It is true that some handheld GPS units do not come with a built-in compass. In this case, you will need to have a satellite lock AND be moving in order to find north. (My Magellan Sportrak Pro falls under this category)
HOWEVER, many handheld GPS units, especially slightly higher end ones DO come with built in compasses, and can tell you which way is north even when you're in the basement of a building with absolutely no satellite reception and you're not moving. (My Brunton MNS falls under this category)
Bottom line, you should know what you're buying and what features it has before you get it.
On a somewhat related note, having a built-in compass can be extremely useful, as it will tell you how far away and in what direction a mark is even when you're not moving - it will tell you relative to the orientation of the GPS. Many units without a built in compass only tell you in what direction a mark is relative to direction of travel - so this can be very confusing if you're standing still or haven't oriented the unit in the direction of travel. Hope this made at least an inkling of sense.
"Morgan adds that GPS typically only locates things within a few hundred meters" - this is absolute crap. Most run-of-the-mill GPS units (easily found for under 100 dollars) will get you within 10m accuracy under suboptimal conditions (think heavy tree and cloud cover), usually closer than that. And that's without WAAS enabled. I find urban environments a lot easier to get good readings from many satellites than heavy forests - and even 3 or 4 satellites will give you a heck of a lot more accurate reading than 20-40 meters.
This might be a cute program, and I'm sure it's useful inside a building where you won't get a GPS signal (but really, how many WiFi signals do you get in the middle of a building? And how many of them will be on a map generated by "driving down the street"?)
Grandparent post didn't miss the point at all. The article makes a blatant and fundamental error, upon which it bases the rest of the article.
I wanna live there! If that's their method of convincing people to move, it worked. Seriously though - just add 10 or 20 bucks to your taxes and you're good to go! Awesome!
Now if they can only cooperate and get their darn keyboards to have similar layouts!
I mean seriously, who would have the caps lock key where shift is? Ridiculous.
They don't care about getting the facts straight when they hire an "expert" to consult for a show or movie. Bringing in an expert isn't about listening to what they have to say.
Hollywood brings on experts so that they can say they used an expert when producing the movie/show. This effectively justifies the science of the plot while not making it any more realistic.
I believe something like this was tried in the 1940's and 1950's. Entire communities were built, rather cheaply, from a balloon that was inflated and around which concrete was poured. All right, so it's not exactly the same, but a very similar idea.
One of the reasons it was abandoned (other than being very difficult to make any bigger - the concrete needed to build increases with the square of the house diameter, not even taking stress and strain into account - but the accoustics were horrible: everything echoed and made daily life quite... unique.
The airform house was a unique form of low-cost housing he developed between 1934 and 1941. It was a dome-shaped structure made of reinforced concrete that was cast in place over an inflatable balloon. Although the design did not find favor in the United States it was used for mass housing projects in West Africa, Egypt and Brazil during the 1940s and 1950s.
Maybe I'm out of the loop - but what's the big deal?
If I were to search for "online poker" I'd be sure to read the TITLE and the two lines or so that Google gives you from the site to figure out if it was a relevant result or not.
If I already know what online poker is, there's no need for me to go to a wikipedia page, no matter how high it's listed. Conversely, if I'm not interested in playing, I'm not going to go to some site unless I haven't had my daily dose of cookies.
Very few people use the "I'm feeling lucky" button (I remember reading some really low percentage on the Google website, forget what exactly it was) so even getting this site to #1 won't affect discerning users.
All right, you can make the argument that people are stupid and click blindly. Problably. But most people realize after a few seconds if they've gone to an irrelevant result.
Most organizations have some sort of regulatory body. Does the data harvesting industry have this?
Perhaps this should turn some heads in Congress now that we've got multiple cases of this insecurity. The question is, is Congress going to be able to do anything about it or will it be the same situation as with government computer security: Right now they just say "your security is bad" but that doesn't always fix the problem.
Maybe instead of finding "the new indecency fines disproportionately large compared to other fines", maybe the other fines are disproportionately small?
I mean, come on, those fines didn't put a dent in the pockets of the major networks. I wouldn't call them unreasonable. Fines for dangerous situations at nuclear powerplants being only 60k, on the other hand, is a situation that needs to be remedied.
E = m*c^2 refers to the amount of energy contained in the rest mass of a particle. This is applicable for particles of mass, such as electrons, protons, etc. It is NOT a valid formula in the case of photons, since photons travel at the speed of light, they have no rest mass.
Note, E = m*c^2 isn't the formula for the entire energy of a particle, only for its rest energy. To find the total energy you need to multiply m*c^2 by gamma, where gamma = (1 - v^2 / c^2)^(-1/2). If you expand this you see that for non-relativistic particles the kinetic energy formula E=m*v^2/2 is a pretty good approximation.
Light consists of photons, which are massless. They do have energy (E=momentum * speed of light = Planck's constant * frequency) and momentum (p = planck's constant / wavelength).
Perhaps some people in this subthread are getting confused with the DeBroglie wavelengths, which is a property all particles, having mass or otherwise. The DeBroglie wavelength is equal to Planck's constant / momentum, so for a photon this is the same as its actual wavelength.
From the Washington Post: Company officials said they were sending out more letters to 110,000 addresses throughout the country that may be connected to the reports delivered to the fraudsters.
"We have reason to believe your personal information may have been obtained by unauthorized third parties, and we deeply regret any inconvenience this event may cause you," the letters say.
Aw, that's nice of them. They certainly do care about us and the "inconvenience" of being fired and losing all credit.
Authorities said the number of records involved may go higher as the investigation continues. "This is way far more reaching," said Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Lt. Robert Costa, commander of an identity theft unit. "I believe that when we're done it will be more than a half million nationally. It's huge."
Looks like someone agrees with your 300k+ theory. Glad to hear someone's still trying to figure out how deep this rabbit hole goes...
I think part of the reason it's posted isn't that it's "news", but in the sense that this information has hit a major, legitimate newspaper - The Washington Post (all bow to the great Post).
After all, the post does start with "According to the Washington Post". It's the news of the news that's the news, not the news that's the news.
Is it the responsibility of the search engine to babysit users with big bold THIS IS A PAID AD messages everywhere? Maybe. But it becomes progressively harder to inform people as the percentage of people you wish to inform rises.
At some point you have to draw the line and let people fend for themselves.
But this brings up another point:
If only 1/6 of internet searchers can distinguish between paid advertisments and legitimate results, what does this say about phishing?
This suggests that most people can't figure out the easy-to-spot phishing scams, let alone the sophisticated scams that many phishers have begun creating.
ITunes is only shared over a network, and isn't downloaded but viewed - doesn't this mean that the feature could be construed as a viewing to a private audience?
This is legal with movies etc, why made illegal for music? Just because music is more commonly transfered makes congressmen antsy over the streaming issue.
The Washington Post also did a story on Firefox yesterday, I believe you can find the link here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A471 46-2004Nov13.html
AOL duking it out against spammers? This is great news! If we're lucky both sides will annihilate each other in a war of attrition, good news for all of the internet-using world.
That is, unless the rest of us get caught up in collateral damage resulting from reduced privacy or cloggage of internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the liquid fuel tank camera view was incredible. I hope that I can find the clip of the shuttle executing its roll with earth in the background.
HOWEVER, many handheld GPS units, especially slightly higher end ones DO come with built in compasses, and can tell you which way is north even when you're in the basement of a building with absolutely no satellite reception and you're not moving. (My Brunton MNS falls under this category)
Bottom line, you should know what you're buying and what features it has before you get it.
On a somewhat related note, having a built-in compass can be extremely useful, as it will tell you how far away and in what direction a mark is even when you're not moving - it will tell you relative to the orientation of the GPS. Many units without a built in compass only tell you in what direction a mark is relative to direction of travel - so this can be very confusing if you're standing still or haven't oriented the unit in the direction of travel. Hope this made at least an inkling of sense.
This might be a cute program, and I'm sure it's useful inside a building where you won't get a GPS signal (but really, how many WiFi signals do you get in the middle of a building? And how many of them will be on a map generated by "driving down the street"?)
Grandparent post didn't miss the point at all. The article makes a blatant and fundamental error, upon which it bases the rest of the article.
I wanna live there! If that's their method of convincing people to move, it worked. Seriously though - just add 10 or 20 bucks to your taxes and you're good to go! Awesome!
Now if they can only cooperate and get their darn keyboards to have similar layouts! I mean seriously, who would have the caps lock key where shift is? Ridiculous.
Hollywood brings on experts so that they can say they used an expert when producing the movie/show. This effectively justifies the science of the plot while not making it any more realistic.
One of the reasons it was abandoned (other than being very difficult to make any bigger - the concrete needed to build increases with the square of the house diameter, not even taking stress and strain into account - but the accoustics were horrible: everything echoed and made daily life quite ... unique.
Ah yes, here's the link: http://www.usc.edu/calendar/events/19404.html
The airform house was a unique form of low-cost housing he developed between 1934 and 1941. It was a dome-shaped structure made of reinforced concrete that was cast in place over an inflatable balloon. Although the design did not find favor in the United States it was used for mass housing projects in West Africa, Egypt and Brazil during the 1940s and 1950s.
Stupid.
If I were to search for "online poker" I'd be sure to read the TITLE and the two lines or so that Google gives you from the site to figure out if it was a relevant result or not.
If I already know what online poker is, there's no need for me to go to a wikipedia page, no matter how high it's listed. Conversely, if I'm not interested in playing, I'm not going to go to some site unless I haven't had my daily dose of cookies.
Very few people use the "I'm feeling lucky" button (I remember reading some really low percentage on the Google website, forget what exactly it was) so even getting this site to #1 won't affect discerning users.
All right, you can make the argument that people are stupid and click blindly. Problably. But most people realize after a few seconds if they've gone to an irrelevant result.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19
Most organizations have some sort of regulatory body. Does the data harvesting industry have this?
Perhaps this should turn some heads in Congress now that we've got multiple cases of this insecurity. The question is, is Congress going to be able to do anything about it or will it be the same situation as with government computer security: Right now they just say "your security is bad" but that doesn't always fix the problem.
This caused lots of weird stuff to happen, including the sun looking blue or green, and crazy red sunsets up to three years later.
Global temperatures were lowered up to 1.2 degrees Celcius in the following year, and didn't return to normal until 1888.
Not to mention the huge tidal waves killing tens of thousands and the explosion being heard on 1/13th of the earth's surface.
Crazy!
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/Eruption04 /Monitoring/plume_in_the_evening_8march05.html
This has some pretty good photos, as well as a picture with (MS Paint?) editing describing what's what.
The photos are taken from a remote camera on the mountain that takes a picture every 2.5 minutes. This is as good as it gets.
Interesting :) God has exceeded his 40 meg limit. I would never have thought of that myself.
I mean, come on, those fines didn't put a dent in the pockets of the major networks. I wouldn't call them unreasonable. Fines for dangerous situations at nuclear powerplants being only 60k, on the other hand, is a situation that needs to be remedied.
Fine 'em!
Hah! Dragging their feet! Get it?
E = m*c^2 refers to the amount of energy contained in the rest mass of a particle. This is applicable for particles of mass, such as electrons, protons, etc. It is NOT a valid formula in the case of photons, since photons travel at the speed of light, they have no rest mass.
Note, E = m*c^2 isn't the formula for the entire energy of a particle, only for its rest energy. To find the total energy you need to multiply m*c^2 by gamma, where gamma = (1 - v^2 / c^2)^(-1/2). If you expand this you see that for non-relativistic particles the kinetic energy formula E=m*v^2/2 is a pretty good approximation.
Light consists of photons, which are massless. They do have energy (E=momentum * speed of light = Planck's constant * frequency) and momentum (p = planck's constant / wavelength).
Perhaps some people in this subthread are getting confused with the DeBroglie wavelengths, which is a property all particles, having mass or otherwise. The DeBroglie wavelength is equal to Planck's constant / momentum, so for a photon this is the same as its actual wavelength.
Aw, that's nice of them. They certainly do care about us and the "inconvenience" of being fired and losing all credit.
Authorities said the number of records involved may go higher as the investigation continues. "This is way far more reaching," said Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Lt. Robert Costa, commander of an identity theft unit. "I believe that when we're done it will be more than a half million nationally. It's huge."
Looks like someone agrees with your 300k+ theory. Glad to hear someone's still trying to figure out how deep this rabbit hole goes ...
After all, the post does start with "According to the Washington Post". It's the news of the news that's the news, not the news that's the news.
But that's a valid point anyway.
But it becomes progressively harder to inform people as the percentage of people you wish to inform rises.
At some point you have to draw the line and let people fend for themselves.
But this brings up another point:
If only 1/6 of internet searchers can distinguish between paid advertisments and legitimate results, what does this say about phishing?
This suggests that most people can't figure out the easy-to-spot phishing scams, let alone the sophisticated scams that many phishers have begun creating.
ITunes is only shared over a network, and isn't downloaded but viewed - doesn't this mean that the feature could be construed as a viewing to a private audience? This is legal with movies etc, why made illegal for music? Just because music is more commonly transfered makes congressmen antsy over the streaming issue.
The Washington Post also did a story on Firefox yesterday, I believe you can find the link here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A471 46-2004Nov13.html
./ ?!? You must mean /. Unless that is another non-mistake that i've mis-commented-on.
That is, unless the rest of us get caught up in collateral damage resulting from reduced privacy or cloggage of internet.