Anyone who has ever looked at a Mercator projection map knows that Greenland is about the same size as the entire continent of Africa, so it's about time they contributed proportionately to the global economy.;-)
The LED street lights have shown up in my neighborhood in CA over the last year. Frankly, now that I see them in place, I don't like them one bit, for the same reason that I don't like LED brake lights on vehicles (as if we need to conserve energy on brake lights, please!): each super-bright LED is a very intense point of light which immediately makes its mark on my retinas and I see the spots for quite a while. I can't be the only one with this problem, and I can't imagine it not having a long-term effect. Sodium, fluorescent, and other kinds of lights seem to more often be accompanied with some sort of diffusion that eliminates the high intensity pinpoints from direct view. Not the street lights: one glance at those and I get a lovely 8x20 matrix of dots in my field of view for the next several minutes (or a 1x40 string in the case of brake lights). I think some improvements need to be made before they continue rolling out en masse.
Tangentially related, I don't particularly feel like we need street lights on all night long. What if we just lit up side walks with low posts (perhaps lower even than the FOV of a typical driver - enough to light the path and cast enough ambient light for pedestrians to take advantage of, but WAY lower power than the street lights, and with no intent of lighting the entire community? If my car's headlights are sufficient in the back woods where there are no street lights to drive safely on the most treacherous of roads, then why would I need street lights to guide my way in town where the roads are all flat and predictable? I, for one, would welcome a far less lit night sky for star-gazing and total overall reduction in energy consumption.
One of our cars has remote start - but it cannot be driven without inserting the key into the ignition. That may not be the case for all vehicles with this feature... but it should be.
With respect to a stable, useful life for software, while I agree that it would be nice if, as an industry, software were mature enough to not have to continually struggle to keep software running and just, plain get things to work for now, much less for an extended period of time, it would be a shame to do so at the expense of industry progress. New frameworks, platforms, languages, etc. I see as a necessary element for the progression of the industry - something that the automotive industry you compare it has shown to be distinctly lacking. The 1989 Geo Metro performed about as well as today's advanced Toyota Prius at a fraction of the price and complexity; by and large, I'd say the automotive industry has been very busy indeed, but made little real progress. As for reliability, I'd venture a guess that there are more fix-it shops out there for busted cars than there are for software. I suppose I am equally dissatisfied with the lack of progress in established industries such as automotive and banking as you are with the excessive activity in software...
Ditto. I'm completely beside myself with this Droid and just want to drop-kick it half the time. Until there is ubiquitous, reliable service on any basic level, technology advancements are almost pointless.
And on top of it, I am completely fed up with Android rearranging how the entire user interface and basic applications function every time they update my damn phone. I went into the Verizon store and complained about my earlier Android phone, (the LG Ally) and how slow it was and the salesman showed me how blazingly fast the new droid 4 was for even basic functions like dialing. It has been all down hill ever since leaving the store. Sometimes the damn thing won't even answer an incoming call. I have literally downloaded like three small games for this thing too, so it's not like I'm loading it down with a bunch of crap. Back up all your contacts to Google and then restore and have it automatically import a phone book entry for everyone you've ever emailed in the last 10 years - yay!
The current consumer-facing model is completely asinine and I'm just about ready to go back to 1992 and get a pager.
Here are a couple hotlines just announced by Boston Chief of Police in response to today's apparent terrorist attacks in Boston:
For help locating people: 1-617-635-4500
For witness tips: 1-800-494-TIPS
We can't even prevent cross-contamination from occurring here on Earth. The commercial overseas shipping industry has introduced countless, destructive, invasive species into other ports that wreak havoc on the local ecosystems - and have the potential to impact local economies. Off-planet is not going to be any better; spreading Earth dust is unavoidable. As Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, "Life.... finds a way." I say give it an honest effort, but don't dwell too long on attempting to thwart the inevitable. When some commercial space-entity decides to conquer the heavens and does not adhere to your strict standards, who are you going to call, the Space Police?
"If people were influenced by video games, a majority of Facebook users would be farmers by now"
This made me laugh for the "in your face" factor, however quip hardly closes the door on the debate. I would submit that generally it is much easier to influence socially undesirable behavior in people than it is to influence desirable behavior. It's human nature - the forbidden fruit is always calling. The appeal of the easy score, and "being bad" for real excitement has no substitute in farming vegetables, paying taxes and enjoying a good round of Go Fish. Just because Farmville players are not easily subdued into actual farming, it does not follow that more violent games cannot have a subversive effect on its players...
I'm not so sure regulate is even the right word. They might make a recommendation for maximum daily allowance, but unless they're going to make it a federally controlled substance (i.e. on par with cocaine), the FDA will in fact have no degree of control - or "regulation" if you will - over people's personal intake. Even alcoholic beverages are not "regulated" for quantity of consumption. They may charge a tax on it... they may make a test that measures how much is too much when operating a vehicle... but they can't regulate the amount that an individual consumes - over-consumption regularly lands people in the hospital or the morgue.
Safe (relative) caffeine intake, like alcohol, comes down to one knowing their own limits and self-regulating. Awareness is important, and the FDA could certainly have an impact on that. Personally, I have discovered in recent years that I actually have zero tolerance for caffeine after that last cup of coffee landed me in an urgent care facility. I can't even enjoy my favorite, Dr. Pepper any more because there is no caffeine-free variant of it. It wasn't remotely a matter of over doing it, it was simply an unusually high sensitivity to caffeine that developed over time. Occasionally I will try a decaf coffee or a Coke to see if the reaction is still there and I am quickly greeted with difficulty breathing.
"Making corporations paying taxes on profits is double taxation and should not be done. Rather the profits should pass through to the owners (investors) and then the investors should pay taxes as if that was their earned income."
As I have no mod points I will simply bump this post with a response. This is an interesting assertion that I have not heard before. Anyone have any solid counter-arguments? I'm not sure I buy the whole "double-taxation" aspect - where is it doubled? If you are referring to the revenue coming into the company being taxed and then paying out to employees who are also taxed on income, then that situation is false. The cost of wages is a tax deduction for the company and they would not be taxed on those dollars that are paid out as an operating expense.
Regardless, I think the premise falls in line with the argument that "corporations are not people", and therefore should not be able to own property, have rights, or, in this case, be taxable. It's the owners of the company who bear those resources/responsibilities.Personally, it seems to me that eliminating corporate tax on profits would substantially benefit the growth of a company and could consequently lead to a number of beneficial side effects including higher employment rates, higher wages, and overall national economic growth. It would most certainly help small businesses which struggle the most and which are among the top sources of employment in the U.S. Since the biggest players are already skirting around this responsibility anyway, why not formalize the model for the betterment of all?
And if some jackhole isn't sending power to the grid when the lineman checks, but then begins sending power once the lineman has his hands on the connections in mid-repair? Momentary testing would not be sufficient for safety - there needs to be a guarantee that there is no path that can place power on those lines while he is working on them.
There would be few things in life worse than being stuck sitting next to some dipstick talking on their phone with no hope of reprieve or escape. I would vote for continued ban on phone calls and noisy electronics (MP3/Game/DVD player, etc) for the sheer nuisance factor. Use your phone menus, apps, camera, text messaging, fine. But no calls. Everything else is fair game... except I suppose electric shavers, that's just wrong.
... and if you had watched the video, you would have seen the dual mode device actually park itself using computer vision... autonomously... like a robot.
The color was derived from multiple passes using red and blue filters over the same photo sensor. Green was derived from red and blue and hence we get the RGB color representation. Some info describing that is on this page - not a primary source, but matches what I recall.
Also, I don't believe we're talking about "bits" here at all - this was all analog technology. My college instructor is in the Monterey, CA area.
Any journalist worth their salt would not use the words, "so-and-so says [insert something they did not actually say here]". I'm going to give benefit of the doubt on the side of journalistic integrity here.
The man who wrote the software for the image processing to handle the raw data that came out of that "camera" works in the Computer Science department at the local community college here now. I have spoken to him at length on this topic. He clarified that it is not a camera at all, but simply a "light sensor" (think sensitive photoresistor). The only thing that makes it able to render an image at all is the rotation of the spacecraft. He also explained that the rotating motion coupled with the linear direction of the craft resulted in really interesting and strange swooping distortions of the "image" produced which was why they needed him to write something special to correct the curvature of the images. All pretty fascinating stuff.
As to the GP however, I am sure that the light sensor is no longer in service for imaging. It needed to be near to a large physical body to have the FOV necessary to form a composite image. Simply spinning in space and looking at the stars, all it would do is register average and ambient light levels of the surrounding star field and would not form a cohesive rasterization of any kind.
The one anecdotal piece I have to complement the above is that I was recently doing some work on an application in C to improve the performance of some legacy Fast Fourier Transform code compiled with GCC. The original code was doing a bunch of heavy lifting with double precision floats. I optimized the algorithm as far as I could without changing any data types and, as a last step I changed the doubles to pure 32bit integer arithmetic expecting at least twice the execution speed compared to the doubles on this Core i7 3Ghz processor. The end result: exactly the same performance for ints as for doubles, down to the microsecond. The new Intel chips have stunning FPU capabilities that I was definitely not expecting and, unless you plan for it as they clearly did, there will be a clear performance difference between int or even single vs. double precision on the GFlop counter...
It's all over the fricken Internet. It was in the NPR report and it looks like the report has since been edited to remove the comment, perhaps out of embarrassment. The transcript from the same report however still includes the quote...
"PALCA: Put a sample of Martian soil or rock or even air inside SAM and it will tell you what the sample's made of. Right now, SAM is working on a Mars soil sample, and [John] Grotzinger says the results are earth-shaking."
" But to teach anything as 'scientific fact" is bastardization of science."
I second this motion. It was my immediate, and only reaction to the headline.
My only other comment is in reaction to something posted way above about wanting both creationism and evolution to be taught in school. I have heard this quite a bit in that past few years and must say I'm freakin tired of it: religion is taught at home and at Church, not at school with taxpayer dollars. Parents need to stop pawning off their responsibilities onto the public school system. The school instills knowledge; parents instill character. School is academia. Church is not academia. If they want to offer theology at school, then that would be a valuable academic survey of the world's religions, but not an indoctrination of creationism. For context, I say this as a believer in science AND a person of faith. The two ARE compatible, and even the Pope is on board, but I have zero desire to have schools trying to teach my child where to place their faith and how to be a good person.
If the Earth is laughing, it may be because she doesn't give two spits about us or any other "dominant species" and would be more than happy to mass-extinct us all. While we may have only been here and conscious of our environment for a small percentage of Earth's total time here, keep in mind that we can still make pretty good observations about that past. The fact that we know the Earth to be more than 4 Billion years old is a good example. Were it not for core samples, carbon testing, etc. we might never have known that. The same types of observations, by the way, are made against core samples from antarctic ice, and they reveal a lot more information than just what our passive observations have noted in the past few decades...
As for me, I'm interested in this whole premise of "compensatory snow" in the Antarctic - do we get one of those fun sliding Earth's crust events once the spinning mass down there becomes lopsided enough to make Antarctica the new equatorial topical paradise?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who has ever looked at a Mercator projection map knows that Greenland is about the same size as the entire continent of Africa, so it's about time they contributed proportionately to the global economy. ;-)
The LED street lights have shown up in my neighborhood in CA over the last year. Frankly, now that I see them in place, I don't like them one bit, for the same reason that I don't like LED brake lights on vehicles (as if we need to conserve energy on brake lights, please!): each super-bright LED is a very intense point of light which immediately makes its mark on my retinas and I see the spots for quite a while. I can't be the only one with this problem, and I can't imagine it not having a long-term effect. Sodium, fluorescent, and other kinds of lights seem to more often be accompanied with some sort of diffusion that eliminates the high intensity pinpoints from direct view. Not the street lights: one glance at those and I get a lovely 8x20 matrix of dots in my field of view for the next several minutes (or a 1x40 string in the case of brake lights). I think some improvements need to be made before they continue rolling out en masse.
Tangentially related, I don't particularly feel like we need street lights on all night long. What if we just lit up side walks with low posts (perhaps lower even than the FOV of a typical driver - enough to light the path and cast enough ambient light for pedestrians to take advantage of, but WAY lower power than the street lights, and with no intent of lighting the entire community? If my car's headlights are sufficient in the back woods where there are no street lights to drive safely on the most treacherous of roads, then why would I need street lights to guide my way in town where the roads are all flat and predictable? I, for one, would welcome a far less lit night sky for star-gazing and total overall reduction in energy consumption.
One of our cars has remote start - but it cannot be driven without inserting the key into the ignition. That may not be the case for all vehicles with this feature... but it should be.
With respect to a stable, useful life for software, while I agree that it would be nice if, as an industry, software were mature enough to not have to continually struggle to keep software running and just, plain get things to work for now, much less for an extended period of time, it would be a shame to do so at the expense of industry progress. New frameworks, platforms, languages, etc. I see as a necessary element for the progression of the industry - something that the automotive industry you compare it has shown to be distinctly lacking. The 1989 Geo Metro performed about as well as today's advanced Toyota Prius at a fraction of the price and complexity; by and large, I'd say the automotive industry has been very busy indeed, but made little real progress. As for reliability, I'd venture a guess that there are more fix-it shops out there for busted cars than there are for software. I suppose I am equally dissatisfied with the lack of progress in established industries such as automotive and banking as you are with the excessive activity in software...
Ditto. I'm completely beside myself with this Droid and just want to drop-kick it half the time. Until there is ubiquitous, reliable service on any basic level, technology advancements are almost pointless.
And on top of it, I am completely fed up with Android rearranging how the entire user interface and basic applications function every time they update my damn phone. I went into the Verizon store and complained about my earlier Android phone, (the LG Ally) and how slow it was and the salesman showed me how blazingly fast the new droid 4 was for even basic functions like dialing. It has been all down hill ever since leaving the store. Sometimes the damn thing won't even answer an incoming call. I have literally downloaded like three small games for this thing too, so it's not like I'm loading it down with a bunch of crap. Back up all your contacts to Google and then restore and have it automatically import a phone book entry for everyone you've ever emailed in the last 10 years - yay!
The current consumer-facing model is completely asinine and I'm just about ready to go back to 1992 and get a pager.
Here are a couple hotlines just announced by Boston Chief of Police in response to today's apparent terrorist attacks in Boston: For help locating people: 1-617-635-4500 For witness tips: 1-800-494-TIPS
We can't even prevent cross-contamination from occurring here on Earth. The commercial overseas shipping industry has introduced countless, destructive, invasive species into other ports that wreak havoc on the local ecosystems - and have the potential to impact local economies. Off-planet is not going to be any better; spreading Earth dust is unavoidable. As Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, "Life.... finds a way." I say give it an honest effort, but don't dwell too long on attempting to thwart the inevitable. When some commercial space-entity decides to conquer the heavens and does not adhere to your strict standards, who are you going to call, the Space Police?
"If people were influenced by video games, a majority of Facebook users would be farmers by now"
This made me laugh for the "in your face" factor, however quip hardly closes the door on the debate. I would submit that generally it is much easier to influence socially undesirable behavior in people than it is to influence desirable behavior. It's human nature - the forbidden fruit is always calling. The appeal of the easy score, and "being bad" for real excitement has no substitute in farming vegetables, paying taxes and enjoying a good round of Go Fish. Just because Farmville players are not easily subdued into actual farming, it does not follow that more violent games cannot have a subversive effect on its players...
Link
I'm not so sure regulate is even the right word. They might make a recommendation for maximum daily allowance, but unless they're going to make it a federally controlled substance (i.e. on par with cocaine), the FDA will in fact have no degree of control - or "regulation" if you will - over people's personal intake. Even alcoholic beverages are not "regulated" for quantity of consumption. They may charge a tax on it... they may make a test that measures how much is too much when operating a vehicle... but they can't regulate the amount that an individual consumes - over-consumption regularly lands people in the hospital or the morgue.
Safe (relative) caffeine intake, like alcohol, comes down to one knowing their own limits and self-regulating. Awareness is important, and the FDA could certainly have an impact on that. Personally, I have discovered in recent years that I actually have zero tolerance for caffeine after that last cup of coffee landed me in an urgent care facility. I can't even enjoy my favorite, Dr. Pepper any more because there is no caffeine-free variant of it. It wasn't remotely a matter of over doing it, it was simply an unusually high sensitivity to caffeine that developed over time. Occasionally I will try a decaf coffee or a Coke to see if the reaction is still there and I am quickly greeted with difficulty breathing.
"Making corporations paying taxes on profits is double taxation and should not be done. Rather the profits should pass through to the owners (investors) and then the investors should pay taxes as if that was their earned income."
As I have no mod points I will simply bump this post with a response. This is an interesting assertion that I have not heard before. Anyone have any solid counter-arguments? I'm not sure I buy the whole "double-taxation" aspect - where is it doubled? If you are referring to the revenue coming into the company being taxed and then paying out to employees who are also taxed on income, then that situation is false. The cost of wages is a tax deduction for the company and they would not be taxed on those dollars that are paid out as an operating expense.
Regardless, I think the premise falls in line with the argument that "corporations are not people", and therefore should not be able to own property, have rights, or, in this case, be taxable. It's the owners of the company who bear those resources/responsibilities.Personally, it seems to me that eliminating corporate tax on profits would substantially benefit the growth of a company and could consequently lead to a number of beneficial side effects including higher employment rates, higher wages, and overall national economic growth. It would most certainly help small businesses which struggle the most and which are among the top sources of employment in the U.S. Since the biggest players are already skirting around this responsibility anyway, why not formalize the model for the betterment of all?
And if some jackhole isn't sending power to the grid when the lineman checks, but then begins sending power once the lineman has his hands on the connections in mid-repair? Momentary testing would not be sufficient for safety - there needs to be a guarantee that there is no path that can place power on those lines while he is working on them.
There would be few things in life worse than being stuck sitting next to some dipstick talking on their phone with no hope of reprieve or escape. I would vote for continued ban on phone calls and noisy electronics (MP3/Game/DVD player, etc) for the sheer nuisance factor. Use your phone menus, apps, camera, text messaging, fine. But no calls. Everything else is fair game... except I suppose electric shavers, that's just wrong.
... and if you had watched the video, you would have seen the dual mode device actually park itself using computer vision... autonomously... like a robot.
The color was derived from multiple passes using red and blue filters over the same photo sensor. Green was derived from red and blue and hence we get the RGB color representation. Some info describing that is on this page - not a primary source, but matches what I recall.
Also, I don't believe we're talking about "bits" here at all - this was all analog technology. My college instructor is in the Monterey, CA area.
Any journalist worth their salt would not use the words, "so-and-so says [insert something they did not actually say here]". I'm going to give benefit of the doubt on the side of journalistic integrity here.
Sounds pretty plausible - thanks for that!
Yea - I'm sure it has nothing to do with recent weather satellite failures.
OK rocket scientists or astrophysicists, what does "6,000 x 12,000 km orbit" mean for us lowly Earth-bound folk?
Actually...
The man who wrote the software for the image processing to handle the raw data that came out of that "camera" works in the Computer Science department at the local community college here now. I have spoken to him at length on this topic. He clarified that it is not a camera at all, but simply a "light sensor" (think sensitive photoresistor). The only thing that makes it able to render an image at all is the rotation of the spacecraft. He also explained that the rotating motion coupled with the linear direction of the craft resulted in really interesting and strange swooping distortions of the "image" produced which was why they needed him to write something special to correct the curvature of the images. All pretty fascinating stuff.
As to the GP however, I am sure that the light sensor is no longer in service for imaging. It needed to be near to a large physical body to have the FOV necessary to form a composite image. Simply spinning in space and looking at the stars, all it would do is register average and ambient light levels of the surrounding star field and would not form a cohesive rasterization of any kind.
The one anecdotal piece I have to complement the above is that I was recently doing some work on an application in C to improve the performance of some legacy Fast Fourier Transform code compiled with GCC. The original code was doing a bunch of heavy lifting with double precision floats. I optimized the algorithm as far as I could without changing any data types and, as a last step I changed the doubles to pure 32bit integer arithmetic expecting at least twice the execution speed compared to the doubles on this Core i7 3Ghz processor. The end result: exactly the same performance for ints as for doubles, down to the microsecond. The new Intel chips have stunning FPU capabilities that I was definitely not expecting and, unless you plan for it as they clearly did, there will be a clear performance difference between int or even single vs. double precision on the GFlop counter...
It's all over the fricken Internet. It was in the NPR report and it looks like the report has since been edited to remove the comment, perhaps out of embarrassment. The transcript from the same report however still includes the quote...
"PALCA: Put a sample of Martian soil or rock or even air inside SAM and it will tell you what the sample's made of. Right now, SAM is working on a Mars soil sample, and [John] Grotzinger says the results are earth-shaking."
From NPR Transcript
Grotzinger is the "principal investigator for the rover mission".
" But to teach anything as 'scientific fact" is bastardization of science."
I second this motion. It was my immediate, and only reaction to the headline.
My only other comment is in reaction to something posted way above about wanting both creationism and evolution to be taught in school. I have heard this quite a bit in that past few years and must say I'm freakin tired of it: religion is taught at home and at Church, not at school with taxpayer dollars. Parents need to stop pawning off their responsibilities onto the public school system. The school instills knowledge; parents instill character. School is academia. Church is not academia. If they want to offer theology at school, then that would be a valuable academic survey of the world's religions, but not an indoctrination of creationism. For context, I say this as a believer in science AND a person of faith. The two ARE compatible, and even the Pope is on board, but I have zero desire to have schools trying to teach my child where to place their faith and how to be a good person.
If the Earth is laughing, it may be because she doesn't give two spits about us or any other "dominant species" and would be more than happy to mass-extinct us all. While we may have only been here and conscious of our environment for a small percentage of Earth's total time here, keep in mind that we can still make pretty good observations about that past. The fact that we know the Earth to be more than 4 Billion years old is a good example. Were it not for core samples, carbon testing, etc. we might never have known that. The same types of observations, by the way, are made against core samples from antarctic ice, and they reveal a lot more information than just what our passive observations have noted in the past few decades...
As for me, I'm interested in this whole premise of "compensatory snow" in the Antarctic - do we get one of those fun sliding Earth's crust events once the spinning mass down there becomes lopsided enough to make Antarctica the new equatorial topical paradise?
... is a duplicate