Like a VW, Subaru, or BMW bike? This is new? Ok, they may be taking this to a new level, but this design has been around for quite a while.
No. I thought the same and wondered why it was different from a flat 4 layout. This has two pistons per cylinder, each pushing away from each other. It's also an advanced two-stroke. (I remember in the late 80s and early 90s when all the talk was about how two-strokes were going to be the next big thing.)
You need to watch the linked video to see how it works. It's actually kinda cool. Each pair of opposing cylinders can act as an independent unit, so you can shut one unit down when you need less power. The guy claims significant fuel consumption savings.
A place with no advertisements, no light pollution, and few cars sounds good to me.
The dictatorship is bad, but the economic situation is caused by bad location in the globe, lack of innovation to improve farming/manufacturing, corruption, and bad trading.
Are you fucking serious?
Let me give you just one example. A doctor goes to NK to treat cataracts using a simple procedure. He cures the blindness of a hundred people in one sitting. When they take the bandages off, the first thing they do when they can see is rush past the doctor to worship the pictures of the Dear Leader and the Great General and thank them for the gift of sight. Of course, that's what they have to do in the presence of the authorities or any cameras whose contents are likely to be viewed by the authorities.
NK is a tin pot hereditary dictatorship, it is a necrocracy with a dead man as its head of state. It is a surreal world that shows what happens when absolute power gets into the hands of an unstable lunatic. Its people are the most oppressed in the modern world.
"Bad location in the globe" my trunks. It's within easy trading distance of Japan on one side and China on the other.
...given the bulk of the population doesn't even know what metric is and that they measure distances in football field lengths.
Not quite as retarded as calculating weight in stones, but it`s only a foot away from that.
What bugs me in the US is that when giving the weight of ships, bridges, aircraft, trucks or other heavy objects, they still use pounds and give you numbers in the millions that quickly become meaningless to the casual reader. What's wrong with tons? Since an imperial ton is not much different from a metric tonne then it's easier for both camps to relate to.
Why is the US objecting to a standard that it has not ever taken the time to actually use? Talk about anything in metric to most anyone from the US and they go "what's that in English?" Argh!!!!
The US cares that much why? Its only a trade matter, as we still use primitave imperial measurements. Maybe if we had switched to metric like they had told us we were going to every year in grade school this would be a big deal, but right now, who cares?
ZanC's informative post about the current setup tells me something I didn't know, but a pound used to be the weight of a pound of gold kept in the Tower of London. It's where the British currency gets its name from since every pound issued by the Bank of England used to be backed by a pound of gold.
Along with listening to music, Pizza Express patrons can use their iPods to activate a light at the table that tells the restaurant staff if they need a bill, drink refill or anything else.
Damned if I know why you'd need an iPod to switch on a light. What's wrong with just pressing a button? Seems to work on planes. I hear they have this sort of thing in Japanese restaurants, just hit the button and summon the waiter instead of hoping you'll catch his eye.
And why did/. decide to destroy my post by interpreting the delete key as a browser 'back' button a few seconds ago?
Hey idiots! TFA doesn't say _anything_ about spending $500 per kid on Aeron chairs. Here's a few choice quotes from it since you were too lazy to RTFA and thought you'd dazzle the world with your ability to have an opinion on everything without actually knowing what you're talking about:
If a chair is too big for a child, his or her feet dangle and the hard edge of the seat digs into the hamstrings, both of which, Dennerlein says, forces the brain to pay attention to something other than geometry worksheets.
[snip]
Alan Hedge, a professor of ergonomics at Cornell University, once helped a school-furniture company design an adjustable chair for students. It cost between $60 and $80. Purchasing guidelines, which can be as rigid as a melamine chair, tend to set the price standard closer to $40, so it didn't sell.
[snip]
Educators might cringe, assuming distractions, but ergonomists who have watched well-behaved children at standing-height tables or in bouncy chairs in Sweden or New Zealand or Canada insist that innovative furniture makes students pay more attention, not less.
Next time you want kids to sit on a plank of wood with nowhere to work, I hope you'll be willing to forgo your nice comfortable office chair and show them how it's done.
"CHILDREN have grown too big for their school chairs, a survey of 750 schools revealed.
Teachers said "desk and chair sizes were often inappropriate".
It is understood the NSW Education Department has been taking orders for custom-sized chairs.
Paediatric dietician Susie Burrell said children who were overweight often didn't carry obvious fat but instead looked older than their age."
The bus company in Northern Ireland was in the news some years back because they had to lay on extra buses for schools because kids were getting bigger. Not fatter, just bigger. They used to be able to squeeze a lot more kids into the same number of seats, but not anymore. Evolution in action.
When the summary said "For school districts with deep pockets..." it really meant "For school districts that are able to reach deeply into the pockets of the local property owners..."
And what you really mean is "For school districts that are able to reach deeply into the pockets of the local property owners who are willing to let them do so in the knowledge that better test scores in the local school district will have a positive effect on their own property value as well as being a good investment in the future since there is no better investment than in the education of children."
You had furniture in your school? We had to make do with moldy cardboard boxes for desks and sharp piles of rusting scrap metal for chairs, and we had to collect the scrap metal ourselves from train yards and storm drains. But try telling that to kids these days, they won't believe you!
Hehe.
Seriously though, there are schools in the world where this isn't so far from the truth. I was watching a National Geographic show the other day about some public schools in Pakistan where they don't have desks, chairs, or even a freaking building. Kids sit on their butts in a brickyard with no shelter, and the school has a single blackboard. Rampant corruption in the government and education department is said to be the cause of that, as well as the presence of textbooks that teach kids how to hate the west. And that's not the madrassas, this is the actual state schools. Scary stuff.
And of course, you think you would do an acceptable job at being King, and even for a limited time, right? Only until the important stuff has been fixed?
"The Cylons Have a Plan"... but the writers don't.
OMG, that just hits the nail on the head! BSG, fun as it was to watch, was just not in the same league of writing as Babylon 5 where there actually was an overall pre-planned arc. The only problems with the writing in B5 were a result of the network dicking around and not being able to promise a 5th season, so the writers had to wrap everything (Shadow war AND Earth civil war) up in season 4 only to have to concoct an additional story line for season 5. Season 5 had an epilogue feel to it, almost as if it wasn't canon.
Beware the idea of keeping the people out the real decisions because they are too dumb or inexperienced: getting people dumbed down and their lowest instincts tickled so that an elite can rule over them with the praetext of protecting society from itself becomes feasible.
One word: California. The place where they vote ballot measures to jack up spending (usually on "get tough on crime" crusades), and suppress taxes at the same time. Then they wonder why they spend so much of their income servicing debt. They have voted on measures that make it impossible for legislators to pass a budget. And who do they blame for the gridlock in the state Capitol? The legislators!
Direct democracy is the greatest threat to civilisation. Californian voters need a good slap upside the head, told to eat what's put in front of them, and stop acting like the childish entitlement merchants they are. California doesn't need more direct democracy, it needs a king. The state is an example of democracy run amok.
I dunno how it would end up for national security. But for money policies we left the matter to central banks so we could have stability and dunno what else, and debt became widespread, money rules de facto over law, insolvent banks compete with their fractional reserve in the same league of your hard earned money. Not the best deal.
Central banks are accountable to their respective legislators. In Britain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the finance minister) used to have direct control of interest rates. It was a disaster because the government kept fiddling interest rates for party political reasons, usually around election time. It doesn't take a genius to guess what that led to. Stability was greatly improved when that was delegated to the Bank of England.
I stopped using it because I was sick of all the garish pages people would put together and the automated music playing.
Amen, brother. That and the endless pages that grow so big that they crash my browser. Who in their right mind designs a social networking site that displays every comment ever made on your page?
TFA doesn't have much detail, in fact it doesn't have much of anything. I've even posted it below. What I was missing was an explanation for the "self assembling" claim. I had to go to Wikipedia. I think the article submitter could have added that as a courtesy.
TFA:
Researchers at Canada's National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT) have developed a way of quicker way to enable self-assembling semiconductors - using microwaves ovens.
The technique could make the technology a viable alternative to conventional lithography for chip production.
Self assembly is seen as key to enabling nanotechnology, but until now the block co-polymer method, which directs nanomaterials to create moulds and then fills them in with a target material, was too slow to be useful.
However, the Canadian researchers found that by switching from old-fashioned convective cookers to newfangled microwave ovens the process time was reduced from days to less than a minute.
“By using microwaves, we have dramatically decreased the cooking time for a specific molecular self-assembly process used to assemble block co-polymers, and have now made it a viable alternative to the conventional lithography process for use in patterning semi-conductors,” the researchers said.
"This is one of the first examples of the self-assembly process being used to address a real-world problem for the semi-conductor industry," said Dr Jillian Buriak, head of materials and interfacial chemistry at NINT.
"We've got the process - the next step is to exploit it to make something useful."
Think what a different place the world would be if you could convince everyone to follow 'kindergarten etiquette', why is it stated so dismissively in the summary? As if getting everyone to show basic respect to everyone else is an easy thing to do.
It's easy to do when face to face with another person. Total strangers who nearly bump into each other on the footpath/sidewalk will instinctively apologize. Separate them either with the bodywork of a car or using the anonymity of a keyboard, and it's a whole different matter because the other person can't get at you. I drive a convertible and I find a huge difference in the way people treat me when I take the roof down.
Look at segregated sports events like English professional soccer where the authorities don't dare let the spectators mingle with those of opposing clubs. Fans in other sports like Gaelic games mingle all the time and there's never any crowd trouble.
It's all about that face-to-face interaction. You just don't have it on Wiki, so asking people to be civil is necessary.
But the great thing about Wiki is the sheer amount of guidelines. No matter what agenda you're trying to push, there's a guideline somewhere that you can cite in support of your edit. Discussions often become a battle to see who can cite the most compelling WP guidelines. In fact I often find the discussion pages more interesting than the actual articles themselves. Ever seen the EV1 discussion? It's as if someone from GM is doing battle with a load of people who watched Who Killed the Electric Car?
I edit a lot of Northern Ireland-related articles on Wiki. A long-standing dispute is the name of one city and county. Catholics call it Derry, Protestants call it Londonderry. Politicians have raged for years on what to call it and never reached a compromise, it's a never-ending dispute. Wikipedians on the other hand have agreed to call the county Londonderry and the city Derry. That kind of compromise is a long way off among the politicians. In fact I sometimes think that Northern Ireland's politicians could do well to spend a few months editing on Wiki and learning how to get along with other editors. They'd be a lot more civil to each other if they did.
Slashdot Mirror
Like a VW, Subaru, or BMW bike? This is new?
Ok, they may be taking this to a new level, but this design has been around for quite a while.
No. I thought the same and wondered why it was different from a flat 4 layout. This has two pistons per cylinder, each pushing away from each other. It's also an advanced two-stroke. (I remember in the late 80s and early 90s when all the talk was about how two-strokes were going to be the next big thing.)
You need to watch the linked video to see how it works. It's actually kinda cool. Each pair of opposing cylinders can act as an independent unit, so you can shut one unit down when you need less power. The guy claims significant fuel consumption savings.
A place with no advertisements, no light pollution, and few cars sounds good to me.
The dictatorship is bad, but the economic situation is caused by bad location in the globe, lack of innovation to improve farming/manufacturing, corruption, and bad trading.
Are you fucking serious?
Let me give you just one example. A doctor goes to NK to treat cataracts using a simple procedure. He cures the blindness of a hundred people in one sitting. When they take the bandages off, the first thing they do when they can see is rush past the doctor to worship the pictures of the Dear Leader and the Great General and thank them for the gift of sight. Of course, that's what they have to do in the presence of the authorities or any cameras whose contents are likely to be viewed by the authorities.
NK is a tin pot hereditary dictatorship, it is a necrocracy with a dead man as its head of state. It is a surreal world that shows what happens when absolute power gets into the hands of an unstable lunatic. Its people are the most oppressed in the modern world.
"Bad location in the globe" my trunks. It's within easy trading distance of Japan on one side and China on the other.
Jesus wept!
...given the bulk of the population doesn't even know what metric is and that they measure distances in football field lengths.
Not quite as retarded as calculating weight in stones, but it`s only a foot away from that.
What bugs me in the US is that when giving the weight of ships, bridges, aircraft, trucks or other heavy objects, they still use pounds and give you numbers in the millions that quickly become meaningless to the casual reader. What's wrong with tons? Since an imperial ton is not much different from a metric tonne then it's easier for both camps to relate to.
Why is the US objecting to a standard that it has not ever taken the time to actually use? Talk about anything in metric to most anyone from the US and they go "what's that in English?" Argh!!!!
The US armed forces work in metric.
The US cares that much why? Its only a trade matter, as we still use primitave imperial measurements. Maybe if we had switched to metric like they had told us we were going to every year in grade school this would be a big deal, but right now, who cares?
ZanC's informative post about the current setup tells me something I didn't know, but a pound used to be the weight of a pound of gold kept in the Tower of London. It's where the British currency gets its name from since every pound issued by the Bank of England used to be backed by a pound of gold.
Quoth TFA:
Along with listening to music, Pizza Express patrons can use their iPods to activate a light at the table that tells the restaurant staff if they need a bill, drink refill or anything else.
Damned if I know why you'd need an iPod to switch on a light. What's wrong with just pressing a button? Seems to work on planes. I hear they have this sort of thing in Japanese restaurants, just hit the button and summon the waiter instead of hoping you'll catch his eye.
And why did /. decide to destroy my post by interpreting the delete key as a browser 'back' button a few seconds ago?
Hey idiots! TFA doesn't say _anything_ about spending $500 per kid on Aeron chairs. Here's a few choice quotes from it since you were too lazy to RTFA and thought you'd dazzle the world with your ability to have an opinion on everything without actually knowing what you're talking about:
If a chair is too big for a child, his or her feet dangle and the hard edge of the seat digs into the hamstrings, both of which, Dennerlein says, forces the brain to pay attention to something other than geometry worksheets.
[snip]
Alan Hedge, a professor of ergonomics at Cornell University, once helped a school-furniture company design an adjustable chair for students. It cost between $60 and $80. Purchasing guidelines, which can be as rigid as a melamine chair, tend to set the price standard closer to $40, so it didn't sell.
[snip]
Educators might cringe, assuming distractions, but ergonomists who have watched well-behaved children at standing-height tables or in bouncy chairs in Sweden or New Zealand or Canada insist that innovative furniture makes students pay more attention, not less.
Next time you want kids to sit on a plank of wood with nowhere to work, I hope you'll be willing to forgo your nice comfortable office chair and show them how it's done.
Funny that I saw this article earlier today.
"CHILDREN have grown too big for their school chairs, a survey of 750 schools revealed.
Teachers said "desk and chair sizes were often inappropriate".
It is understood the NSW Education Department has been taking orders for custom-sized chairs.
Paediatric dietician Susie Burrell said children who were overweight often didn't carry obvious fat but instead looked older than their age."
The bus company in Northern Ireland was in the news some years back because they had to lay on extra buses for schools because kids were getting bigger. Not fatter, just bigger. They used to be able to squeeze a lot more kids into the same number of seats, but not anymore. Evolution in action.
put the cheetos and mountain dew generation into Aerons, that will fix everything
Not quite what TFA said now, is it?
When the summary said "For school districts with deep pockets..." it really meant "For school districts that are able to reach deeply into the pockets of the local property owners..."
And what you really mean is "For school districts that are able to reach deeply into the pockets of the local property owners who are willing to let them do so in the knowledge that better test scores in the local school district will have a positive effect on their own property value as well as being a good investment in the future since there is no better investment than in the education of children."
American schools run from 10 to 3? Schools in Northern Ireland run from 9 to 4:30, so you might get home slightly ahead of your folks but not by much.
We don't need to be finding ways to spend more school money right now.
Oh. My. God.
You had furniture in your school? We had to make do with moldy cardboard boxes for desks and sharp piles of rusting scrap metal for chairs, and we had to collect the scrap metal ourselves from train yards and storm drains. But try telling that to kids these days, they won't believe you!
Hehe.
Seriously though, there are schools in the world where this isn't so far from the truth. I was watching a National Geographic show the other day about some public schools in Pakistan where they don't have desks, chairs, or even a freaking building. Kids sit on their butts in a brickyard with no shelter, and the school has a single blackboard. Rampant corruption in the government and education department is said to be the cause of that, as well as the presence of textbooks that teach kids how to hate the west. And that's not the madrassas, this is the actual state schools. Scary stuff.
And of course, you think you would do an acceptable job at being King, and even for a limited time, right? Only until the important stuff has been fixed?
Correct. We would.
Uh, doesn't facebook do the same thing, more or less? Sure it's hidden with some javascript junk, ...
No. It uses AJAX to retrieve older stuff once you ask for it.
"The Cylons Have a Plan" ... but the writers don't.
OMG, that just hits the nail on the head! BSG, fun as it was to watch, was just not in the same league of writing as Babylon 5 where there actually was an overall pre-planned arc. The only problems with the writing in B5 were a result of the network dicking around and not being able to promise a 5th season, so the writers had to wrap everything (Shadow war AND Earth civil war) up in season 4 only to have to concoct an additional story line for season 5. Season 5 had an epilogue feel to it, almost as if it wasn't canon.
Beware the idea of keeping the people out the real decisions because they are too dumb or inexperienced: getting people dumbed down and their lowest instincts tickled so that an elite can rule over them with the praetext of protecting society from itself becomes feasible.
One word: California. The place where they vote ballot measures to jack up spending (usually on "get tough on crime" crusades), and suppress taxes at the same time. Then they wonder why they spend so much of their income servicing debt. They have voted on measures that make it impossible for legislators to pass a budget. And who do they blame for the gridlock in the state Capitol? The legislators!
Direct democracy is the greatest threat to civilisation. Californian voters need a good slap upside the head, told to eat what's put in front of them, and stop acting like the childish entitlement merchants they are. California doesn't need more direct democracy, it needs a king. The state is an example of democracy run amok.
I dunno how it would end up for national security.
But for money policies we left the matter to central banks so we could have stability and dunno what else, and debt became widespread, money rules de facto over law, insolvent banks compete with their fractional reserve in the same league of your hard earned money. Not the best deal.
Central banks are accountable to their respective legislators. In Britain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the finance minister) used to have direct control of interest rates. It was a disaster because the government kept fiddling interest rates for party political reasons, usually around election time. It doesn't take a genius to guess what that led to. Stability was greatly improved when that was delegated to the Bank of England.
myspace == new geocities.
I stopped using it because I was sick of all the garish pages people would put together and the automated music playing.
Amen, brother. That and the endless pages that grow so big that they crash my browser. Who in their right mind designs a social networking site that displays every comment ever made on your page?
TFA doesn't have much detail, in fact it doesn't have much of anything. I've even posted it below. What I was missing was an explanation for the "self assembling" claim. I had to go to Wikipedia. I think the article submitter could have added that as a courtesy.
TFA:
Think what a different place the world would be if you could convince everyone to follow 'kindergarten etiquette', why is it stated so dismissively in the summary? As if getting everyone to show basic respect to everyone else is an easy thing to do.
It's easy to do when face to face with another person. Total strangers who nearly bump into each other on the footpath/sidewalk will instinctively apologize. Separate them either with the bodywork of a car or using the anonymity of a keyboard, and it's a whole different matter because the other person can't get at you. I drive a convertible and I find a huge difference in the way people treat me when I take the roof down.
Look at segregated sports events like English professional soccer where the authorities don't dare let the spectators mingle with those of opposing clubs. Fans in other sports like Gaelic games mingle all the time and there's never any crowd trouble.
It's all about that face-to-face interaction. You just don't have it on Wiki, so asking people to be civil is necessary.
But the great thing about Wiki is the sheer amount of guidelines. No matter what agenda you're trying to push, there's a guideline somewhere that you can cite in support of your edit. Discussions often become a battle to see who can cite the most compelling WP guidelines. In fact I often find the discussion pages more interesting than the actual articles themselves. Ever seen the EV1 discussion? It's as if someone from GM is doing battle with a load of people who watched Who Killed the Electric Car?
Please remember to be WP:CIVIL when replying...
I edit a lot of Northern Ireland-related articles on Wiki. A long-standing dispute is the name of one city and county. Catholics call it Derry, Protestants call it Londonderry. Politicians have raged for years on what to call it and never reached a compromise, it's a never-ending dispute. Wikipedians on the other hand have agreed to call the county Londonderry and the city Derry. That kind of compromise is a long way off among the politicians. In fact I sometimes think that Northern Ireland's politicians could do well to spend a few months editing on Wiki and learning how to get along with other editors. They'd be a lot more civil to each other if they did.
Dear citizen, cover up your webcam while banging. Love, the government.
Bang on schedule.
... for the "one more step to big government dictatorship" speech in 5-4-3-2-1...