For instance, many ICs are manufactured with depleted boron as a semiconductor dopant and in the borophosphosilicate glass insulating layer.
Since you're talking about isotopically purifying a material, that's going to be a damned sight more expensive than normal-isotope-mix boron. You've got the relatively large mass difference working on your side - 7.7% mass difference (borane) compared to (238+6*19)/(235+6*19) = 0.08% difference (UF6) - but you're still looking at a pretty big job. Even simple heavy water is thousands of times more expensive than normal reagent grade water (11.8% mass difference for D2O versus H2O).
I hadn't thought about the (relative) reactivity of 10B from a radiation-sensitivity point of view. But we've been using it to date the exposure of rock surfaces to the sky for a couple of decades now, and a damned useful tool for archaeological and geomorphological studies it is too. It's up there with thermoluminescence for dating fire damage.
We have near 100 of these in the field and while I've bench-powerfailed them to no avail, out in the real world they die due to fs corruption.
Hang on, let's get that straight : if you pull the power when they're on the bench, then they don't fail, but if they suffer a power fail in the field they do suffer corruption and freeze/ hang/ fail to boot?
Obviously you've tried this, but are you sure that you're pulling the power on the bench while they're in mid-write? Because if you're doing ostensibly the same thing in two circumstances, but with different results, then I'd have to wonder if you're actually doing THE SAME THING both on the bench and in the field.
The way you've described it, it shouldn't do that.
Are the field and lab conditions - e.g. temperature - also the same. I could see temperature having a significant effect on write speeds on (flash) memory. It sounds perplexing. And quite worrying if your troubleshooting isn't replicating something that seems so simple. I know that troubleshooting can be a real time-sink, but if you're getting lots of these fails then the time to service the fialed field modules must add up too.
Are the Pis also under the same load conditions - data-logging, streaming, whatever - on the bench as in the field?
I for one want to meet Mrs. Bucket, ulp, sorry Bouquet...
He's a builder and excellent folk-singer who lives and works in North Yorkshire. Answers to "Pete".
No, I'm not joking.
I had to have the programme explained to me, never having watched more than 30 seconds of the repellent waste of electrons, but once I'd seen enough to recognise the character traits of Bucket-gob (the original) and Mrs Bouquet (the fictional derivative), the comparison was obvious. One or other of the (original) script-writers lives in the same street.
People who use JPEG for images with text in them should be burned at the stake, slowly. Partly because it would solve a significant chunk of the population bomb - there are a lot of them around. But mostly because it is just WRONG. However an image handling protocol which can handle text reasonably well and photographic images very well, would be a very good thing.
You clearly don't have to pay for serious bandwidth. If you were running a significant site, you might have remembered re-processing your GIFs to PNGs, partly because of the threat of patent bullshit, and partly to reduce your bandwidth costs. And the effect works in the other direction too - on my work site (currently moving from West Africa to Turkey) we have 1Mbps available for all business and personal purposes of the up to 180 POB (Personnel On Board). That's not going to be upgraded - why would it?) But chopping a considerable chunk off the size of each photographic image loaded would have a considerable effect.
You may not have a use case for this sort of change. But other people do.
As soon as Photoshop and Firefox/Chrome start supporting it I can see widespread adoption.
Irfanview would be the crunch application for me. And yes, I might well make a new payment (I've already brought one copy) if it would fund the writing of the module.
Up to 14 bits/pixel/channel (does that include the alpha-channel? If TFA included it, I missed it.) would certainly be a major step up from 8bppc in JPEG, though I do occasionally handle data from 16bppc astronomical sensors, and I wonder about HDR photography, so I wonder if pushing up to 16bppc is feasible. We do have FITS for handling the astronomical data, and TIFF for medical up-to-32bppc imaging, so it's not necessarily unworkable. Actually, considering that this is, by design, a lossy format... my worries are a non-issue. For serious work, you'd never use JPEG or BPG or any lossy format.
Bellard seriously knows his coding. Impressive breadth of contributions to the world over the years.
Actually, the twin research (by Mengele, mostly at Auschwitz) wasn't much use. On the other hand, pretty much every piece of cold protection clothing and equipment that has been designed and put into production since the 1940s uses some results of the freezing-Jews-&-homos experiments (mostly at Dachau). They might not know that they're using those results - the whole industry is rife with re-inventing the wheel - but the basic research work was done by killing prisoners (for a variety of crimes which were variants of "disagreeing with the people with guns) in Nazi Germany.
Your point is fair, but your example is pretty weak.
Those are some fair use cases. But I rather doubt that there would be enough business there to support several 40 G$ companies. But that is the investor's look - out.
The government (for all known values of "government") will want their pound of flesh or 20% VAT or 10% GST or whatever they call it. But they will want their tax, regardless of your wishes.
So, if this concept of "free market" works (a big "if" ; Like I said, Adam Smith was an Edinburian, and thus remains suspect), the higher fares that you say are available through Uber will allow some licensed taxi-owner to propose to a token holder that he rent the token for $225/day, and the token holder will, in the spirit of "free enterprise", decline the extra $25/day and refuse to allow Uber into the city.
Sorry, I'm having a problem here. Something doesn't add up. There is money in the system that you've not described. (Or the principles of "free enterprise" and "capitalism" are inaccurate descriptions of the world. And we know, as an article of faith, that the latter can't be true - 300 million Americans can't be wrong!)
Niven is one of the few that spend great detail on the non-humanoid aliens. Both anatomically and culturally.
In Known Space, true. Sadly, I'm ploughing through Niven's recent collaboration with Greg Benford ("Bowl of Heaven", ISBN 0765366460) and thinking very much along the lines that Charlie is. Much though I like Niven's work (hint: I found it on the "N" shelf, where I was looking, not on the "B" shelf where I wasn't looking), I'm reading it and thinking "the Emperor's New Ringworld". I'll leave the rest as spoiler - but I haven't finished reading it yet.
What do I think of Charlie Stross's work? I'd used up my kilogramme new book allowance before I got to the "S" shelf, otherwise I'd probably have succumbed to the temptation. The last time I met Charlie - at a Linux User Group meeting - I hadn't read any of his stuff ; when I meet him again, I will feel obligated to buy him a pint.
An Indian male can apparently be turned into a rapist by merely seeing a clothing store dummy. How on earth can they be expected to control themselves when a real live woman is in a car with them?
and the fee was a "suggested donation" (this gets around the professional driver legality which is killing their model), then I'd be a regular user
In this country, accepting payment for driving is "driving for hire". Regular vehicle insurance is for driving for "social, domestic and pleasure" purposes ("SDP"), which includes getting to and from work, but does not generally include driving as an essential part of your employment. So, you're OK for commuting to and from work ; you're OK for driving to the restaurant for lunch ; you're probably OK if you have to drive to the offices on the other side of town for a meeting. But if you drive around 3 clients/ suppliers collecting and dropping off materials for 3 hours a day, you're probably driving outside the terms of your insurance policy. Which means that you're driving un-insured.
Obviously, there are issues of verification. But the more driving you do, the more likely you are to fall outside the "SDP" categories.
There are a lot of companies who do things like hiring housewives to spend the time between school runs doing parcel deliveries in their cars. And there have been several cases of such employees (technically they're self-employed sole traders, individually responsible for their own companies following the laws) having a crash with a pile of parcels in the car, and this being spotted by an investigating police officer.
"Are you delivering these parcels for 'YouDeliveryCo', Mrs Bloggs?"
"Errr, yes. Is there a problem, Constable?"
"Can I check your insurance details, please?[Few minutes phone calls]I'm arresting you for driving without insurance. Your insurance doesn't cover you for driving for hire."
If your proposed "suggested donation" system started to happen, then you'd see exactly the same situation happening again.
Yes, there is an implication of the above. If you share a car with a buddy for the weekend to go walking/ cycling/ away/ whatever, you're skating on the edges of "driving for hire". And it's true : you are skating the edges. If it is something you do every so often, then it's just not going to be detected. But if you're doing it often enough to make a living at it, then you're almost certainly going to have enough crunches, grinds and scrapes that your insurance company is going to notice. And yes, the insurance companies do talk to one another, and yes, you did agree to them doing that when you signed up for your current insurance policy. (If you scored the condition out, they'd decline the policy. And they talk to each other about declined policies too.)
Since the cities core is fairly wealthy, they are willing to pay more for a cleaner, quicker, and more reliable service.
So, since higher fares are available through Uber, the higher-standards (self-imposed) licensed taxi drivers are moonlighting to Uber and buying out their own tokens (or whatever the system is locally)?
It's a serious question. OP here, and locally we're debating whether to allow Uber into our country and city (an alternative would be to let one of Uber's competitors in, if they actually agree to improve adherence to our existing taxi standards system). One would hope that the theory of the "free market" would prevail, but since the theory of the "free market" originated just down the road (Smith was from Auld Reekie), we've always been decidedly sceptical of it (weird folk in Edinburgh. You'll have had your tea then?)
When I go hitch-hiking, I do my own security checks before getting into the punters car. As often as possible, I do it before the punter even approaches his (or her) car. (But then again, my hitching thumb is probably due for it's quarter-million km oil change, so what would I know?
Oooh, but it's an app, so it must be good, right?
Ohhh, sarcasm! could it possibly be that just like me, you are not convinced by the "new + shiny = good" argument that seems to pass without discussion around here. I'm sure the "glitterati" will have us shot at dawn some time soon ; been nice knowing of your existence.
Rape can be performed with any penis-like object. Dildo ; screwdriver ; beer bottle ; broken beer bottle.
The problem of rape is more fundamental then possession of a penis. Indeed, there have been cases of people without a penis committing rape against people with a penis.
U.S. has better reporting and higher standards of defining rape than India.
What is your metric of comparison for definitions of rape that allows you to say, unambiguously, that one definition is "better" than another? "Different" is, I'm sure true (identity is easy to check for ; one comma moved and you're no longer identical), but you claim to have a metric that allows you to determine if one rape definition is "better" than another ; therefore you have a scoring or ranking system more complex than simply "identical" versus "not identical". What is your ranking system?
Even Uber, bunch of shit-heads though they have for management, haven't made that claim. But then again, you're a Torygraph reader, so I don't expect too much from you.
In any case, it seems they were looking for any excuse at all to ban Uber.
OP here.
As I wrote in the ORIGINAL submission (which, contrary to Slash-meme, samzenpus has substantially edited), I'm decidedly dubious about Uber in particular and less than convinced of the need for the entire concept in general. The second paragraph of my submission read:
Going on previous Uber performance, can we expect the driver to be working again tonight, and the spokesman making such inconvenient admissions to be unemployed? That would sound about the level of PR skill of Uber's senior management â" as currently constituted. They've managed to turn me from a potential supporter to someone who will be voting against Uber being allowed into my city or country."
There do certainly seem to be some complete arseholes in the senior management team of Uber, and I do not see any benefit to allowing companies run by such shit-heads into the taxi service in my country in general, and into my city in particular. I don't make comment about whether other countries may benefit from them - but here the regulations are reasonable, and the enforcement is reasonably effective, so what benefit Uber/ Lyft/ Internet-taxi-ordering-company would actually bring is pretty dubious. Yes, I do get pissed off when a plane lands at the airport, disgorging me and 250 other people out the front doors a few minutes later, and there are only 10 taxis. But that is the problem of 250 people wanting a taxi immediately ; if I wait 20 minutes (a coffee and a cigarette), there are still 10 taxis (a different 10) but only 3 people in the queue so I can then get a taxi home. Or I could just take the bus (every half hour into town), which gets me home just as well and just as comfortably as any taxi.
The investors who own Uber are going to have to seriously ask themselves if the arseholes in charge of the company are actually damaging the company which they (the investors) own.
it has always been common for Vinnie's brother Tony to do the nightshift or whatever in NY. [...] Does the picture of the cabbie on the license match the face of the driver? Often not.
So, when you realise this, you call the police and instruct the driver to stop the cab. then wait with the cab to make your case to the police officer and fill out the paperwork for pursuing the case?
Enforcement of regulation does actually require the assistance of the population (that means you). It can't all be done by the police's random flagging down of passing taxis for document checks. Which does, of course, happen ; and is legal - it's a freedom that goes away with getting your taxi license. And that also required the police to do it without getting an ear-full of abuse from the fare.
A random person in either position would not be as cavalier.
How long before the Joe Random Person who starts working as a taxi driver has absorbed the culture of the job and become the arsehole that other posters describe as their typical taxi driver?
I must admit, the only aspect of their descriptions that I recognise is the poor to non-existent English. But even that only really applies to the taxi drivers in Benin and Gabon, where English isn't actually an official language and they have to put up with my dodgy French. The Afghan and Polish taxi drivers here often speak more comprehensible English than the native-born and bred Scottish taxi drivers, but that's because they (the Afghans and Poles) have been taught to speak English, not learned it from their parents.
So, what were the benefits of Uber again? I'm still not seeing any reason to vote in favour of their service being allowed in my country.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you're talking about isotopically purifying a material, that's going to be a damned sight more expensive than normal-isotope-mix boron. You've got the relatively large mass difference working on your side - 7.7% mass difference (borane) compared to (238+6*19)/(235+6*19) = 0.08% difference (UF6) - but you're still looking at a pretty big job. Even simple heavy water is thousands of times more expensive than normal reagent grade water (11.8% mass difference for D2O versus H2O).
I hadn't thought about the (relative) reactivity of 10B from a radiation-sensitivity point of view. But we've been using it to date the exposure of rock surfaces to the sky for a couple of decades now, and a damned useful tool for archaeological and geomorphological studies it is too. It's up there with thermoluminescence for dating fire damage.
Hang on, let's get that straight : if you pull the power when they're on the bench, then they don't fail, but if they suffer a power fail in the field they do suffer corruption and freeze/ hang/ fail to boot?
Obviously you've tried this, but are you sure that you're pulling the power on the bench while they're in mid-write? Because if you're doing ostensibly the same thing in two circumstances, but with different results, then I'd have to wonder if you're actually doing THE SAME THING both on the bench and in the field.
The way you've described it, it shouldn't do that.
Are the field and lab conditions - e.g. temperature - also the same. I could see temperature having a significant effect on write speeds on (flash) memory. It sounds perplexing. And quite worrying if your troubleshooting isn't replicating something that seems so simple. I know that troubleshooting can be a real time-sink, but if you're getting lots of these fails then the time to service the fialed field modules must add up too.
Are the Pis also under the same load conditions - data-logging, streaming, whatever - on the bench as in the field?
I'd rather boil my own head.
He's a builder and excellent folk-singer who lives and works in North Yorkshire. Answers to "Pete".
No, I'm not joking.
I had to have the programme explained to me, never having watched more than 30 seconds of the repellent waste of electrons, but once I'd seen enough to recognise the character traits of Bucket-gob (the original) and Mrs Bouquet (the fictional derivative), the comparison was obvious. One or other of the (original) script-writers lives in the same street.
People who use JPEG for images with text in them should be burned at the stake, slowly. Partly because it would solve a significant chunk of the population bomb - there are a lot of them around. But mostly because it is just WRONG. However an image handling protocol which can handle text reasonably well and photographic images very well, would be a very good thing.
You clearly don't have to pay for serious bandwidth. If you were running a significant site, you might have remembered re-processing your GIFs to PNGs, partly because of the threat of patent bullshit, and partly to reduce your bandwidth costs. And the effect works in the other direction too - on my work site (currently moving from West Africa to Turkey) we have 1Mbps available for all business and personal purposes of the up to 180 POB (Personnel On Board). That's not going to be upgraded - why would it?) But chopping a considerable chunk off the size of each photographic image loaded would have a considerable effect.
You may not have a use case for this sort of change. But other people do.
Irfanview would be the crunch application for me. And yes, I might well make a new payment (I've already brought one copy) if it would fund the writing of the module.
Up to 14 bits/pixel/channel (does that include the alpha-channel? If TFA included it, I missed it.) would certainly be a major step up from 8bppc in JPEG, though I do occasionally handle data from 16bppc astronomical sensors, and I wonder about HDR photography, so I wonder if pushing up to 16bppc is feasible. We do have FITS for handling the astronomical data, and TIFF for medical up-to-32bppc imaging, so it's not necessarily unworkable. Actually, considering that this is, by design, a lossy format ... my worries are a non-issue. For serious work, you'd never use JPEG or BPG or any lossy format.
Bellard seriously knows his coding. Impressive breadth of contributions to the world over the years.
By what? The fact that the nips have been flashed over. Pathetic! (the entire waste of electrons over this).
Your point is fair, but your example is pretty weak.
How so? They just look like fish to me. Medium-sized, carnivorous fish. Don't seem to have any particularly objectionable habits.
The government (for all known values of "government") will want their pound of flesh or 20% VAT or 10% GST or whatever they call it. But they will want their tax, regardless of your wishes.
Sorry, I'm having a problem here. Something doesn't add up. There is money in the system that you've not described. (Or the principles of "free enterprise" and "capitalism" are inaccurate descriptions of the world. And we know, as an article of faith, that the latter can't be true - 300 million Americans can't be wrong!)
In Known Space, true. Sadly, I'm ploughing through Niven's recent collaboration with Greg Benford ("Bowl of Heaven", ISBN 0765366460) and thinking very much along the lines that Charlie is. Much though I like Niven's work (hint: I found it on the "N" shelf, where I was looking, not on the "B" shelf where I wasn't looking), I'm reading it and thinking "the Emperor's New Ringworld". I'll leave the rest as spoiler - but I haven't finished reading it yet.
What do I think of Charlie Stross's work? I'd used up my kilogramme new book allowance before I got to the "S" shelf, otherwise I'd probably have succumbed to the temptation. The last time I met Charlie - at a Linux User Group meeting - I hadn't read any of his stuff ; when I meet him again, I will feel obligated to buy him a pint.
The author of "Jesus'n'Mo" has, ummm, covered this already. http://www.jesusandmo.net/2007...
Übermensch : man on top ?
In your country, that may be the case. I simply do not think that is the case in my country, and certainly not in my city.
In this country, accepting payment for driving is "driving for hire". Regular vehicle insurance is for driving for "social, domestic and pleasure" purposes ("SDP"), which includes getting to and from work, but does not generally include driving as an essential part of your employment. So, you're OK for commuting to and from work ; you're OK for driving to the restaurant for lunch ; you're probably OK if you have to drive to the offices on the other side of town for a meeting. But if you drive around 3 clients/ suppliers collecting and dropping off materials for 3 hours a day, you're probably driving outside the terms of your insurance policy. Which means that you're driving un-insured.
Obviously, there are issues of verification. But the more driving you do, the more likely you are to fall outside the "SDP" categories.
There are a lot of companies who do things like hiring housewives to spend the time between school runs doing parcel deliveries in their cars. And there have been several cases of such employees (technically they're self-employed sole traders, individually responsible for their own companies following the laws) having a crash with a pile of parcels in the car, and this being spotted by an investigating police officer.
"Are you delivering these parcels for 'YouDeliveryCo', Mrs Bloggs?"
"Errr, yes. Is there a problem, Constable?"
"Can I check your insurance details, please?[Few minutes phone calls]I'm arresting you for driving without insurance. Your insurance doesn't cover you for driving for hire."
If your proposed "suggested donation" system started to happen, then you'd see exactly the same situation happening again.
Yes, there is an implication of the above. If you share a car with a buddy for the weekend to go walking/ cycling/ away/ whatever, you're skating on the edges of "driving for hire". And it's true : you are skating the edges. If it is something you do every so often, then it's just not going to be detected. But if you're doing it often enough to make a living at it, then you're almost certainly going to have enough crunches, grinds and scrapes that your insurance company is going to notice. And yes, the insurance companies do talk to one another, and yes, you did agree to them doing that when you signed up for your current insurance policy. (If you scored the condition out, they'd decline the policy. And they talk to each other about declined policies too.)
So, since higher fares are available through Uber, the higher-standards (self-imposed) licensed taxi drivers are moonlighting to Uber and buying out their own tokens (or whatever the system is locally)?
It's a serious question. OP here, and locally we're debating whether to allow Uber into our country and city (an alternative would be to let one of Uber's competitors in, if they actually agree to improve adherence to our existing taxi standards system). One would hope that the theory of the "free market" would prevail, but since the theory of the "free market" originated just down the road (Smith was from Auld Reekie), we've always been decidedly sceptical of it (weird folk in Edinburgh. You'll have had your tea then?)
When I go hitch-hiking, I do my own security checks before getting into the punters car. As often as possible, I do it before the punter even approaches his (or her) car. (But then again, my hitching thumb is probably due for it's quarter-million km oil change, so what would I know?
Ohhh, sarcasm! could it possibly be that just like me, you are not convinced by the "new + shiny = good" argument that seems to pass without discussion around here. I'm sure the "glitterati" will have us shot at dawn some time soon ; been nice knowing of your existence.
The problem of rape is more fundamental then possession of a penis. Indeed, there have been cases of people without a penis committing rape against people with a penis.
What is your metric of comparison for definitions of rape that allows you to say, unambiguously, that one definition is "better" than another? "Different" is, I'm sure true (identity is easy to check for ; one comma moved and you're no longer identical), but you claim to have a metric that allows you to determine if one rape definition is "better" than another ; therefore you have a scoring or ranking system more complex than simply "identical" versus "not identical". What is your ranking system?
Even Uber, bunch of shit-heads though they have for management, haven't made that claim. But then again, you're a Torygraph reader, so I don't expect too much from you.
OP here.
As I wrote in the ORIGINAL submission (which, contrary to Slash-meme, samzenpus has substantially edited), I'm decidedly dubious about Uber in particular and less than convinced of the need for the entire concept in general. The second paragraph of my submission read :
There do certainly seem to be some complete arseholes in the senior management team of Uber, and I do not see any benefit to allowing companies run by such shit-heads into the taxi service in my country in general, and into my city in particular. I don't make comment about whether other countries may benefit from them - but here the regulations are reasonable, and the enforcement is reasonably effective, so what benefit Uber/ Lyft/ Internet-taxi-ordering-company would actually bring is pretty dubious. Yes, I do get pissed off when a plane lands at the airport, disgorging me and 250 other people out the front doors a few minutes later, and there are only 10 taxis. But that is the problem of 250 people wanting a taxi immediately ; if I wait 20 minutes (a coffee and a cigarette), there are still 10 taxis (a different 10) but only 3 people in the queue so I can then get a taxi home. Or I could just take the bus (every half hour into town), which gets me home just as well and just as comfortably as any taxi.
The investors who own Uber are going to have to seriously ask themselves if the arseholes in charge of the company are actually damaging the company which they (the investors) own.
So, when you realise this, you call the police and instruct the driver to stop the cab. then wait with the cab to make your case to the police officer and fill out the paperwork for pursuing the case?
Enforcement of regulation does actually require the assistance of the population (that means you). It can't all be done by the police's random flagging down of passing taxis for document checks. Which does, of course, happen ; and is legal - it's a freedom that goes away with getting your taxi license. And that also required the police to do it without getting an ear-full of abuse from the fare.
How long before the Joe Random Person who starts working as a taxi driver has absorbed the culture of the job and become the arsehole that other posters describe as their typical taxi driver?
I must admit, the only aspect of their descriptions that I recognise is the poor to non-existent English. But even that only really applies to the taxi drivers in Benin and Gabon, where English isn't actually an official language and they have to put up with my dodgy French. The Afghan and Polish taxi drivers here often speak more comprehensible English than the native-born and bred Scottish taxi drivers, but that's because they (the Afghans and Poles) have been taught to speak English, not learned it from their parents.
So, what were the benefits of Uber again? I'm still not seeing any reason to vote in favour of their service being allowed in my country.