The problem with that is how do you set sentencing guidelines? If someone is hiding something cheap they stole from a store that's quite different from someone shredding documents proving they killed several people by being negligent with repairs, for instance. The easiest way to deal with it is to "assume the worst".
The court can assume she is guilty because she IS guilty of tampering with evidence if she wiped the drive. And the punishment for tampering with evidence in that jurisdiction is that the judge is allowed to assume the worst likely scenario, which in this case is that the drive did contained the copies claimed by the plaintiff.
Water is easier to fully recycle. Many places already have water treatment plants that return water that is cleaner than what went into the water supply in the first place. Toilet paper is the last cycle for paper recycling, for obvious reasons.
And why do you automatically assume that these toilets use lots of water? Fact is, toilets using gravity for the flush tend to use far more water than pressure pump assisted electronic toilets (here in the UK 3 litres is the norm for gravity assisted flushes, while some electronic toilets use less than 0.7l) and a quick check on Google shows bidet seats that use around a litre per minute of washing. So yes, then use more than best case, but they also use less than most toilets currently in use in the west.
If there's any real indication that you might have broken the law, they'd get your home address by getting a court order for your ISP to reveal who was logged in via a certain IP address at a certain time.
Also, let's not confuse child privacy with adult privacy. I find no moral or legal grounding for a child's right to privacy from their own parents. Those who say otherwise are either trying to be the "cool" parent or are not a parent.
Or they accept that rights should apply to everyone unless there are exceptional circumstances. It is fair enough to accept some limitations of privacy, such as preventing a child from going wherever they want.
However in many countries there is a significant legal basis for a childs right to privacy from their own parents in many cases. In Norway, for instance, a parent that opens and reads a locked diary could find themselves in court if the child seeks legal assistance, and a parent reading a childs addressed mail is just as much a criminal as a stranger reading your mail.
The rationale is that as for adults, if a child has no expectation of privacy in such cases they're unlikely to write the stuff the parents are really after in the first place, so carving out exceptions to a childs right to privacy have few compelling benefits at the cost of depriving the child of rights that we wish for everyone to learn to expect as fundamental rights.
Or if the device reports how long it's been without a signal and you don't have a very credible story that can't be easily proven wrong by the parent driving to the location you claimed to have been parked or driving around for hours without getting a signal.
You miss the point. While excessive speed may not be a significant contributor to the number of accident, higher speeds are a significant contributor to the number of injuries and fatalities in accidents.
As for "blocking out the reception" - all it takes is for the device to report on suspiciously long periods without reception.
The trickier aspect would be preventing it from simply being removed from the car and placed somewhere "acceptable" (like in a friends garage).
If I say that your house is [whatever color], I am not making a claim that the color of your house changed to the color I mentioned from that point onward. I am making a claim that from some unspecified point in the past and until now, and until some unspecified point of time in the future, your house is that color.
The same way, saying that something "exists" does not imply that it suddely came into existence.
Plasmas just don't look as bad playing non-native content.
It's very simple: Plasma's have a more blurry picture than LCD's. Having a sharp picture only works better when the DPI is high enough that you don't see the individual pixels. The drive to larger models
Look up real close at a static picture on an LCD and a plasma. The LCD will be rock steady. The plasma will have slight static. Step back to a comfortable viewing distance, and the pictures will look steady on both, but if the resolution is low enough (depending on your sight) the plasma will tend to look a lot better.
Personally I've yet to see ANY LCD TV's that I've found to have an acceptable picture quality with content of any resolution. I have no doubt that we'll eventually get LCD TV's of sufficient quality, but the current generation is not it. Plasma's on the other hand have sufficient quality because they're not as clear. When I buy my next TV it will likely be a plasma because of this, but I expect I'll buy an LCD the next time after that if the quality continues to improve the way it has done.
And of course, while these people may not reuse their own waste and "only" add one more round, that doesn't mean that the waste can't eventually be reused by someone else down the line.
Frankly, if you are planning on reviewing a book, it would be of benefit to actually learn how to express yourself in a way that at least slightly resemble coherent language first...
You miss the point. By exporting heavily subsidized food the industrialised countries are not only depriving third world countries of farming revenue from export, but as a result also upsetting their trade balance and making it hard for third world farmers to compete even in their own markets. One of the results is that a lot of third world farming have changed from focusing on foodcrops to crops that are higher income because the industrialised countries aren't subsidising them or aren't growing them, such as coffee, tobacco etc.
A significant effect of this is that many third world countries are far more vulnerable to things like drought than they used to be, as their own foodcrops are small to start with, and droughts now for many countries both devastate their revenues - affecting their ability to pay for food imports - and reduce the yields of their already too small food crops. Whereas with mainly food crops, drought would mean reduced exports and revenue, but still leave them with significant food reserves.
There are certainly examples of mismanagement too, such as Zimbabwe, but corruption is rarely a major factor in affecting the levels of food production.
The article says it was oats, and wikipedia lists a typical yield as 100 bushels an acre, and a quick Google search indicates a per bushel average price for oats around the $1.50 mark, so it seems like it's even lower. Considering the large unfilled parts of the symbol, even if all of the stomped on parts are unsalvageble the real lost revenue would be unlikely to be more than half that.
You're right. But such a competition would be near impossible to judge because it would require reading through the original and the result and ensuring they correspond sufficiently. Lossless compression is a tradeoff.
Similarly for text and speech. How much does understanding the topic of conversation help? Not much, compared with the knowledge of the most recent several words, which is why all good compression (and prediction) algorithms essentially ignore "understanding" and focus on carefully calculating the mixing of probabilities derived from low-frequency observations.
This is true up to a point. However, if I know that the discussion is related to a specific concept, I have a context that allow me to leave out a lot of details that can be reconstructed from that context later. If I know that the persons in the conversation are trying to impress each other with repeating as much as they can remember or calculate in their heads of the fibonacci sequence, pi, e, for instance, I can trivially outperform a typical text compression algorithm. But to be able to do that I need to recognise more than the word patterns - I need to recognise the progression and know what the correct way to continue is.
Ultimately the optimal compression a large enough database of human knowledge will include lots of special case information representing concepts needed to understand and handle those special cases in an efficient way. The size of the database will decide how many special cases can be added without a net loss when factoring in the size of the compressor.
How much can be gained this way for Wikipedia? I don't know. That in itself is an interesting research question, as it would involve some sort of measure of information density or Wikipedia.
Of course, a lot better results could be achieved if semantic equivalence was sufficient - but then judging the result would be near impossible.
I see where you're going, and you're far off. Storing a single base 45 symbol requires 6 bits when you convert it to binary. Hence you get at most a 25% compression ratio.
On top of that it would work only for latin scripts (in other scripts you'll find you need far more than 45 characters on a frequent basis).
For US-ASCII or latin-X charsets, sure, it would achieve something, however it would also mask a lot of other similarities from any byte oriented compressors, and so you'd risk that it would reduce the compression ratio with more than you've gained if you try to use it in combination with some types of other compressors (of course a byte oriented compressor will never be optimal in the first place exactly because it can get affected badly by stuff like this)
The problem you'd run into is that there are plenty of common compression algorithms around that does what you have described as an implicit effect of how they work, without making arbitrary decisions, like encoding "words" (in most documents there will be more efficient sequences of bytes that doesn't have to be split on word boundaries) or limit deltas to just incremental edits.
In a sense this actually does make sense - most of the problems that are seen as part of AI research involve solutions that doesn't have anything to do with intelligence. The problem is rightfully part of AI research, but the solutions largely aren't.
Imagine being an architect in a world where no building material are known. You'd spend most of your career inventing the basic building blocks and the techniques to use them to allow you to start designing houses. Doing that work would be part of being an architect, but once the work is done, the techniques you've invented would be part of a different field.
Of course the downside is that people asking what your successes as an architect are, based on the "proper" definition of an architect will think you're a perpetual loser, as you haven't completed any house designs, since you need to know what materials and constraints you have to work with first.
You are right that it isn't an end-goal. However for many extreme groups escalation is their only hope of gaining popular support - they NEED the regimes they are fighting to become the demons they claim they are in order to increase recruiting and funding opportunities.
Any voting system that doesn't take into account people not voting is insane - which includes every form of PR I've ever heard proposed, which is a bit of a shame as PR could be modified to take nonvotes into account. IE, if only 39% of the population could be bothered to vote and thier are 10 seats being contested in a region then only 4 seats would actually become available while the other 6 seats would go unfilled - this would stop extremist parties from gaining undue influence. But I don't know of anybody calling for this
Because it's pointless. It only makes any sort of difference if the percentage of people voting vary dramatically by region, and even then it only matters if it's straight proportional voting with no additional measures to even out the results. If the percentage of people voting per region is reasonably close, the only outcome of leaving seats unfilled is that it takes fewer seats to get a majority.
Look to for instance the Scandinavian countries for working proportional voting systems. Norway splits the parliament seats across its 19 regions (slightly skewed so that less populated regions gets more representation than they'd otherwise be due), but keeps a certain number of seats aside. Once the straight regional seats have been allocated, the rest of the seats are allocated among any parties that got more than 4% of the vote in a manner that ensures their representation matches the total popular vote across the country as closely as possible. The seats go to those representatives from each party that were closest to getting elected directly.
This has a number of important properties:
Regional groups and small national parties stands a chance of getting represented through direct votes in areas they have a reasonable level of support (this happens regularly).
The overall distribution of seats closely match actual votes cast.
The 4% limit ensures increased stability (though one might argue about whether that stability is good or bad - it makes it somewhat harder for smaller parties to grow their influence, but also reduces the "risk" of ending with a lot of tiny parties getting important leverage.
While some people thing that PR systems cause "weak" governments, the reality is that it causes governments that learn to compromise and work together with the other parties. Norways current government is a three-party government, like the previous one.
A major impact of this system is that the parties are far more homogenous simply because there is far less reason for factions within the parties because it takes far less to be able to establish a separate party and get elected on a separate party platform, which in many ways make it easier for the voters to know what they are actually voting for.
You entirely miss the point. Protections of privacy and protections against surveillance aren't there to protect you against a good government (assuming you believe the current government is good), but to protect you against individual rotten apples and future governments that may not be nearly as benevolent.
The problem with any system like this is that it shifts power to whomever controls the government, and we don't know who will control the government even 5 years from now.
It doesn't have to be a dictator - it's more than sufficient for it to be a brainless asshole that has "interesting" ideas about how to use access to this data.
Now, there may be benefits, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't be very careful about concentrating more power on fewer hands.
By your argument practically all internet users are uninformed. Fair enough. However that means most of these searches are likely made with the belief that they'd stay private. Whether or not someone theoretically could intercept it has no relevance as it was a company providing them a service who - whether they technically had the right or not - blatantly abused their customers trust.
You're being delusional if you think that technicalities of whether or not it's wise of people to assume their searches will stay completely private affects peoples right to be pissed off when a service provider they have a customer relationship to releases it to the general public.
Skepticism attempts to eliminate "false positives" from science in the process it throws in a lot of "false negatives" - it rejects things which are true - but for which some other possible explanation exists.
How do you know that those things are true when some other possible explanation exists?
You know by challenging them: By considering which predictions can be made based on the theory you believe to be true, and trying to find ways to contradict those predictions. In other words, by being skeptic.
A lot of things have seemed to be "obviously true" to a lot of people throughout history and have later been shown to be blatantly wrong. A typical example is Galileo's experiments with gravity - it was "obvious" to people that objects of different mass fell at different speeds until Galileo bothered to actually test the corresponding predictions experimentally.
Being skeptic isn't about rejecting things that have alternative explanations, but to always expect theroeis to be thoroughly tested before we accept them as likely to be true, and accepting that no proof is absolute and always question whether new data supports existing theories or not.
This is necessary especially in the cases where we consider something as true because those are the cases we'd easily be tempted to ignore.
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The problem with that is how do you set sentencing guidelines? If someone is hiding something cheap they stole from a store that's quite different from someone shredding documents proving they killed several people by being negligent with repairs, for instance. The easiest way to deal with it is to "assume the worst".
The court can assume she is guilty because she IS guilty of tampering with evidence if she wiped the drive. And the punishment for tampering with evidence in that jurisdiction is that the judge is allowed to assume the worst likely scenario, which in this case is that the drive did contained the copies claimed by the plaintiff.
And why do you automatically assume that these toilets use lots of water? Fact is, toilets using gravity for the flush tend to use far more water than pressure pump assisted electronic toilets (here in the UK 3 litres is the norm for gravity assisted flushes, while some electronic toilets use less than 0.7l) and a quick check on Google shows bidet seats that use around a litre per minute of washing. So yes, then use more than best case, but they also use less than most toilets currently in use in the west.
If there's any real indication that you might have broken the law, they'd get your home address by getting a court order for your ISP to reveal who was logged in via a certain IP address at a certain time.
Or they accept that rights should apply to everyone unless there are exceptional circumstances. It is fair enough to accept some limitations of privacy, such as preventing a child from going wherever they want.
However in many countries there is a significant legal basis for a childs right to privacy from their own parents in many cases. In Norway, for instance, a parent that opens and reads a locked diary could find themselves in court if the child seeks legal assistance, and a parent reading a childs addressed mail is just as much a criminal as a stranger reading your mail.
The rationale is that as for adults, if a child has no expectation of privacy in such cases they're unlikely to write the stuff the parents are really after in the first place, so carving out exceptions to a childs right to privacy have few compelling benefits at the cost of depriving the child of rights that we wish for everyone to learn to expect as fundamental rights.
Or if the device reports how long it's been without a signal and you don't have a very credible story that can't be easily proven wrong by the parent driving to the location you claimed to have been parked or driving around for hours without getting a signal.
As for "blocking out the reception" - all it takes is for the device to report on suspiciously long periods without reception.
The trickier aspect would be preventing it from simply being removed from the car and placed somewhere "acceptable" (like in a friends garage).
The same way, saying that something "exists" does not imply that it suddely came into existence.
It's very simple: Plasma's have a more blurry picture than LCD's. Having a sharp picture only works better when the DPI is high enough that you don't see the individual pixels. The drive to larger models
Look up real close at a static picture on an LCD and a plasma. The LCD will be rock steady. The plasma will have slight static. Step back to a comfortable viewing distance, and the pictures will look steady on both, but if the resolution is low enough (depending on your sight) the plasma will tend to look a lot better.
Personally I've yet to see ANY LCD TV's that I've found to have an acceptable picture quality with content of any resolution. I have no doubt that we'll eventually get LCD TV's of sufficient quality, but the current generation is not it. Plasma's on the other hand have sufficient quality because they're not as clear. When I buy my next TV it will likely be a plasma because of this, but I expect I'll buy an LCD the next time after that if the quality continues to improve the way it has done.
And of course, while these people may not reuse their own waste and "only" add one more round, that doesn't mean that the waste can't eventually be reused by someone else down the line.
Frankly, if you are planning on reviewing a book, it would be of benefit to actually learn how to express yourself in a way that at least slightly resemble coherent language first...
A significant effect of this is that many third world countries are far more vulnerable to things like drought than they used to be, as their own foodcrops are small to start with, and droughts now for many countries both devastate their revenues - affecting their ability to pay for food imports - and reduce the yields of their already too small food crops. Whereas with mainly food crops, drought would mean reduced exports and revenue, but still leave them with significant food reserves.
There are certainly examples of mismanagement too, such as Zimbabwe, but corruption is rarely a major factor in affecting the levels of food production.
The article says it was oats, and wikipedia lists a typical yield as 100 bushels an acre, and a quick Google search indicates a per bushel average price for oats around the $1.50 mark, so it seems like it's even lower. Considering the large unfilled parts of the symbol, even if all of the stomped on parts are unsalvageble the real lost revenue would be unlikely to be more than half that.
Either you're a newbie or you have poor memory. The word "byte" most certainly has been applied to a wide variety of number of bits.
You're right. But such a competition would be near impossible to judge because it would require reading through the original and the result and ensuring they correspond sufficiently. Lossless compression is a tradeoff.
This is true up to a point. However, if I know that the discussion is related to a specific concept, I have a context that allow me to leave out a lot of details that can be reconstructed from that context later. If I know that the persons in the conversation are trying to impress each other with repeating as much as they can remember or calculate in their heads of the fibonacci sequence, pi, e, for instance, I can trivially outperform a typical text compression algorithm. But to be able to do that I need to recognise more than the word patterns - I need to recognise the progression and know what the correct way to continue is.
Ultimately the optimal compression a large enough database of human knowledge will include lots of special case information representing concepts needed to understand and handle those special cases in an efficient way. The size of the database will decide how many special cases can be added without a net loss when factoring in the size of the compressor.
How much can be gained this way for Wikipedia? I don't know. That in itself is an interesting research question, as it would involve some sort of measure of information density or Wikipedia.
Of course, a lot better results could be achieved if semantic equivalence was sufficient - but then judging the result would be near impossible.
On top of that it would work only for latin scripts (in other scripts you'll find you need far more than 45 characters on a frequent basis).
For US-ASCII or latin-X charsets, sure, it would achieve something, however it would also mask a lot of other similarities from any byte oriented compressors, and so you'd risk that it would reduce the compression ratio with more than you've gained if you try to use it in combination with some types of other compressors (of course a byte oriented compressor will never be optimal in the first place exactly because it can get affected badly by stuff like this)
The problem you'd run into is that there are plenty of common compression algorithms around that does what you have described as an implicit effect of how they work, without making arbitrary decisions, like encoding "words" (in most documents there will be more efficient sequences of bytes that doesn't have to be split on word boundaries) or limit deltas to just incremental edits.
Imagine being an architect in a world where no building material are known. You'd spend most of your career inventing the basic building blocks and the techniques to use them to allow you to start designing houses. Doing that work would be part of being an architect, but once the work is done, the techniques you've invented would be part of a different field.
Of course the downside is that people asking what your successes as an architect are, based on the "proper" definition of an architect will think you're a perpetual loser, as you haven't completed any house designs, since you need to know what materials and constraints you have to work with first.
Try stripping phone wire with your teeth when the phone rings. I did that once as a kid, and it was rather unpleasant...
You are right that it isn't an end-goal. However for many extreme groups escalation is their only hope of gaining popular support - they NEED the regimes they are fighting to become the demons they claim they are in order to increase recruiting and funding opportunities.
Because it's pointless. It only makes any sort of difference if the percentage of people voting vary dramatically by region, and even then it only matters if it's straight proportional voting with no additional measures to even out the results. If the percentage of people voting per region is reasonably close, the only outcome of leaving seats unfilled is that it takes fewer seats to get a majority.
Look to for instance the Scandinavian countries for working proportional voting systems. Norway splits the parliament seats across its 19 regions (slightly skewed so that less populated regions gets more representation than they'd otherwise be due), but keeps a certain number of seats aside. Once the straight regional seats have been allocated, the rest of the seats are allocated among any parties that got more than 4% of the vote in a manner that ensures their representation matches the total popular vote across the country as closely as possible. The seats go to those representatives from each party that were closest to getting elected directly.
This has a number of important properties:
While some people thing that PR systems cause "weak" governments, the reality is that it causes governments that learn to compromise and work together with the other parties. Norways current government is a three-party government, like the previous one.
A major impact of this system is that the parties are far more homogenous simply because there is far less reason for factions within the parties because it takes far less to be able to establish a separate party and get elected on a separate party platform, which in many ways make it easier for the voters to know what they are actually voting for.
The problem with any system like this is that it shifts power to whomever controls the government, and we don't know who will control the government even 5 years from now.
It doesn't have to be a dictator - it's more than sufficient for it to be a brainless asshole that has "interesting" ideas about how to use access to this data.
Now, there may be benefits, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't be very careful about concentrating more power on fewer hands.
You're being delusional if you think that technicalities of whether or not it's wise of people to assume their searches will stay completely private affects peoples right to be pissed off when a service provider they have a customer relationship to releases it to the general public.
How do you know that those things are true when some other possible explanation exists?
You know by challenging them: By considering which predictions can be made based on the theory you believe to be true, and trying to find ways to contradict those predictions. In other words, by being skeptic.
A lot of things have seemed to be "obviously true" to a lot of people throughout history and have later been shown to be blatantly wrong. A typical example is Galileo's experiments with gravity - it was "obvious" to people that objects of different mass fell at different speeds until Galileo bothered to actually test the corresponding predictions experimentally.
Being skeptic isn't about rejecting things that have alternative explanations, but to always expect theroeis to be thoroughly tested before we accept them as likely to be true, and accepting that no proof is absolute and always question whether new data supports existing theories or not.
This is necessary especially in the cases where we consider something as true because those are the cases we'd easily be tempted to ignore.