You forgot: the prez's mistress (ok, technically "wife", but the primary reason why they got married in the first place is for protocolar reasons. Most states are still too frigid to allow an official visit of a technically forgeign celibate head of state accompanied with his free and wild "very special best friend". With visits to the Vatican and the UK scheduled early in 2008, Sarkozy either had to marry Carla or had to abstain from sex for a couple days (each time).
It happens that Mrs Sarkozy, through her continuing work in the music industry as a composer-singer, has a significant personal interest in seeing this law implemented.
The law now has to go through Conseil d'Etat, which might shoot it down for violating the rule France once signed and ratified, which says that national parliaments shall refrain from voting on issues the EU parliament is currently voting on (since the EU law will probably cause the national law to change again anyway).
All in all, this is a waste of my tax €€€ (yes slashcode this is the euro symbol, thrice) in order to line up the pockets of mostly Mr. Bouygues, Bolloré, Fourtou and of course Carlita. At the expense of that famed but so seldom seen innovation we dearly need but our politicians so love to stifle. Sigh.
what encoding are you using? <p> (now trying again using UTF-8: é € ) <p> I really don't understand what's going on. Gotta check my settings, maybe I ticked a "butcher my non-ASCII posts" box.
...indeed, the Army was using these frequencies when the IEEE felt like putting wifi there. <p> Since Wifi started getting popular, the Autorit\'e de R\'egulation des T\'el\'ecommunications worked with the Army to get them out of the spectrum, and 13-channel WiFi is legal here indoors. Outdoors (cantennas etc., not just leakage signal in your yard) there are still areas where you can't use it unless you declare it (basically so that the Army can tell you to not do this until they've replaced their nearby equipment). Oh, and there's a transmit power limit, which is obviously the case in most any place. <p> Not sure for 802.11a, but I saw plenty of 802.11a devices on sale, so I'm assuming it's clear too. <p> slashcode really, really sucks for banning é, dammit.
*ANY* GSM will do that to poorly insulated speakers, especially if there happens to be a bit of cable with the magic wrong length just before the audio amplifier. f'r instance, I had to cut the cables of the speaker for a radio alarm clock I have in my bedroom (I use it only to project the time on the ceiling, I'm using a proper audio device for waking up purposes). The thing was detecting my cell phone 7 or 10 meters away (which pretty much means anywhere in the flat, plus the neighbour's phone at times).
Crappy old CRTs (or crappy obsolete VGA cables) will also give you some funky video too. El-cheapo car radios are also especially prone to this too.
Well, the two step approach here just sucks. We now have 15+ candidates in the first turns (not just the presidentials, mind you, in just everything. For the European Parliament (a mangled proportional-no-make-that-affine/single turn system in this state), there were no less than 28 lists competing for Paris voters! What we really need is a Condorcet voting system; a little longer to run, but at least people can both send a message to the elected (with a careful choice of "alternative" first choices) and send the serious candidates where they belong -- in the office.
As for the "LEV" sticker, I too have a green sticker, and I too would have to disagree with it, on soot grounds;-)
As for what I drive, that's currently a 2002 Toyota Avensis. Looks a bit Camry-ish. Previous one was a Citroen Saxo, best described as a four-wheeled bicycle (crappy 1.5D engine, had about the same econ as the avensis -- on half the power, a third of the torque). Next one, unplanned yet, but hybrid/hydrogen and steer-by-wire are definitely on the checklist.
When in the US (been there a couple times), I'm amazed to see that no matter what I drive, I have can't really do a complete Detroit-Grand Rapids shuttle without a fillup in the middle. I drove just about every rental junk available. Mulhouse-Paris round-trip on a fillup, no problem. Pfff...
No, I'm asking this question, because AFAIK there's a multi-million USD bounty on their heads today. Yet they're still hiding.
Until the spamming problem is causing buildings to collapse, this FTC bounty system is not going to do anything. And even supposing that the mountain of junk we receive causes computer to be so heavy they start to crack the concrete, it's not because there's a bounty that the capture and conviction becomes easy.
At least not until long-range individually targeted viruses are feasible and bounties are paid for DNA samples of spammers. And if that happens, methinks spam will not be our biggest concern.
yeah, ok, 2% difference, and you're absolutely right that 15% less != 85% of the original. Just went a little bit too fast:-)
Here, the most important difference in emissions between gasoline and diesel is in the level of CO2 emitted.
Toyota quotes, for their Avensis (http://www.toyota.fr/showroom/avensis/index.html) , 171g/km for the 130 VVT-i (gasoline) engine, 155g/km for the 115 D-4D (common-rail diesel), and
for the Prius (roughly the same size and weight), 105g/km.
So, for similar-sized engines (the VVT-i is a bit more powerful, but the D-4D has much more torque, and the hybrid will be in between if the battery's full and the ECU feels like it today), gasoline emits 10% more CO2, and those first-generation hybrids emit 32% less.
Now, when those 155g/km come out of biodiesel, this is actually a non-issue (setting aside for a while the energy required to convert the damn plant seeds into fuel).
The other big difference is in the particles. Unfiltered diesels (like every diesel including in Europe before 2002) do exhaust small soot particles. Peugeot started with their 607 FAP a couple of years ago to include a filter-burner gizmo that totally takes care of the problem. This kind of devices is now reaching the mass-market, all the way down to the 206, Clio or Polo types.
The next set of fuel regulations, Euro IV, due for 2006, will make them mandatory in practice. I'd call that a solved problem.
'fcourse, if I was about to buy a new car today, I'd look at the Prius very, very closely. Things like the A86 are begging for hybrids. On the other hand, I plan on bringing my Avensis through geriatric ages, and then go hydrogen or plutonium or whatever they came up with then.
Got a 2002 Toyota Avensis, with the 110 D-4D engine (TDI-ish, likely a partially licensed design from Bosch and/or PSA). Same stuff here with respect to economy (except that the fuel sold here is a tad cleaner).
To the guy who (rightfully) mentioned that diesel is about 15% more energetic, sure; however,.85 * 50 is still 43, and that is still not bad for a sedan.
(actual average, 5.7L/100km over the 20000km I've owned the thing. Doesn't break much beyond 6L/100 when driving at the legal 130km/h. Claimed to drink over 18L/100 last time I "tested" it in Germany;-) )
Now I can't wait for a water-boosted split-cycle hybrid train running on colza oil...
It's an embedded Linux box with miniPCI ports, a processor and a distro on it. What you can do with a (slightly vintage) PC and a bunch of PCI WLAN cards, you can do with a Meshcube and a bunch of miniPCI WLAN cards, provided that you can shoe-horn your software into the provided 32-64MB of solid-state storage, or are content with an external USB-attached hard drive. I guess the correct answer then is "router", "AP" or "bridge" depending on what actual software you put on it.
It seems to have much, much much more room than a WRT54G/GS, but it sure is quite pricier (the Linksys units are around EUR 90 and 110 incl. VAT respectively, though the GS is only now supposed to come out of pre-order).
From the energy point of view, 4W for all they say the MeshCube does certainly looks very nice.
... which is hardly unpossible, given that Nordic tribes regularly pillaged what is now the Northern half of France, during the IXth and Xth centuries (until Charles the Simple granted Rollon's tribe permission to settle in present-day Normandy (the tribe was called the Normands before they settled there). Or rather, that Rollon's military successes didn't leave Charles the Simple much choice. Either way, it's the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, 911AD; the Normands ("Northern Men") came from present-day Denmark and further North).
The fact that Occitan has setanta, uechanta, nonanta for 70,80,90, and that the Normand invasions didn't spread much into present-day Belgium would corroborate this fact. [quatre-vint=80 is sometimes found, but it might as well be Oil influence]
Of course, hundreds of scholars wrote mountains of obscure books on the subject, with much more detailed and persuasive arguments than those in this thread, but this looks to me to be in the right ballpark:-)
it's also more like 120V in North America these days. Yay2 for engineers!
(and especially Yay^3 for the engineers who came up with cheap inexpensive "universal" "100-250V 50-60Hz just worry about the mechanical interface" wall warts)
for cooking, try measuring fluid ounces with an electronic scale.
Now do the same with a metric electronic scale....
(Obdisclaimer: this is, provided you're not trying to measure the "volume" of liguid plutonium! I'm talking volumes of water and milk at a standard kitchen precision).
Somehow, I have the impression that construction workers and designers over here don't suffer too much from not being able to divide "easily" by 3 or 6. There must be a trick somewhere!
oh, puh-lease. Not again the "12 is better" argument AGAIN. YOU have been trained to divide by 6. I've been trained to recognise instantly that.125 = 1/8 (actually, I parse.375 much faster than 3/8, and it's definitely faster to see that.375 is less than.83, while comparing 3/8 and 5/6 is a certain mental effort)
Surveyors around here are frequently using the grade to measure angles. 400gr = 360° (360deg if slashcode eats the proper symbol). They're about the only ones with this strange custom. Still brain dead, it should be radians all over the place anyway. The time and nondecimal geographic coordinates measurements are simply a PITA to handle, if you really think about it.
When I drive in the US, I took a couple of habits. If there's a warning sign in feet (ANY number of feet), put the foot on the brake pedal NOW and be ready to stop. If the exit is posted in miles, OK drive the speed you would, but if it's posted in ANY fraction of mile, don't think, pull right. When driving home, I would not hesitate to pass even if my exit is posted 600m away, as.6 is parsed by the brain faster than 6/10. [*] (OK, pretty dumbass to pass for 600m, but on the A86 it's fair game)
My point is: the earlier you've been trained with a specific system, the more trouble you have adapting to other systems (especially when, like in my case, you have a strong prejudice that the foreign system is outdated and antiquated [yes I'm French, hence arrogant, thank you very much]), and the more likely you're going to find phony excuses that the system you've been breastfed with is the most natural and self-evident.
[*] yes, this was another culturally-biased overgeneralisation. So is "12-based systems are more natural because 2,3,6 are God-given Natural Super-Efficient Divisors" or some similar bs.
The official SI unit of mass is the kilogram, not the gram. Yes, the original 1791-vintage metric system was meant to use the gram as a base unit, that's a bug.
actually not (but given the Goldorak reference on your web page, you must know this, right?;-) ) We have integrated contractions for onze through seize, which actually derive from N+ten in latin (10=Decem==>Dix, Undecim==>"undz'"==>onze, Duodecim==>"duodz'"==>"dudz'"==>douze, Tredecim, Quattuordecim, Quindecim, Sexdecim which had already collapsed into Sedecim=16 by Caesar's time).
17 through 19 are using a different but equivalent latin form which did not get much contracted (dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf), contrary to the original latin (17=Septemdecim, Duodeviginti[20-2]/Otodecim, Undeviginti[20-1]/Novemdecim=19) but it's really the same thing as the previous forms. I don't really know why we aren't using derivatives from Duodeviginti and why the special case for 17, but comparing with Occitan forms dètz=10, onze, dotze, tretze , quatòrze, quinze, sètze, dètz-e-sèt, dètz-e-uèch, dètz-e-nòu=19 -- this suggests a swithover well before Charlemagne's time. Actually, it goes as far South as in Italian, Castillan and Portugese, so it clearly happened before the Wisigoth and Sarrazin invasions, I'd risk during the late Roman Empire. (Or it has been imported from some Italian fad when Renaissance spread from there, especially during the earlier XVth century) [damn slashcode, again it ate my diacritics. Fed up of wrestling with its super-broken encoding behaviour. scoop & spip rule!]
What we do inherit from the Gauls and the Franks (in French French, not Swiss and Belgian) is the odd Twenty-based counting (soixante et onze = 71 = 60+11, soixante dix-sept=77, and it becomes weirder: quatre-vingt-quatre = 84 = "4 times 20 plus 4", quatre-vingt-quatorze = 94 = "4 times 20 plus 14")..ch and.be are using more regular forms such as "septante un" (71), "huitante quatre" (84) or "nonante cinq" (95).
84 was actually written <latex>IV^{XX}.IV</latex> in some famous XIth century manuscripts (as opposed to the classic Roman form LXXXIV)
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot: the prez's mistress (ok, technically "wife", but the primary reason why they got married in the first place is for protocolar reasons. Most states are still too frigid to allow an official visit of a technically forgeign celibate head of state accompanied with his free and wild "very special best friend". With visits to the Vatican and the UK scheduled early in 2008, Sarkozy either had to marry Carla or had to abstain from sex for a couple days (each time).
It happens that Mrs Sarkozy, through her continuing work in the music industry as a composer-singer, has a significant personal interest in seeing this law implemented.
The law now has to go through Conseil d'Etat, which might shoot it down for violating the rule France once signed and ratified, which says that national parliaments shall refrain from voting on issues the EU parliament is currently voting on (since the EU law will probably cause the national law to change again anyway).
All in all, this is a waste of my tax €€€ (yes slashcode this is the euro symbol, thrice) in order to line up the pockets of mostly Mr. Bouygues, Bolloré, Fourtou and of course Carlita. At the expense of that famed but so seldom seen innovation we dearly need but our politicians so love to stifle. Sigh.
what encoding are you using?
<p>
(now trying again using UTF-8: é € )
<p>
I really don't understand what's going on. Gotta check my settings, maybe I ticked a "butcher my non-ASCII posts" box.
Super weird. If I type a \'e, I get: this é; if I type é, well you see what I get.
<p>
Anyway, slashcode sucks for banning € (and the GBP sign)
...indeed, the Army was using these frequencies when the IEEE felt like putting wifi there.
<p>
Since Wifi started getting popular, the Autorit\'e de R\'egulation des T\'el\'ecommunications worked with the Army to get them out of the spectrum, and 13-channel WiFi is legal here indoors. Outdoors (cantennas etc., not just leakage signal in your yard) there are still areas where you can't use it unless you declare it (basically so that the Army can tell you to not do this until they've replaced their nearby equipment). Oh, and there's a transmit power limit, which is obviously the case in most any place.
<p>
Not sure for 802.11a, but I saw plenty of 802.11a devices on sale, so I'm assuming it's clear too.
<p>
slashcode really, really sucks for banning é, dammit.
Yep. Compare the price of a Roomba in the US, and the price of a Roomba in Germany or Switzerland.
fuck Cingular, then. I have zero coverage problems with Orange or Vodafone. And Bouygues' extended coverage GSM+ is reported to rule.
Oh, wait.
*ANY* GSM will do that to poorly insulated speakers, especially if there happens to be a bit of cable with the magic wrong length just before the audio amplifier. f'r instance, I had to cut the cables of the speaker for a radio alarm clock I have in my bedroom (I use it only to project the time on the ceiling, I'm using a proper audio device for waking up purposes). The thing was detecting my cell phone 7 or 10 meters away (which pretty much means anywhere in the flat, plus the neighbour's phone at times).
Crappy old CRTs (or crappy obsolete VGA cables) will also give you some funky video too. El-cheapo car radios are also especially prone to this too.
EVERYBODY's doing it. iRobot. Apple. Dell. Younameit.
We need a Structural Funds-subsided pricewatch.eu.int.
Well, the two step approach here just sucks. We now have 15+ candidates in the first turns (not just the presidentials, mind you, in just everything. For the European Parliament (a mangled proportional-no-make-that-affine/single turn system in this state), there were no less than 28 lists competing for Paris voters!
What we really need is a Condorcet voting system; a little longer to run, but at least people can both send a message to the elected (with a careful choice of "alternative" first choices) and send the serious candidates where they belong -- in the office.
n/t
OK, that's city, isn't it?
;-)
As for the "LEV" sticker, I too have a green sticker, and I too would have to disagree with it, on soot grounds
As for what I drive, that's currently a 2002 Toyota Avensis. Looks a bit Camry-ish. Previous one was a Citroen Saxo, best described as a four-wheeled bicycle (crappy 1.5D engine, had about the same econ as the avensis -- on half the power, a third of the torque). Next one, unplanned yet, but hybrid/hydrogen and steer-by-wire are definitely on the checklist.
When in the US (been there a couple times), I'm amazed to see that no matter what I drive, I have can't really do a complete Detroit-Grand Rapids shuttle without a fillup in the middle. I drove just about every rental junk available. Mulhouse-Paris round-trip on a fillup, no problem.
Pfff...
No, I'm asking this question, because AFAIK there's a multi-million USD bounty on their heads today. Yet they're still hiding.
Until the spamming problem is causing buildings to collapse, this FTC bounty system is not going to do anything. And even supposing that the mountain of junk we receive causes computer to be so heavy they start to crack the concrete, it's not because there's a bounty that the capture and conviction becomes easy.
At least not until long-range individually targeted viruses are feasible and bounties are paid for DNA samples of spammers. And if that happens, methinks spam will not be our biggest concern.
Here, the most important difference in emissions between gasoline and diesel is in the level of CO2 emitted.
Toyota quotes, for their Avensis (http://www.toyota.fr/showroom/avensis/index.html) , 171g/km for the 130 VVT-i (gasoline) engine, 155g/km for the 115 D-4D (common-rail diesel), and
for the Prius (roughly the same size and weight), 105g/km.
So, for similar-sized engines (the VVT-i is a bit more powerful, but the D-4D has much more torque, and the hybrid will be in between if the battery's full and the ECU feels like it today), gasoline emits 10% more CO2, and those first-generation hybrids emit 32% less.
Now, when those 155g/km come out of biodiesel, this is actually a non-issue (setting aside for a while the energy required to convert the damn plant seeds into fuel).
The other big difference is in the particles. Unfiltered diesels (like every diesel including in Europe before 2002) do exhaust small soot particles. Peugeot started with their 607 FAP a couple of years ago to include a filter-burner gizmo that totally takes care of the problem. This kind of devices is now reaching the mass-market, all the way down to the 206, Clio or Polo types.
The next set of fuel regulations, Euro IV, due for 2006, will make them mandatory in practice. I'd call that a solved problem.
'fcourse, if I was about to buy a new car today, I'd look at the Prius very, very closely. Things like the A86 are begging for hybrids. On the other hand, I plan on bringing my Avensis through geriatric ages, and then go hydrogen or plutonium or whatever they came up with then.
542km and you ran out? 360km average between fillups? Ouch. That must really hurt.
1200km on a single (50L + 10L reserve) tank isn't that much of a feat nowadays, is it?
Got a 2002 Toyota Avensis, with the 110 D-4D engine (TDI-ish, likely a partially licensed design from Bosch and/or PSA).
.85 * 50 is still 43, and that is still not bad for a sedan.
;-) )
Same stuff here with respect to economy (except that the fuel sold here is a tad cleaner).
To the guy who (rightfully) mentioned that diesel is about 15% more energetic, sure; however,
(actual average, 5.7L/100km over the 20000km I've owned the thing. Doesn't break much beyond 6L/100 when driving at the legal 130km/h. Claimed to drink over 18L/100 last time I "tested" it in Germany
Now I can't wait for a water-boosted split-cycle hybrid train running on colza oil...
It's an embedded Linux box with miniPCI ports, a processor and a distro on it. What you can do with a (slightly vintage) PC and a bunch of PCI WLAN cards, you can do with a Meshcube and a bunch of miniPCI WLAN cards, provided that you can shoe-horn your software into the provided 32-64MB of solid-state storage, or are content with an external USB-attached hard drive. I guess the correct answer then is "router", "AP" or "bridge" depending on what actual software you put on it.
It seems to have much, much much more room than a WRT54G/GS, but it sure is quite pricier (the Linksys units are around EUR 90 and 110 incl. VAT respectively, though the GS is only now supposed to come out of pre-order).
From the energy point of view, 4W for all they say the MeshCube does certainly looks very nice.
The fact that Occitan has setanta, uechanta, nonanta for 70,80,90, and that the Normand invasions didn't spread much into present-day Belgium would corroborate this fact. [quatre-vint=80 is sometimes found, but it might as well be Oil influence]
Of course, hundreds of scholars wrote mountains of obscure books on the subject, with much more detailed and persuasive arguments than those in this thread, but this looks to me to be in the right ballpark :-)
it's also more like 120V in North America these days. Yay2 for engineers!
(and especially Yay^3 for the engineers who came up with cheap inexpensive "universal" "100-250V 50-60Hz just worry about the mechanical interface" wall warts)
for cooking, try measuring fluid ounces with an electronic scale.
Now do the same with a metric electronic scale....
(Obdisclaimer: this is, provided you're not trying to measure the "volume" of liguid plutonium! I'm talking volumes of water and milk at a standard kitchen precision).
Somehow, I have the impression that construction workers and designers over here don't suffer too much from not being able to divide "easily" by 3 or 6. There must be a trick somewhere!
oh, puh-lease. Not again the "12 is better" argument AGAIN. .125 = 1/8 (actually, I parse .375 much faster than 3/8, and it's definitely faster to see that .375 is less than .83, while comparing 3/8 and 5/6 is a certain mental effort)
.6 is parsed by the brain faster than 6/10. [*] (OK, pretty dumbass to pass for 600m, but on the A86 it's fair game)
YOU have been trained to divide by 6. I've been trained to recognise instantly that
Surveyors around here are frequently using the grade to measure angles. 400gr = 360° (360deg if slashcode eats the proper symbol). They're about the only ones with this strange custom. Still brain dead, it should be radians all over the place anyway. The time and nondecimal geographic coordinates measurements are simply a PITA to handle, if you really think about it.
When I drive in the US, I took a couple of habits.
If there's a warning sign in feet (ANY number of feet), put the foot on the brake pedal NOW and be ready to stop. If the exit is posted in miles, OK drive the speed you would, but if it's posted in ANY fraction of mile, don't think, pull right.
When driving home, I would not hesitate to pass even if my exit is posted 600m away, as
My point is: the earlier you've been trained with a specific system, the more trouble you have adapting to other systems (especially when, like in my case, you have a strong prejudice that the foreign system is outdated and antiquated [yes I'm French, hence arrogant, thank you very much]), and the more likely you're going to find phony excuses that the system you've been breastfed with is the most natural and self-evident.
[*] yes, this was another culturally-biased overgeneralisation. So is "12-based systems are more natural because 2,3,6 are God-given Natural Super-Efficient Divisors" or some similar bs.
The official SI unit of mass is the kilogram, not the gram. Yes, the original 1791-vintage metric system was meant to use the gram as a base unit, that's a bug.
17 through 19 are using a different but equivalent latin form which did not get much contracted (dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf), contrary to the original latin (17=Septemdecim, Duodeviginti[20-2]/Otodecim, Undeviginti[20-1]/Novemdecim=19) but it's really the same thing as the previous forms. I don't really know why we aren't using derivatives from Duodeviginti and why the special case for 17, but comparing with Occitan forms dètz=10, onze, dotze, tretze , quatòrze, quinze, sètze, dètz-e-sèt, dètz-e-uèch, dètz-e-nòu=19 -- this suggests a swithover well before Charlemagne's time. Actually, it goes as far South as in Italian, Castillan and Portugese, so it clearly happened before the Wisigoth and Sarrazin invasions, I'd risk during the late Roman Empire. (Or it has been imported from some Italian fad when Renaissance spread from there, especially during the earlier XVth century) [damn slashcode, again it ate my diacritics. Fed up of wrestling with its super-broken encoding behaviour. scoop & spip rule!]
What we do inherit from the Gauls and the Franks (in French French, not Swiss and Belgian) is the odd Twenty-based counting (soixante et onze = 71 = 60+11, soixante dix-sept=77, and it becomes weirder: quatre-vingt-quatre = 84 = "4 times 20 plus 4", quatre-vingt-quatorze = 94 = "4 times 20 plus 14"). .ch and .be are using more regular forms such as "septante un" (71), "huitante quatre" (84) or "nonante cinq" (95).
84 was actually written <latex>IV^{XX}.IV</latex> in some famous XIth century manuscripts (as opposed to the classic Roman form LXXXIV)
d'oh! you're right, of course. ELKS it is.
8080: amen!
8086: uCLinux
sure they did, here you go, just before the closing </title> tag: http://www.rolandgarros.com/