New and improved bike routing, with low stress options - <AUTHOR> https://mapzen.com/blog/low-stress-bike-routing/ <comment><USER2> Riding an ebike has dramatically changed the routes I take when commuting because I now prioritize safety and enjoyment over pure efficiency or avoiding inclines. My commute is 25 minutes on an ebike vs 70 on a regular bike, or 30 in a car in traffic.

<comment><USER3> Can I ask what ebike you use?

<comment><USER4> Buying an eBike is a lot about choosing the motor you want then hunting down a bike that uses the motor. I would strongly suggest that you buy from your local bike shop and buy the brand that the bike shop normally stocks.

My pick was the Brose mid-drive motor available in Tour 50nm/City 75nm/MTB 90nm models. I then bought an ex-demo one off model from a localish bike shop. [https://www.ebike-manufaktur.com/en/e-bikes/11lf-shimano- deo...](https://www.ebike-manufaktur.com/en/e-bikes/11lf-shimano-deore- xt-10-gang)

Problem with battery meant it took 11 weeks to get it back on the road as the shop did not have a relationship with the bike manufacturer.

The bike however is phenomenal. I weigh 130kg and it takes me up ANY hill in Bath. There's a couple of 1 in 3s that I can cycle up one handed.

<comment><USER5> What makes it worth 3100 EUR?? That's seems a lot of money even for an electric bike. (I'm guessing your ex-demo was a bit cheaper)

<comment><USER4> Cost me £1700 (about €2000). High-end Mid-drive motors pushing 75nm+ are expensive. Bosch Pro CX line and Shimano Steps are the other two types available. If you start looking around, you see the cheaper mid-drive, i.e. Bosch Active Line starting around £2000 and are suitable for lighter people. The high end motors are usually combined with high end parts and bigger batteries. Thus you end up with bikes costing between 3-4k.

It's saved me an absolute fortune. In fact after owning it for a month, my wife wrote off my car. We just took the insurance money and didn't buy another car going down to a one car family.

<comment><USER6> Interesting. How do you keep it from getting stolen ?

<comment><USER4> Electric bikes are not as easy to take apart and sell on. (I'm sure I'll be proved wrong.)

I have a gold standard D-Lock that is side mounted on the frame (weight not an issue) that I use when parking up. There is also a dutch style rear wheel lock mounted to the frame I also use. The battery has a key that keeps it locked to the frame. The head unit for the eBike display is removable and I take that with me whenever I leave it locked up making the motor unusable.

Basically you're trying to steal a 25kg (55lb) bike with multiple security features and relatively unique electric parts that people would be wary of buying due to lack of guarantees.

Sometimes if I'm popping into a shop/café, I use the bike stand, lock using the dutch lock, and just take the head unit off. I'm guessing somebody could pull up in a van and just lift the bike but the opportunistic 'snatch' is so not going to get very far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's an interesting problem because there are so many factors and even the goal isn't constant from day to day.

Goals

\- get from A to B as quickly as possible

\- get from A to B as safely as possible

\- get from A to B as enjoyably as possible

Factors

\- fitness of rider

\- type of bike (Riding a fixed gear bike up a steep hill is bad for enjoyment, but riding a mountain bike up a steep hill is not)

\- weather (headwinds, tailwinds affect time, affects safety of certain routes as well - don't tell me to ride down a steep windy hill when there is a possibility of ice)

\- time of day (affects safety due to light levels)

\- traffic volume

\- number of lights/stop signs (this affects fast riders more than slow ones because of the effort wasted accelerating and braking is greater)

\- number of turns (turns make the rider slow down and wait for traffic and also increase the complexity of following a route)

\- scenery/environmental factors (eg. ride through an industrial area or through a waterfront park)

<comment><USER8> And it's also not said that all these factors have a linear impact on the Figure of Merit. I guess that this might be a nice application for a machine learning classifier, to rate a route's ride quality depending on all of these inputs (and more.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> NB: "Hybrid" bike in this context (probably) means a city/commuter bike, not an electric/human hybrid. "Hybrid" bikes used to describe upright bicycles with flat handlebars like a mountain bike, but less aggressive and narrower tires more suited to commuting than to trails. These days the industry is calling them "fitness bikes"; one presumes to avoid confusing people who think of "hybrid" as meaning battery-powered, eg in the automotive context.

<comment><USER10> Decathlon (one of largest sports retailers in Europe) still calls them Hybrid bikes.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, I did not clarify, this has been my experience in bike shops in the US in the past few months (I had not previously looked at bicycles in some time).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wonderful. I'd really like these same features in Waze and Google Maps - if it means I can avoid having to cross a busy intersection that's not a 4-way stop, and reduce stress and increase safety, I'd gladly accept a route that's a few minutes slower.

Anyone from Waze or Google Maps team here?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, this is a serious problem with Google Maps directions. They want to send cyclists down the fastest routes, which are usually the least safe routes. There's a route in Kent, WA that Google was recommending that was downhill on a 45 MPH two-lane street with no shoulder or dividers. Meanwhile, about a mile further south there was this safe, car-free route that wound through residential subdivisions.

<comment><USER13> Not just for cyclists. Around here Google Maps will find "shortcuts" through single track back country roads which are especially dangerous in winter by car or bike.

<comment><USER14> They will respond to feedback about such roads not being suitable for general traffic.

If you are in the US the data problem is likely an artifact of TIGER which has hundreds or thousands of miles of roads that are given a single generic class which ends up being pretty unreliable outside of developed areas.

<comment><USER15> Even in the Bay Area, it's not hard to get GMaps to try to e.g. route you through a park, a fire road, a private road (the type with HOAs and nasty signs about how they'll prosecute you if you try to drive down their precious street).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I happen to know those intersections. They could have improved that wiggle route simply by rating the intersections. I'm not sure but it looks like they were not doing that.

The old route crossed two stop signs and did a left turn at a traffic signal. Left turns at traffic signals really suck.

The new, proper wiggle route is two left turns and a right turn, all at stop signs. Left turns at stop signs are not that much worse than going straight across -- and vastly better than a traffic light. Right turns are practically free.

So by simply rating the difficulty of intersections using a global metric, it seems like they could have made the same wiggle improvement without getting into rating each section of street. My point here is not that assessing things like accomodation_factor and road_stress are useless. Rather it appears that they've overlooked the much simpler, global improvement of rating intersections.

<comment><USER17> Only tangentially related to your post, but, two new traffic lights are being installed on the Wiggle. Haight is getting nine new lights, two of which are at Scott and Pierce. Maybe people will wiggle slightly differently to avoid the left turns at the lights.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, the SFBC (SF Bike Coalition) is not super happy about those lights. Better for the bus, which is good, but "will also cause delay for pedestrians and bicycle riders."[1]

There's no good way to avoid them westbound, but we can be certain eastbound wiggle traffic will start taking Page to avoid the left turn at the Haight & Scott traffic light. And that's going to stress the notorious Scott & Page intersection even more. They're currently adding pedestrian safety improvements.[2] We'll see if it's enough.

Unless.. I wonder if timed bicycle signals would help make the traffic signal routes preferable. Not sure if it would work, but that would be a dream.. just flow through the wiggle unimpeded. I can't tell if they're considering it.

[1] [https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/wiggle- neig...](https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/wiggle-neighborhood- green-corridor)

[2] [https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2017/Wigg...](https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2017/Wiggle_Fact%20SheetV3.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there any way to see a demo of this algorithm for a route of the user's choosing? I'm not familiar enough with San Francisco to evaluate the improvement mentioned in the blog. If I could try some routes in Atlanta, however, I'd get a better sense.

<comment><USER14> The routing engine in general is available as an option at openstreetmap.org:

[http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=mapzen_bicycl...](http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=mapzen_bicycle&route=33.7803%2C-84.4934%3B33.7201%2C-84.4540#map=13/33.7498/-84.4749)

I checked the request, the JS powering the OSM feature isn't sending the parameters so they are probably the 0.25 defaults there.

<comment><USER19> Hi! I'm with Mapzen. Yes, the default for `bicycle` are now 0.25.

If you're familiar with Leaflet, it's also pretty easy to draw routes in mapzen.js and pass different parameters to the router -- check the bottom of that post.

<comment><USER14> I would probably try to make a bookmarklet that registered a couple more engines:

[https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap- website/blob/...](https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap- website/blob/3d6a3a6de33aa0c1bc436bce9ea9da33e00460ff/app/assets/javascripts/index/directions/mapzen.js)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So I decided to see how to get to that nice Pho place across town .. 600 Washington Ave Philadelphia, PA 19147 or the one next door at 610 Washington Ave Philadelphia, PA 19147 .. in both cases it truncates off the street number and drops me at a wrong location. Does that mean OpenStreetMap needs some assistance in that area? Even stranger if I put one of those addresses in both source and destination it does a strange 5 block loop to get back to the same wrong start point.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, address coverage and POI coverage are pretty spotty. The address would show on osm.org if it were in the data:

[http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/39.93668/-75.16656](http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/39.93668/-75.16656)

<comment><USER21> Google seems to only have gotten the address coverage it has by sending vans around with cameras and then making people type in the addresses for CAPTCHAs

<comment><USER14> There is also a lot of data that has been collected by governments:

[http://results.openaddresses.io/](http://results.openaddresses.io/)

There's a variety of reasons that such data hasn't made it to OSM (resources, licensing issues, disagreement about how it should be integrated, disagreement about whether it should be integrated, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A friend has been working on a similar project for a while that allowed the rider to tailor, in great detail, the kind of route required. The algorithms involved are pretty interesting!

[http://zikes.website](http://zikes.website)

<comment><USER23> That's really cool.

Any chance it might eventually allow users to specify a single start/end point and a desired distance? That'd be much more useful for people who ride for sport, and even though there seem to be a few websites that generate such looped routes, they don't appear to do it particularly well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I ride in London, and love [https://www.cyclestreets.net/](https://www.cyclestreets.net/). There are versions for the web, android and now iPhone. It has a 'quietest route' option which I love. Android version gives you voice navigation. I put the phone in my shirt pocket and have it talk me through quiet streets avoiding the hassle of traffic. Open source. Runs on Openstreetmap data. Needs funding and promotion.

</comment><comment><USER25> I love the concept. I would love to have anentry point to cost function with the following parameters:

\- traffic \- elevation gain \- type of street \- a way to represent the distance overhead compare the other segments.

Any framework / dev env where I could easily get that entry point and see the top results on a map?

<comment><USER19> Yes -- at the bottom of the post we show how you can use our mapzen.js library to draw routes on a map. If you know Leaflet it's relatively straightforward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there a bike routing product that uses this new api that I can use? I spend hours finding the "less stressfull" bike routes. I like hills but I really value safety.

<comment><USER26> Strava[1] provides a cycle route builder that uses the popularity of routes based on their dataset of uploaded rides. As it's using recorded rides, typically by local riders, I've found it produces good routing; quiet roads similar to those you'd choose if you knew the area well.

[1] [https://www.strava.com](https://www.strava.com)

<comment><USER9> Wow. I was just playing with Strava last night and didn't realize I could build point A to point B routes because the interface is so impenetrable. (tip: search for address, then zoom the map WAY in manually, because it doesn't bother finding the address for you, click on the map to produce a dot, search for 2nd address, zoom WAY in and click to place your second dot, god help you if you don't actually know how to find the places on the map with your own two eyes).

Then it automatically built a route on some of the most heavily-traveled and bike-unfriendly roads in the area. (SF Peninsula locals: Marsh Road, Middlefield bike slaughter through Palo Alto). At least it only had a few turns. Google Maps did far, far better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What a great idea! I'm thinking how great this type of bike-optimized map on a dedicated bike gps unit would be.

<comment><USER14> It's a rabbit hole, but there is pretty good support for loading OpenStreetMap data onto Garmin devices (other device makers did a better job obscuring their formats):

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin)

I guess the routing enabled bike maps will take advantage of whatever data is present.

BBBike supports custom areas:

[http://extract.bbbike.org/extract.html](http://extract.bbbike.org/extract.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> LeafletJS looks interesting there for the maps. Any experiences with it here? Does it work well with PostGIS?

<comment><USER29> Leaflet is for requesting and displaying raster tiles on the client. PostGIS is for storing and managing geo data. Leaflet and PostGIS do not talk to each other. Inbetween you need a tile renderer (like Mapnik).

Leaflet is a great library if you don't need much (use OpenLayers then).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If use_roads is set to zero, will this optimize for roads that include sidewalks?

<comment><USER31> I'm guessing it will optimize for dedicated bike paths since you shouldn't be riding your bike on the sidewalk.

<comment><USER32> If we added bike lanes to sidewalks rather than roads I think it would solve a lot of the complaints motorists have.

<comment><USER33> We should take land away from motorists, not from pedestrians.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but that's a separate matter, you can simply widen the sidewalk into the road to add the cycling lane.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, sure, that's cool

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why's it better than ridewithgps, which is superb?

</comment><comment><USER35> "When he is not writing sick c++ programs he is most likely writing sick music."

This kid is pretty cool.</comment>


Antisurveillance clothes foil cameras by making you look like a car - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/anti-surveillance-clothes-foil-cameras-by-making-you-look-like-a-car/ <comment><USER2> Sir are you classified as a human? Negative, I am a meat popsicle.</comment>


Google Shuts Off Gizmo5 Service - <AUTHOR>

This email was sent out to all Gizmo5 users:
Hello,
Gizmo5 is writing to let you know that we will no longer be providing service starting on April 3, 2011. A week from today, March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to add credit to your account.
Although the standalone Gizmo5 client will no longer be available, we have since launched the ability to call phones from within Gmail at even more affordable rates.
If you purchased calling credit and have a balance remaining in your account, you can request a refund by logging in to http://my.gizmo5.com. If you are in the United States, you can instead choose to transfer your credit to a Google Voice account, so it can be used for calling from Google Voice or Gmail. If you don't have a Google Voice account, please create one so that we can transfer your credit.
Please request a call credit transfer or refund by April 3, 2011. If you don't request a call credit transfer or refund by this date, we will automatically refund your remaining call credit via the payment method you originally used to purchase the credit. Note that if you paid via Moneybookers or if the credit card on file has expired, we will not be able to automatically refund your unused credit, so please log in to initiate the refund process.
Thank you,
The Gizmo5 Team
You have received this mandatory service announcement email to update you about important changes to your Gizmo5 account. <comment><AUTHOR> Also covered by TechCrunch: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/04/google-to-shut- down-gizmo5-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/04/google-to-shut-down- gizmo5-on-april-3/)</comment>


How do you keep your snippets organised? - <AUTHOR>

Best thing I found so far is this gist plugin for sublime but it still feels like there should be something better out there. Maybe something with tags/categories. <comment><USER2> What do you mean by "snippets" exactly?

<comment><AUTHOR> little pieces of text(code in general) that I want to remember/have available somewhere but that doesn't really belong in the code's repository. For example a certain solr query that I use to test out different things, or a certain list of commands I need to run every 2-3 weeks to parse a log in a certain way.</comment></comment>


Coherence Penalty for Humans - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/2018/01/coherence-penalty-for-humans/ <comment><USER2> A manager went to the Master Programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the Master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?"

"It will take one year," said the Master promptly.

"But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?"

The Master Programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years."

"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"

The Master Programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be completed," he said.

<comment><USER3> A great koan, thank you.

There's also a related, from-the-trenches, story:

It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360\. The manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities.

The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they could write the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months, three more than the schedule allowed.

The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they could prepare the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating; it would be well- done and practical, and he could do it on schedule. Futhermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs for ten months.

To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and it was. He was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it added a year to debugging time.

\-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"

<comment><USER4> That sounds specious - grass is greener fallacy. The evidence was that the CP team failed at the job. But where is the evidence that the architecture team would succeed?

The general suspicion of TMMM is that it extrapolates from failure but assumes that some untried else would be better.

<comment><USER5> > _That sounds specious - grass is greener fallacy. The evidence was that the > CP team failed at the job. But where is the evidence that the architecture > team would succeed?_

Anybody who has worked for a couple of decades of large software project, doesn't need any, cause they have seen this play out time and again. Brooks doubly so -- he literally wrote the book on software development timelines.

Sure, technically you're right.

But it's not like every piece knowledge needs to come packaged in a fancy LaTeX, with confidence intervals, and control groups. Sometimes experience alone is enough to assure us that the rain is wet and that a team of 150 will invariably fail in this way when assigned such a task compared to a team of 10.

<comment><USER6> Seems like a good way to go would be 15 isolated teams of 10. Some teams might make the schedule. Pick the best project at that point. Big bonuses for the people that get it done and extra for the final winners. Seems like a huge waste of effort, but it looks like that is the way to go. This would be similar to what happens when a company just buys a small startup that has created what they need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the article. I think, in general, (project) management could learn a lot from computer science. People working on operating systems etc. figured out solutions to a lot of problems like scheduling and so on.

Another similar penalty with humans that is often ignored is caching of skills into working memory.

For example, consider a process, like writing an expense, that is really simple. Because it's simple, it might be tempting not have a specialized person do it and instead having every person do it on the need basis. But then, if it's done only rarely, people will have to learn it each time, or ask somebody how to do it, spending lot more time on it due to what are pretty much cache misses, and it would be more efficient to have a specialist do it, because then he would do it every day and had all the process corner cases in working memory.

Similar problem with caching happens when say a programmer multitasks on several different things at a time. In that case, the cache (working memory) is completely trashed every time a task is switched.

<comment><USER8> _For example, consider a process, like writing an expense, that is really simple. Because it 's simple, it might be tempting not have a specialized person do it and instead having every person do it on the need basis. But then, if it's done only rarely, people will have to learn it each time, or ask somebody how to do it, spending lot more time on it due to what are pretty much cache misses, and it would be more efficient to have a specialist do it, because then he would do it every day and had all the process corner cases in working memory._

This is true, but it's important to remember that people aren't machines. Going too far down the division-of-labour route risks losing sight of what you're actually trying to achieve. Certainly in my case, that makes it a lot harder to perform my best, and it reduces the chance of spotting different ways to slice-and-dice the problem.</comment></comment>


Nunavut is the Largest Electoral District (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://brilliantmaps.com/nunavut-electoral-district/ <comment><USER2> Here in Prince Edward Island (PEI) Canada the province is 5,660 square kilometers with a population of about 150,000 people.

Nunavut, Yukon and NWT combined have a land area of almost 4 million square kilometers and a population of about 120,000 people.

PEI has four members of parliament (MP) the three territories combined have three members. Population-wise it works out but the land difference is so crazy. I think Canada should be all PEI-size provinces.

<comment><USER3> PEI has an outsized number of MPs for their population though. Comparatively, Alberta gets 1 MP for each 120,000 people.

<comment><USER4> Some sort of home ice advantage I assume.

<comment><USER2> 32 years older than Alberta. First dibs for the older brother.

<comment><USER3> Neither. There's a clause that you can't have less seats than you did in 1985. Alberta's & Canada's population have grown much more than the 25000 people that PEI's has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's up with the map showing that all of hudson bay belongs to Nunavut? Surely some of it belongs to the other adjacent provinces?

<comment><USER6> As far as I can gather, all the islands of the Hudson Bay are considered part of Nunavut (even those in James Bay), but I don't think all the water belongs to Nunavut.

<comment><USER7> Not every island either, just most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_constituencies_of_t...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_constituencies_of_the_Italian_Parliament)

A local guy is a member of the Italian parliament, his electorate is Asia, Oceania, Africa and Antarctica.

</comment><comment><USER9> Feels a little cheeky to include so much water, where people little can't—-rather than don't—-live.

<comment><USER10> Lot of that water becomes land during the winter. You'd hope that the people of Nunavut, if anyone, would vote with concern for things like climate change affecting polar bears (which live, as it happens, exclusively _in_ Nunavut.)

Mind you, the real point was just to include all the islands inhabited mostly by Inuit, since the point of the creation of Nunavut in the first place was to give the Inuit a voice when previously they were drowned out as a minority part of the NWT. It's the "good kind" of gerrymandering, where a distinct population that has a clear geographic boundary gets its own representation.

<comment><USER3> >which live, as it happens, exclusively in Nunavut

Clearly you've never been to Churchill Manitoba.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't Greenland larger? It sends two mandates to the Danish Parliament.

<comment><USER11> I think it's considering only single member districts. If you count multi- member districts, Western Australia sends six members to the Australian Senate and it's 2.6 mio sq km. There's probably others around too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The title should be updated to reflect the 2015 article date.

<comment><USER13> Added. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think comments here seem to be missing the point, which isn't so much that Nunavut is geographically huge, but that Canada doesn't seem to have anything like the principle of one person one vote. There's huge disparity between the electors or people per district figures - 1:8. That's some epic malapportionment.

Is there any kind of movement in Canada to introduce democracy? Americans regularly complain about their undemocratic constitution, giving equal say to sheep in the middle of nowhere and humans in New York. The UK has a few problematic cases, but they're easily removed and maintained because they want to maintain them.

But Canada's excuse is that they can't change their constitution — indeed, they continue to use the UK parliament to change what ought to be part of their constitution, that's how cowardly they are. Why is Canada considered so much a centre of democracy when all the evidence is against that notion?

<comment><USER14> The territories each get their own riding for a few legitimate reasons: one, it would be messy to have a rising cross territorial/provincial borders. Two, the north already gets ignored by southern politicians all the time: they have been suffering from food security issues for decades, for example. Three, the "territories" are a large geographic extent mostly comprised of tiny communities of a few hundred to a few thousand people each separated by hundreds of kilometers. If the entire territories were a single riding, the MP for that riding would have a tough time making herself available in person for all her constituents (they have a tough enough time of this already).

Canada hasn't had to use the UK for constitutional amendments since the passage of the _Constitution Act_ in 1982. There is proscribed amendment formula now: the resolution must pass the Commons, the Senate, and be ratified by the provincial legislatures of at least 2/3rds of the provinces comprising at least 50% of the population.

<comment><USER15> Yup. Ive never heard a canadian reference any need to ask the UK for permission to do anything. Such remarks always come from outsiders who have spent too much time on wikipedia reading about how the Queen "owns" canada. Realworld is never so simple.</comment></comment></comment>


Local Library Would Like to Remind Everyone Its Shit Is Free - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/comedy-corner/3c369fb7d704

<comment><USER2> I grew up in a poor rural county with a smattering of libraries. The local branch was a small single room building with maybe 1500-2000 books, but I practically lived there. On occasion I'd visit the central library and just walk among the aisles looking at all of the amazing books. I'd easily spend 7 or 8 hours there, skipping meals.

After the Internet, I (like many people) kind of stopped going, I was spending less time reading for pleasure and more time studying and web surfing. Libraries really struggled during this time finding a purpose. But there's been a definite resurgence in the last few years and I, and it seems many others, really enjoy spending time in libraries. Quite often, when I'm on a work-from-home day, I'll just spend the day working out of the local library. It's quiet, I can focus, the WiFi is decent for what I need to do.

I definitely take them for granted -- considering them as essential for civilization as indoor plumbing. One of the things that has surprised me as I've traveled around the world is how rare public free libraries are and in a sense how at risk this puts the local public library. "If <country> doesn't need public libraries why should <insert US state>?" is something I've heard from time to time.

My wife grew up in a country _without_ free public libraries. They had specialized "study libraries" you pay a monthly fee to go to, or "book loan" libraries where you check out a stack of comic books in a series and return them when you're done, but again you pay for this service. I don't think she has quite the appreciation I do for the public library system, but on occasion I can get her to go to one for isolated work and she's checked out and read a handful of books.

Interestingly, in her home country the government, in search of global cachet, has started building vast public city libraries, a bit like the New York public Library. But they haven't yet turned this into a full-fledged library system like here in the US. It's still a significant travel expense from many places to get to one of the few free public libraries there.

But imagine the social and economic implications if kids did their after school studies at the local free library branch then at an expensive and often poorly run (and sometimes illegal) "study libraries" that almost every Korean kid goes to.

</comment><comment><USER3> My local library has a lot of books available that I can just download and read on my Kindle.

Don't want to pay $9 for a kindle book you will read once, get it from the library in 5 minutes for free. All you need is a library card.

<comment><USER4> I live in Toronto, where the public library system has the highest circulation-per-capita in the North America, and even here we pay about $5.50 (in taxes) for each book borrowed from the library. Yes, it is free at the point of use, but libraries are not cheap to operate.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure cost/book loaned is the best measure of a library's performance.

In my local area (a suburb of Washington D.C.), I have 2 brand new libraries about 5-10 minutes from my house, with another one planned within walking distance. At both the extant libraries, book loaning is just part of the services offered by the library.

For example, on any given day you can go in after school and the libraries will be packed to the gills with students using them as after school study centers -- with private group study rooms and the like. Private tutors often meet with their students in the library as well instead of people's houses as it lets them have a centralized place where they can see 3 or 4 students in a row with high efficiency.

They also offer a pretty full schedule of community events, for example one of my county libraries has regular meet-ups for parents of autistic kids. The kids get together and play videogames and the parents meet with a special educator.

I've also attended talks by authors of niche books that would never get a chance in a major book chain. One of the best I recall was a talk by a retired player about his days as a professional baseball player in the Negro Leagues.

Libraries are more than just a cheap alternative to a book store, they're major community centers dedicated to learning in general.

I'd happily pay $10 a book loaned to keep them around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It took me looking for the described video for me to realize this was The Onion.

I really wanted to see the president of a library board say they had a 'shit ton' of books.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.propublica.org/article/remember-when-the- patriot-...](http://www.propublica.org/article/remember-when-the-patriot-act- debate-was-about-library-records)

</comment><comment><USER7> How long will it be before ereaders are so cheap and disposable that libraries loan them out instead of physical books? Have to think it's not that far off, at least before it starts happening here and there.

<comment><USER8> This already happens at the library in the town I grew up in: [http://brookslibraryvt.org/borrow/digital- media](http://brookslibraryvt.org/borrow/digital-media)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, as more media is created the worth of curated collections increases faster than the worth of the media itself. If I were in charge of libraries, I'd be looking into that aspect of things. Because, right now, I walk into libraries and they're just mediocre collections of books I've no interest in.

<comment><USER10> Libraries do curate their collections, but they serve a lot of different people and they more closely accomplish their mission by having the books 10 different kinds of people want than by having just the books one person wants.

If they seem to be falling behind on book replacement or addition, it's probably for financial reasons. If they are woefully out of date or off base in a particular section (computer science is common, sadly), then they could probably use your expertise. I help pick finance books for one library.

However, public libraries ultimately expect people with particular and/or extensive interests to be able to search the catalog and order books through inter library loan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Like book shops libraries need to move with the times. Adding a DVD section isn't it. That just makes them like blockbusters.

They should be local archives of local things, with content online. Plus free Internet terminals and wifi.

<comment><USER12> They need to do more than that. Local libraries of physical media are dead. They need to close up and take their significant tax burden off of their citizenry.

Pre-internet, I used to use the library quite often. I probably haven't been inside one in 10 years now. Their time is past, they need to die.

<comment><AUTHOR> How about people that do not know how to effectually search the internet to get the social, economic, and political information to make informed decisions in their lives?

<comment><USER13> Even with effectively searching the internet I'd agree that with the exception of web/computer/programming stuff, it's impossible to find on the internet the kind of wide-variety, high-quality information the library has in such a distilled form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Local library business hours are terrible.

<comment><USER15> Here they're 10A - 9P M-Th, 10A - 6P FSa, and 12P - 5P Sunday.

Pretty respectable hours if you ask me.

<comment><USER16> Ours are closed Sunday and Monday, close at 6 on fri/sat, and open at 1pm on Tue. For me it's pretty hard to get to the library sometimes, but I suspect the hours work well for the people that need in-library time the most (school children, retired, and out of work). I'd prefer to pay the taxes for additional access, though. Nothing better than spending a rainy Sunday afternoon in the library (not that we hardly ever have one here in CA)</comment></comment></comment>


How To Make SIP Calls Over IPv6 Using Linphone (on Mac, Windows, Linux) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/2011/04/08/how-to-make-sip-calls-over-ipv6-using-linphone-on-mac-windows-linux/http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/2011/04/08/how-to-make-sip-calls-over-ipv6-using-linphone-on-mac-windows-linux/

<comment><AUTHOR> If other HN readers have used certain softphones to make SIP calls over IPv6, I'd definitely be interested to hear about what works. (thanks!)</comment>


Show HN: We're giving away our Billing Software - <AUTHOR>

We're looking for feedback to make the best billing software out there. Please signup and let us know what you think! Thanks!<p>http://bit.ly/uMPjuS <comment><USER2> Sorry, but even free stuff needs to make a sales pitch to get me to look at it for more that 10secs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay. We provide a simple way to send estimates, bills, and get paid. No longer do you have to send people an invoice via paypal and send them to a paypal page. Also, If your using authorize.net, you can send estimates, bills, recurring bills, and create payment pages via clientbiller all for FREE.</comment></comment>


ValueStream: DevOps Metrics – Observing Delivery Across Multiple Systems - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dm03514/valuestream-devops-metrics-observing-delivery-across-multiple-systems-7ae76a6e8deb <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Author here, I would very much love to hear your experiences capturing these "core" DevOps metrics. Are you able to do it successfully? What approach do you take?</comment>


Uber's Move Away from PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2016/08/ubers-move-away-from-postgresql.html <comment><USER2> It has been pointed out before, but I'll mention again. It is impressive how PostreSQL community reacted. There was no immature name calling, no blaming users. They analyze the problem, mention possible solutions, admit known shortcomings and so on. This is a community worth being a part of and engineers worth working with.

<comment><USER3> I completely agree. It's human nature to become defensive when presented with conflict with your current way of thinking, and yet here they didn't do that.

I thought that this article was a very well reasoned and thoughtful response to the Uber article and gives me hope that PostgreSQL will continue to improve.

<comment><USER4> > "It's human nature"

Rather than making difficult-to-prove statements about humans that imply some sort of just moral backing for behavior, perhaps we should just refer to it as "something [lots of] people do."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Changing database platforms is a big project, and not something you do without consulting experts first.

More than anything, I'm shocked that Uber eng mgmt didn't reach out to the postgres core team for help first -- as you can see, they'd gladly have helped.

</comment><comment><USER6> So far is very cool how dramas were avoided regarding to this switch. I think that even more "corporate" entities should switch to acting like Postgres folks, taking it well when people move away from their systems. Sometimes moving away from a system is not necessarily _just_ a technological matter: people get tired of how a given system is designed, of its complexities or on the contrary of its simplicity that does not hide low level details. Certain times the problem is the lack of high quality documentation and information about how to run such systems at non-obvious scale. I even saw people moving away to technologies because they were struggling with their initial stack, and a vendor of the target technology approached them saying "we can help for free if you switch to X". There are certain situations where a system that is not performing well for workload A could be tuned to work well but there is another that can just be used out of the box with success for the same workload. To avoid becoming a super expert of everything is also an option. The thing I don't understand about all this, is the propaganda made by the switchers. Sometimes you see companies almost working with PR firms of database XYZ (the target of the switch) in order to handle the communication. Or blog posts from well known companies blaming certain databases in a way that will be undetected by 95% of readers, but where the problem is, actually, a misunderstanding of how the system works (in part the Uber case qualifies apparently?). So a good rule could be: we have tons of open solutions now, use what you want, switch all the times you want, if you really care blog about your switch, but: 1) Tell about your experience in a subjective way not stressing the shortcomings you saw in your former system of choice as general problems. 2) Consider instead blogging what you are doing with your new system and why it performs well, instead of analyzing while the previous one did not work. 3) If you really want to make a comparative analysis, put weeks of work on it, so that you make the _best_ you can in order to really explore all the tuning and options that were available in the system you are abandoning. If after the post the community will point you in the direction of errors, both correct your old post and make a new post with updates. So I think it's great to see folks with a vibe like Postres are still around, but conflicts could be avoided also by being more soft in criticizing solutions that, after all, kept your business running for months or years.

</comment><comment><USER7> From the linked article at [http://use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2016-07-29/on- ubers-choic...](http://use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2016-07-29/on-ubers-choice- of-databases)

"Unfortunately, the article doesn't make this very clear because it doesn't mention how their requirements changed with the introduction of Schemaless compared to 2013, when they migrated from MySQL to PostgreSQL."

MySQL -> PostgreSQL -> MySQL ...

Need to keep these developers busy!

But seriously, migrating databases is a huge effort from my experience, where a lot of preperation needs to take place to not corrupt any data or get data in an inconsistent state.

So this takes quite some engineering effort away from feature development.

</comment><comment><USER8> This article strikes me as more honest/objective than [http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/thoughts-on-ubers-list-of- postgr...](http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/thoughts-on-ubers-list-of-postgres- limitations/).

</comment><comment><USER9> Uber says the moved to their "schemaless", which means, as far as I understand, that every update will always touch at least one index. Hence am not sure I understand why Robert and Markus are not clear about the HOT vs Non-HOT case; all the updates will be Non-HOT.

<comment><USER10> As I understand it, Schemaless is append only, so there are no updates at all.

<comment><USER9> There are updates on the "index" tables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://github.com/posix4e/jsoncdc](https://github.com/posix4e/jsoncdc)

</comment><comment><USER12> I've had success with bucardo, not sure if they tried that. Going to mysql will pose its own set of problems because both of these databases are not really designed for that kind of scale.

<comment><USER13> > because both of these databases are not really designed for that kind of > scale

citation needed, because AFAIK that's not true. Implemented right mysql can scale as far a as you want it to.</comment></comment>


Security Firm Sued for Failing to Detect Malware That Caused a 2009 Breach - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/security-firm-sued-for-failing-to-detect-malware-that-caused-a-2009-breach/ <comment><USER2> This paragraph is pretty neat (assuming it's true):

"The lawsuit claims that Visa discovered that Trustwave ignored the fact that Heartland didn't run a firewall, was using vendor-supplied passwords, didn't have sufficient protection for the storage system used for card data, failed to assign unique identification to each person accessing its system, and had failed to monitor servers and cardholder data at regular intervals."</comment>


Ask HN: How to be credited as the publisher of my own software? - <AUTHOR> So, I made this game, Wizznic! some years back. Open source and all, and while it's not great, I still take some pride in it.
Someone else made an unofficial port for Android, I've got no beef with them. (Yes, Wizznic! is a re-implementation of Puzznic, but an improved one and definitely a clean-room implementation)
Google, however, will display them as the publisher of that game, even though they're only publishing an unofficial port for an unsupported platform.
This rubs me the wrong way, even the google search results clearly shows that they're not the official publisher.
Lots of documentation has been provided, source-code repositories, blog posts.. I even emailed them photo id of myself to prove that I exist, but I could not claim the panel, since I am a person, and not a company, and apparently, persons cannot publish software.
What to do now?
Can I start a campaign somehow?
If I could, I'd like to start it here, as I urge you to search on google for Wizznic! and leave feedback where you mark "Mikrosoft Android" as factually wrong.. <comment><USER2> What is the license of your project? Many licences don't require the original programmer to be credited, or they require only to keep the name in the source code.

<comment><AUTHOR> The license is GPLv3, I'm not really thinking about crediting, for example in a port. I'm talking about who the publisher of the program is, and how silly it is that google can get away with ignoring stuff like this, I wonder how many panels are wrong.</comment></comment>


Picking holes in mathematics: Finitely stated, undecidable propositions - <AUTHOR> http://plus.maths.org/content/picking-holes-mathematics <comment><USER2> Mathematicians have been dealing with this problem in concrete ways for longer than implied. For instance, the necessity of the parallel postulate for Euclidian geometry and the existence of non-Euclidean geometries where it doesn't hold were demonstrated in the 19th century. The question of how many and which axioms are required as the basis of a field of mathematics has long been known to be a valid, meaningful question.

What Gödel proved is that in the formal systems we use to model mathematical propositions and proofs, there is no finite number of axioms that enable you to prove or disprove all of the propositions that can be formulated. For someone who grew up in the post-Gödel world, this isn't shocking at all and looks like a natural progression from previous results. You need a certain number of postulates. To get Euclidean geometry, for example, you need the parallel postulate. It's natural to ask how many postulates you need to decide all interesting mathematical questions, and there's no reason to assume the answer to that question is finite. Apparently, that attitude reflects a lot of hindsight bias, but there is no way for us to experience the shock of Gödel's work the way it was experienced by mathematicians at the time, since the books we learn from now are written by mathematicians who have already digested Gödel's discoveries.

</comment><comment><USER3> As he posted on the FOM mailing list earlier this month, the 'final' version of Friedman's book on boolean relation theory is now up on his website. [1] It clocks in at around 900 pages. Not for the faint of heart.

[1] <http://www.cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2011-May/015383.html>

<comment><USER4> For those interested, the crux of Friedman's argument for pursuing examples of "Concrete" Incompleteness is:

> The second rationale for pursuing Concrete Mathematical Incompleteness > preserves ZFC as the ambitious target. The idea is that normal mathematical > activity up to now represents only an infinitesimal portion of eventual > mathematical activity. Even if current mathematical activity does not give > rise to Concrete Mathematical Incompleteness from ZFC, this is a very poor > indication of whether this will continue to be the case, particularly far > out into the future.

page 8 in <http://www.math.osu.edu/~friedman/pdf/0EntireBk051411.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> tldr; Gödel proved the incompleteness of finite axiomatizations of arithmetic. Further more there is no maximum set of unprovable sentences in arithmetic. Therefore, there must be interesting and unprovable sentences in arithmetic.

The article discusses a couple such sentences but unfortunately does not actually state the sentences, which is the interesting part.

Edit: unsurprisingly: "The extent to which we have concrete incompleteness and what the wider implications are, will not be clear for hundreds of years, if not longer." -- Friedman

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious: If you add a new axiom in order to make a undecidable proposition decidable, will this new axiom add more than one undecidable proposition, or is the number of new undecidable propositions unknown? Or are there infinitely undecidable propositions for every set of rules?

If the former is true, couldn't we theoretically just apply axioms in order to solve undecidable propositions which have a practical application if solved? Or will it practically be hard to find these axioms?

<comment><USER6> It's been a long time since I had my Theory of Computation class, but as I recall, the proof that there are computationally undecidable questions uses the same diagonalization technique[1] used to demonstrate that the real numbers are not countably infinite.

The same technique can be used to show there are still computationally undecidable questions if you have a Turing Machine with an Oracle.

This proof technique suggests not only are there undecidable questions, there are uncountably many of them. Even if you have an Oracle.

[1] c.f. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantors_diagonal_argument>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you like this, you'll like that:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567222>

<comment><USER7> Links to HN post on "Searching for the missing truth: Axioms and infinities in mathematics".</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does Ribbon's in-stream Twitter payment work? - <AUTHOR>

Recently, Ribbon.io announced in-stream payment option that lets you buy things without clicking away from Twitter.com.<p>How did Ribbon implement this? <comment><USER2> This article pretty much explains it.

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/well-that-was-fast- twitter-...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/well-that-was-fast-twitter-shut- down-ribbons-newly-launched-in-stream-payments-feature-built-using-twitter- card-technology/)

More specifically, it uses the Twitter "Player" card to load an iFrame with a separately hosted Ribbon checkout page. Example here: <https://www.ribbon.co/086f0a?twitter=true></comment>


Why does Amazon have more books from the 1880s than the 1980s? Blame copyright - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/07/31/why-does-amazon-have-more-books-from-the-1880s-than-the-1980s-blame-copyright/?tid=rssfeed <comment><USER3> Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution spells out the Enumerated Powers of Congress:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumerated_powers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumerated_powers)

Therein lies the Copyright Clause:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause)

Which states:

 _To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries._

The key phrase here is "securing for limited Times". Limited.

For all intents and purposes, we have made copyright unlimited. If you disagree, ask yourself... when Mickey Mouse is up for the public domain again in 6 years do you really believe it won't be extended again? As the article states, the original copyright term was 14 years in the Copyright Act of 1790 unless the copyright holder was still alive after 14 years in which case they could renew for another 14 years:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1790](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1790)

As it stands now, it's until the life of the author + 70 years. Although it's hard to say that with a straight face since anytime Mickey Mouse has been up for public domain it has gotten extended and will likely continue to be extended.

Biggest irony? Many of Disney's biggest works are based on public domain works. Some of them would not have been in the public domain had copyright been as long as Disney has made it to protect their own characters from going into the public domain.

<comment><USER4> I disagree. The real key phrase is _To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts_

Copyrights don't exist for the benefit of the owner, they exist to benefit society. Today's laws are a perverse misinterpretation of copyright's original intent.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the goal is _" To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts_." But the means to that end is to incentivize creators by granting them exclusive rights to the things that they create for a certain period of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing that is not talked about enough, and not mentioned in the article, is the underlying reason. That reason, of course, is Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain the Disney lobby has congress extend the copyright expiration.

<comment><USER7> I don't think Mickey Mouse itself is the main reason for Disney to lobby on prolongation of copyright.

If it was just Mickey, Disney would survive that somehow, but well, Hollywood started to be relevant in about 1920's, and Mickey was created in 1928, so it coincides very well.

<comment><USER8> Sonny Bono also played a part.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act)

"also known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Look, I'm all for limiting copyright but let's think about exactly what you're looking at vs what's in the original study ([http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2295085_code...](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2295085_code227781.pdf?abstractid=2290181&mirid=2)).

The WaPo chart is for _editions_ , not _titles_. If you list by decade for titles -- actual original works of creativity -- the 2000s utterly demolish each prior decade within this sample, and the 1990s surpass most, by the study author's own estimate (rather than manually identify duplicate titles, the author seems to havbe looked at some subsample and divided the whole public domain batch by 4).

See Figure 2 in the study.

It makes sense that public domain books have way more editions than titles; it is a market of duplication and redundancy, where you differentiate yourself using packaging and SEO type tactics. A spammy market, in other words. Printing a public domain book mainly involves some scanning, layout work using widely available software, and sending it off to the printer ("These tasks can be performed in less than a day," says the study). Oh, except you don't even need to scan anything for one of the many works already online, and you don't need to print anything if you use a print-on-demand service. So a lot of the "editions" in the WaPo chart are simply crap duplication garbage angling for a few pennies profit.

Now you can still make a case against lengthy copyright with this data, but it's trickier (because it's more honest). You can point out the population has grown tremendously and also as the study states: "In a world without copyright, one would expect a fairly smoothly downward sloping curve from the decade 2000-2010 to the decade of 1800-1810... Instead, the curve declines sharply and quickly, and then rebounds significantly for books currently in the public domain initially published before 1923."

The WaPo includes a paragraph summarizing this but the chart used is not the more honest Figure 2 but the misleading Figure 1.

Another issue? All the book figures in the study are based on an undisclosed set of subcategories of Amazon's "Literature and Fiction" category, a total of 7000 or so results later whittled down to 2317 based on a cross check with library of congress. What happens when all categories, the full range of textual creative expression, are included? We don't know.

If you want to make a convincing case that copyright terms are too long, use convincing data. "Look, public domain means more heavily duplicated garbage editions on Amazon!" is not particularly convincing.

<comment><USER10> I have several thousand books from the 80's and 90's. Very few are available. Consider one example:

"Mastering The MFC for Windows 95 using Symantec C++" by Richard Parker published by Thomson Computer Press.

It's long out of print, and I wished to make it available to my customers. I contacted the author, he was all for it, but said he didn't have the rights, I'd have to contact the publisher.

The publisher is out of business. I could find nothing on who owned the rights. Dead ends everywhere I looked.

So everybody loses. The author, the publisher, me, and my customers.

BTW, there is one used copy for sale on amazon for $14,763.21:

[http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Mfc-Windows-Using- Symantec/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Mfc-Windows-Using- Symantec/dp/1850328501/)

<comment><USER11> Is there any aspect of that book that motivates that price?

<comment><USER12> Obscure used books on Amazon tend to get automatically bid up to astronomical prices, as the repricing bots mistake the noise of an empty market for a signal: [http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358](http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358)

As of this moment, the most expensive book on Amazon is going for one _billion_ dollars: [http://www.amazon.com/s?rh=n%3A283155&field-is-available- new...](http://www.amazon.com/s?rh=n%3A283155&field-is-available- new=1&ie=UTF8#/ref=sr_st?qid=1303657895&rh=n%3A283155&sort=inversepricerank)

<comment><USER13> There's an insurance scam just waiting to happen here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's also important to note how awesome books from the late-19th early-20th century are. Lots of good Weird Fiction that is still secretly influential; read more Arthur Machen [http://books.google.com/books?id=Re4MAAAAYAAJ&dq=the%20great...](http://books.google.com/books?id=Re4MAAAAYAAJ&dq=the%20great%20god%20pan&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=the%20great%20god%20pan&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER15> Copyrights are a deal passed between society and authors to encourage creative production. If they create something new, they can live off it for sometime until their copyright expires. Extending copyrights years after the author's death may serve a corporation or their children that can live on that rent but fails at establishing an incentive for creation.

This video by CGP Grey summaries the problem pretty well ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4))

<comment><USER16> How do you know it fails?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The title and the premise of the article are misleading.

There were not more works created in the 1880s than the 1980s that Amazon can sell -- that would suggest that human productivity per capita was _significantly_ larger than it is today thanks to different copyright laws, especially since the literary population was much smaller than it is today.

In fact, the article is referring to the number of works _multiplied by the number of releases_. IOW, the same work is being counted multiple (or even hundreds of) times.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well authors from the 80's are mostly still alive and would like to be able to feed themselves, their partner and cats

<comment><USER19> At what point do we, as a society, say you should probably create new works in order to feed yourself, your partner, and your cats?

Copyright, like patents, is an economic policy. By guaranteeing a limited-term exclusivity you encourage the creation of new works. This cuts both ways: if the term is too short creators are disincentivized, as anything they create will shortly be copied before they can make substantial money from it; if the term is too long you can just coast forever without creating more work.

There's a balancing point here. I don't think there's anything intrinsically justifying that you should be able to make a living off a work you wrote 30+ years ago.

<comment><USER20> _I don 't think there's anything intrinsically justifying that you should be able to make a living off a work you wrote 30+ years ago_

Throwing away the whole publishing model for a second, why not? If someone's willing to buy X and X came out in the 80's, shouldn't the creator of X get a share?

Otherwise, I'd imagine we end up with the same planned obsolescence that plagues the textbook industry: swap chapters six and eight, add a few new problems, call it a new edition and charge another $20.

<comment><USER19> > _" If someone's willing to buy X and X came out in the 80's, shouldn't the > creator of X get a share?"_

Maybe? For what reason?

I get where you're coming from - but the whole notion that the "creator should get a share" comes only because of our current understanding of IP ownership. It hasn't always been this way, and odds are it won't always be this way. It may be the norm now, but is there an objectively good reason why it ought to _remain_ the norm?

If I wrote a smash hit song when I was 20, should I get "a share" every time someone plays it 30 years from now? 50? Should my children get a share? There certainly isn't any notion of morality, in our society and most others, that this should be the case.

Which leaves copyright as economic policy. At that point the notion of whether or not we "should" do something is entirely based on the economic benefits it generates for society. Would I create more work for the public to enjoy if the copyright term was 10 years? 20? 30?

To take this example in a different direction - should the artist of a painting get a cut when you sell the painting to someone else? They _did_ create it after all. People are still deriving value off of it, and even willing to pay for it, so why should the creator not get a share? The notion of whether or not someone _should_ get a cut of anything is incredibly subjective, and is more related to the mores and standards of the time rather than any objective (or even subjective) notions of fairness/justice.

<comment><USER20> I think my ideal interpretation of how IP ownership should work would be that if you -- the creator -- own the IP, you deserve a share of value derived from it. But if you no longer own it (so, if you sell the painting, so to speak), then you aren't.

 _The notion of whether or not someone should get a cut of anything is incredibly subjective, and is more related to the mores and standards of the time rather than any objective (or even subjective) notions of fairness /justice._

I agree. I probably should have phrased my question better than using a vague word like _should_ , since I meant it in more of a economic sense of incentivizing valuable work than a moral sense.

<comment><USER19> > _" But if you no longer own it (so, if you sell the painting, so to speak), > then you aren't."_

But that isn't IP. That's the creation of physical objects - and our understanding of it fairly nuanced and not very controversial. IP by definition cannot be "lost" by the creator, since it's about ideas and knowledge rather than their physical manifestations of said ideas.

A painter may "lose" a painting when they sell it, that's not the point under contention. The contention is, for example, if the painter should be compensated if the new owner replicates it and beings selling copies.

IP ownership cannot go by a "you no longer own it, it's fair game" state, because IP _by definition_ cannot be meaningfully removed from one person and given to another.

See: music. I give you CD with my music on it - should I be compensated if you distribute copies of this music? Should I be compensated if you perform this composition on your own (i.e. a cover)? Who "owns" the music?

<comment><USER21> > IP by definition cannot be "lost" by the creator

Yes, it can. "Property" is the right to control, not the subject of the rights. IP is lost in the same way that physical property rights are lost -- I can sell physical property and retain possession of the physical object that is the subject of property rights, but still have lost the property _as such_.

<comment><USER22> Calling it property is considered a misnomer by many (eg [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectu...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property) ) and in fact, in certain jurisdictions, there are certain intellectual property rights that cannot be lost by the creator ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights_%28copyright_law%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights_%28copyright_law%29#Worldwide_situation) ).

<comment><USER21> > Calling it property is considered a misnomer by many

Yes, and those people don't understand property.(The problem isn't their understanding of IP -- most of what they say about the nature of IP is correct; the problem is that they don't understand real property, tangible personal property, and intangible personal property other than IP, because if they did, they would understand that the contrasts they attempt to draw are specious.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love old books, and was amusing myself by reading a geology text from around 1880. It was my first exposure to that science. It amused as I started that I might end up with a good education, a hundred years out of date. As I continued I came to suspect that geology hasn't really changed all that much.

As much as I'd like ~50 year copyright on all classes of works, the good news is that those 1880s texts really are very good. (See also the telegraphy love story that just came across HN.)

</comment><comment><USER24> One thing I love about Amazon, is many of these old classics are free on the kindle. I have read so many books and that many more to go and all are free. Yeah, if I wanted to I might be able to snag one at the library, but this is just too easy.

Dickens, Doyle, and Wells, are the most obvious, but just searching for free netted me people I never heard of.

So yes, while copyright does present issues that can be very troubling, there is such a wealth of stuff available unburdened by it. The difficulty is finding it.

<comment><USER25> You might be interested in Project Gutenberg. They offer over 42,000 free ebooks. Legally.

[http://www.gutenberg.org/](http://www.gutenberg.org/)

<comment><USER26> And it's pretty easy to move any of them over to the Kindle. (Or whatever eBook platform you use, I assume -- the Kindle is just the one I have experience with.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why will more books from the 1880s survive to be read 1000 years from now than books from the 1980's?

You know the chorus, everybody sing along, ok!

<comment><USER28> Because it was required that a copy be registered with the Library of Congress back then, if you wanted to copyright something.

edit: not sure why the downvote. I'll expand a bit.

The Copyright Act of 1870 required two copies of a work to be deposited with the Library of Congress in order to register the copyright -- creative works were not automatically under copyright.

Once that work passed into the public domain, anyone could request a copy of it from the Library of Congress (and then, if they wanted to, copy and distribute themselves). This is pretty important, because it pretty much guaranteed that people would have access to a work even after its copyright expired and was no longer actively being printed by the publisher or author.

<comment><USER29> You're probably getting downvotes because you're still required to do that to _register_ copyrights, which any remotely commercially-significant work will do. (You can only sue for damages in copyright infringement cases if the copyright is registered.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Some people here are supporting keeping works from 1923 on in copyright. Before 2019, Congress will surely take up legislation to prevent works from 1923 from entering the public domain, and this legislation will surely pass.

The argument made in support of this is false though. I am politically realistic about this, and from a perspective of political realism have no problem with with Disney pushing the 1923 goalposts for its works out to 2039. Or for the publishers of the Great Gatsby to push their copyright from 2021 to 2041. And so on. I realize this is political reality, as do most in this fight.

However, there are many works from 1923 sitting on library shelves where absolutely no one would re-register its copyright. They are orphaned, gathering dust, the paper deteriorating. It would be nice if orphaned, forgotten works no one will ever bother to re-register would enter the public domain as the laws currently allows. Project Gutenberg can digitize them, private publishers could even start reprinting them.

This is what the Public Domain Enhancement Act would have allowed for. Hollywood and the MPAA fought it and killed it.

History tells us that many works of Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras etc. have been lost. The same thing is happening now. Old books are sitting on library shelves, deteriorating. These orphaned works will no one will ever re- register will not be scanned, OCR'd and proofread by Project Gutenberg, will not be distributed by print or electronically by independent publishers.

 _This_ is where the argument lies. Some proponents of the extension here are talking about Disney and author compensation and so forth (although the youngest author I can conceive of would be an 18-year-old publishing in the last year, 1923 - and thus would be 114 when copyright goes out in 2019 - <USER2> that would be the absolute youngest author. I should note only four people currently living are verified to be 114 or over).

All of us know with 100% certainty that Congress will pass a law by 2019 keeping Disney works, The Great Gatsby etc. in copyright. This is political reality, and is impossible to stop. What we want is for orphaned works which no one would ever re-register to become public domain - as they are currently supposed to. At this point all talk of author compensation etc. disappears. Hollywood will keep making money on licensing The Great Gatsby, we will prevent orphaned works from becoming the lost Aristotle works, the lost Euclid works of the future.

Hollywood is fighting this, and will probably win, although if there was a mass movement against it, we could win orphaned works. Because at the end of the day Hollywood is not making licensing orphaned works.

But it shows how many of the arguments made here in support of extension are bogus. Because the fight is over orphaned works. We know the Mickey Mouse and Great Gatsby works will be kept by Hollywood. We just want abandoned, orphaned works. And if we organize and fight to get those, we just might get them into the public domain and preserve them.

<comment><USER31> It isn't just Hollywood and the MPAA. Although I don't agree with them, other organizations representing content creators such as photographers have also been very active in fighting just about any orphan works legislation. [http://asmp.org/articles/orphan- works.html#.UflfMmRATsk](http://asmp.org/articles/orphan- works.html#.UflfMmRATsk)

Their general position, as I understand it, is that a lot of the proposed orphaned works legislation would make it too easy for works to accidentally fall out of copyright and too burdensome for individuals to make sure their works stay registered.

<comment><USER30> > too burdensome for individuals to make sure their works stay registered.

Four people in the world are currently verified to be 114 years old are older. An eighteen-year-old taking a photograph in 1923 would be 114 in 2019 when their 1923 photograph might accidentally go out of copyright if they don't re- register it.

You use the language and arguments I am talking about. You say "individuals" re-registering "their" 1923 photos might have the position that it is "too burdensome for individuals to make sure their works stay registered." The reality is that _no_ individuals are making sure _their_ works stay registered. These people will all be dead - no one is going to see their works become public domain in the moments before they die at the age of 114. You're presenting a scenario which will not happen. No individuals protecting their own works are involved.

What exists are Getty Images and other corporations which can re-register their 1923 works if they had to. These companies will certainly re-register their most valuable works.

"Too easy for works to accidentally fall out of copyright" \- does anyone really think Disney is going to let Mickey Mouse fall out of copyright? Anything of value is going to be re-registered. Only things which have so little value that corporations don't bother to re-register them will become public domain. Particularly orphaned works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Old books and old movies don't sell at new media prices. They would cut into potential profits for new works.

That might seem like a good thing for new authors, but old work is predictable, whereas modern authors are -supposed- to be innovative ... a very important part of the idea of copyright.

I'm afraid that Sonny Bono was not a good person to decide the future of US copyright law or creative people. The limits on copyright tenure need to be restored.

</comment><comment><USER33> > In contrast, works published since 1923 may still be under copyright > protection, so publishers have to do legal research to find the copyright > owner (if any) and negotiate a license. That's a hassle, so works published > after 1923 are much less likely to be republished once they've gone out of > print.

This is about the weakest hand waving excuse for an argument relating to why copyright is bad that I've seen in a while.

<comment><USER34> Except that the whole point of copyright is to _enrich_ the public domain, not keep works out of it. It grants creators a limited monopoly on the work, after which it becomes part of our shared culture. Perpetual copyright and placing the burden of researching and protecting it on those who want to use a piece of culture has a chilling effect on future modification and creation.

Copyright was never intended to be perpetual or to enable large companies to lock down culture so that only they are allowed to create and distribute it.

<comment><USER33> Copyright isn't perpetual. I'm stating the above argument is weak and hand waving because it is assuming these works are not available strictly _because_ of copyright. It isn't that black and white. How many of these works wouldn't have ever been created if the author had no way to recoup his investment due to copyright?

<comment><USER35> Copyright is relatively new. Music, writing, art and all the rest flourished before it existed. What copyright added was the ability for non-creators (publishers, producers, companies) to make money off of the creators.

<comment><USER33> There isn't anything wrong with that. Authors still enter into these deals willingly because it is beneficial for them to do so. I highly doubt JK Rowling would be one of the richest people in the UK without help from her publisher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Because books from the 1980s sucked?

</comment><comment><USER37> At least we can take solace in the fact that Amazon sells more quality content than not.</comment>


Vigilantes Have Renamed "The new iPad" - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/tablets/#ipad-3-naming <comment><USER3> "we've come to expect precise and sequential product naming from Apple - <USER2> iPhone, followed by the iPhone 3G, 3GS, 4, and 4S."

I think Apple is correcting a mistake that they made. Most Apple laptop owners have no idea what generation product they have. I own a MacBook Air. Before that I owned some Macbooks, MacBook Pros, and Powerbooks. The same with iPods, though there was differentiation based on features (remember the iPod Photo?).

I suspect that the next iPhone will just be "the new iPhone" as well. There will be another "new iPad" released and then another "new iPhone". When you want an iPad or an iPhone, go buy one. It will be new unless it is used.

"Because of this precise naming, it's easy to identify and buy them used on secondary markets like eBay and Craigslist. However, if you're looking to buy the latest iPad, are you really just supposed to type "the new iPad" into a search box and reliably get results for the 3rd generation model?"

Yes, if buying a new iPad you should just be able to go to Apple.com or BestBuy.com and type in iPad to buy the newest one. As for buying them used or from unauthorized dealers, I can imagine Apple caring about that problem anytime soon.

<comment><USER4> While I appreciate the reasons Apple wants to step away from version-marking their devices, it causes massive confusion in a few important areas, at least assuming they aren't ready to lock down form-factors and connector cable formats forevermore.

eg:

"Does this case fit my new iPhone, or does it fit the old new iPhone or the old old new iPhone?"

I guess one way to deal with this would be for the aftermarket industry to start working with model years as is done with cars. If you're going to buy aftermarket add-ons for your Apple devices, know the year model, and then have the case/cable/etc people publish year model compatibility.

<comment><USER5> I think Apple would love to solve that "confusion" by just having you step into an Apple store with your device and ask the helpful employees for whatever accessory you want, and let them deal with figuring it out for you. Apple doesn't want the consumer to have to care about that at all.

<comment><USER6> > _Apple doesn't want the consumer to have to care about that at all._ //

Don't you mean "control". Apple doesn't want to allow the customer control over that at all. Like you say it makes it for more difficult to access after- market products that fit your device.

I've been really frustrated by a similar thing with an old laptop recently. The company reuses the exact same model name for vastly different devices - it's really hard to get good information, to access support, to purchase parts &c. simply because the idiots can't use a unique model name.

It's like a family choosing to name every male David Davidson ...

<comment><USER7> Control slices two ways. Control can be a burden.

<comment><USER8> Give me a break. Is knowing what version your iPhone is a burden when you want to purchase an aftermarket accessory? How is knowing a name a burden to the customer? Under a named system, even if the customer forgets the model number, he's still no worse off than if he were under Apple's lack-of-naming scheme.

Intentionally making naming confusing is not a benefit to the consumer AFAICT; it only potentially benefits Apple.

<comment><USER7> Some tech nerds are unable to empathize with normal people.

From the perspective of the majority, their naming is less confusing not more confusing. This is why people love MacBook and loathe the Dell InspironXE E1795fpw-A

<comment><USER6> So you're saying that people loved their polycarbonate bubbling base Macbooks because Apple refused to print a model id on the bottom? I'm pretty sure that's factually incorrect.

You think InspironXE users hate it because when they want more an fru or to access model specifid support they just look on the back and type in the code rather than having to have in depth knowledge of a companies development cycle??

Do you think car drivers hate that tyre makers print the id on the tyre enabling buying a replacement or that auction/sale sites can refer to specifc model numbers that act as a primary key on all the cars features?

In your world presumably all coffee drinks in Starbucks would just be called 'coffee' because having names like latté and cappuccino is too confusing?

<comment><USER7> I'd like a late-2011 venti skinny mocha chai latte please.

I really don't give a shit what you prefer. Consumers want simplicity because technology is scary. Apple provides that by anthropomorphizing their products and Apple wins because of it. Apple does it on every front: naming, hardware design, software features, voice recognition, etc.

<comment><USER6> Consumers want what Apple tell them to want.

Consumers need for those things to be resaleable and repairable if they want the human race to efficienlty use the resources available on the planet.

Apple don't care about all that they want to remove the ability to even refer to anything other than the latest bit of worker-exploiting high-fashion shiny- shiny that they insist you must have to be fulfilled.

<comment><USER7> So you agree with my original point then.

Consumers feel choice to be a burden and want to be told what to do, think, like, and buy. Control is felt as a burden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just glanced at an iPad 2 and the box it came in, and interestingly I don't see "2" anywhere except for in the small print on the label on the back, by the model number. The back of the iPad just says "iPad" as does the side of the box. So once you actually bought the thing, the branding on the iPod 2 wasn't very 2-centric at all either.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have an iPhone 3G and an iPhone 4 here-- they both say "iPhone" on the back. I have an iPad 2 and an iPad 3-- they both say "iPad". I have a MacBook labeled "MacBook", a MacBook Pro labeled "MacBook Pro", and a MacBook Air labeled "MacBook Air".

I don't think I've ever owned an Apple product that had a number in the name, not that you'd know from looking at it. Some people just need something to complain about, I guess.

It should also be pointed out that Apple consistently does not use the definite article with product names in order to personalize the branding, going back to the first Macintosh. It's not the iPad, just... _iPad_.

<comment><USER11> The Mac Pro takes this a step further: it doesn't even say "Mac Pro" on itself anywhere, even in fine print on the back.

Most people probably couldn't tell you if they were looking at a PowerMac G5 or a Mac Pro, unless they'd used one long enough to remember which drive bays and I/O ports they have (or took the side off to see if it has the giant "G5" CPU covers).

The new (Retina) Macbook Pro does the same: the label is gone, at least from the front.

I assume this is to make it less 'technical' and more 'appliance'-like: apart from some (old / non-mainstream) hi-fi equipment, no electronic item in my kitchen or living room has a model number visible during normal use, only a brand name or logo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apple is trying to move the iPad in the same direction as the Macbook and iMac. You don't buy a _MacBook Air 14e_. You buy a MacBook Air. When you sell it, you sell a _2011 MacBook Air_. When you say you bought a new Ford Mustang, people know what you are (generally) talking about (with the occasional "new to me" confusion for good measure).

And, yes, it is confusing, especially since Apple is the one who started it with the iPad 2. Ford also differentiates its models with "2012".

</comment><comment><USER13> They should just give them year numbers. This is the 2012 iPad. Older models are the 2011 iPad and the 2010 iPad. The system is perfectly simple to understand and has planned obsolescence.

<comment><USER14> iPad 1 = iPad 2010. iPad 2 = iPad 2011. iPad 3 = iPad 2012.

iPhone = iPhone 2007. iPhone 3G = iPhone 2008. iPhone 3GS = iPhone 2009. iPhone 4 = iPhone 2010. iPhone 4S = iPhone 2011. "iPhone 5" = iPhone 2012.

Even if Apple were to never refer to them by those names, it's such an obvious naming convention (so far) that it's surprising that so many people are missing it.

<comment><USER6> Then they release two models at the same time and your key is not looking so primary any more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You are supposed to call it "iPad". Done.

If you need to be more specific, the model numbers are as follows:

MC705ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 16GB – Black

MC706ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 32GB – Black

MC707ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 64GB – Black

MD366ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 16GB – Black

MD367ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 32GB – Black

MD368ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 64GB – Black

MD328ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 16GB – White

MD329ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 32GB – White

MD330ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi only 64GB – White

MD369ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 16GB – White

MD370ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 32GB – White

MD371ZP/A – iPad 3 Wi-Fi + 4G 64GB – White

They have unique identifiers. The product you walk in to the store and buy is "iPad".

What is the question?

<comment><USER16> The question is, "which used iPad are you offering to sell?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article misses the obvious comparison to the Mac line. Over time people will naturally refer to them by the year they were released.

<comment><USER18> Interesting point. I think that's also due to some influence on Apple's part, because Macs were never released with sequential numbers like the iPhone.

I'd suspect Apple is purposefully trying to disassociate the iPad with the iPhone and realigning it with the Mac line by changing naming conventions. If that's the case, this post is pretty good evidence that it hasn't really worked out so far.

<comment><USER19> > _because Macs were never released with sequential numbers like the iPhone._

Except, you know, the Macintosh II...

Or the Mac LC (followed by the Mac LC II and then the Mac LC III)...

Or the original Power Macintosh models (like the 6100, followed by the 6200, 6300, 6400)...

And then the PowerMac G3 (followed by the G4 and the G5)...

Apple has changed from numbered to unnumbered model names (and back) before.

<comment><USER18> ah yes, oops-- I meant the MacBook line rather than Mac line

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm guessing apple just doesn't care that much about the secondary market for their products since they make all their money off selling new products. It'd be nice if they did though!

</comment><comment><USER21> To people saying it makes sense, because Macbooks don't have numbers:

It's different, because Macbooks have specs instead. A certain amount of GHz, memory, disk space, HD or SSD, particular ports... the relevant information is in the specifications, which are generally included in advertisements. The model itself doesn't matter so much -- especially because people can upgrade specific aspects of individual models.

But iPads/iPhones don't "have" specs, which is a conscious decision on Apple's part. Who knows how much RAM it has, or what its processor speed is? And they're not upgradeable. You can't choose more RAM. So you need some kind of identifier to figure out what the performance is like. Hence, iPhone 3GS or 4 or 4S.

"New iPad" is just stupid, as proven by the point that everyone has wound up calling it the iPad 3 anyways. It's as stupid as if Microsoft called Windows 8 "new Windows" or Toyota stopped giving year names to their cars. Just ask: what comes after "new iPad"? I can't even guess.

</comment><comment><USER22> In the keynote Apple referred to it as "iPad", as a proper noun.

<comment><USER23> And in all their marketing. It's always "with iPad you can", or "on iPad...". An interesting strategy that doesn't seem to have rubbed off on consumers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interestingly, Amazon bypasses the problem by just using the serial number as part of the name: "Apple iPad MD328LL/A (16GB, Wi-Fi, White) NEWEST MODEL by Apple"

So, regardless of intent, people will find a way to use precise labels, especially on secondary markets.

</comment><comment><USER25> The term "iPad (3rd generation)" is not "vigilante", it is simply dis- preferred. That name actually came from Apple: it is how they describe the product on their support website (where it is, of course, necessary to be exact).

<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5176>

(Although I might even argue that it is dis-preferred: when you go to a dealer to get a new car, you get the "2012 Chevy Cruze LT", but when you advertise it as Chevrolet you might simply say "the new Cruze is the most powerful yet". I do not know if Apple actually provides specific guidance to not use the "3rd generation" terminology.)

</comment><comment><USER26> I call mine iPad (Early 2012), which is also how you refer to MacBooks (e.g. MacBook Pro 17 (Mid 2010)). There's also the model identifier like "Model Identifier: MacBookAir4,2" but other than developers, no one uses that.

</comment><comment><USER27> It makes me curious, what will the next iPad after "The New iPad" will be called?

And how will Apple refer to "The New iPad" after it is, uh, old.

It reminds me of the eighties. "Star Trek, the Next Generation" is now many generations behind...

<comment><USER28> They'll do what they do with their Macs. Today's iPad will become "iPad (early 2012)."

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is it me, or are the stories making it to the top of this list getting worse and worse? "Some people have invented an informal name for Apple's latest toy." Great. Which part of this "hacker news" ?

</comment><comment><USER30> If you can't name your product, your consumers will name it for you.

</comment><comment><USER31> > Long live the iPad 3, The new iPad is dead!

Uh, shouldn't that be: "The new iPad is dead. Long live the iPad3!"? If they were not attempting to riff off of: "The King is dead. Long live the King." then the sentence really makes no sense.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_is_dead._Long_live_the...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_is_dead._Long_live_the_King).

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm surprised "retina iPad" isn't in the poll... That's what I've been calling it, matching the "retina MacBook pro" convention.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's listed as "iPad 3rd generation" under the compatibility section for accessories on the apple store.

</comment><comment><USER34> I find it fascinating how little attention this huge branding mistake has gotten. It was extraordinarily amateurish on the part of Apple, the kind of mistake I would have expected from Microsoft a few years ago. Except had Microsoft made that mistake, they would have been properly ridiculed for it.

<comment><USER35> As jaxn said, Apple has been making this "mistake" with Macs for years and it hasn't hurt them.

<comment><USER36> The problem is, they're still selling the previous-generation models. Assuming they do the same thing with the iPhone 5, calling it only the "new iPhone", the confusion will be even more widespread.

Nobody cares with regard to the various Mac refreshes, but it was a customer- unfriendly move in this case.

<comment><USER28> Really? I mean, the new iPhone will probably have a 4" screen. The current iPhone 4S is 0.5" smaller. Consumer shouldn't have a problem distinguishing them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was just marveling this morning at how much mental energy is expended on this very thing. Let's just call it the iPad 3 and not worry too much about how closely we match Apple's marketing copy.</comment>


Can we take down the dude wall? Can universities glorify anyone beside white men - <AUTHOR> https://massivesci.com/notes/dude-wall-male-portraits-yale-medical-school-study/ <comment><USER2> its unfortunate that universities are the gold standard for education and accreditation. University was one of the most corrupt experiences in my life</comment>


Conversion of cheap optical mouse to robot odometer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2012/09/conversion-of-cheap-optical-mouse-to.html

<comment><USER2> I remember reading about someone hacking this together for a sumobot 5 years ago <http://imakeprojects.com/Projects/seeing-eye-mouse/>

In fact people have used more precise laser mice? (mouse?) lol

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using mechanical ball mice as motor encoders for years. Inside every one is a glorious pair of little pie-slice wheels and some phototransistor gates.

I'm kind of bummed the they are getting hard to find as all mice everywhere become direct optical sensor mice.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's really interesting. I was really surprised by how inexpensive but high quality the logic analyzer was. Does anyone know of an inexpensive oscilloscope that is similar to that?

<comment><USER5> I've got an even cheaper one : [http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/open- workbench-logic-sniffe...](http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/open-workbench- logic-sniffer-p-612.html)

It has some limitations of course but its open source and I'm in the process of building a USB analyzer with it.

As for scopes the Rigol ones are quite popular, and with a logic "analyzer" (if you are an EE they aren't really logic analyzers, they are more like channels in a binary oscilloscope) I've got a Rigol scope as well but its not nearly as reliable or accurate as the Tek2024 which is my 'goto' scope.

A number of folks make cheap USB attached scopes which run a program on a PC for the UX, which is nice but I've got one that came from a company now gone that only runs on Windows 98 (or ME if it matters). And no documents on how to make it anything else. Sad really.

<comment><USER4> Wow... that is cheap. How's the software on it?

That tek scope looks like a great scope but it's also an order of magnitude more expensive than the rigol cheap one. I was thinking more for the hobbyist and not for someone who needs it for work and can shell out 3k for a scope. I guess I could if I wanted to but I was hoping there was something like that logic analyzer that was an order of magnitude cheaper than all the other ones but still excellent build quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You know you've been working in undersea robotics for too long when you see this and think "cool, a cheap DVL for land robots."

</comment><comment><USER7> This sounds suspiciously like what one of my friends did about twelve years ago for our freshman engineering project. Granted I believe these mice were more like $50 back then. See the 21 Aug comment here as proof that I'm not hallucinating: [http://news.lugnet.com/robotics/handyboard/?n=*8563,-100&...](http://news.lugnet.com/robotics/handyboard/?n=*8563,-100&v=a)

</comment><comment><USER8> Couldn't you read the same data from the PS/2 port instead? I'd imagine that would be much better documented, and wouldn't need hacking the hardware.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious how he mounted it?</comment>