It is a bad thing. There's way more graphics formats out there than need to be.
png is good for icons and webpage graphics (unless your target is IE). Its compresses well, is lossless, and has good transparency
And the only major differences from TIFF with PNG compression is that png's data is in a fixed order. And "unless your target is IE" is making it clear that you're putting the cart before the horse. Why couldn't IE support TIFFs with PNG compression? If there were only one format of graphics, isn't it more likely that IE would support it?
tiff is a good choice for very large, very high color images, such as producing for poster prints
Why? Only because that's how you view it. In fact, TIFF is the Swiss army knife of image formats; it includes several forms of compression specifically for B&W files, CCITT compression beating PNG compression for page scans quite handily.
gif is paletted, and compress better than png's for low color images. If you only have 20 or so colors and only a need for a mask (or perhaps would like some animation) gif is your bet. See 'screensavers' on mobile phones.
Oh, ah, screensavers on mobile phones, and a couple kilobytes of savings on a few pictures designed with EGA in mind. Why does everything in the world have to support this format, if it's only good for screensavers on mobile phones?
In your world, webpages would take much longer to load, poster prints seem faded and image transformation tools would take forever.
All three are nonsequitors. PNG compressed TIFFs are about the same size as PNG files; the optimal graphics format would logically provide the same tools for quality high-color scans, and have you actually watched top while you're running the netpnm tools? pnmtopng is very quick, but pnmflip and anything else that loads the entire image into memory takes a while. Adding a png decompressor and quick and dirty compressor to every netpnm utility wouldn't matter much at all; netpnm explicitly offers a tradeoff of simplicity over speed anyway.
My understanding is that there was a big push for XML because of a perceived need for open document formats.
The advantage of XML is that you can use an off the shelf parser for every language instead of writing a new parser for each language. Let someone else handle the parsing and you handle only what you have to.
As opposed to computer languages now, where most modern languages (LISP-family excepted) have context-dependent grammars that are incredibly hard to parse correctly and each language has to have a parser written specially for it.
Binary formats are "closed" only in so far as we do not have access to the source of the program that created them.
Yeah, I'm sure that if you got the code to Microsoft Word, you could figure out the format just like that.
Even if you can, then you add another large ball of code to your project, for reading Word files. In the end, you've got a dozen different libraries attached, each one for reading a different format of file.
JPEG is a binary file format, yet we have open standards and the committee who designed it released open source reference implementations of the decoder and encoder.
Look at how many file formats the average graphical viewer has to support. Each one has its own library, its own bugs, its own security holes...
JPEG is an open format and nobody goes around trying to stuff pixels in XML files.
No; they stuff pixels in PNG files and TIFF files and PNM files and GIF files and a dozen other formats that need to be parsed by completely different parsers.
When a judge orders you to hand over a key, you are not being forced to testify against yourself; you are being ordered produce an object that the court wants to see.
You are being ordered to produce an object. A password is not an object; it is speech. There is a distinct difference.
In most juristications, you can be FORCED to hand out the key to your encrypted partitions, but only if the judge sees a reasonable reason suspicition.
Not in the US. The freedom of speech and the freedom not to incriminate yourself includes the right to shut up when they ask for the key.
Here's why: first we have to expand all that digitized data into some sort ASCII encoding, which is then compressed. End result: no gain and a possible loss of precision in the data.
Compressed ASCII encoded binary will rarely be much larger than the original binary compressed. And how are you screwing up so badly that there's a possible loss of precision in the data? If all else fails, use Base64. If you're dealing with floating point numbers, express them exactly in hex.
I mean would an `intelligent` form of life be chucking out loads of extra signals wasting resources
Notice how when you speak to someone, people around you can hear. Are you, as an 'intelligent' form of life, actively trying to prevent that "waste of resources"? Same thing with radio waves; it's sometimes easier and more efficent to hit everything than try and direct it exactly where it needs to go.
If anyone can possess any gun by the 2cd Amendment, then anyone can say anything by the 1st. Including threatening the President.
Guns of themselves do nothing. In the hands of good people, they are used to do good. In the hands of evil, they are used to do evil.
Guns don't do much good. Their primary use is for killing, their secondary is to threaten. Both those uses can be used for good, but they are hardly morally neutral.
Nor can you prevent the evil from aquiring and using guns. For instance, a 'hit' was just performed using a gun in a high security prison in Mexico.
Funny; most high security prisons in the US manage to keep guns out. Must be dumb luck; it couldn't be competence.
Further, the cardinal's critics have to explain why three countries where condoms are readily available and their use vigorously promoted - Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa - have the world's highest rates of HIV infection.
Because many of them believe that condoms cause AIDS?
Maybe I don't see the deeper issue, but 0% chance of being infected is still better than 2% chance of being infected.
Hello, Mr. Michael Jackson? Or is it Mr. Howard Hughes? The degree of isolation acceptable to prevent communicatable disease is always a important, sensitive, personal choice.
And the religious part of it adds fuel to the fire. How many times do you need to be told "you shouldn't have sex because it's a sin" to have the middle finger up before "because"?
Because of the Bill of Rights, there are no grounds for limiting guns, period.
That's an absurd reading. To say that is to say that a person can threaten the life of the president (by the same logic, there are no grounds for limiting freedom of speech), and take his machine guns and march straight up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and there's nothing the cops can do about it.
There are only two things which might actually allow Iranians to get back their Internet freedoms:
Or, you know, the Iranians take to the streets and force the religious leadership to release power, like happened in most of Eastern Europe. Not every solution requires outside influence.
Guess who sold Saddam the helicopters and chemicals he used to gas the Kurds?
The French? The amount of weaponary we sold Iraq is negligable next to Russia, China and France's sales. For proof, simply look at the fact they were using Russian tanks during the Gulf War, and that they're using AK-47s, not M-16s.
As for Iran, it's our own fault that the current government is in place.
British Oil owned the oil lines before they were nationalized, and they're the ones that pushed the US to do it. It's amazing how it's always just the US's fault, though.
That is a pretty interesting point. They would not have laughed, but they might not have believed with much confidence it would work, either. If they had that kind of confidence they certainly would have sent a mission sooner. Why not? I doubt Columbus's ships were much more capable than the ships of a century or two before, and there was money to be made if it worked.
But his ships couldn't make it, and the bankers knew it. The reason why the bankers didn't have confidence is because they were right and Columbus was wrong. Columbus believed in a small world; in reality, had there not been a continent in his way, he never would have reached India, and his bankers knew that.
The 20th century will be remembered as the age when the decadent democracies endlessly battled each other for nothing,
Really? I don't remember any wars between democracies this century. Any.
where the explosive population growth of the inferior was tempered by endless human death and suffering,
Why do you judge them as inferior? More importantly, what gives you the right to be their judge?
The governments where endless deaths and sufferings were going on weren't democracies. Furthermore, we spent this entire century actively fighting human death and suffering, reducing the deaths by smallpox, polio, dipthera, tuberculosis, malaria, and many other diseases hugely.
and the environmental degradation of overpopulation.
Your experts created the things that caused the problem. Your experts have spent years fighting any attempt of the larger population to improve the enviroment, for the profit of their corporate masters. And I'm susposed to trust them.
I don't quite see how an uneducated animal who lives in a housing project is qualified to elect ANYONE to deal with them however
I don't think anyone who calls another human being an uneducated animal is qualified to speak on wisdom.
I could care less if 90% of the world is slaughtered tomorrow.
Which means that (a) any government you construct will be violent torn down, by people who like to live, and (b) means that your plans are opposed by the experts on moral rectitude (philosophers). If you give power to these experts, they will oppose you. If you don't give power to these experts, it's clearly not any form of meritocracy, it's a dictatorship of you.
that's why I am not proposing a dictatorship here.
I was trying to compare the most "reliable" academic publications with Wikipedia and highlight the differences.
But it's not a reliable academic publication; it's not designed to be a reliable academic publication; and no general encyclopedia is be a reliable academic publication. It's an absurd criteria.
In the finite field of two elements, the only elements are 0 and 1. There is no element named 2, and for this reason it is simply not possible for 1+1 to equal 2 (in fact, 1+1 equals 0 in this context). More generally, 1+1 equals 0 in any ring of characteristic 2. [...]
This example illustrates the reason that I think you are wrong and that the Wikipedia founder who wrote the articles being referenced in the story is right.
Walking out of the realm of theory, and into the realm of practice, the articles on fields and rings say exactly that. If they were being changed, then there would be an issue.
I put forth that most intellectual elite do not see the "average" man as something to be gotten rid of, but rather something to learn to live with and to take care of.
Never gotten rid of, but far too often exploited or used. Even taken care of is not a great thing; would you like to be adopted as someone's pet and taken care of, and denied any right or ability to make your own choices, or your own ways in life?
Would you really take pill X or have surgery because wikipedia says so?
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia! Of course you wouldn't, just like you wouldn't if Brittanica said so. You would talk with your doctor and study specific reliable sources about your disease, not works of popular science or encyclopedias.
and I had discovered that the normal formulation of electromagnetism is wrong and I try to edit the wikipedia page, then very quickly someone would change the page back without even trying the experiments I suggested.
As well they should. An encyclopedia is not a place for journal articles. If you discover that the normal formulation of electromagnetism is wrong, publish it in a peer-reviewed journal. At which point it starts to recieve some respectability, it might get mentioned in an encyclopedia as an alternate theory. Encyclopedias present facts as they are generally understood, not speculative, untested research.
It is the wicked child of the delusional advocates of democracy and egalitarianism, who in their naivete believe that all people are equal in their abilities and judgement.
We've tried other ideas. There are reasons why we chopped Charles I's head off. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and George Bush (or Bill Clinton, if you happen to be a conservative), for all his problems, is better then most of the emperors and kings of history.
What we require is a new social order than recognizes the various discplines of each citizen and identifies his expertise.
Wisdom is more important than intelligence. Global warming, for example, balances the effect increased cooling and energy costs will have on the third world and elsewhere versus the possibility that it's doing damage to the environment and the questions about how much damage. Is it worth killing a hundred people now, due to a lack of cheap refrigeration, to possibly save more people later, if we might find a way to fix it later or deal with the consequences later? How do you weigh the risks of a nuclear power plant versus the constant dangers of a coal plant?An environmentalist can't answer the economic and social questions involved; an economist or sociologist can't answer the scientific questions; and none of them may be qualified to answer the moral and ethical questions.
I fear to put the world in charge of people who may randomly boot lusers off the net, or blow up religous monuments to make way for new highways. The antielitism, that we all matter and that no one person can make the right decision, is one of the things that makes democracy work.
Further, we may prevent the complete destruction of our civilization by ceasing to hand power to the unqualified and depraved.
Democracies don't hand power to the depraved. Honestly: Nero, Caligua, Stalin, Mao, Lenin, none of them were elected. Hitler came from a democracy, but was never elected. Bush, Clinton, Regan, Nixon, they all had their particular more issues, but if you look at the problems history and news records about them, they may be venal, stupid, arrogant, even a little bit paranoid, but not depraved.
Relatively speaking, elected officials usually have more qualifications then "my dad was king" or "I've killed everyone who disagreed with me".
Which would only further erode the influence of experts who would, by definition, post their own knowledge of the subject.
If they're experts qualified to post their own knowledge of the subject, they've probably written a book on the subject and can quote from it, or at least journal articles, or at the very least be familiar with the written works in their field.
If there's nothing written about the expert's knowledge, then it's one person's opinion, untested by his peers. It's material for journals and conferences, not the tried and tested material that should go into encyclopedias. It's quite likely wrong; even experts are freqeuently wrong, which is why we have peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
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You say that like its a bad thing.
It is a bad thing. There's way more graphics formats out there than need to be.
png is good for icons and webpage graphics (unless your target is IE). Its compresses well, is lossless, and has good transparency
And the only major differences from TIFF with PNG compression is that png's data is in a fixed order. And "unless your target is IE" is making it clear that you're putting the cart before the horse. Why couldn't IE support TIFFs with PNG compression? If there were only one format of graphics, isn't it more likely that IE would support it?
tiff is a good choice for very large, very high color images, such as producing for poster prints
Why? Only because that's how you view it. In fact, TIFF is the Swiss army knife of image formats; it includes several forms of compression specifically for B&W files, CCITT compression beating PNG compression for page scans quite handily.
gif is paletted, and compress better than png's for low color images. If you only have 20 or so colors and only a need for a mask (or perhaps would like some animation) gif is your bet. See 'screensavers' on mobile phones.
Oh, ah, screensavers on mobile phones, and a couple kilobytes of savings on a few pictures designed with EGA in mind. Why does everything in the world have to support this format, if it's only good for screensavers on mobile phones?
In your world, webpages would take much longer to load, poster prints seem faded and image transformation tools would take forever.
All three are nonsequitors. PNG compressed TIFFs are about the same size as PNG files; the optimal graphics format would logically provide the same tools for quality high-color scans, and have you actually watched top while you're running the netpnm tools? pnmtopng is very quick, but pnmflip and anything else that loads the entire image into memory takes a while. Adding a png decompressor and quick and dirty compressor to every netpnm utility wouldn't matter much at all; netpnm explicitly offers a tradeoff of simplicity over speed anyway.
My understanding is that there was a big push for XML because of a perceived need for open document formats.
The advantage of XML is that you can use an off the shelf parser for every language instead of writing a new parser for each language. Let someone else handle the parsing and you handle only what you have to.
As opposed to computer languages now, where most modern languages (LISP-family excepted) have context-dependent grammars that are incredibly hard to parse correctly and each language has to have a parser written specially for it.
Binary formats are "closed" only in so far as we do not have access to the source of the program that created them.
Yeah, I'm sure that if you got the code to Microsoft Word, you could figure out the format just like that.
Even if you can, then you add another large ball of code to your project, for reading Word files. In the end, you've got a dozen different libraries attached, each one for reading a different format of file.
JPEG is a binary file format, yet we have open standards and the committee who designed it released open source reference implementations of the decoder and encoder.
Look at how many file formats the average graphical viewer has to support. Each one has its own library, its own bugs, its own security holes...
JPEG is an open format and nobody goes around trying to stuff pixels in XML files.
No; they stuff pixels in PNG files and TIFF files and PNM files and GIF files and a dozen other formats that need to be parsed by completely different parsers.
When a judge orders you to hand over a key, you are not being forced to testify against yourself; you are being ordered produce an object that the court wants to see.
You are being ordered to produce an object. A password is not an object; it is speech. There is a distinct difference.
In most juristications, you can be FORCED to hand out the key to your encrypted partitions, but only if the judge sees a reasonable reason suspicition.
Not in the US. The freedom of speech and the freedom not to incriminate yourself includes the right to shut up when they ask for the key.
Here's why: first we have to expand all that digitized data into some sort ASCII encoding, which is then compressed. End result: no gain and a possible loss of precision in the data.
Compressed ASCII encoded binary will rarely be much larger than the original binary compressed. And how are you screwing up so badly that there's a possible loss of precision in the data? If all else fails, use Base64. If you're dealing with floating point numbers, express them exactly in hex.
I mean would an `intelligent` form of life be chucking out loads of extra signals wasting resources
Notice how when you speak to someone, people around you can hear. Are you, as an 'intelligent' form of life, actively trying to prevent that "waste of resources"? Same thing with radio waves; it's sometimes easier and more efficent to hit everything than try and direct it exactly where it needs to go.
No one said anything of the kind.
If anyone can possess any gun by the 2cd Amendment, then anyone can say anything by the 1st. Including threatening the President.
Guns of themselves do nothing. In the hands of good people, they are used to do good. In the hands of evil, they are used to do evil.
Guns don't do much good. Their primary use is for killing, their secondary is to threaten. Both those uses can be used for good, but they are hardly morally neutral.
Nor can you prevent the evil from aquiring and using guns. For instance, a 'hit' was just performed using a gun in a high security prison in Mexico.
Funny; most high security prisons in the US manage to keep guns out. Must be dumb luck; it couldn't be competence.
Further, the cardinal's critics have to explain why three countries where condoms are readily available and their use vigorously promoted - Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa - have the world's highest rates of HIV infection.
Because many of them believe that condoms cause AIDS?
Maybe I don't see the deeper issue, but 0% chance of being infected is still better than 2% chance of being infected.
Hello, Mr. Michael Jackson? Or is it Mr. Howard Hughes? The degree of isolation acceptable to prevent communicatable disease is always a important, sensitive, personal choice.
And the religious part of it adds fuel to the fire. How many times do you need to be told "you shouldn't have sex because it's a sin" to have the middle finger up before "because"?
What if a cop has been assaulted and his hands are covered in blood -- or the sensors are caked in blood and mud after a scuffle in a dirty alleyway?
The cop is in a scuffle in a dirty alleyway, covered in blood and mud, what are the odds it's the other guy who has his gun?
Because of the Bill of Rights, there are no grounds for limiting guns, period.
That's an absurd reading. To say that is to say that a person can threaten the life of the president (by the same logic, there are no grounds for limiting freedom of speech), and take his machine guns and march straight up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and there's nothing the cops can do about it.
There are only two things which might actually allow Iranians to get back their Internet freedoms:
Or, you know, the Iranians take to the streets and force the religious leadership to release power, like happened in most of Eastern Europe. Not every solution requires outside influence.
Guess who sold Saddam the helicopters and chemicals he used to gas the Kurds?
The French? The amount of weaponary we sold Iraq is negligable next to Russia, China and France's sales. For proof, simply look at the fact they were using Russian tanks during the Gulf War, and that they're using AK-47s, not M-16s.
As for Iran, it's our own fault that the current government is in place.
British Oil owned the oil lines before they were nationalized, and they're the ones that pushed the US to do it. It's amazing how it's always just the US's fault, though.
Having a law degree from an Ivy League institution does not qualify.
So if having a degree from an Ivy League institution doesn't qualify you as an expert, what does?
That is a pretty interesting point. They would not have laughed, but they might not have believed with much confidence it would work, either. If they had that kind of confidence they certainly would have sent a mission sooner. Why not? I doubt Columbus's ships were much more capable than the ships of a century or two before, and there was money to be made if it worked.
But his ships couldn't make it, and the bankers knew it. The reason why the bankers didn't have confidence is because they were right and Columbus was wrong. Columbus believed in a small world; in reality, had there not been a continent in his way, he never would have reached India, and his bankers knew that.
After all, encyclopaedias are only useful if you KNOW who wrote them.
Then they're useless. Only experts in the fields who don't need the article will recognize the person who wrote the article, much less their bias.
The 20th century will be remembered as the age when the decadent democracies endlessly battled each other for nothing,
Really? I don't remember any wars between democracies this century. Any.
where the explosive population growth of the inferior was tempered by endless human death and suffering,
Why do you judge them as inferior? More importantly, what gives you the right to be their judge?
The governments where endless deaths and sufferings were going on weren't democracies. Furthermore, we spent this entire century actively fighting human death and suffering, reducing the deaths by smallpox, polio, dipthera, tuberculosis, malaria, and many other diseases hugely.
and the environmental degradation of overpopulation.
Your experts created the things that caused the problem. Your experts have spent years fighting any attempt of the larger population to improve the enviroment, for the profit of their corporate masters. And I'm susposed to trust them.
I don't quite see how an uneducated animal who lives in a housing project is qualified to elect ANYONE to deal with them however
I don't think anyone who calls another human being an uneducated animal is qualified to speak on wisdom.
I could care less if 90% of the world is slaughtered tomorrow.
Which means that (a) any government you construct will be violent torn down, by people who like to live, and (b) means that your plans are opposed by the experts on moral rectitude (philosophers). If you give power to these experts, they will oppose you. If you don't give power to these experts, it's clearly not any form of meritocracy, it's a dictatorship of you.
that's why I am not proposing a dictatorship here.
It's an oligarchy. Not much of an improvement.
I was trying to compare the most "reliable" academic publications with Wikipedia and highlight the differences.
But it's not a reliable academic publication; it's not designed to be a reliable academic publication; and no general encyclopedia is be a reliable academic publication. It's an absurd criteria.
In the finite field of two elements, the only elements are 0 and 1. There is no element named 2, and for this reason it is simply not possible for 1+1 to equal 2 (in fact, 1+1 equals 0 in this context). More generally, 1+1 equals 0 in any ring of characteristic 2. [...]
This example illustrates the reason that I think you are wrong and that the Wikipedia founder who wrote the articles being referenced in the story is right.
Walking out of the realm of theory, and into the realm of practice, the articles on fields and rings say exactly that. If they were being changed, then there would be an issue.
I put forth that most intellectual elite do not see the "average" man as something to be gotten rid of, but rather something to learn to live with and to take care of.
Never gotten rid of, but far too often exploited or used. Even taken care of is not a great thing; would you like to be adopted as someone's pet and taken care of, and denied any right or ability to make your own choices, or your own ways in life?
Would you really take pill X or have surgery because wikipedia says so?
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia! Of course you wouldn't, just like you wouldn't if Brittanica said so. You would talk with your doctor and study specific reliable sources about your disease, not works of popular science or encyclopedias.
and I had discovered that the normal formulation
of electromagnetism is wrong and I try to edit
the wikipedia page, then very quickly
someone would change the page back without
even trying the experiments I suggested.
As well they should. An encyclopedia is not a place for journal articles. If you discover that the normal formulation of electromagnetism is wrong, publish it in a peer-reviewed journal. At which point it starts to recieve some respectability, it might get mentioned in an encyclopedia as an alternate theory. Encyclopedias present facts as they are generally understood, not speculative, untested research.
It is the wicked child of the delusional advocates of democracy and egalitarianism, who in their naivete believe that all people are equal in their abilities and judgement.
We've tried other ideas. There are reasons why we chopped Charles I's head off. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and George Bush (or Bill Clinton, if you happen to be a conservative), for all his problems, is better then most of the emperors and kings of history.
What we require is a new social order than recognizes the various discplines of each citizen and identifies his expertise.
Wisdom is more important than intelligence. Global warming, for example, balances the effect increased cooling and energy costs will have on the third world and elsewhere versus the possibility that it's doing damage to the environment and the questions about how much damage. Is it worth killing a hundred people now, due to a lack of cheap refrigeration, to possibly save more people later, if we might find a way to fix it later or deal with the consequences later? How do you weigh the risks of a nuclear power plant versus the constant dangers of a coal plant?An environmentalist can't answer the economic and social questions involved; an economist or sociologist can't answer the scientific questions; and none of them may be qualified to answer the moral and ethical questions.
I fear to put the world in charge of people who may randomly boot lusers off the net, or blow up religous monuments to make way for new highways. The antielitism, that we all matter and that no one person can make the right decision, is one of the things that makes democracy work.
Further, we may prevent the complete destruction of our civilization by ceasing to hand power to the unqualified and depraved.
Democracies don't hand power to the depraved. Honestly: Nero, Caligua, Stalin, Mao, Lenin, none of them were elected. Hitler came from a democracy, but was never elected. Bush, Clinton, Regan, Nixon, they all had their particular more issues, but if you look at the problems history and news records about them, they may be venal, stupid, arrogant, even a little bit paranoid, but not depraved.
Relatively speaking, elected officials usually have more qualifications then "my dad was king" or "I've killed everyone who disagreed with me".
Am I alone in thinking wikipedia should A) have experts come in and run a "stable" version of the encyclopedia
Who's going to pay for it? Who's going to check it? How do you handle the huge quantity of constantly changing articles?
Which would only further erode the influence of experts who would, by definition, post their own knowledge of the subject.
If they're experts qualified to post their own knowledge of the subject, they've probably written a book on the subject and can quote from it, or at least journal articles, or at the very least be familiar with the written works in their field.
If there's nothing written about the expert's knowledge, then it's one person's opinion, untested by his peers. It's material for journals and conferences, not the tried and tested material that should go into encyclopedias. It's quite likely wrong; even experts are freqeuently wrong, which is why we have peer-reviewed journals and conferences.