As sibling says, bridges and hills are a problem. Major waterways are generally constructed so that bridges are either really high (as in 30ft+) or have some part that can be opened.
Anything that fits on a truck is easy to transport over land, but stuff that is significantly larger and can't be moved in parts is difficult over land. On the water, major ports and waterways are pretty wide. For example, the coast pilot linked a boatnerd.com [1] (who doesn't love that url) says for the mississipi - illinois waterway connection:
So, you can transport something that is roughly 20x150 meters. Some random internet site [2] says that "The standard barge is 195 feet long, 35 feet wide, and can be used to a 9-foot draft. Its capacity is 1500 tons. Some of the newer barges today are 290 feet by 50 feet, double the capacity of earlier barges." So, if we get one of them "newer barges', we can transport something that is 75 x 15 meters and weighs 3000 tonnes using equipment that is standard on the infrastructure.
A random wiki quote [3] says that "In the United States, 80,000 pounds (36,287 kg) is the maximum allowable legal gross vehicle weight without a permit.". So, with standard equipment you can transport something on the ground up to 36 metric tons, or about 0.1 percent of what fits on the barge*. Of course, you *can* transport something bigger than that, but then you get into serious logistic operations with special equipment, road closures, etc etc, while the barge can just be loaded up and sail away.
tl;dr: roads are made for fast and flexible transportation of relatively small amounts of cargo; shipping is made for slow transportation of bulk and large items.
*) I'm totally ignoring any possible short tonne, long tonne, metric tonne etc errors here, since that won't make a dent into a 3 orders of magnitude difference...
Some interesting legal questiosn that we studied for Dutch criminal law:
Someone got shot and was paralysed from the neck down. When she also got an infection (as a complication of the wounds/operation), she decided not to seek treatment because her life wasn't worth living anymore. Is this murder or aggravated assault?
A similar one: a man is stabbed, and while he could have been saved, the medics make a mistake and he dies. Is (the stabbing) murder or assault?
Another one: a man drives too fast in a commercial street, skids, hits a lantern pole, which hits a window, the glass of which hits a man who bleeds to death. Is this manslaughter? (in other words, is there a causal chain from the driving to the glass hitting the man?)
A final one: a man finds an unexploded detonator in the woods, and takes it home as a souvenir/decoration. Years later, the next owner of the house does some remodeling and needs something to prop open a window. He uses (unknowingly) the detonator, with fatal consequences. Did the original man cause the death of the new owner?
tangible assets like precious metals, water rights, mineral rights, real estate
Precious metals: mainly worth something because they are valued high, not much intrinsic value / use in industry. Huge fluctuations based mainly on economic expectations (http://insiderfortunes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Gold1.jpg)
Water rights, mineral rights: these are worth nothing more than the government that issues them, just like banknotes. If you flee the US, you can at least take a suitcase of dollars with you. You can't pick up mineral rights and leave, you have to hope that someone will buy them
Real estate: in most developed markets, maybe 20% of a house price is the cost of building it. The cost of the ground (and the right to build there, esp. in zoned locations) are where the money;s at. And you can't take the ground with you and leave, you have to hope someone will buy it and it is subject to seizure by the government under eminent domain.
So, most of the tangible assets you mention have a worth that is greatly dependent on the current market whims and/or the government that backs them... just like banknotes. It might be a good insurance against inflation, but not really against anything else...
You seem to be talking about the magnetic poles, which are indeed caused by the spin of the core and move a lot every year, in the magnitude of 50 km/year. This is so much that navigating using a compass requires compensating for the specific declination of that year. You can even observe it if you have a good bearing compass: take the bearing from a fixed position to a relatively far away object, such as a broadcast tower. A couple years later, take the bearing again, and (depending on your location) it may have changed by one or even several degrees.
TFA talks about the geographic north, e.g. the intersection of the surface and the axes around which the earth spins. This does not generally move around much, as it is affected by the distribution of mass around the earth causing the axis to shift. According to TFS, it can be measured using GPS, and moves in the magnitude of centimeters per year.
If you compare the US with mostly "developing" nations, you are right, and I would guess that a lot of them are caused by bad roads, bad cars, and really bad driving, the latter presumably caused by easy to get licenses and bad policing.
If you compare the US to some OECD countries, the picture is different:
Country / deaths per 100k vehicles / deaths per 1B miles USA / 15 / 8.5 Germany / 7.2 / 7.2 Netherlands / 7 / 5.6 Switzerland / 7 / 5.6 Sweden / 7 / 5.1 Belgium / 17 / 10.8 Italy / 12 / ? Poland / 18 / 23.5 Serbia / 43 / ? Egypt / 188 / ? India / 315 / Nigeria / 1042 / ?
So, the US has twice the per-vehicle death rate of countries like the Netherlands (really crowded), Germany (really fast driving), Switzerland (mountain roads and inclement weather) and Sweden (low population density). The per-mile deaths are higher (but not so much higher) than germany, and still a lot higher than the smaller countries. Even southern European countries like Italy but also Spain and France (both around 10) have less deaths/vehicle, even though people have "interesting" driving habits there. Unlisted countries like Sweden, the UK, denmark etc. are mostly similar to the Netherlands / Germany. Belgium is a weird outlier, as they are quite similar to the Netherlands in a lot of respects but have a much higher death rate.
Eastern (central) european countries like Poland but especially Serbia are a lot worse, and it seems to loosely correspond with economic development. If you look at countries like Egypt or India it becomes pretty bad, and a lot of African countries have >1000 deaths per 100k vehicles, e.g. a >1% annual death rate for vehicle owners. (That means that if you drive for 30 years, there is a chance of a fatal accident of around 25%... yikes!)
From the list above, it seems that there is a rough predictability of the danger of traffic based on national income and maybe population density, but the US is certainly on the "wrong end" of the prediction, comparable to Germany or Sweden in terms of wealth and population density, but with much higher death rates.
I'd much rather send my phone info to canonical than to google, for the simple reason that google already has too much info. It has always been the case that a large number of entities (eg your boss, spouse, mistress, bank, tax service, football pals) together had a lot of info on you. The scary thing with google is the amount of info placed into the hands of one entity. The more I can spread my info around, the better.
(Of course, this depends on the info being hard to link and recombine, otherwise canonical will just sell the info back to google and they can join it up. So I'm fine with canonical having my search info and location, but not so fine with them having my browser data including gmail account...)
I don't buy an android tablet because I want to be able to run my stuff on it without needing a separate "app". I don't like having to learn a new interface because the device is slightly different.
If they get it to work well, I would certainly consider buying a buntu table and I think I will put ubuntu on my current phone when I get a new one. (I am very hesitant to playing with my android phone after bricking the previous one by trying to flash the rom - toying with gadgets is nice but not if I can't make a phone call until I get it right...)
You don't prove the rules for proving (because you'd need rules for proving first). You reason about the rules for proving, and then apply the agreed upon rules. Also, there are different uses of the word "prove". In math, you can easily prove that -1 != 0. In biology, you can't prove that there are no yellow ants with light bulbs for heads.
Please (re)read your classics, I'd start with Hofstadter and Popper (but I'm old fashioned). Any book with "philosophy of science" in the title should probably also do the trick.
For the majority of enterprise businesses, that is the only thing they do, and they should not even consider thinking about hiring someone to wonder if the should deploy Linux boxes in their business. Anyone small to medium enterprise thinking about putting stuff on Linux should do so in the Cloud, not on premise, but a lot of companies wants or needs their servers on-premise, and the majority of them should use Windows. It's what they know and the training cost alone for putting Linux in place would be a silly investment. Windows just works for most people, and that's good enough.
This is complete and utter bullshit. Properly configuring a windows server with active directory, samba, exchange, etc is not trivial and should not be done by the stereotypical nephew of the SME owner who is good at computers. Setting up a linux server with SMB, IMAP etc is also not trivial but imho easier to set up and keep secured. Also, to an SME the cost of a windows server license is not trivial and you should be able to hire a linux pro to set up and maintain the server for less than the cost of the license if you don't want anything fancy.
I think any small, medium, or large enterprise that does not consider linux (on-site or in-cloud) as a viable alternative to windows servers is not doing good business.
Well google isn't applying for monopoly status anywhere. If the current ISPs can't (or won't) compete with google head-on, and if no other ISPs decide to do what google can apparently do, then those ISPs have no right to be here. If google can make a profit rolling out fiber internet while undercutting the competition, so can other players with large coffers (and a lot of companies are flush with cash right now).
Two caveats that the government should address: 1) dumping. Google should not be allowed to take a loss on its fiber service in order to push out competition and then hike prices. The threshold for entry is high enough that there should be very strict checks on anti-competitive behaviour. 2) open access: Again, due to the very high cost of entry, any provider should be forced to provide access to its network on "cost plus" basis without arbitrary restrictions.
I think it is 'dependencies dependencies' more than laziness. Few real-world projects depend only on the stdlib, and for these projects it is necessary to wait for at least the majority of depencies to adopt 3.x before porting becomes feasible, even if the porting itself is relatively straightforward. Of course, you can fork any dependencies and port them yourself, but the whole point of not reinventing a wheel is avoiding the maintenance on said wheel...
[...]And such stupendous stupidities such as isoweekday() returning a range of 1..7 [...]
Maybe, from a CS point of view, any index should always be zero-based. However, for weekday there are two compelling arguments why this should not be the case:
1) Authoritative: The ISO specs clearly state that weekday number should be 1..7 [from wikipedia: A date is specified by the ISO week-numbering year in the format YYYY, a week number in the format ww prefixed by the letter W, and the weekday number, a digit d from 1 through 7, beginning with Monday and ending with Sunday."]. So, any library that returns an "ISO week day number" of 0 is simply non-compliant
2) Customary: All human readable date components are 1-based (the first "CE" date is 0001-01-01, not 0000-00-00). So why should weekday (which is intended for human consumption) be different?
I think the current trend in the community is to write a single codebase that support both 2.7 and 3.x. In python 2.x you can "from __future__ import" a lot of the 3.x syntax changes, making it possible to have a shared codebase. For example, this is how django (a major python project) is handling 3.x compatability in its latest version.
(I guess this could be used as an argument that breaking backwards compatability was not really needed and the transition could have been more gradual, but I don't know enough of the specifics on this case...)
From TFA (I know, but there were no comments yet;-):
The company says the aluminum plate anodes in its aluminum-air battery have an energy density of 8 kWh/kg, but the batteries are not rechargeable. Once the energy is expended, the plates, which add up to around 55 pounds (25 kg) per battery, need to be replaced. However, the company points out that aluminum is easily recyclable and that swapping the battery out for a fresh one is quicker than recharging.
That makes it a lot less appealing, I would say...
I'm in Israel for a temporary gig, and I was surprised at the mobile plans.
For 100NIS (around 25$/month) I get unlimited calls within Israel *and* to all US phones and EU landlines, 2GM internet (speed capped) and unlimited text on a monthly subscription. Good stuff:-). Apparently they finally got decent competition in the last couple years, and it has certainly done them good...
In the netherlands a civil servant has to do the administrative part, but you can apply to become a "extraordinary civil servant" in order to perform marriages, which sounds similar to the certification system. I think the only legal requirements are the yes-saying, the witnesses, and the signing of the official document.
In general, religious people marry twice, once "for the law", and once "for the church", with the latter being the festive ceremony and the former akin to getting a new passport. When our crown prince and princess Maxima got married they did so first in front of the mayor, and then in a a protestant ceremony in the "new" church on the dam. Since the latter ceremony has no legal status whatsoever, you can celebrate it in any way you want (including protestant;-)).
Well, I drive a 2000 Saab 93 convertible with 2.0 turbo gasoline engine, and get around 8 l/100km (=30MPG) on relatively long distance trips and it goes down to 11 l/100km (=22 mpg) when I do mostly city driving. To my mind these numbers are not exactly spectacular, but the are sure better than most MPG figures people around here quote.
I concur that the main factor is the driver. If I am in a hurry / a mood for speeding and drive more agressively and go to 140 km/h (=85 mph) the efficiency drops quite rapidly, I've certainly seen 14l/100km (17mpg). Also, I know that if I put the display to show efficiency I actually drive more efficient, I guess it becomes kind of a game to optimize the number.My wife and I actually trade mpg numbers after a trip or when taking turns behind the wheel.
I do actually like the l/100km better than km/l now. If you know how much you drive (per day, year, or trip), it is much easier to calculate savings by driving more efficiently (eg trip is 600 km, 1 l/100 km = 6 liters saved)
Dang, Where are all these soulful corporations when you need them?
They used to be in your village main streets and downtown areas (assuming you're American).
Soulful corporations, or at least soulful businesses, are the mom n pop shops and other small shopkeepers and small professionals that keep an urban area vibrant. By driving to the big box stores outside the city, we as customers are killing local retail and replacing it with soulless corporations. Even in Europe, where the problem is less far progressed, most small villages no longer have any services left. In the States, as far as I've seen, outside the major ("liberal") urban centers, the only services left are usually large chain-stores in industrial zones with large parking lots, leading to a complete dependence on cars and a death of the old small stores and corresponding values and social safety
The big question is: if investing in the company to keep it afloat is a good investment, why isn't someone else doing it? Sure, 10 years is a long horizon, but there are still investors who take a long term interest... And even if in some cases the government can profit by nursing the company back to health through direct and indirect capital injection (guaranteeing the borrowing of the nationalised company essentially subsidises the cost of capital at the expense of taxpayers as the capital markets make the national bonds more expensive as the dept grows), this will not be the case for all companies (as the bad decisions and waiting too long the start the cleanup can leave quite a large negative balance) and who trusts politicians or bureaucrats to make good judgment calls there...?
A couple years ago we 'had to' nationalize the remainder of the ABN bank after the credit crisis and the failed takeover by RBS, Fortis, and Santander. The shareholders received (afaik) a ton of money because there was no legislation in place as you suggest.
After this, 'we' enacted legislation to intervene in banks and nationalise them as needed. A week ago, the fourh biggest bank, SNS, failed and they were nationalised. The shareholders and "subordinated bondholders" (?) got due compensation for the price of their holdings assuming SNS would have gone bankrupt without the intervantion, i.e. nil. Normal bondholders and people with savings accounts (even above the government guaranteed 100k) don't notice anything.
This is leading to a lot of public discussion. First is a (knee jerk?) call for the responsible to be put to justice, both the bank's old management and the overseers, especially the Dutch Central Bank. Second there is a group of shareholders and especially subordinated bondholders who think that they are ripped off by the expropriation. Third is a discussion on whether the government should not have just let them gone bankrupt and deal with the results rather than the 3.7B euro bailout, even if the owners of the bank loose all their investment and the management is replaced.
As a social capitalist / rheinland model adapt with strong liberal (in the european sense, e.g. free market) leanings, I think this is a test case of how we as a culture should react to the obvious problem of private gains / public losses with the current banking sector.
Slashdot Mirror
As sibling says, bridges and hills are a problem. Major waterways are generally constructed so that bridges are either really high (as in 30ft+) or have some part that can be opened.
Anything that fits on a truck is easy to transport over land, but stuff that is significantly larger and can't be moved in parts is difficult over land. On the water, major ports and waterways are pretty wide. For example, the coast pilot linked a boatnerd.com [1] (who doesn't love that url) says for the mississipi - illinois waterway connection:
(10) Mississippi River-Illinois Waterway-
(11) depth, 9 feet (2.7);
(12) width, 80 feet (24.38 meters);
(13) length, 600 feet (182.88 meters);
(14) vertical clearance 17 feet (5.18 meters);
So, you can transport something that is roughly 20x150 meters. Some random internet site [2] says that "The standard barge is 195 feet long, 35 feet wide, and can be used to a 9-foot draft. Its capacity is 1500 tons. Some of the newer barges today are 290 feet by 50 feet, double the capacity of earlier barges." So, if we get one of them "newer barges', we can transport something that is 75 x 15 meters and weighs 3000 tonnes using equipment that is standard on the infrastructure.
A random wiki quote [3] says that "In the United States, 80,000 pounds (36,287 kg) is the maximum allowable legal gross vehicle weight without a permit.". So, with standard equipment you can transport something on the ground up to 36 metric tons, or about 0.1 percent of what fits on the barge*. Of course, you *can* transport something bigger than that, but then you get into serious logistic operations with special equipment, road closures, etc etc, while the barge can just be loaded up and sail away.
tl;dr: roads are made for fast and flexible transportation of relatively small amounts of cargo; shipping is made for slow transportation of bulk and large items.
[1] http://www.boatnerd.com/facts-figures/cpgreat.htm
[2] http://www.caria.org/barges_tugboats.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-trailer_truck
*) I'm totally ignoring any possible short tonne, long tonne, metric tonne etc errors here, since that won't make a dent into a 3 orders of magnitude difference...
Some interesting legal questiosn that we studied for Dutch criminal law:
Someone got shot and was paralysed from the neck down. When she also got an infection (as a complication of the wounds/operation), she decided not to seek treatment because her life wasn't worth living anymore. Is this murder or aggravated assault?
A similar one: a man is stabbed, and while he could have been saved, the medics make a mistake and he dies. Is (the stabbing) murder or assault?
Another one: a man drives too fast in a commercial street, skids, hits a lantern pole, which hits a window, the glass of which hits a man who bleeds to death. Is this manslaughter? (in other words, is there a causal chain from the driving to the glass hitting the man?)
A final one: a man finds an unexploded detonator in the woods, and takes it home as a souvenir/decoration. Years later, the next owner of the house does some remodeling and needs something to prop open a window. He uses (unknowingly) the detonator, with fatal consequences. Did the original man cause the death of the new owner?
tangible assets like precious metals, water rights, mineral rights, real estate
So, most of the tangible assets you mention have a worth that is greatly dependent on the current market whims and/or the government that backs them... just like banknotes. It might be a good insurance against inflation, but not really against anything else...
"You didn't come here to hunt, did you?"
You seem to be talking about the magnetic poles, which are indeed caused by the spin of the core and move a lot every year, in the magnitude of 50 km/year. This is so much that navigating using a compass requires compensating for the specific declination of that year. You can even observe it if you have a good bearing compass: take the bearing from a fixed position to a relatively far away object, such as a broadcast tower. A couple years later, take the bearing again, and (depending on your location) it may have changed by one or even several degrees.
TFA talks about the geographic north, e.g. the intersection of the surface and the axes around which the earth spins. This does not generally move around much, as it is affected by the distribution of mass around the earth causing the axis to shift. According to TFS, it can be measured using GPS, and moves in the magnitude of centimeters per year.
Or more elegantly in haiku form:
Top prime's divisors'
product (plus one)'s factors are?
QED, bitches!
-- http://xkcd.com/622/
Interesting wiki link, thanks!
If you compare the US with mostly "developing" nations, you are right, and I would guess that a lot of them are caused by bad roads, bad cars, and really bad driving, the latter presumably caused by easy to get licenses and bad policing.
If you compare the US to some OECD countries, the picture is different:
Country / deaths per 100k vehicles / deaths per 1B miles
USA / 15 / 8.5
Germany / 7.2 / 7.2
Netherlands / 7 / 5.6
Switzerland / 7 / 5.6
Sweden / 7 / 5.1
Belgium / 17 / 10.8
Italy / 12 / ?
Poland / 18 / 23.5
Serbia / 43 / ?
Egypt / 188 / ?
India / 315 /
Nigeria / 1042 / ?
So, the US has twice the per-vehicle death rate of countries like the Netherlands (really crowded), Germany (really fast driving), Switzerland (mountain roads and inclement weather) and Sweden (low population density). The per-mile deaths are higher (but not so much higher) than germany, and still a lot higher than the smaller countries. Even southern European countries like Italy but also Spain and France (both around 10) have less deaths/vehicle, even though people have "interesting" driving habits there. Unlisted countries like Sweden, the UK, denmark etc. are mostly similar to the Netherlands / Germany. Belgium is a weird outlier, as they are quite similar to the Netherlands in a lot of respects but have a much higher death rate.
Eastern (central) european countries like Poland but especially Serbia are a lot worse, and it seems to loosely correspond with economic development. If you look at countries like Egypt or India it becomes pretty bad, and a lot of African countries have >1000 deaths per 100k vehicles, e.g. a >1% annual death rate for vehicle owners. (That means that if you drive for 30 years, there is a chance of a fatal accident of around 25%... yikes!)
From the list above, it seems that there is a rough predictability of the danger of traffic based on national income and maybe population density, but the US is certainly on the "wrong end" of the prediction, comparable to Germany or Sweden in terms of wealth and population density, but with much higher death rates.
I'd much rather send my phone info to canonical than to google, for the simple reason that google already has too much info. It has always been the case that a large number of entities (eg your boss, spouse, mistress, bank, tax service, football pals) together had a lot of info on you. The scary thing with google is the amount of info placed into the hands of one entity. The more I can spread my info around, the better.
(Of course, this depends on the info being hard to link and recombine, otherwise canonical will just sell the info back to google and they can join it up. So I'm fine with canonical having my search info and location, but not so fine with them having my browser data including gmail account...)
I don't buy an android tablet because I want to be able to run my stuff on it without needing a separate "app". I don't like having to learn a new interface because the device is slightly different.
If they get it to work well, I would certainly consider buying a buntu table and I think I will put ubuntu on my current phone when I get a new one. (I am very hesitant to playing with my android phone after bricking the previous one by trying to flash the rom - toying with gadgets is nice but not if I can't make a phone call until I get it right...)
It's called metareasoning, bitch.
You don't prove the rules for proving (because you'd need rules for proving first). You reason about the rules for proving, and then apply the agreed upon rules. Also, there are different uses of the word "prove". In math, you can easily prove that -1 != 0. In biology, you can't prove that there are no yellow ants with light bulbs for heads.
Please (re)read your classics, I'd start with Hofstadter and Popper (but I'm old fashioned). Any book with "philosophy of science" in the title should probably also do the trick.
Okay, I'll bite.
For the majority of enterprise businesses, that is the only thing they do, and they should not even consider thinking about hiring someone to wonder if the should deploy Linux boxes in their business. Anyone small to medium enterprise thinking about putting stuff on Linux should do so in the Cloud, not on premise, but a lot of companies wants or needs their servers on-premise, and the majority of them should use Windows. It's what they know and the training cost alone for putting Linux in place would be a silly investment. Windows just works for most people, and that's good enough.
This is complete and utter bullshit. Properly configuring a windows server with active directory, samba, exchange, etc is not trivial and should not be done by the stereotypical nephew of the SME owner who is good at computers. Setting up a linux server with SMB, IMAP etc is also not trivial but imho easier to set up and keep secured. Also, to an SME the cost of a windows server license is not trivial and you should be able to hire a linux pro to set up and maintain the server for less than the cost of the license if you don't want anything fancy.
I think any small, medium, or large enterprise that does not consider linux (on-site or in-cloud) as a viable alternative to windows servers is not doing good business.
There could well be a place more hospitable in a couple months, if North Korea, America and China all play there part.
Mars could be a lot more hospitable than an earth burning with nuclear (and biological) fallout...
Well google isn't applying for monopoly status anywhere. If the current ISPs can't (or won't) compete with google head-on, and if no other ISPs decide to do what google can apparently do, then those ISPs have no right to be here. If google can make a profit rolling out fiber internet while undercutting the competition, so can other players with large coffers (and a lot of companies are flush with cash right now).
Two caveats that the government should address:
1) dumping. Google should not be allowed to take a loss on its fiber service in order to push out competition and then hike prices. The threshold for entry is high enough that there should be very strict checks on anti-competitive behaviour.
2) open access: Again, due to the very high cost of entry, any provider should be forced to provide access to its network on "cost plus" basis without arbitrary restrictions.
I think it is 'dependencies dependencies' more than laziness. Few real-world projects depend only on the stdlib, and for these projects it is necessary to wait for at least the majority of depencies to adopt 3.x before porting becomes feasible, even if the porting itself is relatively straightforward. Of course, you can fork any dependencies and port them yourself, but the whole point of not reinventing a wheel is avoiding the maintenance on said wheel...
[...]And such stupendous stupidities such as isoweekday() returning a range of 1..7 [...]
Maybe, from a CS point of view, any index should always be zero-based. However, for weekday there are two compelling arguments why this should not be the case:
1) Authoritative: The ISO specs clearly state that weekday number should be 1..7 [from wikipedia: A date is specified by the ISO week-numbering year in the format YYYY, a week number in the format ww prefixed by the letter W, and the weekday number, a digit d from 1 through 7, beginning with Monday and ending with Sunday."]. So, any library that returns an "ISO week day number" of 0 is simply non-compliant
2) Customary: All human readable date components are 1-based (the first "CE" date is 0001-01-01, not 0000-00-00). So why should weekday (which is intended for human consumption) be different?
I think the current trend in the community is to write a single codebase that support both 2.7 and 3.x. In python 2.x you can "from __future__ import" a lot of the 3.x syntax changes, making it possible to have a shared codebase. For example, this is how django (a major python project) is handling 3.x compatability in its latest version.
(I guess this could be used as an argument that breaking backwards compatability was not really needed and the transition could have been more gradual, but I don't know enough of the specifics on this case...)
From TFA (I know, but there were no comments yet ;-):
The company says the aluminum plate anodes in its aluminum-air battery have an energy density of 8 kWh/kg, but the batteries are not rechargeable. Once the energy is expended, the plates, which add up to around 55 pounds (25 kg) per battery, need to be replaced. However, the company points out that aluminum is easily recyclable and that swapping the battery out for a fresh one is quicker than recharging.
That makes it a lot less appealing, I would say...
I'm in Israel for a temporary gig, and I was surprised at the mobile plans.
For 100NIS (around 25$/month) I get unlimited calls within Israel *and* to all US phones and EU landlines, 2GM internet (speed capped) and unlimited text on a monthly subscription. Good stuff :-). Apparently they finally got decent competition in the last couple years, and it has certainly done them good...
In the netherlands a civil servant has to do the administrative part, but you can apply to become a "extraordinary civil servant" in order to perform marriages, which sounds similar to the certification system. I think the only legal requirements are the yes-saying, the witnesses, and the signing of the official document.
In general, religious people marry twice, once "for the law", and once "for the church", with the latter being the festive ceremony and the former akin to getting a new passport. When our crown prince and princess Maxima got married they did so first in front of the mayor, and then in a a protestant ceremony in the "new" church on the dam. Since the latter ceremony has no legal status whatsoever, you can celebrate it in any way you want (including protestant ;-)).
[citation required]
Well, I drive a 2000 Saab 93 convertible with 2.0 turbo gasoline engine, and get around 8 l/100km (=30MPG) on relatively long distance trips and it goes down to 11 l/100km (=22 mpg) when I do mostly city driving. To my mind these numbers are not exactly spectacular, but the are sure better than most MPG figures people around here quote.
I concur that the main factor is the driver. If I am in a hurry / a mood for speeding and drive more agressively and go to 140 km/h (=85 mph) the efficiency drops quite rapidly, I've certainly seen 14l/100km (17mpg). Also, I know that if I put the display to show efficiency I actually drive more efficient, I guess it becomes kind of a game to optimize the number.My wife and I actually trade mpg numbers after a trip or when taking turns behind the wheel.
I do actually like the l/100km better than km/l now. If you know how much you drive (per day, year, or trip), it is much easier to calculate savings by driving more efficiently (eg trip is 600 km, 1 l/100 km = 6 liters saved)
Or get a "real" os with tiling window management. I am using xubuntu+xmonad and it is the best thing since electronic transistors!
Dang, Where are all these soulful corporations when you need them?
They used to be in your village main streets and downtown areas (assuming you're American).
Soulful corporations, or at least soulful businesses, are the mom n pop shops and other small shopkeepers and small professionals that keep an urban area vibrant. By driving to the big box stores outside the city, we as customers are killing local retail and replacing it with soulless corporations. Even in Europe, where the problem is less far progressed, most small villages no longer have any services left. In the States, as far as I've seen, outside the major ("liberal") urban centers, the only services left are usually large chain-stores in industrial zones with large parking lots, leading to a complete dependence on cars and a death of the old small stores and corresponding values and social safety
The big question is: if investing in the company to keep it afloat is a good investment, why isn't someone else doing it? Sure, 10 years is a long horizon, but there are still investors who take a long term interest... And even if in some cases the government can profit by nursing the company back to health through direct and indirect capital injection (guaranteeing the borrowing of the nationalised company essentially subsidises the cost of capital at the expense of taxpayers as the capital markets make the national bonds more expensive as the dept grows), this will not be the case for all companies (as the bad decisions and waiting too long the start the cleanup can leave quite a large negative balance) and who trusts politicians or bureaucrats to make good judgment calls there...?
Case study from the Netherlands.
A couple years ago we 'had to' nationalize the remainder of the ABN bank after the credit crisis and the failed takeover by RBS, Fortis, and Santander. The shareholders received (afaik) a ton of money because there was no legislation in place as you suggest.
After this, 'we' enacted legislation to intervene in banks and nationalise them as needed. A week ago, the fourh biggest bank, SNS, failed and they were nationalised. The shareholders and "subordinated bondholders" (?) got due compensation for the price of their holdings assuming SNS would have gone bankrupt without the intervantion, i.e. nil. Normal bondholders and people with savings accounts (even above the government guaranteed 100k) don't notice anything.
This is leading to a lot of public discussion. First is a (knee jerk?) call for the responsible to be put to justice, both the bank's old management and the overseers, especially the Dutch Central Bank. Second there is a group of shareholders and especially subordinated bondholders who think that they are ripped off by the expropriation. Third is a discussion on whether the government should not have just let them gone bankrupt and deal with the results rather than the 3.7B euro bailout, even if the owners of the bank loose all their investment and the management is replaced.
As a social capitalist / rheinland model adapt with strong liberal (in the european sense, e.g. free market) leanings, I think this is a test case of how we as a culture should react to the obvious problem of private gains / public losses with the current banking sector.
Some English language sources:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323701904578277253567195598.html
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/dutch-government-takes-control-of-sns-reaal/
http://blogs.wsj.com/eurocrisis/2013/02/04/when-not-all-bonds-are-bonds/