Exactly what kind of standards do you think street-straightness is held to?;-)
Picture this: there's a grid of lines covering this state. The lines are 6 miles apart (north-south, east-west). The north-south divisions are called townships, the east-west divisions are called ranges. Each of these squares is divided into 36 sections (square miles, 640 acres). Each of these sections is divided into quarter (160 acre) and 'quarter of quarter' (40 acre) sections, and so on. This is why "40 acres" is/was such a fundamental number for agriculture.
But here's the thing:
- This grid is laying on a round surface.
- This grid was laid out in the middle of a desert in the 1870s.
- Our roads are pretty darned wide, and weren't always connected.
There are places where the township, range, and section lines from one 6x6 square don't exactly jibe with the next one. This is a function of the lower accuracy of early techniques* and of fitting a square grid to a circle, and still keeping "roughly" mile-wide sections. Actually, if you look at a big survey map, you'll see that a lot of the sections are (gasp) not quite equal to 1 mile; they could be +/- about 20% in extreme cases.
And can you imagine being the guy in the 1940s or 50s who was connecting Broadway (Phx) to Broadway (Tempe) to Broadway (Mesa) and having them all line up perfectly? The cities all grew up independently, and there's no telling how wide they had built the street, or whether they had it right on the line or slightly off to the side. And when you expand it, do you condemn land on the north or the south? And does every town do the same thing?
So yes, you are correct--it's not a perfect grid. There's lots of other deviations, too. But the basic plan is on the PLSS grid, and it is coherent over distances of tens of miles. Trust me on this! I've worked in a surveyors office!
*In some places, these lines were drawn by tying a handkerchief to one of the spokes on a wagon, driving west (following a compass), counting the turns of the wheel, and kicking out a milestone after a set number of revolutions. It was hot, hard, lonely work, and the whiskey the surveyor was drinking probably meant that his counting skills deteriorated over the course of the day.
Neighborhood streets, such as those between Baseline and the 60, are typically bent around for traffic calming. Cul de sacs are drawn in because people like living on cul de sacs; within a subdivision, there are a lot of considerations other than map simplicity. Obviously there is some deviation for geography (mountains, for example), and the highways cut across lines in many places. North Scottsdale has a lot of geography.
All of the *major* streets and most of the minor ones, from Litchfield Park to Apache Junction, and from Queen Creek to the top of Peoria, are on a grid. In Phoenix proper, there's 8 "streets" to a mile (e.g. 40th to 48th), which is why most of the major North-South street numbers are multiples of 8.
Just out of curiosity, are you Canadian? And was Canada surveyed entirely using metes and bounds? Because I suppose I could see an SI conversion being made with that sort of system.
While the US government also specifies most things in SI (and in fact, SI is the law of the land), surveying will probably be the last bastion of the old Customary system.
The PLSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System) was an extremely forward-looking and rational surveying system for its era, and almost the entire continental US uses it. All real estate, all farm and ranch development, all city and suburb development follows the grid established by the PLSS. County maps in most of the midwest look like a checkerboard because of it. In Phoenix, for example, all of the streets are laid on the original survey lines. This grid is so firmly established as a part of our economy and legal system, that there's not a snowball's chance in hell of it being switched to SI in my lifetime, and I'm a rather young man.
Even if GPS uses SI internally, it's hardly any effort for a computer to make the conversion for its human user. It would, however, be an exercise in masochism to require surveyors and the government land offices to stop using increments and fractions of 1 mile and pretend that the grid is actually based on increments of 1609 meters.
We can't control demand or the demanders. But demanders are pathetic; at worst, demanders run out of money and become petty criminals. We have built a huge infrastructure to jail people for spending money. Money that goes to......the other side, the Mexican government is dealing with the suppliers. There are huge profits in supply--the flip side of our problem. Supply is so profitable that the cartels rival the government in their ability to wage war.
So, yes. A foreign country's problem with militant cartels IS based on a US decision, because that the US has made breaking the law so fabulously profitable that the cartels are fighting a hot war with the Mexican government using money from the US.
All of this "open source community spirit" talk is completely pedantic with respect to the real or perceived downward spiral of Firefox's competitiveness.
Firefox is open source, and community involvement is both included and important, but it is largely developed by paid developers in a corporation that includes people who specialize in marketing and customer feedback. This corporation (Mozilla Corp), by the way, has revenues of approximately $100M/year, and stands to lose the ability to generate such revenues if it loses significant ground to its competitors.
FF isn't rudderless because it has a bunch of open source volunteers running it and feeling sad because they aren't getting the warm fuzzies these days; it's rudderless because its (well-paid) management can't find the rudder.
Yep, but nobody would launch classic ICBMs with explosive warheads, and nobody would launch a first strike with only a handful of these.
If the Russians (or ourselves) saw a couple hundred of these coming at them, the implication would be pretty clear. On the other hand, if a handful of them were to take great circle paths over (but not through) Russian air space, they'd probably just grit their teeth.
Did you even read the articles you linked? From Pottel:
My overall assessment is that while Excel uses algorithms that are not robust and can lead to errors in extreme cases, the errors are very unlikely to arise in typical scientific data analysis. However, I would not advise data analysis in Excel if the final results could have a serious impact on business results, or on the health of patients. For students, itâ(TM)s my personal belief that the advantages of easy-to-use functions and tools counterbalance the need for extreme precision.
Emphasis mine. I highly doubt that the OP's data require more than a couple of significant figures of precision. While their stats could influence resource allocation, differences of a few percent are unlikely to be deal-breakers--think about it; the library is likely to be dealing with budget items that range in the thousands of dollars, probably in blocks. You're not going to accidentally budget for a whole class based on a wiggle of a percent in attendance.
This, >9000 times. I don't understand why this would need to be in the official kernel... if somebody really wants/needs it in the kernel, shouldn't they be compiling it in themselves? Why should people have to choose to exclude it?
Doesn't this mean that future security audits have to include this wii driver? Do bloat-conscious or security-minded people have to cut this out?
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious, and I'm well aware of how wrong 'common sense' can be when one steps outside of their own field (as I am here), so please feel free to point out how ignorant I am. I really would like to hear a convincing explanation that isn't "Why not? Somebody put the time in and it works."
The government is the buyer, and they are making this disclosure a contractual requirement. If Oracle doesn't want to disclose their discounts, they don't have to sell to the government.
If you are a buyer, you can also demand that Oracle disclose their discounts to other customers. If oracle doesn't want to disclose their discounts, they don't have to sell to you.
But if they DO sign a contract with you, and they CLAIM that they gave you full disclosure, and they LIED to you, then you can SUE them. This is what the government is doing. There's no special law to implement, and there's no special treatment for the government.
Ever consider that I wasn't talking about the States? Didn't think so. Hint: the article was about India, not Indiana.
People in Nigeria, India, or any other massive developing nations aren't paying $200 for a smart phone with a 2 year hitch. They weren't buying cell phones when they first came out, either. They started buying cell phones when the price and functionality hit a sweet spot, and they buy millions of them.
The same could be true for tablets in the near future; personally, I won't be surprised if the functionality of cheap 3rd world phones paces what the consumer wants and can afford, making tablets a non-starter.
Or, nobody will use it because it's junk. Have you ever noticed how everybody in the world is getting cell phones that are cheap--practically disposable, even--and yet perfectly functional? Can you tell me how many of these phones were the product of some kind of design-a-phone-for-poor-people initiatives?
I'll hazard a guess that the answer is zero.
What happened with cell phones was that the price and quality of commodity parts finally hit a sweet spot where everybody could afford a phone that they actually wanted.
Nobody tried (succesfully, anyways) to cobble together the cheapest junk possible into a barely useable "poor folks' phone." The idea of using a massive government purchase to drive down the commodity price sounds good in theory, but didn't work for the OLPC, and won't work for yet another Indian tablet-for-the-masses, because nobody wants the product that they're trying to make.
What will bring tablet computing to the masses--assuming the masses find any value in them--are the true commodity tablets that are starting to emerge from China, that are taking advantage of the price declines from the mass production of Kindles and iPads.
Ok, so the field is uniform in orientation and magnitude spacially, but not uniform in magnitude temporally. You're "sitting still in a uniform field" that's changing in magnitude... which is going to induce eddy currents in a conducting fluid, which you're full of =)
And it had better be changing in magnitude, or else we wouldn't get Magnetic Resonance Imaging out of it!
The physics of this is all very high school; it's the physiology that's interesting to me.
And why on God's Green Earth should he have to do that?
Successful e-commerce makes purchasing so brain-dead simple, and so convenient, that you'll buy things you wouldn't normally buy--it doesn't make it so complicated and/or annoying that you're forced to find a brick & mortar retailer to complete your purchase.
This is why people rave about Steam and rant about Origin. Thank goodness for competition; at least one of the parties recognizes that their *business* depends on treating their customers like customers in a marketplace, instead of sheep to fleece.
Wish I had mod points for you. I've tried several other distros over the years ("but you should try xxx now, yada yada yada") and I always end up going back to Debian stable because "it just works," and when it doesn't, it's the easiest to fix.
A vanilla Gnome install of Debian stable is just as functional and just as noob friendly as Ubuntu. If you're like my dad and you get scared when the "x" on the top of the window is moved from one side of the screen to the other, there's not a linux distro in the world that will save you. If you're more like subby's mom (lol) and you're comfortable clicking around a little to get used to something new, you can figure out Debian/Gnome.
Or, everybody pays the same price up front and the same monthly fee at first, and the people who get good ratings and few/no complaints quietly get their bill lowered as a reward. Kind of like the karma ad blocking on slashdot...
But that doesn't have as much 'derp,' so it must seem unfair.
I am not exaggerating the truck wreck. If the truck wrecks, the odds are the case doesn't break. If the case breaks, the contents can be completely contained and removed, and there is no residue. No fumes. No liquid. No generations of despair.
The repository is another story. There, bad things may happen over thousands of years. But the fact is that bad things may happen over thousands of years for many other toxic substances that we sequester in even larger volumes with much less regard for stability.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly what kind of standards do you think street-straightness is held to? ;-)
Picture this: there's a grid of lines covering this state. The lines are 6 miles apart (north-south, east-west). The north-south divisions are called townships, the east-west divisions are called ranges. Each of these squares is divided into 36 sections (square miles, 640 acres). Each of these sections is divided into quarter (160 acre) and 'quarter of quarter' (40 acre) sections, and so on. This is why "40 acres" is/was such a fundamental number for agriculture.
But here's the thing:
- This grid is laying on a round surface.
- This grid was laid out in the middle of a desert in the 1870s.
- Our roads are pretty darned wide, and weren't always connected.
There are places where the township, range, and section lines from one 6x6 square don't exactly jibe with the next one. This is a function of the lower accuracy of early techniques* and of fitting a square grid to a circle, and still keeping "roughly" mile-wide sections. Actually, if you look at a big survey map, you'll see that a lot of the sections are (gasp) not quite equal to 1 mile; they could be +/- about 20% in extreme cases.
And can you imagine being the guy in the 1940s or 50s who was connecting Broadway (Phx) to Broadway (Tempe) to Broadway (Mesa) and having them all line up perfectly? The cities all grew up independently, and there's no telling how wide they had built the street, or whether they had it right on the line or slightly off to the side. And when you expand it, do you condemn land on the north or the south? And does every town do the same thing?
So yes, you are correct--it's not a perfect grid. There's lots of other deviations, too. But the basic plan is on the PLSS grid, and it is coherent over distances of tens of miles. Trust me on this! I've worked in a surveyors office!
*In some places, these lines were drawn by tying a handkerchief to one of the spokes on a wagon, driving west (following a compass), counting the turns of the wheel, and kicking out a milestone after a set number of revolutions. It was hot, hard, lonely work, and the whiskey the surveyor was drinking probably meant that his counting skills deteriorated over the course of the day.
Neighborhood streets, such as those between Baseline and the 60, are typically bent around for traffic calming. Cul de sacs are drawn in because people like living on cul de sacs; within a subdivision, there are a lot of considerations other than map simplicity. Obviously there is some deviation for geography (mountains, for example), and the highways cut across lines in many places. North Scottsdale has a lot of geography.
All of the *major* streets and most of the minor ones, from Litchfield Park to Apache Junction, and from Queen Creek to the top of Peoria, are on a grid. In Phoenix proper, there's 8 "streets" to a mile (e.g. 40th to 48th), which is why most of the major North-South street numbers are multiples of 8.
Just out of curiosity, are you Canadian? And was Canada surveyed entirely using metes and bounds? Because I suppose I could see an SI conversion being made with that sort of system.
While the US government also specifies most things in SI (and in fact, SI is the law of the land), surveying will probably be the last bastion of the old Customary system.
The PLSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System) was an extremely forward-looking and rational surveying system for its era, and almost the entire continental US uses it. All real estate, all farm and ranch development, all city and suburb development follows the grid established by the PLSS. County maps in most of the midwest look like a checkerboard because of it. In Phoenix, for example, all of the streets are laid on the original survey lines. This grid is so firmly established as a part of our economy and legal system, that there's not a snowball's chance in hell of it being switched to SI in my lifetime, and I'm a rather young man.
Even if GPS uses SI internally, it's hardly any effort for a computer to make the conversion for its human user. It would, however, be an exercise in masochism to require surveyors and the government land offices to stop using increments and fractions of 1 mile and pretend that the grid is actually based on increments of 1609 meters.
Um, yes?
We can't control demand or the demanders. But demanders are pathetic; at worst, demanders run out of money and become petty criminals. We have built a huge infrastructure to jail people for spending money. Money that goes to... ...the other side, the Mexican government is dealing with the suppliers. There are huge profits in supply--the flip side of our problem. Supply is so profitable that the cartels rival the government in their ability to wage war.
So, yes. A foreign country's problem with militant cartels IS based on a US decision, because that the US has made breaking the law so fabulously profitable that the cartels are fighting a hot war with the Mexican government using money from the US.
All of this "open source community spirit" talk is completely pedantic with respect to the real or perceived downward spiral of Firefox's competitiveness.
Firefox is open source, and community involvement is both included and important, but it is largely developed by paid developers in a corporation that includes people who specialize in marketing and customer feedback. This corporation (Mozilla Corp), by the way, has revenues of approximately $100M/year, and stands to lose the ability to generate such revenues if it loses significant ground to its competitors.
FF isn't rudderless because it has a bunch of open source volunteers running it and feeling sad because they aren't getting the warm fuzzies these days; it's rudderless because its (well-paid) management can't find the rudder.
Yep, but nobody would launch classic ICBMs with explosive warheads, and nobody would launch a first strike with only a handful of these.
If the Russians (or ourselves) saw a couple hundred of these coming at them, the implication would be pretty clear. On the other hand, if a handful of them were to take great circle paths over (but not through) Russian air space, they'd probably just grit their teeth.
Did you even read the articles you linked? From Pottel:
My overall assessment is that while Excel uses algorithms that are not robust and can lead to
errors in extreme cases, the errors are very unlikely to arise in typical scientific data analysis.
However, I would not advise data analysis in Excel if the final results could have a serious
impact on business results, or on the health of patients. For students, itâ(TM)s my personal belief
that the advantages of easy-to-use functions and tools counterbalance the need for extreme
precision.
Emphasis mine. I highly doubt that the OP's data require more than a couple of significant figures of precision. While their stats could influence resource allocation, differences of a few percent are unlikely to be deal-breakers--think about it; the library is likely to be dealing with budget items that range in the thousands of dollars, probably in blocks. You're not going to accidentally budget for a whole class based on a wiggle of a percent in attendance.
This, >9000 times. I don't understand why this would need to be in the official kernel... if somebody really wants/needs it in the kernel, shouldn't they be compiling it in themselves? Why should people have to choose to exclude it?
Doesn't this mean that future security audits have to include this wii driver? Do bloat-conscious or security-minded people have to cut this out?
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious, and I'm well aware of how wrong 'common sense' can be when one steps outside of their own field (as I am here), so please feel free to point out how ignorant I am. I really would like to hear a convincing explanation that isn't "Why not? Somebody put the time in and it works."
I've never heard of this... is it a prerelease or something?
Apparently their website is also running on refurbished 1980s technology.
Your retinas aren't flat, and your display (the image your brain has processed) isn't projected on a flat surface. Try again!
The government is the buyer, and they are making this disclosure a contractual requirement. If Oracle doesn't want to disclose their discounts, they don't have to sell to the government.
If you are a buyer, you can also demand that Oracle disclose their discounts to other customers. If oracle doesn't want to disclose their discounts, they don't have to sell to you.
But if they DO sign a contract with you, and they CLAIM that they gave you full disclosure, and they LIED to you, then you can SUE them. This is what the government is doing. There's no special law to implement, and there's no special treatment for the government.
Ever consider that I wasn't talking about the States? Didn't think so. Hint: the article was about India, not Indiana.
People in Nigeria, India, or any other massive developing nations aren't paying $200 for a smart phone with a 2 year hitch. They weren't buying cell phones when they first came out, either. They started buying cell phones when the price and functionality hit a sweet spot, and they buy millions of them.
The same could be true for tablets in the near future; personally, I won't be surprised if the functionality of cheap 3rd world phones paces what the consumer wants and can afford, making tablets a non-starter.
Or, nobody will use it because it's junk. Have you ever noticed how everybody in the world is getting cell phones that are cheap--practically disposable, even--and yet perfectly functional? Can you tell me how many of these phones were the product of some kind of design-a-phone-for-poor-people initiatives?
I'll hazard a guess that the answer is zero.
What happened with cell phones was that the price and quality of commodity parts finally hit a sweet spot where everybody could afford a phone that they actually wanted.
Nobody tried (succesfully, anyways) to cobble together the cheapest junk possible into a barely useable "poor folks' phone." The idea of using a massive government purchase to drive down the commodity price sounds good in theory, but didn't work for the OLPC, and won't work for yet another Indian tablet-for-the-masses, because nobody wants the product that they're trying to make.
What will bring tablet computing to the masses--assuming the masses find any value in them--are the true commodity tablets that are starting to emerge from China, that are taking advantage of the price declines from the mass production of Kindles and iPads.
Ok, so the field is uniform in orientation and magnitude spacially, but not uniform in magnitude temporally. You're "sitting still in a uniform field" that's changing in magnitude... which is going to induce eddy currents in a conducting fluid, which you're full of =)
And it had better be changing in magnitude, or else we wouldn't get Magnetic Resonance Imaging out of it!
The physics of this is all very high school; it's the physiology that's interesting to me.
What's the difference between physically moving through a magnetic field and a stationary object experiencing a moving magnetic field?
(spoiler alert: there isn't any)
I'm listening to spotify on my mac right now, so I'm getting a kick, etc.
And why on God's Green Earth should he have to do that?
Successful e-commerce makes purchasing so brain-dead simple, and so convenient, that you'll buy things you wouldn't normally buy--it doesn't make it so complicated and/or annoying that you're forced to find a brick & mortar retailer to complete your purchase.
This is why people rave about Steam and rant about Origin. Thank goodness for competition; at least one of the parties recognizes that their *business* depends on treating their customers like customers in a marketplace, instead of sheep to fleece.
Wish I had mod points for you. I've tried several other distros over the years ("but you should try xxx now, yada yada yada") and I always end up going back to Debian stable because "it just works," and when it doesn't, it's the easiest to fix.
A vanilla Gnome install of Debian stable is just as functional and just as noob friendly as Ubuntu. If you're like my dad and you get scared when the "x" on the top of the window is moved from one side of the screen to the other, there's not a linux distro in the world that will save you. If you're more like subby's mom (lol) and you're comfortable clicking around a little to get used to something new, you can figure out Debian/Gnome.
Everything you buy from Harbor Freight has the same boilerplate on it:
"Always wear ANSI approved safety goggles etc etc"
I found the warning on an apple slicer, and all kinds of other silly things.
Or, everybody pays the same price up front and the same monthly fee at first, and the people who get good ratings and few/no complaints quietly get their bill lowered as a reward. Kind of like the karma ad blocking on slashdot...
But that doesn't have as much 'derp,' so it must seem unfair.
Point ---> x
You ---> x
First time I've wished I had mod points in a long time, thank you.
2003 called, they want their rant back.
I am not exaggerating the truck wreck. If the truck wrecks, the odds are the case doesn't break. If the case breaks, the contents can be completely contained and removed, and there is no residue. No fumes. No liquid. No generations of despair.
The repository is another story. There, bad things may happen over thousands of years. But the fact is that bad things may happen over thousands of years for many other toxic substances that we sequester in even larger volumes with much less regard for stability.