The boxes are for particular recyclables - plastic bottles, tin cans, newspaper etc. We record weight against household so we can track who recycles and who doesn't (we give out prizes for participation), and look at it on an are level to see what differences there are and so how we could improve performance.
Not as fun as snapping garbage
I am extremely skeptical of the current generation of RFID tags when used in practice out there in the wild.
About three years back I set up software to support a recycling scheme, whereby every household in a community (ca 10,000) were given a couple of plastic boxes in which to place recycled goods. The boxes where chipped *and* barcoded, and there were scales on the collection lorry to weigh the box and automatically scan the rfid chip at the same time, thus collecting usage data.
Three years on it turns out that the one thing we were not expecting - the rfid chips not to be reliable - has proven a major issue. The failure rate is not high, but we consistently have a score or more boxes needing replacing every month, which is a far higher rate than we were lead to expect. We did think it might be the manufacturer, but we've talked to several people doing similar things now and everyone has similar stories - the chips do fail.
Perversely - the barcodes, which we sealed in transparent plastic but didn't expect to last (hence going with rfid tags as major impact) have given us less than a dozen damaged to the point we can't scan them in the whole three years.
3
Jeez, is that all it takes to be a veteran these days. What price those of us who remember the dawn of the endless September.
Yes, but the probability of planets with large moons is looking distinctly higher than it did a few years back - the mars-sized body that collided with the proto-earth probably formed at one of the trojan points and then destabilized to collide with the right velocity to produce the earth/moon pair. OK it's still an unlikely event, but most probably in the one in a few orders of magnitude than one in the tens of millions postulated by the rare earth people
Abso-bloody-lutly. It took me an age to figure that out and as a developer of 20 years in numerous environments this had to be one of the most non-intuitive changes ever.
4 works well actually. I have 3 in the classic 'one in the middle and one each side' layout, then a fourth further around on my right which has all those programs one wants open but doesn't really work on all the time - Skype, IM client (pidgin) iTunes and Spotify in my case.
The three centrals are 24" and the fourth 22" - I figure monitors are cheap and if you go for duel PCI Express slots on your motherboard you've got the plug for the fourth monitor so why no use it?
Is that the lynch mob went after someone killing a kitten. That's new certainly something new and implies that the west's cultural obsessions with animal welfare and cuteness are taking hold.
Nothing new in concept here, although the implementation is updated
We have a similar thing in the UK, but it was designed to tackle the well know scenario where a company would staff their programming pool with 'independent' contractors hired via an agency (thereby both the company and the contractor paying less tax). The contractors worked in the company's office full time, on the company's equipment, with their times and work allocation directly allocated by the company - to all intensive purposes they were employees, and to be honest I think the tightening of the law was perfectly reasonable.
To get around the problem is relatively straightforward if you're a genuine independent developer. Owning your own equipment and working from your own office usually suffices, with other good indicators being you have several contracts and managing your own time.
I've had the same main email address since the mid 90s, so as you might expect it's on every spam list going, and on average I'm seeing 100 emails a day hitting my Outlook spam folder. However it's never an issue for me as I pay for the rather wonderful Cloudmark spamfilter which is near as dam it 100% accurate for my use.
So all I have is spam hitting my spam fillter at about one every 15 minutes. Which has on several occasions been a useful 'heartbeat' to diagnose when my there's something wrong with my connectivity - either the internet connection itself or the servers being hit by spam.
It's so reliable a diagnostic that I've even wondered if there's a viable commercial product in there based on the idea
You're talking about Salon.com - as Daschund says below. I used to read it regularly, and I did take a Premium subscription for a year when it put up the paywall, but after the first year I stopped and exactly as you say never really went back there again. Indeed I've only just discovered they took the paywall down thanks to your post!!! (how ironic is that?). I read Slate for a bit after that precisely because it didn't have the paywall/ad barrier.
It is remarkably easy for online media to mess up. Indeed at a far lower level I used to contribute to Slashdot far more than I do now. Except several years ago my mod status was removed for no apparent reason (my Karma then, as now, is excellent) and somehow I couldn't be bothered to chase it, I started looking at it less, and before long it's dropped down from a site I used to post a lot to to a sort of glorified news feed I still scan daily as it tends to find stuff I'm interested in (for some reason I never really got into digg). Oh and the current version of the interface (current as in the past few years) I find irritating compared to the classic layout.
Do not use the blue keys on this terminal.
