Not necessarily mean; the truly mean types generally end up dead or in prison. What you need is a sort of psychopathic ruthlessness.
Even then, engaging in regular criminal activity ups your chances of being murdered in the USA something like a 100X... Hmm... Let's pull up some figures...
I base this on this post, per the FBI 60-80% of murders are felon on felon. This one suggests that there are ~1.6 million felons denied the right to vote.*
Going by the 300 Million of our population, and round up to 2 million felons(some states don't remove the ability to vote, so the 1.6 is an underestimate. Anyways, we're looking at a category making up.7% of the population consisting of OVER HALF the murder victims... By my calcs, that's 148 times more likely to be murdered if you're a felon. Ouch, huh?
As for the being smart part; many criminals, even if they aren't caught by the police, end up earning less than the average fast food employee. Being caught and spending time in jail/prison, legal costs, etc... Makes even many of the 'more successful' ones rather poor earners.
*I have to say that I wish I could have found better sources, but even if the magnitudes are correct, it points out how dangerous doing felony stuff can be.
Unfortunately I don't have such a choice now, I rent an apartment.
Do the research, if you can make it make financial sense(remember, it'd be a deductible expense!), talk with your landlord. They might do it.
If carbon emissions were taxed alternative energy wouldn't look as expensive. And there are no clean coal plants in commercial production, what plants there are are for research.
Pretty much my point. Except that, in the sense of a 'carbon tax', nuclear power is lumped in right along with wind, solar, tidal, etc... Oh, and when have I expressed anything but disdain for coal power? I want to get rid of it! Mountaintop mining is another form of nasty pollution in my mind.
Even then though I doubt nuclear power would be profitable without subsidies.
I'm trying to remember, did you ever post a link showing just how much nuclear power is subsidized? Bonus points if it shows coal or nuclear above wind/solar per kwh.
$29.91 'clean coal' per mwh (megawatt hour) $24.34 solar $23.37 wind $1.59 nuclear.67 hydroelectric.44 normal coal.25 Natural Gas
Yes, engineering always needs to be done but they are not being subsidized at the same amount as coal or nuclear. They may have but I doubt either First Solar or Nanosolar received subsidies directly. You could say Germany's Nanosolar order is one, and it might be, but I don't think of it so much as a subsidy anymore than first adopters subsidize research and development.
Germany forces the electric companies to pay something like 10X what they normally pay for every kwh of solar energy sold on the grid; I'd tend to say that's a subsidy. And it doesn't matter if the company making the solar panel doesn't get the subsidy if every customer who buys their product gets one. BTW, your first solar and nanosolar links go to the same spot.
Still - Nanosolar gets government subsidies - "Nanosolar in 2006 announced a $75 million Series C round, which it claimed amounted to $100 million when combined with government subsidies." and "Nanosolar already has secured a subsidy for 50 percent of the capital expenses of building the German facility."50% capex subsidy
First solar? Well, the first page of google reveals less, but they still seem dependent upon german subsidies.
Again, I'm not opposed to wind/solar/whatever where they make the most sense. I just think we should put some money down on actually building a few plants. Odds are they'll prove their worth over an estimated 60+ year lifespan, even if wind/solar end up being a bigger chunk of the final answer.
Re:Wow! Who ever would have guessed that!?
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You Are Not a Lawyer
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Burden of evidence can be a killer.
Sure, you're running an Open AP and your computer's been rooted. But they found the CP neatly categorized in a non-hidden folder on your desktop named 'fun stuff', CP on your work machine and logs showing you downloading it from your home machine and elsewhere, the same sorts of sites as at work. Said downloading occurs when you're at home or at work for the appropriate machine.
What are the odds that some outside party would do all that?
Even if I was trying to frame somebody*, I'd have a hard time faking all that even WITH the box rooted. Then there's always the chance they'll also have the control packets for the rootkit logged, which a competent lawyer with techie support would be able to argue.
*discounting that I don't really know how to find CP in the first place, much like I'm sure that if I went looking for dope/illegal guns/hooker I'd run into a police sting first. There are positives and negatives to running on the right side of the law my entire life. Got a good job; don't really know how to 'get away' with crimes. Then again, my 'street smart' cousin hasn't been too successful at the 'get away with it' part. I've never seen the inside of a jail or prison cell, I consider that something of a success.
I'm pretty sure they used to. There's a whole set of Fundy arguments about the validity of carbon (and other) dating methods, and a load of stock rants on how it's all based on faulty assumptions and circular reasoning.
Ah, so we could say that we're winning the argument with the Fundies? IE they've been pushed back a couple of times.
There's no reason it has to be only one or the other, is there?
If anything, theory of evolution would tend to highly approve of making multiple uses out of something.
Ok, that makes more sense then. However, I'm not sure that the standard view of sexual selection is that the feathers are a disadvantage that just happen to impress females. As you said, if the tail was a disadvantage that would seem absurd.
Sounds more like something you'd want to go to a peacock specialist rather than a darwin's theory generalist. It could indeed also be used to scare predators while the male gets up to flight speed.
But, either way, it doesn't invalidate darwin's theory. Let's face it, many male spiders get eaten when they mate. None the less, the male becoming food for the female is a net benefit for the spider's genes, so as long as it successfully mates before becoming food. Darwin's theory doesn't require the survival of the individual, just the genes. And it's also a probabilistic statement, it's all about tendencies. An animal might have the best possible genetics and still taken out by accident, disease, or predator.
I haven't studied that stuff for years, but "Darwinism" has not been the alpha and omega of evolution for quite some time.
I've read about some of that stuff as well, but having to gone to public school and been stuck in 'regular' classes on occasion, I'd say that 'Darwinism' is about the right level for basic grade school scientific theory. Just don't go trying to apply it to bacteria too much. Bacteria sex is one of the weirder things out there. Mendel's Pea experiments are good for heredity.
Honestly enough, I've never really understood any but the most literal creationist's objections to evolution. I mean, why aren't they protesting dinosaurs? Isn't the Earth supposed to be too young for them to have existed?
I thought that "Darwinism" was a term thought up by the religious anti-evolution side.
I was taught 'Darwin's theory of natural selection' in school, as part of the basic theory of evolution. Mendel and his peas were in there as well. I'll also note that the theory of evolution in my textbook explicitly didn't cover the start of life; there was some mention of 'primordial soup', but fully admitted that scientists don't really have a clue.
I have never heard it called 'Darwinism' by anything other than creationists and the people handing out awards in a bit of black humor.
I wonder if the anti-evolutionists were around when I was a kid; I don't remember ever hearing about them. I wouldn't be surprised if a big part of the yelling right now is the last gasp of the creationists, as they can no longer hide in small areas in local or church schools. News is far more national now than it was even 20 years ago. If my study of history has shown me anything; it's that rarely is anything having to do with the human condition new or unique. There's creationists over in Europe; in China and India.
Even if you could, would you really want to? Would you want to make it so that in order to appreciate music you need a $10k sound system, or constantly visit live performances of classical music to appreciate your range?
Personally, I can tell the difference between earbuds/computer speakers/surround sound system with proper wattage capacity and amp, but I haven't bothered to set the sound system back up for a while. Heck, I'm at the point I'd probably be better off buying a new one with HDMI inputs for my new TV. A TV that I can't really tell the difference between 1080p and 720p. I know it's better than analog, that blueray has a better picture than good old DVD(and I remember when THAT was new and crushing it's rival Divx).
How much better of a picture? 100% better? Not hardly - I'd say 10%. For 4X the pixels, I give it 10% in perception. Sad, huh?
So what if instead of wasting time computing and keeping track of the calculation all the way out, I could tell the computer to just come close - show me out to the hundreds?
I think this is maybe a better example?
Not exactly...
Think about color - 8 bit color is only sufficient to show artificial images, since it can only show 256 colors at a time. 16 bit is a LOT better, but you can still see problems with photos as the human eye can still see more than 65.5k colors. The 16 Million of 24 bit color satisfies most eyes, but most imaging is done in the 4 billion possible color/brightness combinations of 32 bit to limit the loss of fidelity due to rounding.
Anyways, when you're doing image arrays, the least significant digits don't make much difference each, but you can't get rid of them entirely and still maintain image quality. Noise over loss of signal, essentially. We'd rather have the 'noise' of lossy compression over sacrificing resolution or color depth. Actual studies comparing various compression schemes vs reducing resolution to get the same image size has shown this before.
Remember - I'm figuring that the system will fail to compute the exact value less than 1% of the time. I'm also not saying the data, even out to the LSD, isn't valuable, it's just less valuable than the MSD.
It's more like computing 1/9 and getting.1111111111112, and calling it 'good enough', cause, well, we have 4 billion OTHER pixels to calculate and we can't dawdle. Besides, we'll be doing all of this again in 1/60th of a second anyways.
It's like doing an audit back in the days of paper and calling the result 'good enough' because it's only off by $1.21 out of 2 million. It's not worth the effort to track down the effort. The people jamming data into early calculators pay more attention to the starting digits than the ending ones when adding/subtracting, etc...
Bit errors can occur anywhere NOW. They're just very unlikely.
Besides, the whole premise of this article is some methodology to keep MSB error rates the same while sacrificing LSB accuracy in exchange for more speed, lower power, and cost...
I mean, how much silicon is used to ensure that errors are detected and corrected? How much space, power, and speed is sacrificed for the circuitry required to make sure the LSB is correct?
There are areas where you need the standard high-reliability silicon, and there are areas where you don't. instruction processes need the good stuff. Though I'll note that even THAT silicon has an error rate; it's just very low, and I imagine much of the extra power is from fail-safes to catch even those.
Open a JPG file, change a random bit somewhere, re-display.
You're not changing just the LSB there, you even have the potential to be changing framing information and such.
The trick becomes of 'just how more inaccurate is this at calculating LSB? How much faster is it? How much power does it save?'.
I see this as being used less in video codecs and more for final display or 3d calculations where the image gets refreshed from central(and dependable) sources each frame. Such as for 3D games.
Please don't confuse "lossy" media compression with whatever Krishna Palem's technology is going to do. First of all, you can definitely hear the differences if you own a nice pair of cans and a pocket-sized amplifier.
And what percent of people running around with MP3 devices HAVE a 'nice pair of cans' instead of cheap earbuds, and I have to say that I've NEVER seen a 'pocket sized amp'. If you do this, you're going to have to face it: You're an audiophile and relatively out of mainstream. You know, the people happy with the earbuds that came with their iPod and 64k MP3 streams?
In either case we're taking advantage of the notion that NOT ALL of the data is important; indeed much of it is relatively irrelevant to our perception.
So that's where you'll probably see the technology going: hardware media decoders
Exactly. This wouldn't be some wierd add-on card or even in your CPU; at least not until long after it's a standard part of Nvidia and ATI's lineup.
In all probability this would never make it into usage as a CPU, more likely a dedicated section of silicon performing the function of a GPU/FPU/DSP. Actual control instructions would be high-integrity, just the low significance digits would get the 'cheap but a bit more unreliable' methods.
I'd like to see how much an image would change if you imposed a 1% chance of a 10% error in either the chroma or luminance of each pixel. I'm willing to bet it'd be 'take a magnifying glass and the images next to each other to tell'. Change it to 30-60 hz video, and the perception of differences would go away.
We've been busting decade level trends here in North Dakota as well.
Note, this means we're getting feet instead of inches. It's been difficult keeping stuff clear. Several people I know's homes have had insulation bonuses from snowdrifts. (Note: This means a section of the home is more or less buried in snow).
And the kid comment also makes me think - we still have a ways to go to reach the levels I saw as a kid.
quite correct the thousands is far more important than the cents, however 13,810.00 is really close to 13,000.81 right. it has all the same numbers in a similar order.
Not by the fuzzy logic the guy's using. He's going for scientific accuracy. IE 13,000.81 (+-.001%). It's just our brains that compare symbols that would consider those numbers 'close'.
In which case a $810 error in a $13k account is a big friggen error, and would violate the standards of the chip he's working on. Now, I don't know HOW he's making sure high order bits are done more accurately than the low order ones, but that's what the article mentions him doing.
It looks like you got sucked into the bad example land. Later on in the article it mentions that it's intended for stuff where accuracy isn't paramount, but where it's not really necessary. Multimedia applications over space/bank calculations.
I mean, there's 1.764 Million pixels in my screen that I'm typing my post on at the moment. Does it really introduce much error if I round it to 1.8M? I'm also running at 60Hz. Do you think that I'd really notice if there's a.01% chance that instead of getting white(255) I get white(254)? That'd be an average of 176 pixels a refresh, assuming an all-white screen. Thing is, those pixels wouldn't be the same every time. Then again, logically each pixel would tend towards red/blue/yellow depending on the error. But only slightly. In a HD movie, are you really going to notice?
I think the point would be using a DSP/math coprocessor that uses 1/30th the power in exchange for a.001% loss in accuracy for non-essential tasks like music decoding.
I mean, combined with the lousy earbuds most people use, who'd notice? Especially if it makes their MP3 player last 3 times as long as ones that use more traditional and technically accurate DSP/decoder?
I'll note that he was making the point that the thousands part is far more important than the cents part.
Basically, it sounds like he dumbed down the answer too much. Of course the cents are important in your bank account. And, more importantly, it's fairly trivial for us to KEEP that accuracy.
Still, when you start expanding it to, say, a company's balance on the books, you tend to get errors. Think of it like a warehouse inventory - every time you do an inventory, there's a chance that somebody will count something wrong, and you'll come up with a slight error. Thing is, once that error is less than real 'noise' like shrinkage, defective products, waste, etc... It doesn't matter much and is easily compensated for. On another topic - voting ballots. You could have a 99.999% accuracy rate, but because you have millions of ballots, some will still be screwed up. In most elections, it doesn't matter, because the actual difference in votes exceeds the margin of error by a significant amount (.001% error rate, 6% difference in polling).
Multimedia wise, if we can accept some error in the least significant bits for color or sound range, which we already do with lossy compression, in exchange for faster, cheaper, and cooler/more energy efficient chips, it could have great value.
Also the UK government didn't buy any salt for the snow we had this week because they thought global warming wasn't going to make it cold enough. Another example of why it matters when people lie about global warming.
That would come to an argument that government officials are over blowing global warming; I'm not sure you want to make that point. Of course, lately I've been hearing 'global climate change' rather than warming.
To say repeating the same bullshit line has no consequences is just moronic.
I view it as extending the holly branch to the doubters. Go screaming 'GLOBAL WARMING IS TRUE111!!!!' isn't going to change their minds.
On the other hand, 'nobody likes pollution' has a lot of truth to it. Even somebody who disbelieves GW 100% can get on the bandwagon of wind power when it's pointed out the pollution that can be avoided; the coal left unburned.
Please stop turning the global warming debate into a religion, you're being part of the problem including your silly little precaution speech.
At least to me, your statements make it seem that you view it as a religion far more than him; including attacking non-believers for contradicting your beliefs.
Yeah, you can't just hook up a VOIP device to niprnet and expect it to work - the firewalls are far too restrictive. Not to mention that it violates regs.
Morale phones are generally provided. A cell phone is a possibility, but remember foreign call charges.
In my experience, about all you can count on is snail mail, email, and rationed phone access.
You know, it's almost like we speak different languages at times?
I think I've heard Hannity once when he was a guest speaker. Rush a few times more, but he's way too bombastic for me. Here's a question for you: Can you guess my positions on abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, gun control, and illegal drugs? From your comments, I think you might be surprised at what my answers really are.
Bullcrap. The legislation was to stop red-lining, or denying people's loans because they lived in a specific area without even bothering to analyze them on their own credit-worthiness.
From what I've read, it went far beyond that - enabling the lending to people with far worse credit ratings and loans that the borrowers had no real ability to pay. While credit ratings certainly aren't perfect, they're far better than the probing people had to endure back before the ratings existed.
encourage evenness? did you even look at the analysis I linked? Sales taxes are tilted stupidly toward the lower and middle class while the rich, who spend much smaller portions of their income, get off scott free.
Swoosh and a miss! I was talking about the overall economy and the boom/bust cycle. We wouldn't boom as far, but then again, we wouldn't bust as far either.
And then you have a new department to replace the department of revenue, equally invasive, equally complicated, and this time it prevents the flow of the mail in addition to the contractionist policy which has people refusing to spend money.
1. Who said we'd ever close the IRS? Wishful thinking aside, I fully realize that the fed.gov needs money to run operations. I tend to think it runs a lot of operations both unforgivably inefficient and completely unnecessary, but that's something of a different topic. 2. It'd only slow down mail on the border; Agencies already do this in the lands of the enlightened, IE Europe, England, and Australia. Haven't heard if Canada does it as regularly, but then I haven't checked. 3. People will still spend money. They'll just spend a while longer before they buy that 60" Plasma, and actually act like ants over grasshoppers in saving up supplies for the winter. It'd take a while before our economy would adjust, but I believe that we'd end up better off in the future.
Pot uses isn't against the rules of the swimming organization. SO I don't know if he was tested.
I think I didn't make myself quite clear enough.
Given the dozens/hundreds of drugs tested for in professional competitions today, I figure it'd take more work to avoid testing for THC than to test for it.
Considering the amount of training it takes to become a world class athlete it blows that picture away.
That and that the last 3 POTUSs sorta/kinda admitted to using the stuff also says that. Of course, I'm in the legalization camp, because I think it's silly to criminalize over half the population.
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Not necessarily mean; the truly mean types generally end up dead or in prison. What you need is a sort of psychopathic ruthlessness.
Even then, engaging in regular criminal activity ups your chances of being murdered in the USA something like a 100X... Hmm... Let's pull up some figures...
I base this on this post, per the FBI 60-80% of murders are felon on felon.
This one suggests that there are ~1.6 million felons denied the right to vote.*
Going by the 300 Million of our population, and round up to 2 million felons(some states don't remove the ability to vote, so the 1.6 is an underestimate. Anyways, we're looking at a category making up .7% of the population consisting of OVER HALF the murder victims... By my calcs, that's 148 times more likely to be murdered if you're a felon. Ouch, huh?
As for the being smart part; many criminals, even if they aren't caught by the police, end up earning less than the average fast food employee. Being caught and spending time in jail/prison, legal costs, etc... Makes even many of the 'more successful' ones rather poor earners.
*I have to say that I wish I could have found better sources, but even if the magnitudes are correct, it points out how dangerous doing felony stuff can be.
Unfortunately I don't have such a choice now, I rent an apartment.
Do the research, if you can make it make financial sense(remember, it'd be a deductible expense!), talk with your landlord. They might do it.
If carbon emissions were taxed alternative energy wouldn't look as expensive. And there are no clean coal plants in commercial production, what plants there are are for research.
Pretty much my point. Except that, in the sense of a 'carbon tax', nuclear power is lumped in right along with wind, solar, tidal, etc... Oh, and when have I expressed anything but disdain for coal power? I want to get rid of it! Mountaintop mining is another form of nasty pollution in my mind.
Even then though I doubt nuclear power would be profitable without subsidies.
I'm trying to remember, did you ever post a link showing just how much nuclear power is subsidized? Bonus points if it shows coal or nuclear above wind/solar per kwh.
All I have is a Wall street journal article:
$29.91 'clean coal' per mwh (megawatt hour) .67 hydroelectric .44 normal coal .25 Natural Gas
$24.34 solar
$23.37 wind
$1.59 nuclear
Yes, engineering always needs to be done but they are not being subsidized at the same amount as coal or nuclear. They may have but I doubt either First Solar or Nanosolar received subsidies directly. You could say Germany's Nanosolar order is one, and it might be, but I don't think of it so much as a subsidy anymore than first adopters subsidize research and development.
Germany forces the electric companies to pay something like 10X what they normally pay for every kwh of solar energy sold on the grid; I'd tend to say that's a subsidy. And it doesn't matter if the company making the solar panel doesn't get the subsidy if every customer who buys their product gets one. BTW, your first solar and nanosolar links go to the same spot.
Still - Nanosolar gets government subsidies - "Nanosolar in 2006 announced a $75 million Series C round, which it claimed amounted to $100 million when combined with government subsidies." and "Nanosolar already has secured a subsidy for 50 percent of the capital expenses of building the German facility." 50% capex subsidy
First solar? Well, the first page of google reveals less, but they still seem dependent upon german subsidies.
Again, I'm not opposed to wind/solar/whatever where they make the most sense. I just think we should put some money down on actually building a few plants. Odds are they'll prove their worth over an estimated 60+ year lifespan, even if wind/solar end up being a bigger chunk of the final answer.
Burden of evidence can be a killer.
Sure, you're running an Open AP and your computer's been rooted. But they found the CP neatly categorized in a non-hidden folder on your desktop named 'fun stuff', CP on your work machine and logs showing you downloading it from your home machine and elsewhere, the same sorts of sites as at work. Said downloading occurs when you're at home or at work for the appropriate machine.
What are the odds that some outside party would do all that?
Even if I was trying to frame somebody*, I'd have a hard time faking all that even WITH the box rooted. Then there's always the chance they'll also have the control packets for the rootkit logged, which a competent lawyer with techie support would be able to argue.
*discounting that I don't really know how to find CP in the first place, much like I'm sure that if I went looking for dope/illegal guns/hooker I'd run into a police sting first. There are positives and negatives to running on the right side of the law my entire life. Got a good job; don't really know how to 'get away' with crimes. Then again, my 'street smart' cousin hasn't been too successful at the 'get away with it' part. I've never seen the inside of a jail or prison cell, I consider that something of a success.
Could be worse, Japan's is 99.97%.
Conviction rate comparison
China is 98%
The USA is listed as 65-80% because statistics are mostly state level.
Therefore, either we're really good at identifying people, or "reasonable doubt" has become unreasonably weak defense.
Or you're using made up statistics.
I'm pretty sure they used to. There's a whole set of Fundy arguments about the validity of carbon (and other) dating methods, and a load of stock rants on how it's all based on faulty assumptions and circular reasoning.
Ah, so we could say that we're winning the argument with the Fundies? IE they've been pushed back a couple of times.
There's no reason it has to be only one or the other, is there?
If anything, theory of evolution would tend to highly approve of making multiple uses out of something.
Ok, that makes more sense then. However, I'm not sure that the standard view of sexual selection is that the feathers are a disadvantage that just happen to impress females. As you said, if the tail was a disadvantage that would seem absurd.
Sounds more like something you'd want to go to a peacock specialist rather than a darwin's theory generalist. It could indeed also be used to scare predators while the male gets up to flight speed.
But, either way, it doesn't invalidate darwin's theory. Let's face it, many male spiders get eaten when they mate. None the less, the male becoming food for the female is a net benefit for the spider's genes, so as long as it successfully mates before becoming food. Darwin's theory doesn't require the survival of the individual, just the genes. And it's also a probabilistic statement, it's all about tendencies. An animal might have the best possible genetics and still taken out by accident, disease, or predator.
I haven't studied that stuff for years, but "Darwinism" has not been the alpha and omega of evolution for quite some time.
I've read about some of that stuff as well, but having to gone to public school and been stuck in 'regular' classes on occasion, I'd say that 'Darwinism' is about the right level for basic grade school scientific theory. Just don't go trying to apply it to bacteria too much. Bacteria sex is one of the weirder things out there. Mendel's Pea experiments are good for heredity.
Honestly enough, I've never really understood any but the most literal creationist's objections to evolution. I mean, why aren't they protesting dinosaurs? Isn't the Earth supposed to be too young for them to have existed?
I thought that "Darwinism" was a term thought up by the religious anti-evolution side.
I was taught 'Darwin's theory of natural selection' in school, as part of the basic theory of evolution. Mendel and his peas were in there as well. I'll also note that the theory of evolution in my textbook explicitly didn't cover the start of life; there was some mention of 'primordial soup', but fully admitted that scientists don't really have a clue.
I have never heard it called 'Darwinism' by anything other than creationists and the people handing out awards in a bit of black humor.
I wonder if the anti-evolutionists were around when I was a kid; I don't remember ever hearing about them. I wouldn't be surprised if a big part of the yelling right now is the last gasp of the creationists, as they can no longer hide in small areas in local or church schools. News is far more national now than it was even 20 years ago. If my study of history has shown me anything; it's that rarely is anything having to do with the human condition new or unique. There's creationists over in Europe; in China and India.
Even if you could, would you really want to? Would you want to make it so that in order to appreciate music you need a $10k sound system, or constantly visit live performances of classical music to appreciate your range?
Personally, I can tell the difference between earbuds/computer speakers/surround sound system with proper wattage capacity and amp, but I haven't bothered to set the sound system back up for a while. Heck, I'm at the point I'd probably be better off buying a new one with HDMI inputs for my new TV. A TV that I can't really tell the difference between 1080p and 720p. I know it's better than analog, that blueray has a better picture than good old DVD(and I remember when THAT was new and crushing it's rival Divx).
How much better of a picture? 100% better? Not hardly - I'd say 10%. For 4X the pixels, I give it 10% in perception. Sad, huh?
So what if instead of wasting time computing and keeping track of the calculation all the way out, I could tell the computer to just come close - show me out to the hundreds?
I think this is maybe a better example?
Not exactly...
Think about color - 8 bit color is only sufficient to show artificial images, since it can only show 256 colors at a time. 16 bit is a LOT better, but you can still see problems with photos as the human eye can still see more than 65.5k colors. The 16 Million of 24 bit color satisfies most eyes, but most imaging is done in the 4 billion possible color/brightness combinations of 32 bit to limit the loss of fidelity due to rounding.
Anyways, when you're doing image arrays, the least significant digits don't make much difference each, but you can't get rid of them entirely and still maintain image quality. Noise over loss of signal, essentially. We'd rather have the 'noise' of lossy compression over sacrificing resolution or color depth. Actual studies comparing various compression schemes vs reducing resolution to get the same image size has shown this before.
Remember - I'm figuring that the system will fail to compute the exact value less than 1% of the time. I'm also not saying the data, even out to the LSD, isn't valuable, it's just less valuable than the MSD.
It's more like computing 1/9 and getting .1111111111112, and calling it 'good enough', cause, well, we have 4 billion OTHER pixels to calculate and we can't dawdle. Besides, we'll be doing all of this again in 1/60th of a second anyways.
It's like doing an audit back in the days of paper and calling the result 'good enough' because it's only off by $1.21 out of 2 million. It's not worth the effort to track down the effort. The people jamming data into early calculators pay more attention to the starting digits than the ending ones when adding/subtracting, etc...
Bit errors can occur anywhere NOW. They're just very unlikely.
Besides, the whole premise of this article is some methodology to keep MSB error rates the same while sacrificing LSB accuracy in exchange for more speed, lower power, and cost...
I mean, how much silicon is used to ensure that errors are detected and corrected? How much space, power, and speed is sacrificed for the circuitry required to make sure the LSB is correct?
Nice rant, but I've already mentioned that this sort of thing:
In all probability this would never make it into usage as a CPU, more likely a dedicated section of silicon performing the function of a GPU/FPU/DSP. Actual control instructions would be high-integrity, just the low significance digits would get the 'cheap but a bit more unreliable' methods."
Exactly. This wouldn't be some wierd add-on card or even in your CPU; at least not until long after it's a standard part of Nvidia and ATI's lineup.
There are areas where you need the standard high-reliability silicon, and there are areas where you don't. instruction processes need the good stuff. Though I'll note that even THAT silicon has an error rate; it's just very low, and I imagine much of the extra power is from fail-safes to catch even those.
Open a JPG file, change a random bit somewhere, re-display.
You're not changing just the LSB there, you even have the potential to be changing framing information and such.
The trick becomes of 'just how more inaccurate is this at calculating LSB? How much faster is it? How much power does it save?'.
I see this as being used less in video codecs and more for final display or 3d calculations where the image gets refreshed from central(and dependable) sources each frame. Such as for 3D games.
Please don't confuse "lossy" media compression with whatever Krishna Palem's technology is going to do. First of all, you can definitely hear the differences if you own a nice pair of cans and a pocket-sized amplifier.
And what percent of people running around with MP3 devices HAVE a 'nice pair of cans' instead of cheap earbuds, and I have to say that I've NEVER seen a 'pocket sized amp'. If you do this, you're going to have to face it: You're an audiophile and relatively out of mainstream. You know, the people happy with the earbuds that came with their iPod and 64k MP3 streams?
In either case we're taking advantage of the notion that NOT ALL of the data is important; indeed much of it is relatively irrelevant to our perception.
So that's where you'll probably see the technology going: hardware media decoders
Exactly. This wouldn't be some wierd add-on card or even in your CPU; at least not until long after it's a standard part of Nvidia and ATI's lineup.
In all probability this would never make it into usage as a CPU, more likely a dedicated section of silicon performing the function of a GPU/FPU/DSP. Actual control instructions would be high-integrity, just the low significance digits would get the 'cheap but a bit more unreliable' methods.
I'd like to see how much an image would change if you imposed a 1% chance of a 10% error in either the chroma or luminance of each pixel. I'm willing to bet it'd be 'take a magnifying glass and the images next to each other to tell'. Change it to 30-60 hz video, and the perception of differences would go away.
We've been busting decade level trends here in North Dakota as well.
Note, this means we're getting feet instead of inches. It's been difficult keeping stuff clear. Several people I know's homes have had insulation bonuses from snowdrifts. (Note: This means a section of the home is more or less buried in snow).
And the kid comment also makes me think - we still have a ways to go to reach the levels I saw as a kid.
I guess the example as a good point to general audiences like, perhaps, my parents. I certainly got what they were after.
Many slashdotters seem to take things too seriously though. They take the bank example as serious.
quite correct the thousands is far more important than the cents, however 13,810.00 is really close to 13,000.81 right. it has all the same numbers in a similar order.
Not by the fuzzy logic the guy's using. He's going for scientific accuracy. IE 13,000.81 (+-.001%). It's just our brains that compare symbols that would consider those numbers 'close'.
In which case a $810 error in a $13k account is a big friggen error, and would violate the standards of the chip he's working on. Now, I don't know HOW he's making sure high order bits are done more accurately than the low order ones, but that's what the article mentions him doing.
It looks like you got sucked into the bad example land. Later on in the article it mentions that it's intended for stuff where accuracy isn't paramount, but where it's not really necessary. Multimedia applications over space/bank calculations.
I mean, there's 1.764 Million pixels in my screen that I'm typing my post on at the moment. Does it really introduce much error if I round it to 1.8M? I'm also running at 60Hz. Do you think that I'd really notice if there's a .01% chance that instead of getting white(255) I get white(254)? That'd be an average of 176 pixels a refresh, assuming an all-white screen. Thing is, those pixels wouldn't be the same every time. Then again, logically each pixel would tend towards red/blue/yellow depending on the error. But only slightly. In a HD movie, are you really going to notice?
I think the point would be using a DSP/math coprocessor that uses 1/30th the power in exchange for a .001% loss in accuracy for non-essential tasks like music decoding.
I mean, combined with the lousy earbuds most people use, who'd notice? Especially if it makes their MP3 player last 3 times as long as ones that use more traditional and technically accurate DSP/decoder?
I'll note that he was making the point that the thousands part is far more important than the cents part.
Basically, it sounds like he dumbed down the answer too much. Of course the cents are important in your bank account. And, more importantly, it's fairly trivial for us to KEEP that accuracy.
Still, when you start expanding it to, say, a company's balance on the books, you tend to get errors. Think of it like a warehouse inventory - every time you do an inventory, there's a chance that somebody will count something wrong, and you'll come up with a slight error. Thing is, once that error is less than real 'noise' like shrinkage, defective products, waste, etc... It doesn't matter much and is easily compensated for. On another topic - voting ballots. You could have a 99.999% accuracy rate, but because you have millions of ballots, some will still be screwed up. In most elections, it doesn't matter, because the actual difference in votes exceeds the margin of error by a significant amount (.001% error rate, 6% difference in polling).
Multimedia wise, if we can accept some error in the least significant bits for color or sound range, which we already do with lossy compression, in exchange for faster, cheaper, and cooler/more energy efficient chips, it could have great value.
Also the UK government didn't buy any salt for the snow we had this week because they thought global warming wasn't going to make it cold enough. Another example of why it matters when people lie about global warming.
That would come to an argument that government officials are over blowing global warming; I'm not sure you want to make that point. Of course, lately I've been hearing 'global climate change' rather than warming.
To say repeating the same bullshit line has no consequences is just moronic.
I view it as extending the holly branch to the doubters. Go screaming 'GLOBAL WARMING IS TRUE111!!!!' isn't going to change their minds.
On the other hand, 'nobody likes pollution' has a lot of truth to it. Even somebody who disbelieves GW 100% can get on the bandwagon of wind power when it's pointed out the pollution that can be avoided; the coal left unburned.
Please stop turning the global warming debate into a religion, you're being part of the problem including your silly little precaution speech.
At least to me, your statements make it seem that you view it as a religion far more than him; including attacking non-believers for contradicting your beliefs.
Yeah, you can't just hook up a VOIP device to niprnet and expect it to work - the firewalls are far too restrictive. Not to mention that it violates regs.
Morale phones are generally provided. A cell phone is a possibility, but remember foreign call charges.
In my experience, about all you can count on is snail mail, email, and rationed phone access.
You know, it's almost like we speak different languages at times?
I think I've heard Hannity once when he was a guest speaker. Rush a few times more, but he's way too bombastic for me. Here's a question for you: Can you guess my positions on abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, gun control, and illegal drugs? From your comments, I think you might be surprised at what my answers really are.
Bullcrap. The legislation was to stop red-lining, or denying people's loans because they lived in a specific area without even bothering to analyze them on their own credit-worthiness.
From what I've read, it went far beyond that - enabling the lending to people with far worse credit ratings and loans that the borrowers had no real ability to pay. While credit ratings certainly aren't perfect, they're far better than the probing people had to endure back before the ratings existed.
encourage evenness? did you even look at the analysis I linked? Sales taxes are tilted stupidly toward the lower and middle class while the rich, who spend much smaller portions of their income, get off scott free.
Swoosh and a miss! I was talking about the overall economy and the boom/bust cycle. We wouldn't boom as far, but then again, we wouldn't bust as far either.
And then you have a new department to replace the department of revenue, equally invasive, equally complicated, and this time it prevents the flow of the mail in addition to the contractionist policy which has people refusing to spend money.
1. Who said we'd ever close the IRS? Wishful thinking aside, I fully realize that the fed.gov needs money to run operations. I tend to think it runs a lot of operations both unforgivably inefficient and completely unnecessary, but that's something of a different topic.
2. It'd only slow down mail on the border; Agencies already do this in the lands of the enlightened, IE Europe, England, and Australia. Haven't heard if Canada does it as regularly, but then I haven't checked.
3. People will still spend money. They'll just spend a while longer before they buy that 60" Plasma, and actually act like ants over grasshoppers in saving up supplies for the winter. It'd take a while before our economy would adjust, but I believe that we'd end up better off in the future.
Pot uses isn't against the rules of the swimming organization. SO I don't know if he was tested.
I think I didn't make myself quite clear enough.
Given the dozens/hundreds of drugs tested for in professional competitions today, I figure it'd take more work to avoid testing for THC than to test for it.
Considering the amount of training it takes to become a world class athlete it blows that picture away.
That and that the last 3 POTUSs sorta/kinda admitted to using the stuff also says that. Of course, I'm in the legalization camp, because I think it's silly to criminalize over half the population.