Even if this were true, being that FOIA requests are not free as in beer, how is this a problem? You do realize that the requester has to pay for the cost of performing the query. Part of a FOIA is a form in which you indicate how much you are willing to pay for the information. Absuive request volumes are "solved" by using said fees to hire additional staff.
Of course, with electronic indexing, the cost of a search drops considerably. Few people can afford manually conducted searches; few people can't afford a query on a google appliance. When searches are conducted manually their cost alone could suffice to prevent the answering of a otherwise embarrasing questions. Think about how much more dirty underwear can be aired when you don't need the fianncial resources of your law firm or newspaper behind your request.
As for the contention that "too much information" could be disclosed I wish only to point out that exemptions for valid secrecy needs (ongoing investigations, state secrets, etc) are already provided for by the FOIA. Putting the shoe on the other foot we should ask "what do you have to hide?"
Let me understand you correctly; the benevolent corporation is only interested guiding the farmer to the self evident conclusion that being separated from their cash is far better than a bad crop.
I applaud that they are extending the tradition of altruistic interest on the part of the corporation for their vulnerable consumer class. Let us consider other noble endeavors.
DRM; Copying your music is fraught with risk, such as CD coasters. Only corporate stamped CDs will suffice.
Car computer codes; Repairing your own car is very dangerous. You must be protected by allowing only a corporate approved dealer do anything useful, such as open your hood.
The Mob; Buying protection is in your best interest... need we say more?
And lets not forget the ultimate protector of the innocent and easily confused consumer class; John Harvey Kellogg, of the Corn Flake fame, who sought to save all of humanity from the horrors of hairy palms and acne by lopping of little bits of little boys and girl's private parts.
You can't have it both ways. Either GM crops are safe, or they arn't. Which is it... from what you say, it seems that later is true. Your efforts to explain come across to the cynical as noting more than a protection racket
Get a cheaper lens then. Decreasing your aperature and increasing your depth of field is cheap for the lens maker and requries only the twist of a knob for you. Going very far in the other direction is what is hard. High F-stop = large depth of field and low shutter speed. Low F-stop = small depth of field and high shutter speed. Any cheap camera lens will give you a 22+ F stop on the high side. Going the other direction is where the glasss gets expensive. IIRC the stock lens with the Canon Rebel (digital) has an F stop of 3.5 at 18mm. That is okay, but if you *want* a small depth of field (say for something more artisitc than a picture of the kids on Santa's lap) you need to get a better lens or more distance between you and the subject.
There is a three way tug of way betweeh shutter speed, depth of field (F-stop) and noise (ISO.) At least with a D-SLR as opposed to a plain film SLR you can readily choose the later on the fly, giving you somee control on the amount of blur in your photo.
Any DSLR can be set to act just like its cheaper counterpart. Please understand that when a reviewer is saying "this SLR camera has a smaller depth of field than its non-SLR counterpart" you should append "and I don't have a clue about what knob to turn to make it look different; damn it I told my boss I'm not qualified to write this review." to the end of their sentence.
If you are really on a tight budget and want the small field of view of an expensive lens, step back and zoom in. Get a cheap telephoto if you can afford it. A low F stop is one contributing factor to a small field of view; a high focal length is the other. The focal length can outweight the F-stop rather quickly in this matter giving you some rather nice fuzzy backgrounds from even the cheapest of lenses. Of course the zoom will conspire against your already paltry shutter speed by magnifing camera shake, so get a tripod too.
FPSs are not the sort of applications to sit back and say "I've had my fill of CPU time (select, yield, whatever)" for as soon as one frame is done, it is going to start up with the next one. Doom3 consumed 100% of the virtual processor that it requested on your machine. Your silly OS seems to have punted the process back and forth between CPU's.
If anything, you are losing performance to your second CPU. Bouncing between CPU's means that each time you bounce, your contend with a stale cache and the possiability of redundant loads. Not to mention the sudden presence of locks that can be so conveniently compiled out of single cpu versions of OS code.
Now if you can convince your OS to keep Doom on one CPU, you might find that the other picks up the lions share of house hold chores such as networking, responding to keystrokes, spyware, etc etc.. but that wouldn't be fair to make one do all of the chores while the other plays.
IANAD, but I suspect It has nothing to do with your computer screen. Computer geeks, almost definion, spend their days totally motionless sans their fingers and the occational flick of the wrist to sip coffee. Computer geeks are fat. And obsessity is linked to diabetes, and that is linked to glaucoma.
No, actually both computers and space heaters are equally efficent, 100%, at turning electricity into heat. Refering to efficency in this sense is a bit silly, for it is usually a measure of the power a device turns into something other htan heat.
Used in the "conventionally popular" sense, any device that doesn't vent to outside is "100%" efficent. Your food processor, TV and electric shaver are 100% efficent electric heaters. Unless your device stored potential energy someplace by lifting or pressureizing something, it was a perfectly efficent heater.
Your furnace and light bulbs are an exception. If you have a window, some of your light will shine outside, and heat the outside a small amount. If you have a lot of windows your light bulbs will be a little less than 100% efficent heaters... by how much depends on what bulb. A high tech CF bulb will produce less heat at the bulb for the amount of energy it throws out the window as light than a dingy old fashioned incadescent.
Ironically, the most "wasteful" devices are typically a home's furnace and water heater... they will throw up a chimney 10%-30% of the energy they consume. Of course, missing from this "analysis" is the slight detail about the 60%-90% losses that occur in converting whatever fuel the powerplant burns into electricty for your outlet.
I frequently see on Slashdot arguements over "how much heat something (typically a CPU) makes vs. how much electricity it uses." Hint to the clueless... how much electricity it uses is EXACTLY how much heat it produces. Heat is the fate of every innocent little watt when it is done pushing bits around your silicone.
The energy to operate your imaginary machine is coming from the sun light that falls upon the plants.
What you are describing is closed carbon cycle fuel source (renewable.)
Grow plants. CO2 and sunlight goes into the plant
Burn plants. CO2 and heat comes out.
Use heat for whatever
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your net CO2 emissions would be zero; all of the CO2 emitted was absorbed the previous year to "save up" for the endeavor.
Wrong. The information transmission speed is limited to the speed of sound of the fluid at best. Displace on molecule at one end and you have to wait for it to be displaced at the other. Inertia, friction, vessel wall flexing and the compresability of the fluid all slow and attentuate the amplitude of your signal.
Automatics have a neutral setting as well... perhaps for this very reason?
Very fish. The brakes responded somewhat; instead of pushing harder to stop the car, the driver tooled around a little before he "tried really hard." Hmm, do that in the first place?
Solar - inefficient at current technology levels. You would need entire fields of solar cells in order to do anything, which causes issues with paving over pristine wilderness; as well as the amount of chemicals and power it takes to make a solar cell in the first place.
It sounds like your problem is more with placement than solar. Why cover wilderness when there are so many strip mall parking lots that could be roofed by solar panels. You move the production nearer the consumption and provide the customer with a nice shady walk into the store. While at it, you can reduce the need for automotive A/C use as well.
Wind - same inefficiency as solar, requiring massive land use. Very non-friendly to birds, so as to get the moniker of 'Condor Cuisinarts'. Also extremely ugly to look at on a nice high-desert plain.
The 1970's called and wants its Condor Cuisinart's back.
Seriously Fossil fuels and atomics are generallly hazardous to those who live around them, more so than the dissappearing issue of chopped up birds. My opinion regarding this issue is biased towards human health.
Hate to break it to you, but you just wasted your money. The radix sort operates in O(m); where m is the number of characters in the list of things to be sorted.
But, wait, didn't you see that funky proof in CS 201 where they demonstrated that a sort must take O(n lg(n))? Well, radix doesn't break that for a simple reason...
If you have n unique strings, each string must encode ceil(lg(n)/lg(2)) bits to be unique. This means that for a list of n unique elements, your elements have to each encode lg(n)/lg(2) bits. Hence, the length of this datafile will be the number of elements * lg(n)/lg(2). If you consider real world data, such as last names, the bitspace is very very sparse, making your datafile a good deal longer than the O(n lg(n)/lg(2)) that the sort takes.
The sort answer is Yes, the radix sort can sort a file in O( number of bytes ) no matter what the content or how long the keys.
Courts will often explain their decision to guide other judges when applying precedence; this is what case law is all about. Quite simply, courts define what laws actually mean and how the conflicts between them are resolved. Courts publish opinions not for vanity, but to guide lower courts in the meaning and application of the law. Secret arguements imply that part of the opinion will be secret which means, in a very real sense, that the law itself is secret.
Sure, you can read the text, but you will never know why courts rule certain ways, and thus can't conduct your behaivor to ensure that you are not in violation of the law. This is actually a very crafty way to create and keep unconstitutional laws. Courts don't "strike down" laws, they overturn decisions citing the unconstitutionality of a law. Future courts know to ignore a bad law even if it remains on the books. By keeping the arguements secret, a defendent who gets the law struck down would only be listed as having had their case overturned. Nobody would know why and would have to assume that the law is still valid, albeit somebody got off the hook on appeal. Even if lower courts knew how to apply the law, nobody would be able to actually say "this law doesn't exist anymore" and the change in behaivor that the bad law sought would still be in effect because nobody would be able to tell otherwise.
Just like we haven't abandoned footed messengers, carrier pigeons and smoke signals. Everyone knows they'll never go away because they will always be cheaper than an RF setup.
Footed messengers and carrier pigeons are specific implementations of physical delivery. The messengers now wear brown shirts and drive UPS, Fedex or DHL vans and the carrier pigeion has been replaced with 707's, but the basic communication medium has remained the same.
It is only a slightly larger streach to equate smoke signals with light houses or sirens, and those are in common use today.
A gallon of diesel fuel isn't the same as a gallon of gasoline. Diesel fuel has more calories in that gallon. The production and combusion of that single gallon of diesel fuel is far more damaging to the environment.
The concern over mpg ratings isn't over a lack of store space for the fuel - mpg ratings for diesel are not any more comparable to mpg ratings for, say for sake of arguement, natural gas at STP (in its gasious form, room temp, etc) or electric cars (look, zero fuel volume = infinite mpg!)
The "proper" way to look at this issue is in terms of calories per mile, with handicapping for other side effects. It isn't too uncommon to see alternative fuels expressed in terms of mpg-gasoline equivalents... something that isn't really that accurate because gasolines vary a tad in theri caloric content.
60mpg diesel is about the same as 54 mpg gas (well within the same ballpark as hybrids). Kudos to those who get such vehicles, but realize that such a vehicle is no alternative to a hybrid - they are slower and dirtier. I wouldn't go so far as to call a hybrid a crime against the earth... that category is for Hummers. But I would call your 60mpg diesel a crime against pedestrians and anybody behind you.
If the toxins are secret, you still accepted the job. You accepted the risk. You accepted the reward. If you don't want risks, don't accept the reward of the salary offered. Work a job you know has low risks.
This paragraph takes your description outside the realm of a free market economy and into the world of fraud. Free market exchanges require informed consent; knowing exactly what I'm buying and exactly what I'm paying.
Strict Liberitarianism calls for the government to do little more than combat force and fraud. I am inclined to belive that even the most conservative and lazie-faire amoung us would wish the above employer's head be handed to them.
ALE is an open source tool that does this nicely. It is normally intended for turning a large number of images of the same thing into one higher quality image, but when you use the --follow and --extend flags. it can turn a sequence of images from a video into a single larger image.
To quote from their site: ALE is a free software program that renders high-fidelity images of real scenes by aligning and combining many similar images from a camera or scanner. The correct similarity between images is roughly that achieved by a somewhat unsteady hand holding a camera.
Rapelling, arboring, glacering, big wall climbing nuts all disagree with your assesment of static rope. Sure, a fall on static can be akin to suicide and a less pleasent death than cratering, but it has its uses.
I'd use a solid core steel wire. Don't bother spooling, just let it dangle below to reduce bending fatigue. This eliminates the trouble of dealing with the unpredictable width of a spool and saves the energy of actually hauling the cable spool ends up and down. Remember to use big enough drive wheels to keep the bend radii withing spec (and consider your big wheels in your design.)
You can provide power and signal over the hoist cables themselves, just pull the ends away with something elastic so they don't tangle and short.
File to/dev/null.
Just remember to cat/dev/le0 once in a while to keep the bit bucket from getting full. It helps to uncap your ethernet terminator while you do this.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if this were true, being that FOIA requests are not free as in beer, how is this a problem? You do realize that the requester has to pay for the cost of performing the query. Part of a FOIA is a form in which you indicate how much you are willing to pay for the information. Absuive request volumes are "solved" by using said fees to hire additional staff.
Of course, with electronic indexing, the cost of a search drops considerably. Few people can afford manually conducted searches; few people can't afford a query on a google appliance. When searches are conducted manually their cost alone could suffice to prevent the answering of a otherwise embarrasing questions. Think about how much more dirty underwear can be aired when you don't need the fianncial resources of your law firm or newspaper behind your request.
As for the contention that "too much information" could be disclosed I wish only to point out that exemptions for valid secrecy needs (ongoing investigations, state secrets, etc) are already provided for by the FOIA. Putting the shoe on the other foot we should ask "what do you have to hide?"
Let me understand you correctly; the benevolent corporation is only interested guiding the farmer to the self evident conclusion that being separated from their cash is far better than a bad crop.
... need we say more?
... from what you say, it seems that later is true. Your efforts to explain come across to the cynical as noting more than a protection racket
I applaud that they are extending the tradition of altruistic interest on the part of the corporation for their vulnerable consumer class. Let us consider other noble endeavors.
DRM; Copying your music is fraught with risk, such as CD coasters. Only corporate stamped CDs will suffice.
Car computer codes; Repairing your own car is very dangerous. You must be protected by allowing only a corporate approved dealer do anything useful, such as open your hood.
The Mob; Buying protection is in your best interest
And lets not forget the ultimate protector of the innocent and easily confused consumer class; John Harvey Kellogg, of the Corn Flake fame, who sought to save all of humanity from the horrors of hairy palms and acne by lopping of little bits of little boys and girl's private parts.
You can't have it both ways. Either GM crops are safe, or they arn't. Which is it
Get a cheaper lens then. Decreasing your aperature and increasing your depth of field is cheap for the lens maker and requries only the twist of a knob for you. Going very far in the other direction is what is hard. High F-stop = large depth of field and low shutter speed. Low F-stop = small depth of field and high shutter speed. Any cheap camera lens will give you a 22+ F stop on the high side. Going the other direction is where the glasss gets expensive. IIRC the stock lens with the Canon Rebel (digital) has an F stop of 3.5 at 18mm. That is okay, but if you *want* a small depth of field (say for something more artisitc than a picture of the kids on Santa's lap) you need to get a better lens or more distance between you and the subject.
There is a three way tug of way betweeh shutter speed, depth of field (F-stop) and noise (ISO.) At least with a D-SLR as opposed to a plain film SLR you can readily choose the later on the fly, giving you somee control on the amount of blur in your photo.
Any DSLR can be set to act just like its cheaper counterpart. Please understand that when a reviewer is saying "this SLR camera has a smaller depth of field than its non-SLR counterpart" you should append "and I don't have a clue about what knob to turn to make it look different; damn it I told my boss I'm not qualified to write this review." to the end of their sentence.
If you are really on a tight budget and want the small field of view of an expensive lens, step back and zoom in. Get a cheap telephoto if you can afford it. A low F stop is one contributing factor to a small field of view; a high focal length is the other. The focal length can outweight the F-stop rather quickly in this matter giving you some rather nice fuzzy backgrounds from even the cheapest of lenses. Of course the zoom will conspire against your already paltry shutter speed by magnifing camera shake, so get a tripod too.
FPSs are not the sort of applications to sit back and say "I've had my fill of CPU time (select, yield, whatever)" for as soon as one frame is done, it is going to start up with the next one. Doom3 consumed 100% of the virtual processor that it requested on your machine. Your silly OS seems to have punted the process back and forth between CPU's.
.. but that wouldn't be fair to make one do all of the chores while the other plays.
If anything, you are losing performance to your second CPU. Bouncing between CPU's means that each time you bounce, your contend with a stale cache and the possiability of redundant loads. Not to mention the sudden presence of locks that can be so conveniently compiled out of single cpu versions of OS code.
Now if you can convince your OS to keep Doom on one CPU, you might find that the other picks up the lions share of house hold chores such as networking, responding to keystrokes, spyware, etc etc
Then why does every good hunting story start with "after the first six pack?"
IANAD, but I suspect It has nothing to do with your computer screen. Computer geeks, almost definion, spend their days totally motionless sans their fingers and the occational flick of the wrist to sip coffee. Computer geeks are fat. And obsessity is linked to diabetes, and that is linked to glaucoma.
No, actually both computers and space heaters are equally efficent, 100%, at turning electricity into heat. Refering to efficency in this sense is a bit silly, for it is usually a measure of the power a device turns into something other htan heat.
... by how much depends on what bulb. A high tech CF bulb will produce less heat at the bulb for the amount of energy it throws out the window as light than a dingy old fashioned incadescent.
... they will throw up a chimney 10%-30% of the energy they consume. Of course, missing from this "analysis" is the slight detail about the 60%-90% losses that occur in converting whatever fuel the powerplant burns into electricty for your outlet.
... how much electricity it uses is EXACTLY how much heat it produces. Heat is the fate of every innocent little watt when it is done pushing bits around your silicone.
Used in the "conventionally popular" sense, any device that doesn't vent to outside is "100%" efficent. Your food processor, TV and electric shaver are 100% efficent electric heaters. Unless your device stored potential energy someplace by lifting or pressureizing something, it was a perfectly efficent heater.
Your furnace and light bulbs are an exception. If you have a window, some of your light will shine outside, and heat the outside a small amount. If you have a lot of windows your light bulbs will be a little less than 100% efficent heaters
Ironically, the most "wasteful" devices are typically a home's furnace and water heater
I frequently see on Slashdot arguements over "how much heat something (typically a CPU) makes vs. how much electricity it uses." Hint to the clueless
- Grow plants. CO2 and sunlight goes into the plant
- Burn plants. CO2 and heat comes out.
- Use heat for whatever
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your net CO2 emissions would be zero; all of the CO2 emitted was absorbed the previous year to "save up" for the endeavor.So, in other words, you are supposed to slam right into the old lady, school bus or whatever just happened to step into your way.
Wrong. The information transmission speed is limited to the speed of sound of the fluid at best. Displace on molecule at one end and you have to wait for it to be displaced at the other. Inertia, friction, vessel wall flexing and the compresability of the fluid all slow and attentuate the amplitude of your signal.
Run an old slackware linux distro. Bonim is a text based Aim client.
Automatics have a neutral setting as well ... perhaps for this very reason?
Very fish. The brakes responded somewhat; instead of pushing harder to stop the car, the driver tooled around a little before he "tried really hard." Hmm, do that in the first place?
What is wrong with her brakes if she couldn't stop a car with a fast idle in 5th?
It sounds like your problem is more with placement than solar. Why cover wilderness when there are so many strip mall parking lots that could be roofed by solar panels. You move the production nearer the consumption and provide the customer with a nice shady walk into the store. While at it, you can reduce the need for automotive A/C use as well.
Wind - same inefficiency as solar, requiring massive land use. Very non-friendly to birds, so as to get the moniker of 'Condor Cuisinarts'. Also extremely ugly to look at on a nice high-desert plain.The 1970's called and wants its Condor Cuisinart's back. Seriously Fossil fuels and atomics are generallly hazardous to those who live around them, more so than the dissappearing issue of chopped up birds. My opinion regarding this issue is biased towards human health.
Google for hot composting.
But monkeys are cheaper.
Hate to break it to you, but you just wasted your money. The radix sort operates in O(m); where m is the number of characters in the list of things to be sorted.
But, wait, didn't you see that funky proof in CS 201 where they demonstrated that a sort must take O(n lg(n))? Well, radix doesn't break that for a simple reason ...
If you have n unique strings, each string must encode ceil(lg(n)/lg(2)) bits to be unique. This means that for a list of n unique elements, your elements have to each encode lg(n)/lg(2) bits. Hence, the length of this datafile will be the number of elements * lg(n)/lg(2). If you consider real world data, such as last names, the bitspace is very very sparse, making your datafile a good deal longer than the O(n lg(n)/lg(2)) that the sort takes.
The sort answer is Yes, the radix sort can sort a file in O( number of bytes ) no matter what the content or how long the keys.
Courts will often explain their decision to guide other judges when applying precedence; this is what case law is all about. Quite simply, courts define what laws actually mean and how the conflicts between them are resolved. Courts publish opinions not for vanity, but to guide lower courts in the meaning and application of the law. Secret arguements imply that part of the opinion will be secret which means, in a very real sense, that the law itself is secret.
Sure, you can read the text, but you will never know why courts rule certain ways, and thus can't conduct your behaivor to ensure that you are not in violation of the law. This is actually a very crafty way to create and keep unconstitutional laws. Courts don't "strike down" laws, they overturn decisions citing the unconstitutionality of a law. Future courts know to ignore a bad law even if it remains on the books. By keeping the arguements secret, a defendent who gets the law struck down would only be listed as having had their case overturned. Nobody would know why and would have to assume that the law is still valid, albeit somebody got off the hook on appeal. Even if lower courts knew how to apply the law, nobody would be able to actually say "this law doesn't exist anymore" and the change in behaivor that the bad law sought would still be in effect because nobody would be able to tell otherwise.
Just like we haven't abandoned footed messengers, carrier pigeons and smoke signals. Everyone knows they'll never go away because they will always be cheaper than an RF setup.
Footed messengers and carrier pigeons are specific implementations of physical delivery. The messengers now wear brown shirts and drive UPS, Fedex or DHL vans and the carrier pigeion has been replaced with 707's, but the basic communication medium has remained the same.
It is only a slightly larger streach to equate smoke signals with light houses or sirens, and those are in common use today.
A gallon of diesel fuel isn't the same as a gallon of gasoline. Diesel fuel has more calories in that gallon. The production and combusion of that single gallon of diesel fuel is far more damaging to the environment. The concern over mpg ratings isn't over a lack of store space for the fuel - mpg ratings for diesel are not any more comparable to mpg ratings for, say for sake of arguement, natural gas at STP (in its gasious form, room temp, etc) or electric cars (look, zero fuel volume = infinite mpg!) The "proper" way to look at this issue is in terms of calories per mile, with handicapping for other side effects. It isn't too uncommon to see alternative fuels expressed in terms of mpg-gasoline equivalents ... something that isn't really that accurate because gasolines vary a tad in theri caloric content.
60mpg diesel is about the same as 54 mpg gas (well within the same ballpark as hybrids). Kudos to those who get such vehicles, but realize that such a vehicle is no alternative to a hybrid - they are slower and dirtier. I wouldn't go so far as to call a hybrid a crime against the earth ... that category is for Hummers. But I would call your 60mpg diesel a crime against pedestrians and anybody behind you.
I recall a study somewhere that found that starbucks coffee would range between 200mg and 600mg.
This paragraph takes your description outside the realm of a free market economy and into the world of fraud. Free market exchanges require informed consent; knowing exactly what I'm buying and exactly what I'm paying.
Strict Liberitarianism calls for the government to do little more than combat force and fraud. I am inclined to belive that even the most conservative and lazie-faire amoung us would wish the above employer's head be handed to them.
ALE is an open source tool that does this nicely. It is normally intended for turning a large number of images of the same thing into one higher quality image, but when you use the --follow and --extend flags. it can turn a sequence of images from a video into a single larger image.
To quote from their site: ALE is a free software program that renders high-fidelity images of real scenes by aligning and combining many similar images from a camera or scanner. The correct similarity between images is roughly that achieved by a somewhat unsteady hand holding a camera.
Rapelling, arboring, glacering, big wall climbing nuts all disagree with your assesment of static rope. Sure, a fall on static can be akin to suicide and a less pleasent death than cratering, but it has its uses.
I'd use a solid core steel wire. Don't bother spooling, just let it dangle below to reduce bending fatigue. This eliminates the trouble of dealing with the unpredictable width of a spool and saves the energy of actually hauling the cable spool ends up and down. Remember to use big enough drive wheels to keep the bend radii withing spec (and consider your big wheels in your design.)
You can provide power and signal over the hoist cables themselves, just pull the ends away with something elastic so they don't tangle and short.
File to /dev/null.
Just remember to cat /dev/le0 once in a while to keep the bit bucket from getting full. It helps to uncap your ethernet terminator while you do this.