GP (not sure if that's you or not, both ACs) mentioned both 2 megabyte images from his current (7.2 megapixel) camera and a 2.1 megapixel old camera, and was apparently surprised that the 2 megabyte (presumably JPEG) files from his current camera have fewer artifacts than the 5872 byte JPEGs on the example site. I suspect he thought the 5872 number was kilobytes, i.e. a 5-6 megabyte file, which would explain why he would seemingly expect that to have better quality than the 2 megabyte files.

And bits per pixel times pixels only gives you a higher number of uncompressed bytes for the resultant files; compression should more than compensate for that, such as how his 7.2 megapixel camera which is presumably 32 bits per pixel doesn't therefore produce 28.8 megabyte files, but rather only around 2 megabytes files. If his old 2.1 megapixel camera was generating files that looked as crappy as the 5872 byte JPEG on the example site, they were probably (or at least hopefully) only a few kilobytes large each themselves.

Why are you surprised that a 5.8 thousand byte image has more artifacts than a 2 million(ish) byte image?

Offshoring and immigration are completely irrelevant to the "information wants to be free" debate. One is about labor relations, and asking the government not to enable (though immigration and tax policy) greedy corporations to force down the price of wages for local people just to stuff the pockets of corporate shareholders and executives. The other is about communication and not prohibiting any forms of it. They have nothing to do with each other.

There's no reason one approach has to block the other.

If there is a monopoly, it should be regulated as a common carrier.

If they don't want to be regulated as a common carrier, they have to let the competition in.

Let the ISPs themselves choose. Would you rather be a regulated common carrier monopoly or free to do as you like in a highly competitive market?

Either way, the users win.

Hosting is absurdly cheap though. I have a Dreamhost "unlimited" (for purposes of hosting a website, not being your personal backup, etc) plan that costs me less than $10/mo. The labor required to build and maintain a hobbyist site for a large community would be worth more than cost of hosting. So if you've got hobbyists who are enthusiastic enough to actually do the community-maintenance stuff to keep their online community running, gathering a measly 33 cents a day on average across all of them can't be that hard. If just one person in that community makes a decent enough living that a $10/mo donation to their favorite online community is trivial, then bam, hosting costs handled. Or ten fans who can each spare a buck a month?

It doesn't assign a heapiness value, though: it assigns odds of something being a heap. That still treats heaps as a crisp set. Compare: a probability function will tell me the odds of a die rolling a six, but it still either the die does or doesn't land on six; there is no "slightly six" in dice, there are just the odds of being either completely six or not. That's not the case with heaps: a collection of grains can be only slightly heapish, or very heapish, which is something different than being slightly or very likely to be (completely and unambiguously) a heap.

Europeans think 200 miles is a long distance; Americans think 200 years is a long time.

(And 2000 years ago is still pretty recent, even just as far as human history goes. That's closer to the Moon Landing than it is to the building of the Pyramids of Giza).

The formalism of use here is not probability, but fuzzy sets. The Problem of the Heap basically highlights that "heapishness" is not a crisp property; there is not a clear-cut line between heaps and non-heaps, rather the demarcation between heaps and non-heaps is fuzzy. A collection of grains of rice can be more heapish or less heapish, and sufficiently non-heapish (for a given purpose, context, etc) collections can be called simply "non-heaps", of sufficiently heapish collections likewise simply called "heaps", but there is never a sudden switch from heap to non-heap.

Probability doesn't express that properly, because it still speaks as though a given collection either is or isn't a heap, and adds the further complication that two different collections of the same number of grains may be a heap and not a heap respectively, though their odds of being a heap are the same.

Going back to chickens: it's not that over time, successive organisms got more and more likely to be chickens. It's that over time, successive organisms got more and more chickenish. Chickens are not a crisp set. Chickenishness if a fuzzy property.

But stillsufficiently chickenish birds came before sufficiently-chickenish-bird eggs, because a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, not necessarily an egg containing a chicken embryo. (Consider: when you buy unfertilized eggs at the store, are those chicken eggs or not?)

This is tangential but I just have to comment that there is so much presumption in your suggestions. That he has retirement savings that he could live off of. That he has a house he could sell. Especially that the alternative to owning a house would cost LESS than owning one — why would anyone ever buy if not to escape the infinite debt that is a life of renting until you die?

In my 20s I wanted to spend my life doing things to enrich the world, art and writing and philosophy, but got sidetracked from those things by the need to get a stable enough life that I could do those things without ending up homeless or starving again —after that happened or nearly happened too many times for comfort. Now as I'm approaching middle age myself, it's becoming clear that it's going to take my entire productive life, if I'm lucky and things continue going as well as they recently have started to, to get to a point where I don't have to work doing pointless things that contribute nothing of value to the world just to have a place to sleep, and can actually start doing something worth doing with my life when I retire — if I'm lucky enough to ever actually retire, since it'll likely be by retirement age that housing is secured and I can start saving up food money to live off of for the few years I'll have left, and that's ignoring the probability that by then I will likely have medical expenses destroying any ability to save like that anymore.

So the alternative to "toil[ing] away the rest of my life working for The Man doing trivial things" as the GP put it isn't "sell my house" or "live off my retirement savings", it's "sleep in my car and beg for food money". In either case I lose out on actually doing anything worth living for, but in the former case at least I'm living a comfortable pointless existence.

The mold dies once it reaches my stomach anyway, and it's already there by the time the wine gets anywhere near it, so I don't know what you're talking about with "kill the fungus". But seriously, bread and water with a roquefort? That leaves a meal of the strongest savory-flavored food in the world, paired with no other flavors of note (depending on the bread you're thinking of). Gotta add some variety in there, and the sweet and sour notes of a rich fruity wine contrast the savory cheese beautifully.

I also have a very high alcohol tolerance and don't care much for the taste, so I never understood why drinking was attractive at all. (With the exception of drinks that actually do taste good, mostly paired with good foods; I do like a nice sangria with my roquefort cheese).

I eventually discovered that I could get drunk if I combined hard liquor with caffeine. And I still didn't understand why that feeling would be appealing. Why would anyone enjoy having poor motor control and cloudy thinking?

Now a drug that made you hyper-competent, that I could see the appeal of; and it would probably be the downfall of me, assuming side-effects and addiction are the price of that temporary boost.

To be complete, Adams' story was far from complimentary of the B-ark people, too. In fact it's mostly just ragging on how useless and incompetent the B-ark people are (and how they completely ruined the world they eventually settled on), and only mentions in passing how their homeworld also collapsed in their absence.

In mathematics "almost" denotes an infinite set minus some finite subset, so if there are only 10 billion galaxies that can support life and the universe is infinite, then the universe is "almost lifeless": infinitely lifeless except some finite subset with potential life.

Indeed, in these kinds of class action lawsuits, there is only one big winner, and that is the lawyers who are litigating it.

I'm all for class action lawsuits in principle; companies that do things that are bad for soceity should face some sort of consequences for their actions, and people who were inconvenienced or harmed by the actions of companies should have some sort of recompence. In practice, however, usually what happens is that the people nominally benefitting get just a few dollars (probably not worth the paperwork of making it happen), the charge to the company is perhaps not trivial, but an easily absorbed cost of doing business, and it's a bonanza for the lawyers involved. The rewards system encourages litigous behavior for the sake of litigation, not good behavior on the part of companies nor does it provide any real recompense for people harmed.

Punishing people for speaking is tantamount to prohibiting speech. Virtually every law against anything is a declaration to the effect of "if you do this, you will be punished"; so if you can legally be punished for doing something, it is effectively illegal to do it.