Wonderfully? Wonderfully??? To wander back and forth through a rats maze where the bends are NOT wide enough to granny in front of me to maneuver her cart around without knocking merchandise off the flimsy pegboards.
To _finally_ get the to the head of the line and seem to be able to outguess the annoying automated voice guide. (you can see people swipe or hand over cash, the clerk has hit the total button, but the guide doesn't send you to the clerk until after they have hit the change button, even then there is an almost 2 second lag between "Please go to" and the cashier number.
And yet it seems _everybody_ , even after staring dumbly at the same signs and flashing lights for 2 minutes STILL starts, looks up in surprise and peers around trying to figure out which aisle the voice is telling them to go to. (With some I suspect the problem is the voices in their head are contradicting the voice on the pole)
At the end of this Skinner inspired rat's maze there isn't any frickin' cheese for the customer
While we're on the subject, I notice further down people commenting on the new self service check outs that many retailers are starting to put in. They seem to like them. I LOATHE them. In my area, only Canadian Tire and Wal-Mart use them and I avoid them. Certain days through the week, at Canadian Tire only the customer service desk and the self serve checkouts are staffed. I always go to the customer service desk when that happens.
1) The self serve check outs are bar code and scale based. The system has to know the precise weight of every bar coded item. If you don't put the item on the scales, it won't let you continue, yet the scales are imprecise enough that a two back of automotive bulbs often don't weight enough to register. And good luck trying to deal with an unwieldy item that doesn't fit in a standard bag. A regular clerk just throws a sticker on it and moves on. This self service system halts and you have to wait for the central cashier to come over and fix it. This always takes a lot longer than having a clerk already standing there and eager to get to the next customer.
2) The system does not provide a customer a way to manual type in a barcode number the way a skilled clerk can when the bars themselves aren't legible to the laser. At the Walmart, deli items get a custom bar code printed up right then and there, but for some reason, the ink sometimes gets a tad smeared. (I don't know what ink/printing system is in the one they use here.) A human can read the numbers, but the laser can't apparently make heads or tails of the bars. Again, you need that central cash person to come over and fix it.
3) Both self service systems are set up so one person is supervising 4 registers and it seems at least at the Canadian Tire, the management only allots one person to do this per shift. At the Walmart, it appears that during slack time, the customer service person covers it in addition to their other duties. These leads to a problem. If you have four clerks and things are slow, you have the flexibility to send one or two off on break earlier or go stock shelves or something. When it's only one person, sure it's cheaper, but what happens when that person needs to go take a leak? At both Walmart and Canadian Tire on at least one occasion each, there hasn't been anyone standing on that little raised platform next to the self serve checkouts. At the Walmart at least, there was usually two other cashiers on duty. (one at the one queue into multiple registers section and one in the traditional single queue area)
At Canadian Tire on the other hand, one time there was nobody, I mean nobody at any of the registers, including the customer service. I looked around, waited a bit and then the customer service staff came back with an empty cart (had been restocking returns I guess) and the self serve supervisor came hustling over from the bathroom/service centre area looking flustered.
And as a bonus, if you pick the right frequency of sound to start with, not only would pedestrians not be able to tell if you are approaching or departing, but they wouldn't have a clue which direction you're really in. Kind of like a mosquito in a dark room.
Sorry, but that just sounds too damn much like "Won't someone pleeeaase think of the children!" for my liking.
Do you have any idea how many injuries and injustices have been committed in an attempt to control thought? Let me throw some terms at you to look up on your own:
1) The Cultural Revolution
2) The Killing Fields
3) Punitive psychiatry
4) McCarthyism
5) Dear Leader
6) The Inquistion (Blasphemy, Apostasy and Heresy )
Put me down as one of the people who fall into both categories. I know that my opt-out won't be heeded. (I may be wrong, but I'm certain)
Actual laws against spam don't seem to have diminished the number of spam messages I get. I've actually taken the time to try and opt out of some the less annoying, slightly more legitimate emails and I've noticed something interesting that seems to be common to all of the opt-out pages I have seen.
A) If/when you sign up for something, you are implicitly agreeing to having your contact details and other information shared/sold to "business partners, service providers and other affiliates" but when you opt-out later, it applies only to the company directly. You'll still get spammed by those other firms.
B) They NEVER say that they will delete your data, just that they won't use it themselves. On it's own, your data is almost worthless, but in the aggregate with thousands of other people with similar profiles it can be worth quite a sum. So opting out still leaves the problem of companies unknown to me, collecting data about me against my will and then selling that data to god-knows-who anywhere in the world. (It's been alleged that intelligence agencies routinely obtain these data stores to cross reference against their existing files.) By the time you get around to opting out, your data could easily have been sold and re-sold dozens of times.
C)The fact that I am willing to actually read the Terms and chose to opt-out is itself another detail to add and cross reference with any other data that they have; or think they have, linked to me. A list composed purely of people who opt-out of (for example) the email alerts that they automatically got subscribed to when they joined a tech forum is probably pretty worthless for a fake Viagra spammer, but potentially worthwhile for a vendor of security and privacy protecting software. (oh the irony!)
and some
A nearby call centre around here has (or at least had) the Canadian contract for OnStar and I've heard some hard to credit but plausible anecdotes about the amount of information the system has on you and how little there is in the way of abuse prevention. Based on these, I would never knowingly buy a vehicle that even had the system installed, let alone activated and subscription paid for. (Apparently; among other problems, the system as set up makes it difficult to transfer ownership to a used car unless the new owner also contracts with OnStar. Until then, most of the time OnStar records still show the original owner, which means the original owner can still call OnStar and get help disabling what is now your car)
That was my first thought as well, since my particular SWMBO walks very differently depending on which pair of footwear she's wearing.
My second thought is not so gender limited. I have osteo-arthritis and fibromyalgia and I walk incredibly differently depending on whether or not I am having a flareup. In fact, my gait changes slowly but noticably through out the day as I tire. So much so that some of my more observant friends have been able to make pretty close guesses about how long I've been on my feet, simply by how I hold myself and move around
Several folks have posted that they'll be interested in an EV when it can do a certain range (call when it can go all week, call me when I can get 500mi etc) Others have responded that by and large, you don't really drive all that far on a day to day basis.
Here's my problem: I live in an apartment building in a large town/small city, so my parking is a ground level lot with the bare minimum of light standards that the municipal building code allows. My assigned spot doesn't even have a curb stone, let alone a source of power run out to it.
At work, I park in an industrial plaza that has only one source of light, the big sign that advertises all the businesses in that plaza. It's such a basic lot that there aren't even painted lines and due to my low position in the company, "my" spot is well away from the building.
So, where would I charge my hypothetical EV? As far as I am concerned an EV is a no-go until municipal codes in both my home town and city where I work are changed to require charge ports for every parking spot that can reasonably called an assigned slot. (someone's assigned bay in the parking garage at his/her apt building, all "employees only" parking spots, municipal curb side "free parking between 8pm and 6am" parking spaces and while we're at it, all those "pay and display" parking lots as well.)
In my opinion, it's the core city-dwellers who could make the most of a small, short-range and inexpensive EV but face the hardest challenges in getting them powered.
Want to know what I think the next big development in EV vehicles should be? School buses. Around here they drive for a total of three hours in the morning (one shift each for the public and catholic schools) then they park for 4-5 hrs, drive for another 3 hours and then park until the next morning. Some park at the drivers home, but most park in a big yard at the depot.
Relatively few of them need to drive in excess of 80km and there is tons of space underneath them for battery packs. The same weight of vehicle vs # of passengers carried economy of scale that a diesel bus has would also be true of an EV bus. Throw in the fact that; unlike your typical four door sedan, school buses don't have such power hungry accessories as a/c power windows, rear defrost, hell most them seem to be barely heated at all. The only draw back I can see is that you can almost guarantee that your local bus line will be far more motivated by, and play closer attention to things like initial capital outlay, long term operation costs and then cost per mile than your average car buyer. I want to buy an electric car, but I have to admit that being able to brag that I have one, knowing I am on the cutting edge and being all "green" is among the motivations, I suspect that's true of a number of EV owners and wannabe owners. The only EV bus I can find with a hasty Google search are Ebus' products and they say right up front that thier city transit style buses are well over a 290,000U$ each! At those kind of prices, no wonder I'm not seeing any EV school buses yet. Diesel buses run under 80,000. An EV bus has to match that, or at least come close, you can go a loooong way on 210,000$ worth of diesel bought at fleet rates....
Anyone here work for Bluebird or Thomas? Those seem to be the only brands of school bus I ever see around here.....
As an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe to the Americans) and an Ignostic I gotta ask if you mean Indian in the sense of First Nation or Indian as in from the sub-continent?
I've had the same issue so thanks for the work-around. On the other hand, it does confirm that it's the slashcode for the idle section that's broken and not a problem with our browser(s)
OK, I'm a bad little slashdotter, I actually RTFA. I noticed a few things:
1)TFA actually acknowledges that the ISBN is very North America-centric, but the other cataloging types are also either N.A-centric or at least western world-centric.
2) The entire article is based on efforts to simply compile a list of books by aggregating and loosely filtering/sorting several other lists. The lists mentioned are, as far as I know, all heavily biased toward 19th and 20th century works. (The article explicitly mentions that one problem is that it doesn't include numerous works not intended for commercial consumption, such as doctoral theses and so on.)
I would argue that the most important works to digitize first is not the low-hanging fruit of works already cataloged and in most cases, existing in multiple copies in multiple locations. (we are at little risk of losing the works of Dan Brown (cited in the article) to the depredations of time during the scope of this project.)
To me; the most important works to get digitized are those works where there are only one or two copies, are possibly hundreds of years old and are moldering away forgotten on the back shelves of some monastary or filed and forgotten in the bowels of some museum.
What I'd like to see is Google and a few other digital data industry leaders get together and create a bounty system for old books. Simply put: The Global Translation Movement will pay say a buck a page multipled by the confirmed age of the book in question. (similar pay scales would have to be worked out for those really old "books" that consist of wood tablets, bamboo or papyrus strips and so on.) The project would need to go out of its way to contact old monastaries, nunneries, temples, museums and so forth. A 200 page folio that is 250 years old nets 50,000$ for the monastary that scans it and shares the digital copy with the world. My inspiration for this came from the Islamic Translation Movement of medieval times.
You could do similar bounties for translations as well into four or five of the world's most widespread languages. (Chinese, English and Arabic come to mind.)
If I were some kind of intellectual or academic authority, this is something that I'd seriously pitch at the next Ted Talk...
Considering the number of webpages that seem full of Lady Gaga's latest outrageous outfit, her sexuality and so on, I'd say it's virtually certain that many people out there really *do* want to see Lady Gaga go naked.....
1) you said Canada, not Canadian Corporate assets. Your usage would refer to either owning a percentage of the physical territory known as Canada OR possibly the people and government that make up Canada in the abstract.
2) even the official report you linked to does not prove that there is 45% ownership of Canadian business assets by USA companies, it proves that 45% of Canadian business assets are foreign owned, a category which I'm willing to stipulate does include American companies, but I doubt it entirely consists of American companies. Surely some of that number is made up of Japanese, British, German, Russian et all interests. Furthermore, these days, at least some of those American companies which own participation in an Canadian firm may themselves have part of their assets in the hands of foreign interests, muddying the waters considerably.
Because the ISP's discovered they could sell something they didn't actually have, this is called over-subscription. In theory, if you have a 100 Mbps backbone, you can grant a 10 Mbps connection to each of ten customers 24/7/365. The reality is that most customers don't use all the bandwidth they are allotted and some of the most bandwidth intensive things they *do* use are pretty tolerant of delays (AKA latency, if BitTorrent or a properly buffered video stream gets another 50 ms delay, nobody's really going to notice). This allows the ISP to grant access to that 100 Mbps connection to, just for the sake of argument, 15 customers allowing for higher profits or more competitive pricing, guess which option they chose?
As long as those 15 users keep thier bandwidth usage within the predicted levels, nobody notices and the ISP coins money hand over fist. The problem comes when a small minority actually use all the bandwidth they have paid for. If one or two of those people use all the bandwidth they are allowed, now the connection will only support 11 or 12 total users without causing acceptable delays. But there is still 15 connected to it, so the ISP starts getting calls from the 5 or 6 people who are affected the worst, complaining about a slow connection. To complicate matters, ISP's will routinely sell you a 10 MB/s connection but actually allow your modem to get a bit more than that just to be on the safe side, so heavy users could actually be getting more than they have contracted for. Video streaming could max out even that extra allotment, but generally for short periods, say two hours max and only when the customer is at the computer. BitTorrent and other P2P apps though, are capable of maxing out the connection and doing so for hours or even days. Another factor to consider is that many ISP offering are not symmetrical, they allot far less upload bandwidth than download bandwidth. Email, web surfing and video streaming all use relatively little upload bandwidth, but P2P apps can and do use a lot more, making the effect on upload far more noticable on upload speeds.
So, if you were an ISP and you had a very small minority whose usage patterns were slowing everybody elses connection down, what are you gonna do about it? You basically have 4 options:
1)buy more bandwidth from your backbone provider and invest in upgraded infrastructure = very expensive, cuts profits, unhappy shareholders
2)employ traffic shaping so that the applications you can identify get throttled back. = relatively minor infrastructure changes, slightly reduced profits until the new equipment is paid for.
3)change your terms of service and employ monitoring tools (you probably already have these) that can ID those heavy users so that you can drop customers who do this. = A minor amount of bad PR, some of which can easily be spun "In order to provide the best possible service to all of our subscribers..."
4) do nothing and wait until enough of the light users get fed up and cancel thier accounts, freeing up enough of the bandwidth that the remaining customers are no longer affected = losing your highest profit margin customers, developing a lot of bad reputation for being a slow provider
From what I've read, ISP's do a mix of all four, but focus mostly on 2) and 3)
so what you're saying is that we can look forward to a huge wave of ignosticism to sweep the world? I think that would be wonderful, but I do see a small problem with that prediction. When times are tough, when the common person feels helpless in the face of forces and circumstances larger than they are, they tend to seek out explanations that are larger than they are. Religion *thrives* when things are toughest. "There are no athesists in a foxhole" is one common way of phrasing that. As I see it, every generation looks at it's kids, looks at the way society is evolving and finds that they don't really understand either one. They also tend to fear the worst. It is all too easy to take heed of those who prophesy a doom that we already suspect ourselves and at the same time promise that doom can be averted if we all just make a few changes in what we are doing.
To my mind; the fundamental problem with groups like NIMF isn't that they View With Alarm, that is a enshrined tradition of priests, politicians and the power-hungry since the dawn of human history. The real problem is human arrogance and an inability to keep from meddling. If can't we can't accurately imagine the future, how can we hope to shape it as we desire? The law of unintended consequences still reigns supreme
I see many posts to the effect of whether or not this is a good idea or whether or not this constitutes bribery. Here's my.02$ worth:
1) it it is a horribly BAD idea.
a) any business that could use the million would probably be cutting thier own throats. (Can a million buy enough advertising to make up the lost new customers that dropping off the Google radar would cost you? I doubt it)
b) The top 1000 is not a static list. Granted, there might not be a lot of change-over, players like Yahoo!, NASDAQ etc will always have a place, but motherjones.com, w3schools.com etc are not so secure in thier position. If a site is on the top 1000 for a week, does it get an offer too?
c) As others have pointed out, it might give Bing a bad rep for "buying" it's prominence.
d) Is this deal going to be a lifetime agreement? Does it cover alternate domain names etc? I can't imagine any company agreeing to keep any domain and any web accessible pages out of Google's index in perpetuity.
2) it's not bribery, it's perfectly legal chicanery. If I want to pay Mike's Rustproofing a sum to never again use print media advertising in any form (I do so hate windshield fliers! and the owner agrees, that is perfectly legal, even if other customers have no objection to the fliers or even derive some benefit from them. I would argue that such a deal is even in the public interest, since many of us hate windshield fliers and tat collection of fliers, pamphlets and newspaper inserts that cover our porches like dead leaves. The chicanery comes in if I happen to own shares in a rival rust proofing company, or, as in this case, I own shares in another advertising medium.
Personally, I'm surprised and slightly disappointed in my fellow slashdotters. I for one hope this deal becomes a reality, because then a cool million U$ is just a googlebomb away! Get out there and get busy crafting the perfect googlebomb* guys!
*a suggestion for the perfect googlebomb: Try to get the profile pages of the top 500 slashdotters (measured by whatever criteria you like, lifetime karma rating, total number of posts, lowest 500 UID's whatever) into the top 1000 of google. Make a pre-arranged agreement that any slashdotter whose profile makes it into the top 1000 will use 10% of the free money to buy gift subscriptions for the rest of us! That's 20,000 subscriptions at the standard rate. We would only need 50 sucessfully googlebombed profiles to be able to buy subscriptions for everybody here! Hell, we could probably even buy a subscription for our most prolific member AC if we felt like being nice.
Actually, it's a four bedroom (Maggie does have her own room) two bathroom home with some extra rooms. (sitting room with fireplace for example).
According to the wiki, the replica that was given away in 1997 cost 120,000 to build.
Homer is always broke, so he no doubt got one of those no money down mortgages, at the current rate that works out to about 680/mth over a 30 year term.
Throw in the fact that the house still has the dated interior and has been alleged to have radon in the basement, asbestos in the walls and lead paint and Homer might have gotten a really good deal on the place.
Homer works as a nuclear safety technician/nuclear engineer ("Yeah, it's best not to think about it" Carl) and has for years, on the other hand, Mr Burns is a tightwad and no doubt pays bottom of the barrel wages. Call it a rough 60,000 per year; so I suspect he could afford the house they live in.
There are what are known as open frame monitors by a wide variety of manufacturers. These usually come with very large and clunky metal brackets as they are intended for use by system integrators and kiosks. On most the bracket is removable, leaving you with what is known as a raw panel or raw module. Or you can also get raw panels yourself, but there are a couple of caveats:
1) Most I found are more expensive than simply buying a regular monitor at your local retailer and throwing the bezel away. (see 2)
2) These are usually models intended for mobile or rough duty use. (cars, kiosks etc) so they'll have heavier Plexiglas on them, be lower resolution/refresh/contrast versions and so on.
3) All LCD monitors are framed by a metal channel edging that acts as a clamp to hold the various layers together. In all the newer monitors I have seen disassembled, the metal channelling is pretty close to the same width as the plastic bezel that covers it. Removing it won't gain you much, unless you are prepared to replace the channelling on the connecting sides with something that clamps just as firmly but with less depth. (say 3mmx5mm H channel vs 5mmx5mm C channel)
4) if you do replace the channelling, that will leave you a dead zone. Panels are designed with the channel in mind, so there is a roughly 5mm zone that isn't "addressed" by the controller all the way around. I suppose a really hard core DIY type could file/sand down this dead area, but frankly I don't know what effect this would have on the rest of the panel and I wouldn't want to kill several panels finding out. (Would the liquid crystal goo leak?)
I've been messing around with some designs for combining several monitors myself. (one 32" and two 19" monitors in portrait mode on the wings) The best I could come up with on my back of the envelope sketches was to replace the channel on the connecting edges with H profile channel acrylic channel to minimize the gap and the visual impact of the channelling.
A description in a work of fiction is enough to discount the application as not being an original and/or non-obvious invention right?
The first thing that comes to my mind when I read the summary is the wands Adele Mundy of Chatsworth uses constantly to interact with her computer systems.....
Slashdot Mirror
Also known as the Apu Nahasapeemapetilan Rule : All bachelors, all ten items or less, paid in cash no chit-chat....
While we're on the subject, I notice further down people commenting on the new self service check outs that many retailers are starting to put in. They seem to like them. I LOATHE them. In my area, only Canadian Tire and Wal-Mart use them and I avoid them. Certain days through the week, at Canadian Tire only the customer service desk and the self serve checkouts are staffed. I always go to the customer service desk when that happens.
1) The self serve check outs are bar code and scale based. The system has to know the precise weight of every bar coded item. If you don't put the item on the scales, it won't let you continue, yet the scales are imprecise enough that a two back of automotive bulbs often don't weight enough to register. And good luck trying to deal with an unwieldy item that doesn't fit in a standard bag. A regular clerk just throws a sticker on it and moves on. This self service system halts and you have to wait for the central cashier to come over and fix it. This always takes a lot longer than having a clerk already standing there and eager to get to the next customer.
2) The system does not provide a customer a way to manual type in a barcode number the way a skilled clerk can when the bars themselves aren't legible to the laser. At the Walmart, deli items get a custom bar code printed up right then and there, but for some reason, the ink sometimes gets a tad smeared. (I don't know what ink/printing system is in the one they use here.) A human can read the numbers, but the laser can't apparently make heads or tails of the bars. Again, you need that central cash person to come over and fix it.
3) Both self service systems are set up so one person is supervising 4 registers and it seems at least at the Canadian Tire, the management only allots one person to do this per shift. At the Walmart, it appears that during slack time, the customer service person covers it in addition to their other duties. These leads to a problem. If you have four clerks and things are slow, you have the flexibility to send one or two off on break earlier or go stock shelves or something. When it's only one person, sure it's cheaper, but what happens when that person needs to go take a leak? At both Walmart and Canadian Tire on at least one occasion each, there hasn't been anyone standing on that little raised platform next to the self serve checkouts. At the Walmart at least, there was usually two other cashiers on duty. (one at the one queue into multiple registers section and one in the traditional single queue area) At Canadian Tire on the other hand, one time there was nobody, I mean nobody at any of the registers, including the customer service. I looked around, waited a bit and then the customer service staff came back with an empty cart (had been restocking returns I guess) and the self serve supervisor came hustling over from the bathroom/service centre area looking flustered.
And as a bonus, if you pick the right frequency of sound to start with, not only would pedestrians not be able to tell if you are approaching or departing, but they wouldn't have a clue which direction you're really in. Kind of like a mosquito in a dark room.
Do you have any idea how many injuries and injustices have been committed in an attempt to control thought? Let me throw some terms at you to look up on your own:
1) The Cultural Revolution
2) The Killing Fields
3) Punitive psychiatry
4) McCarthyism
5) Dear Leader
6) The Inquistion (Blasphemy, Apostasy and Heresy )
We^h^hThey call themselves Anonymous
Actual laws against spam don't seem to have diminished the number of spam messages I get. I've actually taken the time to try and opt out of some the less annoying, slightly more legitimate emails and I've noticed something interesting that seems to be common to all of the opt-out pages I have seen.
A) If/when you sign up for something, you are implicitly agreeing to having your contact details and other information shared/sold to "business partners, service providers and other affiliates" but when you opt-out later, it applies only to the company directly. You'll still get spammed by those other firms.
B) They NEVER say that they will delete your data, just that they won't use it themselves. On it's own, your data is almost worthless, but in the aggregate with thousands of other people with similar profiles it can be worth quite a sum. So opting out still leaves the problem of companies unknown to me, collecting data about me against my will and then selling that data to god-knows-who anywhere in the world. (It's been alleged that intelligence agencies routinely obtain these data stores to cross reference against their existing files.) By the time you get around to opting out, your data could easily have been sold and re-sold dozens of times.
C)The fact that I am willing to actually read the Terms and chose to opt-out is itself another detail to add and cross reference with any other data that they have; or think they have, linked to me. A list composed purely of people who opt-out of (for example) the email alerts that they automatically got subscribed to when they joined a tech forum is probably pretty worthless for a fake Viagra spammer, but potentially worthwhile for a vendor of security and privacy protecting software. (oh the irony!)
I am intrigued by your proposal and wish to subscribe to your newsletter...
and some A nearby call centre around here has (or at least had) the Canadian contract for OnStar and I've heard some hard to credit but plausible anecdotes about the amount of information the system has on you and how little there is in the way of abuse prevention. Based on these, I would never knowingly buy a vehicle that even had the system installed, let alone activated and subscription paid for. (Apparently; among other problems, the system as set up makes it difficult to transfer ownership to a used car unless the new owner also contracts with OnStar. Until then, most of the time OnStar records still show the original owner, which means the original owner can still call OnStar and get help disabling what is now your car)
That was my first thought as well, since my particular SWMBO walks very differently depending on which pair of footwear she's wearing. My second thought is not so gender limited. I have osteo-arthritis and fibromyalgia and I walk incredibly differently depending on whether or not I am having a flareup. In fact, my gait changes slowly but noticably through out the day as I tire. So much so that some of my more observant friends have been able to make pretty close guesses about how long I've been on my feet, simply by how I hold myself and move around
Make one big enough for six pebble bed reactors and we can call it Bun-bun! ("Let's rock Posleen boy!")
Several folks have posted that they'll be interested in an EV when it can do a certain range (call when it can go all week, call me when I can get 500mi etc) Others have responded that by and large, you don't really drive all that far on a day to day basis. Here's my problem: I live in an apartment building in a large town/small city, so my parking is a ground level lot with the bare minimum of light standards that the municipal building code allows. My assigned spot doesn't even have a curb stone, let alone a source of power run out to it. At work, I park in an industrial plaza that has only one source of light, the big sign that advertises all the businesses in that plaza. It's such a basic lot that there aren't even painted lines and due to my low position in the company, "my" spot is well away from the building.
So, where would I charge my hypothetical EV? As far as I am concerned an EV is a no-go until municipal codes in both my home town and city where I work are changed to require charge ports for every parking spot that can reasonably called an assigned slot. (someone's assigned bay in the parking garage at his/her apt building, all "employees only" parking spots, municipal curb side "free parking between 8pm and 6am" parking spaces and while we're at it, all those "pay and display" parking lots as well.) In my opinion, it's the core city-dwellers who could make the most of a small, short-range and inexpensive EV but face the hardest challenges in getting them powered.
Want to know what I think the next big development in EV vehicles should be? School buses. Around here they drive for a total of three hours in the morning (one shift each for the public and catholic schools) then they park for 4-5 hrs, drive for another 3 hours and then park until the next morning. Some park at the drivers home, but most park in a big yard at the depot. Relatively few of them need to drive in excess of 80km and there is tons of space underneath them for battery packs. The same weight of vehicle vs # of passengers carried economy of scale that a diesel bus has would also be true of an EV bus. Throw in the fact that; unlike your typical four door sedan, school buses don't have such power hungry accessories as a/c power windows, rear defrost, hell most them seem to be barely heated at all. The only draw back I can see is that you can almost guarantee that your local bus line will be far more motivated by, and play closer attention to things like initial capital outlay, long term operation costs and then cost per mile than your average car buyer. I want to buy an electric car, but I have to admit that being able to brag that I have one, knowing I am on the cutting edge and being all "green" is among the motivations, I suspect that's true of a number of EV owners and wannabe owners. The only EV bus I can find with a hasty Google search are Ebus' products and they say right up front that thier city transit style buses are well over a 290,000U$ each! At those kind of prices, no wonder I'm not seeing any EV school buses yet. Diesel buses run under 80,000. An EV bus has to match that, or at least come close, you can go a loooong way on 210,000$ worth of diesel bought at fleet rates....
Anyone here work for Bluebird or Thomas? Those seem to be the only brands of school bus I ever see around here.....
As an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe to the Americans) and an Ignostic I gotta ask if you mean Indian in the sense of First Nation or Indian as in from the sub-continent?
I've had the same issue so thanks for the work-around. On the other hand, it does confirm that it's the slashcode for the idle section that's broken and not a problem with our browser(s)
Beagleboard
1)TFA actually acknowledges that the ISBN is very North America-centric, but the other cataloging types are also either N.A-centric or at least western world-centric.
2) The entire article is based on efforts to simply compile a list of books by aggregating and loosely filtering/sorting several other lists. The lists mentioned are, as far as I know, all heavily biased toward 19th and 20th century works. (The article explicitly mentions that one problem is that it doesn't include numerous works not intended for commercial consumption, such as doctoral theses and so on.)
I would argue that the most important works to digitize first is not the low-hanging fruit of works already cataloged and in most cases, existing in multiple copies in multiple locations. (we are at little risk of losing the works of Dan Brown (cited in the article) to the depredations of time during the scope of this project.) To me; the most important works to get digitized are those works where there are only one or two copies, are possibly hundreds of years old and are moldering away forgotten on the back shelves of some monastary or filed and forgotten in the bowels of some museum.
What I'd like to see is Google and a few other digital data industry leaders get together and create a bounty system for old books. Simply put: The Global Translation Movement will pay say a buck a page multipled by the confirmed age of the book in question. (similar pay scales would have to be worked out for those really old "books" that consist of wood tablets, bamboo or papyrus strips and so on.) The project would need to go out of its way to contact old monastaries, nunneries, temples, museums and so forth. A 200 page folio that is 250 years old nets 50,000$ for the monastary that scans it and shares the digital copy with the world. My inspiration for this came from the Islamic Translation Movement of medieval times.
You could do similar bounties for translations as well into four or five of the world's most widespread languages. (Chinese, English and Arabic come to mind.)
If I were some kind of intellectual or academic authority, this is something that I'd seriously pitch at the next Ted Talk...
Considering the number of webpages that seem full of Lady Gaga's latest outrageous outfit, her sexuality and so on, I'd say it's virtually certain that many people out there really *do* want to see Lady Gaga go naked.....
1) you said Canada, not Canadian Corporate assets. Your usage would refer to either owning a percentage of the physical territory known as Canada OR possibly the people and government that make up Canada in the abstract.
2) even the official report you linked to does not prove that there is 45% ownership of Canadian business assets by USA companies, it proves that 45% of Canadian business assets are foreign owned, a category which I'm willing to stipulate does include American companies, but I doubt it entirely consists of American companies. Surely some of that number is made up of Japanese, British, German, Russian et all interests. Furthermore, these days, at least some of those American companies which own participation in an Canadian firm may themselves have part of their assets in the hands of foreign interests, muddying the waters considerably.
Unless you want to argue that US interests own 45% of the privately held land (45% of 89% is 4.95%)
1)buy more bandwidth from your backbone provider and invest in upgraded infrastructure = very expensive, cuts profits, unhappy shareholders
2)employ traffic shaping so that the applications you can identify get throttled back. = relatively minor infrastructure changes, slightly reduced profits until the new equipment is paid for.
3)change your terms of service and employ monitoring tools (you probably already have these) that can ID those heavy users so that you can drop customers who do this. = A minor amount of bad PR, some of which can easily be spun "In order to provide the best possible service to all of our subscribers..."
4) do nothing and wait until enough of the light users get fed up and cancel thier accounts, freeing up enough of the bandwidth that the remaining customers are no longer affected = losing your highest profit margin customers, developing a lot of bad reputation for being a slow provider
From what I've read, ISP's do a mix of all four, but focus mostly on 2) and 3)
To my mind; the fundamental problem with groups like NIMF isn't that they View With Alarm, that is a enshrined tradition of priests, politicians and the power-hungry since the dawn of human history. The real problem is human arrogance and an inability to keep from meddling. If can't we can't accurately imagine the future, how can we hope to shape it as we desire? The law of unintended consequences still reigns supreme
1) it it is a horribly BAD idea.
a) any business that could use the million would probably be cutting thier own throats. (Can a million buy enough advertising to make up the lost new customers that dropping off the Google radar would cost you? I doubt it)
b) The top 1000 is not a static list. Granted, there might not be a lot of change-over, players like Yahoo!, NASDAQ etc will always have a place, but motherjones.com, w3schools.com etc are not so secure in thier position. If a site is on the top 1000 for a week, does it get an offer too?
c) As others have pointed out, it might give Bing a bad rep for "buying" it's prominence.
d) Is this deal going to be a lifetime agreement? Does it cover alternate domain names etc? I can't imagine any company agreeing to keep any domain and any web accessible pages out of Google's index in perpetuity.
2) it's not bribery, it's perfectly legal chicanery. If I want to pay Mike's Rustproofing a sum to never again use print media advertising in any form (I do so hate windshield fliers! and the owner agrees, that is perfectly legal, even if other customers have no objection to the fliers or even derive some benefit from them. I would argue that such a deal is even in the public interest, since many of us hate windshield fliers and tat collection of fliers, pamphlets and newspaper inserts that cover our porches like dead leaves. The chicanery comes in if I happen to own shares in a rival rust proofing company, or, as in this case, I own shares in another advertising medium. Personally, I'm surprised and slightly disappointed in my fellow slashdotters. I for one hope this deal becomes a reality, because then a cool million U$ is just a googlebomb away! Get out there and get busy crafting the perfect googlebomb* guys!
*a suggestion for the perfect googlebomb: Try to get the profile pages of the top 500 slashdotters (measured by whatever criteria you like, lifetime karma rating, total number of posts, lowest 500 UID's whatever) into the top 1000 of google. Make a pre-arranged agreement that any slashdotter whose profile makes it into the top 1000 will use 10% of the free money to buy gift subscriptions for the rest of us! That's 20,000 subscriptions at the standard rate. We would only need 50 sucessfully googlebombed profiles to be able to buy subscriptions for everybody here! Hell, we could probably even buy a subscription for our most prolific member AC if we felt like being nice.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=immaculate+conception%2C+human+egg+fertilization&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a
Actually, it's a four bedroom (Maggie does have her own room) two bathroom home with some extra rooms. (sitting room with fireplace for example). According to the wiki, the replica that was given away in 1997 cost 120,000 to build.
Homer is always broke, so he no doubt got one of those no money down mortgages, at the current rate that works out to about 680/mth over a 30 year term.
Throw in the fact that the house still has the dated interior and has been alleged to have radon in the basement, asbestos in the walls and lead paint and Homer might have gotten a really good deal on the place.
Homer works as a nuclear safety technician/nuclear engineer ("Yeah, it's best not to think about it" Carl) and has for years, on the other hand, Mr Burns is a tightwad and no doubt pays bottom of the barrel wages. Call it a rough 60,000 per year; so I suspect he could afford the house they live in.
There are what are known as open frame monitors by a wide variety of manufacturers. These usually come with very large and clunky metal brackets as they are intended for use by system integrators and kiosks. On most the bracket is removable, leaving you with what is known as a raw panel or raw module. Or you can also get raw panels yourself, but there are a couple of caveats: 1) Most I found are more expensive than simply buying a regular monitor at your local retailer and throwing the bezel away. (see 2) 2) These are usually models intended for mobile or rough duty use. (cars, kiosks etc) so they'll have heavier Plexiglas on them, be lower resolution/refresh/contrast versions and so on. 3) All LCD monitors are framed by a metal channel edging that acts as a clamp to hold the various layers together. In all the newer monitors I have seen disassembled, the metal channelling is pretty close to the same width as the plastic bezel that covers it. Removing it won't gain you much, unless you are prepared to replace the channelling on the connecting sides with something that clamps just as firmly but with less depth. (say 3mmx5mm H channel vs 5mmx5mm C channel) 4) if you do replace the channelling, that will leave you a dead zone. Panels are designed with the channel in mind, so there is a roughly 5mm zone that isn't "addressed" by the controller all the way around. I suppose a really hard core DIY type could file/sand down this dead area, but frankly I don't know what effect this would have on the rest of the panel and I wouldn't want to kill several panels finding out. (Would the liquid crystal goo leak?) I've been messing around with some designs for combining several monitors myself. (one 32" and two 19" monitors in portrait mode on the wings) The best I could come up with on my back of the envelope sketches was to replace the channel on the connecting edges with H profile channel acrylic channel to minimize the gap and the visual impact of the channelling.
A description in a work of fiction is enough to discount the application as not being an original and/or non-obvious invention right? The first thing that comes to my mind when I read the summary is the wands Adele Mundy of Chatsworth uses constantly to interact with her computer systems.....