I suspect this is more to do with waste disposal. I don't know about fellow-geeks, but I have recently cleared my room and found about 15 obsolete chargers for various items I no longer own. All of that is going to have to be disposed of. This new agreement may be the first step towards preventing companies from boxing chargers, or forcing them to sell versions with and without charger.
Politicians overwhelmingly don't have support for what they're doing. Turnout at the last general election was something like 36%. which means that the winner was "none of the above". The trouble is that our Westminister politicos have no power now. It's all been sent up to Brussels and Strasbourg or sent across to QUANGOs (e.g. NICE). New Labour has completely undermined Parliament at the Westminister level by allowing the Government to treat Parliament as a minor detail. MPs are now, broadly speaking, a waste of valuable London air.
You left out the inadvertent subsidy caused by the free emission of CO2 from coal etc. Because the damage caused by that emission is not charged for the fossil fuels get massive subsidies, effectively.
Parties!=political parties. In this case it means corporations, special interest groups, charities, private citizens. Ideally that list would extend to ecosystems and foreigners, but what can you do.
Not so sure. Think about games consoles. I remember back in the day whenever videogames appeared in newspapers one "played Nintendo". It passed via Playstation and now is XBox. Though the Wii has been distinctive enough to avoid this generic naming.
the British system, if they decide not to cover a treatment and you do it privately, you are out of the system for the rest of your life.
That's not quite right. You're out of the system for that particular treatment. If you stop it, you return. Equally, unrelated issues are still covered by the NHS. So if you contract AIDS and want to try a fancy new drug, you'd have to go privately for that. If you contracted TB from your AIDS-weakened immune system then the NHS would treat the TB. If you decided that the fancy new drug was a pile of pants after all and stopped using it, you'd be back in the system entirely.
It's a big problem in the British National Health Service. Essentially a lot of treatments aren't affordable on socialised healthcare, and so don't get rationed out by National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). Not necessarily a problem, but if individuals want to try the treatment then they must go private for the whole package, not just buy in the drugs they want. This is because NICE usually rejects treatments because of either their lack of cost-effectiveness (how many good life-hours can be saved per pound) or because of the costs of the side effects. The NHS would have to pay for the side effects.
The rules are not applied consistently, and what treatment the NHS will pay for depends a lot on where you are, with the most generous being in oil-rich Scotland and it varying significantly with Primary Care Trust (PCT, but the phenomenon is known colloquially as the postcode lottery). The disparity is caused by efficiency of management, the presence of renowned hospitals that can pull in patients and hence funding from outside the PCT and in the case of the different nations, disparity in the funding per head of population.
Socialised healthcare has many of the pitfalls associated with all government spending, with political interference leading to popular-but-ineffective treatments getting funding priority over cheaper and better programmes (a new cancer treatment that NICE refuses will sometimes be pushed out by the government anyway as a vote-winner, no matter how clinically effective it is, and the money will have to come from far more useful screening programmes). There are other issues to do with patient choice and quality of care (patients find it near impossible to judge whether the local hospital is actually competent at cancer operations, for example). It is no panacea.
Equally, the current American system sees the average American paying ten times more for healthcare than the average Brit, yet achieving only a similar outcome and without the universal coverage*. To a certain extent it's a personal choice, but the NHS (like the BBC) is more of a national religion than Christianity over here.
*Can't find the citation for this. Was either a WHO study or the Economist reporting on it. Will look more later.
No newspaper is a pillar of justice and righteousness. The Guardian may be closer to a pillar of hypocrisy and leftiousness, but it does report actual news in an accurate and fairly even-handed manner. I tend to swing between the Guardian and the Telegraph depending on the front page, though I wouldn't sign up to the stance of either. I can stomach either as long as I avoid the editorials*.
In terms of size, the Guardian is the third biggest of what used to be called the broadsheets and you could consider as the real newspapers. The most popular is the Telegraph, but the Sun has ten times the readership at about 8million readers. The Guardian is on about 1/20th of that.
*The Guardian; 'All these capitalists are stealing money from the workers by avoiding tax! This is evil! Unless we're doing it!' The Telegraph; 'The problem with young people is that too many of them are immigrants and none of them are whipped enough, what?' **Please don't misconstrue this as support of Littlejohn. A stopped clock is right twice a day etc etc.
MPs salary, pension and expenses are exempt from tax, unlike standard practice in the private sector. Everyone's first home is free from capital gains tax, MPs just allowed themselves to claim a home was their secondary residence for expenses purposes and then claim it was a primary residence for tax purposes, occasionally at the same time.
Exempting themselves from the tax system is a good sign of tyranny, not to mention hypocrisy.
Hardly. This is a set of expenses paid for by the taxpayers, and we have also had to pay to have it censored before it was released. Ostensibly this was for privacy, but it was more likely to hide the shame of our MPs. Some of the most unforgivable expenses-laundering (flipping the status of primary and secondary residences to avoid capital gains tax and to gain a property portfolio at our expense) is hidden in the official release. In the meantime the Telegraph got a hold of the unredacted claims a month before now through a leak.
Also, the Guardian's claim that there's a receipt for a duck-house in there is false, as that claim was rejected and no rejected claims have been released officially. Arguably this is no great omission, but to see what MPs have tried and failed to claim for illuminates their sense of entitlement.
I live in the UK, so I am aware of the weirdness of it. The UK constitution is a body of law and tradition that makes up the running of the state. The EU has a body of law and tradition that makes up a constitution in a similar way.
Also, it's worth noting that though Denmark, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all use their own currencies, they're actually pegged to the Euro, so they don't operate an independent monetary policy.
Apple is doing Ok with their iTunes store because they're doing this (though it's still a bit heavy handed with the DRM - I want files I can put on a USB stick and plug it into my car/HiFI).
Why do you consider facts to be "right-wing"? You must then consider left-wingers to live in a fantasy world?
Interesting you mention this. I'm just reading Alan Sokal's Beyond the Hoax, where he criticises the liberal-left academic post-modernists for trying to undermine facts. Of course, he then goes on to criticise the fundamentalist right for the same thing, and notes the irony that the latter wouldn't have been able to succeed without the groundwork of the former.
So there was a period (pre-Bush, essentially) where the literary academic establishment did consider facts to be a right-wing anti-progressive and revisionist construct, or some other such spew of verbal diarrhea. Guess what goes around comes around after all.
You've got a good insight there, and one major stumbling block with nuclear power is that some of the waste will be dangerous for a period longer than most cultures last. How can we keep that message of danger alive after our civilisation is buried under the ruins of ones above?
The ivory towers you pretend to exist are only a figment of your imagination and/or ignorance.
I'd go one further; I'd say the ivory towers exist more in OSS. If you can't program, you can't really contribute. Sure you can bug test betas and so on, which I do, but I can't write in C++, so I can't go and fix random bits that are broken or submit patches, though I'd dearly like to.
It's easier to pick up a basic understanding of the scientific method than to understand programming without education.
When they do that to us in (Chemical) Engineering they want us to produce a badly-managed and half-finished mess, the first time around anyway.
They consider it a Learning Experience. And that it is!
Your professor didn't go too far per se, it's just that he assumed that group work just happens. It's something you really have to learn. It doesn't surprise me to hear of academics behaving that way though.
You're looking for some objective criteria in an utterly inappropriate place.
This is kind of my point. GGP just said "Europe is not a country" without any real basis one way or the other. As the point is unanswerable I thought it was a bit of a sweeping statement to make. And I know quite a few people who view Europe as a country, though my sample of ERASMUS students is probably more than a little biased. I personally don't, but I do view Europeans as one people, and believe there are definable elements of European culture and I also believe in a united Europe.
There we go/., a Federalist Brit. Now you've seen everything.
Here in the UK (which is why I chose it:p) the convention seems to be that the UK is a country and Scotland, England &c are nations. Hence things like the Six Nations.
Which is entirely semantic. And, as you observe, to my point.
Not that I'm disagreeing with you, there just aren't many definitions of 'country' that include the USA and exclude the EU. Common currency? Common language? How many Americans speak Spanish as a first language now? Common culture? You mean like Massachusetts and Louisiana right? Common government? Most of our law comes from the EU now. Constitution? Britain doesn't have a written constitution, but not many will deny that it is a country. If you view a constitution as a body of law then European law is pretty formidable.
Would the majority of Europeans describe themselves as European first? No. But neither would the majority of English, Irish*, Scots or Texans.
I don't disagree per se. But a country is one of those things you point at and say; "that's a country" without really knowing why.
This is actually really insightful. Here's the UK chart. Don't recognise anything from it? Here's all the number 1s from the Seventies. Ah, music was so much better then, when we had the genius of Pink Floyd and *cough* Showaddywaddy.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect this is more to do with waste disposal. I don't know about fellow-geeks, but I have recently cleared my room and found about 15 obsolete chargers for various items I no longer own. All of that is going to have to be disposed of. This new agreement may be the first step towards preventing companies from boxing chargers, or forcing them to sell versions with and without charger.
Politicians overwhelmingly don't have support for what they're doing. Turnout at the last general election was something like 36%. which means that the winner was "none of the above". The trouble is that our Westminister politicos have no power now. It's all been sent up to Brussels and Strasbourg or sent across to QUANGOs (e.g. NICE). New Labour has completely undermined Parliament at the Westminister level by allowing the Government to treat Parliament as a minor detail. MPs are now, broadly speaking, a waste of valuable London air.
You left out the inadvertent subsidy caused by the free emission of CO2 from coal etc. Because the damage caused by that emission is not charged for the fossil fuels get massive subsidies, effectively.
Parties!=political parties. In this case it means corporations, special interest groups, charities, private citizens. Ideally that list would extend to ecosystems and foreigners, but what can you do.
Not so sure. Think about games consoles. I remember back in the day whenever videogames appeared in newspapers one "played Nintendo". It passed via Playstation and now is XBox. Though the Wii has been distinctive enough to avoid this generic naming.
the British system, if they decide not to cover a treatment and you do it privately, you are out of the system for the rest of your life.
That's not quite right. You're out of the system for that particular treatment. If you stop it, you return. Equally, unrelated issues are still covered by the NHS. So if you contract AIDS and want to try a fancy new drug, you'd have to go privately for that. If you contracted TB from your AIDS-weakened immune system then the NHS would treat the TB. If you decided that the fancy new drug was a pile of pants after all and stopped using it, you'd be back in the system entirely.
It's a big problem in the British National Health Service. Essentially a lot of treatments aren't affordable on socialised healthcare, and so don't get rationed out by National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). Not necessarily a problem, but if individuals want to try the treatment then they must go private for the whole package, not just buy in the drugs they want. This is because NICE usually rejects treatments because of either their lack of cost-effectiveness (how many good life-hours can be saved per pound) or because of the costs of the side effects. The NHS would have to pay for the side effects.
The rules are not applied consistently, and what treatment the NHS will pay for depends a lot on where you are, with the most generous being in oil-rich Scotland and it varying significantly with Primary Care Trust (PCT, but the phenomenon is known colloquially as the postcode lottery). The disparity is caused by efficiency of management, the presence of renowned hospitals that can pull in patients and hence funding from outside the PCT and in the case of the different nations, disparity in the funding per head of population.
Socialised healthcare has many of the pitfalls associated with all government spending, with political interference leading to popular-but-ineffective treatments getting funding priority over cheaper and better programmes (a new cancer treatment that NICE refuses will sometimes be pushed out by the government anyway as a vote-winner, no matter how clinically effective it is, and the money will have to come from far more useful screening programmes). There are other issues to do with patient choice and quality of care (patients find it near impossible to judge whether the local hospital is actually competent at cancer operations, for example). It is no panacea.
Equally, the current American system sees the average American paying ten times more for healthcare than the average Brit, yet achieving only a similar outcome and without the universal coverage*. To a certain extent it's a personal choice, but the NHS (like the BBC) is more of a national religion than Christianity over here.
*Can't find the citation for this. Was either a WHO study or the Economist reporting on it. Will look more later.
As a European just finding out about these wonders, I have to ask a couple of serious questions.
Why are you all still alive? Have you heard of food? Are you aware of the concept of vegetables?
No newspaper is a pillar of justice and righteousness. The Guardian may be closer to a pillar of hypocrisy and leftiousness, but it does report actual news in an accurate and fairly even-handed manner. I tend to swing between the Guardian and the Telegraph depending on the front page, though I wouldn't sign up to the stance of either. I can stomach either as long as I avoid the editorials*.
Having said that, the Guardian does employ Polly Toynbee, a typical champagne socialist, and a hypocrite to boot**.
In terms of size, the Guardian is the third biggest of what used to be called the broadsheets and you could consider as the real newspapers. The most popular is the Telegraph, but the Sun has ten times the readership at about 8million readers. The Guardian is on about 1/20th of that.
*The Guardian; 'All these capitalists are stealing money from the workers by avoiding tax! This is evil! Unless we're doing it!'
The Telegraph; 'The problem with young people is that too many of them are immigrants and none of them are whipped enough, what?'
**Please don't misconstrue this as support of Littlejohn. A stopped clock is right twice a day etc etc.
MPs salary, pension and expenses are exempt from tax, unlike standard practice in the private sector. Everyone's first home is free from capital gains tax, MPs just allowed themselves to claim a home was their secondary residence for expenses purposes and then claim it was a primary residence for tax purposes, occasionally at the same time.
Exempting themselves from the tax system is a good sign of tyranny, not to mention hypocrisy.
Hardly. This is a set of expenses paid for by the taxpayers, and we have also had to pay to have it censored before it was released. Ostensibly this was for privacy, but it was more likely to hide the shame of our MPs. Some of the most unforgivable expenses-laundering (flipping the status of primary and secondary residences to avoid capital gains tax and to gain a property portfolio at our expense) is hidden in the official release. In the meantime the Telegraph got a hold of the unredacted claims a month before now through a leak.
Also, the Guardian's claim that there's a receipt for a duck-house in there is false, as that claim was rejected and no rejected claims have been released officially. Arguably this is no great omission, but to see what MPs have tried and failed to claim for illuminates their sense of entitlement.
Seig (victory) is spelt with an S.
O2 in the UK allow tethering, for some crazy amount of money extra.
You mean like Canada?
Also nation is a separate concept to country. The UK is one country but contains at least four nations (more, depending on who you count).
I live in the UK, so I am aware of the weirdness of it. The UK constitution is a body of law and tradition that makes up the running of the state. The EU has a body of law and tradition that makes up a constitution in a similar way.
Also, it's worth noting that though Denmark, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all use their own currencies, they're actually pegged to the Euro, so they don't operate an independent monetary policy.
Apple is doing Ok with their iTunes store because they're doing this (though it's still a bit heavy handed with the DRM - I want files I can put on a USB stick and plug it into my car/HiFI).
What DRM?
It seems a lot of this goes along with the rise of geek chic.
When did this happen and why wasn't I informed?
Why do you consider facts to be "right-wing"? You must then consider left-wingers to live in a fantasy world?
Interesting you mention this. I'm just reading Alan Sokal's Beyond the Hoax, where he criticises the liberal-left academic post-modernists for trying to undermine facts. Of course, he then goes on to criticise the fundamentalist right for the same thing, and notes the irony that the latter wouldn't have been able to succeed without the groundwork of the former.
So there was a period (pre-Bush, essentially) where the literary academic establishment did consider facts to be a right-wing anti-progressive and revisionist construct, or some other such spew of verbal diarrhea. Guess what goes around comes around after all.
You've got a good insight there, and one major stumbling block with nuclear power is that some of the waste will be dangerous for a period longer than most cultures last. How can we keep that message of danger alive after our civilisation is buried under the ruins of ones above?
The ivory towers you pretend to exist are only a figment of your imagination and/or ignorance.
I'd go one further; I'd say the ivory towers exist more in OSS. If you can't program, you can't really contribute. Sure you can bug test betas and so on, which I do, but I can't write in C++, so I can't go and fix random bits that are broken or submit patches, though I'd dearly like to.
It's easier to pick up a basic understanding of the scientific method than to understand programming without education.
When they do that to us in (Chemical) Engineering they want us to produce a badly-managed and half-finished mess, the first time around anyway.
They consider it a Learning Experience. And that it is!
Your professor didn't go too far per se, it's just that he assumed that group work just happens. It's something you really have to learn. It doesn't surprise me to hear of academics behaving that way though.
You're looking for some objective criteria in an utterly inappropriate place.
This is kind of my point. GGP just said "Europe is not a country" without any real basis one way or the other. As the point is unanswerable I thought it was a bit of a sweeping statement to make. And I know quite a few people who view Europe as a country, though my sample of ERASMUS students is probably more than a little biased. I personally don't, but I do view Europeans as one people, and believe there are definable elements of European culture and I also believe in a united Europe.
There we go /., a Federalist Brit. Now you've seen everything.
Here in the UK (which is why I chose it :p) the convention seems to be that the UK is a country and Scotland, England &c are nations. Hence things like the Six Nations.
Which is entirely semantic. And, as you observe, to my point.
Why not? Justify your statement.
Not that I'm disagreeing with you, there just aren't many definitions of 'country' that include the USA and exclude the EU. Common currency? Common language? How many Americans speak Spanish as a first language now? Common culture? You mean like Massachusetts and Louisiana right? Common government? Most of our law comes from the EU now. Constitution? Britain doesn't have a written constitution, but not many will deny that it is a country. If you view a constitution as a body of law then European law is pretty formidable.
Would the majority of Europeans describe themselves as European first? No. But neither would the majority of English, Irish*, Scots or Texans.
I don't disagree per se. But a country is one of those things you point at and say; "that's a country" without really knowing why.
*Though this one is more complex.
This is actually really insightful. Here's the UK chart. Don't recognise anything from it? Here's all the number 1s from the Seventies. Ah, music was so much better then, when we had the genius of Pink Floyd and *cough* Showaddywaddy.