They were infinitely more humane than the firebombing employed by the British. Not only were 100 times more civilians killed in Germany than in Britain, but many cities were completely destroyed.
Yeah, 100 times more civilians were killed in Germany because the Germans were gassing them in the death camps, you dick.
The moral high ground you seem to be standing on seems more delusional than anything else I've seen before.
Uh, I'm not standing on any moral high ground. I've re-read my post a couple of times now and unless I'm being so darkly ironic that even I don't recognise it, I was making the case for pragmatism. You're on my side mate.
If [stem cells] are available, because of abortion, it would be morally wrong to ignore a source or valuable research... If we follow that logic, doctors and researches should no longer get bodies to learn and/or research.
Bodies are voluntarily donated to medical science as a condition of their owner's will. Unless the foetus is kicking out the morse code for "scrape me off and suck me out with a vacuum cleaner", I don't think it's getting much choice in the matter.
But then again, I don't really care because it's a woman's right to choose.
Hell, we used all the nazi doctors' death-camp research didn't we? And the US shipped all the nazi guys designing V-1s and V-2s (more terrorist devices than weapons) off to build ICBMs, to protect the land of the free. Supporting research after some other jerk has got their hands dirty and killed some folk to get their answers (and taken the blame) is what we do in the 'civilised' west. Get over it.
Bet you'll be glad for all the stem cell research they will do, with all their aborted female foetuses, when your liver packs in 20 years from now.
I wonder if this would cut down on media piracy worldwide. Since Videos/DVDs on the black market in China would be in AVS Format, no other country could play them.
Who the heck do you think manufactures all the players? Chinese companies. They'll throw in AVS support for nothing with their players (no point in setting up 2 production lines when 1 will do), just like they threw in support for VCD and SVCD. And then the players will get shipped to every country in the world.
In fact, this is a real shot in the arm for piracy, as they can rip the video from DVDs, repackage it in non-region encoded AVS format. Then they fire it around the wibbly-wobbly web in handy, ready-to-burn form and their little pirate buddies with an AVS-compliant player go "Woohoo! No more swapping SVCD discs!"
But, for exactly the same reasons, it'll also be a boost for amateur and small media production companies as they won't have to pay Philips and Sony a big wad of their earnings to get their media distributed worldwide.
A better question would be: given China's intransigence when it comes to upholding international intellectual property agreements, should we rip off this format, use it for publishing everything, make tools to create and edit AVS files willy-nilly, burn AVS discs, blah, blah, blah..., and not pay them one red cent for it?
The best idea I heard of was to make the site inaccessible by covering it in a huge slab of black concrete. The concrete soaks up all the heat, becomes a big storage heater storing more and more heat over time and anybody that gets too close gets cooked.
Of course, you'd hope that in the future people would be bright enough stay away from the place where the trees have tentacles and the squirrels shoot laser beams out their eyes.
It looks like the best job in the world for a serial killer would be in a DNA lab. Just think of the fun they could have:
They murder someone in a gruesome and nasty way.
The folks from CSI come along (hopefully Cally or Sarah) and collect the evidence.
They pass it back to SK in the lab. Snoogins - contact with the ladies.
Cally or Sarah grab a suspect and ask for a sample (and steal it when he tells them to go stuff themselves).
SK swaps the suspect's sample for his own - hey presto, positive match. Case closed.
Or, for more fun, they could find criminals with violent records, but no DNA on record, post their DNA to CODIS (or whatever national variant they have access to) as that nasty criminal and then go on a killing spree, knowing that their DNA is going to be identified as the nasty man's.
But this is just silly, because we all know DNA evidence has never, ever been tampered with.
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one: loosing teams are naughty groups of sex-offenders that work crowds in packs, distracting girls with rude puppet shows, while their mates sneak up behind them and unfasten their bras.
Ooh! I found more details! Apparently, after this, Microsoft paid STAC $43M for the patent infringement, bought $40M of their stock and cross-licensed each other patents. STAC took the deal rather than fight appeals for years and years.
Well, there was that thing with STAC about on-the-fly compression for hard drives. They did end up in court and they lost, owing STAC $120M. They got $14M back in counter-suit, but they were definitely found guilty of patent infringement.
...to take over the Star Trek franchise entirely if they want. What's stopping them? Buy the rights from Viacom and then they could make the shows any damn way they felt like. Decent shows (not sci-fi that's softer than baby shit) would be the best advertising their games could get, if that's what they wanted.
And then they could stop sueing and we could stop tuning into more disappointing episodes (hoping against hope that this will be the turnaround episode were something fun happens).
Where do you go to buy methanol? Your local chemist or drugstore? They won't have it, and even if they do they'll make you sign a poisons register and stuff. I suppose you can get a still knocked together and brew your own, but what are the chances you're going to clog up the cell with the funky brewing by-products. I suppose you're supposed to order it from chemical suppliers, but do you really want to wait a couple of days to use your laptop while they mail your order to you?
If they could get a fuel cell working off butane gas, now I'd buy one of those. Much handier and about a second and a half to fully recharge the cell. That'd be progress. This is a footnote.
Yeah. And while you're at it, Bloomsbury should start suing the hard-core book pirates pushing their degenerate warez onto the kiddies down at your local municipal libraries.
This evil trend must be stamped out before the kiddies' book-dependency and literacy gets out of hand. I'm sure if the big publishers can get together and crush these book sharing reading-mongers once and for all, we can stop the threat of child literacy once and for all.
IANAL, but wouldn't this mean the patent is effective for 27-30 years instead of 20 years, as the 'invention' still has protection while it's pending? And if the IP firm working the system can come up with enough variations, alterations, and improvements they can keep the patent from being issued indefinitely. What a bonus!
The simple fact is that IT moves too damn fast for software patents to be anything other than nuisances at best and corporate genocide at worst.
I'm going to mail my MEPs about this and I hope that any other Eurolanders checking this thread out will too.
And there's only 8 or 9 grand computing challenges to be overcome before 'sentient' computing becomes an everyday reality.
I think we should give all the money to the guys that say they can get man-portable laser weapons working and then we go around having scientist culls in every branch of research that's just a load of time-wasting, cash-grabbing, self-indulgent bollocks. That'd be my idea of putting the cash to a good use. My nominations for fields of research to be thinned out with a few judicious carbonisations (oh ok - indiscriminate slaughters) are:
AI - As well as being the inspiration for a shitty (and excruciatingly dull and mawkish) film, AI boffins have made basically zero progress in creating (or even exhibiting) any intelligence in 30 years. Burn 'em.
Nuclear fusion - They've been working on that for 50 years now. How big a frikkin donut do they need? They gotta go. Burn 'em.
Functional programming - Because Haskell and Ruby are going to replace C++ next year. Honestly man - their time has come. Yeah, uh huh. Burn 'em.
Statistics - Responsible for providing vicious pricks, lazy engineers, and callous researchers with 'mathematical' proof that their half-baked theories about racial superiority, quality control, or drug dosages are anything more than vanity, luck, or pure speculation (if anything they do or build actually works). Burn these dicks down.
I'm sure there are more specialities that could be blasted into grubby smears. Any ideas?
Ooh! The RIAA are going to sue some a couple of hundred folks. It's the end of file sharing as we know it, as no-one will ever share a file ever again! P2P IS DOOOOOMED!
Earth to the United States of America: you only represent 5% of the planet's population. You think the RIAA's going to stop Russians or Chinese or Indians or Saudi Arabians (or Iraqis - they gotta get their own back somehow) from sharing files? Or all us effete, decadent European types?
Get a grip. There's a reason it's called the internet and not AOL. Funnily enough, the global communications network does not stop at the US border (although I think I'm the first to make that point in this thread). Stuff happens in the rest of the world (almost all the time!)
Whew! Panic over. Resume stealing from the oligopolists. But first: pull your heads out of your arses.
In my own experience I remember a migraine I had come on at work and it transformed me into a savant (of sorts) by giving me a mini Tourette's episode. I couldn't actually tell my colleagues in so many words why I was being a bit odd (apparently muttering "motherfucker" every third word is normal for me when I'm working on something tricky - who knew?) but I developed an amazing ability to communicate my predicament by pointing at my head, grimacing, and saying "shit motherfucker gnnn!"
Who knew that talent lay latent within me, just waiting for its release through the method of blinding and nauseating pain?
Re:Permaculture Chickens and Cows
on
Chicken Run
·
· Score: 1
Uh, your forgetting the other benefit the chinese animal husbandry has brought to our world: a fresh stream of animal hosted viruses (note to the pedantic: virii, as a word, sucks balls) to infect our biped bodies and boost our immune systems. If we don't choke on our own mucus first.
Dundee is Budapest on the Danube compared to Aberdeen. When they do Groundskeeper Willy on the Simpsons they get the accent wrong, but the sheer parochial idiocy of those Aberdonian mofos is spot on. God damn they are dumb sons of whores.
There won't be a replacement. And unless there's a massive boost in the world's economy, that means ever.
In 1994 I was involved in research into the viability of synthetic vision systems for the replacement high speed commercial transport aircraft that Airbus were thinking of putting into production. The way the sums worked out, the only consortiums able to field a new aircraft were Boeing/MacDonald-Douglas or Airbus - one would build the supersonic replacement and one would build the economy 600+ seats superjumbo. But the cost of either project would be so high and the margins so marginal that neither of them could build the same type as the other, or they'd have bankrupted each other. Even then though the supersonic would only be viable if the world's economy grew massively (it requires high profit margins on each ticket to provide a decent ROI), and people started to really want to go everywhere fast.
And they didn't.
So Airbus decided that the A380 is the way to go and no other consortium can produce a competitor because it'd be aeronautical mutually assured destruction.
Given that the world total oil production's going to level off between 2010-2020 and then go into permanent decline, the economic strength required for a new commercial supersonic passenger carrier is unlikely to be evident in the next century. So get yourself a ticket while you can.
Oh, and pilots love that aircraft for another reason: you hit a microburst at 200 feet and it's the only commercial jets with afterburners for the thrust needed to stop your ass getting smashed flat on the tarmac. In every other jet you'd be toast. That puppy has serious grunt.
What happens to the troopers that get killed in the game? They've just had a lesson in the fact that a momentary lapse, or even nothing they themselve did wrong, has just got them killed. Imagine how nervous you'd be after that on a real battlefield, after 200 sessions, thinking "My odds of coming out of this are 30/70." My next thought would be "Screw this for a game of soldiers," and then over the fence at the first opportunity. I may (or may not) appear later, once the dust's settled, for tea and medals.
Let's face facts: basically you're training soldiers to expect to die in a combat situation, and reinforcing that far more often than you would if you were limited to real-life exercises for their training. I don't think this will work out in the long run.
Maybe if the code monkeys were personally financially liable for their (numerous and varied) screwups they'd appreciate test analysts and testers a bit more. I'm the only person in the room with a systems engineering degree and there's been times when I've been treated like a dog for having the temerity to comment on the rigour of their latest abortion. "What do you know? You're not a programmer."
If these guys started having to indemnify themselves and pay to clean up their messes (the ones we warned them about and they ignored), we'd have a more harmonious relationship at work between programmers and testers. Nobody likes to be told that they've just done something wrong, but if it's a choice between being told they're wrong, or they're bankrupt and their kids are going to be studying at the University of Burger King, then I think most people would prefer to be checked in time.
1. The setup and maintenance costs of the digester 2. Comparisons to the amount of energy that could be generated if you used the land to farm crops that could be used for biodiesel.
You can't really tell anything about the overall efficiency of the scheme apart from a marginal increase of an unknown amount has been achieved, in a process that's not been comprehensively studied.
What you really need to do is work out, starting from the energy in sunlight and the energy in the cows' feed, to how much energy and money they get back from the electricity.
Efficiency increase = E / (S + F)
where E is the amount of usable electricity delivered, S is the energy from sunlight hitting the ground and F is the amount of energy contained in the cows' feed.
As an exercise to the reader, find out the energy value of solar radiation over the farmland and the energy in the cows' feed. These values dwarf the amount of energy generated as electricity. If this even results in a 0.1% increase in overall system efficiency I'd be totally gobsmacked.
Of course, the other way of looking at it is that this farmer saved (and made) a whole bunch of cash with even this teeny-weeny increase in overall efficiency, how much money could be made with carefully thinking about efficiency in agricultural systems design. Maybe its time for the craftsman/farmer to move on and see what engineers can do.
By the 1960's, the premier UK businesses were service oriented - advertising, finance, etc. They had lost all real edge in "goods" manufacture.
Or there weren't the margins in it. As long as someone's building something they'll need someone to help them sell it. And you keep your fingernails clean. While you can't make a living taking in each other's laundry, you can make a living taking in everybody else's laundry.
Once the empire dissolved in the 1950's a serious decline began.
The empire wasn't "dissolved". It was broken up because it's asset value (to the USian bankers holding its markers) exceeded its total worth.
The British Empire generally ran at a loss. What it did provide was secure access to markets, and this allowed the new British industrial manufacturers to distribute their goods further and with greater efficiency than their competitors in Europe. What's really changed is that, after the war, almost all industrialised countries in the world now have access to secure transportation links for their manufactured goods.
Industrial innovation + only secure markets = distinct competetive advantage
The playing field's been levelled is all, leading to a lower profile UK on the global stage. We're doing pretty OK, in general. We have more cell phones per capita than you luddite USians. And here's the real hallmark of civilisation: we don't pay for incoming calls.
Slashdot Mirror
They were infinitely more humane than the firebombing employed by the British. Not only were 100 times more civilians killed in Germany than in Britain, but many cities were completely destroyed.
Yeah, 100 times more civilians were killed in Germany because the Germans were gassing them in the death camps, you dick.
The moral high ground you seem to be standing on seems more delusional than anything else I've seen before.
... If we follow that logic, doctors and researches should no longer get bodies to learn and/or research.
Uh, I'm not standing on any moral high ground. I've re-read my post a couple of times now and unless I'm being so darkly ironic that even I don't recognise it, I was making the case for pragmatism. You're on my side mate.
If [stem cells] are available, because of abortion, it would be morally wrong to ignore a source or valuable research
Bodies are voluntarily donated to medical science as a condition of their owner's will. Unless the foetus is kicking out the morse code for "scrape me off and suck me out with a vacuum cleaner", I don't think it's getting much choice in the matter.
But then again, I don't really care because it's a woman's right to choose.
Hell, we used all the nazi doctors' death-camp research didn't we? And the US shipped all the nazi guys designing V-1s and V-2s (more terrorist devices than weapons) off to build ICBMs, to protect the land of the free. Supporting research after some other jerk has got their hands dirty and killed some folk to get their answers (and taken the blame) is what we do in the 'civilised' west. Get over it.
Bet you'll be glad for all the stem cell research they will do, with all their aborted female foetuses, when your liver packs in 20 years from now.
I wonder if this would cut down on media piracy worldwide. Since Videos/DVDs on the black market in China would be in AVS Format, no other country could play them.
Who the heck do you think manufactures all the players? Chinese companies. They'll throw in AVS support for nothing with their players (no point in setting up 2 production lines when 1 will do), just like they threw in support for VCD and SVCD. And then the players will get shipped to every country in the world.
In fact, this is a real shot in the arm for piracy, as they can rip the video from DVDs, repackage it in non-region encoded AVS format. Then they fire it around the wibbly-wobbly web in handy, ready-to-burn form and their little pirate buddies with an AVS-compliant player go "Woohoo! No more swapping SVCD discs!"
But, for exactly the same reasons, it'll also be a boost for amateur and small media production companies as they won't have to pay Philips and Sony a big wad of their earnings to get their media distributed worldwide.
A better question would be: given China's intransigence when it comes to upholding international intellectual property agreements, should we rip off this format, use it for publishing everything, make tools to create and edit AVS files willy-nilly, burn AVS discs, blah, blah, blah..., and not pay them one red cent for it?
Maybe as a mod for GTA III. But you'd have to be able to model nuns and a naked Harvey Keitel. Yikes.
The best idea I heard of was to make the site inaccessible by covering it in a huge slab of black concrete. The concrete soaks up all the heat, becomes a big storage heater storing more and more heat over time and anybody that gets too close gets cooked.
Of course, you'd hope that in the future people would be bright enough stay away from the place where the trees have tentacles and the squirrels shoot laser beams out their eyes.
They murder someone in a gruesome and nasty way.
The folks from CSI come along (hopefully Cally or Sarah) and collect the evidence.
They pass it back to SK in the lab. Snoogins - contact with the ladies.
Cally or Sarah grab a suspect and ask for a sample (and steal it when he tells them to go stuff themselves).
SK swaps the suspect's sample for his own - hey presto, positive match. Case closed.
Or, for more fun, they could find criminals with violent records, but no DNA on record, post their DNA to CODIS (or whatever national variant they have access to) as that nasty criminal and then go on a killing spree, knowing that their DNA is going to be identified as the nasty man's.
But this is just silly, because we all know DNA evidence has never, ever been tampered with.
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one: loosing teams are naughty groups of sex-offenders that work crowds in packs, distracting girls with rude puppet shows, while their mates sneak up behind them and unfasten their bras.
Am I right?
Ooh! I found more details! Apparently, after this, Microsoft paid STAC $43M for the patent infringement, bought $40M of their stock and cross-licensed each other patents. STAC took the deal rather than fight appeals for years and years.
Well, there was that thing with STAC about on-the-fly compression for hard drives. They did end up in court and they lost, owing STAC $120M. They got $14M back in counter-suit, but they were definitely found guilty of patent infringement.
...to take over the Star Trek franchise entirely if they want. What's stopping them? Buy the rights from Viacom and then they could make the shows any damn way they felt like. Decent shows (not sci-fi that's softer than baby shit) would be the best advertising their games could get, if that's what they wanted.
And then they could stop sueing and we could stop tuning into more disappointing episodes (hoping against hope that this will be the turnaround episode were something fun happens).
Where do you go to buy methanol? Your local chemist or drugstore? They won't have it, and even if they do they'll make you sign a poisons register and stuff. I suppose you can get a still knocked together and brew your own, but what are the chances you're going to clog up the cell with the funky brewing by-products. I suppose you're supposed to order it from chemical suppliers, but do you really want to wait a couple of days to use your laptop while they mail your order to you?
If they could get a fuel cell working off butane gas, now I'd buy one of those. Much handier and about a second and a half to fully recharge the cell. That'd be progress. This is a footnote.
Yeah. And while you're at it, Bloomsbury should start suing the hard-core book pirates pushing their degenerate warez onto the kiddies down at your local municipal libraries.
This evil trend must be stamped out before the kiddies' book-dependency and literacy gets out of hand. I'm sure if the big publishers can get together and crush these book sharing reading-mongers once and for all, we can stop the threat of child literacy once and for all.
IANAL, but wouldn't this mean the patent is effective for 27-30 years instead of 20 years, as the 'invention' still has protection while it's pending? And if the IP firm working the system can come up with enough variations, alterations, and improvements they can keep the patent from being issued indefinitely. What a bonus!
The simple fact is that IT moves too damn fast for software patents to be anything other than nuisances at best and corporate genocide at worst.
I'm going to mail my MEPs about this and I hope that any other Eurolanders checking this thread out will too.
And there's only 8 or 9 grand computing challenges to be overcome before 'sentient' computing becomes an everyday reality.
I think we should give all the money to the guys that say they can get man-portable laser weapons working and then we go around having scientist culls in every branch of research that's just a load of time-wasting, cash-grabbing, self-indulgent bollocks. That'd be my idea of putting the cash to a good use. My nominations for fields of research to be thinned out with a few judicious carbonisations (oh ok - indiscriminate slaughters) are:
AI - As well as being the inspiration for a shitty (and excruciatingly dull and mawkish) film, AI boffins have made basically zero progress in creating (or even exhibiting) any intelligence in 30 years. Burn 'em.
Nuclear fusion - They've been working on that for 50 years now. How big a frikkin donut do they need? They gotta go. Burn 'em.
Functional programming - Because Haskell and Ruby are going to replace C++ next year. Honestly man - their time has come. Yeah, uh huh. Burn 'em.
Statistics - Responsible for providing vicious pricks, lazy engineers, and callous researchers with 'mathematical' proof that their half-baked theories about racial superiority, quality control, or drug dosages are anything more than vanity, luck, or pure speculation (if anything they do or build actually works). Burn these dicks down.
I'm sure there are more specialities that could be blasted into grubby smears. Any ideas?
Ooh! The RIAA are going to sue some a couple of hundred folks. It's the end of file sharing as we know it, as no-one will ever share a file ever again! P2P IS DOOOOOMED!
Earth to the United States of America: you only represent 5% of the planet's population. You think the RIAA's going to stop Russians or Chinese or Indians or Saudi Arabians (or Iraqis - they gotta get their own back somehow) from sharing files? Or all us effete, decadent European types?
Get a grip. There's a reason it's called the internet and not AOL. Funnily enough, the global communications network does not stop at the US border (although I think I'm the first to make that point in this thread). Stuff happens in the rest of the world (almost all the time!)
Whew! Panic over. Resume stealing from the oligopolists. But first: pull your heads out of your arses.
In my own experience I remember a migraine I had come on at work and it transformed me into a savant (of sorts) by giving me a mini Tourette's episode. I couldn't actually tell my colleagues in so many words why I was being a bit odd (apparently muttering "motherfucker" every third word is normal for me when I'm working on something tricky - who knew?) but I developed an amazing ability to communicate my predicament by pointing at my head, grimacing, and saying "shit motherfucker gnnn!"
Who knew that talent lay latent within me, just waiting for its release through the method of blinding and nauseating pain?
Uh, your forgetting the other benefit the chinese animal husbandry has brought to our world: a fresh stream of animal hosted viruses (note to the pedantic: virii, as a word, sucks balls) to infect our biped bodies and boost our immune systems. If we don't choke on our own mucus first.
Dundee is Budapest on the Danube compared to Aberdeen. When they do Groundskeeper Willy on the Simpsons they get the accent wrong, but the sheer parochial idiocy of those Aberdonian mofos is spot on. God damn they are dumb sons of whores.
p.s. I'm from Glasgow.
There won't be a replacement. And unless there's a massive boost in the world's economy, that means ever.
In 1994 I was involved in research into the viability of synthetic vision systems for the replacement high speed commercial transport aircraft that Airbus were thinking of putting into production. The way the sums worked out, the only consortiums able to field a new aircraft were Boeing/MacDonald-Douglas or Airbus - one would build the supersonic replacement and one would build the economy 600+ seats superjumbo. But the cost of either project would be so high and the margins so marginal that neither of them could build the same type as the other, or they'd have bankrupted each other. Even then though the supersonic would only be viable if the world's economy grew massively (it requires high profit margins on each ticket to provide a decent ROI), and people started to really want to go everywhere fast.
And they didn't.
So Airbus decided that the A380 is the way to go and no other consortium can produce a competitor because it'd be aeronautical mutually assured destruction.
Given that the world total oil production's going to level off between 2010-2020 and then go into permanent decline, the economic strength required for a new commercial supersonic passenger carrier is unlikely to be evident in the next century. So get yourself a ticket while you can.
Oh, and pilots love that aircraft for another reason: you hit a microburst at 200 feet and it's the only commercial jets with afterburners for the thrust needed to stop your ass getting smashed flat on the tarmac. In every other jet you'd be toast. That puppy has serious grunt.
What happens to the troopers that get killed in the game? They've just had a lesson in the fact that a momentary lapse, or even nothing they themselve did wrong, has just got them killed. Imagine how nervous you'd be after that on a real battlefield, after 200 sessions, thinking "My odds of coming out of this are 30/70." My next thought would be "Screw this for a game of soldiers," and then over the fence at the first opportunity. I may (or may not) appear later, once the dust's settled, for tea and medals.
Let's face facts: basically you're training soldiers to expect to die in a combat situation, and reinforcing that far more often than you would if you were limited to real-life exercises for their training. I don't think this will work out in the long run.
Maybe if the code monkeys were personally financially liable for their (numerous and varied) screwups they'd appreciate test analysts and testers a bit more. I'm the only person in the room with a systems engineering degree and there's been times when I've been treated like a dog for having the temerity to comment on the rigour of their latest abortion. "What do you know? You're not a programmer."
If these guys started having to indemnify themselves and pay to clean up their messes (the ones we warned them about and they ignored), we'd have a more harmonious relationship at work between programmers and testers. Nobody likes to be told that they've just done something wrong, but if it's a choice between being told they're wrong, or they're bankrupt and their kids are going to be studying at the University of Burger King, then I think most people would prefer to be checked in time.
There are 2 things I don't see in this article:
1. The setup and maintenance costs of the digester
2. Comparisons to the amount of energy that could be generated if you used the land to farm crops that could be used for biodiesel.
You can't really tell anything about the overall efficiency of the scheme apart from a marginal increase of an unknown amount has been achieved, in a process that's not been comprehensively studied.
What you really need to do is work out, starting from the energy in sunlight and the energy in the cows' feed, to how much energy and money they get back from the electricity.
Efficiency increase = E / (S + F)
where E is the amount of usable electricity delivered, S is the energy from sunlight hitting the ground and F is the amount of energy contained in the cows' feed.
As an exercise to the reader, find out the energy value of solar radiation over the farmland and the energy in the cows' feed. These values dwarf the amount of energy generated as electricity. If this even results in a 0.1% increase in overall system efficiency I'd be totally gobsmacked.
Of course, the other way of looking at it is that this farmer saved (and made) a whole bunch of cash with even this teeny-weeny increase in overall efficiency, how much money could be made with carefully thinking about efficiency in agricultural systems design. Maybe its time for the craftsman/farmer to move on and see what engineers can do.
The empire wasn't "dissolved". It was broken up because it's asset value (to the USian bankers holding its markers) exceeded its total worth.
The British Empire generally ran at a loss. What it did provide was secure access to markets, and this allowed the new British industrial manufacturers to distribute their goods further and with greater efficiency than their competitors in Europe. What's really changed is that, after the war, almost all industrialised countries in the world now have access to secure transportation links for their manufactured goods.
Industrial innovation + only secure markets = distinct competetive advantage
The playing field's been levelled is all, leading to a lower profile UK on the global stage. We're doing pretty OK, in general. We have more cell phones per capita than you luddite USians. And here's the real hallmark of civilisation: we don't pay for incoming calls.
It's not as if the USPTO is going to check though, it it? It'd be their, like, defining moment...