happenstance

Would love to bicycle to work. Here in the USA, very few people do so because (A) there's almost no room on the road and (B) motorists are almost always in a big hurry and not paying attention to anything except lights, police, and other cars.

I lived near a university once where there were some bike paths and it was really great.

Ah. In the states, you only get severance if you're laid off. If you're fired, I don't think there's any severance pay involved.

Also, in the states, if you're laid off, you can apply for "unemployment benefits" from the state. If you're fired, you cannot.

When you compress air, it heats up and expands -- thus making the pressure go up faster than one might expect. So, when storing it you lose a lot of energy as heat.

When you let it uncompress, it cools -- losing a lot of energy again.

Point is, you lose quite a bit of energy going both ways.

A good solution might be to combine wind and pumped hydro: have the wind turbine pump water to a higher elevation when extra wind is available.

I don't really know what you mean by "settlement". There's no settlement that I know of when you get fired in the USA.

Here, a "settlement" is something you might get if you were to sue someone for something and the court awarded you money.

Those things would be easy if it's just you. However, imposing those policies on the wife is another matter. It just devolves into fighting over money all the time.

One data point you are missing: if you fire the incompetent wife, in the USA by default she gets the kids too. Guess what kind of life they will have with just her raising them.

> It is actually quite hard to fire someone in Germany, who wants to stay.

Wow. In the USA, companies can basically fire anyone for any reason at any time (in my experience). And getting fired usually happens very quickly -- as in, that instant: "Please pick up your things and come with me. No, don't touch the computer, someone else will log you out."

No, not anybody can. What if you have a family and are barely making ends meet as it is? It's very difficult to convince a wife that you'd like for the family to spend a little less so you can have a few months off next year between jobs.

How does a founder get fired? So, the CEO says "you're fired". Well, I'm guessing that if you're a founder then that means you're a co-owner. So, don't you just tell the CEO, "um... no"?

Thanks for sharing.

How do you like e-junkie? What other alternatives did you consider?

The article is not coming up. Can anyone advise how I might go about finding a mirror?

What you allude to in your first statement is incorrect for most cases, IMO. Staying together doesn't necessarily mean letting it decrease your happiness. It might just mean you have to get your happiness from a different place.

Often in life you're not presented with win-lose situations. Instead, you're presented with lose-lose situations, and it's your job to choose the least worst solution for everyone involved.

> Are you saying we should just leave it?

I don't know what you mean.

I'm saying that you'll understand what Mark is talking about after you've gotten married and had children and want to keep your family intact.

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. Thanks for the reply.

What about if it's not a public company? That is, 2 or 3 people and an LLC?

Heh. Wait until you're married and have kids.

How does one technically get a "share of the business"? What does this mean? What paperwork is involved?

Thanks for the link.

Though, I still tend to gravitate toward the simplest solutions, and in this case, a series-wound brushed motor is about as simple as it gets.

Regular DC motors have heavy and strong magnets (more expensive), but the series-wound motors are just wires (and, FWICT, a bit less efficient).

Regarding brushless, I'm sure they're quieter and require less maintenance, but they still are more complex than the series-wound DC.

I suppose the AC induction motors have their place, but for the DIY crowd, I think many will stick with the basics.

DC motors are very efficient, so, I'd have to see some numbers to buy that.

Also, a big plus for DC motors is that the controllers are simpler. AC motors require a high-power adjustable-frequency inverter.

The only downside of common standard DC motors that I know of is that you have to change the brushes every n years, which I'll gladly take over oil changes. :)

Lots of people do their own EV conversions from ICE (internal combustion engine) cars. Trouble is, up until now they've all used lead acid batteries (and as such, were heavy and didn't have great range).

The next step -- and what I'm really interested to start seeing -- is homebrew EV's using Lithium Ion batteries. I think this is going to be the next step.

Looks redundant, but easy. Thanks.

Given my html as described above, what would you recommend to use for the DOCTYPE line?

My plan has always been:

* keep making tags lowercase

* keep quoting attribute values

* keep closing tags after I open them (and properly nesting tags)

* keep using the closing slash for standalone tags

* keep calling it text/html (mime type)

* keep using UTF-8 encoded Unicode by default

* keep not using xml namespaces

* keep forgetting to use the DOCTYPE declaration

* and start carefully using some of the neat new tags in html5

I'm not sure exactly how optimized Dvorak is. There are far more sophisticated (computerized) ways to optimize keyboard layout now than there was back when the Dvorak layout was created.

Also, although those punctuation characters are indeed important (though I'd add '/', and '-' to your short-list), you probably type the alphabetic characters far more (just my guess, admittedly).

Right. I think the current max is [5 blades](http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930).

> You should just always be explicit.

I generally agree.

Note: I think if you leave out any specific encoding configuration from your my.cnf, mysql implicitly goes with latin1.

For users who are assuming a modern unicode/utf8 default setup, might be nice if the mysql folks would require an explicit config for this setting.

Why does MySQL still default to latin1? (Or am I mistaken?)