By copyright law, Tetris is barely a baby. It's from 1985. That's "only" 35 years. Under the original copyright law (20 years), it would have been freed for 15 years, and under the first extension amendment (to 30 years) it would only have been free for 5 by now. But 1985 law states that copyright for corporations is 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation, whichever comes first.
Since it was published on the year of its creation, Tetris is under copyright until 2080.
Until Disney decides to go for another extension to protect Steamboat Willie, that is. Then we'll get another Sonny Bono act and they'll add another half-century just to be on the safe side. Copyright is currently eternal for all intents and purposes.
Things written since my great-grandfather was still alive will not reach copyright expiration until at least the first of my great-grandchildren is born.
For the projects that are actively developed, I would think this should be a boon. Smaller incremental changes means that, for most releases, they just need to regression test and update app to publish stated support for the latest version. They don't have to massively recode their applications suddenly once a year.
Those projects that are no longer being maintained will, of course, die sooner.
It still does. It just means 1/4 of what it used to for Firefox releases, and that's a good thing. Really.
I'm trying out 4.0 beta 10, and I'm struggling to figure out what HASN'T changed in this thing. I mean, it's still got a URL bar, and most things are kinda sorta where they used to be, but gawd has a lot changed. And it's on its tenth beta. Tenth. Clearly, they made too hugely sweeping of a change, and meanwhile the universe of web browsers whooshed on by them, and they still have to release backports of most bug fixes to 3.6. So now I'm running something that looks so little like 3.6 that I might as well go to IE or Chrome or Safari, for all the UI consistency and carryover I'm experiencing.
Google has the right idea here. Pick a limited and manageable number of features, add them to the browser, and concentrate on making small changes and getting them out to production frequently. You don't need to backport too many non-serious bug fixes, because you'll be coming out with a new release within a few months anyway, so non-critical bugs just get rolled up into the next version.
See any argument about waterfall (obsolete before it's done) versus agile (rapid changes without a clear vision or endgame). Mozilla is sliding the dial a little more to the agile side of the continuum. And given where they are and where their competition is going, this sounds like a good move.
It's a fair argument to say that they should call them "dot" releases or maybe adopt the Ubuntu numbering system of date/month for their releases, but "major release" means different things to different companies.
For Microsoft, it means years and millions of lines of code and broken legacy applications.
For Google, it means a month or so.
I think I'd rather have Mozzy following the Google model a little more, and the Microsoft model a little less. The release of 4.0 is too big, too different, and took too long. We should have had 2-3 interim versions with less aggressive feature sets by now.
I've held that little beauty in my hands, and if my company-issue Blackberry didn't come with all the mapping I need I'd own one of those.
Disclaimer: Delorme's corporate headquarters and retail store are a few tens of miles from where I live. I have a couple of friends and family members who work there.
Doesn't change the fact that, as far as I'm concerned, if you want to pay money for a mapping product Delorme is way up at the top of my list - their Gazeteers are just plain awesome and I carry one in my car - always.
True, it might speed things up a bit, but the assertion was that aGPS is somehow unreliable ("struggles to get a signal") without it. It struggles no harder than your average standalone GPS. The assist makes the initial lock faster than the average lock time on an unassisted GPS, that's all.
Yes, losing the "assist" can slow down initial lock, but after the initial lock is received all of them work just fine and dandy regardless of cell coverage. And my Blackberry can acquire an initial lock without the assist in about the same time it takes any regular standalone GPS to get a lock.
Deerwood Drive ends / Perimeter Road begins at the railroad tracks up near where all the houses/apartments/businesses are, not at the new tiedown spot as pictured. If you look at the Google Street View, you can actually see the fence just after the railroad tracks (look at the second-to-last image at the end of actual Deerwood). That's the problem, trucks thought they could "cut through" to the end of Deerwood to get to Perimeter Road. Point "A" on your map is actually on Perimeter Road, and if you had a car there you'd likely encounter some unpleasant fellows with a poor sense of humor asking how you got through the fence.
That tie-down area didn't exist when I lived there and flew out of that airport, so at the time Deerwood extended and was pictured as connecting to Perimeter Road. I see there's a break there now, which means autorouting no longer works, which is good. But the map still shows a stretch of restricted-area road as being public access.
I just reported it as a problem (Google Earth did not exist when I lived there, and I was frankly surprised Google was still wrong after all these years, but they do have a good track record of correcting map data).
Regardless, the point is that the difference between the $99 Garmin and the $??? fancy GPS is a matter of amount of data, not necessarily of accuracy of said data.
Actually, no, Kim would probably have been better off with a GPS. They used a paper map, not a GPS. Not only that, they used a highway map, which are piss-poor at covering back roads, yet they chose to use back roads anyway.
More importantly, it was misreading of that map that led them down a hunting road and eventually got them stuck. The side road they selected to avoid going to a higher elevation was, in fact, a dead-end, and any half-assed GPS would have told them that. The problem was they didn't know exactly where they were, and their highway map probably didn't cover the area in sufficient detail even if they did. They took a road that looked like it stayed at a lower elevation.
Even more critical was Kim's misreading of the map that convinced him that a town was 4 miles away. Even the piss-poorest of GPS units would given him better information. Of course, leaving the car with inadequate gear to keep him warm was a bad idea, too, but given the situation he was in, probably the best he could do. I think I would have ripped up a car seat or two for the foam insulation, though...
I remember those systems. Each and every truck driver that tried to drive down my long, very narrow, dead-end road and came up to the LOCKED GATE that led to the airport security perimeter road would show me his screen from that, somehow expecting that if I were only to comprehend that his GPS was right and the physical world was wrong, he could save the 1/2 mile backup down a narrow road with cars parked on both sides and the 12-mile drive around to the other side of the airport.
To be fair, that was only about 1/3 of the drivers. The rest had expensive-looking maps, or directions from their trucking companies, or the occasional printout from MapQuest.
Maps, whether printed or electronic, can be wrong.
PS: That was almost a decade ago. The goddamned map is still wrong. I wonder if the new resident has to deal with equally-upset truck drivers to this day?
I don't know where you heard that, but it's not "apparent" at all. Sorry, but it's simply not true.
aGPS is only dependent on cell towers for the initial GPS lock, and only speeds up that lock from the traditional GPS approach by using approximate location data. aGPS without cell tower = GPS. The GPS radio itself is not dependent in any way on the cell radio.
When any GPS receiver first starts up, it needs to know what satellites to look for. Not all birds are visible from all locations. Traditional GPS just picks a handful of common and evenly-scattered satellite frequencies and starts listening until it gets its first lock. Then it starts listening for satellites that are known to be close to the one it found. When it has 3-4 of them, it has a good idea of where it is and can narrow down the rest and start giving you decent accuracy. This process takes time (in some old GPS units, several minutes).
On my old Magellan Meridian, it would actually ask you what state you were in at start-up to help narrow down the search, and accurately identifying your state could cut 1-2 minutes off start-up (without this initial hint, it could take up to 5 minutes to get a "first lock" even with a clear view of the sky). So that was an example of early "assisted GPS", where I was the "assist" mechanism.
What's even worse is when your GPS tries to remember where it was, and you've moved somewhere else while the GPS receiver was powered off. Once, on a trip from Maine to Texas, I powered down my Meridian in Maine before boarding the plane, then fired it up in Texas and it took nearly 10 minutes for the GPS to conclude that it needed to ask me approximately where it was. It kept trying to broaden the search for satellites but never widened the net enough to include a bird that's visible from Texas because it assumed I was in Maine. When I told it I was in Texas, it took less than 2 minutes to get an initial lock.
If you can figure out where you are very quickly, the GPS can skip that whole up-front search because it can send a quick ping to a local tower or two and figure out your location to within a few dozen miles in a matter of a few seconds. Knowing where you are that accurately means it can predict with really high confidence what satellites are in range, and start searching for them up front. So the "assisted" part pings towers, gets your rough location (which, by the way, Google Maps on the Blackberry and iPhone shows you while the GPS is still trying to get a lock), then feeds that information into the GPS as a "hint" to tell it what satellites to search for.
If you are outside cell range, the aGPS just becomes a plain old GPS. Still works just fine, just takes a little longer for that initial lock. About the same as it would if you had a non-assisted GPS, assuming the two units have similar antennas and similar processors, of course.
Dude, you need a new GPS if your GPS units don't show road type. The problem is, that data is only slightly more accurate than the data found on a printed map, and many people don't check it. Not that they can't, they don't.
My Blackberry with Google Maps shows the road type of each waypoint, and I can scroll down through them and see if the route has come up with a dirt track. Blackberry maps works similarly, and my wife's Nokia Symbian phone also does that. So does my Magellan Meridian Color which is the better part of a decade old, and the Garmin I had prior to that which was before GPS screens were done in fancy color. My mother has a Mercury with GPS, and it's pretty clear as to what road types you are going to encounter, and even allows you to avoid certain road types if you want. I've seen screenshots of TomToms and they clearly show different colors for different road types.
The real problem occurs when the map data is inaccurate, and that's going to happen no matter HOW you get your maps.
I've had plenty of printed maps that have showed me roads that no longer exist, or the road that is there does not resemble the road on the map at all (say, what's that beaver dam doing in the middle of this mud pit that's marked on the map as a 2-lane paved state road?).
The difference is that people can report problems with Google Maps and Google fixes them in a matter of about a month (I know this from experience, I have several dozen Google Maps corrections that have received relatively prompt attention).
I know paper maps very well. I used to buy a Delorme Gazeteer every year. Fantastic maps, by the way, love 'em, and I don't leave home without one in the trunk as an emergency backup. But they only change once a year, and the map data on them is usually several months old by the time they go to publication. Which is fine, roads don't change a whole lot.
But they do change, and even Delorme, good as they are, will make the occasional mistake.
A printed map has the advantage of allowing (and even forcing) you to understand your entire route before you set out. I agree. But I've also had plenty of people ask for directions, folded map in hand, so terribly distracted trying to read each road sign to see where their turn is coming up that they nearly ran me down.
The ideal is a competent copilot with excellent mapreading skills who is willing to devote 100% attention to every turn.
The next best is a GPS with a few minutes taken up front to make sure the route is reasonable, then just focusing on driving the goddamned car while a voice tells you "Turn left in 500 meters". A voice that you have confidence ignoring when you have to, knowing you'll hear a petulant "ReCALCULATING" a few seconds after you deviate off its set course and the voice prompts will continue while you concentrate on actual driving tasks.
Reading a paper map or scribbled complex directions yourself while trying to drive is far more dangerous and distracting than having a proper GPS.
It is, but without the ban on government funding of that research, a lot of the research would now be publicly funded and therefore public domain. Instead, the private sector filled in, and have managed to get exclusive patents on a lot of the stuff they researched, meaning that even if the government or other companies do the legwork themselves the results cannot be applied to further research.
If the government funds the discovery of "a process to replace organs using self-donated tissue and stem cells", then many companies can refine that technique, apply it, and the one who comes up with a way to do it the most cheaply and effectively wins (but everyone else can apply it in different ways which may be more suitable for different organs, etc).
If a private company funds the discover of the same process, they can patent it, and no one else has any incentive to make improvements to the process unless the company that funded it is feeling generous.
I agree, but the success of the gasoline engine is also dependent upon a number of current subsidies already in place. If you want electric cars to compete, give them a level playing field.
Adjust fuel and road taxes so that cars are paying for all road maintenance and construction, and stop subsidizing the use of a car with property, sales, and income taxes. Add to those taxes the amount necessary to clean up the pollution that each vehicle generates, so cleanup becomes the responsibility of the people who pollute and not the average taxpayer.
Stop giving the oil companies incentives and handouts and bailouts, and stop manipulating the price of oil and gasoline to keep the voting populace happy. Make the strategic oil reserve a purely military oil reserve for real emergencies and stop tapping it to level out fuel costs.
Very true. As a bonus, the resale value on my Jetta Diesel would triple in about 5 nanoseconds, and I could afford to buy a really nice bicycle with the profit.:)
Lots of hybrid cars, but that's because they are a semi-practical form of partial electric-ish car.
Look, I love the idea of electric cars. I really do. No pollution (generated by the car itself, so you need clean electricity, but that's easier than having a million clean cars!). Lower cost of operation (assuming affordable electricity). Simpler. All that. Great stuff. Really.
However, there are a few elephants in the room, and will continue to be.
1. Range/Recharge. The Nissan Leaf (the current apparent darling of the electric vehicle fleet) gets anywhere from 62 miles to 138 miles on a charge. That's Nissan's estimates, so they may contain a certain amount of puffery. However, there are some tested numbers in there so let's go with that for now. They don't give a recharge time but it's got a 24 kWh battery and a 3.3 kW charger, so if I understand my division correctly we're looking approximately in the 8 hour range for a recharge. That means if I want to go somewhere 31 miles away on the weekend, I'm taking a calculated risk taking a newly-charged Leaf with a full-capacity battery to get me there and back, and if I want to go 70 miles I'd better plan on an overnight stay. Drop those numbers considerably if it's 20 below zero out.
2. Cost. The Leaf costs about $25 grand if you take advantage of the best of all of the tax incentives. For $15 grand or so, I can get a nice 4-door Toyota Yaris. That leaves me enough to buy a Yaris and (at $4/gal) well over 50,000 miles worth of gasoline for about the same money as a Leaf with no "free miles" on it.
3. Maintenance. Namely the batteries. I've currently got a Jetta Diesel with 93,000 miles on it and the way the engine is going now many many more miles to go. After 5 years, Nissan's "non-guaranteed" figure is that their battery will hold 80% of its original design charge (this is a Li-Ion, and I've owned laptops that were stored under much better conditions than my car would be, I'm thinking more like 40% as a somewhat optimistic estimate). I don't know what a new battery pack would run, but I'll bet it's over $5 grand (or enough to drive the Yaris another 30-40 thousand miles!).
In other words, the cost of replacement batteries would likely exceed the price of fuel for an efficient car.
That battery life will get even worse after a few nights a year at 15 below zero (for those who insist on their temperatures in Celsius, that would be 15 degrees below zero) a year or days over 100F in the sun (I've done one conversion, you can do this one on your own). Or if I want to keep the charges to "only" 8 hours all the time, since the 8-hour charge appears to be the "fast charge" method, which can really mess up battery life.
Environmentally, it's still a good option, assuming of course you get your electricity from a renewable (wind, geothermal, hydro, bio) or less-limited and moderately-polluting (nuclear) source. Also assuming you can recycle the old battery bits cleanly after 3-4 years, of course, and assuming the energy and pollution that goes into making and recycling those batteries is a lot better than burning a few hundred gallons of fuel.
I want to go electric, and my commute is 15 miles, but I still can't justify the cost or the limitations. I save more energy by cycling in when I can and carpooling when I can't, and I don't need to own a second car capable of driving more than 100 miles for weekend trips.
I suspect this is "tagged" photos, not "profile" photos. Still, photos get "tagged" that don't actually contain the subject of the tagging all the time.
No. The photos they use are, by definition, tagged already. They already have the information. They are just asking you to confirm it.
Still, this is a stupid idea. I know every Facebook friend by sight, because I don't friend strangers. However, lots of people tag random pictures with names of people they think should see that picture, or tag pictures with a family account, or tag photos of a newborn with Mom's and Dad's accounts, or whatever.
A random test might show me a funny picture of a guy holding a snowblower with snow flying out of his ass, a picture of a bicycle owned by someone, a picture of a 4-day-old baby that I can't tell from the other 12 million 4-day-old babies on Facebook, and a picture of an actual friend standing in the corner of a fantastic view of Mount Washington in the winter where the friend is three pixels of the picture. I know my friends, but not necessarily THAT well.
Notifications now pull up the top level of the thread, instead of the thread opened to the current discussion. Clicking on the header of the discussion opens the thread (only the direct lineage of the replies that led to the reply to you) and all replies below it on that same lineage.
Result: Very hard to figure out who replied to you compared to the old way, and an artificially stunted view of the thread.
Either show me the whole thread with the message you told me about highlighted, or show me the message you told me about and its direct parent but open the damned thing up and position me there.
Other than that one complaint, however, the redesign is actually kinda nice. Once I increased font size by about 4 clicks so I could read things.
That's quite possible. Maybe his dad is in aerospace and pushed really hard for him to get a degree in it. Maybe he just changed his mind. Maybe he was gunning for NASA then decided that all the cool projects were dead and wanted to see how he could leverage engineering into something that didn't end him up as a suicidal pencil-pusher by middle age.
The number of people who have gone to the trouble of earning a degree then deciding that their chosen degree isn't really what they wanted to do with their life is legion. The number who actually accept that the degree might have been a mistake and go after something that they might actually enjoy doing is much, much smaller.
He graduated a year ago, so his experience was looking for a job for a year, unsuccessfully I might add. You might have noticed that the economy is blowing steaming stinky glowing green monkey chunks at the moment.
He might have garnered his degree into something with a starting wage somewhat higher, or he could have languished in the job market for another year or two and decided to give up and step out in front of a bus some day.
Instead, he found something that he thought he'd love doing that covers his expenses and went for it.
It's not all about the money for all of us, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, me Mongo. Mongo fail math. Me go replace brain with dog shit, make me smarter.
Ouch. The saddest part is that I had consumed some caffeine before typing that, and still I managed to fail at subtraction.
Excuse me while I go commit seppuku with my slide rule.
By copyright law, Tetris is barely a baby. It's from 1985. That's "only" 35 years. Under the original copyright law (20 years), it would have been freed for 15 years, and under the first extension amendment (to 30 years) it would only have been free for 5 by now. But 1985 law states that copyright for corporations is 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation, whichever comes first.
Since it was published on the year of its creation, Tetris is under copyright until 2080.
Until Disney decides to go for another extension to protect Steamboat Willie, that is. Then we'll get another Sonny Bono act and they'll add another half-century just to be on the safe side. Copyright is currently eternal for all intents and purposes.
Things written since my great-grandfather was still alive will not reach copyright expiration until at least the first of my great-grandchildren is born.
That's fucked up.
This is already a retaliatory action. Even the summary mentions this.
Han Sony shot first.
For the projects that are actively developed, I would think this should be a boon. Smaller incremental changes means that, for most releases, they just need to regression test and update app to publish stated support for the latest version. They don't have to massively recode their applications suddenly once a year.
Those projects that are no longer being maintained will, of course, die sooner.
It still does. It just means 1/4 of what it used to for Firefox releases, and that's a good thing. Really.
I'm trying out 4.0 beta 10, and I'm struggling to figure out what HASN'T changed in this thing. I mean, it's still got a URL bar, and most things are kinda sorta where they used to be, but gawd has a lot changed. And it's on its tenth beta. Tenth. Clearly, they made too hugely sweeping of a change, and meanwhile the universe of web browsers whooshed on by them, and they still have to release backports of most bug fixes to 3.6. So now I'm running something that looks so little like 3.6 that I might as well go to IE or Chrome or Safari, for all the UI consistency and carryover I'm experiencing.
Google has the right idea here. Pick a limited and manageable number of features, add them to the browser, and concentrate on making small changes and getting them out to production frequently. You don't need to backport too many non-serious bug fixes, because you'll be coming out with a new release within a few months anyway, so non-critical bugs just get rolled up into the next version.
See any argument about waterfall (obsolete before it's done) versus agile (rapid changes without a clear vision or endgame). Mozilla is sliding the dial a little more to the agile side of the continuum. And given where they are and where their competition is going, this sounds like a good move.
It's a fair argument to say that they should call them "dot" releases or maybe adopt the Ubuntu numbering system of date/month for their releases, but "major release" means different things to different companies.
For Microsoft, it means years and millions of lines of code and broken legacy applications.
For Google, it means a month or so.
I think I'd rather have Mozzy following the Google model a little more, and the Microsoft model a little less. The release of 4.0 is too big, too different, and took too long. We should have had 2-3 interim versions with less aggressive feature sets by now.
I'll have to try that with my iPod Touch gen 2. I've never tried location services with it.
Not to sound like an advert for Delorme, but you might want to feast your eyes on the third screenshot in this advert...
http://shop.delorme.com/OA_HTML/DELibeCCtdItemDetail.jsp?item=30536§ion=10461
I've held that little beauty in my hands, and if my company-issue Blackberry didn't come with all the mapping I need I'd own one of those.
Disclaimer: Delorme's corporate headquarters and retail store are a few tens of miles from where I live. I have a couple of friends and family members who work there.
Doesn't change the fact that, as far as I'm concerned, if you want to pay money for a mapping product Delorme is way up at the top of my list - their Gazeteers are just plain awesome and I carry one in my car - always.
True, it might speed things up a bit, but the assertion was that aGPS is somehow unreliable ("struggles to get a signal") without it. It struggles no harder than your average standalone GPS. The assist makes the initial lock faster than the average lock time on an unassisted GPS, that's all.
Yes, losing the "assist" can slow down initial lock, but after the initial lock is received all of them work just fine and dandy regardless of cell coverage. And my Blackberry can acquire an initial lock without the assist in about the same time it takes any regular standalone GPS to get a lock.
As I said, aGPS - cell towers = GPS.
Deerwood Drive ends / Perimeter Road begins at the railroad tracks up near where all the houses/apartments/businesses are, not at the new tiedown spot as pictured. If you look at the Google Street View, you can actually see the fence just after the railroad tracks (look at the second-to-last image at the end of actual Deerwood). That's the problem, trucks thought they could "cut through" to the end of Deerwood to get to Perimeter Road. Point "A" on your map is actually on Perimeter Road, and if you had a car there you'd likely encounter some unpleasant fellows with a poor sense of humor asking how you got through the fence.
That tie-down area didn't exist when I lived there and flew out of that airport, so at the time Deerwood extended and was pictured as connecting to Perimeter Road. I see there's a break there now, which means autorouting no longer works, which is good. But the map still shows a stretch of restricted-area road as being public access.
I just reported it as a problem (Google Earth did not exist when I lived there, and I was frankly surprised Google was still wrong after all these years, but they do have a good track record of correcting map data).
Regardless, the point is that the difference between the $99 Garmin and the $??? fancy GPS is a matter of amount of data, not necessarily of accuracy of said data.
Actually, no, Kim would probably have been better off with a GPS. They used a paper map, not a GPS. Not only that, they used a highway map, which are piss-poor at covering back roads, yet they chose to use back roads anyway.
More importantly, it was misreading of that map that led them down a hunting road and eventually got them stuck. The side road they selected to avoid going to a higher elevation was, in fact, a dead-end, and any half-assed GPS would have told them that. The problem was they didn't know exactly where they were, and their highway map probably didn't cover the area in sufficient detail even if they did. They took a road that looked like it stayed at a lower elevation.
Even more critical was Kim's misreading of the map that convinced him that a town was 4 miles away. Even the piss-poorest of GPS units would given him better information. Of course, leaving the car with inadequate gear to keep him warm was a bad idea, too, but given the situation he was in, probably the best he could do. I think I would have ripped up a car seat or two for the foam insulation, though...
I remember those systems. Each and every truck driver that tried to drive down my long, very narrow, dead-end road and came up to the LOCKED GATE that led to the airport security perimeter road would show me his screen from that, somehow expecting that if I were only to comprehend that his GPS was right and the physical world was wrong, he could save the 1/2 mile backup down a narrow road with cars parked on both sides and the 12-mile drive around to the other side of the airport.
To be fair, that was only about 1/3 of the drivers. The rest had expensive-looking maps, or directions from their trucking companies, or the occasional printout from MapQuest.
Maps, whether printed or electronic, can be wrong.
PS: That was almost a decade ago. The goddamned map is still wrong. I wonder if the new resident has to deal with equally-upset truck drivers to this day?
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=nashua,+nh&aq=&sll=43.924836,-69.925726&sspn=0.010849,0.027874&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Nashua,+Hillsborough,+New+Hampshire&ll=42.790027,-71.526715&spn=0.002764,0.006968&t=h&z=18
I don't know where you heard that, but it's not "apparent" at all. Sorry, but it's simply not true.
aGPS is only dependent on cell towers for the initial GPS lock, and only speeds up that lock from the traditional GPS approach by using approximate location data. aGPS without cell tower = GPS. The GPS radio itself is not dependent in any way on the cell radio.
When any GPS receiver first starts up, it needs to know what satellites to look for. Not all birds are visible from all locations. Traditional GPS just picks a handful of common and evenly-scattered satellite frequencies and starts listening until it gets its first lock. Then it starts listening for satellites that are known to be close to the one it found. When it has 3-4 of them, it has a good idea of where it is and can narrow down the rest and start giving you decent accuracy. This process takes time (in some old GPS units, several minutes).
On my old Magellan Meridian, it would actually ask you what state you were in at start-up to help narrow down the search, and accurately identifying your state could cut 1-2 minutes off start-up (without this initial hint, it could take up to 5 minutes to get a "first lock" even with a clear view of the sky). So that was an example of early "assisted GPS", where I was the "assist" mechanism.
What's even worse is when your GPS tries to remember where it was, and you've moved somewhere else while the GPS receiver was powered off. Once, on a trip from Maine to Texas, I powered down my Meridian in Maine before boarding the plane, then fired it up in Texas and it took nearly 10 minutes for the GPS to conclude that it needed to ask me approximately where it was. It kept trying to broaden the search for satellites but never widened the net enough to include a bird that's visible from Texas because it assumed I was in Maine. When I told it I was in Texas, it took less than 2 minutes to get an initial lock.
If you can figure out where you are very quickly, the GPS can skip that whole up-front search because it can send a quick ping to a local tower or two and figure out your location to within a few dozen miles in a matter of a few seconds. Knowing where you are that accurately means it can predict with really high confidence what satellites are in range, and start searching for them up front. So the "assisted" part pings towers, gets your rough location (which, by the way, Google Maps on the Blackberry and iPhone shows you while the GPS is still trying to get a lock), then feeds that information into the GPS as a "hint" to tell it what satellites to search for.
If you are outside cell range, the aGPS just becomes a plain old GPS. Still works just fine, just takes a little longer for that initial lock. About the same as it would if you had a non-assisted GPS, assuming the two units have similar antennas and similar processors, of course.
Dude, you need a new GPS if your GPS units don't show road type. The problem is, that data is only slightly more accurate than the data found on a printed map, and many people don't check it. Not that they can't, they don't.
My Blackberry with Google Maps shows the road type of each waypoint, and I can scroll down through them and see if the route has come up with a dirt track. Blackberry maps works similarly, and my wife's Nokia Symbian phone also does that. So does my Magellan Meridian Color which is the better part of a decade old, and the Garmin I had prior to that which was before GPS screens were done in fancy color. My mother has a Mercury with GPS, and it's pretty clear as to what road types you are going to encounter, and even allows you to avoid certain road types if you want. I've seen screenshots of TomToms and they clearly show different colors for different road types.
The real problem occurs when the map data is inaccurate, and that's going to happen no matter HOW you get your maps.
I've had plenty of printed maps that have showed me roads that no longer exist, or the road that is there does not resemble the road on the map at all (say, what's that beaver dam doing in the middle of this mud pit that's marked on the map as a 2-lane paved state road?).
The difference is that people can report problems with Google Maps and Google fixes them in a matter of about a month (I know this from experience, I have several dozen Google Maps corrections that have received relatively prompt attention).
I know paper maps very well. I used to buy a Delorme Gazeteer every year. Fantastic maps, by the way, love 'em, and I don't leave home without one in the trunk as an emergency backup. But they only change once a year, and the map data on them is usually several months old by the time they go to publication. Which is fine, roads don't change a whole lot.
But they do change, and even Delorme, good as they are, will make the occasional mistake.
A printed map has the advantage of allowing (and even forcing) you to understand your entire route before you set out. I agree. But I've also had plenty of people ask for directions, folded map in hand, so terribly distracted trying to read each road sign to see where their turn is coming up that they nearly ran me down.
The ideal is a competent copilot with excellent mapreading skills who is willing to devote 100% attention to every turn.
The next best is a GPS with a few minutes taken up front to make sure the route is reasonable, then just focusing on driving the goddamned car while a voice tells you "Turn left in 500 meters". A voice that you have confidence ignoring when you have to, knowing you'll hear a petulant "ReCALCULATING" a few seconds after you deviate off its set course and the voice prompts will continue while you concentrate on actual driving tasks.
Reading a paper map or scribbled complex directions yourself while trying to drive is far more dangerous and distracting than having a proper GPS.
There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza...
It is, but without the ban on government funding of that research, a lot of the research would now be publicly funded and therefore public domain. Instead, the private sector filled in, and have managed to get exclusive patents on a lot of the stuff they researched, meaning that even if the government or other companies do the legwork themselves the results cannot be applied to further research.
If the government funds the discovery of "a process to replace organs using self-donated tissue and stem cells", then many companies can refine that technique, apply it, and the one who comes up with a way to do it the most cheaply and effectively wins (but everyone else can apply it in different ways which may be more suitable for different organs, etc).
If a private company funds the discover of the same process, they can patent it, and no one else has any incentive to make improvements to the process unless the company that funded it is feeling generous.
I agree, but the success of the gasoline engine is also dependent upon a number of current subsidies already in place. If you want electric cars to compete, give them a level playing field.
Adjust fuel and road taxes so that cars are paying for all road maintenance and construction, and stop subsidizing the use of a car with property, sales, and income taxes. Add to those taxes the amount necessary to clean up the pollution that each vehicle generates, so cleanup becomes the responsibility of the people who pollute and not the average taxpayer.
Stop giving the oil companies incentives and handouts and bailouts, and stop manipulating the price of oil and gasoline to keep the voting populace happy. Make the strategic oil reserve a purely military oil reserve for real emergencies and stop tapping it to level out fuel costs.
Very true. As a bonus, the resale value on my Jetta Diesel would triple in about 5 nanoseconds, and I could afford to buy a really nice bicycle with the profit. :)
Lots of hybrid cars, but that's because they are a semi-practical form of partial electric-ish car.
Look, I love the idea of electric cars. I really do. No pollution (generated by the car itself, so you need clean electricity, but that's easier than having a million clean cars!). Lower cost of operation (assuming affordable electricity). Simpler. All that. Great stuff. Really.
However, there are a few elephants in the room, and will continue to be.
1. Range/Recharge. The Nissan Leaf (the current apparent darling of the electric vehicle fleet) gets anywhere from 62 miles to 138 miles on a charge. That's Nissan's estimates, so they may contain a certain amount of puffery. However, there are some tested numbers in there so let's go with that for now. They don't give a recharge time but it's got a 24 kWh battery and a 3.3 kW charger, so if I understand my division correctly we're looking approximately in the 8 hour range for a recharge. That means if I want to go somewhere 31 miles away on the weekend, I'm taking a calculated risk taking a newly-charged Leaf with a full-capacity battery to get me there and back, and if I want to go 70 miles I'd better plan on an overnight stay. Drop those numbers considerably if it's 20 below zero out.
2. Cost. The Leaf costs about $25 grand if you take advantage of the best of all of the tax incentives. For $15 grand or so, I can get a nice 4-door Toyota Yaris. That leaves me enough to buy a Yaris and (at $4/gal) well over 50,000 miles worth of gasoline for about the same money as a Leaf with no "free miles" on it.
3. Maintenance. Namely the batteries. I've currently got a Jetta Diesel with 93,000 miles on it and the way the engine is going now many many more miles to go. After 5 years, Nissan's "non-guaranteed" figure is that their battery will hold 80% of its original design charge (this is a Li-Ion, and I've owned laptops that were stored under much better conditions than my car would be, I'm thinking more like 40% as a somewhat optimistic estimate). I don't know what a new battery pack would run, but I'll bet it's over $5 grand (or enough to drive the Yaris another 30-40 thousand miles!).
In other words, the cost of replacement batteries would likely exceed the price of fuel for an efficient car.
That battery life will get even worse after a few nights a year at 15 below zero (for those who insist on their temperatures in Celsius, that would be 15 degrees below zero) a year or days over 100F in the sun (I've done one conversion, you can do this one on your own). Or if I want to keep the charges to "only" 8 hours all the time, since the 8-hour charge appears to be the "fast charge" method, which can really mess up battery life.
Environmentally, it's still a good option, assuming of course you get your electricity from a renewable (wind, geothermal, hydro, bio) or less-limited and moderately-polluting (nuclear) source. Also assuming you can recycle the old battery bits cleanly after 3-4 years, of course, and assuming the energy and pollution that goes into making and recycling those batteries is a lot better than burning a few hundred gallons of fuel.
I want to go electric, and my commute is 15 miles, but I still can't justify the cost or the limitations. I save more energy by cycling in when I can and carpooling when I can't, and I don't need to own a second car capable of driving more than 100 miles for weekend trips.
I suspect this is "tagged" photos, not "profile" photos. Still, photos get "tagged" that don't actually contain the subject of the tagging all the time.
No. The photos they use are, by definition, tagged already. They already have the information. They are just asking you to confirm it.
Still, this is a stupid idea. I know every Facebook friend by sight, because I don't friend strangers. However, lots of people tag random pictures with names of people they think should see that picture, or tag pictures with a family account, or tag photos of a newborn with Mom's and Dad's accounts, or whatever.
A random test might show me a funny picture of a guy holding a snowblower with snow flying out of his ass, a picture of a bicycle owned by someone, a picture of a 4-day-old baby that I can't tell from the other 12 million 4-day-old babies on Facebook, and a picture of an actual friend standing in the corner of a fantastic view of Mount Washington in the winter where the friend is three pixels of the picture. I know my friends, but not necessarily THAT well.
Notifications now pull up the top level of the thread, instead of the thread opened to the current discussion. Clicking on the header of the discussion opens the thread (only the direct lineage of the replies that led to the reply to you) and all replies below it on that same lineage.
Result: Very hard to figure out who replied to you compared to the old way, and an artificially stunted view of the thread.
Either show me the whole thread with the message you told me about highlighted, or show me the message you told me about and its direct parent but open the damned thing up and position me there.
Other than that one complaint, however, the redesign is actually kinda nice. Once I increased font size by about 4 clicks so I could read things.
That's quite possible. Maybe his dad is in aerospace and pushed really hard for him to get a degree in it. Maybe he just changed his mind. Maybe he was gunning for NASA then decided that all the cool projects were dead and wanted to see how he could leverage engineering into something that didn't end him up as a suicidal pencil-pusher by middle age.
The number of people who have gone to the trouble of earning a degree then deciding that their chosen degree isn't really what they wanted to do with their life is legion. The number who actually accept that the degree might have been a mistake and go after something that they might actually enjoy doing is much, much smaller.
And that's sad.
Agreed, here in Maine ~$40K would probably get you ostracized as "that rich guy" by most of your neighbors.
He graduated a year ago, so his experience was looking for a job for a year, unsuccessfully I might add. You might have noticed that the economy is blowing steaming stinky glowing green monkey chunks at the moment.
He might have garnered his degree into something with a starting wage somewhat higher, or he could have languished in the job market for another year or two and decided to give up and step out in front of a bus some day.
Instead, he found something that he thought he'd love doing that covers his expenses and went for it.
It's not all about the money for all of us, you know.