And impossible to achieve, therefore not worth considering.
People in the U.S. can't even agree to provide universal health care for themselves, when it's demonstrably cheaper and demonstrably better at providing higher quality health care, as the rest of the first world countries have proven over several decades. It's a no-brainer, and the U.S. could pick from any of five or six different models and learn from their experience to fix the parts that need improvement, yet they don't do it. And yet you think that we could collectively decide to radically alter how everyone lives and works?
What do you propose we do? Lean back and accept our fates?
I'm not defending the status quo, but I'm also not pretending that I know what will save us. I do what I can around me to improve things, and accept what I can't change.
As far as the snipe about mass graves: what's your logic? I'm here to help prevent death and disaster. Not cause it.
The history of the 20th century is my logic. The great murderers of the 20th century were all leaders who decided to drag humanity towards a better way to live--Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, Mussolini (and now a generation of radical Islamists)... What tends to happen when someone with a vision realizes that he can't get everyone to co-operate, is he decides to force the issue under the belief that history will vindicate him.
History continually demonstrates that people with grand visions for how we should all live, should be feared, not followed.
You forgot people who get cancer and cause spikes in the employer's share of health insurance premiums.
"Hmm, that sore throat of yours has gone on quite a while... YOU'RE FIRED!"
And shouldn't a private company be allowed to require hot subordinates to fuck their boss to get a promotion or raise? Why would we interfere in their HR practices?
I jest because your proposed solution is simpleminded and unworkable. I jest because I believe that we're collectively incapable of choosing a wise direction for humanity and then going in that direction, and I've got a lot of history to back me up. I jest because I understand that we are not in control of our collective fate. And I jest because when people like you get any measure of political power, it tends to end in mass graves for those who disagree with you.
People aren't afraid of violence from Christians? Tell that to Matthew Shepherd's family. Or anyone walking towards an abortion clinic, or performing abortions. Or black people in the American South in the 60s.
Someone elsewhere observed the OKCupid missed the real opportunity here: instead of grouping likes by race, they could create newer, more accurate races by grouping likes. Then a race war to end all race wars would start, with Tom Clancy fans holding the east coast, Soul Food lovers basing in the South and pushing west, while Nickelback fans surge out of Michigan.
assuming that you have at least some degree of trust that they will do so in good faith and not just delete/vandalize your work I guess.
This is exactly where Wikipedia falls down.
And wikipedia HAS a pretty good handle on C, all things considered.
No, it doesn't. It appears to on topics on which there's widespread agreement about factual knowledge because there's an easily referenced external source. On any topic requiring real expertise, or worse, a topic on which there are few experts (but many who think they are), you get either edit wars or the idiosyncratic views of page-squatters. There's also no mechanism for verifying the expertise of writers--that's how you get scandals like the Wikipedia editor who claimed to have multiple PhDs and was page-squatting and reverting others edits, who turned out to be a 26 year old college student.
That same episode of SNL had a send-up of TJ Hooker where Shatner is trapped on the hood of a car full of fleeing felons, writing a note to his ex-wife: "it's been three days now... they have to run out of gas soon..."
Shatner's on my list of celebrities who I like just because they went on SNL and were good at either mocking themselves, or worked hard to actually do good comedy. See Garth Brooks (who did a Mango sketch), Jason Priestly, and Justin Timberlake as the dancing milkshake.
It cost 6 billion to put a network of satellites in orbit for a satphone network that cost $4 a minute--absolutely unsustainable business model. Picked up for $25 million after bankruptcy, it's now a thriving business since the huge sunk costs were discharged to the investors.
No surprise at all that a company would take 3D Realms assets, slap them all together and box them up. The launch campaign writes itself: "HOLY SHIT IT'S FINALLY HERE!"
Deepwater Horizon wasn't "producing anything" either--it was drilling an exploratory well. Don't assume this won't lead to another environmental catastrophe.
The size constraint for cameras is the lens, not the sensor size. We already have small, handy point-and-shoots that match the resolution of DSLRs. But the image quality is generally poorer because the lenses are smaller (and not manufactured as exactingly). A camera on an iPod Nano will suck because the lens will be tiny and collect much less light than a 35mm lens.
One interesting development is origami lenses that use a flat array of angled mirrors to collect the same light as a comparable-diameter lens, but without the length, so you can have 35mm lenses of any focal length that are an eighth of an inch thick--your iPhone can then be as good as a DSLR for image quality.
Many old construction techniques hold up surprisingly well in modern terms for both comfort, durability and cost. Rammed earth is a technique going back millennia, and rammed earth structures still exist today. The Great Wall of China is one example (rammed earth core, faced with brick), but there are others.
Briefly, you dump properly pulverized soil into the same sort of mold into which you'd pour concrete. Soak it with water and use a pneumatic tamper to compress it 50%, then repeat in layers 5-10 inches thick. Like concrete, it cures over time, and has about 25% the structural strength--more than sufficient for small and medium sized structures. If you're in a wet climate, you apply a sealing coat, and you're done.
Like concrete, you can reinforce it with rebar to make it earthquake-resistant. The material itself can come directly from the site where you're building. It's fireproof, soundproof, insect-resistant, and has similar thermal properties to brick or concrete. There's basically no waste. As a building material, it's an environmentalist's wet dream.
Since killing Netscape, have they succeeded at anything they've said they'd do, or that it was implied they'd do? Their list of failures is long, and each one has a multi-billion dollar price tag on it. Even after all these years, the only inarguably profitable lines are still Windows itself and Office.
About the only thing I can think of is X-box, which has become successful in its own right, though far from dominant. SQL Server is successful within its segment, though I don't know if its profitable. Visual Studio is the best IDE for developing on Windows, but they have no real competition there, and now they're giving it away.
You're right: We should burn down the FDA so that the wise and beneficient pharmaceutical companies can immediately cure all our diseases with their well-tested, totally safe, and 100% effective drugs that are never mis-marketed for the sake of profit.
Wrong. The very first copies of Star Wars shown in theatres didn't have "Episode IV" on them. That was added shortly after first release as an homage to earlier Flash Gordon serials, to imply a longer continuity in the story. Lucas never had a nine episode story arc plotted out, as one can see by how much Star Wars itself changed in the immediate run-up to production--if it was part of a larger story arc, the changes they made would have completely scrodded the framing narrative. Likewise, Empire Strikes Back underwent massive story revisions in pre-production, and the detail about Vader being Luke's father and Leia's sister wasn't even settled when they started filming. And as the Gary Kurtz interview floating around now shows, ROTJ also got massively changed.
Treatments of Episodes VII-IX that are "out there on the net" are all bogus. Lucas was making it up as he went along. Deal with it.
Seriously, how many different versions will the fanbois pay money for? No matter how you feel about Greedo shooting first, doesn't owning four different box sets already make dumping $150 on another seem as silly as rebuilding your basement into the Emperor's Throne Room?
MegaTexture refers to a texture allocation technique facilitating the use of a single extremely large texture rather than repeating multiple smaller textures. It is featured in Splash Damage's game, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and was developed by id Software technical director John Carmack.[1]
MegaTexture employs a single large texture space for static terrain. The texture is stored on removable media or the hard drive and streamed as needed, allowing large amounts of detail and variation over a large area with comparatively little RAM usage.[citation needed]
Then during rendering, required parts of the texture space are streamed inside dynamically (re-)allocated textures in video memory, scaled to the correct mipmap level(s) depending on the polygon size. This allows the engine to reduce the number of texels in VRAM/number of pixels on the screen ratio (the goal being getting closer to 1), saving memory.
It does get swapped in and out of memory, and the benefit isn't performance, it's having a lot more varied texture than a repeating scheme.
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought a megatexture was the opposite of what you're suggesting: It's where you load a single, complete texture into memory just to avoid 1) chunking it up, and 2) coming up with some sort of demand-load/page-otherwise scheme.
It wasn't really possible until game machines had sufficient memory that taking up a huge chunk of RAM with a megatexture was possible. But once it was a reasonable assumption about the minimal hardware, loading a single giant texture became far preferable for performance reasons. Assuming I understand it correctly, most people saw it coming, but Carmack was the first to do it and make it work as expected.
Everyone on his blog already pointed out that the vast majority of consumers don't have choice when it comes to ISPs, so you actually have greater influence by voting over the FCC than you do the threat of switching providers.
He also fails to address another aspect of Net Neutrality: The big entities like Google make deals, while the small entities get screwed. The absence of Net Neutrality is a lock in for large entities and a barrier to entry for upstarts and challengers. The absence of Net Neutrality actually favours entrenched interests, making the overall marketplace less competitive.
If Blizzard created a Boss that ate your subscription time if it killed you, and players knew about this aspect, and fought it anyway, no one would be furious. Everyone would say "you knowingly gambled on it eating your subscription time. Don't want to lose your subscription? Don't go after that Boss."
All I've seen elsewhere is "man, that guy was stupid trying to move 74 plex in a weak ship, alone, in an area known for suicide-ganking."
Re:What would the impacts of this be for cryptogra
on
Claimed Proof That P != NP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Off the top of my head, if P = NP, then a lot of cryptography like RSA and elliptic curve cryptography become, in principle, mathematically solvable. Much of their security is premised on the idea that their equations are prohibitively difficult to brute force because they're NP.
If this proof holds up, then RSA and ECC become provably secure in a way they weren't before.
Slashdot Mirror
My solution is elegant and effective.
And impossible to achieve, therefore not worth considering.
People in the U.S. can't even agree to provide universal health care for themselves, when it's demonstrably cheaper and demonstrably better at providing higher quality health care, as the rest of the first world countries have proven over several decades. It's a no-brainer, and the U.S. could pick from any of five or six different models and learn from their experience to fix the parts that need improvement, yet they don't do it. And yet you think that we could collectively decide to radically alter how everyone lives and works?
What do you propose we do? Lean back and accept our fates?
I'm not defending the status quo, but I'm also not pretending that I know what will save us. I do what I can around me to improve things, and accept what I can't change.
As far as the snipe about mass graves: what's your logic? I'm here to help prevent death and disaster. Not cause it.
The history of the 20th century is my logic. The great murderers of the 20th century were all leaders who decided to drag humanity towards a better way to live--Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, Mussolini (and now a generation of radical Islamists)... What tends to happen when someone with a vision realizes that he can't get everyone to co-operate, is he decides to force the issue under the belief that history will vindicate him.
History continually demonstrates that people with grand visions for how we should all live, should be feared, not followed.
You forgot people who get cancer and cause spikes in the employer's share of health insurance premiums.
"Hmm, that sore throat of yours has gone on quite a while... YOU'RE FIRED!"
And shouldn't a private company be allowed to require hot subordinates to fuck their boss to get a promotion or raise? Why would we interfere in their HR practices?
I jest because your proposed solution is simpleminded and unworkable. I jest because I believe that we're collectively incapable of choosing a wise direction for humanity and then going in that direction, and I've got a lot of history to back me up. I jest because I understand that we are not in control of our collective fate. And I jest because when people like you get any measure of political power, it tends to end in mass graves for those who disagree with you.
Oh... well, if that's all we have to do, let's get on it!
People aren't afraid of violence from Christians? Tell that to Matthew Shepherd's family. Or anyone walking towards an abortion clinic, or performing abortions. Or black people in the American South in the 60s.
Someone elsewhere observed the OKCupid missed the real opportunity here: instead of grouping likes by race, they could create newer, more accurate races by grouping likes. Then a race war to end all race wars would start, with Tom Clancy fans holding the east coast, Soul Food lovers basing in the South and pushing west, while Nickelback fans surge out of Michigan.
If you'd like, I can come over and we can empirically test some ethical quandaries.
This is exactly where Wikipedia falls down.
No, it doesn't. It appears to on topics on which there's widespread agreement about factual knowledge because there's an easily referenced external source. On any topic requiring real expertise, or worse, a topic on which there are few experts (but many who think they are), you get either edit wars or the idiosyncratic views of page-squatters. There's also no mechanism for verifying the expertise of writers--that's how you get scandals like the Wikipedia editor who claimed to have multiple PhDs and was page-squatting and reverting others edits, who turned out to be a 26 year old college student.
That same episode of SNL had a send-up of TJ Hooker where Shatner is trapped on the hood of a car full of fleeing felons, writing a note to his ex-wife: "it's been three days now... they have to run out of gas soon..."
Shatner's on my list of celebrities who I like just because they went on SNL and were good at either mocking themselves, or worked hard to actually do good comedy. See Garth Brooks (who did a Mango sketch), Jason Priestly, and Justin Timberlake as the dancing milkshake.
It cost 6 billion to put a network of satellites in orbit for a satphone network that cost $4 a minute--absolutely unsustainable business model. Picked up for $25 million after bankruptcy, it's now a thriving business since the huge sunk costs were discharged to the investors.
No surprise at all that a company would take 3D Realms assets, slap them all together and box them up. The launch campaign writes itself: "HOLY SHIT IT'S FINALLY HERE!"
Deepwater Horizon wasn't "producing anything" either--it was drilling an exploratory well. Don't assume this won't lead to another environmental catastrophe.
That's a really good catch. Well done.
The size constraint for cameras is the lens, not the sensor size. We already have small, handy point-and-shoots that match the resolution of DSLRs. But the image quality is generally poorer because the lenses are smaller (and not manufactured as exactingly). A camera on an iPod Nano will suck because the lens will be tiny and collect much less light than a 35mm lens.
One interesting development is origami lenses that use a flat array of angled mirrors to collect the same light as a comparable-diameter lens, but without the length, so you can have 35mm lenses of any focal length that are an eighth of an inch thick--your iPhone can then be as good as a DSLR for image quality.
Right, because none of the major media outlets have said anything about a radical jihadist trying to build a mega-mosque at Ground Zero.
Many old construction techniques hold up surprisingly well in modern terms for both comfort, durability and cost. Rammed earth is a technique going back millennia, and rammed earth structures still exist today. The Great Wall of China is one example (rammed earth core, faced with brick), but there are others.
Briefly, you dump properly pulverized soil into the same sort of mold into which you'd pour concrete. Soak it with water and use a pneumatic tamper to compress it 50%, then repeat in layers 5-10 inches thick. Like concrete, it cures over time, and has about 25% the structural strength--more than sufficient for small and medium sized structures. If you're in a wet climate, you apply a sealing coat, and you're done.
Like concrete, you can reinforce it with rebar to make it earthquake-resistant. The material itself can come directly from the site where you're building. It's fireproof, soundproof, insect-resistant, and has similar thermal properties to brick or concrete. There's basically no waste. As a building material, it's an environmentalist's wet dream.
Since killing Netscape, have they succeeded at anything they've said they'd do, or that it was implied they'd do? Their list of failures is long, and each one has a multi-billion dollar price tag on it. Even after all these years, the only inarguably profitable lines are still Windows itself and Office.
About the only thing I can think of is X-box, which has become successful in its own right, though far from dominant. SQL Server is successful within its segment, though I don't know if its profitable. Visual Studio is the best IDE for developing on Windows, but they have no real competition there, and now they're giving it away.
You're right: We should burn down the FDA so that the wise and beneficient pharmaceutical companies can immediately cure all our diseases with their well-tested, totally safe, and 100% effective drugs that are never mis-marketed for the sake of profit.
Wrong. The very first copies of Star Wars shown in theatres didn't have "Episode IV" on them. That was added shortly after first release as an homage to earlier Flash Gordon serials, to imply a longer continuity in the story. Lucas never had a nine episode story arc plotted out, as one can see by how much Star Wars itself changed in the immediate run-up to production--if it was part of a larger story arc, the changes they made would have completely scrodded the framing narrative. Likewise, Empire Strikes Back underwent massive story revisions in pre-production, and the detail about Vader being Luke's father and Leia's sister wasn't even settled when they started filming. And as the Gary Kurtz interview floating around now shows, ROTJ also got massively changed.
Treatments of Episodes VII-IX that are "out there on the net" are all bogus. Lucas was making it up as he went along. Deal with it.
Seriously, how many different versions will the fanbois pay money for? No matter how you feel about Greedo shooting first, doesn't owning four different box sets already make dumping $150 on another seem as silly as rebuilding your basement into the Emperor's Throne Room?
Since it "streams" from the hard drive, I would guess that bus and drive speeds would have been the limiter early on.
Hunh... actually, you were closer to it than I was, if Wikipedia is to be believed:
It does get swapped in and out of memory, and the benefit isn't performance, it's having a lot more varied texture than a repeating scheme.
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought a megatexture was the opposite of what you're suggesting: It's where you load a single, complete texture into memory just to avoid 1) chunking it up, and 2) coming up with some sort of demand-load/page-otherwise scheme.
It wasn't really possible until game machines had sufficient memory that taking up a huge chunk of RAM with a megatexture was possible. But once it was a reasonable assumption about the minimal hardware, loading a single giant texture became far preferable for performance reasons. Assuming I understand it correctly, most people saw it coming, but Carmack was the first to do it and make it work as expected.
Everyone on his blog already pointed out that the vast majority of consumers don't have choice when it comes to ISPs, so you actually have greater influence by voting over the FCC than you do the threat of switching providers.
He also fails to address another aspect of Net Neutrality: The big entities like Google make deals, while the small entities get screwed. The absence of Net Neutrality is a lock in for large entities and a barrier to entry for upstarts and challengers. The absence of Net Neutrality actually favours entrenched interests, making the overall marketplace less competitive.
If Blizzard created a Boss that ate your subscription time if it killed you, and players knew about this aspect, and fought it anyway, no one would be furious. Everyone would say "you knowingly gambled on it eating your subscription time. Don't want to lose your subscription? Don't go after that Boss."
All I've seen elsewhere is "man, that guy was stupid trying to move 74 plex in a weak ship, alone, in an area known for suicide-ganking."
Off the top of my head, if P = NP, then a lot of cryptography like RSA and elliptic curve cryptography become, in principle, mathematically solvable. Much of their security is premised on the idea that their equations are prohibitively difficult to brute force because they're NP.
If this proof holds up, then RSA and ECC become provably secure in a way they weren't before.