I remember being told a story (I don't know if it's true, as I was much too young at the time to remember) that back in the 70s, they tried to switch to selling gasoline in the US in Liters instead of gallons. However, instead of converting honestly, many gas station owners jacked up the price, thinking people wouldn't notice. Of course, they did, and metricification became reviled. Again, I don't know if there's any truth to this story.
Temperatures took the longest to get intuitively as I had to live through the various weather patterns before I could feel it. But, even then there wasn't really any advantage to it as I was still comparing it to what I consider a comfortable temperature.
Personally, I think there's a small disadvantage to using Celsius rather than Fahrenheit: you get a smaller range of usable whole numbers. The temperatures we humans are likely to experience walking around on this planet range from about -50F to 135F; in America, it's probably more like -40 to 120F. And in temperate cllimates (most of the US, but not all), you're not likely to see many days that fall outside of the 0F-100F range. If you convert those to Celcius, they'll be about -45C to 57C, -40C to 49C, and -18C to 38C. 1 degree Fahrenheit is just enough of a difference I think for people to notice the difference, and when I'm setting my thermostat at home, it's enough for me to want that level of granularity. I wouldn't be happy with a thermostat that only let me choose between 68, 70, 72, 74, etc. Wtih Celcius, you get less granularity unless you resort to fractions or decimal places.
And for what? What does it gain you? Nothing that I can see. If I'm doing scientific calculations, I'm going to be using Kelvins anyway, not Celcius, and converting between any of the systems is trivial if I have a calculator.
Ever since I was in the Army, I've always written my dates as 12-FEB-09
My wife was in the Air Force, and she always writes dates as 12FEB2009 (no hyphens, 4-digit year). I adopted the convention because it does make a lot of sense. If you write date-first, you're going to have lots of Americans who interpret it wrong. If you write month-first, you'll have all the non-Americans interpreting it wrong. You can also do year-first (year/month/date), but you'll definitely have to write all 4 digits of the year or someone will get confused thinking you're talking about the 13th, instead of 2013; but that is one way to avoid the problem without having to use 3-letter month abbreviations. Of course, some people probably don't like the 12FEB2009 notation because it uses English month names/abbrevations.
A guy commented just above that his '01 Ford (which isn't exactly new, but not exactly ancient either; lots of people drive 10-15 year old cars these days) has a speedometer with only MPH markings on it.
Are you incapable of reading? I never proposed 48 independent states, I proposed a handful of independent republics. Go re-read my prior post before you spout any more stupidity.
That would be nice, but we wouldn't hear the end of it from the southern states.
What are you talking about? They've been itching to break away for over 150 years. They'd be happy to be allowed to go out on their own finally. Yes, they do absorb the most Federal money, but that's irrelevant: go ask all the Southern pride folks if they want to secede or not, and they'll tell you "yes". They think they'll do just fine without a Federal government (or at least, with only a Federal government that encompasses the Southern states and is independent from the north and west).
and would quickly erupt into anarchy once the shit hit the fan. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they killed themselves in the span of a month.
That may be, but again, the Southerners don't see it that way. And if they do self-destruct, how's that our problem? The conservatives (who are strong in the South) are constantly talking about "letting the free market work"; well, let's give them their freedom and leave them to their own devices. They're all adults; it's their own responsibility to take care of themselves. If they can do better on their own, great. If not, oh well. Either way, the rest of us would be better off without their representatives being part of our government.
And it's not just that I think the South should be kicked out, it's the whole union: the northwest, the midwest, the southwest, the southeast should all be separate countries. They'd probably all (or at least most of them) do better without having to be part of a single union where none of them can agree on anything, and the federal government of which has entirely too much power and no longer represents the will of the people (for example: marijuana laws), and thrives on the endless infighting between the different regional interests.
Ok, but I still stand by my prior assertion. If belief in "the Illuminati" is sufficient for having someone detained, then so should watching Fox News. Additionally, anyone who believes Obama is any different from Bush should also be committed. So that should cover about 98% of the country right there.
Sure, but how is a law enforcement officer supposed to be able to determine if someone is mentally unstable. Believing in the Illuminati is no more proof of mental instability than believing Fox News to be a reliable source of journalism. If ranting about the Illuminati is sufficient to detain someone without due process, then we should be doing the same for a large portion of our population that watches Fox News.
Exactly. Voting doesn't do squat when you're limited to two pre-approved choices that are both bad. And bullets (or explosives) don't help either; just ask Jared Loughner or Timothy McVeigh; their actions sure didn't help matters any.
The pen (or the keyboard) truly is mightier than the sword. Of course, while mighty, the keyboard isn't very effective when the country's populace is completely dumbed-down and apathetic.
Personally, my hope is that the political and economic pressures in the US will cause it to break apart into a handful of separate republics, and that by being freed of having to compromise with the other states with completely different views and values, some of those republics will prosper, much like some of the eastern European countries prospered after being freed of Soviet rule (such as Czech Republic and Poland).
Literally hundreds of chemical species are in their lists of banned substances it's amazing that anything can be made or grown there.
That shouldn't be a problem for growing things; you just wouldn't use any pesticides or artificial fertilizers. Farmers got along just fine hundreds of years ago before all these substances were invented. Considering how much food the EU produces (and exports), they don't seem to be having a problem there.
But yes, for modern manufacturing, having a lot of banned toxic substances would be a problem. It just isn't possible to make most manufactured goods without handling toxic or hazardous substances at some point.
One of the reasons the high-end luxury car brands have lower quality scores is because their owners have higher expectations, and complain more about minor problems. If there's a squeak or rattle in your new $100k Mercedes, you take it back to the dealership for warranty repairs. If there's a squeak in your $15k Ford, you just live with it. So Mercedes looks bad because it has an incident of a warranty repair, whereas Ford doesn't.
Also, Mercedes is not a luxury brand in Europe, only in the USA.
Like what? I'm just curious. For instance, suppose I have a small family (mom-n-pop) business here in the USA (that sells on the internet, rather than being tied to a specific locale), and decide I want to move to Europe. What would I be in for?
amend/abolish ridiculous labor laws which are killing startups
I'm just curious; what kind of labor laws do they have which are killing startups? Over here in the US, hiring isn't that hard when you only have a few employees, and even asl long as as it's under 40 I hear the labor laws aren't too hard to keep up with. Over 40, however, it starts getting really complicated, at least that's what a small company I used to work for told me.
"Bimbo", as I'm sure you well know, is derogatory term used to denote sexual promiscuity.
No, it's not. I don't know where you got that. Where I come from, "bimbo" basically translates to "female airhead". It's also a synonym for "ditz". It has nothing to do with sexual practices or promiscuity.
Sounds good, but I seriously doubt this Marissa person would be interested in doing that and essentially putting herself out of a job, and also making herself look incapable.
Isn't that true of lots of companies from that time though?
Really, I think Apple was an exception, one which very few people could have predicted accurately. "slashdot_commenter" is right; their fortunes really didn't turn around until the iPod.
No, because history shows that big corporations buying start-ups never turns out well. The big corp has no idea how to effectively use the new start-up, and its potential (assuming it had any) ends up being wasted.
Of course, most start-ups go nowhere too. But of those lucky few that succeed, we do get things like Google, Yahoo (back when they were successful), and Facebook (ugh).
No, it just wouldn't make any sense, just like calling a man a "bimbo" wouldn't make any sense at all. Calling a woman a "bimbo", and a man a "bozo", is fine; you're just alleging that the person in question is not very competent.
Yes, that may very well be, but if she were a male, you wouldn't call her (him) that. A stupid male you might call a "bozo" (or just a moron or idiot), but never a "bimbo"; that's reserved for women. I'm only pointing this out because it loos like PlastikMissle has some kind of problem with the usage of the word "bimbo". I'm just pointing out that it's entirely appropriate.
Dating? Do they even still do that? I remember Yahoo Personals in the early-mid 2000s, but it was a disaster, because most of the "women" on there weren't real. They eventually shut it down, as I remember.
Google would have to do some serious foot-shooting to make their product more crappy than Yahoo mail. Yes, Gmail's new UI sucks donkey balls, but it's nowhere near as bad as Yahoo's gaudy crap.
And why hasn't someone made some Greasemonkey script or extension to fix Gmail anyway? Surely it can be done somehow.
Because she's a female. If she were a man, we could call him an "overrated bozo". You wouldn't call a woman a "bozo", since that's a reference to Bozo the Clown, who was a man.
There's always an exception somewhere. Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, was a uniquely talented individual, and if Apple hadn't brought him back the way they did, they would indeed have died years ago. I seriously doubt this Marissa Mayer is this sort of uniquely talented person. Moreover, Apple has always had a bit of a cult around it due to the qualities of its products (remember, their whole goal was to make computers that regular people could use for work and everyday tasks, hence their extreme focus on UI and UX from way back when Jobs toured PARC). Yahoo doesn't have anything like this; its whole claim to fame was that it was a web portal back in the days before Google and search engines; essentially it started out as a giant web directory. This whole concept is totally obsolete now, so they tried to pitch themselves as a "front page" to the internet, but not many people care about that any more.
The only way I see them surviving is if they use the cash they still have and re-invent themselves into something different, mostly abandoning this "web portal" crap. I have no idea what that would be, however, and since really revolutionary ideas (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) never come from large, established corporations, but rather from tiny start-ups, I think their days are very numbered.
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I remember being told a story (I don't know if it's true, as I was much too young at the time to remember) that back in the 70s, they tried to switch to selling gasoline in the US in Liters instead of gallons. However, instead of converting honestly, many gas station owners jacked up the price, thinking people wouldn't notice. Of course, they did, and metricification became reviled. Again, I don't know if there's any truth to this story.
Temperatures took the longest to get intuitively as I had to live through the various weather patterns before I could feel it. But, even then there wasn't really any advantage to it as I was still comparing it to what I consider a comfortable temperature.
Personally, I think there's a small disadvantage to using Celsius rather than Fahrenheit: you get a smaller range of usable whole numbers. The temperatures we humans are likely to experience walking around on this planet range from about -50F to 135F; in America, it's probably more like -40 to 120F. And in temperate cllimates (most of the US, but not all), you're not likely to see many days that fall outside of the 0F-100F range. If you convert those to Celcius, they'll be about -45C to 57C, -40C to 49C, and -18C to 38C. 1 degree Fahrenheit is just enough of a difference I think for people to notice the difference, and when I'm setting my thermostat at home, it's enough for me to want that level of granularity. I wouldn't be happy with a thermostat that only let me choose between 68, 70, 72, 74, etc. Wtih Celcius, you get less granularity unless you resort to fractions or decimal places.
And for what? What does it gain you? Nothing that I can see. If I'm doing scientific calculations, I'm going to be using Kelvins anyway, not Celcius, and converting between any of the systems is trivial if I have a calculator.
Ever since I was in the Army, I've always written my dates as 12-FEB-09
My wife was in the Air Force, and she always writes dates as 12FEB2009 (no hyphens, 4-digit year). I adopted the convention because it does make a lot of sense. If you write date-first, you're going to have lots of Americans who interpret it wrong. If you write month-first, you'll have all the non-Americans interpreting it wrong. You can also do year-first (year/month/date), but you'll definitely have to write all 4 digits of the year or someone will get confused thinking you're talking about the 13th, instead of 2013; but that is one way to avoid the problem without having to use 3-letter month abbreviations. Of course, some people probably don't like the 12FEB2009 notation because it uses English month names/abbrevations.
A guy commented just above that his '01 Ford (which isn't exactly new, but not exactly ancient either; lots of people drive 10-15 year old cars these days) has a speedometer with only MPH markings on it.
Are you incapable of reading? I never proposed 48 independent states, I proposed a handful of independent republics. Go re-read my prior post before you spout any more stupidity.
That would be nice, but we wouldn't hear the end of it from the southern states.
What are you talking about? They've been itching to break away for over 150 years. They'd be happy to be allowed to go out on their own finally. Yes, they do absorb the most Federal money, but that's irrelevant: go ask all the Southern pride folks if they want to secede or not, and they'll tell you "yes". They think they'll do just fine without a Federal government (or at least, with only a Federal government that encompasses the Southern states and is independent from the north and west).
and would quickly erupt into anarchy once the shit hit the fan. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they killed themselves in the span of a month.
That may be, but again, the Southerners don't see it that way. And if they do self-destruct, how's that our problem? The conservatives (who are strong in the South) are constantly talking about "letting the free market work"; well, let's give them their freedom and leave them to their own devices. They're all adults; it's their own responsibility to take care of themselves. If they can do better on their own, great. If not, oh well. Either way, the rest of us would be better off without their representatives being part of our government.
And it's not just that I think the South should be kicked out, it's the whole union: the northwest, the midwest, the southwest, the southeast should all be separate countries. They'd probably all (or at least most of them) do better without having to be part of a single union where none of them can agree on anything, and the federal government of which has entirely too much power and no longer represents the will of the people (for example: marijuana laws), and thrives on the endless infighting between the different regional interests.
Ok, but I still stand by my prior assertion. If belief in "the Illuminati" is sufficient for having someone detained, then so should watching Fox News. Additionally, anyone who believes Obama is any different from Bush should also be committed. So that should cover about 98% of the country right there.
Sure, but how is a law enforcement officer supposed to be able to determine if someone is mentally unstable. Believing in the Illuminati is no more proof of mental instability than believing Fox News to be a reliable source of journalism. If ranting about the Illuminati is sufficient to detain someone without due process, then we should be doing the same for a large portion of our population that watches Fox News.
Exactly. Voting doesn't do squat when you're limited to two pre-approved choices that are both bad. And bullets (or explosives) don't help either; just ask Jared Loughner or Timothy McVeigh; their actions sure didn't help matters any.
The pen (or the keyboard) truly is mightier than the sword. Of course, while mighty, the keyboard isn't very effective when the country's populace is completely dumbed-down and apathetic.
Personally, my hope is that the political and economic pressures in the US will cause it to break apart into a handful of separate republics, and that by being freed of having to compromise with the other states with completely different views and values, some of those republics will prosper, much like some of the eastern European countries prospered after being freed of Soviet rule (such as Czech Republic and Poland).
Literally hundreds of chemical species are in their lists of banned substances it's amazing that anything can be made or grown there.
That shouldn't be a problem for growing things; you just wouldn't use any pesticides or artificial fertilizers. Farmers got along just fine hundreds of years ago before all these substances were invented. Considering how much food the EU produces (and exports), they don't seem to be having a problem there.
But yes, for modern manufacturing, having a lot of banned toxic substances would be a problem. It just isn't possible to make most manufactured goods without handling toxic or hazardous substances at some point.
One of the reasons the high-end luxury car brands have lower quality scores is because their owners have higher expectations, and complain more about minor problems. If there's a squeak or rattle in your new $100k Mercedes, you take it back to the dealership for warranty repairs. If there's a squeak in your $15k Ford, you just live with it. So Mercedes looks bad because it has an incident of a warranty repair, whereas Ford doesn't.
Also, Mercedes is not a luxury brand in Europe, only in the USA.
They just need to find a lode of rare-earth elements somewhere in their borders.
Like what? I'm just curious. For instance, suppose I have a small family (mom-n-pop) business here in the USA (that sells on the internet, rather than being tied to a specific locale), and decide I want to move to Europe. What would I be in for?
amend/abolish ridiculous labor laws which are killing startups
I'm just curious; what kind of labor laws do they have which are killing startups? Over here in the US, hiring isn't that hard when you only have a few employees, and even asl long as as it's under 40 I hear the labor laws aren't too hard to keep up with. Over 40, however, it starts getting really complicated, at least that's what a small company I used to work for told me.
"Bimbo", as I'm sure you well know, is derogatory term used to denote sexual promiscuity.
No, it's not. I don't know where you got that. Where I come from, "bimbo" basically translates to "female airhead". It's also a synonym for "ditz". It has nothing to do with sexual practices or promiscuity.
Sounds good, but I seriously doubt this Marissa person would be interested in doing that and essentially putting herself out of a job, and also making herself look incapable.
Hmm. You seem to have a good point here.
Of course, every single one of those seems to be a Google acquisition. Does Yahoo have any similar successes to point to? I doubt it.
Isn't that true of lots of companies from that time though?
Really, I think Apple was an exception, one which very few people could have predicted accurately. "slashdot_commenter" is right; their fortunes really didn't turn around until the iPod.
No, because history shows that big corporations buying start-ups never turns out well. The big corp has no idea how to effectively use the new start-up, and its potential (assuming it had any) ends up being wasted.
Of course, most start-ups go nowhere too. But of those lucky few that succeed, we do get things like Google, Yahoo (back when they were successful), and Facebook (ugh).
No, it just wouldn't make any sense, just like calling a man a "bimbo" wouldn't make any sense at all. Calling a woman a "bimbo", and a man a "bozo", is fine; you're just alleging that the person in question is not very competent.
Yes, that may very well be, but if she were a male, you wouldn't call her (him) that. A stupid male you might call a "bozo" (or just a moron or idiot), but never a "bimbo"; that's reserved for women. I'm only pointing this out because it loos like PlastikMissle has some kind of problem with the usage of the word "bimbo". I'm just pointing out that it's entirely appropriate.
Dating? Do they even still do that? I remember Yahoo Personals in the early-mid 2000s, but it was a disaster, because most of the "women" on there weren't real. They eventually shut it down, as I remember.
Google would have to do some serious foot-shooting to make their product more crappy than Yahoo mail. Yes, Gmail's new UI sucks donkey balls, but it's nowhere near as bad as Yahoo's gaudy crap.
And why hasn't someone made some Greasemonkey script or extension to fix Gmail anyway? Surely it can be done somehow.
Because she's a female. If she were a man, we could call him an "overrated bozo". You wouldn't call a woman a "bozo", since that's a reference to Bozo the Clown, who was a man.
There's always an exception somewhere. Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, was a uniquely talented individual, and if Apple hadn't brought him back the way they did, they would indeed have died years ago. I seriously doubt this Marissa Mayer is this sort of uniquely talented person. Moreover, Apple has always had a bit of a cult around it due to the qualities of its products (remember, their whole goal was to make computers that regular people could use for work and everyday tasks, hence their extreme focus on UI and UX from way back when Jobs toured PARC). Yahoo doesn't have anything like this; its whole claim to fame was that it was a web portal back in the days before Google and search engines; essentially it started out as a giant web directory. This whole concept is totally obsolete now, so they tried to pitch themselves as a "front page" to the internet, but not many people care about that any more.
The only way I see them surviving is if they use the cash they still have and re-invent themselves into something different, mostly abandoning this "web portal" crap. I have no idea what that would be, however, and since really revolutionary ideas (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) never come from large, established corporations, but rather from tiny start-ups, I think their days are very numbered.