Well, no, it *is* a question of what the EO references. The Court is ruling on the legality of the EO as it is currently written, because that's really what they have jurisdiction to do.
For them to broaden the scope to things like their perception of intent would be to wildly exceed their authority and destroy what little remains of the checks and balances, making the judiciary branch way too powerful. I mean, while they are at it, they could start to oversee the Legislative branch too, right? Strike down some law, not because the law was bad, but because the Senator that sponsored it was caught saying that he didn't care about the bill itself and just wanted it to pass because it had some unrelated stuff attached to the bill that would be beneficial for his constituents.:)
Regardless, my point wasn't one of whether or not intent would be considered to any degree, it was just that basing an argument on someone else's intent puts you in an extremely weak position, that's all. Even if your view on an issue is the "correct" view, if you arguments are based on the other side's intent, then you just have a much harder time making your case.
I mean, even with a recording of someone saying something you can never really "prove" intent, so the most you can do is get the ruling body to agree that making an assumption is okay and that your assumption is reasonable and the one they should agree with. And then on top of that, it's too easy for the other party to (truthfully or not) say they changed their mind along the way, that they heard from the people, that they misspoke, that they now understand the issue better, etc., etc., etc. Again, it could all be total lies, but it'd all serve to weaken your case - if you've pinned your argument on the other guy's motivations, then it's a much easier position for him to defend.
True, and those are good articles, but they merely take a look at differences in scope, duration, etc. in this set of travel restrictions vs earlier ones. They don't do anything to support the argument that the current EO violates any constitutional rights while the earlier ones did not. (Also, I know it's obvious, but the Constitution guarantees the rights of U.S. citizens - it makes no guarantees for others.)
The version of the EO in the lawsuit does not mention religion, it affects more than just Muslims, and it at most affects a tiny sliver of all Muslims in the world. Despite all this, some people are arguing that by singling out a handful of countries whose populations are predominantly Muslim, the ban is a de facto targeting based on religion. Because of this, earlier orders are relevant and it's not wrong to ask what it is about this one that is so wrong when its tests for application are either identical or very similar to those of earlier orders.
Look, Trump was pretty ham-fisted in this whole thing, and people were right to give him grief for bringing up religion in this context during the campaign. Bringing it up in the earlier versions of the EO wasn't as egregious, but it was good it's been removed entirely. Now that it's completely out of the EO, it's time for anti-Trump people to pick a new battle - there is way, way, waaaaay too much earlier precedent in support of this EO, such that it's hard to argue against this one while not calling out numerous past presidents from both parties without being completely disingenuous. People against Trump should pat themselves on the back for making him correct a mistake, but now it's really time to move on to something else.
Agreed, but I think the point is just that the argument that it's a de facto ban based solely or primarily on religion is extremely weak at this point*, such that this case ends up being essentially identical to prior rulings in favor of presidential powers and national security.
* The key points are that (a) the EO in the lawsuit doesn't mention religion, (b) it doesn't affect the vast majority of Muslims in the world, and (c) the EO potentially affects people who aren't Muslims too. It seems like a stretch to argue that, as written, it's a Muslim ban.
I dunno, the EO doesn't mention religion and it doesn't affect the vast majority of Muslims - approximately one billion Muslims around the world (Google says there are 1.2b Muslims and that the total population of the affected countries is about 180 million), and under Obama when there was a temporary and partial ban on some visitors from those same countries it didn't seem to run afoul of the First Amendment. On top of that, there's also some debate on how much those rights should apply to non-US-citizens anyway, which could drastically reduce the number of people it affects. All of this undermines the argument that it is targeting a religion.
The ban itself is probably stupid (but then again I obviously don't have access to all of the US terrorism intel). It was certainly stupid of Trump to bring religion to it at all during the campaign or since. But at this point the arguments against it on any sort of religious basis seem pretty tenuous. The religious argument now boils down to, "well, despite what the order says and despite what Trump says these days, we all know better and know that in reality this is religiously motivated" which is a weak argument and tough to back up.
Well, please go re-read my comment - this subthread isn't about whether or not Sloot's work was real vs fake, but about the compressibility of media and that, because humans are the consumers of the data, there are additional opportunities for higher compression beyond what one might normally expect.
Unlikely. Yes, compression can take advantage of quirks in human hearing/sight, BUT there are people who do not have the same quirks.
There might be *some* techniques you couldn't take advantage of because there are some people that would be bothered by them, but before you get to that point there are many, many ways in which the original image can differ from the original without people noticing it, and we've been using these techniques for many years (for example, the switch from black and white to color TV was one such case in which engineers were able to make a big optimization based on how the human visual system works). In modern codecs we use similar techniques that emphasize some parts of the color gamut over others, again because of how our eyes work.
Beyond that, there is typically a huge amount of "error" that gets introduced in video compression before it ever becomes discernible - even when you're looking at still frames side by side (i.e. even in a scenario where you can scrutinize the frames more than people can when watching a movie). Long before really bad errors like blocking or color distortion become apparent, there is all sorts of "error" vs the original frame that is not noticeable, and that error is a tradeoff used for extra compression.
In fact, one struggle we have with measuring video compression techniques is that it's really hard to quantify quality as perceived by humans, so there is a constant effort to come up with metrics that accurately reflect perceived quality. Things like PSNR, SSIM, and others roughly correlate to it, but are full of known flaws (i.e. there are cases where, based on SSIM values vs the original, the output quality seems very low but if you do A/B testing with actual humans, they rate the quality as much higher. And vice versa).
These days there's more data in the audio signal of a bluray than in the HD video signal. What did Sloot do with the audio? Back to the silent era?? A few KB of video but still a gigabyte download for a blockbuster?
I'm not quite sure I understand the point of bringing up Blurays in the context of his work since they came about after his death, but typically the amount of audio data relative to the amount of video data is vastly smaller. These days the only time you'd see audio data take up more space is if you just have such an access of space that you don't bother compressing the audio much if at all (e.g. you have 10 language tracks, each is full 7.1 (or more) channels, with little or no compression).
A more realistic comparison would be in a typical MP4 file downloaded from a service, or in video streaming. In either case the ratio of video to audio data is typically 4:1 on the low quality end to 20:1 (or higher) for high quality stuff - in general terms, as the overall total bitrate of the media goes up, the relative portion that is audio goes down because of diminishing returns in increasing audio bitrate and because higher quality video usually correlates to higher resolution and framerates, so the data is just absolutely massive compared to the audio.
For example, one second of raw 4k video is over a gigabyte of data (3840x2160 @ 60fps * RGB = ~1.4GB). By comparison, one second of one channel of raw absurdly HD audio (say, 96kHz, 32-bit samples) is a relatively tiny 3 megabytes. Assuming compression rates for audio and video that are in the same ballpark as each other, in order for the audio to match (not even exceed) the video data in size, you'd need nearly 50 different spoken languages, each with 10 completely independent audio channels per language. Video data is just plain huge.
Haha, the whole reason I started my comment with agreeing that his claims don't hold up is to avoid responses like yours.
Do I believe the claim that any arbitrary movie could be compressed (with any reasonable degree of fidelity) into 8kb using his techniques? No. Does that mean that the whole set of ideas that he was exploring are completely without merit? No. Breakthroughs and major innovation often come from toying around with seemingly crazy ideas and looking at a problem space from a very different angle.
You did enough thinking to get to the point of noticing an obvious problem. Good job. Now you can either get hung up on that and stop thinking, or you can say, "ok, that doesn't quite work, but what if..." and try to build on some of those ideas to see - who knows, you might stumble upon a really creative and innovative breakthrough.
Yup, in another subthread here I mentioned "replay" files from video games, and those are kind of a halfway step towards what you're talking about, and those files are very small compared to what a video stream of the gameplay would require.
You could probably start with cartoon TV shows and then, as the technology improved, eventually use it for more real-world shows. Interestingly, cartoons these days are already most of the way there since they are typically drawn and animated on computers anyway, which means that the individual assets and their animation instructions are already in some form that would support this model. And more and more news shows use virtual and/or augmented reality studios now too.
Content producers wouldn't likely go this route just to achieve lower data transfer rates, but some of the other features it enables might be enough to get them to adopt it. For example, it could lead to much more interactive content that blurs the lines between a show and a game, or individualized shows (e.g. the characters use your kid's name, or your avatar gets to be in the show, etc.), and for sports it'd give fans complete control over camera angles and replays.
And here's a site that lets you experience just one of the ways the brain manufactures some of the detail you perceive: http://www.uniformillusion.com...
A common theme in all of these is that "sight" isn't entirely achieved with our eyes, but our brains get involved very early in the signal processing stage and even make up a lot of info based on what it expects.
Who knows how much of this can be practically applied to things like video compression, but we've already been doing it to a limited degree for years (e.g. x264's psychovisual enhancement setting, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...).
I agree with you, but I do find this whole idea interesting at least, for a couple of reasons:
1) Video codecs today do use some form of the index-to-dictionary technique already (e.g. I-/P-/B-frames), the big differences include the fact that the dictionary is in the file itself (I-frames), and it is not comprehensive for the whole media typically but is instead relevant to only a small portion of frames before a new "dictionary" is created.
So not really the same thing as what Sloot was possibly doing, but it does make me wonder if there is something to the idea of having some builtin library of sample blocks that can be "good enough" replacements for many cases, or maybe act as starting samples that can be transformed into something suitable for various uses, etc. This never escapes the indices-become-too-big problem that you rightly pointed out, but there could very well be merit in the general concept. I doubt it'd yield the massive reduction in bitrates Sloot was apparently hoping to achieve, but maybe it'd be enough for the step in compression improvements? I mean h264/h265 already do some pretty impressive and creative stuff already, so something along these lines isn't completely outlandish.
2) Media compression (and to a lesser extent decompression) always battles the cost tradeoff, both the compute power required but also just the time it takes to do the compression. Because of the complexities of getting a codec adopted everywhere (especially in silicon like in a phone), there is a push to have general purpose codecs that can be used for both live and pre-recorded media, and the type of analysis that is done on each frame or on groups of frames is still driven by available computing power - even when you fiddle with the compression settings between "just get this done in realtime" to "take as long as you want and analyze each frame to death", the difference in time between the two extremes is usually just an order of magnitude or so - a big difference to be sure, but still kind of within the same realm.
The point is just that the types of analysis done are impacted by whatever is considered to be, at that point in time, a feasible amount of computational work. When we think ahead to 5 or 6 orders of magnitude of more compute power (due to faster CPUs or harnessing gazillion-core GPUs or something else entirely), it's hard for us to really grasp what doors that opens in terms of analysis techniques - we can mostly think in terms of what we do today and how we could make that faster, but as we get there we'll also start to take on completely novel approaches simply because things that were too ludicrous to even consider before become worth exploring.
For example, we are still at the dawn of GPU-based video compression (in the sense that right now GPUs can do some things to speed it up, but in/general/ they are just optimizing the CPU-based approach - we're at the early stages of actually have codecs designed for GPUs specifically. Given vastly more computing power, maybe we really could get to the point where the sample blocks mentioned above can be distilled down to equations that produce them (them or a good enough representation). When we get to a relatively absurd amount of compute time available when compressing the video, there's no telling what sorts of new ideas and techniques will be explored.
Or maybe we'll take on a completely different approach to video altogether. I mean, what if we move away from trying to reproduce individual pictures and their pixels and instead start transmitting the scene info? A TV show has a limited number of sets, what if the 3d model/texture info for most everything was transmitted in advance so that during playback all of that information is expressed in a few identifiers and their 3d transforms (ditto for the actors at some point too). We already see this in simplified form in replays from video games - a replay of a minute of gameplay can recreate the scene with perfect fidelity, and yet it is tiny compared to wh
Yeah, I don't think his work would have panned out either, but in theory the idea isn't totally implausible, in part because general purpose media compression is a bit of a special case in that the goal is not to try to have lossless compression, due to the way human audio and visual systems work.
When you look at compression on individual frames, there is a huge amount of acceptable error (differences versus the original) that isn't even discernible when you're looking at still frames side by side, and then when you're playing back the frames at a rate of 30 or 60 or more per second, there's a whole *additional* layer of imperceptible error that can be introduced. And then on top of *that* you can introduce more and more error that is in fact discernible on some level, but it becomes a game of tradeoffs of what you can get away with vs the various costs involved.
Another way to put it is that this isn't just lossy compression, it's lossy compression that takes advantage of quirks in the way human eyes and ears work, and so the limits of compression potentially go far beyond what you might expect in a strict information theory sense (there are still limits of course, they just might be a lot further out than you might expect).
On some level it's kinda like how paintings work - you see a barn with a tree next to it in the shade, and yet when you look at it really close you realize that it's just a couple of strokes of paint - your brain perceived far more detail than is actually there. To be clear, I'm not saying this is how media codecs work, just saying that the goal in media compression isn't necessarily to accurately reproduce the source material, rather the goal is to get people's brains to *perceive* that the final version is an accurate reproduction, and in practice that opens up a lot of possibilities.
Um, you do know that the 'J' in JSON doesn't stand for 'Java', right? JSON is not from Java, nor is it some sort of Java standard.
XML may have its place, but JSON is a pretty good format for storing structured data and is generally far easier to use in a lot of programming languages (no property vs value confusion, it preserves type info for basic data types, maps really well to a lot of languages' native syntax, etc.). It's a great interop format too, is far less "noisy" to read and write, and is wildly popular for client-server communication on the web.
Sorry, I forgot a part of my reply: I think you hit the nail on the head with the voting of their conscience thing. Related to that is the problem that somehow we've reached the point where 'compromise' is a dirty word, and yet compromise and cooperation are the only ways to get things done when there are diverse interests, but candidates often get shamed if they are on record as having worked with "the other side", like that's somehow bad.
Voters and candidates both share some of the blame because it seems common for in primaries/elections the candidates to try to out do each other in their extremity. To me the classic example of this is the "pledge" that some candidates sign and then bully other candidates to sign, e.g. a pledge to never raise taxes. Candidates take all sorts of extreme positions to ensure they get elected, and then they show up at Congress with their hands tied by dumb, extreme promises they made to get elected.
If I can generalize, it seems like the voters in the country have adopted a "winner takes all" mentality, and so they demand candidates that promise not to yield an inch, and are furious with any elected representative who "caves" on anything the voter deems important. This mentality is fatally flawed and we have to get back to the idea that negotiation, give-and-take, and even compromise are the norm, are good, and are productive.
I agree with the broader sense of your post but disagree with the initial premise. Garland would have been confirmed easily.
Maybe so, I dunno - I think Democrats had 44 seats in the Senate (+2 independents) at the time. They would have needed 14-15 Republicans to vote for Garland. IIRC only 9 Reps voted in favor of Sotomayor in 2009 and only 5 voted in favor of Kagan in 2010, and in each vote there was also a Dem who either voted no or who abstained (meaning Dems would have needed to come up with one additional Rep 'yea' vote). Would nearly *one third* of Reps broken rank in 2016? Seems iffy.
You could argue that Garland was perceived as moderate enough that he would have gotten significantly more Rep votes than other recent nominees had, but you could also argue that by 2016 (when Garland was nominated) the Reps were already so fully entrenched in "no" mode that even less of them would have voted in favor of a Dem-nominated candidate, no matter how moderate or qualified. Garland getting enough Rep votes was possible, but by that time him getting zero (or very few) Rep votes was also pretty plausible because by that point in time the vote wouldn't really have been about the nominee - just like how the Gorsuch vote arguably wasn't really about him.
I can see how it could have gone either way, although I still lean towards believing Garland would not have been confirmed. If he had been confirmed, I bet it would have been reallllly close.
I'm not a Republican, but the whole "stolen seat" thing is kind of overstating it because it implies that Garland would have become a justice for the SCOTUS, which is unlikely. It was stupid for the GOP to refuse a vote for Garland (stupid on multiple levels but even just strategically - they could have blocked Garland just via voting, there was no need to take it a step further and refuse a vote altogether and cause so much rancor), but regardless Garland was most likely not going to be on the SC, so the seat was not stolen. Legally it doesn't appear that they did anything technically wrong, but I think it's fair to say that having a vote would have been the right thing to do (notwithstanding some cases in the past where people such as Biden suggested a different course of action).
But let's be clear: both sides have, are, and continue to behave like children. Is what the GOP did stupid? You bet! Is the Dem handling of Gorsuch stupid? Most definitely. It's worth noting that the GOP senators in the past voted to seat justices that were quite liberal, but in the end relented because the candidate was qualified and there was not a good reason not to. With Gorsuch there's no real debate that he is very qualified, and yet few Dems voted for him - they voted against purely as retaliation.
And so the Dems did something stupid in retaliation for something stupid the Reps did. And the Reps did that stupid thing because of what Dems did to them before that. And the Dems did that thing because of what the Reps did even earlier. It's been going on for so long that we're at the point where neither side can claim any sort of moral high ground - it's pure, deep-rooted, partisan politics, and anyone who tries to argue that one of those two sides is better-behaving than the other is turning a blind eye to past events.
To everyone who is frustrated by this, you have to realize that Dem and Rep are two sides of the same coin. Both are almost comically hypocritical and neither consistently acts in the best interest of the USA. They have reached the point where so much of their identity is defined by not being the other side that I don't think there is any way for either party to fix themselves.
I watched a lot of the Gorsuch hearings and I came away with two main conclusions: (1) Gorsuch would make a great justice - I don't agree with him on various points, but he's sane and sincere and intelligent and it's not hard to imagine him being a fair judge. (2) The senators from both major parties are complete morons. So much pettiness and shallow posturing. So much snide smirking and pretentiousness. It was embarrassing for both parties.
It's time we moved the conversation away from "Reps are bad" vs "Dems are bad" because that will get us nowhere. Both are terrible and possibly beyond repair. But as long as we allow ourselves to believe that one side is acting in good faith while the other side is not, we will make zero progress. Both are incredibly corrupt. Both major parties have a list of "sins" so long that neither should be allowed in power.
We still go to the theater occasionally - it's kinda fun if done once in awhile and the theaters near me don't tend to have the "problem people", and I like movie theater popcorn - but watching from the convenience and comfort of my home is just really, really tough to beat.
The weakness of this list is itself a testament to why people like to watch stuff at home.
Pro-tip: to be a really effective troll, and to gain the most enjoyment from trolling, you need to draw out the conversation a bit more, and to do that you can't just completely ignore all the points in a person's reply, otherwise the other person will interpret that as you having no reading comprehension ability (and so they'll walk away because any attempt at conversation is pointless) or they'll know right away that you're a troll (same outcome).
You gotta lead them along, feigning that you're considering their viewpoints, and that you're always right there, just on the cusp of agreeing to - or at least appreciating - the alternate point of view... but needing just a little more convincing. Repeat for a few rounds of back-and-forth (or until a more interesting victim comes along), all the while leading the conversation further and further away from the point or from rational thinking. The longer you have them engaged, the zanier you can get without them walking away (because the more they invest in you, the harder it is for them to realize it's been a complete waste of time), but even then to keep it going you need to still maintain the pretense of actual debate.
It's not just a skill, it's also an art. Focus on your subtlety and patience, and with practice you'll master it - I believe in you, you can do it! Have a great day!
Just curious, have you tried the latest gen of VR? Because I've tried the Rift and the Vive on tons of people (basically large swaths of my neighborhood), almost none of which are tech geeks, and not a single person has had any bit of motion sickness. From young kids to people in their 70s, all of them were blown away by the experience, and nobody got sick.
The main reason IMHO, besides the much improved tech, is that very few VR experiences are creating the situation you describe, where there is a disconnect between physical and virtual motion. A lot of work has been done to develop techniques for moving the user in ways that don't violate what the user's body thinks is happening. It's an area of ongoing research, but already some pretty effective techniques have been discovered. So while it's true that a lot of people can't stomach a roller coaster VR experience, there are also tons and tons of VR experiences that work just fine without inducing nausea.
I don't think VR or AR is going to have the exclusive hold on the future because they both have their usefulness. Further, there is so much overlap in the technical needs that ultimately both will probably be delivered to consumes in the same device anyway (e.g. an AR headset with a removable opaque covering over the eyes that you can put on for a VR experience).
(P.S. As to the OP's question: Vive wins this round, but only slightly now that the Rift has finally released hand controllers - the room setup is less convoluted and it deals with user orientation better and allows for other devices to be given tracking sensors - but round 2 could easily go to Rift, we'll see)
Actually, lots of people would miss it - just go ask on on comp.lang.python for example - it's one of the features that many people really prefer about the language. I for one do. I totally get that you might not like it, but to a/lot/ of people not only is it not a negative, it's a big positive.
C'mon, go re-read what I said - not once did I suggest that "everyone" (or anything close to that) was having problems with those things, only pointing out that that is a class of problems that can arise due to having both braces and indentation (which is significant on some level to the human but not the language). Unlike many of the anti-Python posts, I didn't make any claim that this was a major source of bugs, a huge issue, etc.
Anyway, looks like my posting limit is just about up with this story, not sure if/. will let me continue feeding ACs, so thanks for the discussion and have a great day!
*sigh*, no, it's not that at all. I'll assume you're trolling, but for the sake of the discussion: yes, obviously the compiler requires them, but that's purely because that's the way the language was designed. My point - which I'm pretty sure you got - was that if you're coming from a language like Python, you tend to wonder why a language like C++ requires them. As in, you don't see the point of them, that's all.
I guess so? I dunno - somewhat ironically, I do *all* of my Python development in vim and I have no special plugins or anything that assist with it other than the native indent stuff, and it's only with other languages (Java/.Net/ObjC/C++) that I feel the need for a full IDE.
Maybe that's for other reasons though (like other languages being more verbose or something). I just find it interesting that in the scenario in which you feel I should really need the aid of a good tool is where I use the most rudimentary development environment.:) Again, I move chunks of code around all the time, so it seems like I should be running into this issue constantly and yet... it doesn't happen. I don't consider myself some superstar dev, I don't consider myself lucky, so I'm at a loss to explain it, especially when the same is true of all of the other people I've worked with that use Python as well. Life's mysteries I guess!
People that think braces and statement terminators are problematic have never used a good auto-formatter.
Hmm, that seems like a pretty sweeping generalization, no? I've used every major IDE out there too, and I don't dev in just Python. As noted earlier, my dislike of braces is that they are noise, and more subtly, they introduce this problem where the block structure indicator that actually matters to the tool (the braces) is a weaker indicator than the one people naturally see more strongly (the indentation - the "shape" of the code is a stronger indicator of structure than some relatively small symbols).
I'm genuinely confused by people who think that cutting and pasting a few lines in problematic in Python. That sort of thing is what people do all day, every day... and somehow it's not causing widespread problems or anything close to it. Even copying and pasting from websites works well (although I find there aren't many real world cases where anyone copies and pastes code verbatim off the web, especially anything more than a few lines).
Anyway, all I can do is reiterate that I've used Python for decades, and watched others - of all skill levels - use Python for decades, and this simply isn't a problem that occurs with any sort of regularity (like I mentioned elsewhere, I can't actually remember the last time I/ever/ saw this happen in practice). Because of this, I really struggle to reconcile lots of first hand experience to the contrary with people who assert it's a major problem (or even a minor problem that occurs with any sort of regularity). Any suggestions?
Hmm, no, that's not what I said (or meant). Rather, when I go to a language like C++, the braces feel entirely superfluous, which begs the question: why are they here? Even with the IDE doing a lot of the work to keep them in sync with the indentation (which in itself is pretty telling), they still feel like completely unnecessary noise.
All languages have things you do that aren't really for your benefit as the developer and are there because the language or other tools need them, and that's a source of friction and too much of that makes it tedious to use that language. Remember in the old days when in C you had to put all your variables at the start of a function? Despite a few who would claim that it aided in "organization" or something, the fact of the matter is that it was because the tool chain just wasn't smart enough yet. Not a big deal, but a case where you're doing stuff not because it helps you, but because the language requires it. For me, curly braces are another example of that, that's all. If you like 'em, great, more power to you. But Python is by no means broken or bad or poorly designed for not having them.
I don't miss them in Python, and in languages that use them I really wish they weren't there.
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Well, no, it *is* a question of what the EO references. The Court is ruling on the legality of the EO as it is currently written, because that's really what they have jurisdiction to do.
For them to broaden the scope to things like their perception of intent would be to wildly exceed their authority and destroy what little remains of the checks and balances, making the judiciary branch way too powerful. I mean, while they are at it, they could start to oversee the Legislative branch too, right? Strike down some law, not because the law was bad, but because the Senator that sponsored it was caught saying that he didn't care about the bill itself and just wanted it to pass because it had some unrelated stuff attached to the bill that would be beneficial for his constituents. :)
Regardless, my point wasn't one of whether or not intent would be considered to any degree, it was just that basing an argument on someone else's intent puts you in an extremely weak position, that's all. Even if your view on an issue is the "correct" view, if you arguments are based on the other side's intent, then you just have a much harder time making your case.
I mean, even with a recording of someone saying something you can never really "prove" intent, so the most you can do is get the ruling body to agree that making an assumption is okay and that your assumption is reasonable and the one they should agree with. And then on top of that, it's too easy for the other party to (truthfully or not) say they changed their mind along the way, that they heard from the people, that they misspoke, that they now understand the issue better, etc., etc., etc. Again, it could all be total lies, but it'd all serve to weaken your case - if you've pinned your argument on the other guy's motivations, then it's a much easier position for him to defend.
True, and those are good articles, but they merely take a look at differences in scope, duration, etc. in this set of travel restrictions vs earlier ones. They don't do anything to support the argument that the current EO violates any constitutional rights while the earlier ones did not. (Also, I know it's obvious, but the Constitution guarantees the rights of U.S. citizens - it makes no guarantees for others.)
The version of the EO in the lawsuit does not mention religion, it affects more than just Muslims, and it at most affects a tiny sliver of all Muslims in the world. Despite all this, some people are arguing that by singling out a handful of countries whose populations are predominantly Muslim, the ban is a de facto targeting based on religion. Because of this, earlier orders are relevant and it's not wrong to ask what it is about this one that is so wrong when its tests for application are either identical or very similar to those of earlier orders.
Look, Trump was pretty ham-fisted in this whole thing, and people were right to give him grief for bringing up religion in this context during the campaign. Bringing it up in the earlier versions of the EO wasn't as egregious, but it was good it's been removed entirely. Now that it's completely out of the EO, it's time for anti-Trump people to pick a new battle - there is way, way, waaaaay too much earlier precedent in support of this EO, such that it's hard to argue against this one while not calling out numerous past presidents from both parties without being completely disingenuous. People against Trump should pat themselves on the back for making him correct a mistake, but now it's really time to move on to something else.
Agreed, but I think the point is just that the argument that it's a de facto ban based solely or primarily on religion is extremely weak at this point*, such that this case ends up being essentially identical to prior rulings in favor of presidential powers and national security.
* The key points are that (a) the EO in the lawsuit doesn't mention religion, (b) it doesn't affect the vast majority of Muslims in the world, and (c) the EO potentially affects people who aren't Muslims too. It seems like a stretch to argue that, as written, it's a Muslim ban.
I dunno, the EO doesn't mention religion and it doesn't affect the vast majority of Muslims - approximately one billion Muslims around the world (Google says there are 1.2b Muslims and that the total population of the affected countries is about 180 million), and under Obama when there was a temporary and partial ban on some visitors from those same countries it didn't seem to run afoul of the First Amendment. On top of that, there's also some debate on how much those rights should apply to non-US-citizens anyway, which could drastically reduce the number of people it affects. All of this undermines the argument that it is targeting a religion.
The ban itself is probably stupid (but then again I obviously don't have access to all of the US terrorism intel). It was certainly stupid of Trump to bring religion to it at all during the campaign or since. But at this point the arguments against it on any sort of religious basis seem pretty tenuous. The religious argument now boils down to, "well, despite what the order says and despite what Trump says these days, we all know better and know that in reality this is religiously motivated" which is a weak argument and tough to back up.
Well, please go re-read my comment - this subthread isn't about whether or not Sloot's work was real vs fake, but about the compressibility of media and that, because humans are the consumers of the data, there are additional opportunities for higher compression beyond what one might normally expect.
Unlikely. Yes, compression can take advantage of quirks in human hearing/sight, BUT there are people who do not have the same quirks.
There might be *some* techniques you couldn't take advantage of because there are some people that would be bothered by them, but before you get to that point there are many, many ways in which the original image can differ from the original without people noticing it, and we've been using these techniques for many years (for example, the switch from black and white to color TV was one such case in which engineers were able to make a big optimization based on how the human visual system works). In modern codecs we use similar techniques that emphasize some parts of the color gamut over others, again because of how our eyes work.
Beyond that, there is typically a huge amount of "error" that gets introduced in video compression before it ever becomes discernible - even when you're looking at still frames side by side (i.e. even in a scenario where you can scrutinize the frames more than people can when watching a movie). Long before really bad errors like blocking or color distortion become apparent, there is all sorts of "error" vs the original frame that is not noticeable, and that error is a tradeoff used for extra compression.
In fact, one struggle we have with measuring video compression techniques is that it's really hard to quantify quality as perceived by humans, so there is a constant effort to come up with metrics that accurately reflect perceived quality. Things like PSNR, SSIM, and others roughly correlate to it, but are full of known flaws (i.e. there are cases where, based on SSIM values vs the original, the output quality seems very low but if you do A/B testing with actual humans, they rate the quality as much higher. And vice versa).
These days there's more data in the audio signal of a bluray than in the HD video signal. What did Sloot do with the audio? Back to the silent era?? A few KB of video but still a gigabyte download for a blockbuster?
I'm not quite sure I understand the point of bringing up Blurays in the context of his work since they came about after his death, but typically the amount of audio data relative to the amount of video data is vastly smaller. These days the only time you'd see audio data take up more space is if you just have such an access of space that you don't bother compressing the audio much if at all (e.g. you have 10 language tracks, each is full 7.1 (or more) channels, with little or no compression).
A more realistic comparison would be in a typical MP4 file downloaded from a service, or in video streaming. In either case the ratio of video to audio data is typically 4:1 on the low quality end to 20:1 (or higher) for high quality stuff - in general terms, as the overall total bitrate of the media goes up, the relative portion that is audio goes down because of diminishing returns in increasing audio bitrate and because higher quality video usually correlates to higher resolution and framerates, so the data is just absolutely massive compared to the audio.
For example, one second of raw 4k video is over a gigabyte of data (3840x2160 @ 60fps * RGB = ~1.4GB). By comparison, one second of one channel of raw absurdly HD audio (say, 96kHz, 32-bit samples) is a relatively tiny 3 megabytes. Assuming compression rates for audio and video that are in the same ballpark as each other, in order for the audio to match (not even exceed) the video data in size, you'd need nearly 50 different spoken languages, each with 10 completely independent audio channels per language. Video data is just plain huge.
Haha, the whole reason I started my comment with agreeing that his claims don't hold up is to avoid responses like yours.
Do I believe the claim that any arbitrary movie could be compressed (with any reasonable degree of fidelity) into 8kb using his techniques? No.
Does that mean that the whole set of ideas that he was exploring are completely without merit? No. Breakthroughs and major innovation often come from toying around with seemingly crazy ideas and looking at a problem space from a very different angle.
You did enough thinking to get to the point of noticing an obvious problem. Good job. Now you can either get hung up on that and stop thinking, or you can say, "ok, that doesn't quite work, but what if..." and try to build on some of those ideas to see - who knows, you might stumble upon a really creative and innovative breakthrough.
Yup, in another subthread here I mentioned "replay" files from video games, and those are kind of a halfway step towards what you're talking about, and those files are very small compared to what a video stream of the gameplay would require.
You could probably start with cartoon TV shows and then, as the technology improved, eventually use it for more real-world shows. Interestingly, cartoons these days are already most of the way there since they are typically drawn and animated on computers anyway, which means that the individual assets and their animation instructions are already in some form that would support this model. And more and more news shows use virtual and/or augmented reality studios now too.
Content producers wouldn't likely go this route just to achieve lower data transfer rates, but some of the other features it enables might be enough to get them to adopt it. For example, it could lead to much more interactive content that blurs the lines between a show and a game, or individualized shows (e.g. the characters use your kid's name, or your avatar gets to be in the show, etc.), and for sports it'd give fans complete control over camera angles and replays.
Yes, and it's some really neat stuff - research talked about in these articles is fascinating:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
https://medicalxpress.com/news...
And here's a site that lets you experience just one of the ways the brain manufactures some of the detail you perceive: http://www.uniformillusion.com...
A common theme in all of these is that "sight" isn't entirely achieved with our eyes, but our brains get involved very early in the signal processing stage and even make up a lot of info based on what it expects.
Who knows how much of this can be practically applied to things like video compression, but we've already been doing it to a limited degree for years (e.g. x264's psychovisual enhancement setting, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...).
I agree with you, but I do find this whole idea interesting at least, for a couple of reasons:
1) Video codecs today do use some form of the index-to-dictionary technique already (e.g. I-/P-/B-frames), the big differences include the fact that the dictionary is in the file itself (I-frames), and it is not comprehensive for the whole media typically but is instead relevant to only a small portion of frames before a new "dictionary" is created.
So not really the same thing as what Sloot was possibly doing, but it does make me wonder if there is something to the idea of having some builtin library of sample blocks that can be "good enough" replacements for many cases, or maybe act as starting samples that can be transformed into something suitable for various uses, etc. This never escapes the indices-become-too-big problem that you rightly pointed out, but there could very well be merit in the general concept. I doubt it'd yield the massive reduction in bitrates Sloot was apparently hoping to achieve, but maybe it'd be enough for the step in compression improvements? I mean h264/h265 already do some pretty impressive and creative stuff already, so something along these lines isn't completely outlandish.
2) Media compression (and to a lesser extent decompression) always battles the cost tradeoff, both the compute power required but also just the time it takes to do the compression. Because of the complexities of getting a codec adopted everywhere (especially in silicon like in a phone), there is a push to have general purpose codecs that can be used for both live and pre-recorded media, and the type of analysis that is done on each frame or on groups of frames is still driven by available computing power - even when you fiddle with the compression settings between "just get this done in realtime" to "take as long as you want and analyze each frame to death", the difference in time between the two extremes is usually just an order of magnitude or so - a big difference to be sure, but still kind of within the same realm.
The point is just that the types of analysis done are impacted by whatever is considered to be, at that point in time, a feasible amount of computational work. When we think ahead to 5 or 6 orders of magnitude of more compute power (due to faster CPUs or harnessing gazillion-core GPUs or something else entirely), it's hard for us to really grasp what doors that opens in terms of analysis techniques - we can mostly think in terms of what we do today and how we could make that faster, but as we get there we'll also start to take on completely novel approaches simply because things that were too ludicrous to even consider before become worth exploring.
For example, we are still at the dawn of GPU-based video compression (in the sense that right now GPUs can do some things to speed it up, but in /general/ they are just optimizing the CPU-based approach - we're at the early stages of actually have codecs designed for GPUs specifically. Given vastly more computing power, maybe we really could get to the point where the sample blocks mentioned above can be distilled down to equations that produce them (them or a good enough representation). When we get to a relatively absurd amount of compute time available when compressing the video, there's no telling what sorts of new ideas and techniques will be explored.
Or maybe we'll take on a completely different approach to video altogether. I mean, what if we move away from trying to reproduce individual pictures and their pixels and instead start transmitting the scene info? A TV show has a limited number of sets, what if the 3d model/texture info for most everything was transmitted in advance so that during playback all of that information is expressed in a few identifiers and their 3d transforms (ditto for the actors at some point too). We already see this in simplified form in replays from video games - a replay of a minute of gameplay can recreate the scene with perfect fidelity, and yet it is tiny compared to wh
Yeah, I don't think his work would have panned out either, but in theory the idea isn't totally implausible, in part because general purpose media compression is a bit of a special case in that the goal is not to try to have lossless compression, due to the way human audio and visual systems work.
When you look at compression on individual frames, there is a huge amount of acceptable error (differences versus the original) that isn't even discernible when you're looking at still frames side by side, and then when you're playing back the frames at a rate of 30 or 60 or more per second, there's a whole *additional* layer of imperceptible error that can be introduced. And then on top of *that* you can introduce more and more error that is in fact discernible on some level, but it becomes a game of tradeoffs of what you can get away with vs the various costs involved.
Another way to put it is that this isn't just lossy compression, it's lossy compression that takes advantage of quirks in the way human eyes and ears work, and so the limits of compression potentially go far beyond what you might expect in a strict information theory sense (there are still limits of course, they just might be a lot further out than you might expect).
On some level it's kinda like how paintings work - you see a barn with a tree next to it in the shade, and yet when you look at it really close you realize that it's just a couple of strokes of paint - your brain perceived far more detail than is actually there. To be clear, I'm not saying this is how media codecs work, just saying that the goal in media compression isn't necessarily to accurately reproduce the source material, rather the goal is to get people's brains to *perceive* that the final version is an accurate reproduction, and in practice that opens up a lot of possibilities.
LOL, nice trolling - well played. Have a great day!
Um, you do know that the 'J' in JSON doesn't stand for 'Java', right? JSON is not from Java, nor is it some sort of Java standard.
XML may have its place, but JSON is a pretty good format for storing structured data and is generally far easier to use in a lot of programming languages (no property vs value confusion, it preserves type info for basic data types, maps really well to a lot of languages' native syntax, etc.). It's a great interop format too, is far less "noisy" to read and write, and is wildly popular for client-server communication on the web.
Sorry, I forgot a part of my reply: I think you hit the nail on the head with the voting of their conscience thing. Related to that is the problem that somehow we've reached the point where 'compromise' is a dirty word, and yet compromise and cooperation are the only ways to get things done when there are diverse interests, but candidates often get shamed if they are on record as having worked with "the other side", like that's somehow bad.
Voters and candidates both share some of the blame because it seems common for in primaries/elections the candidates to try to out do each other in their extremity. To me the classic example of this is the "pledge" that some candidates sign and then bully other candidates to sign, e.g. a pledge to never raise taxes. Candidates take all sorts of extreme positions to ensure they get elected, and then they show up at Congress with their hands tied by dumb, extreme promises they made to get elected.
If I can generalize, it seems like the voters in the country have adopted a "winner takes all" mentality, and so they demand candidates that promise not to yield an inch, and are furious with any elected representative who "caves" on anything the voter deems important. This mentality is fatally flawed and we have to get back to the idea that negotiation, give-and-take, and even compromise are the norm, are good, and are productive.
I agree with the broader sense of your post but disagree with the initial premise. Garland would have been confirmed easily.
Maybe so, I dunno - I think Democrats had 44 seats in the Senate (+2 independents) at the time. They would have needed 14-15 Republicans to vote for Garland. IIRC only 9 Reps voted in favor of Sotomayor in 2009 and only 5 voted in favor of Kagan in 2010, and in each vote there was also a Dem who either voted no or who abstained (meaning Dems would have needed to come up with one additional Rep 'yea' vote). Would nearly *one third* of Reps broken rank in 2016? Seems iffy.
You could argue that Garland was perceived as moderate enough that he would have gotten significantly more Rep votes than other recent nominees had, but you could also argue that by 2016 (when Garland was nominated) the Reps were already so fully entrenched in "no" mode that even less of them would have voted in favor of a Dem-nominated candidate, no matter how moderate or qualified. Garland getting enough Rep votes was possible, but by that time him getting zero (or very few) Rep votes was also pretty plausible because by that point in time the vote wouldn't really have been about the nominee - just like how the Gorsuch vote arguably wasn't really about him.
I can see how it could have gone either way, although I still lean towards believing Garland would not have been confirmed. If he had been confirmed, I bet it would have been reallllly close.
I'm not a Republican, but the whole "stolen seat" thing is kind of overstating it because it implies that Garland would have become a justice for the SCOTUS, which is unlikely. It was stupid for the GOP to refuse a vote for Garland (stupid on multiple levels but even just strategically - they could have blocked Garland just via voting, there was no need to take it a step further and refuse a vote altogether and cause so much rancor), but regardless Garland was most likely not going to be on the SC, so the seat was not stolen. Legally it doesn't appear that they did anything technically wrong, but I think it's fair to say that having a vote would have been the right thing to do (notwithstanding some cases in the past where people such as Biden suggested a different course of action).
But let's be clear: both sides have, are, and continue to behave like children. Is what the GOP did stupid? You bet! Is the Dem handling of Gorsuch stupid? Most definitely. It's worth noting that the GOP senators in the past voted to seat justices that were quite liberal, but in the end relented because the candidate was qualified and there was not a good reason not to. With Gorsuch there's no real debate that he is very qualified, and yet few Dems voted for him - they voted against purely as retaliation.
And so the Dems did something stupid in retaliation for something stupid the Reps did. And the Reps did that stupid thing because of what Dems did to them before that. And the Dems did that thing because of what the Reps did even earlier. It's been going on for so long that we're at the point where neither side can claim any sort of moral high ground - it's pure, deep-rooted, partisan politics, and anyone who tries to argue that one of those two sides is better-behaving than the other is turning a blind eye to past events.
To everyone who is frustrated by this, you have to realize that Dem and Rep are two sides of the same coin. Both are almost comically hypocritical and neither consistently acts in the best interest of the USA. They have reached the point where so much of their identity is defined by not being the other side that I don't think there is any way for either party to fix themselves.
I watched a lot of the Gorsuch hearings and I came away with two main conclusions: (1) Gorsuch would make a great justice - I don't agree with him on various points, but he's sane and sincere and intelligent and it's not hard to imagine him being a fair judge. (2) The senators from both major parties are complete morons. So much pettiness and shallow posturing. So much snide smirking and pretentiousness. It was embarrassing for both parties.
It's time we moved the conversation away from "Reps are bad" vs "Dems are bad" because that will get us nowhere. Both are terrible and possibly beyond repair. But as long as we allow ourselves to believe that one side is acting in good faith while the other side is not, we will make zero progress. Both are incredibly corrupt. Both major parties have a list of "sins" so long that neither should be allowed in power.
Hey, I think you're right. They should add:
#11. A night at the cinema is a fun time for the ladies to put on their best dresses and for the men to don their most dapper suits and ties.
... then they are screwed.
We still go to the theater occasionally - it's kinda fun if done once in awhile and the theaters near me don't tend to have the "problem people", and I like movie theater popcorn - but watching from the convenience and comfort of my home is just really, really tough to beat.
The weakness of this list is itself a testament to why people like to watch stuff at home.
Pro-tip: to be a really effective troll, and to gain the most enjoyment from trolling, you need to draw out the conversation a bit more, and to do that you can't just completely ignore all the points in a person's reply, otherwise the other person will interpret that as you having no reading comprehension ability (and so they'll walk away because any attempt at conversation is pointless) or they'll know right away that you're a troll (same outcome).
You gotta lead them along, feigning that you're considering their viewpoints, and that you're always right there, just on the cusp of agreeing to - or at least appreciating - the alternate point of view... but needing just a little more convincing. Repeat for a few rounds of back-and-forth (or until a more interesting victim comes along), all the while leading the conversation further and further away from the point or from rational thinking. The longer you have them engaged, the zanier you can get without them walking away (because the more they invest in you, the harder it is for them to realize it's been a complete waste of time), but even then to keep it going you need to still maintain the pretense of actual debate.
It's not just a skill, it's also an art. Focus on your subtlety and patience, and with practice you'll master it - I believe in you, you can do it! Have a great day!
Just curious, have you tried the latest gen of VR? Because I've tried the Rift and the Vive on tons of people (basically large swaths of my neighborhood), almost none of which are tech geeks, and not a single person has had any bit of motion sickness. From young kids to people in their 70s, all of them were blown away by the experience, and nobody got sick.
The main reason IMHO, besides the much improved tech, is that very few VR experiences are creating the situation you describe, where there is a disconnect between physical and virtual motion. A lot of work has been done to develop techniques for moving the user in ways that don't violate what the user's body thinks is happening. It's an area of ongoing research, but already some pretty effective techniques have been discovered. So while it's true that a lot of people can't stomach a roller coaster VR experience, there are also tons and tons of VR experiences that work just fine without inducing nausea.
I don't think VR or AR is going to have the exclusive hold on the future because they both have their usefulness. Further, there is so much overlap in the technical needs that ultimately both will probably be delivered to consumes in the same device anyway (e.g. an AR headset with a removable opaque covering over the eyes that you can put on for a VR experience).
(P.S. As to the OP's question: Vive wins this round, but only slightly now that the Rift has finally released hand controllers - the room setup is less convoluted and it deals with user orientation better and allows for other devices to be given tracking sensors - but round 2 could easily go to Rift, we'll see)
Actually, lots of people would miss it - just go ask on on comp.lang.python for example - it's one of the features that many people really prefer about the language. I for one do. I totally get that you might not like it, but to a /lot/ of people not only is it not a negative, it's a big positive.
C'mon, go re-read what I said - not once did I suggest that "everyone" (or anything close to that) was having problems with those things, only pointing out that that is a class of problems that can arise due to having both braces and indentation (which is significant on some level to the human but not the language). Unlike many of the anti-Python posts, I didn't make any claim that this was a major source of bugs, a huge issue, etc.
Anyway, looks like my posting limit is just about up with this story, not sure if /. will let me continue feeding ACs, so thanks for the discussion and have a great day!
*sigh*, no, it's not that at all. I'll assume you're trolling, but for the sake of the discussion: yes, obviously the compiler requires them, but that's purely because that's the way the language was designed. My point - which I'm pretty sure you got - was that if you're coming from a language like Python, you tend to wonder why a language like C++ requires them. As in, you don't see the point of them, that's all.
I guess so? I dunno - somewhat ironically, I do *all* of my Python development in vim and I have no special plugins or anything that assist with it other than the native indent stuff, and it's only with other languages (Java/.Net/ObjC/C++) that I feel the need for a full IDE.
Maybe that's for other reasons though (like other languages being more verbose or something). I just find it interesting that in the scenario in which you feel I should really need the aid of a good tool is where I use the most rudimentary development environment. :) Again, I move chunks of code around all the time, so it seems like I should be running into this issue constantly and yet... it doesn't happen. I don't consider myself some superstar dev, I don't consider myself lucky, so I'm at a loss to explain it, especially when the same is true of all of the other people I've worked with that use Python as well. Life's mysteries I guess!
People that think braces and statement terminators are problematic have never used a good auto-formatter.
Hmm, that seems like a pretty sweeping generalization, no? I've used every major IDE out there too, and I don't dev in just Python. As noted earlier, my dislike of braces is that they are noise, and more subtly, they introduce this problem where the block structure indicator that actually matters to the tool (the braces) is a weaker indicator than the one people naturally see more strongly (the indentation - the "shape" of the code is a stronger indicator of structure than some relatively small symbols).
I'm genuinely confused by people who think that cutting and pasting a few lines in problematic in Python. That sort of thing is what people do all day, every day... and somehow it's not causing widespread problems or anything close to it. Even copying and pasting from websites works well (although I find there aren't many real world cases where anyone copies and pastes code verbatim off the web, especially anything more than a few lines).
Anyway, all I can do is reiterate that I've used Python for decades, and watched others - of all skill levels - use Python for decades, and this simply isn't a problem that occurs with any sort of regularity (like I mentioned elsewhere, I can't actually remember the last time I /ever/ saw this happen in practice). Because of this, I really struggle to reconcile lots of first hand experience to the contrary with people who assert it's a major problem (or even a minor problem that occurs with any sort of regularity). Any suggestions?
Hmm, no, that's not what I said (or meant). Rather, when I go to a language like C++, the braces feel entirely superfluous, which begs the question: why are they here? Even with the IDE doing a lot of the work to keep them in sync with the indentation (which in itself is pretty telling), they still feel like completely unnecessary noise.
All languages have things you do that aren't really for your benefit as the developer and are there because the language or other tools need them, and that's a source of friction and too much of that makes it tedious to use that language. Remember in the old days when in C you had to put all your variables at the start of a function? Despite a few who would claim that it aided in "organization" or something, the fact of the matter is that it was because the tool chain just wasn't smart enough yet. Not a big deal, but a case where you're doing stuff not because it helps you, but because the language requires it. For me, curly braces are another example of that, that's all. If you like 'em, great, more power to you. But Python is by no means broken or bad or poorly designed for not having them.
I don't miss them in Python, and in languages that use them I really wish they weren't there.