In this case it probably doesn't, as the large business centers have commuters from states without large business centers. Of course, WV has Sen. Byrd, and as a result already gets more than its share of federal dollars. This is really just icing.
Overall, though, I'd agree that it's probably close enough for government purposes.
You're right, despite the crap being doled out as responses. Perhaps if you'd asked why someone would grab a (puportedly) high end image program to deal with images shot with a (very) amatuer level camera. If you're so concered that you need the maximum image quality for archival purposes that you need a specialzed RAW software package, you darned well better start where the image is captured. Top quality glass and a big, low-noise, high pixel count CCD is a good place to start.
There will always be better algorithms and processing as time goes by - the RAW data will never get more accurate than that which you capture initially.
ATTFA, it did take longer, based on his testing. Now that was of a certain set of batch processes, and not individual filters, so it may just be a bug.
Actually, he gave you the 95% confidence level, the lower level offered a "single number solution" which may have been easier for the weak minded to digest. Those who don't understand confidence levels wouldn't have made sense of the +11 to -26 (or whatever it was).
The numbers were also taken from the report cited. That's not to say that they are accurate to that level, but the researchers chose that level of precision for their presentation. Tenths of accidents don't happen, of course, but then partial offspring and cars don't exist either...yet we have 2.6 childern and 2.3 cars per household, and there's nothing wrong with using figures like that do describe a population.
Quantifying human reactions is difficult work, and inherently has its errors - hence ranges of results. Having kicked back with several transporation manuals in the course of a local zoning effort, I can understand what he is referring to. Everything is ranges or zones, nothing is cut and dried. I had to explain that to both the board of supervisors and the group I was helping out. They were on different sides of the debate, and neither liked the answer, but everyone agreed with my findings and found them to be an impartial view of the situation (I'm an engineer, it's my job). YEs, the ggp was probably trying to be funny, but I thought the gp was a very well written and appropriate post...and I'm sorry you didn't try to understand it.
1. People fear that which they do not understand. 2. Nuclear Physics is hard* (apologies to Barbie(R)) 3. People fear Nuclear Physics
*Definition: Hard: "Cannot be completely understood by any human based on common adult eduction methods**." **Definition: Adult Education Methods: "a 3 minute news story delivered on television in a sensationalized manner by a non-technically educated reporter."
the popular thereisno.god notwithstanding, you should look at the.god domain as every other three letter tld - it's just an abbreviation..com didn't mean anything on its own (except as a DOS executable) until it became popular. You don't go into the mil to shoot at people, it's the military..net was just lucky.
So,.god really stands for God, No God, Goddess, and Gods, all at once!
Of course, I do think we should add.fsm as a TLD, as it is by far the most important religion, and should not be stuck in with all the false religions out there.
(I'd have suggested.pirate as more appropriate, but fsm is three letters and the,pirate domain would probably be hijacked by all the.torrent locator sites)
No, they're more concerned about how to stay afloat (revenue). Since they can't reasonably raist the monthly fee (again), they don't make squat off of the boxes sold, and their feature set doesn't make them a must have (hint: auto commercial skipping, unencumbered digital transfer of files, simple compilation of program gourps on to DVD, no no-captive integration with non-air service providers), they must look elsewhere to help the bottom line.
You mean, like the TV station which is 100 miles from me, but considers me in its market? The one that is trnasmitting digital at reduced effective power (based on distance covered at its digital frequency)? The one that denied me getting a rebroadcast national feed in HD so I could watch MNF, since I get a singnal of about 5 (out of 100, ~50 needed to sync up) with an aligned channelmaster 4221 and a 10dB amplifier?
Yeah, I really feel sorry for them. I feel so sorry, I'm sending them a "love" note, and copying the FCC.
It's not a scam, it's gambling. Think of insider trading as point shaving, or - better yet - as a dealer tell. Would a casino let the dealer of blackjack play a hand it his own table? Certainly he wouldn't win every time, but it would increase his advantage. Now, make it a blackjack tourney, where the dealer is playing to amass a stake against other (non-dealer) players. He's still not guaranteed to win, but he will have an unfair advantage.
Never underestimate the incompetence of a large organization, nor the ability of middle managers to hide career-stopping errors for short* periods of time.
*Short is generally between 60 days and 4 years - sometimes longer, but rarely shorter. It is mostly dependent on the type of auditing done, the desire of upper management to find a scapegoat, and the amount of publicity surrounding the original erroneous decision.
"Instant" electric immersion heaters are nearly 100% efficient. The only reason that they are not commonplace is that it takes a lot of amps at 240V to heat water. That falls back to the service entrance rating and the overall system capacity in a typical residence. Microwaves are a difficult and complex way to heat water that could otherwise use an immersion heater. I suggest you google Eemax if you want to see some instant water heaters. They are electric, but raising the temperature of a 3 gallons a minute from line temp to shower temp is going to take about 16 to 20 kW - about 80 amps at 240v (US typ max residential line voltage +/-120V).
I have two Eemax 9.5kW models under my kitchen sink, in line with my hot water line. The first heats about 1.5g/m from 70F to 135F for kitchen faucet use, the second heats to 195 for (unlimited) instant hot water. As soon as the slug of cold water is out of the pipes, the first unit shuts off. I can start with near boiling water for pasta as fast as I can fill the pot. While each unit is about $225, it means I waste less water (and time) waiting for the hot water to make it to the kitchen. The down side - I had to upgrade the electric in my house (c1962) to have the power to do it. The best part? If the element ever fails, it's less than $40 for a new one. Oh, as as for not using them as my primary HW source, having a tank means having hot water when the power goes out. Since the power is rarely out for longer than it takes me to use 60 gallons of hot water, it provides a nice "cushion," and my sensitive American tushy never has to suffer through a cold shower;-)
As for cost - I get electricity at about 4.5-6c/kWh and - as of last year's natural gas rates - electric resistance heat is about 10% more than gas heating at a 92% AFUE rate for gas (electric is, by definition, 100% efficient, as all the energy ends up as heat). This year, it will be cheaper to heat with electric resistance than gas. Heck, my oil furnace is costing me twice what it would be for electric resistance, which is why I'm going to a heat pump w/ staged booster coils. I get >100% efficiency on the HP, plus 105F+ register temps all the time. It may not be perfectly efficient, but its the lowest cost, always-comfy solution.
Yes, but at the time, the amount of digial video in the typical computer user's realm was fairly small. With both DV and DVD video easy to get on to disc, and the large quantity desireable now (HTPCs, for example), there is a market that just didn't exist back then.
And Cohen doesn't really have any financial interest in promoting or assisting infringing downloads. He's supposed to be running a business, based on lawful distribution of content of various types. I wouldn't be suprised if he contacted them first and offered a press-release opportunity for them, in hopes of getting better ties with the folks who could put more money in his pocket.
Damned right. Ditto for me - DC and LA (The city, not the state). Back to Blacksburg, VA for me. I do miss the proximity to good (well, at leat popular) theater, and malls with niche shops, but for the mileage I save commuting I can take several trips a year. Heck, it's 3 mintues from the house-next-to-the-golf-course to the office. Of course, it would be more like 15 minutes if I worked on the other side of town like my wife does, but that's 'cause there's no straight shot through the university in the center of town.
BTW - most of the cost of living, now that America has been mostly homogenized, is in housing. Having done a little negotiating on both sides about COL, the actual bits and pieces only come up to 10-20%. Housing, otoh, can easily be double or triple between BFNW and city-suburb. Brand new single family home on 1/4 acre for $100/sf? It's here, just 200 miles from DC. Want to be in a really good school district in the "upscale" neighborhood, you'll need closer to $140/sf for a new home, a few dollars less for a resale. They tear resales down that cost more than that in the 'burbs around cities.
Yup. Clean air, wide open spaces, friendly people. Of course, if you want to fit in, you'll have to learn smile wave back with your whole hand, not just one finger. Small price to pay, I assure you.
Lose, damnit. I saw it as I hit submit. Just add it to the list (like someone - one word). Someday I'll learn to look at the screen instead of the keyboard when I type.
Well, then I'm getting lots of Americans of Indian descent when I call for tech support, because they certainly haven't been through vocal training to loose their accents. Is that bad or objectionable? No, as long as we can understand each other enough to solve the problem I'm having.
Then again, I suppose you could be right. The last two times I've called Dell, I've gotten TS reps with no disernable "foreign" accent, and yet they've been either (a) clueless or (b) outright wrong in their attepmts to repair the problem. Luckily, the phrases "Would you pass me up tot he next level" and "You clearly don't know what your talking about, please put me back in the queue so that I can speak to some one competent" have both worked.
(That last one really did work, BTW. I was politely put on hold, and the second rep was marginally more helpful. He was at least willing to do some research on my issue, instead of telling me that it was a built-in, unchangeble feature of my $3000 laptop that the internal network card would shut down while on battery power, even with a full charge. That gave me the extra time to find the application I needed to fix the problem on my own. I think when he came back on the line he had found the same application I had - and that fixed the issue.)
Well, actually, yeah. I remember back in the early 90s when a secretary showed my this Mosaic thing she'd found. I told her it looked interesting, but that I could get anything I needed off of gopher. It didn't seem like anything that would take off. Fast forward a year or so, and I remarked to a couple of friends, after starting to use mosaic and looking at HTML, that in a couple of years you'd see web addresses instead of 800 numbers in advertising pretty soon. They looked at me like I told them computers would grow legs and walk around the office. 0.500 isn't too bad, right?
No real point to this post - just an old fart trying to avoid real work by surfing slashdot...
The problem is that there are many devices which have very useful functions while "off". PVRs are one obvious example, but what about IR controlled components. The whole point is to be able to turn them on remotely. Since turning them on requires a detection circuit, that would require a standby mode. Turning off your coffeemaker because yo udon't need the clock is fine, but it won't turn itself on in the morning to make coffee if the outlet is switched off. Also, a higher energy standby mode means a faster startup, and that is generally met with approval by consumers. And then there are annoying devices which have a set power-up routine which prevents use of the item for a reasonably long period of time. My DVD jukebox falls into that category. On powerup, it plays the first disc it finds, either in the mechanism or in the selected slot. After the 20 second ID spin, if it happens to be a Disney movie, it will be 2-6 minutes of PUOP-non-skippable trailers before I can wrest control back. No thanks...I just leave it on.
Your X10 can be controlled remotely, but there is an additional delay, and requires a second remote, or a programmable remote and an IR/RF gateway.
BTW - I've set up a whole house with x10 as a test, and decided that it really wasn't ready for primetime due to the timeit took to turn on/off - a liitle delay, it turn out, really does annoy me. Also, I found that I wasted more energy. How? Well, I'd leave every light in the house on at night, because I knew that when I went to bed I could just hit the "all off" button from my bedside controller. Without the need to go back and turn all the lights off at once, I just left them all on when I left a room. Interesting result, I thought.
You're kidding, right? Why would you pay $15/mo instead of using easynews (at $9.98/mo), unless you've got some need for massive d/l bandwisth and are getting an unlimited account. I don't really download that much (I think I've got about 180GB in my easynews bank), but I like the retention, uptime, completeness, and speed. I would be happy with a 1/2 or 1/4 bw account for $5/mo if they offered it...I don't think I'll ever exceed the 26GB nntp monthly limit they've given me.
Oh, and as a bonus, they host some linux distros for "free" (at least, I don't think the hosting is paid for) - that's how I just got Slack 10.2 isos a couple of days ago.
This actually has an interesting possibility. The "substantial public harm" part looks to try and kick the (current) patent system in the balls. Patents were formed for the public good - to reward creators for creating and sharing their work (for a fee), and protecting their investment in time, thus encouraging research.
To "abuse" the patent system (to use a/. friendly term), would be contrary to the purpose of patents, and a high court ruling could require the reworking of language governing patents.
JPGs are silly, but what if someone came up with a cure for, oh I don't know, the Avian Flu, and then wouldn't license manufacturing rights for a "reasonable" sum, but could not produce enough of the drug themselves to supply the world market and prevent a pandemic which could kill hundreds of millions of people? Is that a good use of the Patent system? Is that the intent of the Patent system? And...what this suit could represent is asking the question "Is this what the intent of the Patent system SHOULD BE?"
I don't think it will actually come to this, but the Courts are there to question and restrain the legislative and executive powers. This is a nice opportunity to rattle some cages.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case it probably doesn't, as the large business centers have commuters from states without large business centers. Of course, WV has Sen. Byrd, and as a result already gets more than its share of federal dollars. This is really just icing.
Overall, though, I'd agree that it's probably close enough for government purposes.
Not only did you miss the joke, you didn't even ge the right fastener.
Really? actfa, that does appear to be its main draw. If you want to do manipulation, get photoshop.
You're right, despite the crap being doled out as responses. Perhaps if you'd asked why someone would grab a (puportedly) high end image program to deal with images shot with a (very) amatuer level camera. If you're so concered that you need the maximum image quality for archival purposes that you need a specialzed RAW software package, you darned well better start where the image is captured. Top quality glass and a big, low-noise, high pixel count CCD is a good place to start.
There will always be better algorithms and processing as time goes by - the RAW data will never get more accurate than that which you capture initially.
ATTFA, it did take longer, based on his testing. Now that was of a certain set of batch processes, and not individual filters, so it may just be a bug.
Actually, he gave you the 95% confidence level, the lower level offered a "single number solution" which may have been easier for the weak minded to digest. Those who don't understand confidence levels wouldn't have made sense of the +11 to -26 (or whatever it was).
The numbers were also taken from the report cited. That's not to say that they are accurate to that level, but the researchers chose that level of precision for their presentation. Tenths of accidents don't happen, of course, but then partial offspring and cars don't exist either...yet we have 2.6 childern and 2.3 cars per household, and there's nothing wrong with using figures like that do describe a population.
Quantifying human reactions is difficult work, and inherently has its errors - hence ranges of results. Having kicked back with several transporation manuals in the course of a local zoning effort, I can understand what he is referring to. Everything is ranges or zones, nothing is cut and dried. I had to explain that to both the board of supervisors and the group I was helping out. They were on different sides of the debate, and neither liked the answer, but everyone agreed with my findings and found them to be an impartial view of the situation (I'm an engineer, it's my job). YEs, the ggp was probably trying to be funny, but I thought the gp was a very well written and appropriate post...and I'm sorry you didn't try to understand it.
1. People fear that which they do not understand.
2. Nuclear Physics is hard* (apologies to Barbie(R))
3. People fear Nuclear Physics
*Definition: Hard: "Cannot be completely understood by any human based on common adult eduction methods**."
**Definition: Adult Education Methods: "a 3 minute news story delivered on television in a sensationalized manner by a non-technically educated reporter."
I think my sig is rather appropriate today...
Chinese Gooseberries...ewwwww, that's nasty. No wonder they changed the name.
Though lack of planning, the $100 laptop is in thousands of small pieces..
Maybe they should have had the Archbishop of Canterbury's brother do the demonstration?
the popular thereisno.god notwithstanding, you should look at the .god domain as every other three letter tld - it's just an abbreviation. .com didn't mean anything on its own (except as a DOS executable) until it became popular. You don't go into the mil to shoot at people, it's the military. .net was just lucky.
.god really stands for God, No God, Goddess, and Gods, all at once!
.fsm as a TLD, as it is by far the most important religion, and should not be stuck in with all the false religions out there.
.pirate as more appropriate, but fsm is three letters and the ,pirate domain would probably be hijacked by all the .torrent locator sites)
So,
Of course, I do think we should add
(I'd have suggested
No, they're more concerned about how to stay afloat (revenue). Since they can't reasonably raist the monthly fee (again), they don't make squat off of the boxes sold, and their feature set doesn't make them a must have (hint: auto commercial skipping, unencumbered digital transfer of files, simple compilation of program gourps on to DVD, no no-captive integration with non-air service providers), they must look elsewhere to help the bottom line.
You mean, like the TV station which is 100 miles from me, but considers me in its market? The one that is trnasmitting digital at reduced effective power (based on distance covered at its digital frequency)? The one that denied me getting a rebroadcast national feed in HD so I could watch MNF, since I get a singnal of about 5 (out of 100, ~50 needed to sync up) with an aligned channelmaster 4221 and a 10dB amplifier?
Yeah, I really feel sorry for them. I feel so sorry, I'm sending them a "love" note, and copying the FCC.
F*cking bastards.
It's not a scam, it's gambling. Think of insider trading as point shaving, or - better yet - as a dealer tell. Would a casino let the dealer of blackjack play a hand it his own table? Certainly he wouldn't win every time, but it would increase his advantage. Now, make it a blackjack tourney, where the dealer is playing to amass a stake against other (non-dealer) players. He's still not guaranteed to win, but he will have an unfair advantage.
*Short is generally between 60 days and 4 years - sometimes longer, but rarely shorter. It is mostly dependent on the type of auditing done, the desire of upper management to find a scapegoat, and the amount of publicity surrounding the original erroneous decision.
"Instant" electric immersion heaters are nearly 100% efficient. The only reason that they are not commonplace is that it takes a lot of amps at 240V to heat water. That falls back to the service entrance rating and the overall system capacity in a typical residence. Microwaves are a difficult and complex way to heat water that could otherwise use an immersion heater. I suggest you google Eemax if you want to see some instant water heaters. They are electric, but raising the temperature of a 3 gallons a minute from line temp to shower temp is going to take about 16 to 20 kW - about 80 amps at 240v (US typ max residential line voltage +/-120V).
;-)
I have two Eemax 9.5kW models under my kitchen sink, in line with my hot water line. The first heats about 1.5g/m from 70F to 135F for kitchen faucet use, the second heats to 195 for (unlimited) instant hot water. As soon as the slug of cold water is out of the pipes, the first unit shuts off. I can start with near boiling water for pasta as fast as I can fill the pot. While each unit is about $225, it means I waste less water (and time) waiting for the hot water to make it to the kitchen. The down side - I had to upgrade the electric in my house (c1962) to have the power to do it. The best part? If the element ever fails, it's less than $40 for a new one. Oh, as as for not using them as my primary HW source, having a tank means having hot water when the power goes out. Since the power is rarely out for longer than it takes me to use 60 gallons of hot water, it provides a nice "cushion," and my sensitive American tushy never has to suffer through a cold shower
As for cost - I get electricity at about 4.5-6c/kWh and - as of last year's natural gas rates - electric resistance heat is about 10% more than gas heating at a 92% AFUE rate for gas (electric is, by definition, 100% efficient, as all the energy ends up as heat). This year, it will be cheaper to heat with electric resistance than gas. Heck, my oil furnace is costing me twice what it would be for electric resistance, which is why I'm going to a heat pump w/ staged booster coils. I get >100% efficiency on the HP, plus 105F+ register temps all the time. It may not be perfectly efficient, but its the lowest cost, always-comfy solution.
Yes, but at the time, the amount of digial video in the typical computer user's realm was fairly small. With both DV and DVD video easy to get on to disc, and the large quantity desireable now (HTPCs, for example), there is a market that just didn't exist back then.
And Cohen doesn't really have any financial interest in promoting or assisting infringing downloads. He's supposed to be running a business, based on lawful distribution of content of various types. I wouldn't be suprised if he contacted them first and offered a press-release opportunity for them, in hopes of getting better ties with the folks who could put more money in his pocket.
Damned right. Ditto for me - DC and LA (The city, not the state). Back to Blacksburg, VA for me. I do miss the proximity to good (well, at leat popular) theater, and malls with niche shops, but for the mileage I save commuting I can take several trips a year. Heck, it's 3 mintues from the house-next-to-the-golf-course to the office. Of course, it would be more like 15 minutes if I worked on the other side of town like my wife does, but that's 'cause there's no straight shot through the university in the center of town.
BTW - most of the cost of living, now that America has been mostly homogenized, is in housing. Having done a little negotiating on both sides about COL, the actual bits and pieces only come up to 10-20%. Housing, otoh, can easily be double or triple between BFNW and city-suburb. Brand new single family home on 1/4 acre for $100/sf? It's here, just 200 miles from DC. Want to be in a really good school district in the "upscale" neighborhood, you'll need closer to $140/sf for a new home, a few dollars less for a resale. They tear resales down that cost more than that in the 'burbs around cities.
Yup. Clean air, wide open spaces, friendly people. Of course, if you want to fit in, you'll have to learn smile wave back with your whole hand, not just one finger. Small price to pay, I assure you.
Lose, damnit. I saw it as I hit submit. Just add it to the list (like someone - one word). Someday I'll learn to look at the screen instead of the keyboard when I type.
Well, then I'm getting lots of Americans of Indian descent when I call for tech support, because they certainly haven't been through vocal training to loose their accents. Is that bad or objectionable? No, as long as we can understand each other enough to solve the problem I'm having.
Then again, I suppose you could be right. The last two times I've called Dell, I've gotten TS reps with no disernable "foreign" accent, and yet they've been either (a) clueless or (b) outright wrong in their attepmts to repair the problem. Luckily, the phrases "Would you pass me up tot he next level" and "You clearly don't know what your talking about, please put me back in the queue so that I can speak to some one competent" have both worked.
(That last one really did work, BTW. I was politely put on hold, and the second rep was marginally more helpful. He was at least willing to do some research on my issue, instead of telling me that it was a built-in, unchangeble feature of my $3000 laptop that the internal network card would shut down while on battery power, even with a full charge. That gave me the extra time to find the application I needed to fix the problem on my own. I think when he came back on the line he had found the same application I had - and that fixed the issue.)
Well, actually, yeah. I remember back in the early 90s when a secretary showed my this Mosaic thing she'd found. I told her it looked interesting, but that I could get anything I needed off of gopher. It didn't seem like anything that would take off. Fast forward a year or so, and I remarked to a couple of friends, after starting to use mosaic and looking at HTML, that in a couple of years you'd see web addresses instead of 800 numbers in advertising pretty soon. They looked at me like I told them computers would grow legs and walk around the office. 0.500 isn't too bad, right?
No real point to this post - just an old fart trying to avoid real work by surfing slashdot...
The problem is that there are many devices which have very useful functions while "off". PVRs are one obvious example, but what about IR controlled components. The whole point is to be able to turn them on remotely. Since turning them on requires a detection circuit, that would require a standby mode. Turning off your coffeemaker because yo udon't need the clock is fine, but it won't turn itself on in the morning to make coffee if the outlet is switched off. Also, a higher energy standby mode means a faster startup, and that is generally met with approval by consumers. And then there are annoying devices which have a set power-up routine which prevents use of the item for a reasonably long period of time. My DVD jukebox falls into that category. On powerup, it plays the first disc it finds, either in the mechanism or in the selected slot. After the 20 second ID spin, if it happens to be a Disney movie, it will be 2-6 minutes of PUOP-non-skippable trailers before I can wrest control back. No thanks...I just leave it on.
Your X10 can be controlled remotely, but there is an additional delay, and requires a second remote, or a programmable remote and an IR/RF gateway.
BTW - I've set up a whole house with x10 as a test, and decided that it really wasn't ready for primetime due to the timeit took to turn on/off - a liitle delay, it turn out, really does annoy me. Also, I found that I wasted more energy. How? Well, I'd leave every light in the house on at night, because I knew that when I went to bed I could just hit the "all off" button from my bedside controller. Without the need to go back and turn all the lights off at once, I just left them all on when I left a room. Interesting result, I thought.
You're kidding, right? Why would you pay $15/mo instead of using easynews (at $9.98/mo), unless you've got some need for massive d/l bandwisth and are getting an unlimited account. I don't really download that much (I think I've got about 180GB in my easynews bank), but I like the retention, uptime, completeness, and speed. I would be happy with a 1/2 or 1/4 bw account for $5/mo if they offered it...I don't think I'll ever exceed the 26GB nntp monthly limit they've given me.
Oh, and as a bonus, they host some linux distros for "free" (at least, I don't think the hosting is paid for) - that's how I just got Slack 10.2 isos a couple of days ago.
The Sony rootkit for a keylogger? Then we'd only have to worry about 5999 others!
This actually has an interesting possibility. The "substantial public harm" part looks to try and kick the (current) patent system in the balls. Patents were formed for the public good - to reward creators for creating and sharing their work (for a fee), and protecting their investment in time, thus encouraging research.
/. friendly term), would be contrary to the purpose of patents, and a high court ruling could require the reworking of language governing patents.
To "abuse" the patent system (to use a
JPGs are silly, but what if someone came up with a cure for, oh I don't know, the Avian Flu, and then wouldn't license manufacturing rights for a "reasonable" sum, but could not produce enough of the drug themselves to supply the world market and prevent a pandemic which could kill hundreds of millions of people? Is that a good use of the Patent system? Is that the intent of the Patent system? And...what this suit could represent is asking the question "Is this what the intent of the Patent system SHOULD BE?"
I don't think it will actually come to this, but the Courts are there to question and restrain the legislative and executive powers. This is a nice opportunity to rattle some cages.