I can't stand the voice prompting,.... don't need to be told a dozen times to keep right, I surmised that by the fact that I'm turning right in 2 miles and all the road signs indicate the exit for this is on the right.
Sounds like you drive only on major highways and/or with few junctions. In the UK there can be 20 other junctions within two miles and I'm not good at estimating 2 miles exactly. Also in the UK, road signs only fully cover the more significant junctions, and a smaller junction (either rural or in ctowns) will at best have a sign only at the spot or none at all. There are large areas of "back lanes" in the UK (including where I llve) with no signs at all.
It depends on your model of GPS, but mine gives three instructions at most - at 2 miles, 200 yds and at the spot; and the first one or two are (obviously) omitted if the previous junction was closer which it often is on UK roads.
How many billionaires alive today started with nothing, or near to nothing?... There's the Microsoft schmuck, and the Facebook douche - who else?
Depends on what you mean by "started with nothing", but there is Bernie Ecclestone, Alan Greenspan, Richard Branson, Alan Sugar, Sean Quinn, the Ikea guy - how many more examples do you need?
We have this problem with billionaire right wingers who managed to pack the Supreme Court with judges who think it's OK for billionaires to pay politicians to do their bidding.
Odd; it is billionaires who are more likely to be "disabled" as they usually only acquire that money later in life.
Recently the majority of republicans voted against.... ratifying... A treaty that takes poppa Bush's (bipartisan) disability act of the early 90's and promotes it as a global minimum standard.... To an non-American all this is just too fucking bizzare to be real
As a non-American (UK) it is the lengths gone to here in favour of the "disabled" that I find bizzare. For example, the fee for some toll bridges is waived for them (why??? they don't even to leave the car), they get reserved parking spaces even if their disability is nothing to do with their mobility (like a missing finger), and I have known small companies give up their business because they cannot afford the changes to their premises required just in case someone who cannot get up a step wants a job there. The railways here have had to spend millions on disability features - they add something like 10% to the cost of a railway carriage.
The treaty (according to Wikipedia) requires "Prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability with regard to all matters concerning all forms of employment". ALL forms? What about roofing? It's bullshit. One of those things that politicos sign because it is good PR (to some) without thinking through the implications.
Given that helmet mounted HUDs are good enough for military pilots, how does having a GPS in your field of vision whilst driving a car, impair you? It sure beats looking down at a fixed display to view the GPS map (often not in the best location).
1) I don't look down at my GPS when driving. I go by its voice instructions and it surprises me that not everyone does this.
2) Pilots are looking at HUDs to get info relevant to the flying of the plane. Someone with Google Glass could be reading the New York Times.
FTFA:- "Tesla says it will blanket the US with its Superchargers for a fraction of the cost, because it.... installs charging stations only where [customers] tend to travel"
Translation:- "Tesla will put chargers only where there is a lot of traffic"
Self-contradiction. Putting only where there is a lot of traffic is not "blanketing". No wonder Tesla can do it cheaper.
In the 1960's, the UK closed most of its railways because a study for the Beeching Report found that a third of the system generated only 1% of the revenue. In fact, a similar statistic would be found for the UK roads (and any nation's roads I suspect) - ie a third of the roads carry a tiny % of the traffic - buy no-one talks of withdrawing public finding for them. If such backwaters are to have any modern infrastructure they require subsidy and I don't imaging Tesla would be prepared to provide it. Although I live in the hills, I don't care - because I'll continue to drive home over the neglected roads in my gas-powered off-roader.
"From the grid" is the key flaw in your argument. In the electricity production line there are similar losses upstream before it even gets to the power outlet.
It's not really my argument, but doesn't the same go for fuel? You need to burn it to transport it, after all.
Oh dear, where do I start. The electric car is only the last stage in a system starting with a power station. To consider the efficiency of that system you must consider the efficiency of all stages combined, and the lower efficiencies (the weak links in the chain) of that system will be upsteam, at the power station and in the transmission of that electricity to the car batteries, including through the "manhole covers". Even if the electric cars were 100% efficient in themselves, if the power station burns fossil fuels the efficiency of the whole system will be lower than that of an internal combustion engine car. That is even allowing for the efficiency losses of liquid fuel refining and distribution.
Don't get me wrong - I am an elecricity enthusiast. In fact I am a power station engineer. But let's face facts. Electricity does have many other advantages however, such as being derivable from sources not practicable on board a car or train - such as nuclear and tidal, as well as being lower maintenance.
In fact, if only 60% of the electricity taken by the car reaches the wheel, that is disgracefully inefficient
But still far better than petrol.
I am shocked at how low this 60% is. An electric motor should be around 90% efficient,and the gear train (if needed) better than 95%, so total ~85%. What are they doing with the rest - are the batteries that lousy? But as I said, even if it were 100% the total system efficiency remains low.
Personally, I don't get this obsession with avoiding the need to plug in a charging lead. People have managed for years with fuel pumps.
If there was any way to do away with the physical connection, it would be done,... the installers of these systems will also have to deal with the extra maintenance (and possibilities for quick and easy abuse) that's always inherent in anything with moving/connecting parts.>
Maintenance?! I have been plugging an unplugging all sorts of electrical appliances (eg vacuum cleaner) for years with negligable maintenance required. Ditto for heavier industrial stuff (I'm a power station engineer remember) OTOH for "manhole cover" charging we are hearing of devices to lower a coil from the underside of the car and devices to guide the car into exact position; they will need maintenance.
I guess manholes just happen to be located in those same places that rechargeable vehicles tend to park. And for those that aren't, we'll just move em!
It's bullshit. They are not manhole covers, they are chargers. Someone has called them "manhole covers" to give the impression to non-technical politicians and councils (they are all non-technical BTW) that you just convert existing manholes to chargers by waving a magic wand over them without digging up the road etc.
Its bull shit because:-
1) Existing manholes will never be in the right place.
2) Existing manholes are needed as er... manholes
3) Existing manholes are not likely to be the optimum size and shape for charging
4) Existing manholes (in my neck of the woods at least) are of all different shapes and sizes, and they will not want to make chargers fit each one
5) The heavy power they need will require large new cables to be laid to them, so digging up the road anyway.
It's like those adverts you see like "Convert your attic into an extra room in minutes!"
Can people not take the 15 seconds it takes to put a physical plug in?
Apparently not.
They manage to fill liquid fuel, which takes longer, so clearly they can. The reason electric cars have not hit it off yet is nothing to do with having to plug a wire in.
Or is this being done strictly to make electric cars "sexier?"
Um, if you think it's "sexier" not to plug in, you just might be doing it wrong.
You missed his point. He does not give a shyte whether it is sexy or not, and neither do I.
Electric vehicles convert about 59–62% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels—conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 17–21% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels.
"From the grid" is the key flaw in your argument. In the electricity production line there are similar losses upstream before it even gets to the power outlet. In fact, if only 60% of the electricity taken by the car reaches the wheel, that is disgracefully inefficient - no doubt much of it due to the poor air connection between "manhole cover" and car.
Personally, I don't get this obsession with avoiding the need to plug in a charging lead. People have managed for years with fuel pumps. It seems someone was pipe-dreaming and said "wouldn't it be nice if..." and the idea has got out of hand from that point. It is not the silver bullet for electric car adoption; in fact tying electric car adoption to solving contactless charging is putting an unnecessary obstacle in the way of their success.
But I don't think this is about color anyway.... It's more likely that cinematographers simply found dark skin tones difficult to light: you either lose details in the dark areas or you blow out the light ones. Losing detail in dark areas looks more natural than blowing out light areas, because that's what human eyes do. Furthermore, even in person, it's harder to read facial expressions of dark skin tones under bad lighting, so this isn't really a "bias" of film but more a reflection of reality.
Exactly. Someone is trying to make a race issue out of this.
I am a keen photographer and have looked into the technical side a lot. The difficulty is with limitations on brightness range (= contrast range). Any photographer/cinematographer with more than a cheap all-auto camera can place the optimum exposure on whatever tone they want. Optimise for black skin and the white people will appear washed out; optimise for white skin and the black people will lose detail in darkness. It's your choice. Makers of films/sensors are always trying to increase the contrast range, and actually, films and sensors have always been better than devices used at the final presentation stage; in other words paper and ink cannot show a brighter white than the base paper or darker black than the black ink, and that range is not very great - much less than reality. Similarly monitors cannot show a darker black than what they look like when switched off (take a look right now - not very black) and their full white is well short of bright daylight, so the range of tones gets lost.
If black people's skin tones are sometimes lost, then that happens for real too. There was an amusing faux pas committed by a British diplomat at a conference, who had been instructed not to show any sign of friendliness to Robert Mugabe. At one point however he was confronted by a hand extended for a handshake from a black man standing against the light. All he could see of the man was his sihouette and smiling white teeth. He shook the hand. Then as the man turned he saw it was Mugabe.
While I don't like paying for water, why should you not be allowed to sell it for profit?
It is an ancient law in the UK which there is no reason to change. It is hardly a big problem for these places.
It is a bit like motorway service companies being obliged to provide free toilets to all comers,.
in the UK, we generally focus our efforts on keeping invaders out rather than worrying about them getting in.
No, around 1950 Britain stopped trying to keep any invaders out. There are now millions of people here of foreign origin, increasingly in positions of control, originally invited or let in because some people saw some short-term advantage to themselves. Even recently, Tony Blair welcomed immigrants as more likely to be Labour voters.
A very similar situation to when the Romano-British leader Vortigern invited the Saxons to Britain around 450 AD because he wanted them as allies against other rival Romano-British tribes and the Northern Celts. It ended with the Saxons driving the Romano-British (the ones they did not manage to massacre), including Vortigern himself, into the Western corners of the island (Wales and Cornwall), and some even to France (Brittany) where they are resentfully licking their wounds even to the present day.
Terrorists are such a vanishingly irrelevant problem We need to protect against vending-machine related accidents before we need to deal with terrorism
There is only a mildly negative feedback loop wrt vending machine accidents. The makers might put a little more effort into the safety of the next design, and I might be a bit more careful if I hear of a friend being hurt by one (I never have).
OTOH, there is a very strong positive feedback loop with regard to crime, including terrorism. If potential criminals hear of others getting away with it, they are likely to try their luck too. If you want an example of that, it is the London riots last year when looters came out in force when they heard that the police had lost control (or never took control) and others were getting rich pickings.
By your reasoning, we should repeal the law against murder, because murders are really quite rare.
Agree the punishments are well deserved (but it remains to be seen how effectivley administered).
However, not just for the sake of Kenya's economy, or even for its sake of their economy at all. These poachers are on the way to wiping out the largest remaining land animal species, just for the sake of making trinkets and humouring idiots who believe in quack medicine.
I know people that keep accounts in four different banks. They're worried about a bank run and think this way they'll be able to get to some of their money.
Well, in the UK the government have promised to compensate account holders if their bank goes bust; however only up to a certain amount per bank. I have more than that amount, so I spread it around. Also, savings interest rates yo-yo, and can differ widely between different banks, so I like to be able to move most of it easily to the more favourable banks at the time.
I cannot even begin to imagine having 15 credit cards....
I usually only use two, one for internet purchases, and one for shops. Many of the others I started because eg a shop offered me an on-the-spot discount on a purchase if I signed up to their card - although I never use it again. One I took out because I got a mail shot that offered me a crate of wine if I signed up, and another gave 50 GBP credit for signing. I would cancel most, but I know that if I try I will be held on a premium rate phone line while a robot lectures me on how unwise I am being (they don't let you cancel on-line). Some, they tell me, will expire naturally if I don't use them, so I will just let that happen.
Now if my wife wants anything from Amazon, I buy it. It's all the same bank account, so it doesn't matter whose card is used.... Where this is really a violation of privacy is when I... go to Amazon.. it shows me everything my wife has been looking at, and vice versa.
I'm not trying to defend Amazon, who are shites, but if you share a bank account with her then she is going to see expenditures you made with it, and if she is anything like my wife, want to know what they were for. That's what you get with a joint account. OTOH, if you were "just looking" and don't want her to know, you'd best look for it elsewhere, or open a different account with Amazon with a different bank card. Personally I have about 15 different credit cards and 5 bank accounts, only one of them joint.
Here in the UK Oxford and Cambridge have entrance exams,.... certainly in the case of Oxford and Cambridge, owe more to tradition than to any serious requirement for additional assessment.
No it is a serious assessment. If Oxbridge were satisfied with top grades at A-level, they would be vastly over-filled, and there is nothing to differntiate the applicants, so they can and do set a higher standard for admission. It has become too easy to get a top grade at A-level (thanks to teacher assessment, league tables, and the exams simple getting easier).
When my son was taking A-levels I showed him my old A-level maths papers. While some new areas of maths had been introduced (and some dropped), he commented that where comparable my papers were harder than his. Some of the maths I did at A-level he did not do until the university first or second years. I took the Cambridge entrance exam back then and it was much harder than A-levels - we did two terms of futher study after A-levels just for that exam.
FTFA:- "Anyone can see how easily you could split off the gaming folks, business division, retail stores, and hardware division says John Dvorak."
Agreed. Each of those areas could be self-contained, if it isn't already.
"Each entity would have agreements in place for long-term supply of software and services. 'This sort of shake up would ferret out all the empire builders and allow for new and more creative structures to emerge."
Why? There will always be empire builders. And why would "new and more creative structures" emerge? If the existing divisions are lagely self-contained, what stops that now? I have witnessed companies down-sizing and splitting up - management become obsessed with it as an end in itself, like "well we shut down that department, what can we shut down next?". They stop thinking about the product. "Creative" groups are the first up against the wall.
On a much smaller scale, I saw a company of about 30 people reduced to about 5 because the new owner, a devout Thatcherite, just thought "The smaller the better". It ended up with the craftsman in the workshop keep having to stop making stuff to go and answer the phone; that was not efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't stand the voice prompting, .... don't need to be told a dozen times to keep right, I surmised that by the fact that I'm turning right in 2 miles and all the road signs indicate the exit for this is on the right.
Sounds like you drive only on major highways and/or with few junctions. In the UK there can be 20 other junctions within two miles and I'm not good at estimating 2 miles exactly. Also in the UK, road signs only fully cover the more significant junctions, and a smaller junction (either rural or in ctowns) will at best have a sign only at the spot or none at all. There are large areas of "back lanes" in the UK (including where I llve) with no signs at all.
It depends on your model of GPS, but mine gives three instructions at most - at 2 miles, 200 yds and at the spot; and the first one or two are (obviously) omitted if the previous junction was closer which it often is on UK roads.
How many billionaires alive today started with nothing, or near to nothing? ... There's the Microsoft schmuck, and the Facebook douche - who else?
Depends on what you mean by "started with nothing", but there is Bernie Ecclestone, Alan Greenspan, Richard Branson, Alan Sugar, Sean Quinn, the Ikea guy - how many more examples do you need?
We have this problem with billionaire right wingers who managed to pack the Supreme Court with judges who think it's OK for billionaires to pay politicians to do their bidding.
Odd; it is billionaires who are more likely to be "disabled" as they usually only acquire that money later in life.
Recently the majority of republicans voted against .... ratifying ... A treaty that takes poppa Bush's (bipartisan) disability act of the early 90's and promotes it as a global minimum standard .... To an non-American all this is just too fucking bizzare to be real
As a non-American (UK) it is the lengths gone to here in favour of the "disabled" that I find bizzare. For example, the fee for some toll bridges is waived for them (why??? they don't even to leave the car), they get reserved parking spaces even if their disability is nothing to do with their mobility (like a missing finger), and I have known small companies give up their business because they cannot afford the changes to their premises required just in case someone who cannot get up a step wants a job there. The railways here have had to spend millions on disability features - they add something like 10% to the cost of a railway carriage.
The treaty (according to Wikipedia) requires "Prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability with regard to all matters concerning all forms of employment". ALL forms? What about roofing? It's bullshit. One of those things that politicos sign because it is good PR (to some) without thinking through the implications.
Given that helmet mounted HUDs are good enough for military pilots, how does having a GPS in your field of vision whilst driving a car, impair you? It sure beats looking down at a fixed display to view the GPS map (often not in the best location).
1) I don't look down at my GPS when driving. I go by its voice instructions and it surprises me that not everyone does this.
2) Pilots are looking at HUDs to get info relevant to the flying of the plane. Someone with Google Glass could be reading the New York Times.
California ...... where .... Google Glass is already a social norm.
Citation?
FTFA :- "Tesla says it will blanket the US with its Superchargers for a fraction of the cost, because it .... installs charging stations only where [customers] tend to travel"
:- "Tesla will put chargers only where there is a lot of traffic"
Translation
Self-contradiction. Putting only where there is a lot of traffic is not "blanketing". No wonder Tesla can do it cheaper.
In the 1960's, the UK closed most of its railways because a study for the Beeching Report found that a third of the system generated only 1% of the revenue. In fact, a similar statistic would be found for the UK roads (and any nation's roads I suspect) - ie a third of the roads carry a tiny % of the traffic - buy no-one talks of withdrawing public finding for them. If such backwaters are to have any modern infrastructure they require subsidy and I don't imaging Tesla would be prepared to provide it. Although I live in the hills, I don't care - because I'll continue to drive home over the neglected roads in my gas-powered off-roader.
"From the grid" is the key flaw in your argument. In the electricity production line there are similar losses upstream before it even gets to the power outlet.
It's not really my argument, but doesn't the same go for fuel? You need to burn it to transport it, after all.
Oh dear, where do I start. The electric car is only the last stage in a system starting with a power station. To consider the efficiency of that system you must consider the efficiency of all stages combined, and the lower efficiencies (the weak links in the chain) of that system will be upsteam, at the power station and in the transmission of that electricity to the car batteries, including through the "manhole covers". Even if the electric cars were 100% efficient in themselves, if the power station burns fossil fuels the efficiency of the whole system will be lower than that of an internal combustion engine car. That is even allowing for the efficiency losses of liquid fuel refining and distribution.
Don't get me wrong - I am an elecricity enthusiast. In fact I am a power station engineer. But let's face facts. Electricity does have many other advantages however, such as being derivable from sources not practicable on board a car or train - such as nuclear and tidal, as well as being lower maintenance.
In fact, if only 60% of the electricity taken by the car reaches the wheel, that is disgracefully inefficient
But still far better than petrol.
I am shocked at how low this 60% is. An electric motor should be around 90% efficient,and the gear train (if needed) better than 95%, so total ~85%. What are they doing with the rest - are the batteries that lousy? But as I said, even if it were 100% the total system efficiency remains low.
Personally, I don't get this obsession with avoiding the need to plug in a charging lead. People have managed for years with fuel pumps.
If there was any way to do away with the physical connection, it would be done, ... the installers of these systems will also have to deal with the extra maintenance (and possibilities for quick and easy abuse) that's always inherent in anything with moving/connecting parts.>
Maintenance?! I have been plugging an unplugging all sorts of electrical appliances (eg vacuum cleaner) for years with negligable maintenance required. Ditto for heavier industrial stuff (I'm a power station engineer remember) OTOH for "manhole cover" charging we are hearing of devices to lower a coil from the underside of the car and devices to guide the car into exact position; they will need maintenance.
I guess manholes just happen to be located in those same places that rechargeable vehicles tend to park. And for those that aren't, we'll just move em!
It's bullshit. They are not manhole covers, they are chargers. Someone has called them "manhole covers" to give the impression to non-technical politicians and councils (they are all non-technical BTW) that you just convert existing manholes to chargers by waving a magic wand over them without digging up the road etc.
Its bull shit because :-
1) Existing manholes will never be in the right place.
2) Existing manholes are needed as er... manholes
3) Existing manholes are not likely to be the optimum size and shape for charging
4) Existing manholes (in my neck of the woods at least) are of all different shapes and sizes, and they will not want to make chargers fit each one
5) The heavy power they need will require large new cables to be laid to them, so digging up the road anyway.
It's like those adverts you see like "Convert your attic into an extra room in minutes!"
Apparently not.
They manage to fill liquid fuel, which takes longer, so clearly they can. The reason electric cars have not hit it off yet is nothing to do with having to plug a wire in.
Um, if you think it's "sexier" not to plug in, you just might be doing it wrong.
You missed his point. He does not give a shyte whether it is sexy or not, and neither do I.
Wireless charging is hugely wasteful; ..... Is there a good reason to be, essentially, throwing this (public!) money away?
Let me answer that :- NO
is this being done strictly to make electric cars "sexier?"
Let me answer that one too :- YES
Electric vehicles convert about 59–62% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels—conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 17–21% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels.
"From the grid" is the key flaw in your argument. In the electricity production line there are similar losses upstream before it even gets to the power outlet. In fact, if only 60% of the electricity taken by the car reaches the wheel, that is disgracefully inefficient - no doubt much of it due to the poor air connection between "manhole cover" and car.
Personally, I don't get this obsession with avoiding the need to plug in a charging lead. People have managed for years with fuel pumps. It seems someone was pipe-dreaming and said "wouldn't it be nice if ..." and the idea has got out of hand from that point. It is not the silver bullet for electric car adoption; in fact tying electric car adoption to solving contactless charging is putting an unnecessary obstacle in the way of their success.
But I don't think this is about color anyway. ... It's more likely that cinematographers simply found dark skin tones difficult to light: you either lose details in the dark areas or you blow out the light ones. Losing detail in dark areas looks more natural than blowing out light areas, because that's what human eyes do. Furthermore, even in person, it's harder to read facial expressions of dark skin tones under bad lighting, so this isn't really a "bias" of film but more a reflection of reality.
Exactly. Someone is trying to make a race issue out of this.
I am a keen photographer and have looked into the technical side a lot. The difficulty is with limitations on brightness range (= contrast range). Any photographer/cinematographer with more than a cheap all-auto camera can place the optimum exposure on whatever tone they want. Optimise for black skin and the white people will appear washed out; optimise for white skin and the black people will lose detail in darkness. It's your choice. Makers of films/sensors are always trying to increase the contrast range, and actually, films and sensors have always been better than devices used at the final presentation stage; in other words paper and ink cannot show a brighter white than the base paper or darker black than the black ink, and that range is not very great - much less than reality. Similarly monitors cannot show a darker black than what they look like when switched off (take a look right now - not very black) and their full white is well short of bright daylight, so the range of tones gets lost.
If black people's skin tones are sometimes lost, then that happens for real too. There was an amusing faux pas committed by a British diplomat at a conference, who had been instructed not to show any sign of friendliness to Robert Mugabe. At one point however he was confronted by a hand extended for a handshake from a black man standing against the light. All he could see of the man was his sihouette and smiling white teeth. He shook the hand. Then as the man turned he saw it was Mugabe.
I actually nearly refuse to fly at all, but when i do it is because driving isnt an option. This usually means long distance
I might be asking a silly question here (from the UK), but don't they have trains where you live?
What could possibly go wrong?
This :- Mr. Pirozek was flying a remote-controlled helicopter .. when it struck him, cutting off the top of his head
While I don't like paying for water, why should you not be allowed to sell it for profit?
It is an ancient law in the UK which there is no reason to change. It is hardly a big problem for these places. It is a bit like motorway service companies being obliged to provide free toilets to all comers,.
in the UK, we generally focus our efforts on keeping invaders out rather than worrying about them getting in.
No, around 1950 Britain stopped trying to keep any invaders out. There are now millions of people here of foreign origin, increasingly in positions of control, originally invited or let in because some people saw some short-term advantage to themselves. Even recently, Tony Blair welcomed immigrants as more likely to be Labour voters.
A very similar situation to when the Romano-British leader Vortigern invited the Saxons to Britain around 450 AD because he wanted them as allies against other rival Romano-British tribes and the Northern Celts. It ended with the Saxons driving the Romano-British (the ones they did not manage to massacre), including Vortigern himself, into the Western corners of the island (Wales and Cornwall), and some even to France (Brittany) where they are resentfully licking their wounds even to the present day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortigern
Terrorists are such a vanishingly irrelevant problem We need to protect against vending-machine related accidents before we need to deal with terrorism
There is only a mildly negative feedback loop wrt vending machine accidents. The makers might put a little more effort into the safety of the next design, and I might be a bit more careful if I hear of a friend being hurt by one (I never have).
OTOH, there is a very strong positive feedback loop with regard to crime, including terrorism. If potential criminals hear of others getting away with it, they are likely to try their luck too. If you want an example of that, it is the London riots last year when looters came out in force when they heard that the police had lost control (or never took control) and others were getting rich pickings.
By your reasoning, we should repeal the law against murder, because murders are really quite rare.
Agree the punishments are well deserved (but it remains to be seen how effectivley administered).
However, not just for the sake of Kenya's economy, or even for its sake of their economy at all. These poachers are on the way to wiping out the largest remaining land animal species, just for the sake of making trinkets and humouring idiots who believe in quack medicine.
Whatever works for you.
I am in the UK if that makes a difference.
I know people that keep accounts in four different banks. They're worried about a bank run and think this way they'll be able to get to some of their money.
Well, in the UK the government have promised to compensate account holders if their bank goes bust; however only up to a certain amount per bank. I have more than that amount, so I spread it around. Also, savings interest rates yo-yo, and can differ widely between different banks, so I like to be able to move most of it easily to the more favourable banks at the time.
I cannot even begin to imagine having 15 credit cards ....
I usually only use two, one for internet purchases, and one for shops. Many of the others I started because eg a shop offered me an on-the-spot discount on a purchase if I signed up to their card - although I never use it again. One I took out because I got a mail shot that offered me a crate of wine if I signed up, and another gave 50 GBP credit for signing. I would cancel most, but I know that if I try I will be held on a premium rate phone line while a robot lectures me on how unwise I am being (they don't let you cancel on-line). Some, they tell me, will expire naturally if I don't use them, so I will just let that happen.
Now if my wife wants anything from Amazon, I buy it. It's all the same bank account, so it doesn't matter whose card is used. ... Where this is really a violation of privacy is when I ... go to Amazon .. it shows me everything my wife has been looking at, and vice versa.
I'm not trying to defend Amazon, who are shites, but if you share a bank account with her then she is going to see expenditures you made with it, and if she is anything like my wife, want to know what they were for. That's what you get with a joint account. OTOH, if you were "just looking" and don't want her to know, you'd best look for it elsewhere, or open a different account with Amazon with a different bank card. Personally I have about 15 different credit cards and 5 bank accounts, only one of them joint.
Here in the UK Oxford and Cambridge have entrance exams, .... certainly in the case of Oxford and Cambridge, owe more to tradition than to any serious requirement for additional assessment.
No it is a serious assessment. If Oxbridge were satisfied with top grades at A-level, they would be vastly over-filled, and there is nothing to differntiate the applicants, so they can and do set a higher standard for admission. It has become too easy to get a top grade at A-level (thanks to teacher assessment, league tables, and the exams simple getting easier).
When my son was taking A-levels I showed him my old A-level maths papers. While some new areas of maths had been introduced (and some dropped), he commented that where comparable my papers were harder than his. Some of the maths I did at A-level he did not do until the university first or second years. I took the Cambridge entrance exam back then and it was much harder than A-levels - we did two terms of futher study after A-levels just for that exam.
FTFA :- "Anyone can see how easily you could split off the gaming folks, business division, retail stores, and hardware division says John Dvorak."
Agreed. Each of those areas could be self-contained, if it isn't already.
"Each entity would have agreements in place for long-term supply of software and services. 'This sort of shake up would ferret out all the empire builders and allow for new and more creative structures to emerge."
Why? There will always be empire builders. And why would "new and more creative structures" emerge? If the existing divisions are lagely self-contained, what stops that now? I have witnessed companies down-sizing and splitting up - management become obsessed with it as an end in itself, like "well we shut down that department, what can we shut down next?". They stop thinking about the product. "Creative" groups are the first up against the wall.
On a much smaller scale, I saw a company of about 30 people reduced to about 5 because the new owner, a devout Thatcherite, just thought "The smaller the better". It ended up with the craftsman in the workshop keep having to stop making stuff to go and answer the phone; that was not efficient.
A bridge perhaps?
Who cares? I don't need to impress anyone, especially not random strangers.
You're the one who said it's cool.