No. And your trite oversimplification is utterly worthless. We make the agreement so that when China *does* break it, we have a protocol in place for responding. We contact the Chinese government, we point at the malicious behavior, and we expect them to correct it. If they do not, then we have put in a good-faith effort, and we can enact our own consequences.
It's a first step. It's not the entire solution. But we have to start somewhere.
If they can keep in feedstock, and maintain the machine. Which seem to be way more difficult in an education setting than just ordering a box of rulers and stuff.
I dunno. I'm excited about the capacity for 3D printers to enable rapid prototyping and printing items downloaded from the internet. But I have a hard time connecting that with fundamental education.
Now watch as those whose salaries are paid by pushing more computers and testing post lies that aren't backed by peer reviewed scientific studies, to feather their nests.
It started even before TFA was over. There was a marketing guy from Microsoft and a guy who is a 'head teacher' who say that this study is obviously bullshit because... computers are great!
FTFA MS guy: "The internet gives any student access to the sum of human knowledge, 3D printing brings advanced manufacturing capabilities to your desktop"
Yep. That's mostly true. But he doesn't even mention learning or education. WTF good is 3D printing when the problem is that students are struggling with math and reading?
I'm a programmer, and I still don't understand why it's the 256th day. Why not the 16th? Because 8-bit bytes? I guess? Listen, how about we take advantage of the fact that the abbreviation for February only uses letters that are digits in hex. We could make programmers day 0xfeb+20 (111111111111b) and have it on February 20th. At least there's enough 'joke' there that we could explain it, instead of telling people that they wouldn't understand just because it's shamefully simpleminded.
Anyway, the whole concept is so lame, it doesn't really matter what day they say it is.
I dealt with this for years with D-Link and Linksys (now bought by Cisco) access points. They had all kinds of problems, and I was constantly rebooting them. At one point, I went so far as to wire a relay into a power strip, hook it up via serial cable to a computer, and wrote a script to monitor the access point and reset the power when it got too shitty (at least once a day). A couple of years ago, I bought an Apple Airport Express and an HP Procurve 1410-8G switch (the Airport Express only has something like 1 or 2 ethernet ports). I have reset this setup only a handful of times since I put it in, and most of those times it turned out to be a problem with my cable modem or provider, not my access point.
The downsides of the Apple hardware are that it has no web interface, and of course there is no way to load 3rd party firmware. But I'd rather make do with Apple's mediocre interface software than the absolute shit that we put up with when using D-Link or Linksys. Oh, and I mostly don't use Apple computers at home, it's all Windows and Linux. Just saying, I have no particular Apple fetish--I've just found that for me, that access point solved my problems.
Well, he mentions the room full of women, and he also talks about being in charge of a group that ran problems through some kind of IBM machines:
And so I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease. And, although they had done only three problems in nine months, I had a very good group.
The real trouble was that no one had ever told these fellows anything. The Army had selected them from all over the country for a thing called Special Engineer Detachment - clever boys from high school who had engineering ability. They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in barracks. And they would tell them nothing.
Then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM machines - punching holes, numbers that they didn't understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we're doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited: "We're fighting a war! We see what it is!" They knew what the numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more energy released, and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing.
Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn't need supervising in the night; they didn't need anything. They understood everything; they invented several of the programs that we used - and so forth.
So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was, that's all. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, we did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten times as fast.
I see your point (didn't for a second -- the humor would have been clearer if you quoted "good" and "evil").
What is it about the GPP that makes you think it's a joke?
Do you think that an ultra-conservative who wants to run an anti-abortion ad would think it humorous that they were also required to advocate for the side that they consider to be, quite literally, evil?
You're going to "train" a teacher, who has no formal CS training, in ONE DAY, to teach CS?
Yeah, so I was asked to train high school teachers on programming so they could teach it to their students. I was asked to do a three-day workshop. But other topics started to creep in. The organizers wanted time dedicated to this and that. My three days was gradually whittled down to about 2.5 hours on one morning. 9-noon with a couple of 15-minute breaks. Now, with three days, I could see working through a few lessons with teachers, having them actually get up and teach a lesson themselves, and planting a seed of interest, even if we couldn't make them experts. But 2.5 hours? It's not enough time to do more than have them type some magic words without understanding what they are, and then be underwhelmed by the result.
I told the organizers that there was very little point in my 'training' these teachers on programming if all we were going to have time for was a couple of 20-minute lectures and one-hour activities during one morning. They would have no chance to repeat these tasks, they would have no homework to make them think about the subject, they were just going to go to lunch afterward and the entire morning would immediately begin evaporating from their minds. The organizers insisted that they valued my contributions, and since I had committed, they wanted me to do it. So I did.
A year later, I ran into one of the organizers who was actually sympathetic to my issues with the plan. He told me that, as I'd predicted, none of the teachers had reported using any of the information that I'd given them. It was a complete waste of time for everyone involved. But it 'counted' as CS training, and so if you look at those teachers' records, you will see that they've taken a certain number of continuing education credits that were CS-related.
The thing that really offends me is that the lie is so flimsy and transparent. If they have a legitimate technical reason for making this change, then they should publish it. If they don't, don't feed us this bullshit about 'better serving' us. Just say that you're doing it because you want to charge different prices in different markets. It's still shitty, but at least it's true.
Seriously, anyone thinking of actually voting for this guy is an idiot.
I live in a state that's so red, we vote at a ratio of about 3:1 for the Republican candidate for president regardless of who he is or who else is running. If Trump doesn't get the Republican nomination and runs as an independent, I will vote for him, not because I think he's great, but because I know my vote counts for nothing so I might as well vote for the fool in protest.
There's a tiny part of me that wants Trump to win in the general, because the resulting disasters might have a sliver of possibility of getting people to take their heads out of their asses and try to govern properly, rather than voting for whichever bloviator scores the most points.
The moral of the story is; if you are ever on safari and need to claim some pack mules, either bring them back with you or describe them as "breakfast" on the expense claim..
See, that would just get me in trouble. My office won't pay for meals, only for per diem, so then I'd be out the cost of the mules, unless they cost less than an out-of-state breakfast allowance (somewhere around $12.00, I think)--and then I'd be out of pocket for the cost of my actual breakfast that day, unless I did in fact eat the mules!
I think I'd be better off describing the mules as 'rental transportation' and then filing a 'lost receipt memo' so the bean counters couldn't see that I'd actually bought them.
As much as I don't want to talk about it anymore, I feel like the more of the stuff like this that gets posted, the more it gets accepted as "truth" that women are somehow under attack by "the boys club".
I hope it isn't. I see the conversations on-line today, and they appear to be two completely polarized extremes hurling bilious invective at each other and threatening (and even acting against) each other in ways that are totally unacceptable in discourse. I am a guy, and in my shop, there happen to be three men and three women working together. As far as I have ever seen, nobody has ever been harassed, sexually or otherwise. If anyone ever is, I'd like to think that all the stuff we hear from HR means something, and the problem could be resolved through those channels. I support people's rights to not be harassed at work.
In fact, in my time here, the only person I've ever had any friction with is another guy, and he was a moron, and he doesn't work here anymore. And he had the same friction with other men and with women. But it wasn't harassment. And it never descended to the level of what I've seen on the Internet. These two sides have just descended into the deepest muckhole they can find and are unswervingly dedicated to hurling as much filth at each other as they can.
So I don't think people should harass others at work, but I also think that some people sometimes need to grow a little thicker skin. I've had interactions with people in professional settings in which I've felt personally insulted by something they said or did. But when that happens, I don't fly off the handle and try to get the other person fired. Not every slight needs to be elevated to the level of existential crisis. Sometimes, you just have to grit your teeth and get the job done, even when the person you're working with is distasteful.
Maybe my 11 gallon gas tank just isn't big enough for significant savings, but I really wonder whether these gas price apps are worth it.
Yeah, I have a 12 gallon tank. The other day, when I was about on empty, I went and bought gas. It's the end of the month, so I put in my phone number to claim my Safeway rewards. I got a $0.10 discount per gallon! Wow! That's... about $1.20 that I saved. I don't even know if that was worth the amount of time that it took to type in my phone number (twice, because I did it wrong the first time, and then it took forever to cancel the transaction...)
I absolutely wouldn't use an app that helped me find the cheapest gas. On average, I buy no more than 15 gallons of gas per month, so even if the app can save me twenty cents a gallon, the cumulative effect of saving $3.00 per month is so insignificant that I couldn't really care much less.
I don't hate ads. I don't pay much attention to them, I don't find them to be useful or helpful in any way, and I don't click on them except by accident. But I totally understand the reason they're on the page. I get it. People hosting web sites need some income to pay the fees associated with that.
When your ads take so long to load that I navigate away from the page before it even loads, you lose ad impression money. When your ads are so intrusive that I stop going to your site, you lose ad impression money. When you make my experience shitty, you lose ad impression money.
There is an equilibrium here. If you can serve me ads in a way that doesn't make me stop viewing your page, then you get ad impression money and I get to consume your content: we both win.
$2 million? Is slashdot even worth that much? Would they take $300,000 in return for perpetual dice.com banner ads or something?
Well, when Dice bought Geeknet media properties Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode three years ago, they paid $20 million for the bundle. All three sites have undergone significant decline since then (Freecode is basically dead), but I very much doubt that Dice plans to take that big a loss on the sale.
Okay, I've been willing to put up with ads on Slashdot for many years. I've never taken advantage of the 'turn off ads' feature for subscribers. But the auto-playing Youtube ads that I'm getting today are crashing browser tabs, they're occasionally scrolling my browser up to the top of the page and interrupting my reading [and my writing--typing this comment was interrupted by shittyness from the video ad], and they're causing pages to have to continue to load occasionally after they've already loaded. I'm glad I have my sound muted by default.
Fuck you, Slashdot, I'm browsing you with adblock from now on.
Look at it this way: if Comcast creates a 2gb service that's so expensive that nobody uses it, they get a little more ammo in the can for their claims that nobody wants or needs gb-scale internet access. When we complain about their crappy, slow service, they'll just point at the lack of adoption of this service and say, 'see? Nobody wants it!'
It is suspected that the tape was re-used due to NASA's tight budget and they couldn't afford more tape.
Not just budget concerns. There was also a big problem in the 80s when commercial whaling was outlawed. The tape that NASA had used to record a lot of data involved whale oil in its production somehow. When whaling went out, whale oil went away, and companies that made data tape scrambled to replace it with something. They came up with synthetic alternatives, but because they didn't have much time to test, they discovered after it was already in use that the new stuff basically turned into glue after sitting on a shelf too long, which ruined tapes. So the old whale oil tapes became valuable for re-use, since you could depend on them not gluing together and losing all of your data. So that's another reason why NASA taped over a lot of irreplaceable data.
At a conference last year, I spoke with a NASA guy who was working on recovering a lot of old lunar data. He told me about the whale oil angle. He also said their best find at that point had been a whole palette/palettes of the whale oil tapes that had been sent from one NASA group to another to be copied over, but had been misplaced in a warehouse during transit, and just sat there ever since.
Okay, but look. The ISS roughly repeats its orbital path roughly every 3 days, taking a 5-meter resolution image. Landsat is 16 days and 15 meters. RapidEye is 5 meters at 5 days (or daily, if you are okay with some pretty oblique photos). MODIS is every 1-2 days, 250-meter resolution. There are many other options, but you get the idea. You choose your instrument based upon the needs of your project. If you're imaging the northwestern US in the summer, and you're interested in being able to check up on some phenomenon at a temporal resolution that's pretty short and a high spatial resolution, Urthecast may be a good choice. You could use RapidEye, but in my experience, it's crazy expensive. I don't know what Urthecast costs are. If you just want to see something like % cloud cover of the Earth daily, MODIS will work and is free. If you want to see land use change since 1980, you go with Landsat because it goes back so far.
If it's cloudy, then you won't get good data, but that's basically true of all satellite imagery, unless you are doing some application that uses EM bands that pass through clouds easily.
The other option is chartering aircraft or using drones, and aircraft are super expensive and drones are a lot more DIY. But those might be the best instruments, like I say, depending on your project.
It appears that individual cars are at just about the spatial resolution of the camera. Figure a car is something like 2 meters by 5 meters. Urthecast's camera, 'Theia', is advertised as a 5-meter camera (5m x 5m on the ground). So a car only takes up about half of a pixel. Which means that when the CCD is exposed, sometimes the pixel comes out white for a white car that happens to align itself totally within one cell of the CCD, and sometimes the car 'disappears' when it is overlapping two cells and is not increasing either cell's reflectance enough to make the cell come out white. (Note also that we only really see white cars; if you look very closely you may be able to see darker colored cars also, but they mostly blend into the road because they are not differently colored enough).
Theia is also a 'pushbroom' camera, which means that its CCD array is a linear array that is swept over the field of view (likely with a mirror or similar). Furthermore, the camera itself is moving through 30 degrees of arc while focusing on one area of the Earth, which means that as the CCD is imaging each linear set of pixels, it's moving within a camera that is moving on board a space station that is moving with respect to the Earth. So there is a *lot* of image processing going on to turn this collection of pixel rows into a coherent video. Some of that processing is likely to involve lossy processes and interpolation that provide a second source of this 'disappearing car' phenomenon.
'they' probably means the local government union objected to a non-union project.
Could be. On the other hand, it could just be because they'd like a system with a formal service contract, warrantee, liability insurance, etc. Having some former student come back to the school occasionally to perform incantations over a Commodore may not inspire great confidence that the system is well in hand. What if something goes horribly wrong with the system and causes damage to the building? May not be Jeff's fault, but Jeff may be involved in the legal fallout.
Slashdot Mirror
No. And your trite oversimplification is utterly worthless. We make the agreement so that when China *does* break it, we have a protocol in place for responding. We contact the Chinese government, we point at the malicious behavior, and we expect them to correct it. If they do not, then we have put in a good-faith effort, and we can enact our own consequences.
It's a first step. It's not the entire solution. But we have to start somewhere.
What about Ted Stravinsky, the tunabomber?
I don’t know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.
If they can keep in feedstock, and maintain the machine. Which seem to be way more difficult in an education setting than just ordering a box of rulers and stuff.
I dunno. I'm excited about the capacity for 3D printers to enable rapid prototyping and printing items downloaded from the internet. But I have a hard time connecting that with fundamental education.
It started even before TFA was over. There was a marketing guy from Microsoft and a guy who is a 'head teacher' who say that this study is obviously bullshit because... computers are great!
FTFA MS guy: "The internet gives any student access to the sum of human knowledge, 3D printing brings advanced manufacturing capabilities to your desktop"
Yep. That's mostly true. But he doesn't even mention learning or education. WTF good is 3D printing when the problem is that students are struggling with math and reading?
I'm a programmer, and I still don't understand why it's the 256th day. Why not the 16th? Because 8-bit bytes? I guess? Listen, how about we take advantage of the fact that the abbreviation for February only uses letters that are digits in hex. We could make programmers day 0xfeb+20 (111111111111b) and have it on February 20th. At least there's enough 'joke' there that we could explain it, instead of telling people that they wouldn't understand just because it's shamefully simpleminded.
Anyway, the whole concept is so lame, it doesn't really matter what day they say it is.
I dealt with this for years with D-Link and Linksys (now bought by Cisco) access points. They had all kinds of problems, and I was constantly rebooting them. At one point, I went so far as to wire a relay into a power strip, hook it up via serial cable to a computer, and wrote a script to monitor the access point and reset the power when it got too shitty (at least once a day). A couple of years ago, I bought an Apple Airport Express and an HP Procurve 1410-8G switch (the Airport Express only has something like 1 or 2 ethernet ports). I have reset this setup only a handful of times since I put it in, and most of those times it turned out to be a problem with my cable modem or provider, not my access point.
The downsides of the Apple hardware are that it has no web interface, and of course there is no way to load 3rd party firmware. But I'd rather make do with Apple's mediocre interface software than the absolute shit that we put up with when using D-Link or Linksys. Oh, and I mostly don't use Apple computers at home, it's all Windows and Linux. Just saying, I have no particular Apple fetish--I've just found that for me, that access point solved my problems.
Well, he mentions the room full of women, and he also talks about being in charge of a group that ran problems through some kind of IBM machines:
http://calteches.library.calte...
What is it about the GPP that makes you think it's a joke?
Do you think that an ultra-conservative who wants to run an anti-abortion ad would think it humorous that they were also required to advocate for the side that they consider to be, quite literally, evil?
Yeah, so I was asked to train high school teachers on programming so they could teach it to their students. I was asked to do a three-day workshop. But other topics started to creep in. The organizers wanted time dedicated to this and that. My three days was gradually whittled down to about 2.5 hours on one morning. 9-noon with a couple of 15-minute breaks. Now, with three days, I could see working through a few lessons with teachers, having them actually get up and teach a lesson themselves, and planting a seed of interest, even if we couldn't make them experts. But 2.5 hours? It's not enough time to do more than have them type some magic words without understanding what they are, and then be underwhelmed by the result.
I told the organizers that there was very little point in my 'training' these teachers on programming if all we were going to have time for was a couple of 20-minute lectures and one-hour activities during one morning. They would have no chance to repeat these tasks, they would have no homework to make them think about the subject, they were just going to go to lunch afterward and the entire morning would immediately begin evaporating from their minds. The organizers insisted that they valued my contributions, and since I had committed, they wanted me to do it. So I did.
A year later, I ran into one of the organizers who was actually sympathetic to my issues with the plan. He told me that, as I'd predicted, none of the teachers had reported using any of the information that I'd given them. It was a complete waste of time for everyone involved. But it 'counted' as CS training, and so if you look at those teachers' records, you will see that they've taken a certain number of continuing education credits that were CS-related.
The thing that really offends me is that the lie is so flimsy and transparent. If they have a legitimate technical reason for making this change, then they should publish it. If they don't, don't feed us this bullshit about 'better serving' us. Just say that you're doing it because you want to charge different prices in different markets. It's still shitty, but at least it's true.
I live in a state that's so red, we vote at a ratio of about 3:1 for the Republican candidate for president regardless of who he is or who else is running. If Trump doesn't get the Republican nomination and runs as an independent, I will vote for him, not because I think he's great, but because I know my vote counts for nothing so I might as well vote for the fool in protest.
There's a tiny part of me that wants Trump to win in the general, because the resulting disasters might have a sliver of possibility of getting people to take their heads out of their asses and try to govern properly, rather than voting for whichever bloviator scores the most points.
See, that would just get me in trouble. My office won't pay for meals, only for per diem, so then I'd be out the cost of the mules, unless they cost less than an out-of-state breakfast allowance (somewhere around $12.00, I think)--and then I'd be out of pocket for the cost of my actual breakfast that day, unless I did in fact eat the mules!
I think I'd be better off describing the mules as 'rental transportation' and then filing a 'lost receipt memo' so the bean counters couldn't see that I'd actually bought them.
I hope it isn't. I see the conversations on-line today, and they appear to be two completely polarized extremes hurling bilious invective at each other and threatening (and even acting against) each other in ways that are totally unacceptable in discourse. I am a guy, and in my shop, there happen to be three men and three women working together. As far as I have ever seen, nobody has ever been harassed, sexually or otherwise. If anyone ever is, I'd like to think that all the stuff we hear from HR means something, and the problem could be resolved through those channels. I support people's rights to not be harassed at work.
In fact, in my time here, the only person I've ever had any friction with is another guy, and he was a moron, and he doesn't work here anymore. And he had the same friction with other men and with women. But it wasn't harassment. And it never descended to the level of what I've seen on the Internet. These two sides have just descended into the deepest muckhole they can find and are unswervingly dedicated to hurling as much filth at each other as they can.
So I don't think people should harass others at work, but I also think that some people sometimes need to grow a little thicker skin. I've had interactions with people in professional settings in which I've felt personally insulted by something they said or did. But when that happens, I don't fly off the handle and try to get the other person fired. Not every slight needs to be elevated to the level of existential crisis. Sometimes, you just have to grit your teeth and get the job done, even when the person you're working with is distasteful.
Yeah, I have a 12 gallon tank. The other day, when I was about on empty, I went and bought gas. It's the end of the month, so I put in my phone number to claim my Safeway rewards. I got a $0.10 discount per gallon! Wow! That's... about $1.20 that I saved. I don't even know if that was worth the amount of time that it took to type in my phone number (twice, because I did it wrong the first time, and then it took forever to cancel the transaction...)
I absolutely wouldn't use an app that helped me find the cheapest gas. On average, I buy no more than 15 gallons of gas per month, so even if the app can save me twenty cents a gallon, the cumulative effect of saving $3.00 per month is so insignificant that I couldn't really care much less.
I don't hate ads. I don't pay much attention to them, I don't find them to be useful or helpful in any way, and I don't click on them except by accident. But I totally understand the reason they're on the page. I get it. People hosting web sites need some income to pay the fees associated with that.
When your ads take so long to load that I navigate away from the page before it even loads, you lose ad impression money. When your ads are so intrusive that I stop going to your site, you lose ad impression money. When you make my experience shitty, you lose ad impression money.
There is an equilibrium here. If you can serve me ads in a way that doesn't make me stop viewing your page, then you get ad impression money and I get to consume your content: we both win.
Well, when Dice bought Geeknet media properties Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode three years ago, they paid $20 million for the bundle. All three sites have undergone significant decline since then (Freecode is basically dead), but I very much doubt that Dice plans to take that big a loss on the sale.
Okay, I've been willing to put up with ads on Slashdot for many years. I've never taken advantage of the 'turn off ads' feature for subscribers. But the auto-playing Youtube ads that I'm getting today are crashing browser tabs, they're occasionally scrolling my browser up to the top of the page and interrupting my reading [and my writing--typing this comment was interrupted by shittyness from the video ad], and they're causing pages to have to continue to load occasionally after they've already loaded. I'm glad I have my sound muted by default.
Fuck you, Slashdot, I'm browsing you with adblock from now on.
Jesus. That machine. Super cool, but if I was captain, I'd have to have the goddamn thing removed. It's the only responsible choice.
Look at it this way: if Comcast creates a 2gb service that's so expensive that nobody uses it, they get a little more ammo in the can for their claims that nobody wants or needs gb-scale internet access. When we complain about their crappy, slow service, they'll just point at the lack of adoption of this service and say, 'see? Nobody wants it!'
Jesus. Why do you even engage with this fool?
Not just budget concerns. There was also a big problem in the 80s when commercial whaling was outlawed. The tape that NASA had used to record a lot of data involved whale oil in its production somehow. When whaling went out, whale oil went away, and companies that made data tape scrambled to replace it with something. They came up with synthetic alternatives, but because they didn't have much time to test, they discovered after it was already in use that the new stuff basically turned into glue after sitting on a shelf too long, which ruined tapes. So the old whale oil tapes became valuable for re-use, since you could depend on them not gluing together and losing all of your data. So that's another reason why NASA taped over a lot of irreplaceable data.
At a conference last year, I spoke with a NASA guy who was working on recovering a lot of old lunar data. He told me about the whale oil angle. He also said their best find at that point had been a whole palette/palettes of the whale oil tapes that had been sent from one NASA group to another to be copied over, but had been misplaced in a warehouse during transit, and just sat there ever since.
Okay, but look. The ISS roughly repeats its orbital path roughly every 3 days, taking a 5-meter resolution image. Landsat is 16 days and 15 meters. RapidEye is 5 meters at 5 days (or daily, if you are okay with some pretty oblique photos). MODIS is every 1-2 days, 250-meter resolution. There are many other options, but you get the idea. You choose your instrument based upon the needs of your project. If you're imaging the northwestern US in the summer, and you're interested in being able to check up on some phenomenon at a temporal resolution that's pretty short and a high spatial resolution, Urthecast may be a good choice. You could use RapidEye, but in my experience, it's crazy expensive. I don't know what Urthecast costs are. If you just want to see something like % cloud cover of the Earth daily, MODIS will work and is free. If you want to see land use change since 1980, you go with Landsat because it goes back so far.
If it's cloudy, then you won't get good data, but that's basically true of all satellite imagery, unless you are doing some application that uses EM bands that pass through clouds easily.
The other option is chartering aircraft or using drones, and aircraft are super expensive and drones are a lot more DIY. But those might be the best instruments, like I say, depending on your project.
It appears that individual cars are at just about the spatial resolution of the camera. Figure a car is something like 2 meters by 5 meters. Urthecast's camera, 'Theia', is advertised as a 5-meter camera (5m x 5m on the ground). So a car only takes up about half of a pixel. Which means that when the CCD is exposed, sometimes the pixel comes out white for a white car that happens to align itself totally within one cell of the CCD, and sometimes the car 'disappears' when it is overlapping two cells and is not increasing either cell's reflectance enough to make the cell come out white. (Note also that we only really see white cars; if you look very closely you may be able to see darker colored cars also, but they mostly blend into the road because they are not differently colored enough).
Theia is also a 'pushbroom' camera, which means that its CCD array is a linear array that is swept over the field of view (likely with a mirror or similar). Furthermore, the camera itself is moving through 30 degrees of arc while focusing on one area of the Earth, which means that as the CCD is imaging each linear set of pixels, it's moving within a camera that is moving on board a space station that is moving with respect to the Earth. So there is a *lot* of image processing going on to turn this collection of pixel rows into a coherent video. Some of that processing is likely to involve lossy processes and interpolation that provide a second source of this 'disappearing car' phenomenon.
Could be. On the other hand, it could just be because they'd like a system with a formal service contract, warrantee, liability insurance, etc. Having some former student come back to the school occasionally to perform incantations over a Commodore may not inspire great confidence that the system is well in hand. What if something goes horribly wrong with the system and causes damage to the building? May not be Jeff's fault, but Jeff may be involved in the legal fallout.