I'd say coming down out of the trees was probably a mistake...
In fact we should return to the trees. By my math, raising the living level of 6.8 billion people by three meters yields a net increase in the human living level by 20.4 billion person-meters. We could achieve the same net increase in the level of human life by sending 53 astronauts the 385,000 km to the moon, but it's important to note that would do nothing for the median level.
but probably franklin would just prefer to open windows on both ends of the long hall in his mansion, and just sit in the middle on a stool naked, as he sometimes preferred to do.
Gosh, he left that little detail out of all the self-improvement advice in his autobiography. The more I learn about that man the more I find to admire.
I have a kindle and I sometimes use the kindle reader on an iPod Touch. There are situations where the Amazon reader on the iTouch blows away the kindle 2.
It's not a simple matter. The user experience is a mixture of many different elements. The clearest, biggest win for the hardware Kindle is the trade-off it achieves between screen size, battery life, and size/weight.
There are other situations where having a pocketable reader that works in low light is a huge win.
Then there are things that specific implementations of e-Ink based readers happent to get wrong or which are missing because of the designers didn't think a reader needed them. The touch screen and the availability of a usable keyboard is a *huge* win for the iPod. The superiority direct manipulation interface for page turning is almost impossible to overstate. I hate the huge click that accompanies page turning on the Kindle. The iPod also wins in terms of the accuracy of rendering. Math and technical books that are nearly useless on the Kindle are quite usable on the iPod, despite its small size. You can't even read most diagrams on the Kindle. I presume that's lousy software.
I was never for overnight trade liberalization, and that includes *before* it was white collar jobs being lost. So you don't have any right to lump me in with the people who thought it was a great idea.
its globalization. america has to come to terms with the age of globalization, especially after forcing many countries to come to terms with it itself.
No we don't. It's just embarrassing after we shoved it down other peoples' throats.
Personally, I'm for globalization over the long term. I'd be delighted if the average salary and wealth of India was on par with the US. What I don't like is management making a quick buck with salary arbitrage. It's not fair to US workers to stick them with the costs of changing the rules overnight.
Oh, the unions were never bastions of purity, not even in your grandpa's day. Nor was management. Nor was government, not even small town government.
It all boils down to a simple but overlooked aspect of human nature: people tend to be most public spirited when they see themselves getting the most out of the public good in the long run.
So it's no accident that you see unions willing to destroy the companies they work for to get short term gains when they expect their jobs to be shipped overseas. Especially since the top level managers were making a killing offshoring jobs. A *safe* killing too. There's no reason the CEO job couldn't be sent overseas. There's lots of really talented people in India who would do that job for less. Hell, if that's to exotic, you could still save bundle by replacing yoru top level management with Europeans.
The only reason that management doesn't offshore their own jobs is because they are in a position to stop that from happening. And you expect *unions* to look out for the company's interests under these conditions? To refrain from screwing the company so management can do it first?
As for organized crime, you're worried about the teamsters, but not Goldman Sachs? I suppose it makes a kind of ironic sense: if a criminal has enough power to draft the laws and get friendly justices appointed to the courts, *technically* he's not a criminal any longer.
We're in a quick buck economy, where it's about getting yours before somebody else grabs his. If you're a worker and your union runs the company into the ground, you're a villain. If you're a CEO and you run your company into the ground, you're senatorial material.
No, nerds are social pariahs that don't want to LISTEN to anyone they went to high school with.
They'd gladly talk to anyone who would listen to *them*.
That, by the way, is what makes people bores: wanting to talk about their own interests and not being interested in others' interests. Since nerds and, say, jocks tend to have few overlapping interests, it's not surprising each considers the other bores.
Pretentious suckage is the best *kind* of suckage there is!
OK, maybe the *second* best... but surely the best kind of *artistic* suckage. I mean, you might as well write of TOS entirely if you outlawed pretentious suckage.
It's all a matter of numbers. Suppose the methane was about to be dumped all at once into the atmosphere. Then converting it to CO2 would be better. On the other hand, suppose it is going to dribbled out into the atmosphere over the course of several centuries. Then converting it to long lasting CO2 would be really bad.
Also, the idea that this is somehow carbon neutral because it displaces other CO2 sources is economically naive (as is the estimate of powering China's energy needs for 90 years). What this would do is shift the supply curve so that carbon emitting fuels as a class are cheaper and more abundant. The inevitable result is more carbon emitting fuel use.
Now I think the discovery of a massive new fuel reserve could be a good thing for humanity, so long as we use some of the economic growth that brings to blunt the impact of carbon emissions. For example, if some of the profits from exploiting this energy source could be used to sequester the carbon emitted (supposing a practical solution can be engineered), then you'd have what amounts to a massive new clean fuel source that could tide us over a few more decades as energy sources come on-line.
I don't own a gun. If you don't count BB guns, I've never even shot one. On the other hand I don't have a philosophical opposition to reasonable regulation of gun use, although my standards for "reasonable" are pretty high.
So I don't have a dog in this fight.
I don't see the sense in lumping everyone who enjoys shooting sports in with these people. I see a great deal of sense in *not* doing so.
That kind of reasoning is contagious. If you are going to lump all the people who use or enjoy some thing in with the stupid, irresponsible and criminal users of that thing, you've got to be willing to have that same logic applied to the things you use and enjoy. If the use of a thing is significant problem for society, then society should take the narrowest possible action to address that problem that could reasonably be expected to be effective. The law should not be viewed as a forum for expressing our contempt for other people and their pastimes.
That's why while I don't enjoy guns myself, and am concerned about some of the problems of gun violence, I'd never support a gun ban, nor any measure that harasses people for enjoying them in a responsible way.
Are you a parent? There's absolutely NOTHING they could do to the guy that would be worse than losing a child.
That's not necessarily true. There are parents who abuse, exploit or even kill their own children. I don't think that's what we're dealing with here. The sheer danger to everyone of leaving a loaded firearm where a toddler can get at it argues for plain stupidity and negligence. But we can't conclude anything by extrapolating from how we'd feel.
Why not hand scan and stitch the results together? Because that will take *forever*.
If you have a fair number of maps, and you paid yourself for doing this, you could easily justify buying or leasing a large format scanner.
It boils down to this: you either find out the right tool for the job and get it, or you *build* the tool you need, or you spend a long time struggling with an unsatisfactory process.
If I had to build the tool, I'd build a wooden box, painting the interior flat black or maybe even lining it with black felt. The map would go on the floor. On the ceiling of the box I'd rig a high resolution digital camera with a longish lens, mounting it on a vertically adjustable platform; ideally a rack and pinion mechanism. Given the size of your largest maps (1.5m) I'd try to mount the camera as far as possible, 2m at least; even 3m if I had the room. That way I don't have to rubbersheet the results much.
I'd put lights with diffusers on the roof as well. I'd put the total design and construction time at 40 hours. At my normal consulting rate, that would be about five thousand dollars. With camera and materials, call it seven or eight thousand total.
That's actually surprisingly cheap, although you're not guaranteed good results. That's up to your design and construction skills. But the key is you want the conversion operation to consist of simple, quick, repeatable actions. Even allowing two weeks to design, build and test my contraption, if I had to scan over a hundred large format maps, I'd still be ahead considering the logistics of scanning little swaths of each map, stitching them together and checking the results. I'd only consider hand scanning if I was doing no more than a half dozen maps.
Most importantly, it would be a hell of a lot less fun than building my own scanner.
It might be worth building your own scanner if your large maps are so fragile they can't be trusted to a wide format scanner that will feed them through the scanning mechanism. Otherwise it'd be better to buy a large format color scanner, because you know it will give good results.
After you've got your images you're talking about the normal process of registering the map in a geographic coordinate system (not geocoding, which is a simple process of finding a geographic coordinate system for a piece of data; you'll have to produce a file that is in a known coordinate system).
There are lots of tools for doing that, but if you don't know where to begin, you'll either have to hire somebody who knows what they're doing, or educate yourself on the process. That's beyond what you can expect in Slashdot request. There are lots of commercial tools for this; I think you can even do it in Matlab. The only open source software I know off the top of my head that could do this is GRASS, but learning to use GRASS is an education in itself.
From the operating system's standpoint, a file is the atomic unit of document management.
From a computer language standpoint, a file is an atomic unit of parsing.
From a programming standpoint, both these concepts have utility, but neither is particularly fundamental.
That's one of the things that makes literate programming possible.
That said, I'm not exactly thrilled by the bubble concept. It's one more place to store vague ideas and associations that will be incomprehensible a few weeks later. It's not bad like the attempts at "graphical programming" languages twenty years ago or so, but I don't see that its really better than code folding, or even as good. What a programmer has to do is to express himself clearly. Anything which helps that is good. Anything that doesn't is meh.
Also, I can't see using the system shown on a laptop. It might be usable on a 24" monitor, but not a 15".
No. Gray market does not mean counterfeit. It is just as legal as "normal" channels, although manufacturers don't like it.
Let's say I manufacture a widget in Indonesia and sell it to US distributors for $100. I sell the same widget to Indian distributors for $10, because you can't sell this widget for as much there. I make the Indian distributor promise he won't sell back to the US and undercut my official channel price. But I can't control what people downstream do with the widget. Indians being smart and enterprising, somebody there figures out he can buy a boatload of widgets from the distributor, ship them back to the US, and sell them at a profit for $40.
That's gray market. It's the legitimate goods, made on the same assembly line, and passing from hand to hand by completely legal sales. The manufacturers don't like it, and I may cut off my Indian distributor if I think he's involved with this or turning a blind eye. That means the incentive is for gray market sellers to be secretive, and therein lies the potential for a black marketeer to step into the process and represent himself as a gray marketeer.
When somebody steals widgets from the Indonesian factory, or repackages rejects being thrown out and represents them as good, or sells a non-functional plastic knock-off and represents it as functional, that's *black* market.
You may end up buying black market goods from somebody who represents himself as a gray marketeer. It could be because he is a fraud, but not necessarily. Goods pass from hand to hand in the gray market, and the fraud may be removed one or two transactions from your purchase.
I'm skeptical because I've heard so many reports like this.
However it's not physically improbable to achieve 30% efficiency with an internal combustion engine. Even an ordinary ICE theoretically can achieve 37%. If the combustion temperature is raised, it is conceivable that higher efficiencies could be achieved.
As far as mileage is concerned, that's not related in a straightforward way to engine efficiency under ideal conditions. Toyota's Prius is rated at 51 MPG highway; that's not the electrical system doing that, it's an engine that's tuned to be very efficient at highway speeds and which doesn't have to deliver torque at low speeds.
It's not out of the question to almost obtain twice that in a ultralight prototype vehicle with an engine that marginally outperforms the Prius engine under those conditions, if the rest of the power train was a little simpler and more efficient. The key to the Prius engine is that it can be tuned for higher peak power because it doesn't have to generate much torque at low speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
We all know that "rampant" piracy is a myth.
The proper attitude of the intellectual property thief is passant reguardant .
Activate tearducts and proceed with robot mourning routine!
Translation: Interrupt OxD.
I live near Woods Hole, MA and the scientists who designed it are Trekkie's. I am also a contractor for WHOI.
You mean they're the slaves of the King of the Trekkies?
Because of the Geek trainer's motto: "If you want the users to remember, say it like a dick."
I'd say coming down out of the trees was probably a mistake...
In fact we should return to the trees. By my math, raising the living level of 6.8 billion people by three meters yields a net increase in the human living level by 20.4 billion person-meters. We could achieve the same net increase in the level of human life by sending 53 astronauts the 385,000 km to the moon, but it's important to note that would do nothing for the median level.
The only difference between "crackpot" and "visionary" is the degree of of appeal the crack/vision holds for you.
but probably franklin would just prefer to open windows on both ends of the long hall in his mansion, and just sit in the middle on a stool naked, as he sometimes preferred to do.
Gosh, he left that little detail out of all the self-improvement advice in his autobiography. The more I learn about that man the more I find to admire.
I have a kindle and I sometimes use the kindle reader on an iPod Touch. There are situations where the Amazon reader on the iTouch blows away the kindle 2.
It's not a simple matter. The user experience is a mixture of many different elements. The clearest, biggest win for the hardware Kindle is the trade-off it achieves between screen size, battery life, and size/weight.
There are other situations where having a pocketable reader that works in low light is a huge win.
Then there are things that specific implementations of e-Ink based readers happent to get wrong or which are missing because of the designers didn't think a reader needed them. The touch screen and the availability of a usable keyboard is a *huge* win for the iPod. The superiority direct manipulation interface for page turning is almost impossible to overstate. I hate the huge click that accompanies page turning on the Kindle. The iPod also wins in terms of the accuracy of rendering. Math and technical books that are nearly useless on the Kindle are quite usable on the iPod, despite its small size. You can't even read most diagrams on the Kindle. I presume that's lousy software.
You've got it backwards.
I was never for overnight trade liberalization, and that includes *before* it was white collar jobs being lost. So you don't have any right to lump me in with the people who thought it was a great idea.
its globalization. america has to come to terms with the age of globalization, especially after forcing many countries to come to terms with it itself.
No we don't. It's just embarrassing after we shoved it down other peoples' throats.
Personally, I'm for globalization over the long term. I'd be delighted if the average salary and wealth of India was on par with the US. What I don't like is management making a quick buck with salary arbitrage. It's not fair to US workers to stick them with the costs of changing the rules overnight.
Oh, the unions were never bastions of purity, not even in your grandpa's day. Nor was management. Nor was government, not even small town government.
It all boils down to a simple but overlooked aspect of human nature: people tend to be most public spirited when they see themselves getting the most out of the public good in the long run.
So it's no accident that you see unions willing to destroy the companies they work for to get short term gains when they expect their jobs to be shipped overseas. Especially since the top level managers were making a killing offshoring jobs. A *safe* killing too. There's no reason the CEO job couldn't be sent overseas. There's lots of really talented people in India who would do that job for less. Hell, if that's to exotic, you could still save bundle by replacing yoru top level management with Europeans.
The only reason that management doesn't offshore their own jobs is because they are in a position to stop that from happening. And you expect *unions* to look out for the company's interests under these conditions? To refrain from screwing the company so management can do it first?
As for organized crime, you're worried about the teamsters, but not Goldman Sachs? I suppose it makes a kind of ironic sense: if a criminal has enough power to draft the laws and get friendly justices appointed to the courts, *technically* he's not a criminal any longer.
We're in a quick buck economy, where it's about getting yours before somebody else grabs his. If you're a worker and your union runs the company into the ground, you're a villain. If you're a CEO and you run your company into the ground, you're senatorial material.
Er... what's the difference between pretentious suckage and cluelessly earnest suckage?
Or maybe you're confusing pretentious suckage with cynically smarmy suckage?
Your haiku does no scan. How about
No, nerds are social pariahs that don't want to LISTEN to anyone they went to high school with.
They'd gladly talk to anyone who would listen to *them*.
That, by the way, is what makes people bores: wanting to talk about their own interests and not being interested in others' interests. Since nerds and, say, jocks tend to have few overlapping interests, it's not surprising each considers the other bores.
Are you guys all gay? My favorite starship captain is Kathryn Janeway!
Where do you think gay Trekkies come from?
This washed-up old fart is popular, so let's pretend like what he has to say about a technology he does not remotely understand is somehow important.
Speaking of which, Chuck Norris' Internet connection has faster upload speed than download. Even his data is trying to get away from him.
Pretentious suckage is the best *kind* of suckage there is!
OK, maybe the *second* best ... but surely the best kind of *artistic* suckage. I mean, you might as well write of TOS entirely if you outlawed pretentious suckage.
Well... maybe.
It's all a matter of numbers. Suppose the methane was about to be dumped all at once into the atmosphere. Then converting it to CO2 would be better. On the other hand, suppose it is going to dribbled out into the atmosphere over the course of several centuries. Then converting it to long lasting CO2 would be really bad.
Also, the idea that this is somehow carbon neutral because it displaces other CO2 sources is economically naive (as is the estimate of powering China's energy needs for 90 years). What this would do is shift the supply curve so that carbon emitting fuels as a class are cheaper and more abundant. The inevitable result is more carbon emitting fuel use.
Now I think the discovery of a massive new fuel reserve could be a good thing for humanity, so long as we use some of the economic growth that brings to blunt the impact of carbon emissions. For example, if some of the profits from exploiting this energy source could be used to sequester the carbon emitted (supposing a practical solution can be engineered), then you'd have what amounts to a massive new clean fuel source that could tide us over a few more decades as energy sources come on-line.
I don't own a gun. If you don't count BB guns, I've never even shot one. On the other hand I don't have a philosophical opposition to reasonable regulation of gun use, although my standards for "reasonable" are pretty high.
So I don't have a dog in this fight.
I don't see the sense in lumping everyone who enjoys shooting sports in with these people. I see a great deal of sense in *not* doing so.
That kind of reasoning is contagious. If you are going to lump all the people who use or enjoy some thing in with the stupid, irresponsible and criminal users of that thing, you've got to be willing to have that same logic applied to the things you use and enjoy. If the use of a thing is significant problem for society, then society should take the narrowest possible action to address that problem that could reasonably be expected to be effective. The law should not be viewed as a forum for expressing our contempt for other people and their pastimes.
That's why while I don't enjoy guns myself, and am concerned about some of the problems of gun violence, I'd never support a gun ban, nor any measure that harasses people for enjoying them in a responsible way.
Are you a parent? There's absolutely NOTHING they could do to the guy that would be worse than losing a child.
That's not necessarily true. There are parents who abuse, exploit or even kill their own children. I don't think that's what we're dealing with here. The sheer danger to everyone of leaving a loaded firearm where a toddler can get at it argues for plain stupidity and negligence. But we can't conclude anything by extrapolating from how we'd feel.
On your hip I can understand. I might not agree, but I can understand the case made for that.
Loaded and ready to shoot where somebody else could get to them before you can seems like asking for trouble.
Why not hand scan and stitch the results together? Because that will take *forever*.
If you have a fair number of maps, and you paid yourself for doing this, you could easily justify buying or leasing a large format scanner.
It boils down to this: you either find out the right tool for the job and get it, or you *build* the tool you need, or you spend a long time struggling with an unsatisfactory process.
If I had to build the tool, I'd build a wooden box, painting the interior flat black or maybe even lining it with black felt. The map would go on the floor. On the ceiling of the box I'd rig a high resolution digital camera with a longish lens, mounting it on a vertically adjustable platform; ideally a rack and pinion mechanism. Given the size of your largest maps (1.5m) I'd try to mount the camera as far as possible, 2m at least; even 3m if I had the room. That way I don't have to rubbersheet the results much.
I'd put lights with diffusers on the roof as well. I'd put the total design and construction time at 40 hours. At my normal consulting rate, that would be about five thousand dollars. With camera and materials, call it seven or eight thousand total.
That's actually surprisingly cheap, although you're not guaranteed good results. That's up to your design and construction skills. But the key is you want the conversion operation to consist of simple, quick, repeatable actions. Even allowing two weeks to design, build and test my contraption, if I had to scan over a hundred large format maps, I'd still be ahead considering the logistics of scanning little swaths of each map, stitching them together and checking the results. I'd only consider hand scanning if I was doing no more than a half dozen maps.
Most importantly, it would be a hell of a lot less fun than building my own scanner.
It might be worth building your own scanner if your large maps are so fragile they can't be trusted to a wide format scanner that will feed them through the scanning mechanism. Otherwise it'd be better to buy a large format color scanner, because you know it will give good results.
After you've got your images you're talking about the normal process of registering the map in a geographic coordinate system (not geocoding, which is a simple process of finding a geographic coordinate system for a piece of data; you'll have to produce a file that is in a known coordinate system).
There are lots of tools for doing that, but if you don't know where to begin, you'll either have to hire somebody who knows what they're doing, or educate yourself on the process. That's beyond what you can expect in Slashdot request. There are lots of commercial tools for this; I think you can even do it in Matlab. The only open source software I know off the top of my head that could do this is GRASS, but learning to use GRASS is an education in itself.
From the operating system's standpoint, a file is the atomic unit of document management.
From a computer language standpoint, a file is an atomic unit of parsing.
From a programming standpoint, both these concepts have utility, but neither is particularly fundamental.
That's one of the things that makes literate programming possible.
That said, I'm not exactly thrilled by the bubble concept. It's one more place to store vague ideas and associations that will be incomprehensible a few weeks later. It's not bad like the attempts at "graphical programming" languages twenty years ago or so, but I don't see that its really better than code folding, or even as good. What a programmer has to do is to express himself clearly. Anything which helps that is good. Anything that doesn't is meh.
Also, I can't see using the system shown on a laptop. It might be usable on a 24" monitor, but not a 15".
No. Gray market does not mean counterfeit. It is just as legal as "normal" channels, although manufacturers don't like it.
Let's say I manufacture a widget in Indonesia and sell it to US distributors for $100. I sell the same widget to Indian distributors for $10, because you can't sell this widget for as much there. I make the Indian distributor promise he won't sell back to the US and undercut my official channel price. But I can't control what people downstream do with the widget. Indians being smart and enterprising, somebody there figures out he can buy a boatload of widgets from the distributor, ship them back to the US, and sell them at a profit for $40.
That's gray market. It's the legitimate goods, made on the same assembly line, and passing from hand to hand by completely legal sales. The manufacturers don't like it, and I may cut off my Indian distributor if I think he's involved with this or turning a blind eye. That means the incentive is for gray market sellers to be secretive, and therein lies the potential for a black marketeer to step into the process and represent himself as a gray marketeer.
When somebody steals widgets from the Indonesian factory, or repackages rejects being thrown out and represents them as good, or sells a non-functional plastic knock-off and represents it as functional, that's *black* market.
You may end up buying black market goods from somebody who represents himself as a gray marketeer. It could be because he is a fraud, but not necessarily. Goods pass from hand to hand in the gray market, and the fraud may be removed one or two transactions from your purchase.
I'm skeptical because I've heard so many reports like this.
However it's not physically improbable to achieve 30% efficiency with an internal combustion engine. Even an ordinary ICE theoretically can achieve 37%. If the combustion temperature is raised, it is conceivable that higher efficiencies could be achieved.
As far as mileage is concerned, that's not related in a straightforward way to engine efficiency under ideal conditions. Toyota's Prius is rated at 51 MPG highway; that's not the electrical system doing that, it's an engine that's tuned to be very efficient at highway speeds and which doesn't have to deliver torque at low speeds.
It's not out of the question to almost obtain twice that in a ultralight prototype vehicle with an engine that marginally outperforms the Prius engine under those conditions, if the rest of the power train was a little simpler and more efficient. The key to the Prius engine is that it can be tuned for higher peak power because it doesn't have to generate much torque at low speeds.