Are they really lighter to render? My experience has been that acroread, xpdf, and such tend to bog down. Granted, this evince thingie that came installed with Ubuntu (which I just switched to, from Gentoo) seems pretty nice. (I'm a convert to "It just works!"-style Linux.)
I honestly don't know the technical ends and outs of either format (I'm a physicist, not a CS... albeit one who had to fuss at his students this semester for turning in crap in.docx format after I told them plaintext), but why the choice of pdf over postscript for the "formatting preserved" format? My department seems to use them pretty interchangeably... and aren't there tons of tools that do nifty things to postscript? (ps2* and *2ps style things?)
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution states, in part:
"...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
In Roe vs. Wade, SCOTUS ruled that an implied Constitutional right to privacy exists, and thus the 14th amendment proscribes states from banning abortion.
Whether this is the correct interpretation of the Constitution or not is a question that people may discuss. Regardless of whether it is correct, however, it is the currently accepted one in matters of law; and Paul, if he truly claims to be a strict constructionist, should realize that the court has spoken and abide by that decision.
Abortion is not a matter for the states to decide because the Constitution says it's not.
Why should I pay your salary to sit around and provide no benefit to me, the taxpayer, or anyone else?
I assume you have some kind of marketable skill, probably in engineering or CS, or you wouldn't be posting on/.. I hear you can get jobs in those fields building *useful* things.
Thompson's platform is basically "I am more like Ronald Reagan than any of the other candidates, including the advanced age and partial dementia. Thus, since you are a good Republican and fellate statues of Reagan on a daily basis, you should vote for me."
Kucinich gets my support simply because he wants to reduce the military budget. I don't care how much of a nutcase you are or what other bad ideas you have, it's hard to make an error that'll offset the hundreds of billions a year saved.
Noise *can* be removed in post-processing; there are utilities like NeatImage and Noise Ninja that do a pretty good job.
The older Fuji's are in fact the *only* small-sensor that have decent high-sensitivity performance.
The FZ8 shows noise at higher ISO's, but then so do all other compact cameras. Keep in mind you have to enlarge something pretty big to see the noise, and that looking at something at 100% pixels-on-screen is the equivalent of peering at a 40x30 print from a foot away. Panasonic's approach to noise reduction is a bit boneheaded at high ISO's (you wind up losing a more detail than you ought to), but it's not a big deal, and you can always bypass it by shooting RAW. There are also features, like image stabilization and a fast lens, that let you stay at ISO 100 in much lower light than you might think.
Sure, there's noise, but 4x6 prints up to ISO 800 still look good, and stuff shot at ISO 100 (which, again, you can use most of the time because of the fast stabilized lens) looks absolutely fantastic. Lots of folks who do photography on a budget have two cameras: a Panasonic FZ-series, and an old Fuji for a backup when you need to stop motion in low light by using high ISO.
Panasonic FZ8 digital camera: for $220, this thing takes amazingly good pictures: quite sharp 12x zoom (36-432mm equivalent, f/2.8-3.3), very effective optical image stabilization, 7MP (which is about all you need), full manual control, RAW, and lots of features.
Or, if someone already has a decent camera:
Raynox DCR-150 4.8-diopter closeup adapter: for $30, and combined with the above camera or many others (anything with a long optical zoom), you can count the hairs on a bee's little toe. I got one of these recently, and the colored phosphor strips on my (old) television are literally hundreds of pixels wide on the image.
The thing is, a normal encyclopedia is degraded by having too much stuff in there, since you don't want to flip through two hundred pages of donkey pictures to find the article on ducks. But Wikipedia has no such problem -- it's not going to get full.
More critically, how clean does the charging voltage have to be?
Suppose my 45 WHr laptop battery could be charged in ten minutes. That's 240W -- say 500W, to account for conversion inefficiencies. The power cord to your hair dryer carries four times this much. That, in itself, isn't the problem.
The problem is, how much processing do we have to do to mains power to feed it in?
Lost? Someone actually *gets* that money *back*. Sure, it might not be the person you think should get it (and in many cases it's not the person I think should get it either -- welfare is horribly misimplemented in this country), but it's not pissed away; it's used for something. That's the crucial difference between entitlements and the military; nobody benefits from that.
You seem to be a small-government conservative, who thinks that the American taxpayer needs lower taxes and more money back in his pocket. That's fine; I can find something useful to do with that money. Paying for plasma screens in the lobby of Boeing != useful. My personal beliefs are that there are some things (i.e. the financing of nuclear power plants) which are desperately needed but which private capital can't or won't accomplish, but that's a debate civilized people can have, because it's between two useful things.
Yes the military spends a lot of money. Yes a lot is wasted. However that same military is the reason why we can bitch about the state of our country and the world with near impunity. We don't have to worry about tanks rolling over our demonstrations, we don't have to worry about family members being disappeared overnight because a relative spoke out in university, and we don't go to the market worried about some whacko with a bomb on his chest.
The Japanese, Swedish, French, Germans, Australians, Brazilians, and a host of other countries can say the same things. They have, in many cases, *more* domestic political freedom and freedom of expression, and less danger of foreign terrorism. Political freedom has nothing to do with a strong military; the Chinese have a strong military and little political freedom; the Swiss have a weak military and more political freedom than Americans. It does have something to do with national defense against invasion, but what we've got is a little excessive for that purpose, don't you think? Besides, the way we're currently using our strong military makes us more likely to be attacked, seeing as we've pissed off maybe five of the six billion people on the planet, and most of the radical militaristic ones. (The Russians don't like us. The Chinese don't like us. The Muslims sure as hell don't like us. The Europeans don't like us, but they're not troublemakers. The Africans have too many problems to really care, except for the ones that are Muslims; they don't like us.
Missile defense is ineffective against a large regime shooting at you, and a small regime is more likely to smuggle in a bomb than launch one on a missile.
A better form of national defense is to have an inexpensive and efficient standing military (yes to infantry and tanks and a few A-10's and F-16's, no to flying lasers and F-22's), an humble foreign policy, and a huge industrial base and strong economy that can mobilize for war if necessary, but during peacetime produces useful things. You also make friends that way, reducing the likelihood anyone would want to attack you.
A citizen of the EU, Japan, or Brazil has a much lower risk of dying in war than an American, despite their lower military spending... and they enjoy a higher standard of living than they would otherwise, since their government is spending that money on something useful. (Yes, I know Brazil has a lower standard of living than the USA. That's because it's not fully industrialized yet, and because the country has an overpopulation problem brought on by an outbreak of Catholicism. But a military won't help with that, short of bombing the Vatican.)
I think Congress should grow a spine and, if Bush continues to insist on staying in Iraq and vetoing stem-cell research funding and such, Congress should just cut funding for the Secret Service and let nature take its course.
Cheney could be dealt with very easily -- just sneak up behind him and say "Boo!"
Slashdot Mirror
only the dumb windows users.
They should just give the mean and estimated error calculated from the Poisson distribution.
Ah, okay. Thanks.
Are they really lighter to render? My experience has been that acroread, xpdf, and such tend to bog down. Granted, this evince thingie that came installed with Ubuntu (which I just switched to, from Gentoo) seems pretty nice. (I'm a convert to "It just works!"-style Linux.)
I honestly don't know the technical ends and outs of either format (I'm a physicist, not a CS... albeit one who had to fuss at his students this semester for turning in crap in .docx format after I told them plaintext), but why the choice of pdf over postscript for the "formatting preserved" format? My department seems to use them pretty interchangeably... and aren't there tons of tools that do nifty things to postscript? (ps2* and *2ps style things?)
Does it compress better or something?
The other one that comes readily to mind is cell phone carriers.
Just because the majority of Windows users are stupid doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the HPware.
He opposes the right of two people to copulate and *not* produce offspring.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution states, in part:
"...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
In Roe vs. Wade, SCOTUS ruled that an implied Constitutional right to privacy exists, and thus the 14th amendment proscribes states from banning abortion.
Whether this is the correct interpretation of the Constitution or not is a question that people may discuss. Regardless of whether it is correct, however, it is the currently accepted one in matters of law; and Paul, if he truly claims to be a strict constructionist, should realize that the court has spoken and abide by that decision.
Abortion is not a matter for the states to decide because the Constitution says it's not.
Lincoln: Fought the Civil War. Got shot.
Kennedy: Escalated Vietnam. Got shot.
McKinley: Fought the Spanish-American War. Got shot.
Garfield: Had a "hawkish" voting record while in Congress; didn't do much as president because he -- wait for it -- got shot.
Reagan: Escalated the Cold War by increasing the military budget drastically. Got shot.
Not saying that militarism or military action led to these assassination (attempts), but the correlation you suggest certainly isn't there...
No correlation implies no causation!
Why should I pay your salary to sit around and provide no benefit to me, the taxpayer, or anyone else?
/.. I hear you can get jobs in those fields building *useful* things.
I assume you have some kind of marketable skill, probably in engineering or CS, or you wouldn't be posting on
No, because he opposes reproductive rights.
Thompson's platform is basically "I am more like Ronald Reagan than any of the other candidates, including the advanced age and partial dementia. Thus, since you are a good Republican and fellate statues of Reagan on a daily basis, you should vote for me."
Kucinich gets my support simply because he wants to reduce the military budget. I don't care how much of a nutcase you are or what other bad ideas you have, it's hard to make an error that'll offset the hundreds of billions a year saved.
Noise *can* be removed in post-processing; there are utilities like NeatImage and Noise Ninja that do a pretty good job.
The older Fuji's are in fact the *only* small-sensor that have decent high-sensitivity performance.
The FZ8 shows noise at higher ISO's, but then so do all other compact cameras. Keep in mind you have to enlarge something pretty big to see the noise, and that looking at something at 100% pixels-on-screen is the equivalent of peering at a 40x30 print from a foot away. Panasonic's approach to noise reduction is a bit boneheaded at high ISO's (you wind up losing a more detail than you ought to), but it's not a big deal, and you can always bypass it by shooting RAW. There are also features, like image stabilization and a fast lens, that let you stay at ISO 100 in much lower light than you might think.
Sure, there's noise, but 4x6 prints up to ISO 800 still look good, and stuff shot at ISO 100 (which, again, you can use most of the time because of the fast stabilized lens) looks absolutely fantastic. Lots of folks who do photography on a budget have two cameras: a Panasonic FZ-series, and an old Fuji for a backup when you need to stop motion in low light by using high ISO.
Panasonic FZ8 digital camera: for $220, this thing takes amazingly good pictures: quite sharp 12x zoom (36-432mm equivalent, f/2.8-3.3), very effective optical image stabilization, 7MP (which is about all you need), full manual control, RAW, and lots of features.
Or, if someone already has a decent camera:
Raynox DCR-150 4.8-diopter closeup adapter: for $30, and combined with the above camera or many others (anything with a long optical zoom), you can count the hairs on a bee's little toe. I got one of these recently, and the colored phosphor strips on my (old) television are literally hundreds of pixels wide on the image.
The thing is, a normal encyclopedia is degraded by having too much stuff in there, since you don't want to flip through two hundred pages of donkey pictures to find the article on ducks. But Wikipedia has no such problem -- it's not going to get full.
Can't they just look up the "Malawi" article on ... ... wait...
The crucial difference is that many of today's liberals have no relation to the unwashed hippies from the sixties.
More critically, how clean does the charging voltage have to be?
Suppose my 45 WHr laptop battery could be charged in ten minutes. That's 240W -- say 500W, to account for conversion inefficiencies. The power cord to your hair dryer carries four times this much. That, in itself, isn't the problem.
The problem is, how much processing do we have to do to mains power to feed it in?
Nearly half the budget is lost to entitlements.
Lost? Someone actually *gets* that money *back*. Sure, it might not be the person you think should get it (and in many cases it's not the person I think should get it either -- welfare is horribly misimplemented in this country), but it's not pissed away; it's used for something. That's the crucial difference between entitlements and the military; nobody benefits from that.
You seem to be a small-government conservative, who thinks that the American taxpayer needs lower taxes and more money back in his pocket. That's fine; I can find something useful to do with that money. Paying for plasma screens in the lobby of Boeing != useful. My personal beliefs are that there are some things (i.e. the financing of nuclear power plants) which are desperately needed but which private capital can't or won't accomplish, but that's a debate civilized people can have, because it's between two useful things.
Yes the military spends a lot of money. Yes a lot is wasted. However that same military is the reason why we can bitch about the state of our country and the world with near impunity. We don't have to worry about tanks rolling over our demonstrations, we don't have to worry about family members being disappeared overnight because a relative spoke out in university, and we don't go to the market worried about some whacko with a bomb on his chest.
The Japanese, Swedish, French, Germans, Australians, Brazilians, and a host of other countries can say the same things. They have, in many cases, *more* domestic political freedom and freedom of expression, and less danger of foreign terrorism. Political freedom has nothing to do with a strong military; the Chinese have a strong military and little political freedom; the Swiss have a weak military and more political freedom than Americans. It does have something to do with national defense against invasion, but what we've got is a little excessive for that purpose, don't you think? Besides, the way we're currently using our strong military makes us more likely to be attacked, seeing as we've pissed off maybe five of the six billion people on the planet, and most of the radical militaristic ones. (The Russians don't like us. The Chinese don't like us. The Muslims sure as hell don't like us. The Europeans don't like us, but they're not troublemakers. The Africans have too many problems to really care, except for the ones that are Muslims; they don't like us.
My father, a hunter, taught me the two rules of gun safety when I was five:
1) Don't point a gun at anything you don't want to shoot
2) Don't shoot anywhere you can't see.
Cheney, at least drunk Cheney, can't follow these apparently.
To those rules then you'd have to add:
3) Don't carry a gun when you're drunk.
Missile defense is ineffective against a large regime shooting at you, and a small regime is more likely to smuggle in a bomb than launch one on a missile.
... and they enjoy a higher standard of living than they would otherwise, since their government is spending that money on something useful. (Yes, I know Brazil has a lower standard of living than the USA. That's because it's not fully industrialized yet, and because the country has an overpopulation problem brought on by an outbreak of Catholicism. But a military won't help with that, short of bombing the Vatican.)
A better form of national defense is to have an inexpensive and efficient standing military (yes to infantry and tanks and a few A-10's and F-16's, no to flying lasers and F-22's), an humble foreign policy, and a huge industrial base and strong economy that can mobilize for war if necessary, but during peacetime produces useful things. You also make friends that way, reducing the likelihood anyone would want to attack you.
A citizen of the EU, Japan, or Brazil has a much lower risk of dying in war than an American, despite their lower military spending
So why then did we attack a little sandpit in the Middle East over whom we had an overwhelming military superiority?
1) You can anywhere other than the US.
2) I wish you could in the US as well.
I think Congress should grow a spine and, if Bush continues to insist on staying in Iraq and vetoing stem-cell research funding and such, Congress should just cut funding for the Secret Service and let nature take its course.
Cheney could be dealt with very easily -- just sneak up behind him and say "Boo!"