But for the northern hemisphere, there's enough demand for single hop flights between regional airports, and a few choices for planes that can fly those routes efficiently.
This! When I flew from Brisbane to London my choice was source > hub > hub where the first hub varied, or source > hub > hub > hub in case I flew via Sydney, then the second hub varied.
When I fly from the Netherlands to London I have a choice between 4 source airports and 4 destination airports (or a train). With spread out populations in small pockets the hub and spoke does not make much sense.
so people obviously want to travel to hubs for reasons other than going elsewhere afterward
This. It is the same problem as network design. Do you put your hub in the building next door and run lots of cables to your server? No it goes into the server rack. So regardless of how many options become available for flying around the world, if you need to go from London to Chicago (two of the most populated cities on each side of the Atlantic) you will go from hub to hub. That's the reason they built the hubs there in the first place.
but came back to Firefox after noticing how much better it performed than Chrome, which was somewhat surprising to me. I had assumed they were at performance parity. At this point, I think Mozilla has the top performing browser by metrics that tend to matter in real life. The one I notice the most is that Firefox's UI rarely stutters when loading a page, while Chrome hitches and hangs in short bursts, making things feel sluggish.
This is confusing to me. What exactly are you expecting your UI to do for you while the page is loading, make you a pizza? A little spinny icon indicating the page hasn't finished loading having a stutter is of no consequence compared to handling an input.
And when loading Firefox and Chrome actual page rendering performance is comparable when measured from start to end, but Firefox feels much faster. I put that down to at what process Firefox decides to start populating the white page. Chrome seems to display more complete elements later in the loading. Firefox seems to put up more broken partially finished content earlier. I actually prefer the Firefox method here.
Also note that all of this is completely irrelevant if you don't run an adblocker. No one cares how many milliseconds the vendor shaves off if you spend whole seconds waiting for tracking scripts to complete.
Most transformers you see on poles are designed to cool down at night when usage goes down
Who told you that? They didn't tell me that at school. Or at university. Or while doing my practical. Or in the industry. Or while ordering the things for projects. Or while maintaining them while I worked for a distributor.
Maybe you're confusing the problems? A big one is that they weren't designed for backfeed which creates some lossy heating. But the problem there is solar panels.
That's also why production of the Tesla 3 has been so slow to ramp up. They won't want to produce more of them per year than they're able to sell credits for.
They are not even close to producing more of them than they can sell credits for. The same credits that Musk as repeatedly called for to be abolished. See the problem is that the credits are granted across the industry. This would create an incentive for Tesla to produce as many Model 3s as quickly as possible. It's also the reason why he called for them to be abolished. By being spread across the industry they are also available to companies with far larger manufacturing capabilities which actually gives incredible advantage to the likes of Ford who could just rush out and eat all that money themselves.
The Model 3 has quite a few production problems. Tax credits is definitely not on the list.
My contention is that for every Microsoft built up while not having to work you'll find 100 other businesses that were built up by people after they came home from their 9-5.
My contention is that you either don't know the meaning of the word coincidence or you didn't think it through.
You make it sound like it is a big deal, that there are rare days where Germany imports more electricity than it imports.
I'm sure it is rare. Yet a single grid destabilising power outage in even a portion of an economy the size of Germany is not a big deal. It's a HUGE fucking deal.
At the same time, you fail to mention that France was often importing a significant amount of power continuously for weeks at a time in 2017 because it could not fulfill its own demand as too many nuclear plants were down.
You're comparing planned events to unplanned events. Don't do that. You may cause a power outage, and even one of the even a portion of an economy the size of France is not a big deal. It's a HUGE fucking deal.
Well that's a USA vs non USA thing. Travelling around the world I've never had a problem using a non-USA based card in any country other than the USA. I mean it's obvious when you think about it. Our cards are 85mm long and yours are 3.35inches. Totally incompatible:-)
This simply isn't true. When you buy gas at a gas pump, the ZIP is submitted along with the mag stripe data and, if it doesn't match, the transaction is declined.
You found a rare edge case. I used to think it was done for marketing purposes so I entered random ones. Never been denied gas. Mind you if I went to the trouble of stealing a credit card, filling up my tank would be low on the list of expensive purchases, and filling up the tank is about the only time I've ever been asked for a zip code.
Quite the opposite. The problem don't use excel as a calculator. They use it as a database, management tool, accounting tool, expediting tool, employee management, planning tool, scheduling tool,... each of which loaded with enough VB script mostly copied and pasted straight from stack exchange and re-arranged until it gives the least number of errors while running that it is a wonder the computers haven't committed harakiri to spare themselves from having to execute it.
Needless to say portability of those spreadsheets isn't good, and neither is how critically important these sheets are to their departments.
California could just have their law makers tarred and feathered too. But neither will realistically happen, likely because the former will result in the latter.
It helps to understand the economics of what is going on here. Germany provides transit for electricity from France which is why they import and export at the same time. It's very true Germany is a net exporter, but none the less they were forced to import some 25TWh of electricity last year to keep the lights on during bad weather.
A lot of this has to do with a big power split between baseload and renewables with a large shortfall of peaking capacity in between. They are heavily reliant on interconnects for stability. That is also not a very good position to be in. Mind you neither is paying quite as much as they do for electricity.
Why? Is it not true that it isn't much safer for the environment? Even if you take the spent fuel and just throw it out in the garden the result is a very localised form of pollution that does not spread anywhere compared to CO2 emissions from power plants that are showing global effect on the planet.
Even when you consider accidents it is remarkably safe. Not only has nuclear power killed the lowest number of people of any of the generation methods (count how many people die constructing solar power for a fun evening game), even with its major 1960s era design throwback incidents it has made less of the world unlivable than a certain major hydropower incident no one likes to admit happened, not to mention has far less effect on the planet.
Say what you want, if you want to save the thing we call the planet then you'd be all in favour of nuclear power. But what you really are proposing to do is save some uneducated irrational NIMBYs instead.
So not only do you not know how the PIN system works, but you also have no idea of the purpose of the zip code. The ZIP code does nothing to prevent someone buying something. All it does is settle assign fault between you and the merchant in the eyes of the bank.
Just because you get refunded doesn't mean fraud hasn't taken place and that someone isn't out of pocket for stolen goods. the ZIP codes are precisely 0% effective at preventing fraudulent transactions.
The internet would have come along just fine over the last 20 years if it were running on IIS and.NET.
It was. IIS and ActiveX had half the market share of Apache in 1997. But fast forward to 2007 and it was getting tight, 40% vs 50%, and in 2007 that was a HUGE amount of websites.
Even now with the millions of websites out there it's at 20%, although ActiveX is hopefully rotting in a special kind of hell by now.
Until, that is, we went stupid and put NFC payments on the same card so any kind of temporary physical proximity is enough to charge, even without the user knowing.
You don't implement NFC + pin? My bank makes it opt in to not use the pin for NFC transactions below €25 with the explicit point that I would be liable for the €25 of fraud.
Then there's the random asking for the pin periodically anyway, and asking for the chip periodically as a security measure too (I think it asks for the pin every 5 transactions even if they are below the pin threshold).
I believe banks in Europe will still issue chip-and-signature cards to elderly people on request.
That varies greatly by country and also varies greatly by utility. e.g. Public transport ticketing machines around here don't accept chip and signature cards.
Everything that should have been used instead of Excel in the first place.
Seriously the only Excel tables which don't work on the several other office suits which are available are the ones that shouldn't have been setup in the first place (think payroll database that someone decided to implement in Excel). Migrating to cloud based services for management returns the office applications to their basic roots and makes adoption of other software easy.
Tell it to your own energy charts which showed quite a bit of import happening over the weekend. That's the thing about having intermittent energy sources. Germany is a net energy exporter but relies heavily on imports to keep the lights on when there's no wind. You imported 25TWh Jan-Oct last year.
You sure about that? Germany's economy is larger than CA but using renewables they have more energy than they can use.
Great example. Germany's renewable energy generation capabilities stands at 33%. Last Saturday it produced precisely 0% of Germany's consumption with import running full steam from France for some of that wonderful nuclear goodness. They have had more energy than they could use precisely 2 days last year, and then only because their energy mix is so heavily geared towards base load and intermittent load with few peaking plants in between.
And they get all that for the privilege of paying some of the highest electricity costs in the world (almost 3x what Californians currently pay, those two windy days where they had excess energy being a notable exception)
Slashdot Mirror
But for the northern hemisphere, there's enough demand for single hop flights between regional airports, and a few choices for planes that can fly those routes efficiently.
This! When I flew from Brisbane to London my choice was source > hub > hub where the first hub varied, or source > hub > hub > hub in case I flew via Sydney, then the second hub varied.
When I fly from the Netherlands to London I have a choice between 4 source airports and 4 destination airports (or a train). With spread out populations in small pockets the hub and spoke does not make much sense.
so people obviously want to travel to hubs for reasons other than going elsewhere afterward
This. It is the same problem as network design. Do you put your hub in the building next door and run lots of cables to your server? No it goes into the server rack. So regardless of how many options become available for flying around the world, if you need to go from London to Chicago (two of the most populated cities on each side of the Atlantic) you will go from hub to hub. That's the reason they built the hubs there in the first place.
but came back to Firefox after noticing how much better it performed than Chrome, which was somewhat surprising to me. I had assumed they were at performance parity. At this point, I think Mozilla has the top performing browser by metrics that tend to matter in real life. The one I notice the most is that Firefox's UI rarely stutters when loading a page, while Chrome hitches and hangs in short bursts, making things feel sluggish.
This is confusing to me. What exactly are you expecting your UI to do for you while the page is loading, make you a pizza? A little spinny icon indicating the page hasn't finished loading having a stutter is of no consequence compared to handling an input.
And when loading Firefox and Chrome actual page rendering performance is comparable when measured from start to end, but Firefox feels much faster. I put that down to at what process Firefox decides to start populating the white page. Chrome seems to display more complete elements later in the loading. Firefox seems to put up more broken partially finished content earlier. I actually prefer the Firefox method here.
Also note that all of this is completely irrelevant if you don't run an adblocker. No one cares how many milliseconds the vendor shaves off if you spend whole seconds waiting for tracking scripts to complete.
Most transformers you see on poles are designed to cool down at night when usage goes down
Who told you that? They didn't tell me that at school. Or at university. Or while doing my practical. Or in the industry. Or while ordering the things for projects. Or while maintaining them while I worked for a distributor.
Maybe you're confusing the problems? A big one is that they weren't designed for backfeed which creates some lossy heating. But the problem there is solar panels.
That's also why production of the Tesla 3 has been so slow to ramp up. They won't want to produce more of them per year than they're able to sell credits for.
They are not even close to producing more of them than they can sell credits for. The same credits that Musk as repeatedly called for to be abolished. See the problem is that the credits are granted across the industry. This would create an incentive for Tesla to produce as many Model 3s as quickly as possible. It's also the reason why he called for them to be abolished. By being spread across the industry they are also available to companies with far larger manufacturing capabilities which actually gives incredible advantage to the likes of Ford who could just rush out and eat all that money themselves.
The Model 3 has quite a few production problems. Tax credits is definitely not on the list.
My contention is that for every Microsoft built up while not having to work you'll find 100 other businesses that were built up by people after they came home from their 9-5.
My contention is that you either don't know the meaning of the word coincidence or you didn't think it through.
You make it sound like it is a big deal, that there are rare days where Germany imports more electricity than it imports.
I'm sure it is rare. Yet a single grid destabilising power outage in even a portion of an economy the size of Germany is not a big deal. It's a HUGE fucking deal.
At the same time, you fail to mention that France was often importing a significant amount of power continuously for weeks at a time in 2017 because it could not fulfill its own demand as too many nuclear plants were down.
You're comparing planned events to unplanned events. Don't do that. You may cause a power outage, and even one of the even a portion of an economy the size of France is not a big deal. It's a HUGE fucking deal.
Well that's a USA vs non USA thing. Travelling around the world I've never had a problem using a non-USA based card in any country other than the USA. I mean it's obvious when you think about it. Our cards are 85mm long and yours are 3.35inches. Totally incompatible :-)
This simply isn't true. When you buy gas at a gas pump, the ZIP is submitted along with the mag stripe data and, if it doesn't match, the transaction is declined.
You found a rare edge case. I used to think it was done for marketing purposes so I entered random ones. Never been denied gas. Mind you if I went to the trouble of stealing a credit card, filling up my tank would be low on the list of expensive purchases, and filling up the tank is about the only time I've ever been asked for a zip code.
Again worthless for fraud prevention.
Don't cross pollinate Windows and Unix derivative users. The last we need is the former bringing down the IQ of the latter. :-)
Quite the opposite. The problem don't use excel as a calculator. They use it as a database, management tool, accounting tool, expediting tool, employee management, planning tool, scheduling tool, ... each of which loaded with enough VB script mostly copied and pasted straight from stack exchange and re-arranged until it gives the least number of errors while running that it is a wonder the computers haven't committed harakiri to spare themselves from having to execute it.
Needless to say portability of those spreadsheets isn't good, and neither is how critically important these sheets are to their departments.
California can just outlaw air conditioning.
California could just have their law makers tarred and feathered too. But neither will realistically happen, likely because the former will result in the latter.
It helps to understand the economics of what is going on here. Germany provides transit for electricity from France which is why they import and export at the same time. It's very true Germany is a net exporter, but none the less they were forced to import some 25TWh of electricity last year to keep the lights on during bad weather.
A lot of this has to do with a big power split between baseload and renewables with a large shortfall of peaking capacity in between. They are heavily reliant on interconnects for stability. That is also not a very good position to be in. Mind you neither is paying quite as much as they do for electricity.
Why? Is it not true that it isn't much safer for the environment? Even if you take the spent fuel and just throw it out in the garden the result is a very localised form of pollution that does not spread anywhere compared to CO2 emissions from power plants that are showing global effect on the planet.
Even when you consider accidents it is remarkably safe. Not only has nuclear power killed the lowest number of people of any of the generation methods (count how many people die constructing solar power for a fun evening game), even with its major 1960s era design throwback incidents it has made less of the world unlivable than a certain major hydropower incident no one likes to admit happened, not to mention has far less effect on the planet.
Say what you want, if you want to save the thing we call the planet then you'd be all in favour of nuclear power. But what you really are proposing to do is save some uneducated irrational NIMBYs instead.
Go ahead, prove me wrong
No. Back up your own partisan bullshit.
So not only do you not know how the PIN system works, but you also have no idea of the purpose of the zip code. The ZIP code does nothing to prevent someone buying something. All it does is settle assign fault between you and the merchant in the eyes of the bank.
Just because you get refunded doesn't mean fraud hasn't taken place and that someone isn't out of pocket for stolen goods. the ZIP codes are precisely 0% effective at preventing fraudulent transactions.
That's a big problem if you have fascist regimes and dictators. But there are many countries which have laws like this and didn't turn into Russia.
Your example is like saying that everyone who sneezes will die of ebola.
The internet would have come along just fine over the last 20 years if it were running on IIS and .NET.
It was. IIS and ActiveX had half the market share of Apache in 1997. But fast forward to 2007 and it was getting tight, 40% vs 50%, and in 2007 that was a HUGE amount of websites.
Even now with the millions of websites out there it's at 20%, although ActiveX is hopefully rotting in a special kind of hell by now.
nearly every gas pump asks for my 5-digit zip code as an effective security measure against lost/stolen cards
Effective ... I don't think you know what that word means.
Until, that is, we went stupid and put NFC payments on the same card so any kind of temporary physical proximity is enough to charge, even without the user knowing.
You don't implement NFC + pin? My bank makes it opt in to not use the pin for NFC transactions below €25 with the explicit point that I would be liable for the €25 of fraud.
Then there's the random asking for the pin periodically anyway, and asking for the chip periodically as a security measure too (I think it asks for the pin every 5 transactions even if they are below the pin threshold).
If the server has pressed OK twice after entering the bill total (skipping the gratuity step) then
... he's likely well paid and not an American desperately relying on the messed up tipping culture.
I believe banks in Europe will still issue chip-and-signature cards to elderly people on request.
That varies greatly by country and also varies greatly by utility. e.g. Public transport ticketing machines around here don't accept chip and signature cards.
Move from Excel to what?
Everything that should have been used instead of Excel in the first place.
Seriously the only Excel tables which don't work on the several other office suits which are available are the ones that shouldn't have been setup in the first place (think payroll database that someone decided to implement in Excel). Migrating to cloud based services for management returns the office applications to their basic roots and makes adoption of other software easy.
Now Sharepoint and Exchange on the other hand...
Germany is not importing power.
Tell it to your own energy charts which showed quite a bit of import happening over the weekend. That's the thing about having intermittent energy sources. Germany is a net energy exporter but relies heavily on imports to keep the lights on when there's no wind. You imported 25TWh Jan-Oct last year.
Get a damn clue, moron
Learn to internet.
You sure about that? Germany's economy is larger than CA but using renewables they have more energy than they can use.
Great example. Germany's renewable energy generation capabilities stands at 33%. Last Saturday it produced precisely 0% of Germany's consumption with import running full steam from France for some of that wonderful nuclear goodness. They have had more energy than they could use precisely 2 days last year, and then only because their energy mix is so heavily geared towards base load and intermittent load with few peaking plants in between.
And they get all that for the privilege of paying some of the highest electricity costs in the world (almost 3x what Californians currently pay, those two windy days where they had excess energy being a notable exception)