I think it's time we make math more interesting and switch to base 23. Then it will be equally as complex as the US's Imperial ("Standard" or "English" or whatever) system of measurements- which might actually make more sense in base 23.. who knows. At least it will reduce the fixation on 9's and keep mathematicians busy for a few years while re-writing all their text books.

The reason they are not as sharp is because the reference image IS the JPEG version. They are using wikipedia images for examples, and they are working off the JPEG image to produce their WebP version.

They don't even know what quality the JPEG images were saved with, how many times they were resaved, or which JPEG algorithm was used.

I suspected the file sizes of the "original" JPEGs didn't match up with their quality. To verify, I took the second sample image, opened the "original" in photoshop, saved for web at 50% JPEG quality, and the file size was 139KB and the image was visually sharper and more detailed than the WebP version at 161KB. However, the WebP version was pixel per pixel, closer to the "original" and did not have the same JPEG artifacts you see in the new JPEG version. But I can't be sure this would be the case if a RAW image were used as the original.

did anyone consider ahead of time how many calculations would be necessary before they invested all that money?

I'm pretty sure they took a clear photo, and blurred it with their custom software to look like an unsteady hand, and then, knowing how it was blurred, their un-blurring algorithm worked great... show me some real-world examples of photos you didn't take.

Yeah, I'm thinking either they haven't considered a lot of things in this experiment, or they're keeping all the data to themselves until they can prove their speculations. I also hope they tested this with different elasticity coefficients and weights to be thorough.

To be honest, the results they are describing just make sense to me given what we already know about elasticity.. imagine the rubber band was made up of tiny links (like a the tread on a tank) and they were connected with the appropriate elasticity coefficient (that changes with the application of heat). I'm pretty sure if you model that you'll see that it's not so complicated after all.

This does not actually affect the IPad but rather is an attack to get Windows users to install an "update" for ITunes. The "update" is malware for Windows and is targeted at people who own an IPad and sync it with Windows.

If you have a Cisco ASA 5510 or higher you can purchase the botnet filter for roughly $320 a year. Then enable the filter on your internal interface to block any outbound traffic going to the known botnet IP ranges. I would also recommend blocking unnecessary outbound ports and limiting necessary ports to specific machines (ex. Port 25 mail server only outbound). I would also look at setting up a proxy server such as SQUID proxy. I would do mime filtering on untrusted web traffic and perhaps using dansguardian for prebuilt whitelist/blacklisting. At my workplace I am fortunate enough to be allowed to do a default deny on the entire internet, only white-listing work related sites (of course I work at a bank). Antivirus should be considered a secondary defense in this day and age. You really need to look at getting an IPS device for your network and then perhaps an aggregated log server if you haven't already. These last two recommendations will cost some money. So short term I would focus on outbound firewall filtering and a proxy server.

"and somehow you can't see the difference between '*I* can scoop fetus out of *my* body' and '*you* can't put salt on *my* food.'" You can go somewhere else to eat if you don't like salt. Nobody is forcing you to go there. Who are you to impose regulations on the restaurant owner? You didn't fork up the money to start their business. They have the freedom to choose how they want to make their food and the public has the freedom to choose if they want to eat it. You don't like it? Start your own restaurant and then make your food without salt... See how far that gets you. Probably just about as far as any other liberal fascist idea. Your ideas only work at the expense of others which is why regulations are pushed down our throats. Is there a law against pissing in the wind? No because everyone knows it is fucking stupid. People who run their own business know how to run it best. Others like yourself, impose regulations.

They should then be required to where corporate logos on their suits just like they do in NASCAR...

That's amazing. I have 3 checkboxes... the last one being "Display the list of people I'm following and people following me." I created my profile this last year when google wave went preview so it could have something to do with the age of your profile. Wish I could have been more help.