The standard dry cell, based on manganese dioxide electrolyte, zinc as cathode and carbon as anode if I remember my high school physics right, does not last that even if it is not used!
Additives are going to kill it. The article is notably silent about the additives. In a lab they can feed the fuel cell "pure" gasoline or "pure" diesel and show it can work. Or feed it stock fuels, show it works and ask the graduate students slogging at minimum wage to dismantle the stack and clean it for the next demo. But in reality the fuel at the pump has detergents to prevent fuel injector fouling, anti-freeze to prevent water-contamination leading ice formation in the fuel lines, and a host of other additives to prevent evaporation etc etc. All these are not hydro carbons. If you don't burn them at high temperatures and flush them out using air flow, they will be deposited on the fuel cell surfaces.
Technically the pumps can store pure hydro carbons and mix them with additives at the delivery nozzle, the way the mix 87 and 93 octane fuel to create 90 octane. But it is still a major infrastructure upgrade.
Despite all this, if the technology bears out, it would be a great thing. But let us not raise our hopes prematurely, only to seem them smashed down, yet another time.
What is the world coming to nowadays? Why are these crooks looking for holes in the computer servers and steal money? Why can't they steal the money honestly by buying the congress critters and passing legislation that forks over 7.1 trillion dollars? When will these crooks realize the Return on Investment for putting money in campaign contribution is like one million percent. These American Congresscritters are the best money can buy. Instead they go hire script kiddies and money mules. People like these give a bad name to the legitimate thieves of Wall Street.
You are assuming the standard deductions will stay at the current levels and only the charitable donation exception will be removed. Two problems with that.
1. The standard deduction has to increase substantially, something like 3 or 4 times the poverty level. Between 18K to 24K per person. In reality the charitable donations are a great way for really rich people to do all their spending tax free. You typically are not rich enough to found a charitable foundation, with charters and accountants complying with all the laws. But if you do, you can nominate your own cronies as the directors and they can spend the money on anything you choose. Charitable foundations are one of the vilest tax shelters used by some of the richest people. You think of churches, soup kitchens, scholarship grants. They use it to pay tuition for their nieces and nephews, engage in political action and maintain vacation villas.
2. Some people need education, some people might be caring for elderly parents or some might have a special need child. Give a generous base exemptions and let us get the government out of the business of choosing what level of charitable donations or child care or elder care or medical care should be tax exempt and what should not be.
3. In fact there could be a quick acting tribunal administered IRS for people with exceptional circumstances to petition for additional exemptions. A quasi judicial procedure to allow that lone bubble boy to have higher deductible than the rest of more fortunate of us.
Make no distinctions between earned income, investment income, capital gains, dividends, gifts. Everything is incoming money, so it is income. That would simplify the tax code a lot.
To encourage investing instead of speculation, permit the cost basis for capital gains to be indexed to inflation. That way holding a security for a long time does not incur heavy penalty when you sell.
On the expense side, exempt 10% or 15% as deduction. Withdrawals from this pre-tax savings account would count as income. This would allow middle class also to tax-manage their income. Right now only the rich are able to tax-manage their income.
Remove all exemptions, mortgage interest, charitable donations, educational expenses blah blah, and give a blanket exemption of something like two or three time poverty line. Use the exemption to buy a home or live in rented home and spend it on clothes. Your choice. This would simplify tax code further.
So a sister species will occupy the niche vacated by A. aegypti. I don't mind giving a few drops of blood to these suckers. As long as they don't leave behind germs that cause malaria and other illnesses.
The same judge also ordered alll the people who have book marked these sites before the ruling came to remove them from their computers. And if the site has an easy to remember URL, he ordered every one in the world to forget it. And then they all have to get off his lawn too.
Yes, it would be legal for such an off shore ship to house coders and do some programing jobs.
But it would also be legal for the U.S Govt to declare that these ships are not going to be eligible for rescue and recovery by US Coast Guard, and US Navy to declare it is not their job to protect such ships from pirates. (Real ones not the software DVD pirates).
It would also be legal for people to find the customers of these ship borne companies and the products made by them and give wide publicity for them. After BofA backed down on the debit card fee, the Occupy Something or the Other people are itching to find something to occupy. It will give them something to go after.
All perfectly legal of course. But again, all this assumes US Government is going to be looking after the interests of its citizens. But in this post citizens-united world, it might decide "even ship borne floating sweat shop owning corporations are people" and protect them instead of us.
Yeah, you won't get credit for good work, but you would get more than the fair share of the blame when things go wrong, and in the end it will average out. Wait. There seems to be catch here somewhere.
It is cheaper to build the first few stories up than down. But at some point, the cost of holding up more and more floors, structural integrity issues, wind issues, etc come into play. May be even visibility to terrorists for insurance purposes. Building down, the only cost is earth removal and dumping it somewhere. But the earth starts getting hotter, and ventilation, fire escape etc get complicated.
Actually the problem seems to be a sorting order, I heard. Instead of gathering everything in chronological order (which isn't that easy of course) and thus giving a chance to know what commands where made obsolete by newer ones, they sorted everything from shortest sentence to longest.
No they did not sort it by sentence length. They sorted it by the chronological order in which these sayings were found after the death of Mohammad. Mohammad was illeterate (some Muslims dispute that assertion) and his sayings were transcribed by Abu Bucr, the scribe, when Mohammad was in a trance communicating with Archangel Gabriel. Abu Bucr was also the Confirmer of Truth, also the father of Mohammad's most beloved wife A'yisha, and he wrote them on whatever was available at that time. Abu Bucr was the second Caliph is buried close to Mohammad in Medina. (There is an empty grave for Jesus there to buried after the Second coming. Details are a little murky) After the death of Mohammad, the third Caliph wanted to collect all the sayings and compile it into a Book. There were objections to that even at that time, "Should we do which the Prophet himself did not do in his life time, and did not leave instructions for it, and did not consider the transcriptions to be important when he was alive" were the counter arguments.
But the Caliph collected as many of the sayings as possible, from various sources and numbered and listed them all in one official version. So there are no organizing themes to the chapters. You will get one surah about inheritance rules, the next one might prohibit usury, then jump to Jesus, then back to dietary rules etc. The Caliph also ruled that any further sayings found after the first compilation were all either duplicates or false. Thus was born Q`ran. But most Muslims believe that Q`ran existed before it was compiled, it was merely revealed to Mohamad by Gabriel and Q`ran predates the formation of the universe too.
Look for contract jobs advertised in the web in PeopleSoft, Oracle or Web design. Most of the listings will ask for qualifications and experience you don't have. But you are not looking for jobs. What you are looking for are the links to contractors who are looking for such jobs. Most of them are independent consultants. Some of them join together to own partnerships. Ask them to take you as an intern or a trainee and offer to work for free for three or six months to learn the job skills. They are likely to evaluate you based on your skills rather than qualifications. Once you break into this circuit, you survive by your skills, not by paper qualifications. Pay is good. Unemployment is low. Most of these jobs would require you to fly out on Sunday night and return on Thursday night to your home base. Jobs are called 4 by 10, for they put in 40 hours in four days.
Sorry about your nitwit ex-room mate. Looks like he was spoiled rotten by his parents who made money but did not raise a responsible adult.
But moral of the story is not "responsible behavior is for the suckers". Responsible behavior will pay, sometimes in money, sometimes in nicer relationships, sometimes in lowered stress levels and general happiness, but usually in a combination of these things.
Ultimate thing you should be angry about is the general stereotyping by the political parties. Republicans broadbrush like this: "All rich people are successful because of hard work and initiative, all poor people are poor because they are lazy, dimwitted or both". Democrats broadbrush like this: "All rich people got rich by wheeling and dealing and having the system stacked in their favor. Or they inherited from their wheeling-dealing parents. All poor people are poor because of bad luck, exploitation and discrimination."
In reality, there are some rich people got there by hard work, others inherited it, or were simply lucky. There are definitely poor people who are lazy and who made bad choices in life. But not all the poor are like this. Please do spend sometime paying attention to the politicians. And become politically active. It does not matter whether you become a Democrat or Republican. We need more responsible people in both parties.
When you take your movie collection this seriously, do not go for these techno solutions that puts all your movies in one device. You plan your viewing, you probably have a good video/audio set up. You really don't want everything you own at the finger tips, you are not going to watch movies at the spur of the moment. So invest in devices that will protect the disks and preserve them for a longer period. Temp/humidity control of the original disks is probably a better investment than a 500 disk carousel, made of plastic, that might scratch the disk or allow dust to settle on it. Just my two cents. You seem to know what you are doing.
I had to spend over an hour with customer service before I got them to block all billing to my mobile phone account.
My experience with T-mobile is totally different. Never a dispute with billing. They usually waive if there was any issue. Last time I was in Niagara Falls, the phone picked up some Canadian telcom roaming and slammed me with some $18 worth of excess charges. Called them, and they waived it without any questions.
Within one month I got a text saying I was over my data limit. Called them and told them, "I have an android, but I don't have a data plan, I don't want a data plan, I have never paid any data charges, why there is this new charge, how they can block internet on my phone".
They said if I was on Wi-fi connection at home, and move away from home without closing the apps and the browser the connection would automatically switch to 3G network. They confirmed they have a data-block request already on file. The tech re-enabled the block to disable this auto switch facility. To avoid getting a larger bill (at that time I had $42 in data charges) and then fighting the billing department, he also gave me one month "free internet trial offer". That way the monthly bill would be normal.
Within two months two calls and got some $60 reversed. May be your mileage varies.
I also like their attempts to move away from subsidized handset business model. They seem to realize the subsidized handsets and two year upgrade treadmill is a loser's game for the smaller carriers.
Of the hundreds of movies that you own, how many are you going to watch? Go through your collection and make three piles:
Movies that you have watched in the last one year
Movies that you were planning to watch but did not get around to
Movies that you did not even know you had, especially the second and third copies that you bought without realizing you already had a copy or two
Store those movies in these file folders with plastic pockets. Buy the kind that will let you also store the jewel case printed material.
Figure out how many hours a week you are planning to watch movies from your collection. Figure out how many years it is going to take to finish what you already have. Finally realize the only reason you have such a big collection is to brag about the size of the collection. So save some money on the techno solutions and buy more movies to enhance the bragging.
On one hand, why look for malice when mere incompetence would suffice to explain the chain of events? I mean it is not that Microsoft was turning out super duper crash free, bug free secure code at other places!
On the other hand, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
You typed this in a key board without giving any clues about your body language. This must be a lie. That is what the article says. But you seem to think, "If only people can hide their From: headers they will give more honest and true opinions." One of the two must be wrong.
People don't tell the truth in e-mails? What are you saying? Crown Prince Abalua Ngmbutte, who is seeking my help to move 23 million US Dollars out of the Central Reserve Bank of Nigeria might not be telling the truth? OMG! What am going to do? I was counting on my honest share of 8.2 million US Dollars to restart my life! Am I going to be ruined? Why bad things keep happening to me? When I am going to get my just reward?
I always tell the truth when post in Slashdot. Especially when I check mark the anonymous coward option. Computers, IM, email etc encourage lying. bah! humbug.
If the one time customers can be served at a no-loss basis, they will help keep the lights on and defray the fixed costs. And if you convert a few to regulars you are ahead of the game. The trick is to serve them at no loss basis. Most restaurants can serve an additional entree at 50% of menu price, or they limit these coupons to items with least cost.
I saw an analysis that Groupon is simply a large short term loan to these businesses with a huge interest load. Except the repayment is "in kind" instead of money, and this comes in masquerading as an advertisement scheme that gives money to the merchant unlike all other coupon deals where the merchant pays for the ad costs. Young entrepreneurs who have more dreams than sense bite it hook, line and the sinker.
Microsoft did not descend to that level till Bing! came along. It created a program to pay for people to use Bing!.
But IE is "free". Netscape was also "free". But Microsoft gave money / discount to companies that would not pre install Netscape. It was selling IE at a negative price. You can disagree. But the courts thought otherwise.
Very few of his fellow consultants have CS degrees. They still manage to find contracts and the unemployment is quite low. Many of them run their own tiny companies, more like a group of doctors coming together to set up a practice. The best course for someone looking for plain programming jobs on APIs of these databases is to find these tiny companies, join as an intern and get trained on the API and get some practical training under these consultants. Then get a contract job and eventually make partner or get out and hang a shingle on your own name. To get contract jobs you should have good English skills and good interviewing skills. Any basic degree is enough, but the "programmer/coder/hacker" mind set is a must. It would probably take about 3 months of training and 3 more months of practical work before you start billing clients.
My point is, if someone is just looking for a way to get decent well paid job, CS degree is a hard way to get it.
Slashdot Mirror
The standard dry cell, based on manganese dioxide electrolyte, zinc as cathode and carbon as anode if I remember my high school physics right, does not last that even if it is not used!
Technically the pumps can store pure hydro carbons and mix them with additives at the delivery nozzle, the way the mix 87 and 93 octane fuel to create 90 octane. But it is still a major infrastructure upgrade.
Despite all this, if the technology bears out, it would be a great thing. But let us not raise our hopes prematurely, only to seem them smashed down, yet another time.
What is the world coming to nowadays? Why are these crooks looking for holes in the computer servers and steal money? Why can't they steal the money honestly by buying the congress critters and passing legislation that forks over 7.1 trillion dollars? When will these crooks realize the Return on Investment for putting money in campaign contribution is like one million percent. These American Congresscritters are the best money can buy. Instead they go hire script kiddies and money mules. People like these give a bad name to the legitimate thieves of Wall Street.
1. The standard deduction has to increase substantially, something like 3 or 4 times the poverty level. Between 18K to 24K per person. In reality the charitable donations are a great way for really rich people to do all their spending tax free. You typically are not rich enough to found a charitable foundation, with charters and accountants complying with all the laws. But if you do, you can nominate your own cronies as the directors and they can spend the money on anything you choose. Charitable foundations are one of the vilest tax shelters used by some of the richest people. You think of churches, soup kitchens, scholarship grants. They use it to pay tuition for their nieces and nephews, engage in political action and maintain vacation villas.
2. Some people need education, some people might be caring for elderly parents or some might have a special need child. Give a generous base exemptions and let us get the government out of the business of choosing what level of charitable donations or child care or elder care or medical care should be tax exempt and what should not be.
3. In fact there could be a quick acting tribunal administered IRS for people with exceptional circumstances to petition for additional exemptions. A quasi judicial procedure to allow that lone bubble boy to have higher deductible than the rest of more fortunate of us.
So a sister species will occupy the niche vacated by A. aegypti. I don't mind giving a few drops of blood to these suckers. As long as they don't leave behind germs that cause malaria and other illnesses.
The same judge also ordered alll the people who have book marked these sites before the ruling came to remove them from their computers. And if the site has an easy to remember URL, he ordered every one in the world to forget it. And then they all have to get off his lawn too.
But it would also be legal for the U.S Govt to declare that these ships are not going to be eligible for rescue and recovery by US Coast Guard, and US Navy to declare it is not their job to protect such ships from pirates. (Real ones not the software DVD pirates).
It would also be legal for people to find the customers of these ship borne companies and the products made by them and give wide publicity for them. After BofA backed down on the debit card fee, the Occupy Something or the Other people are itching to find something to occupy. It will give them something to go after.
All perfectly legal of course. But again, all this assumes US Government is going to be looking after the interests of its citizens. But in this post citizens-united world, it might decide "even ship borne floating sweat shop owning corporations are people" and protect them instead of us.
Yeah, you won't get credit for good work, but you would get more than the fair share of the blame when things go wrong, and in the end it will average out. Wait. There seems to be catch here somewhere.
It is cheaper to build the first few stories up than down. But at some point, the cost of holding up more and more floors, structural integrity issues, wind issues, etc come into play. May be even visibility to terrorists for insurance purposes. Building down, the only cost is earth removal and dumping it somewhere. But the earth starts getting hotter, and ventilation, fire escape etc get complicated.
Actually the problem seems to be a sorting order, I heard. Instead of gathering everything in chronological order (which isn't that easy of course) and thus giving a chance to know what commands where made obsolete by newer ones, they sorted everything from shortest sentence to longest.
No they did not sort it by sentence length. They sorted it by the chronological order in which these sayings were found after the death of Mohammad. Mohammad was illeterate (some Muslims dispute that assertion) and his sayings were transcribed by Abu Bucr, the scribe, when Mohammad was in a trance communicating with Archangel Gabriel. Abu Bucr was also the Confirmer of Truth, also the father of Mohammad's most beloved wife A'yisha, and he wrote them on whatever was available at that time. Abu Bucr was the second Caliph is buried close to Mohammad in Medina. (There is an empty grave for Jesus there to buried after the Second coming. Details are a little murky) After the death of Mohammad, the third Caliph wanted to collect all the sayings and compile it into a Book. There were objections to that even at that time, "Should we do which the Prophet himself did not do in his life time, and did not leave instructions for it, and did not consider the transcriptions to be important when he was alive" were the counter arguments.
But the Caliph collected as many of the sayings as possible, from various sources and numbered and listed them all in one official version. So there are no organizing themes to the chapters. You will get one surah about inheritance rules, the next one might prohibit usury, then jump to Jesus, then back to dietary rules etc. The Caliph also ruled that any further sayings found after the first compilation were all either duplicates or false. Thus was born Q`ran. But most Muslims believe that Q`ran existed before it was compiled, it was merely revealed to Mohamad by Gabriel and Q`ran predates the formation of the universe too.
Look for contract jobs advertised in the web in PeopleSoft, Oracle or Web design. Most of the listings will ask for qualifications and experience you don't have. But you are not looking for jobs. What you are looking for are the links to contractors who are looking for such jobs. Most of them are independent consultants. Some of them join together to own partnerships. Ask them to take you as an intern or a trainee and offer to work for free for three or six months to learn the job skills. They are likely to evaluate you based on your skills rather than qualifications. Once you break into this circuit, you survive by your skills, not by paper qualifications. Pay is good. Unemployment is low. Most of these jobs would require you to fly out on Sunday night and return on Thursday night to your home base. Jobs are called 4 by 10, for they put in 40 hours in four days.
But moral of the story is not "responsible behavior is for the suckers". Responsible behavior will pay, sometimes in money, sometimes in nicer relationships, sometimes in lowered stress levels and general happiness, but usually in a combination of these things.
Ultimate thing you should be angry about is the general stereotyping by the political parties. Republicans broadbrush like this: "All rich people are successful because of hard work and initiative, all poor people are poor because they are lazy, dimwitted or both". Democrats broadbrush like this: "All rich people got rich by wheeling and dealing and having the system stacked in their favor. Or they inherited from their wheeling-dealing parents. All poor people are poor because of bad luck, exploitation and discrimination."
In reality, there are some rich people got there by hard work, others inherited it, or were simply lucky. There are definitely poor people who are lazy and who made bad choices in life. But not all the poor are like this. Please do spend sometime paying attention to the politicians. And become politically active. It does not matter whether you become a Democrat or Republican. We need more responsible people in both parties.
When you take your movie collection this seriously, do not go for these techno solutions that puts all your movies in one device. You plan your viewing, you probably have a good video/audio set up. You really don't want everything you own at the finger tips, you are not going to watch movies at the spur of the moment. So invest in devices that will protect the disks and preserve them for a longer period. Temp/humidity control of the original disks is probably a better investment than a 500 disk carousel, made of plastic, that might scratch the disk or allow dust to settle on it. Just my two cents. You seem to know what you are doing.
I had to spend over an hour with customer service before I got them to block all billing to my mobile phone account.
My experience with T-mobile is totally different. Never a dispute with billing. They usually waive if there was any issue. Last time I was in Niagara Falls, the phone picked up some Canadian telcom roaming and slammed me with some $18 worth of excess charges. Called them, and they waived it without any questions.
Within one month I got a text saying I was over my data limit. Called them and told them, "I have an android, but I don't have a data plan, I don't want a data plan, I have never paid any data charges, why there is this new charge, how they can block internet on my phone".
They said if I was on Wi-fi connection at home, and move away from home without closing the apps and the browser the connection would automatically switch to 3G network. They confirmed they have a data-block request already on file. The tech re-enabled the block to disable this auto switch facility. To avoid getting a larger bill (at that time I had $42 in data charges) and then fighting the billing department, he also gave me one month "free internet trial offer". That way the monthly bill would be normal.
Within two months two calls and got some $60 reversed. May be your mileage varies.
I also like their attempts to move away from subsidized handset business model. They seem to realize the subsidized handsets and two year upgrade treadmill is a loser's game for the smaller carriers.
Store those movies in these file folders with plastic pockets. Buy the kind that will let you also store the jewel case printed material.
Figure out how many hours a week you are planning to watch movies from your collection. Figure out how many years it is going to take to finish what you already have. Finally realize the only reason you have such a big collection is to brag about the size of the collection. So save some money on the techno solutions and buy more movies to enhance the bragging.
I don't know if it would be the funniest. But the shortest joke is: A smart Pakistani [eoj].
On the other hand, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
You typed this in a key board without giving any clues about your body language. This must be a lie. That is what the article says. But you seem to think, "If only people can hide their From: headers they will give more honest and true opinions." One of the two must be wrong.
People don't tell the truth in e-mails? What are you saying? Crown Prince Abalua Ngmbutte, who is seeking my help to move 23 million US Dollars out of the Central Reserve Bank of Nigeria might not be telling the truth? OMG! What am going to do? I was counting on my honest share of 8.2 million US Dollars to restart my life! Am I going to be ruined? Why bad things keep happening to me? When I am going to get my just reward?
I always tell the truth when post in Slashdot. Especially when I check mark the anonymous coward option. Computers, IM, email etc encourage lying. bah! humbug.
I saw an analysis that Groupon is simply a large short term loan to these businesses with a huge interest load. Except the repayment is "in kind" instead of money, and this comes in masquerading as an advertisement scheme that gives money to the merchant unlike all other coupon deals where the merchant pays for the ad costs. Young entrepreneurs who have more dreams than sense bite it hook, line and the sinker.
You are doing it wrong, if you apply for companies that are big enough to have HR departments.
But IE is "free". Netscape was also "free". But Microsoft gave money / discount to companies that would not pre install Netscape. It was selling IE at a negative price. You can disagree. But the courts thought otherwise.
My point is, if someone is just looking for a way to get decent well paid job, CS degree is a hard way to get it.