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Condensing boilers became mandatory in UK just over 20 years ago

This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to heat in the gas. And the heat pump has an efficiency factor of about 3. So you get back to unity.

While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.

Interesting. In UK, I think the big construction companies would hire these bean-counters then use them to out-manoeuvre the ones that are hired to replace them. Quickly nobody knows what a reasonable price is, and the govmnt has to go with choice of one out of two overpriced bids. (I have no direct experience, this is just what it looks like from an observers perspective)

Would be interesting to read how the Austrian project was contracted out? It seems in the UK the big construction companies have got very good in extracting a lot of money from customers, wonder if things were different in Austria with this project.

Moved out of TCL and into Python in 2001. Perl was big at the time. But Python had REPL and numeric/numarray which swung it in my case.

(Worked out well I suppose? Almost 1/4 century and still using Python)

Many comments here focusing on secrets and problems. But here is another way to look at this:

Environment variables are the "indefinite scope and dynamic extent" variable bindings to make structured programs out of Unix processes. To compare them to a text file is like writing that a program needs no variables because it can read all the values it needs from an input data file when it needs them.

Environment variables are precisely to be used in situation where sub-processes need to be passed information in a way that is not necessarily affecting subsequent calls to that subprocess from another section of a program. Sometime the subprocesses are sequences of nested shells, and sometimes other more complex programs, but the same idea applies.

Yes, and it was a huge thing at the time. The social effects of all this time coordination and time tabling are one of the underlying themes of Stoker's novel Dracula.

Exactly this. But you don't really want to bundle straight away -- think about the exact problem you have and then solve exactly that problem. After you've sorted a few problems like this think if a bundled platform is useful.

“studying the Coherence theory with some applications to the propagation of electromagnetic waves through turbulent atmosphere… a humble and down-to-earth type of problem.” -> Ended up being a very important (and largerly solvable!) problem in ground-based astronomy

I didn't know about that, would have been right that Amazon pays damages to the copyright holder. But they did at least refund the price paid, so the readers were no worse off than at start.

Generally not a big fan of Amazon-world, but if you don't mind reading older books kindle is good value I think. My 30pence copy of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" was very good value, and has not yet mysteriously disappeared from my Kindles!

The terms of service in UK seem better in this regard than USA.

Which/why did they remove the book?

I agree. And the cost of ebooks is often very reasonable, Amazon are selling lots (more than one can read in a lifetime) of superb stuff in the $1-$4 range. (Makes things really difficult for the modern authors though).

Also a paper book you'd carry every day with you for a year will look in much worse state than a Kindle.

Reading e-books is an affordable past time...

Its great for when people need to be in the loop, looking at the data, maybe loading in Excel etc. (I use it myself...). But not enough humans around for 21 GB/s