Spoil tip

A spoil tip (also called a spoil bank, boney pile, gob pile, bing, batch, boney dump or pit heap) is a pile built of accumulated spoil - the overburden or other waste rock removed during coal and ore mining. These waste materials are typically composed of shale, as well as smaller quantities of carboniferous sandstone and various other residues. Spoil tips are not formed of slag, but in some areas they are referred to as slag heaps.

The term "spoil" is also used to refer to material removed when digging a foundation, tunnel, or other large excavation. Such material may be ordinary soil and rocks, or may be heavily contaminated with chemical waste, determining how it may be disposed of. Clean spoil may be used for land reclamation.

Spoil is distinct from tailings, which is the processed material that remains after the valuable components have been extracted from ore.

Physical description

Spoil tips may be conical in shape, and can appear as conspicuous features of the landscape, or they may be much flatter and eroded, especially if vegetation has established itself. In Loos-en-Gohelle, in the former mining area of Pas-de-Calais, France, are a series of five, very perfect cones, of which two reach 180 metres (590 ft), surpassing the highest peak in Flanders, Mont Cassel.

Bing

Bing is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft's previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety of search services, including web, video, image and map search products. It uses the ASP.NET programming language and follows the design principles of Microsoft's "Metro" design language.

Bing, Microsoft's replacement for Live Search, was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009, at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, California, for release on June 1, 2009. Notable new features at the time included the listing of search suggestions while queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explore pane") based on semantic technology from Powerset, which Microsoft had acquired in 2008.

In July 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012. The deal was altered in 2015, meaning Yahoo! was only required to use Bing for a "majority" of searches.

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation /ˈmaɪkrəˌsɒft, -roʊ-, -ˌsɔːft/ (commonly referred to as Microsoft) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington, that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics and personal computers and services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup. It is the world's largest software maker by revenue, and one of the world's most valuable companies.

Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in its largest acquisition to date.

Bing (bread)

Bing is a wheat flour-based Chinese food with a flattened or disk-like shape, similar to the French concept of a galette. These foods may resemble the flatbreads, pancakes, unleavened dough foods of non-Chinese and western cuisines. Many of them are similar to the Indian roti, French crêpes, or Mexican tortilla, while others are more similar to Western cakes and cookies.

The term is Chinese, but may also refer to flatbreads or cakes of other cultures. The crêpe and the pizza, for instance, are referred to as keli bing (可麗餅) and bisa bing (比薩餅) respectively, based on the sound of their Western names, and the flour tortilla is known as Mexican thin bing (墨西哥薄餅) based on its country of origin.

Types

Bing are usually a casual food and generally eaten for lunch, but they can also be incorporated into formal meals. Both Peking duck and moo shu pork are rolled up in thin wheat flour bao bing with scallions and sweet bean sauce or hoisin sauce. Bing may also have a filling such as ground meat. Bing are commonly cooked on a skillet or griddle although some are baked.