I don't consider myself "old", but my first PC was an XT with *dual* 5.25" floppy drives
Bah! My first computer used a cassette to load programs (at about 300 baud, I think). Eventually, we got a single floppy for it (single sided, what's that, 180K?)
(and, yes, I guess I do consider myself old. though at least I never used 8" disks.)
consisting of as many as six lanes for cars and four for trucks
That's 3 car lanes and 2 truck lanes in each direction. Bah. We've got that many lanes already in some stretches of the capital beltway here in Washington DC.
I was glad to hear, though, that they're considering rail as well. In western Virginia, they've talked about adding "truck only lanes" to I-81 (which is only two lanes on each side and carries a LOT of trucks). I've always wondered why they don't just put a rail line down the median. I mean, if they expect trucks to roll in at the Kentucky or North Carolina border and go north to Maryland, hell, just put a rail yard at each end, let the truckers pull onto a flatbed, and every hour or so roll another train out. I'd imagine the trip would be faster, cheaper, and more efficient, plus it'd give the drivers time to sleep.
I'm sure there are plenty of "rural" interstate routes and interchanges that'd be ripe for such an overlaid rail network. If you can bring the trucks to within, say, 50 miles of a major city (I-81 is about 55 miles west of Washington via I-66), you'll take a helluva lot of traffic off the interstates, reduce gas use, reduce driver fatigue, and still have the truck industry for the "local" segments. Seems to me it'd be a great hybrid shipping network, easier than bringing rail too close to cities and more efficient than relying only on trucks.
The problem being that this can undercut domestic policies. E.g. if you can buy from a country with no copyright law, then the copyright law in your own country becomes pretty worthless.
Agreed - and I don't have any easy answer for that. However, I don't think that anyone would say that you should surrender your CDs when you travel overseas (and especially not when you *move* overseas). So why should a purchase from a foreign country be any different? So long as what you purchase is legal where you purchased it, it's yours, you bought it, you paid for it, take it wherever you like.
There isn't any easy answer. It hasn't been a problem before, because it hasn't been terribly convenient to buy from overseas. But when you can get 7-day turnaround from amazon.co.uk (as I've managed on a couple of occasions), well, those quaint concepts like nationally-based rights owners sort of become irrelevant.
It'll be interesting to see how all this falls out over the next several years... though I suppose it could be solved with a really simple political solution: Exorbitant tarrifs or outright prohibitions on "personal" importation. Though the ship may have sailed on that already....
Apple has to license the songs from a different organization, for a different price, in each country.
Yeah, I sorta deliberately glossed over that.
On the other hand, if they only sell *from the US server*, then do they really need to license in each country?
A further modification of my slogan: "One world. One song. One price."
After all, it's the same bloody song no matter where you buy it, screw those other countries' licensing schemes. The artist will still get paid, right, whether the purchase comes from the US store or the UK store. Right?
(yes, I'm glossing over further stupid complexities. But it's about time the world moved past those idiotic practices. You should be allowed to buy from wherever the hell you please. This applies equally to books, CDs, and DVDs. As someone said further up, it's a global economy -- that should apply to the final, consumer stage of the process as well as to the manufacturing side of things.)
will apple keep 0.99 euros and change the british price or keep 0.69 pounds and change the euro price?
Apple's an American company. They should just set the price at $0.99 and let everyone do the math at checkout.
99 US cents = 0.74 Euro cent = 51 pence 99 Euro cent = $1.33 = 68 pence 79 pence = $1.53 = 1.14 Euro
So going with UK units, the US and Europe get screwed. With Euro pricing, the US gets screwed, while the UK gets a drop in price. Pricing based on the dollar, the US stays the same, and both Europe and the UK get a bargain. Sounds like a win/win for everyone!
I mean, really, think of the slogan: "One world. One price. One dollar." (or is that too....er...militaristic?)
1) Make holograms of the digits of the time in question (lots of holograms). 2) Take the holograms and cut them into strips. 3) Take some of the strips and glue them back to make one hologram
I don't think it uses holograms. It's more like a series of carefully-arranged slits, with light coming in from any given angle only making it through the gauntlet in a single path, while light form a different angle hits a different path. Theoretically *like* a hologram, but simulated by the masks over a depth somewhat greater than a single sheet of film.
On the other hand, I'd wondered *years* ago whether a digital sundial could be easily made from a simple hologram. No need to cut into strips -- any hologram already gives different images depending on the angle you look at it from. Generally, you see this as you walk around a hologram (like the novelty ones where someone blows you a kiss). Only instead of you walking, if you move the light source, the same animation plays out. Just build a multi-image hologram of all sorts of clock images, and as the light source moves, you'll see the clock animate forwards. It could even be an analog clock -- any picture would work.
If you account for varying altitudes of the sun, you might even be able to get the month displayed (though it'd probably have to show two dates at once, letting the user decide whether it's, say, December 1 or January 9 (each being about 20 days away from the solstice).
[note: The newspaper photo on the MSNBC story looks like it's got a space shuttle mockup in the background. The "photo gallery" link has better images.]
Aside from the obvious color scheme borrowed from the US orbiters, this seems like it's really just incremental progress. Going from a 3-person Soyuz to a 6-person Klipper seems very much like one of the crew reentry vehicle concepts that have been floating around in the US for a while. One of those took an Apollo capsule, and extended it downwards a bit, to fit six people instead of three.
On the other hand, the "lifting body" design is interesting, if it'll work enough of the time (I'm gathering the parachute reentry option is for when the runways aren't available or weather doesn't cooporate).
On the gripping hand, I'm having Six Million Dollar Man flashbacks.
...about 5 years ago (or maybe even longer) there was talk about a pilot program for something like this out near me (just west of Washington DC). I'm glad to hear that the concept hasn't been lost.
I haven't read the article yet, but here are the thoughts I've had about it in the past:
Run the cars in the street, just like old (wait for it) streetcars.
Obviously, they'll need proximity sensors and some way to follow traffic signals, etc.
Put stations at Elementary Schools. In my area, at least, these are plentiful, within walking distance of many homes, and generally fairly safe.
Join cars up into longer trains as cars with similar destinations meet on the road. These trains can therefore run faster (and once they hit, say, the highway median, jump onto express tracks)
Of course, there are also problems of payment (flash passes, credit card swipers, etc.), car calling (it'd be good to have enough in the system that you never have more than a 5 minute wait), etc. But generally, those are technical / scalability problems, not issues with implementation in general. The hardest issue to crack would be right-of-way, but getting the cars to co-exist on current surface roads would nip that problem in the bud pretty quickly (and turns it from a land-acquisition problem back into a "simple" technical problem).
Do Golomb rulers exist that can measure every integer distance from 1 up to their length?
That is, a ruler with marks at (0,1,2) can measure lengths of 1, 2, and 3 units, and is 3 units long. The sample ruler on the above-linked site has marks at (0,1,4,9,11), and can measure every length between 1 and 11 EXCEPT 6. You can swap the first two blocks (giving (0,3,4,9,11)) but then you lose the ability to measure 10.
I guess what I'm asking is whether these rulers exist, and how many are they? Or is there a point where they stop being possible?
I believe there is a.torrent floating around that was ripped from the original laserdiscs, all ready for burning to DVD.
Okay, maybe I'm just stupid, but I've tried torrents on a few different occasions, and have simply never been able to get it to work well. Just now, I tried one of the links posted elsewhere on this discussion, and maxed out at about 4 KB/s download. 138 hours to complete. And I'm on a fairly speedy connection (4MB down, 512K up), so it's not my network.
Am I missing something stupid? Do I need to punch holes in my firewall? If so, how does one do that while still remaining secure (that is, what do I need to open, and how dangeroud is it)?
I've had similar issues with Kazaa and Gnutella. And I'm on a business class connection (Cox Business Cable), so I don't think there's any protocol-specific throttling going on at the ISP (though I could be wrong).
Thats fine for a 2-5 person race, but imagine a 15 seat city council election, with over 25 people running, you would have a 10 page ballot.
No, because the "A > B, B > C, C > D" comparisons are inferred from the ranking. You only need to rank them all at once.
So a 25-person race would just have 25 names listed, and you put a "1" next to the person you like best, "2" next to your second choice, etc.
That said, I'm not sure how Condercet works for a multi-seat election like a county council. I guess it's just a question of ranking the final results.
If 20% of the population prefer Nader to Kerry and Kerry to Bush, 35% of the population prefer Kerry to Nader and Nader to Bush, and 45% of the population prefer Bush to Kerry and Kerry to Nader, then 80% prefer Kerry to Nader and 55% prefer Kerry to Bush, so Kerry wins by every pair-wise comparison and hence would win the election.
Ah, that seems much easier than what I just wrote. Lemme try and clean it up:
20% vote: Nader, Kerry, Bush
35% vote: Kerry, Nader, Bush
45% vote: Bush, Kerry, Nader
You end up with three two-way elections: Kerry/Bush, Kerry/Nader, Bush/Nader.
Kerry beats Bush in 55% of ballots.
Kerry beats Nader in 80% of ballots.
Nader beats Bush in 55% of ballots.
No other candidate beats *both* of the other two in more than 50% of the ballots cast, so Kerry wins.
That said, I don't think I would be opposed to Condorcet voting. (However, I'd like to see an introduction to it that is presented in a less dense way than the one at electionmethods.org. You know, something I could send other people to and actually expect them to read.)
I'll try.
Everyone ranks their candidates: I like Alice better than Bob better than Charlie. I hate Zod so much I don't even bother to rank him at all.
This vote can then be re-worded as a series of A/B comparisons: I like Alice better than Bob, Alice better than Charlie, and Alice better than Zod. Bob > Charlie, Bob > Zod. Charlie > Zod.
Count all "I like X better than Y" votes. The candidate who has more "better than" votes against more candidates wins. 5000 people like Alice better than Bob, and only 2000 people like Bob better than Alice. Chalk one "runoff" for Alice. Repeat for Alice/Charlie, Alice/Zod, Bob/Charlie, Bob/Zod, Charlie/Zod.
Put another way: Everyone ranks their choices. Simple math is used to turn those ranks into multiple head-to-head competitions among all candidates. The candidate who wins the most head-to-head comparisons is therefore most agreeable, and wins the election.
Essentially, you're asking every voter: If you were voting between Kerry and Nader, who would you vote for? If between Kerry and Bush? If between Bush and Nader?
Can anyone who's had more than 20 minutes with Condercet comment on this? Have I come close?
We're not talking about requiring them to deliver service to the competition, but impairing the services they have been contracted to deliver simply because the company in question is providing a competing service.
The problem is, they haven't agreed contractually to provide any given quality of service for any given protocols. Except, maybe, for WWW and email.
And also any agreement that the typical home user gets probably also says that the cable company can change the offerings w/out warning, at will. So what's to stop them from adding a line "we support only our own VOIP service. All other VOIP services will be blocked." Not much you can do then, eh?
Sound quality: both about the same. you'll get zealots on both sides who swear on their grandmother's grave that one or the other is better, but really, they're all about the same.
The SkyFi has a cradle for the car, and for home, but it's not been terribly convenient for me to switch between the car and home. The Roady2 is really small, can probably velcro to your dash, and (I think) has a built-in FM modulator. Though I'd probably suggest you use a cassette or aux-in adaptor instead. People have even made little battery-containing-armbands for the Roady2 so you can use it as a portable. I don't know what Sirius offers.
It'd be nice to have NPR, but I can pretty reliably find that on my FM dial, and XM now has XM Public Radio, with many PRI programs and Bob Edwards (but no All Things Considered or Morning Edition, nor Car Talk or Prarie Home).
XM has pretty good coverage on the less-mainstream stuff. Fine Tuning is a VERY eclectic mix of pop, rock, progressive, classical, new age, and very occasionally folk. There are 3 or 4 dance/technois chanels, a bunch of world channels, and an 80s channel that generally plays pretty good stuff.
Also, I'm pretty sure you can subscribe on a monthly basis with XM. And XM has terrestrial repeaters that help when satellite reception is spotty (though even that fails in heavily wooded areas). I'm pretty sure Sirius does not have that.
Check out XMFan.com for a lot of good information, opinions, and reviews.
Not bad. You don't get Lisa Baden's goofy commentary, but generally it's pretty good. They do it in four phases:
* "Jam Alert Status" - Red (absoultely fucked up, like the beltway's blocked), Yellow (typical everyday delays), and Green (everything's smooth)
* Key alerts (major or unusual backups listed w/out much detail, like "delays northbound at quantico and an overturned cement truck on the BW parkway")
* Detailed information (all around the city, no predictable pattern, pretty much all major roads hit always, with the notable exception of the toll road, which is often missed:( ) Includes details for the key alerts listed above.
* Sometimes, specific information on smaller incidents on smaller roads
They also frequently give travel times ("27 minutes from 495 to Centreville at an average speed of 34 mph"). Also, for severe alerts (like a Red alert, a blocked road, or a tornado warning) it'll be showin in the display. Usually, the display shows visibility ("Partly Cloudy") for the "artist" and temperature for the current song. A couple weeks ago it said "WELCOME EXPOS!!!":) (XM is headquartered downtown)
All this happens in about 2-5 minutes, total (including weather report and a couple of ads), then it repeats. I think they re-record the report every 20-30 minutes (I haven't tried to prove that).
I still hit WTOP occasionally, just in case I'm looking for a particular detail and XM didn't have it, or if I'm absolutely wanting the latest info (as I said, they repeat each report on XM a few times before they record new ones). Of course, even WTOP doesn't always have up-to-the-minute information, since there's a delay and they don't always report on all roads at each report.
All in all, though, it's very highly recommended.:)
..that what I'd really like in my car is time-shifted:
* News
* Traffic
* Weather
Of course, the radio station's business model depends on my sitting through mind-numbing ads to catch the 20-second blast of traffic info
XM doesn't do time-shifting (though the forthcoming SkyFi-2 does have a 30 minute "history" buffer). But it does have 24x7 news channels (fox, cnn, headline, msnbc, etc.), weather (the weather channel), and about 20 or so 24x7 traffic/weather channels for specific major cities. Takes about 2 minutes to loop through traffic and weather for me here in Washington, DC.
They even have an "emergency" channel now (channel 247 - get it? 24x7?) where they were broadcasting detailed information about shelters, storm tracks, road closings, tornadoes, etc., when the hurricanes recently hit Florida. This channel is, if I recall correctly, broadcast for free. Even non-activated receivers can get it.
I've had XM for about 6 months, and it's been worth every dime.
It's not been conclusively proven that the recording features of TimeTrax hastened the demise of the XM-PCR unit. In fact, IIRC, XM Radio hasn't even admitted that they've discontinued it. Many feel the PCR was on its way out regardless (which was part of why many sites were selling at steep discounts in the month or two prior to its disappearance).
This unit is basically just a pinout converter, maybe with level adjustment and such. The software must use the XM Direct protocol, which is different from the XM PCR protocl and has not yet been published (by anyone, even those who created this system).
Another system (at xmfan.com) includes a USB adaptor and a microcontroller-based protocol converter, that accepts the existing XM PCR commands and converts them to XM Direct. That system works with all existing software except the stock software distributed with XM PCR.
What is going to happen: Someone is going to get the crap sued out of them.
Why? They've done nothing wrong. In fact, they've done exactly what Terk/Blitzsafe is doing -- provided an interface between the XM Direct tuner module and a head unit. Only in this case the head unit is a PC, not a car radio.
All rail in the UK seems determined to be as crap as possible.
Hey, at least you've *got* serious rail. I recently spent a couple weeks in the UK (mostly in Yorkshire) and was impressed by the rail system, overall. We had one delay coming back from London (the Leeds train was late) but in general, we never had any problems.
And the whole "walk a few blocks into town to grab a train to go the next major city over" thing was fantastic. Just £6.50 for a 1-hour ride to/from York? Incredible. That'd be like driving to the nearest strip mall here in Northern Virgina and getting to downtown Baltimore for, what, $10 or so? I can't even do round-trip to DC for under $7 during rush hour, and the nearest Metro (subway) station is a 15 minute drive away.
So, yes, there are probably many problems, and there will *always* be problems. But having a large, well-used, cheap regional/national rail network is something we chaps on the left side of the pond will always envy. We're lucky if we can get regional rail around a single city, let alone networked between 'em. (and we'll never have a subway as pervasive as the London Underground, except in New York, and that's only because it was built so long ago).
Their first HD-based MP3 player was the Rio Riot. I bought one of those a couple of years ago on eBay for about 2/3 list, and love it. However, I rarely use it any longer because of a) low battery life, b) absolutely impossible to get music onto the damned thing, and c) I now have XM.
Aside from the above-mentioned drawbacks, what I really loved about the Riot was the interface. It had the standard by song, by artist, and by genre selections. But you could also build your own playlists (we've done that on long trips, on the fly), it also can play random selections from your most-played songs, least-played songs, or even just fill X number of minutes with random music.
Unfortunately, it was only USB-1, and required a screwed-up version of iTunes or MusicMatch to get songs onto the unit. Right now I really want to remove all the music and start over, but it's just too difficult to bother with.:(
Even the iPod, from what I understand, doesn't do this quite "right". All I want is a fast interface (USB2 or FW), that shows up as a hard drive, and let me drag songs and playlists on/off as I like. let the box periodically re-index its database, rather than doing it as I transfer songs (as every other device seems to do).
Anyway, I just wanted to point out that this wasn't Rio's first HD unit. And that I still like their software better than the iPod's. Give me iPod-quality hardware with improved Rio software, and I'll go back to MP3s in a heartbeat.
I mean, how far do we take this? Is van Hollen automatically entitled to *all* domains that might be remotely associated with his campaign? If van Hollen had himself purchased vanhollen2004.com, would we be having this conversation if the opponent has set up vanhollen-2004.com?
The website is real. It's not a "buy me for megabucks!" squatter. It says right up front that it's not an official Chris van Hollen site. There's nothing misleading about it, except for the little trick of the name itself.
Whether it's ethical, or "right," is another question entirely. But I'd rather these stupid tricks play out on the internet, where I can choose not to surf to a website, than on the streets, where all those damned (and illegal) campaign signs show up every year making it almost impossible to see around corners, if you're in a small car.
Slashdot Mirror
We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake [...] if we were LUCKY!
I suppose I should have expected that.
I don't consider myself "old", but my first PC was an XT with *dual* 5.25" floppy drives
Bah! My first computer used a cassette to load programs (at about 300 baud, I think). Eventually, we got a single floppy for it (single sided, what's that, 180K?)
(and, yes, I guess I do consider myself old. though at least I never used 8" disks.)
consisting of as many as six lanes for cars and four for trucks
That's 3 car lanes and 2 truck lanes in each direction. Bah. We've got that many lanes already in some stretches of the capital beltway here in Washington DC.
I was glad to hear, though, that they're considering rail as well. In western Virginia, they've talked about adding "truck only lanes" to I-81 (which is only two lanes on each side and carries a LOT of trucks). I've always wondered why they don't just put a rail line down the median. I mean, if they expect trucks to roll in at the Kentucky or North Carolina border and go north to Maryland, hell, just put a rail yard at each end, let the truckers pull onto a flatbed, and every hour or so roll another train out. I'd imagine the trip would be faster, cheaper, and more efficient, plus it'd give the drivers time to sleep.
I'm sure there are plenty of "rural" interstate routes and interchanges that'd be ripe for such an overlaid rail network. If you can bring the trucks to within, say, 50 miles of a major city (I-81 is about 55 miles west of Washington via I-66), you'll take a helluva lot of traffic off the interstates, reduce gas use, reduce driver fatigue, and still have the truck industry for the "local" segments. Seems to me it'd be a great hybrid shipping network, easier than bringing rail too close to cities and more efficient than relying only on trucks.
The problem being that this can undercut domestic policies. E.g. if you can buy from a country with no copyright law, then the copyright law in your own country becomes pretty worthless.
Agreed - and I don't have any easy answer for that. However, I don't think that anyone would say that you should surrender your CDs when you travel overseas (and especially not when you *move* overseas). So why should a purchase from a foreign country be any different? So long as what you purchase is legal where you purchased it, it's yours, you bought it, you paid for it, take it wherever you like.
There isn't any easy answer. It hasn't been a problem before, because it hasn't been terribly convenient to buy from overseas. But when you can get 7-day turnaround from amazon.co.uk (as I've managed on a couple of occasions), well, those quaint concepts like nationally-based rights owners sort of become irrelevant.
It'll be interesting to see how all this falls out over the next several years... though I suppose it could be solved with a really simple political solution: Exorbitant tarrifs or outright prohibitions on "personal" importation. Though the ship may have sailed on that already....
Apple has to license the songs from a different organization, for a different price, in each country.
Yeah, I sorta deliberately glossed over that.
On the other hand, if they only sell *from the US server*, then do they really need to license in each country?
A further modification of my slogan:
"One world. One song. One price."
After all, it's the same bloody song no matter where you buy it, screw those other countries' licensing schemes. The artist will still get paid, right, whether the purchase comes from the US store or the UK store. Right?
(yes, I'm glossing over further stupid complexities. But it's about time the world moved past those idiotic practices. You should be allowed to buy from wherever the hell you please. This applies equally to books, CDs, and DVDs. As someone said further up, it's a global economy -- that should apply to the final, consumer stage of the process as well as to the manufacturing side of things.)
will apple keep 0.99 euros and change the british price or keep 0.69 pounds and change the euro price?
Apple's an American company. They should just set the price at $0.99 and let everyone do the math at checkout.
99 US cents = 0.74 Euro cent = 51 pence
99 Euro cent = $1.33 = 68 pence
79 pence = $1.53 = 1.14 Euro
So going with UK units, the US and Europe get screwed. With Euro pricing, the US gets screwed, while the UK gets a drop in price. Pricing based on the dollar, the US stays the same, and both Europe and the UK get a bargain. Sounds like a win/win for everyone!
I mean, really, think of the slogan:
"One world. One price. One dollar."
(or is that too....er...militaristic?)
1) Make holograms of the digits of the time in question (lots of holograms).
2) Take the holograms and cut them into strips.
3) Take some of the strips and glue them back to make one hologram
I don't think it uses holograms. It's more like a series of carefully-arranged slits, with light coming in from any given angle only making it through the gauntlet in a single path, while light form a different angle hits a different path. Theoretically *like* a hologram, but simulated by the masks over a depth somewhat greater than a single sheet of film.
On the other hand, I'd wondered *years* ago whether a digital sundial could be easily made from a simple hologram. No need to cut into strips -- any hologram already gives different images depending on the angle you look at it from. Generally, you see this as you walk around a hologram (like the novelty ones where someone blows you a kiss). Only instead of you walking, if you move the light source, the same animation plays out. Just build a multi-image hologram of all sorts of clock images, and as the light source moves, you'll see the clock animate forwards. It could even be an analog clock -- any picture would work.
If you account for varying altitudes of the sun, you might even be able to get the month displayed (though it'd probably have to show two dates at once, letting the user decide whether it's, say, December 1 or January 9 (each being about 20 days away from the solstice).
[note: The newspaper photo on the MSNBC story looks like it's got a space shuttle mockup in the background. The "photo gallery" link has better images.]
Aside from the obvious color scheme borrowed from the US orbiters, this seems like it's really just incremental progress. Going from a 3-person Soyuz to a 6-person Klipper seems very much like one of the crew reentry vehicle concepts that have been floating around in the US for a while. One of those took an Apollo capsule, and extended it downwards a bit, to fit six people instead of three.
On the other hand, the "lifting body" design is interesting, if it'll work enough of the time (I'm gathering the parachute reentry option is for when the runways aren't available or weather doesn't cooporate).
On the gripping hand, I'm having Six Million Dollar Man flashbacks.
I haven't read the article yet, but here are the thoughts I've had about it in the past:
- Run the cars in the street, just like old (wait for it) streetcars.
- Obviously, they'll need proximity sensors and some way to follow traffic signals, etc.
- Put stations at Elementary Schools. In my area, at least, these are plentiful, within walking distance of many homes, and generally fairly safe.
- Join cars up into longer trains as cars with similar destinations meet on the road. These trains can therefore run faster (and once they hit, say, the highway median, jump onto express tracks)
Of course, there are also problems of payment (flash passes, credit card swipers, etc.), car calling (it'd be good to have enough in the system that you never have more than a 5 minute wait), etc. But generally, those are technical / scalability problems, not issues with implementation in general. The hardest issue to crack would be right-of-way, but getting the cars to co-exist on current surface roads would nip that problem in the bud pretty quickly (and turns it from a land-acquisition problem back into a "simple" technical problem).For now, at least: ftpmoz.newaol.com/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases /1.0/
Anyone know if the New York Times ad went through? Is it available to view anywhere?
Do Golomb rulers exist that can measure every integer distance from 1 up to their length?
That is, a ruler with marks at (0,1,2) can measure lengths of 1, 2, and 3 units, and is 3 units long. The sample ruler on the above-linked site has marks at (0,1,4,9,11), and can measure every length between 1 and 11 EXCEPT 6. You can swap the first two blocks (giving (0,3,4,9,11)) but then you lose the ability to measure 10.
I guess what I'm asking is whether these rulers exist, and how many are they? Or is there a point where they stop being possible?
I believe there is a .torrent floating around that was ripped from the original laserdiscs, all ready for burning to DVD.
Okay, maybe I'm just stupid, but I've tried torrents on a few different occasions, and have simply never been able to get it to work well. Just now, I tried one of the links posted elsewhere on this discussion, and maxed out at about 4 KB/s download. 138 hours to complete. And I'm on a fairly speedy connection (4MB down, 512K up), so it's not my network.
Am I missing something stupid? Do I need to punch holes in my firewall? If so, how does one do that while still remaining secure (that is, what do I need to open, and how dangeroud is it)?
I've had similar issues with Kazaa and Gnutella. And I'm on a business class connection (Cox Business Cable), so I don't think there's any protocol-specific throttling going on at the ISP (though I could be wrong).
Thats fine for a 2-5 person race, but imagine a 15 seat city council election, with over 25 people running, you would have a 10 page ballot.
No, because the "A > B, B > C, C > D" comparisons are inferred from the ranking. You only need to rank them all at once.
So a 25-person race would just have 25 names listed, and you put a "1" next to the person you like best, "2" next to your second choice, etc.
That said, I'm not sure how Condercet works for a multi-seat election like a county council. I guess it's just a question of ranking the final results.
If 20% of the population prefer Nader to Kerry and Kerry to Bush, 35% of the population prefer Kerry to Nader and Nader to Bush, and 45% of the population prefer Bush to Kerry and Kerry to Nader, then 80% prefer Kerry to Nader and 55% prefer Kerry to Bush, so Kerry wins by every pair-wise comparison and hence would win the election.
Ah, that seems much easier than what I just wrote. Lemme try and clean it up:
20% vote: Nader, Kerry, Bush
35% vote: Kerry, Nader, Bush
45% vote: Bush, Kerry, Nader
You end up with three two-way elections: Kerry/Bush, Kerry/Nader, Bush/Nader.
Kerry beats Bush in 55% of ballots.
Kerry beats Nader in 80% of ballots.
Nader beats Bush in 55% of ballots.
No other candidate beats *both* of the other two in more than 50% of the ballots cast, so Kerry wins.
That said, I don't think I would be opposed to Condorcet voting. (However, I'd like to see an introduction to it that is presented in a less dense way than the one at electionmethods.org. You know, something I could send other people to and actually expect them to read.)
I'll try.
Everyone ranks their candidates: I like Alice better than Bob better than Charlie. I hate Zod so much I don't even bother to rank him at all.
This vote can then be re-worded as a series of A/B comparisons: I like Alice better than Bob, Alice better than Charlie, and Alice better than Zod. Bob > Charlie, Bob > Zod. Charlie > Zod.
Count all "I like X better than Y" votes. The candidate who has more "better than" votes against more candidates wins. 5000 people like Alice better than Bob, and only 2000 people like Bob better than Alice. Chalk one "runoff" for Alice. Repeat for Alice/Charlie, Alice/Zod, Bob/Charlie, Bob/Zod, Charlie/Zod.
Put another way: Everyone ranks their choices. Simple math is used to turn those ranks into multiple head-to-head competitions among all candidates. The candidate who wins the most head-to-head comparisons is therefore most agreeable, and wins the election.
Essentially, you're asking every voter: If you were voting between Kerry and Nader, who would you vote for? If between Kerry and Bush? If between Bush and Nader?
Can anyone who's had more than 20 minutes with Condercet comment on this? Have I come close?
We're not talking about requiring them to deliver service to the competition, but impairing the services they have been contracted to deliver simply because the company in question is providing a competing service.
The problem is, they haven't agreed contractually to provide any given quality of service for any given protocols. Except, maybe, for WWW and email.
And also any agreement that the typical home user gets probably also says that the cable company can change the offerings w/out warning, at will. So what's to stop them from adding a line "we support only our own VOIP service. All other VOIP services will be blocked." Not much you can do then, eh?
Lemme try to answer some of your questions.
Sound quality: both about the same. you'll get zealots on both sides who swear on their grandmother's grave that one or the other is better, but really, they're all about the same.
The SkyFi has a cradle for the car, and for home, but it's not been terribly convenient for me to switch between the car and home. The Roady2 is really small, can probably velcro to your dash, and (I think) has a built-in FM modulator. Though I'd probably suggest you use a cassette or aux-in adaptor instead. People have even made little battery-containing-armbands for the Roady2 so you can use it as a portable. I don't know what Sirius offers.
It'd be nice to have NPR, but I can pretty reliably find that on my FM dial, and XM now has XM Public Radio, with many PRI programs and Bob Edwards (but no All Things Considered or Morning Edition, nor Car Talk or Prarie Home).
XM has pretty good coverage on the less-mainstream stuff. Fine Tuning is a VERY eclectic mix of pop, rock, progressive, classical, new age, and very occasionally folk. There are 3 or 4 dance/technois chanels, a bunch of world channels, and an 80s channel that generally plays pretty good stuff.
Also, I'm pretty sure you can subscribe on a monthly basis with XM. And XM has terrestrial repeaters that help when satellite reception is spotty (though even that fails in heavily wooded areas). I'm pretty sure Sirius does not have that.
Check out XMFan.com for a lot of good information, opinions, and reviews.
How is the traffic as compared to WTOP's reports?
:( ) Includes details for the key alerts listed above.
:) (XM is headquartered downtown)
:)
Not bad. You don't get Lisa Baden's goofy commentary, but generally it's pretty good. They do it in four phases:
* "Jam Alert Status" - Red (absoultely fucked up, like the beltway's blocked), Yellow (typical everyday delays), and Green (everything's smooth)
* Key alerts (major or unusual backups listed w/out much detail, like "delays northbound at quantico and an overturned cement truck on the BW parkway")
* Detailed information (all around the city, no predictable pattern, pretty much all major roads hit always, with the notable exception of the toll road, which is often missed
* Sometimes, specific information on smaller incidents on smaller roads
They also frequently give travel times ("27 minutes from 495 to Centreville at an average speed of 34 mph"). Also, for severe alerts (like a Red alert, a blocked road, or a tornado warning) it'll be showin in the display. Usually, the display shows visibility ("Partly Cloudy") for the "artist" and temperature for the current song. A couple weeks ago it said "WELCOME EXPOS!!!"
All this happens in about 2-5 minutes, total (including weather report and a couple of ads), then it repeats. I think they re-record the report every 20-30 minutes (I haven't tried to prove that).
I still hit WTOP occasionally, just in case I'm looking for a particular detail and XM didn't have it, or if I'm absolutely wanting the latest info (as I said, they repeat each report on XM a few times before they record new ones). Of course, even WTOP doesn't always have up-to-the-minute information, since there's a delay and they don't always report on all roads at each report.
All in all, though, it's very highly recommended.
..that what I'd really like in my car is time-shifted:
* News
* Traffic
* Weather
Of course, the radio station's business model depends on my sitting through mind-numbing ads to catch the 20-second blast of traffic info
XM doesn't do time-shifting (though the forthcoming SkyFi-2 does have a 30 minute "history" buffer). But it does have 24x7 news channels (fox, cnn, headline, msnbc, etc.), weather (the weather channel), and about 20 or so 24x7 traffic/weather channels for specific major cities. Takes about 2 minutes to loop through traffic and weather for me here in Washington, DC.
They even have an "emergency" channel now (channel 247 - get it? 24x7?) where they were broadcasting detailed information about shelters, storm tracks, road closings, tornadoes, etc., when the hurricanes recently hit Florida. This channel is, if I recall correctly, broadcast for free. Even non-activated receivers can get it.
I've had XM for about 6 months, and it's been worth every dime.
- It's not been conclusively proven that the recording features of TimeTrax hastened the demise of the XM-PCR unit. In fact, IIRC, XM Radio hasn't even admitted that they've discontinued it. Many feel the PCR was on its way out regardless (which was part of why many sites were selling at steep discounts in the month or two prior to its disappearance).
- This unit is basically just a pinout converter, maybe with level adjustment and such. The software must use the XM Direct protocol, which is different from the XM PCR protocl and has not yet been published (by anyone, even those who created this system).
- Another system (at xmfan.com) includes a USB adaptor and a microcontroller-based protocol converter, that accepts the existing XM PCR commands and converts them to XM Direct. That system works with all existing software except the stock software distributed with XM PCR.
What is going to happen: Someone is going to get the crap sued out of them.Why? They've done nothing wrong. In fact, they've done exactly what Terk/Blitzsafe is doing -- provided an interface between the XM Direct tuner module and a head unit. Only in this case the head unit is a PC, not a car radio.
"I'm a big fan of wind"
;-)
Punny!
That just blows.
All rail in the UK seems determined to be as crap as possible.
Hey, at least you've *got* serious rail. I recently spent a couple weeks in the UK (mostly in Yorkshire) and was impressed by the rail system, overall. We had one delay coming back from London (the Leeds train was late) but in general, we never had any problems.
And the whole "walk a few blocks into town to grab a train to go the next major city over" thing was fantastic. Just £6.50 for a 1-hour ride to/from York? Incredible. That'd be like driving to the nearest strip mall here in Northern Virgina and getting to downtown Baltimore for, what, $10 or so? I can't even do round-trip to DC for under $7 during rush hour, and the nearest Metro (subway) station is a 15 minute drive away.
So, yes, there are probably many problems, and there will *always* be problems. But having a large, well-used, cheap regional/national rail network is something we chaps on the left side of the pond will always envy. We're lucky if we can get regional rail around a single city, let alone networked between 'em. (and we'll never have a subway as pervasive as the London Underground, except in New York, and that's only because it was built so long ago).
I believe it is Rio's first HDD-based player
:(
Their first HD-based MP3 player was the Rio Riot. I bought one of those a couple of years ago on eBay for about 2/3 list, and love it. However, I rarely use it any longer because of a) low battery life, b) absolutely impossible to get music onto the damned thing, and c) I now have XM.
Aside from the above-mentioned drawbacks, what I really loved about the Riot was the interface. It had the standard by song, by artist, and by genre selections. But you could also build your own playlists (we've done that on long trips, on the fly), it also can play random selections from your most-played songs, least-played songs, or even just fill X number of minutes with random music.
Unfortunately, it was only USB-1, and required a screwed-up version of iTunes or MusicMatch to get songs onto the unit. Right now I really want to remove all the music and start over, but it's just too difficult to bother with.
Even the iPod, from what I understand, doesn't do this quite "right". All I want is a fast interface (USB2 or FW), that shows up as a hard drive, and let me drag songs and playlists on/off as I like. let the box periodically re-index its database, rather than doing it as I transfer songs (as every other device seems to do).
Anyway, I just wanted to point out that this wasn't Rio's first HD unit. And that I still like their software better than the iPod's. Give me iPod-quality hardware with improved Rio software, and I'll go back to MP3s in a heartbeat.
I mean, how far do we take this? Is van Hollen automatically entitled to *all* domains that might be remotely associated with his campaign? If van Hollen had himself purchased vanhollen2004.com, would we be having this conversation if the opponent has set up vanhollen-2004.com?
The website is real. It's not a "buy me for megabucks!" squatter. It says right up front that it's not an official Chris van Hollen site. There's nothing misleading about it, except for the little trick of the name itself.
Whether it's ethical, or "right," is another question entirely. But I'd rather these stupid tricks play out on the internet, where I can choose not to surf to a website, than on the streets, where all those damned (and illegal) campaign signs show up every year making it almost impossible to see around corners, if you're in a small car.
Just remember this: Aluminum Foil -- it's not just for hats anymore.
Being a Government Contractor(tm), I'm fond of reminding people: Tinfoil in no way impairs our ability to read your mind.