Having lived in both countries, I far prefer the British system.
Each circuit is protected, in my house, I have a central breaker panel with a 13A RCD on each circuit (older panels would have fuses, but these days, RCDs are used, they are much better at preventing lethal electric shocks). Other circuits have different ratings, for instance, the lighting circuits have 10A breakers. Additionally, the main feed into the building has an 80 amp breaker if I remember correctly.
Those large pinned plugs, when plugged in, stay plugged in. They feel and are mechanically sound, they aren't easily knocked loose. US 2-pin plugs feel "wobbly", especially the variety often found on consumer goods and things like table lamps; the mechanical connection feels very inadequate. Wall warts are the worst - the mass of the wall wart hanging off that loose-feeling 2 pin plug makes them especially easy to knock out of the socket. Also, when plugging in an electric kettle to a US style socket you inevitably get a nice big flash as it plugs in, leading to oxidisation of the contacts and a greater probability of a bad connection. British sockets are typically switched, so you can plug high current appliances in, then switch on once plugged in avoiding the prolonged flashover as the contact slides into the socket.
They probably are. Having lived in both countries, where most UK devices are almost always properly grounded (the earth pin is not optional in UK power plugs because you physically can't plug something in that doesn't have one - the earth pin opens the shutters in the wall socket), a great number of US appliances lack a ground pin.
Perhaps because 110 volts is seen to be less dangerous than 240v, it gets omitted.
Well, it's not that the intertubes uses no power, but the internet will be powered up and will use pretty much the same amount of power whether the files were downloaded or not. So the incremental energy use of distributing this material over the intertubes is likely a lot lower.
People will still be producing "lowly 64 bit" chips (that will probably still be the main architecture for desktop systems - and by the way, the VAX was 32 bit in 1979). 8 bit chips are incredibly common today, probably outselling 32 bit and 64 bit chips by 10 to 1. Embedded systems tend to be 8 bit. The Z80 is still manufactured (and there are new versions of the Z80 - still 8 bit - but you can buy a brand new, made in 2007 Zilog Z80 in a 40 pin DIP, which will plug straight into a Z80 based home computer from 1980). Microcontrollers like the Atmel AVR and Microchip PIC are 8 bit.
The vast majority of embedded systems don't care about the time, either.
On a point of pedantry, it's also a 31 bit overflow given that time_t is signed. (If it were a 32 bit overflow, we'd have a considerably longer period before having to worry about it).
With Microsoft's legendary secure coding practises, this will happen sooner, not later. My first thought on seeing this story was "This is gonna be good for some top class pranks..."
That's the thing I do too. The very day uPnP came out, I remarked what a dreadful idea it was, invented by the clueless who want everything luser friendly and damn any silly ideas about security.
I wonder which company thought up the appaling idea that is uPnP.
The Soviets mainly copied western computers in the Cold War. They copied mostly DEC stuff (pdp-11 and VAX - the DEC engineers even wrote something in Russian on the chip die for the vax CPU since they knew one of the first things that would happen is the Soviets would take the lid off one). They also made their own copies of 74-series TTL, and 8 bit CPUs such as the Z80. Russian homebrewers predominantly cloned the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the 1980s for a home computer, although the Russian homebrewers generally didn't simply copy, they usually made significant extensions to the Spectrum (the Sinclair ZX Spectrum has to be the 80s home computer with the most versions thanks to the Russian homebrewing scene).
CD rot _is_ a problem; they were right in the media, but as ever it was massively blown out of proportion. I have exactly one (well, two - it's a double album) CD that's suffering from this out of several bought about 1989-1990. The others of the same vintage are just fine. Fortunately, by the time the CD started to go bad, cdparanoia was available so I could rip it before it degraded too badly to be unplayable.
The other interesting thing: as a foreign visitor to the US, I won't have any of these IDs. So will foreign visitors now no longer be allowed to board internal flights?
The Smart Car has a Euro NCAP rating of 5 stars (the best rating) - better than most full size cars and miles better than many SUVs. Part of the testing includes hitting a solid, immovable object with just half of the front of the car (one of the worst case scenarios, since there's only half the energy absorbing crumple zone compared to hitting a barrier with the complete front).
If the Smart Car is a commercial failure, I'd love to fail like them. Fail all the way to the bank!
There are LOADS of Smart Cars around here. It's one of the more popular superminis. But then again, here is Rightpondia, where small cars traditionally sell very well anyway.
If so, that'd be like talking about America and only meaning the western USA. I think most people think of the European Union when people talk of Europe (just like people think of the USA when saying America). The European Union includes nearly all of central Europe and most of eastern Europe today. This is almost 4.5M sq. km, so still several times larger than Texas.
Additionally, the EU has a population of just under 500M people - around 200M more than live in the United States. The EU is a much larger market than all of North America.
Sinclair always wanted to make budget machines, so the keyboards were always awful. However, the Spectrum+ and QL was really no worse than a modern laptop keyboard. I wrote enough Z80 asm on a Spectrum+ to know it wasn't all that bad. The rubber 48K Spectrum was fine for gaming, but I wouldn't want to type much on it (but people did!)
The Amstrad Spectrum keyboards were good. By the time Amstrad bought Sinclair, the costs of making a nice keyboard had fallen, and Amstrad's first move was to put a proper keyboard. I don't have an Amstrad Spectrum (but I do have a keyboard for one - keyboards for 8 bit machines are great for homebrew computers since they are simple switch matrices).
Practically, you'd probably want to phase it. Start with the motorways (tr. US: freeways). This is where there will be very great benefits in preventing traffic jams (being able to adapt your speed to an incident ahead to prevent the "standing wave" traffic jam), sequencing merging traffic etc. all the way to having "trains" of cars travelling at speed almost bumper to bumper (reducing drag).
At least in Britain, most motorcycle accidents are caused by a car, not by the motorcyclist.
Filtering is often a safe activity for a motorcycle to carry out (they are vastly more maueverable than a car), and what may be an unsafe speed in a car (generally, a speed at which you cannot stop in the road you can see to be clear) may not be so on a motorcycle. I don't have a motorcycle myself, but on a friend's Super Blackbird, while I found the acceleration to be pretty spectacular, it was nowhere near as spectacular as the braking. The deceleration was several times better than what my ABS-equipped car could ever hope to achieve on the same road surface; the stopping power was simply phenomenal.
As a regular cyclist, I've never felt even vaguely put in danger by a motorcyclist. Ever. Even during the Isle of Man TT (this is when 40,000 bikers show up where I live for a period of 2 weeks) However, I've been hit by two car drivers (one on a straight piece of road just ploughed into the back of my bicycle at 50 mph, and one who didn't look to see if the road ahead was clear and just pulled right out in front of me) and car drivers regularly overtake me dangerously (so fast and close their bow wave almost knocks me off).
That's a bit of a generalisation; in the city (which is where most people actually live) public transport is often faster than the car. Take London for example: Top Gear (a TV programme about cars for petrolheads by petrolheads) held a race: one presenter on a bicycle, one presenter in a speedboat, one on public transport and one in a car - to do the typical London rush-hour journey. The bicycle won by some considerable margin. The car arrived a significant amount of time *after* public transport. This is probably the case with any densely populated city with a good railway system.
Well, they don't - electric railway locomotives have had solid state controls for some time (and a 6000 hp loco is around 4.5 megawatts at full chat). I suspect semiconductors just haven't (yet) been built to run that sort of power at radio frequency... but they are on their way.
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It wasn't Microsoft hardware, it was someone else's hardware (i.e. design and manufacture) with a Microsoft badge on it.
France isn't Europe. France is part of Europe. Just like, say, Canada is part of North America, it isn't all of it.
Having lived in both countries, I far prefer the British system.
Each circuit is protected, in my house, I have a central breaker panel with a 13A RCD on each circuit (older panels would have fuses, but these days, RCDs are used, they are much better at preventing lethal electric shocks). Other circuits have different ratings, for instance, the lighting circuits have 10A breakers. Additionally, the main feed into the building has an 80 amp breaker if I remember correctly.
Those large pinned plugs, when plugged in, stay plugged in. They feel and are mechanically sound, they aren't easily knocked loose. US 2-pin plugs feel "wobbly", especially the variety often found on consumer goods and things like table lamps; the mechanical connection feels very inadequate. Wall warts are the worst - the mass of the wall wart hanging off that loose-feeling 2 pin plug makes them especially easy to knock out of the socket. Also, when plugging in an electric kettle to a US style socket you inevitably get a nice big flash as it plugs in, leading to oxidisation of the contacts and a greater probability of a bad connection. British sockets are typically switched, so you can plug high current appliances in, then switch on once plugged in avoiding the prolonged flashover as the contact slides into the socket.
Only on double insulated devices. All the laptops I've used are not double insulated and have a metal earth pin.
They probably are. Having lived in both countries, where most UK devices are almost always properly grounded (the earth pin is not optional in UK power plugs because you physically can't plug something in that doesn't have one - the earth pin opens the shutters in the wall socket), a great number of US appliances lack a ground pin.
Perhaps because 110 volts is seen to be less dangerous than 240v, it gets omitted.
Well, it's not that the intertubes uses no power, but the internet will be powered up and will use pretty much the same amount of power whether the files were downloaded or not. So the incremental energy use of distributing this material over the intertubes is likely a lot lower.
People will still be producing "lowly 64 bit" chips (that will probably still be the main architecture for desktop systems - and by the way, the VAX was 32 bit in 1979). 8 bit chips are incredibly common today, probably outselling 32 bit and 64 bit chips by 10 to 1. Embedded systems tend to be 8 bit. The Z80 is still manufactured (and there are new versions of the Z80 - still 8 bit - but you can buy a brand new, made in 2007 Zilog Z80 in a 40 pin DIP, which will plug straight into a Z80 based home computer from 1980). Microcontrollers like the Atmel AVR and Microchip PIC are 8 bit.
The vast majority of embedded systems don't care about the time, either.
On a point of pedantry, it's also a 31 bit overflow given that time_t is signed. (If it were a 32 bit overflow, we'd have a considerably longer period before having to worry about it).
With Microsoft's legendary secure coding practises, this will happen sooner, not later. My first thought on seeing this story was "This is gonna be good for some top class pranks..."
That's the thing I do too. The very day uPnP came out, I remarked what a dreadful idea it was, invented by the clueless who want everything luser friendly and damn any silly ideas about security.
I wonder which company thought up the appaling idea that is uPnP.
The Soviets mainly copied western computers in the Cold War. They copied mostly DEC stuff (pdp-11 and VAX - the DEC engineers even wrote something in Russian on the chip die for the vax CPU since they knew one of the first things that would happen is the Soviets would take the lid off one). They also made their own copies of 74-series TTL, and 8 bit CPUs such as the Z80. Russian homebrewers predominantly cloned the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the 1980s for a home computer, although the Russian homebrewers generally didn't simply copy, they usually made significant extensions to the Spectrum (the Sinclair ZX Spectrum has to be the 80s home computer with the most versions thanks to the Russian homebrewing scene).
CD rot _is_ a problem; they were right in the media, but as ever it was massively blown out of proportion. I have exactly one (well, two - it's a double album) CD that's suffering from this out of several bought about 1989-1990. The others of the same vintage are just fine. Fortunately, by the time the CD started to go bad, cdparanoia was available so I could rip it before it degraded too badly to be unplayable.
The other interesting thing: as a foreign visitor to the US, I won't have any of these IDs. So will foreign visitors now no longer be allowed to board internal flights?
The Smart Car has a Euro NCAP rating of 5 stars (the best rating) - better than most full size cars and miles better than many SUVs. Part of the testing includes hitting a solid, immovable object with just half of the front of the car (one of the worst case scenarios, since there's only half the energy absorbing crumple zone compared to hitting a barrier with the complete front).
If the Smart Car is a commercial failure, I'd love to fail like them. Fail all the way to the bank!
There are LOADS of Smart Cars around here. It's one of the more popular superminis. But then again, here is Rightpondia, where small cars traditionally sell very well anyway.
Could a team of 30 horses do the same? Or have people really gotten that fat where 30 horses couldn't pull them up a normal paved road?
If so, that'd be like talking about America and only meaning the western USA. I think most people think of the European Union when people talk of Europe (just like people think of the USA when saying America). The European Union includes nearly all of central Europe and most of eastern Europe today. This is almost 4.5M sq. km, so still several times larger than Texas.
Additionally, the EU has a population of just under 500M people - around 200M more than live in the United States. The EU is a much larger market than all of North America.
Sinclair always wanted to make budget machines, so the keyboards were always awful. However, the Spectrum+ and QL was really no worse than a modern laptop keyboard. I wrote enough Z80 asm on a Spectrum+ to know it wasn't all that bad. The rubber 48K Spectrum was fine for gaming, but I wouldn't want to type much on it (but people did!)
The Amstrad Spectrum keyboards were good. By the time Amstrad bought Sinclair, the costs of making a nice keyboard had fallen, and Amstrad's first move was to put a proper keyboard. I don't have an Amstrad Spectrum (but I do have a keyboard for one - keyboards for 8 bit machines are great for homebrew computers since they are simple switch matrices).
Well, not with your remaining eye, certainly!
I am a post office system administrator. Double power!
Practically, you'd probably want to phase it. Start with the motorways (tr. US: freeways). This is where there will be very great benefits in preventing traffic jams (being able to adapt your speed to an incident ahead to prevent the "standing wave" traffic jam), sequencing merging traffic etc. all the way to having "trains" of cars travelling at speed almost bumper to bumper (reducing drag).
That's because Chrysler is German, headquartered in Stuttgart.
At least in Britain, most motorcycle accidents are caused by a car, not by the motorcyclist.
Filtering is often a safe activity for a motorcycle to carry out (they are vastly more maueverable than a car), and what may be an unsafe speed in a car (generally, a speed at which you cannot stop in the road you can see to be clear) may not be so on a motorcycle. I don't have a motorcycle myself, but on a friend's Super Blackbird, while I found the acceleration to be pretty spectacular, it was nowhere near as spectacular as the braking. The deceleration was several times better than what my ABS-equipped car could ever hope to achieve on the same road surface; the stopping power was simply phenomenal.
As a regular cyclist, I've never felt even vaguely put in danger by a motorcyclist. Ever. Even during the Isle of Man TT (this is when 40,000 bikers show up where I live for a period of 2 weeks) However, I've been hit by two car drivers (one on a straight piece of road just ploughed into the back of my bicycle at 50 mph, and one who didn't look to see if the road ahead was clear and just pulled right out in front of me) and car drivers regularly overtake me dangerously (so fast and close their bow wave almost knocks me off).
That's a bit of a generalisation; in the city (which is where most people actually live) public transport is often faster than the car. Take London for example: Top Gear (a TV programme about cars for petrolheads by petrolheads) held a race: one presenter on a bicycle, one presenter in a speedboat, one on public transport and one in a car - to do the typical London rush-hour journey. The bicycle won by some considerable margin. The car arrived a significant amount of time *after* public transport. This is probably the case with any densely populated city with a good railway system.
Well, they don't - electric railway locomotives have had solid state controls for some time (and a 6000 hp loco is around 4.5 megawatts at full chat). I suspect semiconductors just haven't (yet) been built to run that sort of power at radio frequency... but they are on their way.