On the several sites I have so far explored, I see no ISO images. Moreover, the folders are labeled up through v6, with v7 apparently in the development folder. Score another point for the sloppiness of Linux distros....
"You know, I've heard that excuse from day one in Econ 100, all the way thru Econ 400 level courses, usually from people who don't actually have a real understanding of how markets actually function, what the preconditions for a market are, or why it's wrong."
You know, it's not an excuse. It's reality. The consumer is the only one who can pay for recycling or disposal. You nmay think it's a great idea to exact the price in advance, and give the appearance that the manufacturers are eating the cost (they aren't), but it's still the consumer who pays. What you're arguing about, in reality, is who should handle the processing, and the collection of goods for recycling. Whether you understand the mechanics of economics or not, the reality doesn't change.
"where all manufacturers have to pay true costs for pollution and recycling"
Manufacturers do not pay the costs, consumers do. The mere fact that the tax is collected from the manufacturer doesn't make them the benefactors of the environment. The tax paid becomes a part of overhead, which is, of course, transferred to the price paid for the product by consumers.
Economics is a simple and transparent affair; pretending the manufacturer bears a cost doesn't make it so.
Actually, it's more like a case of the Jesse Jackson game. Apple doesn't do things as Greenpeace dictates, so Apple is in the wrong. Guilty until proved innocent, and innocence can't ever happen, because Greenpeace is working on assumptions.
You're not missing the point. Greenpeace is a fundamentally a socialist organization, therefore property is to them, meaningless.
The reality is that when you buy a product, you take on responsibility for the disposal of that product when it is no longer useful to you. I contend that at present, the greenest disposal of a computer is to donate it for use by a charity, thus extending its life, rather than consigning it to a recycling heap.
Another point always avoided by the recycling police is that some of the things -- many, in fact -- that are recycled make little sense, as the cost in real dollars and in chemical waste is often worse than the original manufacture.
But when your cause is "just", reality needn't be considered. Just ask Al Gore.
One of the reasons you describe your plasma as producing a picture that is "deep" compared to LCD is that you are almost certainly seeing an image with higher light output than from an LCD. Typically, LCD screens output about 500cd/meter squared. Plasma screens tend to be 2-3 times the output. Human contrast sensitivity varies in proportion to the light levels.
My experiments are at odds with your own. The figure you offer is not representative of the screen you will be viewing, and the other issue is that contrast sensitivity is a function of the illumination present.
Your commentary on the utility of the calculations widely offered is apt. Offering advice in the absence of data for the individuals who will be viewing is questionable, at best.
As to your conclusions, I doubt very much that you will be able to distinguish individual pixels on your screen at a distance of 8 feet, even if you were to display black and white lines on alternate pixels.
OK, there's much confusion, and tremendous amounts of false data on this. Do a search on CSF, and pay attention to the range over which the eye is sensitive to detail. Any chart or formula based on an acuity of one arcminute is going to lead you astray.
Use a graphics program to prepare a chart for yourself. Make, for example, 20 equally spaced lines of black on a white field. Space them at 0.10" centers, per black/white line pair. Print this out at full size. Now tape it to the wall, and walk backwards to the point where you can just barely distinguish lines, rather than a gray box. Measure the distance, do some simple trig, and you'll be able to determine your own CSF. Or rather, not a function, but your own contrast sensitivity at a given light level. CSF varies with illumination. So a plasma screen at 1500 cd/sq meter will look sharper than an LCD of equal resolution and size at equal distance, with a brightness of only 500 cd/sq meter.
Consider that black and white line pairs are the extreme condition. Most picture content will not exhibit such contrast. So for any display screen, if you convert the lines/degree from the chart experiment, and solve for an equal lines/degree for the screen you like, you will find the distance that is ideal for that screen. At that distance, or more, you will not see pixels. Below that distance, you may.
The counterintuitive reality is this: HD was intended to allow closer viewing than NTSC. Most people assume a greater distance, but that's just wrong. A shorter distance and the larger screen blows you away because it fills a larger field of view.
I see that the RIAA achieves the opposite of their stated intentions. That's exactly what our elected representatives do, as well. Every bill obtains the opposite to the claimed effect. So the folks at the RIAA have reached an equal level of incompetence. Gotta love it.
What this article demonstrates most clearly is that the writer knows little about many of the items on the list. OS/2 was not without problems, but it got more things right than wrong, and saved my butt on a major project that was causing Win3.11 to crash in a heartbeat. DAT, as has been noted, was not a flop, but lost its shot at commercial (consumer) success because of the greed of the RIAA, and the stupidity of politicians. And so it goes. Many other comments have pointed out the errors in other topics. The real bottom line is that when you don't know the history, and don't do the research, you can write pretty silly stuff.
Of course it's important to learn assembly language. Compiler writers need the capability to tweak code below the level of the compiled language, for one thing. But so do many others. It's easy to overlook the importance of assembly language when you're running a 3GHz 64 bit machine, but for those of us who sometimes have to work with real-time (microseconds, not milliseconds) and for those who must deal with what happens on adapter cards, not just on the PC, and even more, for those who may have to code for 8-bit machines in real-time with very small memory budgets, assembly continues to be important.
It's worth mentioning that malaria was nearly wiped out by the simple and inexpensive use of DDT before Rachel Carson and her sympathizers managed to get the stuff banned. And 35 years later, pretty much all her arguments have been shown to have been fabricated. But hey, only 30 million+ died as a result.
It's nice to know that grid computing can be used to evaluate the potential of all those compounds, of course, as there are certainly applications for that. But the context of the current test is one that we should be ashamed is necessary.
You're kidding yourself if you think that "scientists" funded/employed by the most profitable industry in history (which has everything to lose, if anthropogenic climate change is real/accepted) are just as objective or impartial on this matter as regular scientists working off federal grants or university funding.
Sorry, but if you think that the scientists funded by federal grants, university funding, or eco-group funding are any less biased, or any more to be trusted, then you're not applying the same reasoning process to all groups. Either scientists are applying the scientific method, demanding empirical, repeatable results, or they're not. The former would be science; the latter is just politics. But the use of scientific credentials in pursuit of a personal belief is no less than reprehensible. We didn't tolerate it from the cold-fusion claimants, and we should be no more tolerant of fraudulent claims on global warming, regardless of the camp from which they emanate.
Whether an aggregate result is predictable in this case is simply unknown. We have no track record on which to base such claims, and worse, many of those championing the notion of human-caused global warming were not so long ago equally adamant about the coming ice age. The one constant here is their ardor.
Declaring global warming to have been caused by humans, on the scant evidence available, is purely hubris. And the hint here is the claims of how easily we seem to have caused it, and how insignificant will be our effects in reversing it.
Furthermore, I'll remind you that the data for global climate change extends into thousands of years. It's not unreasonable to expect an accurate extrapolation for the next fifty or one-hundred years from that.
It does, indeed. But there is no comparable evidence for the ability of humans to control it, one way or another. And while we're on that subject, I can think of few areas that hold the potential for such huge profits as in a system to control weather. Never mind that we have insufficient knowledge to use such a system without destroying our planet. The reality is that it's been a dream for decades, and were a multinational corporation to develop a workable system, they would be inundated with money, mostly from governments.
I hold little hope for a realistic approach to this subject, as it is so overwhelmingly clouded by emotion and ignorance, as ably demonstrated by the threads here.
There is no impartial scientist to be found. As earth is a closed system -- we're all here for the duration -- we all have a vested interest in the future. It makes little difference whether a study is financed by a corporation like ExxonMobil or by a green group with deep pockets; both have agendas, and in the final analysis, either the scientific methods are sound, or they're not, regardless of who is funding.
The problem up to now has been the tendency of many to assume that a) because a study is endorsed by scientists, it must therefore be valid, and b) that if it is financed by a green organization or a government, it is therefore more trustworthy than if it were funded by a multinational corporation. Both assumptions are false. Of all the scientists on the planet, only a very small percentage are competent in the the analysis of climatological data, and of those, even fewer are knowledgeable with respect to the long term studies involved. As to funding and impartiality, every group I can think of has an agenda here, be they environmental groups, governments, or corporations.
What is clearly needed is a rational study by qualified scientists, and discussion and even attacks on the conclusions drawn by other groups of equally qualified scientists. This is essentially the kind of thing that is done to keep scholarly journals on track. Articles are refereed by people with knowledge and experience in the field.
Finally, one of the chief problems in trying to analyze the existing data is that we possess reasonably accurate data for only a very brief period of time, and from those data, we hope to extrapolate global long term trends. In undertaking that task, trends are extrapolated forward and backward, and assumptions are stacked upon assumptions. The further we get from today, in either direction, the less reliable are those assumptions. And let us not forget that we are still unable to reliably predict the weather more than a few days in advance, yet we have sufficient hubris to believe we can predict 100 years forward.
History shows that when politicians decide to wrestle the market, their constituents lose. And the result is always felt in the pocketbook, often by those least able to afford it.
It seems axiomatic that politicians all fail to learn from history, but are they all complete idiots?
Whatever numbers the BSA asserts for the percentage of piracy, the fallacy in their position is their assertion that each pirated copy represents a lost sale. I know for a fact that there are people out there who will pirate a copy of something that they would never use if they had to pay money to get it. This is a simple example of a principle basic to economics. Elasticity of demand, or of sales, where the relationship between price and sales volume is not fixed.
Further, as another post asserted, I am sure there is some number of WGA failures that represent multiple attempts. As a software author myself, I am opposed to piracy, I am at least equally opposed to the specious arguments of the BSA, and even more opposed to the devious ads they ran on radio suggesting that people turn in their employers. No one benefits from that, not even the BSA, in the long run, as putting businesses into bankruptcy reduces the number of future sales to be made.
Of course, one approach to the piracy problem would be to bring prices down out of the clouds....
Oh, and for the record, I am a hard-core Libertarian. I prefer a bevy of unconstrained voices to the babble of homogenized nonsense that comes of a scripted "balance".
As with so many things created by the government, the name is opposite to its effect. The Fairness Doctrine is not fair at all, but essentially eliminates the opportunity for political editorialization, of whatever stripe. Instead, we must be presented with "balanced" opponents, who are often anything but balanced.
As another comment said, conservatives now have Fox News and tal radio, while liberals have all of CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, and CNN. That the liberals could not mount a successful talk radio operation is a primary motivating force for returning the Fairness Doctrine.
The effect of the Fairness Doctrine, overall, is antithetical to free speech, and in the presence of a rational court position, it should be found unconstitutional.
Whereas many of the people in support of the theory of global warming are paid by eco organizations.
Bias is a reality, wherever you turn. The real issue is, does the science (from any reporter, regardless of bias) bear up under scrutiny? Many of Gore's claims are abuses of statistics, not to mention just plain lies. One of the more important presentations I found in the last few months was written by a scientist whose expertise is in the study of climatological change. The overwhelming majority of the "scientists" whose opinions are often cited (especially in notes such as "17,000 scientists signed a petition...") simply have no competence in the field.
Check credentials, and check the cited resources. No resources cited? Then consign the article to the junk bin, and move on. We haven't time to evaluate the claims of every raver online.
Nonsense. In China, there is no such thing as freedom of speech, nor could google be there at all if they had not agreed to censorship. By accepting the limitations imposed on them by the PRC, they at least have a toe-hold, one that I'm sure they hope will be a wedge for the future.
In the other case, they are refusing to interfere with free speech. That's a line not to be crossed lightly. I hope you can see the difference. Were they to accede to public pressure on this issue, it would mark the beginning of the end to their utility as a general search tool in the free world.
You cannot, on the one hand, take Google to task for caving to the demands for censorship by the Chinese, and on the other, for their failing to cave in to pressure to remove blogs.
While their failure to take a stand in China is questionable, their refusal to remove blogs is on much more solid ground. As has been said, racist hate speech can be countered, but censorship is just simply evil. And worse, were they to indulge in censorship in the free world, there would be no end to the reasons people would demand more of the same.
Another little detail. It is illegal, in the U.S., to strip closed-caption data from a program that contained it, for rebroadcast. When you have located all the available encoder products, the list will be decimated by that detail.
Slashdot Mirror
On the several sites I have so far explored, I see no ISO images. Moreover, the folders are labeled up through v6, with v7 apparently in the development folder. Score another point for the sloppiness of Linux distros....
"You know, I've heard that excuse from day one in Econ 100, all the way thru Econ 400 level courses, usually from people who don't actually have a real understanding of how markets actually function, what the preconditions for a market are, or why it's wrong."
You know, it's not an excuse. It's reality. The consumer is the only one who can pay for recycling or disposal. You nmay think it's a great idea to exact the price in advance, and give the appearance that the manufacturers are eating the cost (they aren't), but it's still the consumer who pays. What you're arguing about, in reality, is who should handle the processing, and the collection of goods for recycling. Whether you understand the mechanics of economics or not, the reality doesn't change.
"where all manufacturers have to pay true costs for pollution and recycling"
Manufacturers do not pay the costs, consumers do. The mere fact that the tax is collected from the manufacturer doesn't make them the benefactors of the environment. The tax paid becomes a part of overhead, which is, of course, transferred to the price paid for the product by consumers.
Economics is a simple and transparent affair; pretending the manufacturer bears a cost doesn't make it so.
Actually, it's more like a case of the Jesse Jackson game. Apple doesn't do things as Greenpeace dictates, so Apple is in the wrong. Guilty until proved innocent, and innocence can't ever happen, because Greenpeace is working on assumptions.
You're not missing the point. Greenpeace is a fundamentally a socialist organization, therefore property is to them, meaningless.
The reality is that when you buy a product, you take on responsibility for the disposal of that product when it is no longer useful to you. I contend that at present, the greenest disposal of a computer is to donate it for use by a charity, thus extending its life, rather than consigning it to a recycling heap.
Another point always avoided by the recycling police is that some of the things -- many, in fact -- that are recycled make little sense, as the cost in real dollars and in chemical waste is often worse than the original manufacture.
But when your cause is "just", reality needn't be considered. Just ask Al Gore.
One of the reasons you describe your plasma as producing a picture that is "deep" compared to LCD is that you are almost certainly seeing an image with higher light output than from an LCD. Typically, LCD screens output about 500cd/meter squared. Plasma screens tend to be 2-3 times the output. Human contrast sensitivity varies in proportion to the light levels.
See my message later in the page for more.
My experiments are at odds with your own. The figure you offer is not representative of the screen you will be viewing, and the other issue is that contrast sensitivity is a function of the illumination present.
Your commentary on the utility of the calculations widely offered is apt. Offering advice in the absence of data for the individuals who will be viewing is questionable, at best.
As to your conclusions, I doubt very much that you will be able to distinguish individual pixels on your screen at a distance of 8 feet, even if you were to display black and white lines on alternate pixels.
See my message directly above yours for more.
OK, there's much confusion, and tremendous amounts of false data on this. Do a search on CSF, and pay attention to the range over which the eye is sensitive to detail. Any chart or formula based on an acuity of one arcminute is going to lead you astray.
Use a graphics program to prepare a chart for yourself. Make, for example, 20 equally spaced lines of black on a white field. Space them at 0.10" centers, per black/white line pair. Print this out at full size. Now tape it to the wall, and walk backwards to the point where you can just barely distinguish lines, rather than a gray box. Measure the distance, do some simple trig, and you'll be able to determine your own CSF. Or rather, not a function, but your own contrast sensitivity at a given light level. CSF varies with illumination. So a plasma screen at 1500 cd/sq meter will look sharper than an LCD of equal resolution and size at equal distance, with a brightness of only 500 cd/sq meter.
Consider that black and white line pairs are the extreme condition. Most picture content will not exhibit such contrast. So for any display screen, if you convert the lines/degree from the chart experiment, and solve for an equal lines/degree for the screen you like, you will find the distance that is ideal for that screen. At that distance, or more, you will not see pixels. Below that distance, you may.
The counterintuitive reality is this: HD was intended to allow closer viewing than NTSC. Most people assume a greater distance, but that's just wrong. A shorter distance and the larger screen blows you away because it fills a larger field of view.
I see that the RIAA achieves the opposite of their stated intentions. That's exactly what our elected representatives do, as well. Every bill obtains the opposite to the claimed effect. So the folks at the RIAA have reached an equal level of incompetence. Gotta love it.
What this article demonstrates most clearly is that the writer knows little about many of the items on the list. OS/2 was not without problems, but it got more things right than wrong, and saved my butt on a major project that was causing Win3.11 to crash in a heartbeat. DAT, as has been noted, was not a flop, but lost its shot at commercial (consumer) success because of the greed of the RIAA, and the stupidity of politicians. And so it goes. Many other comments have pointed out the errors in other topics. The real bottom line is that when you don't know the history, and don't do the research, you can write pretty silly stuff.
Of course it's important to learn assembly language. Compiler writers need the capability to tweak code below the level of the compiled language, for one thing. But so do many others. It's easy to overlook the importance of assembly language when you're running a 3GHz 64 bit machine, but for those of us who sometimes have to work with real-time (microseconds, not milliseconds) and for those who must deal with what happens on adapter cards, not just on the PC, and even more, for those who may have to code for 8-bit machines in real-time with very small memory budgets, assembly continues to be important.
C++ is not the universal solution.
It's worth mentioning that malaria was nearly wiped out by the simple and inexpensive use of DDT before Rachel Carson and her sympathizers managed to get the stuff banned. And 35 years later, pretty much all her arguments have been shown to have been fabricated. But hey, only 30 million+ died as a result.
It's nice to know that grid computing can be used to evaluate the potential of all those compounds, of course, as there are certainly applications for that. But the context of the current test is one that we should be ashamed is necessary.
You're kidding yourself if you think that "scientists" funded/employed by the most profitable industry in history (which has everything to lose, if anthropogenic climate change is real/accepted) are just as objective or impartial on this matter as regular scientists working off federal grants or university funding.
Sorry, but if you think that the scientists funded by federal grants, university funding, or eco-group funding are any less biased, or any more to be trusted, then you're not applying the same reasoning process to all groups. Either scientists are applying the scientific method, demanding empirical, repeatable results, or they're not. The former would be science; the latter is just politics. But the use of scientific credentials in pursuit of a personal belief is no less than reprehensible. We didn't tolerate it from the cold-fusion claimants, and we should be no more tolerant of fraudulent claims on global warming, regardless of the camp from which they emanate.
Whether an aggregate result is predictable in this case is simply unknown. We have no track record on which to base such claims, and worse, many of those championing the notion of human-caused global warming were not so long ago equally adamant about the coming ice age. The one constant here is their ardor.
Declaring global warming to have been caused by humans, on the scant evidence available, is purely hubris. And the hint here is the claims of how easily we seem to have caused it, and how insignificant will be our effects in reversing it.
Furthermore, I'll remind you that the data for global climate change extends into thousands of years. It's not unreasonable to expect an accurate extrapolation for the next fifty or one-hundred years from that.
It does, indeed. But there is no comparable evidence for the ability of humans to control it, one way or another. And while we're on that subject, I can think of few areas that hold the potential for such huge profits as in a system to control weather. Never mind that we have insufficient knowledge to use such a system without destroying our planet. The reality is that it's been a dream for decades, and were a multinational corporation to develop a workable system, they would be inundated with money, mostly from governments.
I hold little hope for a realistic approach to this subject, as it is so overwhelmingly clouded by emotion and ignorance, as ably demonstrated by the threads here.
There is no impartial scientist to be found. As earth is a closed system -- we're all here for the duration -- we all have a vested interest in the future. It makes little difference whether a study is financed by a corporation like ExxonMobil or by a green group with deep pockets; both have agendas, and in the final analysis, either the scientific methods are sound, or they're not, regardless of who is funding.
The problem up to now has been the tendency of many to assume that a) because a study is endorsed by scientists, it must therefore be valid, and b) that if it is financed by a green organization or a government, it is therefore more trustworthy than if it were funded by a multinational corporation. Both assumptions are false. Of all the scientists on the planet, only a very small percentage are competent in the the analysis of climatological data, and of those, even fewer are knowledgeable with respect to the long term studies involved. As to funding and impartiality, every group I can think of has an agenda here, be they environmental groups, governments, or corporations.
What is clearly needed is a rational study by qualified scientists, and discussion and even attacks on the conclusions drawn by other groups of equally qualified scientists. This is essentially the kind of thing that is done to keep scholarly journals on track. Articles are refereed by people with knowledge and experience in the field.
Finally, one of the chief problems in trying to analyze the existing data is that we possess reasonably accurate data for only a very brief period of time, and from those data, we hope to extrapolate global long term trends. In undertaking that task, trends are extrapolated forward and backward, and assumptions are stacked upon assumptions. The further we get from today, in either direction, the less reliable are those assumptions. And let us not forget that we are still unable to reliably predict the weather more than a few days in advance, yet we have sufficient hubris to believe we can predict 100 years forward.
History shows that when politicians decide to wrestle the market, their constituents lose. And the result is always felt in the pocketbook, often by those least able to afford it.
It seems axiomatic that politicians all fail to learn from history, but are they all complete idiots?
It appears that the post reporting that the photos are blurred before google gets them may be correct.
A quick look at the Pickering Generating Station east of Toronto shows no pixelation.
Whatever numbers the BSA asserts for the percentage of piracy, the fallacy in their position is their assertion that each pirated copy represents a lost sale. I know for a fact that there are people out there who will pirate a copy of something that they would never use if they had to pay money to get it. This is a simple example of a principle basic to economics. Elasticity of demand, or of sales, where the relationship between price and sales volume is not fixed.
Further, as another post asserted, I am sure there is some number of WGA failures that represent multiple attempts. As a software author myself, I am opposed to piracy, I am at least equally opposed to the specious arguments of the BSA, and even more opposed to the devious ads they ran on radio suggesting that people turn in their employers. No one benefits from that, not even the BSA, in the long run, as putting businesses into bankruptcy reduces the number of future sales to be made.
Of course, one approach to the piracy problem would be to bring prices down out of the clouds....
Oh, and for the record, I am a hard-core Libertarian. I prefer a bevy of unconstrained voices to the babble of homogenized nonsense that comes of a scripted "balance".
As with so many things created by the government, the name is opposite to its effect. The Fairness Doctrine is not fair at all, but essentially eliminates the opportunity for political editorialization, of whatever stripe. Instead, we must be presented with "balanced" opponents, who are often anything but balanced.
As another comment said, conservatives now have Fox News and tal radio, while liberals have all of CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, and CNN. That the liberals could not mount a successful talk radio operation is a primary motivating force for returning the Fairness Doctrine.
The effect of the Fairness Doctrine, overall, is antithetical to free speech, and in the presence of a rational court position, it should be found unconstitutional.
And 51 to 49 hardly constitutes the "eviction" of Republicans from the Senate.
Ignorance of economics and the Constitution flourish here.
Whereas many of the people in support of the theory of global warming are paid by eco organizations.
Bias is a reality, wherever you turn. The real issue is, does the science (from any reporter, regardless of bias) bear up under scrutiny? Many of Gore's claims are abuses of statistics, not to mention just plain lies. One of the more important presentations I found in the last few months was written by a scientist whose expertise is in the study of climatological change. The overwhelming majority of the "scientists" whose opinions are often cited (especially in notes such as "17,000 scientists signed a petition...") simply have no competence in the field.
Check credentials, and check the cited resources. No resources cited? Then consign the article to the junk bin, and move on. We haven't time to evaluate the claims of every raver online.
Nonsense. In China, there is no such thing as freedom of speech, nor could google be there at all if they had not agreed to censorship. By accepting the limitations imposed on them by the PRC, they at least have a toe-hold, one that I'm sure they hope will be a wedge for the future.
In the other case, they are refusing to interfere with free speech. That's a line not to be crossed lightly. I hope you can see the difference. Were they to accede to public pressure on this issue, it would mark the beginning of the end to their utility as a general search tool in the free world.
You cannot, on the one hand, take Google to task for caving to the demands for censorship by the Chinese, and on the other, for their failing to cave in to pressure to remove blogs.
While their failure to take a stand in China is questionable, their refusal to remove blogs is on much more solid ground. As has been said, racist hate speech can be countered, but censorship is just simply evil. And worse, were they to indulge in censorship in the free world, there would be no end to the reasons people would demand more of the same.
Another little detail. It is illegal, in the U.S., to strip closed-caption data from a program that contained it, for rebroadcast. When you have located all the available encoder products, the list will be decimated by that detail.