Hey, that's a great idea! I bought a house last year, and I loved using MLS. Pictures, number of rooms, lot size, house age, almost everything you could want to know before going to see a house. And if the data wasn't there, then we just never went to check out the house.
I'm not sure what kind of revenue model you could use for this, though. The MLS system is funded by Real Estate agents, who pay to be able to see the postings the instant they are posted (as I understand it). That gives them 24 hours to contact their clients, try to set up a viewing, sell the house, and make their commission before the general public sees things. Funding for this database could be a small price to post, or a small subscription fee to access. The first would be easier to administer.
Of course, this is only one-way searchable. The seller posts the house, interested buyers then contact the seller. That would be analogous to employers posting jobs and waiting for job-seekers to contact them. Maybe you could set up a parallel site, with employees who want to posting their CVs, and providing employers the ability to search that.
Of course, for this to work, it would rely on the cooperation and honesty of the people using the system. Provide plenty of fields for searching, and hope that everyone fills them in properly. If they don't (as happened in MLS sometimes), well, they get less hits.
I blame it on the lack of teaching grammar. English classes in elementary and high school for me (Canadian, granted) consisted of spelling, reading, and reading comprehension.
In my grade 9 French class, my teacher was astounded that we did not know what the subject or object of a sentence was. She spent half the term teaching us the fundamentals of grammar in English, then proceeded to apply them to French. It was pretty important considering that certain terms had to agree with the subject, and others with the object. Don't get me started on different verb tenses.
With no official second language, I don't think US citizens are made to learn a second language in school. It was that exposure to a second language that brought me to understand all of the formal rules in English.
Do you live in Ontario? By law, a lease is not allowed to prohibit you from owning pets except under the following conditions:
1. The pet causes undue damage to the property 2. The pet can reasonably be considered dangerous 3. Other residents of the property are allergic to the pet
Know your rights, and stand up for them. We had a property management company try to tell us that we couldn't have a dishwasher, and that we're not allowed to store flammable substances in our apartment. What a joke.
You're right, the "T" does stand for transgendered. My bad. I misremembered the original slashdot article. However, it was specified as a GLBT-friendly guild, so I think the statement of not needing to be a member of one of the four groups identified in the acronym still stands.
Tolerant. It was a guild for people who were tolerant of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. No requirement to be a member of one of those three groups. You just had to stop using OMG F4G!!!!11!!one when someone ganked you.
They'd just need to invest in groomers, like there are on terrestrial slopes. The same problem happens on earth-based snow-skiing mountains. At the end of the day, a lot of the snow has been pushed around, and there isn't a nice surface to ski on. The snow machines level out the bumps, smooth out the surface, and push snow to places where there is no snow.
Of course, the dust would be compacted a bit, and it wouldn't be nice powder per se, but I'm sure if that's what the moon skiers really want, it won't take too long for a moon ski resort to think of a way to put fluffy powder back on the slopes.
Well, a whole bunch of people have already pointed out that the current widely accepted hypothesis is that global warming will shut down the gulf stream, and make Britain colder. However,
The Gulf stream tends to have a moderating effect on Britain. It makes the winters warmer and the summers cooler. If the Gulf Stream shuts down, won't that just eliminate the moderating effect? Wouldn't you have colder winters and warmer summers? If that's the case, then developing plants that can survive in a hotter climate (during the hotter growing season) is the right move.
So are they claiming that the machine not only ages the wine, it also imparts the flavour of oak to it as well? Does it have different settings so you can get regular oak, toasted oak, and steel barrel aged? Somehow I don't think so.
People at the Niagara College School of Hospitality and Viniculture have designed a brand new machine to shake the ladybugs out of bunches of grapes. Really. Apparently, the cyclical population boom of ladybugs resulted in some years that were completely undrinkable, when too many got into the wine.
But, in true evil monopolistic style, you can only build a hotel on a lot that already has four houses on it, and you have to tear down the houses first:(
1) Why didn't you just rename the file to WHATEVER.txt, and include instructions in the email for the customer to rename it when they received it? Our IT blocks.exe's, and I send test programs as.ex_'s. Costs a hell of a lot less than $4000.
2) Did you ever consider once, during that two month period, unplugging the machine from the network? If IT can't push updates down the pipe, they can't interrupt your simulations. Also, I can't imagine them having any issues with a stand-alone machine not being fully upgraded.
3) & 4) Okay, these are clear cases of insufficient staffing in the IT department. The access revocation would have sucked, but if it takes one day to unlock a friggin account, they've got problems.
BTW - feel free to argue that hindsight is 20/20, but jeepers, $4000 to hand-deliver software? A 2-month slip in schedule? Why weren't your managers slitting the throats of the people that forced this?
The limit on pixel size is mostly responsivity. The smaller each pixel gets, the less photo-generated electrons will be generated in that pixel from the incident light. If your analog chain can keep track of these electrons, it essentially does become a signal to noise problem. This smaller number of electrons (when converted to a voltage) must be gained up more to get the same digital response. It also gains up the noise. Responsivity issues kick in well before any problems from having pixel dimensions on the same order as the wavelength of the incident light.
Also, there are ways to design area CCDs with effectively no dead zone between pixels. This is referred to as the "fill factor" of a sensor, and 100% fill factor is easily acheived. It's different with CMOS sensors, as they have active circuitry in each pixel (3 to 5+ transistors) that necessarily cannot be light sensitive.
You're spot on about the defects, though. In a CMOS sensor, defective pixels can show up as isolated white or black spots, easily overlooked in a picture inspected with the human eye. With CCDs, however, a defective pixel will often take out a whole column, which is easily picked up by human image processing circuitry (ie, the stuff between your ears).
And for the grandparent poster, if the image sensor is a CCD, there probably is not a A/D on the chip. Most CCD processes are tuned for low noise photo-generated electron capture and transfer, which usually makes it incompatible with on-die A/D circuits. Additionally, it adds more heat, substrate bounce, etc to a very sensitive analog device. You'll probably find that the signal from the chip is just analog (either a voltage or a current, both are used), which is then buffered off-chip before being sent to an ADC. Helps keep the digital nasties out of your picture.
If you were to make an 8"x10" CCD (or CMOS image sensor) that was defect free, I would tip my hat to you. Consider that if you weren't going to but dies (resulting in some dead space), you would need a wafer with a diameter of at least 13 inches.
Then, at a pixel size of 10um (which is larger than most consumer digital cameras nowadays), you're talking 500 million pixels, defect free. I think there are automotive manufacturers that would appreciate a failure rate like that:)
You have to tell her to stop plugging the vacuum cleaner into the UPS. Explain to her that a momentary drop in power while vacuuming is nowhere near as devastating as the same while computing.
Yep, I'm fully in support of legal, safe abortions. Moreso if I've just been driving on the highway. At those times, I feel that abortions should have been practiced more in the past:)
In all seriousness, though, I suppose you could say that I am in favour of a woman's right to choose, but that's just a wimpy way of saying that I have no objections to abortions. I can think of dozens of ways that a simple, safe medical procedure can keep people's lives on track. Imagine a promising young university student who used a defective condom once, or missed one day of birth control, forced to drop out of school and go back to live with her parents. Imagine a victim of rape or incest. Imagine a woman who's life is threatened by her pregnancy. In favour of abortions in all these cases.
And thank you for the honest and clear answer. I think the issue is that people of your opinion are not very vocal about it. Often you'll find people against embryonic stem cell research, who fully support fertility treatments, because it allows mommies to have babies that they otherwise couldn't have, with no consideration to the extra cells leftover.
At least you have a consistent belief, and I can respect that, even if it does differ from mine.
This comment has gone from +4 Insightful to -1 Troll to +2 Funny in the space of a couple of minutes. It's more fun to watch than a presidential debate:)
My apologies if you did not mean to imply that embryonic stem cells come from abortions. However, I did see that misconception stated elsewhere, and it seemed pretty clear from the link you were making between embryonic stem cells and abortions that you thought so as well. If you were indeed just trying to make a slippery slope argument (as I mentioned in the second paragraph), you should perhaps be a bit more explicit next time. How exactly will embryonic stem cell research make abortions more palatable?
Now, to address the point I made in my second paragraph - where do you draw the line? If we're not allowed to use embryonic stem cells for research, why are you not protesting the destruction of embryos left over from fertility treatments?
I won't be the first or the last to mention this, but embryonic stem cells do not come from aborted early pregnancies. They are instead harvested from the unused embryos from fertility treatments, which would be flushed down the drain anyway.
Unless you are talking about the fact that we are ending a "life" (said sarcastically, I'm a proponent of abortions) to further medical goals, which is the first step in a slippery slope towards ending a "life" to make an (un)expectant mother's life more bearable. If that's the case, then why aren't you protesting the fertility treatments that flush dozens of viable embryos down the drain?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, that's a great idea! I bought a house last year, and I loved using MLS. Pictures, number of rooms, lot size, house age, almost everything you could want to know before going to see a house. And if the data wasn't there, then we just never went to check out the house.
I'm not sure what kind of revenue model you could use for this, though. The MLS system is funded by Real Estate agents, who pay to be able to see the postings the instant they are posted (as I understand it). That gives them 24 hours to contact their clients, try to set up a viewing, sell the house, and make their commission before the general public sees things. Funding for this database could be a small price to post, or a small subscription fee to access. The first would be easier to administer.
Of course, this is only one-way searchable. The seller posts the house, interested buyers then contact the seller. That would be analogous to employers posting jobs and waiting for job-seekers to contact them. Maybe you could set up a parallel site, with employees who want to posting their CVs, and providing employers the ability to search that.
Of course, for this to work, it would rely on the cooperation and honesty of the people using the system. Provide plenty of fields for searching, and hope that everyone fills them in properly. If they don't (as happened in MLS sometimes), well, they get less hits.
I blame it on the lack of teaching grammar. English classes in elementary and high school for me (Canadian, granted) consisted of spelling, reading, and reading comprehension.
In my grade 9 French class, my teacher was astounded that we did not know what the subject or object of a sentence was. She spent half the term teaching us the fundamentals of grammar in English, then proceeded to apply them to French. It was pretty important considering that certain terms had to agree with the subject, and others with the object. Don't get me started on different verb tenses.
With no official second language, I don't think US citizens are made to learn a second language in school. It was that exposure to a second language that brought me to understand all of the formal rules in English.
Coleman fuel, charcoal briquettes, fondue fuel, butane for our kitchen torch, numerous cleaning products, WD-40, bicycle chain oil . . .
All properly stored in environments where there is minimal risk of ignition.
Do you live in Ontario? By law, a lease is not allowed to prohibit you from owning pets except under the following conditions:
1. The pet causes undue damage to the property
2. The pet can reasonably be considered dangerous
3. Other residents of the property are allergic to the pet
Know your rights, and stand up for them. We had a property management company try to tell us that we couldn't have a dishwasher, and that we're not allowed to store flammable substances in our apartment. What a joke.
You're right, the "T" does stand for transgendered. My bad. I misremembered the original slashdot article. However, it was specified as a GLBT-friendly guild, so I think the statement of not needing to be a member of one of the four groups identified in the acronym still stands.
Tolerant. It was a guild for people who were tolerant of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. No requirement to be a member of one of those three groups. You just had to stop using OMG F4G!!!!11!!one when someone ganked you.
They'd just need to invest in groomers, like there are on terrestrial slopes. The same problem happens on earth-based snow-skiing mountains. At the end of the day, a lot of the snow has been pushed around, and there isn't a nice surface to ski on. The snow machines level out the bumps, smooth out the surface, and push snow to places where there is no snow.
Of course, the dust would be compacted a bit, and it wouldn't be nice powder per se, but I'm sure if that's what the moon skiers really want, it won't take too long for a moon ski resort to think of a way to put fluffy powder back on the slopes.
Well, a whole bunch of people have already pointed out that the current widely accepted hypothesis is that global warming will shut down the gulf stream, and make Britain colder. However,
The Gulf stream tends to have a moderating effect on Britain. It makes the winters warmer and the summers cooler. If the Gulf Stream shuts down, won't that just eliminate the moderating effect? Wouldn't you have colder winters and warmer summers? If that's the case, then developing plants that can survive in a hotter climate (during the hotter growing season) is the right move.
put towel over pipe
put satchel on floor
put junk mail on satchel
push button
So are they claiming that the machine not only ages the wine, it also imparts the flavour of oak to it as well? Does it have different settings so you can get regular oak, toasted oak, and steel barrel aged? Somehow I don't think so.
People at the Niagara College School of Hospitality and Viniculture have designed a brand new machine to shake the ladybugs out of bunches of grapes. Really. Apparently, the cyclical population boom of ladybugs resulted in some years that were completely undrinkable, when too many got into the wine.
But, in true evil monopolistic style, you can only build a hotel on a lot that already has four houses on it, and you have to tear down the houses first :(
1) Why didn't you just rename the file to WHATEVER.txt, and include instructions in the email for the customer to rename it when they received it? Our IT blocks .exe's, and I send test programs as .ex_'s. Costs a hell of a lot less than $4000.
2) Did you ever consider once, during that two month period, unplugging the machine from the network? If IT can't push updates down the pipe, they can't interrupt your simulations. Also, I can't imagine them having any issues with a stand-alone machine not being fully upgraded.
3) & 4) Okay, these are clear cases of insufficient staffing in the IT department. The access revocation would have sucked, but if it takes one day to unlock a friggin account, they've got problems.
BTW - feel free to argue that hindsight is 20/20, but jeepers, $4000 to hand-deliver software? A 2-month slip in schedule? Why weren't your managers slitting the throats of the people that forced this?
Yes and no. To elaborate:
The limit on pixel size is mostly responsivity. The smaller each pixel gets, the less photo-generated electrons will be generated in that pixel from the incident light. If your analog chain can keep track of these electrons, it essentially does become a signal to noise problem. This smaller number of electrons (when converted to a voltage) must be gained up more to get the same digital response. It also gains up the noise. Responsivity issues kick in well before any problems from having pixel dimensions on the same order as the wavelength of the incident light.
Also, there are ways to design area CCDs with effectively no dead zone between pixels. This is referred to as the "fill factor" of a sensor, and 100% fill factor is easily acheived. It's different with CMOS sensors, as they have active circuitry in each pixel (3 to 5+ transistors) that necessarily cannot be light sensitive.
You're spot on about the defects, though. In a CMOS sensor, defective pixels can show up as isolated white or black spots, easily overlooked in a picture inspected with the human eye. With CCDs, however, a defective pixel will often take out a whole column, which is easily picked up by human image processing circuitry (ie, the stuff between your ears).
And for the grandparent poster, if the image sensor is a CCD, there probably is not a A/D on the chip. Most CCD processes are tuned for low noise photo-generated electron capture and transfer, which usually makes it incompatible with on-die A/D circuits. Additionally, it adds more heat, substrate bounce, etc to a very sensitive analog device. You'll probably find that the signal from the chip is just analog (either a voltage or a current, both are used), which is then buffered off-chip before being sent to an ADC. Helps keep the digital nasties out of your picture.
If you were to make an 8"x10" CCD (or CMOS image sensor) that was defect free, I would tip my hat to you. Consider that if you weren't going to but dies (resulting in some dead space), you would need a wafer with a diameter of at least 13 inches.
:)
Then, at a pixel size of 10um (which is larger than most consumer digital cameras nowadays), you're talking 500 million pixels, defect free. I think there are automotive manufacturers that would appreciate a failure rate like that
You have to tell her to stop plugging the vacuum cleaner into the UPS. Explain to her that a momentary drop in power while vacuuming is nowhere near as devastating as the same while computing.
Yep, I'm fully in support of legal, safe abortions. Moreso if I've just been driving on the highway. At those times, I feel that abortions should have been practiced more in the past :)
In all seriousness, though, I suppose you could say that I am in favour of a woman's right to choose, but that's just a wimpy way of saying that I have no objections to abortions. I can think of dozens of ways that a simple, safe medical procedure can keep people's lives on track. Imagine a promising young university student who used a defective condom once, or missed one day of birth control, forced to drop out of school and go back to live with her parents. Imagine a victim of rape or incest. Imagine a woman who's life is threatened by her pregnancy. In favour of abortions in all these cases.
And thank you for the honest and clear answer. I think the issue is that people of your opinion are not very vocal about it. Often you'll find people against embryonic stem cell research, who fully support fertility treatments, because it allows mommies to have babies that they otherwise couldn't have, with no consideration to the extra cells leftover.
At least you have a consistent belief, and I can respect that, even if it does differ from mine.
This comment has gone from +4 Insightful to -1 Troll to +2 Funny in the space of a couple of minutes. It's more fun to watch than a presidential debate :)
Aw, geez. Flamebait. Are we not allowed to bash Dubya on here any more? Fine, I'm taking my ball and going home.
Ah, okay. That clears it all up then. Thank you.
I thought your president was a random person with a 3rd grade education . . .
My apologies if you did not mean to imply that embryonic stem cells come from abortions. However, I did see that misconception stated elsewhere, and it seemed pretty clear from the link you were making between embryonic stem cells and abortions that you thought so as well. If you were indeed just trying to make a slippery slope argument (as I mentioned in the second paragraph), you should perhaps be a bit more explicit next time. How exactly will embryonic stem cell research make abortions more palatable?
Now, to address the point I made in my second paragraph - where do you draw the line? If we're not allowed to use embryonic stem cells for research, why are you not protesting the destruction of embryos left over from fertility treatments?
I won't be the first or the last to mention this, but embryonic stem cells do not come from aborted early pregnancies. They are instead harvested from the unused embryos from fertility treatments, which would be flushed down the drain anyway.
Unless you are talking about the fact that we are ending a "life" (said sarcastically, I'm a proponent of abortions) to further medical goals, which is the first step in a slippery slope towards ending a "life" to make an (un)expectant mother's life more bearable. If that's the case, then why aren't you protesting the fertility treatments that flush dozens of viable embryos down the drain?
Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing. I will block it out.