The ousted president went in on a ticket of closer relations with the west.
He'd have gotten away with the continued corruption if he hadn't torn that up and gone with russia without consulting the electorate (and such a decision is enough of a change in policy to justify a referendum)
It's kind of hard to vote against an option if the contrary position isn't on offer and I'm not overly surpised there was such a low turnout. What other option did people have if they didn't agree with either choice?
That would be the Saddamn, who was put in place by american interests (knocking over a relatively democratic govt), who was used to go to war against the Iranians, whose current state of affairs stems largely from the USA knocking over a democraticv govt and installing a dictator (the Shah)
American activities in foreign countries since the end of WW2 have been _at least_ as destabilising as those of the old USSR
Let's not forget who trained Bin Laden and his friends in the first place....
I wish they'd avoided the vicious "reparations" which set things up for a continuation of WW1 in the first place. It wouldn't have mattered who was in charge and various key military figures said in 1918-19 that the terms of armistice didn't end the war but merely gave a 20-year ceasefire.
Better diplomacy in 1918 would have avoided the need for better diplomacy in 1938.
"It is true the drivers crippled double precession floats on it"
My understanding was that the crippling was done in firmware/hardware. I'd like to see otherwise as it'd save having to buy K10 cards for a current project.
Yes, it's a form of variable displacement - much better than the types previously seen in auto engines (cylinder deactivation)
Cylinder deactivation on anything rigidly attached to a crankshaft is an imperfect way of doing variable displacement as there are still significant frictional losses (Try turning a crankshaft by hand with the head off and cams disconnected - you'll feel it)
If you don't have a crankshaft then the pistons can be stopped entirely, resulting in greater efficiency.
This idea has a lot of merit and is extremely compact, but I do wonder how they'll kill the vibration issue.
Japanmese women I know seem to want to have kids, but not have them in Japan.
FWIW Japan is merely the first country where the pensions bomb is exploding. At least they're prepared for it. Most western countries aren't and the first wave of baby boomers are retiring.
As a direct result of this mismanagement I fully expect that even low-wage earners will be hit with 40% tax rates within 20 years - and the only reason it won't be higher is that retirement age will rise to at least 70.
EU Xenophobes campaigning against migrants (mostly young) are painting themselves into a corner. They won't realise this until it's too late.
"My understanding is that short of enforced sterlisation or genocide, an improved standard of living and quality of life is the only sure way to curb population growth."
Actually it's the latter.
Every single event of the former (genocide or dieoff caused by disease) has had the population recover and shoot past previous levels within 2 generations. People feel obliged to have more children to fill the obvious gaps left by the dead.
The poor have more children because more children die.
Last year I was startled to have friends in SE asia, in their late-30s to mid-40s talk about having children now in order to have someone to look after them when they are old.
No welfare system = need kids or you're on the trash heap and need to have enough kids to ensure that a couple of them will live long enough to look after you. The statements were made by _middle class_ people, not at all poor by local standards, although they did state an intention to stop at 2. Poorer people talk about having more kids. Attitudes like this are entrenched all over the world.
The reason for "the knowledge" is because taxi driving in London is a guild and the training is the apprenticeship.
The City of London Corporation is mostly controlled by the old guilds. The City even has its own police force, entirely separate from the Metropolitan Police and with their own sets of rules (Try wearing an anti-scientology T-shirt in the City and find out what happens...)
Outside of the City, the rules are entirely different.
It's not every single road in London. It's a specific set of roads north of the river in inner london, mostly inside the old city walls (The City of London).
Outside of those boundaries most cabbies are useless at navigating.
AND - it only applies to black cabs you can hail on the street (hackney carriages) in the CIty of London (which is not "London"). Elsewhere "the knowledge" isn't required to be a hackney driver.
There's a separate class of taxi (private hire car, aka minicab) in the UK which can't be flagged down in the street, but they can be booked by phone. Technically Uber falls into that category but those drivers must be police vetted too.
Gettinmg a London Taxi license is _extremely_ expensive, even more so than getting a NYC taxi medallion.
If Black Cab drivers start obstructing roads in greater London they're likely to find that the special licensing conditions and exemptions they received will be wiped - starting with prohibiting access to bus lanes.
The City of London (the square mile in the middle bounded by the old city walls) is a corporation and plays hardball with organisations which mess with it. Should cabbies cause disruption in there it's entirely possible the corporation would arbitrarily strip their licenses (They do have this power) or change the rules (they have this power too)
SSMEs were badly built and badly implemented, using 1960s construction techniquies.
The policy was to only test the completed article, which resulted in a number of them exploding on the test stand due to wedling cracks letting LH2/LOX get places it shouldn't have been.
Ironically, NASA had to trawl retirement homes across the USA to find metallurgists who knew how to fabricate seamless tubing - a once common art which had been lost after WW2. At one point they resorted to hacking the gun barrels off mothballed battleships to get the needed parts.
In this kind of situation (which humans are quite bad at antcipating) odds are good that the car will have noticed something odd ahead and slowed down to a stop well before a human would need to be making this kind of decision.
This includes pedestrians walking from gaps between cars. An AI is more likely to notice feet under the vehicles at the side of the road than a comparable human as it never stops looking for them. Similarly stuff coming form side roads is going to be seen/acted on while a human is still processing the input as "not normal". That's not even accounting for situations where several hazardous things are happening at once, which humans are notoriously bad at handling.
At least 90% of car crahes are down to driver error, usually due to inattention. I'd expect that the rate of crashes in automated vehicles would be substantially less than manually controlled in a very short period of time and that's for standalone systems. Once you factor in inter-vehicle communications it should drop further still.
When automated vehicles become common, you can substantially raise the bar on skills required to get;/retain a license. This alone will make a big difference, as at least half the drivers on the road today are barely competent and even decent drivers have lapses in concentration at times (I don't think I'm any better than average and I'm looking forward to letting the car do most of the work.)
If that's true and they really are in the UK then they've got a world of hurt in store, as that's completely and utterly illegal under UK law and the authorities WILL nail them to the wall plus go after the company princpals for back-pay.
Tips are EXTRA to minimum wage, not a top up to get to it. There's plenty of UK/EU case law on this subject and every single employer who's tried the american model of counting tips towards final pay has been handed their head on a plate.
I agree with the assessment about power and stress ponts, but bear in mind that we _are_ talking about small amounts of power.
One of the largest advantages of the toyota design is that you can use power modules and only fire up as many as are needed, which gets around the issue of piston engines only being most efficient around full load. That alone will improve the overall efficiency of the setup from the typical 5-15% to the 25-30% range.
There's another design I ran across a few years ago which has been tested in real world situations and works well, developing a lot of torque, but at cost of utterly hideous mechanical complexity (the crank is replaced with 2 counterrotating butterfly wheels and the connecting rod rides on top of them, rigidly attached to the piston)
All reciprocating stuff all has disadvantages though - primarily vibration. Fuel cells are more efficient and quiet but they require levels of fuel purity currently unavailable in portable applications.
Wave disks (essentially an inverted whittle turbine) look interesting, but proabbly aren't practical and almost certainly won't achieve the claimed improvements. http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of Crimea, "russification" was pushed along by deporting the entire Tarter popularion off to Siberia.
Most have now moved back, but they're second class citizens in their own ancestral lands.
The ousted president went in on a ticket of closer relations with the west.
He'd have gotten away with the continued corruption if he hadn't torn that up and gone with russia without consulting the electorate (and such a decision is enough of a change in policy to justify a referendum)
The choices given were
1: secession to independence
2: Joining Russia
Nothing about staying with Ukraine
It's kind of hard to vote against an option if the contrary position isn't on offer and I'm not overly surpised there was such a low turnout. What other option did people have if they didn't agree with either choice?
That would be the Saddamn,
who was put in place by american interests (knocking over a relatively democratic govt),
who was used to go to war against the Iranians,
whose current state of affairs stems largely from the USA knocking over a democraticv govt and installing a dictator (the Shah)
American activities in foreign countries since the end of WW2 have been _at least_ as destabilising as those of the old USSR
Let's not forget who trained Bin Laden and his friends in the first place....
That analogy is more apt than you think.
The old greek democracies voted to go to war with their neighbours _every single year_
Yes. The capsules are already capable of it, but haven't been fully tested to verify man-rating.
I wish they'd avoided the vicious "reparations" which set things up for a continuation of WW1 in the first place. It wouldn't have mattered who was in charge and various key military figures said in 1918-19 that the terms of armistice didn't end the war but merely gave a 20-year ceasefire.
Better diplomacy in 1918 would have avoided the need for better diplomacy in 1938.
"It is true the drivers crippled double precession floats on it"
My understanding was that the crippling was done in firmware/hardware. I'd like to see otherwise as it'd save having to buy K10 cards for a current project.
Yes, it's a form of variable displacement - much better than the types previously seen in auto engines (cylinder deactivation)
Cylinder deactivation on anything rigidly attached to a crankshaft is an imperfect way of doing variable displacement as there are still significant frictional losses (Try turning a crankshaft by hand with the head off and cams disconnected - you'll feel it)
If you don't have a crankshaft then the pistons can be stopped entirely, resulting in greater efficiency.
This idea has a lot of merit and is extremely compact, but I do wonder how they'll kill the vibration issue.
The global population is unsustainably high. Until it falls back down to 3-4 billion, smaller families should be encouraged.
The problem is poor forward planning and economic models which only allow for growth mean that massive population falls can't be allowed to happen.
Japanmese women I know seem to want to have kids, but not have them in Japan.
FWIW Japan is merely the first country where the pensions bomb is exploding. At least they're prepared for it. Most western countries aren't and the first wave of baby boomers are retiring.
As a direct result of this mismanagement I fully expect that even low-wage earners will be hit with 40% tax rates within 20 years - and the only reason it won't be higher is that retirement age will rise to at least 70.
EU Xenophobes campaigning against migrants (mostly young) are painting themselves into a corner. They won't realise this until it's too late.
"My understanding is that short of enforced sterlisation or genocide, an improved standard of living and quality of life is the only sure way to curb population growth."
Actually it's the latter.
Every single event of the former (genocide or dieoff caused by disease) has had the population recover and shoot past previous levels within 2 generations. People feel obliged to have more children to fill the obvious gaps left by the dead.
The poor have more children because more children die.
Last year I was startled to have friends in SE asia, in their late-30s to mid-40s talk about having children now in order to have someone to look after them when they are old.
No welfare system = need kids or you're on the trash heap and need to have enough kids to ensure that a couple of them will live long enough to look after you. The statements were made by _middle class_ people, not at all poor by local standards, although they did state an intention to stop at 2. Poorer people talk about having more kids. Attitudes like this are entrenched all over the world.
The cure for this kind of inanity is a slap around the head and telling them it isn't going to be accepted until it's readably documented.
There's a lot of whining when they get told this, but aftee a few rounds they tend to get into the habit of documenting as they go.
Nice answer but I work in a space lab and more new code is written in Fortran than every other language put together.
It works. That's the main reason. We have people who can write in multiple languages, but the language of choice for most heavy lifting is Fortran.
"we can vote on the politicians who make the rules for cabbies."
not in the City of London you can't.
Votes are held by guilds, companies and the very few people who actually live there (so few these days that effective control is held by companies)
The reason for "the knowledge" is because taxi driving in London is a guild and the training is the apprenticeship.
The City of London Corporation is mostly controlled by the old guilds. The City even has its own police force, entirely separate from the Metropolitan Police and with their own sets of rules (Try wearing an anti-scientology T-shirt in the City and find out what happens...)
Outside of the City, the rules are entirely different.
You still can't flag down an uber driver on the street. Only Black Cabs have that privelege.
And is probaly the origin point for the Philippines term "jeepney" - originally being a jitney conversion of a jeep.
Yup, and one black Cab driver got away with raping passengers for more than a decade before being apprehended.
That said, they're statistically safer than minicabs and those in turn are an order of magnitude safer than anythign unlicensed.
London Black Cab drivers are notorious for refusing "out of area" fares.
It's not every single road in London. It's a specific set of roads north of the river in inner london, mostly inside the old city walls (The City of London).
Outside of those boundaries most cabbies are useless at navigating.
AND - it only applies to black cabs you can hail on the street (hackney carriages) in the CIty of London (which is not "London"). Elsewhere "the knowledge" isn't required to be a hackney driver.
There's a separate class of taxi (private hire car, aka minicab) in the UK which can't be flagged down in the street, but they can be booked by phone. Technically Uber falls into that category but those drivers must be police vetted too.
Gettinmg a London Taxi license is _extremely_ expensive, even more so than getting a NYC taxi medallion.
If Black Cab drivers start obstructing roads in greater London they're likely to find that the special licensing conditions and exemptions they received will be wiped - starting with prohibiting access to bus lanes.
The City of London (the square mile in the middle bounded by the old city walls) is a corporation and plays hardball with organisations which mess with it. Should cabbies cause disruption in there it's entirely possible the corporation would arbitrarily strip their licenses (They do have this power) or change the rules (they have this power too)
SSMEs were badly built and badly implemented, using 1960s construction techniquies.
The policy was to only test the completed article, which resulted in a number of them exploding on the test stand due to wedling cracks letting LH2/LOX get places it shouldn't have been.
Ironically, NASA had to trawl retirement homes across the USA to find metallurgists who knew how to fabricate seamless tubing - a once common art which had been lost after WW2. At one point they resorted to hacking the gun barrels off mothballed battleships to get the needed parts.
In this kind of situation (which humans are quite bad at antcipating) odds are good that the car will have noticed something odd ahead and slowed down to a stop well before a human would need to be making this kind of decision.
This includes pedestrians walking from gaps between cars. An AI is more likely to notice feet under the vehicles at the side of the road than a comparable human as it never stops looking for them. Similarly stuff coming form side roads is going to be seen/acted on while a human is still processing the input as "not normal". That's not even accounting for situations where several hazardous things are happening at once, which humans are notoriously bad at handling.
At least 90% of car crahes are down to driver error, usually due to inattention. I'd expect that the rate of crashes in automated vehicles would be substantially less than manually controlled in a very short period of time and that's for standalone systems. Once you factor in inter-vehicle communications it should drop further still.
When automated vehicles become common, you can substantially raise the bar on skills required to get;/retain a license.
This alone will make a big difference, as at least half the drivers on the road today are barely competent and even decent drivers have lapses in concentration at times (I don't think I'm any better than average and I'm looking forward to letting the car do most of the work.)
CItation please.
If that's true and they really are in the UK then they've got a world of hurt in store, as that's completely and utterly illegal under UK law and the authorities WILL nail them to the wall plus go after the company princpals for back-pay.
Tips are EXTRA to minimum wage, not a top up to get to it. There's plenty of UK/EU case law on this subject and every single employer who's tried the american model of counting tips towards final pay has been handed their head on a plate.
I agree with the assessment about power and stress ponts, but bear in mind that we _are_ talking about small amounts of power.
One of the largest advantages of the toyota design is that you can use power modules and only fire up as many as are needed, which gets around the issue of piston engines only being most efficient around full load. That alone will improve the overall efficiency of the setup from the typical 5-15% to the 25-30% range.
There's another design I ran across a few years ago which has been tested in real world situations and works well, developing a lot of torque, but at cost of utterly hideous mechanical complexity (the crank is replaced with 2 counterrotating butterfly wheels and the connecting rod rides on top of them, rigidly attached to the piston)
All reciprocating stuff all has disadvantages though - primarily vibration. Fuel cells are more efficient and quiet but they require levels of fuel purity currently unavailable in portable applications.
At the other extreme from car engines, this is a good example of a slider crank: http://qualityjunkyard.com/200...
Wave disks (essentially an inverted whittle turbine) look interesting, but proabbly aren't practical and almost certainly won't achieve the claimed improvements. http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...