The story summary says the topic includes "exactly how much pressure the levees protecting New Orleans could withstand before giving way". I reply with evidence that the levees cracked even before their design limits were reached.
TrollMod pressure cracks Slashdot's moderation levees, but it can't crack me.
I lived in New Orleans for several years, up until a few years ago. It's certainly the case that "in Louisiana, people don't expect corruption - they demand it", as the wisecrack goes. But of course the Corps of Engineers knows to expect that corruption. And it knows that corruption is in no ways limited to Louisiana. The Corps is not some recent arrival on the water projects scene, or its long history of corruption nationwide. That's exactly why we expect the Corps to complete these projects by testing the results, rather than some faith-based "trust the contractors".
The Corps of Engineers is responsible for quality control of outsourced work. Of course ripoff contractors are responsible for their actions. But the CoE is responsible for oversight. The people of New Orleans, and the people who depend on them, trusted the CoE to do so. And got screwed.
I wonder how many other ripoff projects the CoE and other public agencies have paid for that are just waiting to fail. It's the kind of government handout that I expect in broken old ex-colonial countries.
Canadian physicist Garnet Ord has unified Newtonian and Einsteinian spacetime models for about a decade with fractal spacetime. Fractals are numbers with fractional dimensions. By treating time as a fractional dimension, all these physical phenomena can be described accurately.
A simple example is how time can flow in one direction, either completely or just enough to seems so. Because time isn't even one dimensional, the motion in the negative direction (half its dimension) doesn't happen. These innovations along similar lines (puns intended;) promise even more accurate models, and even better combinations of models that have each seemed to offer value, but disagreed with each other.
Of course, digital images can be jittered into a targeted retina. With realtime feedback from a retina position sensor. But there are bigger problems.
When we were making digital cameras for publishing (and I was mastering colorspaces, even working with the JPEGroup), we worked with a RG/YB when compensating for resolution (4Kx3K) with gamut dynamic range (40bits). We also subsampled, stepping the 512x512 video sensor 8x6 times across half-pixel for a single scan.
We found the most obvious evidence of the process, vs photography or even drumscanners, was in the "grids". The sensor grid of photodiodes, and its stepping pattern, was too regular, and its rectangular grid was perceptible even in film prints from rastered analog CRTs. The retina is more circular, more stochastic, and detects the grid. Moreover, video frames are detectable per se by the retina firing without a lockstep clock.
I think replicating the retinal image's total light modulation characteristics will require clockless sensors, distributed perhaps stochastically, fractally, or somehow more organically than a grid. And almost as importantly, the projector which transmits light to the retina on playback as well.
Given those challenges at the cutting edge of digital design, perhaps the better strategy is modulating at the optic nerve, rather than via the retina. nerve connections are even more primitive, but the time it takes to complete them might be comparable to the extra time to complete photo techniques. And much more broadly productive engineering for many applications.
I want a software-tuned phased-array. That's my idea of a universal radio: any frequency, all frequencies, multiplied by all the points from which transmissions originate, across several GHz of spectrum, suited to a mobile device. Finally bandwidth to compete with a stationwagon loaded with backup tapes.
You don't even know what a Troll is, let alone how the DoE budget is designed by Bush and rubberstamped by his Republican Congress. Of course it's more complex than that, but the complexity doesn't reverse the power structure. It strengthens it. What do you think Bush does, anyway? Why do you vote for him, if he's not responsible for doing any of the things he promises?
I prefer to refer to the people living in North America prior to European conquest "tribal Americans". And their descendants living here today likewise, so long as they're part of a tribe. If they live here today without a tribe, they're just assimilated Americans like anyone else.
The Americans who live in tribes today not descended from those resident prior to European conquest are also tribal. Maybe they just live in a familial affiliation, like a hippie camp. That's how the ancient tribal Americans got started, too, and certainly not all of them lasted more than a generation.
Confusion between the two shows the dangers of referring to any group of people by a collective term. Ancient American tribes were mostly as different as were European nations, peoples or tribes. And today's tribal Americans are mostly as different from one another, including recently started tribes, as they are from ancient tribes.
It's hard to understand what you write when you mistake "Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports" as badly as Bush misunderstood "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US". Of course, the laid off Renewable Energy Lab workers make no mistake about Bush's SOTU energy lies.
How about the "common sense" and "economics" that Bush's catapult also faces? The Spanish word for "advertisement" is "propaganda". We're not talking about the existence of propaganda. We're talking about the catapult. Spokesmodels catapult the propaganda by repetition.
If you can't see that "that was purely an example" means "he was lying" when the example itself is denied as reflecting policy, you're hopeless. I'm glad you're so happy with your Republican president, after 6 years of total catastrophe. Yep, that Republican small government, fiscal responsibility, government out of our private lives, all that stuff really is the stuff that dreams are made of. You have nothing to tell anyone about doing oneself favors by posting. Because your posts are so devoid of reality that I feel like I'm talking to myself. Which isn't what I'm after, so you're welcome to the rest of this thread.
In fact, not even a day later, Bush's staff explains that Bush was full of shit when promising to reduce America's addiction to foreign oil. Just as I expected.
Now what was that about believing Bush on something like pharmaco patents?
Bush also said we have to kick our "oil addiction". Do you think he will do anything like that, or is he just saying it to help keep Congress Republican in 2006? Do you think he will compel oil companies to explain to Congress - or anyone - record profits like Exxon's $36BILLION 2005? I don't think so. I also don't think Bush will do anything to limit his pharmaco patrons patenting human genes.
One nice benefit of "paranoia" is highlighting threats, which can then be analyzed rationally. I've seen nothing to suggest Bush is anything but my enemy in the 5 years he's been running the show, and plenty of clear damage. Adjust your frames accordingly.
Your denial is cheap and easy when you don't know what you're talking about.
FYI, I also get trolls signing up as a series of "Fans", with attacking phrases as usernames. They often appear during modbomb attacks after I post info critical of Bush.
Wake up and realize that even paranoids have enemies.
This past December I got modbombed after making my usual points. The fascists game the Slashdot moderation system just like their Republican representatives in government game the rest of the system. I'll probably get hit again now. Of course that can't stop me.
No, it's obvious that Bush is repeating himself like a good propagandist. Why he repeats himself is not obvious. But he's not debating anyone in that speech. He's trying to overcome the audience's existing worries by repeating that they don't have to worry. An audience of old people with lots of life experience, as well as exposure to propaganda.
Again, the specter of "counterpropaganda" is only derived from a preexisting belief in the presence of that propaganda. I'm not going to repeat this again - you'll have to decide for yourself.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Now, before you get out your boolean logic analyzers for a legal statement with centuries of precedent built on it, grok the fact that
"searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment--subject only to a few specially established and well-delineated exceptions."
"Pickback": The 24bit pixels I mentioned are sufficient to cover the eye's dynamic range. They're not RGB by any means - the eye's gamut is mostly green, and only slightly blue->violet. But I haven't seen any evidence for 64bits of range in color info - even our 40bits tests on CiE (and other colorspaces) demonstrated substantial overkill.
All of my estimates are overestimates, as I'm looking for the worst case of affordable storage. But there are over 130M retinal receptors in each eye. There is less than 1 fiber per 100 receptors from the eye to the brain, but I'm not talking about recording the optic nerve - I'm talking about recording the images received by the eye. The 40Hz rate is derived from the optic nerve, but it's an oversimplification of the async signalling of images by the retina. And your point about sleeping might contribute to my 10x compression becoming 30x, though I'd like to record what I would see if I weren't sleeping.
Computer science and biology have much different analytical techniques. But I started working in imaging engineering over a decade and a half ago. Engineers developing devices to augment or replace biology can look at upper limits to necessary performance, and then optimize within those limits. The upper limit I proposed makes "total recall" look feasible soon. Your further reductions make it look even more feasible. The Wikipedia page indicates that both eyes generate 1Mbps, or under 400TB raw. That means the storage is already "affordable", though we'd need more than retinal projectors - we'd need a nerve interface. But any way we look at it, we've nearly reached the amount of storage that is "enough for anybody".
Each of your eyes has about 8Kx6K retinal detector cells, signalling at 40Hz. Nyquist sampling means we'd need 16Kx12K 24bit pixels to fill them at 40fps, or 368Gbps. Two ears at even 1Mbps falls into the rounding error, but 10:1 compression is a reasonable minimum expectation: 3.7Gbps. 100 years is 1450PB . The average American earns about $40K:y for 40 years, or $1600K. That means when we get $1:PB, we'll be able to afford to store everything we see and hear in our entire lives.
25 years ago, 10MB cost $5K to store, or $1:2KB. Today $1 stores 1GB, a 500K-fold increase. The 1500-fold increase to $1:PB is relatively around the corner.
Digital music is a perfect example of our tolerance for error. Digital music is lower fidelity, therefore an approximation, than actual music, or even analog recordings. But we accept it - we like it anyway. We're doing well in our binary depiction, but it's not the same as the real thing. The same can be said for our binary depictions of other real world events: close enough. But not the same as the real thing.
Even the binary depiction of music doesn't survive once turned into audio: the air doesn't vibrate between replayer and ears in a binary pattern. It's another continuous pattern, similar to the one in the air from the original musical instrument to the microphone. The air isn't binary. And even the pattern on, say, a CD isn't binary: holes are larger or smaller. Even RAM has error, as charge density can have errors across OFF/ON thesholds, and "square waves" transferred to memory buses are really rough trapezoids, with skew, ringing, settling times.
So "binary" is only an ideal mental description of the world. It's a useful way to work with the world. But the world itself is not binary, and our acceptance of the difference doesn't make the difference nonexistent.
And what makes you think that a little peon like you, not even 6 billion of you, has any chance of understanding something as complex as the global climate? If you're going to insist on being so humble, you should also keep quiet.
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100% Offtopic
The story summary says the topic includes "exactly how much pressure the levees protecting New Orleans could withstand before giving way". I reply with evidence that the levees cracked even before their design limits were reached.
TrollMod pressure cracks Slashdot's moderation levees, but it can't crack me.
I lived in New Orleans for several years, up until a few years ago. It's certainly the case that "in Louisiana, people don't expect corruption - they demand it", as the wisecrack goes. But of course the Corps of Engineers knows to expect that corruption. And it knows that corruption is in no ways limited to Louisiana. The Corps is not some recent arrival on the water projects scene, or its long history of corruption nationwide. That's exactly why we expect the Corps to complete these projects by testing the results, rather than some faith-based "trust the contractors".
The Corps of Engineers is responsible for quality control of outsourced work. Of course ripoff contractors are responsible for their actions. But the CoE is responsible for oversight. The people of New Orleans, and the people who depend on them, trusted the CoE to do so. And got screwed.
I wonder how many other ripoff projects the CoE and other public agencies have paid for that are just waiting to fail. It's the kind of government handout that I expect in broken old ex-colonial countries.
Yes, because the problem in New Orleans was the precision of measuring the inadequate levees. It couldn't possibly be that the Federal Corps of Engineers built levees that , then claimed they failed because they weren't designed to stand a category 5 hurricane.
Canadian physicist Garnet Ord has unified Newtonian and Einsteinian spacetime models for about a decade with fractal spacetime. Fractals are numbers with fractional dimensions. By treating time as a fractional dimension, all these physical phenomena can be described accurately.
;) promise even more accurate models, and even better combinations of models that have each seemed to offer value, but disagreed with each other.
A simple example is how time can flow in one direction, either completely or just enough to seems so. Because time isn't even one dimensional, the motion in the negative direction (half its dimension) doesn't happen. These innovations along similar lines (puns intended
Of course, digital images can be jittered into a targeted retina. With realtime feedback from a retina position sensor. But there are bigger problems.
When we were making digital cameras for publishing (and I was mastering colorspaces, even working with the JPEGroup), we worked with a RG/YB when compensating for resolution (4Kx3K) with gamut dynamic range (40bits). We also subsampled, stepping the 512x512 video sensor 8x6 times across half-pixel for a single scan.
We found the most obvious evidence of the process, vs photography or even drumscanners, was in the "grids". The sensor grid of photodiodes, and its stepping pattern, was too regular, and its rectangular grid was perceptible even in film prints from rastered analog CRTs. The retina is more circular, more stochastic, and detects the grid. Moreover, video frames are detectable per se by the retina firing without a lockstep clock.
I think replicating the retinal image's total light modulation characteristics will require clockless sensors, distributed perhaps stochastically, fractally, or somehow more organically than a grid. And almost as importantly, the projector which transmits light to the retina on playback as well.
Given those challenges at the cutting edge of digital design, perhaps the better strategy is modulating at the optic nerve, rather than via the retina. nerve connections are even more primitive, but the time it takes to complete them might be comparable to the extra time to complete photo techniques. And much more broadly productive engineering for many applications.
So Tut went out from a gold overdose? Looks like his whole funerary display is a 3D hieroglyphic epitaph of just that demise.
I want a software-tuned phased-array. That's my idea of a universal radio: any frequency, all frequencies, multiplied by all the points from which transmissions originate, across several GHz of spectrum, suited to a mobile device. Finally bandwidth to compete with a stationwagon loaded with backup tapes.
You don't even know what a Troll is, let alone how the DoE budget is designed by Bush and rubberstamped by his Republican Congress. Of course it's more complex than that, but the complexity doesn't reverse the power structure. It strengthens it. What do you think Bush does, anyway? Why do you vote for him, if he's not responsible for doing any of the things he promises?
Crickets...
I prefer to refer to the people living in North America prior to European conquest "tribal Americans". And their descendants living here today likewise, so long as they're part of a tribe. If they live here today without a tribe, they're just assimilated Americans like anyone else.
The Americans who live in tribes today not descended from those resident prior to European conquest are also tribal. Maybe they just live in a familial affiliation, like a hippie camp. That's how the ancient tribal Americans got started, too, and certainly not all of them lasted more than a generation.
Confusion between the two shows the dangers of referring to any group of people by a collective term. Ancient American tribes were mostly as different as were European nations, peoples or tribes. And today's tribal Americans are mostly as different from one another, including recently started tribes, as they are from ancient tribes.
It's hard to understand what you write when you mistake "Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports" as badly as Bush misunderstood "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US". Of course, the laid off Renewable Energy Lab workers make no mistake about Bush's SOTU energy lies.
How about the "common sense" and "economics" that Bush's catapult also faces? The Spanish word for "advertisement" is "propaganda". We're not talking about the existence of propaganda. We're talking about the catapult. Spokesmodels catapult the propaganda by repetition.
Fuck you, you willfully blind cliche factory. You might like your twisted little echo chamber, but you're a mockery of yourself.
If you can't see that "that was purely an example" means "he was lying" when the example itself is denied as reflecting policy, you're hopeless. I'm glad you're so happy with your Republican president, after 6 years of total catastrophe. Yep, that Republican small government, fiscal responsibility, government out of our private lives, all that stuff really is the stuff that dreams are made of. You have nothing to tell anyone about doing oneself favors by posting. Because your posts are so devoid of reality that I feel like I'm talking to myself. Which isn't what I'm after, so you're welcome to the rest of this thread.
In fact, not even a day later, Bush's staff explains that Bush was full of shit when promising to reduce America's addiction to foreign oil. Just as I expected.
Now what was that about believing Bush on something like pharmaco patents?
And did I hear something about America's faith in Bush?
Bush also said we have to kick our "oil addiction". Do you think he will do anything like that, or is he just saying it to help keep Congress Republican in 2006? Do you think he will compel oil companies to explain to Congress - or anyone - record profits like Exxon's $36BILLION 2005? I don't think so. I also don't think Bush will do anything to limit his pharmaco patrons patenting human genes.
One nice benefit of "paranoia" is highlighting threats, which can then be analyzed rationally. I've seen nothing to suggest Bush is anything but my enemy in the 5 years he's been running the show, and plenty of clear damage. Adjust your frames accordingly.
Your denial is cheap and easy when you don't know what you're talking about.
FYI, I also get trolls signing up as a series of "Fans", with attacking phrases as usernames. They often appear during modbomb attacks after I post info critical of Bush.
Wake up and realize that even paranoids have enemies.
This past December I got modbombed after making my usual points. The fascists game the Slashdot moderation system just like their Republican representatives in government game the rest of the system. I'll probably get hit again now. Of course that can't stop me.
No, it's obvious that Bush is repeating himself like a good propagandist. Why he repeats himself is not obvious. But he's not debating anyone in that speech. He's trying to overcome the audience's existing worries by repeating that they don't have to worry. An audience of old people with lots of life experience, as well as exposure to propaganda.
Again, the specter of "counterpropaganda" is only derived from a preexisting belief in the presence of that propaganda. I'm not going to repeat this again - you'll have to decide for yourself.
4th Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Now, before you get out your boolean logic analyzers for a legal statement with centuries of precedent built on it, grok the fact that
"searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment--subject only to a few specially established and well-delineated exceptions."
"Pickback": The 24bit pixels I mentioned are sufficient to cover the eye's dynamic range. They're not RGB by any means - the eye's gamut is mostly green, and only slightly blue->violet. But I haven't seen any evidence for 64bits of range in color info - even our 40bits tests on CiE (and other colorspaces) demonstrated substantial overkill.
All of my estimates are overestimates, as I'm looking for the worst case of affordable storage. But there are over 130M retinal receptors in each eye. There is less than 1 fiber per 100 receptors from the eye to the brain, but I'm not talking about recording the optic nerve - I'm talking about recording the images received by the eye. The 40Hz rate is derived from the optic nerve, but it's an oversimplification of the async signalling of images by the retina. And your point about sleeping might contribute to my 10x compression becoming 30x, though I'd like to record what I would see if I weren't sleeping.
Computer science and biology have much different analytical techniques. But I started working in imaging engineering over a decade and a half ago. Engineers developing devices to augment or replace biology can look at upper limits to necessary performance, and then optimize within those limits. The upper limit I proposed makes "total recall" look feasible soon. Your further reductions make it look even more feasible. The Wikipedia page indicates that both eyes generate 1Mbps, or under 400TB raw. That means the storage is already "affordable", though we'd need more than retinal projectors - we'd need a nerve interface. But any way we look at it, we've nearly reached the amount of storage that is "enough for anybody".
Each of your eyes has about 8Kx6K retinal detector cells, signalling at 40Hz. Nyquist sampling means we'd need 16Kx12K 24bit pixels to fill them at 40fps, or 368Gbps. Two ears at even 1Mbps falls into the rounding error, but 10:1 compression is a reasonable minimum expectation: 3.7Gbps. 100 years is 1450PB . The average American earns about $40K:y for 40 years, or $1600K. That means when we get $1:PB, we'll be able to afford to store everything we see and hear in our entire lives.
25 years ago, 10MB cost $5K to store, or $1:2KB. Today $1 stores 1GB, a 500K-fold increase. The 1500-fold increase to $1:PB is relatively around the corner.
Digital music is a perfect example of our tolerance for error. Digital music is lower fidelity, therefore an approximation, than actual music, or even analog recordings. But we accept it - we like it anyway. We're doing well in our binary depiction, but it's not the same as the real thing. The same can be said for our binary depictions of other real world events: close enough. But not the same as the real thing.
Even the binary depiction of music doesn't survive once turned into audio: the air doesn't vibrate between replayer and ears in a binary pattern. It's another continuous pattern, similar to the one in the air from the original musical instrument to the microphone. The air isn't binary. And even the pattern on, say, a CD isn't binary: holes are larger or smaller. Even RAM has error, as charge density can have errors across OFF/ON thesholds, and "square waves" transferred to memory buses are really rough trapezoids, with skew, ringing, settling times.
So "binary" is only an ideal mental description of the world. It's a useful way to work with the world. But the world itself is not binary, and our acceptance of the difference doesn't make the difference nonexistent.
And what makes you think that a little peon like you, not even 6 billion of you, has any chance of understanding something as complex as the global climate? If you're going to insist on being so humble, you should also keep quiet.