I was hoping for the complete Lena. When the image popped up, in the 1970s, sure that the larger parts of the image were cut off for indecency.
But in 2014, I think this is no topic any longer.
A new coding algorithm could as well have come with a new perspective on morals.
And given us something NSFW, to look at in the workplace!

Amazing.
An AC modded down for a crudely shortened summary, to a minus 1. Actually, no.
And the next poster at this moment in time, another AC, says 'nope'.
Has the mod (wo)man posted as AC to strengthen her statement?

While AC's comment wasn't really up to the article, the paper by Kadanoff does what parent is saying; and it is what re-normalization is about.
http://www.studiolo.org/Mona/M... and http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/availa...
are prior art. The former if you're more in arts, the second if you're more in physics/maths.
I don't want to say that there is not much in the paper, it is not my field. Common sense makes me wonder how much effort is necessary in the competitive academic world of our time to self-promote one's work on /.; or to get someone's friends to promote an otherwise not earth-shattering approach into the headlines.

I rarely reply to ACs.

Here is no different. Though the arguments sound intriguing and insightful.
I for one would be happy to get some confirmation about these from someone with a higher reliability probability than that of an AC.

But I can't help it.

Diesel is the better fuel, it results in a lower consumption, less dangerous. Buy a barrel and try to set fire to it, you'd be surprised! Try the same with petrol (oh, please don't!).
Consumption is lower, I mentioned it. In the refining process, it comes out as the 'lower quality', though.
Buy a modern diesel engine, and it neither stinks nor does it make more noise.

The whole thing is a sick publicity stunt by the former girl-friend of the French president.

I could agree on one single item where diesel is worse than petrol: that's the particles in the exhaust fumes. However, these are not dangerous at all to nature. It only so happens that they are seen at the origin of one or another cancer. But that's a problem mostly to us, the oxygen-breathing species. How can we dare to use significantly more oil, and waste mother nature's resources; produce more CO2; generate more heat, etc. for just one egotistic reason: prevent a number of lung cancers. A number that fades into oblivion compared to the numbers produced by the Marlboro Man and his followers, the pollution produced by capitalist enterprises around the world, including the 'communist' PRC.

Why don't I have any mod points? I'd throw all at you.
probably my only chance is to put in another redundant post further down just to stress that you are spot on!

I used to be a francophile person throughout. But in the last ten, twenty years they have disappointed me left and right. So sad.

Hi, its me again, it bugged me too much to let it slip. 2007, so, yes, bloody repeats and lousy editing. Dr. Google gives you a whole list at 'TGV speed'; for example this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Now don't come and tell me 'Maglev' was different. On the contrary, without rails, it ought to go even faster. Plus, Maglev uses by definition more energy. Nothing against the Japanese here, but this is no more than an academic achievement. What's the point of using a system that consumes more energy for a lesser speed?

Oh, and don't come to me with the reduction of noise by avoiding the noise of the rails on a track. This has been debunked in the early 1980, when it was shown that the rolling of wheels on rails actually is the main noise component, but only for low speeds, beyond 180 or 250 km/h it is the displacement of air that produces the higher noise components.

I can only take guesses why the Japanese still try: to avoid the almost completely stonewalled intellectual property around the technological leader, the TGV. German Rail had tried to do exactly that: work around the patents used for the French TGV, at the loss of more than 100 lives at Eschede. I'll surely leave out the gory and sad details of that, however. Promised!

Expert? Are you? Fine, then. Can you specify, what 'relative' bio-compatible is supposed to mean, please?

Though I am too lazy and have better fish to fry in my spare time than running after questionable /.-eds: I do quite well remember having watched a clip of a French TGV running just above 500 km/h some three to four years ago.
So what's the heck here? I dunno. But we are on /., and 'bloody repeats!' are our staple diet here. alas.

Huh, what's a monolith, then? Maybe you mean 'monopoly'?
systemd, though, is a monolith, like pulseaudio.

And nobody argues about creating alternative to essentials, like sysvinit. Not at all. But never with the declared intention to supplant one monopoly with another one. Freedom is the freedom to plug in an alternative; not to have it forced down one's throat. And with the declared intention of systemd, sysvînit will not be any compatible plug-in alternative any longer. And it will be a monolith.

Nobody argues against a declarative, parallel, daemon initiation. But surely against one that has wider reaching consequences; up to graphical applications in userland.

You come across like a rather unthinking salesperson-type, sorry. Your nice words don't actually demonstrate that you know what you are talking about, sorry again.
You talk about features, documentation, and so forth. Would you know that the existing system init has been proven through more than one generation, fulfills its tasks splendidly, and has been without a glitch for me for the same time, is widely accepted, including by your perceived 'large community'. And then you equate a large number of people with quality, at least implicitly. I don't think you are a software engineer.

The start of the argument is silly, silly, silly. Why would system X be a good choice because there is a large developer community behind it? Then you must logically stick with Redmond. Or, even better, Android, with close to one million apps for download.

Can nobody do anything about this chap on an ego trip?
First, he didn't do what was necessary for audio; but made a huge, convoluted "Eierlgende Wollmilchsau" from it (I guess, he knows what that is!) that pops up and tells me all the while that I have plugged in some headphone or some; but doesn't remember, ever, despite of all my efforts, that, no, I don't want the internal sound card after each reboot, thank you very much! So I have been telling my machine for the last 2 years, whenever I boot, exactly that, and again. After each reboot. Thank you very much!
He seems to like all the convoluted stuff - against all Unix philosophy, by the way - and the stuff that usurp the rest of the world. How can a maniac be such unstoppable?

has a rule, conceived close to two generations ago: "Whatever the menu is going to offer, never mind. But the menu has to have Nuremberg sausages on it." And the menu has changed, a lot. Still there are Nuremberg sausages on it!

OT?? No, beware! This is spot on! What Debian is missing, and what has been discussed above, also in the context of 'democracy', is a constitution. Exactly like the Nuremberg sausages. A constitution that no forum can override. In this case it would have to contain "No package shall ever become singular alternative to run another program. If one does, it needs to be deleted immediately from the tree. Any new package, any new technology devised, must comply to this rule. There must never be any substitution of one package by another that breaks backward compatibility." Or so, I am not a lawyer.
Like Wayland, I love it, I tried it and want it on my tablet! And heel will freeze over before I use it voluntarily on my desktop! - Don't ask why! That's what my freedom is about, I guess. And the freedom of the developers is, to come up with systemd, that has some great points to it, or to come up with Wayland. Welcome! I'll try, and decide I want X and sysinit. Out and over!
Democracy ought to have never been allowed to factually abolish freedom!
 

Why AC? I would have liked to know who is behind such thoughtful lines.
And I have no mod points to make myself heard through your words.
Yours is an insightful and fully seconded message; since what we have been advocating from the early years of GNU onwards, was first and foremost freedom; and secondly modular architectures.
I have been teaching this to my students throughout the years, and I have poked fun at the 42 levels of dependencies gobbled together in Redmond. Today I'd blush if any of my students ever came back asking about freedom and modularity. When an oversized init is needed, this and none else, to use a drawing application. Good Lord! What has the early spawning of services to make with late applications!?!? And worse: There is zero - nil alternative as drop in. Welcome to the software Redmond V2.0! Okay, it is not from Redmond, but is intoxicated with its spirit.
The sad part is not, that it is; but that a bunch of people seemingly went crazy about this rotten philosophy. Like 'All your code are belong to us - because you can't run it without us!'. That's what I have been fighting for the last twenty years of my life: Applications not running on Linux as excuse to not run Linux. Now, in my graying years, applications don't run on Linux because of Linux. Do I need to carry on by drawing the next parallel, the one between DRM and systemd and Wayland?

Being too busy to try to figure out what Joey had in mind, I sympathise with him. Had to do with him some moment in time, with some bug/feature, and he was most helpful; and he came across as someone who'd live and die for Debian.
If he was with systemd or against it; to me the difference is nihil.

I do in a number of projects see the seniors leave, abandon, and being replaced by kids from another generation; with sometimes almost opposite ideas, motivations, and approaches. We, the old, (formerly, at least) long-bearded, left-leaning, nerds of the earlier years are on the way out. No tears, we have been able to set down a foot, or only a grain of sand (in my case); and the youngsters have to carry on, have to shoulder what it takes.
That I am not always very content with what goes on, stands on another page. It probably has to make with age, too.

Though you're an AC, I reply because this is about the closest what I can find in this discussion and what I also experience. In my case on kubuntu. So far everyone has shifted the responsibility to everyone else. Slowly I am getting sick of FOSS, though I have used it happily for close to 20 years.
Alas, also me getting old, and the youngsters don't always follow the philosophy of the old days. So we have to endure the modern types as well, the Lennart Ps, Christoph Fs, Vishesh Hs, etc., for whom the FOSS-thing is closer to an ego trip than a community effort.
Though back to the topic: I run kubuntu almost exclusively on a number of boxes, 32-bit, 64-bit, always updated. And for the last years, none has ever been willing to store my audio settings; except of the volume.
One DELL-box has seen me setting the output to 'headphone' some 50 times, after each reboot. Another self-assembled box (MSI) with internal audio and extra sound card comes back on the internal sound card after each reboot, and graciously accepts me setting it to the extra sound card; only to revert to the built-in device after the next reboot. And, yes, I have saved the settings close to one hundred times by now. Then I stopped, giving up, and start by setting the audio system to use the add-on sound card.
In the old days the distros could know much better what angle they were responsible for; and what was upstream. With the more recent smudge-over of functionality (against the UNIX philosophy of small, modular, distributed) it is also more difficult for them to locate the trouble. And so more recent bug reports on kubuntu are returned with 'report to KDE', and from there 'report to [application]'.

Sad, just sad, very sad.