Cost of a crown on top of an implant in The Netherlands, without insurance (so yes, you can come over here and get it, just add some money for flight and hotel): between 1900 and 2500 euro. In total. So for four dental implants WITH CROWN your mother would spend at most 10.000 euro, if she was uninsured. I'm pretty sure this can be negotiated down a bit if she wants four, or a bit higher if she has health issues.

(source: http://www.implantaat.nl/koste...)

In Blegium, it's cheaper (and just as good): http://www.kaakchirurgie-anna....
Yes, that's that's about 2000 euro for 4 implants...

I think you might want to show those prices to your mother's dentist and ask him to reconsider his pricing. Failing that, I'm pretty sure you can get a nice Euro-trip and implants for around 5000 euro total.

I assume this is to prevent a leaking main from electrocuting everyone in the area, and/or to prevent gasses building up underneath and/or to have better airflow around the battery to keep the temperature from going up in hotspots.

In Germany, companies that accept energy during peak supply actually *get paid* to use energy. Those batteries will not just break even, they're going to be a major money maker even in the first year.

I agree. It's more false consciousness than cognitive dissonance.

48kWh... must be a house in the US. ... In The Netherlands, the average electricity use for a family of 2,2 persons is about 3500 kWh/year, or about 9,6 kWh per day. That's around 20% of the energy use of an average house in the US.

Perhaps in the US you don't need batteries or solar energy as much as you need decent insulation.

I may have misinterpreted your statement, but with sampling this has always been the default argument: that it was re-use of material under copyright. This POV has been validated in lawsuits.

[citation needed] - the music industry is claiming the exact opposite as an argument to have more stringent laws against copyright violations. It would be nice if someone had some figures to back it up.

The Carmina Burana was a famous case: there were several mashups of the Carmina Burana with house-music in the 90's and they were all killed off by the composer's widow who didn't like house music.

Copyrights kill creativity.

The defense presents exhibit A: "Paul's Boutique" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul%27s_Boutique)

"The album's rankings near the top of many publications' "best albums" lists in disparate genres has given Paul's Boutique critical recognition as a landmark album in hip hop."
"most of the samples used on Paul's Boutique were cleared, easily and affordably, something that [...] would be 'unthinkable' in today's litigious music industry."
"This type of sampling was only possible before Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc., the landmark lawsuit against Biz Markie by Gilbert O'Sullivan, which changed the process and future of hip hop sampling."

Creating something new from existing things has ALWAYS been the mainstay of most artists - disguising it as something completely new has been the province of the superior artists.

And I should have added: We corrected the modeling mistakes. So now it's down to 50 MB/s at its peak, on test. Given the datamodel and the layout of the incoming data we don't expect it to get much higher even with bigger data loads.

I recently hit 600 MB/s disk throughput on our current test database (the interface limit). I was trying to do an incremental load of machine logs that have 16 datapoints per discrete item - and the machines process tens of millions of items per day. The datamodel wasnt as smart as it should have been, and the database had incorrect analytics, leading it to the conclusion that walking through the entire table (250GB data) row-by-row was a smart move...

But that was on a small sample of the data, so when we load two years of machinelogs, we're going to see if we run up against the limit again. We hope so - that should wipe the smile of the faces of those smug storage operators :)

It may also have something to do with the attempts by the conservative government to remove peoples rights (said law is a good example), including abortion rights. And their economic policy is a mix of insane boondoggles (transporting water from one part of the country to another) and attacks on trade unions.

That doesn't mean the economy shouldn't reform, but the current proposals are, IMO, pretty one-sided.

From experience, that's usually what happens on the way back :)

If you can see that poin coming, and plan ahead, you can start a company and move into a position where you can do whatever you want (scratch your itch), without having to go through external financing rounds or getting loans from the bank - the last thing has been fatal to a lot of startups recently, when the banks had to take back the loan due to new rules.

If you are a consultant and have some other consulting friends, and a good plan, you can just start out with founding a small consulting firm and then hiring a few other people as work picks up (assuming you're good at what you do). After a while you can spend more and more time on either product development, management or other activities, as you see fit.

This is the pattern I've seen for many small firms I work with. There's no reason it can't work for others.