Posts by BenWilson
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Paul, you may find they are not the same place as far as the software is concerned. Britomart Place is a street with 2 ends, for starters. It's a small difference but does the computer know that?
If you think that's bad, I can tell you I made a much worse error in my software. I had accidentally mislabelled 2 intersections that were hundreds of kilometers apart as the same. So the software used this convenient wormhole to send trucks on the most bizzare routes they had ever seen, whilst claiming to have saved them thousands of kilometers.
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I used to write software to plan routes for milk collection. It's a damned hard job, so I'm always interested when I see other commercial examples. Working out best paths from point to point is part of it, a much easier and better solved problem, but still not without difficulties - what is the best path is not a static thing, nor is it the same for all people on all tasks. Shortest distance is not always shortest time, nor is it always safest or most convenient. There's endless complexity in modeling it.
Robyn, I'll bet your walking route was by roads, and there wasn't one going the way that really made sense, it was a footpath? So it got you there by the shortest path on the roads. You can't expect them to map every conceivable walkable route in there! For instance I used to find the best walking route to University from Queen St used a mall's escalators and lifts, but they can't put that into a public package.
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There's another option again, which is actually a slightly shorter distance. At the end of Jervois Road there are stairs down to Cox's Creek. Less car fumes to inhale that way, and a better view. I'm curious why their route takes a sharp left off Westend Road up quite a steep suburban street. I guess their algorithm found the shortest path to the centre of the Westmere Shops, but if you were actually going to most of the shops you'd be bitter to have followed that route.
Still, it's neat technology. I'll certainly use it to get my father-in-law around next time he's over.
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Heh, love NRT's description of bloggers "sad bastard at computer keyboard picks nose, has opinion". Can't say that MSM opinion seems much more deep than that, but their actual news does have a bit of 'research' behind it. Which pretty much appears to me to be 'they used Google News and rewrote what someone else who had actually done some research said'. Somewhere way down that chain of 'research' some actual research must have been done though, some reporter turned up somewhere and asked a few questions. For that, MSM deserves some credit. Their opinions may be bland, their facts may be carefully filtered through corporate and/or government censorship, and their story choices may be predictable and dull, but at least somewhere in there someone actually went somewhere and asked some questions.
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I remember Klaw, when he was resurrected by Dr Doom in the first Secret Wars. 1984 I think. Dr Doom dissected him and used him as a weapon against the Beyonder and stole his beyond-infinite power, which he promptly used to kill all the Marvel Superheroes in one blast.
But the Beyonder possessed Klaw and undermined Doom's already fragile sanity, so that he unconsciously resurrected all the heroes for a titanic final clash, in which the lamest superhero ever, Captain America, who harnessed the superpower of American Cheese, managed to fight his way through to Doom so that he could do a Captain Kirk where-do-you-get-the-right speech on him. But the Beyonder nicked back his powers before Cap could deliver the cheesiest lines of the whole series, and I think Doom self destructed, or went to hell, something like that.
A cool series, I expect they'll make the movie eventually, after they have introduced all the characters with the franchise movies. The part I loved most was when my hero Spiderman managed to singlehandedly bash the entire X-Men. The X-Men fanboys were soooo bitter.
That's where Spidey got his amazing alien suit which featured in the last movie. Cause he was running out of web-shooting juice stuck on a planet at the other end of the universe, so they needed a plot twist to give him his webs back.
I wish I still had my collection but in a weak moment of student debt induced poverty, I sold the lot for $50. So gutted, it would be worth about $2000 now.
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Totally agree it's a soap. Will this be your last post on it?
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I didn't realise McD's made their products in-house, I'd always assumed they shipped the burgers in frozen, rather than recycled them at the, ahem, restaurant.
I guess that's a matter of terminology. The burger was certainly assembled in the restaurant, production line style.
In Henry Ford Plant style they always said that people who thought of innovations would be rewarded. They neglected to say that the reward would be to have your idea ignored, and you would be given extra shifts on whatever equipment or procedures you thought could be improved. I had the brilliant idea that 'draining the patties' could be done with a utensil rather than your dirty bare finger on scalding hot meat. Perhaps cooked human fingers were an essential part of the McTaste. I wonder if that's still the case, certainly the taste has never changed.
Similarly, I found a way on one particular workstation to get 25 seconds back every 2 minutes. After being observed slacking for 25 seconds every 2 minutes, I was firmly told that I was not following procedure. So they missed the chance to hire 25% less staff on that station.
A lot of time was wasted in there trying to find a pen. I suggested putting the pen on a string next to where it was used, but for that impudence I was sent to compact the garbage, where I found my true calling.
That was one job for which detailed McProcedures had not been written, so I was able to halve the time that it took, and then goof off during the rest, and no manager was prepared to come down there to check on me regularly. Ah, bliss.
Then they worked out that I spoke good English, and that was the end of my freedom. I got the most fucked job of all, Front Counter. Caught between the bug-ridden procedures, the bitchy staff, the overbearing management and angry customers I finally decided $4.50 an hour was not enough.
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Maybe the nuke power supporters could all band together, form a town, and have the generator there? That is, if they're comfortable with that....
Reminds me of a possibly apocryphal story: The software developers of a control system for a plant in the US all left town just before the system came online. It was suggested that all such developers should be contracted to live in the area just to ensure quality.
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<blockquote>I'm not convinced Australia and the US even really give that much of a shit about our 'iconic' nuclear weapons policy.</blockquote>
I'm sure they don't, much in the same way that we don't give much of a shit about many of their internal affairs. But we do have an opinion on them, and that could be reported as a 'controversy' if the media is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Any defiance is a threat to total dominance, so they have to at least act like they care to keep NZ's pro-US demographic working against no-nukes becoming a non-controversial policy. But in practice friendly relations with NZ are a thousand times more important than having yet another port to dock nuclear armed and/or powered ships here.
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I can't think why anyone outside of NZ gives a stuff whether we use Hydro or Nuclear as our low-carbon-emissions alternative. I think for Oz and the US they're really driving at the no nuke weapons policy and see nuclear power as a wedge they could drive in here. But as you say, I bet they don't really give it much thought most of the time, and plugging nuclear is really about justifying why they have so much of it.
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