They've photographed entire countries from the roadside, pretty epic
They've also skipped massive chunks for no good reason that I can see. Look at this map of my home county.... if you zoom in, you can see plenty of areas where the major arterial are the only thing covered. Or take a look at this area of the county - where the eastern half is done, but the western half only partially so. (And this condition has persisted for some time now.)
Weirdly enough... some of my favorite and fondest Navy related memories fall into that same category. When either I (individually) or we as team went to 110% to solve a problem or deal with a crisis. OTOH, these events punctuated long boring stretches of dull routine pushing around the ocean at mumble feet at 5 knots or sitting through interminable off crew training sessions...
Valve also grok this. Their employee manual basically says "organize yourself into groups and do whatever the hell you want" (yes, really).
Linden Labs (Second Life) tried this - and it was an abysmal failure.... Mostly because other elements of the culture tended to pressure developers into concentrating on quick wins and new shinies (that at least on the surface appeared to work) over maintenance and the long slow slogs into deeper and more subtle problems. So there's a lot more to handling this successfully than just saying "go forth and create".
Google isn't (at least openly) organized this way - but there's something decidedly odd with their management and planning systems. You can this where products will sit more-or-less untouched for years (Reader) or are subject to ongoing pulses of incoherent 'upgrades' and 'changes' between periods of quiescence (Mail). And that's not even talking about the number of badly handled launches (Wave, Buzz, G+). Or partially functioning services launched with great fanfare and then ignored until they were closed (Knol). Not to mention the "what the hell were they thinking" services (Lively).
Google understands - creative people dislike being told what to do, but more importantly LOATHE being told how to do it.
It's worth repeating what was said upthread - Google (and Valve) can get away with a lot because they're swimming in bucketloads of cash not because they have some mythical understanding that allows them to treat 'creative people' in the manner those people believe themselves entitled to. It's also worth pointing out that many creative people based businesses (I.E. in the graphic arts and various other media fields) have done very well over the decades, and continue to do so, despite telling their creative people what to do, how to do it, and when it's due.
Ars says, "What we've seen is an application focused solely on making the Facebook experience the hub for all of your social correspondence, but that can be extremely limiting for those who use a number of other social networks."
Um... what exactly did the reviewer expect? That a specialized Facebook phone would somehow magically also be a G+ phone too? That's like walking into a Burger King and complaining that they're limiting your experience because they don't serve Arby's roast beef.... The whole point of the phone/app seems to have gone right over the reviewers head - it's aimed are core and heavy Facebook users, not at the technorati.
If it were available on iOS, there's times I'd be sorely tempted to use it sometimes.
Ever tried to communicate in a real emergency? (One where seconds rather than minutes means the difference between life and death?) I have, and it's not nearly so easy as you think to communicate clearly under those circumstances. There's a reason why military folks and 911 dispatchers undergo extensive and ongoing training.
They have only reduced the projected spending by 2%, even though spending was projected to increase by something on the order of 10%* (at a time when inflation is counted as being less than 2%).
For most of the government, yes. Which means that yes, they have to cut expenditures because their planning was based on not having that cut. (Hint: If you expected and planned to get paid $10 and only got $9.80 - you can't spend $10. You don't have it.)
But that doesn't apply to the DoD - they're taking very deep and very real cuts.
Actually, what you are hearing about is more of the "Washington Monument Gambit", just done in a more localized and subtle fashion.
No, what I'm seeing is total ignorance of the facts - you're just trumpeting what you've heard elsewhere with no more understanding of what it actually means than they keyboard you're typing on.
Actually, while the federal government as a whole is only slowing the rate of increase, the defense department specifically does have real cuts.
Of course your point is still correct-- the blue angels are being targetted to make it publicly visible.
But that doesn't mean they haven't made cuts that are aren't quite so visible to the general public or so likely to garner widespread (national) media attention and aren't prepared go further.
PSNS is close enough to my house that I can hear Colors in the morning and Taps at sunset.... and I know more than a few people that work there, and between them and the local media it's quite clear there's more going on than the "Washington Monument gambit". They're taking this seriously. They're already looking at what work can be cut or deferred, at what workers can be let go and what ones can be placed on furlough. Etc... etc... (As in expending real man hours in doing the planning and preparation for these cuts.)
I don't see how spreading out parts of a system that operate in the many GHz range is going to help performance. At 3GHz, light only travels 100mm per cycle.
Presuming of course that the system operates in the many GHz range, or even needs to. Not to mention that you can pack a *bunch* of chiplets (each the size of a grain of sand and holding thousands of gates) in an area 100mm on a side.
But a "real GPS" isn't great in urban areas - precisely where there are the most APs to get a location from (and which tend to have reasonable power uptimes).
That's only true if you limit your definition of "urban" to "dense high rise city cores (where GPS signals are blocked)", which is an infinitesimally small fraction of the area usually described as "urban" and an invisibly small fraction of the total land area of pretty much any country. There's also an awful lot of us who live where WLAN 'coverage' is at best limited to major arterials, and at worst is spare to non-existent. (The nearest point to my house on Wingle is over a mile away - and I don't exactly live in flyover land.) Another thing to consider is that GPS coverage is global and (with a maximum five minute wait to download the latest emphemis, even though the old one is probably good enough) always 100% up-to-date, while WLAN maps are only as good as the last update...
So, the OP is 'mostly correct'. There isn't a one size fits all solution - but GPS is a 90% or better solution for most people, most of the time.
Only a fool, someone deeply biased, or someone hopelessly ignorant would make the mistake of believing my comment was limited to income taxes or to taxing the rich.
Not to mention the even more ignorant and biased mistake of conflating income and wealth.
No, it's the same "sour grapes" political/fiscal theory that drives so many tax debates - "my taxes are high as hell, and that means the other guy isn't carrying his weight".
No, not so much "up" as "scattered" - as unless it's a front surface mirror, it's pretty much useless against lasers of any energy. (That is, so long as the front surface mirror is impeccably clean... a spot of dust, a fingerprint, a scratch... and it's pretty much useless too.)
I can't believe you're too ignorant and stupid to actually look up the ship and learn the derivation of her name. But this is Slashdot, so I should have expected such juvenile behavior - and for it to be moderated up.
Ponce is named after a town in Puerto Rico, which in turn is named for Ponce de Leon. (And in Spanish, the word "ponce" means "prince".)
The bar for being 'well enough known' to have a Wikipedia entry is pretty damn low - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Bonesteel_III. Basically it amounts to having somebody with enough time on their hands to write the article, and not having anyone who cares enough challenge it's existence.
one thing is certain: The military base article â" now available in English â" will get more public awareness than ever before.
Not really. The general public will never really hear of it, and within a few days the netizens currently aware of it will have moved on to a new outrage of the day. The Streisand "Effect' was a one-time confluence of celebrity and celebrity journalism - now long forgotten except for obsessive fanboys who cite it endlessly.
What's not clear in the article is how they plan to power the drive... I seriously doubt solar will be sufficient (mostly due to the low insolation at Mars), which means nuclear. Which means *heavy*.
Raised on decades of science fiction, horror, twilight zone and outer limits, such an encounter would be grave and dangerous, but perhaps not quite as sanity-altering as it once was.
The people of our grandfathers time, and beyond, were raised on a steady diet of some fairly creepy and horrifying ghost and creature stories... there's much more to the old world than Han Christian Andersen. At any rate, encountering something creepy in real life is *very* different from 'encountering' it on the big or little screen or between the pages of a book.
Sooooooo... when do we own up to spreading FUD about this Kickstarter campaign?
Did you actually note the date of the article you linked too? (I know you typed it out, that doesn't mean you stopped to think about it.) It was nine months ago - and things do change over time. You also seem to have failed to note that the article is about the functionality of the device - something largely currently unknown *as it has just started shipping*.
Your comment should have been moderated "-1 Fanboy".
The biggest question I have, now that the general public is also aware of how the ultra rich "hide" their money (and oftentimes to avoid taxation):
YOU may be massively clueless and disconnected from reality (for large values of 'you' approximating the total number of commenters here), but pretty much everyone else has known about offshore shells and trusts since I was wee lad back in the 60's and 70's. At a minimum, they were well enough known to serve as key plot element of The Firm all the way back in 1991. They were also a (small) plot element of The Moneychangers in 1975.
This leak reveals the details, but nobody even remotely well informed will be surprised at the concept.
Vote for politicians who have the 25-year vision to fund and build an American high-speed rail network.
Which would be about as useful to most Americans as a bicycle is to a mollusk. America is too big and trains too slow to be useful outside of a handful of corridors, and on most of those the costs of construction far exceed anything that could be reasonably be recouped from fares.
Slashdot Mirror
They've also skipped massive chunks for no good reason that I can see. Look at this map of my home county.... if you zoom in, you can see plenty of areas where the major arterial are the only thing covered. Or take a look at this area of the county - where the eastern half is done, but the western half only partially so. (And this condition has persisted for some time now.)
Weirdly enough... some of my favorite and fondest Navy related memories fall into that same category. When either I (individually) or we as team went to 110% to solve a problem or deal with a crisis. OTOH, these events punctuated long boring stretches of dull routine pushing around the ocean at mumble feet at 5 knots or sitting through interminable off crew training sessions...
Linden Labs (Second Life) tried this - and it was an abysmal failure.... Mostly because other elements of the culture tended to pressure developers into concentrating on quick wins and new shinies (that at least on the surface appeared to work) over maintenance and the long slow slogs into deeper and more subtle problems. So there's a lot more to handling this successfully than just saying "go forth and create".
Google isn't (at least openly) organized this way - but there's something decidedly odd with their management and planning systems. You can this where products will sit more-or-less untouched for years (Reader) or are subject to ongoing pulses of incoherent 'upgrades' and 'changes' between periods of quiescence (Mail). And that's not even talking about the number of badly handled launches (Wave, Buzz, G+). Or partially functioning services launched with great fanfare and then ignored until they were closed (Knol). Not to mention the "what the hell were they thinking" services (Lively).
It's worth repeating what was said upthread - Google (and Valve) can get away with a lot because they're swimming in bucketloads of cash not because they have some mythical understanding that allows them to treat 'creative people' in the manner those people believe themselves entitled to. It's also worth pointing out that many creative people based businesses (I.E. in the graphic arts and various other media fields) have done very well over the decades, and continue to do so, despite telling their creative people what to do, how to do it, and when it's due.
Um... what exactly did the reviewer expect? That a specialized Facebook phone would somehow magically also be a G+ phone too? That's like walking into a Burger King and complaining that they're limiting your experience because they don't serve Arby's roast beef.... The whole point of the phone/app seems to have gone right over the reviewers head - it's aimed are core and heavy Facebook users, not at the technorati.
If it were available on iOS, there's times I'd be sorely tempted to use it sometimes.
Ever tried to communicate in a real emergency? (One where seconds rather than minutes means the difference between life and death?) I have, and it's not nearly so easy as you think to communicate clearly under those circumstances. There's a reason why military folks and 911 dispatchers undergo extensive and ongoing training.
For most of the government, yes. Which means that yes, they have to cut expenditures because their planning was based on not having that cut. (Hint: If you expected and planned to get paid $10 and only got $9.80 - you can't spend $10. You don't have it.)
But that doesn't apply to the DoD - they're taking very deep and very real cuts.
No, what I'm seeing is total ignorance of the facts - you're just trumpeting what you've heard elsewhere with no more understanding of what it actually means than they keyboard you're typing on.
Do you have actual evidence that the areas I'm talking about had an increase?
I thought not.
But that doesn't mean they haven't made cuts that are aren't quite so visible to the general public or so likely to garner widespread (national) media attention and aren't prepared go further.
PSNS is close enough to my house that I can hear Colors in the morning and Taps at sunset.... and I know more than a few people that work there, and between them and the local media it's quite clear there's more going on than the "Washington Monument gambit". They're taking this seriously. They're already looking at what work can be cut or deferred, at what workers can be let go and what ones can be placed on furlough. Etc... etc... (As in expending real man hours in doing the planning and preparation for these cuts.)
Presuming of course that the system operates in the many GHz range, or even needs to. Not to mention that you can pack a *bunch* of chiplets (each the size of a grain of sand and holding thousands of gates) in an area 100mm on a side.
That's only true if you limit your definition of "urban" to "dense high rise city cores (where GPS signals are blocked)", which is an infinitesimally small fraction of the area usually described as "urban" and an invisibly small fraction of the total land area of pretty much any country. There's also an awful lot of us who live where WLAN 'coverage' is at best limited to major arterials, and at worst is spare to non-existent. (The nearest point to my house on Wingle is over a mile away - and I don't exactly live in flyover land.) Another thing to consider is that GPS coverage is global and (with a maximum five minute wait to download the latest emphemis, even though the old one is probably good enough) always 100% up-to-date, while WLAN maps are only as good as the last update...
So, the OP is 'mostly correct'. There isn't a one size fits all solution - but GPS is a 90% or better solution for most people, most of the time.
Only a fool, someone deeply biased, or someone hopelessly ignorant would make the mistake of believing my comment was limited to income taxes or to taxing the rich.
Not to mention the even more ignorant and biased mistake of conflating income and wealth.
No, it's the same "sour grapes" political/fiscal theory that drives so many tax debates - "my taxes are high as hell, and that means the other guy isn't carrying his weight".
No, not so much "up" as "scattered" - as unless it's a front surface mirror, it's pretty much useless against lasers of any energy. (That is, so long as the front surface mirror is impeccably clean... a spot of dust, a fingerprint, a scratch... and it's pretty much useless too.)
I can't believe you're too ignorant and stupid to actually look up the ship and learn the derivation of her name. But this is Slashdot, so I should have expected such juvenile behavior - and for it to be moderated up.
Ponce is named after a town in Puerto Rico, which in turn is named for Ponce de Leon. (And in Spanish, the word "ponce" means "prince".)
The bar for being 'well enough known' to have a Wikipedia entry is pretty damn low - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Bonesteel_III. Basically it amounts to having somebody with enough time on their hands to write the article, and not having anyone who cares enough challenge it's existence.
True. But utterly irrelevant to my point.
Not really. The general public will never really hear of it, and within a few days the netizens currently aware of it will have moved on to a new outrage of the day. The Streisand "Effect' was a one-time confluence of celebrity and celebrity journalism - now long forgotten except for obsessive fanboys who cite it endlessly.
It was cancelled because costs were spiraling, performance decreasing, and a practical engine getting further away every day.
That contradictions exist between Newtonian physics, relativity, and quantum mechanics is pretty much old news.
What's not clear in the article is how they plan to power the drive... I seriously doubt solar will be sufficient (mostly due to the low insolation at Mars), which means nuclear. Which means *heavy*.
The people of our grandfathers time, and beyond, were raised on a steady diet of some fairly creepy and horrifying ghost and creature stories... there's much more to the old world than Han Christian Andersen. At any rate, encountering something creepy in real life is *very* different from 'encountering' it on the big or little screen or between the pages of a book.
Did you actually note the date of the article you linked too? (I know you typed it out, that doesn't mean you stopped to think about it.) It was nine months ago - and things do change over time. You also seem to have failed to note that the article is about the functionality of the device - something largely currently unknown *as it has just started shipping*.
Your comment should have been moderated "-1 Fanboy".
YOU may be massively clueless and disconnected from reality (for large values of 'you' approximating the total number of commenters here), but pretty much everyone else has known about offshore shells and trusts since I was wee lad back in the 60's and 70's. At a minimum, they were well enough known to serve as key plot element of The Firm all the way back in 1991. They were also a (small) plot element of The Moneychangers in 1975.
This leak reveals the details, but nobody even remotely well informed will be surprised at the concept.
Which would be about as useful to most Americans as a bicycle is to a mollusk. America is too big and trains too slow to be useful outside of a handful of corridors, and on most of those the costs of construction far exceed anything that could be reasonably be recouped from fares.
Exactly.