Because their friends and family and loved ones have still lost someone very dear to them
Only temporarily. They'll see them again. A couple of weeks ago I was at a memorial service for a friend of mine who died after moving to the USA. Most of her friends were devout Christians. From their perspective, being in the USA and being dead aren't that different - they're both long term but temporary separations. The sorrow coming from them was overwhelming.
Nice story, but Catholics are not discouraged from reading the Bible
You'll have to excuse the grandparent for not paying attention to recent history. When an organisation presents itself as the guardians of an immutable truth and has a certain policy for the first 85% of its lifetime, it's forgivable to assume that the policy is still in effect.
Yes, that's my point. The pricing model in the USA makes switching to mobile only more difficult because it skews the pricing in favour of landlines. The pricing model elsewhere skews the pricing in favour of mobile phones. This reached a tipping point in the UK a few years ago where it was cheaper to have a mobile than a landline for most people. For light to moderate users, a pre-pay mobile has no line rental and the cost of calls is less than the cost of a line rental. For heavy users, a mobile contract with inclusive minutes is often cheaper than a landline - especially since inclusive minutes deals from landlines don't usually include calls to mobiles.
If you're in the UK and have a mobile and a landline, you'll give out the mobile number because it's more useful. If you're in the USA, you'll give out the landline number because it costs you less. This means that the mobile networks reach the critical mass required for economies of scale in the UK a lot faster.
The UK government seems to be really bad at this kind of project (see also the Millennium Dome). When I was in Salt Lake City, I stayed in what used to be the Olympic Village from when they hosted the Winter Olympics. The houses that were built then are all now student accommodation and the hotel that they built for press is now used for people visiting the university (e.g. for conferences). I don't know how much the olympics cost them, but at least they got something lasting out of it. I doubt the lasting monument to the London Olympics will be anything other than a big chunk of debt.
Surely a vendor bidding to use open source software would have made a lower bid.
Almost certainly. I doubt the Free Software Foundation would have bid anything like as much as Microsoft to have its logo all over the Olympics coverage.
Calling a US mobile phone costs exactly as much as calling a land line. In other countries, calling a mobile phone is much more expensive because the caller also pays for the last leg of the call
Only if you're calling from a landline. In the UK, for example, calls from mobiles are usually the same rate irrespective of whether they are calls to landlines or mobiles, although calls to the mobiles on the same network can be cheaper. It shifts the incentives to the point where I now know lots of people with no landline but no one without a mobile (the last person I knew without a mobile got one a couple of years back). The cheapest line rental on a landline per month is about I spend about as much on my mobile every 3-4 months.
I bought 3 2TB disks for about £150 a few months ago. In a RAID-Z configuration they give 4TB of usable space for backups. I could dump my entire DVD collection on it without recompression without making a significant dent in the space. BluRays are a bit different, but I don't own any of them yet, and I'm not really interested in buying them.
I'm using dvdbackup. It uses libdvdread and creates a VIDEO_TS folder on the hard disk that looks just like the DVD filesystem. It will rip anything that VLC can play (because they use the same code for reading the disk) and the result contains everything from the original disk, including videos and so on. When you can fit over 100 DVDs on a 1TB hard disk, there doesn't seem much point in transcoding unless it's for playback on a mobile device.
Because productivity means producing something of value. Simply digging holes and filling them in would be doing work, but no one would argue that it is productive. For something to count as productivity then it has to involve a net improvement in the lives of those involved in producing and consuming it. Dollars moved provides a fairly reasonable first approximation of productivity, but not an accurate measure (accurately measuring it is difficult - if it were easy, the stock market would always be a safe place to put your money).
If you remember when the olympics wasn't an overhyped commercial extravaganza and was actually about amateur athletes from around the world competing, then you definitely are old.
I don't think I'd like to have only 10 hours of work worth doing in a week, that would get real boring real fast, and I'd probably be bad at it because you don't maintain the skills
I work about 10 hours on a typical week, maybe a bit less. It doesn't get boring because work isn't the only thing I fill my time with. Contributions to open source projects mean that my developer skills stay sharp and I have lots of free time for tango, reading, and other fun things.
Especially since being opposed to new nuclear power stations effectively (given the lack of alternatives) means that you are in favour of old nuclear power stations, many of which are passed the end of their intended operational lifespan already. I bet 'shut down all existing nuclear power plants over the next ten years and replace them all with modern, safer, designs' wasn't one of the poll options...
Personally, I'm opposed to nuclear power and would like to see everything powered by magic (which is non-polluting and 100% sustainable). In the absence of commercial magic power plants, I'll go with nuclear...
$500 (a reasonable one-year follow-on profit per customer)
Mobile providers in the USA make a $500 profit per customer per year? Really? That's over $40/month, which seems an insanely large amount to pay, even before you subtract the operating costs.
Wind is renewed by the Sun pumping energy into it. The Sun is renewed by inserting a wormhole into its core and the pumping in hydrogen from a spare nebula somewhere.
An order of magnitude depends on your number base. In computer science, it's common for an order of magnitude to mean a factor of two. In most other scientific or engineering disciplines it usually means a factor of ten. In general usage, it means (as my PhD supervisor would say) 'big-huge'.
At one charge cycle per day, that's 1,000 years. Not everlasting, but certainly lasting longer than anyone is likely to care - if we're still trying to use the same battery technology in 1,000 years then civilisation has probably collapsed completely at least once in the interim. Even if it's backed by a wind turbine and is doing ten discharge cycles a day it's 100 years.
The 400 cycles quoted for LiIon seems a bit low though. Newer ones are rated for 3,000.
Nope. Any two dimensional maze with a single exit can be solved by following a wall. You can prove this with some fairly basic topology. This only doesn't work if some of the paths cross over (i.e. with bridges / tunnels). Following a wall in a two-dimensional maze will never cause you to go around in circles - if it did then the maze would be topologically equivalent to a circle and there would be no path through it.
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Because their friends and family and loved ones have still lost someone very dear to them
Only temporarily. They'll see them again. A couple of weeks ago I was at a memorial service for a friend of mine who died after moving to the USA. Most of her friends were devout Christians. From their perspective, being in the USA and being dead aren't that different - they're both long term but temporary separations. The sorrow coming from them was overwhelming.
Nice story, but Catholics are not discouraged from reading the Bible
You'll have to excuse the grandparent for not paying attention to recent history. When an organisation presents itself as the guardians of an immutable truth and has a certain policy for the first 85% of its lifetime, it's forgivable to assume that the policy is still in effect.
Yes, that's my point. The pricing model in the USA makes switching to mobile only more difficult because it skews the pricing in favour of landlines. The pricing model elsewhere skews the pricing in favour of mobile phones. This reached a tipping point in the UK a few years ago where it was cheaper to have a mobile than a landline for most people. For light to moderate users, a pre-pay mobile has no line rental and the cost of calls is less than the cost of a line rental. For heavy users, a mobile contract with inclusive minutes is often cheaper than a landline - especially since inclusive minutes deals from landlines don't usually include calls to mobiles.
If you're in the UK and have a mobile and a landline, you'll give out the mobile number because it's more useful. If you're in the USA, you'll give out the landline number because it costs you less. This means that the mobile networks reach the critical mass required for economies of scale in the UK a lot faster.
The UK government seems to be really bad at this kind of project (see also the Millennium Dome). When I was in Salt Lake City, I stayed in what used to be the Olympic Village from when they hosted the Winter Olympics. The houses that were built then are all now student accommodation and the hotel that they built for press is now used for people visiting the university (e.g. for conferences). I don't know how much the olympics cost them, but at least they got something lasting out of it. I doubt the lasting monument to the London Olympics will be anything other than a big chunk of debt.
Surely a vendor bidding to use open source software would have made a lower bid.
Almost certainly. I doubt the Free Software Foundation would have bid anything like as much as Microsoft to have its logo all over the Olympics coverage.
Calling a US mobile phone costs exactly as much as calling a land line. In other countries, calling a mobile phone is much more expensive because the caller also pays for the last leg of the call
Only if you're calling from a landline. In the UK, for example, calls from mobiles are usually the same rate irrespective of whether they are calls to landlines or mobiles, although calls to the mobiles on the same network can be cheaper. It shifts the incentives to the point where I now know lots of people with no landline but no one without a mobile (the last person I knew without a mobile got one a couple of years back). The cheapest line rental on a landline per month is about I spend about as much on my mobile every 3-4 months.
I bought 3 2TB disks for about £150 a few months ago. In a RAID-Z configuration they give 4TB of usable space for backups. I could dump my entire DVD collection on it without recompression without making a significant dent in the space. BluRays are a bit different, but I don't own any of them yet, and I'm not really interested in buying them.
I'm using dvdbackup. It uses libdvdread and creates a VIDEO_TS folder on the hard disk that looks just like the DVD filesystem. It will rip anything that VLC can play (because they use the same code for reading the disk) and the result contains everything from the original disk, including videos and so on. When you can fit over 100 DVDs on a 1TB hard disk, there doesn't seem much point in transcoding unless it's for playback on a mobile device.
Because productivity means producing something of value. Simply digging holes and filling them in would be doing work, but no one would argue that it is productive. For something to count as productivity then it has to involve a net improvement in the lives of those involved in producing and consuming it. Dollars moved provides a fairly reasonable first approximation of productivity, but not an accurate measure (accurately measuring it is difficult - if it were easy, the stock market would always be a safe place to put your money).
If you remember when the olympics wasn't an overhyped commercial extravaganza and was actually about amateur athletes from around the world competing, then you definitely are old.
I don't think I'd like to have only 10 hours of work worth doing in a week, that would get real boring real fast, and I'd probably be bad at it because you don't maintain the skills
I work about 10 hours on a typical week, maybe a bit less. It doesn't get boring because work isn't the only thing I fill my time with. Contributions to open source projects mean that my developer skills stay sharp and I have lots of free time for tango, reading, and other fun things.
Especially since being opposed to new nuclear power stations effectively (given the lack of alternatives) means that you are in favour of old nuclear power stations, many of which are passed the end of their intended operational lifespan already. I bet 'shut down all existing nuclear power plants over the next ten years and replace them all with modern, safer, designs' wasn't one of the poll options...
Personally, I'm opposed to nuclear power and would like to see everything powered by magic (which is non-polluting and 100% sustainable). In the absence of commercial magic power plants, I'll go with nuclear...
It says you didn't read the first post before posting, what else does it say?
$500 (a reasonable one-year follow-on profit per customer)
Mobile providers in the USA make a $500 profit per customer per year? Really? That's over $40/month, which seems an insanely large amount to pay, even before you subtract the operating costs.
No, in computer science, but my supervisor was Chinese and picked up a lot of Welsh idioms that he didn't always apply appropriately...
It's like rugby, but they wear body armour and the game is scheduled around regular advert breaks.
Wind is renewed by the Sun pumping energy into it. The Sun is renewed by inserting a wormhole into its core and the pumping in hydrogen from a spare nebula somewhere.
An order of magnitude depends on your number base. In computer science, it's common for an order of magnitude to mean a factor of two. In most other scientific or engineering disciplines it usually means a factor of ten. In general usage, it means (as my PhD supervisor would say) 'big-huge'.
But if someone could say "This battery could last for a thousand years.", is cool
At one discharge cycle per day, it will.
At one charge cycle per day, that's 1,000 years. Not everlasting, but certainly lasting longer than anyone is likely to care - if we're still trying to use the same battery technology in 1,000 years then civilisation has probably collapsed completely at least once in the interim. Even if it's backed by a wind turbine and is doing ten discharge cycles a day it's 100 years.
The 400 cycles quoted for LiIon seems a bit low though. Newer ones are rated for 3,000.
The walls actually look pretty low. I bet you could make a mouse that could hop over them pretty easily...
meece.
Oh, or unless the walls are not all connected. As they aren't in the micromouse competition. Oh well. Ignore me.
Nope. Any two dimensional maze with a single exit can be solved by following a wall. You can prove this with some fairly basic topology. This only doesn't work if some of the paths cross over (i.e. with bridges / tunnels). Following a wall in a two-dimensional maze will never cause you to go around in circles - if it did then the maze would be topologically equivalent to a circle and there would be no path through it.
Or gzcat file | whatever...