what would happen if the cab drivers would also act as Uber drivers?
They'd lose their taxi license / medallion, which they may have invested over 200,000 euros in, depending on where they operate. The license price is dropping, though, with the arrival of Uber and similar services.
That's the basic problem: the government used to enforce a license scarcity that drove prices so high that taxi drivers now consider it an investment or a retirement package. It's very like a housing price crash, except that the government has a direct responsibility for creating this bubble and letting it burst. No wonder taxi drivers are angry.
The problem, if I understood it correctly (not a given as I know only the german taxi situation well), is that french taxi have some hoop and loop to go thru (http://vosdroits.service-public.fr/professionnels-entreprises/F21907.xhtml roughly translated says you need a licence, you need to not have been guilty of certain crime, there is some lessons you ened to follow). All costs.
What the page you cite doesn't tell is that the number of licences is limited, like taxi medallions in some US cities; you can get one free after a couple of decades on the waiting list, or you can buy one from another taxi driver who retires. In Paris, the market value of such a license is over 200,000 euros; in some other cities, it's even higher. However, the arrival of Uber and similar services are making these values drop.
So, when they speak of "families" left out to dry, they actually mean that they won't be able to sell the license they invested in, as they expected to. A bit like a housing price crash, except that license prices used to be kept high by a state-mandated scarcity. I guess taxi drivers are lashing at the government for not enforcing this scarcity anymore.
I don't really have an opinion on this subject. I think the government is at fault for letting people depend on a business model and then not being consistent. On the other hand, it happens all the time with any change in subsidies and policies. And blocking roads is definitely a step too far, but it's not the first time: the French administration has never been a good negotiator in that kind of situations; violent strikes have kind of become the default solution...
Regular Mint, indeed, is based on Ubuntu and each Mint release is derived from the corresponding Ubuntu release. LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is based on Debian, and doesn't really have releases: the packages get upgraded (from Debian Testing, I believe) perhaps twice a year.
On paper, I'd prefer LMDE's update scheme, but the apparent lack of day-to-day security updates is a big no-no.
How do you handle security updates? I thought this distribution (LMDE) was ideal for my needs until I realized that, apart from Firefox and Thunderbird, practically no packages were being regularly updated despite vulnerabilities being discovered: LibreOffice, ffmpeg, file, apt, libnss, qemu to name some recent ones. Bash did get updated recently, and openssl eventually did after heartbleed, though I'm not sure it got all the updates.
I read some flamew^Wdebates on this topic online, which I think boil down to "LMDE is not a server OS, if you want security use Debian". This neglects the fact that even an end-user's desktop or workstation handles data from the network, which could be malware. To this kind of security philosophy, my reaction is that LMDE shouldn't be used except in very controlled environments.
As for regular Mint, I like it better than Ubuntu, though I was disappointed by their not supporting OS upgrades: as I understand it, installing a new Mint version requires a reinstall. (I tried doing it anyway, from 15 to 16 I think, and X broke. That's when I decided to try out LMDE, in fact.)
Not to diminish ICE's accomplishments, but it didn't do rendezvous, only flybys. Rosetta will place itself in orbit then drop a lander on its target comet.
If you worked in this particular mission control group, how could you possibly resist setting all the clocks forward about 2 minutes on the day in question?
Hold that thought, think of the tense wait... Then consider that the signal was actually received 18 minutes later than expected.
...the rotation of the moon just about exactly matches the revolution around the Earth
I think we can say exactly, as it's not a coincidence that the rotations align like that, it's a stable configuration of two bodies in orbit
Yes but there's still libration. Although the Moon's rotation and revolution periods are indeed exactly the same, its orbital speed changes slightly over each orbit. So "just about exactly" is justified too.
What is different about the quantum case is that you can send, say electrons, through the slits *indivdually*, one at a time and they somehow interfere, that is what is intuitively strange.
Correct, but you can also send individual photons and have the same counter-intuitive result. It is not a different case, electrons and photons are both quantum particles.
Not just NTP; the reference implementation.
On the machines I checked last time around, those with the reference implementation handled time correctly; those with OpenNTPD just ignored the leap second and resynchronized later.
I'll check again next summer, we'll see what happens.
Actually, there was a piece of news today, warning against possible blackouts next winter: although France does usually produce more electricity that it consumes, it imports power dto handle strong peak loads--especially from Germany, it was said. If Germany shuts down its own reactors, and the winter is again especially cold, there might be problems.
OTOH, next year is an election year in France, nuclear power is sure to be an issue, and the news I mentioned originates from the (pro-nuclear) government. Who knows how reliable it is?
Interesting, thanks. I couldn't find detailed specs in English, but they indeed seem lighter than the MacBook Air.
However, what I'd really been drooling about when checking out the Vaio X was the 0.7-kg weight without the extra battery. Even the R9 is over 0.9, and (to answer Anonymous' reply) so is the Eee PC X101. That's not light enough that I'd consider changing my current Eee PC.
Now, only tablets seem to be really lightweight, but they don't have a physical keyboard, and suffer more or less from the same problems as the ChromeBook in terms of usability. Though I could imagine working on an Android tablet if I could find a LaTeX distribution for it (not just an online compiler)...
The device sounds great for travelling with its light weight and long battery life.
It's still half again the weight of a Sony Vaio X + extra battery, which could last almost 10 hours.
Why don't they make them anymore? I was looking for a replacement for my Eee PC 901 (1.1 kg); the 2009-vintage Vaio X sounded great (0.7 kg, or 1 kg with the larger battery), but the best I found currently on the market was the MacBook Air (1 kg, half the battery life, not worth the change).
Don't cancel it, just go through the project management and fire everyone who was mismanaging it causing it to go so far over-budget.
AFAICT, the reason why it's going so high over budget is that the budget itself was massively low-balled to begin with, so that the project would have a chance of being approved. In other words: lie about the true costs, they'll have to give you more later, when it's too high-profile to cancel.
The "mismanagement" here is that it wasn't spotted earlier. You can fire them, but you'll still have to either double the budget or cancel it all...
As someone who is about to get their first Android device, is there a good resource for practices for protecting it?
You may want to read this earlier Slashdot story, from which the suggestion that made the most sense to me was to install DroidWall and just not let applications access the network.
Of course, they might not work then, and it can be difficult to single out a single app among, say, Google Services.
Your comment resonates with what Arthur C. Clarke wrote in the post-Apollo preface to Prelude to Space:
Yet when, in 1947, I set this novel exactly thirty years in the future, I did not really believe that a lunar landing would be achieved even by that distant date [...] Still less could I have imagined that the first nation to reach the Moon would so swiftly abandon it again....
In one sense, the Apollo Project was indeed a Prelude to Space. Now there will be a short interlude; and sometime in the 1980s, the real story will begin.
The hiatus has been somewhat longer, but hopefully the rise of the commercial manned spaceflight will bootstrap a self-sustaining economic sector, which will no longer be at the mercy of the whims of governments and lobbies, and ossified agiencies crumbling under their own weight.
Only when spaceflight reaches that point, will that story begin.
Answering your quip seriously, they'd have to be in geostationary orbit to do that (the ISS is in a much lower orbit, in an inclined plane), and then it would be called a space elevator. Lots of unsolved problems, not the least of which is spinning out at least 36,000 km of strong enough material. But yes, it is theoretically possible, and hopefully will revolutionize spaceflight when it is done.
For clarity I mean more than 1) Space Shuttle 2) International Space Station. I think I got that part figured out.
And 3) Soyuz 4) Progress 5) ATV, for there are three other vehicles docked to the ISS in this picture.
I'll try (just from memory; hopefully people will correct my mistakes). From top to bottom:
1) Space shuttle Endeavour.
2) Connecting node (which one? There are 3 but I see only 2), with I believe European lab Columbus partly hidden on the left and two-module Japanese lab Kibo on the right. There ought to be a logistics module somewhere there, maybe behind?
3) US lab Destiny.
4) The big truss, with 4x4 solar panels, the big radiators and the arm on its chariot.
5) Connecting node Unity (second launched), with a couple of smaller modules I'm not sure about.
6) Russian module Zarya (first launched), with a dedicated EVA airlock facing the camera.
7) Russian module Zvezda (third launched), with a Soyuz spacecraft and a Progress cargo (don't know which is which) on its ring of docking ports
8) European cargo Johannes Kepler (the X-wing-like thing docked to Zvezda's aft docking port).
Here's a couple of more recent ones, including videos, also taken from the ground (by the same photographer, probably):
http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/STS-134.html
Slashdot Mirror
For Paris, I found at least one English source: http://www.rudebaguette.com/2013/08/07/anatomy-of-the-paris-taxi-market-past-present-future/. If you read French, you may try Wikipedia or this article in Le Figaro.
They'd lose their taxi license / medallion, which they may have invested over 200,000 euros in, depending on where they operate. The license price is dropping, though, with the arrival of Uber and similar services.
That's the basic problem: the government used to enforce a license scarcity that drove prices so high that taxi drivers now consider it an investment or a retirement package. It's very like a housing price crash, except that the government has a direct responsibility for creating this bubble and letting it burst. No wonder taxi drivers are angry.
What the page you cite doesn't tell is that the number of licences is limited, like taxi medallions in some US cities; you can get one free after a couple of decades on the waiting list, or you can buy one from another taxi driver who retires. In Paris, the market value of such a license is over 200,000 euros; in some other cities, it's even higher. However, the arrival of Uber and similar services are making these values drop.
So, when they speak of "families" left out to dry, they actually mean that they won't be able to sell the license they invested in, as they expected to. A bit like a housing price crash, except that license prices used to be kept high by a state-mandated scarcity. I guess taxi drivers are lashing at the government for not enforcing this scarcity anymore.
I don't really have an opinion on this subject. I think the government is at fault for letting people depend on a business model and then not being consistent. On the other hand, it happens all the time with any change in subsidies and policies. And blocking roads is definitely a step too far, but it's not the first time: the French administration has never been a good negotiator in that kind of situations; violent strikes have kind of become the default solution...
Regular Mint, indeed, is based on Ubuntu and each Mint release is derived from the corresponding Ubuntu release. LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is based on Debian, and doesn't really have releases: the packages get upgraded (from Debian Testing, I believe) perhaps twice a year.
On paper, I'd prefer LMDE's update scheme, but the apparent lack of day-to-day security updates is a big no-no.
How do you handle security updates? I thought this distribution (LMDE) was ideal for my needs until I realized that, apart from Firefox and Thunderbird, practically no packages were being regularly updated despite vulnerabilities being discovered: LibreOffice, ffmpeg, file, apt, libnss, qemu to name some recent ones. Bash did get updated recently, and openssl eventually did after heartbleed, though I'm not sure it got all the updates.
I read some flamew^Wdebates on this topic online, which I think boil down to "LMDE is not a server OS, if you want security use Debian". This neglects the fact that even an end-user's desktop or workstation handles data from the network, which could be malware. To this kind of security philosophy, my reaction is that LMDE shouldn't be used except in very controlled environments.
As for regular Mint, I like it better than Ubuntu, though I was disappointed by their not supporting OS upgrades: as I understand it, installing a new Mint version requires a reinstall. (I tried doing it anyway, from 15 to 16 I think, and X broke. That's when I decided to try out LMDE, in fact.)
Any advice?
Bullet cluster, bitches!
You mean Brand X?
Not to diminish ICE's accomplishments, but it didn't do rendezvous, only flybys. Rosetta will place itself in orbit then drop a lander on its target comet.
Hold that thought, think of the tense wait... Then consider that the signal was actually received 18 minutes later than expected.
Yes but there's still libration. Although the Moon's rotation and revolution periods are indeed exactly the same, its orbital speed changes slightly over each orbit. So "just about exactly" is justified too.
Correct, but you can also send individual photons and have the same counter-intuitive result. It is not a different case, electrons and photons are both quantum particles.
Not just NTP; the reference implementation. On the machines I checked last time around, those with the reference implementation handled time correctly; those with OpenNTPD just ignored the leap second and resynchronized later. I'll check again next summer, we'll see what happens.
OTOH, next year is an election year in France, nuclear power is sure to be an issue, and the news I mentioned originates from the (pro-nuclear) government. Who knows how reliable it is?
Switzerland is an even better example on that point. :-) They too are heading towards shutting down their nuclear reactors.
Interesting, thanks. I couldn't find detailed specs in English, but they indeed seem lighter than the MacBook Air.
However, what I'd really been drooling about when checking out the Vaio X was the 0.7-kg weight without the extra battery. Even the R9 is over 0.9, and (to answer Anonymous' reply) so is the Eee PC X101. That's not light enough that I'd consider changing my current Eee PC.
Now, only tablets seem to be really lightweight, but they don't have a physical keyboard, and suffer more or less from the same problems as the ChromeBook in terms of usability. Though I could imagine working on an Android tablet if I could find a LaTeX distribution for it (not just an online compiler)...
It's still half again the weight of a Sony Vaio X + extra battery, which could last almost 10 hours.
Why don't they make them anymore? I was looking for a replacement for my Eee PC 901 (1.1 kg); the 2009-vintage Vaio X sounded great (0.7 kg, or 1 kg with the larger battery), but the best I found currently on the market was the MacBook Air (1 kg, half the battery life, not worth the change).
AFAICT, the reason why it's going so high over budget is that the budget itself was massively low-balled to begin with, so that the project would have a chance of being approved. In other words: lie about the true costs, they'll have to give you more later, when it's too high-profile to cancel.
The "mismanagement" here is that it wasn't spotted earlier. You can fire them, but you'll still have to either double the budget or cancel it all...
You may want to read this earlier Slashdot story, from which the suggestion that made the most sense to me was to install DroidWall and just not let applications access the network. Of course, they might not work then, and it can be difficult to single out a single app among, say, Google Services.
The hiatus has been somewhat longer, but hopefully the rise of the commercial manned spaceflight will bootstrap a self-sustaining economic sector, which will no longer be at the mercy of the whims of governments and lobbies, and ossified agiencies crumbling under their own weight.
Only when spaceflight reaches that point, will that story begin.
Great, thanks a lot! How did you figure which was Soyuz and which was Progress?
The ISS equivalent would be that one, which gives you a better view of Endeavour, but misses out a lot of the ISS.
Answering your quip seriously, they'd have to be in geostationary orbit to do that (the ISS is in a much lower orbit, in an inclined plane), and then it would be called a space elevator. Lots of unsolved problems, not the least of which is spinning out at least 36,000 km of strong enough material. But yes, it is theoretically possible, and hopefully will revolutionize spaceflight when it is done.
And 3) Soyuz 4) Progress 5) ATV, for there are three other vehicles docked to the ISS in this picture.
I'll try (just from memory; hopefully people will correct my mistakes). From top to bottom:
Here's a couple of more recent ones, including videos, also taken from the ground (by the same photographer, probably): http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/STS-134.html
True enough. But now that the money is spent, shouldn't we at least enjoy the view?