If you're going to trust your police with guns then you need to be able to trust them not to use them in response to provocation. If you can't find someone that you can trust not to start shooting at people taunting them, then you should just take the guns away from them -- or arrest them for assault.
The Arizona Criminal Code says, plain as day: "the use of force or deadly force is not justified in response to verbal provocation alone".
I'm no fan of some of the shit Occupy has pulled -- in particular, squatting on public land in such a way that it reduces the value the public can get out of it. (I think a lot of their demands are naive and silly, too, but that's neither here nor there, since if being wrong negated the right to free speech we'd have to close all the churches -- and the Capitol, for that matter.) But the police get trigger-happy when provoked then you need some better police.
(NB: Provoking them in a manner that makes them unable to do legitimate police work is a different story.)
Nonviolence comes from all sides acknowledging a non-aggression principle: you don't use violence against me or my property, I won't against you. The traditional role of police is to respond to violence with overwhelming violence (or the threat of such): you punch me or smash my shit, they'll arrest you, and if you punch them too they'll come with guns.
But using weapons like this against peaceful protesters isn't what the police are for -- it's using violence against the nonviolent, and the victims (like any other victim of unprovoked aggression) have the right to respond in kind. Bullets, microwave-oven HERF guns, take your pick.
Yeah, that's the other issue with the Volt -- it's not even a very good electric car. I'm befuddled by the bad mileage it gets -- I thought one of the ideas was that a true series hybrid like the Volt (where the gas engine only exists to generate electrical power, as in trains) could be more efficient, since the engine can be engineered to have a very sharply peaked efficiency curve and can always be run at the peak of that curve. Yet this thing gets less mileage than my $12k Yaris, with a bog-standard engine, on the highway.
Chevy could have done better by just bolting bigger batteries to the Prius (so it could be used as a plug-in hybrid) and writing "Volt" on the side in crayon, it seems.
Honestly, everyone's needs differ so much that electric carmakers ought to just sell cars that accept variably-sized batteries. Someone like me, who either drives 5 miles or 500, would want a Volt-type car with a small battery pack. Someone whose daily commute is 50 miles roundtrip would want a battery of that size.
Plug in hybrids make a lot of sense in the USA. Out West it can be 200 miles between towns. Until and unless every gas station also has a battery-pack-exchange facility (I give you my empty pack, you give me a charged one for a fee), cars with a 60 mile range are not so practical.
There's a large chunk of potential car buyers who would look at the specs of a pure electric car with even a 100 mile range and say "Wait, so I can drive this in the LA area, the SF area, and the Boston-DC corridor, and that's it? Screw that, Imma buy a Prius."
Wait, it's that bad? I had heard something like 60 miles/charge and then 50-60MPG back when I looked at Chevy's plans. Is the real car that bad compared to their claims?
I've got one, and it's a great car. Cheap, reliable, great gas mileage, and handles shitty dirt roads a lot better than you'd expect. Now if it only had a built-in defense against ghetto folk tossing rocks through the windows...
I was given the assignment of teaching an intro computational physics class at a university two years ago using C. The students came in knowing no programming (or Linux), and I was supposed to get them comfortable writing C codes to simulate things in two hours a week.
The trouble with C is that graphical output requires a bunch of advanced concepts; I wanted to give them a way to animate their simulations just using the things they already knew (which, at that point, were basically math, for, if, and printf/scanf)
One of the first things they learned was shell I/O redirection (the | operators), so I wrote a command-line filter that read text in from stdin and translated it into animations, with support for various graphics primitives in 2D and 3D along with some interactivity (rescaling/translating on the fly by keystroke input into the animation window). So they could code up a simulation of some thing (a double pendulum, say), and watch it go in front of them. To my surprise it was a lot faster, even over remote X, than I thought it'd be. The huge advantage is that it let them get pretty graphics using nothing other than printf on their end.
Some of the stuff they made by the end was pretty impressive: vibrating 3D meshes showing the oscillations of a stretched membrane, the resonance between Jupiter and the asteroid belt developing, and the like.
Suppose that these cameras could prevent half of all backup deaths.
TFA says that 200 people are killed by backover accidents, so that's saving a hundred lives a year.
TFA also gives a range for the cost of these things. Let's take $200, since we all know government tends to underestimate cost.
Per Wikipedia, 5.5 million cars are sold this year. Multiplying, that means that mandating these cameras on all of them will cost about a billion dollars.
I guarantee you that you can save a lot more than a hundred lives if you spend a billion dollars on any number of other things (diabetes education, suicide prevention and mental illness care, cancer screenings for the poor, medical research in general, take your pick).
If it's possible to perform a transformation on the audio file to make it sound better on iShit, then why doesn't the iShit itself do this by default?
I mean, it's not like some variant on equalization or compression or things like that takes much CPU, and if you can decode AAC on the fly you can fiddle with it too.
This isn't terribly new -- I do it every day when I display the 4000x3000 images from my camera on my 1920x1080 screen. My image display software does some fancy averaging to make fewer pixels out of the average values of the pixels in the original jpeg.
The only difference here is that you're doing it in software *before* you save the image to the card, rather than in software when you go to *display* the image later. But even that's not revolutionary -- most digital cameras have a mode that does pixel averaging in the camera and then saves a lower-res image.
The only difference is that this phone has so many pixels (or, to put it another way, so little detail at the Nyquist frequency) that it's designed to be used this way.
The key here is the sensor size, not the pixel count itself. There are sensors that are huge but have low pixel counts (the 12MP fullframe sensor in the Nikon D3s, for instance) that have tremendously low noise. As you say, big sensor -> more flux, regardless of how many pixels you slice it into.
What lens is it? Lots of the lenses that come with DSLR's are terrible. The 10MP models that come to mind are the Canon XTi (400D) and Olympus E-410/420/510/520. The lens that comes with the former is sort of a stinker, the ones that come with the latter (especially the 40-150mm) are not bad.
Not true. So long as you are away from the diffraction limit and your glass is good enough and you have enough light, the resolution is determined by the pixel count.
Those conditions are very hard to satisfy for very high pixel counts, and there usually are other limiting factors (noise/focusing errors/optical aberrations). But, in principle (and sometimes in practice) it's the pixel count that limits absolute resolution.
Actually, they are. (Nikon thinks so, at any rate, since they just made a DSLR with that kind of resolution.)
What you should ask is "Are these lenses capable of delivering a MTF significantly different from zero at a frequency of 5000 line pairs per picture height?" (In engineering terms, this is 2500 cycles per picture height.) This is an unambiguous criterion for being able to make use of that extra resolution: can the lens deliver detail up to the Nyquist frequency of the sensor?
The answer is pretty unequivocally yes, as can be shown by several tests. The simplest of them is to consider teleconverters. I don't have a 48MP camera handy, but I *do* have a 12MP camera and a 2x teleconverter. Any lens capable of resolving 3000 lp/ph well with a 2x teleconverter will be capable of resolving 6000 lp/ph without it, since an ideal teleconverter just magnifies the image. I have a $125 lens (the Zuiko Digital 35mm f/3.5 macro) which easily satisfies this criterion: it delivers images that contain detail all the way down to the pixel level on a 12MP sensor (i.e. 3000 lp/ph) with a 2x teleconverter. (I use this in the field to get more working distance for bug shots since 35mm is quite short for a macro lens.) Thus, it will deliver useful detail to twice that resolution without the teleconverter, which corresponds to a 48MP sensor at the 4:3 aspect ratio.
This is a $125 lens. (It's also the sharpest I own.) If a cheap lens can do this -- and can do it when focused well into the macro range, which provides special optical challenges -- then there are plenty of more expensive ones that can, too.
Another test is to look at an extremely dense sensor already in existence: the 24MP Sony NEX-7 sensor, which has a crop factor of 1.5x. It's got the same pixel density as a 50+MP fullframe sensor. But people use fullframe lenses on it, such as the Carl Zeiss ones built for the Sony mount, or Leica M lenses, or whatever, and get useful detail out of all that resolution. Those lenses, then, are capable of delivering useful detail to a 50+MP fullframe sensor.
Zoom lenses may have trouble resolving this sort of detail, but even most cheap prime lenses can. (Of course, the very fast ones won't be able to at f/1.4...)
Does France not have mandatory liability insurance? Seems like if you are the drunk idiot and hit someone, *you* are on the hook for the bill. You broke it, you bought it.
I don't think it should be ended entirely -- I think we can't in good conscience let a destitute person die of or suffer from a condition that can be treated without too much effort. But I think the swath of society that is "too poor to pay on their own" is nowhere near as large as our current system believes it to be. Rather than trying to pick out the population that "needs help" and provide them health care and food and subsidized rent and so forth, we should ask the question: "Why is this person unable to find someone to sell his or her labor to in exchange for enough money to live decently?" Perhaps the answer is a lack of education, or a lack of skills, or the lack of motivation -- it could be any number of things. But we're not even in the business of asking the question these days.
I have a problem with mandatory seatbelt laws. I'm not saying that the justification of "you have to wear this because otherwise you'll break your face and Uncle Sam will have to fix it for you" is a good one, only that that's the one that's often given. The issues are subtly different, though: even the most careful driver is at some risk of getting into a crash (maybe they were hit by a drunk!), and that risk can't be avoided. The risk of driving drunk, though, can be avoided extremely easily: don't drive drunk. (Your example points out another issue with the whole thing: you say that ten percent of Americans will admit to pollsters of having driven while drunk, but the only thing these breathalyzers will do is tell you how drunk you are. If you already knew you were too drunk to drive then they're not terribly relevant!)
I have no problem with the government publishing big warnings saying "This model of car is patently unsafe because it doesn't have seat belts, don't buy it", but I'd prefer if equipment to keep yourself safe wasn't mandatory. It's like the warnings that Linux sometimes throws up: "This is probably a bad idea. Are you sure you want to do it? [y/N]" Let me pick yes if I really want to, and -- more importantly -- relieve the police the burden of dicking around with protecting people from themselves.
Not at all. I have lots of things in my car that are there to help me out for when I fuck up behind the wheel: air bags, seatbelts, antilock brakes, etc. I am an imperfect driver and I make mistakes.
Driving while drunk is not one of those mistakes. It is very easy to not accidentally drive drunk. If you think that you're at risk for accidentally driving drunk, then go buy yourself a test kit. If you're like the majority of responsible folks who manage to not drive drunk without technological assistance, then why should you have to waste $2? (And why should the police waste their time and yours, which are probably worth a great deal more, haranguing you to see if you have your state-mandated drunk-o-meter?)
If it wasn't for government mandates, most cars would not be equipped with seatbelts, let alone airbags which cost a lot more than a 2$ kit.
Is this true? I know that both my family (when I was younger) and me (now; I've only bought one car) have paid more for cars with safety features that aren't mandated.
But these things aren't even really the same. Whenever you drive, you're at risk of a collision. That risk can't be eliminated entirely based on your actions.
The risk of drunk driving can be eliminated 100% by simply not driving while drunk.
Does the state require that Toyota provide me an owner's manual with the car?
Not that I know of, but even if they didn't, they'd still probably print one. They provide me an owner's manual because the majority of the people who purchase their cars want one, and they feel that it would make them seem cheap to charge $5 for the booklet when you just paid them $13k for a car.
There's a strong argument that you shouldn't have to. However, since we have taxpayer-funded emergency medical care in the US, if you're going to expect the taxpayers to fix you up after you get thrown from your car (or, worse, care for you after you suffer brain damage), then they have an interest in making sure you don't.
It rubs me the wrong way too, but while the taxpayers are potentially out a great deal of money from indigents hurting themselves badly by not wearing seatbelts, it's sort of necessary to mandate that automakers provide them. Of course, even if it weren't mandated, I imagine most of them still *would*.
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If you're going to trust your police with guns then you need to be able to trust them not to use them in response to provocation. If you can't find someone that you can trust not to start shooting at people taunting them, then you should just take the guns away from them -- or arrest them for assault.
The Arizona Criminal Code says, plain as day: "the use of force or deadly force is not justified in response to verbal provocation alone".
I'm no fan of some of the shit Occupy has pulled -- in particular, squatting on public land in such a way that it reduces the value the public can get out of it. (I think a lot of their demands are naive and silly, too, but that's neither here nor there, since if being wrong negated the right to free speech we'd have to close all the churches -- and the Capitol, for that matter.) But the police get trigger-happy when provoked then you need some better police.
(NB: Provoking them in a manner that makes them unable to do legitimate police work is a different story.)
Nonviolence comes from all sides acknowledging a non-aggression principle: you don't use violence against me or my property, I won't against you. The traditional role of police is to respond to violence with overwhelming violence (or the threat of such): you punch me or smash my shit, they'll arrest you, and if you punch them too they'll come with guns.
But using weapons like this against peaceful protesters isn't what the police are for -- it's using violence against the nonviolent, and the victims (like any other victim of unprovoked aggression) have the right to respond in kind. Bullets, microwave-oven HERF guns, take your pick.
Yeah, that's the other issue with the Volt -- it's not even a very good electric car. I'm befuddled by the bad mileage it gets -- I thought one of the ideas was that a true series hybrid like the Volt (where the gas engine only exists to generate electrical power, as in trains) could be more efficient, since the engine can be engineered to have a very sharply peaked efficiency curve and can always be run at the peak of that curve. Yet this thing gets less mileage than my $12k Yaris, with a bog-standard engine, on the highway.
Chevy could have done better by just bolting bigger batteries to the Prius (so it could be used as a plug-in hybrid) and writing "Volt" on the side in crayon, it seems.
Honestly, everyone's needs differ so much that electric carmakers ought to just sell cars that accept variably-sized batteries. Someone like me, who either drives 5 miles or 500, would want a Volt-type car with a small battery pack. Someone whose daily commute is 50 miles roundtrip would want a battery of that size.
Plug in hybrids make a lot of sense in the USA. Out West it can be 200 miles between towns. Until and unless every gas station also has a battery-pack-exchange facility (I give you my empty pack, you give me a charged one for a fee), cars with a 60 mile range are not so practical.
There's a large chunk of potential car buyers who would look at the specs of a pure electric car with even a 100 mile range and say "Wait, so I can drive this in the LA area, the SF area, and the Boston-DC corridor, and that's it? Screw that, Imma buy a Prius."
Wait, it's that bad? I had heard something like 60 miles/charge and then 50-60MPG back when I looked at Chevy's plans. Is the real car that bad compared to their claims?
I've got one, and it's a great car. Cheap, reliable, great gas mileage, and handles shitty dirt roads a lot better than you'd expect. Now if it only had a built-in defense against ghetto folk tossing rocks through the windows...
I was given the assignment of teaching an intro computational physics class at a university two years ago using C. The students came in knowing no programming (or Linux), and I was supposed to get them comfortable writing C codes to simulate things in two hours a week.
The trouble with C is that graphical output requires a bunch of advanced concepts; I wanted to give them a way to animate their simulations just using the things they already knew (which, at that point, were basically math, for, if, and printf/scanf)
One of the first things they learned was shell I/O redirection (the | operators), so I wrote a command-line filter that read text in from stdin and translated it into animations, with support for various graphics primitives in 2D and 3D along with some interactivity (rescaling/translating on the fly by keystroke input into the animation window). So they could code up a simulation of some thing (a double pendulum, say), and watch it go in front of them. To my surprise it was a lot faster, even over remote X, than I thought it'd be. The huge advantage is that it let them get pretty graphics using nothing other than printf on their end.
Some of the stuff they made by the end was pretty impressive: vibrating 3D meshes showing the oscillations of a stretched membrane, the resonance between Jupiter and the asteroid belt developing, and the like.
I would sign up for this in a heartbeat.
Suppose that these cameras could prevent half of all backup deaths.
TFA says that 200 people are killed by backover accidents, so that's saving a hundred lives a year.
TFA also gives a range for the cost of these things. Let's take $200, since we all know government tends to underestimate cost.
Per Wikipedia, 5.5 million cars are sold this year. Multiplying, that means that mandating these cameras on all of them will cost about a billion dollars.
I guarantee you that you can save a lot more than a hundred lives if you spend a billion dollars on any number of other things (diabetes education, suicide prevention and mental illness care, cancer screenings for the poor, medical research in general, take your pick).
If it's possible to perform a transformation on the audio file to make it sound better on iShit, then why doesn't the iShit itself do this by default?
I mean, it's not like some variant on equalization or compression or things like that takes much CPU, and if you can decode AAC on the fly you can fiddle with it too.
This isn't terribly new -- I do it every day when I display the 4000x3000 images from my camera on my 1920x1080 screen. My image display software does some fancy averaging to make fewer pixels out of the average values of the pixels in the original jpeg.
The only difference here is that you're doing it in software *before* you save the image to the card, rather than in software when you go to *display* the image later. But even that's not revolutionary -- most digital cameras have a mode that does pixel averaging in the camera and then saves a lower-res image.
The only difference is that this phone has so many pixels (or, to put it another way, so little detail at the Nyquist frequency) that it's designed to be used this way.
The key here is the sensor size, not the pixel count itself. There are sensors that are huge but have low pixel counts (the 12MP fullframe sensor in the Nikon D3s, for instance) that have tremendously low noise. As you say, big sensor -> more flux, regardless of how many pixels you slice it into.
What lens is it? Lots of the lenses that come with DSLR's are terrible. The 10MP models that come to mind are the Canon XTi (400D) and Olympus E-410/420/510/520. The lens that comes with the former is sort of a stinker, the ones that come with the latter (especially the 40-150mm) are not bad.
Not true. So long as you are away from the diffraction limit and your glass is good enough and you have enough light, the resolution is determined by the pixel count.
Those conditions are very hard to satisfy for very high pixel counts, and there usually are other limiting factors (noise/focusing errors/optical aberrations). But, in principle (and sometimes in practice) it's the pixel count that limits absolute resolution.
Actually, they are. (Nikon thinks so, at any rate, since they just made a DSLR with that kind of resolution.)
What you should ask is "Are these lenses capable of delivering a MTF significantly different from zero at a frequency of 5000 line pairs per picture height?" (In engineering terms, this is 2500 cycles per picture height.) This is an unambiguous criterion for being able to make use of that extra resolution: can the lens deliver detail up to the Nyquist frequency of the sensor?
The answer is pretty unequivocally yes, as can be shown by several tests. The simplest of them is to consider teleconverters. I don't have a 48MP camera handy, but I *do* have a 12MP camera and a 2x teleconverter. Any lens capable of resolving 3000 lp/ph well with a 2x teleconverter will be capable of resolving 6000 lp/ph without it, since an ideal teleconverter just magnifies the image. I have a $125 lens (the Zuiko Digital 35mm f/3.5 macro) which easily satisfies this criterion: it delivers images that contain detail all the way down to the pixel level on a 12MP sensor (i.e. 3000 lp/ph) with a 2x teleconverter. (I use this in the field to get more working distance for bug shots since 35mm is quite short for a macro lens.) Thus, it will deliver useful detail to twice that resolution without the teleconverter, which corresponds to a 48MP sensor at the 4:3 aspect ratio.
This is a $125 lens. (It's also the sharpest I own.) If a cheap lens can do this -- and can do it when focused well into the macro range, which provides special optical challenges -- then there are plenty of more expensive ones that can, too.
Another test is to look at an extremely dense sensor already in existence: the 24MP Sony NEX-7 sensor, which has a crop factor of 1.5x. It's got the same pixel density as a 50+MP fullframe sensor. But people use fullframe lenses on it, such as the Carl Zeiss ones built for the Sony mount, or Leica M lenses, or whatever, and get useful detail out of all that resolution. Those lenses, then, are capable of delivering useful detail to a 50+MP fullframe sensor.
Zoom lenses may have trouble resolving this sort of detail, but even most cheap prime lenses can. (Of course, the very fast ones won't be able to at f/1.4...)
Do teetotalers (who can provide documentation of a longstanding abstinence from alcohol) also get the reduced premium?
Does France not have mandatory liability insurance? Seems like if you are the drunk idiot and hit someone, *you* are on the hook for the bill. You broke it, you bought it.
I don't think it should be ended entirely -- I think we can't in good conscience let a destitute person die of or suffer from a condition that can be treated without too much effort. But I think the swath of society that is "too poor to pay on their own" is nowhere near as large as our current system believes it to be. Rather than trying to pick out the population that "needs help" and provide them health care and food and subsidized rent and so forth, we should ask the question: "Why is this person unable to find someone to sell his or her labor to in exchange for enough money to live decently?" Perhaps the answer is a lack of education, or a lack of skills, or the lack of motivation -- it could be any number of things. But we're not even in the business of asking the question these days.
I have a problem with mandatory seatbelt laws. I'm not saying that the justification of "you have to wear this because otherwise you'll break your face and Uncle Sam will have to fix it for you" is a good one, only that that's the one that's often given. The issues are subtly different, though: even the most careful driver is at some risk of getting into a crash (maybe they were hit by a drunk!), and that risk can't be avoided. The risk of driving drunk, though, can be avoided extremely easily: don't drive drunk. (Your example points out another issue with the whole thing: you say that ten percent of Americans will admit to pollsters of having driven while drunk, but the only thing these breathalyzers will do is tell you how drunk you are. If you already knew you were too drunk to drive then they're not terribly relevant!)
I have no problem with the government publishing big warnings saying "This model of car is patently unsafe because it doesn't have seat belts, don't buy it", but I'd prefer if equipment to keep yourself safe wasn't mandatory. It's like the warnings that Linux sometimes throws up: "This is probably a bad idea. Are you sure you want to do it? [y/N]" Let me pick yes if I really want to, and -- more importantly -- relieve the police the burden of dicking around with protecting people from themselves.
Ding ding ding. Same with so many traffic laws in the US -- they exist for no purpose other than to extract money from citizens.
Not at all. I have lots of things in my car that are there to help me out for when I fuck up behind the wheel: air bags, seatbelts, antilock brakes, etc. I am an imperfect driver and I make mistakes.
Driving while drunk is not one of those mistakes. It is very easy to not accidentally drive drunk. If you think that you're at risk for accidentally driving drunk, then go buy yourself a test kit. If you're like the majority of responsible folks who manage to not drive drunk without technological assistance, then why should you have to waste $2? (And why should the police waste their time and yours, which are probably worth a great deal more, haranguing you to see if you have your state-mandated drunk-o-meter?)
If it wasn't for government mandates, most cars would not be equipped with seatbelts, let alone airbags which cost a lot more than a 2$ kit.
Is this true? I know that both my family (when I was younger) and me (now; I've only bought one car) have paid more for cars with safety features that aren't mandated.
But these things aren't even really the same. Whenever you drive, you're at risk of a collision. That risk can't be eliminated entirely based on your actions.
The risk of drunk driving can be eliminated 100% by simply not driving while drunk.
Does the state require that Toyota provide me an owner's manual with the car?
Not that I know of, but even if they didn't, they'd still probably print one. They provide me an owner's manual because the majority of the people who purchase their cars want one, and they feel that it would make them seem cheap to charge $5 for the booklet when you just paid them $13k for a car.
There's a strong argument that you shouldn't have to. However, since we have taxpayer-funded emergency medical care in the US, if you're going to expect the taxpayers to fix you up after you get thrown from your car (or, worse, care for you after you suffer brain damage), then they have an interest in making sure you don't.
It rubs me the wrong way too, but while the taxpayers are potentially out a great deal of money from indigents hurting themselves badly by not wearing seatbelts, it's sort of necessary to mandate that automakers provide them. Of course, even if it weren't mandated, I imagine most of them still *would*.
It's 80 during the daytime in west Texas, and the speed limits are widely understood to be unenforced on most interstates in Montana.
Out west, it's only when you get into a jurisdiction with either
1) nannies
2) bullies
3) a broke government that is willing to resort to highway robbery to raise funds
that you see tickets written for simple speeding.