If its just laziness, this could be enough to embarrass the authorities into improving enforcement. Of course, if it's corruption then it's unlikely that his cameras are going to last very long.
Open source number plate recognition software appears to exist. Now all you need is a couple of cameras and a server. In fact, you don't even need a real-time link to the server. You could store the photos on the camera and then process them off-line.
In the UK, reduced speed limits due to road-works on motorways are often policed using average speed cameras. These use number-plate recognition to identify cars as they pass cameras at two or more points, then calculate the average speed based on the distance between the points. The advantage of this as a home-brew solution is that you could build it with off-the-shelf equipment - no radar units needed. There's also no need to paint lines on the road or to calibrate a radar unit. It's also possibly more effective - there's no point slowing down just for the trap and then accelerating away again and it's passive, so radar detectors don't work.
You'd need some license-plate recognition software, but I imagine there are free or cheap solutions available for that now. You'd need to ensure that your jurisdiction allowed you to photograph cars on a public road and store details of their number plates and you'd need to find a way to convince a court of the fidelity of the time-stamps on the photos (maybe have an OTS unprogrammable GPS unit sitting in view of the camera?).
Catching speeders imposes no new restrictions - it's just about enforcing the rules that are already in place. So presumably it requires much less effort from the politicians / authorities, which makes it a more achievable objective for this guy, who's just a private citizen.
Speaking of stairs and escalators, England really needs to catch up on this one. When I was riding the train there I kept having little old ladies ask me to carry their luggage for them up the stairs. I can't imagine what wheelchaired people do.
They have to plan their journeys around accessible stations, just like in the US. Incidentally, the "Stand on the right" notices all over escalators on the underground are supposed to (and generally do) achieve exactly the the effect that you describe. Oh, and you should probably have offered to help the old ladies before you were asked;-).
I'm a maths researcher. At my previous and current institution there's a mix of Windows, OS X and Linux. The people doing more serious coding tend to be on OS X or Linux - often both. IMANPE (In my admittedly narrow personal experience), I have never come across any research level codes that are Windows-only and I often use libraries that assume some kind of Make-style UNIX build environment.
Also, how are you computing the total number of Achievements? If you add up my achievements (and if I add the powers of two I get closer) but it doesn't come out to be the number you posted.
Yes you could, it's a tautology, not a contradiction. If I have all the other achievements and Slashdot gives me this one, then that's fine, I have the achievement, and hence I have the right to the achievement.
More problematic would be an achievement for having achieved nothing. That's when Bertrand Russell would come knocking.
I enjoyed them too.
As far as I'm concerned, full credit to Microsoft for putting up $200k (or whatever) to entertain me for a minute or two during a commercial break, and, even better, removing the opportunity for another company to try and persuade me that Sunny D is good for children or that I should speak to my doctor about a made-up medical condition that they happen to have a made-up cure for.
Nothing else comes close in the combination of brilliant and awful software development.
The underlying engine is great (it does symbolic algebra). The GUI is awful. It was awful in version 9. Then they revised it in version 10 (or 11, or something) and it's still awful, just in new ways. Backspace arbitrarily stops working. Mouse-select highlights random areas of the worksheet that bear no relation to where you clicked the mouse. The fancy new formatted maths in version 10 doesn't have a linear key-stroke model behind it, so backspace never works. Every new version seems to break both forwards and backwards compatibility.
If this is indeed what he (and NASA) claim to be true then I agree these rough calculations don't discount it.
However, given the obvious mistakes in the article (next orbit, 200 billion tonnes), I still have little confidence that claims that the story makes bear much relation to what he actually calcuated.
Ah, I guess that the point is that close pass in 2029 changes the orbit (or at least introduces lots of error), so the orbital simulation applet is meaningless after that.
Yeah, even with the distortion, it's still no better than about 50% to hit the Atlantic (5 time zones = 75 degrees. sin(75/2) = 0.53).
As for the small change, the asteroid is actually ~20 billion tonnes, so its about 5E9 times more massive than a satellite. There is info about its orbit in this table correctly. I haven't done the calculations, but my guess is that the ratio of its mazimum possible collision velocity relative to a typical geostationary satellite to its orbital velocity is very small, but lets say 5% (almost certainly a huge over-estimate). That means that the effect of the collision on its orbital velocity is going to be on the order of 1E-11. Now, that's well inside the the errors on the table, so yes, small changes can be amplified, but a change that is significantly smaller than measurement error is not going to change any predictions for where this thing ends up.
The Atlantic ocean is about 75 degrees across (5 time zones). sin (75/2) = 0.53, so, as a rough estimate, even if we did know the exact time, one couldn't say that it would hit the Atlantic with much better odds than 50%.
Interestingly, I've been playing around with this applet and it's not predicted to come anywhere near earth in 2036. It comes within 0.0022 AU in 2029, but no closer than about 0.1 AU in 2036 (or 2035 or 2037, for that matter).
It would seem surprising if a collision with a satellite that's 0.00000005% of the asteroid's mass is going to change that enough for it to hit the earth. The whole article is bullshit.
Right, but the asteroid has hit a satellite between now and then, a satellite which has, apparently, increased its chance of hitting earth from 1 in 45000 to 1 in 450, which means that its trajectory has changed fairly significantly. In particular, its orbital period has probably changed, which makes it seem unlikely that we can say anything accurate about an impact time 7 years later. There's only a four hour window to hit the Atlantic.
Not only that, but the Atlantic only covers one fifth of the earth's surface, which means that even if, despite all the uncertainty, we knew exactly what time it would hit the earth, the Atlantic would cover at most about one half of the target. So I very much doubt that anyone who knows what they are doing would be prepared to "agree" that it will hit the Atlantic.
So I smell bullshit in the science lab. To be fair, it's possible that a bad translation from the original German article was required as a catalyst.
... it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres (1049 feet) wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes... If this thing weighs 200 billion tonnes, it seems surprising that hitting a satellite is going to divert its course very significantly (unless that satellite is the moon).
And:
NASA and Marquardt agree that... [it] will crash into the Atlantic ocean Ah, so there's only a 1 in 450 chance of it hitting earth, but we know which ocean it will land in if it does (7 years after it hits the satellite).
Next week: 13 year old boy discovers new chemical reaction in which a combination of scientifically illiterate PR bunnies and sub-editors produces large quantities of bullshit.
In 2002, I flew out of La Guardia wearing sandals and no socks. I get pulled aside by a security bloke for some kind of random screening (which happened every time I flew one-way anywhere - very random). I was asked to sit down whilst he wanded my feet. The wand beeped, so he asked me to take off my sandals. He proceeded to ignore my sandals and wand my bare feet.
Incidentally, the lesson for terrorists everywhere is to do what Jesus would do: Wear sandals and make sure that everyone thinks that you've planned a return journey.
If you're Canadian then you don't have to do it (yet). As far as I know, if you're from anywhere else then you need a visa or visa waiver, which requires the whole fingerprint, photograph, declaration of not being Muslim, etc. N.B. I'm British, with Canadian permanent residency, and I have to do it.
Your example is misleadingly compelling because you're making a reasonable profit per transaction. However, I'd say that whilst you are "taking" $10 on every sale, you are only "making" $3. A counter example - when you go to a bank to exchange $100 USD into Euros, the bank takes about a 3% cut over what they pay wholesale. I think that most people (and all accountants) would consider the bank only made $3 on the transaction, not $100.
As for my salary. After some fixed costs (taxes, rent, etc.), I'm free to do pretty much what I please with it. At the very least, what I do with my salary is pretty independent of what I had to do to earn it. However, if you want to stay in business then you're going to need to pay your supplier $7 for the goods at roughly the same rate that you receive $10 for shifting them.
Slashdot Mirror
If its just laziness, this could be enough to embarrass the authorities into improving enforcement. Of course, if it's corruption then it's unlikely that his cameras are going to last very long.
Open source number plate recognition software appears to exist. Now all you need is a couple of cameras and a server. In fact, you don't even need a real-time link to the server. You could store the photos on the camera and then process them off-line.
In the UK, reduced speed limits due to road-works on motorways are often policed using average speed cameras. These use number-plate recognition to identify cars as they pass cameras at two or more points, then calculate the average speed based on the distance between the points. The advantage of this as a home-brew solution is that you could build it with off-the-shelf equipment - no radar units needed. There's also no need to paint lines on the road or to calibrate a radar unit. It's also possibly more effective - there's no point slowing down just for the trap and then accelerating away again and it's passive, so radar detectors don't work. You'd need some license-plate recognition software, but I imagine there are free or cheap solutions available for that now. You'd need to ensure that your jurisdiction allowed you to photograph cars on a public road and store details of their number plates and you'd need to find a way to convince a court of the fidelity of the time-stamps on the photos (maybe have an OTS unprogrammable GPS unit sitting in view of the camera?).
Catching speeders imposes no new restrictions - it's just about enforcing the rules that are already in place. So presumably it requires much less effort from the politicians / authorities, which makes it a more achievable objective for this guy, who's just a private citizen.
Speaking of stairs and escalators, England really needs to catch up on this one. When I was riding the train there I kept having little old ladies ask me to carry their luggage for them up the stairs. I can't imagine what wheelchaired people do.
They have to plan their journeys around accessible stations, just like in the US. Incidentally, the "Stand on the right" notices all over escalators on the underground are supposed to (and generally do) achieve exactly the the effect that you describe. Oh, and you should probably have offered to help the old ladies before you were asked ;-).
I'm a maths researcher. At my previous and current institution there's a mix of Windows, OS X and Linux. The people doing more serious coding tend to be on OS X or Linux - often both. IMANPE (In my admittedly narrow personal experience), I have never come across any research level codes that are Windows-only and I often use libraries that assume some kind of Make-style UNIX build environment.
I'm a mathematician and I resent that wildebeest
Three years is a bit late, though. I hear that a child at a year old is most delicious, nourishing and wholesome.
Kudos to egg.
Ah. Fair enough.
Also, how are you computing the total number of Achievements? If you add up my achievements (and if I add the powers of two I get closer) but it doesn't come out to be the number you posted.
Rounding errors, gets them every time...
Base 4 works for me. Anyone else?
More problematic would be an achievement for having achieved nothing. That's when Bertrand Russell would come knocking.
the iPhone doesn't have WiFi
Yes it does
I enjoyed them too. As far as I'm concerned, full credit to Microsoft for putting up $200k (or whatever) to entertain me for a minute or two during a commercial break, and, even better, removing the opportunity for another company to try and persuade me that Sunny D is good for children or that I should speak to my doctor about a made-up medical condition that they happen to have a made-up cure for.
By Maplesoft.
Nothing else comes close in the combination of brilliant and awful software development.
The underlying engine is great (it does symbolic algebra). The GUI is awful. It was awful in version 9. Then they revised it in version 10 (or 11, or something) and it's still awful, just in new ways. Backspace arbitrarily stops working. Mouse-select highlights random areas of the worksheet that bear no relation to where you clicked the mouse. The fancy new formatted maths in version 10 doesn't have a linear key-stroke model behind it, so backspace never works. Every new version seems to break both forwards and backwards compatibility.
Yes, I know that I should be using SAGE.
Fair enough, my bad on the numbers.
If this is indeed what he (and NASA) claim to be true then I agree these rough calculations don't discount it.
However, given the obvious mistakes in the article (next orbit, 200 billion tonnes), I still have little confidence that claims that the story makes bear much relation to what he actually calcuated.
Ah, I guess that the point is that close pass in 2029 changes the orbit (or at least introduces lots of error), so the orbital simulation applet is meaningless after that.
eek, bad typos. guess I should check the preview next time ...
Yeah, even with the distortion, it's still no better than about 50% to hit the Atlantic (5 time zones = 75 degrees. sin(75/2) = 0.53).
As for the small change, the asteroid is actually ~20 billion tonnes, so its about 5E9 times more massive than a satellite. There is info about its orbit in this table correctly. I haven't done the calculations, but my guess is that the ratio of its mazimum possible collision velocity relative to a typical geostationary satellite to its orbital velocity is very small, but lets say 5% (almost certainly a huge over-estimate). That means that the effect of the collision on its orbital velocity is going to be on the order of 1E-11. Now, that's well inside the the errors on the table, so yes, small changes can be amplified, but a change that is significantly smaller than measurement error is not going to change any predictions for where this thing ends up.
The Atlantic ocean is about 75 degrees across (5 time zones). sin (75/2) = 0.53, so, as a rough estimate, even if we did know the exact time, one couldn't say that it would hit the Atlantic with much better odds than 50%.
Interestingly, I've been playing around with this applet and it's not predicted to come anywhere near earth in 2036. It comes within 0.0022 AU in 2029, but no closer than about 0.1 AU in 2036 (or 2035 or 2037, for that matter).
It would seem surprising if a collision with a satellite that's 0.00000005% of the asteroid's mass is going to change that enough for it to hit the earth. The whole article is bullshit.
Right, but the asteroid has hit a satellite between now and then, a satellite which has, apparently, increased its chance of hitting earth from 1 in 45000 to 1 in 450, which means that its trajectory has changed fairly significantly. In particular, its orbital period has probably changed, which makes it seem unlikely that we can say anything accurate about an impact time 7 years later. There's only a four hour window to hit the Atlantic.
Not only that, but the Atlantic only covers one fifth of the earth's surface, which means that even if, despite all the uncertainty, we knew exactly what time it would hit the earth, the Atlantic would cover at most about one half of the target. So I very much doubt that anyone who knows what they are doing would be prepared to "agree" that it will hit the Atlantic.
So I smell bullshit in the science lab. To be fair, it's possible that a bad translation from the original German article was required as a catalyst.
... it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres (1049 feet) wide and weighing 200 billion tonnesNext week: 13 year old boy discovers new chemical reaction in which a combination of scientifically illiterate PR bunnies and sub-editors produces large quantities of bullshit.
In 2002, I flew out of La Guardia wearing sandals and no socks. I get pulled aside by a security bloke for some kind of random screening (which happened every time I flew one-way anywhere - very random). I was asked to sit down whilst he wanded my feet. The wand beeped, so he asked me to take off my sandals. He proceeded to ignore my sandals and wand my bare feet.
Incidentally, the lesson for terrorists everywhere is to do what Jesus would do: Wear sandals and make sure that everyone thinks that you've planned a return journey.
If you're Canadian then you don't have to do it (yet). As far as I know, if you're from anywhere else then you need a visa or visa waiver, which requires the whole fingerprint, photograph, declaration of not being Muslim, etc. N.B. I'm British, with Canadian permanent residency, and I have to do it.
Your example is misleadingly compelling because you're making a reasonable profit per transaction. However, I'd say that whilst you are "taking" $10 on every sale, you are only "making" $3. A counter example - when you go to a bank to exchange $100 USD into Euros, the bank takes about a 3% cut over what they pay wholesale. I think that most people (and all accountants) would consider the bank only made $3 on the transaction, not $100.
As for my salary. After some fixed costs (taxes, rent, etc.), I'm free to do pretty much what I please with it. At the very least, what I do with my salary is pretty independent of what I had to do to earn it. However, if you want to stay in business then you're going to need to pay your supplier $7 for the goods at roughly the same rate that you receive $10 for shifting them.