Letting economics drive power sources is a lot more natural than having the government do it and creating tons of pork that only provide jobs in politically important regions
Most developers don't realize this, but average users absolutely hate web apps. They typically aren't anywhere near as easy to use as normal desktop applications. Developers are loving web apps.
That may be true - but its funny how these things always work out - its the developers who decide where the platform is, not the user.
Funny how that works - for years we've been told that good business (where customer facing or internal facing) revolves around customer service. Now, it's fuck the customer - developers love web apps.
These "Upgraded" versions make a developer's and a support staff's life easier.
And, as above, we used to hire developers to make the customer's lives easier and more productive...
so long as he does a good job and injects some accountability and transparency into the process.
Tufte isn't being hired to inject accountability and transparency into the process, he's being hired because he's somewhat of a media darling. All he can do is produce very pretty guaranteed-to-be-popular (among certain demographics) visual representation of whatever data he is given. If the data is garbage, then his graphs will be pretty, clear, and convey the data in an understandable fashion but will be utterly irrelevant.
It's not really clear to me what Tufte is supposed to be accomplishing here. Pretty graphs are pretty graphs, but the real truth is in the numbers and analysis, and Tufte isn't a numbers and analysis guy. Also, Tufte's best work appears to be in 'forensic graphology' - taking a graph and comparing it post facto to the data, the complete opposite of what he's going to be doing here.
I just had to pay $1300 in out-of-pocket expenses for my daughter to get a single stitch (emergency room visit because it was after hours). And the doctor was on the fence as to whether nor not she needed one. Had I known it was going to cost me $1300, I would have used a band-aid.
Let me get this straight - you took your daughter to the ER for an injury that could have been handled with a band aid? (And even wosre, you haven't the common sense to recognize this?)
Christ, I'm glad you're paying out-of-pocket and don't use the same insurance company I do.
There is a HUGE disconnect between medical services and pricing.
Yes, there's a huge disconnect - and it's between your ears. But in typical fashion, you blame anyone but yourself.
Because I don't have the weeks or months it takes to work through that byzantine procedure. Nor do I have any desire to do so, because it favors the 'side' with the most time on its hands and the most sockpuppets at its beck and call.
Yes, Constellation might have been cool, but Obama has the right idea. He understands that building rockets is economically feasible and therefore should be done by commercial entities.
Which, oddly enough, is precisely why commercial entities have been building rockets and selling them on the open market for decades to government and private entities. Other than odd sounding rocket class vehicle or the occasional small prototype, the government hasn't built any rockets in decades.
Turns will confuse such a system, as will hills. I forgot to mention that you'll also need a decent clock too...
But with this kind of problem, you can't really get a 'damm good idea', you'll either be right on or way off. Once you start diverging, you'll tend to continue diverging.
Good job computer memory only gets more expensive and reduces in capacity over time or else it would be possible to use the acceleration forces to make a map of your route and overlay this on a real map to find out where and when
Assuming of course the accelerometers are pretty damn accurate - almost inertial guidance grade. But even inertial grade sensors are pretty useless without heading and horizon references. (I.E. I don't find this a very likely scenario at all.)
OTOH GPS chips on the other hand are getting cheaper and more ubiquitous every year.
The real news (to me at least) is that they use 77k hits per second to TEST.
According to TFA - the 'test' users were in addition to the normal users, simulating the additional load of the new services. So actual load on the production servers was something well north of 77khits/sec.
And as the big media shifts to being aggregators rather than publishers, they can push all kinds of liability, accountability, and accuracy issues down onto the shoulders of the 'little guys'.
I'm not worried so much about terrorists as 'journalist flash mobs' where every Tom, Dick, and Harriet with a blog and a press pass* tries to crash the police lines at an active crime scene, or a major emergency (fire, steam pipe rupture, or whatever), or major 'social' event... Whether for the purpose of actual news reporting or with other, less than noble, intentions. Blogging tends to be much more 'look at me, look at me, look at me' than it does about reporting, and the potential for abuse and problems under the new standards abounds.
Crown control for the NYPD, FDNY, and other city enforcement authorities just got much harder. This is a victory for free speech and free press, but I suspect common sense may have just taken a thrashing.
* If you read TFA, the bar for obtaining and maintaining credentials seems awfully low.
You have obviously never tried to sell property. If the yard next door looks like shit, and the prospective buyers don't like it, spinning a line of bullshit about 'eco friendly' isn't likely to 'raise the value'. (Assuming they even hung around long enough to stop being 'lookers' and become 'buyers'.)
You'd be amazed how much water people pour on their lawns in OC (where I currently live). It spills out onto the street in great floods when the sprinklers are going in some places - and they run them *every night*. Of course, we're in a desert here, so it makes sense if one must have a lawn - most of it evaporates in the daytime.
Well, it doesn't entirely make sense because if the water is running into the street you're over watering.
Therefore, the GP's assertion that no one in this area should have a lawn - why this isn't obvious to more people who live here, I don't know. Perhaps this case - if properly publicized - will get people to realize that. But who are we kidding? Most people in OC couldn't care less about anything, except their appearance to others - and a lush lawn is a big part of that, apparently.
Keep in mind the Ha's are *not* being forced to plant a lawn. They are being required to cover their yard in living plants - the ordinance doesn't care what kind of plants.
When I read that they were using 299,221 gallons of water, I assumed that they lived on some giant estate. But if you look at the picture of their home, it is a smallish, modest house. Sort of a lot of lawn, but not really.
Unless they have a huge backyard, it sounds like they were pouring water onto their lawn *far* in excess of what it actually needed. (BOTE and a little guesswork yields 10gal/sqft/mo, which is a *lot* of water.)
The ordinance says "40% living plants", not "40% grass". They're being taken to court not only because they didn't "do it nicely" (even though they didn't), but because they didn't even try to comply.
FWIW, San Francisco is the granola-land. Los Angeles is the land of false appearances, so forcing people to keep their grass green fits right in.
FWIW, they aren't being forced to keep their grass green - they're being forced to cover their yards with living plants, the ordinance stands utterly silent on the type and color.
I'm not sure where the city/county is trying to go here. Normally they pretend to try and be a little eco-friendly in granolaland.
The city isn't trying to make them be non eco-friendly, the city is trying to make them comply with the code - and it doesn't look like the Ha's even tried. The ordinance calls for 40%, and guesstimating from the photograph they planted maybe 2% and hoped the cheap ass fence would make the city overlook the missing 38%.
No, just pointing out the lack of a rush to colonize Antarctica as well as the lack of any rational reason for doing so. (Other than national virtual penis enlargement.)
Presuming that somebody is going to the Moon anyway, the cost of getting a kilo of water there is of the order of tens of thousands of dollars. Digging a kilo up in-situ, if it's handy, costs very little indeed.
Sure, other than the (decidedly non trivial) costs of developing the requisite mining and refining equipment and then moving several tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of kilograms of said mining and refining equipment to the moon.
Not to mention the costs of operations and support for said equipment, which can range from hideously expensive to merely very expensive depending on the amount of on-location operation and maintenance that is required versus remote operation and monitoring. For the near term, you can rule teleoperation out - there's many industries on Earth that would love to have remotely or automatically operated earthmoving equipment, we haven't figured that one out yet. While you can most likely operate and monitor the refining process from Earth (which still won't be cheap), you'll still need boots on the regolith for maintenance of the mining and refining processes - and the moon is a harsh mistress for equipment.
There's some huge up front and capital investment required before producing liter one of lunar water. Many people seem to forget that, charitably assuming they are even aware of it.
It's like finding a bunch of ready cut diamond rings lying around, as opposed to having to build a strip mine, excavate them and cut them, mine the gold for the ring, smelt it, make a ring, and mount the diamond.
With known and near term technology it's more like this:
Boosting water to the moon is like you buying a diamond ring at your local jewelers. It's an expensive, but straightforward, and well known process.
Mining water on the moon is like you buying a shovel and hitting Expedia.com for a ticket to South Africa. You may have seen a few episodes of Modern Marvels on the History channel on diamond mining and gold mining but you haven't ever prospected for either, let alone processed them into useful forms, or even designed a ring, let alone converting the gold and diamond into a ring. There's a lot of work ahead of you to master all those intermediate steps, and you're planning on doing it all from scratch.
Like fusion power, lunar water holds a great deal of promise, but there are numerous hurdles and challenges between where we are and a liter of water sitting on a table in the crews mess of a moon base. (Oh, and I haven't even discussed the huge challenge of establishing the base to support the mining crews.)
If a guided missile is launched to fly into a window of an enemy-occupied building, the offset can be enough to make a difference between hitting the window and hitting the wall.
GPS doesn't have the kind of precision to guide a shot like that regardless of whether the time is uncalibrated. If we need to launch a missile into a building and it is imperative that it enter the building through a small window, we would surely use laser or thermal guidance... not GPS.
The C/A code used by civilian GPS receivers don't have that kind of accuracy - but the P(Y) code used by military GPS receivers does. Heck, a WAAS enabled civilian GPS receiver can get pretty close to that level of accuracy - down to the 1 meter range.
Slashdot Mirror
There, fixed that for you.
Funny how that works - for years we've been told that good business (where customer facing or internal facing) revolves around customer service. Now, it's fuck the customer - developers love web apps.
And, as above, we used to hire developers to make the customer's lives easier and more productive...
Tufte isn't being hired to inject accountability and transparency into the process, he's being hired because he's somewhat of a media darling. All he can do is produce very pretty guaranteed-to-be-popular (among certain demographics) visual representation of whatever data he is given. If the data is garbage, then his graphs will be pretty, clear, and convey the data in an understandable fashion but will be utterly irrelevant.
It's not really clear to me what Tufte is supposed to be accomplishing here. Pretty graphs are pretty graphs, but the real truth is in the numbers and analysis, and Tufte isn't a numbers and analysis guy. Also, Tufte's best work appears to be in 'forensic graphology' - taking a graph and comparing it post facto to the data, the complete opposite of what he's going to be doing here.
Let me get this straight - you took your daughter to the ER for an injury that could have been handled with a band aid? (And even wosre, you haven't the common sense to recognize this?)
Christ, I'm glad you're paying out-of-pocket and don't use the same insurance company I do.
Yes, there's a huge disconnect - and it's between your ears. But in typical fashion, you blame anyone but yourself.
Because I don't have the weeks or months it takes to work through that byzantine procedure. Nor do I have any desire to do so, because it favors the 'side' with the most time on its hands and the most sockpuppets at its beck and call.
Which, oddly enough, is precisely why commercial entities have been building rockets and selling them on the open market for decades to government and private entities. Other than odd sounding rocket class vehicle or the occasional small prototype, the government hasn't built any rockets in decades.
Turns will confuse such a system, as will hills. I forgot to mention that you'll also need a decent clock too...
But with this kind of problem, you can't really get a 'damm good idea', you'll either be right on or way off. Once you start diverging, you'll tend to continue diverging.
Assuming of course the accelerometers are pretty damn accurate - almost inertial guidance grade. But even inertial grade sensors are pretty useless without heading and horizon references. (I.E. I don't find this a very likely scenario at all.)
OTOH GPS chips on the other hand are getting cheaper and more ubiquitous every year.
The irony of this post appearing on Slashdot... it's almost too much.
According to TFA - the 'test' users were in addition to the normal users, simulating the additional load of the new services. So actual load on the production servers was something well north of 77khits/sec.
The proper website for the (in)famous body farm is: University of Tennessee: Forensic Anthropology Center.
Bloggers do actual work? What planet do you live on?
And as the big media shifts to being aggregators rather than publishers, they can push all kinds of liability, accountability, and accuracy issues down onto the shoulders of the 'little guys'.
I'm not worried so much about terrorists as 'journalist flash mobs' where every Tom, Dick, and Harriet with a blog and a press pass* tries to crash the police lines at an active crime scene, or a major emergency (fire, steam pipe rupture, or whatever), or major 'social' event... Whether for the purpose of actual news reporting or with other, less than noble, intentions. Blogging tends to be much more 'look at me, look at me, look at me' than it does about reporting, and the potential for abuse and problems under the new standards abounds.
Crown control for the NYPD, FDNY, and other city enforcement authorities just got much harder. This is a victory for free speech and free press, but I suspect common sense may have just taken a thrashing.
* If you read TFA, the bar for obtaining and maintaining credentials seems awfully low.
You have obviously never tried to sell property. If the yard next door looks like shit, and the prospective buyers don't like it, spinning a line of bullshit about 'eco friendly' isn't likely to 'raise the value'. (Assuming they even hung around long enough to stop being 'lookers' and become 'buyers'.)
Well, it doesn't entirely make sense because if the water is running into the street you're over watering.
Keep in mind the Ha's are *not* being forced to plant a lawn. They are being required to cover their yard in living plants - the ordinance doesn't care what kind of plants.
Unless they have a huge backyard, it sounds like they were pouring water onto their lawn *far* in excess of what it actually needed. (BOTE and a little guesswork yields 10gal/sqft/mo, which is a *lot* of water.)
The ordinance says "40% living plants", not "40% grass". They're being taken to court not only because they didn't "do it nicely" (even though they didn't), but because they didn't even try to comply.
If they were being required to plant grass, you'd have a point.
FWIW, they aren't being forced to keep their grass green - they're being forced to cover their yards with living plants, the ordinance stands utterly silent on the type and color.
On which planet is Orange County 'bright red'? My sister lives there and reports quite the opposite.
The city isn't trying to make them be non eco-friendly, the city is trying to make them comply with the code - and it doesn't look like the Ha's even tried. The ordinance calls for 40%, and guesstimating from the photograph they planted maybe 2% and hoped the cheap ass fence would make the city overlook the missing 38%.
No, just pointing out the lack of a rush to colonize Antarctica as well as the lack of any rational reason for doing so. (Other than national virtual penis enlargement.)
Sure, other than the (decidedly non trivial) costs of developing the requisite mining and refining equipment and then moving several tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of kilograms of said mining and refining equipment to the moon.
Not to mention the costs of operations and support for said equipment, which can range from hideously expensive to merely very expensive depending on the amount of on-location operation and maintenance that is required versus remote operation and monitoring. For the near term, you can rule teleoperation out - there's many industries on Earth that would love to have remotely or automatically operated earthmoving equipment, we haven't figured that one out yet. While you can most likely operate and monitor the refining process from Earth (which still won't be cheap), you'll still need boots on the regolith for maintenance of the mining and refining processes - and the moon is a harsh mistress for equipment.
There's some huge up front and capital investment required before producing liter one of lunar water. Many people seem to forget that, charitably assuming they are even aware of it.
With known and near term technology it's more like this:
Like fusion power, lunar water holds a great deal of promise, but there are numerous hurdles and challenges between where we are and a liter of water sitting on a table in the crews mess of a moon base. (Oh, and I haven't even discussed the huge challenge of establishing the base to support the mining crews.)
The C/A code used by civilian GPS receivers don't have that kind of accuracy - but the P(Y) code used by military GPS receivers does. Heck, a WAAS enabled civilian GPS receiver can get pretty close to that level of accuracy - down to the 1 meter range.