In New Zealand, Auckland Transport updated their requirements for new buses that all operators of AT services must follow in 2015. One requirement was that USB ports must be installed in at least every second row (on each side), other requirements include wifi and monitors showing up to date route information an announcements. With all the contracts being re-tendered between the end of last year and early next year about half of all buses will have these features bythe end of next year. These are local buses running around a city.
Huntly is the only transmission connected coal plant in New Zealand.
According to the Electricity Authority stats for distributed generation...
There is no fuel type on the registry for Coal. "Other" has 120MW from 28 connections and "Undefined" 0.022 MW from 10 connections. From that it is safe to say that there is probably no other coal plants in operation in New Zealand. ( Source )
Notes: 1. The New Zealand Government has not banned coal plants but they are hard to run economically against hydro, gas and geothermal. 2. Huntly was originally going to close sooner (end of 2018 when its current fuel stock ran out), it is only being kept open because other electricity companies are paying for the 2 units left to remain on call. 3. Huntly can be switched over to run on gas, which it mostly did until the 90's when gas supplies became tighter.
The last steam trains built made exactly 1 run, from the factory to the scrapheap. When diesels came in they were so much cheaper to run and maintain it wasn't worthwhile keeping around a brand new steam engine that you had already paid for.
If an new self driving truck is cheaper long term than paying the driver of the current truck, then the current truck and driver will be gone.
Already done. Auckland, New Zealand is busy installing these at the moment. The existing mostly sodium bulb fittings are being replaced with LED fittings, on the quieter streets the lights will be equiped with motion sensors that will turn on the lights for the whole when they detect a car.
30% of all streetlights are being replaced over a 3 year period. Total cost for the project -$20 million, yes negative, the savings in electricity move than covers the cost of replacing the lights.
Exactly this is just demand response/load management (the terminology depends on who has the control, the utility doing it automatically or the customer doing it when requested).
For the last decade this has been going on for industrial and commercial properties, where customers are paid either to turn off interruptible load (say a cool store) or run their backup generators for a couple of hours. Industrial and commercial because you only need to manage a few sites to get a large response, e.g. ringing up Google and asking them to switch a data centre over to generators for a hour.
For residential customers this is even older, pilot lines and ripple control have allowed utilities to turn off stored water heaters/night store heaters as required, this is 60+ years old. The first trials for this were used as energy saving measures during WWII.
The US has jurisdiction on the ground the company plans to launch from and the airspace that they plan to fly through.
The US has jurisdiction over New Zealand?
The FAA has jurisdiction over Moon Express because they are an American company. Rocket Lab who are launching the rocket are based in New Zealand (registered in the US but based in New Zealand) hence the large silver fern and NZ on the rocket and a launch site in New Zealand.
If you look at the actual costs they are going to be similar between the US and NZ, it is a global market for medical supplies and doctors. The difference is who pays
Example: angioplasty with 2 stents (heart surgery): $17,000-$20,000 This is rarely done as elective surgery through a private hospital, so although the operation would cost that much to perform, it would paid by the district health board. Last time my father had this done the doctors were discussing during the op if they should ask for a refund from the manufacturer of the stent that didn't work.
Let's compare the price paid for cancer treatment, what would 12.5 months of hospital stays, chemo, painkillers, a nurse visiting your home everyday for a month (plus 2 months of less frequent visits), multiple doctors visits to your home (with 2 doctors so you can get an instant second opinion) cost in the US? In NZ the out of pocket payment was $2 to fill a proscription for 1,000 paracetamol tablets.
Openstreetmap has my address but thinks I am in a different province, but then again so does accuweather (I wonder who uses who as the source).
Google maps on the other hand have my driveway marked as a road and the actual road not existing (well the satelite photos are at least 8 years old), also the have labeled the village with the name of a hotel (which closed and moved away years ago) instead of the real and completely different name, I guess the hotel having "village" in its name was the problem there.
Can someone please explain to me why you would want that interface on a server, the last company that I worked for "upgraded" the RDP server from 2K3 to 2012, it was the most painful experience of my life and I once had a root canal done with no pain killers.
Or just negotiate your salary based on 37.5 hours a week and get paid for overtime, public holidays, on call standby, on call callouts (minimum 4 hours per call out). If the company wants you to do work there must be some value in it for them, which means there should be something in it for you.
By the way the above example isn't in Europe and one person did manage to combine all of the above to claim 26 hours pay for 1 day.
I remember in my first year at university a chem lecturer setting off an explosion in one of the lecture theaters, I was in another room at the time, the entire concrete building shook and four fire trucks turned up.
I always remember my old Social Studies teacher who said that the more that the above words (Democratic, People's and Republic) appear in the name of a country the less likely it is that it is true.
The problem was the guy hired to write the awk scripts decided to use perl instead and half way through his cat rolled on the keyboard and he couldn't tell which parts were written by him and which by the cat so he left it all in. The battery controller must be using the cat code.
In New Zealand it is (or at least was) 24 hours without the phone = 1 months free line rental. I know of at least one power company in New Zealand that has to pay out $50 to each affected customer if an outage on their network lasts more than 4 hours. Both of these are for residential connections.
The first DVD player we brought for my father (a Phillips) when you opened the box there was a piece of paper sitting on top of saying how to turn off the region checking.
The first DVD player I brought for myself I was comparing two very similar players at about the same price, the salesman walked over and said "you want that one, it comes region unlocked out of the box, the other one you have to look up the code online"
The unlocked one was the cheaper one by the way, still works to this day.
Your right not the best example, but the first one that came into my head when I was thinking about how old e-mails saved my butt.
All my e-mails are archived on a specific archive server and can be retrieved by those with the required access should I get hit by a bus tomorrow, and I don't take it personally I have used the same reason for getting people to learn all of the things that are sitting inside my head. The company that I work for has nicely organised shared drives where nothing is ever deleted (and if it is there are tested tape backups) but as is always the case, things that have been done are always better documented than things that haven't been done. where do you store a "customer has told about this problem but ignored it" conversation that everyone can see (really I would like to know it is the only thing that is falling through the cracks).
I am glad that I don't work for $BIG_CORP, I have all of the e-mails I have ever sent or received from a customer store in a folder for that customer (my inbox is in effect my to do list, the only e-mails in there are ones I have to respond to, either by reply or by doing work if they are from one of the work tracking systems.
The reason I do this is for the following situation, this is an actual example, names have been removed to protect the guilty.
1. I discover a bug in the minor piece of software that I develop where a common mistake in data input can result in a customer not being billed correctly. I trace the history of the bug and notify all affected customers that the bug exists, the conditions that it occurs under and why it is going to affect all of them (the input is a file coming from a source they all share) and that the fix is free as per their support contract. 2. All but one of the affected customers ask for the fix straight away, the other says they don't think it is important so they don't want it. 3. Fast forward one year customer who doesn't get the fix realises that their bills are coming out wrong, raises all sorts of hell with my boss about the buggy software that they are using, I forward their e-mail saying that they don't want the fix and suddenly they go very quiet.
Without my e-mail history it would be my word against theirs. Finally almost all of my projects last longer than 90 days, how do you keep track of what was agreed (most importantly agreed to be excluded) at the start if all the e-mail trails are gone.
I am left wondering what dodgy things $BIG_CORP are up to if they think e-mails over 90 days old are a legal risk.
Search for Whaleway Station Road in Kaikoura New Zealand, I did this on the weekend.
Apple Maps - The road does not exist
Google Maps - Clearly shows the road, the railway station and Whale Watch Kaikoura, the main tourist attraction in the town, which has only been there for about 15 years.
You don't even have to nationalise it, just force the owners of the companies to split into two companies, one owning the network and the other selling services on the network with the requirement that the network has to sell access to any company at the same price.
You can also use a carrot for this, see Telecom NZ which split off its fixed line network into a company called Chorus in return for ~$1B, on the condition that it (Chorus who got the money) build an open access fibre network to ~65% of the population within 10 years. I guess in this case the stick in this case was the Government saying if you don't do it we will give the money to someone else and they can build there own network, with blackjack and hookers.
So you are treating them like PADDs from TNG? Do your trainees get one for each document so that can carry around a pile?
I am joking of course, but this is the perfect use for tablets and like you said it saves money (and space). I know of other companies which have done similar things, but since it was board reports for the board members they were using iPads, but part of their justification was they could just e-mail all the documents when they were ready and the board members could read them ahead of time instead of sending out massive piles of paper each month.
For extra fun downloading from a server is not covered by this law so downloading a movie using bit torrent could get you a strike but downloading from megaupload wouldn't. Hmmm, co-incidence?
Additionally, there have been a small number of people who have hit three strikes, and the music industry has not pursued disconnection for those people - presumably because pursuing it means taking it to a tribunal which might actually require evidence of infringement.
Good point, I would like to add for those not familiar with the NZ law, if you get to three strikes and the right holders don't take you to the copyright tribunal within a set amount of time (2 or 3 months I think) the earlier strikes are thrown out and the user goes back to the start of the process, basically a use it or lose situation for the rights holders, don't accuse someone unless you are prepared to back it up.
Once the tablets are deployed, the power to instantly update the curriculum via internet updates is powerful.
Unfortunately there are a large number of schools in Thailand, mostly those in rural areas that don't even have power let alone the internet. For example the school closest to me has bathrooms and storage inside but the two classrooms only have a roof and one wall with a blackboard on it.
Also if you read the specs these tablets have a battery life of 2-3 hours, if there is no power at the school you better hope the students have it at home and remembered to charge their tablet. In a way this is one thing OLPC got right with the XO1 include a hand crank.
But once the schools all have basic infrastructure then you are right the tablets could be a very powerful tool
Slashdot Mirror
In New Zealand, Auckland Transport updated their requirements for new buses that all operators of AT services must follow in 2015. One requirement was that USB ports must be installed in at least every second row (on each side), other requirements include wifi and monitors showing up to date route information an announcements. With all the contracts being re-tendered between the end of last year and early next year about half of all buses will have these features bythe end of next year. These are local buses running around a city.
Huntly is the only transmission connected coal plant in New Zealand.
According to the Electricity Authority stats for distributed generation...
There is no fuel type on the registry for Coal. "Other" has 120MW from 28 connections and "Undefined" 0.022 MW from 10 connections. From that it is safe to say that there is probably no other coal plants in operation in New Zealand. ( Source )
Notes:
1. The New Zealand Government has not banned coal plants but they are hard to run economically against hydro, gas and geothermal.
2. Huntly was originally going to close sooner (end of 2018 when its current fuel stock ran out), it is only being kept open because other electricity companies are paying for the 2 units left to remain on call.
3. Huntly can be switched over to run on gas, which it mostly did until the 90's when gas supplies became tighter.
Sunken cost.
The last steam trains built made exactly 1 run, from the factory to the scrapheap. When diesels came in they were so much cheaper to run and maintain it wasn't worthwhile keeping around a brand new steam engine that you had already paid for.
If an new self driving truck is cheaper long term than paying the driver of the current truck, then the current truck and driver will be gone.
Already done. Auckland, New Zealand is busy installing these at the moment. The existing mostly sodium bulb fittings are being replaced with LED fittings, on the quieter streets the lights will be equiped with motion sensors that will turn on the lights for the whole when they detect a car.
30% of all streetlights are being replaced over a 3 year period. Total cost for the project -$20 million, yes negative, the savings in electricity move than covers the cost of replacing the lights.
Exactly this is just demand response/load management (the terminology depends on who has the control, the utility doing it automatically or the customer doing it when requested).
For the last decade this has been going on for industrial and commercial properties, where customers are paid either to turn off interruptible load (say a cool store) or run their backup generators for a couple of hours. Industrial and commercial because you only need to manage a few sites to get a large response, e.g. ringing up Google and asking them to switch a data centre over to generators for a hour.
For residential customers this is even older, pilot lines and ripple control have allowed utilities to turn off stored water heaters/night store heaters as required, this is 60+ years old. The first trials for this were used as energy saving measures during WWII.
The US has jurisdiction on the ground the company plans to launch from and the airspace that they plan to fly through.
The US has jurisdiction over New Zealand?
The FAA has jurisdiction over Moon Express because they are an American company. Rocket Lab who are launching the rocket are based in New Zealand (registered in the US but based in New Zealand) hence the large silver fern and NZ on the rocket and a launch site in New Zealand.
If you look at the actual costs they are going to be similar between the US and NZ, it is a global market for medical supplies and doctors. The difference is who pays
Example:
angioplasty with 2 stents (heart surgery): $17,000-$20,000
This is rarely done as elective surgery through a private hospital, so although the operation would cost that much to perform, it would paid by the district health board. Last time my father had this done the doctors were discussing during the op if they should ask for a refund from the manufacturer of the stent that didn't work.
Let's compare the price paid for cancer treatment, what would 12.5 months of hospital stays, chemo, painkillers, a nurse visiting your home everyday for a month (plus 2 months of less frequent visits), multiple doctors visits to your home (with 2 doctors so you can get an instant second opinion) cost in the US? In NZ the out of pocket payment was $2 to fill a proscription for 1,000 paracetamol tablets.
I think I will take the government healthcare
Openstreetmap has my address but thinks I am in a different province, but then again so does accuweather (I wonder who uses who as the source).
Google maps on the other hand have my driveway marked as a road and the actual road not existing (well the satelite photos are at least 8 years old), also the have labeled the village with the name of a hotel (which closed and moved away years ago) instead of the real and completely different name, I guess the hotel having "village" in its name was the problem there.
Metro or DEATH?
Death please, seriously.
Can someone please explain to me why you would want that interface on a server, the last company that I worked for "upgraded" the RDP server from 2K3 to 2012, it was the most painful experience of my life and I once had a root canal done with no pain killers.
Or just negotiate your salary based on 37.5 hours a week and get paid for overtime, public holidays, on call standby, on call callouts (minimum 4 hours per call out). If the company wants you to do work there must be some value in it for them, which means there should be something in it for you.
By the way the above example isn't in Europe and one person did manage to combine all of the above to claim 26 hours pay for 1 day.
The first one I heard was Software Against People
I remember in my first year at university a chem lecturer setting off an explosion in one of the lecture theaters, I was in another room at the time, the entire concrete building shook and four fire trucks turned up.
Shortest calculus lecture ever.
I always remember my old Social Studies teacher who said that the more that the above words (Democratic, People's and Republic) appear in the name of a country the less likely it is that it is true.
The problem was the guy hired to write the awk scripts decided to use perl instead and half way through his cat rolled on the keyboard and he couldn't tell which parts were written by him and which by the cat so he left it all in. The battery controller must be using the cat code.
In New Zealand it is (or at least was) 24 hours without the phone = 1 months free line rental. I know of at least one power company in New Zealand that has to pay out $50 to each affected customer if an outage on their network lasts more than 4 hours. Both of these are for residential connections.
Exactly,
The first DVD player we brought for my father (a Phillips) when you opened the box there was a piece of paper sitting on top of saying how to turn off the region checking.
The first DVD player I brought for myself I was comparing two very similar players at about the same price, the salesman walked over and said "you want that one, it comes region unlocked out of the box, the other one you have to look up the code online"
The unlocked one was the cheaper one by the way, still works to this day.
Your right not the best example, but the first one that came into my head when I was thinking about how old e-mails saved my butt.
All my e-mails are archived on a specific archive server and can be retrieved by those with the required access should I get hit by a bus tomorrow, and I don't take it personally I have used the same reason for getting people to learn all of the things that are sitting inside my head. The company that I work for has nicely organised shared drives where nothing is ever deleted (and if it is there are tested tape backups) but as is always the case, things that have been done are always better documented than things that haven't been done. where do you store a "customer has told about this problem but ignored it" conversation that everyone can see (really I would like to know it is the only thing that is falling through the cracks).
I am glad that I don't work for $BIG_CORP, I have all of the e-mails I have ever sent or received from a customer store in a folder for that customer (my inbox is in effect my to do list, the only e-mails in there are ones I have to respond to, either by reply or by doing work if they are from one of the work tracking systems.
The reason I do this is for the following situation, this is an actual example, names have been removed to protect the guilty.
1. I discover a bug in the minor piece of software that I develop where a common mistake in data input can result in a customer not being billed correctly. I trace the history of the bug and notify all affected customers that the bug exists, the conditions that it occurs under and why it is going to affect all of them (the input is a file coming from a source they all share) and that the fix is free as per their support contract.
2. All but one of the affected customers ask for the fix straight away, the other says they don't think it is important so they don't want it.
3. Fast forward one year customer who doesn't get the fix realises that their bills are coming out wrong, raises all sorts of hell with my boss about the buggy software that they are using, I forward their e-mail saying that they don't want the fix and suddenly they go very quiet.
Without my e-mail history it would be my word against theirs. Finally almost all of my projects last longer than 90 days, how do you keep track of what was agreed (most importantly agreed to be excluded) at the start if all the e-mail trails are gone.
I am left wondering what dodgy things $BIG_CORP are up to if they think e-mails over 90 days old are a legal risk.
Search for Whaleway Station Road in Kaikoura New Zealand, I did this on the weekend.
Apple Maps - The road does not exist
Google Maps - Clearly shows the road, the railway station and Whale Watch Kaikoura, the main tourist attraction in the town, which has only been there for about 15 years.
You don't even have to nationalise it, just force the owners of the companies to split into two companies, one owning the network and the other selling services on the network with the requirement that the network has to sell access to any company at the same price.
You can also use a carrot for this, see Telecom NZ which split off its fixed line network into a company called Chorus in return for ~$1B, on the condition that it (Chorus who got the money) build an open access fibre network to ~65% of the population within 10 years. I guess in this case the stick in this case was the Government saying if you don't do it we will give the money to someone else and they can build there own network, with blackjack and hookers.
So you are treating them like PADDs from TNG? Do your trainees get one for each document so that can carry around a pile?
I am joking of course, but this is the perfect use for tablets and like you said it saves money (and space). I know of other companies which have done similar things, but since it was board reports for the board members they were using iPads, but part of their justification was they could just e-mail all the documents when they were ready and the board members could read them ahead of time instead of sending out massive piles of paper each month.
Many many months of never clicking on links on slashdot, yes that means I never RTFA
The law only targets peer-to-peer file sharing.
For extra fun downloading from a server is not covered by this law so downloading a movie using bit torrent could get you a strike but downloading from megaupload wouldn't. Hmmm, co-incidence?
Additionally, there have been a small number of people who have hit three strikes, and the music industry has not pursued disconnection for those people - presumably because pursuing it means taking it to a tribunal which might actually require evidence of infringement.
Good point, I would like to add for those not familiar with the NZ law, if you get to three strikes and the right holders don't take you to the copyright tribunal within a set amount of time (2 or 3 months I think) the earlier strikes are thrown out and the user goes back to the start of the process, basically a use it or lose situation for the rights holders, don't accuse someone unless you are prepared to back it up.
Once the tablets are deployed, the power to instantly update the curriculum via internet updates is powerful.
Unfortunately there are a large number of schools in Thailand, mostly those in rural areas that don't even have power let alone the internet. For example the school closest to me has bathrooms and storage inside but the two classrooms only have a roof and one wall with a blackboard on it.
Also if you read the specs these tablets have a battery life of 2-3 hours, if there is no power at the school you better hope the students have it at home and remembered to charge their tablet. In a way this is one thing OLPC got right with the XO1 include a hand crank.
But once the schools all have basic infrastructure then you are right the tablets could be a very powerful tool