No, we're sorry, that would be a violation of the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1938 and under the interstate commerce clause, we're going to have to force you to quit.
-- Congress
I also understand that in US schools they're taught metric measurements as well as imperial measurements (however I'm sure the focus is vastly in favour of imperial units)
Actually, all of my classes were in metric. They don't teach imperial in school. At least, not in Texas (anti Texas rants in 3, 2, 1.....)
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
Tax sugar! Sugar producers should pay!
Actually, it already is taxed as an import quota http://www.fas.usda.gov/itp/imports/ussugar.asp. This is why corn syrup is used in most products in the U.S. Congress thought it would be a good idea to prop up corn farmers by hurting sugar importers. Coupled with ethanol subsidies, it's a wonder we have any corn left for regular unsweetened food.
Re:Sorry but it does not meet the criteria
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
What's more you find sugar is essential to the function of a body
Not sugar, glucose, which you say in the next sentence. Sugar is 50% fructose, which is not essential for your body to function, and is alleged by Lustig to be the primary culprit in fatty liver, which results in increased LDL, insulin resistance, and possibly some forms of cancer. Glucose, OTOH, can be found in starches, so the sugar isn't actually needed as part of your diet, it just makes eating more fun.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 2
Actually, the article does a very good job of explaining the history of the research and the current state of the art in our understanding of fructose. It's good reading - it starts out with a scientific consensus where researchers who dare to question that consensus are marginalized and shut out, then it goes on to talk about various evidence that came out bit by bit and chipped away at the consensus until finally a new consensus is adopted. I wonder where it's going to go from here.....
Climate science aside, it's a very good treatment of biological research and the pitfalls of forgetting that correlation != causation (as every/.er is so quick to point out as they run for their reams of data showing correlation - or not - to prove their pet theory).
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
Heart disease, for instance, is the leading cause of death in the US, with cancer a close 2nd.
Funny, TFA makes the case that fructose could be the culprit of heart disease and some kinds of cancer. Guess the comparison between it and tobacco might be apropos to the conversation after all.
Yes, one of his dissertation committee members is from MS's Kinect shop. I doubt his work is included in the Kinect, but it very likely will be in the next version.
it should be no problem to track individual limbs to generate a skeleton of the user
I'm not so sure about that. He is using a tracking algorithm paired to a template matching algorithm. His claim is that, although both methods have high error rates, their errors are mostly orthogonal to each other. In other words, one method works better sometimes, the other method works better sometimes, and combined, they do a pretty good job. In his videos he's left out scenes where there is a large area of near constant intensity. I'm curious how his method deals with this as there aren't enough details to track, nor are there enough features to template match. Also, with arms and legs, if the texture is generally the same between the two (say you are wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt of the same color), then there really isn't enough information for the tracker to work with in order to distinguish a leg from an arm. Straight arms and straight legs will both match the template, the tracker will likely struggle with the relatively large area of constant intensity.
That's not to detract from Kalal's research - this is really good work - I just want to point out that it very likely suffers from a few achilles heals not mentioned in his video.
Now pair this method with the kinect, and you might see a real improvement.
If you drove to mexico, bought something and brought it back to your state, you are still legally obligated to pay your state tax.
I bought a truck in Virginia and paid the sales tax for it there. I then moved to Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, and finally California. By your reasoning, I bought it out of state, so I should have to pay sales tax in each state I move to? That could get expensive.
In reality, I did have to pay the difference in Virginia and Texas sales tax to register it in Texas (full purchase value tax on a depreciated asset, ouch), but no other state tried to gouge me beyond that little nugget.
people, when asked if they'd drive across town to pay $25 less on a $100 item, say they would, but when asked if they'd drive across town to pay $25 less on a $1500 item, say they wouldn't
Given current gas prices, it has to be within walking distance to justify anything less than $25 savings. I'm so glad I have a trusty furniture cart for that tv.....
Do I believe that mathematics is consistent and axiomatic?
You shouldn't unless you are assuming non-Hilbert mathematics. See Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. The basic outtake is that if you have a system of math that is complete, it will not be sound (consistent), if it is sound, it will not be complete. This was discovered in the effort to axiomatize all mathematics and proves that such an endeavor is impossible unless you restrict your system to a very simple set of axioms.
I agree completely with you, I just wanted to throw the numbers out there. I think micro-generation at the point of delivery is good idea. It doesn't have the same economies of scale that a large-scale nuclear plant has, but it eliminates transmission and storage losses (for variable generators like solar and wind). In the end, any energy solution we come up with is going to have to be an all/and solution. We need large nuclear plants for efficient base-load generation, solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro can help reduce demand, but in the end, you can't go all solar or all wind, it just doesn't make any sense.
Basically the qualifications of the author aren't technical and he's commenting on a technical topic and the story was lacking on details so such a big claim couldn't (and shouldn't) be taken at face value without independent validation.
Congratulations, you've just described 99% of/. posters
Unfortunately, it's not voluntary in the U.S. Stores are not allowed to sell bulbs below a given efficiency threshold, thus my assertion that it is a ban (at least in the US).
Amount of solar energy reaching the surface: 600 Watts per sq meter
Amount in a day: 4.8KWh per sq meter
Amount in a year (assuming 365 sunny days): 1.752MWh
Global electricity usage in 2009(est): 132,000 TWh
Total sq meters needed for 2009 usage: 75342465753 sq meters or ~274km x 274km, roughly twice the total amount of land used in California for agriculture in 2007
Of course, this all assumes 100% efficiency of conversion and transmission as well as 365 days of 8 hours of direct sunlight. So there's your theoretical maximum, and it's still an extremely large number all things considered.
Just for fun, assume 250 sunny days with an average of 6 hours of sun, and 30% conversion efficiency. I'm assuming the usage estimate already accounts for transmission loss as part of global electric usage: ~700x700km would do it in this case, roughly 70% of the total land area of Texas.
Conclusion: You can do it, but it would take an awful lot of space. If you want citations for the numbers above, I'm feeling too lazy to put them in, so go google it yourself.
Because by and large Americans have a huge contrarian streak and like to think the entire world is out to get them....
Any why do you, or anyone else, care what those contrarians are doing? It has been pointed out repeatedly that incandescents have to be replaced more frequently, cost more per hour than CFLs, etc. So instead of just letting people make a rational choice between higher electric/replacement bills and CFL lights with their related issues, you would prefer to simply force people to live the way you think they should live?
At least with car emissions there is no economic incentive. A cleaner running car costs more, so you can't expect people to spend more money on an externality, but if the reviled incandescent is so inferior to the CFL, and the CFL costs less over the life of the bulb, then it would make rational sense to use it, and those who don't will have to pay for more electricity, higher replacement costs etc You could go on in your geeky smugness knowing that you're smarter than everyone around you, and no law will ever have to be passed. Instead, you decide to force your will on others, making your support of a de facto ban on incandescents nothing short of tyrrany.
So I suppose we should also not allow any books with the word "incandescent" in them to be sold It's not censorship, it's just a law restricting their sale. Sure, authors can still write them, publishers can still publish them, but stores aren't allowed to sell them because they violate word efficiency standards. It's not a ban.
Really what is happening is they are taking an existing design and trying to automagically modify it for their purposes instead of simply engineering a processor that does what they need. I'm pretty sure that if someone sat down and did a clean-sheet design for a hearing-aid processor, you would do even better than TFA's method. The question becomes cost. Do you have a computer program do some pruning based on a probabilistic heuristic of some kind, or do you pay an engineer to actually design an efficient single-purpose processor? My guess is that it's cheaper to pay the engineer once you've figured in the cost of designing and writing the code so that it works for your particular purpose, but I don't have any data to back that up.
Still, it's interesting that you can do this, I just don't know why you would do it....
RISC resulted from a study of what instruction were actually used by typical applications that were compiled with standard compilers.
Reduced instruction set computing, or RISC (pronounced/rsk/), is a CPU design strategy based on the insight that simplified (as opposed to complex) instructions can provide higher performance if this simplicity enables much faster execution of each instruction.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_computing
The point of RISC wasn't to reduce the instruction set to those most commonly used, although the concept of "make the common case fast" resulted in some of that. The main goal was to reduce the complexity of what each instruction does so that any instruction will execute in the same number of clock cycles as any other instruction. By enforcing instruction execution time, this opened up the ability to pipeline instructions easily. In fact, this model was used in the Pentium Pro. and Pentium Core architectures which use instruction decoders to "rewrite" CISC instructions into micro-ops that are pretty analogous to RISC operations. The micro-ops allow the processor to take advantage of things like out of order execution, speculative execution, and parallelization. If the processor stuck to a purely CISC instruction set, this wouldn't work as each instruction has a different execution time and pipelining would become extremely complex.
The right conclusion would have been that CPUs should have optimal instructions, which might mean removing some and adding others - not merely removing some.
I suppose you reached the right conclusion, but for the wrong reason. RISC simply wasn't about "matching of CPU instruction to software". It was about making instructions simple and easy to implement. This concept is alive and well in every modern day processor. I don't think your version of RISC development comports well with the actual history of the development of MIPS and other RISC architectures.
I'm reporting the numbers on the package and the subjective response to the light observed side by side with an incandescent. Appropriately, I also have full spectrum incandescents that are supposed to mimic the sun. You know what, they don't look bad at all. In fact, they look pretty good. They make the "full spectrum" CFLs next to them look like those pasty blue LED christmas lights everyone is using now.
Is that subjective? Yes. And they subjectively look horrible. Just like some people would be willing to pay twice as much for a hotel room that offers amenities that are important to them, I'd much rather pay more money for electricity usage and bulb replacement in exchange for light that doesn't look absolutely horrible. Now why would Congress be against me making that decision on my own?
there's a few documentaries out there to raise awareness already, but they seem to gather very little attention.
Gasland is already underquestion for many of its "facts". Instead of documentaries we could look at studies by the EPA that say there is no impact. Of course, that study was questioned by a whistleblower, so maybe it isn't reliable either.
In short, I've read at least 50 comments in this thread stating with great certainty that ground water pollution is occurring from fracking, TFA says earthquakes are likely caused by fracking, yet there aren't any studies to support any claims for or against those statements. How 'bout we all wait for the EPA lifecycle study to do its thing and then we can have an informed discussion instead of a/. discussion?
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No, we're sorry, that would be a violation of the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1938 and under the interstate commerce clause, we're going to have to force you to quit. -- Congress
I also understand that in US schools they're taught metric measurements as well as imperial measurements (however I'm sure the focus is vastly in favour of imperial units)
Actually, all of my classes were in metric. They don't teach imperial in school. At least, not in Texas (anti Texas rants in 3, 2, 1.....)
Tax sugar! Sugar producers should pay!
Actually, it already is taxed as an import quota http://www.fas.usda.gov/itp/imports/ussugar.asp. This is why corn syrup is used in most products in the U.S. Congress thought it would be a good idea to prop up corn farmers by hurting sugar importers. Coupled with ethanol subsidies, it's a wonder we have any corn left for regular unsweetened food.
What's more you find sugar is essential to the function of a body
Not sugar, glucose, which you say in the next sentence. Sugar is 50% fructose, which is not essential for your body to function, and is alleged by Lustig to be the primary culprit in fatty liver, which results in increased LDL, insulin resistance, and possibly some forms of cancer. Glucose, OTOH, can be found in starches, so the sugar isn't actually needed as part of your diet, it just makes eating more fun.
Actually, the article does a very good job of explaining the history of the research and the current state of the art in our understanding of fructose. It's good reading - it starts out with a scientific consensus where researchers who dare to question that consensus are marginalized and shut out, then it goes on to talk about various evidence that came out bit by bit and chipped away at the consensus until finally a new consensus is adopted. I wonder where it's going to go from here.....
Climate science aside, it's a very good treatment of biological research and the pitfalls of forgetting that correlation != causation (as every /.er is so quick to point out as they run for their reams of data showing correlation - or not - to prove their pet theory).
Heart disease, for instance, is the leading cause of death in the US, with cancer a close 2nd.
Funny, TFA makes the case that fructose could be the culprit of heart disease and some kinds of cancer. Guess the comparison between it and tobacco might be apropos to the conversation after all.
Yes, it is. No argument with you there.
not abortion since its illegal for fed funds to go to abortion
Let's not let facts get in the way of that argument shall we?
Yes, one of his dissertation committee members is from MS's Kinect shop. I doubt his work is included in the Kinect, but it very likely will be in the next version.
it should be no problem to track individual limbs to generate a skeleton of the user
I'm not so sure about that. He is using a tracking algorithm paired to a template matching algorithm. His claim is that, although both methods have high error rates, their errors are mostly orthogonal to each other. In other words, one method works better sometimes, the other method works better sometimes, and combined, they do a pretty good job. In his videos he's left out scenes where there is a large area of near constant intensity. I'm curious how his method deals with this as there aren't enough details to track, nor are there enough features to template match. Also, with arms and legs, if the texture is generally the same between the two (say you are wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt of the same color), then there really isn't enough information for the tracker to work with in order to distinguish a leg from an arm. Straight arms and straight legs will both match the template, the tracker will likely struggle with the relatively large area of constant intensity.
That's not to detract from Kalal's research - this is really good work - I just want to point out that it very likely suffers from a few achilles heals not mentioned in his video.
Now pair this method with the kinect, and you might see a real improvement.
If you drove to mexico, bought something and brought it back to your state, you are still legally obligated to pay your state tax.
I bought a truck in Virginia and paid the sales tax for it there. I then moved to Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, and finally California. By your reasoning, I bought it out of state, so I should have to pay sales tax in each state I move to? That could get expensive.
In reality, I did have to pay the difference in Virginia and Texas sales tax to register it in Texas (full purchase value tax on a depreciated asset, ouch), but no other state tried to gouge me beyond that little nugget.
people, when asked if they'd drive across town to pay $25 less on a $100 item, say they would, but when asked if they'd drive across town to pay $25 less on a $1500 item, say they wouldn't
Given current gas prices, it has to be within walking distance to justify anything less than $25 savings. I'm so glad I have a trusty furniture cart for that tv.....
Do I believe that mathematics is consistent and axiomatic?
You shouldn't unless you are assuming non-Hilbert mathematics. See Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. The basic outtake is that if you have a system of math that is complete, it will not be sound (consistent), if it is sound, it will not be complete. This was discovered in the effort to axiomatize all mathematics and proves that such an endeavor is impossible unless you restrict your system to a very simple set of axioms.
I agree completely with you, I just wanted to throw the numbers out there. I think micro-generation at the point of delivery is good idea. It doesn't have the same economies of scale that a large-scale nuclear plant has, but it eliminates transmission and storage losses (for variable generators like solar and wind). In the end, any energy solution we come up with is going to have to be an all/and solution. We need large nuclear plants for efficient base-load generation, solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro can help reduce demand, but in the end, you can't go all solar or all wind, it just doesn't make any sense.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html This is where models will get you when they aren't verified or validated.
Basically the qualifications of the author aren't technical and he's commenting on a technical topic and the story was lacking on details so such a big claim couldn't (and shouldn't) be taken at face value without independent validation.
Congratulations, you've just described 99% of /. posters
Unfortunately, it's not voluntary in the U.S. Stores are not allowed to sell bulbs below a given efficiency threshold, thus my assertion that it is a ban (at least in the US).
Re: Germany http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/04/germany-the-worlds-first-major-renewable-energy-economy http://www.buildings.com/ArticleDetails/tabid/3334/ArticleID/11755/Default.aspx http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/26/germany-nuclear-power-protest_n_841023.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/03/23/tech-germany-nuclear.html
Real numbers to work with:
Global electricity usage in 2009(est): 132,000 TWh
Total sq meters needed for 2009 usage: 75342465753 sq meters or ~274km x 274km, roughly twice the total amount of land used in California for agriculture in 2007
Of course, this all assumes 100% efficiency of conversion and transmission as well as 365 days of 8 hours of direct sunlight. So there's your theoretical maximum, and it's still an extremely large number all things considered.
Just for fun, assume 250 sunny days with an average of 6 hours of sun, and 30% conversion efficiency. I'm assuming the usage estimate already accounts for transmission loss as part of global electric usage: ~700x700km would do it in this case, roughly 70% of the total land area of Texas.
Conclusion: You can do it, but it would take an awful lot of space. If you want citations for the numbers above, I'm feeling too lazy to put them in, so go google it yourself.
Because by and large Americans have a huge contrarian streak and like to think the entire world is out to get them....
Any why do you, or anyone else, care what those contrarians are doing? It has been pointed out repeatedly that incandescents have to be replaced more frequently, cost more per hour than CFLs, etc. So instead of just letting people make a rational choice between higher electric/replacement bills and CFL lights with their related issues, you would prefer to simply force people to live the way you think they should live?
At least with car emissions there is no economic incentive. A cleaner running car costs more, so you can't expect people to spend more money on an externality, but if the reviled incandescent is so inferior to the CFL, and the CFL costs less over the life of the bulb, then it would make rational sense to use it, and those who don't will have to pay for more electricity, higher replacement costs etc You could go on in your geeky smugness knowing that you're smarter than everyone around you, and no law will ever have to be passed. Instead, you decide to force your will on others, making your support of a de facto ban on incandescents nothing short of tyrrany.
So I suppose we should also not allow any books with the word "incandescent" in them to be sold It's not censorship, it's just a law restricting their sale. Sure, authors can still write them, publishers can still publish them, but stores aren't allowed to sell them because they violate word efficiency standards. It's not a ban.
Really what is happening is they are taking an existing design and trying to automagically modify it for their purposes instead of simply engineering a processor that does what they need. I'm pretty sure that if someone sat down and did a clean-sheet design for a hearing-aid processor, you would do even better than TFA's method. The question becomes cost. Do you have a computer program do some pruning based on a probabilistic heuristic of some kind, or do you pay an engineer to actually design an efficient single-purpose processor? My guess is that it's cheaper to pay the engineer once you've figured in the cost of designing and writing the code so that it works for your particular purpose, but I don't have any data to back that up.
Still, it's interesting that you can do this, I just don't know why you would do it....
RISC resulted from a study of what instruction were actually used by typical applications that were compiled with standard compilers.
Reduced instruction set computing, or RISC (pronounced /rsk/), is a CPU design strategy based on the insight that simplified (as opposed to complex) instructions can provide higher performance if this simplicity enables much faster execution of each instruction.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_computing
The point of RISC wasn't to reduce the instruction set to those most commonly used, although the concept of "make the common case fast" resulted in some of that. The main goal was to reduce the complexity of what each instruction does so that any instruction will execute in the same number of clock cycles as any other instruction. By enforcing instruction execution time, this opened up the ability to pipeline instructions easily. In fact, this model was used in the Pentium Pro. and Pentium Core architectures which use instruction decoders to "rewrite" CISC instructions into micro-ops that are pretty analogous to RISC operations. The micro-ops allow the processor to take advantage of things like out of order execution, speculative execution, and parallelization. If the processor stuck to a purely CISC instruction set, this wouldn't work as each instruction has a different execution time and pipelining would become extremely complex.
The right conclusion would have been that CPUs should have optimal instructions, which might mean removing some and adding others - not merely removing some.
I suppose you reached the right conclusion, but for the wrong reason. RISC simply wasn't about "matching of CPU instruction to software". It was about making instructions simple and easy to implement. This concept is alive and well in every modern day processor. I don't think your version of RISC development comports well with the actual history of the development of MIPS and other RISC architectures.
I'm reporting the numbers on the package and the subjective response to the light observed side by side with an incandescent. Appropriately, I also have full spectrum incandescents that are supposed to mimic the sun. You know what, they don't look bad at all. In fact, they look pretty good. They make the "full spectrum" CFLs next to them look like those pasty blue LED christmas lights everyone is using now.
Is that subjective? Yes. And they subjectively look horrible. Just like some people would be willing to pay twice as much for a hotel room that offers amenities that are important to them, I'd much rather pay more money for electricity usage and bulb replacement in exchange for light that doesn't look absolutely horrible. Now why would Congress be against me making that decision on my own?
there's a few documentaries out there to raise awareness already, but they seem to gather very little attention.
Gasland is already under question for many of its "facts". Instead of documentaries we could look at studies by the EPA that say there is no impact. Of course, that study was questioned by a whistleblower, so maybe it isn't reliable either.
In short, I've read at least 50 comments in this thread stating with great certainty that ground water pollution is occurring from fracking, TFA says earthquakes are likely caused by fracking, yet there aren't any studies to support any claims for or against those statements. How 'bout we all wait for the EPA lifecycle study to do its thing and then we can have an informed discussion instead of a /. discussion?