Secondly, most people claim to be religious. That's not to say they follow 100% of the doctrine of their choice, but it is untrue to say that most people have debilitated mental faculties (by definition).
Why? Do you think the mind is an on-off proposition? Then how do you account for great musical talents who can't add? Great athletic talents that can't paint? Great thinkers who can't control their legs?
It is not unreasonable to look at a group of people who believe for the most part in some ridiculous precept, and declare them wrong either by pointing out countering facts, or to declare them preposterous by virtue (if I may misuse the word) of their uniform lack of facts. In the middle ages, the majority believed that closing windows and bleeding you was the best (cough) "medical" procedure for disease. They were uniformly wrong. Not stupid -- just wrong. Uninformed, or perhaps misinformed. Nonetheless, they were wrong, and the sooner they had been corrected, the better off they would have been. Not smarter, mind you, just better off, better informed. Today, sure, a majority of US citizens will stand up to be counted when the question is "are you religious", but again, this doesn't make them stupid -- it makes them just today's bunch of closed-window believers. If you look at my original post, I didn't say these people were stupid, I pointed *specifically* at the factors involved in making them loony in this area of reasoning. It doesn't mean they can't add, and it doesn't change their IQ. They're just wrong.
The idea that when the majority believes something, they are "ok" or the idea is correct is manifestly broken right out of the gate. I can cite you popular example after example: "All men are created equal." No. They aren't. Not actually, not conceptually, and this is a poor basis from which to proceed. The right sentiment is something along the lines of "all shall be afforded equal opportunity according to their ability to take advantage of it." Here's another: "Democracy is the most equitable system." No. It isn't. In fact, it really is pretty stupid. Democracy is the concept that any two idiots can outvote an expert, which is patently insane. Yet if you asked that question like we ask the religion question, you'll get an outpouring of backing for democracy. Even though you can watch it massively fail the citizens any day by examining the actions of congress or the political parties. No, the fact that most people are religious does not in any way validate religion. Sorry.
Don't dismiss [Santa Claus] simply because [he] is not scientifically provable
There. Care to defend your statement now?
You see, it it perfectly reasonable to dismiss things that are ridiculous. Religion is one of those things. It exists entirely free of proof at any level whatsoever, just like Santa, has 100% in common with any superstition you'd care to use as an example, except for how widespread it is and how much harm it has done. I have no trouble at all dismissing it. Because religion is just Santa, writ large.
Who gives a damn?
Well, you know, I wouldn't, but these people keep getting in other people's way who would have nothing to do with them by choice. Stores closed on Sunday. Marriage only to one person of the opposite sex. Ridiculous ideas like creationism being forced on innocent children. Repression and criminalization of teenage sexuality. Flying aircraft into buildings. Cutting off young ladies' clitoris and other goodly parts. Bathing in filthy water. Taking the last pennies from gullible retirees by "virtue" of their made-up stories. Making me pay their share of property taxes. Burning people at the stake for imaginary crimes. Creating insane people by denying them sex, and subsequently creating child victims of these cracked folks. And then hiding these same people. Again, I could go on. But I really don't need to.
No. They don't. They may return nonsensical claims, uninformed speculation or superstition when posed, but those things are not answers, any more than "flower" is an answer to "the temperature of the heliosphere is...?"
Besides, with religion and philosophy, an answer just has to ring true enough to affect you.
Yes, in order to completely mislead you. You're exactly right. That's why religion and philosophy often share the same bed. You know, the one you really ought to use the UV lamp on before you lie down.
I read it. It's broken, won't run old code, it's 100% useless to me. There will be no porting. Incompatibly changing the print statement. How unbelievably ridiculous. It's the kind of thing you do when you have no users yet, not when there are untold numbers of people who trusted you.
Really -- why not just say it has to run under AmigaDOS now, requires Fortran syntax, and be done with it? Wouldn't kill it any deader.
Oh, he did? Reasonable men like... Hitler? Pol Pot? Stalin? Assholes who torture kittens? A logical world with... asteroid impacts? Children born with painful and irreparable defects? Mothers dying in giving birth to their children? The black plague? Yeah, I know if *I* were omnipotent and all-knowing, I'd design a world that resembles a well designed structure about as much as a pile of dung resembles a gourmet meal. Suuuure I would.
Explain to me how Catholicism is at eh "head of the pack" in affronting human dignity.
Explain? Sure. The 400-year Papal inquisition. The 600-year Spanish inquisition (really an inquisitional schism, but certainly a Catholic operation from beginning to end.) The burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno. Witch burnings. Scourgings. I don't recall the Scientologists burning anyone lately, or the Mormons holding an inquisition complete with "special" tools used to "help you recall" things they want to hear. That's more George Bush's style. Hold your head under water, make you think you're going to drown, you know the drill. Hot pokers, the Iron Maiden, the rack, your basic set of tongs, a brazier full of hot coals. Yessir, those catholics really know how to host a party.
If it isn't backwards compatible, it isn't Python, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure not going to be re-writing a couple hundred megabytes of code. They can take their incompatible new snakelike thing and smoke it. Foregoing backwards compatibility is about as dim a move as I've ever seen anyone outside of Microsoft pull (MS dropping VB underneath Access comes to mind as a comparable clueless act, with exactly the same consequences — it isn't the same product and is useless to me.)
Close, anyway. First thing I thought when I saw the headline "Pope denounces some biotech as affront to human dignity" was "Most religion is an affront to human dignity, Catholicism right at the head of the pack."
I don't feel that it is my place to tell them what to believe, but that doesn't make me think they're anything but a bunch of whacked-out loonies, driven by insecurity, fear and an inability to deal with the idea that some questions may not have answers, and others we may never know the answers to.
Religion is the crack-pipe of the masses. Makes some of them hyper, drives others to euphoria, costs them much time, treasure and effort, all the while debilitating their faculties of reason.
I don't think you know what representative democracy is.
Oh, I know that one. Let me answer in terms of the US system, with 300 million people:
Democracy: System where, worst case with everyone motivated and participating, 150 million people have to comply with rules, laws and forces they disagree with, and 150 million people feel otherwise.
Representative Democracy: System where, worst case with everyone motivated and participating, 300 million people have to comply with rules, laws and forces they disagree with, and a few hundred people (majorities in the house and senate) feel otherwise.
Both systems hold tightly to the idea that it is right and proper that any two uninformed idiots can outvote a well informed expert consequent to the vile falsehood that "all men (and women) are created equal."
They've missed the publicly announced milestone, and there is a lot of speculation about the practicality of the method. Don't get me wrong, I *really* want them to succeed, but so far, it's 100% vapor.
...and I can guarantee that the whole idea of "wasting water" is ridiculous in the first place. Where do people think "wasted" water goes? When it evaporates, it comes back as rain; when it soaks into the ground, it is transpired by plant life, and again evaporates and comes back as rain; when it goes into the sewer system, it dilutes the sewage, makes it easier to process, is replaced into the groundwater, evaporates, comes back as rain...
The only way you can really "waste" water is to convert it into hydrogen and oxygen. Even then, we'll probably get it back eventually.
The only thing being "wasted" here is the money you pay the city to process that water so that when you super-soak the other person, you don't hand them a bunch of water-bourne disease vectors in the process. But it is your money.
Now, if you've gone and plopped yourself down where there isn't enough water for the population and industrial loading... that'd be your fault. Guess you'll just have to grit your teeth.
Your presumption is guilty until proven innocent. It is my contention that the time you need to concern yourself with someone's identity, location, and actions becomes "now" when they commit a crime. Until then, we don't need to know who they are or any of the rest. This assumes risk; that's the nature of liberty. I'm OK with that.
The problem with giving up liberty to obtain safety is that even if you gave every liberty you had up, you still wouldn't be safe. It is a game that you will lose, no matter what; and liberty has great value, in particular with regard to your own security, posterity, and safety, oddly enough.
The politicians have you playing the game to the degree that you cannot see why it would be reasonable for you to enter some country without them knowing who you are. That's quite sad, really. The argument continues if you replace "some country" with any other public venue, right down to the town square. It really isn't any different, regardless of scale.
Individual rights are natural, and cannot be legislated away.
No. Individual rights are presumed to be natural, and the constitution does not endow the feds with the authority to take them away. So far, so good.
However, the feds have assumed the power to take them away, and have successfully done so for decades now. The only recourse with regard to abrogating this abuse of legislative authority is to take the law to the supreme court; but the supreme court has also come down on the side of the government and has ignored the constitution in various areas where it is quite specific, so this may well be ineffective.
What you are doing here is conflating authority with power. The federal government has very little authority. However, it has great power, and consequently it uses force and the threat of force as a perfectly adequate substitute for legitimate authority.
No, it doesn't. That's because when 480i (standard video) is recorded, the odd and even fields are taken at 1/30th of a second intervals, meaning that for motion, the fields become out of register. A progressive data source - such as a true progressive HD camera - takes the entire field at once, eliminating interlace time errors. Quite different.
We're talking about equivalent capabilities here. Of course it can deliver less frame changes than the maximum. It can even deliver the same frame all night and day for a real-world refresh rate of one frame per 24 hours - or one frame per year, regardless of the various official refresh rates. The point is it can deliver 60 fps max, and 1080i cannot - 1080i can deliver 30 fps max. They can both deliver less than the max, either by ratcheting down to a lower spec'd refresh rate or simply not changing display data for some arbitrary amount of time. The GP was trying to say that 30 fps 1080i capability == 1080p capability, which is nonsense.
1080p delivers - guess what? a full 1080p frame every 1/30th of a second.
No. 1080p delivers a full 1080 line frame, non-interlaced, every 1/60th of a second.
The main issue right now is that there aren't very many 60 fps sources. The PS3 can generate true 1080p during gameplay, that's one - but movies shot on film are typically 24 fps, converted to 30 fps using a technique called 3:2 pulldown, so a 1080p display keeps the same image up for (at least) two complete frames, resulting in an effective 30 fps non-interlaced display.
Actual 1080i puts up 1/2 the lines (a "field") in 1/60th of a second, then the other half during the next 1/60th of a second. If it is the native format, as the fields are actually recorded at different times, the usual time-caused artifacts can occur, just as they can with standard television. This is generally not the case with movies, because as I mentioned above, they don't contain information above 30 fps; the odd and even fields for film conversions for both DVD and HD formats are taken from the same image slice in time unless a technical error was made during the conversion, which isn't likely (but it happens - the DVD of "Outland", a Sean Connery film, was made with this error and I have a copy — damn thing is painful to watch.)
As the technology matures, we'll begin to see 1080p source material on disk, but it'll be a slow process.
I really enjoy movies, and my version of "sitting out" the hi-def war was simply to ensure I could play both formats. I also game quite a bit, so $120 invested in the 1080i capable XBox 360 HiDef player drive and the built-in 1080p Blueray capability of the PS3 were perfect to bring high resolution playback into the house. We have a 204-inch 1080p projection system with optimally sited seating, so we see all the detail there is.
I'm really glad we didn't wait; hidef content on a big screen really looks a lot better - you're going from about 700 horizontally to 1920, and 480 vertically to 1080... of *course* it looks better. Aside from the disk formats, another source of hi-def is satellite, which has a surprising number of channels available in hi-def (1080i at the moment.) I particularly enjoy hi-def flyover videos of europe, science shows on Discovery, and so on. Even the news is better in HD, any video they shoot to support a story carries six times the detail of standard video, it's like someone finally cleaned the camera lens.
The line in TFS that says that standard DVD players can convert standard DVDs to "near high definition" is a complete line of nonsense. With 1/6th the information in each full frame, all you get are interpolated pixels for smooth areas, and guessed pixels for areas with edges, and the latter only if you have a *very* sophisticated upscaler. Nothing substitutes for real data; if you want to compare what you get, take a 1920x1080 image, scale it down to 853x480, then upscale the small version - using the best method you can find - back to 1920x1080, then compare with the original. *That* is what you get with a DVD upscaling system. 1/6th the original detail - and there is no way around it.
However, your DVD collection is just as good it ever was. Getting into HD in no way compromises your investment in DVDs. We watch DVDs all the time here, and still enjoy them. It's just that we get new movies in either HD format, that's all. Sometimes — Blade Runner, for instance — it is worth it to replace the DVD with a hi-def version, but to be honest, most movies don't deserve that kind of treatment.
The book is "Fuzzy Logic" by McNeill and Freiberger, 0-671-73843-7. I *really* enjoyed that book. I like
Southbound... that's one of my two originals. The other isn't quite as polite - when something is dead, expired, blown up, crashed, faulted or otherwise demised in a terminal fashion, I use "darn thing is nipples north" or some similar construction. Some kind of magnetic affinity happening there, clearly.:-) Feel free, it it takes your fancy.
I think the thing would be underground, at least that's how I picture it. That ameliorates all of those hazards significantly. Heat and cold can be a non-issue, just insulate enough and dig down a story. The geology is good for that in a number of places around here, all megacheap, land wise.
I presume any facility designed - or retrofitted - for archival use will be properly insulated and environmentally controlled, of course. I'm about 120 miles from Miles city, further north.
Anyway, this wouldn't be film or magnetic, and a good choice of media would survive huge temperature swings in storage. Which is not to say they should happen, just that they wouldn't be harmful.
They can put in a fast private pipe directly to LA if they like. They need access if they want to use the archive, that's all. Nothing stopping them from having a huge HD (or data storage device of the day) couriered to them, either. It'd still be cheaper than land in LA by a huge margin.
It doesn't work for hardly anyone. I was talking about after-the fact. There is no after the fact for a suicide bomber; but even for a murderer that is reformable - it still doesn't undo the murder. States with death penalties for murder still see murders. So clearly, prevention isn't being accomplished, and it is pointless to even try to look at crime in the sense of prevention at the punishment end.
That turns our attention to the pre-crime state; can we stop things there? Clearly, we can stop many things by eliminating sources of friction. No poverty, no desperation brought on by poverty. There's still desperation brought on by relationships, by social barriers that cannot be crossed (I want drugs, you say I can't have them; Joe, 21, wants to have sex with Jane, but Jane is 15; Fred wants to control me so I can't have two wives, but I *want* two wives) and it'll take a country with a perfect understanding of liberty to eliminate those social barriers as they manifest in pandering legislation, but it is possible, and it should be attempted.
Can you stop a person who is completely wacky? No - I don't think you can. And religion is the very definition of completely whacky. This is the problem. It cannot be solved by telling law-abiding people they cannot own weapons, they cannot carry shampoo, they must submit to a retinal scan. There will always be some whacked-out scumbag living in someone's basement, preparing his very own care package of explosive goodness, ready to get it on with his 71 virgins, sit at Yaweh's right paw, or whatever the fucking stupid imaginary reward of the day is. This person won't be in the system, won't give you any warning, and is going to make a mess. We need to say, ok, when it happens, we'll be brave, honorable and strong and we'll deal with it and get on with our lives. What we are doing is putting huge extra burdens on the people who are not causing any problems while not solving anything to do with the actual problem. This is business as usual in US politics.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. -- Ernest Benn, publicist (1875 - 1954)
Aren't the original functions and new functions still equivalent?
They are. Wolfram was saying, Look here, for each case, applying the following CA rules gets you the following output set (smaller than the input set) of behaviors. So he was observing - in another way - that the various inputs resulted in a more sparse set of results (speaking as far as they are unique with respect to each other.) Once he identified the various types of behavior possible from these sets, he showed that some were very orderly, some considerably less so, some obviously recognizable - visually - as being members of the same classes of behaviors, and some not so obvious at all except that they certainly weren't in the easy-to-recognize class.
From there - and it gets a lot more murky - he went on to propose that these very behaviors might underlay either everything, or darned near everything. To bolster that assertion, he showed that you could find those very patterns in many interesting and disjoint places - formulas seeming completely unrelated to anything he'd talked about thus far, seashell structure and so forth. That part of the book was downright breathtaking.
It's really a very interesting book. His conclusions far outstrip his ability to back them up, but as far as TFA goes, it's looking at the very start of his chain of reasoning and applying some nitpicking that changes nothing he said or meant to say that had anything at all to do with the proposals and justifications made in the book.
Personally, I could give the south end of a northbound rat if he has a high opinion of himself, or not. What I appreciate is that he provided me with a great read, thought provoking on the one hand, and as far as I could tell, without running into anything I knew that would make me question his approach or conclusions. I've got a good general science background, strong engineering and technical design skills, passable math, and am very creative; I do fairly well at finding little - occasionally large, usually not - holes in new science books and have a huge collection of such volumes full of snippy little annotations of my own (and just for my own benefit, on re-reading.) Aside from a really wonderful book on fuzzy logic which to this day I know of no faults with, this book stood out as almost uniquely solid in the specific area he was clearly trying to explain his thoughts on. I consider it money and time well spent.
No. The trick here is only half archival; the other half - and it's not complex, just apparently not obvious - is that it should take any half-competent tech no more than a day or so to rig up a reader using discrete components of current technology, the task having intentionally made simple. An optical diode, resistors, a transistor, maybe a lens system and an XY table. Not "drives" and metaconstructs like them. This way, the components can be emulated if required (doubtful, but possible) by higher technology. The format needs to be blind-dumb-simple, as does the error correction; row-column EC will allow recovery of single lost datums and is trivial to implement. If it is easy to do today, it will be easy to do tomorrow. Once that is done, you can construct as sophisticated a reader as you like, all the while knowing that if worst comes to worst, some half-smart high schooler can recover the data given enough time and $100 in parts.
You misunderstood my guarantee, too; I was guaranteeing that I could get the job done and archive, and recover, a movie in this fashion, making a maintainance free storage method that did not suffer from unrecoverability. I was not guaranteeing the data; they have to provide physical security for it, and I have no control over that, so I couldn't possibly make any promises in that area. I *could* sell them some land in Montana; I just bought two city lots and the 5000 sq ft building on them for 25 grand. Taxes are low, too.;-) There's plenty more where that came from - hundreds and hundreds of square miles. Thousands, even. Storage space isn't a problem unless they insist it be in LA, which - of course - would be stupid. It should be in a geologically stable area with a high speed pipe and reliable power, that's all.
How about printing a few copies of a binary bar-code record in big books of archival quality paper for terms of a few centuries? Or how about blowing the bit pattern into any other format with some longevity on some nice passive substrate like a non-flowing glass if you'd like to keep them for a few millennia? Two hundred plus grand a year per film to maintain, my aching ass. Give me two million bucks - the supposed cost to archive just ten films - and I *guarantee or your money back* that I can design (and build a prototype) archive system that will reliably maintain digital films such that they can be recovered many centuries from now with no more "yearly archival cost per film" than a roof over its digital head. Error correction and all. All this story demonstrates is that someone isn't taking proper advantage of the technical community.
First of all, mod parent up. I know you moderators suck ass and the system is broken, but come on - parent post is a precise description of TFA's issue, the first in the thread. If you're going to spend mod points at all and pretend they do something worthwhile, parent post is the place.
Secondly, Wolfram's point - in the book - wasn't that the descriptions were minimal (even if he may have mentioned that he thought they were, which I don't actually recall), his point was that they were a complete set of correct descriptions (which I would add are functionally equivalent to the minimal ones anyway) that one can examine for certain behaviors he thought were significant. Niggling about the description not being minimal does not affect what Wolfram was trying to say to the reader. He may be completely wrong, but this kind of nit-picking can not and will not demonstrate it. It is a complete waste of everyone's time.
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First of all religion is not an "affront to human dignity.
And then there's today's religious news.
Why? Do you think the mind is an on-off proposition? Then how do you account for great musical talents who can't add? Great athletic talents that can't paint? Great thinkers who can't control their legs?
It is not unreasonable to look at a group of people who believe for the most part in some ridiculous precept, and declare them wrong either by pointing out countering facts, or to declare them preposterous by virtue (if I may misuse the word) of their uniform lack of facts. In the middle ages, the majority believed that closing windows and bleeding you was the best (cough) "medical" procedure for disease. They were uniformly wrong. Not stupid -- just wrong. Uninformed, or perhaps misinformed. Nonetheless, they were wrong, and the sooner they had been corrected, the better off they would have been. Not smarter, mind you, just better off, better informed. Today, sure, a majority of US citizens will stand up to be counted when the question is "are you religious", but again, this doesn't make them stupid -- it makes them just today's bunch of closed-window believers. If you look at my original post, I didn't say these people were stupid, I pointed *specifically* at the factors involved in making them loony in this area of reasoning. It doesn't mean they can't add, and it doesn't change their IQ. They're just wrong.
The idea that when the majority believes something, they are "ok" or the idea is correct is manifestly broken right out of the gate. I can cite you popular example after example: "All men are created equal." No. They aren't. Not actually, not conceptually, and this is a poor basis from which to proceed. The right sentiment is something along the lines of "all shall be afforded equal opportunity according to their ability to take advantage of it." Here's another: "Democracy is the most equitable system." No. It isn't. In fact, it really is pretty stupid. Democracy is the concept that any two idiots can outvote an expert, which is patently insane. Yet if you asked that question like we ask the religion question, you'll get an outpouring of backing for democracy. Even though you can watch it massively fail the citizens any day by examining the actions of congress or the political parties. No, the fact that most people are religious does not in any way validate religion. Sorry.
There. Care to defend your statement now?
You see, it it perfectly reasonable to dismiss things that are ridiculous. Religion is one of those things. It exists entirely free of proof at any level whatsoever, just like Santa, has 100% in common with any superstition you'd care to use as an example, except for how widespread it is and how much harm it has done. I have no trouble at all dismissing it. Because religion is just Santa, writ large.
Well, you know, I wouldn't, but these people keep getting in other people's way who would have nothing to do with them by choice. Stores closed on Sunday. Marriage only to one person of the opposite sex. Ridiculous ideas like creationism being forced on innocent children. Repression and criminalization of teenage sexuality. Flying aircraft into buildings. Cutting off young ladies' clitoris and other goodly parts. Bathing in filthy water. Taking the last pennies from gullible retirees by "virtue" of their made-up stories. Making me pay their share of property taxes. Burning people at the stake for imaginary crimes. Creating insane people by denying them sex, and subsequently creating child victims of these cracked folks. And then hiding these same people. Again, I could go on. But I really don't need to.
No. They don't. They may return nonsensical claims, uninformed speculation or superstition when posed, but those things are not answers, any more than "flower" is an answer to "the temperature of the heliosphere is...?"
Yes, in order to completely mislead you. You're exactly right. That's why religion and philosophy often share the same bed. You know, the one you really ought to use the UV lamp on before you lie down.
I read it. It's broken, won't run old code, it's 100% useless to me. There will be no porting. Incompatibly changing the print statement. How unbelievably ridiculous. It's the kind of thing you do when you have no users yet, not when there are untold numbers of people who trusted you.
Really -- why not just say it has to run under AmigaDOS now, requires Fortran syntax, and be done with it? Wouldn't kill it any deader.
Oh, he did? Reasonable men like... Hitler? Pol Pot? Stalin? Assholes who torture kittens? A logical world with... asteroid impacts? Children born with painful and irreparable defects? Mothers dying in giving birth to their children? The black plague? Yeah, I know if *I* were omnipotent and all-knowing, I'd design a world that resembles a well designed structure about as much as a pile of dung resembles a gourmet meal. Suuuure I would.
Explain? Sure. The 400-year Papal inquisition. The 600-year Spanish inquisition (really an inquisitional schism, but certainly a Catholic operation from beginning to end.) The burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno. Witch burnings. Scourgings. I don't recall the Scientologists burning anyone lately, or the Mormons holding an inquisition complete with "special" tools used to "help you recall" things they want to hear. That's more George Bush's style. Hold your head under water, make you think you're going to drown, you know the drill. Hot pokers, the Iron Maiden, the rack, your basic set of tongs, a brazier full of hot coals. Yessir, those catholics really know how to host a party.
You want me to go on? I can, you know...
If it isn't backwards compatible, it isn't Python, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure not going to be re-writing a couple hundred megabytes of code. They can take their incompatible new snakelike thing and smoke it. Foregoing backwards compatibility is about as dim a move as I've ever seen anyone outside of Microsoft pull (MS dropping VB underneath Access comes to mind as a comparable clueless act, with exactly the same consequences — it isn't the same product and is useless to me.)
Close, anyway. First thing I thought when I saw the headline "Pope denounces some biotech as affront to human dignity" was "Most religion is an affront to human dignity, Catholicism right at the head of the pack."
I don't feel that it is my place to tell them what to believe, but that doesn't make me think they're anything but a bunch of whacked-out loonies, driven by insecurity, fear and an inability to deal with the idea that some questions may not have answers, and others we may never know the answers to.
Religion is the crack-pipe of the masses. Makes some of them hyper, drives others to euphoria, costs them much time, treasure and effort, all the while debilitating their faculties of reason.
Oh, I know that one. Let me answer in terms of the US system, with 300 million people:
Democracy: System where, worst case with everyone motivated and participating, 150 million people have to comply with rules, laws and forces they disagree with, and 150 million people feel otherwise.
Representative Democracy: System where, worst case with everyone motivated and participating, 300 million people have to comply with rules, laws and forces they disagree with, and a few hundred people (majorities in the house and senate) feel otherwise.
Both systems hold tightly to the idea that it is right and proper that any two uninformed idiots can outvote a well informed expert consequent to the vile falsehood that "all men (and women) are created equal."
The US operates using the latter system.
They've missed the publicly announced milestone, and there is a lot of speculation about the practicality of the method. Don't get me wrong, I *really* want them to succeed, but so far, it's 100% vapor.
The only way you can really "waste" water is to convert it into hydrogen and oxygen. Even then, we'll probably get it back eventually.
The only thing being "wasted" here is the money you pay the city to process that water so that when you super-soak the other person, you don't hand them a bunch of water-bourne disease vectors in the process. But it is your money.
Now, if you've gone and plopped yourself down where there isn't enough water for the population and industrial loading... that'd be your fault. Guess you'll just have to grit your teeth.
Your presumption is guilty until proven innocent. It is my contention that the time you need to concern yourself with someone's identity, location, and actions becomes "now" when they commit a crime. Until then, we don't need to know who they are or any of the rest. This assumes risk; that's the nature of liberty. I'm OK with that.
The problem with giving up liberty to obtain safety is that even if you gave every liberty you had up, you still wouldn't be safe. It is a game that you will lose, no matter what; and liberty has great value, in particular with regard to your own security, posterity, and safety, oddly enough.
The politicians have you playing the game to the degree that you cannot see why it would be reasonable for you to enter some country without them knowing who you are. That's quite sad, really. The argument continues if you replace "some country" with any other public venue, right down to the town square. It really isn't any different, regardless of scale.
No. Individual rights are presumed to be natural, and the constitution does not endow the feds with the authority to take them away. So far, so good.
However, the feds have assumed the power to take them away, and have successfully done so for decades now. The only recourse with regard to abrogating this abuse of legislative authority is to take the law to the supreme court; but the supreme court has also come down on the side of the government and has ignored the constitution in various areas where it is quite specific, so this may well be ineffective.
What you are doing here is conflating authority with power. The federal government has very little authority. However, it has great power, and consequently it uses force and the threat of force as a perfectly adequate substitute for legitimate authority.
No, it doesn't. That's because when 480i (standard video) is recorded, the odd and even fields are taken at 1/30th of a second intervals, meaning that for motion, the fields become out of register. A progressive data source - such as a true progressive HD camera - takes the entire field at once, eliminating interlace time errors. Quite different.
We're talking about equivalent capabilities here. Of course it can deliver less frame changes than the maximum. It can even deliver the same frame all night and day for a real-world refresh rate of one frame per 24 hours - or one frame per year, regardless of the various official refresh rates. The point is it can deliver 60 fps max, and 1080i cannot - 1080i can deliver 30 fps max. They can both deliver less than the max, either by ratcheting down to a lower spec'd refresh rate or simply not changing display data for some arbitrary amount of time. The GP was trying to say that 30 fps 1080i capability == 1080p capability, which is nonsense.
No. 1080p delivers a full 1080 line frame, non-interlaced, every 1/60th of a second.
The main issue right now is that there aren't very many 60 fps sources. The PS3 can generate true 1080p during gameplay, that's one - but movies shot on film are typically 24 fps, converted to 30 fps using a technique called 3:2 pulldown, so a 1080p display keeps the same image up for (at least) two complete frames, resulting in an effective 30 fps non-interlaced display.
Actual 1080i puts up 1/2 the lines (a "field") in 1/60th of a second, then the other half during the next 1/60th of a second. If it is the native format, as the fields are actually recorded at different times, the usual time-caused artifacts can occur, just as they can with standard television. This is generally not the case with movies, because as I mentioned above, they don't contain information above 30 fps; the odd and even fields for film conversions for both DVD and HD formats are taken from the same image slice in time unless a technical error was made during the conversion, which isn't likely (but it happens - the DVD of "Outland", a Sean Connery film, was made with this error and I have a copy — damn thing is painful to watch.)
As the technology matures, we'll begin to see 1080p source material on disk, but it'll be a slow process.
I really enjoy movies, and my version of "sitting out" the hi-def war was simply to ensure I could play both formats. I also game quite a bit, so $120 invested in the 1080i capable XBox 360 HiDef player drive and the built-in 1080p Blueray capability of the PS3 were perfect to bring high resolution playback into the house. We have a 204-inch 1080p projection system with optimally sited seating, so we see all the detail there is.
I'm really glad we didn't wait; hidef content on a big screen really looks a lot better - you're going from about 700 horizontally to 1920, and 480 vertically to 1080... of *course* it looks better. Aside from the disk formats, another source of hi-def is satellite, which has a surprising number of channels available in hi-def (1080i at the moment.) I particularly enjoy hi-def flyover videos of europe, science shows on Discovery, and so on. Even the news is better in HD, any video they shoot to support a story carries six times the detail of standard video, it's like someone finally cleaned the camera lens.
The line in TFS that says that standard DVD players can convert standard DVDs to "near high definition" is a complete line of nonsense. With 1/6th the information in each full frame, all you get are interpolated pixels for smooth areas, and guessed pixels for areas with edges, and the latter only if you have a *very* sophisticated upscaler. Nothing substitutes for real data; if you want to compare what you get, take a 1920x1080 image, scale it down to 853x480, then upscale the small version - using the best method you can find - back to 1920x1080, then compare with the original. *That* is what you get with a DVD upscaling system. 1/6th the original detail - and there is no way around it.
However, your DVD collection is just as good it ever was. Getting into HD in no way compromises your investment in DVDs. We watch DVDs all the time here, and still enjoy them. It's just that we get new movies in either HD format, that's all. Sometimes — Blade Runner, for instance — it is worth it to replace the DVD with a hi-def version, but to be honest, most movies don't deserve that kind of treatment.
The book is "Fuzzy Logic" by McNeill and Freiberger, 0-671-73843-7. I *really* enjoyed that book. I like
Southbound... that's one of my two originals. The other isn't quite as polite - when something is dead, expired, blown up, crashed, faulted or otherwise demised in a terminal fashion, I use "darn thing is nipples north" or some similar construction. Some kind of magnetic affinity happening there, clearly. :-) Feel free, it it takes your fancy.
I think the thing would be underground, at least that's how I picture it. That ameliorates all of those hazards significantly. Heat and cold can be a non-issue, just insulate enough and dig down a story. The geology is good for that in a number of places around here, all megacheap, land wise.
I presume any facility designed - or retrofitted - for archival use will be properly insulated and environmentally controlled, of course. I'm about 120 miles from Miles city, further north.
Anyway, this wouldn't be film or magnetic, and a good choice of media would survive huge temperature swings in storage. Which is not to say they should happen, just that they wouldn't be harmful.
They can put in a fast private pipe directly to LA if they like. They need access if they want to use the archive, that's all. Nothing stopping them from having a huge HD (or data storage device of the day) couriered to them, either. It'd still be cheaper than land in LA by a huge margin.
It doesn't work for hardly anyone. I was talking about after-the fact. There is no after the fact for a suicide bomber; but even for a murderer that is reformable - it still doesn't undo the murder. States with death penalties for murder still see murders. So clearly, prevention isn't being accomplished, and it is pointless to even try to look at crime in the sense of prevention at the punishment end.
That turns our attention to the pre-crime state; can we stop things there? Clearly, we can stop many things by eliminating sources of friction. No poverty, no desperation brought on by poverty. There's still desperation brought on by relationships, by social barriers that cannot be crossed (I want drugs, you say I can't have them; Joe, 21, wants to have sex with Jane, but Jane is 15; Fred wants to control me so I can't have two wives, but I *want* two wives) and it'll take a country with a perfect understanding of liberty to eliminate those social barriers as they manifest in pandering legislation, but it is possible, and it should be attempted.
Can you stop a person who is completely wacky? No - I don't think you can. And religion is the very definition of completely whacky. This is the problem. It cannot be solved by telling law-abiding people they cannot own weapons, they cannot carry shampoo, they must submit to a retinal scan. There will always be some whacked-out scumbag living in someone's basement, preparing his very own care package of explosive goodness, ready to get it on with his 71 virgins, sit at Yaweh's right paw, or whatever the fucking stupid imaginary reward of the day is. This person won't be in the system, won't give you any warning, and is going to make a mess. We need to say, ok, when it happens, we'll be brave, honorable and strong and we'll deal with it and get on with our lives. What we are doing is putting huge extra burdens on the people who are not causing any problems while not solving anything to do with the actual problem. This is business as usual in US politics.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. -- Ernest Benn, publicist (1875 - 1954)
They are. Wolfram was saying, Look here, for each case, applying the following CA rules gets you the following output set (smaller than the input set) of behaviors. So he was observing - in another way - that the various inputs resulted in a more sparse set of results (speaking as far as they are unique with respect to each other.) Once he identified the various types of behavior possible from these sets, he showed that some were very orderly, some considerably less so, some obviously recognizable - visually - as being members of the same classes of behaviors, and some not so obvious at all except that they certainly weren't in the easy-to-recognize class.
From there - and it gets a lot more murky - he went on to propose that these very behaviors might underlay either everything, or darned near everything. To bolster that assertion, he showed that you could find those very patterns in many interesting and disjoint places - formulas seeming completely unrelated to anything he'd talked about thus far, seashell structure and so forth. That part of the book was downright breathtaking.
It's really a very interesting book. His conclusions far outstrip his ability to back them up, but as far as TFA goes, it's looking at the very start of his chain of reasoning and applying some nitpicking that changes nothing he said or meant to say that had anything at all to do with the proposals and justifications made in the book.
Personally, I could give the south end of a northbound rat if he has a high opinion of himself, or not. What I appreciate is that he provided me with a great read, thought provoking on the one hand, and as far as I could tell, without running into anything I knew that would make me question his approach or conclusions. I've got a good general science background, strong engineering and technical design skills, passable math, and am very creative; I do fairly well at finding little - occasionally large, usually not - holes in new science books and have a huge collection of such volumes full of snippy little annotations of my own (and just for my own benefit, on re-reading.) Aside from a really wonderful book on fuzzy logic which to this day I know of no faults with, this book stood out as almost uniquely solid in the specific area he was clearly trying to explain his thoughts on. I consider it money and time well spent.
No. The trick here is only half archival; the other half - and it's not complex, just apparently not obvious - is that it should take any half-competent tech no more than a day or so to rig up a reader using discrete components of current technology, the task having intentionally made simple. An optical diode, resistors, a transistor, maybe a lens system and an XY table. Not "drives" and metaconstructs like them. This way, the components can be emulated if required (doubtful, but possible) by higher technology. The format needs to be blind-dumb-simple, as does the error correction; row-column EC will allow recovery of single lost datums and is trivial to implement. If it is easy to do today, it will be easy to do tomorrow. Once that is done, you can construct as sophisticated a reader as you like, all the while knowing that if worst comes to worst, some half-smart high schooler can recover the data given enough time and $100 in parts.
You misunderstood my guarantee, too; I was guaranteeing that I could get the job done and archive, and recover, a movie in this fashion, making a maintainance free storage method that did not suffer from unrecoverability. I was not guaranteeing the data; they have to provide physical security for it, and I have no control over that, so I couldn't possibly make any promises in that area. I *could* sell them some land in Montana; I just bought two city lots and the 5000 sq ft building on them for 25 grand. Taxes are low, too. ;-) There's plenty more where that came from - hundreds and hundreds of square miles. Thousands, even. Storage space isn't a problem unless they insist it be in LA, which - of course - would be stupid. It should be in a geologically stable area with a high speed pipe and reliable power, that's all.
How about printing a few copies of a binary bar-code record in big books of archival quality paper for terms of a few centuries? Or how about blowing the bit pattern into any other format with some longevity on some nice passive substrate like a non-flowing glass if you'd like to keep them for a few millennia? Two hundred plus grand a year per film to maintain, my aching ass. Give me two million bucks - the supposed cost to archive just ten films - and I *guarantee or your money back* that I can design (and build a prototype) archive system that will reliably maintain digital films such that they can be recovered many centuries from now with no more "yearly archival cost per film" than a roof over its digital head. Error correction and all. All this story demonstrates is that someone isn't taking proper advantage of the technical community.
First of all, mod parent up. I know you moderators suck ass and the system is broken, but come on - parent post is a precise description of TFA's issue, the first in the thread. If you're going to spend mod points at all and pretend they do something worthwhile, parent post is the place.
Secondly, Wolfram's point - in the book - wasn't that the descriptions were minimal (even if he may have mentioned that he thought they were, which I don't actually recall), his point was that they were a complete set of correct descriptions (which I would add are functionally equivalent to the minimal ones anyway) that one can examine for certain behaviors he thought were significant. Niggling about the description not being minimal does not affect what Wolfram was trying to say to the reader. He may be completely wrong, but this kind of nit-picking can not and will not demonstrate it. It is a complete waste of everyone's time.