Compare and contrast the number of terrorists from Iran (on "The List") vs. the number of terrorists from Our Friend And Ally, Saudi Arabia (not on The List) and Pakistan (also not). The List just gives Trump supports an illusion of Doing Something; never mind that it is useless and indeed counter-productive.
Most of the crazies have been home-grown (and many have been converts).
Please don't confuse anti-Semitisim with anti-Zionism. You can in fact be opposed to the behaviour of the Israeli state without being anti-Jewish. There are plenty of Jews who aren't in favour of Zionism either - Einstein was one.
The first 2D electronic television displays had similar levels of performance. This is a tremendous achievement. If you want proper 3D - sans glasses - this is almost certainly how it will happen.
Perhaps you should read some of the literature. Of all the greenhouse gases, CO2 is, by a considerable margin, the most significant. Methane (and others) are far more potent... there just isn't as much, so their effect is smaller.
The fact is, global temperatures are strongly correlated with CO2 concentration. That's a mathematical fact, recorded in the ice of Antarctica. CO2 concentrations are increasing at an unprecedented rate. This is a real cause for concern. Glaciers are shrinking... major chunks of Antarctica are just melting away. I don't doubt that we can survive. However, unless we do something *now* about all the crap we are pumping into the atmosphere (primarily CO2, but also methane and others) we are going to see significant rises in sea levels within our lifetime.
This maybe the first ATSC HD receiver card on the market, but that doesn't make it the first HD:)
Australia uses the European DVB-T digital standard, and there are *many* so-called 'budget' DVB-T cards on the market which don't have a hardware MPEG decoder - they cost around $A200 (say around $US120) They let you dump the whole DVB transport stream into (say) mplayer, letting you watch HD, SD, or listen to audio-only channels, provided that the host machine is fast enough to handle it. You can also stream it to a faster machine across the network, in which case even a crappy slow box is an adequate TV receiver. Ironically the deluxe cards with on-board MPEG can only do standard definition digital:)
In Australia we have a variety of HD content available now, at a variety of resolutions including 1080i.
For many reasons, DVB-T is a much better system (COFDM as opposed to dodgy 8-VSB with horrendously complex equalisers).
I have set up a Chinese environment under Debian - it works beatifully, easily better than any Chinese input/output system under Windows. The key ingredients:
* KDE 2.2.2 * ttf-arphic-* true type fonts (traditional and simplified are available) * XCIN, with a little tweaking to get it working properly - does Pinyin input, which most people prefer * locales - make sure your/etc/locale.gen includes the zh_CN GB2312 line (or equivalnet Big5 traditional encoding) and run locale-gen * environment variables - there is a Debian Chinese HOWTO which tells you what you need to set.
The key thing is the fonts (turn on anti-aliasing in KDE, make sure your X windows is set up to support this). The Arphic AA fonts look utterly magnificent, easily the best chinese fonts around. KDE supports X input (i.e. XCIN) quite happily, so you can use KOffice etc. and type in Chinese without a problem.
One of these days I'll get around to writing a HOWTO to explain exactly how it works - if you want details, pester me by e-mailing daniel at ieee dot uow dot edu dot au.
Speaking from a position of total ignorance is easy. Having just come back from three months working in China with Chinese engineers on a number of projects, I can make the following observations:
1. China is the most capitalist country on the Earth. Far more so than the U.S. China is currently opening up its markets to the world, the US is busily closing theirs ("Export Enhancement Program" = subsidies for inefficient farmers, tariffs against Australian lamb imports despite WTO rulings etc. etc. etc.).
2. Chinese people in 2001 enjoy significantly more freedom than even 10 years ago.
3. There is a clear path outlined between where they are now and a democratic future. Already you don't have to be a member of the communist party to run for office at the local level. Also, Hong Kong today is more democratic than at the time of the British handover.
4. Some parts of China are experimenting with increased freedoms of expression, such as Shanghai and the Shenzhen special economic zone next to HK. This will only continue to improve.
5. Government is much more transparent than my experience of US buearocracy. Public comment is welcomed on many major decisions such as public works programs.
6. The US hypocritically compains about China's human rights record. The US also has a death penalty - so China executes more people (about 4x per capita) - this makes the US executions OK? Plenty of innocent people have been put to death in the US (particularly by the Texecutioner). If you're black or hispanic and poor, you are far more likely to be found guilty on the basis of the same evidence than a wealthy white person. Human rights? Hah! The US is responsible for overthrowing democracies in Central and South America and for sponsoring wars and terrorism elsewhere in the world (who was it who created and installed Saddam and Osama in the first place?). Don't complain about the human rights record of China (which is making significant improvements in this area) while you are sliding backwards.
7. Democracy in the US? Who was it who won your last presidential election?
- Daniel (heartily sick of American lecturing on human rights and democracy).
I co-wrote a fine piece of fractal generating software, that came with its own windowing system, mouse driver and midi-like music synthesiser (it played a tune of your choice when it had finished rendering the fractal - this was in the days of 386s being power machines), it could do mandelbrot (+ several variations), julia, sierpinski and logistic fractals (plus a few chaotic dynamics plots done in phase space), save and load BMP files of the images and a whole heap of other cool stuff - and it was written in Borland Pascal which had a limit if 64 kB for the compiled program! Those were the days... taught me good programming discipline.
Still remember the excitement of discovering the limits of machine precision by rendering magnified Mandelbrot sets on my 386:)
We've been paying about that ($A0.70-0.80) for 700 MB media recently, and commenting on how damn cheap it is! What is the current price like in the US?
South Australia used to be the most progressive state in the country, being the first to give the vote to women, legalise homosexuality, liberalise drug laws etc. and Queensland and Western Australia the most reactionary. With the recent chucking out of a very dry right-wing government in WA (and it's replacement with a likely Labor/Greens coalition) and the re-election of Labor (and general rejection of the Pauline Hanson Retarded Redneck Party) by a massive majority in Queensland, it seems that this role has been reversed.
Our present government is composed of traditional right wing 1950s white picket fence conservatives. One of the few relatively liberal members of the ironically named Liberal party (yes I know the diff between L and l) is in charge of Finance (The Right Incomprehensible John Fahey), and made the decision to outsource the whole of IT for all government departments, including our main government (science organisation, our (small) nuclear research body and our weather forcasters. He did this for reasons of right-wing political ideology (outsourcing = private industry is good, mmmkay? In-house expertise is bad, mmmkay?) and claimed it would save over a billion $A (about 35 US cents). Needless to say, it didn't, CSIRO, ANSTO and the weather guys said "no", there was an official inquiry which backed up the scientists, and our Minister for Financial Disasters (my local member incidentally) looks like the rugby-playing lawyer he is - a man with no clue about IT.
Anyway, local industry is happy - they were never even remotely in the running for the Government tenders. Now it's up to the individual govt departments as to when and if to outsource.
Short form is, when the US has finished with its current President, can we please have him? He seems to have a clue, and we won't let him near any female interns with big hair. You can keep Dubs and Chainsaw tho - we have enough people like that running the country already:-)
Most people posting here haven't the first clue about anti-aliasing. AA is a DSP technique which band-limits a signal prior to sampling in order for it to be faithfully reconstructed. If this is not done the higher-frequency components "wrap around". For instance, if you sample a sound signal at 20 kHz, then you must remove all frequency components above 10 kHz (assuming perfect roll-off). If (say) a 12 kHz signal was present it would appear to be an 8 kHz signal in your digital representation of the waveform. The alias is NOT supposed to be there. It's called the Nyquist sampling theorem.
One use of this is in downsampling - where you take a signal originally sampled at one frequency and generate samples at another lower frequency. To do this by an integral amount (e.g. downsample by factor of N) you firstly band-limit the signal via a digital filter to at most half of your new sampling rate, then take every Nth sample. If you wish to change to (say) 2/3 of the sampling rate you need to upsample by two and downsample by 3 (upsampling is a bit different and not all that relevant).
Now, the same applies to 2-D (and 3-D) signals as well. If you are trying to view (e.g.) a 600 dpi image on a 100 dpi monitor, you are in effect down-sampling. If you wish to see what is really there (to the best ability of your display) then you MUST anti-alias. To not do so is to see artifacts which are NOT present in the original signal (remember the example of the apparently 8 kHz signal! It's not really there!).
The only issue is the attributes of the anti-aliasing filter (roll-off, ripple etc.). This depends on the size and type of digital filter you choose - bigger and more complex digital filters may give better quality but be slower to execute. If you are complaining about "blurring" at some chunky coarse resolution, it's not the anti-aliasing, it's the poor resolution. The anti-aliasing is helping you.
- Daniel
Check out EAGLE: http://www.cadsoftusa.com. There is a Linux version. It's not bad at all. You can download a free 'light' version (only 2 layers, single sheet, limited board area, otherwise fully functional).
NNs don't work well on parallel computers, and even worse with distributed computing (e.g. a network of PCs). The reason is that each node does some very simple processing (e.g. adds, multiplies and passes through a simple function). So the communications overhead is so massive that you don't gain very much at all - in fact you would probably lose.
Parallel computing is suited to tasks which can be broken into many chunks, each of which takes substantially longer to process than it takes to send the tasks over the communications infrastructure. These include RC5 (tiny data - a range of keys - but each block needing lots of number crunching) and SETI@home. With a neural net you'd congestion-collapse your network and the CPUs would be 99.9% idle.
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Compare and contrast the number of terrorists from Iran (on "The List") vs. the number of terrorists from Our Friend And Ally, Saudi Arabia (not on The List) and Pakistan (also not). The List just gives Trump supports an illusion of Doing Something; never mind that it is useless and indeed counter-productive.
Most of the crazies have been home-grown (and many have been converts).
Possibly you mean far side?
That's so wrong it's not funny. Read what the parent wrote. It is correct and you are entirely wrong.
Please don't confuse anti-Semitisim with anti-Zionism. You can in fact be opposed to the behaviour of the Israeli state without being anti-Jewish. There are plenty of Jews who aren't in favour of Zionism either - Einstein was one.
By the way, the Arabs are a Semitic people...
I look forward to your work on string theory.
Do the editors even read the submissions?
The first 2D electronic television displays had similar levels of performance. This is a tremendous achievement. If you want proper 3D - sans glasses - this is almost certainly how it will happen.
Are you a "scientist"?
Perhaps you should read some of the literature. Of all the greenhouse gases, CO2 is, by a considerable margin, the most significant. Methane (and others) are far more potent... there just isn't as much, so their effect is smaller.
The fact is, global temperatures are strongly correlated with CO2 concentration. That's a mathematical fact, recorded in the ice of Antarctica. CO2 concentrations are increasing at an unprecedented rate. This is a real cause for concern. Glaciers are shrinking... major chunks of Antarctica are just melting away. I don't doubt that we can survive. However, unless we do something *now* about all the crap we are pumping into the atmosphere (primarily CO2, but also methane and others) we are going to see significant rises in sea levels within our lifetime.
This maybe the first ATSC HD receiver card on the market, but that doesn't make it the first HD :)
:)
Australia uses the European DVB-T digital standard, and there are *many* so-called 'budget' DVB-T cards on the market which don't have a hardware MPEG decoder - they cost around $A200 (say around $US120) They let you dump the whole DVB transport stream into (say) mplayer, letting you watch HD, SD, or listen to audio-only channels, provided that the host machine is fast enough to handle it. You can also stream it to a faster machine across the network, in which case even a crappy slow box is an adequate TV receiver. Ironically the deluxe cards with on-board MPEG can only do standard definition digital
In Australia we have a variety of HD content available now, at a variety of resolutions including 1080i.
For many reasons, DVB-T is a much better system (COFDM as opposed to dodgy 8-VSB with horrendously complex equalisers).
I have set up a Chinese environment under Debian - it works beatifully, easily better than any Chinese input/output system under Windows. The key ingredients:
/etc/locale.gen includes the zh_CN GB2312 line (or equivalnet Big5 traditional encoding) and run locale-gen
* KDE 2.2.2
* ttf-arphic-* true type fonts (traditional and simplified are available)
* XCIN, with a little tweaking to get it working properly - does Pinyin input, which most people prefer
* locales - make sure your
* environment variables - there is a Debian Chinese HOWTO which tells you what you need to set.
The key thing is the fonts (turn on anti-aliasing in KDE, make sure your X windows is set up to support this). The Arphic AA fonts look utterly magnificent, easily the best chinese fonts around. KDE supports X input (i.e. XCIN) quite happily, so you can use KOffice etc. and type in Chinese without a problem.
One of these days I'll get around to writing a HOWTO to explain exactly how it works - if you want details, pester me by e-mailing daniel at ieee dot uow dot edu dot au.
Speaking from a position of total ignorance is easy. Having just come back from three months working in China with Chinese engineers on a number of projects, I can make the following observations:
1. China is the most capitalist country on the Earth. Far more so than the U.S. China is currently opening up its markets to the world, the US is busily closing theirs ("Export Enhancement Program" = subsidies for inefficient farmers, tariffs against Australian lamb imports despite WTO rulings etc. etc. etc.).
2. Chinese people in 2001 enjoy significantly more freedom than even 10 years ago.
3. There is a clear path outlined between where they are now and a democratic future. Already you don't have to be a member of the communist party to run for office at the local level. Also, Hong Kong today is more democratic than at the time of the British handover.
4. Some parts of China are experimenting with increased freedoms of expression, such as Shanghai and the Shenzhen special economic zone next to HK. This will only continue to improve.
5. Government is much more transparent than my experience of US buearocracy. Public comment is welcomed on many major decisions such as public works programs.
6. The US hypocritically compains about China's human rights record. The US also has a death penalty - so China executes more people (about 4x per capita) - this makes the US executions OK? Plenty of innocent people have been put to death in the US (particularly by the Texecutioner). If you're black or hispanic and poor, you are far more likely to be found guilty on the basis of the same evidence than a wealthy white person. Human rights? Hah! The US is responsible for overthrowing democracies in Central and South America and for sponsoring wars and terrorism elsewhere in the world (who was it who created and installed Saddam and Osama in the first place?). Don't complain about the human rights record of China (which is making significant improvements in this area) while you are sliding backwards.
7. Democracy in the US? Who was it who won your last presidential election?
- Daniel (heartily sick of American lecturing on human rights and democracy).
I'm sorry, 1.44 MB is not tiny :)
:)
I co-wrote a fine piece of fractal generating software, that came with its own windowing system, mouse driver and midi-like music synthesiser (it played a tune of your choice when it had finished rendering the fractal - this was in the days of 386s being power machines), it could do mandelbrot (+ several variations), julia, sierpinski and logistic fractals (plus a few chaotic dynamics plots done in phase space), save and load BMP files of the images and a whole heap of other cool stuff - and it was written in Borland Pascal which had a limit if 64 kB for the compiled program! Those were the days... taught me good programming discipline.
Still remember the excitement of discovering the limits of machine precision by rendering magnified Mandelbrot sets on my 386
- Daniel
We've been paying about that ($A0.70-0.80) for 700 MB media recently, and commenting on how damn cheap it is! What is the current price like in the US?
- Daniel
South Australia used to be the most progressive state in the country, being the first to give the vote to women, legalise homosexuality, liberalise drug laws etc. and Queensland and Western Australia the most reactionary. With the recent chucking out of a very dry right-wing government in WA (and it's replacement with a likely Labor/Greens coalition) and the re-election of Labor (and general rejection of the Pauline Hanson Retarded Redneck Party) by a massive majority in Queensland, it seems that this role has been reversed.
- Daniel
Anyway, local industry is happy - they were never even remotely in the running for the Government tenders. Now it's up to the individual govt departments as to when and if to outsource.
Short form is, when the US has finished with its current President, can we please have him? He seems to have a clue, and we won't let him near any female interns with big hair. You can keep Dubs and Chainsaw tho - we have enough people like that running the country already :-)
Most people posting here haven't the first clue about anti-aliasing. AA is a DSP technique which band-limits a signal prior to sampling in order for it to be faithfully reconstructed. If this is not done the higher-frequency components "wrap around". For instance, if you sample a sound signal at 20 kHz, then you must remove all frequency components above 10 kHz (assuming perfect roll-off). If (say) a 12 kHz signal was present it would appear to be an 8 kHz signal in your digital representation of the waveform. The alias is NOT supposed to be there. It's called the Nyquist sampling theorem. One use of this is in downsampling - where you take a signal originally sampled at one frequency and generate samples at another lower frequency. To do this by an integral amount (e.g. downsample by factor of N) you firstly band-limit the signal via a digital filter to at most half of your new sampling rate, then take every Nth sample. If you wish to change to (say) 2/3 of the sampling rate you need to upsample by two and downsample by 3 (upsampling is a bit different and not all that relevant). Now, the same applies to 2-D (and 3-D) signals as well. If you are trying to view (e.g.) a 600 dpi image on a 100 dpi monitor, you are in effect down-sampling. If you wish to see what is really there (to the best ability of your display) then you MUST anti-alias. To not do so is to see artifacts which are NOT present in the original signal (remember the example of the apparently 8 kHz signal! It's not really there!). The only issue is the attributes of the anti-aliasing filter (roll-off, ripple etc.). This depends on the size and type of digital filter you choose - bigger and more complex digital filters may give better quality but be slower to execute. If you are complaining about "blurring" at some chunky coarse resolution, it's not the anti-aliasing, it's the poor resolution. The anti-aliasing is helping you. - Daniel
Check out EAGLE: http://www.cadsoftusa.com. There is a Linux version. It's not bad at all. You can download a free 'light' version (only 2 layers, single sheet, limited board area, otherwise fully functional).
- Daniel
NNs don't work well on parallel computers, and even worse
with distributed computing (e.g. a network of PCs). The
reason is that each node does some very simple processing
(e.g. adds, multiplies and passes through a simple function).
So the communications overhead is so massive that you
don't gain very much at all - in fact you would probably lose.
Parallel computing is suited to tasks which can be broken into
many chunks, each of which takes substantially longer to
process than it takes to send the tasks over the communications
infrastructure. These include RC5 (tiny data - a range of keys -
but each block needing lots of number crunching) and
SETI@home. With a neural net you'd congestion-collapse
your network and the CPUs would be 99.9% idle.
- Daniel