Many thanks for correcting my misapprehension : I found this genuinely informative and I wish I could mod you up.
I too think that public broadcasters are great value for money, and I think we can agree that while they feel market pressure, they also exert it, which is one of the more important parts of their mandate.
Whoever modded this offtopic, shame on you. I've seen diversions in topic thread far more meandering and less relevant over the past few days.
It's an interesting opportunity to discuss the differences and similarities of the Pharmaceutical / Music business models.
Both of them provide
* something of perceived high value
* something where the bulk of cost in in the R&D phase
* something with a low per-unit production cost
* something where if the product is copied, it can be just as good as the original
Arguably, both also
* Advertise products excessively heavily given their actual value
* Exploit the producers of their intellectual property
The major difference is that the music industry has a consumer base where a significant fraction can copy the product themselves, whereas the pharamceutical industry only has to worry about industrial competitors in markets where their pricing levels cannot be supported.
The agreement that Russia has entered is ostensibly about clincal trial data, but given that clinical trials represent the most time consuming and costly part of the development of any drug, it is essentially about prohibiting the marketing of that drug product by a competitor. This protection appears to be distinct and seperate from the protection that may (or may not) be afforded by patents, and is liable to be imposed upon other countries seeking WTO agreements. It is in effect, using the regulatory framework of the country against them.
It could of course, be trivially circumvented by any country willing to make their certification process as simple as "the FDA approves of it, thus so shall we all".
The USA almost certainly has sufficient strategic reserves squirelled away to conquer oil producers.
Hell, they don't have zero domestic production. The consumption their military would require is miniscule compared to their present levels of consumer consumption.
About the only thing that would result is that you would deprive the greedy US consumer of the "American Way of Life(tm)" and make them just about angry enough to come and stomp on the rest of us.
The difference is that the license fee actually pays for something ; the world-class British Broadcasting Corporation.
Try and find a public service broadcaster anywhere in the world that produces better. Not only does the BBC produce programming good enough to export abroad, it also has a civilising and improving effect on all the other broadcasters in Britain. Even on our commercial channels, commercial breaks are shorter (typically 15 minutes per hour instead of 22 on some American channels), and the general standard is higher, because these companies have to compete with Aunty for eyeball/airtime.
I can understand people who genuinely choose not to watch television complaining about the harassment of the TV Licensing Authority. Their tactics are a little draconian. But in all fairness, I suspect that in the majority of cases, people claiming that they have no TV are just trying to avoid paying. For the rest, I'm sure that a yearly visit from the TV license man to certify them TV free should only be a small imposition. It's the threatening letters and similar that I take issue with. They should just have a clear dispute resolution process which involves a polite inspection visit and a susequent cessation of botherment for at least a year.
But I can't understand people who do watch television in the UK complain about paying the license fee. At a mere £131.50 a year it's just shy of £11 a month. People will shell out for a £40 per month satellite TV package without even blinking. They'll spend more on their mobile, their landline, their ISP, and none of these things contains such a wonderful cornucopia of content (aside from the internet, but the cost for getting a 24/7 15GBit/s stream of high-bandwidth video content on the internet would be rather more than £11 per month.)
And those who say "well, I don't watch the BBC, just the cable/satellite, so why should I pay for it?" are missing part of my point - without the BBC setting a standard which isn't bound to bow to commercial pressures, the commercial television in this country would rapidly descend to the depths that American and European broadcast television has.
The BBC is a BARGAIN, and I am in the camp who would genuinely pay twice as much for it and still be happy.
Given that the motion sensor is an accelerometer, it should be easy for the machine to detect the impact of your foot on the floor - it just has to pick up the point at which the sensor decelerates rapidly. Coupled with the lateral vectors of left/right forward/backward, you should actually be able to produce MORE move options than DDR. This setup could, for example, ask you to jump to the right with both feet, and actually be able to measure it, unlike the standard DDR impact pad which can only detect that *something* has jumped on the pad, not how many things.
I'd suggest that a game which provides a pair of two strap-on ankle holsters and gets you to attach a wiimote to each leg is not an impossibility.
Vodafone at the very least, disabled the Bluetooth OBEX protocol on my Motorola V3 to make it harder to copy objects to and from the phone.
This is done firstly to encourage sales of their third-party phone management software, and secondly to increase their revenues from the likes of reverse SMS services for ringtone purchases and the like.
Telcos are only interested in giving you a feature rich handset in so far as they benefit from your use of those features. Features that allow you to enjoy the phone without their financial participation are less well supported.
Subversion clients above version 1.1 on *nix systems which support symlinks are quite happy to support them, although it's a bit of a kludge.
The SVN repository filesystem itself has no concept of the symlink, something which remarkably enough, Visual SourceSafe *does* support. The "Share" command in VSS is about the only thing I miss about it when using SVN.
I *don't* miss the period repo crashes, the inordinate sensitivity to network outage, and the propensity of VSS to allow you do do horrible things to your data without even warning you.
And of course, if anyone really finds a feature missing from SVN to be really boiling their noodle, they can always code it up themselves (programming skills / cash to pay for developers may be required.).
Is this how corporations will respond when we have the technology to have a microwave sized device that can build almost any consumer object under the control of a computer?
Shut up shop with a sign that says, "Sorry, Godti Makers did us out of business" ?
I for one, welcome our matter-assembling, programatically controlled, electronically fucked-out-of-their chip overlords.
The entire rationale behind Choose and Book is fallacious. It's a piece of window dressing for government policy - a service rooted in spin. The premise that "Patients want to choose which healthcare service to consume." is utter nonsense.
Patients in the UK, by and large, do not want to choose. They just want to receive treatment. Because of the prevalence of the NHS, and the relatively low takeup of private healthcare, there is no real perception of choice anyway.
Making the patient choose a service provider is just a means for the government to impress upon the populace that they are making changes to NHS IT systems. Choose and Book is a convenient example because it contains no potential compromise to patient confidentiality, and because it's a relatively easy project.
If it had been done properly, of course, people would barely know it was there. Things would proceed as they always had done - the doctor would use his judgement (which is far better informed than the patients), select a specialist to refer to, and use the system to place the referral. In short, it would be a streamlined replacement for an existing paper system. Of course, this is not a high profile, visible success for government IT policy.
PS ; My opinion as expressed in any public forum in no way constitutes an accurate or informative reflection on the actual motivations for government policy.
Dear Bev,
While it's not a 100% surety, a good way of adding credence to the provenance of these files would be to post MD5 checksums of the three archive files on a visibly accessible page at blackboxvoting.org
Your neighbourhood friendly ubergeek should be able to oblige you. Or yourself, you seem to be pretty well versed.
Much kudos to you. I watched Hacking Democracy the other night, and if it hadn't been such serious material, I would have been wetting myself with laughter at how craptastically awful the GEMS software is. I shall have a poke around in the material in a non self-endangering manner for a while.
But you're trying to make one person pay for the crimes of a geometric progression of other people. This is analagous to the Roman Catholic concept of "Original Sin".
While the person has responsibility for what they personally allow to be uploaded from their machine, you cannot hold her responsible for what other people do with that data after they receive it. That is their responsibility, and if the RIAA want recompense for those activities, it is that geometric progression of people that they should chase.
Upstream bandwidth (kBit/s) 128 (this is my own bandwidth rate) Time to upload 1 MB (s) 64 Average song size (MB) 5 Time to upload average song (s) 320
Wholesale cost of song (USD) $0.70 Sue-value per song (USD) $750.00 Number of instances req'd 1071.43
Upload time per song sue-value (s) 342857.14
Or just shy of 4 days (3.97). So 2 days for 256 kBit/s And 1 day for 512 kBit/s
So basically, a value of $750 means that, if the sole means of distribution is via the network, for each and every count, the plaintiff should have to prove that the defendants computer was on, connected, and maxing it's upstream bandwidth for a period not less than 1 full day, multiplied by their upstream bandwidth divided by 512. I'd expect that also to be tempered by some reasonable fraction accounting for computer downtime, other uses of bandwidth, network overheads, etc.
Has anyone ploughed through the legal documents and found out how many counts they are sueing for, and what Ms Lindors' upstream is? Because if she has 128kBit/s and it's 1,000 counts, they should have to prove that she had her computer uploading music for 11 years straight without a break. (To quote Billy-Bob Thornton in Armageddon, "Most of us don't even have cars that old."). I doubt that much upstream was even available in most places 11 years ago....
Pardon me for asking, but how does a clinical hypnotherapist from Wales have extended contact through unreleased consoles and software through his job?
And is Sony gonna crucify your ass for breaking an NDA when they see this?
That's a dangerous route to go down, because it also leaves you open to rhetoric like "I wonder how many downloads of The Gimp or Paint.NET are actually lost sales for "
Declare downloads of open-source and FreeBeer software to be lost sales for commercial products
Declare the installation of such software to be a crime
Most of my machines are built from scratch, with OEM licensed copies of the OS, but laptops are virtually impossible to get "naked". And I do tend to start from scratch and repartition it, as you do.
They're also the most vulnerable to breakage ; my desktop usually only gets upgraded voluntarily because the parts I buy tend to be reliable. The hard drive in a laptop is something I regard as a perishable component, because sooner or later, it's going to headcrash or the bearings are going to wear out.
While we of course don't know whether the algorithm is going to be that nasty, if it prevents me from swapping in a replacement drive without paying for a new license.....
Never mind, anyway. I've already decided that the only way I shall be running Vista is if my job mandates that I should do so ; they won't be getting my personal cash. I no longer have such a taste for games as I once did, and quite frankly, I find software development a more enjoyable pastime anyway. I guess I'll be developing for a different platform in future.
Do you think that those in power in democratic nations want to keep democracy? Possibly the only part of democracy they want to keep is the appearance that the populace have any influence in government.
These units, as pointed out elsewhere, have always existed. The revealance of this unit is probably intended as a sop to the sheeple - if we public admit that we have a propaganda corps, then we can't have anything to hide on that front, right? They're on "our side", right?
You thoroughly deserve your +5 moderation for that. For another +5, a link to a citation would be wonderful.
This is the first documentary evidence I have seen (however flimsy it is) that Google is not now prey to the US laws that mean that a public company in the US is virtually required to be "evil" if that is what secures the greatest profit.
I've yet to find the mention that cropped up in the original, that the system had to be compatible with the proposed European system, but the number of documents has expanded considerably and I'm still looking. As has their estimate of costs, which has risen by an order of magnitude. And we all know how underpriced goverment IT project figures tend to be.
The justification that the DfT has always put forward for the scheme is the reduction of congestion in key areas. This does not stand up to examination.
The DfT themselves prices the "OBU" on board unit with GPS and cellular comms at between £100 and £525. In contrast, a simple active RFID in the front number plate would cost around £10. I suspect the road side infrastructure to read either solution is going to work out roughly equivalent in cost.
It's just not credible that the end goal of the scheme is congestion reduction. Congestion reduction only requires you to track vehicles entering the congested stretches of road. It does not require you to be able to track a vehicle parked in the middle of a field. When you can achieve your aims with an order of magnitude less in terms of capital cost, the only possible conclusions are that this is either pork-barrel spending on a massive scale, or that the government wants to track your vehicle wherever it goes, anywhere in Europe. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide WHY.
Restaurant food is not representative of the typical food of the culture.
For example, Indian food is typically not high in fat. But the restaurant variety is often saturated with ghee (clarified butter). This is because a lot of ghee is a sign of opulence, and what people want when they visit a restaurant is opulence, right?
The same applies to Chinese. Because the culture is historically quite poor, extra oil is a sign of "richness". I mean, this is a culture that invented the wok / stir fry cooking method because resources like firewood were so scarce. Because the food is cut into thin slivers you can cook it quickly in a wok with a minimum of oil, reducing the amount of firewood and oil required.
I don't believe that a fast metabolism is some kind of genetic accident either. The base pathways we have for processing food for energy are incredible invariant in terms of genetics. I think that your personal biochemistry is something that can be "trained" as much as any other physical attribute.
I think a fast metabolism is the product of habits that promote a fast metabolism. Eating right. Getting off your ass and walking places. Taking exercise.
My weight is pretty much dependant on my exercise level. My present job isn't helping, as I commute four hours a day on the train.
I had an *enormous* metabolism when I was 18 - actually objectively measured in terms of liters of oxygen/minute consumed at rest, as I was a med student. But at the time I was a superfit highschool rowing star, walked more than five miles a day to get to and from campus, and worked out on a regular basis. And ate whatever the hell I liked.
These days I really have to watch myself - but exercise still has the most profound effect on my weight. And I shall be striving to improve matters, because I have a 2 year old daughter and I care enough about seeing her future to work harder on mine.
My wife is like a pocket dynamo - she's a foot shorter than me, half my body weight, and she has real trouble keeping weight on, because she's like the gentleman discussed above - she really can't seem to see the value of taking care of her body, although her tendancy is to run in the other direction, she's too busy with her job as a hospital doctor and her extensive social commitments to slow down, eat properly and regularly, take exercise, etc. When she does eat, it's more often than not total high-calorie crap, but she rarely gains weight... I wish she would, she needs to put on about 10 pounds of muscle mass, she's literally wasted away since I met her.
And he also scores below average on a general IQ test ; but the man is so abnormal in many ways that it's not really fair to lump him in with the rest of the population.
From his general build he looks like he would fit in the classification of "Overweight" as opposed to "Obese". And as to whether it's decreased his abilities? Well, that would be rather like noticing that someone had taken a cupful or two out of the ocean.
The documentation for DirectX is good ; Microsoft documentation for all their APIs intended to be used by a third party is good. You can even download their documentation for free, which is more in line with the fact that their compilers are now also free to download.
The reverse engineering part is not the API, it's the implementation underneath. More like "re-engineering". It's basically a similar challenge to reimplementing a console graphics library for an emulator.
No you can't. You can sell it back (although, good luck finding an electric board which has the infrastructure to actually put in the chargeback meter and getting around the paperwork).
But it doesn't work like "a big battery". You're just enabling them to reduce their generation requirements overnight. Now, if only that EEStor capacitor/battery thing was available, you could store 52kWh in your garage in a unit that costs $2000... if only... with one (or more) of those babies and enough generation capacity you could feasibly go completely off grid.
Slashdot Mirror
Many thanks for correcting my misapprehension : I found this genuinely informative and I wish I could mod you up.
I too think that public broadcasters are great value for money, and I think we can agree that while they feel market pressure, they also exert it, which is one of the more important parts of their mandate.
Whoever modded this offtopic, shame on you. I've seen diversions in topic thread far more meandering and less relevant over the past few days.
It's an interesting opportunity to discuss the differences and similarities of the Pharmaceutical / Music business models.
Both of them provide
* something of perceived high value
* something where the bulk of cost in in the R&D phase
* something with a low per-unit production cost
* something where if the product is copied, it can be just as good as the original
Arguably, both also
* Advertise products excessively heavily given their actual value
* Exploit the producers of their intellectual property
The major difference is that the music industry has a consumer base where a significant fraction can copy the product themselves, whereas the pharamceutical industry only has to worry about industrial competitors in markets where their pricing levels cannot be supported.
The agreement that Russia has entered is ostensibly about clincal trial data, but given that clinical trials represent the most time consuming and costly part of the development of any drug, it is essentially about prohibiting the marketing of that drug product by a competitor. This protection appears to be distinct and seperate from the protection that may (or may not) be afforded by patents, and is liable to be imposed upon other countries seeking WTO agreements. It is in effect, using the regulatory framework of the country against them.
It could of course, be trivially circumvented by any country willing to make their certification process as simple as "the FDA approves of it, thus so shall we all".
The USA almost certainly has sufficient strategic reserves squirelled away to conquer oil producers.
Hell, they don't have zero domestic production. The consumption their military would require is miniscule compared to their present levels of consumer consumption.
About the only thing that would result is that you would deprive the greedy US consumer of the "American Way of Life(tm)" and make them just about angry enough to come and stomp on the rest of us.
The difference is that the license fee actually pays for something ; the world-class British Broadcasting Corporation.
Try and find a public service broadcaster anywhere in the world that produces better. Not only does the BBC produce programming good enough to export abroad, it also has a civilising and improving effect on all the other broadcasters in Britain. Even on our commercial channels, commercial breaks are shorter (typically 15 minutes per hour instead of 22 on some American channels), and the general standard is higher, because these companies have to compete with Aunty for eyeball/airtime.
I can understand people who genuinely choose not to watch television complaining about the harassment of the TV Licensing Authority. Their tactics are a little draconian. But in all fairness, I suspect that in the majority of cases, people claiming that they have no TV are just trying to avoid paying. For the rest, I'm sure that a yearly visit from the TV license man to certify them TV free should only be a small imposition. It's the threatening letters and similar that I take issue with. They should just have a clear dispute resolution process which involves a polite inspection visit and a susequent cessation of botherment for at least a year.
But I can't understand people who do watch television in the UK complain about paying the license fee. At a mere £131.50 a year it's just shy of £11 a month. People will shell out for a £40 per month satellite TV package without even blinking. They'll spend more on their mobile, their landline, their ISP, and none of these things contains such a wonderful cornucopia of content (aside from the internet, but the cost for getting a 24/7 15GBit/s stream of high-bandwidth video content on the internet would be rather more than £11 per month.)
And those who say "well, I don't watch the BBC, just the cable/satellite, so why should I pay for it?" are missing part of my point - without the BBC setting a standard which isn't bound to bow to commercial pressures, the commercial television in this country would rapidly descend to the depths that American and European broadcast television has.
The BBC is a BARGAIN, and I am in the camp who would genuinely pay twice as much for it and still be happy.
Given that the motion sensor is an accelerometer, it should be easy for the machine to detect the impact of your foot on the floor - it just has to pick up the point at which the sensor decelerates rapidly. Coupled with the lateral vectors of left/right forward/backward, you should actually be able to produce MORE move options than DDR. This setup could, for example, ask you to jump to the right with both feet, and actually be able to measure it, unlike the standard DDR impact pad which can only detect that *something* has jumped on the pad, not how many things.
I'd suggest that a game which provides a pair of two strap-on ankle holsters and gets you to attach a wiimote to each leg is not an impossibility.
Vodafone at the very least, disabled the Bluetooth OBEX protocol on my Motorola V3 to make it harder to copy objects to and from the phone.
This is done firstly to encourage sales of their third-party phone management software, and secondly to increase their revenues from the likes of reverse SMS services for ringtone purchases and the like.
Telcos are only interested in giving you a feature rich handset in so far as they benefit from your use of those features. Features that allow you to enjoy the phone without their financial participation are less well supported.
... although not on Windows, obviously.
Subversion clients above version 1.1 on *nix systems which support symlinks are quite happy to support them, although it's a bit of a kludge.
The SVN repository filesystem itself has no concept of the symlink, something which remarkably enough, Visual SourceSafe *does* support. The "Share" command in VSS is about the only thing I miss about it when using SVN.
I *don't* miss the period repo crashes, the inordinate sensitivity to network outage, and the propensity of VSS to allow you do do horrible things to your data without even warning you.
And of course, if anyone really finds a feature missing from SVN to be really boiling their noodle, they can always code it up themselves (programming skills / cash to pay for developers may be required.).
Is this how corporations will respond when we have the technology to have a microwave sized device that can build almost any consumer object under the control of a computer?
Shut up shop with a sign that says, "Sorry, Godti Makers did us out of business" ?
I for one, welcome our matter-assembling, programatically controlled, electronically fucked-out-of-their chip overlords.
I second this.
The entire rationale behind Choose and Book is fallacious. It's a piece of window dressing for government policy - a service rooted in spin. The premise that "Patients want to choose which healthcare service to consume." is utter nonsense.
Patients in the UK, by and large, do not want to choose. They just want to receive treatment. Because of the prevalence of the NHS, and the relatively low takeup of private healthcare, there is no real perception of choice anyway.
Making the patient choose a service provider is just a means for the government to impress upon the populace that they are making changes to NHS IT systems. Choose and Book is a convenient example because it contains no potential compromise to patient confidentiality, and because it's a relatively easy project.
If it had been done properly, of course, people would barely know it was there. Things would proceed as they always had done - the doctor would use his judgement (which is far better informed than the patients), select a specialist to refer to, and use the system to place the referral. In short, it would be a streamlined replacement for an existing paper system. Of course, this is not a high profile, visible success for government IT policy.
PS ; My opinion as expressed in any public forum in no way constitutes an accurate or informative reflection on the actual motivations for government policy.
Dear Bev, While it's not a 100% surety, a good way of adding credence to the provenance of these files would be to post MD5 checksums of the three archive files on a visibly accessible page at blackboxvoting.org Your neighbourhood friendly ubergeek should be able to oblige you. Or yourself, you seem to be pretty well versed. Much kudos to you. I watched Hacking Democracy the other night, and if it hadn't been such serious material, I would have been wetting myself with laughter at how craptastically awful the GEMS software is. I shall have a poke around in the material in a non self-endangering manner for a while.
But you're trying to make one person pay for the crimes of a geometric progression of other people. This is analagous to the Roman Catholic concept of "Original Sin".
While the person has responsibility for what they personally allow to be uploaded from their machine, you cannot hold her responsible for what other people do with that data after they receive it. That is their responsibility, and if the RIAA want recompense for those activities, it is that geometric progression of people that they should chase.
Upstream bandwidth (kBit/s) 128 (this is my own bandwidth rate)
Time to upload 1 MB (s) 64
Average song size (MB) 5
Time to upload average song (s) 320
Wholesale cost of song (USD) $0.70
Sue-value per song (USD) $750.00
Number of instances req'd 1071.43
Upload time per song sue-value (s) 342857.14
Or just shy of 4 days (3.97).
So 2 days for 256 kBit/s
And 1 day for 512 kBit/s
So basically, a value of $750 means that, if the sole means of distribution is via the network, for each and every count, the plaintiff should have to prove that the defendants computer was on, connected, and maxing it's upstream bandwidth for a period not less than 1 full day, multiplied by their upstream bandwidth divided by 512. I'd expect that also to be tempered by some reasonable fraction accounting for computer downtime, other uses of bandwidth, network overheads, etc.
Has anyone ploughed through the legal documents and found out how many counts they are sueing for, and what Ms Lindors' upstream is? Because if she has 128kBit/s and it's 1,000 counts, they should have to prove that she had her computer uploading music for 11 years straight without a break. (To quote Billy-Bob Thornton in Armageddon, "Most of us don't even have cars that old."). I doubt that much upstream was even available in most places 11 years ago....
Pardon me for asking, but how does a clinical hypnotherapist from Wales have extended contact through unreleased consoles and software through his job?
And is Sony gonna crucify your ass for breaking an NDA when they see this?
Most of my machines are built from scratch, with OEM licensed copies of the OS, but laptops are virtually impossible to get "naked". And I do tend to start from scratch and repartition it, as you do.
They're also the most vulnerable to breakage ; my desktop usually only gets upgraded voluntarily because the parts I buy tend to be reliable. The hard drive in a laptop is something I regard as a perishable component, because sooner or later, it's going to headcrash or the bearings are going to wear out.
While we of course don't know whether the algorithm is going to be that nasty, if it prevents me from swapping in a replacement drive without paying for a new license.....
Never mind, anyway. I've already decided that the only way I shall be running Vista is if my job mandates that I should do so ; they won't be getting my personal cash. I no longer have such a taste for games as I once did, and quite frankly, I find software development a more enjoyable pastime anyway. I guess I'll be developing for a different platform in future.
Do you think that those in power in democratic nations want to keep democracy? Possibly the only part of democracy they want to keep is the appearance that the populace have any influence in government.
These units, as pointed out elsewhere, have always existed. The revealance of this unit is probably intended as a sop to the sheeple - if we public admit that we have a propaganda corps, then we can't have anything to hide on that front, right? They're on "our side", right?
You thoroughly deserve your +5 moderation for that. For another +5, a link to a citation would be wonderful.
This is the first documentary evidence I have seen (however flimsy it is) that Google is not now prey to the US laws that mean that a public company in the US is virtually required to be "evil" if that is what secures the greatest profit.
Otherwise known as "Track Every Vehicle in Europe with the thin excuse of taxation".
Since the last time I looked at this, the UK Department for Transport documentation on the matter has become far more structured and comprehensive.
I've yet to find the mention that cropped up in the original, that the system had to be compatible with the proposed European system, but the number of documents has expanded considerably and I'm still looking. As has their estimate of costs, which has risen by an order of magnitude. And we all know how underpriced goverment IT project figures tend to be.
The justification that the DfT has always put forward for the scheme is the reduction of congestion in key areas. This does not stand up to examination.
The DfT themselves prices the "OBU" on board unit with GPS and cellular comms at between £100 and £525. In contrast, a simple active RFID in the front number plate would cost around £10. I suspect the road side infrastructure to read either solution is going to work out roughly equivalent in cost.
It's just not credible that the end goal of the scheme is congestion reduction. Congestion reduction only requires you to track vehicles entering the congested stretches of road. It does not require you to be able to track a vehicle parked in the middle of a field. When you can achieve your aims with an order of magnitude less in terms of capital cost, the only possible conclusions are that this is either pork-barrel spending on a massive scale, or that the government wants to track your vehicle wherever it goes, anywhere in Europe. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide WHY.
Restaurant food is not representative of the typical food of the culture.
For example, Indian food is typically not high in fat. But the restaurant variety is often saturated with ghee (clarified butter). This is because a lot of ghee is a sign of opulence, and what people want when they visit a restaurant is opulence, right?
The same applies to Chinese. Because the culture is historically quite poor, extra oil is a sign of "richness". I mean, this is a culture that invented the wok / stir fry cooking method because resources like firewood were so scarce. Because the food is cut into thin slivers you can cook it quickly in a wok with a minimum of oil, reducing the amount of firewood and oil required.
The food you see in restaurants is the Americanised version.
I don't believe that a fast metabolism is some kind of genetic accident either. The base pathways we have for processing food for energy are incredible invariant in terms of genetics. I think that your personal biochemistry is something that can be "trained" as much as any other physical attribute.
I think a fast metabolism is the product of habits that promote a fast metabolism. Eating right. Getting off your ass and walking places. Taking exercise.
My weight is pretty much dependant on my exercise level. My present job isn't helping, as I commute four hours a day on the train.
I had an *enormous* metabolism when I was 18 - actually objectively measured in terms of liters of oxygen/minute consumed at rest, as I was a med student. But at the time I was a superfit highschool rowing star, walked more than five miles a day to get to and from campus, and worked out on a regular basis. And ate whatever the hell I liked.
These days I really have to watch myself - but exercise still has the most profound effect on my weight. And I shall be striving to improve matters, because I have a 2 year old daughter and I care enough about seeing her future to work harder on mine.
My wife is like a pocket dynamo - she's a foot shorter than me, half my body weight, and she has real trouble keeping weight on, because she's like the gentleman discussed above - she really can't seem to see the value of taking care of her body, although her tendancy is to run in the other direction, she's too busy with her job as a hospital doctor and her extensive social commitments to slow down, eat properly and regularly, take exercise, etc. When she does eat, it's more often than not total high-calorie crap, but she rarely gains weight... I wish she would, she needs to put on about 10 pounds of muscle mass, she's literally wasted away since I met her.
And he also scores below average on a general IQ test ; but the man is so abnormal in many ways that it's not really fair to lump him in with the rest of the population.
From his general build he looks like he would fit in the classification of "Overweight" as opposed to "Obese". And as to whether it's decreased his abilities? Well, that would be rather like noticing that someone had taken a cupful or two out of the ocean.
You're neglecting the possibility for VR formats.
I'm sure full-immersion sensory data will require far more data bandwidth.
The documentation for DirectX is good ; Microsoft documentation for all their APIs intended to be used by a third party is good. You can even download their documentation for free, which is more in line with the fact that their compilers are now also free to download.
The reverse engineering part is not the API, it's the implementation underneath. More like "re-engineering". It's basically a similar challenge to reimplementing a console graphics library for an emulator.
This is why I am so glad that we in the UK have at least one major media outlet that doesn't always have to think of the bottom line - the BBC.
No you can't. You can sell it back (although, good luck finding an electric board which has the infrastructure to actually put in the chargeback meter and getting around the paperwork).
But it doesn't work like "a big battery". You're just enabling them to reduce their generation requirements overnight. Now, if only that EEStor capacitor/battery thing was available, you could store 52kWh in your garage in a unit that costs $2000... if only... with one (or more) of those babies and enough generation capacity you could feasibly go completely off grid.