Slashdot Mirror
Virtual Tourists in the Swiss Alps
Roland Piquepaille writes "Farmers in Switzerland receive money from their government for letting their cows eat young trees in the Alps. But why? Because this is improving the mountain views for tourists who might return year after year and spend their cash in the country. As the Swiss government wants to wisely spend its money, it is using a computer model of the mountains populated by virtual tourists -- or software agents -- which tirelessly take the same roads again and again and give their appreciation about the best spots. The Economist reports about these virtual tourists in this very cleverly-titled article, "Computer browsers." What will be the next logical step? Pay more the farmers with the strongest potential to improve the views for real tourists? Wrong. Instead, real hikers will be invited to explore the virtual Alps to give their feedback. Their observations will be then integrated into the software managing the virtual travelers. Read more for pictures and references."
It seems he is able to get an article posted on the front page at least once a week, maybe more.
This is just spam to get to his little site.
Maybe the editors are just incompetent and getting trolled, or this is some synergy (paid referrals) going on. So whats the deal?
** So what? His articles are interesting.
**
his articles suck.
basically what the guy does is he follows some other sites that have the real news on them, then he takes them(sometimes pretty much copypastes) them to his blog and after that he submits them to slashdot.
his publication(his blog) is pretty much a standard ripoff of the real sites and their news. but i guess they don't another publication copying their stories verbatim without hesitation.. I wonder if they would mind if started a newspaper that just copied the articles from other papers..
if he just wanted us to know about it he could submit the stories instead of copypasting together 'stories' of his own. yeah, i got karma to burn. i wish the excess karma could be used to vote on _changes_ to the system(among other things filtering the politics.slashdot.org doesn't seem to work, i've ticked both 'politics' topics in the exclude topics tab.. and for the reference there aren't _any_ sections to tick in the sections tab).
and to really 'stick it up': here's actually a meaningful link about the story at hand: http://www.sim.inf.ethz.ch/projects/alpsim/ . It's to the actual project..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm too lazy to sift through the thread and see if someone's already answered this, but cows, sheep, goats, etc. will all eat trees. Specifically, this article is referring to natural regeneration; not trees in the large-and-I-can-make-furniture-out-of-them sense, but trees in the in-120-years-I-can-make-furniture-out-of-them-sens e. Nothing more than a branch sticking out the ground, so to speak. IAAPF (I am a Professional Forester) so I can say that some species are actually quite tasty too! (Sassafras tastes like root beer, and black birch tastes like wintergreen for example)
May the threads progress competently.