Re:The Rent Seeking Economy
by VLM on Monday April 15, 2013 @08:25AM
(#5551040)
"Second capitalism has actual, real information to base it's conclusion on, and nobody can unduly influence it's opinions for long."
That would be an interesting society to live in. Your quote above is basically the opposite of the USA, which brings it pretty far from the premise of the original article.
Also the most efficient long distance navigation path is a great circle route not a "straight" line. The geometry of projecting a round-ish globe on a flat map on a large scale has always been pretty messed up, so its actually kinda unusual for long trip to have the shortest route on a map be a straight line.
One interesting startup idea related to the above is people have historically had all kinds of interesting compromise map projections, but it should be possible to compute and display an optimized custom map projection for any specified route with minimal distortion such that the shortest path really would be a straight(ish) line on that optimized map. I'm sure there's a forest of patents on this idea preventing progress of this idea, at least in the USA, see the original article, etc.
That would be an interesting society to live in. Your quote above is basically the opposite of the USA, which brings it pretty far from the premise of the original article.
Also the most efficient long distance navigation path is a great circle route not a "straight" line. The geometry of projecting a round-ish globe on a flat map on a large scale has always been pretty messed up, so its actually kinda unusual for long trip to have the shortest route on a map be a straight line.
One interesting startup idea related to the above is people have historically had all kinds of interesting compromise map projections, but it should be possible to compute and display an optimized custom map projection for any specified route with minimal distortion such that the shortest path really would be a straight(ish) line on that optimized map. I'm sure there's a forest of patents on this idea preventing progress of this idea, at least in the USA, see the original article, etc.