It may have fuck all with why three color TVs are insufficient, but clearly our eyes do respond to a range of wavelengths. When responsivity is above 80% of max over a range of 100nm (in the total 300nm range of visible light) I'd call that responding to a range. That's why you can see a red LED that emits a much narrower band and almost no energy at the peak frequency of our red receptors.
Jefferson's ideas of "organized rebellion" WERE incorporated into the constitution, in the form of the balance of powers
You're seriously going to nitpick out the fact that I didn't explicitly say "organized AND ARMED rebellion", and then try to play it off like JEFFERSON didn't explicitly say so? Please. Jefferson, while whole-heartedly embracing the principles of Democratic government, was very cynical about it actually continuing to represent the people and not reverting to de-facto tyranny. He most definitely maintained that fear of armed revolt was a valid way to keep governments in line -- all governments, including the one he created. He most definitely maintained that people should be allowed to keep arms expressly for that purpose. You can't have read his writings and say otherwise, so try the WP page at least.
All the most famous quotes you've heard from Jefferson regarding revolution, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants" for example, and "what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms." come from a letter that was regarding a revolt against the government of the state of Massachusetts, as in part of the United States! No talk of hunting or protecting your property from injuns, no, instead he says of the rebellion: "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion."
So, yeah, sorry, but your thesis that Jefferson thought guns as tools of rebellion were unnecessary in a land of free speech is, shall we say, grossly at odds with reality.
However, that trick can't be used when displaying an image that's half white and half black, so the "real" contrast ratio you see most of the time is much, much lower.
Well that depends on the halves. The whole point of the LED backlights is that different parts of the backlight can be individually turned on and off.
I don't know how fine a 'resolution' the backlight has though it's certainly going to be less than the LCD layer, and I can see where at a certain level of mixed light/dark the technique would fail. But the screens at Best Buy were playing some March of the Penguins, and the blacks of the penguins -- right next to the blaring white of the ice and the penguin's own white -- were very black, and ridiculously more black than the normal florescent back lit LCDs next to them.
So i think the technique works better in practice than you would think.
A game with emphasis on beauty and immersion could teach me a lot of things. Like the Myst games; immersive enough to have me decipher an alien number system. Could as well have taught me hexadecimals or binary numbers.
Yeah, I recall a lengthy sequence in Stephenson's Diamond Age where the Primer taught Nell about binary numbers and encodings, boolean logic, transistor logic circuits, and even lisp programming by analogizing them into puzzles she had to solve to escape a mythical castle. One of the puzzles was even a kind of Turing Test! I remember reading it and thinking it sounded like a very fun way to learn those kinds of things and I wished they'd make a game like it. The water-gates-as-transistors part I thought was especially cool, and didn't seem that far from the kinds of puzzles you'd find in Myst.
Instead of the absent minded professor and his beautiful-yet-intelligent-and-spunky daughter needing rescuing, have the scientist do the rescuing. Or better yet, have the absent minded professor's hard working apprentice do the rescuing. You know, a young man or woman that your target demographic can relate to.
I'm thinking of Penny, Inspector Gadget's daughter(niece? Niece sounds right). She was always saving his moron ass with her computer book (zomg a portable computer the size of an unabridged dictionary?!) and was rarely just a damsel in distress. Gadget isn't exactly a great setting for an educational game, but the Penny character at least seems like a good model for what you're talking about.
But then again, how many camera systems have 24-bit dynamic range and is this preserved in current digital compression techniques? Probably not. The whole system has to handle this.
I dunno, but I would imagine they still have enough range to look good on a CRT, which has a really high contrast ratio. Certainly on those occasions I've watched TV on a CRT in recent years I didn't notice any contrast issues like I do with LCDs.
Since our eyes only have receptors for three different wavelengths, it seems that we ought to be able to replicate any color with appropriate intensities at each of those three wavelengths.
I'm not an expert on this, but I think the basic reason is that it isn't completely true that our eyes only respond to three wavelengths. Each type of cone responds to a range of frequencies. But the pixels on a screen represent exactly one frequency.
Contrast is perhaps in worst shape. The most impressive videos are those that have contrast ranges over a million, preferably over a billion. Super dark shadows and bright light source appear real then. The best monitors at Best Buy have contrast ranges in hundred thousands, but many are under a thousand. Different contrasts are very noticeable viewing screens side-by side. Sony has an experimental Organic-LED screen with a million contrast that starts to look realistic.
This LED-backlit LCD supposed has a five-million-to-one contrast ratio.
They have these at Best Buy, and the 40-inch one is only $1600, and I think I may be getting one. I'm not about to assume that manufacturer-reported contrast ratio is accurate, but visually comparing them to the normal florescent-backlit LCDs next to them, the difference is incredibly apparent and I think worth the extra price.
Thought evolution was about randomness.... not "importantness".... if being important means need backup (of course trying to explain randomness using logical design might lead one to insanity while at the same time trying to explain there can't possibility be a designer because of the randomness....), anyhow, why not two hearts, two brains, or two mouths (after all, we gotta eat)...
You IDers are so cute with your simple misconceptions. You've heard of "natural selection" right?:)
Mutations are random, and in sexual reproduction which genes from each parent get passed on to the offspring are random. Which changes provide benefit to the organism and make it more likely to survive to mate and pass on its genes are decidedly not random -- excepting that survival always involves an element of chance. A random change that damages kidney function would result in a weaker organism and would be strongly selected against. A random change that improved kidney function, or a mutation that resulted in two kidneys, would enhance the survival potential of that organism and would be strongly selected for. So you have two random changes, but one is propagated and the other isn't because of "importantness", and there's no insanity-inducing contradiction there at all.
I would argue the heart is more important and therefore we should have 2 of them instead. Since most people die of heart failure than kidney failure.
Sure the heart is more important. But I should think that the heart is an "expensive" organ and so any benefit has to be weighed against that. Plus I see a lot of practical engineering problems in trying to hook up two hearts in parallel. It may be that once you've already evolved an organ as strong and robust as the heart that it's too big a move from the local maximum to get to a two-heart situation, vs simply continuing to evolve the single heart towards more robustness.
One the other hand, we have two lungs. But one diaphragm.
Great, that probably explains why I've always had sinus trouble. I had my tonsils (and adenoids) removed as an infant, for no reason at all.
Yeah, that was something they used to remove whenever they found the excuse as a preventative. Up until recently they did the same thing with the appendix. If they were already cutting you open, they'd remove the appendix 'just in case'. Apparently they don't do this as much anymore because they have found the appendix tissue makes a useful substitute for other things so now they keep it around 'just in case'. Now that they think it has an actual use, then they probably won't remove it at all unless it's infected (or whatever they're going to use the appendix for, which apparently includes replacement bladders, is more important).
If it makes you feel any better, I still have my tonsils and have tons of sinus problems anyway.:)
Yeah that one is a recent discovery. I think I read about it on/. last year, and the WP gives links to research papers written between 2004 and 2007.
The WP article also says some people have congenital defects where they don't have an appendix. If their theory is right, then I'm guessing it's like a lot of other things: Not vital to survival like a major organ, but still advantageous enough that having one is fairly strongly selected for.
or that I thought I could EASILY live without one of my kidneys
You can live pretty easily without one of your kidneys, as long as the other one is working fine. But therein lies the rub...
how contaminated things like our blood and urine must have been to require 2 kidneys and other "non-essential" organs
Not necessarily any more. But since you'll die quickly if you have no working kidneys, and they are prone to failure, it made evolutionary "sense" to have a backup.
You can lose a kidney, gall bladder, tonsils, etc. and they MUST have either had a use at one point or are meant for a very specific, yet seldom used task, i.e the Spleen being a repository for big white blood cells
Uh as pointed out kidneys have a rather important, crucial, and well-known use. The reason you can lose one is because the function the kidneys provide is so important that you evolved two so you have a backup.
The gall bladder does not provide a crucial function so it can be removed but this is not without consequence. Especially before your digestive system adjusts, you will have some quite noticeable side effects. Read: You don't want to be very far from a bathroom.
Tonsils are part of the lymphatic system. You can afford to lose them, but you are more likely to get upper respiratory infections.
These have all been known for a long time.
A better example of something thought to be useless which turned out not to be would be the appendix, which was thought to be a holdover from our purely herbivorous ancestors. But then recently they discovered it had another use -- as a reserve pocket of digestive bacteria that can be used to "reboot" the digestive system if something wipes out the microbes in the intestines.
. So whether or not the DNS server returns the proper error message or resolves to a site is *meaningless* for any piece of software to rely on.
Just like a server that inherently trusts the client is broken, so is any software that makes assumptions about a remote site just because it exists.
Knowing whether a site exists can still provide useful information for a wide variety of uses. Nobody is using the existence of a server as a form of authentication, okay? We have other mechanisms for verifying the identity of a site, when such identification is important. As the simplest example of how this screws things up, having a valid NX response versus a made up lie of a response will make the difference between an app failing immediately because the NX response says the server doesn't exist, versus waiting and eventually timing out trying to connect to a server that doesn't exist, but the app doesn't know it's because the server is slow, or the service is down, or the packet filter rules are eating your packets.
Just because you don't know or understand how this breaks things doesn't mean it isn't broken.
The behavior of identifying typosquatters and directing the user to the site they intended is properly implemented in the web browser. Not by fucking up one of the fundamental protocols of the internet. The web isn't the internet. And this behavior is broken even for the web.
No it's not. It's a big drain on business. That's why alcohol was legalized again, it brought in more money for more people and businesses then prohibiting it.
You're thinking of the "big picture", as in total cost versus total profit for our society at large. Think instead think solely in terms of those who benefit from prohibition -- everyone who makes a chemical that THC could compete with, the prison industry, and so on -- because those are the ones who keep pushing to continue the status quo. They don't give a fuck about society at large, they care about their own pockets, and for them, prohibition is big business.
I am under the impression that a slider means a continuous range of settings, like the slide of a trombone.
Yes, but at any point in time the slide of a trombone occupies a single position.
It does not sound like this thing can do progressive lenses (which are basically bifocals without the line), where you can switch between near and far views without adjusting the slide, but merely by moving your eyes.
That would leave you unable to read LCDs. A single polarized lens is bad enough in this regard: I use polarized sunglasses, and I have to align the LCD to be able to view it.
LOL yeah. I was once driving cross-country wearing polarized sunglasses, and you know after 12 hours on the road I basically forgot the glasses were there. So I pull into a gas station and the pumps have LCD displays instead of LED. I thought the display on the first one was broken (the place didn't look like it saw a lot of upkeep), so i moved my car to another which was broken too! It wasn't until I tilted my head in puzzlement that I realized the problem.:P
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Oh I see my bad. Yeah "exactly" one frequency was wrong. But it is a much narrower peak in a lot of cases.
No they don't.
It may have fuck all with why three color TVs are insufficient, but clearly our eyes do respond to a range of wavelengths. When responsivity is above 80% of max over a range of 100nm (in the total 300nm range of visible light) I'd call that responding to a range. That's why you can see a red LED that emits a much narrower band and almost no energy at the peak frequency of our red receptors.
Jefferson's ideas of "organized rebellion" WERE incorporated into the constitution, in the form of the balance of powers
You're seriously going to nitpick out the fact that I didn't explicitly say "organized AND ARMED rebellion", and then try to play it off like JEFFERSON didn't explicitly say so? Please. Jefferson, while whole-heartedly embracing the principles of Democratic government, was very cynical about it actually continuing to represent the people and not reverting to de-facto tyranny. He most definitely maintained that fear of armed revolt was a valid way to keep governments in line -- all governments, including the one he created. He most definitely maintained that people should be allowed to keep arms expressly for that purpose. You can't have read his writings and say otherwise, so try the WP page at least.
All the most famous quotes you've heard from Jefferson regarding revolution, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants" for example, and "what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms." come from a letter that was regarding a revolt against the government of the state of Massachusetts, as in part of the United States! No talk of hunting or protecting your property from injuns, no, instead he says of the rebellion: "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion."
So, yeah, sorry, but your thesis that Jefferson thought guns as tools of rebellion were unnecessary in a land of free speech is, shall we say, grossly at odds with reality.
That Samsung may represent the best of LCD, but I'll bet $5 that it's not really 5x10^6 shades on the scale.
Pfft, I doubt that too, and doubt that's even just the max brightness:darkness for each measured in ideal conditions.
What happened is that rectangular regions would go black then gray once there were enough stars or noise inside them.
Oh man. I didn't notice that at all at the store when comparing them. That would be really annoying.
However, that trick can't be used when displaying an image that's half white and half black, so the "real" contrast ratio you see most of the time is much, much lower.
Well that depends on the halves. The whole point of the LED backlights is that different parts of the backlight can be individually turned on and off.
I don't know how fine a 'resolution' the backlight has though it's certainly going to be less than the LCD layer, and I can see where at a certain level of mixed light/dark the technique would fail. But the screens at Best Buy were playing some March of the Penguins, and the blacks of the penguins -- right next to the blaring white of the ice and the penguin's own white -- were very black, and ridiculously more black than the normal florescent back lit LCDs next to them.
So i think the technique works better in practice than you would think.
A game with emphasis on beauty and immersion could teach me a lot of things. Like the Myst games; immersive enough to have me decipher an alien number system. Could as well have taught me hexadecimals or binary numbers.
Yeah, I recall a lengthy sequence in Stephenson's Diamond Age where the Primer taught Nell about binary numbers and encodings, boolean logic, transistor logic circuits, and even lisp programming by analogizing them into puzzles she had to solve to escape a mythical castle. One of the puzzles was even a kind of Turing Test! I remember reading it and thinking it sounded like a very fun way to learn those kinds of things and I wished they'd make a game like it. The water-gates-as-transistors part I thought was especially cool, and didn't seem that far from the kinds of puzzles you'd find in Myst.
Definitely potential in that area.
Instead of the absent minded professor and his beautiful-yet-intelligent-and-spunky daughter needing rescuing, have the scientist do the rescuing. Or better yet, have the absent minded professor's hard working apprentice do the rescuing. You know, a young man or woman that your target demographic can relate to.
I'm thinking of Penny, Inspector Gadget's daughter(niece? Niece sounds right). She was always saving his moron ass with her computer book (zomg a portable computer the size of an unabridged dictionary?!) and was rarely just a damsel in distress. Gadget isn't exactly a great setting for an educational game, but the Penny character at least seems like a good model for what you're talking about.
But then again, how many camera systems have 24-bit dynamic range and is this preserved in current digital compression techniques? Probably not. The whole system has to handle this.
I dunno, but I would imagine they still have enough range to look good on a CRT, which has a really high contrast ratio. Certainly on those occasions I've watched TV on a CRT in recent years I didn't notice any contrast issues like I do with LCDs.
Since our eyes only have receptors for three different wavelengths, it seems that we ought to be able to replicate any color with appropriate intensities at each of those three wavelengths.
I'm not an expert on this, but I think the basic reason is that it isn't completely true that our eyes only respond to three wavelengths. Each type of cone responds to a range of frequencies. But the pixels on a screen represent exactly one frequency.
Contrast is perhaps in worst shape. The most impressive videos are those that have contrast ranges over a million, preferably over a billion. Super dark shadows and bright light source appear real then. The best monitors at Best Buy have contrast ranges in hundred thousands, but many are under a thousand. Different contrasts are very noticeable viewing screens side-by side. Sony has an experimental Organic-LED screen with a million contrast that starts to look realistic.
This LED-backlit LCD supposed has a five-million-to-one contrast ratio.
They have these at Best Buy, and the 40-inch one is only $1600, and I think I may be getting one. I'm not about to assume that manufacturer-reported contrast ratio is accurate, but visually comparing them to the normal florescent-backlit LCDs next to them, the difference is incredibly apparent and I think worth the extra price.
How 'bout them foreskins?
Personally I don't think the Foreskins have a chance against my fav team, the New England Labia.
Thought evolution was about randomness.... not "importantness".... if being important means need backup (of course trying to explain randomness using logical design might lead one to insanity while at the same time trying to explain there can't possibility be a designer because of the randomness....), anyhow, why not two hearts, two brains, or two mouths (after all, we gotta eat)...
You IDers are so cute with your simple misconceptions. You've heard of "natural selection" right? :)
Mutations are random, and in sexual reproduction which genes from each parent get passed on to the offspring are random. Which changes provide benefit to the organism and make it more likely to survive to mate and pass on its genes are decidedly not random -- excepting that survival always involves an element of chance. A random change that damages kidney function would result in a weaker organism and would be strongly selected against. A random change that improved kidney function, or a mutation that resulted in two kidneys, would enhance the survival potential of that organism and would be strongly selected for. So you have two random changes, but one is propagated and the other isn't because of "importantness", and there's no insanity-inducing contradiction there at all.
I gotta say, that's pretty awesome.
I would argue the heart is more important and therefore we should have 2 of them instead. Since most people die of heart failure than kidney failure.
Sure the heart is more important. But I should think that the heart is an "expensive" organ and so any benefit has to be weighed against that. Plus I see a lot of practical engineering problems in trying to hook up two hearts in parallel. It may be that once you've already evolved an organ as strong and robust as the heart that it's too big a move from the local maximum to get to a two-heart situation, vs simply continuing to evolve the single heart towards more robustness.
One the other hand, we have two lungs. But one diaphragm.
Great, that probably explains why I've always had sinus trouble. I had my tonsils (and adenoids) removed as an infant, for no reason at all.
Yeah, that was something they used to remove whenever they found the excuse as a preventative. Up until recently they did the same thing with the appendix. If they were already cutting you open, they'd remove the appendix 'just in case'. Apparently they don't do this as much anymore because they have found the appendix tissue makes a useful substitute for other things so now they keep it around 'just in case'. Now that they think it has an actual use, then they probably won't remove it at all unless it's infected (or whatever they're going to use the appendix for, which apparently includes replacement bladders, is more important).
If it makes you feel any better, I still have my tonsils and have tons of sinus problems anyway. :)
Yeah that one is a recent discovery. I think I read about it on /. last year, and the WP gives links to research papers written between 2004 and 2007.
The WP article also says some people have congenital defects where they don't have an appendix. If their theory is right, then I'm guessing it's like a lot of other things: Not vital to survival like a major organ, but still advantageous enough that having one is fairly strongly selected for.
or that I thought I could EASILY live without one of my kidneys
You can live pretty easily without one of your kidneys, as long as the other one is working fine. But therein lies the rub...
how contaminated things like our blood and urine must have been to require 2 kidneys and other "non-essential" organs
Not necessarily any more. But since you'll die quickly if you have no working kidneys, and they are prone to failure, it made evolutionary "sense" to have a backup.
You can lose a kidney, gall bladder, tonsils, etc. and they MUST have either had a use at one point or are meant for a very specific, yet seldom used task, i.e the Spleen being a repository for big white blood cells
Uh as pointed out kidneys have a rather important, crucial, and well-known use. The reason you can lose one is because the function the kidneys provide is so important that you evolved two so you have a backup.
The gall bladder does not provide a crucial function so it can be removed but this is not without consequence. Especially before your digestive system adjusts, you will have some quite noticeable side effects. Read: You don't want to be very far from a bathroom.
Tonsils are part of the lymphatic system. You can afford to lose them, but you are more likely to get upper respiratory infections.
These have all been known for a long time.
A better example of something thought to be useless which turned out not to be would be the appendix, which was thought to be a holdover from our purely herbivorous ancestors. But then recently they discovered it had another use -- as a reserve pocket of digestive bacteria that can be used to "reboot" the digestive system if something wipes out the microbes in the intestines.
. So whether or not the DNS server returns the proper error message or resolves to a site is *meaningless* for any piece of software to rely on.
Just like a server that inherently trusts the client is broken, so is any software that makes assumptions about a remote site just because it exists.
Knowing whether a site exists can still provide useful information for a wide variety of uses. Nobody is using the existence of a server as a form of authentication, okay? We have other mechanisms for verifying the identity of a site, when such identification is important. As the simplest example of how this screws things up, having a valid NX response versus a made up lie of a response will make the difference between an app failing immediately because the NX response says the server doesn't exist, versus waiting and eventually timing out trying to connect to a server that doesn't exist, but the app doesn't know it's because the server is slow, or the service is down, or the packet filter rules are eating your packets.
Just because you don't know or understand how this breaks things doesn't mean it isn't broken.
The behavior of identifying typosquatters and directing the user to the site they intended is properly implemented in the web browser. Not by fucking up one of the fundamental protocols of the internet. The web isn't the internet. And this behavior is broken even for the web.
It isn't. Clearly Bell don't consider themselves an ISP any more, they consider themselves a WSP. (Web Service Provider).
It's not supposed to work, it's supposed to give them a blanket CYA response to people complaining about this bullshit. "Hey you can opt out."
No it's not. It's a big drain on business. That's why alcohol was legalized again, it brought in more money for more people and businesses then prohibiting it.
You're thinking of the "big picture", as in total cost versus total profit for our society at large. Think instead think solely in terms of those who benefit from prohibition -- everyone who makes a chemical that THC could compete with, the prison industry, and so on -- because those are the ones who keep pushing to continue the status quo. They don't give a fuck about society at large, they care about their own pockets, and for them, prohibition is big business.
I am under the impression that a slider means a continuous range of settings, like the slide of a trombone.
Yes, but at any point in time the slide of a trombone occupies a single position.
It does not sound like this thing can do progressive lenses (which are basically bifocals without the line), where you can switch between near and far views without adjusting the slide, but merely by moving your eyes.
That would leave you unable to read LCDs. A single polarized lens is bad enough in this regard: I use polarized sunglasses, and I have to align the LCD to be able to view it.
LOL yeah. I was once driving cross-country wearing polarized sunglasses, and you know after 12 hours on the road I basically forgot the glasses were there. So I pull into a gas station and the pumps have LCD displays instead of LED. I thought the display on the first one was broken (the place didn't look like it saw a lot of upkeep), so i moved my car to another which was broken too! It wasn't until I tilted my head in puzzlement that I realized the problem. :P
The cost/benefit curve has a very clear kink in it.
Well then figure out what its kink is, and hire it an open-minded hooker or something to straighten it out. Geeze, do I have to think of everything?