not deja vu
Deja Vu is when you feel that you've done or seen something before *WHEN YOU KNOW YOU HAVEN'T*
It doesn't mean "when something happens twice"
366 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2007
Interesting wording in that judgement, which leaves lots of open issues.
It says that a worker who wasn't able to take leave because he was sick can either carry it over, or be paid for it if he leaves the company. There's no clear definition of "wasn't able", though. What about someone who has chosen to take no leave during the year, then ends up sick for the last two months? Was the illness the reason they couldn't take the leave? They had 10 months of opportunity which they didn't use, so can it be assumed that it is only 1/6 (i.e. 2/12 of a year) worth of leave which was potentially lost?
It's also not clear on earning leave. Everyone's entitled to 4 weeks paid leave, yet under French law, for example, you need to earn your entitlement. Anyone starting a new job in France has no guarantee of leave, and if you start half-way through the year you only earn half a year's entitlement for the following year.
Most EU directives are carefully ambiguous, so that they can be interpreted according to each member state's needs and not rejected outright. That's exactly what leads to these weasel-worded judgements that don't clarify anything. It'll just make employment lawyers even richer.
And what if the car doesn't go over it dead centre (center?) so that it only snags the wheels on one side? Sounds like a recipe for several tons of out-of-control steel rolling along the road.
Wasn't there an EMP-based thingy like that a few years ago? When fired under a car from a pursuing police vehicle it stuck up a couple of antennæ and zapped the car's electronics, leaving it to coast to a halt without power? A sort of trucktazer... never saw that deployed either.
Why isn't hydrogen a good option for planes? OK, I know it's an energy *carrier*, not a source, and has to be created from something, but I'd have thought that logistically it would be easier to use in planes than in road vehicles.
Planes have a weight, not size, issue, so storage room is less of a problem than for a car. They are refuelled just before departure, so the problem of standing evaporation is much less serious. They don't need a network of filling stations along the route.
What am I missing?
The early Megastores were novel, and worth visiting. Recently the ones I've visted have been disorganized, scruffy, grungy and with painfully overloud music banging away. Maybe I'm not Zavvi/VM's target market,. but I certainly found shopping in HMV or Borders a far more pleasant experience.
Isn't this like the US phone companes who grab the numbers corresponding to things like
1-800-operater to catch the people who can't spell 'operator' ?
Also reminds me of the spelling checker in the Interleaf wordprocessor that used to offer "Interleaf" as a correction for "Framemaker" in documents (or maybe that was the other way around) . Full marks to M&S for initiative.
70kW (94HP) motor, 800kg. That's over 100BHP/Ton and they still only get 75mph and a 6 sec 0-60?
As for the solar cells; assuming the 65mile range is at moderate speed, say 30MPH, so that's 2 hours worth of battery at a load well below the motor's 70kW, it still implies a battery of maybe 20kWh? With an average solar cell developing 100W/m², covering the whole roof will give maybe 200W on a bright day, say 2kWh for the daylight period. That's 3 weeks to fil the battery, not "a few days".
Sorry, but even on a back-of-the-envelope calculation, something about those numbers is screwy.
@Mike Joseph
Yes, ICL had some great kit. George IV running on a 1900-series was way ahead of its time, which is why so many installations of the replacement 2900s spent their entire life running 1900 emulators!
@B
As to what killed VMS, I think it was the same thing that is causing Solaris so many problems today. It was designed by really clever engineers who knew exactly what an OS needed to do, and they filled it with all sorts of nice features (like $getdvi!). Unfortunately that made it slow. Just as I remember being astonished by how much faster VMS 2.0 on a 780 was compared to compiling Fortran on an ICL 1906S, the first Sun workstations flew compared to VMS 4.7, because SunOS 3.x did so much less than VMS.
Now Solaris has been filled with many of the nice features from VMS (always amuses me when something 'new' is added, and I think "Hmm, VMS had that 20 years ago") and now Linux is eating its lunch because people think "ohh, Debian is soooo much faster". Of course it is, it does sooooo much less, but if it's doing all you ned it to, so what? Robustness and features are important to some parts of the market, which is where VMS had (has) a good hold, but not everyone's willing to pay the price up front, even if they learn to their sorrow later that they should have done :)
No doubt in 20 years we'll be reminiscing about how good Linux was, and why it's so sad that it's being superseded by the latest 128-bit mobile phones running some Chinese quantum-effect fuzzy logic OS or somesuch. And some of us will still have Solaris systems running in the basement, just for fun...
The original Tripod books weren't published by the BBC. They were written in the late 60s, the Beeb didn't get round to them until 20 years later. They were aimed at teenagers, I remember my Grandad bought me "The White Mountains", it's probably what hooked me on SF. By the time the Beeb got round to making the series I assumed I'd become too old for them...
Still, while we're on the subject of kid's SF, anyone else remember the Tomorrow People?
Why bother with the stealth and all the penalties? Wouldn't it be cheaper just to make it so fscking fast that by the time you'd seen it coming amd worked out what to do it would have already shat on you and gone home? It's not like the carrier it lives on will be very stealthy anyway...
Look's like Gordo has given up any hope of winning the next election then, he's wasting his time laying traps for the Tories when they come in and have to clean up Labour's economic mess. Again.
He could have tried 10p off a litre of petrol and diesel for the next year, funded by a windfall tax on the oil companies for the extra profits they've made in the past 12 months. That would not only have a bigger effect, psychologically as well as financially, it would send a message to the oil companies that they can't hike the pump price instantly when crude goes up, then drag their feet for months when crude goes down again...
2.5% VAT reduction? Well, the shopping I was going to do anyway next week will be cheaper, but I won't be encouraged to do any more of it. Big deal.
in the days when British Telecom was the only game in town, and still 'a part of the Post Office', i.e. state-owned, we all had to "sign the official secrets act". It was made clear to us that if we were caught snooping on such material then dismissal was likely to be the least of our worries...
Is "interfering with the Royal Mail" still a hanging offence?
This is exactly why off the shelf devices need to be used with care. If there is really a need for USB connectivity the military should just define their own incompatible USB connector, and provide suitable devices (with built-in crypto?) for those who need them. That, and fill the standard USB ports on their PCs with epoxy glue...
Of course, that is why they end up paying $400 for a hammer, but security doesn't come free...
Highly unpleasant though the BNP is, it's a legal party. Banning serving police officers from belonging to a legal political party seems a very dubious move. Replace "BNP" with "Sinn Fein" in that situation, would it still be accepted without complaint everywhere? Either ban the police from belonging to any political party, or ban the BNP outright. Anything else must surely be dodgy ground?
Not bad, I made it to 950-odd points, plenty meaner than mama, but the tofu was too gross to continue.
Still, Peta have a lot to learn about a nice turkey, not least that it should be hung long enough for the blood to drain out first.
Nice one, El Veg, it's only 10am and I'm already salivating for a nice medium-rare steak...
"Comparisons with Blair are fair, but you're being a little harsh. Yes he went off the rails with Iraq but we're no longer worrying about Northern Ireland, largely down to his first term. Anyone believe the conservatives could have done that? Didn't think so"
Bollocks. John Major did all the work for that, Bliar just stepped in and took the credit. As usual.
This brings back memories of terminals with downloadable font sets, and email messages with unfiltered escape sequences. Flip your bosses VT100 (yes, I'm that old) into upside-down characters, then tell him it's a known bug, and he'll just have to invert the screen until the service tech arrives.
Will this FlipFont application react to any old SMS messages with the right content in them? Could be fun...
It's not that simple. Power consumed by aircon isn't the same as heat energy shifted by the aircon. You can pump 3KW of heat out of a building using only 1KW of power consumed, and the efficiency of that pumping process *will* depend on the temperature differential between hot and cold sides.
And what if I'm just popping down to the shops and my Mum asks me to get her a pint of milk. Do I then need to get her phone to transfer money to my phone? I can see that being a real hit :(
What planet do these Eurocrats live on? I suppose they have people to spend money for them, so they never carry it themselves, like the Queen.
"in case anyone's forgotten, optimal use of the electro-magnetic spectrum is the primary remit of the regulator."
Funny, I thought Ofcom was created to ensure a level playing field and to stop BT (at the time) from using it's weight to crush newcomers, not to be the government's spectrum pimp.
Looks like it's a case of gamekeeper turned poacher?
It's stage one of the next PPP initiative. The gadget will ship with the alarm set to 60m spacing on motorways, and then the government will install safety cameras that issue tickets to anyone driving closer than 70m from the car in front. The money will come rolling in, with a 50:50 split...