents will happen, and at any given point they may be more statistically threatening than whatever deliberate attacks may be going on. But accidents are relatively constant, and societies work to minimise them. Intentional attacks, on the other hand, tend to have people working to maximise the effects.
There are people right now who would bomb every airplane in the world if they had the ability to do so. There is no possibility of an accident happening on any similar scale.
The guy on the street who knows nothing of statistical analysis is right, and Bruce Schneier is wrong.
Communism and democracy (and even republics) are NOT mutually exclusive.
Yes they are.
Communism and capitalism should be mutually exclusive however.
You see, capitalism allows people to own things. Communism does not. Therefore to create a democratic communist state, you have to maintain a population where more than 50% of the people support the government's power to take away everything they own.
Most communist governments just resort to murdering millions of their own citizens instead.
Communism will never properly work while money exists.
That's a wee bit of a problem for communism, then, isn't it?
"Okay, all we have to do is take away all personal property, and then abolish money, and then we can build a successful communist state. Fer real."
The aberrations that exist today that are referred to as communist are actually far from it.
They may be far from communist ideals, but they represent the inevitable outcome of communism in practice. Oppression, economic collapse, and piles of corpses. It never fails. Russia? 40 million dead. China? 60 million.
And now you say, all we have to do to make it work the next time is abolish money?
The one thing we know for sure is that communist ideals cannot be achieved via communism.
The article says that the blogs "have anti-Muslim hate speech in varying degrees".
For that to be true, the net for "hate speech" (a term I thoroughly loathe) must be cast so wide as to include every element of human discourse. For any reasonable definition of "hate speech", the statement is untrue.
The article mentions some of the (I think it was 19?) blogs that were recently banned in India. These include "The Jawa Report", "Merri Musings", and "My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" (bamapachyderm.com). It says that they "have anti-Muslim hate speech in varying degrees".
That's not entirely accurate.
The Jawa Report is an anti-Islamist blog, and undoubtedly would be offensive to some Muslims.
My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy isn't focused on Islamism to the same degree, but does comment on it.
Merri Musings barely touches on the subject.
But there's one thing they all have in common, along with "Princess Kimberly" and a number of the other banned sites: After the (false) story of the Koran-in-a-toilet at Gitmo came out, and the rioting and deaths that followed in the Islamic world, they all posted photoshopped images of a Koran in a toilet.
So if you want to get banned in India, you know what you have to do.
Ah, thanks. My iPod has been playing up - when I accidentally let it discharge fully it really doesn't want to come back to life again. But doing the reset trick a couple of times fixed it. Must have done it by accident last time while I was mashing the buttons.
Slashdot Mirror
This works really well, so long as the data you want to store happens to be the value of Pi.
Unfortunately, if you want to store anything else, you get no saving; the number of bits required to store the starting and ending positions in the sequence of Pi works out to be at least as much as the number of bits required to store your original data.
Try it. Let's say you want to store the digit 0. Now, let's find the position of the first instance of 0 in the decimal expansion of Pi... it's the 37th digit after the decimal point. So instead of just storing 0, we have to store 37.
The adage about If it sounds too good to be true... holds double for compression algorithms.
Sorry, you've fallen into the same trap. Not 250,000 colours (which sounds vaguely feasible), but 250,000 bits of colour resolution, which is of course impossible.
As you say, the true colour resolution of good printers is around 300dpi, so the caculation is really off by a factor of 100,000,000 or so.
You are an idiot because: You ignored the one and only thing he /did/ say, which was that he was doing something differently.
Bzzt.
Encoding data using dots is the most efficient method possible. He has to print the image somehow, and scan it back in again. No combination of triangles and circles can circumvent the resolution limit, which is what is being calculated here.
By showing that the claim exceeds all practical limits of optical resolution (and probably the absolute physical limits), we show that what we have is just another magical compression scam.
He says that he's "doing something differently"; we've proved that what he claims to be doing is impossible. End of story.
Sorry, but you have combinatorial math in there where it doesn't apply. Yes, 24 bits gives you 256*256*256 colours, but it's still 24 bits.
The appropriate calculation is 4096*4096*24*8*11, so you over-estimated the capacity by a factor of 700,000 or so.
2.7GB per square inch, eh?
Alright, that's 21.6 gigabits per square inch.
For the sake of argument, let's say that the printer and scanner can reliably print and scan colour at 24-bit fidelity (which is nonsense, but makes the numbers nice and tidy): 900 million pixels per square inch.
That's 30,000 dpi.
That means you'd have to print and scan pixels less than a micron across. In full colour.
I don't think so.
And those who understand Unix wrote the Unix Hater's Handbook...
No, they're just Lisp users. They're like humans, only their brains are inside out.
As I said, if anyone thought this was viable, he would be buried in funding. A working fusion reactor is the solution to half the world's problems. (For the other half, you need to bang people's heads together.)
There is enormous interest in any solutions, from all directions. Governments, militaries, all sorts of big business.
No-one thinks Bussard has anything.
As for being a nutcase: The tell-tales are all there; read his rant on JREF. And the power output scales according to the 7th power of the radius? Give me a break.
As for the funding: When all you have is an idea, and you need a grant for basic research, money is hard to come by. Been there. When you have something that demonstrates your idea, even in principle, and there's big money in it, then the development funds come knocking on your door. I've been there, as well.
I don't think Bussard is a deliberate fraud, not at all. I just think he's been chasing a dream too long.
He's a nutcase.
If anyone thought this was viable, he would be buried in funding. Google would have to take a number and wait in line.
Now, it's possible that he's right, and everyone else in the field is wrong, but the odds are against it, and he's still a nutcase.
I had quite a late model A1000, and the message was still there. Ctrl key, both shift keys, both Amiga keys, pop the disk out and then push it back in. (This was *not* easy.) And it only displayed the message for an instant, so you had to really slow the machine down to be able to read it. Running 30 copies of the blitter demos did the trick.
Now, consider this - if the compensation for the creative arts was fair and equitable, you'd be paying a lot more for it, not a lot less.
Bzzt! Wrong.
The compensation is fair and equitable. If no-one wants your product, thats [i]your[/i] problem.
Copyright is essentially a taxation right and the effect it has on the economy is comparable to other forms of taxation. The whole issue is much easier to analyze if you simply consider the above-market price exacted through monopoly pricing to be a form of VAT. For example, for a CD costing $15 you can assign $14 to copyright VAT, and $1 to production (and theoretical free market pricing) cost.
It's neither worse nor better than the disease, it's the same disease with another name.
What utter baloney.
With copyrighted products, even DRM'd ones, I choose where to spend my money.
As such, it becomes a simple question of wether the current form of public financing of the IP industries is the most efficient way, or wether the public would be better served by incorporating the IP systems within the ordinary state budgets.
NO. It becomes a simple question of whose money it is.
What you are suggesting is good old-fashioned forcible redistribution. That never works out well.
Not to mention the rather minor point that the US broke international law by invading Iraq in the first place.
It's a "minor point" because it's not true. As much of a mess as international law is, the Coalition did not break any such laws with the 2003 invasion. In no small part because they were still at war with Iraq from the last time, and Iraq had committed innumerable breaches of the ceasefire conditions.
Sorry. You can claim that the invasion was a bad idea, but it was not in any way illegal.
Yes, and a lousy idea it is too.
But what they don't do is use this as a means by which to compensate all so-called musicians.
And that is what Jenner is after.
So Jenner's wonderful idea is a music tax?
Frankly, I'd rather have the DRM.
The "freedom" people are telling us I have to go out and sell more T-shirts - it's an argument I find tremendously insulting.
Nobody cares, Mr Jenner. Nobody cares.
This is exactly right.
Humans naturally and correctly respond more strongly to intentional attacks than to accidents.
Accidents will happen, and at any given point they may be more statistically threatening than whatever deliberate attacks may be going on. But accidents are relatively constant, and societies work to minimise them. Intentional attacks, on the other hand, tend to have people working to maximise the effects.
There are people right now who would bomb every airplane in the world if they had the ability to do so. There is no possibility of an accident happening on any similar scale.
The guy on the street who knows nothing of statistical analysis is right, and Bruce Schneier is wrong.
Communism and democracy (and even republics) are NOT mutually exclusive.
Yes they are.
Communism and capitalism should be mutually exclusive however.
You see, capitalism allows people to own things. Communism does not. Therefore to create a democratic communist state, you have to maintain a population where more than 50% of the people support the government's power to take away everything they own.
Most communist governments just resort to murdering millions of their own citizens instead.
Communism will never properly work while money exists.
That's a wee bit of a problem for communism, then, isn't it?
"Okay, all we have to do is take away all personal property, and then abolish money, and then we can build a successful communist state. Fer real."
The aberrations that exist today that are referred to as communist are actually far from it.
They may be far from communist ideals, but they represent the inevitable outcome of communism in practice. Oppression, economic collapse, and piles of corpses. It never fails. Russia? 40 million dead. China? 60 million.
And now you say, all we have to do to make it work the next time is abolish money?
The one thing we know for sure is that communist ideals cannot be achieved via communism.
So, what you are saying is that the election is only valid if YOU win?
Reminds me of the story about a new drug that converted cancer cells into beneficial stem cells.
Despite its promise, it was banned when it was shown to cause rats in laboratory cancer.
Then why does Norway have the highest standard of living in the world?
North Sea oil. Without that, their economy would be shrinking.
Lenin and Stalin killed 40 million of their own people.
Mao killed 60 million of his own people.
The Tsars and the Chinese nationalists were pikers when it came to bad government compared to the communists.
The fundamental law of communism is that it is the worst political system ever invented. No exceptions.
The article says that the blogs "have anti-Muslim hate speech in varying degrees".
For that to be true, the net for "hate speech" (a term I thoroughly loathe) must be cast so wide as to include every element of human discourse. For any reasonable definition of "hate speech", the statement is untrue.
Your call.
The article mentions some of the (I think it was 19?) blogs that were recently banned in India. These include "The Jawa Report", "Merri Musings", and "My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" (bamapachyderm.com). It says that they "have anti-Muslim hate speech in varying degrees".
That's not entirely accurate.
The Jawa Report is an anti-Islamist blog, and undoubtedly would be offensive to some Muslims.
My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy isn't focused on Islamism to the same degree, but does comment on it.
Merri Musings barely touches on the subject.
But there's one thing they all have in common, along with "Princess Kimberly" and a number of the other banned sites: After the (false) story of the Koran-in-a-toilet at Gitmo came out, and the rioting and deaths that followed in the Islamic world, they all posted photoshopped images of a Koran in a toilet.
So if you want to get banned in India, you know what you have to do.
It's about time. New Scientist started to go of the rails ten years ago, and has just been accelerating since then.
Ah, thanks. My iPod has been playing up - when I accidentally let it discharge fully it really doesn't want to come back to life again. But doing the reset trick a couple of times fixed it. Must have done it by accident last time while I was mashing the buttons.
"Today's machines now come standard with up to 4 megabytes of Random Access Memory, and this continues to increase every year!"
My new PC comes with 4 megabytes of Random Access Memory.
And 4GB of volatile streaming storage.