Don't forget Brent Spar: when they occupied the platform and took some measurements, it turned out Shell was actually right, so they fudged the numbers rather than admit their mistake. Greenpeace is not about the environment any more, even though many of its individual members and employees may still be. This often happens to such organisations: at some point it's no longer about the founders' goals, but about membership, money, and influence. Greenpeace is no exception: today they are a marketing firm with themselves as sole customer.
I am sure they will offer up some excuse about Shell greenwashing its image, or brainwashing our kids about the blessings of fossil fuels, but the stark truth is that this does nothing for the environment. This announcement comes in time for GP to further their real goals: they have been out of the news for a bit and they needed a win and some publicity. Well played.
It works just fine. And the theory says that it'll work at reactor-size scales as well. But you're right in the sense that we don't yet know how to make it work. The biggest issues aren't economic ones, but engineering issues.
No, the rush to create a vaccine coinicdes with the latest outbreak, which has 10 times (and counting) the number of infected as the next largest outbreak. More importantly, all previous outbreaks were local and contained reasonably easily. This is the first time Ebola is getting away from us; in previous cases we had the option of containing it and letting it run its course, now it looks like that may no longer be enough.
And before this outbreak happened, research into vaccines was already taking place. Of course the urgency is somewhat higher now, since we may be looking at a global epidemic. This has nothing to do with ohmygodanAMERICANgotinfected.
Are Comcast obliged to retain such recordings? Comcast have already denied the guy's claims, and if they smell a lawsuit coming up, they'd make sure those recordings got "lost" if they could get away with it... unless the recording backs up Comcast's side of the story.
Exactly. I kind of noticed that many of these "we can not afford..." types are power-hungry do-gooders who would just love to be in a position where they can tell us what to do and what we can't do. How I noticed that? Because they oppose anything that looks like cheap, clean energy (even hydro). "Gives us bad habits", they say.
Besides, energy consumption in the USA is the extreme end of the spectrum. Realistically, it will be a while before everyone is up to European levels of energy consumption, which is a lot lower than USA ones but still allows plenty of creature comforts and leisure.
Simply ask for permission without disclosing the nature of the study or the objectives. This is how scientist do it (of necessity) when they get a bunch of subjects in a room for a test. The subjects perform their tasks without knowing what the actual study is, hence there's little or no bias.
My understanding is that a deed poll can be signed by anyone, but that some organisations require the deed poll to be registered at the Royal Court. When registerig the deed poll, you'll need the statutory declaration as well, which was an issue: since we're not living in the UK, we could not find anyone qualified to sign.
As it turned out, the passport service did not require registration of the deed poll (which was our way out of the catch-22), nor did we provide a statutory declaration. We did have the deed poll signed by a judge and notarised in the Netherlands, which may have helped.
Even in the western world there's no common understanding of what your name is. My friend recently had her name changed, but ran into some issues as she is from the UK but lives permanently in the Netherlands. In the UK, changing your name means signing a "deed poll", getting your mates down the pub to sign as witnesses, and then simply start using it. At some point you will be issued a passport with your new name on it... if you can prove that you have been using the new name for a while. Bank statements and other semi official correspondence serves as proof. The problem is: in the Netherlands it works exactly the other way around: you first get your name changed officially (through the courts), get a new passport, and only then will the bank, the utility companies and the tax office change your name in their records. A nice catch 22 that took a while to sort out.
As for myself, I'll be happy once the world learns to build systems that don't break on the apostrophe in my last name. I still come across plenty of systems that don't, and every time I am tempted to go "Johnny Tables" on their ass.
Thing is, he was not reporting random fake names he came across. He was reporting fake names from a specific group of people, and you might say he was going out of his way to find fake names from this specific group. Does this sound like a vigilante bent on making sure only real names are being used on FB, or like someone who stumbled across a way to cause grief for a group of people he dislikes, and milking it for all it's worth?
The arcane prefixes are what make metric units easy to use, without having to invent new names for the same quantity at different scales (inches, feet, yards). "1E-3 liter", "a thousand grams", "a hundredth of a meter" are quantities you'll encounter every day, but these don't exactly roll off the tongue. "Milliliter", "kilogram" (or kilo) and "centimeter" are used in everyday life instead. And once you know what a kilogram is, you know what a kilometer is as well.
I doubt he actually cares much about this issue; he is just pandering to a group of people currently not voting for him but to whom the issue has a lot of emotional baggage, on an issue that is not too important (since such a change would never see the light of day anyway). Kind of like how el-Sisi is suddenly cracking down on Egypt's GLBT community; it's not really an issue to him and he certainly has bigger fish to fry right now, but the affected group is small enough to make it a political non-issue, and it panders to the large group of traditionally minded / religious people who think he is too secular.
Can't change the law, or don't want to? Just redefine the words.
In the introductory class on law I took ages ago, they already told us that "one can be led astray by relying on the generic or commonly understood definition of a particular word.", and advised to always examine the meaning of words like "accused", "summons", etc, as they have a specific legal definition that often differs from the commonly understood meaning. Now I know why...
Not true for skills in themselves, but nevertheless sound career advice. Don't neglect those people skills, they are important for most knowledge worker careers. And not just because the office environment happens to have a strong bias towards extroverts; these skills are actually useful for the next level job in your profession. Yes, even techies. In real life, BOFH finds himself stuck in the basement for life, if he doesn't find himself out in the street. The good news is: people and networking skills can be acquired, even by us basement dwelling nerds, work on these skills and your network early on in your career; don't wait until you think you need them.
Everyone can code in the same way that everyone can play soccer or bowling. Only a small number of people will be genuinely incapable of it, most people can master the basics, but it takes skill and perseverance to become good enough to make a living doing it, and only a handful make it to the top.
You'll likely end up trying a few brands. The thing is that with incandescents, you pretty much always get what you expect; the worst thing that can happen is that the thing dies prematurely. With LEDs, I have been burned in a few different ways: lights not being as bright as advertised, or giving off a horrible green/yellow light instead of "warm white", or a nasty blue-ish hue instead of bright white. When LEDs were relatively new, it wasn't uncommon to find differences in hue or brightness even between different production runs of the same brand and model. I finally found a consistently good brand for regular bulbs, but now the (costly) quest to find good spotlights begins.
GP and GGP posts were very much about attractiveness.
By the way, the Sari and that other dress (forgot the name) are not "traditional" in the same way that tuxedos and tailcoats are traditional or worn at formal occasions only. When I visited India, I saw these everywhere in public life as well as in the office. In our own office in Europe, visiting Indians sometimes wear them as well.
Out of interest, what sets those Blackberries apart from the Samsung (and presumably other smartphones), making one a productivity tool and the others toys?
Hydro and geothermal are cheap compared to other renewables in terms of cost per kWh. The cost for wind and solar is coming down a little as technology improves, but it is still very high compared to gas or coal fired plants. Hydro and geothermal also have some other important advantages over other renewables: output can be adjusted to demand, and continues day and night: you can often use these as baseload generators without having to store energy (with hydro, the lake behind the dam is the energy store). Consider yourself very lucky to live in a country where hydro can be implemented on such a large scale.
Nice of the PM to visit and sit in on the last stage of the journey, putting science and scientists in the spotlight. Over here (NL) we hardly ever celebrate scientific successes, and accomplished scientists receive less attention and recognition from politicians than sports heroes.
Slashdot Mirror
they feature open and airy interiors inspired by aviation design.
Aviation design doesn't exactly spell open and airy interiors to me. It spells cramped seats and stale peanuts.
Don't forget Brent Spar: when they occupied the platform and took some measurements, it turned out Shell was actually right, so they fudged the numbers rather than admit their mistake. Greenpeace is not about the environment any more, even though many of its individual members and employees may still be. This often happens to such organisations: at some point it's no longer about the founders' goals, but about membership, money, and influence. Greenpeace is no exception: today they are a marketing firm with themselves as sole customer.
I am sure they will offer up some excuse about Shell greenwashing its image, or brainwashing our kids about the blessings of fossil fuels, but the stark truth is that this does nothing for the environment. This announcement comes in time for GP to further their real goals: they have been out of the news for a bit and they needed a win and some publicity. Well played.
I'm sure they have thought of that
It works just fine. And the theory says that it'll work at reactor-size scales as well. But you're right in the sense that we don't yet know how to make it work. The biggest issues aren't economic ones, but engineering issues.
No, the rush to create a vaccine coinicdes with the latest outbreak, which has 10 times (and counting) the number of infected as the next largest outbreak. More importantly, all previous outbreaks were local and contained reasonably easily. This is the first time Ebola is getting away from us; in previous cases we had the option of containing it and letting it run its course, now it looks like that may no longer be enough.
And before this outbreak happened, research into vaccines was already taking place. Of course the urgency is somewhat higher now, since we may be looking at a global epidemic. This has nothing to do with ohmygodanAMERICANgotinfected.
Are Comcast obliged to retain such recordings? Comcast have already denied the guy's claims, and if they smell a lawsuit coming up, they'd make sure those recordings got "lost" if they could get away with it... unless the recording backs up Comcast's side of the story.
Exactly. I kind of noticed that many of these "we can not afford..." types are power-hungry do-gooders who would just love to be in a position where they can tell us what to do and what we can't do. How I noticed that? Because they oppose anything that looks like cheap, clean energy (even hydro). "Gives us bad habits", they say.
Besides, energy consumption in the USA is the extreme end of the spectrum. Realistically, it will be a while before everyone is up to European levels of energy consumption, which is a lot lower than USA ones but still allows plenty of creature comforts and leisure.
Simply ask for permission without disclosing the nature of the study or the objectives. This is how scientist do it (of necessity) when they get a bunch of subjects in a room for a test. The subjects perform their tasks without knowing what the actual study is, hence there's little or no bias.
My understanding is that a deed poll can be signed by anyone, but that some organisations require the deed poll to be registered at the Royal Court. When registerig the deed poll, you'll need the statutory declaration as well, which was an issue: since we're not living in the UK, we could not find anyone qualified to sign.
As it turned out, the passport service did not require registration of the deed poll (which was our way out of the catch-22), nor did we provide a statutory declaration. We did have the deed poll signed by a judge and notarised in the Netherlands, which may have helped.
Oh and that's "Bobby Tables" of course
Even in the western world there's no common understanding of what your name is. My friend recently had her name changed, but ran into some issues as she is from the UK but lives permanently in the Netherlands. In the UK, changing your name means signing a "deed poll", getting your mates down the pub to sign as witnesses, and then simply start using it. At some point you will be issued a passport with your new name on it... if you can prove that you have been using the new name for a while. Bank statements and other semi official correspondence serves as proof. The problem is: in the Netherlands it works exactly the other way around: you first get your name changed officially (through the courts), get a new passport, and only then will the bank, the utility companies and the tax office change your name in their records. A nice catch 22 that took a while to sort out.
As for myself, I'll be happy once the world learns to build systems that don't break on the apostrophe in my last name. I still come across plenty of systems that don't, and every time I am tempted to go "Johnny Tables" on their ass.
Thing is, he was not reporting random fake names he came across. He was reporting fake names from a specific group of people, and you might say he was going out of his way to find fake names from this specific group. Does this sound like a vigilante bent on making sure only real names are being used on FB, or like someone who stumbled across a way to cause grief for a group of people he dislikes, and milking it for all it's worth?
The arcane prefixes are what make metric units easy to use, without having to invent new names for the same quantity at different scales (inches, feet, yards). "1E-3 liter", "a thousand grams", "a hundredth of a meter" are quantities you'll encounter every day, but these don't exactly roll off the tongue. "Milliliter", "kilogram" (or kilo) and "centimeter" are used in everyday life instead. And once you know what a kilogram is, you know what a kilometer is as well.
try and work will millimeters in engineering and you soon find out that thousands of an inch are the only way to measure small tolerances
What's wrong with thousands of a mm? Here in Europe, engineers, machinists and the like have happily worked with metric for ages.
I doubt he actually cares much about this issue; he is just pandering to a group of people currently not voting for him but to whom the issue has a lot of emotional baggage, on an issue that is not too important (since such a change would never see the light of day anyway). Kind of like how el-Sisi is suddenly cracking down on Egypt's GLBT community; it's not really an issue to him and he certainly has bigger fish to fry right now, but the affected group is small enough to make it a political non-issue, and it panders to the large group of traditionally minded / religious people who think he is too secular.
Can't change the law, or don't want to? Just redefine the words.
In the introductory class on law I took ages ago, they already told us that "one can be led astray by relying on the generic or commonly understood definition of a particular word.", and advised to always examine the meaning of words like "accused", "summons", etc, as they have a specific legal definition that often differs from the commonly understood meaning. Now I know why...
Not true for skills in themselves, but nevertheless sound career advice. Don't neglect those people skills, they are important for most knowledge worker careers. And not just because the office environment happens to have a strong bias towards extroverts; these skills are actually useful for the next level job in your profession. Yes, even techies. In real life, BOFH finds himself stuck in the basement for life, if he doesn't find himself out in the street. The good news is: people and networking skills can be acquired, even by us basement dwelling nerds, work on these skills and your network early on in your career; don't wait until you think you need them.
Everyone can code in the same way that everyone can play soccer or bowling. Only a small number of people will be genuinely incapable of it, most people can master the basics, but it takes skill and perseverance to become good enough to make a living doing it, and only a handful make it to the top.
You'll likely end up trying a few brands. The thing is that with incandescents, you pretty much always get what you expect; the worst thing that can happen is that the thing dies prematurely. With LEDs, I have been burned in a few different ways: lights not being as bright as advertised, or giving off a horrible green/yellow light instead of "warm white", or a nasty blue-ish hue instead of bright white. When LEDs were relatively new, it wasn't uncommon to find differences in hue or brightness even between different production runs of the same brand and model. I finally found a consistently good brand for regular bulbs, but now the (costly) quest to find good spotlights begins.
GP and GGP posts were very much about attractiveness.
By the way, the Sari and that other dress (forgot the name) are not "traditional" in the same way that tuxedos and tailcoats are traditional or worn at formal occasions only. When I visited India, I saw these everywhere in public life as well as in the office. In our own office in Europe, visiting Indians sometimes wear them as well.
Out of interest, what sets those Blackberries apart from the Samsung (and presumably other smartphones), making one a productivity tool and the others toys?
Hydro and geothermal are cheap compared to other renewables in terms of cost per kWh. The cost for wind and solar is coming down a little as technology improves, but it is still very high compared to gas or coal fired plants. Hydro and geothermal also have some other important advantages over other renewables: output can be adjusted to demand, and continues day and night: you can often use these as baseload generators without having to store energy (with hydro, the lake behind the dam is the energy store). Consider yourself very lucky to live in a country where hydro can be implemented on such a large scale.
It may be more about the price tag than anything else.
Ezekiel 23:20
What version of the Bible is that!?
Nice of the PM to visit and sit in on the last stage of the journey, putting science and scientists in the spotlight. Over here (NL) we hardly ever celebrate scientific successes, and accomplished scientists receive less attention and recognition from politicians than sports heroes.
That's fine until the brats from next door hack into your exoskeleton and make you do the Gangnam routine for 48 hours straight.