As a constitutional matter, municipalities do not have any independent existence; they are organs of the state governments. Municipal governments only have whatever powers states choose to give them, and the federal government may not commandeer a state government. So if a state chooses to deny its municipalities the authority to sell Internet access (or sell it below a certain price), then no declaration from the FCC can give the municipality that power, nor require the state to give a municipality that power.

So, all this vote means is the FCC majority has decided to waste a bunch of taxpayer dollars losing a lawsuit.

Yes but it's popular and sadly too many slashdotters not only feel that have too much nerd cool to ever be interested in something normal people are interested in but feel the need to tell us about it too.

I said elsewhere that this is a scam for the following reasons.

Except a good chunk of slashdot, absolutewrite and a few other also completely unrelated forums and IRC channels are in on the "scam" and have a bunch of people who have joined the conspiracy to pretend it's blue and black. Or white and gold, in which case I'm in on the scam and hereby declare I got my note from a shady black vehicle with blacked out windows this morning at precisely 5:50am at the dedicated drop point.

It's not a scam, because it frankly doesn't matter what the original colour of the dress is.

The interesting thing is it's sufficiently close to some average threshold of human perception that nearly half the population perceive it as completely different from the other slightly-more-than half.

At that point it wouldn't actually matter if it was a 'shopped image of a dress covered in purple unicorns.

Wow, I don't normally read AC posts, but you are right. Most excellent Poe style post indeed!

They were "Pluto-haters"

Yep. Haters gonna hate. Pluto gonna er... plut...?

Still a while until Putin's birthday. Maybe they're just testing it early.

But to travel at 800 mph without making your passengers sick and barfing, the route actually needs curves to be 16 times as smooth as the 200 mph CHSR.

You can save some by using tilting trains: they can go around much tighter curves at speed than regular trains with a low barf-factor.

High speed railway is *phenomenally* expensive. It requires massive earthworks because of the very limited turning radius and limited climb angle of high speed trains. It requires very specialised rails that have to be laid under very high tension and welded so that the result is seamless and can withstand large temperature variations. It's also much more expensive to ballast because normal ballast doesn't cusion things well above certain speeds and turns into nasty pebbles instead of spikey lumps of rock. The result is big and heavy which means it needs its own strip of dedicated land. Finally, the air resistance for high speed rail grows quickly. On the very high speed test trains it gets comparable to aircraft. Despite having a smaller frontal area per passenger mile, the trains go fast in the thick lower atmosphere. The costs of those things add up a lot.

The hyperloop system claims to solve some of them and long, large airtight pipes are also well established technology in the oil industry for pipelines.

Whether or not the hyperloop claims are valid, I don't know, but it's not as wild as it first seems.

the surprising thing is how strong the interpretation is - either way.

It's *vast*.

If you're a bit of a programmer and have some time, try the following.

Find a red object (or any other colour of your choice) and photograph it in a variaty of conditions, e.g. indoors, outdoors under different lughts, with or without a flash and so on and so forth. Write a script to extract the pixels from the object (make sure the object completely covers some square or circle in the middle of the image to make this possible, you don't need all of the pixels after all), and create an image out of the resulting pixels. You might want to sort them by for example absolute intensity on one axis and relative proportion of blue on the other (and otherwise random).

You will be amazed at the sheer variety of colours that make up the same "red". Not only that but you always strongly perceive the object as the same colour despite these.

What's wrong with that?

It's made people realise and think about that our brain is what interprets what colours mean and in deeply non-trivial ways. It's certainly only for a short time in many cases but it's got people thinking about things they'd not normally think about.

I can't see anything wrong with that. I'm a computer vision person, so until today colour interpretation has been an esoteric topic that no one really cares about. Today I can actually talk to non-experts on a topic find interesting, and one that they temporarily find interesting too.

I like this.

In the XCKD comic the dress on the BLUE background has "black" that appears golden. In the original image the dress is on a white background, but apparently to 75% of people it appears white/gold...

On the blue background, you believe the light is blue. So, the blueish tinge on the white is from the light and the golden gold is more or less unchanged. On the one with the orange faced person, you believe the light is strong yellow, so the illuminated colour must be blue, not white and that implies the black will have an orange hue.

The thing is not the background but what your brain intreprets the light colour as. Tweaking the background is not the only way to achieve it but it is a way to do it reasonably reliably. What's amazing is that some people's brain succeeds in correctly interpreting the light and colour despite having very little and washed out background.

But anyway, the point is the ligt not the background.

Well, I'd hesitate to call you colour blind since you are in fact correct. The dress really is blue and your brain is somehow undoing the mangling that's been done by the camera and lighting to arrive at the correct colour. I can't unsee it as white and gold however.

You can think of it all hinging on the blue/white stripes.

Objectively they're grey with a little blue in (check with a colour picker). All colour interpretation is ambiguous since you have do undo the effect of lighting and uneven colour sensors (eyes included). If your brain decides the light is white with a bit of blue, then that implies the underlying colour must be white and so the other colours must be gold.

If however your brain makes the call that it's strong orange light then that implies the stripes are in fact blue. That further implies the other stripes are dark grey, usually intrepreped as black.

There are other optical illusions designed to trigger this different intrepretation such as this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

What's unique about this is it's not made to trigger two different intrepretations in one person, but instead by chance triggeres quite evenly the different intrepretations in different people, leading to big debates.

For you, the XKCD one isn't extreme enough to push you in different directions. Interestingly high level intrepretation has a big part. I can't cite anything but I can give a personal anecdote. The other day I saw an odd green thing on the floor in my hotel room. It was actually my backpack lit with green tinged light, but was crumpled in an odd shape so I couldn't tell what it was. When I figured it was my backpack, I could no longer see it as green (the actual colour is black). I probably spent 5 minutes staring at it trying to re-see the green with no success. It's a good illustration that the brain uses information from all levels including high level information such as recognising a specific object that I know is in the room to intrepret light colour.

God, this, 1000 times this. This is a deeply fascinating topic (yes I am a computer vision person), and it's sad to see so many people crowing about how uninteresting it is because it's popular outside of nerd circles.

Basically, given there colours, there are two equally plausible interpretations: normal blue light or very strong yellow light. Depending on which you perceive the colours look gold/white or black/blue. It seems in this regard the brain won't go half way and is either all in one interpretation or the other.

I think it happens this way because the photo is genuinely ambiguous between two quite different interpretations and is exactly in a region where people differ, rather than everyone going one way (pedantically, colour is always ambiguous---try interpreting any colour under low pressure sodium lamps).

and then I realized I just don't care.

Huh, how brains work isn't interesting! Who knew? BTW: the title of the site is "news for nerds ... " and this certainly qualifies. Just because it's popular doesn't make convincing yourself that you're indifferent any cooler.

And yes it is interesting. If you've ever tried to write code to interpret colours correctly andautomatically, you will be in awe of how good we are at it. Anything that sheds light (pun intended) on such a fascinating process is interesting.