And the exception... Dutch judges are using international agreements to see if the laws are violating them. If they are, the plaintiffs will be released/compensated based on the international agreements as they are overriding national laws, especially when they are EU judicial guidelines.

So there is no constitution, but in the EU we are now getting a weird mix of Roman law and case law.

That depends on whether the law is based on case law and precedents, or statutes. If the laws are based on what parliament passes as law (which is used in most countries under Roman law but perhaps not in the UK) then it would be a matter of looking at the relevant laws. Several centuries of history would not matter one whit if there was a new law passed that allowed it.

True, but the reverse can happen as well.

My in-law's cousin was top of his class in a city about 150km from Shanghai. Scoring high on tests, he made it into Shanghai university where he also scored pretty high. This got him and his parents a Shanghai Hukou and a job as finance manager after graduation at the same time.

But yeah, if you're of average intelligence you are ordered to stay where you are. Only the very gifted will be mobile both up and sideways.

Totally different from the USA, where every poor kid attends Harvard, of course.

I know they have a horrible track record on brown coal. But right now when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, they produce rather a lot of clean energy quite cheap - so much so the long-standing discussion about grid integration is getting rather urgent.

I think closing their nuclear plants was the wrong decision, in light of the CO2 debate - global climate change is much more urgent than closing well-managed and quite secure nuclear plants. It did take the wind out of the opposition for the government though, which was probably what mattered after Fukushima.

That said, Germany is switching to more green energy because they are running rather low on alternatives.

Actually there's quite a lot of experience with this type of roof nowadays.

Standard roofs locally are covered with bitumen waterproof covering. THis is affected mostly by UV light, which is countered by layering it over with earth and having vegetation on top of it. This can double the lifespan of the waterproof covering.

The weight of a light covering with Sedum (very small, fatty ground-covering foliage that is very robust) will weigh between 50 and 60 kilograms per square meter. If your roof can't hold that, it will have serious trouble with a big snowlayer. Roofs are mandated to hold at least 100 kg/m^2 over 10m^2, and roofs meant to be used as terrace or walked upon for inspection have to be able to hold 250 kg/m^2.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Actually, several Dutch companies are trying to either move their company to Germany, OR build a long cable to draw power from Germany, precisely because of this point.

Right now it turns out that they were so succesful that Germany actually has a competitive advantage over its neighbours who don't have that nice clean and low-cost energy source between 9 and 5. I bet that half the reason France is doing this is because they're seeing the writing on the wall: clean energy is not just clean, it's also becoming cheaper than fossil fuels once you factor in the cost of pollution in densely populated areas.

I'll take "stupid apple fanboys" for 5 points.

Aptly put :)

... I'm off to set up a new marketplace on Tor. Apparently, criminals are really gullible AND use untraceable money! What a great combination :)

I mean, nice to see a study confirming "stuff we already know", but not only has this discussion been done to death in academic circles, it's been such a hot topic it was used as the basis for the Jack Vance story "The Languages of Pao" and a mainstay of the A.E. van Vogt stories, most notably the Null-A novels.

And that is even without going into other literature where this was a hot topic about 80 years ago...

ITIL is a set of best practices. You take what you can use, mold the rest in shape and it gives you a vocabulary with definitions to use in conversation so everyone has a better chance of understanding eachother. I highly recommend it for developers so they can talk the talk with service desk folks.

That said, there are some managers that raise an altar to ITIL and then start praying to the ITIL gods for deliverance. And if you do not follow the Holy Book of ITIL you are DOOOOOOOMED!

If that's the case, you're in for some heavy weather because how you do it is going to be more important than what you do. Get out fast.

On the other hand, if it's an attempt to get problem and error reporting and detection on a better footing, with more data so problems are solved earlier and better, it's a great way to go.

From the description, it's impossible to tell what's happening.

As for the whole "staying in contact with suppliers" and "project management dependencies" - the new guys apparently do like you, but they want you to take on more managerial responsibilities. Overall scope and strategy as opposed to hard-core hacking at terminals. If they didn't like you, they'd leave you alone.

Did you try talking to the managers and discussing your ideas and fears with management? If they freak out, it's time to go. If not, you could maybe have a discussion about how you see your future, versus their vision?

Your use of ad-hominem attacks and posting as an anonymous account says enough about you.

See, we can all do ad-hominem attacks. Join the fun.

The software that comes with my Samsung disables the windows swapfile if you want it to. Since I have plenty of RAM, that's okay with me.

I have the 1TB Samsung 850 Pro, and I'm not giving it up for anything. Any new laptop I buy from now on will have an SSD in it. It's the biggest performance improvement I've ever had, except that time when I installed my first graphics card :)

Interesting idea. I guess we'll know when the scientists that are now studying the object have finished with their calculations.