For the teachers. Not the kids. Samsung NC10s, MSI Winds, all the new 10 inch netbooks will do everything the nonspecialist teacher needs, quietly and unobtrusively.
Interactive whiteboards are vastly superior to blackboards for teachers that learn to use them. Teachers are there to teach, not do Powerpoint. Unfortunately, parents who think they are successful (aka managers) often think that a knowledge of PP is a sign of success. A netbook forces you to produce educational material that is not over-complicated. It also costs less. All staff should keep all their work in progress and records on the big server. Use an OS (hint hint) which doesn't involve taking weeks to log on to a domain. Use a plain SMTP server. Outlook is overkill for anything that goes on in schools.
You will need additional kit to run Photoshop and so on, and you need to budget accordingly. The music department will have special needs. But, as someone who spent 7 years teaching before going back into industry, with a child who is in a senior teaching role in a large London school, I can tell you one thing. IT should be unobtrusive. The best advice I ever got on the subject was from my second technical director, who said "IT should be like plumbing. It should be there when you want it and rarely go wrong. Nobody cares how the sewage plant works except sewage engineers, and that's how it should be".
There is absolutely nothing a teacher ever needs to do routinely that exceeds what can be done with free software, except possibly accounting.
Final observation: printers. For schools use, it's my current view that HP is more expensive than needed, Samsungs are not quite beefy enough but they are getting there fast, Lexmark is too idiosyncratic. Oki and Xerox are your friends and have reasonably priced heavy duty A3 machines.
Indeed. Students of Scots history know that the villain in the Glencoe massacre was a Scots lawyer, who used the law to acquire the land.
Not at all like our own beloved Tony Blair, a Scots/Australian lawyer who used the law to suppress dissent while invading Iraq to try and gain control over the oil. Lawyers can steal more money because they can gain control over the hundren men with guns.
As I note above, the system ensures no such thing. It enables a person who is completely unqualified - e.g. a Building Inspector - to approve electrical wiring work! It also allows someone to do wiring in dry areas, but not wet areas. Guess what? You can cause just as much damage in either. In fact, a wiring error in a wet area is more likely to trip the RCD, indicating a fault, while a bad earth in a dry area is not. The worst wiring error I know of was done by electricians working for a contracting firm (live showers in a sports centre). The RCD kept tripping, so the electrician turned up the RCD trip until it stopped, which was at a dangerous level for a wet area. A home installer would not be able to interfere with the trip.
As an aside, what makes you think the law actually stops an unqualified person, who is not even likely to know the law exists?
This is a general issue with laws that make something an offence which most people would not understand or know about. Viruses and Trojans on the Internet are more likely to make criminals of non-IT-literate people. As the network of enforcers widens, more and more stupid, incompetent and malicious people join their ranks. These people then use their arbitrary power to upset other people for pleasure. They won't succeed against real criminals because they know enough to hide their traces (like cowboy electricians knowing where to buy old stocks of installation gear from before the cutoff date so the householder can claim it's an old installation...)
When you sell your house, it gets surveyed.
And no, it's NOT the EU. This kind of silliness is something our legislators can manage without any outside help.
The PDF reminds me of something I have seen before with bad lawyers: the worse the case, the longer and more threatening the language. The RIAA seem to have spotted a new idea: if you want to be e.g. a bank robber or a burglar, become a lawyer. Then when you get caught, you can try to avoid testifying on the grounds of legal privilege.
On the other hand, when you have a strong case things are different. I'm reminded of a business acquaintance who had a case against a powerful US trade group some years ago. His lawyers said the case was unanswerable, spent a morning summarising it on one side of a letter, and sent it off. The other side promptly settled out of court. The other famous example was the UK satirical magazine Private Eye, which once received a long and very threatening letter from the lawyers of a notorious fraudster. Their reply was something on the lines of "We have had your interesting letter and we have taken legal advice. Our lawyers advise us to tell you to f**k off".
Given this history, the one liner back (in effect "bring it on") is surely instructive.
You've just said it. You had to pay an unqualified and incompetent person 100UKP to assess your competence, whereas you would not have had to pay anything if a contractor sent round an unqualified apprentice. Which is idiotic, and makes my point exactly. Why can't a C Eng or TE simply send a copy of his incorporation certificate to the Council and get a waiver back? Because that would make the qualification dependent on competence, not form filling. Which would open the way to sue contractors who sent round unqualified people to do work. Part P was all about sucking up to the NICEIC, not improving electrical safety.
Incidentally - I did have a professional involvement in this as a member of BSI electrical safety committees in the 80s and 90s. Did you know that the Government would not make the Wiring Regulations statutory, against the advice of their own experts, because of resistance from the electrical installers?
The root cause is nothing to do with IT or information policy. It is the ability of the British Government to govern by statutory instrument (SI), an essentially undemocratic tool not overseen by Parliament which allows civil servants to make laws. The result is that they pass laws in response to to Murdoch- and Rothermere- dominated tabloids, without stopping to consider how they will be paid for. Additional work is placed on the police, the emergency services, local government and the NHS without any funding. They are then left to consider which activity, not being screamed about by Paul Dacre just at the moment, they will have to cut. We're at risk of child abduction by paedophiles! Stop it! OK, let's cut the traffic police to pay for it. Or stop manning local police stations.
The answer, which won't happen while the Civil Service is run by Civil Servants, and while the government is run by politicians, is either to roll back the SIs and rely on properly thought out laws, or to require that any SI must first identify all funding issues required and explain how they are to be addressed.
My favourite idiotic SI is the one passed a few years ago, under which it is now illegal for, say, a professor of electrical engineering to rewire his or her own kitchen or bathroom, while the same job can be done by an unqualified trainee who merely works for a registered electrical contractor. That's typical of Civil Service thinking: don't look at the job to be done, look at the paperwork.
Remember - the guy who wanted to privatise all the roads? Because clearly building the Interstates destroyed the US economy. And that ridiculous army you have - H****b****n would obviously do a much better job. (As you note, the police and the army must be far more inefficient and corrupt than all those contractors in Iraq).
One thing I think is funny is that every time I make a comment suggesting that right wing libertarians are less than 100% correct, it gets down modded in a few minutes, while they all whine that Slashdot has a left wing bias. But I don't care...
The last few hundred years of human history have seen people gradually being forced to abandon our exceptionalism. From the belief that the Earth is the centre of the universe to identifying it as a small planet going round an only slightly above average star has taken about 500 years. The belief that human beings, despite having the same biological mechanisms as the other mammals, are essentially different in some magical way is in retreat. Palaeontologists are now assigning more and more anthropoid remains to the genus homo - Neanderthals are now considered merely a different race. But a lot of people are still kicking and screaming to believe that the Earth is somehow magically a uniquely habitable planet. This is perhaps why there was such resistance, first to the idea of water on Mars, then to admitting that there is a lot. The story of recent Mars exploration so far is that it is more like the Earth than expected. This is despite its size and distance from the sun - which raises the possible number of habitable planets out there.
The last time I posted on this - pointing out that so far 100% of the actual planets we've explored have been inhabited - someone replied repeatedly emphasising the words "on Earth" - whereas my entire point was that this view is "Earth exceptionalism". Other than a few vague words in a book written over 2000 years ago by one small Middle Eastern tribe, we have no written statement on the subject (while most Indians religions support a plurality of worlds.)
Mars may not be inhabited by life, it may never have been - but we are now seeing a lot more water than previously believed, and evidence of methane generation. The probability must be assessed as non-zero.
Time did not pass more slowly for you. It passed at its usual rate of 1 second per second, in your frame of reference. And you were not traveling at 99.5% of the speed of light. You were traveling at 99.5% of the speed of light relative to the Earth. There is no absolute frame of reference. From your point of view, everything felt normal, but the sun turned dark red, and the strongly red-shifted TV programs you received showed that everything had drastically slowed down on Earth. On the way back, you had to filter the sunlight because it was in the X-ray spectrum, but the TV programs had speeded up enormously. The cumulative effect of the speeding up and slowing down was that very little time appeared to pass on the Earth during your journey out, but a lot more passed on the way back, so that when you got back a lot more time had passed on Earth.
The strange thing was that both you and they continued to experience your own times at the usual rate. That's why Albie called it the "Theory of Relativity". (Incidentally I know this is a non-technical explanation, but a little additional analysis shows why there is the apparent paradox that although both you and the Earth apparently experience a body accelerating away from you and then accelerating towards you, the time dilation is not the same on both sides.)
Anybody else notice that two of the researchers are from Samsung?
I guess that's why the abstract focuses on the conductivity and the transparency of the material. Samsung very obviously wants to be the world number one in imaging and printing, and there is growing evidence that they are going to achieve it.
I know there are people who claim that sudo is insecure. However, Windows 7 still has a problem in that ordinary users tend to need to be admins. So when you run a process in a terminal window, magic causes it not to run with admin status to reduce the potential for harm. There is a workaround to get a privlege elevation box before the terminal window is opened - the one that comes at the top of Google involves writing a javascript which calls an asp which puts up the privilege elevation box. It works, but when is Windows going to get a proper security system that isn't half baked with magic?
You obviously slept through 2008. Up till then, the Government did its libertarian job of keeping out of banking, investment gambling, and the housing market. As a result the US was forced to flip from laissez-faire to statism overnight. It's now trying to reconcile statism with the preservation of the market economy, and finding it very difficult. In fact, it's making the same errors the UK made in the late 60s and 70s (auto maker bailouts being the most obvious.)
Limited government turned out not to work, owing to greed. I'm afraid that the world turned out to work differently from the way the Adam Smith Institute and the Cato Foundation thought, get over it.
You would not be surprised to know that many of the procurement people in the MOD are not and have never been in the Armed Forces, and are widely hated by serving personnel. After the Falklands War, it was identified that the MOD had failed to provide the Army with, for root's sake, adequate socks. I remember one officer remarking that the MOD would now have a Project Manager, Socks. To which someone else replied that this was incorrect; they would need two: Project Manager, Socks, Left and Project Manager, Socks, Right.
We've only explored one planet seriously, and looked at a tiny bit of a moon with extreme temperature variation. Almost everywhere we look on the planet - water, air, surface, crevices in rocks - we find lots of living things and the remains of even more. We find things like thiobacter concretivorans chewing up nuclear reactors. We find complex features that arise through different biological routes - image forming eyes evolve separately at least twice. We find a variety of body plans. We find two different data storage systems, DNA and RNA. The evidence so far is that life appears all over the place and can inhabit moderately sever environments so long as it has a source of energy, an electrolyte, and some stuff around the place suitable for building molecules based on carbon backbones.
Putting aside some books written by people who thought the Earth was flat, the evidence to date is that where life is possible, there you find it. If you even half accept Popper's falsificationism, it is up to the people who believe that life doesn't appear wherever it is possible to prove that there is no life on Mars. People who believe that life on Mars is probable are actually just accepting that the cumulative evidence of experience is likely to be correct.
You've assumed no maintenance, but let's assume that is only a couple of hundred dollars (perhaps including additional household insurance). We also have a recession, so the benefit of investing the cash instead may be no more than 3%. 3% of $38000 = $1140. Depreciating the asset over 25 years gives a straight line depreciation of about $1500/year. Baseline annual cost, therefore, is around $2640 for a first year cost saving of around $2000. Therefore first year ROI is $2000 on $38000, or under 6%. That's useful, but few professional investors would be attracted.
Now assume that the cost of solar cells halves in a 5 year timescale. That seems about right based on trends so far. The $38000 investment is worth $19000 in 5 years. Each year I've forgone $1140 in interest, and the depreciation has actually been closer to $3800. So I have saved $4800, but I've lost slightly more. And remember, this assumes no more maintenance than routine cleaning and checking.
My conclusion is that this kind of investment is close to making sense, but not close enough. If the recession ends in a year or so, the stock market will become attractive again, people will invest more in solar technology and it will get cheaper. If it doesn't end, energy prices will be depressed and the cost of electricity may drop. I'd wait till 2011-12 to decide.
Depreciation is probably more than killing his savings right now. If he puts the system in in, say, 5 years time (1) he has had the interest on his $36000 and he still has the $36000,less the electricity costs and so (2) he can put in a much cheaper system, save more money from day 1, and have a lower debt.
This, folks, is why you need to do management classes. ROI is a subject which can be arcane if you start to do serious modelling, but it is the ROI that gets management to tell the bean counters to give you money. The lack of forecast ROI is why the Government is not simply putting up money to build loads of PV solar plants.
Computers are quite different. Our business depends on them. We have to pay what it takes to do the job. But the payback is enormous. Compare what I can earn in a non-IT job with what I can earn in an IT job, and my having access to a computer probably gives me a net benefit of well over half a million dollars since 2000. The cost of the computer is negligible compared to the opportunity benefit. The cost of the solar cells exceeds the opportunity benefit over 5 years or so.
Once again I say, learn some economics, folks. Remember, in a recession you will get opportunities and promotion if you can offer your business significant savings. And that means mastering lifecycle project costs and ROI.
Yes, he spent $36000 up front on the system, which means that even with 25 year life on the panels an eventual payback is uncertain. He must surely also know that in a few years those same panels will probably cost no more than half that, so he has heavy depreciation to contend with. Of course people do waste money on big toys- I plead guilty myself - but you don't get much actual enjoyment out of a solar panel.
I don't know about the position in the US, but in Europe there is a market in energy efficient appliances, and a small change in cost for things like freezers can buy one with half the power consumption. It would be interesting to know if he did the exercise you suggest, and if so did a cost benefit analysis. After all, in Northern CA it might be that he is using air con which could be avoided by improved ventilation, planting, modifications to windows etc., or electric heating for part of the winter which could have been replaced more efficiently with roof thermal absorbers rather than PV.
The NIH has driven all the drug companies and medical equipment companies out of business, hasn't it?
Your example is bad. A supermarket is a consumer, not a producer. Now let me give you a real example, one I know something about.
Years ago, there were many companies making marine engines. They were typically very bespoke and very expensive, and though they were very solidly built they were not terribly reliable. Then what happened was consolidation. Volume manufacturers appeared who produced limited ranges of engines that were much cheaper and, because R&D was amortised over high volume, much more reliable - companies like Kubota, Mitsubishi, Mercedes, Volvo. So the small manufacturers went bust, didn't they?
Of course not. They simply absorbed the high volume engines into their product range. They took the core engines and used their marinising parts to provide a range of options for different applications, which they could now do more cheaply. They focussed on services and added value. Because they did not have to have lots of capital tied up in core engine production, they had lower financial risk. The reduction in cost is one reason for the explosion in the powerboat market.
Same thing for software. Most small companies do not run by making core services. They survive on supplying special markets. Common core software allows them to focus their expertise on the added value in those markets. Because the vertical market software now has a lower cost basis, more people can afford it. The market grows. The company has a more diversified customer base so it has to do more customisation. This absorbs the resources that were once trying to maintain the invisible code.
You can be completely in the right and yet still post something that will attract people with poor emotional control. In fact, let me add, on some subjects the more right you are the more hate mail you will get. It's always seemed to me that "flamebait" is a legacy moderation from the early days of the internet. It covers everything from "holds divergent opinions from some people" to "complete and utter asshole". But nowadays it's mostly (IMNSHO) used by fanboys to defend their obsession with one bit of plastic covered electronics over another.
Gould pointed out in one of his essays that whereas horses are a very unsuccessful line of animals (compared to what most people think) because they have few habitats and only really one small genus, bats (which most people are not very aware of) are very diverse and successful. They're doing something right.
Referencing the post above who suggested that artificial bats could easily be disposed of by a shotgun, have you ever tried to aim at a bat? They are difficult enough to follow with low power binoculars. They also obviously have a fair bit of computing power in rather small brains.
Some of the posts here seem to be unwittingly revealing just how religious right fundamentalist a lot of US HR practice can be. The cultural gap is staggering. One US company I worked for in the 90s had a policy that nobody in a plant was allowed to have a "relationship" with anyone else. Husbands and wives in the same company were found jobs at different locations...imagine their shock on discovering that in Japan co-workers were actively encouraged to marry, and that US HR policies could not cross the Pacific.
Surely the point of the training is that some nerds don't know the point at which ordinary human interaction becomes harassment, and because of this either fail to communicate or get into trouble. I didn't know this and then ended up in what was nearly a single sex university (Cambridge at the end of the 60s) - it took several years in the world of work to recover.
It's also worth pointing out that when nerds do get married, which they usually do, it often turns out very well. Low divorce rates, successful children. The application of intelligence to human relationships is not a bad idea.
City and Guilds has had an oral (not verbal,notice) on its advanced exams where you have to submit a project, where the examiner asks questions to find out if you actually did the work yourself. The higher your likely score, the harder the questions get. I really cannot think of an alternative way of verifying that the submitter actually did the work.
You are of course correct. However, you seem to have missed what this is all about. My original comment was that the effect described (a switch between two resistance states) is not a "fourth electronic component". The GP says that the "memristor" in fact follows the rule d(phi) = M*dq. This is a linear function relating charge stored to magnetic field, and is nothing at all to do with a two state resistive device.
It looks to me as though there is a confusion. The original vanadium oxide film when nonconducting can store supplied charge in a magnetic field. But the switching behaviour doesn't seem to be anything to do with this, unless there is some explanation not given in the article.
I guess someone from man.ac.uk ought to be interested in electronic storage, seeing as how you started off using cathode ray tubes:-)
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Because his life is not long enough to read his way through all the New Labour management-speak and do his job.
Interactive whiteboards are vastly superior to blackboards for teachers that learn to use them. Teachers are there to teach, not do Powerpoint. Unfortunately, parents who think they are successful (aka managers) often think that a knowledge of PP is a sign of success. A netbook forces you to produce educational material that is not over-complicated. It also costs less. All staff should keep all their work in progress and records on the big server. Use an OS (hint hint) which doesn't involve taking weeks to log on to a domain. Use a plain SMTP server. Outlook is overkill for anything that goes on in schools.
You will need additional kit to run Photoshop and so on, and you need to budget accordingly. The music department will have special needs. But, as someone who spent 7 years teaching before going back into industry, with a child who is in a senior teaching role in a large London school, I can tell you one thing. IT should be unobtrusive. The best advice I ever got on the subject was from my second technical director, who said "IT should be like plumbing. It should be there when you want it and rarely go wrong. Nobody cares how the sewage plant works except sewage engineers, and that's how it should be".
There is absolutely nothing a teacher ever needs to do routinely that exceeds what can be done with free software, except possibly accounting.
Final observation: printers. For schools use, it's my current view that HP is more expensive than needed, Samsungs are not quite beefy enough but they are getting there fast, Lexmark is too idiosyncratic. Oki and Xerox are your friends and have reasonably priced heavy duty A3 machines.
Not at all like our own beloved Tony Blair, a Scots/Australian lawyer who used the law to suppress dissent while invading Iraq to try and gain control over the oil. Lawyers can steal more money because they can gain control over the hundren men with guns.
As an aside, what makes you think the law actually stops an unqualified person, who is not even likely to know the law exists?
This is a general issue with laws that make something an offence which most people would not understand or know about. Viruses and Trojans on the Internet are more likely to make criminals of non-IT-literate people. As the network of enforcers widens, more and more stupid, incompetent and malicious people join their ranks. These people then use their arbitrary power to upset other people for pleasure. They won't succeed against real criminals because they know enough to hide their traces (like cowboy electricians knowing where to buy old stocks of installation gear from before the cutoff date so the householder can claim it's an old installation...)
When you sell your house, it gets surveyed.
And no, it's NOT the EU. This kind of silliness is something our legislators can manage without any outside help.
On the other hand, when you have a strong case things are different. I'm reminded of a business acquaintance who had a case against a powerful US trade group some years ago. His lawyers said the case was unanswerable, spent a morning summarising it on one side of a letter, and sent it off. The other side promptly settled out of court. The other famous example was the UK satirical magazine Private Eye, which once received a long and very threatening letter from the lawyers of a notorious fraudster. Their reply was something on the lines of "We have had your interesting letter and we have taken legal advice. Our lawyers advise us to tell you to f**k off".
Given this history, the one liner back (in effect "bring it on") is surely instructive.
Incidentally - I did have a professional involvement in this as a member of BSI electrical safety committees in the 80s and 90s. Did you know that the Government would not make the Wiring Regulations statutory, against the advice of their own experts, because of resistance from the electrical installers?
The answer, which won't happen while the Civil Service is run by Civil Servants, and while the government is run by politicians, is either to roll back the SIs and rely on properly thought out laws, or to require that any SI must first identify all funding issues required and explain how they are to be addressed.
My favourite idiotic SI is the one passed a few years ago, under which it is now illegal for, say, a professor of electrical engineering to rewire his or her own kitchen or bathroom, while the same job can be done by an unqualified trainee who merely works for a registered electrical contractor. That's typical of Civil Service thinking: don't look at the job to be done, look at the paperwork.
One thing I think is funny is that every time I make a comment suggesting that right wing libertarians are less than 100% correct, it gets down modded in a few minutes, while they all whine that Slashdot has a left wing bias. But I don't care...
The last time I posted on this - pointing out that so far 100% of the actual planets we've explored have been inhabited - someone replied repeatedly emphasising the words "on Earth" - whereas my entire point was that this view is "Earth exceptionalism". Other than a few vague words in a book written over 2000 years ago by one small Middle Eastern tribe, we have no written statement on the subject (while most Indians religions support a plurality of worlds.)
Mars may not be inhabited by life, it may never have been - but we are now seeing a lot more water than previously believed, and evidence of methane generation. The probability must be assessed as non-zero.
The strange thing was that both you and they continued to experience your own times at the usual rate. That's why Albie called it the "Theory of Relativity". (Incidentally I know this is a non-technical explanation, but a little additional analysis shows why there is the apparent paradox that although both you and the Earth apparently experience a body accelerating away from you and then accelerating towards you, the time dilation is not the same on both sides.)
Governments don't want people in top jobs who are too highly qualified because they tend to think that reality is not just what lobbyists think it is.
I guess that's why the abstract focuses on the conductivity and the transparency of the material. Samsung very obviously wants to be the world number one in imaging and printing, and there is growing evidence that they are going to achieve it.
I know there are people who claim that sudo is insecure. However, Windows 7 still has a problem in that ordinary users tend to need to be admins. So when you run a process in a terminal window, magic causes it not to run with admin status to reduce the potential for harm. There is a workaround to get a privlege elevation box before the terminal window is opened - the one that comes at the top of Google involves writing a javascript which calls an asp which puts up the privilege elevation box. It works, but when is Windows going to get a proper security system that isn't half baked with magic?
Limited government turned out not to work, owing to greed. I'm afraid that the world turned out to work differently from the way the Adam Smith Institute and the Cato Foundation thought, get over it.
You would not be surprised to know that many of the procurement people in the MOD are not and have never been in the Armed Forces, and are widely hated by serving personnel. After the Falklands War, it was identified that the MOD had failed to provide the Army with, for root's sake, adequate socks. I remember one officer remarking that the MOD would now have a Project Manager, Socks. To which someone else replied that this was incorrect; they would need two: Project Manager, Socks, Left and Project Manager, Socks, Right.
Putting aside some books written by people who thought the Earth was flat, the evidence to date is that where life is possible, there you find it. If you even half accept Popper's falsificationism, it is up to the people who believe that life doesn't appear wherever it is possible to prove that there is no life on Mars. People who believe that life on Mars is probable are actually just accepting that the cumulative evidence of experience is likely to be correct.
Now assume that the cost of solar cells halves in a 5 year timescale. That seems about right based on trends so far. The $38000 investment is worth $19000 in 5 years. Each year I've forgone $1140 in interest, and the depreciation has actually been closer to $3800. So I have saved $4800, but I've lost slightly more. And remember, this assumes no more maintenance than routine cleaning and checking.
My conclusion is that this kind of investment is close to making sense, but not close enough. If the recession ends in a year or so, the stock market will become attractive again, people will invest more in solar technology and it will get cheaper. If it doesn't end, energy prices will be depressed and the cost of electricity may drop. I'd wait till 2011-12 to decide.
This, folks, is why you need to do management classes. ROI is a subject which can be arcane if you start to do serious modelling, but it is the ROI that gets management to tell the bean counters to give you money. The lack of forecast ROI is why the Government is not simply putting up money to build loads of PV solar plants.
Computers are quite different. Our business depends on them. We have to pay what it takes to do the job. But the payback is enormous. Compare what I can earn in a non-IT job with what I can earn in an IT job, and my having access to a computer probably gives me a net benefit of well over half a million dollars since 2000. The cost of the computer is negligible compared to the opportunity benefit. The cost of the solar cells exceeds the opportunity benefit over 5 years or so.
Once again I say, learn some economics, folks. Remember, in a recession you will get opportunities and promotion if you can offer your business significant savings. And that means mastering lifecycle project costs and ROI.
I don't know about the position in the US, but in Europe there is a market in energy efficient appliances, and a small change in cost for things like freezers can buy one with half the power consumption. It would be interesting to know if he did the exercise you suggest, and if so did a cost benefit analysis. After all, in Northern CA it might be that he is using air con which could be avoided by improved ventilation, planting, modifications to windows etc., or electric heating for part of the winter which could have been replaced more efficiently with roof thermal absorbers rather than PV.
Your example is bad. A supermarket is a consumer, not a producer. Now let me give you a real example, one I know something about.
Years ago, there were many companies making marine engines. They were typically very bespoke and very expensive, and though they were very solidly built they were not terribly reliable. Then what happened was consolidation. Volume manufacturers appeared who produced limited ranges of engines that were much cheaper and, because R&D was amortised over high volume, much more reliable - companies like Kubota, Mitsubishi, Mercedes, Volvo. So the small manufacturers went bust, didn't they?
Of course not. They simply absorbed the high volume engines into their product range. They took the core engines and used their marinising parts to provide a range of options for different applications, which they could now do more cheaply. They focussed on services and added value. Because they did not have to have lots of capital tied up in core engine production, they had lower financial risk. The reduction in cost is one reason for the explosion in the powerboat market.
Same thing for software. Most small companies do not run by making core services. They survive on supplying special markets. Common core software allows them to focus their expertise on the added value in those markets. Because the vertical market software now has a lower cost basis, more people can afford it. The market grows. The company has a more diversified customer base so it has to do more customisation. This absorbs the resources that were once trying to maintain the invisible code.
You can be completely in the right and yet still post something that will attract people with poor emotional control. In fact, let me add, on some subjects the more right you are the more hate mail you will get. It's always seemed to me that "flamebait" is a legacy moderation from the early days of the internet. It covers everything from "holds divergent opinions from some people" to "complete and utter asshole". But nowadays it's mostly (IMNSHO) used by fanboys to defend their obsession with one bit of plastic covered electronics over another.
Referencing the post above who suggested that artificial bats could easily be disposed of by a shotgun, have you ever tried to aim at a bat? They are difficult enough to follow with low power binoculars. They also obviously have a fair bit of computing power in rather small brains.
Surely the point of the training is that some nerds don't know the point at which ordinary human interaction becomes harassment, and because of this either fail to communicate or get into trouble. I didn't know this and then ended up in what was nearly a single sex university (Cambridge at the end of the 60s) - it took several years in the world of work to recover.
It's also worth pointing out that when nerds do get married, which they usually do, it often turns out very well. Low divorce rates, successful children. The application of intelligence to human relationships is not a bad idea.
City and Guilds has had an oral (not verbal,notice) on its advanced exams where you have to submit a project, where the examiner asks questions to find out if you actually did the work yourself. The higher your likely score, the harder the questions get. I really cannot think of an alternative way of verifying that the submitter actually did the work.
It looks to me as though there is a confusion. The original vanadium oxide film when nonconducting can store supplied charge in a magnetic field. But the switching behaviour doesn't seem to be anything to do with this, unless there is some explanation not given in the article.
I guess someone from man.ac.uk ought to be interested in electronic storage, seeing as how you started off using cathode ray tubes:-)