Don't you think you might be projecting just a teensy bit? Most people aren't suffering when they watch a video on youtube. Neither are their computers.
If you're a sophisticated enough user to care about the number of cycles mplayer uses versus flash, you should be sophisticated enough to, say, install a userscript like ViewTube
...that will send the video format (codec and size) of your choice to a non-flash player of your choice. You can even download the video and watch it offline later!
Those rare individuals who can't watch a flash video and can't figure out why are probably not suffering either, because they probably don't care.
Space junk is a problem; defunct satellites are not really.
The number of defunct satellites is finite, small, and decreases over time. Satellites are big and have predictable orbits. They're not hard to dodge. If you actually wanted to collect them, you could. Satellites are the least dangerous fraction of the space junk.
The dangerous fraction of the space junk is all of the tiny fragments that have been left behind by, for example, anti-satellite missile tests (lookin' at you, China) among other things (lost bits and pieces, leftovers from stage separations).
That fraction of the space junk can be further divided into the chunks that we can see and track, and the pieces that are too small to track and don't have known paths. It presents the biggest hazard because you can't always see it, certainly can't always dodge it, and it moves at tens of thousands of km/h relative to other satellites--that's a lot of kinetic energy.
So yeah, orbital garbage collector sounds sexy, but it's not going to even put a scratch in the actually dangerous part of the space junk cloud.
How very bootstrappy and independent of you. Is there really no grey area between "expecting others to solve your problem" and wanting some reasonable investment in the community?
I come from a rural area in AZ. The telephone cooperative, which is responsive to the wants/needs of its customers/shareholders, takes a very long view of their needs in its planning, and recognizes the future economic value that can come from having infrastructure in place. As a result, they pulled fiber past my parent's ranch house a long time ago.
They've had DSL for probably seven years now, and they live 35 miles from the nearest town (Pop: 3000) and more than 80 from the nearest city of any size (Sierra Vista or Tucson).
The argument that you make is the very argument that would have left rural communities without electricity or telephones (the very phones that you suggest they use dialup over) because these "lifestyle luxuries" didn't provide large enough profit margins to make them worthwhile to provide for small, low-density rural populations.
The investment required to wire the rural west was affordable, has been fully repaid, and continues to pay economic dividends. It just requires a longer view than the today's MBA standard, and an understanding that investing in infrastructure has economic benefits beyond letting rural people caption cats.
The nervous system is capable of speeding the main pacemaker, but that connection isn't necessary to keep the heart beating. And the pacemakers are redundant, set at different frequencies. The highest frequency pacemaker drives the rest; should it fail, the next slower one takes over.
Who was it that said that if you don't understand the principles of operation, a piece of technology may be indistinguishable from an object with magical properties?
I said it has warts, and I'll agree with you wholeheartedly that that's probably the biggest one of them. I would be less critical of them if it was just for people using the free version (maybe they get some revenue from FB), but for the paid version they should be able to handle their own business.
Yay! It's available for iPhone and iPad and... that's it. Congratulations, you've made something that I won't ever use.
I mean, I'm typing this on a MacBook and I can't even check out a preview of one of their fancy e-motion-2.0-books, so I bet you can imagine how excited I am to buy one. Really, you can't make a browser app so that I can at least try it out?
For all its warts, these guys should take a cue from Spotify: it's available on all platforms, and damned if I don't have it running on an android phone, a MacBook, an assortment of Windows (XP, Vista, 7) computers at work and home, and a Debian box.
I was probably in the 8 - 12 range when Bellairs was my favorite author EVER; I loved these books: creepy gothic fantasy, with a little sci-fi twist (IIRC).
Also, books about kids building things--like the Mad Scientists' Club books:
Totally inspirational for a young "life hacker." The books are from the 60s (?) but they were still amazing in the late 80s / early 90s, so I can't imagine they've lost it since then.
No, he thinks it's a failed experiment because it's a fragile ecosystem run by people who will pull the rug out from under it at the first opportunity.
The fact that he got free money out of it was just a happy benefit from being in the right place at the right time, and means that he probably has some perspective on the future utility of the system.
It's funny; the basic argument that I hear for "more computers" and "more calculators" is that the calculator frees you from drudgery and allows you to spend more time on the big picture, or the important concept.
I'm not going to deny that this is true sometimes. But having been a teacher I also think that it's warning that the lesson isn't being done as well as it could be. There's so much in math and physics that can be done without pages of arithmetic or with just a limited amount of algebra or calculus that carries so much meaning. That there's really no reason to assign problems with so much "drudgery" that a computer becomes indispensable.
I think that there's a real balance that needs to be found, where learning to work by hand leads into interesting problems that lend themselves to application of computers. That's so much different than just using a computer to skip to the answers.
I spend about eighteen hours a day with a computer on in my presence, and eight-plus hours interacting with one. I'd hazard to say that I'm computer literate.
I also happen to be one of those luddites who thinks people should learn to do math on paper first, only I prefer to think that it's important for a person to be flexible and capable of doing math without a calculator. You might never do long division again, but then again, you might; wouldn't it be a lot easier to have it already exist in your mental toolkit? And simplifying fractions isn't just an exercise to satisfy your 4th grade teacher; it prepares you for algebra.
Being able to know when to use math-on-paper and when to switch to your graphing calculator or excel shows that you have a better sense of what you're working with, not that you're anachronistic. Understanding what your calculator does when it solves a matrix is a strength, not a weakness.
I mean, is it so crazy that I can touch-type 90 wpm, and yet also believe that people should be able to write legibly with a pen and paper?
You're right; I was being a little hyperbolic, for humor's sake. Heck, I taught a pretty mean Outlook class to a bunch of little old ladies. I wanted to talk about sorting and mailboxes; they just wanted to know how to put background colors in their emails =)
But not all corporate computer training is good, either, and my experience has definitely been defined by the bad. I've got a whole folder full of those baloney certificates, and don't get me started on "mandatory online training." You know, the kind where you click through a powerpoint, guess "C" for all of the answers on the multiple choice test, and then get to go back and do it again once you know the right answers.
Most of the things that I hear about the potential cost of retraining a workforce to use (insert Linux, Google, etc here) seem like they were estimated using the same math that the local news uses to give a half-smoked joint a street value of thousands of dollars.
Purely from an office drone's perspective (all software proselytizing aside), training is the bogeyman. The vendors bring it out to scare the customer, but it doesn't exist. It "costs" eleventy billion dollars! Nobody will know how to do anything if you don't buy training!
But big offices make big changes all the time, and they don't *really* do squat for training. They might gather the group around a conference table and click through some slides, and tell everybody that Joe has used the program before and they should ask him if they're having trouble.
Hooray, you wasted a day watching powerpoint and you got a photocopied certificate that you get to scrawl your own name on!
How many offices have gone from something, to Lotus, to Exchange, to Google... etc.? And it's not just email infrastructure. Your billing system as a consultant might change every few years; your code management system as a programmer might change. Your document control system might change. The way your network space is apportioned, the way you print; any number of things can change depending on the way the wind blows in management.
And then, you top it off with planned obsolescence: remember going from Office 97 to Office XP? And then to the new craziness of Office 2010? A little old lady secretary wouldn't be any more confused by moving to Open Office... and she's not getting any training when MS Office 2014 comes out and scraps everything she knows for touch-screen inspired insanity!
Even universities, where you would expect old systems to soldier on for far too long, seem to do that kind of thing in less than 10 year intervals. And the employees who you would expect to get some "training" (office staff, geezer professors) don't--they complain, they suffer, and then they figure it out;-)
If you're in high school your teachers don't need to know that you are preparing for the zombie apocalypse. And if you're a teacher, the parents shouldn't be able to find out that your favorite sport is tethercat.
And there are a million more reasons I don't need an identity services or want my hobbies connected to my CV
There are a million more reasons why people wouldn't want to participate in identity services or social media, so you don't need to create a strawman. Since this is slashdot, I'll put it this way: It's like saying "Among other reasons why I don't drive a car, I really don't appreciate that they can't change direction or slow down." The problem here isn't the car.
G+ and Facebook have fine-grained permissions. First of all, you don't have to be friends with everybody (boss, teacher, local furry fanclub), but let's say you are. Pretty much whatever you want to make available, you can, with a very reasonable expectation that only people from groups with permission can read/see it. Yes, the existence of your account makes it possible to connect your hobbies to your CV, but the only people who will know will be the ones to whom you give access to both.
If you don't like or aren't interested in social media, that's cool. If you're not interested in being part of the data mine or being tracked, that's admirable. But if you're just too lazy or stupid to figure out how to use privacy settings, don't blather about privacy.
Sort of; technically, I reversed part of his interpretation and clarified nuance in the rest. So, while some of the functions (macro vs. blank) might be equivalent, the interpretation is not. Viz.:
Mr. 655 thinks Mr. 822 was implying that he forgot to fill in the blanks. I believe the opposite, that Mr. 822 was implying that he was filling in blanks.
M4. 655 thinks that Mr. 822 was implying electronic substitution, whereas I believe that Mr. 822 was only implying blank-filling; this could be accomplished electronically or manually.
Anyways, if Mr. 822 was filling out the kinds of official documents that seem to appear most commonly in my office, he had to delete those underscores to keep Word from wrapping them and blowing up the table that the sadistic form author used to format the whole damned thing;-) He probably would be better off printing it out, and then taking it to the typewriter.
I bought a phone (Nexus S) that came unlocked and doesn't need to be rooted. I purchase service for this phone from T-Mobile, without a contract.
The thing that annoys me the most is how remarkably underwhelming the "community response" is for that kind of combination. The choice most slashdotters rave about wanting is available, and yet they piss around with jailbreaks and complaints about walled gardens. Don't get me wrong; I appreciate doing nerdy things just-for-the-sake-of-it, but I also think there's a point where you have to vote with your dollars.
Buying a used android phone on Craigslist and rooting it is cool and probably gives you what you most of what you want, but it doesn't make it any more likely that what you want will be widely available in the future.
People use GoDaddy because they're big, and big = safe. Remember the old adage, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Same for Microsoft, same for big banks like Bank of America, etc.
I was hoping to find a plugin for google earth (that didn't require purchase), but this will do. It's direct from BLM.
Unclick all of the options on the right-hand panel except for PLSS and Base Map (World Street Map ESRI).
Mouse over Phoenix, drag it to the center of the pane, and zoom in slowly with your scroll wheel--one click at a time. At first, it'll just be a map, but when you get close enough, things will pop up in this order:
- First you'll see a few cryptic "5E" and "5N" numbers sprinkled on the state. You'll have a hard time finding it at this level, but the origin for the grid is somewhere out by Gila Bend. Those number are referring to townships and ranges (so 5E is the line 30 miles east of the origin).
- One more click down, the township/range grid will appear.
- Three more clicks down the section (1 mile squared) lines will appear. Note the disconnects; things are pretty regular inside of a township, but the range lines in particular have some deviations.
- One more click in and you'll see that Baseline Rd lies on a township line. In fact, the line between 1N and 1S.... which is why it's called Baseline! It's one of the axes. There is a slight disconnect between the ranges. At this zoom you can also see the sixteen 40-acre chunks that make up a section.
- One more click in and you can see the section numbers. At this level you can really see the way the roads are laid out--and how they conform to the grid, for the most part. Mill is a weird one! Notice that the Union Pacific Railroad lies on the section line nearest Mill; Mill itself is approximately (but not exactly) 1/4 mile away. Following the Phoenix numbering system, it would be 66th st.
- Pan over to Grand Ave. Look at that abomination! It lies directly diagonal across the sections, connecting corners =) It's friggin' awful now, but it was originally just US 60, and was mostly just running diagonal across a bunch of farms.
Farms are one of the main reasons Phoenix is laid out so neatly. In the west, farmland generally has property lines that lie nicely on the grid, and so local roads start on the grid and are just converted into the city roads as the farms are overtaken.
Highways, in particular, are the most likely to lie *off* the grid (although many of them follow it, at least for some lengths). This is because many of the routes were developed across open cattle ranges where the property lines were many (tens of) miles apart. Additionally, there weren't really any fences until well after the turn of the 20th century, so the long-haul routes grew up more organically than the more organized roads in farming areas.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading this and your previous post, I don't think you know what a straw man argument is.
Don't you think you might be projecting just a teensy bit? Most people aren't suffering when they watch a video on youtube. Neither are their computers.
If you're a sophisticated enough user to care about the number of cycles mplayer uses versus flash, you should be sophisticated enough to, say, install a userscript like ViewTube
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011
Those rare individuals who can't watch a flash video and can't figure out why are probably not suffering either, because they probably don't care.
It's a crying shame that no other art history books have ever been written or published. Ever.
This just makes me even more curious about why the geological community is covering up the obvious impact crater in Tennessee!
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/28/2217237/tennessee-crater-inches-toward-recognition
Space junk is a problem; defunct satellites are not really.
The number of defunct satellites is finite, small, and decreases over time. Satellites are big and have predictable orbits. They're not hard to dodge. If you actually wanted to collect them, you could. Satellites are the least dangerous fraction of the space junk.
The dangerous fraction of the space junk is all of the tiny fragments that have been left behind by, for example, anti-satellite missile tests (lookin' at you, China) among other things (lost bits and pieces, leftovers from stage separations).
That fraction of the space junk can be further divided into the chunks that we can see and track, and the pieces that are too small to track and don't have known paths. It presents the biggest hazard because you can't always see it, certainly can't always dodge it, and it moves at tens of thousands of km/h relative to other satellites--that's a lot of kinetic energy.
So yeah, orbital garbage collector sounds sexy, but it's not going to even put a scratch in the actually dangerous part of the space junk cloud.
How very bootstrappy and independent of you. Is there really no grey area between "expecting others to solve your problem" and wanting some reasonable investment in the community?
I come from a rural area in AZ. The telephone cooperative, which is responsive to the wants/needs of its customers/shareholders, takes a very long view of their needs in its planning, and recognizes the future economic value that can come from having infrastructure in place. As a result, they pulled fiber past my parent's ranch house a long time ago.
They've had DSL for probably seven years now, and they live 35 miles from the nearest town (Pop: 3000) and more than 80 from the nearest city of any size (Sierra Vista or Tucson).
The argument that you make is the very argument that would have left rural communities without electricity or telephones (the very phones that you suggest they use dialup over) because these "lifestyle luxuries" didn't provide large enough profit margins to make them worthwhile to provide for small, low-density rural populations.
The investment required to wire the rural west was affordable, has been fully repaid, and continues to pay economic dividends. It just requires a longer view than the today's MBA standard, and an understanding that investing in infrastructure has economic benefits beyond letting rural people caption cats.
That's funny, because the way I read the summary, I assumed it was the 5th largest privately funded scope.
Thanks, English ancestors....
Except that the heart's natural pacemakers aren't nervous, but specialized muscle cells:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA_node
The nervous system is capable of speeding the main pacemaker, but that connection isn't necessary to keep the heart beating. And the pacemakers are redundant, set at different frequencies. The highest frequency pacemaker drives the rest; should it fail, the next slower one takes over.
Who was it that said that if you don't understand the principles of operation, a piece of technology may be indistinguishable from an object with magical properties?
I said it has warts, and I'll agree with you wholeheartedly that that's probably the biggest one of them. I would be less critical of them if it was just for people using the free version (maybe they get some revenue from FB), but for the paid version they should be able to handle their own business.
Yay! It's available for iPhone and iPad and... that's it. Congratulations, you've made something that I won't ever use.
I mean, I'm typing this on a MacBook and I can't even check out a preview of one of their fancy e-motion-2.0-books, so I bet you can imagine how excited I am to buy one. Really, you can't make a browser app so that I can at least try it out?
For all its warts, these guys should take a cue from Spotify: it's available on all platforms, and damned if I don't have it running on an android phone, a MacBook, an assortment of Windows (XP, Vista, 7) computers at work and home, and a Debian box.
And I couldn't be happier giving them my money.
http://www.amazon.com/John-Bellairs/e/B000APZTO2/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1340223614&sr=1-1
I was probably in the 8 - 12 range when Bellairs was my favorite author EVER; I loved these books: creepy gothic fantasy, with a little sci-fi twist (IIRC).
Also, books about kids building things--like the Mad Scientists' Club books:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Scientists'_Club
Totally inspirational for a young "life hacker." The books are from the 60s (?) but they were still amazing in the late 80s / early 90s, so I can't imagine they've lost it since then.
Well, since Debian, Fedora, SUSE, and their derivatives probably have a >90% "market" share, I'd say it's a pretty good start.
Or was that the joke? =)
100x this.
No, he thinks it's a failed experiment because it's a fragile ecosystem run by people who will pull the rug out from under it at the first opportunity.
The fact that he got free money out of it was just a happy benefit from being in the right place at the right time, and means that he probably has some perspective on the future utility of the system.
It's funny; the basic argument that I hear for "more computers" and "more calculators" is that the calculator frees you from drudgery and allows you to spend more time on the big picture, or the important concept.
I'm not going to deny that this is true sometimes. But having been a teacher I also think that it's warning that the lesson isn't being done as well as it could be. There's so much in math and physics that can be done without pages of arithmetic or with just a limited amount of algebra or calculus that carries so much meaning. That there's really no reason to assign problems with so much "drudgery" that a computer becomes indispensable.
I think that there's a real balance that needs to be found, where learning to work by hand leads into interesting problems that lend themselves to application of computers. That's so much different than just using a computer to skip to the answers.
I spend about eighteen hours a day with a computer on in my presence, and eight-plus hours interacting with one. I'd hazard to say that I'm computer literate.
I also happen to be one of those luddites who thinks people should learn to do math on paper first, only I prefer to think that it's important for a person to be flexible and capable of doing math without a calculator. You might never do long division again, but then again, you might; wouldn't it be a lot easier to have it already exist in your mental toolkit? And simplifying fractions isn't just an exercise to satisfy your 4th grade teacher; it prepares you for algebra.
Being able to know when to use math-on-paper and when to switch to your graphing calculator or excel shows that you have a better sense of what you're working with, not that you're anachronistic. Understanding what your calculator does when it solves a matrix is a strength, not a weakness.
I mean, is it so crazy that I can touch-type 90 wpm, and yet also believe that people should be able to write legibly with a pen and paper?
You're right; I was being a little hyperbolic, for humor's sake. Heck, I taught a pretty mean Outlook class to a bunch of little old ladies. I wanted to talk about sorting and mailboxes; they just wanted to know how to put background colors in their emails =)
But not all corporate computer training is good, either, and my experience has definitely been defined by the bad. I've got a whole folder full of those baloney certificates, and don't get me started on "mandatory online training." You know, the kind where you click through a powerpoint, guess "C" for all of the answers on the multiple choice test, and then get to go back and do it again once you know the right answers.
Most of the things that I hear about the potential cost of retraining a workforce to use (insert Linux, Google, etc here) seem like they were estimated using the same math that the local news uses to give a half-smoked joint a street value of thousands of dollars.
Training? Ahahahaha, ohohohoho, eehehehehee.
Purely from an office drone's perspective (all software proselytizing aside), training is the bogeyman. The vendors bring it out to scare the customer, but it doesn't exist. It "costs" eleventy billion dollars! Nobody will know how to do anything if you don't buy training!
But big offices make big changes all the time, and they don't *really* do squat for training. They might gather the group around a conference table and click through some slides, and tell everybody that Joe has used the program before and they should ask him if they're having trouble.
Hooray, you wasted a day watching powerpoint and you got a photocopied certificate that you get to scrawl your own name on!
How many offices have gone from something, to Lotus, to Exchange, to Google... etc.? And it's not just email infrastructure. Your billing system as a consultant might change every few years; your code management system as a programmer might change. Your document control system might change. The way your network space is apportioned, the way you print; any number of things can change depending on the way the wind blows in management.
And then, you top it off with planned obsolescence: remember going from Office 97 to Office XP? And then to the new craziness of Office 2010? A little old lady secretary wouldn't be any more confused by moving to Open Office... and she's not getting any training when MS Office 2014 comes out and scraps everything she knows for touch-screen inspired insanity!
Even universities, where you would expect old systems to soldier on for far too long, seem to do that kind of thing in less than 10 year intervals. And the employees who you would expect to get some "training" (office staff, geezer professors) don't--they complain, they suffer, and then they figure it out ;-)
If you're in high school your teachers don't need to know that you are preparing for the zombie apocalypse. And if you're a teacher, the parents shouldn't be able to find out that your favorite sport is tethercat.
And there are a million more reasons I don't need an identity services or want my hobbies connected to my CV
There are a million more reasons why people wouldn't want to participate in identity services or social media, so you don't need to create a strawman. Since this is slashdot, I'll put it this way: It's like saying "Among other reasons why I don't drive a car, I really don't appreciate that they can't change direction or slow down." The problem here isn't the car.
G+ and Facebook have fine-grained permissions. First of all, you don't have to be friends with everybody (boss, teacher, local furry fanclub), but let's say you are. Pretty much whatever you want to make available, you can, with a very reasonable expectation that only people from groups with permission can read/see it. Yes, the existence of your account makes it possible to connect your hobbies to your CV, but the only people who will know will be the ones to whom you give access to both.
If you don't like or aren't interested in social media, that's cool. If you're not interested in being part of the data mine or being tracked, that's admirable. But if you're just too lazy or stupid to figure out how to use privacy settings, don't blather about privacy.
Sort of; technically, I reversed part of his interpretation and clarified nuance in the rest. So, while some of the functions (macro vs. blank) might be equivalent, the interpretation is not. Viz.:
Anyways, if Mr. 822 was filling out the kinds of official documents that seem to appear most commonly in my office, he had to delete those underscores to keep Word from wrapping them and blowing up the table that the sadistic form author used to format the whole damned thing ;-) He probably would be better off printing it out, and then taking it to the typewriter.
No, he's implying that he input values into blanks on a boilerplate response.
I bought a phone (Nexus S) that came unlocked and doesn't need to be rooted. I purchase service for this phone from T-Mobile, without a contract.
The thing that annoys me the most is how remarkably underwhelming the "community response" is for that kind of combination. The choice most slashdotters rave about wanting is available, and yet they piss around with jailbreaks and complaints about walled gardens. Don't get me wrong; I appreciate doing nerdy things just-for-the-sake-of-it, but I also think there's a point where you have to vote with your dollars.
Buying a used android phone on Craigslist and rooting it is cool and probably gives you what you most of what you want, but it doesn't make it any more likely that what you want will be widely available in the future.
People use GoDaddy because they're big, and big = safe. Remember the old adage, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Same for Microsoft, same for big banks like Bank of America, etc.
Being big is a recommendation in and of itself.
OK man, you got me curious---so here you go:
http://www.geocommunicator.gov/blmMap/MapLSIS.jsp
I was hoping to find a plugin for google earth (that didn't require purchase), but this will do. It's direct from BLM.
Unclick all of the options on the right-hand panel except for PLSS and Base Map (World Street Map ESRI).
Mouse over Phoenix, drag it to the center of the pane, and zoom in slowly with your scroll wheel--one click at a time. At first, it'll just be a map, but when you get close enough, things will pop up in this order:
- First you'll see a few cryptic "5E" and "5N" numbers sprinkled on the state. You'll have a hard time finding it at this level, but the origin for the grid is somewhere out by Gila Bend. Those number are referring to townships and ranges (so 5E is the line 30 miles east of the origin).
- One more click down, the township/range grid will appear.
- Three more clicks down the section (1 mile squared) lines will appear. Note the disconnects; things are pretty regular inside of a township, but the range lines in particular have some deviations.
- One more click in and you'll see that Baseline Rd lies on a township line. In fact, the line between 1N and 1S.... which is why it's called Baseline! It's one of the axes. There is a slight disconnect between the ranges. At this zoom you can also see the sixteen 40-acre chunks that make up a section.
- One more click in and you can see the section numbers. At this level you can really see the way the roads are laid out--and how they conform to the grid, for the most part. Mill is a weird one! Notice that the Union Pacific Railroad lies on the section line nearest Mill; Mill itself is approximately (but not exactly) 1/4 mile away. Following the Phoenix numbering system, it would be 66th st.
- Pan over to Grand Ave. Look at that abomination! It lies directly diagonal across the sections, connecting corners =) It's friggin' awful now, but it was originally just US 60, and was mostly just running diagonal across a bunch of farms.
Farms are one of the main reasons Phoenix is laid out so neatly. In the west, farmland generally has property lines that lie nicely on the grid, and so local roads start on the grid and are just converted into the city roads as the farms are overtaken.
Highways, in particular, are the most likely to lie *off* the grid (although many of them follow it, at least for some lengths). This is because many of the routes were developed across open cattle ranges where the property lines were many (tens of) miles apart. Additionally, there weren't really any fences until well after the turn of the 20th century, so the long-haul routes grew up more organically than the more organized roads in farming areas.