Just because they both deal with "space" doesn't mean that they're optimizing toward the same thing. These joyrides have a lot more to do with supersonic airplanes than they do with orbital rockets. So, mind you, kudos to them for helping advance low-end supersonic aircraft flight. But don't look to them for anything related to orbit or beyond.
Except, of course, that supersonic aircraft flight is the first step towards air-breathing rockets. Being able to use the atmosphere as reaction mass and perhaps even oxidizer would boost the fuel efficiency of rockets tremendously.
Perhaps. Then again, perhaps equating breaches of privacy with Nazism may demean Nazism. Privacy is far from a universally agreed subject. There's significant movements to relinquish privacy, and they're not coming from despotic potential leaders, waiting for their chance to perform a coup on democracy. Equating Nazism this way may garner support for privacy, it also makes the word very cliché, especially for those who don't particularly care about the majority of their privacy.
Please explain how is being forced to wear the Star of David on your breast because you are an evil judish sub-human hell-bent on destroying the master race fundamentally different from being forced to give DNA samples because you are an evil future criminal sub-human hell-bent on destroying the decent people ? Because I sure am troubled by the parallels I see, and would like reassurance that it's just my paranoia acting up.
Holding the good of the state over everything, especially individuals rights and freedoms, is what Nazism is all about.
If that's all they were about, then all my parents friends and family would probably be alive now, I'd probably be speaking German, and I probably wouldn't be so angry at the Nazis.
You forget one important detail: sanity. Nazis that they were doing their nation (their "Aryan" race, to be exact) an important service by persecuting the judes. In their fantasy world, the judes were the source of all evil, so they had to be exterminated. In the Nazis minds, your parent's friends and family died for the greater good of Germany. They thought that Germany would be better off without them, and because the good of the state justified anything... the solution was as obvious as it was final.
Of course their consciences acted up. Anyone's would, at the murder of millions of helpless people. But they heroically suppressed them and pressed on, doing what had to be done - or that's the way they saw it, anyway. It's pretty fascinating, actually, reading some of the messages exchanged between the members of Nazi leadership at that time. An insight into the level of self-deception human beings are capable of.
Hitler drove Nazism to more than just the typical totalitarian regime.
No, he didn't, and that's a very important thing to understand. Nazis were no worse than an average totalitarian regime, and Hitler was no worse than an average maniacal dictator. All totalitarian regimes leave a body count in the thousands, if not millions behind them. The only thing setting Hitler apart from an average petty tyrant is that he was the head of a very powerful European country, rather than a third world hellhole. Consequently, he could pillage and murder on the global scale, rather than being limited to inside his own borders; but that is a difference in the power, not the nature, of the beast.
Besides, what these police are trying to do is far from totalitarianism (which implies an extreme), let alone Nazism.
It is, however, a step to that direction. Totalitarianism creeps upon you. And frankly, the whole concept of taking DNA samples from children because you think they might become criminals later is quite hard to justify from any perspective except the totalitarian: state uber alles.
I'm not asking for fucking handout here, I just want to preserve the horror and the lessons from Nazism and the Holocaust.
You're doing a fucking bad job then, downplaying the very things which allowed the former to do the latter.
Not that that's very surprising, since you didn't actually go through it, your parents did. So you wouldn't actually know it. But don't worry, the way things are going I'm pretty certain there's going to be a major war in Europe in my lifetime; the generation which actually experienced the last one is dying out, so the new one is once again free to engage in nationalistic bullshit and blow themselves to Hell for the sake of glory. Which might be prevented or at least postponed if people realized that this same shit went through before WWII. Pointing out the similarities with recent developments and Nazi Germany might help with that.
They aren't references to Nazism. They are references to certain minor aspects of Nazism. To say they are references to Nazism implies a certain similarity between Nazism and the ideology behind this proposition, that the proposition and Nazism share some key values, which they mostly don't.
Nazism is, at its core, a stereotypical totalitarian ideology. Surveillance and control are its core; saying that they're "minor aspects" is the same as saying that your heart is a minor part of yourself. The specifics of Nazi psychosis simply don't matter, except as to decide who, precisely speaking, they're going to blame for everything and mass murder; but that they were going to do that to someone is independent of them.
Holding the good of the state over everything, especially individuals rights and freedoms, is what Nazism is all about. That is also what continuously giving new powers to the police is all about. The comparison is perfectly justified.
It seems that Nazi is just a word that people wave around to make their cause sound scary, and consequently, it starts to lose meaning.
"Nazi" is on its way of becoming a synonym for "totalitarian", since it gives such a good example of what totalitarian actually means and what it results in. It drives the point home better than mere "totalitarian" or "authoritarian" would.
Being such an arrogant ass, you'd be far too busy sucking yourself off to care about anything like that.
... what is the evolutionary benefit that mammals get from not regenerating?
What evolutionary benefit do you get from not being able to produce your own vitamin C ? What evolutionary benefit do people get from hereditary illnesses ? Evolution doesn't neccessarily weed out harmful mutations if they aren't harmful enough; so perhaps we simply got unlucky.
The moment humans began to care for other members of their society survival of the fittest no long applied.
Incorrect. What actually happened is that the definition of "fit" began including getting people to like you more than it did previously.
"Survival of the fittest" is an oxymoron and therefore always true, so long as something survives, because the definition of "fit" is "that which survives", so the saying translates to: "Survival of that which survives". The only set of circumstances in which it would not be true would be total annihilation of all life; and even then you could argue that none was fit.
The children of holocaust survivors. I respect my parents and the hardship they had to endure, and it insults me when people equate that hardship with something as relatively trivial as a privacy breach.
I'm an n:th generation killer asteroid survivor. I respect my single-celled goo ancestors and the hardship they had to endure, and it insults me when people equate the oceans boiling away after a hundred-kilometer asteroid hits the Earth with something as trivial as a death camp.
As a side note, I'd like to point out that the holocaust denied me the opportunity to know many of my relatives, plus I have chronic nightmares in which I'm being chased, which is a symptom of the holocuast that apparently commonly affects first, second, and sometimes even third generation holocaust survivors. The trauma runs very deep.
I know what you mean. I often dream of being a single-celled organism, minding my own business somewhere deep within the bedrock of Earth, when suddenly the sky gets all white-hot and the oceans boil away, leaving behind them salt which also boils away - not that I know any of that since I'm inside the bedrock and have no eyes besides. I'd be terrified if single-celled organisms were capable of fear. Since they aren't, it actually is a pretty peaceful dream.
Seriously speaking, do you honestly believe that because your ancestors went through bad shit makes you somehow special enough to be "especially insulted" by references to nazism, especially when said references are quite justified in the current climate of creeping totalitarianism ?
Nazi Germany and the Soviet union are prime examples. They both got bad beyond any sort of comprehension before the pulled back, but they did.
Nazi Germany did not pull back. It was crushed by force from the outside by outsiders. The germans kept fighting for, not against, the Nazi government even when Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin.
Soviet Russia did collapse by itself, but took nearly a century to do so, and even then the immediate reason for the collapse was that Gorbachev loosened the oppression and censorship. Power was not taken from him, he gave up some of it voluntarily - too much, as it turned out, resulting in an attempted coup and collapse. Furthermore, is Putin's Russia truly that much different from the old Soviet one ? Political murders (of Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko, to name two), Putin Youth, etc... No, Russia is far from free, never has been, and likely won't be for a long time if ever, even thought it might no longer be communist.
So no, I don't think that it's at all certain that freedom will prevail. The default in human history has always been tyranny; the current democracies are a historical aberration. It is all too easy to imagine them sliding straight back to being ruled by the divine rights of kings. If they do, it is unlikely that they can recover, because the historical conditions which allowed them to be born are unique and unlikely to be repeated. For a tiny time frame in history the communication technology was supreme to surveillance; it won't happen again.
So we either win this fight here and now, or we our children will get the iron-heeled boot stamping their face for all eternity. Won't someone please actually think of the children for once ?
I think at least GNOME and KDE have utilities to switch screen resolutions without restarting X, for some time already.
Bit depth has nothing to do with resolution, it means how many bits are used to express the color of each pixel. 8- and 16-bit modes use a lookup table, called a palette, and simply point to the entries of said table, while 24- and 32-bit modes actually store the values of red, green and blue separately for each pixel, with 8 bits reserved for each (and 6 for padding in 32-bit mode).
Like I always say (sometimes): "A process blocked on I/O is blocked, no matter how many processors you throw at it."
But if it is blocked because the target of the I/O operation, say, a local database server, is busy calculating the data to be returned, throwing more processors at it might indeed cause it to unblock sooner.
This is getting to be ridiculous. There's no way that anyone could juggle 1000 cores in their head and make a synchronous-threaded program.
Why would you need to ? Either your program is multithreaded or it isn't; and if it is, it either is or isn't properly synchronized. The number of cores is completely irrelevant; a broken multithreaded program will fail randomly in a single-core machine too, and a singlethreaded program in a 1000-core machine won't run into any issues either.
Publish your public key along with your email address, require that any message sent to you be encrypted with the public key, and then delete any incoming messag which isn't. Use whitelists for mailing lists and such, preferably based on cryptographic signature verification to avoid source spoofing.
Come again? Have you ever even had a basic biology class?
Certainly. I have also read history, and know what happened when Europeans came to America, for example: the same thing which happened every time two groups, one of which had infectious diseases the other didn't, met.
The human immune system is astoundingly adaptable. The reason why you hear about the immune system failing (AIDs, etc.) is because all the OTHER hundreds upon hundreds (if not thousands) of possible invaders are crushed - either before we know or after a brief cold. AIDs, Prion Diseases, etc. are the very small minority.
No. The thousands upon thousands of invaders who get crushed are familiar to the immune system. Every time there's a new one, or even sufficiently mutated old one, we have a major epidemic with a huge death toll.
The only pathogens the human immune system can deal with efficiently are those it has been primed through natural selection to specifically fight. And even then it takes personal experience with the disease - having it once, typically - until the system reaches full efficiency. If anything new comes around, you'll be bedridden for weeks, and that's assuming you won't die outright.
And of course all of this is completely ignoring the autoimmune diseases, such as allergies and some forms of diabetes, where it is the immune system itself which causes the damage.
BSODs are less frequent than they used to be. They are WAY more frequent in my experience than crashes in any *nix environment.
Linux kernel is stable. However, from the user's poing of view, X crashing is the same as if the whole machine had gone. It takes all their applications with it because the default is to quit when connection to X is lost, and can happen quite often especially in a heavily stressed machine.
X and the graphical system in general is clearly the weakest point of modern-day Linux. It is an userland program, yet it has the same stability requirement than a kernel, and fails to live up to them. This is on top of various annoyances, like being apparently unable to switch the bit depth of the screen at runtime (affects at least Wine) and having to play around with modelines in config files to set up display modes.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to get fixed, because it only affects the desktop users and not the Important Server Guys.
It is not necessary to believe that Darth Vader actually existed in order to hate the man who obliterated entire planets.
FYI, if someone told me that they hate Darth Vader because he's a person of somewhat less than perfect ethical standards, I'd propably consider them nuts.
Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms.
No, you don't. You can easily have moral dogma without religious dogma. Didn't your parents ever tell you to do something "Because I said so!"
Yes, and I obeyed since they were bigger than me, at least until I was out of their sight, after which I promptly ignored their words. You aren't bigger than me, so I would not bother even pretending to obey.
Anyway, this message chain is stupid. People usually behave because they have social instincts, with empathy and submitting to pack leader as the most important ones. Trying to derive moral codes is simply an attempt to rationalize the resulting behavior, to make it seem noble, rather than what it actually is: merely obeying your instincts.
Personally, I'd like to see ALL religions lose their tax write off. They have all become soo political that I don't understand why the religion of ? should enjoy tax benefits when others pay. If the donors don't get to write it off, I suspect funding for all religions might drop like a rock.
Agreed. Pay your taxes and donate what you please with what's left. Being able to deduct donations from the taxes you pay means that the rest of us have to pick up the slack; we pay a bit more taxes to cover for the amount that went from you to the church instead of the state. In other words, if the donations are tax deductible, then you are effectively donating other people's money.
Yes, that's right people: your money is being put into Scientologists coffers. You are being made to fund Hubbard's little scam. You are paying for the lawyers Scientology uses in its censorship campaigns.
And of course the same is true for all other organizations. Any donation which is tax-deductible is actually paid by every other taxpayer combined. That's something to think about. And I have to admit, it is a pretty clever loophole to allow the state to donate taxpayer money to religious institutions while not appearing to do so:).
When encountering an unfamiliar pathogen, human immune system will most likely fail to do anything useful (but sometimes manages to do something harmful) while the owner will keel over and die. This has been shown time and again during the history of the world. So if you want to make something adaptible, that's the last thing you want to take the model from.
Of course human populations adapt, so I guess this could work, if the robot swarm was able to reproduce and mutate - but that has some rather obvious dangers too.
This is a religion of a unique type, where instead of zero, one, or multiple deities, the number of deities is negative one.
Actually, wouldn't Scientology count as one ? They are, after all, supposed to be opposing an evil god-like being (Xenu), so they worship a negative number of deities.
Because we all know that the most effective way to be informed is by only talking with and listening to people you already agree with./sarcasm
What makes you think that is what this tool's about ? As I read it, it is for automatically giving an appriximation of the bias in a given news article. Sure, you could find that yourself, by comparing it to other articles from other sources and keeping yourself informed of current affairs; but frankly, Joe Average doesn't have time for that. Joe has a job, a family, friends, hobbies, and possibly other obligations. He isn't a professional journalist; he simply doesn't have the resources neccessary to find the truth.
An automated bias detector is a good idea which helps negate the PR-machines at least somewhat. Of course, coming from Microsoft, it will propably be tuned to not be quite objective at it, but it's better than nothing.
Of course one might ask: what does it matter ? Even if Joe knows what's actually going on and how badly his elected representatives are betraying him, there isn't anything he can do about it. Anyone else he votes for will simply screw him over a different way, and that's being optimistic. Joe can as well be comfortable and avoid having his political views challenged, because they don't make any difference in the end.
Re:Talk Like A Physicist Day
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
Never say "I didn't sleep enough" - the correct way to say it is "It was observed that my sleep duration was less than average." Or (In Plank units), "I have a sleep deficiency of about ten to the power 47, which is about half an hour."
Except that these are not equivalent statements. Your need for sleep could, after all, be less than average, in which case you could had very well slept enough despite having slept less than average. Or, if "average" refers to your own personal average sleep per night, rather than the population's at large, you could still normally sleep more than you really need to, or perhaps needed less than normal this particular day - perhaps you've been ill and needing more sleep, hiking your average up, and have now recovered, bringing your sleep requirements back down.
The correct form would be something like: "It was observed that my state upon waking matched the criteria for being categorized as sleep deprived."
The residents of Sderot have every right to expect their government to protect them and if the government is refusing to take any preventative action, while over 7,000 rockets have fallen on the town, then suing the government seems a very reasonable action.
Actually, the reasonable action would be moving away from harms way, but I guess this is Middle-East we're talking about.
There's also the problem of the raytracing of moving objects. Especially when they move at a significant fraction of c.
To account for red- and blueshift: simply keep track of the speed of each object in the scene, then whenever a ray bounces, alter its wavelength (color) based on the speed difference of the object it last hit (or was emitted from) and the object it hit now.
Apart from this, there's the Lorentz contraction. From what I've understood, this can be accounted for with a simple scale operation - standard in most raytracers - along the direction of movement.
The real problem is that the speed of light is finite, so in order to get a correct picture when objects move rapidly you'd need to calculate their path backwards along with the ray. Oh well, I guess there's no getting around it: you need a full 4-dimensional spacetime simulation. It shouldn't be that hard, since POV-Ray already supports sweeping 2-dimensional shapes along a path, and this is simply an extension of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, of course, that supersonic aircraft flight is the first step towards air-breathing rockets. Being able to use the atmosphere as reaction mass and perhaps even oxidizer would boost the fuel efficiency of rockets tremendously.
Please explain how is being forced to wear the Star of David on your breast because you are an evil judish sub-human hell-bent on destroying the master race fundamentally different from being forced to give DNA samples because you are an evil future criminal sub-human hell-bent on destroying the decent people ? Because I sure am troubled by the parallels I see, and would like reassurance that it's just my paranoia acting up.
You forget one important detail: sanity. Nazis that they were doing their nation (their "Aryan" race, to be exact) an important service by persecuting the judes. In their fantasy world, the judes were the source of all evil, so they had to be exterminated. In the Nazis minds, your parent's friends and family died for the greater good of Germany. They thought that Germany would be better off without them, and because the good of the state justified anything... the solution was as obvious as it was final.
Of course their consciences acted up. Anyone's would, at the murder of millions of helpless people. But they heroically suppressed them and pressed on, doing what had to be done - or that's the way they saw it, anyway. It's pretty fascinating, actually, reading some of the messages exchanged between the members of Nazi leadership at that time. An insight into the level of self-deception human beings are capable of.
Anyway, while I still find the concept of a "second-generation survivor" ridiculous, I shouldn't have mocked you, and do apologize for that. Sorry.
You're doing a fucking bad job then, downplaying the very things which allowed the former to do the latter.
Not that that's very surprising, since you didn't actually go through it, your parents did. So you wouldn't actually know it. But don't worry, the way things are going I'm pretty certain there's going to be a major war in Europe in my lifetime; the generation which actually experienced the last one is dying out, so the new one is once again free to engage in nationalistic bullshit and blow themselves to Hell for the sake of glory. Which might be prevented or at least postponed if people realized that this same shit went through before WWII. Pointing out the similarities with recent developments and Nazi Germany might help with that.
Nazism is, at its core, a stereotypical totalitarian ideology. Surveillance and control are its core; saying that they're "minor aspects" is the same as saying that your heart is a minor part of yourself. The specifics of Nazi psychosis simply don't matter, except as to decide who, precisely speaking, they're going to blame for everything and mass murder; but that they were going to do that to someone is independent of them.
Holding the good of the state over everything, especially individuals rights and freedoms, is what Nazism is all about. That is also what continuously giving new powers to the police is all about. The comparison is perfectly justified.
"Nazi" is on its way of becoming a synonym for "totalitarian", since it gives such a good example of what totalitarian actually means and what it results in. It drives the point home better than mere "totalitarian" or "authoritarian" would.
Oh, the wit ! I'm hit !
Ups! I meant tautology. Argh.
What evolutionary benefit do you get from not being able to produce your own vitamin C ? What evolutionary benefit do people get from hereditary illnesses ? Evolution doesn't neccessarily weed out harmful mutations if they aren't harmful enough; so perhaps we simply got unlucky.
Incorrect. What actually happened is that the definition of "fit" began including getting people to like you more than it did previously.
"Survival of the fittest" is an oxymoron and therefore always true, so long as something survives, because the definition of "fit" is "that which survives", so the saying translates to: "Survival of that which survives". The only set of circumstances in which it would not be true would be total annihilation of all life; and even then you could argue that none was fit.
I'm an n:th generation killer asteroid survivor. I respect my single-celled goo ancestors and the hardship they had to endure, and it insults me when people equate the oceans boiling away after a hundred-kilometer asteroid hits the Earth with something as trivial as a death camp.
I know what you mean. I often dream of being a single-celled organism, minding my own business somewhere deep within the bedrock of Earth, when suddenly the sky gets all white-hot and the oceans boil away, leaving behind them salt which also boils away - not that I know any of that since I'm inside the bedrock and have no eyes besides. I'd be terrified if single-celled organisms were capable of fear. Since they aren't, it actually is a pretty peaceful dream.
Seriously speaking, do you honestly believe that because your ancestors went through bad shit makes you somehow special enough to be "especially insulted" by references to nazism, especially when said references are quite justified in the current climate of creeping totalitarianism ?
Nazi Germany did not pull back. It was crushed by force from the outside by outsiders. The germans kept fighting for, not against, the Nazi government even when Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin.
Soviet Russia did collapse by itself, but took nearly a century to do so, and even then the immediate reason for the collapse was that Gorbachev loosened the oppression and censorship. Power was not taken from him, he gave up some of it voluntarily - too much, as it turned out, resulting in an attempted coup and collapse. Furthermore, is Putin's Russia truly that much different from the old Soviet one ? Political murders (of Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko, to name two), Putin Youth, etc... No, Russia is far from free, never has been, and likely won't be for a long time if ever, even thought it might no longer be communist.
So no, I don't think that it's at all certain that freedom will prevail. The default in human history has always been tyranny; the current democracies are a historical aberration. It is all too easy to imagine them sliding straight back to being ruled by the divine rights of kings. If they do, it is unlikely that they can recover, because the historical conditions which allowed them to be born are unique and unlikely to be repeated. For a tiny time frame in history the communication technology was supreme to surveillance; it won't happen again.
So we either win this fight here and now, or we our children will get the iron-heeled boot stamping their face for all eternity. Won't someone please actually think of the children for once ?
Bit depth has nothing to do with resolution, it means how many bits are used to express the color of each pixel. 8- and 16-bit modes use a lookup table, called a palette, and simply point to the entries of said table, while 24- and 32-bit modes actually store the values of red, green and blue separately for each pixel, with 8 bits reserved for each (and 6 for padding in 32-bit mode).
But if it is blocked because the target of the I/O operation, say, a local database server, is busy calculating the data to be returned, throwing more processors at it might indeed cause it to unblock sooner.
Why would you need to ? Either your program is multithreaded or it isn't; and if it is, it either is or isn't properly synchronized. The number of cores is completely irrelevant; a broken multithreaded program will fail randomly in a single-core machine too, and a singlethreaded program in a 1000-core machine won't run into any issues either.
Publish your public key along with your email address, require that any message sent to you be encrypted with the public key, and then delete any incoming messag which isn't. Use whitelists for mailing lists and such, preferably based on cryptographic signature verification to avoid source spoofing.
So, how does this fail ?
Certainly. I have also read history, and know what happened when Europeans came to America, for example: the same thing which happened every time two groups, one of which had infectious diseases the other didn't, met.
No. The thousands upon thousands of invaders who get crushed are familiar to the immune system. Every time there's a new one, or even sufficiently mutated old one, we have a major epidemic with a huge death toll.
The only pathogens the human immune system can deal with efficiently are those it has been primed through natural selection to specifically fight. And even then it takes personal experience with the disease - having it once, typically - until the system reaches full efficiency. If anything new comes around, you'll be bedridden for weeks, and that's assuming you won't die outright.
And of course all of this is completely ignoring the autoimmune diseases, such as allergies and some forms of diabetes, where it is the immune system itself which causes the damage.
Linux kernel is stable. However, from the user's poing of view, X crashing is the same as if the whole machine had gone. It takes all their applications with it because the default is to quit when connection to X is lost, and can happen quite often especially in a heavily stressed machine.
X and the graphical system in general is clearly the weakest point of modern-day Linux. It is an userland program, yet it has the same stability requirement than a kernel, and fails to live up to them. This is on top of various annoyances, like being apparently unable to switch the bit depth of the screen at runtime (affects at least Wine) and having to play around with modelines in config files to set up display modes.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to get fixed, because it only affects the desktop users and not the Important Server Guys.
FYI, if someone told me that they hate Darth Vader because he's a person of somewhat less than perfect ethical standards, I'd propably consider them nuts.
Yes, and I obeyed since they were bigger than me, at least until I was out of their sight, after which I promptly ignored their words. You aren't bigger than me, so I would not bother even pretending to obey.
Anyway, this message chain is stupid. People usually behave because they have social instincts, with empathy and submitting to pack leader as the most important ones. Trying to derive moral codes is simply an attempt to rationalize the resulting behavior, to make it seem noble, rather than what it actually is: merely obeying your instincts.
Agreed. Pay your taxes and donate what you please with what's left. Being able to deduct donations from the taxes you pay means that the rest of us have to pick up the slack; we pay a bit more taxes to cover for the amount that went from you to the church instead of the state. In other words, if the donations are tax deductible, then you are effectively donating other people's money.
Yes, that's right people: your money is being put into Scientologists coffers. You are being made to fund Hubbard's little scam. You are paying for the lawyers Scientology uses in its censorship campaigns.
And of course the same is true for all other organizations. Any donation which is tax-deductible is actually paid by every other taxpayer combined. That's something to think about. And I have to admit, it is a pretty clever loophole to allow the state to donate taxpayer money to religious institutions while not appearing to do so :).
When encountering an unfamiliar pathogen, human immune system will most likely fail to do anything useful (but sometimes manages to do something harmful) while the owner will keel over and die. This has been shown time and again during the history of the world. So if you want to make something adaptible, that's the last thing you want to take the model from.
Of course human populations adapt, so I guess this could work, if the robot swarm was able to reproduce and mutate - but that has some rather obvious dangers too.
A steam-powered laser. Agatha Heterodyne would be proud.
Actually, wouldn't Scientology count as one ? They are, after all, supposed to be opposing an evil god-like being (Xenu), so they worship a negative number of deities.
What makes you think that is what this tool's about ? As I read it, it is for automatically giving an appriximation of the bias in a given news article. Sure, you could find that yourself, by comparing it to other articles from other sources and keeping yourself informed of current affairs; but frankly, Joe Average doesn't have time for that. Joe has a job, a family, friends, hobbies, and possibly other obligations. He isn't a professional journalist; he simply doesn't have the resources neccessary to find the truth.
An automated bias detector is a good idea which helps negate the PR-machines at least somewhat. Of course, coming from Microsoft, it will propably be tuned to not be quite objective at it, but it's better than nothing.
Of course one might ask: what does it matter ? Even if Joe knows what's actually going on and how badly his elected representatives are betraying him, there isn't anything he can do about it. Anyone else he votes for will simply screw him over a different way, and that's being optimistic. Joe can as well be comfortable and avoid having his political views challenged, because they don't make any difference in the end.
Except that these are not equivalent statements. Your need for sleep could, after all, be less than average, in which case you could had very well slept enough despite having slept less than average. Or, if "average" refers to your own personal average sleep per night, rather than the population's at large, you could still normally sleep more than you really need to, or perhaps needed less than normal this particular day - perhaps you've been ill and needing more sleep, hiking your average up, and have now recovered, bringing your sleep requirements back down.
The correct form would be something like: "It was observed that my state upon waking matched the criteria for being categorized as sleep deprived."
Actually, the reasonable action would be moving away from harms way, but I guess this is Middle-East we're talking about.
To account for red- and blueshift: simply keep track of the speed of each object in the scene, then whenever a ray bounces, alter its wavelength (color) based on the speed difference of the object it last hit (or was emitted from) and the object it hit now.
Apart from this, there's the Lorentz contraction. From what I've understood, this can be accounted for with a simple scale operation - standard in most raytracers - along the direction of movement.
The real problem is that the speed of light is finite, so in order to get a correct picture when objects move rapidly you'd need to calculate their path backwards along with the ray. Oh well, I guess there's no getting around it: you need a full 4-dimensional spacetime simulation. It shouldn't be that hard, since POV-Ray already supports sweeping 2-dimensional shapes along a path, and this is simply an extension of that.