The problem of ordering over mail or the Internet is that the seller is also required to declare the value, and when the carrier brings the parcel to the customs, Wham! you get VATed again. Even if you can have a postal address in Luxembourg, that's 15% (plus repostage).
Now, one travelling to the US can get creative by doing cross-state mail-order then bring the stuff back in the luggage...
(if you can convince a mail-order seller to sell to you even though you're willing to pay using your perfectly valid *International* VISA card, that is. It used to work great but now people are such dickheads...)
1) the European Patent system just changed. Hello! there is a recent patent directive ("directive" is a polite term for "Federal law", except that you don't want to use the F-word in Brussels politics. In fact, the European Constitution to be adopted soon will remove the word "directive" and replace it by "European Law" -- I digress) which does exactly that. It's now at the transposition stage (directives don't get signed into law. The states are required to transpose them into state law; but if they don't in a timely manner, they get fined heavily (Brussels just doesn't pretend it's highway money)).
2) Linus Torvalds is from a Swedish-speaking minority of *Finland*
3) Linus Torvalds lives in California (which last I checked was still one of the United States of America).
4) s/Europeans/Indians/ or Brazilians or Chinese or whoever. Though US pressures on IT-rich third-world countries to abide by "certain IP standards" are quite heavy once that country's industry starts appearing on the radar. And it's bloody effective.
You get someone litterate you trust give you a bit of paper with the name of your favourite candidate printed on it, with a font likely to resemble the fonts used in the ballot (think Times, Courier and Helvetica samples).
Then, compare your scrap of paper with what's printed on the ballot -- late pre-school kids usually can compare two bits of printed text, and tell whether they're different or similar.
I certainly underestimate the challenges that "our " (broadly defined as "Western" if such a thing still exists) society poses to illiterates, but don't assume that because they can't read they are totally stupid and can't see and compare.
multiplexed buses
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Peugeot 307. They didn't go full-multiplex, but a sizeable portion of the electric doodads is basically doing things the USB way: a pair of power supply rails, and a data bus through the whole car. Cheap terminal gizmos in front of each device to demultiplex. VoilÃ, less wiring.
Punto is shit, that's why
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
The Fiat Punto is a shitty car. That's why Fiat's market share is collapsing.
The CitroÃn C3 now includes an electric power steering, and for a car of that class (that is, smallcheapcheapdammit), it rocks.
That said, every car manufacturer in the markets that can spend real money on cars, every, is wanting to do the jump.
And I can't wait for full steer-by-wire to enter the market. Simply removing the column will save a lot of lifes.
I just wanted to emphasize that saying 'US saved Europe from Nazis' is a gross overstatement. </EM>
True. However, saying that USSR alone 'saved Europe from Nazis' is a gross overstatement too.
The history of WWI and WWII on the European theatre is full of actions which wouldn't have resulted in Allied success (or semi-success, in the case of WWI) if there wasn't a big action on the other side which forced the Germans to split their resources.
Yup, I overlooked this one. But on the biometric stuff, the EU and member state have not yet decided, but the PNAC boys already did it for us. Machine readable PLUS biometrics (I may have the year wrong, it's possibly 2005).
As for pure EU citizenship, amen brother! Pay your taxes once in any given place, earn a voice to decide on what these taxes are for. I'm afraid we're still in for another round of Moses In the Desert, sadly.
Don't forget the US shipments of equipment and supplies (especially dried eggs, nicknamed "Roosvelt's eggs") towards the Eastern Front.
It's quite possible that the US will avoid spilling the blood of their own soldiers even at the cost of ten houses and their civilian formerly living contents, but that's their way of doing business. I visited several WWI and WWII western battlefields with significant American action (and also lots WWI with no American action -- who the hell decided to continue the botched action at Craonne!!), and it's clear that those who were there -- living or dead, friend or foe -- deserve too a lot of respect.
Except that animals become trainkill, and trucks become a train-truck accident. This is why also there is not railroad crossings on high-speed trains (I didn't bother to check Acela Express, this one is a botched implementation, I'm talking real, well-implemented high-speed trains). Finally, the track itself is seldom laid to go into a wall, and you'd be amazed as how many inspection teams a high-duty track sees in a given period of time.
Self-driving cars will happen with better real-time video recognition, and might happen first on delimited areas (motorways). This would already be quite neat in fact.
I am not German, I am European. If the EU issued passports and direct citizenship, I'd be the first in line.
Bartmoss, my fellow citizen; I am French, in the same sense I am Parisian (as in: born there, raised there, not necessarily living there). And yes, I would just love that the passports which will be issued next year will be EU, not member-nations passports (yep, the USA is forcing us to change our passports by the end of 2004, so we can have embedded biometrics in them. It would be fitting in my mind that these passports removed another remnant from our continent's past diseases).
No, you know what someone thought the altitude was.
Fair enough. However, if the NOAA-gathered terrain databases are good enough to guide low-alt cruise missiles, they might be good enough to be used in aircraft too.
<BLOCKQUOTE>Assuming the ping is low power and fairly directional, and that the plane is at low altitude (else it would probably be using the barometric altimeter) that means the enemy would be able to detect you with the MkI eyeball or a head mounted compression wave detection array.</BLOCKQUOTE>
It's one thing to detect, it's another altogether to aim at. It's a no-brainer to have terrain avoidance radar-seeking AA guns; manually aiming an AA gun at a fast moving aircraft, no matter how noisy, is a much different thing.
Besides, the more directional you make your radar beam, the less chance it has of actually hitting the ground (you don't necessarily know what your orientation is when you're trying to figure out where the ground is).
Was not exactly on the North American continent (last I checked, Vietnam is still in Asia). And it killed, on the US side, about one or two years worth of road fatalities.
Last I checked, WWI & WWI killed much more French or British than a decade of either country's road fatalities (which Falklands, Algeria or Indochina did not -- though Algeria was close).
As for the biochem WMD, I hear a certain Donald R. was sent on by a certain Ronald R., during the eighties, with that purpose. Nobody's clean.
Wrong. The US didn't tell France and Britain to back out. The Soviets said back out or else we nuke you out. The US then said to France and Britain: whatever happens guys, you're on your own. The Suez crisis is actually what triggered the French nuclear programme.
Then on the Treaty of Versailles. One of the problems was that Wilson actually/prevented/ France from having a consistently unfair but solid treaty. The result was a terribly unfair but fragile treaty; add to that 1930's era politician incompetence, a good dose of Communist agitation, a former British King who toured the Western Front then sent letters to his friend Adolf H. somewhere east of where himself was, and of course strategic military incompetence from French generals. (1940 French Army was the absolute best in the world, for trench warfare. Ooops.)
For Indochina, who said to the US that the problem was not a colonial problem, but a problem with Communists? Uh, I guess the US had a good grasp on the problem afterwards.
GPS gives you lat+long+(not too good altitude) you can get the altitude from another source.
Compare with a terrain map --> you know the ground's altitude relative to sea level
Subtract --> you know your altitude relative to the ground, which is what you really want.
The alternative method is to send a radar ping to the ground; this should give you a very accurate reading, provided you send the beam in the right direction, and provided you don't mind the signal being picked up by ground stations (the problem in mil-craft being that said ground stations might belong to your opponent).
Nope, at least in my locale, it is tolerated to broadcast within a couple metres (basically, as long as it doesn't go beyond your walls). I'd love such a single-metre-range device for my car. In fact, I had built one out of a kit sold at Radio Shack, like, in 1988 ?
driver information by huge screens on the road, telling how long to this and this direction
Preach on, brother!
(with just one tiny quibble with this time thingy: it's a wonderful excuse for grabbing the cell phone and telling how long you'll be late. Of course this is illegal -- but who cares?;-) )
For IDF, better use directly Sytadin (whose information they resell), Sytadin is slightly more complete (and you don't need to download adverts, you already paid for the service).
For the other regions... Huh. Don't you get better service from 107.7 FM ?
OK, so I was wrong; everybody but the Denver area already had got it for years (maybe Mogadishu, Somalia is not yet equipped; excuse me while I rush to check).
By the way, again the Paris link, I'm rusty on extrans rules and too lame to hit Preview: Sytadin (Paris/IDF system)
Wow -- I noticed the Variable Message Displays were pretty good, accurate and a numerous in the Netherlands, but in addition these pictures are gorgeous!
Heh, at least this article will help someone to build a site listing all these kind of traffic sites (OK I'm too lazy to google for the already existing such site).
Easy: on each lane, you put two magnetic loop sensors 50 cm apart from each other. You get count, and speed for each vehicle per lane at the point of passage. Sure, you don't get the speed of each individual vehicle like across the channel in the UPK, but I guess we'll buy their stuff anytime soon
(the Basel city automated radar fine system is pretty good and could make a hot import soon too).
People in Denver are probably like the old cartoon dinosaur: pretty outdated.
Like a million other fellow Europeans, I'll point out my favourite service, opened for over half a decade now: http://www.sytadin.tm.fr/. This stuff is also linked to the information the FM stations relay, and more importantly to the variable message displays (one every 500m, on the Périphérique, the inner ring you see out there). There are displays to this map at every major subterranean parking place in business centres (La Défense etc.). Years ago, one company was broadcasting it into a display embedded into the (passenger's, duh!) sun shield.
(in fact, I had this very GIF in my slashbox in... say...1999? Hemos, you can really wear cowboyneal's donkey helm today).
What's important is that today, this stuff is refined to the point they're able to accurately tell you how accurate they are. And they are.
And of course, today, you can access this on i-Mode phones (those from Bouygues), and you can bet the UMTS offers will trumpet it like it's legal marijuana... uh, when they are ready to roll, that is.
(by the way, the Detroit (Michigan) VMD system pretty sucks; from my limited experience with it, times are accurate at an order of magnitude, no better (ie, if it says 5 minutes, you're going to be anywhere in the 2-30 minutes range or almost... if you can dodge the potholes, that is). I hope for the Denver folks that the outdated system announced by Hemos works better -- poor tax dollars otherwise).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem of ordering over mail or the Internet is that the seller is also required to declare the value, and when the carrier brings the parcel to the customs, Wham! you get VATed again. Even if you can have a postal address in Luxembourg, that's 15% (plus repostage).
Now, one travelling to the US can get creative by doing cross-state mail-order then bring the stuff back in the luggage...
(if you can convince a mail-order seller to sell to you even though you're willing to pay using your perfectly valid *International* VISA card, that is. It used to work great but now people are such dickheads...)
1) the European Patent system just changed. Hello! there is a recent patent directive ("directive" is a polite term for "Federal law", except that you don't want to use the F-word in Brussels politics. In fact, the European Constitution to be adopted soon will remove the word "directive" and replace it by "European Law" -- I digress) which does exactly that. It's now at the transposition stage (directives don't get signed into law. The states are required to transpose them into state law; but if they don't in a timely manner, they get fined heavily (Brussels just doesn't pretend it's highway money)).
2) Linus Torvalds is from a Swedish-speaking minority of *Finland*
3) Linus Torvalds lives in California (which last I checked was still one of the United States of America).
4) s/Europeans/Indians/ or Brazilians or Chinese or whoever. Though US pressures on IT-rich third-world countries to abide by "certain IP standards" are quite heavy once that country's industry starts appearing on the radar. And it's bloody effective.
Actually, Cyprus better follow EU suit, or inaugurate its first non-transposition penalties
(not that N.T.P never happen to any member state)
Won't work, unless you have a non-PO box address in the US (or can prove citizenship, yadda yadda)
You get someone litterate you trust give you a bit of paper with the name of your favourite candidate printed on it, with a font likely to resemble the fonts used in the ballot (think Times, Courier and Helvetica samples).
Then, compare your scrap of paper with what's printed on the ballot -- late pre-school kids usually can compare two bits of printed text, and tell whether they're different or similar.
I certainly underestimate the challenges that "our " (broadly defined as "Western" if such a thing still exists) society poses to illiterates, but don't assume that because they can't read they are totally stupid and can't see and compare.
Peugeot 307. They didn't go full-multiplex, but a sizeable portion of the electric doodads is basically doing things the USB way: a pair of power supply rails, and a data bus through the whole car. Cheap terminal gizmos in front of each device to demultiplex. VoilÃ, less wiring.
The Fiat Punto is a shitty car. That's why Fiat's market share is collapsing.
The CitroÃn C3 now includes an electric power steering, and for a car of that class (that is, smallcheapcheapdammit), it rocks.
That said, every car manufacturer in the markets that can spend real money on cars, every, is wanting to do the jump.
And I can't wait for full steer-by-wire to enter the market. Simply removing the column will save a lot of lifes.
You mean, 15% ?
(according to http://www.mic.org.mt/EUINFO/qeua/Q&A66.htm )
Not that Luxembourg completely lacks experience in shell companies...
n/t
I just wanted to emphasize that saying 'US saved Europe from Nazis' is a gross overstatement.
</EM>
True. However, saying that USSR alone 'saved Europe from Nazis' is a gross overstatement too.
The history of WWI and WWII on the European theatre is full of actions which wouldn't have resulted in Allied success (or semi-success, in the case of WWI) if there wasn't a big action on the other side which forced the Germans to split their resources.
Yup, I overlooked this one. But on the biometric stuff, the EU and member state have not yet decided, but the PNAC boys already did it for us. Machine readable PLUS biometrics (I may have the year wrong, it's possibly 2005).
As for pure EU citizenship, amen brother! Pay your taxes once in any given place, earn a voice to decide on what these taxes are for. I'm afraid we're still in for another round of Moses In the Desert, sadly.
Don't forget the US shipments of equipment and supplies (especially dried eggs, nicknamed "Roosvelt's eggs") towards the Eastern Front.
It's quite possible that the US will avoid spilling the blood of their own soldiers even at the cost of ten houses and their civilian formerly living contents, but that's their way of doing business. I visited several WWI and WWII western battlefields with significant American action (and also lots WWI with no American action -- who the hell decided to continue the botched action at Craonne!!), and it's clear that those who were there -- living or dead, friend or foe -- deserve too a lot of respect.
Except that animals become trainkill, and trucks become a train-truck accident. This is why also there is not railroad crossings on high-speed trains (I didn't bother to check Acela Express, this one is a botched implementation, I'm talking real, well-implemented high-speed trains). Finally, the track itself is seldom laid to go into a wall, and you'd be amazed as how many inspection teams a high-duty track sees in a given period of time.
Self-driving cars will happen with better real-time video recognition, and might happen first on delimited areas (motorways). This would already be quite neat in fact.
Bartmoss, my fellow citizen; I am French, in the same sense I am Parisian (as in: born there, raised there, not necessarily living there). And yes, I would just love that the passports which will be issued next year will be EU, not member-nations passports (yep, the USA is forcing us to change our passports by the end of 2004, so we can have embedded biometrics in them. It would be fitting in my mind that these passports removed another remnant from our continent's past diseases).
Fair enough. However, if the NOAA-gathered terrain databases are good enough to guide low-alt cruise missiles, they might be good enough to be used in aircraft too.
<BLOCKQUOTE>Assuming the ping is low power and fairly directional, and that the plane is at low altitude (else it would probably be using the barometric altimeter) that means the enemy would be able to detect you with the MkI eyeball or a head mounted compression wave detection array.</BLOCKQUOTE>
It's one thing to detect, it's another altogether to aim at. It's a no-brainer to have terrain avoidance radar-seeking AA guns; manually aiming an AA gun at a fast moving aircraft, no matter how noisy, is a much different thing.
Besides, the more directional you make your radar beam, the less chance it has of actually hitting the ground (you don't necessarily know what your orientation is when you're trying to figure out where the ground is).
Was not exactly on the North American continent (last I checked, Vietnam is still in Asia). And it killed, on the US side, about one or two years worth of road fatalities.
Last I checked, WWI & WWI killed much more French or British than a decade of either country's road fatalities (which Falklands, Algeria or Indochina did not -- though Algeria was close).
As for the biochem WMD, I hear a certain Donald R. was sent on by a certain Ronald R., during the eighties, with that purpose. Nobody's clean.
Wrong. The US didn't tell France and Britain to back out. The Soviets said back out or else we nuke you out. The US then said to France and Britain: whatever happens guys, you're on your own. The Suez crisis is actually what triggered the French nuclear programme.
/prevented/ France from having a consistently unfair but solid treaty. The result was a terribly unfair but fragile treaty; add to that 1930's era politician incompetence, a good dose of Communist agitation, a former British King who toured the Western Front then sent letters to his friend Adolf H. somewhere east of where himself was, and of course strategic military incompetence from French generals.
Then on the Treaty of Versailles. One of the problems was that Wilson actually
(1940 French Army was the absolute best in the world, for trench warfare. Ooops.)
For Indochina, who said to the US that the problem was not a colonial problem, but a problem with Communists? Uh, I guess the US had a good grasp on the problem afterwards.
GPS gives you lat+long+(not too good altitude)
you can get the altitude from another source.
Compare with a terrain map --> you know the ground's altitude relative to sea level
Subtract --> you know your altitude relative to the ground, which is what you really want.
The alternative method is to send a radar ping to the ground; this should give you a very accurate reading, provided you send the beam in the right direction, and provided you don't mind the signal being picked up by ground stations (the problem in mil-craft being that said ground stations might belong to your opponent).
Nope, at least in my locale, it is tolerated to broadcast within a couple metres (basically, as long as it doesn't go beyond your walls). I'd love such a single-metre-range device for my car. In fact, I had built one out of a kit sold at Radio Shack, like, in 1988 ?
Preach on, brother!
(with just one tiny quibble with this time thingy: it's a wonderful excuse for grabbing the cell phone and telling how long you'll be late. Of course this is illegal -- but who cares? ;-) )
(thanks for the detailed sensor info, BTW)
For IDF, better use directly Sytadin (whose information they resell), Sytadin is slightly more complete (and you don't need to download adverts, you already paid for the service).
For the other regions... Huh. Don't you get better service from 107.7 FM ?
By the way, again the Paris link, I'm rusty on extrans rules and too lame to hit Preview: Sytadin (Paris/IDF system)
Wow -- I noticed the Variable Message Displays were pretty good, accurate and a numerous in the Netherlands, but in addition these pictures are gorgeous!
Heh, at least this article will help someone to build a site listing all these kind of traffic sites (OK I'm too lazy to google for the already existing such site).
Easy: on each lane, you put two magnetic loop sensors 50 cm apart from each other. You get count, and speed for each vehicle per lane at the point of passage. Sure, you don't get the speed of each individual vehicle like across the channel in the UPK, but I guess we'll buy their stuff anytime soon
(the Basel city automated radar fine system is pretty good and could make a hot import soon too).
People in Denver are probably like the old cartoon dinosaur: pretty outdated.
Like a million other fellow Europeans, I'll point out my favourite service, opened for over half a decade now: http://www.sytadin.tm.fr/. This stuff is also linked to the information the FM stations relay, and more importantly to the variable message displays (one every 500m, on the Périphérique, the inner ring you see out there). There are displays to this map at every major subterranean parking place in business centres (La Défense etc.). Years ago, one company was broadcasting it into a display embedded into the (passenger's, duh!) sun shield.
(in fact, I had this very GIF in my slashbox in... say...1999? Hemos, you can really wear cowboyneal's donkey helm today).
What's important is that today, this stuff is refined to the point they're able to accurately tell you how accurate they are. And they are.
And of course, today, you can access this on i-Mode phones (those from Bouygues), and you can bet the UMTS offers will trumpet it like it's legal marijuana... uh, when they are ready to roll, that is.
(by the way, the Detroit (Michigan) VMD system pretty sucks; from my limited experience with it, times are accurate at an order of magnitude, no better (ie, if it says 5 minutes, you're going to be anywhere in the 2-30 minutes range or almost... if you can dodge the potholes, that is). I hope for the Denver folks that the outdated system announced by Hemos works better -- poor tax dollars otherwise).