This, incidentally, is why Alaskans have a fighting chance at a decent constitutional challenge. You must fly if you want to go to Congress to petition them.
It's posting in a way that's intended to deceive the reader into thinking the message is by an average citizen and not paid propaganda. It's fraud.
Bullshit. Nobody has accused Google of hiding their identity from the ACCC, who are the ones who have to make the decision. The ACCC just removed Google's identity from the public record.
Moreover, nobody is accusing anyone of lying about who Google's submission came from.
Think it doesn't matter? It does, or they wouldn't do it.
Actually, we know exactly why Google wanted the submission to be anonymous to the public, and it had nothin to do with fraud.
The ACCC inquiry, if you recall, is to determine whether or not eBay should be granted an exemption from Australian trade practices law so that they can require everyone to use PayPal on eBay Australia. Everyone knows that eBay is using Australia as an experiment to see if they can get away with imposing this on the rest of the world, too. Google Checkout is in direct competition with PayPal elsewhere, but not in Australia yet.
Google wanted to submit anonymously to avoid hard questions about whether or not they were planning to roll out Google Checkout in Australia any time soon. To their credit, Google has been very up-front about this since the story broke.
(Disclaimer: I am not connected with Google, but it was a close family member of mine who "discovered" the PDF metadata.)
Generally, whatever makes the most money is most beneficial to the people when there is no gov't interference in the market place.
Most "backbone" ISPs around the world are former government monopolies that have been privatised. They are still reaping the benefits of being a former legally-mandated monopoly.
If there was any real competition in the expensive telecommunications infrastructure market, then net neutrality wouldn't be an issue. Until there is, we need this.
Researchers don't work at the fringes of what can be done "more easily". They work at the fringes of what is currently possible.
Think about multi-tasking for a moment. If your problem is inherently sequential (e.g. everything is effectively sequentialised by a shared resource that can't be split, such as a piece of hardware), then you can use a single-process event loop. If your problem is inherently parallel (e.g. a web server), then you can use multiple forked processes. In otherwords: If your problem is easy, use an easy solution.
But not every job is easy. That's why we have multi-threading.
Similarly, these new data structures are designed to solve difficult problems.
The theory is that if things ever got that bad that some (most? all?) of the guys in the tanks and F-22s would be on our side.
The theory is wrong, because things will never get that bad. The guys in the tanks and F-22s will always be on the side of the popular crowd, so FSM help you if you ever become unpopular.
The guys in the tanks did nothing to help the Japanese-Americans in WW2, the Communists in the McCarthy era, or those on the wrong side of the War on Drugs(tm). They do nothing to help people doing legal, legitimate but unexpected activities today in the War on Terror(tm).
Generally speaking, Pixar and DreamWorks' "raw data" is something like 16 bits per channel in a linear space. After compositing, it's converted to a 10 bits per channel logarithmic space.
ILM does one better: They store their images in a half-precision floating point format.
DNA is in a more or less constant state of "editing". But yeah, there are trees that are almost 5000 years old which presumably haven't evolved in that time.
If I color something as #13f522, that's what it's going to be everywhere.
Have you ever owned a colour printer? Have you ever tried to get the print colour to match what's on your screen?
People who work in publishing know this problem all too well. But when you have multiple output formats, such as DLP, celluloid, TV and print, the problem gets even worse. Pixar and DreamWorks have an entire department each whose job is to ensure that the colour on the computer screen is the same as the colour on all output media.
You would be almost right if you meant packing more bits into the same space.
Computer displays have an upper limit on brightness. In the real world, you can always add more photons.
This makes a real difference to people doing film work. If you define "white" as the colour of a reference white piece of paper/card on a brightly-lit day, then film can be illuminated over 20 times more than that before it saturates. Most of the time you don't need all that headroom, but specular highlights on chrome or water can be much brighter than reference white.
I say you'd be "almost" right, because there's one place where you're wrong.
Just about everything in human perception is logarithmic. (That's why sound intensity is measured in decibels, a logarithmic scale. 10dB -> 20dB sounds like the same volume increase as 20dB -> 30dB, even though it's not a step increase in power.)
Similarly, doubling the number of photons reaching your eye is perceived as the same "step" in light intensity no matter where you are on the intensity scale. So while a few extra bits wouldn't make a perceptual difference near white, it does make a difference near black.
As far as I know, there are pretty much no jurisdictions left in the English-speaking world which consider attempted suicide a crime.
It will, however, get you locked up, because you are a clear danger to yourself and/or others. In countries which understand public health, it will even get you psychiatric care.
We're talking about machines that are already compromised, and hence at a heightened risk of crashing. We should be asking the question if a "friendly worm" would pose much in the way of an additional risk.
One problem that I have with those figures is that just because meat has a big footprint in some places doesn't mean that it needs to.
As an example, most countries feed their cattle whatever happens to be growing in the pasture where they live. But the US, for some reason, feeds them "agricultural output" (as you call it), which I agree is highly inefficient.
As a matter of curiosity, where did you get the 80% figure from? The official PETA-like organisation's figures for the footprint of meat includes all sorts of things which you normally don't think of and, of course, take into account that leather is a byproduct of meat, so you don't want to count it twice. To be completely fair, when gauging the footprint of synthetics, you'd have to include the cost of exploring, drilling, refining and transporting the raw petroleum, for example. If you think about the famous figure that it takes three bottles of water to make one bottle of bottled water, the 80% figure sounds way too high, by at least a factor of two.
I bet that you don't use any laser stronger than 5mW visible.
The "high power" lasers that we're talking about are in the class IIIb (under the old system) range, some around 100mW visible. The only non-scientific use for those that I can think of is an outdoor laser light show, which should arguably be regulated with about the same level of stringency that you'd apply to pyrotechnics.
[...] causing incredible environmental damage (like eating meat does -- the scale is truly staggering. [...]
I've always wondered about that. PETA's answer to the demand for leather (an extremely durable material used for a lot of purposes) seems to be to use petrochemical synthetics, which doesn't seem more environmentally sustainable to me. Moreover, in vitro meat would still have to be made somewhere, and would still require raw materials (presumably vegetable matter would be part of it) and electricity.
Seriously, when they come to strip you of your rights, do you think they're actually going to ring the doorbell and say "Hi I'm from the government, I'm here for your rights", and then act really surprised when you march them off your property at gunpoint?
Of course! Don't you know your history? The government tried to intern a lot of Japanese-Americans in WW2, but it didn't work because all of those law-abiding gun owners stopped them!
And don't forget the Patriot Act! I remember well the NRA marching against that particular piece of legislation!
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That's certainly the case in Australia. Both eBay Australia and PayPal have no mechanism for incorporating the local sales tax (GST) in a purchase.
Unhelpfully, Australia doesn't have Google Checkout yet.
Indeed, but Alaska is the subject of the current test case in the making.
This, incidentally, is why Alaskans have a fighting chance at a decent constitutional challenge. You must fly if you want to go to Congress to petition them.
I always get a kick out of these stories, because Jack Thompson is the name of a famous Australian actor. You might have seen him in a movie.
Also non-Americans, you insensitive clod.
Actually, it was decided in Katz in 1967.
Additionally, Keith was decided in 1972, and FISA was passed in 1978.
As has been noted earlier, Google does not have a payment system in Australia, which is the actual reason for their desire for secrecy.
Bullshit. Nobody has accused Google of hiding their identity from the ACCC, who are the ones who have to make the decision. The ACCC just removed Google's identity from the public record.
Moreover, nobody is accusing anyone of lying about who Google's submission came from.
Actually, we know exactly why Google wanted the submission to be anonymous to the public, and it had nothin to do with fraud.
The ACCC inquiry, if you recall, is to determine whether or not eBay should be granted an exemption from Australian trade practices law so that they can require everyone to use PayPal on eBay Australia. Everyone knows that eBay is using Australia as an experiment to see if they can get away with imposing this on the rest of the world, too. Google Checkout is in direct competition with PayPal elsewhere, but not in Australia yet.
Google wanted to submit anonymously to avoid hard questions about whether or not they were planning to roll out Google Checkout in Australia any time soon. To their credit, Google has been very up-front about this since the story broke.
(Disclaimer: I am not connected with Google, but it was a close family member of mine who "discovered" the PDF metadata.)
Most "backbone" ISPs around the world are former government monopolies that have been privatised. They are still reaping the benefits of being a former legally-mandated monopoly.
If there was any real competition in the expensive telecommunications infrastructure market, then net neutrality wouldn't be an issue. Until there is, we need this.
Researchers don't work at the fringes of what can be done "more easily". They work at the fringes of what is currently possible.
Think about multi-tasking for a moment. If your problem is inherently sequential (e.g. everything is effectively sequentialised by a shared resource that can't be split, such as a piece of hardware), then you can use a single-process event loop. If your problem is inherently parallel (e.g. a web server), then you can use multiple forked processes. In otherwords: If your problem is easy, use an easy solution.
But not every job is easy. That's why we have multi-threading.
Similarly, these new data structures are designed to solve difficult problems.
The theory is wrong, because things will never get that bad. The guys in the tanks and F-22s will always be on the side of the popular crowd, so FSM help you if you ever become unpopular.
The guys in the tanks did nothing to help the Japanese-Americans in WW2, the Communists in the McCarthy era, or those on the wrong side of the War on Drugs(tm). They do nothing to help people doing legal, legitimate but unexpected activities today in the War on Terror(tm).
It depends which 16K lines.
How about climate change? Modern hardware is far, far more energy efficient for the same level of performance than the ancient stuff they're using.
DNA is in a more or less constant state of "editing". But yeah, there are trees that are almost 5000 years old which presumably haven't evolved in that time.
Have you ever owned a colour printer? Have you ever tried to get the print colour to match what's on your screen?
People who work in publishing know this problem all too well. But when you have multiple output formats, such as DLP, celluloid, TV and print, the problem gets even worse. Pixar and DreamWorks have an entire department each whose job is to ensure that the colour on the computer screen is the same as the colour on all output media.
You would be almost right if you meant packing more bits into the same space.
Computer displays have an upper limit on brightness. In the real world, you can always add more photons.
This makes a real difference to people doing film work. If you define "white" as the colour of a reference white piece of paper/card on a brightly-lit day, then film can be illuminated over 20 times more than that before it saturates. Most of the time you don't need all that headroom, but specular highlights on chrome or water can be much brighter than reference white.
I say you'd be "almost" right, because there's one place where you're wrong.
Just about everything in human perception is logarithmic. (That's why sound intensity is measured in decibels, a logarithmic scale. 10dB -> 20dB sounds like the same volume increase as 20dB -> 30dB, even though it's not a step increase in power.)
Similarly, doubling the number of photons reaching your eye is perceived as the same "step" in light intensity no matter where you are on the intensity scale. So while a few extra bits wouldn't make a perceptual difference near white, it does make a difference near black.
As far as I know, there are pretty much no jurisdictions left in the English-speaking world which consider attempted suicide a crime.
It will, however, get you locked up, because you are a clear danger to yourself and/or others. In countries which understand public health, it will even get you psychiatric care.
We're talking about machines that are already compromised, and hence at a heightened risk of crashing. We should be asking the question if a "friendly worm" would pose much in the way of an additional risk.
One problem that I have with those figures is that just because meat has a big footprint in some places doesn't mean that it needs to.
As an example, most countries feed their cattle whatever happens to be growing in the pasture where they live. But the US, for some reason, feeds them "agricultural output" (as you call it), which I agree is highly inefficient.
As a matter of curiosity, where did you get the 80% figure from? The official PETA-like organisation's figures for the footprint of meat includes all sorts of things which you normally don't think of and, of course, take into account that leather is a byproduct of meat, so you don't want to count it twice. To be completely fair, when gauging the footprint of synthetics, you'd have to include the cost of exploring, drilling, refining and transporting the raw petroleum, for example. If you think about the famous figure that it takes three bottles of water to make one bottle of bottled water, the 80% figure sounds way too high, by at least a factor of two.
Yes, I agree. Given that you're an AR operator, you're probably not against getting a licence, for example.
I bet that you don't use any laser stronger than 5mW visible.
The "high power" lasers that we're talking about are in the class IIIb (under the old system) range, some around 100mW visible. The only non-scientific use for those that I can think of is an outdoor laser light show, which should arguably be regulated with about the same level of stringency that you'd apply to pyrotechnics.
I've always wondered about that. PETA's answer to the demand for leather (an extremely durable material used for a lot of purposes) seems to be to use petrochemical synthetics, which doesn't seem more environmentally sustainable to me. Moreover, in vitro meat would still have to be made somewhere, and would still require raw materials (presumably vegetable matter would be part of it) and electricity.
But you do agree that the overwhelming majority of NRA members disagreed with the Patriot Act, right?
Of course! Don't you know your history? The government tried to intern a lot of Japanese-Americans in WW2, but it didn't work because all of those law-abiding gun owners stopped them!
And don't forget the Patriot Act! I remember well the NRA marching against that particular piece of legislation!