6005.99999 years ago, one of them flipped God the bird and so He did Smite them and lo their teeh were no more and there was lamentaion and suffering.

Also, beaks are much lighter than teeth, which was probably a significant factor.

Also also, if you're thinking about mammal teeth, you're probably imagining it wrong. One of the unique things about mammal teeth is their complexity relative to the other branches of the vertibrates. Studying mammal evolution has been described as an exercise in studying teeth.

It's thought this advanced tooth development went hand in hand with warm blooded development during the pre-mammal period as more adavanced, inerlocking teeth were requied to mash up food better for quicker digestion which was required for a faster metabolism.

Most reptile teeth look primitive by comparison. Except that simple teeth are easily replacable and so reptiles can regrow lost teeth much more easily (later on some mammals in the ungulates developed open roots for continuous growth which was useful for grazers, whereas others hae a large stock of teeth then starve to death when they run out). The specialisation makes these much harder.

It seems likely that birds did not have the great teeth for supporting warm blooded metabolisms, but rather the simple, robust general purpose teeth of other reptiles, so in this sense there were not losing nearly as much. They also solved the grinding problem in a different way, using a gizzard (this may well predate birds: crocs have gizzards as well and it is speculated that some dinosaurs did). As a result they were replacing the bit that grips and possibly does some initial cutting of food with a much more lightweight structure.

And the other half of this is that students who not only have the pre-requisites but have already learned the course material should be able to test out. Perhaps required to test out,

Possibly. Might just be easier to tell them that it's an optional catch up course for those not already up to speed. Students rarely take optional catch up courses if they don't need them.

No need to faff with burdening everyone with extra exams.

the effective sequestering of unprepared individuals until they are ready - is a good idea.

Certainly: if you are trying to teach a class it is a pain in the neck if half of the sudents doen't actually know the prerequisite material. The obvious solution is to teach them the prerequisiste material.

But did anyone consider the possibility of the government backstopping insurance companies for high-expense patients, by (for example) putting a cap on the amount of money an insurance company must pay out in the lifetime of an individual (call it $1 million)--then when you hit that cap, the money beyond that cap comes from the government, filtered through the insurance company? That is, we socialize costs for expensive patients, while privatizing costs below the cap.

My god no!

That's socialising the losses and privaising the losses. That's using tax money to let the insurance companies cream off only he most profitable bits while making the taxes pay for the unprofitable bits.

Beer was invented to create a use for grain that had sat too long and gone off.

Or, it was mostly drunk because beer is safe as the alcohol kills bacteria. Read some history of Europe. People spent most of the time mildly pissed because it was the only not to get something worse.

Small beer was a breakfast drink.

Does Windows support running Linux apps? No.

Windows does not acively support it (that's not the issue), but it certainly does not BLOCK it either:

http://www.colinux.org/
Cygwin
MingW

And then there's various VMs and so on.

Also, 3-D printed titanium? Have we skipped ahead a century or so?

No. If you have a cool million or so to drop on a 3 printer, you can print with a variety of metals in very high precision, including titanium and hardened steel.

For example, here is a 3D printed gun:

https://www.solidconcepts.com/...

You can print all sorts of stuff.

Not to mention, the creative types who are prototyping new and interesting inventions that weren't cost effective if sent to milling houses.

This is the use I'm most interested in. I have a couple of dual head Printrbot 2.1's. personally I rather like dual head printers since I'm no contsrained to print shapes where support material can easily be picked off. I favour ABS and HIPS as the latter dissolves easily.

I'm part of a startup. We're going through a rapid ieration phase for a wearable medical device. We can get a small batch of circuit boards done, then do a bunch of iterations on the case, print out the "final" cases and get that round of devices out and tested.

Works amazingly well.

Um... would you like a beer, perchance?

yes, but I would also like a better T key without the junk stuck under it :(

. And it's all on the cop to make sure he is polite, doesn't use excessive force

Yeah you're right. It should be up to that guy in the middle of being choked to death to ensure the cop isn't in fact choking him to death. The cop shouldn't have to make sure he isn't murdering someone for a misdemenour.

Silly me.

TIFF has excellent compression, the best in fact. It even supports BPG. All you need to do is encode the image and mark it with TIFFTAG_COMPRESSION_BPG (defined as 0xdeadbeef) :)

For those who don't know, TIFF is basically a miniture filesystem inside a file. So, generally TIFF decoding is about as hard as being handed an ISO image with arbirary files in it and told to get the images.

Funny you should say that...

EPS can already support this in principle.

PS decodes things in a chain, where an element of the chain consumes data, processes it and emits data. You can insert arbitrary PostScript code into the decoding chain. This has been used in the past to implement everything from better compressors to an entire raytracing engine.

If they have to be told what the image is from to get upset

Everyone knows now.

Trying to play language laywer: "oh without being *told* you can't tell it's from playboy so you're no allowed to get offended at the single mos popular image in compure vision being a Playboy centrefold" just makes you seem silly, to be honest.

Everyone knows already. I's really sodding tastless, neer mind that the image has been so far used to death and beyond that i's not even funny.

to paraphrase Steve Jobs,

Ah yes, wisdom from the man who believed he inventd rounded corners.

The image as it is now does not objectify women any more than images that run in modern newspapers.

Nope, because everyone knows it came from Playboy. It's like a nudge nudge wink wink know what I mean say no more say no more kind of image.

If you can tell them instead it's from some old ladies fashion magazine and they're suddenly okay with it, I'd have to say you proved my point.

Except it isn't. And everyone can prove that.

Anyway the source of things DOES matter. It's why blood diamonds and trade in endangered species is illegal. Without digging further, you can't tell if they're really blood diamonds, or no bred in captivity. It becomes bad when the source is known.

This is because people have ethics.

In order for something to be sexist doesn't it in some way have to discriminate between sexes?

It's always totally neutral images or a picure cropped from a playboy centerfold, with the later dominating about 2:1. Don't see how this is just a little biased?

You can either even it up by having some fine male specimines too, or just retire that image.

OK, this is going to really get my goat.

Except that this test image has just a face and part of a shoulder, without any naughty bits. Not even erotic at all.

Except that everybody KNOWS that it's a cutout of some porn. You know what? That's tasteless and tacky. Years ago when I was a PhD student in computer vision (more later) I used to help supervise an image processing practical. It used Lena of course. Sooner or later someone found out and everyone had a good laugh.

Well the guys in the practical (90% of the people). The other 10% didn't seem to think i's so funny. I can't imagine why. So yes having a PlayBoy centrefold, even cropped sets completely the wrong tone. It sets the tone that it's no just male dominated but a total boy's club too.

For some reason all the other images are bland and neutral. You never see someone pointing out how good the reproduction of high frequencies on Baywach era David Hasslehof's manly chest or anything.

It's always Lena, peppers, and a few others.

It's a good test image because it catches both distortions of detail and color damage to areas with a gentle gradient.

No, it was good perhaps 15 years ago. It has a little high frequencies and a bit fo gradient. There are far beer trickier images now. There are far beer images it's easy to get hold of that are much harsher in those regards. All the massive overuse of Lena does is lead to ad-hoc reverse engineering of tha picture. Or as some wag in the field pointed out, the Lena compression algorithm: If the first bit is 0 then emit Lena, otherwise decode any remaining data as a JPEG.

If I have to see yet another buchered version of a Lena picture again in a compuer vision paper that I read or review, I seriously think I will murderize someone.