KÃre vÃn, you are comparing a country where 64% of managers have engineering or technology degrees, where the customary approach to selecting options is to gather measurable facts and do some calculations based on those facts, with a country where 38% of managers have no formal qualifications at all (not even basic school leaver certificate), and almost all options are selected by dogma or whim.
Sweden is not perfect - the same id number has been allocated to a new born baby as is already in use by someone over a hundred years old (that's fun for the old lady when she gets called to the doctor for a post-natal checkup!). But in general it works because (a) most government and commercial business is run mostly on rational processes (b) the freedom of information laws and privacy laws have teeth. Most government naughtiness gets caught out.
Britain is by comparison chaotic and irrational. Most of us like it that way because we can get on with our lives without any central or local government snoop knowing enough about us to interfere (and believe me, they would if they could - just look at the frequency of local councils using terror laws to combat littering!). Our real objection to ID cards is just this - we don't want to be ordered around by petty jumped-up know-it-all officials.
Another compelling reason for keeping your landline is emergency calls to police, fire, ambulance. When you call on a landline, the emergency center can use caller id and the telco database to identify exactly where you are. When you call on a mobile, nobody knows where you are and it takes much longer to reach you, especially if you can't tell them for some reason.
Unfortunately, the same is not able to be said for the Landline service.
Actually, landline can be restored quickly, at least in UK, where British Telecom has a number of "exchanges in a shipping container" ready on trailers to be hauled to wherever needed. One or two of these were used a couple of years ago when a fire destroyed an exchange in Essex.
This lifeboat station is a bit remote ( 53 34'34.34"N 0 6'39.69"E - take a look in Google Earth - it's quite a place). According to the station website it is 16 miles to the nearest shop, God knows how how far to a telephone exchange, so ADSL was never an option. Next, the RNLI is a charity supported entirely by money received from the public. They get nothing from the government, which is a Good Thing for the efficiency of the service; but does mean that there was no way to afford the horrendous install fee for 16 miles of cable.
All the crews and their families live at the station - imagine that as a way of life.
It was widely used in trade unions in England in the 50's and 60's, typically in public meetings of all the members in a workplace. I heard of it both from a carpenter in the ship-building industry, a family friend; and from other insider reports on meetings in the car-making industry in Oxford, where I lived for a while. According to my sources, these meetings were often used to pass strike decisions of considerable financial importance to the members, but (a) you attended these meetings with your workmates, who saw how you voted, and made life hell if you didn't vote the Right Way (b) the committee appointed tallymen to count the hands - they reported whatever counts the committee had told them to report.
The result was the destruction of British industrial firms by self-centered self-appointed little dictatorial union leaders who werealways interested in making trouble, regardless of their member's interests. Vote them out? How? The elections were by "show of hands".
So "show of hands" voting is wide open to abuse if there are more people present than can be viewed and instantly counted by those present, or where those present are unable to challenge the count effectively.
You are dead right. I for one would call "not being poisoned by organophosphorus residues" a health benefit.
I wonder who paid for this study and then chose the report's title.
You are quite right about version numbers for internal use having to be more sophisticated - we talked about "spin numbers", but I don't remember the format.
Feel free to walk on my lawn, but please take your shoes off and enjoy the feel of the earth. And bring your own beer.
We were using x.y.z, at first in a fairly undefined manner, and then sometime around 1973-1974 an edict came down from Armonk that defined the rules as follows:
The scheme is version.release.level, where
Version - major functional upgrade, permits change in price and/or change in name and product ordering number
Release - useful new function(s), no change in price or name of product number
Level - bug roll-up, minor new function
There were also differences in how many hoops the developers had to jump through to get the product/version/release out the door, so very soon lots of teams were shipping major new function as Levels - guess how much the bean counters liked that!
I chose it because you could get connected anywhere on your travels, including countries that had not yet discovered the internet or dial-up connectivity. There was always a node to dial, usually local if you were in a city.
Now there's friendly people all over the planet who know my old Compuserve address, but I don't know their current email address. So I kept that old address long past its close-down-by date, just in case some old friend came out of the mist looking for me. Worked quite a few times, too. I'm glad AOL are allowing the addresses to continue.
My bro is a poet (professional, no less), who has previously shown some talent in the matter of separating the Arts Council from cash (he got them to pay him to go to Italy, repeat Ovid's trip down the Via Appia from Rome to Brindisi, and write poetry about it). He also very much enjoys viewing a shapely butt. So of course I've told him to get on with writing a grant application - Britain needs poetry in praise of bottoms, in these austere times.
was not just that the colours were great, but also that the grain was tiny. I saw an 8-foot high poster in a photo exhibition, where the grain was not visible until you walked up to it, and asked the photographer how he'd done it. "Enlarged from a single 35-mm Kodachrome" was the reply. I walked away with a new respect for Kodachrome, the film against which all others are measured and found wanting.
Didn't any of you know? You say, "Gnorts, Mr Alien".
Back in the 60's, NASA realised that the Apollo might encounter aliens on the Moon, so they named the leader of the expedition appropriately (in an anagram, to demonstrate our intelligence and puzzle-setting ability).
Mapping for OSM is easy. Set your GPS to record your trail, and record street names and businesses as you drive/walk around. As long as the GPS and whatever device you use for street names have synchronized clocks, the work of matching them up and drawing the streets can be done later.
Ha ha ha, ow splitting my sides! You've never been to Antigua, I note. Street names? Unlikely, even in St John. Business names in St John maybe; elsewhere on the island, forget it. We saw only two direction signs anywhere - every telegraph pole had an arrow pointing to a night club on the north end, and an arrow pointing to Harmony Hall, a truly marvellous restaurant at the south end. You want somewhere else? Find it yourself by random walk.
Read the Daily What-the-Frel http://thedailywtf.com/
This will teach you more in a day's reading about the real world of computing than you will learn in a year on a Master's. And you will enjoy it or be horrified, either way you'll have more fun thn writing a Master's thesis.
..since the 60's. He was a nasty manipulative self-centered Trotskyite nutjob then, and the only thing that has changed since is that more people see through him, thank god - largely because he is actually incompetent.
>What sort of revolutionary vigilante violence might we visit upon the RIAA's clients and its sympathizers in Congress?
Windfall tax, 100%. Take the lawyers for every cent of their fees, and the RIAA for every cent of the settlements. And then throw them into Boston Harbour.
I'm volunteering (in between contracts) at my local Citizens Advice Bureau. Mixed Win 2003/SUSE servers, Win XP desktops, 8-10 permanent staff, 50+ volunteers.
I recently achieved Linux Professional certification and wanted somewhere to gain rela-life experience. This is working out fine for me - fun, some challenges, and satisfying.
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KÃre vÃn, you are comparing a country where 64% of managers have engineering or technology degrees, where the customary approach to selecting options is to gather measurable facts and do some calculations based on those facts, with a country where 38% of managers have no formal qualifications at all (not even basic school leaver certificate), and almost all options are selected by dogma or whim.
Sweden is not perfect - the same id number has been allocated to a new born baby as is already in use by someone over a hundred years old (that's fun for the old lady when she gets called to the doctor for a post-natal checkup!). But in general it works because (a) most government and commercial business is run mostly on rational processes (b) the freedom of information laws and privacy laws have teeth. Most government naughtiness gets caught out.
Britain is by comparison chaotic and irrational. Most of us like it that way because we can get on with our lives without any central or local government snoop knowing enough about us to interfere (and believe me, they would if they could - just look at the frequency of local councils using terror laws to combat littering!). Our real objection to ID cards is just this - we don't want to be ordered around by petty jumped-up know-it-all officials.
Another compelling reason for keeping your landline is emergency calls to police, fire, ambulance. When you call on a landline, the emergency center can use caller id and the telco database to identify exactly where you are. When you call on a mobile, nobody knows where you are and it takes much longer to reach you, especially if you can't tell them for some reason.
Unfortunately, the same is not able to be said for the Landline service.
Actually, landline can be restored quickly, at least in UK, where British Telecom has a number of "exchanges in a shipping container" ready on trailers to be hauled to wherever needed. One or two of these were used a couple of years ago when a fire destroyed an exchange in Essex.
This lifeboat station is a bit remote ( 53 34'34.34"N 0 6'39.69"E - take a look in Google Earth - it's quite a place). According to the station website it is 16 miles to the nearest shop, God knows how how far to a telephone exchange, so ADSL was never an option. Next, the RNLI is a charity supported entirely by money received from the public. They get nothing from the government, which is a Good Thing for the efficiency of the service; but does mean that there was no way to afford the horrendous install fee for 16 miles of cable.
All the crews and their families live at the station - imagine that as a way of life.
Here's some experience of "show of hands" votng.
It was widely used in trade unions in England in the 50's and 60's, typically in public meetings of all the members in a workplace. I heard of it both from a carpenter in the ship-building industry, a family friend; and from other insider reports on meetings in the car-making industry in Oxford, where I lived for a while. According to my sources, these meetings were often used to pass strike decisions of considerable financial importance to the members, but (a) you attended these meetings with your workmates, who saw how you voted, and made life hell if you didn't vote the Right Way (b) the committee appointed tallymen to count the hands - they reported whatever counts the committee had told them to report.
The result was the destruction of British industrial firms by self-centered self-appointed little dictatorial union leaders who werealways interested in making trouble, regardless of their member's interests. Vote them out? How? The elections were by "show of hands".
So "show of hands" voting is wide open to abuse if there are more people present than can be viewed and instantly counted by those present, or where those present are unable to challenge the count effectively.
Just checked the new import rules on Food Agency website.
Sad to say, Australians are still permitted to import V*g*m*te.
You are dead right. I for one would call "not being poisoned by organophosphorus residues" a health benefit. I wonder who paid for this study and then chose the report's title.
You are quite right about version numbers for internal use having to be more sophisticated - we talked about "spin numbers", but I don't remember the format.
Feel free to walk on my lawn, but please take your shoes off and enjoy the feel of the earth. And bring your own beer.
We were using x.y.z, at first in a fairly undefined manner, and then sometime around 1973-1974 an edict came down from Armonk that defined the rules as follows:
The scheme is version.release.level, where
Version - major functional upgrade, permits change in price and/or change in name and product ordering number
Release - useful new function(s), no change in price or name of product number
Level - bug roll-up, minor new function
There were also differences in how many hoops the developers had to jump through to get the product/version/release out the door, so very soon lots of teams were shipping major new function as Levels - guess how much the bean counters liked that!
No, it's much older. We were using the three-number notation in 1972 at IBM.
I chose it because you could get connected anywhere on your travels, including countries that had not yet discovered the internet or dial-up connectivity. There was always a node to dial, usually local if you were in a city. Now there's friendly people all over the planet who know my old Compuserve address, but I don't know their current email address. So I kept that old address long past its close-down-by date, just in case some old friend came out of the mist looking for me. Worked quite a few times, too. I'm glad AOL are allowing the addresses to continue.
My bro is a poet (professional, no less), who has previously shown some talent in the matter of separating the Arts Council from cash (he got them to pay him to go to Italy, repeat Ovid's trip down the Via Appia from Rome to Brindisi, and write poetry about it). He also very much enjoys viewing a shapely butt. So of course I've told him to get on with writing a grant application - Britain needs poetry in praise of bottoms, in these austere times.
was not just that the colours were great, but also that the grain was tiny. I saw an 8-foot high poster in a photo exhibition, where the grain was not visible until you walked up to it, and asked the photographer how he'd done it. "Enlarged from a single 35-mm Kodachrome" was the reply. I walked away with a new respect for Kodachrome, the film against which all others are measured and found wanting.
Didn't any of you know? You say, "Gnorts, Mr Alien". Back in the 60's, NASA realised that the Apollo might encounter aliens on the Moon, so they named the leader of the expedition appropriately (in an anagram, to demonstrate our intelligence and puzzle-setting ability).
Mapping for OSM is easy. Set your GPS to record your trail, and record street names and businesses as you drive/walk around. As long as the GPS and whatever device you use for street names have synchronized clocks, the work of matching them up and drawing the streets can be done later.
Ha ha ha, ow splitting my sides! You've never been to Antigua, I note. Street names? Unlikely, even in St John. Business names in St John maybe; elsewhere on the island, forget it. We saw only two direction signs anywhere - every telegraph pole had an arrow pointing to a night club on the north end, and an arrow pointing to Harmony Hall, a truly marvellous restaurant at the south end. You want somewhere else? Find it yourself by random walk.
Read the Daily What-the-Frel http://thedailywtf.com/ This will teach you more in a day's reading about the real world of computing than you will learn in a year on a Master's. And you will enjoy it or be horrified, either way you'll have more fun thn writing a Master's thesis.
God I wish I hadn't burnt all my mod points yesterday. Mod Parent +5 Passionate, Truthful, Faithful to the America of the Founding Fathers' ideals
I'm a native English speaker, but fluent in Swedish, you insensitive clod!
--Christoph Then, a patent expert with Greenpeace in Germany--
If Then then Then = True
If Not Then then Then = False
If Then AND Not Then then Then = File_Not_Found
..since the 60's. He was a nasty manipulative self-centered Trotskyite nutjob then, and the only thing that has changed since is that more people see through him, thank god - largely because he is actually incompetent.
Our public libraries have moved "1984" to the Non-Fiction shelves, on the basis that it's a User's Manual, not a novel.
Since when did not having an extradition agreement stop the US from abducting and removing anybody they feel like, to any country they feel like?
Choose Extraordinary Rendition for all your extralegal needs, you know it makes sense.
>What sort of revolutionary vigilante violence might we visit upon the RIAA's clients and its sympathizers in Congress?
Windfall tax, 100%. Take the lawyers for every cent of their fees, and the RIAA for every cent of the settlements. And then throw them into Boston Harbour.
specifically X-rays, in vast quantities. So don't sit there and say there's no problem if the LHC does create black holes.
I'm volunteering (in between contracts) at my local Citizens Advice Bureau. Mixed Win 2003/SUSE servers, Win XP desktops, 8-10 permanent staff, 50+ volunteers. I recently achieved Linux Professional certification and wanted somewhere to gain rela-life experience. This is working out fine for me - fun, some challenges, and satisfying.