That's bullshit. What could we do? No political party were seriously against it, and it's not a huge question to form a new political party around.
They did a 'trial run' after the investment which I guess was to make it look more democratic, and there was a public referendum which I actually believe was not in favor, but ignored. (Or was it in favor by only the 20% living inside the toll gates where allowed to vote, and the surrounding 14 regions arranged their own ignored referendums.
They spent a bizarre amount on implementing this, basically paying IBM the complete development cost for a plate reading system but gained no ownership rights into the product, simultaneously implemented a radio based system that was later ditched, hired hundreds if not thousands of people working with the billing and help desks (so how automatic was it), and campaigning on how good this is for the society.
The cost for adding 20 something camera based toll gates were almost half of the cost of building a 5 km long tunnel that was finished a few years before and constitutes about a quarter of an incomplete ring road. 3 billion SEK compared to 6 billion SEK. ($340m vs 680m)
The incomes did not cover the running costs the first years and I can't find any facts on if it's actually covering it's amortized costs now.
Coincidentally, a similarly unloved project in Gothenburg to build a relatively unnecessary train tunnel to huge costs DID actually spawn a new political party that gained 20% of the votes. Maybe there's hope.
This specific configuration is for a commuter train, but similar trains (which can be coupled to other sets) are used on long distance routes in the UK.
As I said, the UK isn't really high speed compared to Europe. Other than the Eurostar line/HS1, all other lines throughout the UK are limited to 140mph (225km/h) or less.
The futures market comes from the fact that some people are trading actual beans by growing, selling, shipping, buying, or cooking them.
They are typically willing to pay for price insurance to reduce their financial risk. (that could close your factory because of the weather, etc)
(If they trade with other countries they are typically also willing to pay for currency insurance)
At that point a secondary market emerges with arbitrages between different market and points in time.
So far this is to the benefit of everyone. Farmers and Buyers get more stable prices.
This secondary market pins into tertiary markets where you can try to outsmart other players, and to the extent that manipulation is possible it will push back into the primary price or more probable the "insurance" cost. This cost is paid by Joe Random.
This is probably not beneficial but unavoidable and acceptable for having access to price insurance.
I built this primarily for myself, the main advatages are:
* Avoiding getting junked/rejected due to:
* Missing/invalid SPF record
* What would the sending domain be, if not set could easily be rejected
* From a dynamic IP
* Port 25 may not be open (it wasn't for my case)
I disagree that DSLs are the right choice unless it's an extension to the suitably flexible implementation language itself.
Actually, the perceived need for "dumb" DSLs is sprung from the same misconceptions as mentioned in the article and the end result is inevitably that simple problems are made somewhat simpler and complex problems turn into impossible problems.
A proper DSL extension in an unobtrusive host language is another thing but also hard to find. If a Lisp syntax is acceptable then that's the canonical example.
I don't want to get depressed overe all misconcieved excuses for test automation languages, process automation, configuration templating systems, etc, so I'll just stop here.
Obviously these are sweeping statements, but the problem with this generalization is that successful DSLs become invisible because we take them for granted. Regular expressions are a DSL. SQL is a DSL. LaTeX is a DSL. The Wikipedia page on domain-specific languages even lists HTML as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language#Examp...
With regard to LaTeX or HTML, you could even argue that their goals could be better accomplished with some sort of graphical interface, which sounds a lot like… visual programming!
Geometric constraint solvers are essentially graphical, declarative domain-specific languages for mechanical/physical design. As an example: http://solvespace.com/index.pl
I would argue that perhaps with the exception of regex, the examples you mentioned are excellent ideas that are awsome despite their suboptimal DSLs, and they would have been even better if their DSLs had been implemented as extensions in a Lisp-like language.
I agree that it's good for a DSL to give not just unfiltered but well integrated access to the underlying implementation language, instead of trying to replace it with a dumbed down domain specific language.
It should be possible for implementation language programmers to create new primitives, that visual language programmers can easily use without learning the implementation language.
And that extension interface should be part of the visual programming language from day one, good enough for the visual language to use itself for most of its built-in primitives, not an afterthought nailed onto the side.
They did a 'trial run' after the investment which I guess was to make it look more democratic, and there was a public referendum which I actually believe was not in favor, but ignored. (Or was it in favor by only the 20% living inside the toll gates where allowed to vote, and the surrounding 14 regions arranged their own ignored referendums.
They spent a bizarre amount on implementing this, basically paying IBM the complete development cost for a plate reading system but gained no ownership rights into the product, simultaneously implemented a radio based system that was later ditched, hired hundreds if not thousands of people working with the billing and help desks (so how automatic was it), and campaigning on how good this is for the society.
The cost for adding 20 something camera based toll gates were almost half of the cost of building a 5 km long tunnel that was finished a few years before and constitutes about a quarter of an incomplete ring road. 3 billion SEK compared to 6 billion SEK. ($340m vs 680m)
The incomes did not cover the running costs the first years and I can't find any facts on if it's actually covering it's amortized costs now.
Coincidentally, a similarly unloved project in Gothenburg to build a relatively unnecessary train tunnel to huge costs DID actually spawn a new political party that gained 20% of the votes. Maybe there's hope.