I hope that you are being facetious, but I'll bite.
I've worked with cvs, subservsion, mercurial/hg, and git, and git is by far the most powerful tool and the easiest one to work with after the initial learning curve. You might have massively larger projects than me, but checking out the whole tree has never been a problem for me, and I really like being able to commit (and more rarely: check version history) when working offline.
Branching, tagging, cherry-picking, and rebasing are very easy to do and make it possible to manage a largish project with multiple release and feature branches relatively painlessly. In my daily workflow there are only a few commands I use regulary, and a couple more than I use occasionally (e.g. when releasing a stable version). Moreover, I've never found that there was anything I couldn't do, from rewriting history when needed (e.g. after checking in passwords or copyrighted code), to undoing stupid stuff (e.g. a force push from a branch that wasn't pulled or a merge with a wrong branch).
Although the commands can be a bit arcane (e.g. the three levels of git reset or the exact rebase syntax) the community support, tooling, and documentation is excellent.
As another poster above said:
I'd rather remove my testicles with a rusty hacksaw than ever use CVS again.
Frankly, it's much less important. I've built and bought quite a number of desktops and put linux on them the past years, never had issues. With laptops, there is less choice within segments (especially within the ultrabook segment), and there are more less-supported parts (and it's more expensive and annoying to replace a part if you need to, e.g. the broadcom wifi chip in the XPS13)
I have a xps13 for about a year now with ubuntu installed. It was somewhat painful at first because of driver issues (the developer edition wasn't released yet for the new xps13), so required a kernel recompile and some fidgeting. A couple months ago I replaced the broadcom chip with an intel (a very quick operation once you get hold of a tiny torque screwdriver) and installed ubuntu 15.10 which worked perfect out of the box.
The resolution is incredibly nice when everything behaves. I run emacs / terminal with font 14 or 16 and it is just so much clearer and nicer to the eyes. What is annoying if you switch between the built in 13" hidpi and a 27" lodpi external monitor, I've not found a way to make it behave sane, and not all programs obey the system settings. Maybe I'll just get a hidpi external monitor:)
Jimminy Cricket, this is the 21st century. Do you see no other political solution to your grievance than buying a gun?
Don't you realise there's no other functioning democracy other than the USA? The existence of guns is the only thing that keeps the country in check!/sarcasm.
That is really funny! You have a great career as a comedian ahead of you (or as a politician, but I sincerely hope you will choose the former)
The one thing I'll grant you is that at the time of founding, the US did pretty well on the democratic front - although it was nowhere near as exceptional as a lot of people might think: the vast majority of the population had no voting rights (excluding in no particular order slaves, indians, women, and people without property), which makes the system less radically different from (proto-)parliaments such as the British Parliament, the French Estates-General, or the institutions of the 17th century Dutch republic. All of these systems ranged somewhere between monarchy, aristocracy, and "real" democracy. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Currently, there are plenty of "real" democracies, with political processes that are each flawed in their own way but that more or less succeed in translating popular preferences into policy and protecting the rights of its citizens. On the Economist's democracy index, the US has 20th place (after most of northwestern Europe) and is only just above the level of "flawed democracy", scoring especially bad on functioning of government and political participation. http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/i...
Freedom house similarly places the US on a downward trajectory and below almost all (north)Western European countries. (https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FH_FITW_Report_2016.pdf). From their report: "[American] elections and legislative process have suffered from an increasingly intricate system of gerrymandering and undue interference by wealthy individuals and special interests. Racial and ethnic divisions have seemingly widened, and the past year brought greater attention to police violence and impunity, de facto residential and school segregation, and economic inequality, adding to fears that class mobility, a linchpin of America’s self-image and global reputation, is in jeopardy."
A nation without a functioning political process, but where everybody has guns - I believe we call that a "failed state". See also Somalia, Iraq, or South Sudan.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
That said, there would be value in a additional legislation to force copyright holders to "use it or lose it". If copyright is used to deliberately keep something from publication (e.g. Mein Kampf in Germany) or if a publisher owns the copyright, but doesn't see the business case in using it, I think that the law should either
(1) revert the work to public domain after some time, and/or (2) allow for making copies as "fair use", or (3) apply some sort of RAND licensing on the work, so anyone can decide to publish (derivatives of) the work if they pay a reasonable fee, probably some percentage of last known retail value.
(this should only apply to works that have been made public before, e.g. acquirable by the general public. As an author you should still have the right to keep something private)
There is an analogy in the Dutch housing market history: until recently it was quasi-legal to squat a house if it had been empty for 1 year. So, a house owner has the exclusive right to use his or her house (by living in it or renting it out to whom s/he pleases), but if s/he just lets the building stand empty, the public used to gain a general right to take occupancy. The owner would then have to go to court and show that there are immediate plans to re-use the building, on which the court could decide to evict the squatters. As noted in the wiki:"Dutch squatting has its origins in the 1960s when the Netherlands was suffering a housing shortage while many properties stood empty" - empty houses were mainly bought for speculation, and rent was not considered enough to cover cost of maintenance and operation (a market failure). In a sense, although the house was private property, the total residential space in the city was seen as a public good. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting#Netherlands and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... )
Or you just live in a civilized country with good laws but bad English grammar teaching, and you can "FUCK ALL the copyright cartel" as much as you like!
You might think that the unit "(mega)people" is standardized, but in fact there's still quite a difference between an American person and an African person [a bit like swallows, I guess.] Concretely, an American uses 12,954 kWh per year[1], while an average Moroccon uses 875 kWh. Thus, the electricity used by 1.1M Moroccons equals the electricity used by 70 thousand Americans. So, while the unit might sound like everyone can relate to it, it's pretty horribly inaccurate.
The Computerworld article doesn't even give total expected production, only MW capacity, which is probably peak capacity, ie only achieved during the day. Wiki [2] gives a production of 370 GWh per year, which is enough to provide energy to just over 400 thousand Moroccans, consistent with providing juice for 1.1M is capacity is roughly tripled. However, if Moroccans start getting up to first-world levels of energy use, the number of people served will swiftly drop by an order of magnitude, even if they don't go all the way to American energy use (e.g. Holland has about half the US energy use, probably due to less need for airco and higher electricity costs)
The water use sounds very problematic, according to wiki it uses 1.7 million m3 per year or 4.6 liters per kWh . To compare, desalination requires 3 kWh/m3, i.e. it would cost about 5GWh to desalinize the amount of water used annually, compared to 370GWh of electrticity produced. So, even if the water draw is compensated by desalinizing water elsewhere, it still comes out ahead.
Another favourite trick in the Netherlands (which is what I'm guessing you're posting about) is to have two bicycle lanes marked on both sides, leaving a normal road that would normally be too small for two cars to pass. This causes cars to drive in the center of the road, forcing them to drive more slowly:
What GP is ignoring is (1) that speed enforcement doesn't really work most of the time on smaller roads, as the proportion of cops to small roads will always be low, and (2) that speed enforcement itself causes people to drive in certain ways (braking when they see cop/radar,
None of these "environmental engineering" solutions will be a panacea: some will work in some conditions, but not in all. For example, the jury is still out on the new "shared space" between Amsterdam central railway station and ferry terminal. Ultimately, the question of what solution to use should not be political, but empirical: given a set of road conditions, what is the design that optimizes safety (or throughput, or speed, or whatever you want to optimize --- which is a political question).
In "other people's money", John Kay makes an interesting argument that most (short-term) trading indeed does little more than create liquidity, but liquidity in that sense is almost only interesting for short-term traders. In most "real" stocks there has always been sufficient liquidity for normal trading, and when a crisis hits and you really need that liquidity it evaporates anyway.
They might be a joy to drive in the countryside, and they might be a joy to drive in a busy city (Paris/Barcelona busy, not LA busy) if that's your thing, but nothing can be a joy to drive on the 1000 km highway between them...
The average attacker conducts eight attacks per year, of which less than half are successful. Among the findings that will be of particular interest to defenders: Hackers prefer easy targets and will call off an attack if it is taking too long. According to the survey, 13 percent quit after a delay of five hours
So, you do 8 attacks, and give up if you don't succeed in five hours. Since unsuccessful attacks are part of the 8, I assume that the ones they give up on are also part of that. That means that they work 40 hours a year, for an average salary of 29k$, or around 800$/hr. Not bad al all:)
In Amsterdam quite a lot of taxis are Tesla. Most taxi trips are short and in slow or stop & go city traffic, and the taxi company built superchargers at the airport. Apparently, software decides whether to charge quickly or more slowly depending on how busy it is.
I'm not sure where the electric city (i.e. non-airport) taxis charge, a newspaper article suggested at the taxi company and on normal street charging stations. I guess with 400km radius and an average trip of <20km, charging once every 20 trips isn't that bad; drivers need a break now and then anyways.
Also, at the official taxi waiting areas (e.g. at central station) there are a lot of taxis waiting, probably for at least 30 minutes outside of rush hour. I could imagine installing a supercharger there are well.
Links (in Dutch - have fun with google translate:))
Well, I for one was glad to see that after all these corporate restructurings slashdot is back at its old level:)
But it is funny how they can post a dupe with exactly the same name, while the original article is even in the "most discussed" list. That's a level of incompetence for which you normally need to hire special staff to achieve:)
[Cum grano salis alert: extremely amateur go player here. ]
Also, Go often has many local "battles" going on simultaneously. If you've figured out that you are losing in one corner, you switch to a different corner. If the opponent finishes you in the first corner, that gives you one or more free moves in the new corner. So, the opponent will generally follow you to the new corner. What you can then try to do is build from the new position towards the old in the hope of rescuing that position. But this means that there can easily be 50 moves between having effectively lost a position, and the material disadvantage from the position being finished.
I think the main problem is that you switch one set of administration and enforcement for another:
Current situation: means tested benefit and an amalgation of special case subsidies, leading to administration/enforcement costs and inviting fraud*
New situation: basic income = zero administration/enforcement cost on top of existing citizen registry, and the ability to collapse/remove a lot of special-case benefits like housing subsidy, health care subsidy, pension, student loans, etc. However, as tax rates will increase it becomes more attractive to work in the "informal" sector on top of the basic income, so there will need to be more enforcement of taxation (or even higher tax rates, but that is a slippery slope, see much of southern Europe). Of couse, it is possible now to work informally next to receiving a benefit, but since the tax rates are lower (relatively) and the benefits are more difficult to get and onerous to keep, it will become more attractive in the new situation.
I believe the balance is still positive for basic income, but it is foolish to think that all administration and enforcement problems will be magically solved.
The real question is what the effect on behaviour will be. How many people now receiving benefits will take small jobs since the net effect is always positive (as the extra income comes on top of the benefits, rather than instead of)? How many people that now have unattractive jobs or difficult home situations quit working? How many people will take more risky steps such as starting a business or switching jobs, since they have the certainty of the basic income to help them through difficult times? And will people be more willing to accept more flexible employment contracts for the same reason?
*) and privacy problems: e.g. old-age pensions and possibly welfare are lower for couples than for two individuals since they can share cost of living, this gives the government a "legitimate" reason to nose around in people's bedrooms. For welfare this is sort of understandable since people specifically request welfare if they fall on hard times, so trading a bit of privacy for government support is understandable - but since everyone gets old-age pension, suddenly the government has an interest in the bedrooms of all >65 citizens (actually, somewhere between 65 and 67 I guess nowadays..)
To me a computer is a tool and I find arbitrary change in UI irritating.
Which is actually a very good reason to avoid most graphical interfaces. Icons jump all over the place, toolbars move, start buttons disappear and re-appear, Unities are invented and discarded.. but things like ls and rm stay put, and the interface convention / syntax of "command --option=value argument > file" also hasn't changed.
If your computer is an important tool, spend the couple days weaning yourself off window managers and desktop environments, and breathe out a sigh of relief.
those who remember having nothing but a command line are dead or retired
Now this is just silly. I'm mid-30 and I started computing* on an Acorn Electron (around '85?). Although Windows 3.x was released a couple years later, I used MSDOS from the moment my parents acquired a PC until windows 95 (admittedly in addition to a Acorn Archmides, which was ahead of Windows by at least 10 years at that time).
Nowadays I adminster a number of linux servers, and although I'm sure I could set up X forwarding, as far as I'm concerned I have nothing but the CLI to run them. I do use X forwarding to the virtual host to run virt-manage because I'm too stupid to learn the vritualization commands for the once a month I use them...
So, not only do I vividly remember the pre-GUI days, I'm not even convinced that they're over, and I have yet to touch 40...
*) OK, I was around 5, and computing meant loading games (using CHAIN) and typing a bit of code into BBC BASIC (of the 10 PRINT "MY BROTHER IS STUPID") level. But still:)
The idea was to show that religions are ridiculous, not to join the ranks of the bullshit peddlers.
It's bringing to the public attention that it is ridiculous for government to allow alleged representatives of bearded men in the sky to solemnize marriage.
>
I agree, but the other way around: I think anybody should be allowed to solemnize marriage, provided that there is a proper interface with the official bureaucracy (e.g. assertions are checked and results are processed -- probably requiring some sort of certification, but preferably one founded on bureaucratic form rather than religious or humanitarian substance). Marriage is partly a bureaucratic affair, but also (to some people) a deeply meaningful and romantic ceremony. If the government can guarantee that the bureaucratic requirements are met, why not give people the liberty to organize the ceremonial aspect in any way they see fit, with bearded men and/or spaghetti-monsters? As long as you can also skip the ceremony and simply register your marriage at the town hall desk, I don't see why alternative ceremonies would not be allowed.
(and first marrying "for the law" and then marrying again "for the church" as is customary in some places is not ideal, I think, as that makes it more difficult for non-organized religions to have a meaningful ceremony since the legal consequences and the ceremony are separated, taking the essence out of the ceremony for those lacking celestial pogonophiles to provide an alternative formality)
There's another angle to this, namely simple honest labeling rules. An atlantic salmon has a certain taste and texture, and I'm not sure that if they GM its growth functions it will have the same taste and text. As a consumer, I want to know what I'm buying, not because I think GM is poison, but because I like to know the quality of the product, and the species of a fish is an important part of that. A turbot is a different fish from a halibut, and I would not like to be given a halibut if I ordered a turbot. From my perspective, a GM-turbot is not necessarily the same thing as a non-GM turbot since the "G" part is what defines a species.
(and no, I don't trust the FDA's "materially different" to sufficiently describe the taste, texture etc of a product)
Uhhhh...isn't that the same argument the multinationals make when they claim Americans should be happy to be paid the same as somebody in Bangalore or Beijing? That you should be happy to "compete" with the absolute lowest bottom of the barrel wage slave they can possibly find on the planet?
As long as we (or at least the vast majority of Americans and Europeans) do our shopping by going to the absolute bottom of the retailer barrel (walmart / aldi+lidl) and/or online shopping barrel, I don't think "we" are in a position to complain.
(and the worst is people who go to a brick&mortar shop to browse and inspect products and get advice, and then buy the thing they selected online because it is 20$ cheaper - since they didn't have to pay the store, the stock, and the somewhat knowledgeable salesperson...)
The police are keeping you in a protected witness facility because the mob is out to get you, and you start thinking the police might not be as bad as the mobsters --- that's not really Stockhold symdrome territory yet:)
In other words, US supremacy is the worst thing that can happen to the world, apart of course from nazi german supremacy, Chinese supremacy, Putin or Stalin russian supremacy, and good lord just imagine EU supremacy. Death by a thousand red tapes, that one...
Slashdot Mirror
What would I need an inner tube buying guide for?
Did you even check your link before sending it?
I hope that you are being facetious, but I'll bite.
I've worked with cvs, subservsion, mercurial/hg, and git, and git is by far the most powerful tool and the easiest one to work with after the initial learning curve. You might have massively larger projects than me, but checking out the whole tree has never been a problem for me, and I really like being able to commit (and more rarely: check version history) when working offline.
Branching, tagging, cherry-picking, and rebasing are very easy to do and make it possible to manage a largish project with multiple release and feature branches relatively painlessly. In my daily workflow there are only a few commands I use regulary, and a couple more than I use occasionally (e.g. when releasing a stable version). Moreover, I've never found that there was anything I couldn't do, from rewriting history when needed (e.g. after checking in passwords or copyrighted code), to undoing stupid stuff (e.g. a force push from a branch that wasn't pulled or a merge with a wrong branch).
Although the commands can be a bit arcane (e.g. the three levels of git reset or the exact rebase syntax) the community support, tooling, and documentation is excellent.
As another poster above said:
I'd rather remove my testicles with a rusty hacksaw than ever use CVS again.
Sounds painful, but: yes :)
That is not how you use vice versa. You just ruined English and Latin in one go.
That's not how you contribute to the Internet. You've just ruined a post and my time in one go! :)
Frankly, it's much less important. I've built and bought quite a number of desktops and put linux on them the past years, never had issues. With laptops, there is less choice within segments (especially within the ultrabook segment), and there are more less-supported parts (and it's more expensive and annoying to replace a part if you need to, e.g. the broadcom wifi chip in the XPS13)
I have a xps13 for about a year now with ubuntu installed. It was somewhat painful at first because of driver issues (the developer edition wasn't released yet for the new xps13), so required a kernel recompile and some fidgeting. A couple months ago I replaced the broadcom chip with an intel (a very quick operation once you get hold of a tiny torque screwdriver) and installed ubuntu 15.10 which worked perfect out of the box.
The resolution is incredibly nice when everything behaves. I run emacs / terminal with font 14 or 16 and it is just so much clearer and nicer to the eyes. What is annoying if you switch between the built in 13" hidpi and a 27" lodpi external monitor, I've not found a way to make it behave sane, and not all programs obey the system settings. Maybe I'll just get a hidpi external monitor :)
Jimminy Cricket, this is the 21st century. Do you see no other political solution to your grievance than buying a gun?
Don't you realise there's no other functioning democracy other than the USA? The existence of guns is the only thing that keeps the country in check! /sarcasm.
That is really funny! You have a great career as a comedian ahead of you (or as a politician, but I sincerely hope you will choose the former)
The one thing I'll grant you is that at the time of founding, the US did pretty well on the democratic front - although it was nowhere near as exceptional as a lot of people might think: the vast majority of the population had no voting rights (excluding in no particular order slaves, indians, women, and people without property), which makes the system less radically different from (proto-)parliaments such as the British Parliament, the French Estates-General, or the institutions of the 17th century Dutch republic. All of these systems ranged somewhere between monarchy, aristocracy, and "real" democracy. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Currently, there are plenty of "real" democracies, with political processes that are each flawed in their own way but that more or less succeed in translating popular preferences into policy and protecting the rights of its citizens. On the Economist's democracy index, the US has 20th place (after most of northwestern Europe) and is only just above the level of "flawed democracy", scoring especially bad on functioning of government and political participation. http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/i...
Freedom house similarly places the US on a downward trajectory and below almost all (north)Western European countries. (https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FH_FITW_Report_2016.pdf). From their report: "[American] elections and legislative process have suffered from an increasingly intricate system of gerrymandering and undue interference by wealthy individuals and special interests. Racial and ethnic divisions have seemingly widened, and the past year brought greater attention to police violence and impunity, de facto residential and school segregation, and economic inequality, adding to fears that class mobility, a linchpin of America’s self-image and global reputation, is in jeopardy."
A nation without a functioning political process, but where everybody has guns - I believe we call that a "failed state". See also Somalia, Iraq, or South Sudan.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
That said, there would be value in a additional legislation to force copyright holders to "use it or lose it". If copyright is used to deliberately keep something from publication (e.g. Mein Kampf in Germany) or if a publisher owns the copyright, but doesn't see the business case in using it, I think that the law should either
(1) revert the work to public domain after some time, and/or
(2) allow for making copies as "fair use", or
(3) apply some sort of RAND licensing on the work, so anyone can decide to publish (derivatives of) the work if they pay a reasonable fee, probably some percentage of last known retail value.
(this should only apply to works that have been made public before, e.g. acquirable by the general public. As an author you should still have the right to keep something private)
There is an analogy in the Dutch housing market history: until recently it was quasi-legal to squat a house if it had been empty for 1 year. So, a house owner has the exclusive right to use his or her house (by living in it or renting it out to whom s/he pleases), but if s/he just lets the building stand empty, the public used to gain a general right to take occupancy. The owner would then have to go to court and show that there are immediate plans to re-use the building, on which the court could decide to evict the squatters. As noted in the wiki:"Dutch squatting has its origins in the 1960s when the Netherlands was suffering a housing shortage while many properties stood empty" - empty houses were mainly bought for speculation, and rent was not considered enough to cover cost of maintenance and operation (a market failure). In a sense, although the house was private property, the total residential space in the city was seen as a public good. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting#Netherlands and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... )
Or you just live in a civilized country with good laws but bad English grammar teaching, and you can "FUCK ALL the copyright cartel" as much as you like!
I realize they are trying to bring slashdot back to its former glory, but I'm not sure that this is what they had in mind :)
You might think that the unit "(mega)people" is standardized, but in fact there's still quite a difference between an American person and an African person [a bit like swallows, I guess.] Concretely, an American uses 12,954 kWh per year[1], while an average Moroccon uses 875 kWh. Thus, the electricity used by 1.1M Moroccons equals the electricity used by 70 thousand Americans. So, while the unit might sound like everyone can relate to it, it's pretty horribly inaccurate.
The Computerworld article doesn't even give total expected production, only MW capacity, which is probably peak capacity, ie only achieved during the day. Wiki [2] gives a production of 370 GWh per year, which is enough to provide energy to just over 400 thousand Moroccans, consistent with providing juice for 1.1M is capacity is roughly tripled. However, if Moroccans start getting up to first-world levels of energy use, the number of people served will swiftly drop by an order of magnitude, even if they don't go all the way to American energy use (e.g. Holland has about half the US energy use, probably due to less need for airco and higher electricity costs)
The water use sounds very problematic, according to wiki it uses 1.7 million m3 per year or 4.6 liters per kWh . To compare, desalination requires 3 kWh/m3, i.e. it would cost about 5GWh to desalinize the amount of water used annually, compared to 370GWh of electrticity produced. So, even if the water draw is compensated by desalinizing water elsewhere, it still comes out ahead.
[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indi.... Note that kWh per year is a pretty stupid unit, too...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Another favourite trick in the Netherlands (which is what I'm guessing you're posting about) is to have two bicycle lanes marked on both sides, leaving a normal road that would normally be too small for two cars to pass. This causes cars to drive in the center of the road, forcing them to drive more slowly:
http://www.brommerenscooterrij...
Another idea is that of a "shared space", having motorist mingle with pedestrians and bicyles, again forcing them to slow down:
https://www.allianz.com/v_1428...
What GP is ignoring is (1) that speed enforcement doesn't really work most of the time on smaller roads, as the proportion of cops to small roads will always be low, and (2) that speed enforcement itself causes people to drive in certain ways (braking when they see cop/radar,
None of these "environmental engineering" solutions will be a panacea: some will work in some conditions, but not in all. For example, the jury is still out on the new "shared space" between Amsterdam central railway station and ferry terminal. Ultimately, the question of what solution to use should not be political, but empirical: given a set of road conditions, what is the design that optimizes safety (or throughput, or speed, or whatever you want to optimize --- which is a political question).
In "other people's money", John Kay makes an interesting argument that most (short-term) trading indeed does little more than create liquidity, but liquidity in that sense is almost only interesting for short-term traders. In most "real" stocks there has always been sufficient liquidity for normal trading, and when a crisis hits and you really need that liquidity it evaporates anyway.
http://www.amazon.com/Other-Pe...
They might be a joy to drive in the countryside, and they might be a joy to drive in a busy city (Paris/Barcelona busy, not LA busy) if that's your thing, but nothing can be a joy to drive on the 1000 km highway between them...
From TFA:
The average attacker conducts eight attacks per year, of which less than half are successful. Among the findings that will be of particular interest to defenders: Hackers prefer easy targets and will call off an attack if it is taking too long. According to the survey, 13 percent quit after a delay of five hours
So, you do 8 attacks, and give up if you don't succeed in five hours. Since unsuccessful attacks are part of the 8, I assume that the ones they give up on are also part of that. That means that they work 40 hours a year, for an average salary of 29k$, or around 800$/hr. Not bad al all :)
In Amsterdam quite a lot of taxis are Tesla. Most taxi trips are short and in slow or stop & go city traffic, and the taxi company built superchargers at the airport. Apparently, software decides whether to charge quickly or more slowly depending on how busy it is.
I'm not sure where the electric city (i.e. non-airport) taxis charge, a newspaper article suggested at the taxi company and on normal street charging stations. I guess with 400km radius and an average trip of <20km, charging once every 20 trips isn't that bad; drivers need a break now and then anyways.
Also, at the official taxi waiting areas (e.g. at central station) there are a lot of taxis waiting, probably for at least 30 minutes outside of rush hour. I could imagine installing a supercharger there are well.
Links (in Dutch - have fun with google translate :))
- http://www.parool.nl/parool/nl...
- http://www.luchtvaartnieuws.nl...
- http://www.smartdriving.nl/kla...
HILARIOUS!
is...
That...
FTFY :)
Well, I for one was glad to see that after all these corporate restructurings slashdot is back at its old level :)
But it is funny how they can post a dupe with exactly the same name, while the original article is even in the "most discussed" list. That's a level of incompetence for which you normally need to hire special staff to achieve :)
[Cum grano salis alert: extremely amateur go player here. ]
Also, Go often has many local "battles" going on simultaneously. If you've figured out that you are losing in one corner, you switch to a different corner. If the opponent finishes you in the first corner, that gives you one or more free moves in the new corner. So, the opponent will generally follow you to the new corner. What you can then try to do is build from the new position towards the old in the hope of rescuing that position. But this means that there can easily be 50 moves between having effectively lost a position, and the material disadvantage from the position being finished.
I think the main problem is that you switch one set of administration and enforcement for another:
Current situation: means tested benefit and an amalgation of special case subsidies, leading to administration/enforcement costs and inviting fraud*
New situation: basic income = zero administration/enforcement cost on top of existing citizen registry, and the ability to collapse/remove a lot of special-case benefits like housing subsidy, health care subsidy, pension, student loans, etc. However, as tax rates will increase it becomes more attractive to work in the "informal" sector on top of the basic income, so there will need to be more enforcement of taxation (or even higher tax rates, but that is a slippery slope, see much of southern Europe). Of couse, it is possible now to work informally next to receiving a benefit, but since the tax rates are lower (relatively) and the benefits are more difficult to get and onerous to keep, it will become more attractive in the new situation.
I believe the balance is still positive for basic income, but it is foolish to think that all administration and enforcement problems will be magically solved.
The real question is what the effect on behaviour will be. How many people now receiving benefits will take small jobs since the net effect is always positive (as the extra income comes on top of the benefits, rather than instead of)? How many people that now have unattractive jobs or difficult home situations quit working? How many people will take more risky steps such as starting a business or switching jobs, since they have the certainty of the basic income to help them through difficult times? And will people be more willing to accept more flexible employment contracts for the same reason?
*) and privacy problems: e.g. old-age pensions and possibly welfare are lower for couples than for two individuals since they can share cost of living, this gives the government a "legitimate" reason to nose around in people's bedrooms. For welfare this is sort of understandable since people specifically request welfare if they fall on hard times, so trading a bit of privacy for government support is understandable - but since everyone gets old-age pension, suddenly the government has an interest in the bedrooms of all >65 citizens (actually, somewhere between 65 and 67 I guess nowadays..)
To me a computer is a tool and I find arbitrary change in UI irritating.
Which is actually a very good reason to avoid most graphical interfaces. Icons jump all over the place, toolbars move, start buttons disappear and re-appear, Unities are invented and discarded.. but things like ls and rm stay put, and the interface convention / syntax of "command --option=value argument > file" also hasn't changed.
If your computer is an important tool, spend the couple days weaning yourself off window managers and desktop environments, and breathe out a sigh of relief.
those who remember having nothing but a command line are dead or retired
Now this is just silly. I'm mid-30 and I started computing* on an Acorn Electron (around '85?). Although Windows 3.x was released a couple years later, I used MSDOS from the moment my parents acquired a PC until windows 95 (admittedly in addition to a Acorn Archmides, which was ahead of Windows by at least 10 years at that time).
Nowadays I adminster a number of linux servers, and although I'm sure I could set up X forwarding, as far as I'm concerned I have nothing but the CLI to run them. I do use X forwarding to the virtual host to run virt-manage because I'm too stupid to learn the vritualization commands for the once a month I use them...
So, not only do I vividly remember the pre-GUI days, I'm not even convinced that they're over, and I have yet to touch 40...
*) OK, I was around 5, and computing meant loading games (using CHAIN) and typing a bit of code into BBC BASIC (of the 10 PRINT "MY BROTHER IS STUPID") level. But still :)
It's bringing to the public attention that it is ridiculous for government to allow alleged representatives of bearded men in the sky to solemnize marriage.
>
I agree, but the other way around: I think anybody should be allowed to solemnize marriage, provided that there is a proper interface with the official bureaucracy (e.g. assertions are checked and results are processed -- probably requiring some sort of certification, but preferably one founded on bureaucratic form rather than religious or humanitarian substance). Marriage is partly a bureaucratic affair, but also (to some people) a deeply meaningful and romantic ceremony. If the government can guarantee that the bureaucratic requirements are met, why not give people the liberty to organize the ceremonial aspect in any way they see fit, with bearded men and/or spaghetti-monsters? As long as you can also skip the ceremony and simply register your marriage at the town hall desk, I don't see why alternative ceremonies would not be allowed.
(and first marrying "for the law" and then marrying again "for the church" as is customary in some places is not ideal, I think, as that makes it more difficult for non-organized religions to have a meaningful ceremony since the legal consequences and the ceremony are separated, taking the essence out of the ceremony for those lacking celestial pogonophiles to provide an alternative formality)
There's another angle to this, namely simple honest labeling rules. An atlantic salmon has a certain taste and texture, and I'm not sure that if they GM its growth functions it will have the same taste and text. As a consumer, I want to know what I'm buying, not because I think GM is poison, but because I like to know the quality of the product, and the species of a fish is an important part of that. A turbot is a different fish from a halibut, and I would not like to be given a halibut if I ordered a turbot. From my perspective, a GM-turbot is not necessarily the same thing as a non-GM turbot since the "G" part is what defines a species.
(and no, I don't trust the FDA's "materially different" to sufficiently describe the taste, texture etc of a product)
Uhhhh...isn't that the same argument the multinationals make when they claim Americans should be happy to be paid the same as somebody in Bangalore or Beijing? That you should be happy to "compete" with the absolute lowest bottom of the barrel wage slave they can possibly find on the planet?
As long as we (or at least the vast majority of Americans and Europeans) do our shopping by going to the absolute bottom of the retailer barrel (walmart / aldi+lidl) and/or online shopping barrel, I don't think "we" are in a position to complain.
(and the worst is people who go to a brick&mortar shop to browse and inspect products and get advice, and then buy the thing they selected online because it is 20$ cheaper - since they didn't have to pay the store, the stock, and the somewhat knowledgeable salesperson...)
The police are keeping you in a protected witness facility because the mob is out to get you, and you start thinking the police might not be as bad as the mobsters --- that's not really Stockhold symdrome territory yet :)
In other words, US supremacy is the worst thing that can happen to the world, apart of course from nazi german supremacy, Chinese supremacy, Putin or Stalin russian supremacy, and good lord just imagine EU supremacy. Death by a thousand red tapes, that one...