"Arabic" means descended from the people of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, etc - based around the Gulf
You are going to have to take Iran of this list. They don't speak Arabic (they speak Farsi), and they are not descendants of Arabic peoples (though they were conquered by them). It's my understanding that many Iranians would be insulted, if you called them Arabs as they are still a bit prejudiced against them.
Dara (I'm 1/2 Iranian, born in the US, don't speak Farsi, and personally could care less if I was considered 1/2 Arabic or not)
There are multiple research paths underway to efficiently (cost, land, etc.) convert solar energy to hydrogen. I wouldn't want to rule any one path out at these early stages.
Solar > PV > Electrolysis > Hydrogen
Solar > Thermal > Hydrogen
Solar > Biomass > Ethanol > Hydrogen
Solar > Biomass > Methanol > Hydrogen...
The problem with the first path is that the Photo Voltaic energy conversion is terrible (under 20%). The electrolysis efficiency is better (65%), but still the overall efficiency is quite low. More direct paths to go from solar to hydrogen may be possible (see:
http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/hydrogen_workshop/Ma cQueen.pdf )
It is more difficult to measure the overall efficiency of solar to biomass to hydrogen, but cost and land use are probably all you need to know. I could imagine that the efficiency is much worse, but if you have fertile land to spare (unlikely with population growth), it may be cost completive with other methods.
It is true that these fonts are optimized for the screen (see e.g. http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm), but I don't believe that makes them a bad choice for paper also. Some claim that serif fonts (e.g. Times New Roman) are a bit easier to read on paper, but I print everything in Verdana and I find it easier to read on paper as well.
Government users send a lot of electronic documents as well, they may as well settle on a font that does both well.
Georgia, Times, Arial are print fonts.
I hate Georgia for the misaligned numbers and I hate all these fonts for the poor one, 'el' and 'oo', zero differentiation. (Nonmono Bitstream Vera fonts have the same problem.)
It's too bad the STIX fonts project isn't ready (is it dead? the webpage is very old). It might have been a good choice also.
I agree, when governments become dependent on fines (or sin taxes for that matter), judgment is often clouded. My claim is that fewer traffic police officers and cars will save some money, but I don't have numbers to show this will offset the loss in fines.
And of course it's not just about balancing the police budget - unions will probably try to prevent a reduction in police staffing.
I'm also pro drug legalization which should also reduce the number of required police officers (and increase the number of drug rehab therapists). But this is an even harder argument to make than vehicle speed control.
I'm not crying, I'm stating my opinion (publicly, I will add), and I vote and write my representatives commensurate with my opinion.
There will be things we like and dislike, but you can't just ban what you dislike.
There are many things I dislike that I have no intention of ever supporting a ban on: tobacco use in private (it raises US health care costs), meat (I'm vegetarian, so I dislike cows taking up the land), too many people having too many babies (I wouldn't ban this, but I think we need some good propaganda a la Iran to get people to back off a bit). Of course, free speech (books) have nothing to do with this thread, but I will say that I wouldn't ban any books by the most obscene writers such as Klansman, etc., but the freedom to shout your opinion at the top of your lungs in public is probably a bit much.
the world isn't here to cater to you, but to everyone.
I don't think the world is here to cater to anyone, I simply have my views of how the world can be better for (almost) everyone, and I don't happen to think that the freedom to satisfy all your wants even if it reduces the pleasure of a much larger number of people (as is the case with a snowmobiler in Yellowstone or a noisy private plane flying low over some of our ever dwindling places of escape from civilization) is better.
If someone can afford to drive a 1 Mile per Gallon car, then so be it.
I used to think this way (with a higher gas tax), but now I think the problem (global warming, falling off the consumption cliff when oil runs out abruptly, etc.) is too serious to allow it. I don't support CAFE standards, but road vehicles should be classified by carrying capacity (combination of volume/passengers/hauling) and should have a maximum fuel consumption (minimum MPG) limit.
I come from the point of view that people have way too much freedom for the current population density (I'm in the US, UK is more dense I think). Freedom to smoke around others outside, speed, fly noisy planes above hikers, ride noisy motorcycles, buy vehicles with ridiculously high fuel consumption, and the list goes on and on.
But this sounds stupid to me. If we as a society are going to invest in traffic systems, we should be moving to direct car control. All cars x years from now (between 5 and 10) should be equipped with electronics to read a signal from a painted road or a wireless sign, whichever design is cheaper, that prevents them from ever going faster than the speed limit (I guess an override button that can be pressed occasionally for passing on two lane roads could be available, this button wouldn't even work on the expressway).
There are several advantages to this strategy:
1] Fewer traffic police and fewer interactions with traffic police (which always leave a bad taste in my mouth) which unnecessarily creates an antagonistic relationship between the populace and the police.
2] Since everyone will be going the speed limit, traffic will flow smoothly. Some cars and trucks may not be able to do the speed limit, but overall the effect will definitely improve throughput (I live in Los Angeles, so this is a primary concern of mine).
3] If the speed limit is too low for a given road, everyone will be so pissed, they will lobby to get it raised instead of just speeding 10 mph which everyone does now (which also sets a bad precedent that it is OK to break the law since everyone else is doing it).
Of course ultimately, a driverless vehicle is even better - no stress, you can sleep or read, but this is technologically much harder.
After reading the article, I see my laptop use may be specifically allowed. The article states:
"The new bill bars drivers from operating televisions and video screens in their line of vision while the vehicle is moving but allows the use of mapping and some other devices."
I guess I need to read the fine print of the bill to see if a laptop qualifies as a "mapping device" when it is being used in that capacity, but this seems plausible anyway.
I live in California, and I just recently purchased a GPS for use with my laptop. It worked very well while traveling over the holiday in San Diego. I had my father run the program and give me directions. I guess in the future if I want someone to navigate for me in the car, I have to have them sit in the backseat (luckily I have one, some don't).
In a funny way, my laptop is safer than my Thomas Guide (printed map) since it can be programmed to use a large font, center my location, and give voice direction (my program doesn't, but they are available). But it isn't illegal to have a Thomas Guide lying on your passenger seat when you get pulled over. Absurd.
Perhaps one of the overpriced in-dash GPS navigation system companies has been making some large donations. Time to write my representative - I had no idea this one was coming.
Uhh - how in the hell would both parties agree with the first decision? Isn't that why they're in a court in the first place?
I was wondering if someone would state the obvious. I'm surprised there is no clear reply yet. Does anyone from Norway have an answer?
I'm assuming there must be some disincentive to go to the second phase or one of the parties would always choose to go. If the disincentive is only lawyers fees, then this system really is stupid, since the side with money always has two tries, so what is the point of spending time on the lower court? (Though I guess if the money side wins, it might stop there, but this problem of money buys justice is the kind of garbage we put up with in the US. The rest of the world should show us a better example.)
Dara
p.s. you might consider leaving off the Polish reference next time (unless you know something about their courts).
I knew that some fonts and clipart were different as well as the database, but I did not realize that the PDF export filters were different. I guess the import filters are different also, which explains why I'm not getting the same results as you. My problems aren't just anchoring, I have Matlab plots embedded in Word docs that don't show up at all in the OpenOffice conversion (RC2 I think).
Your definition of flawless PDF is probably the one everyone else agrees on, but as I read a lot of PDF files on screen, I find it disappointing that I can't make the same kind of quality PDF files that I find when searching for technical articles on the web (maybe the full Acrobat is required for any other solution anyway)
But I'm still confused on how the startup/load/save times could be so different between StarOffice/OpenOffice. Are they? Or is my computer just too slow to give a transparent experience with either? Or is code that has an influence on this issue different also?
You've motivated me to check out StarOffice carefully before I open my mouth again.
I just read the review and though I only know OpenOffice (I'm going to drop the.org, everyone knows which project I'm taking about) and not StarOffice, it seems overly optimistic on comparing the suite to MS Office.
They claim StarOffice starts faster than OpenOffice, which I don't understand at all (isn't this aspect of the code shared?), but it had better be a whole lot faster than OpenOffice is now in order to compete MS.
"Even very large documents open quickly" (StarWriter). Huh? Again, if StarOffice is using different code than OpenOffice, maybe. But file save and load is excruciatingly slow in 1.1beta4. It's nice to have a compact file format, but the price in speed is a bit high currently. (All speed issues are planned improvements in the roadmap).
To say "works with Microsoft Office files flawlessly" is really crazy. Things are getting better, but using the word flawlessly is irresponsible - it just gets users' hopes up who are then overly pessimistic when things don't work (embedded graphics, spacing in table of contents, animation in presentations,...). And this doesn't include the problem that all your work in writing macros has to be redone as there is no easy way to convert these.
"Writer 7 produced a flawless PDF". A flawless PDF would be able to export table of contents links as PDF bookmarks. I can't find this functionality, and I kind of doubt it's there yet.
The drawing tools are fairly standard, offering no more and no less than Word or WordPerfect.", Actually, this is one area where OpenOffice is way better than MS Office (not counting Visio). The grid is more adjustable, you have much more control over glue points to link figures with connectors, and the zoom ratio goes higher.
Conclusion: I'm looking forward to OpenOffice 2, but most serious users of MS Office are probably not going to be swayed just yet.
I've been driving a 2001 Prius for about 10K miles and it works fairly well. It's not mind blowing by any means - there is the occasional jerk when the engine turns on or off (usually smooth though). It corners very well on the mountain roads on the way to go rock climbing. I can get 48 mpg in the mountains, about the same on the highway, but I get much lower doing very short commuting (I'm only 4 mi from work). If only commute, I get about 38 mpg.
Compare this to perhaps 30 mpg for a car that costs $4000 less. Say 30 vs 45 to make the math easy. This means in 90K miles, I use 3000 gallons with the less fuel efficient car. Call this 6000 dollars. By getting 50% better mileage, I use 33% less fuel so I can save 2000 dollars. This assumes I don't have to pay more money at the end of the 90K on replacement batteries, which I'm afraid I will have to.
Get a hybrid only if you really like the driving feel (the CVT on the Prius is great), or if you want to make a statement about the mileage. Don't get one for the economics (until gas hits $5/gallon, or the price differential drops).
If you want to make a different statement, you could also get a PZEV that is a non-hybrid (Ford Focus). The new Toyota Prius should also be a PZEV and is supposed to get a bit better mileage with more room and acceleration.
The lack of automatic PDF bookmark creation in OpenOffice is quite disappointing. I see a lot of nicely done PDF files on the web and I think, wow it would be great to write files like these using OpenOffice. But if I want good bookmark management from section headings, I have to stick to Framemaker for now.
Export to PDF isn't nearly as useful as I hoped - it's still no better than before when you had to print to a.ps file and convert manually - the result is the same.
I have no idea how much it costs to build the 400 MW version, though it can't be too bad if they are planning to sell power at 0.15 US $ per kW Hour (document says "Price is proprietary" - huh? - why I'm I reading it on/. then?). Nor was I able to figure out how much land is required (but I've only skimmed the document). But given that estimates of our future energy needs are on the order of 30 TW, does it seem feasible to build 75,000 of these across the world?
Then all that is required is to solve the energy transportation problem. High power super conducting cables were discussed here earlier and the document mentions that it isn't outrageous to consider the production of hydrogen directly from heat and bypassing the electrical stage (is there any research on this I wonder?).
The most interesting point they really stress is the cost effective, energy efficient storage that you get by using such a large amount of molten salt. No other solar system works as well in this regard. A good reason not to locate solar investment at the residence. (of course there are other advantages to solar roofs).
The logical reaction to this news is to draw the line in the sand at Red Book standard CDs. Don't buy online DRM, don't go for DVD-audio, don't get non-standard CDs. Then rip your own mp3s, oggs, or whatever and put them on your GPS portable along with public domain maps (if possible in your country). There is no reason to forego GPS which is a great feature and getting cheaper all the time.
... and I'm not buying another portable music player until it plays and records ogg files (which my current device can do with mp3). Last time I looked at this project there is no goal of getting an encoder to work. So I'll just wait and save my money for a hard drive based pocket computer which has no limitations (hopefully within a year or two, someone will make something interesting).
Dell has 2 WUXGA (1920x1200) notebooks now, and HP has announced another. This is the minimum resolution I will consider when upgrading my laptop (IBM R30). Apple has the well respected WUXGA desktop display, I hope they don't wait too long to catch up in the notebook market as I am a potential switch customer.
Supposedly OS X 10.3 is going to allow even better resolution scaling, so there should be no problems with fonts being to small.
Your room temperature example illustrates a 3D function quite well, but I'm not sure it helps anyone's conception of a 4D object. A 2D function is a surface (e.g. a sail), which is not the same thing as a 3D object (e.g. a solid cube).
Since this is a discrete example, probably the easiest visualization is a spreadsheet. A simple 3x3x3x3 discrete cubic object is just 81 rows with the 4 columns ranging from -1 to 1. If you added a 5th column without increasing the number of rows, you would have a 4D function.
I'm not sure how this representation is matched to the Rubik's cube example. The first thing is that the row with all 0s is not used as it is not on the 4D surface. Then I guess you could have an ID that represents the state of the surface point. Depending on whether the point is on the center of the face (3 0s), an edge (2 0s), a corner (1 0s), or a 'hypercorner' (no 0s), the ID would represent the set of colors and orientation of the piece. Finally you need a way to describe the effect of all possible moves on the spreadsheet.
Durability arguments may make sense for a PDA, but a GPS/PDA as many have said has a different set of requirements. Large (and cheap preferably) storage is a real plus on such a device. A scanned USGS quad (i.e. DRG) is around 10 MB. Go on a long hike somewhere and you need 20 of these. Don't know where you going to go and want to bring a much larger region? - you're out of luck.
Besides, convergence has to make sense eventually when display quality gets to the point where the map you are viewing is so good it could be paper, why not use it to view photos or even movies (ok, so you'd have to get pretty close to a 3" by 5" screen to watch a DVD). All of these tasks benefit from a hard drive.
What I want is: GPS, audio in, audio out, USB2 (I don't care about firewire, but perhaps someone with an apple will require it), an 800 by 480 screen, a 20-40 Gig hard drive and a battery efficient processor (Crusoe, IBM, ARM,...) that can, along with the board it's on, implement something like Linux BIOS so it can boot near instantly.
The part that really interests me is the ability of the same screen to use less power depending on what you want to do. I own a monochrome PDA for battery reasons, but I'd love to be able to switch to color mode when displaying photos or color maps. I can imagine resolution changes too - QVGA (the Q IS confusing, here it means quarter, but QUXGA means Quad UXGA) might be fine for looking up an address, but for a 3" by 4" photo display, I'd want Quad XGA (320 dpi is not possible now, but someday). Then you could vary between (1/4, 1, 4) x VGA to save power.
Of course, a flexible OLED would be great if it uses no more power and is flexible to boot.
The Science News article left off my top choice (actually a class of choices) of voting schemes - Condorcet voting schemes. I gave a speech at my local Toastmasters group on this topic, which I'm adapting for this forum. I'll probably get around to writing the editor of Science News also. - Dara
Why do we need a new Single Winner Election Method?
When minority candidates do run in single winner elections, they are criticized for the spoiler effect they may have.
Typical Spoiler Effect: (Note these examples are speculative on voters second and third choices, though the percentages on their first choice are accurate
1992: 43 Clinton, Bush, Perot 37.5 Bush, Perot, Clinton 15 Perot, Bush, Clinton 3.9 Perot, Clinton, Bush
2000: 47.9 Bush, Gore, Nader 48.4 Gore, Nader, Bush 2.7 Nader, Gore, Bush
Potential Solution - Voting Schemes that allow each voter to rank their preferences.
Caveat: Kenneth J. Arrow showed in 1951 (Nobel Prize in 1972) that reasonable criteria for a voting scheme are unachievable: 1) Let each voter rank all candidates in order of preference. 2) Form an overall ranking from the data above such that: (Note: in a single winner, only the first name on the list matters) a) if voters prefer A to B, then A should rank higher than B in the overall ranking, b) introducing another candidate into the election should not change the winner, unless it is the new candidate who wins.
It can be shown that no overall ranking scheme exists (assuming there is more than one voter).
Nevertheless, it is possible to relax criteria 2b to get solutions that many people think are better than plurality.
Scheme 1. Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)
If there is no one with more than 50% of the first place votes, the person with the least first place votes is dropped and the second place votes from all the ballots picking that person are then apportioned to the remaining candidates. Repeat as necessary.
Condorcet, a French philosopher, formulated the following method around 1785: Form a matrix of all possible pair-wise elections and fill it according to each ranked ballot. If there is one candidate who wins against all others, this is the (Condorcet) winner.
Example: Hypothetical election where Nader gets enough support to knock Gore out in the first round of IRV.
# Ballot 4 B G N (i.e. 4 voters out of 9 prefer Bush over Gore over Nader) 3 N G B 1 G N B 1 G B N wins)
Plurality: Bush clearly wins (4 to 3)
IRV (after one round): (Bush wins again, 5 to 4)
Condorcet Voting Matrix (row preferred to column)
B G N B X 4 5 G 5 X 6 N 4 3 X
Gore now wins since he is preferred over Bush and over Nader in separate pairwise elections. Doesn't it sound more logical that he should be elected in this case? There is a benefit of Condorcet schemes over IRV that may not be apparent from an example with only 3 candidates - statistics from a precinct are easily tallied and presented by the above matrix. With IRV, every permutation that arises must be tallied - with 20 candidates, this could be quite large.
2b. What if there is no Condorcet Winner?
Find the Smith set where each candidate in the set wins against any candidate not in the set (could be everyone). Of course the winner should be chosen from the Smith set. There are several ways to do this, but the simplest to describe is Condorcet's original method: Form a ranked list of the margins of defeat for all contests within in the Smith set (e.g. in a race with 4 candidates A, B, C, D):
Then eliminate the lowest contest on the list from consideration and check to see if there is now a Condorcet winner. Repeat as necessary. (e.g. If D/A is eliminated, no one is undefeated. But after the race C/D is eliminated, D is now the undefeated winner).
Conclusion
San Francisco passed IRV (via referenda, starts in Nov 2003), so change is possible. These schemes may sound more complicated than what we have, but they are more fair, computers can do the work, and they might even eliminate primary elections.
References
condorcet.org and electionmethods.org (very thorough coverage of the details of Condorcet methods), outlander.com/condorcet (allows you to vote in 2000 and 2004 elections and see results), fairvote.org (advocates the IRV method), www.idea.int (lots of statistics on US and international elections), civilrights.org (search for "Florida" to find stories on voting rights problems).
Since this device includes an MP3 encoder, the proper question to ask about supporting Ogg is whether it would be possible with firmware updates to support on the fly Ogg encoding. This is of course a lot harder than decoding, and I'm not aware of integer encoders for Ogg (though I imagine someone's thinking about them for Speex). Are we going to see this in the near future?
(I'm still waiting for more choices besides a Sharp Zaurus for the player)
Of course the current telecom environment is tough, but I think the most important factor is that all these systems, Teledesic, Iridium, Globalstar, Orbcomm (still going, but never became as mainstream as I hoped), were envisioned in an age when land based cellular did not have the penetration and low cost that it has today in so many of the richer countries. Sure, there will always be the user who needs 100% coverage and can pay a premium, but the market for mobile satellite communications is not turning out to be as lucrative as people hoped. It pains me to admit it (since I work in the satellite industry), that economic solutions may never include LEO constellations.
GEO is actually not as bad a solution as people are saying - Thuraya shows that you can solve some of the power issues by making an extremely high gain satellite antenna. The time delay can be annoying for voice, but if you don't have a cellular link available, you probably aren't going to complain. I'm guessing were going to see more of these types of satellites over the parts of globe where you aren't too far from the equator (how far depends on the application - for me, I want satellite access for backcountry emergency in the contiguous US - I can hopefully hike to line of site within an hour or two from most places) and the population can support it. Finally, cellular phones with very low added cost access the satellites need to be developed (Thuraya phones aren't as bad as Iridium phones - I don't have the exact figures, but I'm sure I'd want to pay less).
Atmospheric platforms sound interesting, but I'd want to see a few test reports before I got too excited. Besides, it isn't really very useful for large area coverage.
Many people have mentioned hybrids in this story, and though I won't go so far as to say the current interest in fuel cells is a conspiracy against hybrid development, it does make sense that hybrids could be useful as a transition over the next 5 and most likely 10 or 15 years.
What would be ideal for me is to use GM's concept (in wheel motors, drive by wire, etc.) for everything but the fuel cell and designing it so the fuel cell (and supporting infrastructure) can be bolted on later. Then come up with a way to bolt on an engine design for the interim. I know that fully serial hybrids have not yet shown themselves to be practical, but perhaps they could get close with this vehicle. Then, you can upgrade (with more cash flow into GM - a plus for them) to a cleaner, quieter, solution later.
I would love to be able to design my own body for this chassis - I have lots of ideas on my ideal moderate clearance/minivan/camper/4wd vehicle. Even though I'll never do it, if there is an after-market for bodies that give me more choice than the current market, that would be better.
Dara (my bumper sticker currently reads: I'd rather be driving a direct methanol fuel cell vehicle)
I think this form factor is a great idea. I started to write an opinion piece that we need a commodity architecture (as is the desktop x86 market) for a Linux computer in the handheld PC form factor even more than we need it in the laptop market.
I didn't find out what processor the OQO is going to use from their rather frivolous website or from the Yahoo article, but I imagine it is using a PIII-M. I'm wondering if it makes more sense (at least for Linux) to go with Xscale instead. True, it doesn't have floating point and probably can't run Windows XP, but Linux/ARM should work great (and people are building prototype devices now - see Tiny SBCs for Embedded Linux based projects).
I was bullish about the Crusoe initially, but now I'd rather have an Xscale which is more efficient for most computing I do anyway. I think I can handle the hit that floating point emulation causes for the programs that need it.
What do people think the best architecture for these class of devices is?
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You are going to have to take Iran of this list. They don't speak Arabic (they speak Farsi), and they are not descendants of Arabic peoples (though they were conquered by them). It's my understanding that many Iranians would be insulted, if you called them Arabs as they are still a bit prejudiced against them.
Dara (I'm 1/2 Iranian, born in the US, don't speak Farsi, and personally could care less if I was considered 1/2 Arabic or not)
There are multiple research paths underway to efficiently (cost, land, etc.) convert solar energy to hydrogen. I wouldn't want to rule any one path out at these early stages.
Solar > PV > Electrolysis > Hydrogen
Solar > Thermal > Hydrogen
Solar > Biomass > Ethanol > Hydrogen
Solar > Biomass > Methanol > Hydrogen ...
The problem with the first path is that the Photo Voltaic energy conversion is terrible (under 20%). The electrolysis efficiency is better (65%), but still the overall efficiency is quite low. More direct paths to go from solar to hydrogen may be possible (see: http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/hydrogen_workshop/Ma cQueen.pdf )
It is more difficult to measure the overall efficiency of solar to biomass to hydrogen, but cost and land use are probably all you need to know. I could imagine that the efficiency is much worse, but if you have fertile land to spare (unlikely with population growth), it may be cost completive with other methods.
Dara
It is true that these fonts are optimized for the screen (see e.g. http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm), but I don't believe that makes them a bad choice for paper also. Some claim that serif fonts (e.g. Times New Roman) are a bit easier to read on paper, but I print everything in Verdana and I find it easier to read on paper as well.
Government users send a lot of electronic documents as well, they may as well settle on a font that does both well.
Georgia, Times, Arial are print fonts.
I hate Georgia for the misaligned numbers and I hate all these fonts for the poor one, 'el' and 'oo', zero differentiation. (Nonmono Bitstream Vera fonts have the same problem.)
It's too bad the STIX fonts project isn't ready (is it dead? the webpage is very old). It might have been a good choice also.
Dara
I agree, when governments become dependent on fines (or sin taxes for that matter), judgment is often clouded. My claim is that fewer traffic police officers and cars will save some money, but I don't have numbers to show this will offset the loss in fines.
And of course it's not just about balancing the police budget - unions will probably try to prevent a reduction in police staffing.
I'm also pro drug legalization which should also reduce the number of required police officers (and increase the number of drug rehab therapists). But this is an even harder argument to make than vehicle speed control.
Dara Parsavand
dparsavand@mailblocks.com
What are you still in grade school or something??
I'm 41 if it matters.
Stop crying
I'm not crying, I'm stating my opinion (publicly, I will add), and I vote and write my representatives commensurate with my opinion.
There will be things we like and dislike, but you can't just ban what you dislike.
There are many things I dislike that I have no intention of ever supporting a ban on: tobacco use in private (it raises US health care costs), meat (I'm vegetarian, so I dislike cows taking up the land), too many people having too many babies (I wouldn't ban this, but I think we need some good propaganda a la Iran to get people to back off a bit). Of course, free speech (books) have nothing to do with this thread, but I will say that I wouldn't ban any books by the most obscene writers such as Klansman, etc., but the freedom to shout your opinion at the top of your lungs in public is probably a bit much.
the world isn't here to cater to you, but to everyone.
I don't think the world is here to cater to anyone, I simply have my views of how the world can be better for (almost) everyone, and I don't happen to think that the freedom to satisfy all your wants even if it reduces the pleasure of a much larger number of people (as is the case with a snowmobiler in Yellowstone or a noisy private plane flying low over some of our ever dwindling places of escape from civilization) is better.
If someone can afford to drive a 1 Mile per Gallon car, then so be it.
I used to think this way (with a higher gas tax), but now I think the problem (global warming, falling off the consumption cliff when oil runs out abruptly, etc.) is too serious to allow it. I don't support CAFE standards, but road vehicles should be classified by carrying capacity (combination of volume/passengers/hauling) and should have a maximum fuel consumption (minimum MPG) limit.
Dara Parsavand
dparsavand@mailblocks.com
I come from the point of view that people have way too much freedom for the current population density (I'm in the US, UK is more dense I think). Freedom to smoke around others outside, speed, fly noisy planes above hikers, ride noisy motorcycles, buy vehicles with ridiculously high fuel consumption, and the list goes on and on.
But this sounds stupid to me. If we as a society are going to invest in traffic systems, we should be moving to direct car control. All cars x years from now (between 5 and 10) should be equipped with electronics to read a signal from a painted road or a wireless sign, whichever design is cheaper, that prevents them from ever going faster than the speed limit (I guess an override button that can be pressed occasionally for passing on two lane roads could be available, this button wouldn't even work on the expressway).
There are several advantages to this strategy:
1] Fewer traffic police and fewer interactions with traffic police (which always leave a bad taste in my mouth) which unnecessarily creates an antagonistic relationship between the populace and the police.
2] Since everyone will be going the speed limit, traffic will flow smoothly. Some cars and trucks may not be able to do the speed limit, but overall the effect will definitely improve throughput (I live in Los Angeles, so this is a primary concern of mine).
3] If the speed limit is too low for a given road, everyone will be so pissed, they will lobby to get it raised instead of just speeding 10 mph which everyone does now (which also sets a bad precedent that it is OK to break the law since everyone else is doing it).
Of course ultimately, a driverless vehicle is even better - no stress, you can sleep or read, but this is technologically much harder.
Dara Parsavand
dparsavand@mailblocks.com
After reading the article, I see my laptop use may be specifically allowed. The article states:
"The new bill bars drivers from operating televisions and video screens in their line of vision while the vehicle is moving but allows the use of mapping and some other devices."
I guess I need to read the fine print of the bill to see if a laptop qualifies as a "mapping device" when it is being used in that capacity, but this seems plausible anyway.
Dara
I live in California, and I just recently purchased a GPS for use with my laptop. It worked very well while traveling over the holiday in San Diego. I had my father run the program and give me directions. I guess in the future if I want someone to navigate for me in the car, I have to have them sit in the backseat (luckily I have one, some don't).
In a funny way, my laptop is safer than my Thomas Guide (printed map) since it can be programmed to use a large font, center my location, and give voice direction (my program doesn't, but they are available). But it isn't illegal to have a Thomas Guide lying on your passenger seat when you get pulled over. Absurd.
Perhaps one of the overpriced in-dash GPS navigation system companies has been making some large donations. Time to write my representative - I had no idea this one was coming.
Dara
I was wondering if someone would state the obvious. I'm surprised there is no clear reply yet. Does anyone from Norway have an answer?
I'm assuming there must be some disincentive to go to the second phase or one of the parties would always choose to go. If the disincentive is only lawyers fees, then this system really is stupid, since the side with money always has two tries, so what is the point of spending time on the lower court? (Though I guess if the money side wins, it might stop there, but this problem of money buys justice is the kind of garbage we put up with in the US. The rest of the world should show us a better example.)
Dara
p.s. you might consider leaving off the Polish reference next time (unless you know something about their courts).
Jem,
I stand corrected.
I knew that some fonts and clipart were different as well as the database, but I did not realize that the PDF export filters were different. I guess the import filters are different also, which explains why I'm not getting the same results as you. My problems aren't just anchoring, I have Matlab plots embedded in Word docs that don't show up at all in the OpenOffice conversion (RC2 I think).
Your definition of flawless PDF is probably the one everyone else agrees on, but as I read a lot of PDF files on screen, I find it disappointing that I can't make the same kind of quality PDF files that I find when searching for technical articles on the web (maybe the full Acrobat is required for any other solution anyway)
But I'm still confused on how the startup/load/save times could be so different between StarOffice/OpenOffice. Are they? Or is my computer just too slow to give a transparent experience with either? Or is code that has an influence on this issue different also?
You've motivated me to check out StarOffice carefully before I open my mouth again.
Thanks for your report and comment to my post,
Dara
I just read the review and though I only know OpenOffice (I'm going to drop the .org, everyone knows which project I'm taking about) and not StarOffice, it seems overly optimistic on comparing the suite to MS Office.
...). And this doesn't include the problem that all your work in writing macros has to be redone as there is no easy way to convert these.
They claim StarOffice starts faster than OpenOffice, which I don't understand at all (isn't this aspect of the code shared?), but it had better be a whole lot faster than OpenOffice is now in order to compete MS.
"Even very large documents open quickly" (StarWriter). Huh? Again, if StarOffice is using different code than OpenOffice, maybe. But file save and load is excruciatingly slow in 1.1beta4. It's nice to have a compact file format, but the price in speed is a bit high currently. (All speed issues are planned improvements in the roadmap).
To say "works with Microsoft Office files flawlessly" is really crazy. Things are getting better, but using the word flawlessly is irresponsible - it just gets users' hopes up who are then overly pessimistic when things don't work (embedded graphics, spacing in table of contents, animation in presentations,
"Writer 7 produced a flawless PDF". A flawless PDF would be able to export table of contents links as PDF bookmarks. I can't find this functionality, and I kind of doubt it's there yet.
The drawing tools are fairly standard, offering no more and no less than Word or WordPerfect.", Actually, this is one area where OpenOffice is way better than MS Office (not counting Visio). The grid is more adjustable, you have much more control over glue points to link figures with connectors, and the zoom ratio goes higher.
Conclusion: I'm looking forward to OpenOffice 2, but most serious users of MS Office are probably not going to be swayed just yet.
Dara
I've been driving a 2001 Prius for about 10K miles and it works fairly well. It's not mind blowing by any means - there is the occasional jerk when the engine turns on or off (usually smooth though). It corners very well on the mountain roads on the way to go rock climbing. I can get 48 mpg in the mountains, about the same on the highway, but I get much lower doing very short commuting (I'm only 4 mi from work). If only commute, I get about 38 mpg.
Compare this to perhaps 30 mpg for a car that costs $4000 less. Say 30 vs 45 to make the math easy. This means in 90K miles, I use 3000 gallons with the less fuel efficient car. Call this 6000 dollars. By getting 50% better mileage, I use 33% less fuel so I can save 2000 dollars. This assumes I don't have to pay more money at the end of the 90K on replacement batteries, which I'm afraid I will have to.
Get a hybrid only if you really like the driving feel (the CVT on the Prius is great), or if you want to make a statement about the mileage. Don't get one for the economics (until gas hits $5/gallon, or the price differential drops).
If you want to make a different statement, you could also get a PZEV that is a non-hybrid (Ford Focus). The new Toyota Prius should also be a PZEV and is supposed to get a bit better mileage with more room and acceleration.
Dara
The lack of automatic PDF bookmark creation in OpenOffice is quite disappointing. I see a lot of nicely done PDF files on the web and I think, wow it would be great to write files like these using OpenOffice. But if I want good bookmark management from section headings, I have to stick to Framemaker for now.
.ps file and convert manually - the result is the same.
Export to PDF isn't nearly as useful as I hoped - it's still no better than before when you had to print to a
Dara
I have no idea how much it costs to build the 400 MW version, though it can't be too bad if they are planning to sell power at 0.15 US $ per kW Hour (document says "Price is proprietary" - huh? - why I'm I reading it on /. then?). Nor was I able to figure out how much land is required (but I've only skimmed the document). But given that estimates of our future energy needs are on the order of 30 TW, does it seem feasible to build 75,000 of these across the world?
Then all that is required is to solve the energy transportation problem. High power super conducting cables were discussed here earlier and the document mentions that it isn't outrageous to consider the production of hydrogen directly from heat and bypassing the electrical stage (is there any research on this I wonder?).
The most interesting point they really stress is the cost effective, energy efficient storage that you get by using such a large amount of molten salt. No other solar system works as well in this regard. A good reason not to locate solar investment at the residence. (of course there are other advantages to solar roofs).
Interesting times ahead I hope.
Dara
The logical reaction to this news is to draw the line in the sand at Red Book standard CDs. Don't buy online DRM, don't go for DVD-audio, don't get non-standard CDs. Then rip your own mp3s, oggs, or whatever and put them on your GPS portable along with public domain maps (if possible in your country). There is no reason to forego GPS which is a great feature and getting cheaper all the time.
Dara
... and I'm not buying another portable music player until it plays and records ogg files (which my current device can do with mp3). Last time I looked at this project there is no goal of getting an encoder to work. So I'll just wait and save my money for a hard drive based pocket computer which has no limitations (hopefully within a year or two, someone will make something interesting).
Dell has 2 WUXGA (1920x1200) notebooks now, and HP has announced another. This is the minimum resolution I will consider when upgrading my laptop (IBM R30). Apple has the well respected WUXGA desktop display, I hope they don't wait too long to catch up in the notebook market as I am a potential switch customer.
Supposedly OS X 10.3 is going to allow even better resolution scaling, so there should be no problems with fonts being to small.
Dara
Your room temperature example illustrates a 3D function quite well, but I'm not sure it helps anyone's conception of a 4D object. A 2D function is a surface (e.g. a sail), which is not the same thing as a 3D object (e.g. a solid cube).
Since this is a discrete example, probably the easiest visualization is a spreadsheet. A simple 3x3x3x3 discrete cubic object is just 81 rows with the 4 columns ranging from -1 to 1. If you added a 5th column without increasing the number of rows, you would have a 4D function.
I'm not sure how this representation is matched to the Rubik's cube example. The first thing is that the row with all 0s is not used as it is not on the 4D surface. Then I guess you could have an ID that represents the state of the surface point. Depending on whether the point is on the center of the face (3 0s), an edge (2 0s), a corner (1 0s), or a 'hypercorner' (no 0s), the ID would represent the set of colors and orientation of the piece. Finally you need a way to describe the effect of all possible moves on the spreadsheet.
Durability arguments may make sense for a PDA, but a GPS/PDA as many have said has a different set of requirements. Large (and cheap preferably) storage is a real plus on such a device. A scanned USGS quad (i.e. DRG) is around 10 MB. Go on a long hike somewhere and you need 20 of these. Don't know where you going to go and want to bring a much larger region? - you're out of luck.
...) that can, along with the board it's on, implement something like Linux BIOS so it can boot near instantly.
Besides, convergence has to make sense eventually when display quality gets to the point where the map you are viewing is so good it could be paper, why not use it to view photos or even movies (ok, so you'd have to get pretty close to a 3" by 5" screen to watch a DVD). All of these tasks benefit from a hard drive.
What I want is: GPS, audio in, audio out, USB2 (I don't care about firewire, but perhaps someone with an apple will require it), an 800 by 480 screen, a 20-40 Gig hard drive and a battery efficient processor (Crusoe, IBM, ARM,
Dara Parsavand
The part that really interests me is the ability of the same screen to use less power depending on what you want to do. I own a monochrome PDA for battery reasons, but I'd love to be able to switch to color mode when displaying photos or color maps. I can imagine resolution changes too - QVGA (the Q IS confusing, here it means quarter, but QUXGA means Quad UXGA) might be fine for looking up an address, but for a 3" by 4" photo display, I'd want Quad XGA (320 dpi is not possible now, but someday). Then you could vary between (1/4, 1, 4) x VGA to save power.
Of course, a flexible OLED would be great if it uses no more power and is flexible to boot.
Dara Parsavand
The Science News article left off my top choice (actually a class of choices) of voting schemes - Condorcet voting schemes. I gave a speech at my local Toastmasters group on this topic, which I'm adapting for this forum. I'll probably get around to writing the editor of Science News also. - Dara
Why do we need a new Single Winner Election Method?
When minority candidates do run in single winner elections, they are criticized for the spoiler effect they may have.
Typical Spoiler Effect: (Note these examples are speculative on voters second and third choices, though the percentages on their first choice are accurate
1992:
43 Clinton, Bush, Perot
37.5 Bush, Perot, Clinton
15 Perot, Bush, Clinton
3.9 Perot, Clinton, Bush
2000:
47.9 Bush, Gore, Nader
48.4 Gore, Nader, Bush
2.7 Nader, Gore, Bush
Potential Solution - Voting Schemes that allow each voter to rank their preferences.
Caveat: Kenneth J. Arrow showed in 1951 (Nobel Prize in 1972) that reasonable criteria for a voting scheme are unachievable:
1) Let each voter rank all candidates in order of preference.
2) Form an overall ranking from the data above such that: (Note: in a single winner, only the first name on the list matters)
a) if voters prefer A to B, then A should rank higher than B in the overall ranking,
b) introducing another candidate into the election should not change the winner, unless it is the new candidate who wins.
It can be shown that no overall ranking scheme exists (assuming there is more than one voter).
Nevertheless, it is possible to relax criteria 2b to get solutions that many people think are better than plurality.
Scheme 1. Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)
If there is no one with more than 50% of the first place votes, the person with the least first place votes is dropped and the second place votes from all the ballots picking that person are then apportioned to the remaining candidates. Repeat as necessary.
Scheme 2. Condorcet voting schemes (my preferred choice)
Condorcet, a French philosopher, formulated the following method around 1785: Form a matrix of all possible pair-wise elections and fill it according to each ranked ballot. If there is one candidate who wins against all others, this is the (Condorcet) winner.
Example: Hypothetical election where Nader gets enough support to knock Gore out in the first round of IRV.
# Ballot
4 B G N (i.e. 4 voters out of 9 prefer Bush over Gore over Nader)
3 N G B
1 G N B
1 G B N
wins)
Plurality: Bush clearly wins (4 to 3)
IRV (after one round): (Bush wins again, 5 to 4)
Condorcet Voting Matrix (row preferred to column)
B G N
B X 4 5
G 5 X 6
N 4 3 X
Gore now wins since he is preferred over Bush and over Nader in separate pairwise elections. Doesn't it sound more logical that he should be elected in this case? There is a benefit of Condorcet schemes over IRV that may not be apparent from an example with only 3 candidates - statistics from a precinct are easily tallied and presented by the above matrix. With IRV, every permutation that arises must be tallied - with 20 candidates, this could be quite large.
2b. What if there is no Condorcet Winner?
Find the Smith set where each candidate in the set wins against any candidate not in the set (could be everyone). Of course the winner should be chosen from the Smith set. There are several ways to do this, but the simplest to describe is Condorcet's original method: Form a ranked list of the margins of defeat for all contests within in the Smith set (e.g. in a race with 4 candidates A, B, C, D):
D/B (60)
B/C (50)
A/B (40)
C/A (30)
C/D (25)
D/A (20)
Then eliminate the lowest contest on the list from consideration and check to see if there is now a Condorcet winner. Repeat as necessary. (e.g. If D/A is eliminated, no one is undefeated. But after the race C/D is eliminated, D is now the undefeated winner).
Conclusion
San Francisco passed IRV (via referenda, starts in Nov 2003), so change is possible. These schemes may sound more complicated than what we have, but they are more fair, computers can do the work, and they might even eliminate primary elections.
References
condorcet.org and electionmethods.org (very thorough coverage of the details of Condorcet methods), outlander.com/condorcet (allows you to vote in 2000 and 2004 elections and see results), fairvote.org (advocates the IRV method), www.idea.int (lots of statistics on US and international elections), civilrights.org (search for "Florida" to find stories on voting rights problems).
Since this device includes an MP3 encoder, the proper question to ask about supporting Ogg is whether it would be possible with firmware updates to support on the fly Ogg encoding. This is of course a lot harder than decoding, and I'm not aware of integer encoders for Ogg (though I imagine someone's thinking about them for Speex). Are we going to see this in the near future?
(I'm still waiting for more choices besides a Sharp Zaurus for the player)
- Dara
Satellite systems are most hurt by cellular
Of course the current telecom environment is tough, but I think the most important factor is that all these systems, Teledesic, Iridium, Globalstar, Orbcomm (still going, but never became as mainstream as I hoped), were envisioned in an age when land based cellular did not have the penetration and low cost that it has today in so many of the richer countries. Sure, there will always be the user who needs 100% coverage and can pay a premium, but the market for mobile satellite communications is not turning out to be as lucrative as people hoped. It pains me to admit it (since I work in the satellite industry), that economic solutions may never include LEO constellations.
GEO is actually not as bad a solution as people are saying - Thuraya shows that you can solve some of the power issues by making an extremely high gain satellite antenna. The time delay can be annoying for voice, but if you don't have a cellular link available, you probably aren't going to complain. I'm guessing were going to see more of these types of satellites over the parts of globe where you aren't too far from the equator (how far depends on the application - for me, I want satellite access for backcountry emergency in the contiguous US - I can hopefully hike to line of site within an hour or two from most places) and the population can support it. Finally, cellular phones with very low added cost access the satellites need to be developed (Thuraya phones aren't as bad as Iridium phones - I don't have the exact figures, but I'm sure I'd want to pay less).
Atmospheric platforms sound interesting, but I'd want to see a few test reports before I got too excited. Besides, it isn't really very useful for large area coverage.
Dara Parsavand
What would be ideal for me is to use GM's concept (in wheel motors, drive by wire, etc.) for everything but the fuel cell and designing it so the fuel cell (and supporting infrastructure) can be bolted on later. Then come up with a way to bolt on an engine design for the interim. I know that fully serial hybrids have not yet shown themselves to be practical, but perhaps they could get close with this vehicle. Then, you can upgrade (with more cash flow into GM - a plus for them) to a cleaner, quieter, solution later.
I would love to be able to design my own body for this chassis - I have lots of ideas on my ideal moderate clearance/minivan/camper/4wd vehicle. Even though I'll never do it, if there is an after-market for bodies that give me more choice than the current market, that would be better.
Dara (my bumper sticker currently reads: I'd rather be driving a direct methanol fuel cell vehicle)
I think this form factor is a great idea. I started to write an opinion piece that we need a commodity architecture (as is the desktop x86 market) for a Linux computer in the handheld PC form factor even more than we need it in the laptop market.
I didn't find out what processor the OQO is going to use from their rather frivolous website or from the Yahoo article, but I imagine it is using a PIII-M. I'm wondering if it makes more sense (at least for Linux) to go with Xscale instead. True, it doesn't have floating point and probably can't run Windows XP, but Linux/ARM should work great (and people are building prototype devices now - see Tiny SBCs for Embedded Linux based projects).
I was bullish about the Crusoe initially, but now I'd rather have an Xscale which is more efficient for most computing I do anyway. I think I can handle the hit that floating point emulation causes for the programs that need it.
What do people think the best architecture for these class of devices is?
Dara Parsavand