I don't see what the big headache is here. If you orient the sub-pixels 90 degrees apart, you get very little cross-talk with most image patterns. You could use a wave-plate (or some other optical de-polarizer) to de-polarize and then re-polarize if you're looking to use commodity LCD panels.
Not only does this seem pretty simple, but I think it already exists.
Man, I wish that there were more people out there with your non-scheming outlook. At this point, I just don't keep any work material on my personal hardware. It's just too much of an unknown.
I had a lawyer at my last employer say "you're just going to have to trust that we're not out to get you" right after saying "if you made a movie outside of work, it would likely be ours..."
I make software, so the idea that they would even consider grabbing an indie film (not that I'm making one, but it was an example) that was made entirely on my hardware and entirely on my time really didn't fit with the "just going to have to trust.." bit. Needless to say, I quit that job.
That's the most important part of your post. I'm not a lawyer either, but I'm fairly confident that materials developed on company time or company property are defined as "work product" in a "work for hire" environment. I'd be extremely wary of presuming natural rights. The law is rarely completely reasonable, and work product is no exception.
The problem (as if there were only one) is that we hold precedent high above reason, and we pretend that prior decisions are on-point and were completely correct. Neither is typically true. What we have is a system that holds legal trickery at least as the equal of reason and domain knowledge, executed by legal professionals who have an ample supply of neither. We also have a fair proportion of judges and lawyers who have forgotten that the law should serve the people and society and not the other way around. For a football player, perhaps the whole world is football. I know that I look to solve all of my problems with computers and code. Lawyers need to take the extra step and realize that the practice of law should be, essentially, a public service.
Additionally, if you've read well-crafted laws or contracts, you'll note that the language used in crafting such documents, while dry, can be remarkably precise and descriptive.
I've used lawyers for a lot of things, from goin' to jail to contract review. I certainly appreciate the expertise that a good attorney can provide, but the incongruous house-of-cards that we've managed to build up has become a self-perpetuating rat-maze of creative legal interpretation. Don't for a moment think that this somehow leads to the fair and uniform application of laws.
As my lawyer told me once regarding going to court "Even if you're 100% legally right, it's close to a 50% chance that you could lose in court. It's always better to avoid litigation."
And as my public defender told me once regarding charges as a juvenile "What was your name again?"
We could have a legal system not so mired in procedure that it makes it next to impossible for the layman to defend himself, and this system has been perpetually perverted by those blurring the line between zealous adversarial representation and inhuman chicanery.
At this point, yes, we need lawyers, but, in my experience, I haven't found 90% of lawyers to be either good or evil. Maybe 10% are strongly either way. The rest are just like us, lazy, tired, mildly manipulative, and so busy doing the job that they've lost sight of any greater meaning of the work. The next time your doctor gives you Flonase instead of a chest x-ray because they'd rather turf you than fight with your HMO? Yeah.. same thing.
Since our meters are zone-based, (I'm in Chicago, being screwed by an unbelievably corrupt government), you can't really drive off with the tag and expect to be able to use it elsewhere. This means that the city has a series of rate zones that determine what the hourly rate is. Besides, you'd be paying the city^H^H^H^H^H LAZ parking for the time that you're driving. My new approach is to walk back to the ticket-dispensing machine and use the motorcycle stickers (or the sticky back of some tickets) to leave it on the machine so it can be used by someone else. Unfortunately, this only works if they are only going to be there a short enough time to not need any more than your original ticket.
That said, my wife and I were talking about how much we prefer these machines to what we had before, which was six dollars of quarters for an hour of parking. We each had quart-sized plastic bags in our cars that we regularly filled with quarters, and the meters were constantly failing from being too full. In order to fight a ticket later, you needed to call in and put a complaint on record. That was a major headache.
Regular meters were fine until our city screwed us out of parking revenue for 75 years in a no-bid festival of abject corruption. Why Chicagoans haven't burned City Hall to the ground is beyond me.
Perhaps there is already some hypervisor running that we don't know about?
As a Z owner who is planning on upgrading to Windows 7, this pisses me off. That machine was nearly as expensive as my mac... my mac!
It's worth noting that, scarily enough, it *was* still cheaper than my MBP, and the MBP has all sorts of issues running Windows. Sadly, the one ideal computer to run all OS's is actually three and a roll of duct tape.
So it falls within the umbrella of the law, but, as you sort of said, the law itself is ridiculous. In this case, the DMCA protects the razors/blades business model. Otherwise, these consoles, sold at or near a loss, might be used for other purposes. To be fair, the most common use for this is probably the play of pirated games, but there are other legitimate reasons to modify a console. It's mine. If I want to put a spoiler, intake, and huge rims on it, that's my call.
Are we going to have to worry about the DMCA (or laws like it) keeping people from modifying their cars, their legos, or their synthesizers? If I can do something for myself, is it fair to make it illegal to have someone else do it for me? Is it reasonable to make it illegal to have them tell me how to do it? We have a serious problem with entitlement in the US, but not just at a personal level. Business-people appear to believe that they are entitled to the hidden business model of their choosing, and, in the absence of the technical wherewithal to implement that business model, they seek out "legal" protections for their revenue stream.
The DMCA should serve as a strong lesson to all of us. We need to be more involved in the actions of our legislature, and we need to vote and campaign punitively. When your representative has just given you the shaft for a nice dinner and a couple of "gift" azalea bushes, you need to make sure that they know that they've lost your vote, forever.
It's jarring, breaks the style of the game (old-school dollar bills for State Farm?), and sucks when you've bought both the game and the Fury update (Mirror's Edge costs less). This is the natural outcome of having a closed system that allows people to reach in and screw with things you've already "bought."
Of course, I also have an iPhone and iPod touch...
It matters so much that companies that do a lot of trading set up their algorithmic trading facilities as close as is possible to their respective market/trading centers. EBS has heavy-hitters collocated with them, and it can be a selling point, like this.
Think of it this way: In rough numbers, round-tripping 5000 miles, in light-speed-based latency alone, adds just under 55 milliseconds. That is *huge* in terms of algorithmic trading. These guys talk about the speed of light all the time.
I thought it was a toilet, but, either way, my point is that what Colbert is doing is brilliant. Anonymous online polls with such simple measures as cookies to reduce fraud are just silly.
Anything put up to re-vote friendly public vote should suffer the humorous indignity of being named after Colbert.
It's beautiful. It highlights how stupid open online polls are, and how they shouldn't ever be used to name anything important. If people stopped using open online polls for naming, Colbert wouldn't have his name on a bunch of things.
We've known this for a while (as slashdotters), but it's high time that people get a repeated and obvious lesson.
Yep, hygroscopic, though it takes a serious amount of effort to get my hands to type "hy" without "d" to follow.
Look, you can get all holier-than-thou and... wait.. what? Slashdot? Yeah.
Of course I was wrong about the article originally (I said I hadn't read it, so odds are), but the tone and text of the article leads one to believe that the researchers in question have discovered something new. What they are doing is phenomenally important, but it's not a new discovery. Scary how, after making this point a few times, it's still not sticking with you.
The Model T wasn't a new discovery either, but Ford instituted a manufacturing practice that made it far more accessible. Things can be important to humanity without being new discoveries. You can continue to ignore the point if you like, but that will just make this thread even more unreadable on mobile devices.
You may want to change your name to Malthus with the "number of people" doom and gloom, but you don't need a big hand-waving global-food-supply panic argument to get behind atmospheric water extraction. You just need people who are born in arid climates
You must have read the wrong article. They never claimed it was magic.
You must have read the wrong article. They claimed it was "found." Solar hydroscopic water extraction dates back to at least the '90's. You seized on the wrong word. "Magic" could have been "fantabulous" or "wang-wagging" and my statement would still stand.
P.S. Claiming you haven't read the article doesn't absolve you if you make a mistake.
Having read the article doesn't mean that you have analyzed it effectively.
I mean, really, I was making a light-hearted joke and the half-grokking slashdot attack-dogs got all uppity over it. It's a good thing that people are looking to improve living standards globally, but this is not a discovery or major step forward. It's an elegant application of ongoing work. It's a good thing, but it's not a game-changer.
In Boy Scouts, years ago, we learned that an easy way to pull moisture from air was to bury (nearly to the brim) a mug in the ground. Moisture would condense on the inside of the mug in the morning and run down the side (because the ground would be colder than the air).
Leaves, etc.
Using natural temperature fluctuations and gravity hardly seems like a hard trick to figure out.
That said, I haven't read the article yet. Perhaps there are giant worms involved.
You are correct, but I was typing that on an iPod Touch (hate that on-screen keyboard). I considered the point after I'd typed up the post, but I was just too frustrated with the interface to go back.
But, yes, drag racers, indy racers, and Koenigsegg CCX owners could make a fuss with that point. One could argue that the acidification of ethanol is more generally corrosive, but, if you put the right materials in a bucket, dissolving them with gasoline, ethanol, or diesel is a piece of cake.
1. Ethanol damages fuel systems. 2. Our current methods for producing ethanol are not efficiency winners. 3. Ethanol has lower energy density than gasoline. 4. The pro ethanol lobby is unnaturally strong. 5. You are posting at below-average quality ***for slashdot***.
It's no surprise that my 15" MacBook Pro says "this thing cost $2k, minimum" when I pull it out of my overpriced Tumi bag, even though it looks nearly the same as my similarly expensive 15" Powerbook from five years ago (and still burns my lap). Mac notebooks say that they cost more because they do. It's like getting a BMW (in the U.S.). People instantly know that you paid more than that Accord, Camry, or Hyundai Genesis, even if options could have pushed you up into bimmer territory with the cheaper cars. That doesn't necessarily make it better, but don't say that people are being unfair to Apple about price and then show off your shiny new MacBook knowing full well that it's a point of pride for you at coffee shops.
The real kicker is that, when people ask, my favorite notebooks are my trusty old T42 (great keyboard, high-ish-res screen) or my wife's absolutely awesome Vaio Z. I wouldn't be able to say that unless I was sitting there on my MacBook Pro. I'd get written off as someone who just couldn't afford a Mac.
A few notes: - Until bootcamp can do two-finger scroll and two-finger tap-to-right-click, it's just not as good as being on even a cheaper Windows machine for running Windows. If you don't need 3D, stick to VMWare Fusion (if you like stability) or Parallels (if you like speed).
- Aluminum is awful for the bottom of a laptop. Hot legs suck.
- Macs just aren't more reliable. Some of the issues, like the nVidia GPU problem, plague the industry. Others, like the white/black MacBook logic-board failures, plague select notebooks (T4x Thinkpads as well) used in particular ways (being carried by one corner). I have no idea why two of the four MacBook Air owners that I know have had logic board failures. Answer? AppleCare if you need it for more than a year.
- You can adjust to the platform differences fairly easily if you're an accomplished computer user. Generally, people who become platform zealots are the people who don't have the chops to use all of them. You see the same thing in yoga circles, with Ford vs. Chevy vs. Honda tuners, with football fans, and between Canon/Nikon/Leica/Instamatic users. It's not causal, but competent users are generally the ones comfortable enough with their personal choices to allow them to be just personal choices.
I'm sorry, but this device is terminally stupid. I had the original shuffle, and it did what it needed to do. The last gen was just about the perfect form factor, feeling like the remote all by itself. The current one is just stupid. I don't want two blisters on my cable. That's annoying while running.
Throw in the headphone adapter stupidity, and, well, you have a product that will sell millions to millions...
Hard drives have strong (and small) magnets in them which are fun to play with, useful on your fridge, useful in woodshops (hanging tools), and probably useful just about anywhere.
Little flash drives, even 8MB ones, can be useful for students and library users. Donate those puppies, please.
This is the general consensus from everyone I know who uses their VM product for more than the never-switched-on safety net of a stale Windows install:
Parallels gets you there faster if it manages to get you there at all. Fusion just works. I had largely the same experience. If I wanted it to be as fast as possible, I'd bother to BootCamp it. Speed is always secondary to reliability for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see what the big headache is here. If you orient the sub-pixels 90 degrees apart, you get very little cross-talk with most image patterns. You could use a wave-plate (or some other optical de-polarizer) to de-polarize and then re-polarize if you're looking to use commodity LCD panels.
Not only does this seem pretty simple, but I think it already exists.
Sadly, you'd still be wearing glasses.
Man, I wish that there were more people out there with your non-scheming outlook. At this point, I just don't keep any work material on my personal hardware. It's just too much of an unknown.
I had a lawyer at my last employer say "you're just going to have to trust that we're not out to get you" right after saying "if you made a movie outside of work, it would likely be ours..."
I make software, so the idea that they would even consider grabbing an indie film (not that I'm making one, but it was an example) that was made entirely on my hardware and entirely on my time really didn't fit with the "just going to have to trust.." bit. Needless to say, I quit that job.
P.S. IANAL so I could be mistaken.
That's the most important part of your post. I'm not a lawyer either, but I'm fairly confident that materials developed on company time or company property are defined as "work product" in a "work for hire" environment. I'd be extremely wary of presuming natural rights. The law is rarely completely reasonable, and work product is no exception.
The problem (as if there were only one) is that we hold precedent high above reason, and we pretend that prior decisions are on-point and were completely correct. Neither is typically true. What we have is a system that holds legal trickery at least as the equal of reason and domain knowledge, executed by legal professionals who have an ample supply of neither. We also have a fair proportion of judges and lawyers who have forgotten that the law should serve the people and society and not the other way around. For a football player, perhaps the whole world is football. I know that I look to solve all of my problems with computers and code. Lawyers need to take the extra step and realize that the practice of law should be, essentially, a public service.
Additionally, if you've read well-crafted laws or contracts, you'll note that the language used in crafting such documents, while dry, can be remarkably precise and descriptive.
I've used lawyers for a lot of things, from goin' to jail to contract review. I certainly appreciate the expertise that a good attorney can provide, but the incongruous house-of-cards that we've managed to build up has become a self-perpetuating rat-maze of creative legal interpretation. Don't for a moment think that this somehow leads to the fair and uniform application of laws.
As my lawyer told me once regarding going to court "Even if you're 100% legally right, it's close to a 50% chance that you could lose in court. It's always better to avoid litigation."
And as my public defender told me once regarding charges as a juvenile "What was your name again?"
We could have a legal system not so mired in procedure that it makes it next to impossible for the layman to defend himself, and this system has been perpetually perverted by those blurring the line between zealous adversarial representation and inhuman chicanery.
At this point, yes, we need lawyers, but, in my experience, I haven't found 90% of lawyers to be either good or evil. Maybe 10% are strongly either way. The rest are just like us, lazy, tired, mildly manipulative, and so busy doing the job that they've lost sight of any greater meaning of the work. The next time your doctor gives you Flonase instead of a chest x-ray because they'd rather turf you than fight with your HMO? Yeah.. same thing.
Since our meters are zone-based, (I'm in Chicago, being screwed by an unbelievably corrupt government), you can't really drive off with the tag and expect to be able to use it elsewhere. This means that the city has a series of rate zones that determine what the hourly rate is. Besides, you'd be paying the city^H^H^H^H^H LAZ parking for the time that you're driving. My new approach is to walk back to the ticket-dispensing machine and use the motorcycle stickers (or the sticky back of some tickets) to leave it on the machine so it can be used by someone else. Unfortunately, this only works if they are only going to be there a short enough time to not need any more than your original ticket.
That said, my wife and I were talking about how much we prefer these machines to what we had before, which was six dollars of quarters for an hour of parking. We each had quart-sized plastic bags in our cars that we regularly filled with quarters, and the meters were constantly failing from being too full. In order to fight a ticket later, you needed to call in and put a complaint on record. That was a major headache.
Regular meters were fine until our city screwed us out of parking revenue for 75 years in a no-bid festival of abject corruption. Why Chicagoans haven't burned City Hall to the ground is beyond me.
He was posting on slashdot, you insensitive claude!
Perhaps there is already some hypervisor running that we don't know about?
As a Z owner who is planning on upgrading to Windows 7, this pisses me off. That machine was nearly as expensive as my mac... my mac!
It's worth noting that, scarily enough, it *was* still cheaper than my MBP, and the MBP has all sorts of issues running Windows. Sadly, the one ideal computer to run all OS's is actually three and a roll of duct tape.
I was about to, you insensitive clod!
So it falls within the umbrella of the law, but, as you sort of said, the law itself is ridiculous. In this case, the DMCA protects the razors/blades business model. Otherwise, these consoles, sold at or near a loss, might be used for other purposes. To be fair, the most common use for this is probably the play of pirated games, but there are other legitimate reasons to modify a console. It's mine. If I want to put a spoiler, intake, and huge rims on it, that's my call.
Are we going to have to worry about the DMCA (or laws like it) keeping people from modifying their cars, their legos, or their synthesizers? If I can do something for myself, is it fair to make it illegal to have someone else do it for me? Is it reasonable to make it illegal to have them tell me how to do it? We have a serious problem with entitlement in the US, but not just at a personal level. Business-people appear to believe that they are entitled to the hidden business model of their choosing, and, in the absence of the technical wherewithal to implement that business model, they seek out "legal" protections for their revenue stream.
The DMCA should serve as a strong lesson to all of us. We need to be more involved in the actions of our legislature, and we need to vote and campaign punitively. When your representative has just given you the shaft for a nice dinner and a couple of "gift" azalea bushes, you need to make sure that they know that they've lost your vote, forever.
It's jarring, breaks the style of the game (old-school dollar bills for State Farm?), and sucks when you've bought both the game and the Fury update (Mirror's Edge costs less). This is the natural outcome of having a closed system that allows people to reach in and screw with things you've already "bought."
Of course, I also have an iPhone and iPod touch...
It matters so much that companies that do a lot of trading set up their algorithmic trading facilities as close as is possible to their respective market/trading centers. EBS has heavy-hitters collocated with them, and it can be a selling point, like this.
Think of it this way:
In rough numbers, round-tripping 5000 miles, in light-speed-based latency alone, adds just under 55 milliseconds. That is *huge* in terms of algorithmic trading. These guys talk about the speed of light all the time.
I thought it was a toilet, but, either way, my point is that what Colbert is doing is brilliant. Anonymous online polls with such simple measures as cookies to reduce fraud are just silly.
Anything put up to re-vote friendly public vote should suffer the humorous indignity of being named after Colbert.
It's beautiful. It highlights how stupid open online polls are, and how they shouldn't ever be used to name anything important. If people stopped using open online polls for naming, Colbert wouldn't have his name on a bunch of things.
We've known this for a while (as slashdotters), but it's high time that people get a repeated and obvious lesson.
Yep, hygroscopic, though it takes a serious amount of effort to get my hands to type "hy" without "d" to follow.
Look, you can get all holier-than-thou and... wait.. what? Slashdot? Yeah.
Of course I was wrong about the article originally (I said I hadn't read it, so odds are), but the tone and text of the article leads one to believe that the researchers in question have discovered something new. What they are doing is phenomenally important, but it's not a new discovery. Scary how, after making this point a few times, it's still not sticking with you.
The Model T wasn't a new discovery either, but Ford instituted a manufacturing practice that made it far more accessible. Things can be important to humanity without being new discoveries. You can continue to ignore the point if you like, but that will just make this thread even more unreadable on mobile devices.
You may want to change your name to Malthus with the "number of people" doom and gloom, but you don't need a big hand-waving global-food-supply panic argument to get behind atmospheric water extraction. You just need people who are born in arid climates
You must have read the wrong article. They never claimed it was magic.
You must have read the wrong article. They claimed it was "found." Solar hydroscopic water extraction dates back to at least the '90's. You seized on the wrong word. "Magic" could have been "fantabulous" or "wang-wagging" and my statement would still stand.
P.S. Claiming you haven't read the article doesn't absolve you if you make a mistake.
Having read the article doesn't mean that you have analyzed it effectively.
I mean, really, I was making a light-hearted joke and the half-grokking slashdot attack-dogs got all uppity over it. It's a good thing that people are looking to improve living standards globally, but this is not a discovery or major step forward. It's an elegant application of ongoing work. It's a good thing, but it's not a game-changer.
Perhaps you missed the bit where I said that I hadn't read the article.
Now that I have, it's really no big deal. Driving something with renewable (solar) energy in the dessert is, uh, obvious.
I'm glad that people are focusing on answers for people in underprivileged parts of the world, but it's not some sort of magical discovery.
In Boy Scouts, years ago, we learned that an easy way to pull moisture from air was to bury (nearly to the brim) a mug in the ground. Moisture would condense on the inside of the mug in the morning and run down the side (because the ground would be colder than the air).
Leaves, etc.
Using natural temperature fluctuations and gravity hardly seems like a hard trick to figure out.
That said, I haven't read the article yet. Perhaps there are giant worms involved.
You are correct, but I was typing that on an iPod Touch (hate that on-screen keyboard). I considered the point after I'd typed up the post, but I was just too frustrated with the interface to go back.
But, yes, drag racers, indy racers, and Koenigsegg CCX owners could make a fuss with that point. One could argue that the acidification of ethanol is more generally corrosive, but, if you put the right materials in a bucket, dissolving them with gasoline, ethanol, or diesel is a piece of cake.
Oh, sweet Jesus that's a moronic post.
Let's spell this out:
1. Ethanol damages fuel systems.
2. Our current methods for producing ethanol are not efficiency winners.
3. Ethanol has lower energy density than gasoline.
4. The pro ethanol lobby is unnaturally strong.
5. You are posting at below-average quality ***for slashdot***.
It's no surprise that my 15" MacBook Pro says "this thing cost $2k, minimum" when I pull it out of my overpriced Tumi bag, even though it looks nearly the same as my similarly expensive 15" Powerbook from five years ago (and still burns my lap). Mac notebooks say that they cost more because they do. It's like getting a BMW (in the U.S.). People instantly know that you paid more than that Accord, Camry, or Hyundai Genesis, even if options could have pushed you up into bimmer territory with the cheaper cars. That doesn't necessarily make it better, but don't say that people are being unfair to Apple about price and then show off your shiny new MacBook knowing full well that it's a point of pride for you at coffee shops.
The real kicker is that, when people ask, my favorite notebooks are my trusty old T42 (great keyboard, high-ish-res screen) or my wife's absolutely awesome Vaio Z. I wouldn't be able to say that unless I was sitting there on my MacBook Pro. I'd get written off as someone who just couldn't afford a Mac.
A few notes:
- Until bootcamp can do two-finger scroll and two-finger tap-to-right-click, it's just not as good as being on even a cheaper Windows machine for running Windows. If you don't need 3D, stick to VMWare Fusion (if you like stability) or Parallels (if you like speed).
- Aluminum is awful for the bottom of a laptop. Hot legs suck.
- Macs just aren't more reliable. Some of the issues, like the nVidia GPU problem, plague the industry. Others, like the white/black MacBook logic-board failures, plague select notebooks (T4x Thinkpads as well) used in particular ways (being carried by one corner). I have no idea why two of the four MacBook Air owners that I know have had logic board failures. Answer? AppleCare if you need it for more than a year.
- You can adjust to the platform differences fairly easily if you're an accomplished computer user. Generally, people who become platform zealots are the people who don't have the chops to use all of them. You see the same thing in yoga circles, with Ford vs. Chevy vs. Honda tuners, with football fans, and between Canon/Nikon/Leica/Instamatic users. It's not causal, but competent users are generally the ones comfortable enough with their personal choices to allow them to be just personal choices.
Oh.. right. Not made by Apple.
I'm sorry, but this device is terminally stupid. I had the original shuffle, and it did what it needed to do. The last gen was just about the perfect form factor, feeling like the remote all by itself. The current one is just stupid. I don't want two blisters on my cable. That's annoying while running.
Throw in the headphone adapter stupidity, and, well, you have a product that will sell millions to millions...
Of idiots.
Hard drives have strong (and small) magnets in them which are fun to play with, useful on your fridge, useful in woodshops (hanging tools), and probably useful just about anywhere.
Little flash drives, even 8MB ones, can be useful for students and library users. Donate those puppies, please.
This is the general consensus from everyone I know who uses their VM product for more than the never-switched-on safety net of a stale Windows install:
Parallels gets you there faster if it manages to get you there at all. Fusion just works. I had largely the same experience. If I wanted it to be as fast as possible, I'd bother to BootCamp it. Speed is always secondary to reliability for me.
Which is why all radicals should be locked up until we can figure out what it is they want. There's no way that we should just let them run free.
SAVE GITMO!