A somewhat more timely issue that requires the same level of debate is
Should we terraform Mars?
The impacts on the rest of the solar system would be subtle yet possibly devastating. The answer to this question could have a profound effect on the stock markets and the future of video poker.
I think the point of requiring the label is to encourage the coffee industry to instead remove the chemical in question from their processing.
Which can certainly be done by more processing, possibly with an arsenic filter, or perhaps by treatment with dioxin. Better living through chemistry. Dow Chemical might offer some suggestions. And maybe Monsanto can GMO Californians that are resistant to cancer.
California consumer protection laws: A classic example of the witche's caution: "Be very careful about what you ask for, for you may just get that."
You need people who manage to say worthwhile things in an accessible manner. That means people who both have something to say, and knowing how to say it. Grammar, spelling, writing skill, structuring a post, knowing how to quote, understanding what not to do and not doing it, and the rest of the netiquette are all parts of that.
Then later
The problem isn't really technical, though the technical means do facilitate going one way or another. . . . But the root cause is people lacking skill. And if fixing that means teaching entrants, then that is what you shall have to do.
I find myself in partial agreement: I think parent post hit the target, but on an edge of it, as far from the bullseye as possible and still get more than a zero score.
There is a technical approach that can work. The answer to improving the relevance of a website as a whole is to filter applicants during the registration process. For a yarn crafts site this could be a short but simple questionaire: "To test the gauge before starting your project, it is recommended that you make: (a) an anchor row; (b) a patch; (c) a swatch: (d)either b or c" and so forth. Then at least you know the audience has a shared knowledge base and interest in the subject, and are unlikely to screw around.
Slashdot does this with a meritocracy system that is a bit byzantine, almost rococo, but has some interesting features. One is that each user can choose the level of merit they want to interact with: you can mostly avoid the idiots by browsing at 3+, 4+, or level 5. Another is that the criteria used in determining each contributor's place in the merit hierarchy is both multifaceted and fluid, and reflects the judgment of the herd as a whole. Thus someone who is consistently funny is as welcome to high level participants as someone who might be dull as a post but is generally knowledgeable, and so on.
My experience differs from what you describe. Maybe we are searching for very different kinds of information. Or maybe you and I have very different criteria for judging the goodness of a bibliography.
I have generally found the further reading suggested in footnotes and biblios of Wikipedia articles to be quite useful. Partly because these often suggest materials that are quickly accessible web pages. When I think about it, I think I usually google for a Wikipedia article about each of the more prominent articles and authors that were referenced in the original article before going to any particular source, especially when the source is only available in hardcopy. But that secondary searching is so easy to do and takes so little time that I don't take much conscious note of it.
I miss my days of spending hours in the card catalog and the library stacks: those are now ancient memories. I remember feeling the sense of a day well spent when I left the library with three books on a subject of interest. Now between Wikipedia and Google I cover a much broader range of incidental discoveries and I am prepared for much deeper research into the subject of interest in much less time.
I wonder how many readers use Wikipedia as a springboard for deeper research on a subject they need to learn about?
When I have a question where I'm sure there is a discrete answer, like "how do I calculate a square root by hand", Wikipedia can usually give me the answer with no further searching required. But if my question is "what is the history of calculation of square roots" or a similar complex question, I will often start with the same Wikipedia article, then use its footnotes and bibliography to guide my further research.
How common is this approach today?
(Back in my school years I would do the same thing with Encyclopedia Britannica articles cross-referencing with the town library's card catalog to find sources for papers, but Wikipedia biblios are ever so much easier to use)
Gyroplanes. Near-VTOL* with 100+ kph performance with snowblower engines. Impossible to stall. Bunting over nearly impossible with contemporary designs. Several companies have one and two seat models in production. Available today. Typically at a fraction of the cost of a 10 year old single seat monowing.
*Some models need less than a 5 meter roll and can clear a 10 m obstacle in less than 15 m. All the dozen+ models I have looked at qualify as (Very) Short Take-Off and Landing aircraft.
Google "gyroplane". Many of these meet your objections and are already in production.
Unfortunately your last paragraph undermines a good deal of what you said earlier.
Prior to that, you make some interesting assertions that physicists have incorporated "all those things" (referring to what might loosely be called one of the many "electric universe" models), and you make a persuasive case for everyone to accept that the current physics models are collectively the One True Right and Only Way. It is a very good religious argument.
But then you say
IEEE is an engineering society with no astrophysics community. It is inappropriate to publish an astrophysics paper there. That's journal shopping, and it is a violation of scientific ethics
Now that is an inappropriate demonization. Like it or not, you really should acknowledge that science, including physics, is an entirely separate study from engineering, While I fully understand that some scientists are religious fanatics about Science, they have no more business questioning the validity of engineering studies than the Vatican has in questioning the lifestyles of Hindus.
This work was published in the IEEE because it is very much an engineering study. Not a physics study. It is not about the theory of how things work; it is about the possible mechanisms the empirical facts suggest.
If the world had waited for scientists to develop a theory of steam engines, we would still be using horses and buggies. It takes an engineering point of view to model things in practical terms, without regard for theories, and thus make the jump from treadle powered spinning wheels to reciprocating steam locomotives. Put another way, the entirely unscientific concept of centrifugal force is damn useful when engineering centrifuges. An engineering study of interstellar filaments is much more likely to advance fusion power projects than anything the physicists are likely to come up with in the next 25 years.
However the situation remains that you've got to choose between high accuracy and high compression; you can never have both. But that's okay.
Certainly the highest possible accuracy is what is needed in the archival image. But that image is not in frequent use ---or at least it should not be. So how long it takes to stuff it into the archive is not an issue. If you are using good practices, you will be selecting any archival image from thumbnails, and only pulling the actual image once, the first time you've decided to use it for something. So leave it in its native format.
When you do pull an image out of the archive, put it in a working library of all the images, and only the images, that you will be using. These should be in a compressed lossless format ---PNG is the best choice for nearly everybody. But each of these images needs to be edited before it is converted to PNG. Crop out anything you will never need. Look at regions that you will always want to photoshop out, such as that photobombing idiot in the background, and fill them with a neutral gray or make them transparent (you'll fix the properly later). Identify the areas of least interest and deliberately reduce their quality by simplifying them: desaturate a little, or maybe a lot; use bokeh and blur techniques to hide or smooth unnecessary (and probably distracting) detail. Run the result through Photoshop or GIMP and clip both ends of the histogram.
Here's the thing: every image out of a camera contains much more information than anyone can perceive, and a hell of a lot more data than what good art needs. Contrary to popular belief, a good photo artist is not like a painter, adding stuff to what comes out of the camera. A good photo artist is like a sculptor who makes art by removing what stuff that gets in the way of the art.
Be gentle in this process as you prepare your working library; you want a product to use as raw material in making multiple pieces of art. You want to be able to crop heads from that group portrait to work up individual portraits. That dog catching the frisbee: sometimes you want to make the dog the star of the photo, but sometimes the dog is less important than the frisbee (maybe you are sending it to your Ultimate Frisbee team). These working images should be stored as PNGs, since they will be light enough that PNG compression will not be too slow to be a bother, and you want to be lossless in every step of your tool chain (except possibly the final step).
So an image out of your working library might be 10% to 50% of the weight of the archived image, but it has all the detail you might ever want to work with in a lossless format. It will still be too heavy for most purposes. So a copy of it goes back into GIMP or Photoshop and you use all the tools available to increase its artistic value (by removing stuff that gets in the way) which further reduces the weight. Depending on the size and purpose of the final image, you might use either PNG or JPG.
Images that will go on web pages never need to be heavy; often they will weigh 10% or less of the original archived image (but be much more impressive because of that weight loss).
So I don't see where a replacement for JPG/PNG fits in this picture. It would seem to be something designed for people who take snapshots and throw them into a shoe box; I don't see the value for an artist. Or anyone who wants to share stuff with others that is not crappy.
There ottabee a rule: "if there is new communications technology, there will be abuse of it."
Unfortunately for you and me, we are living in a period of communications upheavals: Twitter and FB of course, but also smart phones, web pages, news aggregators, etc.
Zuckerberg is merely an opportunistic profiteer unencumbered by ethical concerns. An OPUE for short. He is truly an outlaw: he is operating in an area where there are no laws as yet.
You are confusing download speeds with presentation speeds. Which is understandable, I could have been more specific.
Without knowing much more about your internet connection than I really want to know, there is no way to tell whether you are doing an apples to oranges comparison. My connection through Verizon is very fast--- until I do something large and trigger Verizon's throttling. Frontier is much better in that and many other respects; I use it when I'm in range.
Throttling isn't the only thing that will arbitrarily slow some data movement. The load balancing pretty much assures that some packets of a large download will take roundabout routes, and some will be cached along the way. If I'm transferring a couple of megabytes between my place in Gresham and my friend in Vancouver, a crow-flying distance of 35 miles, some of the packets will be routed through several different intermediate servers, possibly including servers in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston,, etc. The route, and the delays encountered, have little to do with your connection or the file server's connection; they are mostly affected by the amount of traffic at various key transit points.
The need for "lossy compression for photographic content" belongs to the time when 640 K was more RAM than anyone would ever need and a modem faster than 2400 baud was too fast for even the best speed reader. Back when the big argument was how to best partition that 40 MB hard disk: 32/8 to get the biggest possible C: drive? 20/20 so C: and D: were equal size? Or the common compromise: 30 and 10?
PNG does not compress as well as JPG, but the difference between a display latency of 32 microseconds and one of 53 microseconds is meaningless when eyeball latency is measured in milliseconds. The number of users whose internet connection is so slow that they would notice the difference between JPG and PNG is a vanishing quantity, and those stuck in the slowest of the slow lanes are undoubtedly experiencing other problems with unwanted pop-up ads and gawdawefool redundancies in posts from people who don't know how to unnecessary repetitions of old news.
I'm sure there is at least one good argument for replacing JPG with a brand new format; I'm certain that there is some edge case out there where PNG would not serve well. But I cannot think of it.
oh wait: Mars to Earth true color 4 K images of alien sand. Maybe, that would be a use case. Maybe.
It uses a lossy compression method. That makes it unsuitable in any application where you can expect some uses will be copies of copies (of copies), such as long term archiving, especially when periodic winnowing by a human curator is a part of the process. Or broad distribution where reformatted copies are permitted or even encouraged.
An example of the last are illustrated instructions for use written in English with the intent that others will translate the work into Arabic, Chinese, and even Australian, in environments where the original images are not available such that the reformatting necessary to fit non-letter-size paper has to be done from the images received.
Um, it might be that written Australian is not so much a non-English language, the way that spoken Australian is.:-)
Unity has been bad both as a desktop, and for the corporation. But it was a positive improvement to the train wreck that was Gnome at that time.
I looked at the first Unity package then went to Ubuntu Studio, that uses a low latency version of Xfce, which had some buggy corners but was mostly good and not too heavy on resource demands. I've now moved on to Ubuntu Mate, which for me is a good fit since I really do like my coffee, and it has turned out that I'm not doing the audio capture and editing I hoped to get into, where Xfce really shines.
With Unity, Ubuntu took a chance that computer, tablet, and smart phone interfaces would converge on a single interface, so that the user experience when moving between their gadgets was seamless. That isn't happening; Ubuntu lost that gamble and has quit that game. It now seems that we won't see the same interface on phone, tablet, and computer until we do it all with voice commands. Think of Scotty in the time-travel episode, talking into the computer's mouse.
Gnome appears to have learned from its mistakes and by all reports the combo Gnome 3.28 - with 3.27 Nautilus will be a big win for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I'll be giving that a try. My fall back will be to Mate, but I doubt that I will need to do that.
A prime number (or prime integer, often simply called a "prime" for short) is a positive integer p>1 that has no positive integer divisors other than 1 and p itself. More concisely, a prime number p is a positive integer having exactly one positive divisor other than 1, meaning it is a number that cannot be factored. [see Wolfram MathWorld]
Note that when p is set to 1, the test is also true: its only positive integer divisors are itself, p, and 1. (1/1=1 which is both 1 and the current value of p). Wolfram simply ignores this edge case, since for all but esoteric levels of advanced mathematics it is not necessary to go there.
From a historical perspective this makes sense. When at the end of the day's harvest it was time to evenly divide up the bags of grain that had been gathered in, it turned out that it was always the case that if there were certain numbers of bags, there was no way to evenly divide them, no matter how many persons were to receive a portion. Finding a way to fairly dispose of prime numbers of objects was one of the earliest problems in social engineering.
Similarly, the problem of zero is generally ignored except in the rarefied heights where mathematics no longer has value in engineering, finances, and any other applied mathematics that I am aware of. I am of course referring to the fact that division by zero is undefined. In this manner zero does not qualify as a rational number, and since the integers are a subset of rational numbers, zero is not an integer. Nor is it a counting number. At best, zero is an irrational real number, like pi, the sqrt(2), e, etc. But it might actually be better to define it as a hole in the number line ---that's something for the Wolframs out there to noodle over.
Circling back to the original problem, you said:
There is no largest prime number, and primes are a subset of integers. Therefore, we can have a one-to-one correspondence with primes and the integers 1 and greater, giving the ordinal. Given a prime number, therefore, there's a prime that's the ordinal for. Since there is no largest prime number, there's no largest prime whose ordinal is also prime. There is no largest prime number, and primes are a subset of integers. Therefore, we can have a one-to-one correspondence with primes and the integers 1 and greater, giving the ordinal. Given a prime number, therefore, there's a prime that's the ordinal for. Since there is no largest prime number, there's no largest prime whose ordinal is also prime.
This seems to be tightly reasoned. I think it would have been better to say that "primes are a subset of the counting numbers" rather than integers, but that's a mere quibble. Of course you could also call the set of primes a subset of the rational numbers, or the real numbers ---whatever.
However as this thread has been having problems with word usage intended to dazzle with brilliance or possibly baffle with... . well, I can't immediately accept it what you propose, and I've got other things to think about than puzzling over something that may not have been intended to be meaningful. I will read it over a time or two and let my subconscious play with it. But I also ask whether you can rephrase whatever you may be saying in a more mathematically formal statement.
The Sieve of Eratosthenes is perhaps the oldest method of identifying prime numbers, BUT it is not the definition of a prime number. It is an algorithm ---not a definition--- that was not developed until a long time after the Greeks (and probably other ancient peoples) had identified the nature of prime numbers.
The definition of a prime number is any number that is only divisible by itself and by one. Do not mistake an early algorithm for identifying prime numbers with the definition of prime. For one thing, if you believe your definition is correct, then you are strongly implying that any number of professional mathematicians over more than 2,000 years who have sought other algorithms know less about their profession than you do. That is absurd.
I repeat the problem:
One is prime, and it is the first prime, which is also prime.
Two is prime, and its ordinal is 2, which is prime.
3 is prime, its ordinal is 3, also prime
5 is prime, its ordinal is 4, which is not prime
7 is prime, its ordinal is 5, which is prime
11 is prime, its ordinal is 6, not prime
etc
So is there a rule that would answer whether any given prime's ordinal in the list of primes is also prime? Extra points for a calculator trick to answer this. Super extra bonus points: is there a largest prime number whose ordinal is also prime?
Note that even for those who erroneously believe that one is somehow special with regard to primeness, the problem is there: is there a rule that can be applied to any given prime number to determine if its ordinal value in a listing of primes was also a prime number?
They do not know the corrosiveness of the contents. The hell mix inside those tanks is a self-heating ongoing chemical reaction in a pressure cooker that involves unstable radioactive isotopes that are changing from one element to another. They know that whatever is in there now is very different from the highly corrosive and radioactive materials that were put into the waste stream 70+ years ago. And if any government agency had actually kept a record of what was put into that waste back then, they are not talking about it.
There is known to be stratification with different processes going on at different levels. Instruments inserted into the depths of the hell mix fail rather quickly and the data they do produce may not be accurate. We know that there is active chemistry in the sludge floating at the top; we expect that there is very active chemistry in the "yellow cake" precipitate at the bottom. We don't have a clue as to what is really going on in any of these regions.
These double walled tanks were installed and filled between the late 1960s and the 1980s using the best materials engineering of the time. That engineering was fully mature: we would not be able to do any better today. And yet something has happened in the hell mix and one of the walls of this best-possible material is leaking....
I am no expert about Hanford or the physics or chemistries that are involved. Since I am one of the millions who live downstream from Hanford, I do read everything I come across concerning that horrendous hazard. The damn thing should have been situated in Washington District of Columbia (not Washington state). That would have motivated the US politicians to have done it safely --or not done it at all.
Hmm. In the videos I've seen, the thing doesn't seem to move relative to the camera gunsight that is following it. I haven't seen any images that were taken through the "windshield" (presumably the jet's canopy).
You are failing to recognise that Snowden's actions and motivations are only germane to a very minor distraction from the major story that concerns the contents of the data he released. Why is this distraction so important? Does the color of the envelope affect the meaning of the message in the letter?
I think not.
I don't much care why Snowden did what he did or whether he was a heroic patriot or a snivelling traitor. I don't think anyone outside his circle of family and acquaintances should care very much about that right now. For one thing, it is very unlikely that any irrefutable proof one or the other will ever come to the fore, and it is a waste of time and energy to involve yourself in unresolvable arguments. Maybe when Snowden is brought to trial assessments of his character should become part of the public discourse, but now that is just shadow boxing.
What I do care about is persons who seek to distract others from significant issues with these kinds of meaningless arguments. What is significant here is what Snowden has revealed: agencies of the USA government have been engaged in unamerican activities. Do you have anything to say about how to keep that from happening, or do you simply want to distract people from thinking about it for some reason?
His motivation is as irrelevant as whether he parts his hair on the left or right. Nor, for that matter, does his seeking asylum in Russia. What is relevant is not Snowden; what is relevant is the illegal and unconstitutional practices of agencies of the USA government that Snowden exposed.
Your comments, Sir, have as much value as the food critic who damns the pastry chef for wearing a plaid apron over a striped shirt.
This is not an ad hominem attack. I don't know you well enough for that. This is an attack on your misplaced criticism, which
1) might be intentional on your part because you are incapable of coming up with something that was truly relevant to the issues Snowden raised, or
2) might be unintentional because you sent your comment before you engaged your brain, or
3) might be for any number of other miscellaneous reasons.
So you see, I just don't know enough about you to deliver an ad hominem attack.
Slashdot Mirror
A somewhat more timely issue that requires the same level of debate is
Should we terraform Mars?
The impacts on the rest of the solar system would be subtle yet possibly devastating. The answer to this question could have a profound effect on the stock markets and the future of video poker.
Isn't today April Fools day?
The fundemental problem here is judging how you decide a substance is dangerous enough
Strip out the unnecessary swipes at news organizations, and that quote is the substance of the parent post.
I phrase it differently but I agree:
The fundamental problem here is that California is a nanny state
I think the point of requiring the label is to encourage the coffee industry to instead remove the chemical in question from their processing.
Which can certainly be done by more processing, possibly with an arsenic filter, or perhaps by treatment with dioxin. Better living through chemistry. Dow Chemical might offer some suggestions. And maybe Monsanto can GMO Californians that are resistant to cancer.
California consumer protection laws: A classic example of the witche's caution: "Be very careful about what you ask for, for you may just get that."
Living under California law is hazardous to your intelligence.
Oh wait. That might be one of those "correlation does not imply" things....
You need people who manage to say worthwhile things in an accessible manner. That means people who both have something to say, and knowing how to say it. Grammar, spelling, writing skill, structuring a post, knowing how to quote, understanding what not to do and not doing it, and the rest of the netiquette are all parts of that.
Then later
The problem isn't really technical, though the technical means do facilitate going one way or another. . . . But the root cause is people lacking skill. And if fixing that means teaching entrants, then that is what you shall have to do.
I find myself in partial agreement: I think parent post hit the target, but on an edge of it, as far from the bullseye as possible and still get more than a zero score.
There is a technical approach that can work. The answer to improving the relevance of a website as a whole is to filter applicants during the registration process. For a yarn crafts site this could be a short but simple questionaire: "To test the gauge before starting your project, it is recommended that you make: (a) an anchor row; (b) a patch; (c) a swatch: (d)either b or c" and so forth. Then at least you know the audience has a shared knowledge base and interest in the subject, and are unlikely to screw around.
Slashdot does this with a meritocracy system that is a bit byzantine, almost rococo, but has some interesting features. One is that each user can choose the level of merit they want to interact with: you can mostly avoid the idiots by browsing at 3+, 4+, or level 5. Another is that the criteria used in determining each contributor's place in the merit hierarchy is both multifaceted and fluid, and reflects the judgment of the herd as a whole. Thus someone who is consistently funny is as welcome to high level participants as someone who might be dull as a post but is generally knowledgeable, and so on.
My experience differs from what you describe. Maybe we are searching for very different kinds of information. Or maybe you and I have very different criteria for judging the goodness of a bibliography.
I have generally found the further reading suggested in footnotes and biblios of Wikipedia articles to be quite useful. Partly because these often suggest materials that are quickly accessible web pages. When I think about it, I think I usually google for a Wikipedia article about each of the more prominent articles and authors that were referenced in the original article before going to any particular source, especially when the source is only available in hardcopy. But that secondary searching is so easy to do and takes so little time that I don't take much conscious note of it.
I miss my days of spending hours in the card catalog and the library stacks: those are now ancient memories. I remember feeling the sense of a day well spent when I left the library with three books on a subject of interest. Now between Wikipedia and Google I cover a much broader range of incidental discoveries and I am prepared for much deeper research into the subject of interest in much less time.
I wonder how many readers use Wikipedia as a springboard for deeper research on a subject they need to learn about?
When I have a question where I'm sure there is a discrete answer, like "how do I calculate a square root by hand", Wikipedia can usually give me the answer with no further searching required. But if my question is "what is the history of calculation of square roots" or a similar complex question, I will often start with the same Wikipedia article, then use its footnotes and bibliography to guide my further research.
How common is this approach today?
(Back in my school years I would do the same thing with Encyclopedia Britannica articles cross-referencing with the town library's card catalog to find sources for papers, but Wikipedia biblios are ever so much easier to use)
Gyroplanes. Near-VTOL* with 100+ kph performance with snowblower engines. Impossible to stall. Bunting over nearly impossible with contemporary designs. Several companies have one and two seat models in production. Available today. Typically at a fraction of the cost of a 10 year old single seat monowing.
*Some models need less than a 5 meter roll and can clear a 10 m obstacle in less than 15 m. All the dozen+ models I have looked at qualify as (Very) Short Take-Off and Landing aircraft.
Google "gyroplane". Many of these meet your objections and are already in production.
Unfortunately your last paragraph undermines a good deal of what you said earlier.
Prior to that, you make some interesting assertions that physicists have incorporated "all those things" (referring to what might loosely be called one of the many "electric universe" models), and you make a persuasive case for everyone to accept that the current physics models are collectively the One True Right and Only Way. It is a very good religious argument.
But then you say
IEEE is an engineering society with no astrophysics community. It is inappropriate to publish an astrophysics paper there. That's journal shopping, and it is a violation of scientific ethics
Now that is an inappropriate demonization. Like it or not, you really should acknowledge that science, including physics, is an entirely separate study from engineering, While I fully understand that some scientists are religious fanatics about Science, they have no more business questioning the validity of engineering studies than the Vatican has in questioning the lifestyles of Hindus.
This work was published in the IEEE because it is very much an engineering study. Not a physics study. It is not about the theory of how things work; it is about the possible mechanisms the empirical facts suggest.
If the world had waited for scientists to develop a theory of steam engines, we would still be using horses and buggies. It takes an engineering point of view to model things in practical terms, without regard for theories, and thus make the jump from treadle powered spinning wheels to reciprocating steam locomotives. Put another way, the entirely unscientific concept of centrifugal force is damn useful when engineering centrifuges. An engineering study of interstellar filaments is much more likely to advance fusion power projects than anything the physicists are likely to come up with in the next 25 years.
As has been said before, time is Her way of keeping everything from happening all at once.
True enough.
However the situation remains that you've got to choose between high accuracy and high compression; you can never have both. But that's okay.
Certainly the highest possible accuracy is what is needed in the archival image. But that image is not in frequent use ---or at least it should not be. So how long it takes to stuff it into the archive is not an issue. If you are using good practices, you will be selecting any archival image from thumbnails, and only pulling the actual image once, the first time you've decided to use it for something. So leave it in its native format.
When you do pull an image out of the archive, put it in a working library of all the images, and only the images, that you will be using. These should be in a compressed lossless format ---PNG is the best choice for nearly everybody. But each of these images needs to be edited before it is converted to PNG. Crop out anything you will never need. Look at regions that you will always want to photoshop out, such as that photobombing idiot in the background, and fill them with a neutral gray or make them transparent (you'll fix the properly later). Identify the areas of least interest and deliberately reduce their quality by simplifying them: desaturate a little, or maybe a lot; use bokeh and blur techniques to hide or smooth unnecessary (and probably distracting) detail. Run the result through Photoshop or GIMP and clip both ends of the histogram.
Here's the thing: every image out of a camera contains much more information than anyone can perceive, and a hell of a lot more data than what good art needs. Contrary to popular belief, a good photo artist is not like a painter, adding stuff to what comes out of the camera. A good photo artist is like a sculptor who makes art by removing what stuff that gets in the way of the art.
Be gentle in this process as you prepare your working library; you want a product to use as raw material in making multiple pieces of art. You want to be able to crop heads from that group portrait to work up individual portraits. That dog catching the frisbee: sometimes you want to make the dog the star of the photo, but sometimes the dog is less important than the frisbee (maybe you are sending it to your Ultimate Frisbee team). These working images should be stored as PNGs, since they will be light enough that PNG compression will not be too slow to be a bother, and you want to be lossless in every step of your tool chain (except possibly the final step).
So an image out of your working library might be 10% to 50% of the weight of the archived image, but it has all the detail you might ever want to work with in a lossless format. It will still be too heavy for most purposes. So a copy of it goes back into GIMP or Photoshop and you use all the tools available to increase its artistic value (by removing stuff that gets in the way) which further reduces the weight. Depending on the size and purpose of the final image, you might use either PNG or JPG.
Images that will go on web pages never need to be heavy; often they will weigh 10% or less of the original archived image (but be much more impressive because of that weight loss).
So I don't see where a replacement for JPG/PNG fits in this picture. It would seem to be something designed for people who take snapshots and throw them into a shoe box; I don't see the value for an artist. Or anyone who wants to share stuff with others that is not crappy.
There ottabee a rule: "if there is new communications technology, there will be abuse of it."
Unfortunately for you and me, we are living in a period of communications upheavals: Twitter and FB of course, but also smart phones, web pages, news aggregators, etc.
Zuckerberg is merely an opportunistic profiteer unencumbered by ethical concerns. An OPUE for short. He is truly an outlaw: he is operating in an area where there are no laws as yet.
You are confusing download speeds with presentation speeds. Which is understandable, I could have been more specific.
Without knowing much more about your internet connection than I really want to know, there is no way to tell whether you are doing an apples to oranges comparison. My connection through Verizon is very fast--- until I do something large and trigger Verizon's throttling. Frontier is much better in that and many other respects; I use it when I'm in range.
Throttling isn't the only thing that will arbitrarily slow some data movement. The load balancing pretty much assures that some packets of a large download will take roundabout routes, and some will be cached along the way. If I'm transferring a couple of megabytes between my place in Gresham and my friend in Vancouver, a crow-flying distance of 35 miles, some of the packets will be routed through several different intermediate servers, possibly including servers in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston,, etc. The route, and the delays encountered, have little to do with your connection or the file server's connection; they are mostly affected by the amount of traffic at various key transit points.
I've been a bit of a fool. Even written Aussie, when used 'tween themselves, is a foreign tongue. Cheers!
The need for "lossy compression for photographic content" belongs to the time when 640 K was more RAM than anyone would ever need and a modem faster than 2400 baud was too fast for even the best speed reader. Back when the big argument was how to best partition that 40 MB hard disk: 32/8 to get the biggest possible C: drive? 20/20 so C: and D: were equal size? Or the common compromise: 30 and 10?
PNG does not compress as well as JPG, but the difference between a display latency of 32 microseconds and one of 53 microseconds is meaningless when eyeball latency is measured in milliseconds. The number of users whose internet connection is so slow that they would notice the difference between JPG and PNG is a vanishing quantity, and those stuck in the slowest of the slow lanes are undoubtedly experiencing other problems with unwanted pop-up ads and gawdawefool redundancies in posts from people who don't know how to unnecessary repetitions of old news.
I'm sure there is at least one good argument for replacing JPG with a brand new format; I'm certain that there is some edge case out there where PNG would not serve well. But I cannot think of it.
oh wait: Mars to Earth true color 4 K images of alien sand. Maybe, that would be a use case. Maybe.
It uses a lossy compression method. That makes it unsuitable in any application where you can expect some uses will be copies of copies (of copies), such as long term archiving, especially when periodic winnowing by a human curator is a part of the process. Or broad distribution where reformatted copies are permitted or even encouraged.
An example of the last are illustrated instructions for use written in English with the intent that others will translate the work into Arabic, Chinese, and even Australian, in environments where the original images are not available such that the reformatting necessary to fit non-letter-size paper has to be done from the images received.
Um, it might be that written Australian is not so much a non-English language, the way that spoken Australian is. :-)
Unity has been bad both as a desktop, and for the corporation. But it was a positive improvement to the train wreck that was Gnome at that time.
I looked at the first Unity package then went to Ubuntu Studio, that uses a low latency version of Xfce, which had some buggy corners but was mostly good and not too heavy on resource demands. I've now moved on to Ubuntu Mate, which for me is a good fit since I really do like my coffee, and it has turned out that I'm not doing the audio capture and editing I hoped to get into, where Xfce really shines.
With Unity, Ubuntu took a chance that computer, tablet, and smart phone interfaces would converge on a single interface, so that the user experience when moving between their gadgets was seamless. That isn't happening; Ubuntu lost that gamble and has quit that game. It now seems that we won't see the same interface on phone, tablet, and computer until we do it all with voice commands. Think of Scotty in the time-travel episode, talking into the computer's mouse.
Gnome appears to have learned from its mistakes and by all reports the combo Gnome 3.28 - with 3.27 Nautilus will be a big win for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I'll be giving that a try. My fall back will be to Mate, but I doubt that I will need to do that.
A prime number (or prime integer, often simply called a "prime" for short) is a positive integer p>1 that has no positive integer divisors other than 1 and p itself. More concisely, a prime number p is a positive integer having exactly one positive divisor other than 1, meaning it is a number that cannot be factored. [see Wolfram MathWorld]
Note that when p is set to 1, the test is also true: its only positive integer divisors are itself, p, and 1. (1/1=1 which is both 1 and the current value of p). Wolfram simply ignores this edge case, since for all but esoteric levels of advanced mathematics it is not necessary to go there.
From a historical perspective this makes sense. When at the end of the day's harvest it was time to evenly divide up the bags of grain that had been gathered in, it turned out that it was always the case that if there were certain numbers of bags, there was no way to evenly divide them, no matter how many persons were to receive a portion. Finding a way to fairly dispose of prime numbers of objects was one of the earliest problems in social engineering.
Similarly, the problem of zero is generally ignored except in the rarefied heights where mathematics no longer has value in engineering, finances, and any other applied mathematics that I am aware of. I am of course referring to the fact that division by zero is undefined. In this manner zero does not qualify as a rational number, and since the integers are a subset of rational numbers, zero is not an integer. Nor is it a counting number. At best, zero is an irrational real number, like pi, the sqrt(2), e, etc. But it might actually be better to define it as a hole in the number line ---that's something for the Wolframs out there to noodle over.
Circling back to the original problem, you said:
There is no largest prime number, and primes are a subset of integers. Therefore, we can have a one-to-one correspondence with primes and the integers 1 and greater, giving the ordinal. Given a prime number, therefore, there's a prime that's the ordinal for. Since there is no largest prime number, there's no largest prime whose ordinal is also prime. There is no largest prime number, and primes are a subset of integers. Therefore, we can have a one-to-one correspondence with primes and the integers 1 and greater, giving the ordinal. Given a prime number, therefore, there's a prime that's the ordinal for. Since there is no largest prime number, there's no largest prime whose ordinal is also prime.
This seems to be tightly reasoned. I think it would have been better to say that "primes are a subset of the counting numbers" rather than integers, but that's a mere quibble. Of course you could also call the set of primes a subset of the rational numbers, or the real numbers ---whatever.
However as this thread has been having problems with word usage intended to dazzle with brilliance or possibly baffle with ... . well, I can't immediately accept it what you propose, and I've got other things to think about than puzzling over something that may not have been intended to be meaningful. I will read it over a time or two and let my subconscious play with it. But I also ask whether you can rephrase whatever you may be saying in a more mathematically formal statement.
The Sieve of Eratosthenes is perhaps the oldest method of identifying prime numbers, BUT it is not the definition of a prime number. It is an algorithm ---not a definition--- that was not developed until a long time after the Greeks (and probably other ancient peoples) had identified the nature of prime numbers.
The definition of a prime number is any number that is only divisible by itself and by one. Do not mistake an early algorithm for identifying prime numbers with the definition of prime. For one thing, if you believe your definition is correct, then you are strongly implying that any number of professional mathematicians over more than 2,000 years who have sought other algorithms know less about their profession than you do. That is absurd.
I repeat the problem:
One is prime, and it is the first prime, which is also prime.
Two is prime, and its ordinal is 2, which is prime.
3 is prime, its ordinal is 3, also prime
5 is prime, its ordinal is 4, which is not prime
7 is prime, its ordinal is 5, which is prime
11 is prime, its ordinal is 6, not prime
etc
So is there a rule that would answer whether any given prime's ordinal in the list of primes is also prime? Extra points for a calculator trick to answer this. Super extra bonus points: is there a largest prime number whose ordinal is also prime?
Note that even for those who erroneously believe that one is somehow special with regard to primeness, the problem is there: is there a rule that can be applied to any given prime number to determine if its ordinal value in a listing of primes was also a prime number?
One is prime, and it is the first prime, which is also prime.
Two is prime, and its ordinal is 2, which is prime.
3 is prime, its ordinal is 3, also prime
5 is prime, its ordinal is 4, which is not prime
7 is prime, its ordinal is 5, which is prime
11 is prime, its ordinal is 6, not prime
etc
So is there a rule that would answer whether any given prime's ordinal in the list of primes is also prime?
Extra points for a calculator trick to answer this.
Super extra bonus points: is there a largest prime number whose ordinal is also prime?
They do not know the corrosiveness of the contents. The hell mix inside those tanks is a self-heating ongoing chemical reaction in a pressure cooker that involves unstable radioactive isotopes that are changing from one element to another. They know that whatever is in there now is very different from the highly corrosive and radioactive materials that were put into the waste stream 70+ years ago. And if any government agency had actually kept a record of what was put into that waste back then, they are not talking about it.
There is known to be stratification with different processes going on at different levels. Instruments inserted into the depths of the hell mix fail rather quickly and the data they do produce may not be accurate. We know that there is active chemistry in the sludge floating at the top; we expect that there is very active chemistry in the "yellow cake" precipitate at the bottom. We don't have a clue as to what is really going on in any of these regions.
These double walled tanks were installed and filled between the late 1960s and the 1980s using the best materials engineering of the time. That engineering was fully mature: we would not be able to do any better today. And yet something has happened in the hell mix and one of the walls of this best-possible material is leaking....
I am no expert about Hanford or the physics or chemistries that are involved. Since I am one of the millions who live downstream from Hanford, I do read everything I come across concerning that horrendous hazard. The damn thing should have been situated in Washington District of Columbia (not Washington state). That would have motivated the US politicians to have done it safely --or not done it at all.
1983 is Millennial?
I thought that was still Gen-X. Of course from my Boomer perspective, you are all young-uns.
Hmm. In the videos I've seen, the thing doesn't seem to move relative to the camera gunsight that is following it. I haven't seen any images that were taken through the "windshield" (presumably the jet's canopy).
You are failing to recognise that Snowden's actions and motivations are only germane to a very minor distraction from the major story that concerns the contents of the data he released. Why is this distraction so important? Does the color of the envelope affect the meaning of the message in the letter?
I think not.
I don't much care why Snowden did what he did or whether he was a heroic patriot or a snivelling traitor. I don't think anyone outside his circle of family and acquaintances should care very much about that right now. For one thing, it is very unlikely that any irrefutable proof one or the other will ever come to the fore, and it is a waste of time and energy to involve yourself in unresolvable arguments. Maybe when Snowden is brought to trial assessments of his character should become part of the public discourse, but now that is just shadow boxing.
What I do care about is persons who seek to distract others from significant issues with these kinds of meaningless arguments. What is significant here is what Snowden has revealed: agencies of the USA government have been engaged in unamerican activities. Do you have anything to say about how to keep that from happening, or do you simply want to distract people from thinking about it for some reason?
His motivation is as irrelevant as whether he parts his hair on the left or right. Nor, for that matter, does his seeking asylum in Russia. What is relevant is not Snowden; what is relevant is the illegal and unconstitutional practices of agencies of the USA government that Snowden exposed.
Your comments, Sir, have as much value as the food critic who damns the pastry chef for wearing a plaid apron over a striped shirt.
This is not an ad hominem attack. I don't know you well enough for that. This is an attack on your misplaced criticism, which
1) might be intentional on your part because you are incapable of coming up with something that was truly relevant to the issues Snowden raised, or
2) might be unintentional because you sent your comment before you engaged your brain, or
3) might be for any number of other miscellaneous reasons.
So you see, I just don't know enough about you to deliver an ad hominem attack.