And let's not forget, cash costs money to handle too. You've got to count it, make sure it doesn't grow legs. You've got to track it and haul it to the bank.
Which explains the rapid increase in stores that, if they accept plastic (credit card; debit card, whatever), will ask you if you "want cashback on that". Which means, effectively that you treat their till as an ATM, and make a cash withdrawal.
Which reduces their cash-banking costs. Considerably.
The wildly varied and often difficult terrain across the US would pose a lot of problems putting together a system like this
You do the same thing in difficult terrain as cart drivers and rail layers have done for millennia : go along a different route.
To a lesser degree the same applies to dealing with large fault lines. When you can't avoid them, cross at a high angle, with provisions for rapid repair when ground movement does occur. Which is going to be some engineering for a vacuum-tube containing a vehicle several metres in diameter. The sealing doors and control systems are going to be fun engineering too. At hundreds of km/hr, it's not clear which would be worse : running into a steel plate, or running into the pressure wave from a rupture.
I'm wondering of the practicality of it in becoming anywhere near a mass transit system.
It's going to run into a squeeze from businesses using VR/ video links as being cheaper and less time consuming than sending people, and holiday makers who find it no more convenient than going by plane. Luggage - searched or in the hold ; weighed nonetheless. Weapons and hazardous goods - no. Identity - verified, repeatedly. Door to door - no ; terminal to terminal.
About the only workable use case I can see would be for adding capacity between nearby cities : Birmingham- London ; London - Bristol ; Brussels - Antwerp - Amsterdam ; Zurich - Geneva ; Los Angeles and San Francisco are I believe the test case, perhaps Boston - New York would be the second case. Moscow - St Petersburg would be another interesting test case.
But even so, it's hardly mass transit. The UK examples I mentioned cover about 10% of the population, and for most of them the time for getting to the terminal will be greater than the time in transit between terminals (saying nothing about the check-in, baggage and boarding procedures at the terminal. What the proportion of USian or European or Russian populations are covered by the other lines I suggest, I don't know, but it's not going to be better as a mass transport system.
The student paid good money to be in that class. If they choose not to participate how is that a problem unless they are distracting others?
Is this a difference between British and USian university practice? In (UKian) lectures, interaction between student and lecturer isn't expected apart from a few minutes for questions at the end of the lecture. Those few who are likely to ask questions are expected to seat themselves in the front rank of seats, and are expected to make their questions cogent - e.g. if they catch an ambiguity or contradiction between words and diagrams.
Where interaction is expected is in the once- or twice- weekly seminars between smaller groups of students and lecturers or RAs/ TAs/ PhD students etc. And it is part of the job description of the person running the seminar to ensure that all of the students in their seminar group get tested on their understanding of the materials of the lectures and the problems that have been set.
Microseconds. u is typically used by non unicode internet
It's not just microseconds. It's a general prefix-multiplier for any SI unit. I use it all the time for micrometre, as my thin sections are 30um thick.
This remains a bodge. And not a very nice one either. I guess that it dates back to when "milli" was chosen as a multiplier for 1/1000. In hindsight, making the prefixes symmetrical around the base unit, so that a Captial would indicate n * base and the same lowercase would indicate base / n might have been a better idea. But it's a system that has bee developing over 2 and a quarter centuries, so perfect consistency is not really to be expected.
4. Someone uses one of the new code points that affect directionality but are not on the blacklist, causing the layout of Slashdot's comment section to break.
5. User involved is given a permanent -BIGNUM rating and has the.GT.42char+1hourExpiryResetByEmail rules applied to their password.
OK, then someone needs to do some admin - either editing the database, or just replacing the comment with "this user was a dick" boilerplate.
Since UNICODE organises things by MSB-determined "pages" (of up to several thousand characters apiece), then there's not an unmanageable filtering problem to reject some problematic "pages" but accept the rest.
Except people TRY to use the encoding, often unknowingly,
This user for one, often uses the CORRECT encoding KNOWING that it will be misprepresented by Slashdot.
and we end up with cryptic barf, dropped characters, etc.
Which is a desired outcome, being short hand for a statement to the Ever-Changing Overlordship that "you claim to be 'news for nerds', but you can't even do the basic task of handling users nerdish input properly.
To be honest, it would be less frustrating if Slashcode would just decompose character entities it doesn't recognise with whitespace, instead of variably dropping them, prepending a Capital-A-Acute or otherwise mangling them. "& A E l i g;" for example, if I try to start to spell one of my names correctly.
Hmm, having been complaining about Slashdot not supporting the sterling sign (£) for probably 20 years now, I still haven't noticed any improvement.
they decided to whitelist instead, by using a simple UTF-8 breaking filter of fixing the MSB to 0.
Then whoever is responsible for maintaining that whitelist is really, really incompetent and unresponsive to user comments. Where's Rei when you need him, with his comment about not being able to type his name, which includes a thorn letter. And the number of times I get Cyrillic script mangled by the back-end... it's going to get worse when I start learning Arabic.
I never knew about Slashdot Japan. As a Go player (note the incorrect letter "o" in that name), I would have liked to see some evidence of correct handling of any of the Japanese scripts.
Since you seem to know more about this than most, can you puzzle this for me. If the scheduling in BeOS was so much better (well, differently prioritised) than in the stock Linux kernel), is there anything fundamental to prevent someone writing a BeOS-like scheduler and plugging that into the Linux kernel instead of the stock kernel. Obviously it would need a recompile of the kernel to incorporate into the boot image, but... I don't see why it couldn't be done.
BeOS seems to have a complex mess of clones, derivatives and reimplementations, so I see there might be a minefield of IP issues to navigate.
My wife can't call me on Skype (an Microsoft product, now) on a Nokia (Microsoft) Windows (Microsoft) phone, while she can call her Babushka in Pyccia on Skype (Microsoft) on a white-box PC running pirated Windows.
Tell me again, Apple-o-philes, of the benefits of single-supplier ecosystems.
I'm the sole user of this headset, though. Swapping the lenses in and out would be very awkward if other people had to use it too.
Odd, I'm the sole user of my spectacles and prescription SCUBA mask too. In theory it would be possible for other people to use my frames, mask, etc and swap in their own lenses. But... well, I prefer large lenses ("aviator" style") in my specs while my wife uses those silly "letterbox" style lenses. and the one won't fit into the other.
Basically, I don't think this sort of equipment is going to work very well on a shared basis.
The more annoying thing for me is that the Vive requires a set of earbuds or headphones, and accompanying tangle of wires, which complicates getting the headset on and off. I've heard this will most likely be corrected by the Vive 2, which should have them built-in like the Rift does.
You want me to put those things which have been into your bacteria-riddled aural orifices into MY aural orifices? Tangle of wires or no tangle.
Sorry, sunshine, but when I loan people gags (diving air regulators) or microscopes, I wash the contact surfaces down with an alcohol-based biocidal gel before using them again myself. We had a bout of microscope-transferred conjunctivitis spread through my class in the revision period up to Finals, which was very painful for about 1/3 of the class, spread by an initial infected person and bacteria-laden eyelashes and tear drops. By the time anyone noticed they had a problem, a lot of us had shared the infection around. We learned our hygiene lessons the hard way. If you're sharing your intimate equipment, I suggest you learn your hygiene lessons too.
You can also purchase prescription lens to put in the HMD so you don't have to wear glasses at all.
Well, that's a solution to the problem. From the prices quoted, the cost of putting prescription lenses in would be comparable to the cost of the rest of the equipment put together. (I base this on the cost of my prescription lenses mounted into a decent SCUBA mask ; the price varies on whether it's single focus, bifocal or varifocal lenses you need.)
In theory, I'd need a new set of lenses every couple of years when I get a new prescription from my optician. But in practice, I only update occasional lenses intermittently.
My previous solution to the spectacles-in-a-SCUBA-mask problem was to remove the legs from an old pair of specs, and affix the frame into the mask with Blu-Tak. I literally haven't worn my £10 Google VR "thing" often enough to consider whether I need to address the problem. It's that pressing a problem.
Is it worth $500 if the cell service can no longer be used? I purchased a phone from craigslist that ended up being stolen, and it worked at first, but shortly after it was shut off.
Having had 3 phones stolen over the years, I'm wondering how long the phone was on [advert site] for? Every time that I've had a phone stolen, I've had the number (IMEI) blocked and non-functional in about an hour. Which doesn't leave much room for the thieves to get online, post their advert on [advert site], you to read it, meet the thieves and get the phone.
Or, you do the obvious, and use your concrete cap to control where you release the gas emissions, and feed it through a catalyst that burns the methane down to (much less harmful) carbon dioxide.
Or, if there is a lot of gas being produced, you collect it and pipe it into a gas-fuelled generator set and get... well, at least enough power to run the pumps and monitoring system, and quite likely more.
not building regulations and uncontrolled natural gas.
Errr, while this is methane, and methane is the main component of natural gas, this gas that is a product of decomposition of artificially-collected material is not what you'd normally describe as "natural gas".
Do you really think those politicians understand anything about manufacturing, engineering,
Given a choice between a government with a bullshitting bankrupt property developing tax-dodger at it's head, and a (more complex) political entity with a former research chemist in (arguably) it's most powerful post, I think I'd put a little more credence in the latter over the former.
Link."Nach dem Studium arbeitete ich am Zentralinstitut für Physikalische Chemie der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin und machte 1986 dort meinen Doktor in Physik. Das war harte Arbeit, aber auch eine schÃne Zeit."
(I parse that with my year or so studying German as "After being a student, I worked in [Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Science Academy of Berlin], getting my doctorate in 1986. That was hard work, but also a great time.")
He probably has it for the same reason that I use a USERNAME@goatse.cx email for a large number of things. It's a completely valid email address which was accepted by the provider on set-up. If they didn't think through the potential problems (specifically, the email provider might want a "noreply" address of their own at some point in the future), that is their tough shit. The human reviewing the application 20 years ago should have thought a bit more. If there was a human. And if they saved themselves the cost of employing a human 20 years ago, then they're going to pay the costs of that now.
I guess that they've got a new service (or program to service an existing service) and TFM suggests using a "noreply" address. And they don't know how to work around this (e.g. "ISPnameNoReply"). Which is itself an indication that they're dangerously incompetent.
They're doing a fine demonstration of the Streisand effect.
That's a very modest proposal which will, of course, allow (if not actually encourage) the expansion of the USian sex trafficking industry, and their export of Great Americans to be buggered around the world.
Trump would be proud of you, supporting the industries that will Make America Great Again.
But the distance the light has travelled has doubled. And the light doesn't know about what is going to happen to it, before it happens. You don't have one rule for photons in free space and a different rule for photons which are going to encounter a perpendicular mirror.
It gets significantly more complicated when one or more of your mirror, source, or receiver is travelling at a significant fraction of c.
Slanderous content must be punished. Non-slanderous content should not matter. Educated citizens can see through crap.
Where are you going to be finding them? For decades, education of citizens has been high on the "do not do" list of politicians everywhere where there is at least lip-service to accountability of government to citizens.
In either case, the ability to accurately identify the poster seems appropriate.
Let the posting entity beware!
To be honest, I suspect that the bullet that CNN are firing has, written down the side, "If you become a business profiting from media exposure, then that business will be held publicly accountable for the actions of it's staff." If the GIFer (whatever they are called) remains as a private citizen, no problem.
If he (probably "he", but by no means certain) uses his passing fame to try to monetise his GIF-making skills, well, that's business, and he becomes a public person anyway as the owner/ operator of a business, regardless of what CNN say about it.
But with a Chinese airline proposing it, instead of a Columbian one?
And I'll bet that was a dupe.
Sorry, but I've done the "pick the guy from 3 seats over out of my lap" trick after moderate turbulence once too often to find this even slightly amusing. And I've done the free-fall lifeboat trainer a couple of times (a.k.a the "orange Vomit Comet"). This will reduce costs until the first time they kill 75% of passengers in a landing that should have been "survivable" (10% or less mortality). Then the company will go bankrupt and the injured survivor and next-of-kin can go whistle for compensation.
Slashdot Mirror
Which explains the rapid increase in stores that, if they accept plastic (credit card; debit card, whatever), will ask you if you "want cashback on that". Which means, effectively that you treat their till as an ATM, and make a cash withdrawal.
Which reduces their cash-banking costs. Considerably.
You do the same thing in difficult terrain as cart drivers and rail layers have done for millennia : go along a different route.
To a lesser degree the same applies to dealing with large fault lines. When you can't avoid them, cross at a high angle, with provisions for rapid repair when ground movement does occur. Which is going to be some engineering for a vacuum-tube containing a vehicle several metres in diameter. The sealing doors and control systems are going to be fun engineering too. At hundreds of km/hr, it's not clear which would be worse : running into a steel plate, or running into the pressure wave from a rupture.
It's going to run into a squeeze from businesses using VR/ video links as being cheaper and less time consuming than sending people, and holiday makers who find it no more convenient than going by plane. Luggage - searched or in the hold ; weighed nonetheless. Weapons and hazardous goods - no. Identity - verified, repeatedly. Door to door - no ; terminal to terminal.
About the only workable use case I can see would be for adding capacity between nearby cities : Birmingham- London ; London - Bristol ; Brussels - Antwerp - Amsterdam ; Zurich - Geneva ; Los Angeles and San Francisco are I believe the test case, perhaps Boston - New York would be the second case. Moscow - St Petersburg would be another interesting test case.
But even so, it's hardly mass transit. The UK examples I mentioned cover about 10% of the population, and for most of them the time for getting to the terminal will be greater than the time in transit between terminals (saying nothing about the check-in, baggage and boarding procedures at the terminal. What the proportion of USian or European or Russian populations are covered by the other lines I suggest, I don't know, but it's not going to be better as a mass transport system.
Is this a difference between British and USian university practice? In (UKian) lectures, interaction between student and lecturer isn't expected apart from a few minutes for questions at the end of the lecture. Those few who are likely to ask questions are expected to seat themselves in the front rank of seats, and are expected to make their questions cogent - e.g. if they catch an ambiguity or contradiction between words and diagrams.
Where interaction is expected is in the once- or twice- weekly seminars between smaller groups of students and lecturers or RAs/ TAs/ PhD students etc. And it is part of the job description of the person running the seminar to ensure that all of the students in their seminar group get tested on their understanding of the materials of the lectures and the problems that have been set.
It's not just microseconds. It's a general prefix-multiplier for any SI unit. I use it all the time for micrometre, as my thin sections are 30um thick.
This remains a bodge. And not a very nice one either. I guess that it dates back to when "milli" was chosen as a multiplier for 1/1000. In hindsight, making the prefixes symmetrical around the base unit, so that a Captial would indicate n * base and the same lowercase would indicate base / n might have been a better idea. But it's a system that has bee developing over 2 and a quarter centuries, so perfect consistency is not really to be expected.
5. User involved is given a permanent -BIGNUM rating and has the .GT.42char+1hourExpiryResetByEmail rules applied to their password.
OK, then someone needs to do some admin - either editing the database, or just replacing the comment with "this user was a dick" boilerplate.
Since UNICODE organises things by MSB-determined "pages" (of up to several thousand characters apiece), then there's not an unmanageable filtering problem to reject some problematic "pages" but accept the rest.
This user for one, often uses the CORRECT encoding KNOWING that it will be misprepresented by Slashdot.
Which is a desired outcome, being short hand for a statement to the Ever-Changing Overlordship that "you claim to be 'news for nerds', but you can't even do the basic task of handling users nerdish input properly.
To be honest, it would be less frustrating if Slashcode would just decompose character entities it doesn't recognise with whitespace, instead of variably dropping them, prepending a Capital-A-Acute or otherwise mangling them. "& A E l i g ;" for example, if I try to start to spell one of my names correctly.
For anything more than a 4-function calculator for decorating calculations, I just use an application on my phone.
Then whoever is responsible for maintaining that whitelist is really, really incompetent and unresponsive to user comments. Where's Rei when you need him, with his comment about not being able to type his name, which includes a thorn letter. And the number of times I get Cyrillic script mangled by the back-end ... it's going to get worse when I start learning Arabic.
I never knew about Slashdot Japan. As a Go player (note the incorrect letter "o" in that name), I would have liked to see some evidence of correct handling of any of the Japanese scripts.
BeOS seems to have a complex mess of clones, derivatives and reimplementations, so I see there might be a minefield of IP issues to navigate.
Tell me again, Apple-o-philes, of the benefits of single-supplier ecosystems.
Nope. It's an iDevice, and I've never liked them since the first one I brought - and then sold on. (I will admit, it kept it's resale value).
120$, no. It's still an iDevice.
12$, yeah, I'd consider it.
Per eye, if you're using varifocals.
Odd, I'm the sole user of my spectacles and prescription SCUBA mask too. In theory it would be possible for other people to use my frames, mask, etc and swap in their own lenses. But ... well, I prefer large lenses ("aviator" style") in my specs while my wife uses those silly "letterbox" style lenses. and the one won't fit into the other.
Basically, I don't think this sort of equipment is going to work very well on a shared basis.
You want me to put those things which have been into your bacteria-riddled aural orifices into MY aural orifices? Tangle of wires or no tangle.
Sorry, sunshine, but when I loan people gags (diving air regulators) or microscopes, I wash the contact surfaces down with an alcohol-based biocidal gel before using them again myself. We had a bout of microscope-transferred conjunctivitis spread through my class in the revision period up to Finals, which was very painful for about 1/3 of the class, spread by an initial infected person and bacteria-laden eyelashes and tear drops. By the time anyone noticed they had a problem, a lot of us had shared the infection around. We learned our hygiene lessons the hard way. If you're sharing your intimate equipment, I suggest you learn your hygiene lessons too.
Well, that's a solution to the problem. From the prices quoted, the cost of putting prescription lenses in would be comparable to the cost of the rest of the equipment put together. (I base this on the cost of my prescription lenses mounted into a decent SCUBA mask ; the price varies on whether it's single focus, bifocal or varifocal lenses you need.)
In theory, I'd need a new set of lenses every couple of years when I get a new prescription from my optician. But in practice, I only update occasional lenses intermittently.
My previous solution to the spectacles-in-a-SCUBA-mask problem was to remove the legs from an old pair of specs, and affix the frame into the mask with Blu-Tak. I literally haven't worn my £10 Google VR "thing" often enough to consider whether I need to address the problem. It's that pressing a problem.
Having had 3 phones stolen over the years, I'm wondering how long the phone was on [advert site] for? Every time that I've had a phone stolen, I've had the number (IMEI) blocked and non-functional in about an hour. Which doesn't leave much room for the thieves to get online, post their advert on [advert site], you to read it, meet the thieves and get the phone.
Or, if there is a lot of gas being produced, you collect it and pipe it into a gas-fuelled generator set and get ... well, at least enough power to run the pumps and monitoring system, and quite likely more.
Errr, while this is methane, and methane is the main component of natural gas, this gas that is a product of decomposition of artificially-collected material is not what you'd normally describe as "natural gas".
Given a choice between a government with a bullshitting bankrupt property developing tax-dodger at it's head, and a (more complex) political entity with a former research chemist in (arguably) it's most powerful post, I think I'd put a little more credence in the latter over the former.
Link."Nach dem Studium arbeitete ich am Zentralinstitut für Physikalische Chemie der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin und machte 1986 dort meinen Doktor in Physik. Das war harte Arbeit, aber auch eine schÃne Zeit." (I parse that with my year or so studying German as "After being a student, I worked in [Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Science Academy of Berlin], getting my doctorate in 1986. That was hard work, but also a great time.")
You say that as if you think it is a bad thing. You need to choose your same-sex partners better.
Tough shit. For you.
He probably has it for the same reason that I use a USERNAME@goatse.cx email for a large number of things. It's a completely valid email address which was accepted by the provider on set-up. If they didn't think through the potential problems (specifically, the email provider might want a "noreply" address of their own at some point in the future), that is their tough shit. The human reviewing the application 20 years ago should have thought a bit more. If there was a human. And if they saved themselves the cost of employing a human 20 years ago, then they're going to pay the costs of that now.
I guess that they've got a new service (or program to service an existing service) and TFM suggests using a "noreply" address. And they don't know how to work around this (e.g. "ISPnameNoReply"). Which is itself an indication that they're dangerously incompetent.
They're doing a fine demonstration of the Streisand effect.
Trump would be proud of you, supporting the industries that will Make America Great Again.
It gets significantly more complicated when one or more of your mirror, source, or receiver is travelling at a significant fraction of c.
Where are you going to be finding them? For decades, education of citizens has been high on the "do not do" list of politicians everywhere where there is at least lip-service to accountability of government to citizens.
To be honest, I suspect that the bullet that CNN are firing has, written down the side, "If you become a business profiting from media exposure, then that business will be held publicly accountable for the actions of it's staff." If the GIFer (whatever they are called) remains as a private citizen, no problem.
If he (probably "he", but by no means certain) uses his passing fame to try to monetise his GIF-making skills, well, that's business, and he becomes a public person anyway as the owner/ operator of a business, regardless of what CNN say about it.
And I'll bet that was a dupe.
Sorry, but I've done the "pick the guy from 3 seats over out of my lap" trick after moderate turbulence once too often to find this even slightly amusing. And I've done the free-fall lifeboat trainer a couple of times (a.k.a the "orange Vomit Comet"). This will reduce costs until the first time they kill 75% of passengers in a landing that should have been "survivable" (10% or less mortality). Then the company will go bankrupt and the injured survivor and next-of-kin can go whistle for compensation.