Back in the mid 90s, I spend a month on business visit to Copenhagen.
All the offices had natural light. The building was a central corridor, with offices on the left and on the right of it, and all with big windows.
When I asked about that design, I was told that there is a law where no person should be farther than X meters away from a window, because their winter is long, and the days are short.
A far cry from the cubicle farms in the USA and Canada...
There are already working solutions for this. For example, having FreeDOS on a USB drive, downloading the BIOS to it, and booting from it is very simple.
Did it on my Dell Latitude a while back, and got the latest BIOS on it without any issues.
... if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country." -- Howard Aiken, 1952.
Retarded is those who think that it is no problem at all when government erases a line item in the budget worth 100 million without replacing the funds, or even putting forward a proper budget.
That is how we get populist politicians like Trump and Ford (as different as they are): they tell people what they want to hear, without having any plan except playing with people's emotions, stoking their fears, while shunning the media...
The PC government also cancelled a large wind project, with hefty penalties expected, and cancelled the carbon trading system, which provided C$100 million for schools
Wow, 100 million for absolutely nothing,, not ripped from the pocketbooks of anyone, no sir, it was totally free!
Oh really? So where will schools get the 100 million from now?
Answer: no where. Ford did not even have the decency to come up with a costed budget at election time, and he is just axing stuff based on ideology, not on any logic.
But since when did facts matter? We are in a post-truth era.
No tax credits for retrofitting homes for more power efficiency (insulation, windows, furnaces,...etc.)
I'm doing that with no credits because it saves me money. More power efficient windows and furnaces have an inherent value because they are cheaper - again why are you stealing from others to give money to people well off enough to afford homes?
Good you can afford it. Not everyone can, nor can everyone put money upfront to save on the long run. And trades folk will find that their business is less than before.
Electric cars are the quintessential example of high upfront cost (they are more expensive than internal combustion cars), but lower running costs (electricity to run them is cheaper, no oil change, no gearbox, no maintenance apart from tires and brakes).
Will you be buying an electric car soon by your logic?
Here in Ontario , the newly elected Progressive Conservative government cancelled any tax incentives for electric cars, starting September. But that is only when you buy the car through a dealer. If you buy the car directly (like all Teslas are), the incentives are cancelled immediately, leaving those who ordered Teslas on the hook for C$14,000 more.
The PC government also cancelled a large wind project, with hefty penalties expected, and cancelled the carbon trading system, which provided C$100 million for schools. No tax credits for retrofitting homes for more power efficiency (insulation, windows, furnaces,...etc.)
Detractors aside, Python is a great language. Of course, like all languages it has its warts.
But flexibility wise, it is awesome.
Learning Python has been on my to do list for decades, and finally I got to it last year.
Among the things I developed with it is a small web application specific to one project (a form that users fill, and get back a configuration file). This used the Bottle framework.
I am also using Micropython on ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers, and it is easy to press Ctrl-C and have a Python prompt over USB! Debugging is very easy, and the language is very easy.
Not to mention things like Home Assistant, which is written in Python, and writing custom modules for it was pretty easy, once you got to learn HA's API.
So Guido: thank you so much for decades of making things work for us. I wish I have learned it sooner, but better late than never...
First, I used Tiny Tiny RSS for a few years. It worked well. I ran it on my home server. Written in PHP and using MySQL made it easy to host.
One day, it was choking on feeds from a certain site, and stopped updating.
So I switched to the original MiniFlux reader. Again, it is written in PHP, so easy to host. It can use either SQLite, MySQL, or other databases.
The same developer has gone in a different direction, with MiniFlux 2, which uses Go, and PostgreSQL (only!). The developer describes it as 'opinionated!' Using Go is an odd choice here, since this is not an application that has to be super fast. The slowest parts will be retrieving feeds (limited by the speed of the network and servers that host the feeds), or reading the database. Moreover, being a single executable, it does not integrate with your existing Apache or Nginx (if you already have them and want to use existing SSL certificates,...etc.) and therefore has to run on a different port. PostgreSQL only is higher maintenance than MySQL, and if I don't not run PostgreSQL already, then I will not install, configure and maintain PostgreSQL just for the this one application.
So for now, the original MiniFlux does the job adequately, running behind SSL and password protected, so not much chance for a vulnerability getting exploited. Tiny Tiny RSS had a better user interface, but you get used to MiniFlux quickly. It even uses short cut keys that are like vim (j, k,...).
Your post is full of inaccuracies, and therefore much of your conclusions are flawed.
In the US we allow about 1.1 million legal immigrants per year, which is generous in comparison to any other country. That's enough to skew the economy, make jobs hard to get, and puts a burden on the infrastructure
Canada had 35 million people in the last census, and admits 260,000 legal immigrant annually. That is 0.74% of the population. The USA has 325 million now, and the 1.1 million you quoted would be 0.33%. As you can see, Canada admits more than double the number per capita.
Many Americans like to think they are unique and special, but they are not, and they are even less than other industrial countries. Look at health care in the G7 and compare it to the US for just one example.
The whole refugee thing started because of Arab Spring (remember that?), which was 8 years ago!
It started in 2011, but it is not over yet in many areas. The Syrian Civil War is what drove refugees from Arab countries in the following year (and that war is still on-going, check what is happening in Deraa, the cradle of the Syrian uprising). Most of the Syrian refugees are in neighboring countries (Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt,...etc). A relatively small fraction makes it to Europe.
And the Arab Spring is not the largest driver for migrants. There are migrants from Afghanistan (the aftermath of the American invasion, and the subsequent weak governments, Taliban,...etc.) and Iraq (same drivers). Most of the refugees are from Subsaharan Africa. Desertificaiton, ISIS terrorism, economy, corruption,..etc., drives people to cross the Sahara and go on boats to Italy, Malta, Spain,...etc.
It is going to get worse, as long as we have climate deniers who prevent a world wide concerted effort to mitigate the effects: less arable land, less pasture for live stock, so people will pick up and leave.
Yes, you are right, it is not totally opaque. But there are holes, like you said.
And still, water vapour in our atmosphere absorbs a lot of infrared. Water is a green house gas. So the best observation for IR is above the atmosphere.
So to get over the holes and water vapour, we have things like like SOFIA, which is not 6 meters, and then you have JWST with the sun shield.
Our atmosphere is opaque to infrared. So any infrared astronomy has to be done from space. Hubble can only do partial infrared (specifically near-infrared), not the rest of the infrared spectrum.
JWST works mainly in infrared, near and far. Moreover, it has much more aperture than Hubble (~ 2.4 meters vs 6.5 meters).
All this means that JWST can see back in time when the first stars that shined in the cosmos, and shed light on how the Big Bang progressed. Important stuff, and no instrument compares to its capabilities.
Over the past year, I started a few projects and tested several microcontrollers.
There are already several alternatives that are very capable. There is no point in using Arduino anymore with these options available.
First, you have the STM32 Blue Pill and its cousin, the Black Pill. Each sells for less than $3 on eBay. They are 72MHz ARM Cortex M3, with 20KB of RAM, and 128KB of Flash storage. I am using it to make a Goto telescope controller with USB and WiFi based on OnStep, and ported it to the STM32 platform, and implemented a Hardware Abstraction Layer for the project. See the prototypevideo. The entire controller's electronics can be built for $25 or less (motors extra).
There is also the ESP32 ($8) from Espressif, and its predecessor, the ESP8266 (~ $4). This has a single or dual core processor with WiFi and Bluetooth. I built a temperature and humidity sensor using the ESP8266 (with a DHT22 sensor), and I am building a car garage sensor using the ESP32 with ultrasonic sensors.
So networking already exists, as well as powerful CPUs. The only drawback of the ESPs is that they draw lots of power (relatively speaking, I run them using USB phone chargers) and they have a limited number of GPIO pins (so not suitable for a telescope controller with 7 pins per axis, and a few other peripherals).
And as pointed out earlier, an open network is called Ethernet (or WiFi) not CAN-Bus.
My main router was a Netgear running OpenWRT for years. They lagged behind in updates. Another group picked up where they left, and started the LEDE Project. Now the two projects have merged again.
They provide updates regularly now, and it is very customizable.
Highly recommended. Just pick a router that is explicitly supported.
I used to collect these scam emails on my web site.
Every week or two, I will get an email asking if such and such email is true, or asking to verify a winning ticket, or contacting the Sultan of Brunei for charity or a project,...etc..
The sad thing is that while some of these emails are from the USA and other developed countries, the vast majority are from desperate people in poor countries. Some of them already paid the scammers and believe the documents provided by them, such as lawyer and bank certificates with official stamps on them.
In practice, it is not a problem at all, once you 'get it'.
It is the same for Arabic: with diacritics, everything is clear and explicit. Without, you subconsciously do inference from context. Newspapers (and news sites) in Arab countries do not have diacritics at all, yet everyone manages to read them, write and read contracts, read signs on shops,...etc. without any problems. BBC Arabic News has no diacritics and everyone manages quite fine. It becomes second nature. For a non-native Arabic speaker it is a steep learning curve, until they 'get it'.
English has similar pronunciation and spelling challenges. Ask anyone who is not a native English speaker how it is like. An American who grew up in Hungary tells me how he was surprised that they had to take spelling lessons in English, while Hungarian (according to him) is fully phonetic with no need for exceptions. A Mexican showed me how Spanish is fully phonetic while English is not.
And ask yourself: how did the Turks manage to read and write their script for 8 centuries with no issues?
Again, this is not a defense of the Arabic script. Rather the lament of cutting off people from their culture and heritage by force. The Kazakhs should stay with what their culture is written in, which happens to be Cyrillic.
The idea here is not which is better script: Latin or Arabic. Each has its challenges.
The idea here is cutting the people from their cultural past. Only literature that was approved was to be published in the new script, and the rest which does not agree with the narrative of the totalitarian state was left behind.
The result is that the dictator now has a population that reads only 'approved' stuff: Q.E.D!
My point is that a radical break with the past such as what the Turks did, and now the Kazakhs, will leave the population ignorant of their cultural history. That is bad.
You are confusing the script with the language. Two separate things.
But to your point: Old English is barely English. Beowulf is not English at all for example.
English as it is understood today is the result of the end of the Viking rule and down to the Norman invasion. From that era onwards, it is recognizable (Chaucer to Shakespeare).
Turkish is recognizable from before the work of Kashgari. He just recorded it and systematized it.
He is just like Napoleon: an army officer who made himself absolute ruler. He saved Turkey from direct occupation, and as idolized, and he took advantage of that to have absolute power. He forced people to abandon their customs (dress, for example) and culture (script for example).
On two visits to Turkey in the 1990s (before the rise of Erdogan), I see how appallingly he is worshiped until now. His statues are everywhere. His visage is on the front page of newspapers, every day! No criticism can ever be spoken of him, punishable by law. A kid on his dad's lap on a ferry, who cannot be more than 4 years old, was asked by his father: who is this, and the kid replied: Ataturk.
Ataturk is idealized by many, but he was an authoritarian totalitarian dictator.
His practices along with his successors in the army, and the above worship of him, are what led to the rise of Erdogan as backlash to this continual oppression: generations were falsely, yet romantically, told that there is a better alternative (religious government) and it is much better, and most of the rural conservative areas followed.
The result: now Turkey has the opposite type of dictator, with the same methods and striving to entrench himself further and further (made himself president, changed the constitution to his favour, and after the failed coupe he is more paranoid than ever).
What is it with dictators trying to shape their countries' cultures with changing alphabet in the name of modernity?
Look at Ataturk and what he did to Turkish. He changed the alphabet to be Latin too, but with extra accents on some letters to make up for the sounds that do not exist in Latin. The result is that the same letters sound different. For example the c letter sounds like sh, and so on.
Turks today do not speak English, Spanish nor French, nor any other widespread language despite that the alphabet is 'Western'. They are also cut off form their 600 or so years of recorded history with a vast amount of literature written in the Osmanli script, which is Arabic derived.
Even the first compendium of Turkic languages, Kashgari's Diwan Lughat Al Turk, completed in 1074 C.E., cannot be read today by a learned Turk. Only academics versed in the Osmanli script can.
Now, another dictator is doing the same thing to another country in the name of modernization. The results will be similar.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the mid 90s, I spend a month on business visit to Copenhagen.
All the offices had natural light. The building was a central corridor, with offices on the left and on the right of it, and all with big windows.
When I asked about that design, I was told that there is a law where no person should be farther than X meters away from a window, because their winter is long, and the days are short.
A far cry from the cubicle farms in the USA and Canada ...
There are already working solutions for this. For example, having FreeDOS on a USB drive, downloading the BIOS to it, and booting from it is very simple.
Did it on my Dell Latitude a while back, and got the latest BIOS on it without any issues.
Sounds that may be explosions were heard during his speech. That much cannot be disputed.
Maduro says right wing plot, Colombia president, yadda yadda ...
However, fire fighters on the scene said it is a gas tank explosion inside an apartment near where the speech was.
Neither side gave more details, and in this climate and culture of conspiracies, it is hard to get to the real facts.
Long version of the above on the BBC.
Half a dozen is enough ...
Retarded is those who think that it is no problem at all when government erases a line item in the budget worth 100 million without replacing the funds, or even putting forward a proper budget.
That is how we get populist politicians like Trump and Ford (as different as they are): they tell people what they want to hear, without having any plan except playing with people's emotions, stoking their fears, while shunning the media ...
Oh really? So where will schools get the 100 million from now?
Answer: no where. Ford did not even have the decency to come up with a costed budget at election time, and he is just axing stuff based on ideology, not on any logic.
Here is a university professor at UWO's Ivey saying it: Scrapping the carbon tax leaves a gaping hole in Ontario's budget.
But since when did facts matter? We are in a post-truth era.
Good you can afford it. Not everyone can, nor can everyone put money upfront to save on the long run. And trades folk will find that their business is less than before.
Electric cars are the quintessential example of high upfront cost (they are more expensive than internal combustion cars), but lower running costs (electricity to run them is cheaper, no oil change, no gearbox, no maintenance apart from tires and brakes).
Will you be buying an electric car soon by your logic?
Here in Ontario , the newly elected Progressive Conservative government cancelled any tax incentives for electric cars, starting September. But that is only when you buy the car through a dealer. If you buy the car directly (like all Teslas are), the incentives are cancelled immediately, leaving those who ordered Teslas on the hook for C$14,000 more.
The PC government also cancelled a large wind project, with hefty penalties expected, and cancelled the carbon trading system, which provided C$100 million for schools. No tax credits for retrofitting homes for more power efficiency (insulation, windows, furnaces, ...etc.)
Detractors aside, Python is a great language. Of course, like all languages it has its warts.
But flexibility wise, it is awesome.
Learning Python has been on my to do list for decades, and finally I got to it last year.
Among the things I developed with it is a small web application specific to one project (a form that users fill, and get back a configuration file). This used the Bottle framework.
I am also using Micropython on ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers, and it is easy to press Ctrl-C and have a Python prompt over USB! Debugging is very easy, and the language is very easy.
Not to mention things like Home Assistant, which is written in Python, and writing custom modules for it was pretty easy, once you got to learn HA's API.
So Guido: thank you so much for decades of making things work for us. I wish I have learned it sooner, but better late than never ...
First, I used Tiny Tiny RSS for a few years. It worked well. I ran it on my home server. Written in PHP and using MySQL made it easy to host.
One day, it was choking on feeds from a certain site, and stopped updating.
So I switched to the original MiniFlux reader. Again, it is written in PHP, so easy to host. It can use either SQLite, MySQL, or other databases.
The same developer has gone in a different direction, with MiniFlux 2, which uses Go, and PostgreSQL (only!). The developer describes it as 'opinionated!' Using Go is an odd choice here, since this is not an application that has to be super fast. The slowest parts will be retrieving feeds (limited by the speed of the network and servers that host the feeds), or reading the database. Moreover, being a single executable, it does not integrate with your existing Apache or Nginx (if you already have them and want to use existing SSL certificates, ...etc.) and therefore has to run on a different port. PostgreSQL only is higher maintenance than MySQL, and if I don't not run PostgreSQL already, then I will not install, configure and maintain PostgreSQL just for the this one application.
So for now, the original MiniFlux does the job adequately, running behind SSL and password protected, so not much chance for a vulnerability getting exploited. Tiny Tiny RSS had a better user interface, but you get used to MiniFlux quickly. It even uses short cut keys that are like vim (j, k,...).
Your post is full of inaccuracies, and therefore much of your conclusions are flawed.
Canada had 35 million people in the last census, and admits 260,000 legal immigrant annually. That is 0.74% of the population. The USA has 325 million now, and the 1.1 million you quoted would be 0.33%. As you can see, Canada admits more than double the number per capita.
Many Americans like to think they are unique and special, but they are not, and they are even less than other industrial countries. Look at health care in the G7 and compare it to the US for just one example.
It started in 2011, but it is not over yet in many areas. The Syrian Civil War is what drove refugees from Arab countries in the following year (and that war is still on-going, check what is happening in Deraa, the cradle of the Syrian uprising). Most of the Syrian refugees are in neighboring countries (Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, ...etc). A relatively small fraction makes it to Europe.
And the Arab Spring is not the largest driver for migrants. There are migrants from Afghanistan (the aftermath of the American invasion, and the subsequent weak governments, Taliban, ...etc.) and Iraq (same drivers). Most of the refugees are from Subsaharan Africa. Desertificaiton, ISIS terrorism, economy, corruption, ..etc., drives people to cross the Sahara and go on boats to Italy, Malta, Spain, ...etc.
It is going to get worse, as long as we have climate deniers who prevent a world wide concerted effort to mitigate the effects: less arable land, less pasture for live stock, so people will pick up and leave.
You can see visualizations of migrant and terrorism data by a data scientist.
Yes, you are right, it is not totally opaque. But there are holes, like you said.
And still, water vapour in our atmosphere absorbs a lot of infrared. Water is a green house gas. So the best observation for IR is above the atmosphere.
So to get over the holes and water vapour, we have things like like SOFIA, which is not 6 meters, and then you have JWST with the sun shield.
Our atmosphere is opaque to infrared. So any infrared astronomy has to be done from space. Hubble can only do partial infrared (specifically near-infrared), not the rest of the infrared spectrum.
Infrared is needed because it can peer through dust clouds. See this image of Eagle Nebula in visible vs. near infrared by Hubble to see the difference.
JWST works mainly in infrared, near and far. Moreover, it has much more aperture than Hubble (~ 2.4 meters vs 6.5 meters).
All this means that JWST can see back in time when the first stars that shined in the cosmos, and shed light on how the Big Bang progressed. Important stuff, and no instrument compares to its capabilities.
Over the past year, I started a few projects and tested several microcontrollers.
There are already several alternatives that are very capable. There is no point in using Arduino anymore with these options available.
First, you have the STM32 Blue Pill and its cousin, the Black Pill. Each sells for less than $3 on eBay. They are 72MHz ARM Cortex M3, with 20KB of RAM, and 128KB of Flash storage. I am using it to make a Goto telescope controller with USB and WiFi based on OnStep, and ported it to the STM32 platform, and implemented a Hardware Abstraction Layer for the project. See the prototypevideo. The entire controller's electronics can be built for $25 or less (motors extra).
There is also the ESP32 ($8) from Espressif, and its predecessor, the ESP8266 (~ $4). This has a single or dual core processor with WiFi and Bluetooth. I built a temperature and humidity sensor using the ESP8266 (with a DHT22 sensor), and I am building a car garage sensor using the ESP32 with ultrasonic sensors.
So networking already exists, as well as powerful CPUs. The only drawback of the ESPs is that they draw lots of power (relatively speaking, I run them using USB phone chargers) and they have a limited number of GPIO pins (so not suitable for a telescope controller with 7 pins per axis, and a few other peripherals).
And as pointed out earlier, an open network is called Ethernet (or WiFi) not CAN-Bus.
Puny iPhone ...
The xKCD Phone 2000 has 5 cameras!
My main router was a Netgear running OpenWRT for years. They lagged behind in updates. Another group picked up where they left, and started the LEDE Project. Now the two projects have merged again.
They provide updates regularly now, and it is very customizable.
Highly recommended. Just pick a router that is explicitly supported.
I used to collect these scam emails on my web site.
Every week or two, I will get an email asking if such and such email is true, or asking to verify a winning ticket, or contacting the Sultan of Brunei for charity or a project, ...etc..
The sad thing is that while some of these emails are from the USA and other developed countries, the vast majority are from desperate people in poor countries. Some of them already paid the scammers and believe the documents provided by them, such as lawyer and bank certificates with official stamps on them.
At least for me, it changed my life.
The ZX Spectrum was my first computer ever. I used it to learn BASIC, programming, and all things computers.
As a result, I switched careers from pharmacy to software, and never looked back ...
Rest in peace Rick!
In practice, it is not a problem at all, once you 'get it'.
It is the same for Arabic: with diacritics, everything is clear and explicit. Without, you subconsciously do inference from context. Newspapers (and news sites) in Arab countries do not have diacritics at all, yet everyone manages to read them, write and read contracts, read signs on shops, ...etc. without any problems. BBC Arabic News has no diacritics and everyone manages quite fine. It becomes second nature. For a non-native Arabic speaker it is a steep learning curve, until they 'get it'.
English has similar pronunciation and spelling challenges. Ask anyone who is not a native English speaker how it is like. An American who grew up in Hungary tells me how he was surprised that they had to take spelling lessons in English, while Hungarian (according to him) is fully phonetic with no need for exceptions. A Mexican showed me how Spanish is fully phonetic while English is not.
And ask yourself: how did the Turks manage to read and write their script for 8 centuries with no issues?
Again, this is not a defense of the Arabic script. Rather the lament of cutting off people from their culture and heritage by force. The Kazakhs should stay with what their culture is written in, which happens to be Cyrillic.
The idea here is not which is better script: Latin or Arabic. Each has its challenges.
The idea here is cutting the people from their cultural past. Only literature that was approved was to be published in the new script, and the rest which does not agree with the narrative of the totalitarian state was left behind.
The result is that the dictator now has a population that reads only 'approved' stuff: Q.E.D!
My point is that a radical break with the past such as what the Turks did, and now the Kazakhs, will leave the population ignorant of their cultural history. That is bad.
You are confusing the script with the language. Two separate things.
But to your point: Old English is barely English.
Beowulf is not English at all for example.
English as it is understood today is the result of the end of the Viking rule and down to the Norman invasion. From that era onwards, it is recognizable (Chaucer to Shakespeare).
Turkish is recognizable from before the work of Kashgari. He just recorded it and systematized it.
At what cost?
He is just like Napoleon: an army officer who made himself absolute ruler. He saved Turkey from direct occupation, and as idolized, and he took advantage of that to have absolute power. He forced people to abandon their customs (dress, for example) and culture (script for example).
On two visits to Turkey in the 1990s (before the rise of Erdogan), I see how appallingly he is worshiped until now. His statues are everywhere. His visage is on the front page of newspapers, every day! No criticism can ever be spoken of him, punishable by law. A kid on his dad's lap on a ferry, who cannot be more than 4 years old, was asked by his father: who is this, and the kid replied: Ataturk.
Ataturk is idealized by many, but he was an authoritarian totalitarian dictator.
His practices along with his successors in the army, and the above worship of him, are what led to the rise of Erdogan as backlash to this continual oppression: generations were falsely, yet romantically, told that there is a better alternative (religious government) and it is much better, and most of the rural conservative areas followed.
The result: now Turkey has the opposite type of dictator, with the same methods and striving to entrench himself further and further (made himself president, changed the constitution to his favour, and after the failed coupe he is more paranoid than ever).
No!
They should stick with what they have now, since most of their culture (literature, poetry, history, ..etc.) is written in Cyrillic.
That is my point.
What is it with dictators trying to shape their countries' cultures with changing alphabet in the name of modernity?
Look at Ataturk and what he did to Turkish. He changed the alphabet to be Latin too, but with extra accents on some letters to make up for the sounds that do not exist in Latin. The result is that the same letters sound different. For example the c letter sounds like sh, and so on.
Turks today do not speak English, Spanish nor French, nor any other widespread language despite that the alphabet is 'Western'. They are also cut off form their 600 or so years of recorded history with a vast amount of literature written in the Osmanli script, which is Arabic derived.
Even the first compendium of Turkic languages, Kashgari's Diwan Lughat Al Turk, completed in 1074 C.E., cannot be read today by a learned Turk. Only academics versed in the Osmanli script can.
Now, another dictator is doing the same thing to another country in the name of modernization. The results will be similar.
Right.
It is also Ubuntu = Ooh-boon-tu, not You-buntu.
And many of the C things are actually K, Kephalos = Cephalus, Cetus = Kaitos, ...etc.
Here is an an earlier 3D printed house, from a year ago.
Seems that the Russian one lays out cement directly, rather than a polymer to be filled later with cement (by humans), as the French one does.