I often was amazed at how they could diagnose something based on a caller's illogical blabberings. It added to their mystique.
I agree that they are hilarious and amazingly knowledgeable, but I think their process helps to make them look their "best". My understanding is not complete, but I was interested in phoning in once, so I gave them a call. At least when I called I was not put directly on the show, or even put it a queue but rather was asked by automation to give a detailed description of the issue, along with attempts at making noises like the problem and stuff like that. They then said that they would call me back for further stuff. I went no further as I was missing some details (model year of the car in this case) but I never called again to proceed further.
I suspect that they screen the calls for wackos at the very least, but that they also want callers with good voices and clear speaking. When they do finally put people on the air the producers at least have a pre-knowledge of the problem and possibly have done some research so "Click and Clack" can be able to say things like "I think that model of obscure-car had troubles with the ashtray, and in 1963 they changed the retainer-clip design to prevent it falling out on your foot - maybe you can get one from the local junkyard." I don't think that they are pre-scripting or anything like that, but they certainly have the ability to get more info than would be available in a strictly "live call-in" type of format.
This also gives them the ability to line up other people to bring into the conversation ("Let's call our professor friend." "Why don't we call your fiancee to hear their side?" "Where does your dad work? Let's call him!") and increase the laughs even more.
In any case, "Car Talk" has been great fun over the years. My radio time has been limited for quite a while but a few years back I started doing lots of pod-casts and Car Talk has been a staple. Sad to hear it is finishing up.
I don't feel that continued broadening of executive power without oversight mechanisms is a good thing to do.
the problem is, the power of "rogue states" has increased several fold over the past 15 years or so. 9/11, subway attacks, wmds, training camps overseas. US needs expanded capabilities to meet these threats. this has been accomplished through broadening of executive power. This is one possible mechanisms, and others are viable i suppose. i would rather that obama have additional powers, rather than the army for example.
Worldwide, the number (both absolute and in fractional terms) of violent deaths has been dropping since the 1400s. The power of "rogue states" may have increased, but the actual statistical danger to the population is no where near large enough to justify any dramatic changes in policies. I have not seen any credible evidence that increases in executive power has resulted in an increase in safety to the population. None of the things that the civil libertarian "extremists" have been complaining about has actually brought us any increased security, just increased oppression, cost, hassle, poor international PR, and overall-unpleasant experiences.
I am in fact not so concerned about these issues that I am building an armed compound out in the boonies or anything, and actually think that the majority of those in power actually think that most of these decisions are reasonable and effective. But I would be overjoyed that if in addition to "evidence based medicine", and "evidence based instructional systems", there was a larger movement towards "evidence based public policy" where we tried to have clearly stated objectives and attempted to actually measure the policies we put in place against those objectives.
What a bunch of dreamers we all are these days....
All this in a story about some wacko trying to make an over-reaching claim to fame....
justice is a construct for domestic matters. In international matters, the standard is "war crime". As long as obama is not committing a war crime, then he's good to go with his list or whatever.
I disagree - if there is such a thing as "justice" then it is applicable universally, and our actions internationally are not exempt from these ideals. Of course the big "BUT" is that there are few if any international mechanisms for enforcement of these sorts of ideals.
Purely from a domestic point of view, I don't feel that continued broadening of executive power without oversight mechanisms is a good thing to do. I suppose that if enough voters feel the same, the tide will eventually turn, but I've been waiting for a while and there seems to be no slowing.
Hypocritical is when you say one thing and do something else. Changing (public) opinion is not hypocrisy - a person (or society) is supposed to change as circumstances change.
I also suggest that blowing up entire apartment buildings has never been something that has been widely accepted as justifiable.
Just because the "norm" used to be pretty awful does not remove our ability (or right) to criticize the current state of affairs.
But back on point (or at least the off-topic point I had originally replied to), signing someone's death warrant without any oversight is a poor way to set up a self-sustaining system of "justice", in my opinion. "Targeted killings" seem pretty unjustifiable in my mind from ethical as well as effectiveness arguments.
obl didn't commit a *crime*, he committed an act of war. and when people commit acts of war we land 2 dozen seals in the yard and put bullets in brains.
By what standards do you judge the guilt of someone in this type of situation? Even if we accept the premise that "an act of war" was committed, how do we decide who should pay the penalty for it?
In a "regular" war, when the tanks or planes attack your territory it is pretty clear where they came from and who to launch the missiles against. No one has ever questioned the evidence that it was Germany that invaded Poland. But even in that situation, we went through the Nuremberg Trials in order to give some legitimacy to punishments handed out after hostilities were finished.
I am still pretty uncomfortable giving free reign to our "leaders" to declare anyone worthy of being killed on sight without any transparent system to attempt to ensure that power is used appropriately.
"They tell me that he committed an act of war, and when I am told people commit acts of war I am perfectly happy for us to land 2 dozen seals in the yard and put bullets in brains."
That doesn't sound as convincing as your statement.
Maybe you could do a private criminal prosecution in Canada. It might get some press coverage where you could complain about the lack of follow-through.
It might cost more for a single investigation than can get recovered, but it can also be a deterrent, or the opening in a case against a career thief and fencing operation.
Also, who determines the "value" of the stolen item? They took the hand crafted "world's greatest dad" mug from the father of the child who just lost the battle against leukemia - how much is that worth? How about the stolen medical records that have no monetary value, but havev privacy implications?
I don't know what the best solution is, but it is not clear to me that law enforcement is equipped to make the this type of determination of "value".
Chasing down stolen phones might be a better use of police time than some of the other tasks that they routinely do.
I try to always report this type of stuff, just to increase the chances a report is filled out somewhere and statistics are generated. The local police always seem happy to take info over the phone. Granted, they could be just ignoring the information, but they always seem like they are interested in recording the data.
. More people died in the Iraq war (which, by the way, would be very easy to prevent by not invading it)
Actually, not invading would probably have killed more people. Saddam's long term average for killing Iraqis was higher than what occurred in Iraq after his fall. Now Saddam is gone and terrorism is way down, so objectively the Iraqis are much better off with Saddam falling.
I've seen this stated a few times, but it doesn't seem to be supported by anything I can find - do you have a source?
Back in 2006 these folk claim that the "Iraq war death toll may be more than in 25 years of Saddam brutality", referencing work published in "The Lancet"
What's with the paragraph labeling? Roman numerals, letters, and Arabic numbers?
Anyhow, you forgot the historic shameful treatment of American Natives, "manifest destiny", civil war atrocities, and empire building from the nation's founding until today. The stories we all tell ourselves about how good and just we are and how everyone else is much less worthy are not limited to recent event.
Not that anyone will ever see this, being posted at a the end of a gazillion other posts.
I've never really understood why it is felt that the stock market/share price has such a direct influence on a business' behaviour. The market valuation of a company should make almost no difference in the day to day running of the business except in the most extreme cases. If Widget Inc. is trading for 1 billion on Monday and 2 billion on Tuesday, that just means a bunch of people think it is worth that much, but it has no impact on the business practices other than indirectly. If it is "under priced" investors have incentive to buy; if "over priced", incentive to sell, but why should the people running the company care who owns the shares or how much they are worth?
I suppose if the share owners all think the company is being run poorly they (through the board) can make changes in management, but it seems like this "distance" between shareholders and management would moderate knee-jerk reactions to fluctuations in market valuation.
Are the pundits overstating the influence the market has on business practices? Has the influence grown just because the media has repeatedly said that the link is strong? Did "the market" historically have the same effect on business practices? Has regulatory or other changes impacted this relationship over the years?
The other case is "Mickey Mouse protection", in which case you need to (as I understand it) keep all works containing MM under copyright to maintain exclusive rights to the character. Now since the main reason he's valuable is that they can keep selling new works featuring him the fees will steadily increase, only linearly with the number of works but still an ever-increasing overhead. That might eventually be a problem as the cost to maintain copyright on all works featuring any cash cow characters could begin to rival that of buying new legislation. Still, that's a problem for another day.
But Trademark law seems to do pretty well for that. Superman is not under significant pressure from the Fleischer cartoons that are out of copyright, for example and widely, legally, available.
folks, we're talking about radioactivity. pretty rare and outside the norm here. you should expect to be pulled over a few times if there is anything radioactive in your person or your vehicle or anything you are transporting. that actually sounds prudent to me. am i hysterical? no. am i propagandized with a siege mentality? no. we're talking about something radioactive moving around the roads we live and work on. you're not interested in knowing what is going on with that? you're so eager to make a point about security theatre you're comfortable with radioactivity moving about your neighborhood? really? i don't want a lecture about low levels of radiation. what is it? where is it going? you honestly don't care?
there will of course be false alarms. so what. if you're transporting something radioactive, expect to be inconvenienced with pull overs and searches. sounds perfectly reasonable to me. i'd rather have a lot of false positives than just one false negative, wouldn't you?
It may be pretty rare and outside the norm, but it is still way way more common than radioactivity being used in a nefarious dangerous manner. This type of treatment seems to happen a couple of million times a year in the US - so should we be spending our precious law enforcement resources investigating it?
Nitrates are used to make bombs, but the vast majority of nitrates being transported on the roads are in fertilizer. If a cop's nitrate detector goes "beep" should he stop the truck to check it out absent any other indication abnormality?
The difference in this case is that radiation is more rare than nitrates, but neither is anywhere close to as rare as terrorist type activities.
It depends on what you mean by "false positive rate". A previous poster http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2846387&cid=39986761 claims over 5000 of these types of medical treatments occur per day (2 million per year). If we expect about 1 person per year diving the USA with a similar radiation signal and nefarious intent, to have a significant chance of detecting that one "bad guy" you would experience about around a million "false positives" with your magic bad-guy-detector.
It doesn't seem like a good use of resources.
If in fact the goal is to prevent those dirty bomb types, it seems like this is not going to be an effective way of going about it. Too many false positives.
I like the geometric progression rising price for copyright renewal. First 10 years (or some other number to be decided) for free, the next year $10, doubling every year after that. 20 years would only cost (10 + 20 + 40 + 80 + 160 + 320 +... + 5120 ) = $10230 (if my math is correct), but it soon starts to be prohibitively expensive - at 30 years it would cost 100 million to renew. If the creator is still pulling in income, good for them, if not then they won't renew. The central registry also means you can find easily out a work's status if it is over a decade old.
Pirated copies can hurt sales when their quality is identical to the version for sale, yet their price is $0. For example: 1) pirated digital music file vs. the for-sale digital music file, or 2) a digital rip of a DVD vs. the for-sale DVD. The pirated quality of both of those items is identical to the for-sale items, yet they cost $0.
One should also factor in the value of convenience. Finding and downloading a torrent in may instances can be easier or more convenient than paying for a ticket or finding a video store or vending machine to rent it from. If Redbox can make money paying for and handling physical DVDs with a rental price of $1 - it seems like some of those torrent down loaders could be turned into paying customers if the experience was simple enough and the price low enough.
*Wow* Just when I think the pirates can't come up with an even more tortured and logic free "reason" justifying themselves - they manage to top themselves yet again.
"I can't be bothered to go to the theater and will feel left out if I can't talk about the movie - so it's ok to pirate it" Seriously? I mean, I can almost buy some of the arguments about regional codes, or not being released in new formats... but pirating because your self esteem will be damaged and you want to keep up with the crowd?
Your moral/ethical arguments do not invalidate the proposition that this type of thing is a driving force for piracy of this nature (which may or may not be significant). dgatwood didn't say he necessarily felt this way, but that "lots of folks" did.
In computer graphics scenes, the simulated sun is MUCH closer to the scene than the real sun would be. (It might be effectively a few tens of kilometers from your scene geometry, maybe even less). In the real world, the difference between treating it like a point source and a plane source would be irrelevant. In a simulated world, treating it like a plane source would actually give more "correct" results.
However... You already need a system for rendering shadow volumes from the point of view of a point light source (for normal terrestrial point light sources). Using the same system for the sun is a reasonable thing to do, and unless you want to mess around with a non-perspective projection matrix, treating it like a point source might just be easier. OTOH, many real game engines for outdoor games have a completely different system for sun shadows than for normal "dynamic" light shadows, and that system is simpler if it only deals with one sun direction vector for the whole scene.
Instead, we just choose a vector for the incident sunlight and do a projection along that vector onto what lies behind the object. This is fast and efficient and how computer graphics are actually done in order to make your game run at reasonable FPS!
So, in an Optics class, both myself and my professor would both be wrong and you would be right. In a computer graphics class, the sun is most definitely a plane light source.
That was the sort of thing I would have thought - the efficiencies of modeling the system in one particular manner (lit by a bunch of parallel rays) being more important than the potentially more "accurate" other options. Your statement that the sun "behaves like a plane light source because it is much larger than the Earth" though, is more wrong than it is right. The sun behaves like a plane light source because it is so far away that even though it it is freaking huge, it can be fairly accurately treated as a point source at infinite distance. The smaller it is, and the farther away it is, the more like plane waves is the light coming from it.
But you already know that. Your point was that your instructor was unable or unwilling to see the limitations of his idea.
Not quite the same, but I've seen college exams where the professor had it wrong, marked me wrong, and would not fix the mistake.
One professor (computer graphics exam) thought the Sun behaved like a point light source on Earth. It does not, it behaves like a plane light source because it is much larger than the Earth and the light arriving from the sun is for all computer graphics purposes arriving with the same vector direction. He would have none of it.
Humm, he wanted to treat the sun as a point source at 1 AU (93 million miles, 49,597,870.7 kilometres from wikipedia), while you wanted to treat it as a point source at infinite distance (thus generating plane waves)? Any "plane wave" like behaviour of sunlight is not because the sun is huge, but rather because the sun is far away. The larger the sun, the LESS its light behaves like a plane wave.
From a shadow casting point of view, both plane wave illumination and distant point source illumination result in sharp shadows, with very little to distinguish them. For a point sources at 1AU, the difference between angles on different sides of person-sized objects at for person-sized distances where the shadow is formed, is pretty minimal. To get a 1% increase in shadow size, you would need to have the shadow be 1% longer than the distance from the point source to the object casting the shadow, or about one million miles - which is probably not the type of thing you are trying to represent with your computer graphics.
I've never done any computer graphics involving scene lighting or anything like that, but I doubt the difference between point source and plane wave would be noticeable in modeling sunlight.
In actual fact, the sun is not a point source, it is an extended object about 1/2 of a degree in size, which means that shadows cast by sharp edges in sunlight have a "penumbra" of 0.5 degrees. Here is an image showing the formation of this type of shadow:
For a shadow cast on something a meter behind the object, using good old trig (1m) x tangent(0.5 degrees) = 0.00872686779 m or almost 9 mm. Thus sunlight shadows are fuzzy edges for real-world distances (albeit not really very fuzzy), compared to the sharp edges that plane waves or point sources would cast.
It may well be that the professor was "wrong" to model sunlight as a point source, but it seems at least as wrong to model it as a plane wave, when there is up to 1/2 of a degree in difference between different directions of the light from the source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen...Common English translations of the word amen include "verily" and "truly". It can also be used colloquially to express strong agreement,[2] as in, for instance, amen to that.[4]....
But why did evolution continue to operate and come up with a mechanism to "turn off" the regeneration ability after a single cycle? That would appear to be a pointless evolutionary step.
Do you really think that two kidneys confers more advantage than two hearts?
Evolution doesn't have a "point". There was no "decision". One baby lost the ability to regenerate, and it had descendants. Those descendants had lots of kids. Why did the non-regenerators "win"? Well, in the beginning it was mostly luck, any number of accidents could have killed off that first kid, independent of the regeneration. Later on, when there were a whole bunch of them, butter statistics came into play, and that change must have had some advantage.
I think you misunderstood my energy/cost statements. Comparing two identical lizards, one with regeneration and one without, it could be that the regeneration biology takes a bit more energy to survive than the non-regeneration one, just like being a cheetah takes more energy than being a turtle. Living in the same ecological niche, needing more energy is a disadvantage unless some other benefit comes into play.
Evolution does not guarantee that a creature will be optimal, it could well be true that two hearts would be better than two kidneys. That sounds more like an argument against "intelligent design" - what sort of idiot would put blood vessels over top of the light sensitive cells on the mammalian retina?
It's worth mentioning just a few areas where it seems to me the question hasn't been met.
I think that in the broad brushstrokes, answers/stories/explanations to the types of questions that people like you and I can come up with are considered pretty much solved in evolutionary biological circles. They have been trying to poke holes and patch them up in the model for 200+ years - we are unlikely to come up with any clear deficiency. Evolutionary principles are universal - any time you have a system that produces copies that have variations and experience selection forces MUST "evolve" - this is true in breeding as well as computer coding and fashion. While evolutionary forces COULD involve some supernatural forces, there has to date been no need to invoke one, when the details of any particular issue are examined. To invoke one without a physical need seems a bit intellectually inefficient.
Slashdot Mirror
I often was amazed at how they could diagnose something based on a caller's illogical blabberings. It added to their mystique.
I agree that they are hilarious and amazingly knowledgeable, but I think their process helps to make them look their "best". My understanding is not complete, but I was interested in phoning in once, so I gave them a call. At least when I called I was not put directly on the show, or even put it a queue but rather was asked by automation to give a detailed description of the issue, along with attempts at making noises like the problem and stuff like that. They then said that they would call me back for further stuff. I went no further as I was missing some details (model year of the car in this case) but I never called again to proceed further.
I suspect that they screen the calls for wackos at the very least, but that they also want callers with good voices and clear speaking. When they do finally put people on the air the producers at least have a pre-knowledge of the problem and possibly have done some research so "Click and Clack" can be able to say things like "I think that model of obscure-car had troubles with the ashtray, and in 1963 they changed the retainer-clip design to prevent it falling out on your foot - maybe you can get one from the local junkyard." I don't think that they are pre-scripting or anything like that, but they certainly have the ability to get more info than would be available in a strictly "live call-in" type of format.
This also gives them the ability to line up other people to bring into the conversation ("Let's call our professor friend." "Why don't we call your fiancee to hear their side?" "Where does your dad work? Let's call him!") and increase the laughs even more.
In any case, "Car Talk" has been great fun over the years. My radio time has been limited for quite a while but a few years back I started doing lots of pod-casts and Car Talk has been a staple. Sad to hear it is finishing up.
I don't feel that continued broadening of executive power without oversight mechanisms is a good thing to do.
the problem is, the power of "rogue states" has increased several fold over the past 15 years or so. 9/11, subway attacks, wmds, training camps overseas. US needs expanded capabilities to meet these threats. this has been accomplished through broadening of executive power. This is one possible mechanisms, and others are viable i suppose. i would rather that obama have additional powers, rather than the army for example.
Worldwide, the number (both absolute and in fractional terms) of violent deaths has been dropping since the 1400s. The power of "rogue states" may have increased, but the actual statistical danger to the population is no where near large enough to justify any dramatic changes in policies. I have not seen any credible evidence that increases in executive power has resulted in an increase in safety to the population. None of the things that the civil libertarian "extremists" have been complaining about has actually brought us any increased security, just increased oppression, cost, hassle, poor international PR, and overall-unpleasant experiences.
I am in fact not so concerned about these issues that I am building an armed compound out in the boonies or anything, and actually think that the majority of those in power actually think that most of these decisions are reasonable and effective. But I would be overjoyed that if in addition to "evidence based medicine", and "evidence based instructional systems", there was a larger movement towards "evidence based public policy" where we tried to have clearly stated objectives and attempted to actually measure the policies we put in place against those objectives.
What a bunch of dreamers we all are these days....
All this in a story about some wacko trying to make an over-reaching claim to fame....
justice is a construct for domestic matters. In international matters, the standard is "war crime". As long as obama is not committing a war crime, then he's good to go with his list or whatever.
I disagree - if there is such a thing as "justice" then it is applicable universally, and our actions internationally are not exempt from these ideals. Of course the big "BUT" is that there are few if any international mechanisms for enforcement of these sorts of ideals.
Purely from a domestic point of view, I don't feel that continued broadening of executive power without oversight mechanisms is a good thing to do. I suppose that if enough voters feel the same, the tide will eventually turn, but I've been waiting for a while and there seems to be no slowing.
Hypocritical is when you say one thing and do something else. Changing (public) opinion is not hypocrisy - a person (or society) is supposed to change as circumstances change.
I also suggest that blowing up entire apartment buildings has never been something that has been widely accepted as justifiable.
Just because the "norm" used to be pretty awful does not remove our ability (or right) to criticize the current state of affairs.
But back on point (or at least the off-topic point I had originally replied to), signing someone's death warrant without any oversight is a poor way to set up a self-sustaining system of "justice", in my opinion. "Targeted killings" seem pretty unjustifiable in my mind from ethical as well as effectiveness arguments.
obl didn't commit a *crime*, he committed an act of war. and when people commit acts of war we land 2 dozen seals in the yard and put bullets in brains.
By what standards do you judge the guilt of someone in this type of situation? Even if we accept the premise that "an act of war" was committed, how do we decide who should pay the penalty for it?
In a "regular" war, when the tanks or planes attack your territory it is pretty clear where they came from and who to launch the missiles against. No one has ever questioned the evidence that it was Germany that invaded Poland. But even in that situation, we went through the Nuremberg Trials in order to give some legitimacy to punishments handed out after hostilities were finished.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials
I am still pretty uncomfortable giving free reign to our "leaders" to declare anyone worthy of being killed on sight without any transparent system to attempt to ensure that power is used appropriately.
"They tell me that he committed an act of war, and when I am told people commit acts of war I am perfectly happy for us to land 2 dozen seals in the yard and put bullets in brains."
That doesn't sound as convincing as your statement.
Maybe you could do a private criminal prosecution in Canada. It might get some press coverage where you could complain about the lack of follow-through.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution
It might cost more for a single investigation than can get recovered, but it can also be a deterrent, or the opening in a case against a career thief and fencing operation.
Also, who determines the "value" of the stolen item? They took the hand crafted "world's greatest dad" mug from the father of the child who just lost the battle against leukemia - how much is that worth? How about the stolen medical records that have no monetary value, but havev privacy implications?
I don't know what the best solution is, but it is not clear to me that law enforcement is equipped to make the this type of determination of "value".
Chasing down stolen phones might be a better use of police time than some of the other tasks that they routinely do.
I try to always report this type of stuff, just to increase the chances a report is filled out somewhere and statistics are generated. The local police always seem happy to take info over the phone. Granted, they could be just ignoring the information, but they always seem like they are interested in recording the data.
. More people died in the Iraq war (which, by the way, would be very easy to prevent by not invading it)
Actually, not invading would probably have killed more people. Saddam's long term average for killing Iraqis was higher than what occurred in Iraq after his fall. Now Saddam is gone and terrorism is way down, so objectively the Iraqis are much better off with Saddam falling.
I've seen this stated a few times, but it doesn't seem to be supported by anything I can find - do you have a source?
Back in 2006 these folk claim that the "Iraq war death toll may be more than in 25 years of Saddam brutality", referencing work published in "The Lancet"
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/news_syndication/article_061012wardead.shtml
What's with the paragraph labeling? Roman numerals, letters, and Arabic numbers?
Anyhow, you forgot the historic shameful treatment of American Natives, "manifest destiny", civil war atrocities, and empire building from the nation's founding until today. The stories we all tell ourselves about how good and just we are and how everyone else is much less worthy are not limited to recent event.
Not that anyone will ever see this, being posted at a the end of a gazillion other posts.
I've never really understood why it is felt that the stock market/share price has such a direct influence on a business' behaviour. The market valuation of a company should make almost no difference in the day to day running of the business except in the most extreme cases. If Widget Inc. is trading for 1 billion on Monday and 2 billion on Tuesday, that just means a bunch of people think it is worth that much, but it has no impact on the business practices other than indirectly. If it is "under priced" investors have incentive to buy; if "over priced", incentive to sell, but why should the people running the company care who owns the shares or how much they are worth?
I suppose if the share owners all think the company is being run poorly they (through the board) can make changes in management, but it seems like this "distance" between shareholders and management would moderate knee-jerk reactions to fluctuations in market valuation.
Are the pundits overstating the influence the market has on business practices? Has the influence grown just because the media has repeatedly said that the link is strong? Did "the market" historically have the same effect on business practices? Has regulatory or other changes impacted this relationship over the years?
Maybe I should take an economics degree.
The other case is "Mickey Mouse protection", in which case you need to (as I understand it) keep all works containing MM under copyright to maintain exclusive rights to the character. Now since the main reason he's valuable is that they can keep selling new works featuring him the fees will steadily increase, only linearly with the number of works but still an ever-increasing overhead. That might eventually be a problem as the cost to maintain copyright on all works featuring any cash cow characters could begin to rival that of buying new legislation. Still, that's a problem for another day.
But Trademark law seems to do pretty well for that. Superman is not under significant pressure from the Fleischer cartoons that are out of copyright, for example and widely, legally, available.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischer_Studios#Popeye_and_Superman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCiv6FuEUEA
folks, we're talking about radioactivity. pretty rare and outside the norm here. you should expect to be pulled over a few times if there is anything radioactive in your person or your vehicle or anything you are transporting. that actually sounds prudent to me. am i hysterical? no. am i propagandized with a siege mentality? no. we're talking about something radioactive moving around the roads we live and work on. you're not interested in knowing what is going on with that? you're so eager to make a point about security theatre you're comfortable with radioactivity moving about your neighborhood? really? i don't want a lecture about low levels of radiation. what is it? where is it going? you honestly don't care?
there will of course be false alarms. so what. if you're transporting something radioactive, expect to be inconvenienced with pull overs and searches. sounds perfectly reasonable to me. i'd rather have a lot of false positives than just one false negative, wouldn't you?
It may be pretty rare and outside the norm, but it is still way way more common than radioactivity being used in a nefarious dangerous manner. This type of treatment seems to happen a couple of million times a year in the US - so should we be spending our precious law enforcement resources investigating it?
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2846387&cid=39986761
What is the relative odds of this being a problem? Do we stop the 2 million people per year getting this type of treatment on their drive home?
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2846387&cid=39986761
Nitrates are used to make bombs, but the vast majority of nitrates being transported on the roads are in fertilizer. If a cop's nitrate detector goes "beep" should he stop the truck to check it out absent any other indication abnormality?
The difference in this case is that radiation is more rare than nitrates, but neither is anywhere close to as rare as terrorist type activities.
It depends on what you mean by "false positive rate". A previous poster http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2846387&cid=39986761 claims over 5000 of these types of medical treatments occur per day (2 million per year). If we expect about 1 person per year diving the USA with a similar radiation signal and nefarious intent, to have a significant chance of detecting that one "bad guy" you would experience about around a million "false positives" with your magic bad-guy-detector.
It doesn't seem like a good use of resources.
If in fact the goal is to prevent those dirty bomb types, it seems like this is not going to be an effective way of going about it. Too many false positives.
I like the geometric progression rising price for copyright renewal. First 10 years (or some other number to be decided) for free, the next year $10, doubling every year after that. 20 years would only cost (10 + 20 + 40 + 80 + 160 + 320 + ... + 5120 ) = $10230 (if my math is correct), but it soon starts to be prohibitively expensive - at 30 years it would cost 100 million to renew. If the creator is still pulling in income, good for them, if not then they won't renew. The central registry also means you can find easily out a work's status if it is over a decade old.
Pirated copies can hurt sales when their quality is identical to the version for sale, yet their price is $0. For example: 1) pirated digital music file vs. the for-sale digital music file, or 2) a digital rip of a DVD vs. the for-sale DVD. The pirated quality of both of those items is identical to the for-sale items, yet they cost $0.
One should also factor in the value of convenience. Finding and downloading a torrent in may instances can be easier or more convenient than paying for a ticket or finding a video store or vending machine to rent it from. If Redbox can make money paying for and handling physical DVDs with a rental price of $1 - it seems like some of those torrent down loaders could be turned into paying customers if the experience was simple enough and the price low enough.
*Wow* Just when I think the pirates can't come up with an even more tortured and logic free "reason" justifying themselves - they manage to top themselves yet again.
"I can't be bothered to go to the theater and will feel left out if I can't talk about the movie - so it's ok to pirate it" Seriously? I mean, I can almost buy some of the arguments about regional codes, or not being released in new formats... but pirating because your self esteem will be damaged and you want to keep up with the crowd?
Your moral/ethical arguments do not invalidate the proposition that this type of thing is a driving force for piracy of this nature (which may or may not be significant). dgatwood didn't say he necessarily felt this way, but that "lots of folks" did.
I suspect it means "number of retractions" is a poor measurement of "rate of scientific fraud".
The little graph accompanying the article itself shows that only about 1/3 or less of the retractions are "fraud" related.
Increases in fraud retractions could be just the result of increased scrutiny, or increased transparency - maybe fraud itself is on the decline.
In computer graphics scenes, the simulated sun is MUCH closer to the scene than the real sun would be. (It might be effectively a few tens of kilometers from your scene geometry, maybe even less). In the real world, the difference between treating it like a point source and a plane source would be irrelevant. In a simulated world, treating it like a plane source would actually give more "correct" results.
However... You already need a system for rendering shadow volumes from the point of view of a point light source (for normal terrestrial point light sources). Using the same system for the sun is a reasonable thing to do, and unless you want to mess around with a non-perspective projection matrix, treating it like a point source might just be easier. OTOH, many real game engines for outdoor games have a completely different system for sun shadows than for normal "dynamic" light shadows, and that system is simpler if it only deals with one sun direction vector for the whole scene.
That seems pretty reasonable.
Instead, we just choose a vector for the incident sunlight and do a projection along that vector onto what lies behind the object. This is fast and efficient and how computer graphics are actually done in order to make your game run at reasonable FPS!
So, in an Optics class, both myself and my professor would both be wrong and you would be right. In a computer graphics class, the sun is most definitely a plane light source.
That was the sort of thing I would have thought - the efficiencies of modeling the system in one particular manner (lit by a bunch of parallel rays) being more important than the potentially more "accurate" other options. Your statement that the sun "behaves like a plane light source because it is much larger than the Earth" though, is more wrong than it is right. The sun behaves like a plane light source because it is so far away that even though it it is freaking huge, it can be fairly accurately treated as a point source at infinite distance. The smaller it is, and the farther away it is, the more like plane waves is the light coming from it.
But you already know that. Your point was that your instructor was unable or unwilling to see the limitations of his idea.
a) and b) can give you results in "barometer-length" units. "The building is 234 barometers tall"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp
This is a nicely written account:
http://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/introbook2.1/x874.html
here are a bunch of ideas (most involve extras beyond the barometer)
http://www.esmerel.com/circle/question/building.html
Not quite the same, but I've seen college exams where the professor had it wrong, marked me wrong, and would not fix the mistake.
One professor (computer graphics exam) thought the Sun behaved like a point light source on Earth. It does not, it behaves like a plane light source because it is much larger than the Earth and the light arriving from the sun is for all computer graphics purposes arriving with the same vector direction. He would have none of it.
Humm, he wanted to treat the sun as a point source at 1 AU (93 million miles, 49,597,870.7 kilometres from wikipedia), while you wanted to treat it as a point source at infinite distance (thus generating plane waves)? Any "plane wave" like behaviour of sunlight is not because the sun is huge, but rather because the sun is far away. The larger the sun, the LESS its light behaves like a plane wave.
From a shadow casting point of view, both plane wave illumination and distant point source illumination result in sharp shadows, with very little to distinguish them. For a point sources at 1AU, the difference between angles on different sides of person-sized objects at for person-sized distances where the shadow is formed, is pretty minimal. To get a 1% increase in shadow size, you would need to have the shadow be 1% longer than the distance from the point source to the object casting the shadow, or about one million miles - which is probably not the type of thing you are trying to represent with your computer graphics.
I've never done any computer graphics involving scene lighting or anything like that, but I doubt the difference between point source and plane wave would be noticeable in modeling sunlight.
In actual fact, the sun is not a point source, it is an extended object about 1/2 of a degree in size, which means that shadows cast by sharp edges in sunlight have a "penumbra" of 0.5 degrees. Here is an image showing the formation of this type of shadow:
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/9/5239/F2.expansion.html
For a shadow cast on something a meter behind the object, using good old trig (1m) x tangent(0.5 degrees) = 0.00872686779 m or almost 9 mm. Thus sunlight shadows are fuzzy edges for real-world distances (albeit not really very fuzzy), compared to the sharp edges that plane waves or point sources would cast.
It may well be that the professor was "wrong" to model sunlight as a point source, but it seems at least as wrong to model it as a plane wave, when there is up to 1/2 of a degree in difference between different directions of the light from the source.
Amen brother, amen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen ...Common English translations of the word amen include "verily" and "truly". It can also be used colloquially to express strong agreement,[2] as in, for instance, amen to that.[4]....
But why did evolution continue to operate and come up with a mechanism to "turn off" the regeneration ability after a single cycle? That would appear to be a pointless evolutionary step.
Do you really think that two kidneys confers more advantage than two hearts?
Evolution doesn't have a "point". There was no "decision". One baby lost the ability to regenerate, and it had descendants. Those descendants had lots of kids. Why did the non-regenerators "win"? Well, in the beginning it was mostly luck, any number of accidents could have killed off that first kid, independent of the regeneration. Later on, when there were a whole bunch of them, butter statistics came into play, and that change must have had some advantage.
I think you misunderstood my energy/cost statements. Comparing two identical lizards, one with regeneration and one without, it could be that the regeneration biology takes a bit more energy to survive than the non-regeneration one, just like being a cheetah takes more energy than being a turtle. Living in the same ecological niche, needing more energy is a disadvantage unless some other benefit comes into play.
Evolution does not guarantee that a creature will be optimal, it could well be true that two hearts would be better than two kidneys. That sounds more like an argument against "intelligent design" - what sort of idiot would put blood vessels over top of the light sensitive cells on the mammalian retina?
It's worth mentioning just a few areas where it seems to me the question hasn't been met.
I think that in the broad brushstrokes, answers/stories/explanations to the types of questions that people like you and I can come up with are considered pretty much solved in evolutionary biological circles. They have been trying to poke holes and patch them up in the model for 200+ years - we are unlikely to come up with any clear deficiency. Evolutionary principles are universal - any time you have a system that produces copies that have variations and experience selection forces MUST "evolve" - this is true in breeding as well as computer coding and fashion. While evolutionary forces COULD involve some supernatural forces, there has to date been no need to invoke one, when the details of any particular issue are examined. To invoke one without a physical need seems a bit intellectually inefficient.