I stopped reading when he described a catenary as a parabola
Why is that? Did the line drop?
The cable would be a catenary only if there were no load on it other than its self weight, which is uniform along the cable - which is not horizontal except right at the centre. However, when supporting a road deck, the deck imposes a weight load that is uniform along the horizontal length, not uniform along the length of the cable. The road deck weight is far greater than the cable self-weight, so it is (more or less) a parabola.
That is to the first order anyway. In fact the cable tends to go in straight lines between each point where a vertical suspender is, but those points lying on a parabola. And of course the roadway is not exactly horizontal in most modern suspension bridges.
browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
There is so much to go wrong here (wrong from theadman's viewpoint). You get no choice about how long you watch a TV ad - they last as long as they last, and I am probably out having a piss. And they have the same ads on many differnt channels and they bear no relation to the TV programme. All it might tell the adman is how much TV I watch.
And how does the sound link devices together? The TV advert cannot send an individual ultra-sonic code to every TV receiver, so millions of devices belonging to millions of people will have exactly the same signature placed in them.
And even when the button is actually a switch with an air gap, the push-on push-off type, you cannot see if it is on or off. With old-time toggle
switches (and rocker switches, though less obviously) you could see at a glance if it were on or off.
Last night I wasted ten minutes trying to connect my laptop to my WiFi before realising that its "Kill" button was in the "Kill" state. It does have a light in the button to show if connected, but that is not the same as being un-killed - ie the light stays off if the problem is at the wireless hub or you are out of range.
Designers (ie the art graduate types) prefer buttons because they believe their design to be the absolute optimum aesthetic. They therefore do not want the visual distubance that would result from a toggle or rocker switch being moved into a different position. That is the way they think.
As there are nearly as many people in London than in Scotland + NI + Wales (taking your word for it) then I would expect London people to have collectively as much influence. In fact the system is meant to do that now, because each parliamentary seat is supposed to represent roughly equal numbers of voters. London does not have just one parliamentary seat, you know.
It is the distribution of voters that makes the present system broken - working class people, who tend to vote Labour instinctively, without thinking about it much*, tend to be clustered into areas where they are like 90% of the population (industrial South Wales for example) - areas where any Labour votes over the 50% are "wasted". There are some Conservative areas like this too (I'm in one, Monmouthshire, farming and tourism), but fewer. Even the Liberal Party has areas supporting them mainly by tradition.
OTOH, people voting for minority parties like UKIP, BNP, The Greens and Communist are, if anything, people who are by nature more individualistic (they are leaving the comfort zone). But such people tend to be scattered around (it does not correlate much with any particular type of area), so there is almost no chance of them getting MPs elected, and nothing like in proportion to their actual numbers. Their percentage in any one constituency will always be rather low. Of course, the main parties (and the people who vote for them) want to keep it that way.
Under the present UK system, the optimum distribution of voters is to have the support of just over 50% of the voters in as many constituencies as possible, and have none of your supporters "wasted" in no-hope areas. The Conservatives are the closest to having this voting demography, which is why they always punch above their weight in elections.
* My mother is an example. From a family with a traditional "Us and Them" attiude, she voted Labour all her life. She didn't understand Blair's "New Labour" but said she could never change "after all these years". She'd have still been voting Labour if they were going to send her to the gas chambers [whoops, is that Godwin?].
Replying to myself, sorry I didn't read TFA. Now I have and see it is about leasing cars to Uber taxi drivers, not to general public, but the/. article did not make that point clear. It is still not a/. matter though.
I get down-voted every time I ask questions like this...:(
The post is an advert. The question remains unanswered though.
In the UK, AFAIK long term car hire schemes are total packages, including services and tyres. The sort of people who have such hires, mostly though their company like travelling reps and PHBs, would never dream of stooping to look at their tyre wear anyway.
Agreed. On BBC TV recently they featured a Syrian doctor who wanted to settle in the UK so that he could continue his medical practice. We were supposed to sympathise with him as a quiet middle-class man who just wanted to continue his quite middle-class life.
My thought instead was that with his country at war, his country needed doctors.
You really only have one choice for "interfering", and that's gearing up for a massive ground invasion with the troops and manpower to militarily occupy the region at a troop scale similar to the European theater of WWII.
Nothing like that scale. The Germans in WWII were extremely tough fighters with a home-grown manufacturing base and deployed high tech. ISIS, for all their willy waving in front of the cameras, are nothing of the sort.
Ah, Bill O'Reilly, the shining beacon of rationality and humanism. Nothing he says should be taken seriously, ever.
Not being in the USA, I don't know who the hell Bill O'Relly is, and don't much care. Nevertheless the statement "General Patton could destroy all of ISIS in a week." is perfectly true with the minor correction to "could have if he were still around". It doesn't matter who says it. In fact any living general who is not totally incompetent could do the same with the West's firepower at their disposal. I don't know why it is not done.
Its the UK , there is not [sic] right to own and bear arms.
Very few people in the UK have any wish to "own and bear arms". Most people find the idea repulsive, and certainly would not regard it as a "right"; it is a different culture from wherever you are and always has been.
I say this as one of a tiny minority who has owned a firearm, as a member of a rifle club, and even I did not regard my ownership as a "right", but as something to qualify for. Anyway, last time I checked there is no great difficulty in owning a firearm if you are a bona-fide member of such a club, or have an identifiable need for one, such as a chicken farmer owning a shotgun to kill foxes. I live in a rural area and in fact my neighbour farmer has a shotgun, another of this tiny minority.
What's to keep these from being carried to the nearest alley and a relieved of their payloads?
What's to stop you hijacking a parcel delivery van? Or mugging a little old lady for her pension? Or robbing a bank?
Because these involve human victims, that in some cases might put up a fight. A court would take such cases far more seriously than hijacking a robitic cart. As would the police - I can imagine a takeaway owner complaining to the police that his pizza was nicked on the way to Acacia Avenue and the police laughing their heads off, like "WTF did you expect!".
Cameras, GPS, constant communication with base would mitigate loss
How? The GPS will be on the robot, not the payload.
I was once in a cafe with a guy who left his bike outside unlocked. He said it could not be stolen because he could watch it through the window. Then someone came along and rode it away.
What's to keep these from being carried to the nearest alley and a relieved of their payloads?
Nothing. And kicked to pieces too.
I live in the UK, and someone said it won't happen because of the number of surveillance cameras; that's rubbish, because the percentage of ground coverage outside of town centres and private premises (which is what is involved here) is tiny. In any case there is a huge difference between being on a security camera and someone in authority seeing it. Muggers don't give a shit about security cameras - they will dance in front of them.
Outlawing guns only keeps them from lawful people. Criminals still get them anyway.
Guns are extremely rarely used in crime in the UK. Criminals know that if they appear anywhere with a gun, all the police over a very wide radius will descend on them like a ton of bricks; it isn't worth it.
I would have no idea how to get a gun if I decided to commit a crime with one, and most criminals, who are petty criminals anyway, would have no idea either. Even if such a small criminal, a house burglar say, happened to know a serious criminal gang who could possible provide him with one, they would be extremely unlikely to provide it to him at any price, not wanting to be linked to him. Their attitude would be "WTF do you need a gun for, just to burgle a house?". Because if the police found anyone with a gun, they would get the provider's name out of him.
Slashdot Mirror
10.5 gun related deaths a year per 100,000 population .... in the US
But only 3.01 in France.
Turns out that the train takes the same amount of travel time
Just goes to show how slow trains are in the USA if you need to highlight that they are as "fast" as a car.
No it does not still apply. See my response to Zealath's comment above.
I stopped reading when he described a catenary as a parabola
Why is that? Did the line drop?
The cable would be a catenary only if there were no load on it other than its self weight, which is uniform along the cable - which is not horizontal except right at the centre. However, when supporting a road deck, the deck imposes a weight load that is uniform along the horizontal length, not uniform along the length of the cable. The road deck weight is far greater than the cable self-weight, so it is (more or less) a parabola.
That is to the first order anyway. In fact the cable tends to go in straight lines between each point where a vertical suspender is, but those points lying on a parabola. And of course the roadway is not exactly horizontal in most modern suspension bridges.
browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
There is so much to go wrong here (wrong from theadman's viewpoint). You get no choice about how long you watch a TV ad - they last as long as they last, and I am probably out having a piss. And they have the same ads on many differnt channels and they bear no relation to the TV programme. All it might tell the adman is how much TV I watch.
And how does the sound link devices together? The TV advert cannot send an individual ultra-sonic code to every TV receiver, so millions of devices belonging to millions of people will have exactly the same signature placed in them.
Making something that can record 16kHz with good fidelity but won't record 20kHz at all would actually be quite difficult.
Not difficult, but would cost a little more.
And even when the button is actually a switch with an air gap, the push-on push-off type, you cannot see if it is on or off. With old-time toggle switches (and rocker switches, though less obviously) you could see at a glance if it were on or off.
Last night I wasted ten minutes trying to connect my laptop to my WiFi before realising that its "Kill" button was in the "Kill" state. It does have a light in the button to show if connected, but that is not the same as being un-killed - ie the light stays off if the problem is at the wireless hub or you are out of range.
Designers (ie the art graduate types) prefer buttons because they believe their design to be the absolute optimum aesthetic. They therefore do not want the visual distubance that would result from a toggle or rocker switch being moved into a different position. That is the way they think.
So in what way would that be "not working" ?
As there are nearly as many people in London than in Scotland + NI + Wales (taking your word for it) then I would expect London people to have collectively as much influence. In fact the system is meant to do that now, because each parliamentary seat is supposed to represent roughly equal numbers of voters. London does not have just one parliamentary seat, you know.
It is the distribution of voters that makes the present system broken - working class people, who tend to vote Labour instinctively, without thinking about it much*, tend to be clustered into areas where they are like 90% of the population (industrial South Wales for example) - areas where any Labour votes over the 50% are "wasted". There are some Conservative areas like this too (I'm in one, Monmouthshire, farming and tourism), but fewer. Even the Liberal Party has areas supporting them mainly by tradition.
OTOH, people voting for minority parties like UKIP, BNP, The Greens and Communist are, if anything, people who are by nature more individualistic (they are leaving the comfort zone). But such people tend to be scattered around (it does not correlate much with any particular type of area), so there is almost no chance of them getting MPs elected, and nothing like in proportion to their actual numbers. Their percentage in any one constituency will always be rather low. Of course, the main parties (and the people who vote for them) want to keep it that way.
Under the present UK system, the optimum distribution of voters is to have the support of just over 50% of the voters in as many constituencies as possible, and have none of your supporters "wasted" in no-hope areas. The Conservatives are the closest to having this voting demography, which is why they always punch above their weight in elections.
* My mother is an example. From a family with a traditional "Us and Them" attiude, she voted Labour all her life. She didn't understand Blair's "New Labour" but said she could never change "after all these years". She'd have still been voting Labour if they were going to send her to the gas chambers [whoops, is that Godwin?].
It involves computers, somewhere.
Right, Uber will struggle because every respectable South African will have a "boy" to drive him already.
Plenty of unrespectable ones though, I suppose.
Replying to myself, sorry I didn't read TFA. Now I have and see it is about leasing cars to Uber taxi drivers, not to general public, but the /. article did not make that point clear. It is still not a /. matter though.
It's an interesting story because it means getting Uber cars on the road in places they haven't got to yet..
And why is that interesting? We don't see stories here about, say, Hertz opening new branches.
what relevance this whole thing has to Slashdot?
I get down-voted every time I ask questions like this... :(
The post is an advert. The question remains unanswered though.
In the UK, AFAIK long term car hire schemes are total packages, including services and tyres. The sort of people who have such hires, mostly though their company like travelling reps and PHBs, would never dream of stooping to look at their tyre wear anyway.
The cross channel catamarans have long gone too, replaced by a train.
What they make floating trains now? Where does the track go? Huh?
In a tunnel.
Camps? You wish. Municipalities are struggling to put up immigrants ......
Whoosh! Way to miss the point.
no action was taken to prepare, and still there is no short term or long term plan
My preparation would be very simple. Turn the buggers back at gun point. Any that get through give a beating and send back to spread the message.
My thought instead was that with his country at war, his country needed doctors.
You really only have one choice for "interfering", and that's gearing up for a massive ground invasion with the troops and manpower to militarily occupy the region at a troop scale similar to the European theater of WWII.
Nothing like that scale. The Germans in WWII were extremely tough fighters with a home-grown manufacturing base and deployed high tech. ISIS, for all their willy waving in front of the cameras, are nothing of the sort.
Ah, Bill O'Reilly, the shining beacon of rationality and humanism. Nothing he says should be taken seriously, ever.
Not being in the USA, I don't know who the hell Bill O'Relly is, and don't much care. Nevertheless the statement "General Patton could destroy all of ISIS in a week." is perfectly true with the minor correction to "could have if he were still around". It doesn't matter who says it. In fact any living general who is not totally incompetent could do the same with the West's firepower at their disposal. I don't know why it is not done.
Most people who view websites don't even know what Wordpress is.
I have created websites and did not even know what Wordpress is. I'd heard of it, and just assumed it was some Windows shit.
Its the UK , there is not [sic] right to own and bear arms.
Very few people in the UK have any wish to "own and bear arms". Most people find the idea repulsive, and certainly would not regard it as a "right"; it is a different culture from wherever you are and always has been.
I say this as one of a tiny minority who has owned a firearm, as a member of a rifle club, and even I did not regard my ownership as a "right", but as something to qualify for. Anyway, last time I checked there is no great difficulty in owning a firearm if you are a bona-fide member of such a club, or have an identifiable need for one, such as a chicken farmer owning a shotgun to kill foxes. I live in a rural area and in fact my neighbour farmer has a shotgun, another of this tiny minority.
What's to keep these from being carried to the nearest alley and a relieved of their payloads?
What's to stop you hijacking a parcel delivery van? Or mugging a little old lady for her pension? Or robbing a bank?
Because these involve human victims, that in some cases might put up a fight. A court would take such cases far more seriously than hijacking a robitic cart. As would the police - I can imagine a takeaway owner complaining to the police that his pizza was nicked on the way to Acacia Avenue and the police laughing their heads off, like "WTF did you expect!".
Cameras, GPS, constant communication with base would mitigate loss
How? The GPS will be on the robot, not the payload.
I was once in a cafe with a guy who left his bike outside unlocked. He said it could not be stolen because he could watch it through the window. Then someone came along and rode it away.
What's to keep these from being carried to the nearest alley and a relieved of their payloads?
Nothing. And kicked to pieces too.
I live in the UK, and someone said it won't happen because of the number of surveillance cameras; that's rubbish, because the percentage of ground coverage outside of town centres and private premises (which is what is involved here) is tiny. In any case there is a huge difference between being on a security camera and someone in authority seeing it. Muggers don't give a shit about security cameras - they will dance in front of them.
Outlawing guns only keeps them from lawful people. Criminals still get them anyway.
Guns are extremely rarely used in crime in the UK. Criminals know that if they appear anywhere with a gun, all the police over a very wide radius will descend on them like a ton of bricks; it isn't worth it.
I would have no idea how to get a gun if I decided to commit a crime with one, and most criminals, who are petty criminals anyway, would have no idea either. Even if such a small criminal, a house burglar say, happened to know a serious criminal gang who could possible provide him with one, they would be extremely unlikely to provide it to him at any price, not wanting to be linked to him. Their attitude would be "WTF do you need a gun for, just to burgle a house?". Because if the police found anyone with a gun, they would get the provider's name out of him.
I saw nothing in the GP that said Germany was "old", only that East and West were previously unified. The latter is a fact.