That was the point of view about 5 years back.

The latest managerial fad is to have everyone colocated so travel and commuting instead of telecommuting are firmly back on the menu.

Japan did not do the copying after WW2. The big "copy the west" operation happened 50 years prior to that at the turn of the century.

It is Japan from around 1890 to 1940 which is the worrying analogy with today's china, not post-WW2 japan.

You are missing the point.

In the case of Ireland EU was going against the political powers of Ireland and the public opinion there.

In the case of introducing rules on "EU interest" EU will be going along with the public opinion and politics in more than half of the EU countries. The only one to oppose that will probably be Britain and I would not be so sure about that one either.

And that is 10 times more worrisome because the right analogy is still there in history. It is not USA, it is Japan.

That is an analogy that is making me shudder for a moment.

Here you go:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/17/russian_data_cherrypicked_says_sceptic/

I have read the paper itself. It is extremely well written with excellent statistical analysis and so far there has been NO answer from the so called "not another old university in cambridge" which did most of the analysis quoted and re-quoted in AGW papers.

Actually, I beg to differ here.

The current AGW protagonists have been caught redhanded to cherry pick the data for a large portion of the northern hemisphere.

http://www.iea.ru/article/kioto_order/15.12.2009.pdf

Read this. I have read this paper over a bottle of wine with my mom this summer. She is a retired met support officer - initially strategic missile command, after that strategic bomber command and after that 30 years of met support for civilian aviation. She used slightly less "diplomatic language", but the exec summary is: "the guys have a point".

1. At some point this summer FDA started looking into food supplements and actively removing "body builder" supplements which actually were a supplement for that muscle that is not quite muscle tissue and is affected by various sildenafil salts. A lot of SPAM was advertising these semi-legit operations and it is logical for it to reduce in volume as they get closed down.

2. Facebook, LinkedIn and their like have become easier routes than mail with higher success rates.

I would expect SPAM to decrease as a result of both of these even without major operations being taken down.

Reinventing the wheel using Lithium Ion batteries.

I am having some difficulty being convinced that this is much better than taking the good old good trolleybus of the kind which Moscow has been running for nearly 100 years now and adding a 2 mile mini-battery to it.

It would have made much more sense to add some modern "lock/unlock to the cables" tech to a trolleybus system and use the batteries only for the intervals where there is no overhead wires so you can have interrupted coverage. This way you also do not need any of battery swapping and so on. You also pull wires only where it is cost effective and so on.

Even for note taking laptop is a bad idea. You end up loading your brain in parallel via visual with exactly what the prof is saying at the desk. That has long been proven by various cognition studies to be a bad idea. It is similar to what is known amidst presenters as death by powerpoint (putting on slides exactly what you are going to say).

That is besides the point. Only 5% end up using the laptop for notes. Rest will be chatting over IM, updating their facebook pages and so on. As a result the prof ends up teaching to an audience of 90%+ who does not pay attention to what he says. Teaching anything in an environment like this borders on the impossible.

It is not the lazy eye which is the problem here.

There is a fundamental problem - the stereoscopical position of eyes and the depth perception of a child are different from those of an adult. The reasons for this are purely anatomical - the eyes are positioned differently in the skull.

So you have to generate different content for different ages and probably even take development into account. That is simply beyond the limits of today's tech.

There is no "if" in my case. My results in school and uni have always been a statistical anomaly.

I always used to score nearly 100% on the difficult problems and quite often fail trivial ones (in fact I still do till this day). My test results were also all over the place. While I managed a decent grade at the end of each class I have quite often gone top/bottom/top through the year and so on. I also believe that this is not new. I had a couple of professors pick me up as a target for "special attention" based on similar methods as far back as 20+ years.

Frankly, I am not alone here. All bi-polar people, people with SAD or just people who are a bit nuts will show up as a statistical anomaly.

This technique discriminates against everyone who has a creative spark (call it talent, madness or just plain good old "short bus") and in favour of Joe Mediocre Average who always pulls the same predictable score and will never ever exceed his limitations and achieve anything beyond what is expected from him.

You are missing something.

G-Wiz officially is not a car - it is a quadricycle. There is a number of local manufacturers besides G-wiz and at least one of them electric IIRC. Offficially, quadricycle is limited to 40mph, is under some weight limit (different for electric and petrol), etc. It also does not have to pass most of EU car safety tests.

There is a reason why France is the only country in Europe where the so called quadricicles still sell and which continues writing them into the EU rulebook. It is called Paris (not that other french major cities are much better) traffic. You are not accelerating to Jeremy Clarkson (or 70-es Alain Delon film) speeds any time soon. Similarly, if you are hit you are not spilling out anything on the road anytime soon (especially if you got one of the french ones that actually pass car safety tests) because you are most likely to be hit at sub-10mph speeds.

So besides everything else this is also a subsidy to local manufacturers as most people will not go for G-wiz but for one of the local ones.

Minor difference.

Having a site in a language different from English is one thing. Having a state policy to enforce the language on all websites is another.

In any case, the first to try to put a policy along these lines are not the chinese. If my memory serves me right the first country to try a national language policy for the internet and mandatory translations are actually the French more than 10 years ago. AFAIK they did not get very far... Plenty of sites with mixed language and plenty of English language sites under .fr.

US != the rest of the world and vice versa

US is automatic and customary automatic and unless you put it into Neutral at the red lights it is not true unloaded idle. There is load on the engine which causes it burn WAY more fuel than an average EU manual car (especially a diesel).

So the figures for consumption are not surprising. No need to stop it by the way. Just fully separating the clutch when break is pressed even if the car is not in neutral should do the job.

_WRONG_. It costs in performance.

Start/Stop causes extra wear and tear on the engine block. Additionally, you need to ensure that the engine block retains heat longer which in most cases means bigger and heavier engine block. Similarly, you may need some extra work on the cat and emission control to keep the entire system warm and ensure you stay within pollution limits. On top of that you need a beefier starter motor and a beefier battery or a supercapacitor system to ensure you get the cranking current for it so that the engine starts up straight away. And so on. All of this adds weight which in turn costs in performance.

It also does not solve the biggest problem with in-traffic economy. A good engine especially diesel eats nearly nothing in idle (especially with manual). Now acceleration is what really eats fuel - from stop to going.

All in all you get worse pollution (and nastier - particles and unburned/partially burned hydrocarbons), worse economy and worse performance than an smaller and "weaker" normal engine with an electric boost similar to the one on the Honda, Mercedes and a few others.