Interestingly, the word Slav derives from greek Sklabos, which according to the good Wiki "may derive from the Greek verb (skulá), a variant of (skuleú, “to get the spoils of war”)[1] because Slavs were often enslaved." - so it could still be that Slav derived from slavery/loot, and in turn slavery was derived from Slav...
Everyone time this gets posted, people act as though it hasn't been NIH policy for YEARS that every NIH-funded paper (so, essentially every important paper in the US) is open access within 6 months of publication. YEARS.
This is indeed an improvement / extension of that policy. The point is that the NIH policy allowed journals to remain closed while allowing a subset of papers to be open access (i.e. hybrid style). Since a lot of papers were still not open access, universities still needed a subscription, so their business model remained intact (and was even improved as they now get open access charges as well as subscriptions).
You can run a journal for about 500$ per article (archiving, copy-editing, type-setting. etc), maybe 1000$ if you include editorial assistance (which most science journals have very little of). Everything above that is just rent seeking and is caused by the vicious circle that scientists need to publish in 'prestigious' journals, and so the journals they publish their best work in remain prestigious; this makes the whole system very slow to change, allowing the big publishers to have 35%+ profit margins (which is significantly higher even than big pharma).
What is great about this policy is that by banning hybrids it forces a significant body of work to be published in truly open access journals, which helps these journals to become more highly ranked, which tempts other scientists to also publish there. Thus, either existing journals will need to switch to keep these submissions (which would be good), or new journals (especially community owned) will have an easier time getting started and building reputation (which would also be good).
(note also that NIH is the institute of Health, not the general science funder NSF - that would have had much more impact)
you mean MS Office - there is still no usable alternative for Linux - just some free half-baked toys for people who never needed an office suite in the first place
- Most people who use MS Office have no need of an office suite - they would do fine with a simple word processor and calculator - For typing a letter, making a simple graph or presentation, etc, libreoffice is fine. - Google docs/calc/etc offers a decent set of tools. It's missing a lot of features, but the collaboration features are fantastic. A lot of my work doesn't really need complicated type setting and reference management, and google docs makes it a lot easier to share things - The CSV import/export in LO Calc is actually superior to MS Excel. Excel assumes that everyone uses files matching their local settings, which is a complete disaster if you collaborate with people on different regional settings.
You can't take a dictionary from the library, or an encyclopedia, or even an almanac. It's relatively useless to try to check out cookbooks, unless it's only on a few special occasions when you cook.
Who really uses dictionaries and encyclopedias anymore? Finding a word/lemma in a digital reference is so much easier, plus you can follow links and do full-text search (if the index doesn't contain what you're looking for)
Cookbooks: yes, they are useful. I am a pretty hard-core amateur cook, but there's only a couple books I use a lot (mostly silver spoon (italian) and food lab). 90% of my recipes are digital, either my own collection, or (selected) online recipes, e.g. seriouseats.
Lots of technology requires reference literature, and while some of it is available in digital form, ALL of it is available in dead trees. Very little of that is loaned by even a very good public library. Even a good university's research libraries will not have some critically important books. Thus, a prof consults colleagues, who have heavily laden shelves in their offices, or he/she needs to load down his own shelves.
I'm an (associate) professor and have been in social science research for the past 14 years. I hardly ever use physical books or journals. We don't even have personal bookshelfs anymore in my department. I've not visited my library since grad school. Everything relevant is written in journals or the occasional edited volume, all available online.
Non-ownership of books is borderline functional illiteracy. Survivable, yes; desirable, no.
I love owning books for leisure reading, in bed, on holiday, on the couch. But I have friends who use ebooks for that and they seem perfectly happy with it....
Books make great sound-isolation and decoration, though. A shelf full of ebook readers is just not very pretty to look at:-)
Frankly, people never owned the music or the words in the book. They owned a physical copy printed on a dead tree or a shiny disc. Copyright law always restricted what you were able to do with the music or words.
From the OP:
It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship.
Interestingly, entrepreneurship is decreasingly about owning and running capital stock, and more and more about connecting services and resources. Most companies lease their offices
(the problem with feudal peasants, of course, is that there was no free competition in land leases - they were bound to "lease" from their landlord, who was able to skim most profits off the peasant's work. A lot of farmers nowadays don't own (all) the land they work, and as long as the terms of lease are good this doesn't need to be a problem at all)
The batteries are meant primarily for ferries, which are especially suited for wired charging as they (1) have relatively short routes (2) between set points (3) with relatively frequent and long (un)loading delays, including generally a nightly downtime. So they can charge at night and top-up every time they (un)load passengers.
This means they can use generated electricity, which in Norway (the first customer of these ships) means hydro-electricity, reducing pollution (making the gov't happy) and apparently reducing costs by 80%.
Since the main drawback of all-electric transport is battery weight, it seems that ships, especially ferries and short-distance haulers, should be very well suited to electrification.
[For comparison, a random city car (VW UP) is 60 HP for about 1 ton.for A lorry seems to be about 500HP for at most 50 (metric) tons fully loaded, so about 10 HP per ton. A random ferry (https://www.teso.nl/nl/teso-mainmenu-70/schepen-mainmenu-106/dokter-wagemaker-mainmenu-107) is 4x1.8KW ~ 10kHP for 7k ton, or just over 1 HP per ton. So, the weight of the battery pack will be a lot less (relatively) to to total weight compared to cars or lorries]
USS Enterprise is 342 m long, 78.4m wide, and has 12m draft. The (new) panama locks allows max 49m beam. The real problem is the st. Lawrence seaway, however: to get beyond Montreal max draft is 8.2m, and the locks can only accomodate 233.5 m length and 24.4m beam.
US is around 19T$, EU is 17T$ and relatively easy to do business in (strong rule of law, some convergence between countries). Next are China at 12T$, but if you find EU too much of a hassle don't even think about it, after that Japan (4T$) and India (2T$), also not easy markets.
So, if you don't think US is a big enough market, EU is a pretty natural second. But to play ball here, you gotta play by the rules. Which is true across the pond as well, just check out the fines EU banks were hit by in response to (presumably) violating US laws or statutes.
The point of antitrust law is that if you have a (near) monopoly in one area, you are not allowed to (ab)use that to also gain a monopoly in another area. Antitrust law always removes freedom of enterprise for the (assumed) benefits of consumers. The justification for this is that free markets work well iff there is healthy competition; and that if left alone companies tend to concentrate by merger or natural growth and then get monopoly pricing power (see e.g. the history of US railways). If there is only two companies left, they have a very strong incentive to merge because as monopolists they can make much more profit than when they are in competition with each other. So, in reaction to the abuses of (especially) 19th century capitalism the government stepped in to break up companies, prevent mergers, and restrict the freedom of (near) monopolists if break up is not sensible or not needed.
Concretely, it is fine if a random linux distro would by default install its own browser. However, if MS by default installs its own browser on its (near) monopoly desktop OS, it is abusing its OS market power to increase its market share in the browser market.
So, yes, if android didn't have a (near) monopoly there would be no problem. However, now that it is a near monopoly they lose the freedom to use their mobile OS market share to effectively push their other services onto users.
They told me they're embarrased to quote anything that's older than 5 years and I should never quote a book from 1998.... WTF? Seriously? [..] Mind you, this is CompSci where you would expect some sort of academic credibility, unlike Sociology or "Gender Studies"
I won't make any comments about gender studies, but I would like to point out that sociology and other fields of social science are usually a lot better at keeping track of and citing literature. I've done my PhD in AI but have since moved to social science, and I'm often embarrassed at the quality of literature review / previous work section in comp sci papers: extremely short and superficial and often more aimed at dismissing everything that is done before than at showing the tradition, context, and framework of the ideas presented in the paper.
So, yeah, the teacher was not doing a very good job there, but that reflects on CS much more than on social science.
(also, I often teach my students not to cite a textbook where you could have cited the original papers, unless the argument was actually originally made in the textbook or it is just a matter of explanation or definition. And I also teach students not to just cite the new literature on a topic, but show both where the ideas came from (the seminal / classical articles) and the recent discourse on the topic. It's hard work:-) )
So much THIS!!! Nothing motivates a server like a good tip.
Tipping is structurally unable to achieve the kind of service which I want - which is a waiter who doesn't interrupt me while I'm eating or talking to ask if everything is okay.
Also, there is such a strong social pressure to give a certain %tip in the US, that tipping doesn't really give off a strong message about serving quality anymore. They should really just pay the waiting staff a decent wage (and increase the price of the food/drinks by whatever % needed), and then I will give a tip iff I like the service.
If the waiter checks back shortly after delivering the food, the waiter will be interrupting my eating and likely interrupting my conversation. This is the kind of service I specifically DON'T want.
Yup.
When I started out as a waiter I was instructed to do just this (ask whether everything is in order a couple minutes after bringing the plates) and maybe for a mediocre restaurant that's actually a good idea. But you shouldn't go to mediocre restaurants, or at least not go there and then complain about it.
In a good restaurant they are confident that they didn't forget anything and that the food is good. However, they will actually keep an eye on the table, and if they spot something is wrong (guests are looking around, someone didn't start eating, etc) then you come in to ask if everything is alright. Because maybe they decided they'd actually prefer a different wine, or they want to ask something about the food or whatever.
Sign of good service: the waiter is always there when you need him, and never interrupts you.
The problem is: this requires a (socially) smart person and/or years of experience, and preferably both. Parisian service has a bad rep, but the places where you see mostly 50+ year olds waiting actually have really good service most of the time (speaking 3 words of tourist French helps) because they treat it as a profession, not a side job. But these people obviously cost more than 5-10$ per hour, and a lot of people prefer to pay less for their burger and get a novice waiter to help them. Which is fine, but again: don't complain about it.
It's a class thing. Waiters are traditionally supposed to act like serving staff. [..] Some people are made uncomfortable by that. They want a waiter who's their peer and buddy, not their staff.
I disagree (at least in part). I've been a waiter myself as a teenager and student, and now I am happy to go to restaurants a guest. As a waiter I never wanted to be anyones peer or buddy, and as a guest I certainly don't want the waiter to be my peer and buddy. When I travel to the US I am made uncomfortable by waiters who somehow think that it's good to draw attention to their person and be all friendly. I want them to be efficient and polite, and I will respond by being polite and respectful.
Waiting is a profession, and being a good waiter is not an easy job. We should let them do their job while we enjoy the fruits. If you take a taxi you don't sit in front, chat with the driver, and help them navigate, right? If you go to the doctor or dentist you don't go there because you love chatting with the guy right? Distance is a sign of professionalism, not of class difference.
(Note that whether a waiter will appreciate you stacking the plates and passing them will depend on a host of factors, but if you expect the total bill to exceed 100$ per person, my advise would be to let them do their jobs. They should have plenty of staff and you disrespect them by thinking they need you to do their job. If it's more like a 25$ per person place and the waiter looks overworked, there's a good chance s/he will be happy for your helpfulness.)
And if I do need a chat, I'll go to a bar and take a stool at the actual bar and hope for a nice bartender. I certainly don't go to TGI Fridays because I love chatting with the waiting staff... (I'm not actually sure why anyone would go to any of the restaurant chains mentioned for any reason, but that's a different story....)
Sure, that's called PRT. But why not just use trains? You eliminate the engine (and the driver) and control all train cars from a central location. The cars are smart enough to do certain things on their own, like safely approach a leading car and couple to it, or decelerate and stop at a siding once sent to it.
I think this is going to be the only idea that will compete with self-driving cars on traditional roads. If you can have "pods" that can link to each other without slowing down you can get the best of both worlds (fine granularity without frequent unneeded stops). Problem is of course that it will be quite complicated to let a pod in the middle go off to a siding - it needs to decouple both front and aft, get enough distance to be able to take a siding safely (presumably meaning both it and the aft pod decelerates, because the larger train is at cruising speed) while the other pods go straight, and then the aft pod needs to accelerate and hook back up with the 'train'. This will cause quite a lot of inefficiency which might negate the gains from hooking up if it is frequent enough.
Alternative could be to always decouple the last car in the train, and let people move back and forth between cars. That would negate the "flatbed"/"private pod" idea, but allow for better economies of scale, as everyone in station X can take the pod/car that leaves from X, walk into the main train, and get off by walking to the back of the train.
approach to fighting [s]spam[/s] "mob rule online". Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad [s]federal law[/s]Royal Decree was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it (X) Microsoft will not put up with it (X) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems (X) Unpopularity of weird new laws ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (X) Huge existing software investment ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of [s]spam[/s]"online mob rule" (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (X) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck (X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. (X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
The Netherlands do indeed have a universal pension, but it's not an awful lot of money, around 1200$ a month for a single person. Probably enough to live on if you have cheap housing, but not really what I aim my retirement to look like. Moreover, the retirement age is creeping up and there are worries about sustainability as it's a pay-as-you-go system.
Employees often have mandatory collective retirement funds, which are actually really well funded. They are mandated to have 'coverage' of over 100%, meaning that they have enough money to pay all their obligations assuming very modest interest rates. A lot of them are also in trouble because of the current hyperlow interest rates - it forces them to calculate their future means with a very low interest, so they need to increase payments or decrease current pensions (or at least not index them for inflation). In general they are running into the general problem of maintaining a fixed benefit scheme in an ageing population. As I work for university I am covered by the civil servant pension fund, which seems to be doing quite well and has implicit government backing. In other trades the companies are forced to chip in if the retirement fund is unable to maintain its coverage, but of course in a declining industry (e.g. shipbuilding) this will be very difficult. If I keep my current salary until retirement age, I should get 3000,- in total (per month; including state pension and after taxes), which is probably enough to live comfortably as my house should be paid by then.
Finally, all self-employed people and a lot of other people save themselves for retirement, either pre-tax or post-tax. This is the only reason you would need to know a lot about stocks/pensions, and even then probably most people just buy an off-the-shelf retirement saving product (either savings or stock based), which is also the only way to get tax benefits. Of course, this is highly unpredictable in any case.
They are constantly debating reforms to the current system. Plans include opening the pension funds to self-employed people or even forcing them to take part [labour would like that], altering the change in pension age, and moving from collective defined benefits to some more individual system. The labour unions have a big part in this negotiations so I'm sure whatever comes out will serve the current old people [who make up most of the membership] well...
I'm no MS fanboi and haven't used any of their products for the past ~10 years (apart from the outlook calendar forced on me by work).
But this is really good, it's fantastic that they're doing this, and it actually sounds like a good idea. Of course they have good incentives apart from the goodness of their heart (good PR, and possible future profits - there's an estimate of 36M (completely) blind people globally), but as far as I care if an "evil" corporation does "good" stuff because of incentives in the system, the system is working.
So, yay microsoft, keep up the good work [and please release office for linux and stop messing around otherwise]
Not to make too fine a point, but.gov is for US government website. All other countries get a TLD (.fr for France) which they are (AFAIK) free to administer as they please. So, France could have reserved france.fr, france.gov.fr, or maybe even just http://fr/ (not sure of the specs here)
In any case, although there might be issues with naming your company after a foreign country, one would expect a bit more due process here.
The issue most of us have with cyclists is that there is a significant number of them that really want maximum penalties applied to cars, but don't want the rules to apply to them at all.
That would be me:)
Enforcing some rules on cyclists makes sense. For example, requiring proper lighting in the dark makes sense, because you want to give cars a chance to see them. Even if the car would not be legally responsible if the bike is not lighted (which is highly dubious), there's a lot of moral/emotional damage for the car driver.
I violate traffic lights all the time in my bike when it is safe to do so. I would be fine with cars also using more common sense, as e.g. the turn on red rules in the US allow. However, there are two big differences between a car and a bike in case a mistake is made: (1) on my bike I can very quickly get out of the way, either forwards (to the next lane or in between lanes by turning my bike sideways) or backwards or even sideways, since usually a bike and car can share a lane if the bike is going the same direction. Cars take a lot longer to react since they are bigger and have more inertia. Moreover, they take a lot more space, and the space behind them is probably filled by the next car and the lane ahead might not always be free (or he might be turning onto a divided or one way street). So, there is a good chance that the car won't be able to get out of the way as quickly. (2) if worst comes to worst, as OP said it's my body that's on the line first. You really don't want to get there, and you don't want to inflict the physical, emotional and material damage on the car driver; but the fact that I will die first is a very good incentive for me to pay attention. And given the driving habits of some people in modern tanks (SUVs and minivans), I think it does make quite a difference.
Bike-bike and bike-pedestrian interaction can in 99% of cases be left to the people involved. I know that some pedestrians think bikers are assholes, and as an Amsterdam biker I think most tourist pedestrians are complete morons, but we really don't need police to guide our interaction. Sure, some people will get minor bruising, and once a year someone might die. But these cases can be dealt post-hoc through torts and criminal proceedings as a last resort. See http://www.urbancyclinginstitu... and other articles on that site for some really good info.
Cops are human beings, with mostly the same virtues and weaknesses. They are granted power, which in some people instills a great sense of responsibility but which other people sometimes abuse for personal profit or out of cruelty.
For that reasons we have checks on cops behaviour, just like we have checks on most people who wield official power. In a "my word vs the cop's" situation it is difficult and indeed, the judge generally sides with the cop, and your single complaint will not get him/her fired. However, if a single cop gets too many complaints it will count against them; and if you have real evidence of a cop purposefully lying it can have real repercussions for him/her, depending on a lot of factors.
Granting power vs checking it is a real dilemma. If we ask judges and the cop's bosses to distrust cops by default, it will be very difficult to find and retain cops and to let them do their job, leading to much less effective policing and less security. If we go too far to the trust-by-default side, you get corruption and public distrust. However "we" chose to set the balance, there will be mistakes made in both directions. And yes, it sucks to be you if you are one of these mistakes...
This is actually exactly what the founder of Otis lifts did: he demonstrated his safety elevator by standing on a raised platform and having the rope severed, showing that the safety system would stop the fall safely [https://www.britannica.com/technology/elevator-vertical-transport#ref90006]
I guess the big difference is that we humans can employ an AI program to help us beat the reverse captcha, but the AI can't (yet) employ humans to help them beat the captcha.
Unless you see captcha's as a method for the AI to employ humans to help it beat the captcha, of course. And it wouldn't surprise me if there were sites that place a bot-encountered captcha in their human interactions in real time as a way of dealing with them?
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, the word Slav derives from greek Sklabos, which according to the good Wiki "may derive from the Greek verb (skulá), a variant of (skuleú, “to get the spoils of war”)[1] because Slavs were often enslaved." - so it could still be that Slav derived from slavery/loot, and in turn slavery was derived from Slav...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...
Everyone time this gets posted, people act as though it hasn't been NIH policy for YEARS that every NIH-funded paper (so, essentially every important paper in the US) is open access within 6 months of publication. YEARS.
This is indeed an improvement / extension of that policy. The point is that the NIH policy allowed journals to remain closed while allowing a subset of papers to be open access (i.e. hybrid style). Since a lot of papers were still not open access, universities still needed a subscription, so their business model remained intact (and was even improved as they now get open access charges as well as subscriptions).
You can run a journal for about 500$ per article (archiving, copy-editing, type-setting. etc), maybe 1000$ if you include editorial assistance (which most science journals have very little of). Everything above that is just rent seeking and is caused by the vicious circle that scientists need to publish in 'prestigious' journals, and so the journals they publish their best work in remain prestigious; this makes the whole system very slow to change, allowing the big publishers to have 35%+ profit margins (which is significantly higher even than big pharma).
What is great about this policy is that by banning hybrids it forces a significant body of work to be published in truly open access journals, which helps these journals to become more highly ranked, which tempts other scientists to also publish there. Thus, either existing journals will need to switch to keep these submissions (which would be good), or new journals (especially community owned) will have an easier time getting started and building reputation (which would also be good).
(note also that NIH is the institute of Health, not the general science funder NSF - that would have had much more impact)
you mean MS Office - there is still no usable alternative for Linux - just some free half-baked toys for people who never needed an office suite in the first place
- Most people who use MS Office have no need of an office suite - they would do fine with a simple word processor and calculator
- For typing a letter, making a simple graph or presentation, etc, libreoffice is fine.
- Google docs/calc/etc offers a decent set of tools. It's missing a lot of features, but the collaboration features are fantastic. A lot of my work doesn't really need complicated type setting and reference management, and google docs makes it a lot easier to share things
- The CSV import/export in LO Calc is actually superior to MS Excel. Excel assumes that everyone uses files matching their local settings, which is a complete disaster if you collaborate with people on different regional settings.
You can't take a dictionary from the library, or an encyclopedia, or even an almanac. It's relatively useless to try to check out cookbooks, unless it's only on a few
special occasions when you cook.
Who really uses dictionaries and encyclopedias anymore? Finding a word/lemma in a digital reference is so much easier, plus you can follow links and do full-text search (if the index doesn't contain what you're looking for)
Cookbooks: yes, they are useful. I am a pretty hard-core amateur cook, but there's only a couple books I use a lot (mostly silver spoon (italian) and food lab). 90% of my recipes are digital, either my own collection, or (selected) online recipes, e.g. seriouseats.
Lots of technology requires reference literature, and while some of it is
available in digital form, ALL of it is available in dead trees. Very little of
that is loaned by even a very good public library. Even a good university's research libraries
will not have some critically important books. Thus, a prof consults colleagues,
who have heavily laden shelves in their offices, or he/she needs to
load down his own shelves.
I'm an (associate) professor and have been in social science research for the past 14 years. I hardly ever use physical books or journals. We don't even have personal bookshelfs anymore in my department. I've not visited my library since grad school. Everything relevant is written in journals or the occasional edited volume, all available online.
Non-ownership of books is borderline functional illiteracy. Survivable, yes; desirable, no.
I love owning books for leisure reading, in bed, on holiday, on the couch. But I have friends who use ebooks for that and they seem perfectly happy with it. ...
Books make great sound-isolation and decoration, though. A shelf full of ebook readers is just not very pretty to look at :-)
Frankly, people never owned the music or the words in the book. They owned a physical copy printed on a dead tree or a shiny disc. Copyright law always restricted what you were able to do with the music or words.
From the OP:
It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship.
Interestingly, entrepreneurship is decreasingly about owning and running capital stock, and more and more about connecting services and resources. Most companies lease their offices
(the problem with feudal peasants, of course, is that there was no free competition in land leases - they were bound to "lease" from their landlord, who was able to skim most profits off the peasant's work. A lot of farmers nowadays don't own (all) the land they work, and as long as the terms of lease are good this doesn't need to be a problem at all)
The batteries are meant primarily for ferries, which are especially suited for wired charging as they (1) have relatively short routes (2) between set points (3) with relatively frequent and long (un)loading delays, including generally a nightly downtime. So they can charge at night and top-up every time they (un)load passengers.
This means they can use generated electricity, which in Norway (the first customer of these ships) means hydro-electricity, reducing pollution (making the gov't happy) and apparently reducing costs by 80%.
Since the main drawback of all-electric transport is battery weight, it seems that ships, especially ferries and short-distance haulers, should be very well suited to electrification.
[For comparison, a random city car (VW UP) is 60 HP for about 1 ton.for A lorry seems to be about 500HP for at most 50 (metric) tons fully loaded, so about 10 HP per ton. A random ferry (https://www.teso.nl/nl/teso-mainmenu-70/schepen-mainmenu-106/dokter-wagemaker-mainmenu-107) is 4x1.8KW ~ 10kHP for 7k ton, or just over 1 HP per ton. So, the weight of the battery pack will be a lot less (relatively) to to total weight compared to cars or lorries]
I'm afraid she won't fit :)
USS Enterprise is 342 m long, 78.4m wide, and has 12m draft. The (new) panama locks allows max 49m beam. The real problem is the st. Lawrence seaway, however: to get beyond Montreal max draft is 8.2m, and the locks can only accomodate 233.5 m length and 24.4m beam.
Sources: good ol' wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Thanks for sharing!
Can you leave your nerd badge on the table when you leave?
That's an easy question :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
US is around 19T$, EU is 17T$ and relatively easy to do business in (strong rule of law, some convergence between countries). Next are China at 12T$, but if you find EU too much of a hassle don't even think about it, after that Japan (4T$) and India (2T$), also not easy markets.
So, if you don't think US is a big enough market, EU is a pretty natural second. But to play ball here, you gotta play by the rules. Which is true across the pond as well, just check out the fines EU banks were hit by in response to (presumably) violating US laws or statutes.
The point of antitrust law is that if you have a (near) monopoly in one area, you are not allowed to (ab)use that to also gain a monopoly in another area. Antitrust law always removes freedom of enterprise for the (assumed) benefits of consumers. The justification for this is that free markets work well iff there is healthy competition; and that if left alone companies tend to concentrate by merger or natural growth and then get monopoly pricing power (see e.g. the history of US railways). If there is only two companies left, they have a very strong incentive to merge because as monopolists they can make much more profit than when they are in competition with each other. So, in reaction to the abuses of (especially) 19th century capitalism the government stepped in to break up companies, prevent mergers, and restrict the freedom of (near) monopolists if break up is not sensible or not needed.
Concretely, it is fine if a random linux distro would by default install its own browser. However, if MS by default installs its own browser on its (near) monopoly desktop OS, it is abusing its OS market power to increase its market share in the browser market.
So, yes, if android didn't have a (near) monopoly there would be no problem. However, now that it is a near monopoly they lose the freedom to use their mobile OS market share to effectively push their other services onto users.
They told me they're embarrased to quote anything that's older than 5 years and I should never quote a book from 1998. ... WTF? Seriously? [..] Mind you, this is CompSci where you would expect some sort of academic credibility, unlike Sociology or "Gender Studies"
I won't make any comments about gender studies, but I would like to point out that sociology and other fields of social science are usually a lot better at keeping track of and citing literature. I've done my PhD in AI but have since moved to social science, and I'm often embarrassed at the quality of literature review / previous work section in comp sci papers: extremely short and superficial and often more aimed at dismissing everything that is done before than at showing the tradition, context, and framework of the ideas presented in the paper.
So, yeah, the teacher was not doing a very good job there, but that reflects on CS much more than on social science.
(also, I often teach my students not to cite a textbook where you could have cited the original papers, unless the argument was actually originally made in the textbook or it is just a matter of explanation or definition. And I also teach students not to just cite the new literature on a topic, but show both where the ideas came from (the seminal / classical articles) and the recent discourse on the topic. It's hard work :-) )
So much THIS!!! Nothing motivates a server like a good tip.
Tipping is structurally unable to achieve the kind of service which I want - which is a waiter who doesn't interrupt me while I'm eating or talking to ask if everything is okay.
Also, there is such a strong social pressure to give a certain %tip in the US, that tipping doesn't really give off a strong message about serving quality anymore. They should really just pay the waiting staff a decent wage (and increase the price of the food/drinks by whatever % needed), and then I will give a tip iff I like the service.
If the waiter checks back shortly after delivering the food, the waiter will be interrupting my eating and likely interrupting my conversation. This is the kind of service I specifically DON'T want.
Yup.
When I started out as a waiter I was instructed to do just this (ask whether everything is in order a couple minutes after bringing the plates) and maybe for a mediocre restaurant that's actually a good idea. But you shouldn't go to mediocre restaurants, or at least not go there and then complain about it.
In a good restaurant they are confident that they didn't forget anything and that the food is good. However, they will actually keep an eye on the table, and if they spot something is wrong (guests are looking around, someone didn't start eating, etc) then you come in to ask if everything is alright. Because maybe they decided they'd actually prefer a different wine, or they want to ask something about the food or whatever.
Sign of good service: the waiter is always there when you need him, and never interrupts you.
The problem is: this requires a (socially) smart person and/or years of experience, and preferably both. Parisian service has a bad rep, but the places where you see mostly 50+ year olds waiting actually have really good service most of the time (speaking 3 words of tourist French helps) because they treat it as a profession, not a side job. But these people obviously cost more than 5-10$ per hour, and a lot of people prefer to pay less for their burger and get a novice waiter to help them. Which is fine, but again: don't complain about it.
It's a class thing. Waiters are traditionally supposed to act like serving staff. [..] Some people are made uncomfortable by that. They want a waiter who's their peer and buddy, not their staff.
I disagree (at least in part). I've been a waiter myself as a teenager and student, and now I am happy to go to restaurants a guest. As a waiter I never wanted to be anyones peer or buddy, and as a guest I certainly don't want the waiter to be my peer and buddy. When I travel to the US I am made uncomfortable by waiters who somehow think that it's good to draw attention to their person and be all friendly. I want them to be efficient and polite, and I will respond by being polite and respectful.
Waiting is a profession, and being a good waiter is not an easy job. We should let them do their job while we enjoy the fruits. If you take a taxi you don't sit in front, chat with the driver, and help them navigate, right? If you go to the doctor or dentist you don't go there because you love chatting with the guy right? Distance is a sign of professionalism, not of class difference.
(Note that whether a waiter will appreciate you stacking the plates and passing them will depend on a host of factors, but if you expect the total bill to exceed 100$ per person, my advise would be to let them do their jobs. They should have plenty of staff and you disrespect them by thinking they need you to do their job. If it's more like a 25$ per person place and the waiter looks overworked, there's a good chance s/he will be happy for your helpfulness.)
And if I do need a chat, I'll go to a bar and take a stool at the actual bar and hope for a nice bartender. I certainly don't go to TGI Fridays because I love chatting with the waiting staff... (I'm not actually sure why anyone would go to any of the restaurant chains mentioned for any reason, but that's a different story....)
By voting into power a 92-year own previous president and strongman who was actually the mentor of the thief they voted out.
Mind, it's still probably a good trade, but a nonagenarian ex-president doesn't sound exactly refreshing to me...
Sure, that's called PRT. But why not just use trains? You eliminate the engine (and the driver) and control all train cars from a central location. The cars are smart enough to do certain things on their own, like safely approach a leading car and couple to it, or decelerate and stop at a siding once sent to it.
I think this is going to be the only idea that will compete with self-driving cars on traditional roads. If you can have "pods" that can link to each other without slowing down you can get the best of both worlds (fine granularity without frequent unneeded stops). Problem is of course that it will be quite complicated to let a pod in the middle go off to a siding - it needs to decouple both front and aft, get enough distance to be able to take a siding safely (presumably meaning both it and the aft pod decelerates, because the larger train is at cruising speed) while the other pods go straight, and then the aft pod needs to accelerate and hook back up with the 'train'. This will cause quite a lot of inefficiency which might negate the gains from hooking up if it is frequent enough.
Alternative could be to always decouple the last car in the train, and let people move back and forth between cars. That would negate the "flatbed"/"private pod" idea, but allow for better economies of scale, as everyone in station X can take the pod/car that leaves from X, walk into the main train, and get off by walking to the back of the train.
Dear UK Security minister,
Thank you for your post advocates a
(X) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting [s]spam[/s] "mob rule online". Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad [s]federal law[/s]Royal Decree was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new laws
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of [s]spam[/s]"online mob rule"
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
The Netherlands do indeed have a universal pension, but it's not an awful lot of money, around 1200$ a month for a single person. Probably enough to live on if you have cheap housing, but not really what I aim my retirement to look like. Moreover, the retirement age is creeping up and there are worries about sustainability as it's a pay-as-you-go system.
Employees often have mandatory collective retirement funds, which are actually really well funded. They are mandated to have 'coverage' of over 100%, meaning that they have enough money to pay all their obligations assuming very modest interest rates. A lot of them are also in trouble because of the current hyperlow interest rates - it forces them to calculate their future means with a very low interest, so they need to increase payments or decrease current pensions (or at least not index them for inflation). In general they are running into the general problem of maintaining a fixed benefit scheme in an ageing population. As I work for university I am covered by the civil servant pension fund, which seems to be doing quite well and has implicit government backing. In other trades the companies are forced to chip in if the retirement fund is unable to maintain its coverage, but of course in a declining industry (e.g. shipbuilding) this will be very difficult. If I keep my current salary until retirement age, I should get 3000,- in total (per month; including state pension and after taxes), which is probably enough to live comfortably as my house should be paid by then.
Finally, all self-employed people and a lot of other people save themselves for retirement, either pre-tax or post-tax. This is the only reason you would need to know a lot about stocks/pensions, and even then probably most people just buy an off-the-shelf retirement saving product (either savings or stock based), which is also the only way to get tax benefits. Of course, this is highly unpredictable in any case.
They are constantly debating reforms to the current system. Plans include opening the pension funds to self-employed people or even forcing them to take part [labour would like that], altering the change in pension age, and moving from collective defined benefits to some more individual system. The labour unions have a big part in this negotiations so I'm sure whatever comes out will serve the current old people [who make up most of the membership] well...
I'm no MS fanboi and haven't used any of their products for the past ~10 years (apart from the outlook calendar forced on me by work).
But this is really good, it's fantastic that they're doing this, and it actually sounds like a good idea. Of course they have good incentives apart from the goodness of their heart (good PR, and possible future profits - there's an estimate of 36M (completely) blind people globally), but as far as I care if an "evil" corporation does "good" stuff because of incentives in the system, the system is working.
So, yay microsoft, keep up the good work [and please release office for linux and stop messing around otherwise]
http://www.who.int/news-room/f...
Not to make too fine a point, but .gov is for US government website. All other countries get a TLD (.fr for France) which they are (AFAIK) free to administer as they please. So, France could have reserved france.fr, france.gov.fr, or maybe even just http://fr/ (not sure of the specs here)
In any case, although there might be issues with naming your company after a foreign country, one would expect a bit more due process here.
The issue most of us have with cyclists is that there is a significant number of them that really want maximum penalties applied to cars, but don't want the rules to apply to them at all.
That would be me :)
Enforcing some rules on cyclists makes sense. For example, requiring proper lighting in the dark makes sense, because you want to give cars a chance to see them. Even if the car would not be legally responsible if the bike is not lighted (which is highly dubious), there's a lot of moral/emotional damage for the car driver.
I violate traffic lights all the time in my bike when it is safe to do so. I would be fine with cars also using more common sense, as e.g. the turn on red rules in the US allow. However, there are two big differences between a car and a bike in case a mistake is made: (1) on my bike I can very quickly get out of the way, either forwards (to the next lane or in between lanes by turning my bike sideways) or backwards or even sideways, since usually a bike and car can share a lane if the bike is going the same direction. Cars take a lot longer to react since they are bigger and have more inertia. Moreover, they take a lot more space, and the space behind them is probably filled by the next car and the lane ahead might not always be free (or he might be turning onto a divided or one way street). So, there is a good chance that the car won't be able to get out of the way as quickly. (2) if worst comes to worst, as OP said it's my body that's on the line first. You really don't want to get there, and you don't want to inflict the physical, emotional and material damage on the car driver; but the fact that I will die first is a very good incentive for me to pay attention. And given the driving habits of some people in modern tanks (SUVs and minivans), I think it does make quite a difference.
Bike-bike and bike-pedestrian interaction can in 99% of cases be left to the people involved. I know that some pedestrians think bikers are assholes, and as an Amsterdam biker I think most tourist pedestrians are complete morons, but we really don't need police to guide our interaction. Sure, some people will get minor bruising, and once a year someone might die. But these cases can be dealt post-hoc through torts and criminal proceedings as a last resort. See http://www.urbancyclinginstitu... and other articles on that site for some really good info.
Cops are human beings, with mostly the same virtues and weaknesses. They are granted power, which in some people instills a great sense of responsibility but which other people sometimes abuse for personal profit or out of cruelty.
For that reasons we have checks on cops behaviour, just like we have checks on most people who wield official power. In a "my word vs the cop's" situation it is difficult and indeed, the judge generally sides with the cop, and your single complaint will not get him/her fired. However, if a single cop gets too many complaints it will count against them; and if you have real evidence of a cop purposefully lying it can have real repercussions for him/her, depending on a lot of factors.
Granting power vs checking it is a real dilemma. If we ask judges and the cop's bosses to distrust cops by default, it will be very difficult to find and retain cops and to let them do their job, leading to much less effective policing and less security. If we go too far to the trust-by-default side, you get corruption and public distrust. However "we" chose to set the balance, there will be mistakes made in both directions. And yes, it sucks to be you if you are one of these mistakes...
This is actually exactly what the founder of Otis lifts did: he demonstrated his safety elevator by standing on a raised platform and having the rope severed, showing that the safety system would stop the fall safely [https://www.britannica.com/technology/elevator-vertical-transport#ref90006]
I guess the big difference is that we humans can employ an AI program to help us beat the reverse captcha, but the AI can't (yet) employ humans to help them beat the captcha.
Unless you see captcha's as a method for the AI to employ humans to help it beat the captcha, of course. And it wouldn't surprise me if there were sites that place a bot-encountered captcha in their human interactions in real time as a way of dealing with them?
And two days old, in true slashdot fashion:
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...