So when the Chinese say "may you live in interesting times", they refer to the headaches that occur when you consider those four plus UTC, the leap second issue, and daylight savings while you're at it?
Actually, what I want from the Mozilla devs at the moment is not new features, but a solution to Firefox's memory problems. I shouldn't have to restart my browser every couple of days just because I have a few tabs open.
It seems to me that the attempts by schools, universities etc. to detect plagiarism would be useful in this area. The problem of course is that plagiarism isn't illegal per se, e.g. if a spammer rips off a source like Wikipedia there's no legal recourse. But it would mean that sites like Amazon would be able to detect these worthless books and put up a warning.
This was a competition organized for school kids, in the UK. The UK is one of the worst nanny-states about anything to do with children, so I can guarantee you that something has been said etc.
Look at it as fundamental research instead. Yes, it's far removed from road cars, but new ideas have to be tested somewhere before a car company will commit millions to incorporate it into a saleable vehicle. Hypermile racing is an avenue where e.g. combustion research can be carried out at relatively low cost and in a competitive environment that fosters new ideas etc. Many schools and universities take part [1], it would be much harder for them to design and build engines of the size needed to power a fullsize car.
1: that also means that competitions like these are in part about education. Education is best done on systems that show the fundamental principles, without getting bogged down in myriad implementation details. Another argument to use these simple racers rather than a fullsize car.
Cambridge Design built an oxygen concentrator to replace oxygen tanks in battlefield medicine. This device is powered by a tiny diesel engine. I suspect that that engine is what's being used in this car, not the oxygen concentration device.
Actually that page doesn't say anything about the issue, and your understanding is incorrect.
This is the amendment we're talking about:
[ een uitzondering om] tegemoet te komen aan een uitdrukkelijk verzoek van de abonnee om diensten of toepassingen op grond van door de abonnee gespecificeerde ideologische motieven te belemmeren, mits de aanbieder de abonnee voor deze toestemming geen geldelijk of ander voordeel biedt.
Translated: An exception to honor specific requests by the subscriber to block services or applications on grounds of ideological motives specified by the subscriber, on condition that the provider does not grant the subscriber price reductions or other advantages in exchange for this request.
So the only way an ISP can get away with filtering is at the express request of the customer, and the ISP can't offer filtered internet at a lower price than unfiltered internet.
That's nonsense. Nobody is stopping you (or anyone else) from creating and marketing such a filter. Conservative Christians just have been the only group where there's enough demand that someone decided to provide the service.
No endorsement is expressed or implied by the government; in fact, that same government is currently engaged in creating laws that are seen as antireligious (a proposed ban on certain types of animal slaughter that includes kosher and halal).
In most of the country (>90% would be my guess, can't find hard numbers on short notice) you have at least two networks (cable and ADSL). ADSL is offered by multiple ISPs (the owner of the last mile wiring is required to allow other ISPs to offer connections). Quite a few ADSL providers are storefronts for a few companies, though. This may be the case for cable as well, not sure about that. There are no geographic monopolies. Smaller, independent ISPs still exist.
Filtering can be (and is) done by third-parties. Several solutions are available. The one ISP that would be affected by this ruling is linked to a very conservative church. They used to use whitelist filtering (i.e. no site is available unless it's expressly approved). That's no longer viable, but they still have pretty strict filtering. They have a few thousand subscribers, iirc.
Here in the Netherlands, there currently are a few (right-wing Christian) ISPs that filter internet access at the request of their clients. Some of these ISPs do this by providing filtering software that the customer can install locally, others do the filtering on proxy servers at the ISP. The net neutrality law makes the second option illegal, despite this filtering being done at the client's request.
The amendment in question would repair this, allowing clients to request a filter. Some parties (PvdA, GL) see this amendment as a loophole. I don't see how, though.
I've been involved with a similar project in the Netherlands. We found that commercial OCR engines had a high error rate on these old documents. We ended up having each document OCR'ed twice: once by software, once by having a sweatshop in India manually type up the document. The Indians had a lower error rate than the OCR software. By combining the two sources we could achieve an error rate low enough to comply with the project spec. The project was unusual in that the documents were an index (of the minutes of parliament meetings); this meant it was full of words without context (incl. loads of names), and part of the information was in numbers, so we couldn't use a spelling checker to increase accuracy.
Using a spelling checker on century-old documents is iffy anyway, since you need one that has the then-current vocabulary instead of modern spelling.
Stephen F. Badylak and J. Peter Rubin at Pitt are working with funding from the Defense Department to develop an implantable extracellular matrix that can re-grow tissue. The matrix is a biological scaffold, enriched with proteins and growth factors, which recruits stem cells and other cell precursors to the site of the injury, according to the McGowan Institute's website. The therapy stimulates further tissue regeneration, essentially rebuilding the lost muscle.
Yup, BOE and tailored to my situation, I planned on DIY installation. Maintenance? You may have to clean the panels occasionally. Panels are sold with a 25-year warranty, but are generally expected to hold out longer than that. I used today's price for electricity, but in the past 10 years there's been a 80% increase. Oil became 5x more expensive. That's a trend I expect to continue. My electricity price contains taxes (about 100%) and transport/connection tariffs.
All in all, I'm perhaps too optimistic about PV at the moment. But the time when PV is cost-effective is not far off. PV panel prices halved (from E 4.20/Wp to E2/Wp) in two years.
My BOE (actually a spreadsheet that's lived on my computer for a couple of years now): Wp required 1687,5 Wp (that's required for my home, for a total of 1350 kWh/y, at 100 Wp=80 kWh/y) price/Wp 2 E (grabbed from the first webpage I could find for actual panels that can be bought today) inverter: E 1200 Total: 4575 E ex installation
Electricity per kWh 0,21 E as per my current contract savings per year 282,69 E, or 6% of my investment. If I had put the investment into a bank account, i'd have had half that as interest.
break-even after 16,18 year without subsidies at the current price of electricity Installation cost adds another E 500 in materials on a flat roof, or a little under 2 years Subsidy was E0,24 per kWh last year (this year's figures haven't been published yet), that's E 324 per year, so that would more halve the break-even time.
The 12 years in my original post came from a recent newspaper article so I can't reproduce that. I disregarded interest on a loan because that's the situation I'm in. Current interest rates on a home mortgage are around 4%, so then you'd have a savings of E 100 and break-even after max 45 y (assuming you don't pay off the loan)
I'd do this tomorrow if it weren't for me living in a rented apartment.
But then MS did something that created a lot of value to the user - they created an office suite.
They did more. Office took off along with Windows. For the first time on the IBM PC, here was a set of applications that had a common, consistent UI. Learn to use one program, and you could quickly find your way around the others as well. This was a big improvement over the likes of WP and Lotus 123 where each program had its own UI, and training users to use a new program was a nightmare. WP and Lotus were at a severe disadvantage when porting their apps to Windows, because they now had to conform to the Windows UI, which was nice for new users but alienated the existing user base. ISTR that WordPerfect in particular made a hash of their first WP for Windows versions.
Also unlike WP, Word had WYSIWYG that sort of worked. Compared to Word, WP suddenly looked arcane and byzantine.
That's a question only an American could ask. Elsewhere in the Western world, people occasionally grumble, but everyone concedes that seat belts are a good thing, and seat belt laws are a good idea.
Come again? A home PV installation is currently cost-effective even here (.nl), you can recover your investment in something like 12 years. It makes more sense to invest in a PV installation than to put the money in a savings account.
Slashdot Mirror
So when the Chinese say "may you live in interesting times", they refer to the headaches that occur when you consider those four plus UTC, the leap second issue, and daylight savings while you're at it?
I'm currently on FF 4.0.1 with a bunch of plugins. In FF 3.6 I had no problem despite having the same plugins installed. (OS X, btw)
- Users want the latest and greatest
Actually, what I want from the Mozilla devs at the moment is not new features, but a solution to Firefox's memory problems. I shouldn't have to restart my browser every couple of days just because I have a few tabs open.
FTA:
It takes two or three visitors to push around the capstan of the clock and to lift its 10,000-pound stones.
The real question is: do they need to sing?
I meant that wikipedia articles come with a license that allows reuse (as long as attribution is given?).
It seems to me that the attempts by schools, universities etc. to detect plagiarism would be useful in this area. The problem of course is that plagiarism isn't illegal per se, e.g. if a spammer rips off a source like Wikipedia there's no legal recourse.
But it would mean that sites like Amazon would be able to detect these worthless books and put up a warning.
This was a competition organized for school kids, in the UK. The UK is one of the worst nanny-states about anything to do with children, so I can guarantee you that something has been said etc.
Perhaps, but this article says there's no oxygen concentrator in the car.
Look at it as fundamental research instead. Yes, it's far removed from road cars, but new ideas have to be tested somewhere before a car company will commit millions to incorporate it into a saleable vehicle.
Hypermile racing is an avenue where e.g. combustion research can be carried out at relatively low cost and in a competitive environment that fosters new ideas etc. Many schools and universities take part [1], it would be much harder for them to design and build engines of the size needed to power a fullsize car.
1: that also means that competitions like these are in part about education. Education is best done on systems that show the fundamental principles, without getting bogged down in myriad implementation details. Another argument to use these simple racers rather than a fullsize car.
this page has more info. The diesel engine in the car is one of the designs they studied for the oxygen device.
so of course it's going to be piloted by a kid. All vehicles in the competition were.
Cambridge Design built an oxygen concentrator to replace oxygen tanks in battlefield medicine. This device is powered by a tiny diesel engine. I suspect that that engine is what's being used in this car, not the oxygen concentration device.
Actually that page doesn't say anything about the issue, and your understanding is incorrect.
This is the amendment we're talking about:
[ een uitzondering om] tegemoet te komen aan een uitdrukkelijk verzoek van de abonnee om diensten of toepassingen op grond van door de abonnee gespecificeerde ideologische motieven te belemmeren, mits de aanbieder de abonnee voor deze toestemming geen geldelijk of ander voordeel biedt.
Translated:
An exception to honor specific requests by the subscriber to block services or applications on grounds of ideological motives specified by the subscriber, on condition that the provider does not grant the subscriber price reductions or other advantages in exchange for this request.
So the only way an ISP can get away with filtering is at the express request of the customer, and the ISP can't offer filtered internet at a lower price than unfiltered internet.
That's nonsense. Nobody is stopping you (or anyone else) from creating and marketing such a filter. Conservative Christians just have been the only group where there's enough demand that someone decided to provide the service.
No endorsement is expressed or implied by the government; in fact, that same government is currently engaged in creating laws that are seen as antireligious (a proposed ban on certain types of animal slaughter that includes kosher and halal).
Because its thrust direction depends on the shape of the rotor blades. You'd have to flip the rotor blades upside down to get upwards thrust.
In most of the country (>90% would be my guess, can't find hard numbers on short notice) you have at least two networks (cable and ADSL). ADSL is offered by multiple ISPs (the owner of the last mile wiring is required to allow other ISPs to offer connections). Quite a few ADSL providers are storefronts for a few companies, though.
This may be the case for cable as well, not sure about that. There are no geographic monopolies. Smaller, independent ISPs still exist.
Filtering can be (and is) done by third-parties. Several solutions are available. The one ISP that would be affected by this ruling is linked to a very conservative church. They used to use whitelist filtering (i.e. no site is available unless it's expressly approved). That's no longer viable, but they still have pretty strict filtering. They have a few thousand subscribers, iirc.
Here in the Netherlands, there currently are a few (right-wing Christian) ISPs that filter internet access at the request of their clients. Some of these ISPs do this by providing filtering software that the customer can install locally, others do the filtering on proxy servers at the ISP. The net neutrality law makes the second option illegal, despite this filtering being done at the client's request.
The amendment in question would repair this, allowing clients to request a filter. Some parties (PvdA, GL) see this amendment as a loophole. I don't see how, though.
I've been involved with a similar project in the Netherlands. We found that commercial OCR engines had a high error rate on these old documents. We ended up having each document OCR'ed twice: once by software, once by having a sweatshop in India manually type up the document. The Indians had a lower error rate than the OCR software. By combining the two sources we could achieve an error rate low enough to comply with the project spec.
The project was unusual in that the documents were an index (of the minutes of parliament meetings); this meant it was full of words without context (incl. loads of names), and part of the information was in numbers, so we couldn't use a spelling checker to increase accuracy.
Using a spelling checker on century-old documents is iffy anyway, since you need one that has the then-current vocabulary instead of modern spelling.
here
Stephen F. Badylak and J. Peter Rubin at Pitt are working with funding from the Defense Department to develop an implantable extracellular matrix that can re-grow tissue. The matrix is a biological scaffold, enriched with proteins and growth factors, which recruits stem cells and other cell precursors to the site of the injury, according to the McGowan Institute's website. The therapy stimulates further tissue regeneration, essentially rebuilding the lost muscle.
Yup, BOE and tailored to my situation, I planned on DIY installation. Maintenance? You may have to clean the panels occasionally. Panels are sold with a 25-year warranty, but are generally expected to hold out longer than that.
I used today's price for electricity, but in the past 10 years there's been a 80% increase. Oil became 5x more expensive. That's a trend I expect to continue.
My electricity price contains taxes (about 100%) and transport/connection tariffs.
All in all, I'm perhaps too optimistic about PV at the moment. But the time when PV is cost-effective is not far off. PV panel prices halved (from E 4.20/Wp to E2/Wp) in two years.
OT: Select 'Plain old text' instead of 'HTML Formatted'. You can still use HTML tags, but CRs don't get filtered out.
My BOE (actually a spreadsheet that's lived on my computer for a couple of years now):
Wp required 1687,5 Wp (that's required for my home, for a total of 1350 kWh/y, at 100 Wp=80 kWh/y)
price/Wp 2 E (grabbed from the first webpage I could find for actual panels that can be bought today)
inverter: E 1200
Total: 4575 E ex installation
Electricity per kWh 0,21 E as per my current contract
savings per year 282,69 E, or 6% of my investment. If I had put the investment into a bank account, i'd have had half that as interest.
break-even after 16,18 year without subsidies at the current price of electricity
Installation cost adds another E 500 in materials on a flat roof, or a little under 2 years
Subsidy was E0,24 per kWh last year (this year's figures haven't been published yet), that's E 324 per year, so that would more halve the break-even time.
The 12 years in my original post came from a recent newspaper article so I can't reproduce that.
I disregarded interest on a loan because that's the situation I'm in. Current interest rates on a home mortgage are around 4%, so then you'd have a savings of E 100 and break-even after max 45 y (assuming you don't pay off the loan)
I'd do this tomorrow if it weren't for me living in a rented apartment.
But then MS did something that created a lot of value to the user - they created an office suite.
They did more. Office took off along with Windows. For the first time on the IBM PC, here was a set of applications that had a common, consistent UI. Learn to use one program, and you could quickly find your way around the others as well. This was a big improvement over the likes of WP and Lotus 123 where each program had its own UI, and training users to use a new program was a nightmare. WP and Lotus were at a severe disadvantage when porting their apps to Windows, because they now had to conform to the Windows UI, which was nice for new users but alienated the existing user base. ISTR that WordPerfect in particular made a hash of their first WP for Windows versions.
Also unlike WP, Word had WYSIWYG that sort of worked. Compared to Word, WP suddenly looked arcane and byzantine.
Are seatbelt laws unethical?
That's a question only an American could ask. Elsewhere in the Western world, people occasionally grumble, but everyone concedes that seat belts are a good thing, and seat belt laws are a good idea.
PV isn't cost effective yet
Come again? A home PV installation is currently cost-effective even here (.nl), you can recover your investment in something like 12 years. It makes more sense to invest in a PV installation than to put the money in a savings account.