Also remember, the colour resolution of the eye is far poorer than the b&w resolution of the eye, and the aim here is about colour.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but the fovea responsible for your "high resolution" sight contains almost exclusively cones, which are colour sensitive. Most of them detect red and green light, so the resolution in monochromatic red or green isn't that far below white light.
The rod cells on the other hand can only distinguish between black and white, but they are much sparser giving significantly lower resolution. (Their advantage is that they are extremely light sensitive, almost down to detecting a single photon. This is why you have no colour vision when it is dark. Another interesting consequence is that you are blind in the center of your visual field when light conditions are bad, since the fovea lacks rods.)
After having read the FAQ on the Linaro web site and a blog entry by Mark Shuttleworth, I get the feeling that this is an initiative coming from Canonical. If they will be driving this forward, with support from the hardware vendors of course, it might not become your garden variety standards organisation. In that case, the key issue will be to keep the commitment from the hardware manufacturers. But I guess it could work out alright considering Canonical isn't a direct competitor to any of them.
some (many) pro-agw people have been saying for a couple of years that man-made co2 has caused temps to increase but the lack of solar activity has negated the increase so we don't see an increase in measured temps.
Considering this press release, it does indeed seem likely the OLPC will use it.
Quoting:
The One Laptop per Child Foundation (OLPC) [...] and Pixel Qi Corporation [...] have signed a permanent and royalty-free cross-licensing agreement that will allow both organizations to deliver products incorporating the world’s most advanced screen technology.
As a result of the agreement, OLPC receives full license to all Pixel Qi “3qi” screen technology, including 70+ patents in process and all current and future IP developed by Pixel Qi for multi-mode screens. Pixel Qi is leading the design of new screens for OLPC’s next-generation XO laptops.
The computer doesn't have any rights, but you have obligations. If you spilled coffee on the CD drive and it stopped working, then you would need to replace the CD drive.
Not if I own the computer. In that case, I can damage it in any way I like, and no one cares. This is different from the case with animals: Even if I am the sole owner of an animal, I have obligations not to cause it unnecessary harm. This is because society has decided that it is bad for the animal itself that it suffers, and it should have to. It is not because it is unethical to destroy things in general, it is unethical because the animal can experience the suffering.
Most Vegans of today will get supplement sources added to different products they purchase [...]
So you agree with me that we could live healthy lives without eating meat, if we thought it to be important enough?
[...] In other words, you do not need the same amount of arable land to produce animals as you do to produce the equivalent amount of crops you would need to replace the animal.
I'm not sure where you found this information, but I don't think it is correct. It might be true in some corner cases, but even if you can plant faster growing crops you generally get a net loss, as each step in the food chain reduces the energy content by about 90%. This an important reason why meat is considerably more expensive than grains and many other vegetables. It is also the reason people in regions with dense population and high poverty almost never eat much meat.
Another benefit of eating animals is that no preservation is needed while they are alive so they can grow in winter when food crops wouldn't.
They need fodder, unlike vegetables which only need a storage place.
I'm not trying to say meat as a food has no use, and our bodies are quite obviously adapted to have meat as one food source. And as I said before, I personally have no problem with eating meat, although I'm not particularly fond of the way animals are treated in the industrialized meat production of today. But I think it is hard to make the case that we couldn't stop eating it if we chose to.
These examples are perhaps not expressed as rights in a legal context, but the obligations to treat the knife wound or refrain from animal mistreatment would not have been codified unless we thought there were underlying ethical reasons for them. We could call these "rights" or we could call them something else; that is mostly a matter of semantics.
With regard to treatment of animals, we could have an "obligation" not to kill an otherwise healthy animal if we thought it to be unethical. One could of course argue that slaughtering animals is necessary and that we need to eat them, but to be fair, we have to acknowledge that humans can survive and live healthy lives perfectly well without meat in their diet.
So in essence, we breed and kill animals mainly for the purpose of our enjoyment. It is not totally unreasonable to make the argument that this is, in principle, similar to for example arranging dog fights which is illegal in most countries.
I agree that gay marriage does not affect third parties. However, I think it is debatable whether legalization of all drugs can be put in the same category, as there are obvious indirect effects of on third parties when people get addicted (increased levels of burglary etc.). You end up in a situation where the value of personal freedoms has to be weighed against the potential negative effects on members of the society (i.e. would-be addicts and those who get harmed by them). Whichever position you take, the opposite side will feel that you are trying to impose your values onto them. This is the unavoidable compromise of democracy.
As for the question about eating meat, there is a similar ethical dimension. I take it you agree that one should not be allowed to treat animals however one feels like without restrictions, for example exposing them to needless cruelty? In that case you agree that animals have at least some rights in our society (i.e. not to be mistreated by humans). Now, extending this to the point where you say one should not be allowed to slaughter animals is just a matter of degree.
Personally, I eat meat and enjoy it. But I don't think the animal rights lobby is better or worse in that they try to convince me that this is unethical, than any other lobby group, as long as they respect the democracy.
PETA is anti-free all on their own. By definition, they want to people to either voluntarily, or by restriction of law, to behave in their version of "Ethical" or face serious consequences.
I know to little about PETA to have any real opinion about it, but honestly, how is what you say different from what any other political lobby group wants? The whole point of lobbying is to convince lawmakers and other citizens that your view on what is right and wrong should be the norm.
Any license requires interpretation. However, this one doesn't require as much as you seem to think. If you had RTFL you would have seen that it prohibits the "intended purpose [...] of causing grievous bodily harm". This explicitly implies intent, limiting the scope quite heavily, and it uses the phrase "grievous bodily harm" which has a legal definition and precedence that indicates how to interpret it.
You seem to be confusing sampling with extrapolation. For a number of reasons, your parallel with the number of stars is entirely inappropriate; most importantly, the total number is not relevant.
If you had made an estimate about the fraction of stars that are currently burnt out, and later discovered that there are ten times as many stars as you though, the estimate would still be correct!
Please, please. I hate to see people one would suppose have a better understanding of mathematics that the average Joe Sixpack make stupid statements.
Saying X percentage of species have died because of human action assumes that we know how many total species there were at a given point in time
I wouldn't bother to answer this if it weren't for the fact that you were being such an ass about knowing mathematics while being dead wrong, and even got modded insightful for it.
No, determining the percentage of something certainly does not require knowing the total. In fact, you usually don't.
Or do you think they counted the number of molecules in the atmosphere to find out it is 21% oxygen?
The US endangered species list isn't representative for the world. The western countries have reached somewhat of a steady state in relation to our local (land) environment*, and our populations aren't growing very much. The situation is very different in tropical forest regions and in the oceans.
* That is not to say that we are in balance with nature, however. Our ecological footprint is much larger than our land area, but we defer much it to other countries by importing goods produced elsewhere. Luckily, the rest of the world can't afford our level of consumption. Yet.
I guess if you were living your entire life inside the Library of Alexandria, you would be burning books for fuel. Especially the "useless" ones written in a foreign language that you don't understand.
I think humans are blinded by the extraordinary diversity around us to the degree that we fail to realize how unique it is. And our life spans are too short for us to grasp what we are doing. We destroy things that have taken hundreds of millions of years to form in a generation without even reflecting on it. From a geological perspective, we are likely at par with some of the large impact events.
it actually uses a couple of additional mechanical "inputs" to operate its internal magic
"Magic" is the key word here. You may call one or two of the power inputs "control inputs", but regardless of what you call them they are power inputs into what is essentially an epicyclic gear set. No magic or any other form of hand waving will change the basic mechanics. The fact that the inventor thinks he has discovered something radically different doesn't mean he has.
I'm not qualified to judge how innovative this is, but it is clear to me that it is not "just" a differential or "just" a planetary gear
It is not "just" a differential in so much that it seems to be a combination of two differentials. I don't know if this is a particularly efficient way to construct a differential, lending it some merit, but there is nothing fundamentally new about its basic principle.
For details, please have a look in this very thorough analysis of the transmission.
Whether you add two or three power flows makes little difference to the principle of operation. You do not escape the fact that the "control" engine(s) will be experiencing a proportional amount of torque as the main one.
It seems to be a novel and unique transmission.
Well, many things seem novel and unique when you lack the relevant expertise.
And from the same link you provided (emphasis mine):
The Durnin transmission is operating as a conventional epicyclic gear set, combining power flows from three shafts in various combinations. It can be embodied as one of the twelve general epicyclic gearset classes described by Lévai (1966), (i.e. as a Class I or Class III epicyclic gearset) or as a combination of these two gearsets.
later followed by:
Epicyclic gearsets are indeed currently used widely in hybrid transmissions because of their flexibility in summing and splitting mechanical power flows.
You don't have to use TCP/IP over ethernet, you know. AoE & FCoE come to mind.
Mechanisms for ensuring reliable transfer of data aren't exclusive to TCP/IP. There is also some overhead in the packet headers (yes, it could be made very small if you use non-standard Ethernet frames).
There are very few ways you might lose packets in a well-built local data-link network.
Well, yeah, depending on how you define local. I don't know what distances they need to transfer the data at CERN, and I imagine there could be all sorts of nasty EM fields around a 14 TeV particle accelerator.
Anyway, to say you could easily handle this data stream on a single 10 Gb/s Ethernet connection is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
I did watch video in TFA, and it doesn't make it clear how this device works. It does suggest, however, that they haven't actually made any real measurements yet, so whether it works as they think remains to be seen. Regardless, what I instantly dismissed was the GGP's claim that combining two inputs to an output is anything new.
The new aspect is that this planetary gearset actually has TWO inputs, and the output is determined by the *difference* in speeds between the two.
You just stated the definition of a differential gear. It is not new in any way, and describes exactly how a planetary gear works and is normally used. For a real world example take a look at the Hybrid Synergy Drive used in Toyota Prius. It has precisely that: A planetary gear with two inputs summing up to one output, allowing the engine to operate at optimal rpm regardless of wheel speed.
A single 10gb ethernet connection can handle that quite easily.
Eh. A 10 Gb ethernet connection can't handle 1.25 GB/s at all, not to mention doing it reliably. Theoretically, 10 Gb is exactly 1.25 GB, but then you need to account for protocol overhead, packet loss and so on.
We already have a solution to global warming, have had it for over 50 years: Switch our electricity generation to nuclear.
Sure, although you haven't addressed the issue with vehicle fuels, which if I recall correctly is about half of the total energy consumption.
The refusal by the environmental groups to accept the only energy solution we have ready right now which can stop AGW in its tracks. If they really believed in AGW and that we are in serious trouble unless we make massive changes to our infrastructure right now, then they should be willing to accept nuclear power despite its flaws since it's the only technology we have for probably the next few decades which can satisfy the world's energy needs without producing CO2.
You could be right that the lack of pragmatism in some environmentalist groups is counterproductive contributes to skepticism, but I think you are simplifying the gamut of opinions quite a bit. Where I live, I would say that the majority of AGW supporters, which is essentially everyone, accept nuclear power as the lesser of two evils. In fact, so much so that we are entirely dependent on it, and have no coal or oil power whatsoever nowadays. And this is in spite of the fact that we were affected by the fallout of the Chernobyl disaster and remember it well.
And what agenda is that? Making money through grants? Because I am pretty sure any climate scientist would easily double their salary by joining the coal-industry lobby. Frankly, I am amazed more of them don't given the amount of distrust they apparently have to face from the public (who have actually hired them).
Gotta run, so can't reply to everything, but that's a bit of a Pascal's Wager. Like the fallacy of the wager, the fallacy of that is that there are infinite things that can do us in environmental disaster, war, asteroids, gray goo, skynet, etc.
Maybe so, but then you have to weigh those different risks against each other and try to find out which are worth considering at this moment. If there were, right now, thousands of scientists calling out for immediate action against the formation of gray goo, and even humanly visible signs of it present in nature, it would certainly deserve our attention. However, as it stands, do you honestly argue that all of these other risks are currently at the same level of credibility or imminence as climate change?
I agree that there are a lot of rhetorics, simplifications and plain errors in the public debate at the moment. That is unfortunately how the world and the dramaturgy of our media works, especially considering the vast economical and political stakes involved. It is also the issue that most people get convinced by emotional arguments rather than cold data and logic, so arguing over data have a tendency to come second in public discourse. Like it or not, but this is human nature. However, that mustn't deter us from finding the facts of these matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Also remember, the colour resolution of the eye is far poorer than the b&w resolution of the eye, and the aim here is about colour.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but the fovea responsible for your "high resolution" sight contains almost exclusively cones, which are colour sensitive. Most of them detect red and green light, so the resolution in monochromatic red or green isn't that far below white light.
The rod cells on the other hand can only distinguish between black and white, but they are much sparser giving significantly lower resolution. (Their advantage is that they are extremely light sensitive, almost down to detecting a single photon. This is why you have no colour vision when it is dark. Another interesting consequence is that you are blind in the center of your visual field when light conditions are bad, since the fovea lacks rods.)
After having read the FAQ on the Linaro web site and a blog entry by Mark Shuttleworth, I get the feeling that this is an initiative coming from Canonical. If they will be driving this forward, with support from the hardware vendors of course, it might not become your garden variety standards organisation. In that case, the key issue will be to keep the commitment from the hardware manufacturers. But I guess it could work out alright considering Canonical isn't a direct competitor to any of them.
some (many) pro-agw people have been saying for a couple of years that man-made co2 has caused temps to increase but the lack of solar activity has negated the increase so we don't see an increase in measured temps.
But we are seeing an increase in temperature.
People who want agw to be true say "yeah, that sounds good".
I don't think anyone in their right mind wants AGW to be happening.
Considering this press release, it does indeed seem likely the OLPC will use it.
Quoting:
The computer doesn't have any rights, but you have obligations. If you spilled coffee on the CD drive and it stopped working, then you would need to replace the CD drive.
Not if I own the computer. In that case, I can damage it in any way I like, and no one cares. This is different from the case with animals: Even if I am the sole owner of an animal, I have obligations not to cause it unnecessary harm. This is because society has decided that it is bad for the animal itself that it suffers, and it should have to. It is not because it is unethical to destroy things in general, it is unethical because the animal can experience the suffering.
Most Vegans of today will get supplement sources added to different products they purchase [...]
So you agree with me that we could live healthy lives without eating meat, if we thought it to be important enough?
[...] In other words, you do not need the same amount of arable land to produce animals as you do to produce the equivalent amount of crops you would need to replace the animal.
I'm not sure where you found this information, but I don't think it is correct. It might be true in some corner cases, but even if you can plant faster growing crops you generally get a net loss, as each step in the food chain reduces the energy content by about 90%. This an important reason why meat is considerably more expensive than grains and many other vegetables. It is also the reason people in regions with dense population and high poverty almost never eat much meat.
Another benefit of eating animals is that no preservation is needed while they are alive so they can grow in winter when food crops wouldn't.
They need fodder, unlike vegetables which only need a storage place.
I'm not trying to say meat as a food has no use, and our bodies are quite obviously adapted to have meat as one food source. And as I said before, I personally have no problem with eating meat, although I'm not particularly fond of the way animals are treated in the industrialized meat production of today. But I think it is hard to make the case that we couldn't stop eating it if we chose to.
If this means that all conversations are recorded and stored by iConji when you use their apps, it is without any doubt a deal breaker for me.
These examples are perhaps not expressed as rights in a legal context, but the obligations to treat the knife wound or refrain from animal mistreatment would not have been codified unless we thought there were underlying ethical reasons for them. We could call these "rights" or we could call them something else; that is mostly a matter of semantics.
With regard to treatment of animals, we could have an "obligation" not to kill an otherwise healthy animal if we thought it to be unethical. One could of course argue that slaughtering animals is necessary and that we need to eat them, but to be fair, we have to acknowledge that humans can survive and live healthy lives perfectly well without meat in their diet.
So in essence, we breed and kill animals mainly for the purpose of our enjoyment. It is not totally unreasonable to make the argument that this is, in principle, similar to for example arranging dog fights which is illegal in most countries.
I agree that gay marriage does not affect third parties. However, I think it is debatable whether legalization of all drugs can be put in the same category, as there are obvious indirect effects of on third parties when people get addicted (increased levels of burglary etc.). You end up in a situation where the value of personal freedoms has to be weighed against the potential negative effects on members of the society (i.e. would-be addicts and those who get harmed by them). Whichever position you take, the opposite side will feel that you are trying to impose your values onto them. This is the unavoidable compromise of democracy.
As for the question about eating meat, there is a similar ethical dimension. I take it you agree that one should not be allowed to treat animals however one feels like without restrictions, for example exposing them to needless cruelty? In that case you agree that animals have at least some rights in our society (i.e. not to be mistreated by humans). Now, extending this to the point where you say one should not be allowed to slaughter animals is just a matter of degree.
Personally, I eat meat and enjoy it. But I don't think the animal rights lobby is better or worse in that they try to convince me that this is unethical, than any other lobby group, as long as they respect the democracy.
PETA is anti-free all on their own. By definition, they want to people to either voluntarily, or by restriction of law, to behave in their version of "Ethical" or face serious consequences.
I know to little about PETA to have any real opinion about it, but honestly, how is what you say different from what any other political lobby group wants? The whole point of lobbying is to convince lawmakers and other citizens that your view on what is right and wrong should be the norm.
Any license requires interpretation. However, this one doesn't require as much as you seem to think. If you had RTFL you would have seen that it prohibits the "intended purpose [...] of causing grievous bodily harm". This explicitly implies intent, limiting the scope quite heavily, and it uses the phrase "grievous bodily harm" which has a legal definition and precedence that indicates how to interpret it.
You seem to be confusing sampling with extrapolation. For a number of reasons, your parallel with the number of stars is entirely inappropriate; most importantly, the total number is not relevant.
If you had made an estimate about the fraction of stars that are currently burnt out, and later discovered that there are ten times as many stars as you though, the estimate would still be correct!
Please, please. I hate to see people one would suppose have a better understanding of mathematics that the average Joe Sixpack make stupid statements.
Saying X percentage of species have died because of human action assumes that we know how many total species there were at a given point in time
I wouldn't bother to answer this if it weren't for the fact that you were being such an ass about knowing mathematics while being dead wrong, and even got modded insightful for it.
No, determining the percentage of something certainly does not require knowing the total. In fact, you usually don't.
Or do you think they counted the number of molecules in the atmosphere to find out it is 21% oxygen?
The US endangered species list isn't representative for the world. The western countries have reached somewhat of a steady state in relation to our local (land) environment*, and our populations aren't growing very much. The situation is very different in tropical forest regions and in the oceans.
* That is not to say that we are in balance with nature, however. Our ecological footprint is much larger than our land area, but we defer much it to other countries by importing goods produced elsewhere. Luckily, the rest of the world can't afford our level of consumption. Yet.
I guess if you were living your entire life inside the Library of Alexandria, you would be burning books for fuel. Especially the "useless" ones written in a foreign language that you don't understand.
I think humans are blinded by the extraordinary diversity around us to the degree that we fail to realize how unique it is. And our life spans are too short for us to grasp what we are doing. We destroy things that have taken hundreds of millions of years to form in a generation without even reflecting on it. From a geological perspective, we are likely at par with some of the large impact events.
it actually uses a couple of additional mechanical "inputs" to operate its internal magic
"Magic" is the key word here. You may call one or two of the power inputs "control inputs", but regardless of what you call them they are power inputs into what is essentially an epicyclic gear set. No magic or any other form of hand waving will change the basic mechanics. The fact that the inventor thinks he has discovered something radically different doesn't mean he has.
I'm not qualified to judge how innovative this is, but it is clear to me that it is not "just" a differential or "just" a planetary gear
It is not "just" a differential in so much that it seems to be a combination of two differentials. I don't know if this is a particularly efficient way to construct a differential, lending it some merit, but there is nothing fundamentally new about its basic principle.
For details, please have a look in this very thorough analysis of the transmission.
Whether you add two or three power flows makes little difference to the principle of operation. You do not escape the fact that the "control" engine(s) will be experiencing a proportional amount of torque as the main one.
It seems to be a novel and unique transmission.
Well, many things seem novel and unique when you lack the relevant expertise.
And from the same link you provided (emphasis mine):
later followed by:
Thanks. I rest my case. :-)
You don't have to use TCP/IP over ethernet, you know. AoE & FCoE come to mind.
Mechanisms for ensuring reliable transfer of data aren't exclusive to TCP/IP. There is also some overhead in the packet headers (yes, it could be made very small if you use non-standard Ethernet frames).
There are very few ways you might lose packets in a well-built local data-link network.
Well, yeah, depending on how you define local. I don't know what distances they need to transfer the data at CERN, and I imagine there could be all sorts of nasty EM fields around a 14 TeV particle accelerator.
Anyway, to say you could easily handle this data stream on a single 10 Gb/s Ethernet connection is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
I did watch video in TFA, and it doesn't make it clear how this device works. It does suggest, however, that they haven't actually made any real measurements yet, so whether it works as they think remains to be seen. Regardless, what I instantly dismissed was the GGP's claim that combining two inputs to an output is anything new.
The new aspect is that this planetary gearset actually has TWO inputs, and the output is determined by the *difference* in speeds between the two.
You just stated the definition of a differential gear. It is not new in any way, and describes exactly how a planetary gear works and is normally used. For a real world example take a look at the Hybrid Synergy Drive used in Toyota Prius. It has precisely that: A planetary gear with two inputs summing up to one output, allowing the engine to operate at optimal rpm regardless of wheel speed.
A single 10gb ethernet connection can handle that quite easily.
Eh. A 10 Gb ethernet connection can't handle 1.25 GB/s at all, not to mention doing it reliably. Theoretically, 10 Gb is exactly 1.25 GB, but then you need to account for protocol overhead, packet loss and so on.
You've got to give it to them though, the Soviet mishap looks way cooler.
Sure, although you haven't addressed the issue with vehicle fuels, which if I recall correctly is about half of the total energy consumption.
You could be right that the lack of pragmatism in some environmentalist groups is counterproductive contributes to skepticism, but I think you are simplifying the gamut of opinions quite a bit. Where I live, I would say that the majority of AGW supporters, which is essentially everyone, accept nuclear power as the lesser of two evils. In fact, so much so that we are entirely dependent on it, and have no coal or oil power whatsoever nowadays. And this is in spite of the fact that we were affected by the fallout of the Chernobyl disaster and remember it well.
And what agenda is that? Making money through grants? Because I am pretty sure any climate scientist would easily double their salary by joining the coal-industry lobby. Frankly, I am amazed more of them don't given the amount of distrust they apparently have to face from the public (who have actually hired them).
Maybe so, but then you have to weigh those different risks against each other and try to find out which are worth considering at this moment. If there were, right now, thousands of scientists calling out for immediate action against the formation of gray goo, and even humanly visible signs of it present in nature, it would certainly deserve our attention. However, as it stands, do you honestly argue that all of these other risks are currently at the same level of credibility or imminence as climate change?
I agree that there are a lot of rhetorics, simplifications and plain errors in the public debate at the moment. That is unfortunately how the world and the dramaturgy of our media works, especially considering the vast economical and political stakes involved. It is also the issue that most people get convinced by emotional arguments rather than cold data and logic, so arguing over data have a tendency to come second in public discourse. Like it or not, but this is human nature. However, that mustn't deter us from finding the facts of these matters.