If morals were relative than I could only assert that is wrong for ME to murder, but you get to make your own decision whether it is moral for you to murder.
Well, I guess you could say morals are _defined_ as a given society's set of behavioral norms. Then, at least within this society, they are not relative. However, once you define them thus, why should my ideas of "right" and "wrong" (ethical choices) have anything to do with morals?
Would you also say that "illegal" necessarily implies "wrong"? If yes, why? If not, why should "immoral" imply "wrong"? Kissing in public used to be immoral not so many decades ago, this just goes to show...
Plus, yes, I make my own decisions on when it is moral for me to murder, just as "society" makes its own decisions when it is moral for it to execute me for it. Not so?
The only effective limitation comes from linear algebra - there are only as many degrees of freedom as there are pixels, so if you downsample, you *always* lose data, like it or not.
However, even this is not a problem in practice since in real-world pictures nearby pixels are not independent. By using an appropriate encoding dictionary such as wavelets, which zoom in on sharp edges and economize on flat surfaces, you can shrink a typical picture by something like 90% without visible quality loss.
Now since wavelets are actually continuous functions, you could then convert from wavelet representation to upsampled signal, with no information loss. I imagine this could give sharper edges as wavelets are better at egdes than Fourier.
The problem of upsampling well is very similar to making a blurry image crisp - called deconvolution. The problem in doing that is that any noise in the blurry image gets amplified, must be filtered out etc...
Moral is that clever algorithims have been around for ages - the effective limit is whether they can be done in realtime.
Not to mention that external USB hard drives have massive issues with sp2. If I weren't an ODBC addict (SQL queries from a bunch of arbitrary rectangular regions in Excel into another spot in the same Excel file are just cool), I'd switch to oSX right away...
Free EU internal market will kill the stupid plan!
on
Dutch Pass iPod Tax
·
· Score: 1
That's one of the problems with the free market we have inside the EU.
Problems? That's a feature! That's exactly the reason this idiotic levy will fail unless EVERY EU country adopts it (not likely, and if they do, expect a drop in sales and jump in illegally imported units - how long until the retailers scream?).
About what I thought. Now what would be really cool is having a directory tree of categories and vague groupings, like Dance>80s>Disco>BandName, with the same genres/albums occurring in different folders thanks to hard links, _and_ having the whole thing indexed by tag content as well, with a soft player that understands both. Is that perhaps already possible with Spotlight BTW?
Why "much better"? Why not have both, to each his favorite?
Incidentally, does iTunes support a hierarchical structure, tree-like, kinda like a directory tree? Or just top-level labels, kinda like a RDBMS table?
I happen to like the former.
Why? For example, I like my LaTeX dirs sharing certain files (.bib, headers, etc.), which I achieve via softlinks. I'm sure I could have put them on the global LaTeX path somewhere, but why bother to find out how? ln -s is good enough for me.
Incidentally, a good reason to use softlinks over hardlinks is that e.g. emacs apparently tends to save the _old_ version (filename~) under the old inode, creating a new inode for the edited version (filename). Thus suddenly the other hardlinks point to the old version - not good. Using softlinks eliminates this problem.
So? If you're proficient in OOo, tell them you _are_ proficient with MSOffice. If you're feeling _really_ truthful, spend an afternoon playing with MSO at some machine somewhere before doing so, and skim the relevant job adverts for MSO functions to name-drop (mail-merge, whatever). How is that going to disadvantage you? It's not like MSO is like C++ or something else that actually takes some time to learn.
The two should stay completely separate
Why? What's wrong with having both "old-style" servers and new ones where you are allowed to trade?
You don't like it, you stay on old-style servers?
What's the point of proclaiming proudly that "a test has been conducted" without outlining the results? TFA refers vaguely to a forthcoming paper - WTF? If there's anything interesting about the story, it's how successful the judges were with M/F vs. AI/F pairs - and as far as I can see, there's no data whatsoever of this kind.
Not sure what you are talking about. The most fancy DB I ever used before was MS Access (OK, so kick me;)), but Postgres for Win installer installed like a charm and caused no problems since.
I haven't found a graphic query editor analog to MS access's one yet, but I guess it's a matter of different style - scripting instead of GUI. But installation? A breeze.
Even better: StarLogo. Runs in Java, you can spawn hundreds of multicolored logo turtles and make them all move in sync (or randomly) using the same 5-line logo program from the console - type in a line and watch the turtles obey.
Plus, they have ready-made projects (Click on Projects from the main page) that are all set to go, simple and super-cool visually, from "Slime-mold cells aggregate into clusters, using a chemical pheromone" to "Diffusion Limited Aggregation. Create fractals with simple rules".
Thats what I used in a similar situation - the kids LOVED it.
Not really. As you remark, LaTeX graphs are more limited; if you want to embed LaTeX (formulas etc.) into your pictures (inside LaTeX docs), use EPS pics and the psfrag LaTeX package.
VBA is quite useful for bulk processing. Say, I need to load a bunch of data into an excel file, crunch it with pre-programmed Excel formulas, graph the results inside the said Excel file, and repeat a dozen times for different data. Then VBA is my friend. I also do matlab, but to hack something like that on the quick, VBA is better.
Also, ODBC is quite neat. Especially the bit where you can mark any rectangular region in your spreadsheet as a table and join it to other such "tables", storing results in the same Excel file that the data came from, as a pivot table. In fact, this ability of Excel to behave sometimes like a database, sometimes like a so-so OLAP, and sometimes like a shapeless mass of cells, is what makes it rock. I bet not even gnumeric does that, let alone OO.
And I'm sure most people don't need all that - I do.
Every time a dollar (or other currency unit) is created, it accrues to _somebody_. If not the Fed, then the government. Seigniorage is always there, look it up in any monetary policy textbook.
All they're doing is propping up the unfortunately largely-dollar-based world economy until they can find a way to ease out of it. Would you mind providing a quote saying that's what they think they're doing?
Thanks for your comment dude. I feel however that you might have misunderstood the thrust of my remark . Certainly, civility is important, and I am all for modifying one's language texture according to context. When I say something is a matter of taste it does not mean that it is irrelevant - in fact, good taste is one of the more important personality traits as far as I am concerned.
What I disagree with is firstly, the idea of _enforcing_ your concept of civility unto others, and secondly, attempts to equate out of context speech usage with more serious breaches of peace. Both might have something to be said against them, but for very different reasons.
And yes, as you note yourself, slashdot is quite a proper context to say fuck.
P.S. I did not rate myself insightful, and am rather amused that others did, as a matter of fact.
why can't a public forum also do so without getting flamed for violating free speech? It seems like their is not much reward in allowing that and other words to be spoken or typed. What do you mean reward? That's _exactly_ the line between freedom and censorship - you don't like the word, fine. But please don't try to tell me what words I should and should not use.
The dynamics of yelling FIRE in a theater are similar to saying the F word in front of children No they ain't!. The former might result in a panic and thus people actually being hurt. Who you say fuck in front of is a manner of your personal fucking taste.
I guess darwin will take care of it in time anyway.;) If only evolution always followed what I think is right...
No, the dollar is not. But the Fed does make a profit by issuing all that cash - it is called seigniorage. Might not be a major issue inside the US (though the Fed is not exactly a government institution), but you bet the dominance of the dollar worldwide has very noticeable cash flow implications for the US economy (is one of the major reasons that the dollar is a stable currency in spite of the huge trade deficits of the US).
I utterly fail to see the advantage to me as a buyer
The advantage to me is simplicity. When I buy a $3 book or a $10 phone card online, I couldn't care less about all that reliability stuff (not worth my time to track down a bastard $3 vendor)- but I do care that I only have to enter paypal username/password rather than all of my bloody credit card info, billing address, etc. And only giving that latter info to one place, paypal, rather than every $3 retailer out there is a comfort, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Why use VSS at all? Use Subversion, AnkhSVN takes care of VS.NET integration, and TortoiseSVN integrates it with the file browser (Windows Explorer).
Unwanted children as a disease? Cute. Anyway, ever heard of condoms?
seeing women as sex objects
Rather enjoy being a sex object meself, as a matter of fact;)
lack of morality
Ever read "Stranger in a strange land"? Give it a try.
Well, I just got me a PhD, and I can tell you acing things in academe works _exactly_ like that. Your professor happy = you doing good.
Well, I guess you could say morals are _defined_ as a given society's set of behavioral norms. Then, at least within this society, they are not relative. However, once you define them thus, why should my ideas of "right" and "wrong" (ethical choices) have anything to do with morals?
Would you also say that "illegal" necessarily implies "wrong"? If yes, why? If not, why should "immoral" imply "wrong"? Kissing in public used to be immoral not so many decades ago, this just goes to show...
Plus, yes, I make my own decisions on when it is moral for me to murder, just as "society" makes its own decisions when it is moral for it to execute me for it. Not so?
The only effective limitation comes from linear algebra - there are only as many degrees of freedom as there are pixels, so if you downsample, you *always* lose data, like it or not.
However, even this is not a problem in practice since in real-world pictures nearby pixels are not independent. By using an appropriate encoding dictionary such as wavelets, which zoom in on sharp edges and economize on flat surfaces, you can shrink a typical picture by something like 90% without visible quality loss.
Now since wavelets are actually continuous functions, you could then convert from wavelet representation to upsampled signal, with no information loss. I imagine this could give sharper edges as wavelets are better at egdes than Fourier.
The problem of upsampling well is very similar to making a blurry image crisp - called deconvolution. The problem in doing that is that any noise in the blurry image gets amplified, must be filtered out etc...
Moral is that clever algorithims have been around for ages - the effective limit is whether they can be done in realtime.
Not to mention that external USB hard drives have massive issues with sp2. If I weren't an ODBC addict (SQL queries from a bunch of arbitrary rectangular regions in Excel into another spot in the same Excel file are just cool), I'd switch to oSX right away...
Problems? That's a feature! That's exactly the reason this idiotic levy will fail unless EVERY EU country adopts it (not likely, and if they do, expect a drop in sales and jump in illegally imported units - how long until the retailers scream?).
XP does that too, under "my network places".
About what I thought. Now what would be really cool is having a directory tree of categories and vague groupings, like Dance>80s>Disco>BandName, with the same genres/albums occurring in different folders thanks to hard links, _and_ having the whole thing indexed by tag content as well, with a soft player that understands both. Is that perhaps already possible with Spotlight BTW?
Why "much better"? Why not have both, to each his favorite? Incidentally, does iTunes support a hierarchical structure, tree-like, kinda like a directory tree? Or just top-level labels, kinda like a RDBMS table? I happen to like the former.
Why? For example, I like my LaTeX dirs sharing certain files (.bib, headers, etc.), which I achieve via softlinks. I'm sure I could have put them on the global LaTeX path somewhere, but why bother to find out how?
ln -s is good enough for me.
Incidentally, a good reason to use softlinks over hardlinks is that e.g. emacs apparently tends to save the _old_ version (filename~) under the old inode, creating a new inode for the edited version (filename). Thus suddenly the other hardlinks point to the old version - not good. Using softlinks eliminates this problem.
So? If you're proficient in OOo, tell them you _are_ proficient with MSOffice. If you're feeling _really_ truthful, spend an afternoon playing with MSO at some machine somewhere before doing so, and skim the relevant job adverts for MSO functions to name-drop (mail-merge, whatever). How is that going to disadvantage you? It's not like MSO is like C++ or something else that actually takes some time to learn.
Actually, Arch is integrating git
The two should stay completely separate
Why? What's wrong with having both "old-style" servers and new ones where you are allowed to trade? You don't like it, you stay on old-style servers?
What's the point of proclaiming proudly that "a test has been conducted" without outlining the results? TFA refers vaguely to a forthcoming paper - WTF?
If there's anything interesting about the story, it's how successful the judges were with M/F vs. AI/F pairs - and as far as I can see, there's no data whatsoever of this kind.
Am I missing something?
Not sure what you are talking about. The most fancy DB I ever used before was MS Access (OK, so kick me;)), but Postgres for Win installer installed like a charm and caused no problems since.
I haven't found a graphic query editor analog to MS access's one yet, but I guess it's a matter of different style - scripting instead of GUI. But installation? A breeze.
Even better: StarLogo.
Runs in Java, you can spawn hundreds of multicolored logo turtles and make them all move in sync (or randomly) using the same 5-line logo program from the console - type in a line and watch the turtles obey.
Plus, they have ready-made projects (Click on Projects from the main page) that are all set to go, simple and super-cool visually, from "Slime-mold cells aggregate into clusters, using a chemical pheromone" to "Diffusion Limited Aggregation. Create fractals with simple rules".
Thats what I used in a similar situation - the kids LOVED it.
Not really. As you remark, LaTeX graphs are more limited; if you want to embed LaTeX (formulas etc.) into your pictures (inside LaTeX docs), use EPS pics and the psfrag LaTeX package.
VBA is quite useful for bulk processing. Say, I need to load a bunch of data into an excel file, crunch it with pre-programmed Excel formulas, graph the results inside the said Excel file, and repeat a dozen times for different data. Then VBA is my friend. I also do matlab, but to hack something like that on the quick, VBA is better. Also, ODBC is quite neat. Especially the bit where you can mark any rectangular region in your spreadsheet as a table and join it to other such "tables", storing results in the same Excel file that the data came from, as a pivot table. In fact, this ability of Excel to behave sometimes like a database, sometimes like a so-so OLAP, and sometimes like a shapeless mass of cells, is what makes it rock. I bet not even gnumeric does that, let alone OO. And I'm sure most people don't need all that - I do.
By the way, if you care about formulae and pdf, why use OO and not LaTeX?
Ditto with bibliographies. Or can OO grab citations online (or even export them into bibtex)?
Every time a dollar (or other currency unit) is created, it accrues to _somebody_. If not the Fed, then the government. Seigniorage is always there, look it up in any monetary policy textbook.
All they're doing is propping up the unfortunately largely-dollar-based world economy until they can find a way to ease out of it.
Would you mind providing a quote saying that's what they think they're doing?
Thanks for your comment dude. I feel however that you might have misunderstood the thrust of my remark . Certainly, civility is important, and I am all for modifying one's language texture according to context. When I say something is a matter of taste it does not mean that it is irrelevant - in fact, good taste is one of the more important personality traits as far as I am concerned.
What I disagree with is firstly, the idea of _enforcing_ your concept of civility unto others, and secondly, attempts to equate out of context speech usage with more serious breaches of peace. Both might have something to be said against them, but for very different reasons.
And yes, as you note yourself, slashdot is quite a proper context to say fuck.
P.S. I did not rate myself insightful, and am rather amused that others did, as a matter of fact.
why can't a public forum also do so without getting flamed for violating free speech? It seems like their is not much reward in allowing that and other words to be spoken or typed.
;)
What do you mean reward? That's _exactly_ the line between freedom and censorship - you don't like the word, fine. But please don't try to tell me what words I should and should not use.
The dynamics of yelling FIRE in a theater are similar to saying the F word in front of children
No they ain't!. The former might result in a panic and thus people actually being hurt. Who you say fuck in front of is a manner of your personal fucking taste.
I guess darwin will take care of it in time anyway.
If only evolution always followed what I think is right...
No, the dollar is not. But the Fed does make a profit by issuing all that cash - it is called seigniorage. Might not be a major issue inside the US (though the Fed is not exactly a government institution), but you bet the dominance of the dollar worldwide has very noticeable cash flow implications for the US economy (is one of the major reasons that the dollar is a stable currency in spite of the huge trade deficits of the US).
I utterly fail to see the advantage to me as a buyer
The advantage to me is simplicity. When I buy a $3 book or a $10 phone card online, I couldn't care less about all that reliability stuff (not worth my time to track down a bastard $3 vendor)- but I do care that I only have to enter paypal username/password rather than all of my bloody credit card info, billing address, etc. And only giving that latter info to one place, paypal, rather than every $3 retailer out there is a comfort, too.