It being common knowledge that flying is subject to higher than normal radiation levels, and there is therefore a worry about crews, I had assumed that aircraft carried dosimeters so that crew members' total personal doses were monitored. No? If so, then this would not be a theory - it could be checked from the monitoring.
If they do not carry dosimeters, why not? Ground level radiation workers have to by law. I am a nuclear engineer and do so on visits to plant - yet my total life dose over some years of this is tiny, less than typical aircrew would have I believe.
I watched a TV money program two nights ago where they were talking to seemingly typical people who even found the concept of a bank savings account hard to grasp.
Do you happen to remember what it was called and/or what station?
It was about ISAs, broadcast Friday 5th at 8pm on an ITV channel:-
I remember the milk. It wasn't just for poor children - it was for all children. They used to make special half-pint milk bottles to hand it out in.
Don't know where you went to school, but where I was it was 1/3 pints. I cannot imaging today's kids not smashing all that glass up for the hell of it - an attitude I believe Mrs T should also carry some responsibility with her "everyone-for-themselves, anti-community" outlook.
.And of course, despite the damage she caused both the UK and the world at large, she will be given a state funeral. A funeral where protest and dissent will be not permitted. Where the militarised police (and possibly even the military, c.f. the recent Oxbridge Boat Race) will be used to keep all those who despise the policies she stood for elsewhere.
Agreeing with you every bit on the damage she caused, but you can go to Hell with the rest of that bit I quote. Whether or not it is a State funeral (I hope not), a funeral should be respected. And f#@k you for supporting the disruption of a non-political sporting event - that event and anything else legitimate should be protected with whatever is necessary.
The first female Prime Minister of the UK did nothing to promote women?
Yes, definitely. A well known fact and matereial for an interesting psychological study.
Women like her are aggressive in outlook. They look down on other women who do not achieve what they have, and regard other women who have as rivals to be held back. Sorry to say it, but women are much more bitchy between each other than men are, and Mrs T was a very bitchy type.
Mrs T' s attitude could be summed up as : "I got where I did by the sweat of my brow, so could you!", very much the attitude of small business people (like the family from which she came)
Unusually these days for a politician she was originally a science graduate
But she did science and technology no good - in fact she seemed to have it in for them. This has been psychologically explained along the lines that, having changed career she needed to justify having changed. Never having had time to rise in her first career, can you imagine her having to make the tea in the lab where she worked, and her later resentment of this time.
Some of this showed through in her leadership style - trying to do the logical thing for the best long term results (at least in her analysis) rather than trying to win the popularity contest and appealing to the masses.
Now you are joking. She played popularity like a violin maestro.
in other cases it contributed to her downfall - e.g. the per-person 'poll tax' vs. a property-based tax for local services (such as rubbish/refuse collection) surely makes some logical sense to many slashdot readers? but unfortunately it made a larger number of people pay more tax than those unaffected / getting a a tax reduction so it was a political disaster.
You are right there, she did misjudge it. I don't think it was to do with the numbers so much as the "enthusiasm". You can get people out to demonstrate against something (the Poll Tax) but not for it. The council rating system (and it successor Council Tax) are completely illogical, being based on the archaic assumption that the vast majority of people rented their house from a Lord of the Manor, so the Lord (owner) was taxed mainly according to the total number of rooms he had on the assumption that each would contain a tenant. But in fact the cost of the services a house requires depends mainly on the number of people (rubbish, water, social services, traffic).
Of course, a lot of opposition stemmed from the fact that there are large numbers of people "off the grid", like in immigrant sweat shops, who were concerned that the Poll Tax would find them out.
Britain voted her into power again and again. She was chosen by Brits to lead because she was a good leader.
Don't include me in that. The way UK voting works, leaders can get voted in even with less than 50% of the votes going to their party even if there are only two parties to vote for as things largely were in those days; that is because Labour-supporting areas tend to be far more solidly Labour than Conservative areas are - ie Conservative votes are spread more efficiently.
Your post may give non-UK readers the impression that near "everyone" liked her. In fact people either loved her or loathed her, independent of political and social boundaries. I mostly knew people who loathed her, despite their being professional types and thus natural conservatives. OTOH, women of all sorts tended to like and vote for her, seeing her as a role model and assuming she supported women's issues. In fact Mrs T hated other women - she avoided them and could not control them (eg the Queen) as she could certain types of men (eg the type she promoted to cabinet).
Mrs T fantasised that we would become a "Share-owning society". I remember the phrase well. But it was obvious to everyone except her government that people buying these shares would sell them again within a few weeks for the quick buck to be made. So the shares ended up owned by big investors.
I own some shares myself today, because the bank interest rate is so low, but they are a PITA. They need constant attention if you are to make money with them and not seriously lose out. Some guys I used to work with spent most of their spare time on their shares, drawing charts etc. No-one can seriously expect Joe Average to have the time, inclination, or ability to do this. I watched a TV money program two nights ago where they were talking to seemingly typical people who even found the concept of a bank savings account hard to grasp.
The ultimate irony of that selling frenzy was that the freight side of British Rail, having been "privatised", has ended up in the ownership of the nationalised German Railways. To be fair, British rail was not sold off by Mrs T, who rightly predicted it would be a disaster, but by John Major.
Well, I have seen plenty of lies with statistics. Not saying this is a lie, just that I cannot remember the last manufactured thing I bought that said "Made in the UK" - apart from a box of Xmas crackers. It is no longer possible to buy a sane british car (I don't count Jap assembly plants in the UK, because the clever designing is done elsewhere and those plants are just chimps banging things together). You do realise that stuff coming from abroad as a kit and assembled here is counted as made in the UK as far as the spin doctors are concerned?
I also know that whole areas of cities that were once factories have been flattened and replaced by housing and "retail outlets". Small anecdote - I want to get something cast in iron. Despite being in South Wales, once a centre of iron and steel making, I cannot find anywhere for it. Suggestion gratefully received.
Strange to see this comment on a techies' site because the "shift" you praise was away from technology, in which the UK had excelled since the industrial revolution, to "service" industries. Mrs T came from a tech background herself, but having changed careers she had it in for it. Knowing her, you can imagine her resentment and relish for revenge for having been the laboratory junior, making the tea etc.
She thought that Britons were cleverer than the rest of the world so Britain could make its living from purely cerebrial work, like finance, without getting its hands dirty. And of course, selling the "family silver" (the UK industries) and North Sea oil would keep the UK going, for some time anyway. This was before the internet allowed many service industries (apart from the most crappy things like washing up) to be outsourced, even more easily than manufacturing which has significant shipping costs.
The French, Germans and Italians, the most comparable nations, did not follow suit. My own industry - railway engineering - was decimated by Mrs T (she particularly hated railways) and the world-leading railway technology we had was largely picked up by those nations to supplement their own, and they now manufacture and sell the hardware to us.
It is a mystery to me what we live on now in the UK. Everyone I know is basically shifting paperwork around and is, metaphorically speaking, taking in each others' washing. The shit is starting to hit the fan now though.
Here is what I think of her free market theories The Grantham Grocer Fallacy. "The Grantham Grocer fallacy" because she thought it would work as it did among the Grocers of Grantham ( as her father was) during the 30's and 40's. I loathed the bitch, yet I am most definitely not a socialist. Views on her were binary - some loathed her while the others thought the light of the World shone out of her backside.
FTFA:- "microlensing — a phenomenon caused by an intense gravitational field focusing light from behind. This had the counter-intuitive result of causing the starlight to dim when the white dwarf passed behind the red dwarf and then brighten as the white dwarf passed in front"
Not sure why this is counter-intuitive. The light would only appear brighter if you were observing from the focus of the microlens, or near it; elswhere it would dim, even on the same axis if you were far enough beyond it. So it just depends on the strength of the gravitation and your distance away, and the two dwarves are likely to have different gravitation.
It will be interesting to run some of the works of the great writers through this software. Joseph Conrad is well known for some quirky gramatical constructions. Proust is notorious for his long sentences and paragraphs. And would it make sense of Shakespeare's "This fell sergeant Death is strict in his arrest" ?
I expect all three of them would fail their exam. Oops, I started a sentence with "And".
So big box retailers aren't good places to go for computer advice?
I'd be shocked if I haven't heard so many blatant falsehoods coming out of the mouths of people in these stores
I don't think you know Argos (in the UK anyway). They cannot be accused of giving advice because basically they do not say anything about what they sell.
You go in, choose an item from the catalogue at one of the booths, enter its number into a terminal, put in your credit card to pay, then wait 5-10 minutes until your item comes up on a screen as ready for collection. You then go to a counter and someone (this is the only human contact) who knows absolutely nothing about what is in the box, and makes no pretence of doing so, hands it over a bare counter and gets you to sign a receipt. If you were to ask this person a question they would take your item straight back and move to dispensing the next customer's box.
Easily sourced today. I'll be honest, I've not see a gas station without some water supply.
Yes, in the toilets (US "Rest Room"?). Apart from that, in the UK they usually have a combined tyre air and water dispenser on the forecourt, buy they always charge money for air and very often for the water too. That's why I carry a plastic bottle and refill it from a toilet sink tap if I need to.
One thing is certain, if they set up facilities to dispense water for these batteries they would charge extortionately for it. That would skew some of the economics being written about here.
He does not claim that is the definition. In fact he refers to it as a battery himself, as in "you have to throw the aluminum battery away once you've used it". He is just complaining that it is not a rechargeable battery.
Until I saw your post, and never having heard the term "kilomile" before (an Americanism?) I had mis-read the as "Israeli firm makes kilometer claims....... ". I thought they must be a hell of a way behind the curve.
Taking delivery drivers as an example, you must meet some very tolerant ones. In my experience they would leave a message that, as there seemed to be no-one at home and/or couldn't find me, they had taken my goods back to the depot and I would now need to collect it myself. They do that on the slightest pretext anyway.
You have a "thing" about not answering calls from an unknown numbers, so recommend voicemail. But you must spend half your time checking your voicemail if it to be on a timescale short enough to catch deliveries and medical crisis. OTOH, I have a "thing" about being answered by a voicemail recorded messages - I put the phone down and try later or give up entirely, as do many other people in my experience, especially if the call would be to the receiver's advantage and not the caller's.
"... Serdar Danis and Aaron Foss will each receive $25,000 for their proposals, which both use software to intercept and filter out illegal prerecorded calls using technology to 'blacklist' robocaller phone numbers and 'whitelist' numbers associated with acceptable incoming calls."
Wow !! Blacklists and white lists!! Whoever would have thought of that ?!
Honestly, I'm shocked anyone even answers an unknown call at all anymore.
You sound like you live in a rather small circle. Here are some wider-world reasons:-
1) Elderly mother has collapsed in the street somewhere and a Good Samaritan/police/hospital are trying to contact me (she carries my contact number)
2) Daughter's car has broken down somewhere with no cell phone coverage and she is trying to contact me from a payphone.
3) A hobby club meeting I go to weekly has been cancelled and a fellow member is trying to contact me to save me the journey (gets my number from the member's list)
4) An old friend, who's number has changed since I was last in contact, is trying to get in touch again.
5) Father-in-Law's care home is trying to contact me from any of the several phones it may use for this purpose (several land lines and the mobiles of any of its senior staff) and I cannot be arsed to find out and note down every one of these possible numbers.
6) I am expecting a furniture delivery and give my phone number to the company because their driver will need directions when he gets near (my place is in the sticks and hard to find). I (and they) will not know when I place the order who the driver will be nor, therefore, his mob number.
7) I phone the local council with a tax query and they need to pass the query to another department who will investigate and phone back later (maybe several days later). There is no knowing in advance what number they will be calling me from.
8) I order something from a shop who need to order it from the makers themselves. Could be days or weeks. They will phone me when they have it in.
I could go on and on with examples. A common point in several of these scenarios is that if I am expecting a one-off call, even if I do know the number I do not want to have to keep editing a whitelist to accomodate it.
These days Caller ID is almost universal--certainly in the U.S. (this being a story about the FTC), but I'd wager the case is pretty similar in most any first-world nation.
Not in the UK. It is available, but at a price, and I do not see why I should be put out of pocket by these salesmen. In fact the UK Telephone Preference Service works quite well (for me at least, YMMV). When, occasionally, a salesman or scammer does get through I have some fun with them, but that is another story.
I've been worrying about modding in topics I'd rather post in. It's annoying having to hold myself back.
I am also being swamped with mod points. Has the system changed somehow, or are they running out of good moderators? At one time I got mod points very rarely (but often got meta-moderation points).
Do what I do. Use the mod points in topics you are not particularly interested in or have no stong view, so are unlikely to post anyway. It is a better use of mod points as you can award them according to how well argued (or funny, or trollish or whatever) without being biased with your own opinion. Otherwise modding can degenerate into just modding up things you agree with and modding down those you don't.
BTW, is the bra training for you, or are you training for the bra?
As the link has been Slashdotted, I am left with my imagination boggling as to what the one-dimensional interface looked like.
I am thinking in terms of a thermometer-type slider, like those 1960's radio tuners; am I right? But with no room even for markings by the side, just a thin line that changes colour as you slide?
The point is that nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability.
One of the silliest statements I have seen here for some time.
In the early days of computers it was assumed that you got one to write programs on it. Many people said they would never want a computer because they would never want to write programs. Then games and apps came along, Progressively since then, programming became more and more the province of the specialist.
We have even reached the point where people do not even expect toi have to use a keyboard, let alone type code, and soon it will be just voice control.
Your statement is like someone in 1900 saying that soon everyone will need to build a car for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
What we're saying is that [Apple] are homophobes?
Perhaps they thought the gay images would be too exciting for their customers?
There goes my karma.
It being common knowledge that flying is subject to higher than normal radiation levels, and there is therefore a worry about crews, I had assumed that aircraft carried dosimeters so that crew members' total personal doses were monitored. No? If so, then this would not be a theory - it could be checked from the monitoring.
If they do not carry dosimeters, why not? Ground level radiation workers have to by law. I am a nuclear engineer and do so on visits to plant - yet my total life dose over some years of this is tiny, less than typical aircrew would have I believe.
Do you happen to remember what it was called and/or what station?
It was about ISAs, broadcast Friday 5th at 8pm on an ITV channel :-
www.itv.com/itvplayer/the-martin-lewis-money-show/series-2/episode-3
I remember the milk. It wasn't just for poor children - it was for all children. They used to make special half-pint milk bottles to hand it out in.
Don't know where you went to school, but where I was it was 1/3 pints. I cannot imaging today's kids not smashing all that glass up for the hell of it - an attitude I believe Mrs T should also carry some responsibility with her "everyone-for-themselves, anti-community" outlook.
.And of course, despite the damage she caused both the UK and the world at large, she will be given a state funeral. A funeral where protest and dissent will be not permitted. Where the militarised police (and possibly even the military, c.f. the recent Oxbridge Boat Race) will be used to keep all those who despise the policies she stood for elsewhere.
Agreeing with you every bit on the damage she caused, but you can go to Hell with the rest of that bit I quote. Whether or not it is a State funeral (I hope not), a funeral should be respected. And f#@k you for supporting the disruption of a non-political sporting event - that event and anything else legitimate should be protected with whatever is necessary.
The first female Prime Minister of the UK did nothing to promote women?
Yes, definitely. A well known fact and matereial for an interesting psychological study.
Women like her are aggressive in outlook. They look down on other women who do not achieve what they have, and regard other women who have as rivals to be held back. Sorry to say it, but women are much more bitchy between each other than men are, and Mrs T was a very bitchy type.
Mrs T' s attitude could be summed up as : "I got where I did by the sweat of my brow, so could you!", very much the attitude of small business people (like the family from which she came)
Unusually these days for a politician she was originally a science graduate
But she did science and technology no good - in fact she seemed to have it in for them. This has been psychologically explained along the lines that, having changed career she needed to justify having changed. Never having had time to rise in her first career, can you imagine her having to make the tea in the lab where she worked, and her later resentment of this time.
Some of this showed through in her leadership style - trying to do the logical thing for the best long term results (at least in her analysis) rather than trying to win the popularity contest and appealing to the masses.
Now you are joking. She played popularity like a violin maestro.
in other cases it contributed to her downfall - e.g. the per-person 'poll tax' vs. a property-based tax for local services (such as rubbish/refuse collection) surely makes some logical sense to many slashdot readers? but unfortunately it made a larger number of people pay more tax than those unaffected / getting a a tax reduction so it was a political disaster.
You are right there, she did misjudge it. I don't think it was to do with the numbers so much as the "enthusiasm". You can get people out to demonstrate against something (the Poll Tax) but not for it. The council rating system (and it successor Council Tax) are completely illogical, being based on the archaic assumption that the vast majority of people rented their house from a Lord of the Manor, so the Lord (owner) was taxed mainly according to the total number of rooms he had on the assumption that each would contain a tenant. But in fact the cost of the services a house requires depends mainly on the number of people (rubbish, water, social services, traffic).
Of course, a lot of opposition stemmed from the fact that there are large numbers of people "off the grid", like in immigrant sweat shops, who were concerned that the Poll Tax would find them out.
Britain voted her into power again and again. She was chosen by Brits to lead because she was a good leader.
Don't include me in that. The way UK voting works, leaders can get voted in even with less than 50% of the votes going to their party even if there are only two parties to vote for as things largely were in those days; that is because Labour-supporting areas tend to be far more solidly Labour than Conservative areas are - ie Conservative votes are spread more efficiently.
Your post may give non-UK readers the impression that near "everyone" liked her. In fact people either loved her or loathed her, independent of political and social boundaries. I mostly knew people who loathed her, despite their being professional types and thus natural conservatives. OTOH, women of all sorts tended to like and vote for her, seeing her as a role model and assuming she supported women's issues. In fact Mrs T hated other women - she avoided them and could not control them (eg the Queen) as she could certain types of men (eg the type she promoted to cabinet).
Mod parent up, it puts it in a nutshell.
Mrs T fantasised that we would become a "Share-owning society". I remember the phrase well. But it was obvious to everyone except her government that people buying these shares would sell them again within a few weeks for the quick buck to be made. So the shares ended up owned by big investors.
I own some shares myself today, because the bank interest rate is so low, but they are a PITA. They need constant attention if you are to make money with them and not seriously lose out. Some guys I used to work with spent most of their spare time on their shares, drawing charts etc. No-one can seriously expect Joe Average to have the time, inclination, or ability to do this. I watched a TV money program two nights ago where they were talking to seemingly typical people who even found the concept of a bank savings account hard to grasp.
The ultimate irony of that selling frenzy was that the freight side of British Rail, having been "privatised", has ended up in the ownership of the nationalised German Railways. To be fair, British rail was not sold off by Mrs T, who rightly predicted it would be a disaster, but by John Major.
The value of UK manufacturing increased since Thatcher was in power: http://tutor2u.net/economics/content/essentials/manufacturing_industry_in_uk_clip_image002_0000.gif
Well, I have seen plenty of lies with statistics. Not saying this is a lie, just that I cannot remember the last manufactured thing I bought that said "Made in the UK" - apart from a box of Xmas crackers. It is no longer possible to buy a sane british car (I don't count Jap assembly plants in the UK, because the clever designing is done elsewhere and those plants are just chimps banging things together). You do realise that stuff coming from abroad as a kit and assembled here is counted as made in the UK as far as the spin doctors are concerned?
I also know that whole areas of cities that were once factories have been flattened and replaced by housing and "retail outlets". Small anecdote - I want to get something cast in iron. Despite being in South Wales, once a centre of iron and steel making, I cannot find anywhere for it. Suggestion gratefully received.
Strange to see this comment on a techies' site because the "shift" you praise was away from technology, in which the UK had excelled since the industrial revolution, to "service" industries. Mrs T came from a tech background herself, but having changed careers she had it in for it. Knowing her, you can imagine her resentment and relish for revenge for having been the laboratory junior, making the tea etc.
She thought that Britons were cleverer than the rest of the world so Britain could make its living from purely cerebrial work, like finance, without getting its hands dirty. And of course, selling the "family silver" (the UK industries) and North Sea oil would keep the UK going, for some time anyway. This was before the internet allowed many service industries (apart from the most crappy things like washing up) to be outsourced, even more easily than manufacturing which has significant shipping costs.
The French, Germans and Italians, the most comparable nations, did not follow suit. My own industry - railway engineering - was decimated by Mrs T (she particularly hated railways) and the world-leading railway technology we had was largely picked up by those nations to supplement their own, and they now manufacture and sell the hardware to us.
It is a mystery to me what we live on now in the UK. Everyone I know is basically shifting paperwork around and is, metaphorically speaking, taking in each others' washing. The shit is starting to hit the fan now though.
Here is what I think of her free market theories The Grantham Grocer Fallacy. "The Grantham Grocer fallacy" because she thought it would work as it did among the Grocers of Grantham ( as her father was) during the 30's and 40's. I loathed the bitch, yet I am most definitely not a socialist. Views on her were binary - some loathed her while the others thought the light of the World shone out of her backside.
FTFA :- "microlensing — a phenomenon caused by an intense gravitational field focusing light from behind. This had the counter-intuitive result of causing the starlight to dim when the white dwarf passed behind the red dwarf and then brighten as the white dwarf passed in front"
Not sure why this is counter-intuitive. The light would only appear brighter if you were observing from the focus of the microlens, or near it; elswhere it would dim, even on the same axis if you were far enough beyond it. So it just depends on the strength of the gravitation and your distance away, and the two dwarves are likely to have different gravitation.
Already 10 posts! And not one reference to US gun law! And only one reference to the Nazis.
It will be interesting to run some of the works of the great writers through this software. Joseph Conrad is well known for some quirky gramatical constructions. Proust is notorious for his long sentences and paragraphs. And would it make sense of Shakespeare's "This fell sergeant Death is strict in his arrest" ?
I expect all three of them would fail their exam. Oops, I started a sentence with "And".
So big box retailers aren't good places to go for computer advice?
I'd be shocked if I haven't heard so many blatant falsehoods coming out of the mouths of people in these stores
I don't think you know Argos (in the UK anyway). They cannot be accused of giving advice because basically they do not say anything about what they sell.
You go in, choose an item from the catalogue at one of the booths, enter its number into a terminal, put in your credit card to pay, then wait 5-10 minutes until your item comes up on a screen as ready for collection. You then go to a counter and someone (this is the only human contact) who knows absolutely nothing about what is in the box, and makes no pretence of doing so, hands it over a bare counter and gets you to sign a receipt. If you were to ask this person a question they would take your item straight back and move to dispensing the next customer's box.
Easily sourced today. I'll be honest, I've not see a gas station without some water supply.
Yes, in the toilets (US "Rest Room"?). Apart from that, in the UK they usually have a combined tyre air and water dispenser on the forecourt, buy they always charge money for air and very often for the water too. That's why I carry a plastic bottle and refill it from a toilet sink tap if I need to.
One thing is certain, if they set up facilities to dispense water for these batteries they would charge extortionately for it. That would skew some of the economics being written about here.
He does not claim that is the definition. In fact he refers to it as a battery himself, as in "you have to throw the aluminum battery away once you've used it". He is just complaining that it is not a rechargeable battery.
my car has $186k miles on it. you mean I would be replacing the plates 200 times over the course of the cars life? that sounds like a lot of work...
Stil running in then. Mine has 265,000 miles. Anyway, what's with the dollars?
Until I saw your post, and never having heard the term "kilomile" before (an Americanism?) I had mis-read the as "Israeli firm makes kilometer claims ....... ". I thought they must be a hell of a way behind the curve.
I did point out I was trying to talk "average person" here
Well you also originally said :-
I'm shocked anyone even answers an unknown call at all anymore
...... and that "anyone" includes me.
1) I'd call this one of those outlier circumstances [Mother collapsing}
Not every day, but if it happens it is VERY important to know of it, fast.
2) Very much an unusual circumstance [Daughters car breaking down].
No, it happens all the time :-S combined with her mobile battery being flat/out of credit
3, 4, 5, 6) voicemail voicemail voicemail [delivery asking for directions etc]
Taking delivery drivers as an example, you must meet some very tolerant ones. In my experience they would leave a message that, as there seemed to be no-one at home and/or couldn't find me, they had taken my goods back to the depot and I would now need to collect it myself. They do that on the slightest pretext anyway.
You have a "thing" about not answering calls from an unknown numbers, so recommend voicemail. But you must spend half your time checking your voicemail if it to be on a timescale short enough to catch deliveries and medical crisis. OTOH, I have a "thing" about being answered by a voicemail recorded messages - I put the phone down and try later or give up entirely, as do many other people in my experience, especially if the call would be to the receiver's advantage and not the caller's.
" ... Serdar Danis and Aaron Foss will each receive $25,000 for their proposals, which both use software to intercept and filter out illegal prerecorded calls using technology to 'blacklist' robocaller phone numbers and 'whitelist' numbers associated with acceptable incoming calls."
Wow !! Blacklists and white lists!! Whoever would have thought of that ?!
Honestly, I'm shocked anyone even answers an unknown call at all anymore.
You sound like you live in a rather small circle. Here are some wider-world reasons :-
1) Elderly mother has collapsed in the street somewhere and a Good Samaritan/police/hospital are trying to contact me (she carries my contact number)
2) Daughter's car has broken down somewhere with no cell phone coverage and she is trying to contact me from a payphone.
3) A hobby club meeting I go to weekly has been cancelled and a fellow member is trying to contact me to save me the journey (gets my number from the member's list)
4) An old friend, who's number has changed since I was last in contact, is trying to get in touch again.
5) Father-in-Law's care home is trying to contact me from any of the several phones it may use for this purpose (several land lines and the mobiles of any of its senior staff) and I cannot be arsed to find out and note down every one of these possible numbers.
6) I am expecting a furniture delivery and give my phone number to the company because their driver will need directions when he gets near (my place is in the sticks and hard to find). I (and they) will not know when I place the order who the driver will be nor, therefore, his mob number.
7) I phone the local council with a tax query and they need to pass the query to another department who will investigate and phone back later (maybe several days later). There is no knowing in advance what number they will be calling me from.
8) I order something from a shop who need to order it from the makers themselves. Could be days or weeks. They will phone me when they have it in.
I could go on and on with examples. A common point in several of these scenarios is that if I am expecting a one-off call, even if I do know the number I do not want to have to keep editing a whitelist to accomodate it.
These days Caller ID is almost universal--certainly in the U.S. (this being a story about the FTC), but I'd wager the case is pretty similar in most any first-world nation.
Not in the UK. It is available, but at a price, and I do not see why I should be put out of pocket by these salesmen. In fact the UK Telephone Preference Service works quite well (for me at least, YMMV). When, occasionally, a salesman or scammer does get through I have some fun with them, but that is another story.
I've been worrying about modding in topics I'd rather post in. It's annoying having to hold myself back.
I am also being swamped with mod points. Has the system changed somehow, or are they running out of good moderators? At one time I got mod points very rarely (but often got meta-moderation points).
Do what I do. Use the mod points in topics you are not particularly interested in or have no stong view, so are unlikely to post anyway. It is a better use of mod points as you can award them according to how well argued (or funny, or trollish or whatever) without being biased with your own opinion. Otherwise modding can degenerate into just modding up things you agree with and modding down those you don't.
BTW, is the bra training for you, or are you training for the bra?
As the link has been Slashdotted, I am left with my imagination boggling as to what the one-dimensional interface looked like.
I am thinking in terms of a thermometer-type slider, like those 1960's radio tuners; am I right? But with no room even for markings by the side, just a thin line that changes colour as you slide?
The point is that nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability.
One of the silliest statements I have seen here for some time.
In the early days of computers it was assumed that you got one to write programs on it. Many people said they would never want a computer because they would never want to write programs. Then games and apps came along, Progressively since then, programming became more and more the province of the specialist.
We have even reached the point where people do not even expect toi have to use a keyboard, let alone type code, and soon it will be just voice control.
Your statement is like someone in 1900 saying that soon everyone will need to build a car for themselves.