Well yeah, if you're a robot who plans what music you're going to listen to in the next 48 hours in advance then your calculation makes sense. But it doesn't make sense for humans.
I don't need 20GB of music in my pocket, 1,5GB is more than enough for me
Come on! You know better than that surely. 1.5Gb sounds good if you naively think that you never need more than a few dozen albums at a time. But just you wait until over a period of a few weeks you want to listen to a much wider portion of your music collection and you have to keep juggling what is on that 1.5Gb. I ignored the existence of portable mp3 players until one appeared on which all of my music fitted. The increase in convenience when that step happens is incredible. You no longer have constant shuffling back and forth. It's great!
But at the expense of using the money for something that will more directly affect mankind?
What's this 'mankind' stuff you're talking about? I spend my day doing stuff (my jobs, my hobbies, entertainment, seeing friends, whatever) that has nothing to do with "affecting mankind" and I'm happy that way. Why should what I want from a government be any different? If 'mankind' wants to be affected it can jolly well go off and affect itself. I want to see more manned spaceflight and if the opportunity arises for me to encourage that I'll do so.
IMAX quality images out of a 1 megapixel camera? I think not. NASA have high resolution images because they're tiling many low quality images together. 1 megapixel is definitely less than the resolution a prosumer grade lens can project. So sacrificing pixels this much for a lens makes no sense.
I'm sure there is some reasoning behing NASA's decision but that article doesn't say what it is!
But the funny thing is that NASA don't even have decent software for tiling those images so they have seams everywhere (and I don't just mean from the color variance).
Yeah...but this is a harder job. In death becomes her we had one scene with neck twisting around a single axis. For Zaphod we need to fix every scene in which he appears and the new neck needs to follow hundreds of different head movements. It'd probably also require some of the clothing to be CG to hide some of the join. And really you need two CG heads otherwise you'll have the BBC result: one head is central and one hangs to he side. You really want a pair of symmetrical heads. This is expensive work - but doable I think.
Check the warranty, and ask the dealer before you buy
In my case what saved me was the fact that the dealer had an absolutely no questions asked money back guarantee. They paid for the (overseas) return sihpping. Awesome. If you're going to buy crap hardware get it from a good dealer.
Have you any clue just how much work is involved in stitching another head onto someone's body in a convincing manner? In "Death Becomes Her" the neck was expensive CGI. This would require much more work.
Acer sucks. The touchpad failed on an Acer I had. I phoned technical support. They sent me to a local laptop repair place who billed me. Acer said they don't work with that particular repair company so wouldn't foot the bill. I pointed out they sent me there in the first place. They said they couldn't possibly have. They point blank lied to me. Incredible!
Never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, buy a product from Acer.
Acer are the scum of the earth. They are the butthole of laptop manufacturers. They are just plain evil.
English is an annoying language. While 'proven' is the past participle of 'prove', the past participle of 'disprove' is 'disproved'. 'Refuted' is probably a better choice of word anyway.
The only problem with that is that Feynman was just about the only scientist capable of doing what he asks for! For example pick up any popular science book on quantum mechanics. It's guaranteed to be full of bullshit metaphors that have no predictive value until you get to Feynman's book QED. His layman's explanation actually has predictive value. But few people, certainly not pop science writers, seem to have the insight into the work that he did.
Speaking as someone who has written such "colorization" software for a living: A camera isn't some magic piece of equipment that captures color from a scene reproducing it perfectly on paper or a monitor. It's a device that measures the amount of energy falling onto sensors within a certain frequency band with a certain weighting. No camera has sensors that exactly match those in the human eye and so all photographs require some kind of "colorization" before they produce an acceptable representation of the scene for human vision. Even the cheapest digital camera is likely to apply a lookup table to transform the RGB value for each pixel.
I'm pretty sure the original story is deliberately intended as a troll.
It's weird isn't it. Just the fact that he was part of a particular culture at a particular time means there is a ton of stuff to be drawn out from it. Hell, if someone wrote a book about Good fighting Evil at the time of World War II and it didn't make any kind of reference to contemporary events then the difficult course the author would have to chart steering clear of such references would be worthy of study itself!
We'd be much better off, for example, pushing hard to find ways to make sure that the atmosphere of the planet we currently inhabit remains breathable.
Frankly, that's boring. If the atmosphere of this planet becomes a bit less breathable - big deal. We might have to install filters in our houses and cars. Maybe wear masks when we go out. Whatever. It'd be a minor inconvenience and we'd get used to it. But landing people on Mars. That would be fucking awesome! It would be one of the most exciting endeavors the human race has taken part in. It'd be like the old days of moon landings again. I'd watch the pictures on TV and be moved in a way that nothing else on TV can move me. I'd feel proud to be part of a species that is branching out across the universe. Who gives a shit about getting people off drugs? They're usually their through their own choice. I don't want to be part of a human race that sinks to the lowest common denominator and is dragged back by its dregs. I think boldly going where no man has gone before counts for a lot more than providing pharmaceuticals to people, even if that means that I myself have to sacrifice those drugs.
What in heavens name are you talking about? There are a million topics that can easily be drawn out of Tolkien's work that require a close reading. Even a crass topic like "Were Sam and Frodo gay?" is worthy of discussion and requires careful reading to settle one way or another. How can you say there is no deeper significance? Even with Tolkien's flat denial the whole work is screaming out for allegorical interpretation. As they say: a fish is unaware of the water in which it swims and so is the last place to ask about water. And even at the most mundane level you can ask questions about why the story is structured one way rather than another that might require considerable work to answer.
do we have the right or the responsibility to alter the course of nature?
Do you know what the 'course of nature' is? Does it have some preprogrammed path that it's going to take? Is there some reason to believe that this course is somehow superior to any other course? Why should there be any connection between the state of 'nature' and our rights and responsibilities?
If we screw this up, the consequenses will be chatastrophic.
By definition of "screw up". Do you have any information to convey?
Coin tosses are independent events. The climate at time t+dt depepnds on the climate at time t. When that happens the law of averages goes out the window, especially if the dependency has any kind of instability.
I've been trying to eliminate cash from my life for ages. Now I'll try even harder to use my credit card. Or is that not what the Treasury does these days...?
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Well yeah, if you're a robot who plans what music you're going to listen to in the next 48 hours in advance then your calculation makes sense. But it doesn't make sense for humans.
Unless of course you only have 1.5Gb of music.
I'm sure there is some reasoning behing NASA's decision but that article doesn't say what it is!
But the funny thing is that NASA don't even have decent software for tiling those images so they have seams everywhere (and I don't just mean from the color variance).
Yeah...but this is a harder job. In death becomes her we had one scene with neck twisting around a single axis. For Zaphod we need to fix every scene in which he appears and the new neck needs to follow hundreds of different head movements. It'd probably also require some of the clothing to be CG to hide some of the join. And really you need two CG heads otherwise you'll have the BBC result: one head is central and one hangs to he side. You really want a pair of symmetrical heads. This is expensive work - but doable I think.
Never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, buy a product from Acer.
Acer are the scum of the earth. They are the butthole of laptop manufacturers. They are just plain evil.
English is an annoying language. While 'proven' is the past participle of 'prove', the past participle of 'disprove' is 'disproved'. 'Refuted' is probably a better choice of word anyway.
It amazes me that you'd think his amazement is for real! Nobody's that dumb :-)
The only problem with that is that Feynman was just about the only scientist capable of doing what he asks for! For example pick up any popular science book on quantum mechanics. It's guaranteed to be full of bullshit metaphors that have no predictive value until you get to Feynman's book QED. His layman's explanation actually has predictive value. But few people, certainly not pop science writers, seem to have the insight into the work that he did.
You might not have heard of metonymy but even the dumbest person understands it. Clearly you don't.
...as long as they let me RFID their cards...
I'm pretty sure the original story is deliberately intended as a troll.
It's weird isn't it. Just the fact that he was part of a particular culture at a particular time means there is a ton of stuff to be drawn out from it. Hell, if someone wrote a book about Good fighting Evil at the time of World War II and it didn't make any kind of reference to contemporary events then the difficult course the author would have to chart steering clear of such references would be worthy of study itself!
I'd happily make big sacrifices for a "I went to Mars and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" t-shirt if it really was a genuine Martian one.
What in heavens name are you talking about? There are a million topics that can easily be drawn out of Tolkien's work that require a close reading. Even a crass topic like "Were Sam and Frodo gay?" is worthy of discussion and requires careful reading to settle one way or another. How can you say there is no deeper significance? Even with Tolkien's flat denial the whole work is screaming out for allegorical interpretation. As they say: a fish is unaware of the water in which it swims and so is the last place to ask about water. And even at the most mundane level you can ask questions about why the story is structured one way rather than another that might require considerable work to answer.
Anyway, isn't extinction temporary?
The law of averages hardly applies to a continuous process whose state isn't indepepndent of its earlier state.
Coin tosses are independent events. The climate at time t+dt depepnds on the climate at time t. When that happens the law of averages goes out the window, especially if the dependency has any kind of instability.
I've been trying to eliminate cash from my life for ages. Now I'll try even harder to use my credit card. Or is that not what the Treasury does these days...?