Errrm.... Aircon not affecting performance? It sucks about a third of the engine power out of my (admittedly, tiny) car.
Anything electrically powered will put a load on the alternator and leach power from the engine, so that's aircon, seat warmers, air fans, electrical accessories, etc.
And as the sibling points out, extra weight takes extra juice to haul around.
I think we're due for a new age of minimalism if battery electric vehicles are going to take off in the market - they really need to reduce their power draw which means going on a diet as far as current consumption and weight goes.
I have a flashcart and it's incredibly convenient to be able to carry all my games around in one unit instead of having to manage about 20 little slips of plastic.
Plus I can rip DVDs or recorded TV to it and watch it on the train.
I agree with the sentiment, as does this author...
Marshall Brain's "Manna"... but the problem is that the game is rigged for the _current_ owners, who don't want to see their wedge of the pie cut into by those nasty filthy peons they have to employ.
I did participate in one of their projects once for the practice with the language, but it was just too top-heavy to achieve proper quality - really difficult to communicate that the design needed changing to fulfil their requirements. And of course, not winning the payout sucks when you've put so much effort into it, even if you were doing it just for the practice it stings somewhat.
If you can make your process require less fewer skills, you can pay less for the labour to enable it.
Hence robots welding cars. Hence McDonalds having a very clear procedure for EVERY task in their restaurants, very clearly laid out in the three-ring binder, as well as timers on their clamshell grill and pictures of hamburgers on their point of sale tills, and most importantly, factories that produce pre-prepared food items ready to shove in the grill or the fryer.
When mechanisation can magnify the efforts of a few skilled people so much, the labour market inevitably takes a nosedive.
As a race we profit immensely from our ingenuity, but these profits are concentrated in the upper strata of society while the lower strata benefit almost solely as a function of generating these profits.
I would favour entry to the Lords by exam. Or some other test of merit. I reckon it would work very well.
As to whether it would be accepted... no, not with the anti-intellectual streak that runs through this country. It used to be that intellectual ability was lauded, but now we only celebrate... celebrity. Stephen Fry is probably the one exception but only because in the peoples eyes he is a celebrity first and an intellectual second.
MS are lairy of doing anything that will level accusations of monopoly at them again - they have been in trouble for bundling apps before now and if they put in a PDF viewer this is the card that Adobe will play against them.
This is is why Notepad is still the same awful useless piece of rubbish that can't even open files with Unix line endings properly. (note - not sure if the Vista/7 version does this but the most-used business version, XP, does not). The text editor industry is so large that they would be accused of destroying it single handedly if they updated it.
I was staying in a hotel that used iMacs for all their needs recently. I walked into the foyer wearing polarized shades and thought all their computers were switched off because the screens were black. So this trick won't work with those, it would seem.
Really cool setup though, they were streaming all the TV from a central server with VLC.
It should be ; in reality the machines we have in the office eat 650MB of RAM just to boot because of all the corporate paranoiaware installed on them.
Indeed, the signs are there... she thinks him incredibly young, calls him "Sweetie" like a wife or a doting mother, knows his true name, keeps a TARDIS shaped diary and is rather condescending to him at times. It might be enough of an explanation that she's his future wife, but the alternate is that she's his future self.
When I was still practising I worked out I was spending around 3 hours a week just transcribing prescription cards from full ones to fresh ones because the card served as the nurses administration record as well - a total waste of my time as a qualified doctor, but legally it had to be me because they were prescriptions.
There are those of us that think that while children don't necessarily understand logical arguments or "sanctions", they are hardwired (like every other animal) to understand pain.
I define spanking as causing mild temporary pain without tissue damage. Anything that causes visible damage is "beating" them and not "spanking" them.
It should also be used extremely sparingly and only when other punishments have failed to control their behaviour - that way the other punishments are reinforced and become effective on their own without the need to deploy spanking, because they know what comes next.
In short, spanking is a useful means of defining an absolute frame of reference for other punishment. I've spanked my daughter precisely once in her life, only after the usual punishment (the "naughty corner") was not effective, and explained why. Since then, standard punishments have always been adequate. If I'd left it, what then? She would have learned that the "naughty corner" was an ineffective sanction with no teeth and started to behave just as she chose.
I'm aware that some people take it too far. I would go so far as to suggest that these people aren't even considering the morals of the act. Many of them are just being violent with them because they find the immature behaviour of children annoying.
Banning or stigmatizing the act does nothing but remove a useful disciplinary tool from responsible parents, or make them feel guilty about disciplining their kids. The parents who are beating their kids outside of a disciplinary framework didn't care whether it was moral or not anyway.
Ok, it's one of those perpetual "beta" releases. But it works, runs with Pulseaudio, and I'm looking at the webcam prefs right now and my face is definitely there.
I agree, the 2.0 and prior releases were dreadful but the 2.1 builds have been good for me.
It was at one time, both - you had to pay for the call, and pay the ISP for the time you spent online.
In America, inclusive local calls were common at the time, so they just paid their ISP.
We did get a variety of payment models such as
your ISP number was a premium rate no and the ISP got all their costs from that
You paid your ISP per minute to call a freephone number
You pay your ISP a fixed monthly rate to call a freephone number
And even - buy £30 of shares in my company and your dividends will pay for your ISP access
I tried them all. Even the last one ; the guy absconded to Bermuda with the funds but until he was gone, the service his company provided was hands down the best deal you could get.
The worst thing about them all was tying up the phone line.
3D makes it harder to copy movies in the theatre with a camera. High def was their attempt to make things hard to copy by inflating the content size by an order of magnitude. 3D doesn't even double the data size required because you can get good compression from the commonality between left and right fields.
It does actually add value though. It had a shaky start but I've genuinely started enjoying certain movies in 3D more than I would have done in 2D.
On the other hand, all the recent stories about bullshit Hollywood accounting have counteracted that and put me off seeing movies at least as much as 3D is going to encourage it.
IP is the new imperialism though. People truly think that "owning" an idea gives them the right to the lions share of the profit from that idea, even if the bulk of the value is added by those working to implement it.
No, I'm serious. My suspicion is that she shielded the successful plants with something that contains trace nutrients that are lacking in her local soil.
For example, if her shielding was composed of steel chicken wire, then rainwater will pick up iron and zinc from the wire before it falls on the ground, both of these are essential trace nutrients for plant growth. In particular the rich red colour of the leaves in the experimental group speaks of a good supply of iron.
Alas, I've not seen the paper. If she's doing it properly her control plants should be growing through a layer of what she's using for shielding, instead of inside it. I suspect this is not the case.
The neglected part of this is the potential accusation that the pages being published don't actually represent her opinions.
If campaign promised published digitally were required to come with cryptographic signatures from that candidate, the easy refutation would be to say "if I published that, where's my signature?". Of course, politicians would also fear the possibility that someone could prove with some certainty that they said a particular thing in the past.....
You're really just pointing out one of the problems with so-called free market capitalism. The much touted advantage of capitalism is that market competition drives down prices, which increases utility to the consumer. But it doesn't work so well, as in the cases you suggested, where there is a limited supply of non-fungible goods.
Exxon provides value by moving the oil from one place to another where it is more useful. In your example, if Xbox 360s are in short supply in one part of the country but plentiful in your local Walmart, you are providing value by moving the goods to where they are needed. If you are selling them on to locals, the value you are providing is that some people can translate a higher price into getting their Xbox earlier than if they'd had to wait for new stock - an Xbox now is worth more than an Xbox in the future. This is only really true if the demand outstrips the supply - if the demand and supply are similar, then you're just hoarding Xboxes for profit. But the supply chain for Xboxes is such that you can be reasonably sure that some more will be along soon.
In the case of concert tickets, there is no value to geographic translocation (the concert is in a fixed venue), or early acquisition (the concert is at a fixed time). The value the scalper is providing is that you don't have to queue to get your ticket, and you have a higher probability of getting a ticket because fewer people want to pay their higher price.
The problem being that the scalper is part of the reason they provide value ; they quickly buy up large quantities of tickets from the vendor, which artificially increases the scarcity of the goods. That isn't free-market capitalism, because they are distorting their market. If the organizer did their sums right, they should have enough seats for everyone willing to pay their stated ticket price. I'm not saying they do... but in this case, the scalper is the reason for their own existence - the reason you're willing to pay the scalpers prices for a ticket is because the scalpers have bought them instead of you. They're not adding value and making a fat buck doing it and that annoys people. It's rent-seeking behaviour - they are profiting from the mere ownership of those tickets for a while.
If concert goers didn't have to pay their inflated prices, they'd have more disposable income remaining and organizers might put on more dates in bigger venues to capture that, resulting in money going toward what people actually want, which is live music performances.
Is the perception by the concert organisers that there's action out there they ain't getting a piece of.
They can't raise their ticket prices too high, or they won't sell enough to fill their venues, and face protests from their audiences. But they'd dearly love to be able to do what the scalpers do which is create a sub-segment of their audience who pays a greatly increased price for essentially the same service.
The only idea they have so far is that if they drive the scalpers out of business... well, what? If they already set the ticket prices as high as they dare, the only effect they will achieve is to piss off a few rich people who will not get tickets where previously they could.
You could view it as preparation for the next logical step - a Dutch auction. Non-transferable tickets would prevent scalpers from waiting for the latter stages of the auction where the tickets get cheaper to snap up a bargain. The Dutch auction means that all the seats in the house go for exactly the price that the market will bear, so they finally get the action they are craving.
Oh sure, trying to pay for your train journeys in a law-abiding manner is awfully bigoted.
His choice of adjectives (and quite frankly, what adjective isn't open to deliberate misinterpretation here?) had nothing to do with the causation of the incident, which was that someone wanted a free ride, and apparently did so with the tacit approval of the guard.
The fact that you are assigning bigotry to this poster despite the fact that his choice of adjective could be construed to be in order to cause the least offence reveals far more reflexive prejudice on your part than on his.
I bet the contractors all bid in good faith, expecting it to be a cake walk like all of us are assuming right now, until they discovered a seething morass of requirements. Things like
They already had a technical specification for the system (dreamed up by the chief sexton or whatever a cemetery has) which was basically insane and unimplementable but expected it to be followed.
They change the requirements constantly.
The contractors discovered whole other sets of problems concealed in the back of the cupboard ("Oh yeah, we have to keep the form P12 in the cupboard...")
And things too terrible to imagine beyond the ken of engineers.
Imagine if they did digital distribution - just take a thumbdrive, and they plug it into their server and upload a copy. Their inventory problems would disappear instantly. And sneakernet is faster than BitTorrent.
Slashdot Mirror
Errrm.... Aircon not affecting performance? It sucks about a third of the engine power out of my (admittedly, tiny) car.
Anything electrically powered will put a load on the alternator and leach power from the engine, so that's aircon, seat warmers, air fans, electrical accessories, etc.
And as the sibling points out, extra weight takes extra juice to haul around.
I think we're due for a new age of minimalism if battery electric vehicles are going to take off in the market - they really need to reduce their power draw which means going on a diet as far as current consumption and weight goes.
I have a flashcart and it's incredibly convenient to be able to carry all my games around in one unit instead of having to manage about 20 little slips of plastic.
Plus I can rip DVDs or recorded TV to it and watch it on the train.
So there are legitimate uses.
A more useful statistic would be the percentage who have stocks that earn sufficient dividends to live on.
I agree with the sentiment, as does this author ...
Marshall Brain's "Manna" ... but the problem is that the game is rigged for the _current_ owners, who don't want to see their wedge of the pie cut into by those nasty filthy peons they have to employ.
They are, see TopCoder
I did participate in one of their projects once for the practice with the language, but it was just too top-heavy to achieve proper quality - really difficult to communicate that the design needed changing to fulfil their requirements. And of course, not winning the payout sucks when you've put so much effort into it, even if you were doing it just for the practice it stings somewhat.
If you can make your process require less fewer skills, you can pay less for the labour to enable it.
Hence robots welding cars. Hence McDonalds having a very clear procedure for EVERY task in their restaurants, very clearly laid out in the three-ring binder, as well as timers on their clamshell grill and pictures of hamburgers on their point of sale tills, and most importantly, factories that produce pre-prepared food items ready to shove in the grill or the fryer.
When mechanisation can magnify the efforts of a few skilled people so much, the labour market inevitably takes a nosedive.
As a race we profit immensely from our ingenuity, but these profits are concentrated in the upper strata of society while the lower strata benefit almost solely as a function of generating these profits.
I would favour entry to the Lords by exam. Or some other test of merit. I reckon it would work very well.
As to whether it would be accepted ... no, not with the anti-intellectual streak that runs through this country. It used to be that intellectual ability was lauded, but now we only celebrate... celebrity. Stephen Fry is probably the one exception but only because in the peoples eyes he is a celebrity first and an intellectual second.
MS are lairy of doing anything that will level accusations of monopoly at them again - they have been in trouble for bundling apps before now and if they put in a PDF viewer this is the card that Adobe will play against them.
This is is why Notepad is still the same awful useless piece of rubbish that can't even open files with Unix line endings properly. (note - not sure if the Vista/7 version does this but the most-used business version, XP, does not). The text editor industry is so large that they would be accused of destroying it single handedly if they updated it.
I was staying in a hotel that used iMacs for all their needs recently. I walked into the foyer wearing polarized shades and thought all their computers were switched off because the screens were black. So this trick won't work with those, it would seem.
Really cool setup though, they were streaming all the TV from a central server with VLC.
It should be ; in reality the machines we have in the office eat 650MB of RAM just to boot because of all the corporate paranoiaware installed on them.
Indeed, the signs are there... she thinks him incredibly young, calls him "Sweetie" like a wife or a doting mother, knows his true name, keeps a TARDIS shaped diary and is rather condescending to him at times. It might be enough of an explanation that she's his future wife, but the alternate is that she's his future self.
When I was still practising I worked out I was spending around 3 hours a week just transcribing prescription cards from full ones to fresh ones because the card served as the nurses administration record as well - a total waste of my time as a qualified doctor, but legally it had to be me because they were prescriptions.
There are those of us that think that while children don't necessarily understand logical arguments or "sanctions", they are hardwired (like every other animal) to understand pain.
I define spanking as causing mild temporary pain without tissue damage. Anything that causes visible damage is "beating" them and not "spanking" them.
It should also be used extremely sparingly and only when other punishments have failed to control their behaviour - that way the other punishments are reinforced and become effective on their own without the need to deploy spanking, because they know what comes next.
In short, spanking is a useful means of defining an absolute frame of reference for other punishment. I've spanked my daughter precisely once in her life, only after the usual punishment (the "naughty corner") was not effective, and explained why. Since then, standard punishments have always been adequate. If I'd left it, what then? She would have learned that the "naughty corner" was an ineffective sanction with no teeth and started to behave just as she chose.
I'm aware that some people take it too far. I would go so far as to suggest that these people aren't even considering the morals of the act. Many of them are just being violent with them because they find the immature behaviour of children annoying.
Banning or stigmatizing the act does nothing but remove a useful disciplinary tool from responsible parents, or make them feel guilty about disciplining their kids. The parents who are beating their kids outside of a disciplinary framework didn't care whether it was moral or not anyway.
Skype still haven't released a 64-bit version of the Linux client
Errmmmm, what, apart from this one?
Skype Downloads page
Ok, it's one of those perpetual "beta" releases. But it works, runs with Pulseaudio, and I'm looking at the webcam prefs right now and my face is definitely there.
I agree, the 2.0 and prior releases were dreadful but the 2.1 builds have been good for me.
It was at one time, both - you had to pay for the call, and pay the ISP for the time you spent online.
In America, inclusive local calls were common at the time, so they just paid their ISP.
We did get a variety of payment models such as
I tried them all. Even the last one ; the guy absconded to Bermuda with the funds but until he was gone, the service his company provided was hands down the best deal you could get.
The worst thing about them all was tying up the phone line.
3D makes it harder to copy movies in the theatre with a camera. High def was their attempt to make things hard to copy by inflating the content size by an order of magnitude. 3D doesn't even double the data size required because you can get good compression from the commonality between left and right fields.
It does actually add value though. It had a shaky start but I've genuinely started enjoying certain movies in 3D more than I would have done in 2D.
On the other hand, all the recent stories about bullshit Hollywood accounting have counteracted that and put me off seeing movies at least as much as 3D is going to encourage it.
IP is the new imperialism though. People truly think that "owning" an idea gives them the right to the lions share of the profit from that idea, even if the bulk of the value is added by those working to implement it.
No, I'm serious. My suspicion is that she shielded the successful plants with something that contains trace nutrients that are lacking in her local soil.
For example, if her shielding was composed of steel chicken wire, then rainwater will pick up iron and zinc from the wire before it falls on the ground, both of these are essential trace nutrients for plant growth. In particular the rich red colour of the leaves in the experimental group speaks of a good supply of iron.
Alas, I've not seen the paper. If she's doing it properly her control plants should be growing through a layer of what she's using for shielding, instead of inside it. I suspect this is not the case.
The neglected part of this is the potential accusation that the pages being published don't actually represent her opinions.
If campaign promised published digitally were required to come with cryptographic signatures from that candidate, the easy refutation would be to say "if I published that, where's my signature?". Of course, politicians would also fear the possibility that someone could prove with some certainty that they said a particular thing in the past.....
You're really just pointing out one of the problems with so-called free market capitalism. The much touted advantage of capitalism is that market competition drives down prices, which increases utility to the consumer. But it doesn't work so well, as in the cases you suggested, where there is a limited supply of non-fungible goods.
Exxon provides value by moving the oil from one place to another where it is more useful. In your example, if Xbox 360s are in short supply in one part of the country but plentiful in your local Walmart, you are providing value by moving the goods to where they are needed. If you are selling them on to locals, the value you are providing is that some people can translate a higher price into getting their Xbox earlier than if they'd had to wait for new stock - an Xbox now is worth more than an Xbox in the future. This is only really true if the demand outstrips the supply - if the demand and supply are similar, then you're just hoarding Xboxes for profit. But the supply chain for Xboxes is such that you can be reasonably sure that some more will be along soon.
In the case of concert tickets, there is no value to geographic translocation (the concert is in a fixed venue), or early acquisition (the concert is at a fixed time). The value the scalper is providing is that you don't have to queue to get your ticket, and you have a higher probability of getting a ticket because fewer people want to pay their higher price.
The problem being that the scalper is part of the reason they provide value ; they quickly buy up large quantities of tickets from the vendor, which artificially increases the scarcity of the goods. That isn't free-market capitalism, because they are distorting their market. If the organizer did their sums right, they should have enough seats for everyone willing to pay their stated ticket price. I'm not saying they do ... but in this case, the scalper is the reason for their own existence - the reason you're willing to pay the scalpers prices for a ticket is because the scalpers have bought them instead of you. They're not adding value and making a fat buck doing it and that annoys people. It's rent-seeking behaviour - they are profiting from the mere ownership of those tickets for a while.
If concert goers didn't have to pay their inflated prices, they'd have more disposable income remaining and organizers might put on more dates in bigger venues to capture that, resulting in money going toward what people actually want, which is live music performances.
Is the perception by the concert organisers that there's action out there they ain't getting a piece of.
They can't raise their ticket prices too high, or they won't sell enough to fill their venues, and face protests from their audiences. But they'd dearly love to be able to do what the scalpers do which is create a sub-segment of their audience who pays a greatly increased price for essentially the same service.
The only idea they have so far is that if they drive the scalpers out of business... well, what? If they already set the ticket prices as high as they dare, the only effect they will achieve is to piss off a few rich people who will not get tickets where previously they could.
You could view it as preparation for the next logical step - a Dutch auction. Non-transferable tickets would prevent scalpers from waiting for the latter stages of the auction where the tickets get cheaper to snap up a bargain. The Dutch auction means that all the seats in the house go for exactly the price that the market will bear, so they finally get the action they are craving.
Yes, but that helium isn't controlled by the USA and thus doesn't actually exist.
Oh sure, trying to pay for your train journeys in a law-abiding manner is awfully bigoted.
His choice of adjectives (and quite frankly, what adjective isn't open to deliberate misinterpretation here?) had nothing to do with the causation of the incident, which was that someone wanted a free ride, and apparently did so with the tacit approval of the guard.
The fact that you are assigning bigotry to this poster despite the fact that his choice of adjective could be construed to be in order to cause the least offence reveals far more reflexive prejudice on your part than on his.
There's a video of Nick Clegg on the front page specifically promising that all the posts will be read.
My first thought was - yeah, it's a great source of material for tracking dissidents.
But it is awesome. I hope it really gets done right.
I bet the contractors all bid in good faith, expecting it to be a cake walk like all of us are assuming right now, until they discovered a seething morass of requirements. Things like
Imagine if they did digital distribution - just take a thumbdrive, and they plug it into their server and upload a copy. Their inventory problems would disappear instantly. And sneakernet is faster than BitTorrent.