I think it depends on location. We use energy-saving bulbs throughout the house, and the only place where they expire quicker than normally is in the bathroom which is sort of tacked on to the back of the house and so is draftier and colder than the rest of the house - exactly the place I'd be expecting to replace normal lightbulbs more often.
Years and years ago Esther Rantzen's "That's Life" programmme performed a song about all the officials who have a "Statutory right to enter your home". It was quite scary how many there were...
The TV licencing people work by writing to all the residential addresses in the country that don't have licences telling them that they'll be in big trouble if they have a TV and no licence. They will usually follow that up by sending an inspector round. There's no obligation to let the inspector in, but if you do so voluntarily and the inspector is satisfied you don't have a telly, the threatening letters will stop, but only for a few years.
If you don't let the inspector in, they can only gain entry to search for an illegal telly by providing evidence that you have one to a court - typically this will be done by using TV detector equipment, or observing the glow of a TV through the curtains from the street at night. Not sure if they use that one so much today seeing as it could be a PC monitor and not a telly.
However, if you don't have a telly and you don't let the inspectors in to have a look around, they will keep pestering you with letters and doorstepping until you give in. From the TV licencing people's PoV it makes sense as only something like 1% of the population genuinely don't own a TV, but it does royally piss off the people who don't and keep getting pestered.
A few years ago they ran an advertising campaign where they displayed randomly selected street signs from around the country with the slogan "we know that X households in this street are watching television illegally" but they had to drop it after complaints from the residents in those streets who felt they were being unfairly accused.
I'm not saying you are - I'm referring to whoever introduced the term "lawmaker" in the original article, who I'd wager probably is American or from some other country that doesn't follow the British parliamentary tradition.
Whilst I agree in principle with what you write, I do find it uncomfortable when US writers describe MPs as "lawmakers". yes, technically they are, but the term implies some sort of separation of powers and independence of the legislature that simply does not exist in the British system.
American should remember more what they rebelled against when writing about the British political system!
Seriously, solar power is ridiculously overrated. The energy density of sunlight at the earth's surface is simply too low to be practical. Way too much real estate would have to be used to make any realistic amounts of power, and at those scales, upkeep becomes prohibitively expensive.
No-one's suggesting building large-scale power stations using solar technology, but if it gets cheap enough to cost just a few hundred pounds/dollars/euro to stick some on your roof which can save you a chunk of your power bills each year it would be worthwhile.
Even here in the UK (hardly prime solar power territory with our climate) the govt is offering 50% of cost grants to install solar cells to supplement your grid supply - and any surplus generated goes back into the grid and is credited to your electricity bill. At the moment AIUI even with the grants it's only just cost effective from the point of view of savings over its lifetime compared to installation costs, but if this new technology is as cheap as claimed, it could put supplementary solar power within most people's reach.
One town, Woking in Surrey, has installed a lot of solar cells on public and office buildings and saves enough money as a result to cover the cost of heating one of its swimming pools, and the Mayor of London is proposing to make it a requirement for all new office buildings to include solar panels to supplement their grid supply.
I commute on one of the lines that uses this tech, and we often have problems where the train doors won't open at the station 'cos the train can't get a GPS signal and can't work out which station it's at.
GPS tech = cool.
GPS tech in the hands of Britain's railway industry = new and interesting reasons for delays.
Here in Yurp, in most countries mobiles have their own area codes (07xxx here in the UK). This means telcos can and do charge for calls to them at a different (higher) rate than traditional landline calls. However, this means the mobile user doesn't pay to receive the call as they do in the USA, where the other operators can't tell from the number alone that the call is going to a cellphone.
Presumably if the US cell operators are savvy they'll be able to offer "no incoming call charge" service plans for people using these new numbering schemes.
I always thought it was a bit bizarre of the US telcos to give geographical numbers to mobile phones.
Um, not exactly. According to this Wikipedia article Scottish banknotes aren't even legal tender in Scotland!
"Legal tender" is a bit of misleading concept though in that it only really applies to the settlement of debts - i.e if you owe somebody and pay them in legal tender they have to accept that payment, but they don't have to accept payment by other means. It's worth noting that buying something in a shop does not constitute settling a debt as you pay before you receive legal title to the goods, so "legal tender" does not apply.
Ultimately you can pay for anything with anything if the other party agrees. Shops in Scotland will of course accept Scottish banknotes because they're familiar with them and trust the Scottish banks to back them. Many shops in England will similarly accept Scottish banknotes for the same reasons. Some shops in England and Scotland will take Euro notes, and a few at airports US dollars and other currencies. You're unlikely to find a shop that will accept Bhutanese Ngultrum, say, though I suppose it's possible if the shopkeeper happens to be about to go on holiday to Bhutan and can't find a bureau de change that carries Ngultrum...
We get our figures from the user agent string. I wrote a Perl script to analyse and aggregate by "family", customised to our own interests. I broke the figures down by Gecko, IE, KHTML, "classic" Netscape (i.e = v4.x), Opera and "other".
The point about masking the user agent string is valid, and it was interesting that we got very, very few instances of Opera reported (I'm at home now so don't have the figures to hand but it was less than 0.1%). I reckon some Opera users are reporting as IE.
However, having said that, our site is a major UK telco so I think we must get a pretty representative cross-section of the UK internet population. *Maybe* a tad more "techie" than say a supermarket's site but not very much more. I would be surprised if there's any significant amount of UA string-munging going on. I really do think 95% of our user base is using IE, or at least were in October.
Doubt it. On the site I work on (major UK telco) most Mac users are using IE or Safari. Only 3.5% of all users are on non-Windows platforms, the vast majority being on MacOS, with Un*ces not even making 0.2%.
We get our figures monthly so our most recent numbers are for October when we had 3.05% for all Gecko browsers, of whicb 3.5% were on Un*ces, 5% Macs, the rest 'doze. IE still scored at just over 95% of all users.
I am looking forward to seeing November's figures to see if the Firefox 1.0 release has had an impact.
There's been plenty of surveys that show the number of women in IT has been steadily decreasing in recent years. I started my first IT job in 1990 and some 35-40% of my colleagues were women, including four of the five group managers in my section. Admittedly, this was in local government, which may not be a very representative sample.
I've worked two places since - at my last billet (1999-2000) there were no women. Now, I can take the blame for this as I was doing the recruiting, but I saw maybe 2-3 CVs from women in the 18 months I worked there, and none had the skills we required.
At my current job (2000 to date), there's about 40 coders of whom currently two are women.
And interestingly, the Home Office haven't even begun to cost for all the biometric readers in all those places that will be necessary for the Blunkettcard to work. I suspect that if they do, the Treasury will squash the whole thing dead in an instant. They'll probably try to hold off revealing the full cost until enough money has been spent already that it would be more economic to carry on.
She's American, but she also has dual Irish nationality inherited from her grandmother. She's always said that if she's ever on a plane that gets hijacked, she'll be safe if the terrorists demand to see the passengers' passports as she could just wave her Irish one (after all, everyone loves the Irish). Now all they'll need to do is use a RFID scanner...
Here in the UK we have an independent Boundary Commission that re-draws Parliamentary seats. It can receive submissions from the political parties, but it is required to produce a map that ensures constituencies of roughly equal population (about 70K electors IIRC), and - crucially - form a distinct community, or part of one (i.e. a town can be split into two or more constituencies if the population is sufficient).
Now, the distinct community bit is obviously open to intepretation, but it does mean that some of the strange districts some US states have come up with straggling long thin arms halfway across the state wouldn't be allowed.
Admittedly, sometimes balancing the requirements of population vs community can come up with oddities: at present the Western Isles of Scotland are rather over represented with one MP for around 30K electorate, whereas the Isle of Wight is under-represented with one MP for around 100K as it's not quite big enough to qualify for two constituencies. In both cases the Commission felt that the places were too distinct a community, being islands, to be combined with seats on the mainland.
I know US posters will respond that there's no way in thousand years that the politicians would willingly give up this power, but surely in those states that allow popular initiative it ought to be feasible to set up a pressure group to campaign for it?
Not being American, it's not at all obvious to me which side of a Mississippi dividing line would be the "conservative" half and which side would be the "liberal". My wife is (very liberal - probably explains why she's living in Europe!) American and from what I've learnt from her, her family and friends, it seems to me the real split is between the liberal West and (northern part of the) East coasts and the conservative interior.
So looks to me you'd need a three-way split into two liberal countries and one conservative, as a country composed of California, Oregon, Washington and the NE from DC upwards wouldn't be very practical.
This has to be offered because of the UK Data Protection Act, so presumably any UK-based registrar, whether offering.*.uk or.com or whatever, should offer a similar service.
Re:Down with BBCi - keep Ceefax!
on
Ceefax Turns 30
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· Score: 1
We're on Telewest digital cable, with a Pace STB. Part of the problem is that, AFAIK, each of the three digital TV platforms, Freeview, cable and satellite, have different standards for interactive TV (iTV). I think I'm right in stating that the Freeview and cable platforms are the most similar, and are quite different from Sky's satellite iTV platform. This might explain why both us on cable and your neighbour on Freeview experienced similar problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Most food in the UK does suck...
As a UK TV licence player who has seen the leaked episode, I don't mind one bit!
I think it depends on location. We use energy-saving bulbs throughout the house, and the only place where they expire quicker than normally is in the bathroom which is sort of tacked on to the back of the house and so is draftier and colder than the rest of the house - exactly the place I'd be expecting to replace normal lightbulbs more often.
Well we are the country with the highest ratio of CCTV cameras to people in the world...
Years and years ago Esther Rantzen's "That's Life" programmme performed a song about all the officials who have a "Statutory right to enter your home". It was quite scary how many there were...
The TV licencing people work by writing to all the residential addresses in the country that don't have licences telling them that they'll be in big trouble if they have a TV and no licence. They will usually follow that up by sending an inspector round. There's no obligation to let the inspector in, but if you do so voluntarily and the inspector is satisfied you don't have a telly, the threatening letters will stop, but only for a few years.
If you don't let the inspector in, they can only gain entry to search for an illegal telly by providing evidence that you have one to a court - typically this will be done by using TV detector equipment, or observing the glow of a TV through the curtains from the street at night. Not sure if they use that one so much today seeing as it could be a PC monitor and not a telly.
However, if you don't have a telly and you don't let the inspectors in to have a look around, they will keep pestering you with letters and doorstepping until you give in. From the TV licencing people's PoV it makes sense as only something like 1% of the population genuinely don't own a TV, but it does royally piss off the people who don't and keep getting pestered.
A few years ago they ran an advertising campaign where they displayed randomly selected street signs from around the country with the slogan "we know that X households in this street are watching television illegally" but they had to drop it after complaints from the residents in those streets who felt they were being unfairly accused.
I'm not saying you are - I'm referring to whoever introduced the term "lawmaker" in the original article, who I'd wager probably is American or from some other country that doesn't follow the British parliamentary tradition.
Whilst I agree in principle with what you write, I do find it uncomfortable when US writers describe MPs as "lawmakers". yes, technically they are, but the term implies some sort of separation of powers and independence of the legislature that simply does not exist in the British system.
American should remember more what they rebelled against when writing about the British political system!
Seriously, solar power is ridiculously overrated. The energy density of sunlight at the earth's surface is simply too low to be practical. Way too much real estate would have to be used to make any realistic amounts of power, and at those scales, upkeep becomes prohibitively expensive.
No-one's suggesting building large-scale power stations using solar technology, but if it gets cheap enough to cost just a few hundred pounds/dollars/euro to stick some on your roof which can save you a chunk of your power bills each year it would be worthwhile.
Even here in the UK (hardly prime solar power territory with our climate) the govt is offering 50% of cost grants to install solar cells to supplement your grid supply - and any surplus generated goes back into the grid and is credited to your electricity bill. At the moment AIUI even with the grants it's only just cost effective from the point of view of savings over its lifetime compared to installation costs, but if this new technology is as cheap as claimed, it could put supplementary solar power within most people's reach.
One town, Woking in Surrey, has installed a lot of solar cells on public and office buildings and saves enough money as a result to cover the cost of heating one of its swimming pools, and the Mayor of London is proposing to make it a requirement for all new office buildings to include solar panels to supplement their grid supply.
I commute on one of the lines that uses this tech, and we often have problems where the train doors won't open at the station 'cos the train can't get a GPS signal and can't work out which station it's at.
GPS tech = cool.
GPS tech in the hands of Britain's railway industry = new and interesting reasons for delays.
Here in Yurp, in most countries mobiles have their own area codes (07xxx here in the UK). This means telcos can and do charge for calls to them at a different (higher) rate than traditional landline calls. However, this means the mobile user doesn't pay to receive the call as they do in the USA, where the other operators can't tell from the number alone that the call is going to a cellphone.
Presumably if the US cell operators are savvy they'll be able to offer "no incoming call charge" service plans for people using these new numbering schemes.
I always thought it was a bit bizarre of the US telcos to give geographical numbers to mobile phones.
was astounded by the fact that most acts are not even read before they get passed
And you really, seriously believe our MPs read the bills they pass?
Er, I'm not saying I'm right and you're wrong, but I spelt it exactly the way everyone else in the UK spells it.
Although its legal throughout the UK
Um, not exactly. According to this Wikipedia article Scottish banknotes aren't even legal tender in Scotland!
"Legal tender" is a bit of misleading concept though in that it only really applies to the settlement of debts - i.e if you owe somebody and pay them in legal tender they have to accept that payment, but they don't have to accept payment by other means. It's worth noting that buying something in a shop does not constitute settling a debt as you pay before you receive legal title to the goods, so "legal tender" does not apply.
Ultimately you can pay for anything with anything if the other party agrees. Shops in Scotland will of course accept Scottish banknotes because they're familiar with them and trust the Scottish banks to back them. Many shops in England will similarly accept Scottish banknotes for the same reasons. Some shops in England and Scotland will take Euro notes, and a few at airports US dollars and other currencies. You're unlikely to find a shop that will accept Bhutanese Ngultrum, say, though I suppose it's possible if the shopkeeper happens to be about to go on holiday to Bhutan and can't find a bureau de change that carries Ngultrum...
According to this BBC report they've recovered most of the lost data by receiving it directly from the Huygens lander using radio telescopes.
Because I can't see them ever getting the scheme to work...
We get our figures from the user agent string. I wrote a Perl script to analyse and aggregate by "family", customised to our own interests. I broke the figures down by Gecko, IE, KHTML, "classic" Netscape (i.e = v4.x), Opera and "other".
The point about masking the user agent string is valid, and it was interesting that we got very, very few instances of Opera reported (I'm at home now so don't have the figures to hand but it was less than 0.1%). I reckon some Opera users are reporting as IE.
However, having said that, our site is a major UK telco so I think we must get a pretty representative cross-section of the UK internet population. *Maybe* a tad more "techie" than say a supermarket's site but not very much more. I would be surprised if there's any significant amount of UA string-munging going on. I really do think 95% of our user base is using IE, or at least were in October.
Doubt it. On the site I work on (major UK telco) most Mac users are using IE or Safari. Only 3.5% of all users are on non-Windows platforms, the vast majority being on MacOS, with Un*ces not even making 0.2%.
We get our figures monthly so our most recent numbers are for October when we had 3.05% for all Gecko browsers, of whicb 3.5% were on Un*ces, 5% Macs, the rest 'doze. IE still scored at just over 95% of all users.
I am looking forward to seeing November's figures to see if the Firefox 1.0 release has had an impact.
There's been plenty of surveys that show the number of women in IT has been steadily decreasing in recent years. I started my first IT job in 1990 and some 35-40% of my colleagues were women, including four of the five group managers in my section. Admittedly, this was in local government, which may not be a very representative sample.
I've worked two places since - at my last billet (1999-2000) there were no women. Now, I can take the blame for this as I was doing the recruiting, but I saw maybe 2-3 CVs from women in the 18 months I worked there, and none had the skills we required.
At my current job (2000 to date), there's about 40 coders of whom currently two are women.
And interestingly, the Home Office haven't even begun to cost for all the biometric readers in all those places that will be necessary for the Blunkettcard to work. I suspect that if they do, the Treasury will squash the whole thing dead in an instant. They'll probably try to hold off revealing the full cost until enough money has been spent already that it would be more economic to carry on.
She's American, but she also has dual Irish nationality inherited from her grandmother. She's always said that if she's ever on a plane that gets hijacked, she'll be safe if the terrorists demand to see the passengers' passports as she could just wave her Irish one (after all, everyone loves the Irish). Now all they'll need to do is use a RFID scanner...
Here in the UK we have an independent Boundary Commission that re-draws Parliamentary seats. It can receive submissions from the political parties, but it is required to produce a map that ensures constituencies of roughly equal population (about 70K electors IIRC), and - crucially - form a distinct community, or part of one (i.e. a town can be split into two or more constituencies if the population is sufficient).
Now, the distinct community bit is obviously open to intepretation, but it does mean that some of the strange districts some US states have come up with straggling long thin arms halfway across the state wouldn't be allowed.
Admittedly, sometimes balancing the requirements of population vs community can come up with oddities: at present the Western Isles of Scotland are rather over represented with one MP for around 30K electorate, whereas the Isle of Wight is under-represented with one MP for around 100K as it's not quite big enough to qualify for two constituencies. In both cases the Commission felt that the places were too distinct a community, being islands, to be combined with seats on the mainland.
I know US posters will respond that there's no way in thousand years that the politicians would willingly give up this power, but surely in those states that allow popular initiative it ought to be feasible to set up a pressure group to campaign for it?
Not being American, it's not at all obvious to me which side of a Mississippi dividing line would be the "conservative" half and which side would be the "liberal". My wife is (very liberal - probably explains why she's living in Europe!) American and from what I've learnt from her, her family and friends, it seems to me the real split is between the liberal West and (northern part of the) East coasts and the conservative interior.
So looks to me you'd need a three-way split into two liberal countries and one conservative, as a country composed of California, Oregon, Washington and the NE from DC upwards wouldn't be very practical.
This has to be offered because of the UK Data Protection Act, so presumably any UK-based registrar, whether offering .*.uk or .com or whatever, should offer a similar service.
We're on Telewest digital cable, with a Pace STB. Part of the problem is that, AFAIK, each of the three digital TV platforms, Freeview, cable and satellite, have different standards for interactive TV (iTV). I think I'm right in stating that the Freeview and cable platforms are the most similar, and are quite different from Sky's satellite iTV platform. This might explain why both us on cable and your neighbour on Freeview experienced similar problems.