I'm a transportation planner, and the great grandparent is incorrect. Slower speed has little to do with congestion, other than being a side effect. Up to a certain point, slower speeds actually allow more people onto the road. Congestion just has to do with the number of vehicles being too great for the amount of road, for the most part. Speed and capacity are related, but only in that speeds drop as congestion increases.
You're just talking about the situation where someone is blocking you from driving as fast as you want to. That's just life.;)
The first thing I learned in my land-use law class is this: Your right to personal property is derived from the state. You don't have some sort of fundamental right to a given piece of land. All the constitution says (well, as interpreted in recent times) is that they have to pay you before they take something away. All that stuff (life, libery, property..) is just lip service.
There's plenty of precident for this in state supreme courts. Here in Michigan we had this case back in the early 1980's (Poletown vs. City of Detroit) where the state court ruled that it was valid for the city to condemn land and sell it to GM for them to build an auto plant. There have been other cases like this in other states.
This decision doesn't surprise me in the least, and I think it's reasonable that local governments be given the benefit of the doubt here, simply because of the very local nature of the redevelopment process.
That doesn't mean I think that the city of New London is doing the right thing. I just think they're doing the _legal_ thing. I think they're assholes.
I've used most of the big academic search engines, and there's one area where google just blows everyone else away: the interface. No one else can hold a candle to the 'type some shit and get what you want back' google scholar search. Yeah, sure, it may be an 'incomplete' database, but what is there is VERY easy to find in my experience. When they've got more stuff indexed, this thing is going to rock. It's already the first place I turn when I need to pull up a citation, and I rarely have to go to one of the 'better' search engines.
Ah, but Marxist theory tells us we two types of value: Use and Exchange. You're right; those songs have no exchange value. You pay your money in exchange for the right to use them. That use value never goes away.
Of course, you didn't need me to tell you that. Anyone knows that the songs you have in your possession have value to you. You just wanted to be contrary.
And by marxist theory I don't mean anything having to do with communism.
I totally disagree. By this sort of logic, there wouldn't be public schools, roads, police protection or a while host of other things that the 'Big Bad Government' spends your money on.
Municipal broadband access could very well be a net financial benefit to a community. This is _precisely_ the sort of thing I want my city to pay for. Its an excellent competitive advantage. If it draws in a younger crowd, makes it cheaper for businesses to get their job done, and makes it possible for a few more people to get online that is a Good Thing. More high-tech wage earners in town. A friendlier business environment. More educational opportunities for joe schmoe who hasn't used the internet much because dialup is so slow that the 'net is useless. All these things mean a larger tax base and more jobs.
this goes against the apple business model of the last six or seven years: offer a "cheapish" mac and make a thin margin on it. make it a self-contained widget that the avg joe can't muck about in easily and then reap the fat margin on the upgrades.
Your average joe can't muck about in ANY computer easily. You should watch my grandma try to swap a motherboard or a hard drive. Sheesh. STUPID OLD WOMAN, LEARN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCKET 603 AND SOCKET 423!
I think a lot of you are missing the point.
on
Mac mini Dissection
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I have a nice year-and-a-half old PC sitting in my living room, as well as a G4 ibook with a processor running at basically half the speed of my PC. The PC never gets turned on. Rather, it gets turned on by my wife when she can't rip the ibook from my hands, or by me when I need to run ArcGIS or AutoCAD. I'll probably always _need_ a PC around, but I certainly don't _want_ one around. Yes, its clearly a superior machine in raw computing power, but its not really designed to be lived with. Frankly, if I'm going to spend 8 hours a day sitting in front of a computer, I want it to be pleasant to look at and nice to touch and totally silent. I don't want the ugliest thing in my house to be the thing I spend the most time using.
Would I tolerate a refridgerator that was cold enough to make liquid nitrogen if it also kicked out a 90dB whine? No. Would I ever use a toaster that was 5x larger than it needed to be and so ugly that I had to hide it under a desk? No. Do I want my toilet to blue-screen-of-death on me? Not particularly.
Public transportation is more convenient and cheaper.
I'm a transportation planning student and a former Zipcar employee, and even *I* don't believe that. I love public transportation, but if you factor in all the costs associated, public transportation is more expensive per passenger mile. Yes, in theory its cheaper. But, with only 5% of people using it, demand is just not high enough to justify the massive infrastructure investments required to put in new rail or bus rapid transit or any of the other cool ideas out there. Of course, without those big one-time investments, the demand will _never_ be there. Chicken and egg.
In a lot of ways, we've passed the point of no (cheap) return; rail infrastructure is pretty screwed up, but our roads are in (assuming you're not in Detroit) good shape. Carsharing is a nice mix of the high resource utilization of a shared vehicle and the low cost of a car. At zipcar, I seem to recall that one car could support 10 people or so. Clearly, that doesn't work if you're commuting with the car, but as a supplement to walking, biking or riding transit, its very efficient
At the risk of sounding like an advertisement: Zipcar et al are great if you don't want to be bothered with the annoyances of driving a used car--you know the car is going to be running properly when you get there, you don't have to deal with it when it breaks, you don't need to mess with an insurance company or a bank or any of that crap. Its certainly cheaper than owning a brand new car, and probably cheaper than owning a used car and having it serviced by a mechanic.
Personally, I think it'd be a great use of government funds to set up car shares rather than install new bus lines and such. Oh, and if you're in Ann Arbor, MI and are interested in car sharing: Ann Arbor Community Car Coop
Not mentioned yet, but he _is_ a repeat offender. He brought down a local bbs--insert obligatory plug for arbornet.org!--back in 2000 and was the first charged with hacking under michigan law.
http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/netsec/2000-09/ msg00009.html
I dunno, but you'd think he'd have wised up by now.
I'm a planner who works for the energy/environmental department of a ~100K person college town. One of the ideas that we've been batting around for a while now is to implement an online energy billing and tracking system with our local utility companies that can help people chose what appliances they might benefit from upgrading. Perhaps this has already been done, 'cause it seems like a fairly basic idea, but I haven't run across any municipalities doing it.
I think it'd be very helpful for people to see the direct benefits of switching to more energy efficient systems, where it does and doesn't make sense, etc. If I could go online, see my past bills, and see exactly how much money I'd save by upgrading my furnace or buying a new refridgerator, I'd be more likely to make that investment. It'd be relatively easy to calculate real savings by doing something like the following:
Generate a basic energy profile of each person using the system. What type of insulation they have, what type of appliances, the temperature they keep their house in the summer/winter, size of the house, etc. When you upgrade, you enter the change into your profile. The system can then calculate a rough estimate of the savings that new item made, and advise others more accurately as to what sort of real-world savings they'd see.
An extra benefit of this would be that you'd generate a real-world energy consumption dataset that could be extremely valuable to researchers or energy companies (read: it pays for itself).
As someone who occasionally does maintenence to GIS data, I'd also love to see some sort of wiki-based GIS system that'd allow residents to create some basic GIS datasets...where trees are on their property, where their house sits exactly, etc.
On the other hand, a lot of desiccants are recycleable. You can pop them into an oven to dry the material out. Still, there's a lot of infrastructure behind the traditional aluminum can recycling schtick.
I guess maybe this would be most appropriate for fancy (expensive) things anyway, like maybe a nice bottle (er, can?) of white wine.:) Don't expect to see it in your 50 cent can of coke.
Damn. That should be it's, not its, up there. Beware the grammar police.
As much as I'd love to see ESRI relinquish its stranglehold on the end-user map-making world, I don't think I'll see a good, open source alternative for a _long_ time.
I've worked for one of the largest regional planning agencies in the country, for a ~100,000 person city, with planners and environmental types at at U of Michigan, and done a fair bit of GIS work on my own. ~95% of that work has been with ESRI products. Except for some specialized spatial statistics software, and equally specialized transportation modeling packages, ESRIs stuff is (sadly) hard to beat.
The (paying, non-researcher) end-user, a GIS lackey in a planning office somewhere, someone doing work for some environmental group or maybe someone doing marketing analysis, is not going to deal with the hassles that most open source packages involve. The most successful open-source end-user programs tend to be things with a _huge_ amount of interest in them. You know, web browsers, mail clients, desktop publishing, etc. GIS is still kind of a niche market. Maybe I'm totally off-base in assuming this, but my feeling is that ESRIs core customers are the big metropolitan planning organizations and those are _incredibly_ slow moving organizations for the most part. IMO, there has to be a lot of oomph behind a project before it gets polished enough that Joe Blow, Metropolitan Planner, is going to use it.
I love the idea of GRASS, but I don't see it ever out-doing ArcGIS. Open-source GIS needs to find a big, untapped market and branch out from there. I think what the open source GIS community needs to do is focus on a very stripped down package, as easy to use as a web browser, that lets the average person download TIGER line files from census, import ESRI shapefiles, add their own GPS data, with a big open source library of maps for people to play with. Leave out the analysis tools altogether, deal with things like map projection behind the scenes, and let people use GIS to plan gardens around their house, etc. Once you've got people using that, bloat the software from there, rather than slowly adding features to an already buggy, difficult to use package.
The other extreme of the spectrum is the high-end GIS work, where you've already got serious computer nerds working, and where there's always a market for a product that cedes some control back to the user, even if it is at the expense of some day-to-day usability. Thats where open source is already making inroads.
I was in your boat yesterday, about ready to swear off apple, but I went to the store on a whim. The apple store happily took back my 10gb ipod, less a $30 restocking fee, and handed me a new 15gb model on the spot. I just told them I recieved the gift while I was out of town and it just wasn't big enough to store my music. I played dumb and asked if they sold the 20gb model w/o dock and pouch for a cut rate and the nice apple guy told me that they'd released a 15gb model that day. *look shocked*. Nice thing is, because the gift giver (my wife) wasn't a student, and I *am* a student, I got the 15gb one for $270, so it was a wash. Oh, and my receipt had its return date set for Jan 1st. Generally the folks at our local apple stores have been much nicer to deal with than calling apple directly or buying from a big box electronics place.
What I've done is get a 150 watt metal-halide outdoor lamp (like you'd use in a barn) and wire it up to a digital timer rated for 200 watts. The lamp takes about 5-10 minutes to reach full brighness, so it has a nice 'sunrise' effect. I've got a backup alarm that comes on about 20 minutes after the light switches on, but after a week or two I didn't need it. Total cost was about $40.
Re:An explaination for non-bike-geeks
on
Bamboo Bike A Reality
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I believe you're talking about "fixed gear" bikes rather than single-speed bikes. Single-speed means one speed, with or without a freewheel. Fixed gear is a fixed, non-freewheeled single-speed bike.
As far as aluminum goes, its no harsher than any other frame material. The amount of flex offered by the frame, compared to the seat and tires is so small that, for a given frame geometry, I doubt many people could tell the difference between steel and aluminum. Steel's big advantage is that you can get it repaired in third world nations, and lugged steel frames look freekin' cool.
Even the biggest retro-grouch of them all, Sheldon Brown, doesn't think steel offers significant comfort advantages:
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/frame-materials.html
Lets see:
Apple: 100,000 songs/day at $.10 profit per song = $10,000 per day.
Kazaa: Millions of downloads per day at $.00 per song = $0 per day. Oh wait, they probably make a little money for all the spyware they include.
Personally, even at a paltry 100K songs per day, I prefer Apple's business model.
Slashdot Mirror
Seoul National University puppy = Snuppy.
I'm a transportation planner, and the great grandparent is incorrect. Slower speed has little to do with congestion, other than being a side effect. Up to a certain point, slower speeds actually allow more people onto the road. Congestion just has to do with the number of vehicles being too great for the amount of road, for the most part. Speed and capacity are related, but only in that speeds drop as congestion increases. You're just talking about the situation where someone is blocking you from driving as fast as you want to. That's just life. ;)
There's plenty of precident for this in state supreme courts. Here in Michigan we had this case back in the early 1980's (Poletown vs. City of Detroit) where the state court ruled that it was valid for the city to condemn land and sell it to GM for them to build an auto plant. There have been other cases like this in other states.
This decision doesn't surprise me in the least, and I think it's reasonable that local governments be given the benefit of the doubt here, simply because of the very local nature of the redevelopment process.
That doesn't mean I think that the city of New London is doing the right thing. I just think they're doing the _legal_ thing. I think they're assholes.
Yeah, which totally explains Enron and Tyco.
I've used most of the big academic search engines, and there's one area where google just blows everyone else away: the interface. No one else can hold a candle to the 'type some shit and get what you want back' google scholar search. Yeah, sure, it may be an 'incomplete' database, but what is there is VERY easy to find in my experience. When they've got more stuff indexed, this thing is going to rock. It's already the first place I turn when I need to pull up a citation, and I rarely have to go to one of the 'better' search engines.
Of course, you didn't need me to tell you that. Anyone knows that the songs you have in your possession have value to you. You just wanted to be contrary.
And by marxist theory I don't mean anything having to do with communism.
Municipal broadband access could very well be a net financial benefit to a community. This is _precisely_ the sort of thing I want my city to pay for. Its an excellent competitive advantage. If it draws in a younger crowd, makes it cheaper for businesses to get their job done, and makes it possible for a few more people to get online that is a Good Thing. More high-tech wage earners in town. A friendlier business environment. More educational opportunities for joe schmoe who hasn't used the internet much because dialup is so slow that the 'net is useless. All these things mean a larger tax base and more jobs.
Your average joe can't muck about in ANY computer easily. You should watch my grandma try to swap a motherboard or a hard drive. Sheesh. STUPID OLD WOMAN, LEARN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCKET 603 AND SOCKET 423!
Would I tolerate a refridgerator that was cold enough to make liquid nitrogen if it also kicked out a 90dB whine? No. Would I ever use a toaster that was 5x larger than it needed to be and so ugly that I had to hide it under a desk? No. Do I want my toilet to blue-screen-of-death on me? Not particularly.
I'm a transportation planning student and a former Zipcar employee, and even *I* don't believe that. I love public transportation, but if you factor in all the costs associated, public transportation is more expensive per passenger mile. Yes, in theory its cheaper. But, with only 5% of people using it, demand is just not high enough to justify the massive infrastructure investments required to put in new rail or bus rapid transit or any of the other cool ideas out there. Of course, without those big one-time investments, the demand will _never_ be there. Chicken and egg.
In a lot of ways, we've passed the point of no (cheap) return; rail infrastructure is pretty screwed up, but our roads are in (assuming you're not in Detroit) good shape. Carsharing is a nice mix of the high resource utilization of a shared vehicle and the low cost of a car. At zipcar, I seem to recall that one car could support 10 people or so. Clearly, that doesn't work if you're commuting with the car, but as a supplement to walking, biking or riding transit, its very efficient
At the risk of sounding like an advertisement: Zipcar et al are great if you don't want to be bothered with the annoyances of driving a used car--you know the car is going to be running properly when you get there, you don't have to deal with it when it breaks, you don't need to mess with an insurance company or a bank or any of that crap. Its certainly cheaper than owning a brand new car, and probably cheaper than owning a used car and having it serviced by a mechanic.
Personally, I think it'd be a great use of government funds to set up car shares rather than install new bus lines and such. Oh, and if you're in Ann Arbor, MI and are interested in car sharing: Ann Arbor Community Car Coop
Not mentioned yet, but he _is_ a repeat offender. He brought down a local bbs--insert obligatory plug for arbornet.org!--back in 2000 and was the first charged with hacking under michigan law. http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/netsec/2000-09/ msg00009.html
I dunno, but you'd think he'd have wised up by now.
I'm a planner who works for the energy/environmental department of a ~100K person college town. One of the ideas that we've been batting around for a while now is to implement an online energy billing and tracking system with our local utility companies that can help people chose what appliances they might benefit from upgrading. Perhaps this has already been done, 'cause it seems like a fairly basic idea, but I haven't run across any municipalities doing it. I think it'd be very helpful for people to see the direct benefits of switching to more energy efficient systems, where it does and doesn't make sense, etc. If I could go online, see my past bills, and see exactly how much money I'd save by upgrading my furnace or buying a new refridgerator, I'd be more likely to make that investment. It'd be relatively easy to calculate real savings by doing something like the following: Generate a basic energy profile of each person using the system. What type of insulation they have, what type of appliances, the temperature they keep their house in the summer/winter, size of the house, etc. When you upgrade, you enter the change into your profile. The system can then calculate a rough estimate of the savings that new item made, and advise others more accurately as to what sort of real-world savings they'd see. An extra benefit of this would be that you'd generate a real-world energy consumption dataset that could be extremely valuable to researchers or energy companies (read: it pays for itself). As someone who occasionally does maintenence to GIS data, I'd also love to see some sort of wiki-based GIS system that'd allow residents to create some basic GIS datasets...where trees are on their property, where their house sits exactly, etc.
On the other hand, a lot of desiccants are recycleable. You can pop them into an oven to dry the material out. Still, there's a lot of infrastructure behind the traditional aluminum can recycling schtick. I guess maybe this would be most appropriate for fancy (expensive) things anyway, like maybe a nice bottle (er, can?) of white wine. :) Don't expect to see it in your 50 cent can of coke.
Damn. That should be it's, not its, up there. Beware the grammar police.
Its not going to be real easy to recycle now, is it? Or can they melt the whole thing down, desiccant and all? Seems unlikely.
As much as I'd love to see ESRI relinquish its stranglehold on the end-user map-making world, I don't think I'll see a good, open source alternative for a _long_ time.
I've worked for one of the largest regional planning agencies in the country, for a ~100,000 person city, with planners and environmental types at at U of Michigan, and done a fair bit of GIS work on my own. ~95% of that work has been with ESRI products. Except for some specialized spatial statistics software, and equally specialized transportation modeling packages, ESRIs stuff is (sadly) hard to beat.
The (paying, non-researcher) end-user, a GIS lackey in a planning office somewhere, someone doing work for some environmental group or maybe someone doing marketing analysis, is not going to deal with the hassles that most open source packages involve. The most successful open-source end-user programs tend to be things with a _huge_ amount of interest in them. You know, web browsers, mail clients, desktop publishing, etc. GIS is still kind of a niche market. Maybe I'm totally off-base in assuming this, but my feeling is that ESRIs core customers are the big metropolitan planning organizations and those are _incredibly_ slow moving organizations for the most part. IMO, there has to be a lot of oomph behind a project before it gets polished enough that Joe Blow, Metropolitan Planner, is going to use it.
I love the idea of GRASS, but I don't see it ever out-doing ArcGIS. Open-source GIS needs to find a big, untapped market and branch out from there. I think what the open source GIS community needs to do is focus on a very stripped down package, as easy to use as a web browser, that lets the average person download TIGER line files from census, import ESRI shapefiles, add their own GPS data, with a big open source library of maps for people to play with. Leave out the analysis tools altogether, deal with things like map projection behind the scenes, and let people use GIS to plan gardens around their house, etc. Once you've got people using that, bloat the software from there, rather than slowly adding features to an already buggy, difficult to use package.
The other extreme of the spectrum is the high-end GIS work, where you've already got serious computer nerds working, and where there's always a market for a product that cedes some control back to the user, even if it is at the expense of some day-to-day usability. Thats where open source is already making inroads.
I was in your boat yesterday, about ready to swear off apple, but I went to the store on a whim.
The apple store happily took back my 10gb ipod, less a $30 restocking fee, and handed me a new 15gb model on the spot. I just told them I recieved the gift while I was out of town and it just wasn't big enough to store my music. I played dumb and asked if they sold the 20gb model w/o dock and pouch for a cut rate and the nice apple guy told me that they'd released a 15gb model that day. *look shocked*.
Nice thing is, because the gift giver (my wife) wasn't a student, and I *am* a student, I got the 15gb one for $270, so it was a wash. Oh, and my receipt had its return date set for Jan 1st.
Generally the folks at our local apple stores have been much nicer to deal with than calling apple directly or buying from a big box electronics place.
What I've done is get a 150 watt metal-halide outdoor lamp (like you'd use in a barn) and wire it up to a digital timer rated for 200 watts. The lamp takes about 5-10 minutes to reach full brighness, so it has a nice 'sunrise' effect. I've got a backup alarm that comes on about 20 minutes after the light switches on, but after a week or two I didn't need it. Total cost was about $40.
Lock rings and locktite will fix that.
I believe you're talking about "fixed gear" bikes rather than single-speed bikes. Single-speed means one speed, with or without a freewheel. Fixed gear is a fixed, non-freewheeled single-speed bike. As far as aluminum goes, its no harsher than any other frame material. The amount of flex offered by the frame, compared to the seat and tires is so small that, for a given frame geometry, I doubt many people could tell the difference between steel and aluminum. Steel's big advantage is that you can get it repaired in third world nations, and lugged steel frames look freekin' cool. Even the biggest retro-grouch of them all, Sheldon Brown, doesn't think steel offers significant comfort advantages: http://www.sheldonbrown.com/frame-materials.html
Lets see: Apple: 100,000 songs/day at $.10 profit per song = $10,000 per day. Kazaa: Millions of downloads per day at $.00 per song = $0 per day. Oh wait, they probably make a little money for all the spyware they include. Personally, even at a paltry 100K songs per day, I prefer Apple's business model.