There are two kinds of CIA employees: "undercover agents" and those who have ever entered a US embassy. This separation is required by US law (after some casualness about this lead to many deaths, IIRC). If you've ever walked into an US embassy, you can never be an undercover agent, simple as that.
Sorry, but this is the most ridiculous statement I have read on this thread. If it's public federal law can you provide ANY citation? Should be all over the place but I can't find anything even resembling it...
He already said exactly what he was doing and why.
"In the post-process toning and balancing of the uneven light in the alleyway, I developed the raw file with different density to use the natural light instead of dodging and burning. In effect to recreate what the eye sees and get a larger dynamic range. To put it simply, it's the same file - developed over itself - the same thing you did with negatives when you scanned them."
You could call this "sloppy" digital editing, but you could also argue it just means he was trying to more closely simulate an analog photo processing technique that has been used for a long time...
It may have not been any more "scientific" (whatever you think that silly broad term means in this context) than the OP's post but it was factually and mathematically 100% correct, since it simply boils down to the statements "after a decade of reduction in temperature" and "that statement isn't true". That's all my post pointed out, and that's all it was trying to point out. It was a simple logical statement, not a statistical one (and moving averages are not particularly good at establishing trends at the end of a dataset, anyway, obviously).
And despite your denial, you called the last two data points in a 100+ year graph a trend. It's pretty easy to scroll up there and read your own post, but I'll make it easy...
the 5 year average in your graph shows a slight downward trend.
I'm not establishing a trend at all.
Sigh, yet another semantic nitpick debate with someone who can't even be consistent between his own posts, let alone make their own on-topic contribution to the thread as a whole... where are all of these slashdot trolls coming from??
Please cite where an instant messaging client is defined as a "network operator" in telecommunications law. Given IM can be implemented with various technologies like store and forward, P2P, or direct client-to-client connection, I'm guessing you can't.
You should probably have read the OP statement I replied to first before making your snarky comment...
"A very high CO2 measurement is found after a decade of reduction in overall temperature."
In fact, if you look at the last decade, it's still up almost 0.1 degree USING THE 5 YEAR MOVING AVERAGE (0.15 without). His statement was wrong, it's not a decade of reduction, it's just a decade of slowed increase with much more volatility. You seem to be making a conclusion based only on the final two data points on a graph.
Even *if* my response to the OP was incorrect - which is wasn''t - your attempt to establish a useful "trend" from 2 data points out of 100+ is absurd. And the fact that you tried to call someone else out on that on that after making such a silly statement is just plain sad.
I didn't answer "Which is it?" because it is a false dilemma, not a useful question. Plenty of people deny climate change completely in the face of logic. You can call them insane if you want, but it's a fact, and directly contradicts the original statement "no one denies climate change". And of course others admit there is some change but won't admit it will have any significant effect (which is a different set of people). And then there are those who just make idiotic statements like "when the world ends who cares, we are insignificant".
Well, and I suppose that last one has a subcategory - your post - of people who don't even try to address the content of the thread itself, just the semantics. Again, you didn't even mention anything worthy of discussion, just more nitpicks and meta-arguments. Whereas my previous reply once again stated my point, a supporting statistic, as well as an example of the behavior I was talking about (ie. your useless post). Of course your next reply pretty much cut out all of that, which again is my point...
Anyway, this isn't going anywhere. If you would like to state an opinion and/or facts on climate change itself, feel free, but I'm done arguing semantics.
Wha? Are you replying to me? And if so did you actually follow the point of my post and thread overall??
One of those two "quotes" you attributed to me was just me quoting the parent and the other was not stating my opinion, so trying to claim I am being contradictory is a wee bit off there...
And before you try to argue there are no climate change deniers (your "point number 1") because they'd "have to be insane" - something like 40% of the US population still believes in creationism. I would not say 40% of the population is "insane", just deluded with things others have told them to believe over the facts they could find for themselves if they wanted to. If you don't think it's possible (and common) to believe something in the face of facts to the contrary you don't understand people:)
Anyway, you can call what I said "weasel words" (don't follow that in the first place though), but sorry, if you go back and reread your post it didn't really contribute to the discussion at all - just an incorrect comprehension of the thread, a false logical conclusion, and a nitpick. Though to be honest, that nitpicking was in fact key to my point - how the OP (and many slashdotters) seem to be making silly arguments about the effect of humans on climate change in a billion years, which is effectively just trying to derail the real conversation. So I guess your post at least contributed as another example of that...
Take a deep breath and relax;) This guy isn't in Washington, just Sacramento. He's the same idiot - I mean CA state senator - who sponsored a law to regulate video games until the Federal court told him to piss off (ie ruled it unconstitutional). This legislation isn't going anywhere, and hopefully will just piss off enough people in SF that they finally vote the moron out of office...
Yeah, I did get the gist that you are on the side of addressing the issue short term and not using the billion year straw man yourself. But phrases you use like "long term harm" don't make any sense geologically in the first place if you don't consider human implications - "harm" is a very human concept, obviously natural processes just progress, they don't "harm".
My point was bringing up geological time frames like the OP did IS in fact a total straw man and completely unproductive in any climate change debate. And unfortunately though you seem to be (unless I am misreading) in almost complete agreement with me on the issue your devil's advocate posts have weakened your own positions by agreeing with the straw man rather than debating the real issues. Otherwise stated as "don't feed the trolls";)
No, he's NOT really right since he starts his entire statement with "no one denies climate change". MANY people deny climate change - by definition the heart of climate change denial is denying climate change. These people are not slashdot readers debating pointless semantics about the end of the planet/system/universe, they are claiming it won't hurt humanity in the short/mid term and doesn't need to be addressed. His point about the effect in a billion years or whatever is a TOTAL straw man and serves no purpose. Neither political policy nor climate change research needs to consider future effects on "geologic time", it needs to consider our LIFETIME (and hopefully future human lifetimes).
Still in a few tens of million years whatever we do now won't show.
Oh, and I disagree with that, as well. You don't think extracting the majority of organic carbon deposits from the last 500 MILLION YEARS in a span of a few hundred years, and deforesting another few HUNDRED MILLION YEARS of accumulated plant/species diversity in a few hundred years won't show in a "mere" few tens of millions of years? I will leave the orders of magnitude calculations for the various spans in that sentence up to you, but they are not encouraging...
Do you have ANY scientific basis for those statements at ALL? Of course you don't, it was about as fact free as most of the anti-global warming arguments, which is at this point starting to approach the science denial of anti-evolution arguments.
And it doesn't have to cause 100% extinction to be an utter disaster for the human race in the long run, and something we should work to prevent. Rising sea levels, increased weather variability, desertification, deforestation, and changing climate zones (all of which have been linked to human contributions to global warming and other activities) can do huge amounts of damage to many millions of people both directly and indirectly.
Oh, and I hate to reply twice, but I hit send before making the most important point...
Further complicating the "statistics" is the fact that the NAND "cache" will totally change the usage profile of the mechanical drive. If the cache hit rate is high, that's a lot less seeks on the drive. If the drive is the most likely component to fail, that could significantly INCREASE the MTBF, not decrease it. Again, the original post was really the one that "didn't stop to think about it" (and in yours you did stop to think, but just not quite enough;)
No, I understand completely how it works, you just didn't read my post very well...
If the MTBF of one is significantly longer than the other the total MTBF doesn't really change.
Eg. (with totally made up numbers, which really aren't even representative of the types of statistical analysis used in manufacturing) if the HDD has a 1% chance of failure per year and the NAND flash chips have a 0.1% chance of failure, the combination is just not significant (especially vs. the performance advantage gained in their combination). Without knowing the actual failure rates the GP post was just FUD.
By putting the two together, what you're basically getting is a mechanical drive with a massively large cache. And because you now have two drives married behind a single logical interface, you've decreased the life expectancy further -- if either fails, it's a boat anchor.
That's not how "life expectancy" works. It all depends on the failure rate of the two parts. If the MTBF of one is significantly longer than the other the total MTBF doesn't really change.
Well, considering the Saturn V program's yearly budget (in today's dollars) was more than North Korea's entire yearly military budget, if they want to try to build a series of one-off custom missiles instead of mass producing them, we should highly encourage that...
Don't know, I gave up on MMORPGs a long time ago (I think Ultima Online was my first and last, actually;)
If that's the direction they want to go, ugh. But they also made the Mass Effect series and I was pretty happy with that overall (given it's basically the same engine as KOTOR, you can see where my game tastes lie... still waiting for a Jade Empire sequel...)
Except for the fact that every day I encounter websites that do not display properly and/or are non-functional in any browser other than Internet Explorer.. Despite the popularity of Firefox and Chrome, we are still very much locked into "Microsoft's vision of the net"
Ok, that is just absurd. With the latest generation of browsers I almost never see any compatibility issues. I use Chrome and Safari for Microsoft Outlook Web Access and they work perfectly for me. So Microsoft is locking people in when their flagship web-based (and very complex) product works fine on all browsers?
That I can't disagree with (well, not literally, of course:)
It's so ironic that Javascript and HTML/XML form not only the basis of the modern WWW but are GAINING in popularity for "desktop" applications, when they comprise some of the most ridiculous and/or inefficient code and data descriptions someone could come up with. And even more ironic when people use XML as a data format with Javascript, since most Javascript XML parsers are insanely horrible in terms of performance (hence JSON was born). Really, the only reason they are still used is that CPU and RAM specs have so far outpaced software development that no one seems to give a shit any more about performance...
MOST EFFICIENT? Implementing the whole H.264 decoder in Javascript is going to make Flash video playback look like a perfect implementation in comparison CPU usage-wise.
The *most efficient* way to do it is to use hardware decoding from a GPU (or CPU like Intel Sandy Bridge, etc), which is what most modern computers have been capable of for years anyway. But even MMX/SSE SIMD optimizations (which I would assume are NOT going to be available to "pure" Javascript) would be several times more efficient than even a decent Javascript JIT...
*I'd imagine that, even if the stream is 1080p, a DVD rip would be of superior quality due to the fact that the stream would be of limited bit-rate due to being streamed over the Internet. In addition to that, you be re-compressing an already compressed stream, resulting in further degradation.
Not even close, as DVD is an MPEG2 480i encode. These days H.264 @ 9Mbps can get you a 1080p stream of about 80-90% of Blu-Ray quality.
If no one supports Hollywood there is no more budget for Hollywood movies.
And before anyone chimes in with the typical "good, they all suck anyway"... there has to be *something* redeeming about Hollywood content otherwise why the hell does anyone CARE if they use DRM or not!? If that's seriously your position you are no longer logically arguing consumer rights over DRM and are just being a spiteful hater with no real interest in the topic anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two kinds of CIA employees: "undercover agents" and those who have ever entered a US embassy. This separation is required by US law (after some casualness about this lead to many deaths, IIRC). If you've ever walked into an US embassy, you can never be an undercover agent, simple as that.
Sorry, but this is the most ridiculous statement I have read on this thread. If it's public federal law can you provide ANY citation? Should be all over the place but I can't find anything even resembling it...
Beat me to it! He's definitely the decoy GLG-20.
I always wanted to create an iPhone app to do something like that. I'd call it "Unstagram".
He already said exactly what he was doing and why.
"In the post-process toning and balancing of the uneven light in the alleyway, I developed the raw file with different density to use the natural light instead of dodging and burning. In effect to recreate what the eye sees and get a larger dynamic range. To put it simply, it's the same file - developed over itself - the same thing you did with negatives when you scanned them."
You could call this "sloppy" digital editing, but you could also argue it just means he was trying to more closely simulate an analog photo processing technique that has been used for a long time...
It may have not been any more "scientific" (whatever you think that silly broad term means in this context) than the OP's post but it was factually and mathematically 100% correct, since it simply boils down to the statements "after a decade of reduction in temperature" and "that statement isn't true". That's all my post pointed out, and that's all it was trying to point out. It was a simple logical statement, not a statistical one (and moving averages are not particularly good at establishing trends at the end of a dataset, anyway, obviously).
And despite your denial, you called the last two data points in a 100+ year graph a trend. It's pretty easy to scroll up there and read your own post, but I'll make it easy...
the 5 year average in your graph shows a slight downward trend.
I'm not establishing a trend at all.
Sigh, yet another semantic nitpick debate with someone who can't even be consistent between his own posts, let alone make their own on-topic contribution to the thread as a whole... where are all of these slashdot trolls coming from??
Please cite where an instant messaging client is defined as a "network operator" in telecommunications law. Given IM can be implemented with various technologies like store and forward, P2P, or direct client-to-client connection, I'm guessing you can't.
You should probably have read the OP statement I replied to first before making your snarky comment...
"A very high CO2 measurement is found after a decade of reduction in overall temperature."
In fact, if you look at the last decade, it's still up almost 0.1 degree USING THE 5 YEAR MOVING AVERAGE (0.15 without). His statement was wrong, it's not a decade of reduction, it's just a decade of slowed increase with much more volatility. You seem to be making a conclusion based only on the final two data points on a graph.
Even *if* my response to the OP was incorrect - which is wasn''t - your attempt to establish a useful "trend" from 2 data points out of 100+ is absurd. And the fact that you tried to call someone else out on that on that after making such a silly statement is just plain sad.
I didn't answer "Which is it?" because it is a false dilemma, not a useful question. Plenty of people deny climate change completely in the face of logic. You can call them insane if you want, but it's a fact, and directly contradicts the original statement "no one denies climate change". And of course others admit there is some change but won't admit it will have any significant effect (which is a different set of people). And then there are those who just make idiotic statements like "when the world ends who cares, we are insignificant".
Well, and I suppose that last one has a subcategory - your post - of people who don't even try to address the content of the thread itself, just the semantics. Again, you didn't even mention anything worthy of discussion, just more nitpicks and meta-arguments. Whereas my previous reply once again stated my point, a supporting statistic, as well as an example of the behavior I was talking about (ie. your useless post). Of course your next reply pretty much cut out all of that, which again is my point...
Anyway, this isn't going anywhere. If you would like to state an opinion and/or facts on climate change itself, feel free, but I'm done arguing semantics.
Wha? Are you replying to me? And if so did you actually follow the point of my post and thread overall??
One of those two "quotes" you attributed to me was just me quoting the parent and the other was not stating my opinion, so trying to claim I am being contradictory is a wee bit off there...
And before you try to argue there are no climate change deniers (your "point number 1") because they'd "have to be insane" - something like 40% of the US population still believes in creationism. I would not say 40% of the population is "insane", just deluded with things others have told them to believe over the facts they could find for themselves if they wanted to. If you don't think it's possible (and common) to believe something in the face of facts to the contrary you don't understand people :)
Anyway, you can call what I said "weasel words" (don't follow that in the first place though), but sorry, if you go back and reread your post it didn't really contribute to the discussion at all - just an incorrect comprehension of the thread, a false logical conclusion, and a nitpick. Though to be honest, that nitpicking was in fact key to my point - how the OP (and many slashdotters) seem to be making silly arguments about the effect of humans on climate change in a billion years, which is effectively just trying to derail the real conversation. So I guess your post at least contributed as another example of that...
Take a deep breath and relax ;) This guy isn't in Washington, just Sacramento. He's the same idiot - I mean CA state senator - who sponsored a law to regulate video games until the Federal court told him to piss off (ie ruled it unconstitutional). This legislation isn't going anywhere, and hopefully will just piss off enough people in SF that they finally vote the moron out of office...
Given your UID you have probably only had a few more tired and slightly drunk /. posts than I have had so I understand completely ;)
Yeah, I did get the gist that you are on the side of addressing the issue short term and not using the billion year straw man yourself. But phrases you use like "long term harm" don't make any sense geologically in the first place if you don't consider human implications - "harm" is a very human concept, obviously natural processes just progress, they don't "harm".
My point was bringing up geological time frames like the OP did IS in fact a total straw man and completely unproductive in any climate change debate. And unfortunately though you seem to be (unless I am misreading) in almost complete agreement with me on the issue your devil's advocate posts have weakened your own positions by agreeing with the straw man rather than debating the real issues. Otherwise stated as "don't feed the trolls" ;)
No, he's NOT really right since he starts his entire statement with "no one denies climate change". MANY people deny climate change - by definition the heart of climate change denial is denying climate change. These people are not slashdot readers debating pointless semantics about the end of the planet/system/universe, they are claiming it won't hurt humanity in the short/mid term and doesn't need to be addressed. His point about the effect in a billion years or whatever is a TOTAL straw man and serves no purpose. Neither political policy nor climate change research needs to consider future effects on "geologic time", it needs to consider our LIFETIME (and hopefully future human lifetimes).
Still in a few tens of million years whatever we do now won't show.
Oh, and I disagree with that, as well. You don't think extracting the majority of organic carbon deposits from the last 500 MILLION YEARS in a span of a few hundred years, and deforesting another few HUNDRED MILLION YEARS of accumulated plant/species diversity in a few hundred years won't show in a "mere" few tens of millions of years? I will leave the orders of magnitude calculations for the various spans in that sentence up to you, but they are not encouraging...
Do you have ANY scientific basis for those statements at ALL? Of course you don't, it was about as fact free as most of the anti-global warming arguments, which is at this point starting to approach the science denial of anti-evolution arguments.
And it doesn't have to cause 100% extinction to be an utter disaster for the human race in the long run, and something we should work to prevent. Rising sea levels, increased weather variability, desertification, deforestation, and changing climate zones (all of which have been linked to human contributions to global warming and other activities) can do huge amounts of damage to many millions of people both directly and indirectly.
A very high CO2 measurement is found after a decade of reduction in overall temperature.
Where did you get that "fact"? The last decade had the highest average global temperatures on record.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly_1880-2012.svg
If you can't even get a simple quantitative *fact* like that right, why would anyone listen to any of your *opinions*?
And if you actually RTFA it's not about just the last decade, they have over 50 years of data showing a rise in both CO2 and ave global temperature.
Oh, and I hate to reply twice, but I hit send before making the most important point...
Further complicating the "statistics" is the fact that the NAND "cache" will totally change the usage profile of the mechanical drive. If the cache hit rate is high, that's a lot less seeks on the drive. If the drive is the most likely component to fail, that could significantly INCREASE the MTBF, not decrease it. Again, the original post was really the one that "didn't stop to think about it" (and in yours you did stop to think, but just not quite enough ;)
No, I understand completely how it works, you just didn't read my post very well...
If the MTBF of one is significantly longer than the other the total MTBF doesn't really change.
Eg. (with totally made up numbers, which really aren't even representative of the types of statistical analysis used in manufacturing) if the HDD has a 1% chance of failure per year and the NAND flash chips have a 0.1% chance of failure, the combination is just not significant (especially vs. the performance advantage gained in their combination). Without knowing the actual failure rates the GP post was just FUD.
By putting the two together, what you're basically getting is a mechanical drive with a massively large cache. And because you now have two drives married behind a single logical interface, you've decreased the life expectancy further -- if either fails, it's a boat anchor.
That's not how "life expectancy" works. It all depends on the failure rate of the two parts. If the MTBF of one is significantly longer than the other the total MTBF doesn't really change.
Well, considering the Saturn V program's yearly budget (in today's dollars) was more than North Korea's entire yearly military budget, if they want to try to build a series of one-off custom missiles instead of mass producing them, we should highly encourage that...
Don't know, I gave up on MMORPGs a long time ago (I think Ultima Online was my first and last, actually ;)
If that's the direction they want to go, ugh. But they also made the Mass Effect series and I was pretty happy with that overall (given it's basically the same engine as KOTOR, you can see where my game tastes lie... still waiting for a Jade Empire sequel...)
Except for the fact that every day I encounter websites that do not display properly and/or are non-functional in any browser other than Internet Explorer.. Despite the popularity of Firefox and Chrome, we are still very much locked into "Microsoft's vision of the net"
Ok, that is just absurd. With the latest generation of browsers I almost never see any compatibility issues. I use Chrome and Safari for Microsoft Outlook Web Access and they work perfectly for me. So Microsoft is locking people in when their flagship web-based (and very complex) product works fine on all browsers?
That I can't disagree with (well, not literally, of course :)
It's so ironic that Javascript and HTML/XML form not only the basis of the modern WWW but are GAINING in popularity for "desktop" applications, when they comprise some of the most ridiculous and/or inefficient code and data descriptions someone could come up with. And even more ironic when people use XML as a data format with Javascript, since most Javascript XML parsers are insanely horrible in terms of performance (hence JSON was born). Really, the only reason they are still used is that CPU and RAM specs have so far outpaced software development that no one seems to give a shit any more about performance...
MOST EFFICIENT? Implementing the whole H.264 decoder in Javascript is going to make Flash video playback look like a perfect implementation in comparison CPU usage-wise.
The *most efficient* way to do it is to use hardware decoding from a GPU (or CPU like Intel Sandy Bridge, etc), which is what most modern computers have been capable of for years anyway. But even MMX/SSE SIMD optimizations (which I would assume are NOT going to be available to "pure" Javascript) would be several times more efficient than even a decent Javascript JIT...
*I'd imagine that, even if the stream is 1080p, a DVD rip would be of superior quality due to the fact that the stream would be of limited bit-rate due to being streamed over the Internet. In addition to that, you be re-compressing an already compressed stream, resulting in further degradation.
Not even close, as DVD is an MPEG2 480i encode. These days H.264 @ 9Mbps can get you a 1080p stream of about 80-90% of Blu-Ray quality.
If no one supports Hollywood there is no more budget for Hollywood movies.
And before anyone chimes in with the typical "good, they all suck anyway"... there has to be *something* redeeming about Hollywood content otherwise why the hell does anyone CARE if they use DRM or not!? If that's seriously your position you are no longer logically arguing consumer rights over DRM and are just being a spiteful hater with no real interest in the topic anyway.