On 4/19/2011 6:46, Mike Raiford wrote:
> Oh, it can tell if the key is inside or outside the car?

You still haven't read the owner's manual, have you? :-)

> Right... Remember when MP3 came out, computing power wasn't really up to
> task, either. I remember it took hours to encode a single song.

I remember back in the days of Windows 3.1 we had a hardware card to do jpeg 
compression. It was faster to ship a bunch of raw images over the net to a 
PC running a bat file in a loop to compress them and pull them back (over 
NFS) than it was to compress them on the sparcstation where they were generated.

> I mostly use my Zune, nowadays,

How do you like that, UI-wise?

>> It's a simple idea, but in practise it doesn't work like it's supposed to.

I think it's more "in practice it doesn't work like people claimed they 
wanted it to work."   It could work just fine if people wanted it to, but 
the folks in charge don't want it to only catch the flagrant violators.

> Now, you could say that's fairness in the most absolute sense, but,
> sometimes its best to allow a human being to intervene.

In the USA, the police are supposed to look at the picture and all and make 
the decision based on all those factors.  Nothing is *supposed* to go out 
automatically without review.

Then they figured out they could make it a "fee" rather than an actual 
ticket you might be able to fight in court.

> Well, we now have laser diodes that can work at several wavelengths now, so
> ... we're not far off. Before it just wasn't feasible. But yes, the beams
> can cross, and signals can be multiplexed by wavelength.

And it still has to interact when it gets to the other end.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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