Undocumented people do not get most public benefits in the United States. They absolutely do NOT get any housing assistance AT ALL. They would qualify for food stamps (but not welfare, cash aid, or really any other similar program) and for medical care their only option is the emergency room or paying out of pocket.
Emergency rooms are required to treat and stabilize people regardless of ability to pay. You don't want to change this. If you get brought in after a car accident and they can't find your purse to figure out your insurance information, you don't want to die waiting for financial authorization to clear. Stupidly, this is WAY MORE EXPENSIVE than just letting them be on medicaid or similar, but that would look "weak" on immigration so it's politically untenable.
And finally, the right to a free K-12 public education was established by a Supreme Court precedent, so take that up with them. But realistically, since most school funding comes from property taxes, and they are living SOMEwhere, those taxes are getting paid directly or indirectly by the families going to the schools.
So, yeah, immigrants consume way less resources than the talking heads on TV would like you to believe. Oh, and did you know that between 50-75% of undocumented workers actually pay federal, state, and local income tax? Fun fact.
At last count there were roughly ~11 million undocumented people living in the United States. If you're counting all of the legal permanent residents then your argument fails because the legal residents have all the same minimum wage and employment protections as any other citizen.
The difference between male and female doctors is interesting, but note that the difference is actually small: according to the article, a heart attack patient dies in the ER about 11.9 percent of the time, versus 12.4 percent with female doctors-- the difference is one part in two hundred.
The summary said that female patients had a higher mortality from heart attacks when treated in the ER by male doctors. Statistically female doctors had similar outcomes for heart attack patients as male doctors with the exception that male doctors who didn't have much experience with female patients had worse outcomes in treating female heart attack patients.
I'm also shocked that Anne didn't discuss alternative coding methods like wavelet-based (e.g. JPEG 2000), but - again - these approaches have their own limitations and don't address interframe encoding in the same way that a block-based codec can.
I mean, I guess you could use JPEG-2000 for the iFrames, but it's very seriously not designed for video. An interesting potential method would be extrapolating the wavelet to the third dimension (in this case, the time series) for videos, but your working memory would go up dramatically (which would make hardware decoders prohibitively expensive). Also, data loss in hierarchical encoding schemes is often catastrophic to the entire block. Not so bad on a single frame, pretty devastating if you just torched 64 frames of a video.
It doesn't matter that the PhD thesis "Using Fractal Wavelets in non-Euclidian spaces to compress video" shows some promising advantages over MPEG-5 : it will not get funded, because by then "MPEG-6 is out" and is even better just by minor tweaking every where.
I did A/V compression development work once upon a time, and I can tell you that almost 20 years ago we were already looking into 3d wavelet functions for video decoding. The problem comes in that it's vastly less computationally and memory efficient than the standard iFrame/bFrame block decoders, and it messes up WAY worse if there's the slightly disruption in the stream.
I mean, sure, if an iFrame gets hosed you lose part of a second of the video, but you can at least still kind of see what it is with a bunch of displaced blocks and people shrug and move on (fun fact: you can often catching MPEG decoding artifacts in Cable TV streams if you know what to look for). But if you do something like 3d wavelet compression and your top level of the hierarchy gets boned you are going to get some highly unpredictable artifacts that would probably make H.P. Lovecraft think one of his novels came to life, forced him to drop a tab of acid, and then poured nightmare juice directly into his optic nerve.
And, as has been mentioned before, no real hardware support for embedded devices, like your cable box or smart TV.
(BTW: I'm hearing good things about "Upgrade" a little independent Sci Fi film and I'm going to see it before it vanishes from theaters).
Upgrade was competently executed, but thoroughly predictable (like, you instantly know who the bad guy is the instant that individual appears on screen, and spending too much time thinking about it makes the whole premise fall apart). While there is nothing really new or groundbreaking about it, it is a fun little flick to watch to kill some time and munch on some popcorn. I did think that the fight scenes were very well choreographed though. Entertaining enough and doesn't pretend to be more than it is.
That's not a problem with the ruling,that's a problem with the law. I agree that the law needs to be changed, but that's not up to the judge to decide and say "hey, this law sucks, I won't convict people under it", because then the rule of law goes out the window entirely.
Number 1 and 2 make sense and could reasonably be done.
Number 3 we already do, number 4 would require the Supreme Court overturning its precedent and/or a constitutional amendment (for the school part). Immigrants already do not qualify for most social services such as welfare, in-state tuition, cash aid, housing subsidies, medical (state or federal) etc. They do typically qualify for SNAP (food stamps, for maybe a couple hundred a month) and emergency room visits. This is largely because ERs CANNOT stop and ask for citizenship and/or insurance information when life and death are on the line, for reasons which should be obvious.
Food stamps is just a humanitarian thing. People should not starve in this country.
Number 5 seems to be in progress with this administration. Number 6 though...that's not just a Supreme Court case, that's an absolute requirement for a constitutional amendment. The language of the 14th amendment is abundantly clear and really not open to much interpretation. Born in U.S. or U.S. Territory = U.S. citizen. They did not leave exemptions for people born of non-citizen parents and you can't legislate that away.
We need a unit that Slashdot readers can understand. How much lux does a burning Library of Congress put out from one furlong?
Well, if we extrapolate from a burning candle flame taking up one square inch visible and outputting 12.5 lumens at the source, then take one of the library of congress buildings, say the Thomas Jefferson building which is roughly 500ft on a side and around 60ft tall... Then we assume that the 500*60 = 30,000 sq ft side is completely engulfed, which would be 4,320,000 square inches * 12.5 lumens/sq in. = 54,000,000 lumens at the source. Multiply by three buildings and we get a total output of 162,000,000 lumens,
Now convert to lux via assumption that you are one furlong (660 ft) away, lux = 10.76391 * lumens / (4 * pi * r^2) = ~318 lux.
TLDR: So a burning LoC puts out roughly 318 lux at one furlong.
Space isn't empty, contrary to popular belief. Even intergalactic space has a few atoms per cubic meter. If you need a true vacuum it's actually surprisingly hard to achieve.
As with many movies that stray into the "guilty pleasure" category, you have to excuse things like that under the umbrella of the Rule of Cool
It's like the Transporter movies, or the Fast and the Furious (especially the *later* films in the franchise), or pretty much any scene from Pacific Rim.
In the end you have to ask two questions: Is it fucking retarded? Yes. Is it least equally fucking awesome? Yes. So it gets a pass.
Possibility #1: You care about privacy. If you actually care about privacy you are already routing all of your internet traffic through a no-logging VPN paid for through an anonymous crypto-currency wallet. Result: this problem doesn't affect you because all your traffic to the VPN provider is encrypted anyway.
Possibility #2: You don't care about privacy. Result: this also doesn't affect you because you don't care anyway.
Quite honestly writing a comprehensive JPEG-2000 decoder is incredibly complicated. I wrote one off of the standard and the basic level of compliance was not terrible, but the full compliance test set did all manner of chicanery with window offsets, packetized data sets, weird tiling edge cases, massively inefficient wavelet boundaries on said tiles, and basically everything the standard technically allowed but didn't necessarily make any damn sense at all.
In the end I mapped out the logical structure I used to hold everything the packets might contain and I ended up with essentially an 11-dimensional array to contain it all. In the standard case most dimension only had a single element, but they didn't HAVE to in order to meet the spec.
It did have the potentially cool feature of being able to specify your own color-space conversion instead of forcing you into the stand YCrCb that JPEG uses, but overall it was a massive headache, and incredibly computationally expensive. Too many cooks spoiled the pot and it was basically useless by the time it was standardized.
I'm thinking he's off by three orders of magnitude on his set point, and that he meant to say "if a company reaches a 12-figure valuation, then it should be government run". And realistically, in a lot of cases it should simply be split up into regional companies at that size. Like Wal-Mart should be a series of regional stores instead of a monolithic national entity. On the other hand, something like Exxon-Mobile *would* probably be better off as a government run entity.
Did America invade Afghanistan and bomb it to the stone ages? No. It was Russia.
I get that you're trying to be satirical and call out the United States for the invasion of Afghanistan, but realistically Russia set in motion the original destruction of Afghanistan in the early 80's getting into a proxy war with the US. That's where the US originally trained Osama Bin Laden to fight *against* the Russian invasion, effectively turning Afghanistan into Russia's version of Vietnam. Now you can argue that the US should have properly rebuilt Afghanistan the first time around, but the fact remains that Russia set into motion the chain of events that originally led to the rise of the Taliban, the events of 9/11, and ultimately the "War on Terror" which was the crux of your attempt at a witty reply.
So yeah, if you want to go back to first causes, Russia *is* essentially at fault for all of the things you listed.
The problem is that visibility checking difficulty increases as a function of the square of the number of entities you are checking against. Client side you only have to check for the visibility from your character to the 99 other players. Server side you would have to check visibility for a K100 graph of point sources (minimum 4950 checks if you avoid duplicate checks and assume people are bi-directionally visible to each other and to themselves).
But then in a 3d environment it's not necessarily point to point. What about a sniper under cover who is essentially looking through a pinhole vs. a target in an open field? The sniper can *easily* see the open field target, but the sniper is so occluded that the open field person could in no way see the sniper. So bi-directionality is not assured. Add in other pitfalls such as camouflage, uneven terrain, environmental affects (smoke, fog, rain, etc.) multiple ray traces per character (did he see his foot, his head, his chest, arms, etc.) and suddenly you're talking about real-time tracking of hundreds of thousands of ray traces minimum once per second per match and you VERY quickly make it uneconomical to do that server side.
Heck, even client side there's only basic visibility checks for annealing and avoiding bothering to render the obviously non-visible objects. Mostly it just renders things that are probably in the sight line and projects that onto the 2d display with the foreground objects obscuring the background.
Maybe we could build a converter on the ship so that it can optionally burn plastic for fuel. Then, instead of sending it back empty to China, we could send it back with enough plastic to make the trip and all the noxious chemicals (like dioxin) that gets spewed out from burning it goes over a wide unpopulated area.
Slashdot Mirror
Undocumented people do not get most public benefits in the United States. They absolutely do NOT get any housing assistance AT ALL. They would qualify for food stamps (but not welfare, cash aid, or really any other similar program) and for medical care their only option is the emergency room or paying out of pocket.
Emergency rooms are required to treat and stabilize people regardless of ability to pay. You don't want to change this. If you get brought in after a car accident and they can't find your purse to figure out your insurance information, you don't want to die waiting for financial authorization to clear. Stupidly, this is WAY MORE EXPENSIVE than just letting them be on medicaid or similar, but that would look "weak" on immigration so it's politically untenable.
And finally, the right to a free K-12 public education was established by a Supreme Court precedent, so take that up with them. But realistically, since most school funding comes from property taxes, and they are living SOMEwhere, those taxes are getting paid directly or indirectly by the families going to the schools.
So, yeah, immigrants consume way less resources than the talking heads on TV would like you to believe. Oh, and did you know that between 50-75% of undocumented workers actually pay federal, state, and local income tax? Fun fact.
At last count there were roughly ~11 million undocumented people living in the United States. If you're counting all of the legal permanent residents then your argument fails because the legal residents have all the same minimum wage and employment protections as any other citizen.
The difference between male and female doctors is interesting, but note that the difference is actually small: according to the article, a heart attack patient dies in the ER about 11.9 percent of the time, versus 12.4 percent with female doctors-- the difference is one part in two hundred.
The summary said that female patients had a higher mortality from heart attacks when treated in the ER by male doctors. Statistically female doctors had similar outcomes for heart attack patients as male doctors with the exception that male doctors who didn't have much experience with female patients had worse outcomes in treating female heart attack patients.
That's a great idea! Just like the pilgrims all learned and started speaking Abenaki when they landed.
Oh wait...
I'm also shocked that Anne didn't discuss alternative coding methods like wavelet-based (e.g. JPEG 2000), but - again - these approaches have their own limitations and don't address interframe encoding in the same way that a block-based codec can.
I mean, I guess you could use JPEG-2000 for the iFrames, but it's very seriously not designed for video. An interesting potential method would be extrapolating the wavelet to the third dimension (in this case, the time series) for videos, but your working memory would go up dramatically (which would make hardware decoders prohibitively expensive). Also, data loss in hierarchical encoding schemes is often catastrophic to the entire block. Not so bad on a single frame, pretty devastating if you just torched 64 frames of a video.
It doesn't matter that the PhD thesis "Using Fractal Wavelets in non-Euclidian spaces to compress video" shows some promising advantages over MPEG-5 : it will not get funded, because by then "MPEG-6 is out" and is even better just by minor tweaking every where.
I did A/V compression development work once upon a time, and I can tell you that almost 20 years ago we were already looking into 3d wavelet functions for video decoding. The problem comes in that it's vastly less computationally and memory efficient than the standard iFrame/bFrame block decoders, and it messes up WAY worse if there's the slightly disruption in the stream.
I mean, sure, if an iFrame gets hosed you lose part of a second of the video, but you can at least still kind of see what it is with a bunch of displaced blocks and people shrug and move on (fun fact: you can often catching MPEG decoding artifacts in Cable TV streams if you know what to look for). But if you do something like 3d wavelet compression and your top level of the hierarchy gets boned you are going to get some highly unpredictable artifacts that would probably make H.P. Lovecraft think one of his novels came to life, forced him to drop a tab of acid, and then poured nightmare juice directly into his optic nerve.
And, as has been mentioned before, no real hardware support for embedded devices, like your cable box or smart TV.
(BTW: I'm hearing good things about "Upgrade" a little independent Sci Fi film and I'm going to see it before it vanishes from theaters).
Upgrade was competently executed, but thoroughly predictable (like, you instantly know who the bad guy is the instant that individual appears on screen, and spending too much time thinking about it makes the whole premise fall apart). While there is nothing really new or groundbreaking about it, it is a fun little flick to watch to kill some time and munch on some popcorn. I did think that the fight scenes were very well choreographed though. Entertaining enough and doesn't pretend to be more than it is.
It's a test to weed out the machines. No human would click on the Rampage link.
That's not a problem with the ruling ,that's a problem with the law. I agree that the law needs to be changed, but that's not up to the judge to decide and say "hey, this law sucks, I won't convict people under it", because then the rule of law goes out the window entirely.
Number 1 and 2 make sense and could reasonably be done.
Number 3 we already do, number 4 would require the Supreme Court overturning its precedent and/or a constitutional amendment (for the school part). Immigrants already do not qualify for most social services such as welfare, in-state tuition, cash aid, housing subsidies, medical (state or federal) etc. They do typically qualify for SNAP (food stamps, for maybe a couple hundred a month) and emergency room visits. This is largely because ERs CANNOT stop and ask for citizenship and/or insurance information when life and death are on the line, for reasons which should be obvious. Food stamps is just a humanitarian thing. People should not starve in this country.
Number 5 seems to be in progress with this administration. Number 6 though...that's not just a Supreme Court case, that's an absolute requirement for a constitutional amendment. The language of the 14th amendment is abundantly clear and really not open to much interpretation. Born in U.S. or U.S. Territory = U.S. citizen. They did not leave exemptions for people born of non-citizen parents and you can't legislate that away.
Obligatory: XKCD
For comparison in the other direction.
We need a unit that Slashdot readers can understand. How much lux does a burning Library of Congress put out from one furlong?
Well, if we extrapolate from a burning candle flame taking up one square inch visible and outputting 12.5 lumens at the source, then take one of the library of congress buildings, say the Thomas Jefferson building which is roughly 500ft on a side and around 60ft tall... Then we assume that the 500*60 = 30,000 sq ft side is completely engulfed, which would be 4,320,000 square inches * 12.5 lumens/sq in. = 54,000,000 lumens at the source. Multiply by three buildings and we get a total output of 162,000,000 lumens,
Now convert to lux via assumption that you are one furlong (660 ft) away, lux = 10.76391 * lumens / (4 * pi * r^2) = ~318 lux.
TLDR: So a burning LoC puts out roughly 318 lux at one furlong.
Space isn't empty, contrary to popular belief. Even intergalactic space has a few atoms per cubic meter. If you need a true vacuum it's actually surprisingly hard to achieve.
The gun katas were fucking retarded though.
As with many movies that stray into the "guilty pleasure" category, you have to excuse things like that under the umbrella of the Rule of Cool
It's like the Transporter movies, or the Fast and the Furious (especially the *later* films in the franchise), or pretty much any scene from Pacific Rim.
In the end you have to ask two questions: Is it fucking retarded? Yes. Is it least equally fucking awesome? Yes. So it gets a pass.
Oh I can't wait for zero-G UFC fights. "Welcome to the ICOSAHEDRON!"
Possibility #1: You care about privacy. If you actually care about privacy you are already routing all of your internet traffic through a no-logging VPN paid for through an anonymous crypto-currency wallet. Result: this problem doesn't affect you because all your traffic to the VPN provider is encrypted anyway.
Possibility #2: You don't care about privacy. Result: this also doesn't affect you because you don't care anyway.
Conclusion: non-issue.
Quite honestly writing a comprehensive JPEG-2000 decoder is incredibly complicated. I wrote one off of the standard and the basic level of compliance was not terrible, but the full compliance test set did all manner of chicanery with window offsets, packetized data sets, weird tiling edge cases, massively inefficient wavelet boundaries on said tiles, and basically everything the standard technically allowed but didn't necessarily make any damn sense at all.
In the end I mapped out the logical structure I used to hold everything the packets might contain and I ended up with essentially an 11-dimensional array to contain it all. In the standard case most dimension only had a single element, but they didn't HAVE to in order to meet the spec.
It did have the potentially cool feature of being able to specify your own color-space conversion instead of forcing you into the stand YCrCb that JPEG uses, but overall it was a massive headache, and incredibly computationally expensive. Too many cooks spoiled the pot and it was basically useless by the time it was standardized.
I'm thinking he's off by three orders of magnitude on his set point, and that he meant to say "if a company reaches a 12-figure valuation, then it should be government run". And realistically, in a lot of cases it should simply be split up into regional companies at that size. Like Wal-Mart should be a series of regional stores instead of a monolithic national entity. On the other hand, something like Exxon-Mobile *would* probably be better off as a government run entity.
Scary stuff - the car was totaled, the bear shit in the Honda and couldn't figure out how to exit,
Is the Pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the Honda?
And why did we train Osama Bin Laden? To fight Russia! So yes, Osama Bin Laden is *also* Russia's fault!
Exactly this, this is Russia's fault.
Did America invade Afghanistan and bomb it to the stone ages? No. It was Russia.
I get that you're trying to be satirical and call out the United States for the invasion of Afghanistan, but realistically Russia set in motion the original destruction of Afghanistan in the early 80's getting into a proxy war with the US. That's where the US originally trained Osama Bin Laden to fight *against* the Russian invasion, effectively turning Afghanistan into Russia's version of Vietnam. Now you can argue that the US should have properly rebuilt Afghanistan the first time around, but the fact remains that Russia set into motion the chain of events that originally led to the rise of the Taliban, the events of 9/11, and ultimately the "War on Terror" which was the crux of your attempt at a witty reply.
So yeah, if you want to go back to first causes, Russia *is* essentially at fault for all of the things you listed.
The problem is that visibility checking difficulty increases as a function of the square of the number of entities you are checking against. Client side you only have to check for the visibility from your character to the 99 other players. Server side you would have to check visibility for a K100 graph of point sources (minimum 4950 checks if you avoid duplicate checks and assume people are bi-directionally visible to each other and to themselves).
But then in a 3d environment it's not necessarily point to point. What about a sniper under cover who is essentially looking through a pinhole vs. a target in an open field? The sniper can *easily* see the open field target, but the sniper is so occluded that the open field person could in no way see the sniper. So bi-directionality is not assured. Add in other pitfalls such as camouflage, uneven terrain, environmental affects (smoke, fog, rain, etc.) multiple ray traces per character (did he see his foot, his head, his chest, arms, etc.) and suddenly you're talking about real-time tracking of hundreds of thousands of ray traces minimum once per second per match and you VERY quickly make it uneconomical to do that server side.
Heck, even client side there's only basic visibility checks for annealing and avoiding bothering to render the obviously non-visible objects. Mostly it just renders things that are probably in the sight line and projects that onto the 2d display with the foreground objects obscuring the background.
Maybe we could build a converter on the ship so that it can optionally burn plastic for fuel. Then, instead of sending it back empty to China, we could send it back with enough plastic to make the trip and all the noxious chemicals (like dioxin) that gets spewed out from burning it goes over a wide unpopulated area.
That was a profoundly interesting read. Thank you for the background information.
I wish to invest in your Potassium-Nickel-Iron cutting implements. How soon until they start shipping?