Oh, great, just as turn tables all but vanish from the face of the earth we invent something to make them vanish faster. It would creep me out to listen to a dead person's planned recording, so it would have to be something I would pass on to my kids, who would probably be disinterested. There go two generations of disuse and disinterest during which more turntables would vanish.
Why not engrave the deceased thoughts on buggy whips?
He quite possibly believes that businesses actually do pay taxes.
But more likely he probably understands he would get no bribes or campaign contributions from cities.
As to the issue at hand
I'm not convinced that community broadband wouldn't turn into an unmaintainable wasteland of governmental mismanagement, but I'd be willing to give it a try.
It would be great to have it around as a price anchor, to keep the big providers honest, but with no monopoly mandate.
If nothing else we would have worst case pricing data of how much it really costs to run such a system on a city wide scale, something we never get from the big boys.
In much of the US, you have very little choice in broadband providers. Who ever wired your neighborhood pretty much owns you.
Actually, all this means is they finally found a star system where they were viewing planets along (edge on to) the plane of ecliptic, and therefore able to measure multiple planets actually cross the disk of star.
Which suggest all the other multi-planet systems were viewed somewhat orthogonal to the ecliptic, because there are no shortage of multi-planet systems.
The problem with RTS games path finding vs robot path finding is that the games have a flawless description of the environment (the description IS the environment) and no inherent physical limitations on the driven device, only ones programmed in.
Well, that and the utter LACK of any ACTUAL ROBOTS to guide. (Or those few that do exist are so damn expensive nobody can afford a swarm of three).
Oh, and those Surface tables... Those aren't exactly laying around anywhere either.
But overlooking that minor obstacle for the moment, the first thing that goes to hell when you actually NEED a robot swarm is that flawless environment description. And of course situations needing swarms never occur where you have maps, they happen annoyingly in some remote area, immediately adjacent to (but outside of) the area your funding covered.
Perhaps thats why the summary is so ga-ga about the joy stick simulation, because its the only part of this that seems remotely usable on Joe SixPack's touch screen device.
You need to get down on your hands and knees with a mirror. These things are not that small, because they have to have power for days. Think cigarette pack or brick, depending on technology age.
You probably already know if you need to do this can, because they aren't going to bother tracking you for a parking ticket. They already know where your cell phone is.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has also ruled that a warrant is required. Reported here on/. less than 20 days ago.
This decision is bound for the SCOTUS because you can not have different laws in one part of the country as compared to another part due to the Equal Protection Clause.
The Ninth is the most over-ruled circuit in the entire country. Stay tuned.
But seriously, where does landfill stink come from, and why do they all small pretty much the same? Land fills smell nothing like a dumpster full of garbage. So you can't blame it only on the garbage content.
Wouldn't it be better to find the the problem and fix that instead of covering it up?
One wonders if the stink is a necessary outcome of the landfill process or just a byproduct that is not well understood. With sealed landfills, some states mandate gas extraction as part of the sealing process. There are something like 425 Land Fill Gas To Energy (yeah, I know, TreeHugger, cut me some slack ok?) projects in the US accounting for 1,180 megawatts of power.
Not a great deal, but it would seem a better solution than spraying it and hoping no one will notice the stink.
Ok, so which are you proposing, a deposit or a tax?
They are far from the same thing.
There are a lot of different plastics. No one proposes to ban plastic in general.
But an un-recyclable plastic used in an extremely common application is simply not warranted, given the availability of many other plastics that recycle easily into a large variety of products.
So you ban the problem plastics from common usage in consumer packaging.
Taxing them doesn't help anybody. Taking deposits on them doesn't do anything if they are un-recyclable, and non-reusable. All that does is get them to the landfill faster.
Its not necessary to dream up complicated and expensive schemes to handle unrecyclable material which is used by manufacturers simply because its cheap. Its far easier to simply ban it outright and move on.
The last thing you want to do is create a constituency for this material by assigning it an arbitrary value in the eyes of trash collectors or tax collectors. You simply exacerbate the problem.
manage consumption of problematic materials through taxation
Once government becomes a paid participant in the use of problematic materials you virtually guarantee no impediment to their use will ever appear.
Taxes are always passed to the consumer, never borne by the manufacturer. They become invisible.
Any taxes raised will be squandered away into the general budget and no one seriously believes these taxes will go to support the handling of this material.
Dedicated tax funds are illegal in most states and even the federal governments don't operate that way.
It makes far more sense to simply prohibit the use of a material for a specific purpose than to tax it.
Again, you insist on putting standards in my mouth. Point to where I said any of that or STFU.
Its Iran you fool. They have as much chance a putting an optical and radio guidance system in this Tupelov as putting a camel in the driver seat of a tank. They can't even maintain the airplanes they own without foreign assistance and smuggled parts, yet you seem to believe they could come up with something like a Tomahawk built from scratch?
They say anything. And you believe them. The produce next to nothing. They simply do not have the technical capability. These are cobbled together ex soviet era pieces or Chinese remakes with simple guidance. They do not have satellite coverage to optically guide these things.
Its about time YOU do some real world research for once.
If the authors don't defend their copyright on the text-to-speech conversion,
It is not yet clear that text to speech copyright exists. It is not at set in law that reading aloud from a book is a performance, and therefore separately licensable.
A machine reading a book to the owner is not a performance (no fee charged, no money earned) and therefore there is no basis for authors or publishers to claim a copyright.
Authors made a big noise, but they had no legal leg to stand on and Amazon was busy at the time fighting other (pricing) battles. If course its Apple, the darling of the "creative" industry, and maybe that has something to do with the silence.
And what are my standards? I don't remember stating any?
You assume this thing could return to base, but you have no knowledge of that. It has no gear, so best it could do is parachute in like a Tupolev (which were never successfully used in combat).
Its nothing but a GPS guided bomb dropper, with very little likelihood of arriving at the target, let alone returning.
On top of that, they lack the ground/air/satellite based communications infrastructure necessary to operate a UAV/cruise missile remotely; which is the only way they could put bombs on target without detailed aerial imagery of the flight path.
You assume a sophistication level beyond what is needed.
A GPS receiver costs less than 50 bucks these days. It tells you altitude, speed, direction and rather precise location.
You don't need maps beyond what you get from google earth to find the highest mountain to avoid, and the precise gps coordinates of your target. Code those waypoints in and any old tomtom or garmin could be hacked to guide this thing.
More practical when attacking a target with AA defenses than a Tomahawk?
Do you know what the shoot down rate for Tomahawks is? Its next to nill.
This monster is way bigger, easier to hit, and obviously slow enough that sidewinders, ground or air launched would be effective against anything less than a cloud of them.
We know nothing about the guidance of this thing, but as you say, they don't have the satellites, so calling it a UAV is probably misleading.
I suspect they program in the GPS coordinates and fire and forget. No remote pilots involved.
I actually lived in a location that had an incineration plant which sold waste heat to a small electrical generation plant next door. (The electric company owned the gen plant, and the waste company owned the incinerator.)
All was well for a while, but incineration plants are expensive and need maintenance and major overhauls, and when that came due, the economics finally failed, with the electric company no longer willing to pay the cost of the waste heat and the waste company no longer willing to fund a plant replacement. It all came crashing down and they land filled everything.
There is a pulp mill 50 miles from me, and cardboard is in high demand. The biggest problem is the staples which tear the shit out of the pumps after they liquify the cardboard to a slurry. Not all are magnetic, and eddy current separation fails in dense slurry environment, so the filters have to be manually cleaned after every beater load. (Beater is what they call the liquification machine.)
They may get contracts, but recycling is largely a huge failure as many cities/companies end up land-filling the recyclables along with the trash.
There is no real market for most this stuff except cardboard and metals. (Its already in the form it will be recycled into).
If recycling pays, as the slogan claims, you would expect some trickle back to the consumer. You would expect some waste-bill reduction. Instead we see punitive measures designed to enforce feel good regulations.
It doesn't pay, its almost always tax payer funded, and the separation process could be automated at dump sites for less money than duplicate pickup runs and enforcement actions.
If ever anything needed a good coat of technology this is it.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
The city infrastructure of roads serves all carriers, and there is no reason the fiber couldn't do the same thing.
With the right fiber, the bandwidth is virtually unlimited, and easily able to carry multiple providers.
But you don't even have to trench everywhere if you plan for a fiber to wifi solution.
Oh, great, just as turn tables all but vanish from the face of the earth we invent something to make them vanish faster. It would creep me out to listen to a dead person's planned recording, so it would have to be something I would pass on to my kids, who would probably be disinterested. There go two generations of disuse and disinterest during which more turntables would vanish.
Why not engrave the deceased thoughts on buggy whips?
He quite possibly believes that businesses actually do pay taxes.
But more likely he probably understands he would get no bribes or campaign contributions from cities.
As to the issue at hand
I'm not convinced that community broadband wouldn't turn into an unmaintainable wasteland of governmental mismanagement, but I'd be willing to give it a try.
It would be great to have it around as a price anchor, to keep the big providers honest, but with no monopoly mandate.
If nothing else we would have worst case pricing data of how much it really costs to run such a system on a city wide scale, something we never get from the big boys.
In much of the US, you have very little choice in broadband providers. Who ever wired your neighborhood pretty much owns you.
Yeah, I'm being all misty eyed here.
Its not exactly like this is the first time we've discovered other solar systems with planets. And this discovery speaks nothing about habitability.
Its too soon to book your flight.
Actually, all this means is they finally found a star system where they were viewing planets along (edge on to) the plane of ecliptic, and therefore able to measure multiple planets actually cross the disk of star.
Which suggest all the other multi-planet systems were viewed somewhat orthogonal to the ecliptic, because there are no shortage of multi-planet systems.
The problem with RTS games path finding vs robot path finding is that the games have a flawless description of the environment (the description IS the environment) and no inherent physical limitations on the driven device, only ones programmed in.
Well, that and the utter LACK of any ACTUAL ROBOTS to guide. (Or those few that do exist are so damn expensive nobody can afford a swarm of three).
Oh, and those Surface tables... Those aren't exactly laying around anywhere either.
But overlooking that minor obstacle for the moment, the first thing that goes to hell when you actually NEED a robot swarm is that flawless environment description. And of course situations needing swarms never occur where you have maps, they happen annoyingly in some remote area, immediately adjacent to (but outside of) the area your funding covered.
Perhaps thats why the summary is so ga-ga about the joy stick simulation, because its the only part of this that seems remotely usable on Joe SixPack's touch screen device.
No, full faith and credit applies to the states.
Equal protection and due process both apply here.
This is a federal court ruling that is 180 degrees opposite of the DC circuit's ruling. This isn't an interstate issue.
You have two federal courts deciding the EXACT same issue completely opposite of each other.
In the east coast you can't be tracked via GPS without a warrant. On the west coast you can.
Tell me that is not an equal protection issue.
You mean like the unqualified loonie who has never served a single day as a judge until she was appointed by Obamma?
That loonie?
You don't need much of anything to scan your car.
You need to get down on your hands and knees with a mirror.
These things are not that small, because they have to have power for days. Think cigarette pack or brick, depending on technology age.
You probably already know if you need to do this can, because they aren't going to bother tracking you for a parking ticket. They already know where your cell phone is.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has also ruled that a warrant is required. Reported here on /. less than 20 days ago.
This decision is bound for the SCOTUS because you can not have different laws in one part of the country as compared to another part due to the Equal Protection Clause.
The Ninth is the most over-ruled circuit in the entire country. Stay tuned.
A cheap data only air-card+transmitter would be be so much more effective. Cover you everywhere, even when all you get is Edge or GPRS.
Someone is sure to object on those grounds...
But seriously, where does landfill stink come from, and why do they all small pretty much the same?
Land fills smell nothing like a dumpster full of garbage. So you can't blame it only on the garbage content.
Wouldn't it be better to find the the problem and fix that instead of covering it up?
One wonders if the stink is a necessary outcome of the landfill process or just a byproduct that is not well understood. With sealed landfills, some states mandate gas extraction as part of the sealing process. There are something like 425 Land Fill Gas To Energy (yeah, I know, TreeHugger, cut me some slack ok?) projects in the US accounting for 1,180 megawatts of power.
Not a great deal, but it would seem a better solution than spraying it and hoping no one will notice the stink.
So record the Corvette and play it on the Prius speakers.
Of course the crowd reaction will be one of rolling in the street laughing their asses off. But at least they were warned.
Ok, so which are you proposing, a deposit or a tax?
They are far from the same thing.
There are a lot of different plastics. No one proposes to ban plastic in general.
But an un-recyclable plastic used in an extremely common application is simply not warranted, given the availability of many other plastics that recycle easily into a large variety of products.
So you ban the problem plastics from common usage in consumer packaging.
Taxing them doesn't help anybody. Taking deposits on them doesn't do anything if they are un-recyclable, and non-reusable. All that does is get them to the landfill faster.
Its not necessary to dream up complicated and expensive schemes to handle unrecyclable material which is used by manufacturers simply because its cheap. Its far easier to simply ban it outright and move on.
The last thing you want to do is create a constituency for this material by assigning it an arbitrary value in the eyes of trash collectors or tax collectors. You simply exacerbate the problem.
manage consumption of problematic materials through taxation
Once government becomes a paid participant in the use of problematic materials you virtually guarantee no impediment to their use will ever appear.
Taxes are always passed to the consumer, never borne by the manufacturer. They become invisible.
Any taxes raised will be squandered away into the general budget and no one seriously believes these taxes will go to support the handling of this material.
Dedicated tax funds are illegal in most states and even the federal governments don't operate that way.
It makes far more sense to simply prohibit the use of a material for a specific purpose than to tax it.
Again, you insist on putting standards in my mouth.
Point to where I said any of that or STFU.
Its Iran you fool. They have as much chance a putting an optical and radio guidance system in this Tupelov as putting a camel in the driver seat of a tank. They can't even maintain the airplanes they own without foreign assistance and smuggled parts, yet you seem to believe they could come up with something like a Tomahawk built from scratch?
They say anything. And you believe them. The produce next to nothing. They simply do not have the technical capability.
These are cobbled together ex soviet era pieces or Chinese remakes with simple guidance. They do not have satellite coverage to optically guide these things.
Its about time YOU do some real world research for once.
If the authors don't defend their copyright on the text-to-speech conversion,
It is not yet clear that text to speech copyright exists.
It is not at set in law that reading aloud from a book is a performance, and therefore separately licensable.
A machine reading a book to the owner is not a performance (no fee charged, no money earned) and therefore there is no basis for authors or publishers to claim a copyright.
Authors made a big noise, but they had no legal leg to stand on and Amazon was busy at the time fighting other (pricing) battles. If course its Apple, the darling of the "creative" industry, and maybe that has something to do with the silence.
The other thing that caught my eye was the k-12 label.
Does that really mean K-12 housed in the same facility, or it it some kind of project id.
Drug swapping gang bangers in with the teddy bear crowd just seems so bone headed I can't imagine it in any city.
By my standards?
And what are my standards? I don't remember stating any?
You assume this thing could return to base, but you have no knowledge of that. It has no gear, so best it could do is parachute in like a Tupolev (which were never successfully used in combat).
Its nothing but a GPS guided bomb dropper, with very little likelihood of arriving at the target, let alone returning.
On top of that, they lack the ground/air/satellite based communications infrastructure necessary to operate a UAV/cruise missile remotely; which is the only way they could put bombs on target without detailed aerial imagery of the flight path.
You assume a sophistication level beyond what is needed.
A GPS receiver costs less than 50 bucks these days. It tells you altitude, speed, direction and rather precise location.
You don't need maps beyond what you get from google earth to find the highest mountain to avoid, and the precise gps coordinates of your target. Code those waypoints in and any old tomtom or garmin could be hacked to guide this thing.
We have no idea what this thing's capabilities are as far as ground hugging and terrain avoidance. It may be fully capable there.
Additionally, it looks big enough to possibly carry some countermeasures.
Its Iran, Remember?
My bets is the only guidance this thing has is a cheap off the shelf GPS receiver.
Its at best a reworked Tupolev as posted above.
Tu-143 or Tu-141
More practical when attacking a target with AA defenses than a Tomahawk?
Do you know what the shoot down rate for Tomahawks is? Its next to nill.
This monster is way bigger, easier to hit, and obviously slow enough that sidewinders, ground or air launched would be effective against anything less than a cloud of them.
We know nothing about the guidance of this thing, but as you say, they don't have the satellites, so calling it a UAV is probably misleading.
I suspect they program in the GPS coordinates and fire and forget. No remote pilots involved.
I actually lived in a location that had an incineration plant which sold waste heat to a small electrical generation plant next door. (The electric company owned the gen plant, and the waste company owned the incinerator.)
All was well for a while, but incineration plants are expensive and need maintenance and major overhauls, and when that came due, the economics finally failed, with the electric company no longer willing to pay the cost of the waste heat and the waste company no longer willing to fund a plant replacement. It all came crashing down and they land filled everything.
There is a pulp mill 50 miles from me, and cardboard is in high demand. The biggest problem is the staples which tear the shit out of the pumps after they liquify the cardboard to a slurry. Not all are magnetic, and eddy current separation fails in dense slurry environment, so the filters have to be manually cleaned after every beater load. (Beater is what they call the liquification machine.)
They may get contracts, but recycling is largely a huge failure as many cities/companies end up land-filling the recyclables along with the trash.
There is no real market for most this stuff except cardboard and metals. (Its already in the form it will be recycled into).
If recycling pays, as the slogan claims, you would expect some trickle back to the consumer. You would expect some waste-bill reduction. Instead we see punitive measures designed to enforce feel good regulations.
It doesn't pay, its almost always tax payer funded, and the separation process could be automated at dump sites for less money than duplicate pickup runs and enforcement actions.
If ever anything needed a good coat of technology this is it.
Looks like a German V1 if you ask me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb
Except the Germans had the sense to put the bomb inside.