Ummm, are you being dense on purpose? THe original poster said that if it weren't for the cutbacks made by the conservative government, Ontario would have been able to do things like monitor world health trends. Your reply only supports this position.
Don't be naive. The lack of monitoring in the Ontario health ministry had little to do with funding and everything to do with lack of motivation and perhaps even a lack of understanding regarding their need to respond. They simply did not think to monitor WHO reports coming out of Asia, and if they did, their response to these reports was not significant enough to stop the disease before it began spreading. I mean, honestly, how much does it cost to have some guys reading WHO reports and sending out warnings to health officials about anything suspicious? Using money as an excuse for their poor performance is just that, an excuse... and a baseless one (and a convenient one... "Oh, we couldn't do our job because, err, we didn't have enough money! Yeah! Blame the Premier! It's his fault!" Puhlease...)
Re:but for how long?
on
SARS Contained
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Okay, this is starting to piss me off. Oh no, Monkeypox! Ahhh! It's related to smallpox! No! Wait, it's also related to chickenpox and is about as deadly. Yeah, but it gives you nasty sores! Which go away after a while... so the latest media scare is about a disease closely related to a common childhood infection which gives you sores and then goes away. How's that for media hysteria?
Conversely, the past decade in BC has been a big-government (i.e. pro-spending) one, until recently (when a large fraction of the public sector was amputated). However, it has a more fully funded health care system, and was able to quickly react to the news of a new disease.
With Ontario's "immune system" essentially crippled, it fell on other provinces (including BC, where the responsible corona virus DNA was first sequenced) and the federal government to pick up the slack.
The relative merits of a mainly publically or mainly privately funded health care system can be debated, but one thing that any government should realize, regardless of it's political philosophy, is that whatever system it prefers, the one that exists must be fully supported even if it's counter to the party principles.
Damn, don't you hate it when people use the latest media topic to support their favorite political peeve? Note that I don't disagree (I happen to support public healthcare) but, really now...
The fact is, the reason BC fared better than Ontario during the SARs crisis is they were simply better informed and reacted more efficiently. Why? Because they're the friggin' Canadian gate to the Pacific Rim! Knowing this, they keep a pretty sharp eye out on health reports coming out of the Asian continent. As a result, while Ontario was blissfully ignorant, the BC health ministry was keeping a close watch on various WHO reports coming out which documented a mysterious upper-respiratory infection in China.
In fact, before the SARs scare broke, BC had sent out orders to their health care workers telling them to isolate any individuals exhibiting symptoms of "atypical pneumonia". As a result, when the first infected individuals arrived in BC, they were immediately quarantined. Contrast this with the Ontario case, where their first infected patient was placed in a room with two other patients who were later discovered to have contracted the disease.
In short, the failure of the Ontario health system during the SARs scare had little to do with its level of privatization and everything to do with their lack of diligence in monitoring world health trends. Hopefully they'll learn from this experience.
* BTW, in case your wondering, the information in this post was primarily from a CBC report on the this very topic.
Wait, let me get this straight, your assertion is that the benchmark is invalid because they "probably compared the i386 generated code against the one fot he G5". "Probably" IOW, you have no freakin' clue if this is the case and are just spouting off. Brilliant! Worse yet, you got a +1 Insightful...
Well, I do understand the anger, in that the minute some new technology comes out to defeat government-imposed censorship, people start crying out "Think of the children!" and "What about pedophiles" and so on and so on... it gets a little tiresome after a while.:)
Hmm... so you say you might need to encode the video due to bandwidth limitations. Well, that throws out using straight X (what you're describing) (and, no, compressing the X protocol is not sufficient... it doesn't meet compression requirements AND it introduces latency for which you'd have to compensate).
So, we'll have to encode the video at the source and decode at the sink. Oh, and then there's audio. We gotta transport that, somehow, too... sending it in the raw would be silly, since bandwidth is still an issue. Well, we'll encode and decode that, too. And while we're at it, we might as well write some software to set up the transport pipe, enable the capture device, encoders, decoders, etc, etc...
And what does that have to do with EU laws regarding reverse engineering? I mean, yeah, software patents bad, etc, etc, but what does that have to do with Samba? (And don't get started on what-ifs about Microsoft patenting SMB, Windows file sharing, etc...)
Already been done... well, sorta. The Cassini probe had RTGs (Radioisotope Thermal Generators) as a power source, feeding off of 72 pounds of Plutonium. Of course, the anti-nuclear nuts flipped out about the Cassini mission launching, BUT, as you'd expect, it went off without a hitch (as did many other missions which used RTGs).
I took a compiler course, the superset of all that shit.
LOL! That compiler course is BASED on formal language theory, so I think you probably have the relationship a little confused there. In fact, a compiler course really only gives you a light dusting of the real theory behind formal languages (I would know, I've taken a course in both... I'm certainly no expert in either, but at least I have a little perspective). A class in formal languages not only discusses Chomsky's hierarchy and their associated automata, but also delves into fundamental theories about algorithms and computability, time and space complexity, and so on.
Ahh, excellent point. One forgets the whole civil/criminal split. OTOH, now that the laws have been changed to make copyright violation a criminal act...:)
If you need a 500 page book on regexps, you might want to have a look at a good compiler book (red dragon, etc.) first.
And why would I want to learn about all the various automata (finite state machines, push-down automata, and Turing machines) not to mention all that language parsing crap (top-down versus bottom-up parsing, parse trees, etc, etc), when all I really want to learn is how to exploit a regular expression engine efficiently so I can solve real world problems?
Full non-CFG languages are so much more powerful than any regexp could ever dream of being, and more importantly they can have state.
Yeah, that's called a programming language. And yeah, I could implement any regular expression using a standard programming language, but why would I bother when a regular expression is far more concise and better suited to the job?
It's called a plugin. Every music player these days has some concept of plugin. XMMS has a Flac plugin, and so does Winamp. Seriously, the software side is a total non-issue.
I mean instead of letting the companies attempt to crack down on piracy their own way the companies beg and plead that the US government step in and be the daddy.
Not quite. I hate to say it, but the RIAA is right in that it is the job of law enforcement (and hence government) to enforce the law. And guess what, the law says that copyright violation is illegal (eg, distributing copyrighted works without the consent of the author, with the exception of certain cases outlined in copyright law). Thus, it only stands to reason that the RIAA/MPAA/etc would go to the government to request further assistance in enforcing the laws which already exist.
This is no different than a neighbourhood where there's rampant prostitution or something. The populace complains to law enforcement and they do something about it. It's not up to the people to crack down and enforce the law... that's called vigilantiism.
Of course, whether you believe copyright, in it's present form, is a good thing is a completely different matter. Bad laws should be dealt with legislatively (or via judicial activism, if you believe in that sort of thing). BUT, it is the job of law enforcement (and hence the government) to enforce the laws that they DO pass (I say enforce, in that police should catch criminals. The courts can, and do, shoot down bad law, but that's a secondary function of the legal system).
Actually, true Marxist communism involves a complete and utter lack of government. What you describe is a dictatorship, which is, in reality, what is represented by countries like China and former Soviet Union.
It's a way of living, throwing it aside for the sake of progress is an abomination.
Wow, you sound like an RIAA shill. Face it, the world changes, and guess what, people have to change with it. After all, would you have us exhaust all our oil reserves and continue to pollute the planet in order to keep the petroleum industry going? The fact is, throwing aside obsolete social constructs in the face of change is how humanity evolves.
Oh, I'm aware of this, but you must realize that MANY publications make that mistake. In fact, there are plenty of scientists who use the phrase "degrees Kelvin", despite it being technically incorrect.
Incidentally, your example should probably actually be "500 Kelvins", much like how we refer to Joules, Ohms, Volts, etc.
Thus it collapses instandly and one never witness this state of matter
Umm, the fact that you can't directly observe the existence of the plasma doesn't mean you can't detect its presence (or, to be more precise, that fact that it *was* present). After all, we can't directly observe black holes. The article itself describes how they might infer the existence of the plasma... a difference in the ratios of large hadrons after the collision, compared to lower-energy events, as a result of the plasma condensing back into normal matter (I hope I got that right:). Granted, this isn't nearly as nice as being able to directly observe the phenomenon, but it's certainly something, since we can at least confirm another prediction(s) of the Standard Model.
It's another test of the standard model of physics. If the results aren't as we expect, then the standard model will have to be revised (well, first you'd probably perform the experiment a few more times to verify the result:) in order to accomodate the new findings. It's the same reason scientists placed atomic clocks in orbit to test general relativity... it didn't reveal anything *new*, but it helped to further verify things we already *suspected*. The fact is, a theory is pretty meaningless unless you actually attempt to test its predictions...
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I think you meant 10% smaller or 10% larger... shrinking an image by 90% (or increasing by 110%, ie >2x) is a LOT. ;)
Ummm, are you being dense on purpose? THe original poster said that if it weren't for the cutbacks made by the conservative government, Ontario would have been able to do things like monitor world health trends. Your reply only supports this position.
Don't be naive. The lack of monitoring in the Ontario health ministry had little to do with funding and everything to do with lack of motivation and perhaps even a lack of understanding regarding their need to respond. They simply did not think to monitor WHO reports coming out of Asia, and if they did, their response to these reports was not significant enough to stop the disease before it began spreading. I mean, honestly, how much does it cost to have some guys reading WHO reports and sending out warnings to health officials about anything suspicious? Using money as an excuse for their poor performance is just that, an excuse... and a baseless one (and a convenient one... "Oh, we couldn't do our job because, err, we didn't have enough money! Yeah! Blame the Premier! It's his fault!" Puhlease...)
Okay, this is starting to piss me off. Oh no, Monkeypox! Ahhh! It's related to smallpox! No! Wait, it's also related to chickenpox and is about as deadly. Yeah, but it gives you nasty sores! Which go away after a while... so the latest media scare is about a disease closely related to a common childhood infection which gives you sores and then goes away. How's that for media hysteria?
Conversely, the past decade in BC has been a big-government (i.e. pro-spending) one, until recently (when a large fraction of the public sector was amputated). However, it has a more fully funded health care system, and was able to quickly react to the news of a new disease.
With Ontario's "immune system" essentially crippled, it fell on other provinces (including BC, where the responsible corona virus DNA was first sequenced) and the federal government to pick up the slack.
The relative merits of a mainly publically or mainly privately funded health care system can be debated, but one thing that any government should realize, regardless of it's political philosophy, is that whatever system it prefers, the one that exists must be fully supported even if it's counter to the party principles.
Damn, don't you hate it when people use the latest media topic to support their favorite political peeve? Note that I don't disagree (I happen to support public healthcare) but, really now...
The fact is, the reason BC fared better than Ontario during the SARs crisis is they were simply better informed and reacted more efficiently. Why? Because they're the friggin' Canadian gate to the Pacific Rim! Knowing this, they keep a pretty sharp eye out on health reports coming out of the Asian continent. As a result, while Ontario was blissfully ignorant, the BC health ministry was keeping a close watch on various WHO reports coming out which documented a mysterious upper-respiratory infection in China.
In fact, before the SARs scare broke, BC had sent out orders to their health care workers telling them to isolate any individuals exhibiting symptoms of "atypical pneumonia". As a result, when the first infected individuals arrived in BC, they were immediately quarantined. Contrast this with the Ontario case, where their first infected patient was placed in a room with two other patients who were later discovered to have contracted the disease.
In short, the failure of the Ontario health system during the SARs scare had little to do with its level of privatization and everything to do with their lack of diligence in monitoring world health trends. Hopefully they'll learn from this experience.
* BTW, in case your wondering, the information in this post was primarily from a CBC report on the this very topic.
Wait, let me get this straight, your assertion is that the benchmark is invalid because they "probably compared the i386 generated code against the one fot he G5". "Probably" IOW, you have no freakin' clue if this is the case and are just spouting off. Brilliant! Worse yet, you got a +1 Insightful...
Not to mention you could always pipe your email through a Baysian filtering script using procmail, mailfilter, or the like.
Okay, memory hog I could believe... but slow? Hardly...
Well, I do understand the anger, in that the minute some new technology comes out to defeat government-imposed censorship, people start crying out "Think of the children!" and "What about pedophiles" and so on and so on... it gets a little tiresome after a while. :)
Hmm... so you say you might need to encode the video due to bandwidth limitations. Well, that throws out using straight X (what you're describing) (and, no, compressing the X protocol is not sufficient... it doesn't meet compression requirements AND it introduces latency for which you'd have to compensate).
So, we'll have to encode the video at the source and decode at the sink. Oh, and then there's audio. We gotta transport that, somehow, too... sending it in the raw would be silly, since bandwidth is still an issue. Well, we'll encode and decode that, too. And while we're at it, we might as well write some software to set up the transport pipe, enable the capture device, encoders, decoders, etc, etc...
Oh, wait, I've just re-invented the TV Brick...
Not to mention support for a full alpha channel, which is all but a requirement for decent icons these days...
And what does that have to do with EU laws regarding reverse engineering? I mean, yeah, software patents bad, etc, etc, but what does that have to do with Samba? (And don't get started on what-ifs about Microsoft patenting SMB, Windows file sharing, etc...)
Already been done... well, sorta. The Cassini probe had RTGs (Radioisotope Thermal Generators) as a power source, feeding off of 72 pounds of Plutonium. Of course, the anti-nuclear nuts flipped out about the Cassini mission launching, BUT, as you'd expect, it went off without a hitch (as did many other missions which used RTGs).
I took a compiler course, the superset of all that shit.
LOL! That compiler course is BASED on formal language theory, so I think you probably have the relationship a little confused there. In fact, a compiler course really only gives you a light dusting of the real theory behind formal languages (I would know, I've taken a course in both... I'm certainly no expert in either, but at least I have a little perspective). A class in formal languages not only discusses Chomsky's hierarchy and their associated automata, but also delves into fundamental theories about algorithms and computability, time and space complexity, and so on.
Ahh, excellent point. One forgets the whole civil/criminal split. OTOH, now that the laws have been changed to make copyright violation a criminal act... :)
Someone just took a course on formal languages...
If you need a 500 page book on regexps, you might want to have a look at a good compiler book (red dragon, etc.) first.
And why would I want to learn about all the various automata (finite state machines, push-down automata, and Turing machines) not to mention all that language parsing crap (top-down versus bottom-up parsing, parse trees, etc, etc), when all I really want to learn is how to exploit a regular expression engine efficiently so I can solve real world problems?
Full non-CFG languages are so much more powerful than any regexp could ever dream of being, and more importantly they can have state.
Yeah, that's called a programming language. And yeah, I could implement any regular expression using a standard programming language, but why would I bother when a regular expression is far more concise and better suited to the job?
Geez, give someone a hammer...
It's called a plugin. Every music player these days has some concept of plugin. XMMS has a Flac plugin, and so does Winamp. Seriously, the software side is a total non-issue.
I mean instead of letting the companies attempt to crack down on piracy their own way the companies beg and plead that the US government step in and be the daddy.
Not quite. I hate to say it, but the RIAA is right in that it is the job of law enforcement (and hence government) to enforce the law. And guess what, the law says that copyright violation is illegal (eg, distributing copyrighted works without the consent of the author, with the exception of certain cases outlined in copyright law). Thus, it only stands to reason that the RIAA/MPAA/etc would go to the government to request further assistance in enforcing the laws which already exist.
This is no different than a neighbourhood where there's rampant prostitution or something. The populace complains to law enforcement and they do something about it. It's not up to the people to crack down and enforce the law... that's called vigilantiism.
Of course, whether you believe copyright, in it's present form, is a good thing is a completely different matter. Bad laws should be dealt with legislatively (or via judicial activism, if you believe in that sort of thing). BUT, it is the job of law enforcement (and hence the government) to enforce the laws that they DO pass (I say enforce, in that police should catch criminals. The courts can, and do, shoot down bad law, but that's a secondary function of the legal system).
Actually, true Marxist communism involves a complete and utter lack of government. What you describe is a dictatorship, which is, in reality, what is represented by countries like China and former Soviet Union.
Throughout history, umpires have been traditionally consistant from game to game.
;)
Wow. All of history? The whole thing? I had no idea baseball was that old!
This sarcastic comment was brough to you by the letters A and Z, and the number 3.14159265358979...
It's a way of living, throwing it aside for the sake of progress is an abomination.
Wow, you sound like an RIAA shill. Face it, the world changes, and guess what, people have to change with it. After all, would you have us exhaust all our oil reserves and continue to pollute the planet in order to keep the petroleum industry going? The fact is, throwing aside obsolete social constructs in the face of change is how humanity evolves.
Oh, I'm aware of this, but you must realize that MANY publications make that mistake. In fact, there are plenty of scientists who use the phrase "degrees Kelvin", despite it being technically incorrect.
Incidentally, your example should probably actually be "500 Kelvins", much like how we refer to Joules, Ohms, Volts, etc.
Very true... especially given that their "1,000,..." value likely includes a margin of error which easily exceeds 273K. :)
Thus it collapses instandly and one never witness this state of matter
:). Granted, this isn't nearly as nice as being able to directly observe the phenomenon, but it's certainly something, since we can at least confirm another prediction(s) of the Standard Model.
Umm, the fact that you can't directly observe the existence of the plasma doesn't mean you can't detect its presence (or, to be more precise, that fact that it *was* present). After all, we can't directly observe black holes. The article itself describes how they might infer the existence of the plasma... a difference in the ratios of large hadrons after the collision, compared to lower-energy events, as a result of the plasma condensing back into normal matter (I hope I got that right
Given they're physicists, methinks it's in Kelvins.
It's another test of the standard model of physics. If the results aren't as we expect, then the standard model will have to be revised (well, first you'd probably perform the experiment a few more times to verify the result :) in order to accomodate the new findings. It's the same reason scientists placed atomic clocks in orbit to test general relativity... it didn't reveal anything *new*, but it helped to further verify things we already *suspected*. The fact is, a theory is pretty meaningless unless you actually attempt to test its predictions...