Hmm. I'd have to say that when I first learned I was going to be a dad, the third thing that popped through my mind was "Well, I guess I don't have to worry so much about my pension anymore."
(The first thing was "Already? I haven't finished paying off the wedding yet." and the second thing was "Yay! I love children and I've always wanted to be a dad!")
In pure financial terms, the ROI for children is that, hopefully, they look after you in your old age. Now I know that is a hopefully, but given the pension crisis, I reckon that there is a much stronger chance, and better quality, of my children looking after me throughout my old age, than my pension will provide.
The sleep deprivation and spare time loss is an absolute killer, mind. If you thought getting a proper job really cut into your RPG campaigns and FOSS hobby-coding, a baby stops both pretty much stone dead. Plus, my study has become a bedroom. I'm hoping to introduce her to LOGO and FF RPG at the age of 2 or 3, hopefully then we'll both get back into our stride.
So, being a computer geek isn't interesting enough on film; they have to dramatise it.
But this applies to pretty much every job. Do you think an average spy's day is like a James Bond film? Or do you think they spend most of their day sitting in a car drinking cold coffee whilst listening through hours and hours of dull domestic telephone calls?
What do most eco-warriors actually do? Fight running battles on oil rigs, or spend weeks in squalid apartments searching through scientific and legal journals?
The fact that Hollywood focusses on life's edge cases and dramatisations shouldn't come as any surprise.
And I'm quite happy with that - I want explosions on the big screen, not on my doorstep.
Since most Americans tend to take short trips, such as a few blocks to the grocery store, a lot of gas is wasted
You've got a very good point there. It has been quite noticable on my half a dozen or so trips to the US, that Americans drive really short distances where a European would walk. There are exceptions (New York city, for example, where there seemed to be fewer cars than my local town let alone London- I found NYC comparatively quiet) but generally this rule holds. I certainly wouldn't drive any distance less than one and a half miles, unless I was carrying significant cargo.
I think a lot of this isn't so much down to laziness, obesity or convenience, but personal safety. Several times in the USA, I've tried to walk from my hotel to a supermarket (grocery store), and found... I couldn't. The pavements (sidewalks) and zebra crossings just didn't exist. I'd have to walk out into the main road to get there. And, IIRC, in the USA that's illegal- jaywalking- an offence that simply doesn't exist in the UK, where pedestrians have absolute priority over vehicles except on motorways (interstates). For example, there is no pavement (sidewalk) outside my house in the UK - I just walk in the road, and the traffic has to give way (this is unusual, but by no means rare). The Highway Code (government road safety rules) recommend that I should walk facing oncoming traffic, but even if I don't, traffic still has to give way to me.
So maybe part of the answer is that America just needs to build more sidewalks and zebra crossings, and turn more carparks (parking lots) into skateparks. Or get rid of jaywalking as an offence.
(OT: What is the en:US for "zebra crossing"? The black and white stripes on a road that indicate a safe[r] place for pedestrians to cross the road. Sometimes there are just white stripes and the black is assumed to be the tarmac colour.)
TFA: According to the Energy Information Administration, the average cost of gas in the U.S. that year was $1.85 per gallon of regular grade4 and the average gas mileage of a new, light-duty vehicle was 21 mpg
Okay, forget the rest of the damn article. Amercia, your problem is right there: MPG.
Whilst American cars struggle to reach 25MPG, the average MPG of a European car is over 40MPG (source).
How can the country that has MIT have such crappy MPG? I mean, aren't you chaps utterly ashamed of your engineers? Forget saving money, just bring it down to technical prowess. Why aren't American engineering nerds hanging their head in shame?
I have a 4x4 SUV that does better than 25MPG, not just on the motorway and country lanes, but on crowded higgledy-piggledy British towns. And it's a stupid 4x4 that I only really need in the winter! My mother's sporty saloon car does 45MPG. My wife's Volvo (read: APC with upholstery) does 35MPG. What the hell are you Yanks driving to need that much fuel per mile? Do you just grab a fire truck and bolt a couch to it, or what?
(Even given 1 Imperial gallon = 1.2 US Gallons, your MPG still sucks, Amercia)
Show me a report of someone actually having been banned from "using the Internet" as an ASBO condition.
There isn't one.
Because those kind of wide-ranging orders can't be imposed as an ASBO condition. That kind of stuff can only be imposed as a punishment - parole condition or conditional discharge - after proof in court that they breached the lesser ASBO conditions.
An ASBO might prevent someone from "using the Internet to cause distress" or "using the Internet to observe children on webcams", but not "using the Internet".
I think you're misunderstanding how ASBOs and restraining orders work.
With a restraining order, the prosecution asks the Judge to command the defendant not to do a bunch of unplesant things. If the defendant ignores this, and does those things, and that is proven in court, then and only then does he go to jail
With an ASBO, the prosecution asks the Judge to command the defendant not to do a bunch of unplesant things, and sets some penalties, such as having his PC confiscated or whatever if he ignores the order. If the defendant ignores the order, and does those things, and that is proven in court, then and only then does he have his PC confiscated or whatever.
The judge absolutely cannot order the guy's PC to be taken away or whatever, without proving breach of the order in court.
So it goes to court not once but twice. Firstly the Judge has to ascertain that there is sufficient grounds for granting the order, and secondly a jury has to be convinced that the order was breached.
Your remaining reservations are equally as valid against restraining orders, which have worked well for decades without anyone having a valid problem.
voice_of_all_reason wrote: even if they've not been convicted
ASBOs are essentially the same as a restraining order. Restraining orders can be placed on people who haven't been convicted, either. Almost identical burden of proof, too.
Only if the terms of the restraining order (or ASBO) have been breached, does anyone go to jail.
Tomayto, tomato. It's just British English for "restraining order" with a few bits of neighbourhood stuff thrown in.
incest wrote: Programmers are, let's face it, completely nerdy compared to the general population. My dad, for example, writes e-mails in all capital letters.
My dadis a programmer and he still writes emails in capital letters.
Mind you, he did do most of his programming in the 1950s, before lower case letters were included in standard character sets. So I guess he sees lower-case as a somewhat unnecessary modern luxury.
He still writes economic models in QBASIC. In capitals, of course.
The Americans have a foriegn policy? You mean someone actually intended all that crap?
Surely if the kind of people in charge of such a policy were put in charge getting things into orbit, they'd be half way through digging to China by now?
Ted Haegar's Novell Open Audio podcast for 17 April has a lengthly and amusing phone-round search for FOSS users who are part of the hairy guy set- but the only coders he can find who have, are employed by Microsoft.
BoomerSooner: The US economic system grows very quickly compared to european nations. Would anyone here be happy with a 0.8% productivity increase or GDP annual growth (here in the US)? Hell no, people would be freaking out.
You're picking your figures to match your argument. Sure, the US economic system grows very quickly compared to some European nations - but others do better. The UK annual growth rate for Q4 2005 was 1.8% - faster than the US annual growth rate for Q4 2005 at 1.7%.
I work for a company in their UK HQ, with US offices; I am consistently horrified by the miserly 2/3-week holiday allowance that my US cow-orkers seem to consider "normal". The raw minimum in EU states is 4 weeks and most companies offer nearer 5 weeks for established employees.
The thing is, though, that if the cost of living is cheap enough compared to your net salary, you can afford to take unpaid leave. With the cost of living and taxes being much lower in the US, many more US employees can afford to take unpaid leave than UK employees.
So any argument comparing growth to paid leave doesn't hold water; we aren't comparing apples to apples.
Ditto unemployment. Not only do unemployment rates vary enormously across the EU (mass unemployment in France; hardly any in the UK), but the benefits paid also vary enormously.
Treating the EU as one homogenous mass, just because it's relatively small, densely populated, some bits of it share a single currency and some (different) bits of it share a single border control system, is going to completely kill any statistical argument. You can't pretend that rich countries such as Denmark and the UK are in any way economically similar to poorer nations such as Portugal or Poland. The EU exists to make trade easier and regulations more consistent, not to make the dozens of member countries into one country called Europe.
Yes, but then we generally drive manual transmission stick-shift with small engines that require frequent gear changes to maximise efficiency, rather than the oversized fairground bumper-car dodgems with huge slow engines and lazy automatic 4-speed gearings that the Americans drive. Plus their speed limit is only 55mph - I mean, how dangerous can they be?
My experience of driving a brand new Chevrolet up California's route 101 for a week, was that it was not unlike playing GTA:San Andreas from a large comfortable sofa with all the responsiveness and cornering of an exceptionally reluctant cow. Compare this to whipping along a European autobahn at twice that speed in a hatchback a gazillion times as fast on an engine half the size, passing six national borders in a day.
On the third hand, the US so big that anyone travelling any serious distance just flies there, so the question of driving ability isn't really relevent beyond local commuting and the occasional road trip vaccation. The irony being that they can't use their mobile phones on an aeroplane, either.
If you want to talk to anyone, your cellphone-over-wifi connection needs to get terminated back into the regular phone system somehow
That's only true because the phone companies (fixed and cell) are discouraging VOIP from the market through FUD. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a numbers game; where sufficient numbers adopt a particular VOIP standard, the balance will fall in VOIP's favour. The fact that that balance has not yet tipped doesn't indicate that the old PSTN system is somehow a mandatory standard, it just indicates that it's what the majority of morons use.
I don't know anyone, not even my great-uncles and great-aunts, not anyone who doesn't have VOIP-capable kit already in their homes (ie. 40kbps+ unmetered TCP/IP connection, PC, speakers and microphone). Yet nobody can be bothered to use it, because they all believe the phone companies' hype that the only convenient way to call someone is to use a PSTN phone.
When I go abroad 4000 miles away in the USA, I text (SMS) the missus back in the UK to say "Go on MSN" and we chat on MSN with full audio and video, for zero pence-per-minute; free. There's plenty of other apps that do this, too, both freeware and FOSS.
Yet the only reason my missus and I do this, is because I set up my wife's PC to do it.
And that's how the phone companies manage to keep us locked into the pay-per-minute PSTN cage. Convenience, and FUD that VOIP is just too hard.
British Telecom's "Fusion" service already provides this. It uses a variant of either the Motorola Razr V3 or Motorola V560 cellphone with Bluetooth, and is shipped with a dedicated BT Bluetooth & WiFi ADSL router that handles both the VOIP calls and regular broadband access for home computers. It's available to anyone in the UK with a British Telecom phoneline that supports ADSL broadband - which is over 99% of the population, including almost all rural areas such as mine.
Most people think the calls route over the normal analogue voice line, but the giveaway that it is VOIP is on this page where they state "can make up to three simultaneous calls", obviously this is must therefore be routed over the ADSL side rather than the voice side.
drivers punching in "crackpot" as their destination?
They're not. The navigation systems are using Crackpot as a waypoint on a calculated "shortest route" between two other points - most likely between Liverpool and Newcastle.
North Yorkshire is a rural hilly area with few roads, which takes up most of central northern England. It is moorland - vast grassy hills, nearly mountains, which are so steep they cannot be cultivated for agriculture, and are left for sheep grazing.
See this map showing the lack of roads in central northern England.
Basically if you are heading from Liverpool to Newcastle, you can either take a massive detour to use the motorways (interstates), or you can go cross-country on rural roads. It would seem that in this case the satellite systems are picking roads which are significantly more rural than the drivers were expecting.
But at least now those townies know that some country folk actually do need 4x4s. The Crackpots, anyway;-) (Disclaimer: I am a UK rural resident and 1.3litre-engine 4x4 driver)
Does "know" sound like "now" and "we're" sound like "where" in an American accent?
Interesting if so - in English (England) pronunciation, "know" has a long "oh" sound, rhyming with "blow", whereas "now" as an "ou" sound, rhyming with "plough". Also "we're" is pronounced the same as "weir" (as in canal/river; two syllables, we-yr) whereas "where" rhymes with "bear" (one syllable). Plus some Englishmen pronounce "where" with the soft "h" sound just audible.
Similar legislation already exists in the UK. It is illegal for a retailer to sell anything second-hand which plugs into the mains which has not passed a Portable Appliance Test. A PAT is also required on almost every mains-powered electrical item in the workplace (computers, monitors etc), usually once every 4 years, unless it is for a high-risk industry such as construction in which case the PAT requirement can be as frequent as every 3 months. Furthermore most charities, schools and so forth will not accept donations of mains electric items which don't have a recent PAT.
What is possibly new about the Japanese legislation is that the article doesn't distinguish between mains-powered and battery-powered items. I expect this has simply been lost in translation; ie. the article is missing this vital information, and in fact the law does indeed only apply to mains-powered items and not battery-powered ones. I can't imagine any government would see safety risks in a battery-powered handheld game.
Yes, I have one. The Commodore Plus 4 was actually released AFTER the Commodore 64, although it had inferior sound and graphics. It did come with a built-in word processor and was aimed at the home office market.
Unfortunately the machine was a commercial flop, with people preferring to stick with the more powerful and games-oriented C64. The Plus 4's programs were compatible with the Commodore C16 (which had smaller memory) which was also a flop.
Out of interest - and waaaay offtopic now - is there a relationship between St John (or the Hospitaliers) and Denmark, whose national flag is also a white cross (albiet offset) on red background?
A red cross sign doesn't mean "the red cross corporation (tm)" to anybody, it means:
a)This guy patches people up b)He doesn't carry a weapon c)Don't shoot him.
Nope - a red cross on a white background means that the bearer is a Knight Templar in the Middle Ages (around 1200AD), a European Crusader warrior for the Christians involved in a Holy War against the Moors (Muslims of Turkey and the Middle East). The Templars also happened to have hospitals which were open for public use - as did pretty much any holy order of most religions - but you can be pretty damned sure they carried some very nasty weapons, and were known for meting out some very unpleasant retribution on Muslim civilians (the Moors were also guilty of some awful attrocities- it was a particularly bloody period of history on all sides, but that's religion for you).
Various bodies still associating themselves with the Knights Templar still exist today, most of which are fairly harmless religious sects (well, as harmless as monotheism can be), but a small minority are fronts for racist right-wing extremists.
The word "hospital" also comes from related Crusader cult, the Knights Hospitaller (aka the Knights of Malta) who were charged with protecting Christian pilgrims on their journies to the Middle East. "Hospitaller" was the word for the staff of a "Hospice" or "Hostel"- words meaning a hotel for pilgrims; primarily providing bed and food, but usually also some basic medical facilities (pilgrims would usually be old or ill anyway, and usually embarked on their pilgrimage in the hope of divine intervention against a terminal illness). However, the Knights Hospitaller's symbol was a white Maltese cross on a red background - the opposite of the Red Cross symbol.
This was my first experience with PCs; my dad had one, issued to lecturers by Wolverhampton University. British built by Brummies, fact fans. Just like those lovely Mini cars. Bostin'!
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Hmm. I'd have to say that when I first learned I was going to be a dad, the third thing that popped through my mind was "Well, I guess I don't have to worry so much about my pension anymore."
(The first thing was "Already? I haven't finished paying off the wedding yet." and the second thing was "Yay! I love children and I've always wanted to be a dad!")
In pure financial terms, the ROI for children is that, hopefully, they look after you in your old age. Now I know that is a hopefully, but given the pension crisis, I reckon that there is a much stronger chance, and better quality, of my children looking after me throughout my old age, than my pension will provide.
The sleep deprivation and spare time loss is an absolute killer, mind. If you thought getting a proper job really cut into your RPG campaigns and FOSS hobby-coding, a baby stops both pretty much stone dead. Plus, my study has become a bedroom. I'm hoping to introduce her to LOGO and FF RPG at the age of 2 or 3, hopefully then we'll both get back into our stride.
So, being a computer geek isn't interesting enough on film; they have to dramatise it.
But this applies to pretty much every job. Do you think an average spy's day is like a James Bond film? Or do you think they spend most of their day sitting in a car drinking cold coffee whilst listening through hours and hours of dull domestic telephone calls?
What do most eco-warriors actually do? Fight running battles on oil rigs, or spend weeks in squalid apartments searching through scientific and legal journals?
The fact that Hollywood focusses on life's edge cases and dramatisations shouldn't come as any surprise.
And I'm quite happy with that - I want explosions on the big screen, not on my doorstep.
Since most Americans tend to take short trips, such as a few blocks to the grocery store, a lot of gas is wasted
You've got a very good point there. It has been quite noticable on my half a dozen or so trips to the US, that Americans drive really short distances where a European would walk. There are exceptions (New York city, for example, where there seemed to be fewer cars than my local town let alone London- I found NYC comparatively quiet) but generally this rule holds. I certainly wouldn't drive any distance less than one and a half miles, unless I was carrying significant cargo.
I think a lot of this isn't so much down to laziness, obesity or convenience, but personal safety. Several times in the USA, I've tried to walk from my hotel to a supermarket (grocery store), and found... I couldn't. The pavements (sidewalks) and zebra crossings just didn't exist. I'd have to walk out into the main road to get there. And, IIRC, in the USA that's illegal- jaywalking- an offence that simply doesn't exist in the UK, where pedestrians have absolute priority over vehicles except on motorways (interstates). For example, there is no pavement (sidewalk) outside my house in the UK - I just walk in the road, and the traffic has to give way (this is unusual, but by no means rare). The Highway Code (government road safety rules) recommend that I should walk facing oncoming traffic, but even if I don't, traffic still has to give way to me.
So maybe part of the answer is that America just needs to build more sidewalks and zebra crossings, and turn more carparks (parking lots) into skateparks. Or get rid of jaywalking as an offence.
(OT: What is the en:US for "zebra crossing"? The black and white stripes on a road that indicate a safe[r] place for pedestrians to cross the road. Sometimes there are just white stripes and the black is assumed to be the tarmac colour.)
TFA: According to the Energy Information Administration, the average cost of gas in the U.S. that year was $1.85 per gallon of regular grade4 and the average gas mileage of a new, light-duty vehicle was 21 mpg
Okay, forget the rest of the damn article. Amercia, your problem is right there: MPG.
Whilst American cars struggle to reach 25MPG, the average MPG of a European car is over 40MPG (source).
How can the country that has MIT have such crappy MPG? I mean, aren't you chaps utterly ashamed of your engineers? Forget saving money, just bring it down to technical prowess. Why aren't American engineering nerds hanging their head in shame?
I have a 4x4 SUV that does better than 25MPG, not just on the motorway and country lanes, but on crowded higgledy-piggledy British towns. And it's a stupid 4x4 that I only really need in the winter! My mother's sporty saloon car does 45MPG. My wife's Volvo (read: APC with upholstery) does 35MPG. What the hell are you Yanks driving to need that much fuel per mile? Do you just grab a fire truck and bolt a couch to it, or what?
(Even given 1 Imperial gallon = 1.2 US Gallons, your MPG still sucks, Amercia)
TigerPaw: 5. Profit!
Don't be silly - Microsoft always put profit first!
Boom-boom! Thank-you, I'll be here all week, please try the fish...
BlueZ3: Heck, perhaps he just enjoys math for its own sake and doesn't want to deal with all the side-effects of notoriety.
Quite.
Perhaps he just hates parties. It's not like he'd be the first mathematician to do so. I and many other Slashdotters can sympathise with this, surely.
Has the speed of light changed at some point?
Here's the memo - summary: Yes. The speed of light in a vaccuum has changed as the universe grew up.
If the universe is 15.8 billion years old, then shouldn't the universe be 31.6 billion light years across?
As well as a constant C, you are also assuming that the universe grew evenly in every direction. I don't know whether that is true.
Eh? There is burden of proof requirement to convict someone of breaching a restraining order, same in the UK as the US.
Show me a report of someone actually having been banned from "using the Internet" as an ASBO condition.
There isn't one.
Because those kind of wide-ranging orders can't be imposed as an ASBO condition. That kind of stuff can only be imposed as a punishment - parole condition or conditional discharge - after proof in court that they breached the lesser ASBO conditions.
An ASBO might prevent someone from "using the Internet to cause distress" or "using the Internet to observe children on webcams", but not "using the Internet".
I think you're misunderstanding how ASBOs and restraining orders work.
With a restraining order, the prosecution asks the Judge to command the defendant not to do a bunch of unplesant things. If the defendant ignores this, and does those things, and that is proven in court, then and only then does he go to jail
With an ASBO, the prosecution asks the Judge to command the defendant not to do a bunch of unplesant things, and sets some penalties, such as having his PC confiscated or whatever if he ignores the order. If the defendant ignores the order, and does those things, and that is proven in court, then and only then does he have his PC confiscated or whatever.
The judge absolutely cannot order the guy's PC to be taken away or whatever, without proving breach of the order in court.
So it goes to court not once but twice. Firstly the Judge has to ascertain that there is sufficient grounds for granting the order, and secondly a jury has to be convinced that the order was breached.
Your remaining reservations are equally as valid against restraining orders, which have worked well for decades without anyone having a valid problem.
voice_of_all_reason wrote: even if they've not been convicted
ASBOs are essentially the same as a restraining order. Restraining orders can be placed on people who haven't been convicted, either. Almost identical burden of proof, too.
Only if the terms of the restraining order (or ASBO) have been breached, does anyone go to jail.
Tomayto, tomato. It's just British English for "restraining order" with a few bits of neighbourhood stuff thrown in.
incest wrote: Programmers are, let's face it, completely nerdy compared to the general population. My dad, for example, writes e-mails in all capital letters.
My dad is a programmer and he still writes emails in capital letters.
Mind you, he did do most of his programming in the 1950s, before lower case letters were included in standard character sets. So I guess he sees lower-case as a somewhat unnecessary modern luxury.
He still writes economic models in QBASIC. In capitals, of course.
The Americans have a foriegn policy? You mean someone actually intended all that crap?
Surely if the kind of people in charge of such a policy were put in charge getting things into orbit, they'd be half way through digging to China by now?
Ted Haegar's Novell Open Audio podcast for 17 April has a lengthly and amusing phone-round search for FOSS users who are part of the hairy guy set- but the only coders he can find who have, are employed by Microsoft.
BoomerSooner: The US economic system grows very quickly compared to european nations. Would anyone here be happy with a 0.8% productivity increase or GDP annual growth (here in the US)? Hell no, people would be freaking out.
You're picking your figures to match your argument. Sure, the US economic system grows very quickly compared to some European nations - but others do better. The UK annual growth rate for Q4 2005 was 1.8% - faster than the US annual growth rate for Q4 2005 at 1.7%.
I work for a company in their UK HQ, with US offices; I am consistently horrified by the miserly 2/3-week holiday allowance that my US cow-orkers seem to consider "normal". The raw minimum in EU states is 4 weeks and most companies offer nearer 5 weeks for established employees.
The thing is, though, that if the cost of living is cheap enough compared to your net salary, you can afford to take unpaid leave. With the cost of living and taxes being much lower in the US, many more US employees can afford to take unpaid leave than UK employees.
So any argument comparing growth to paid leave doesn't hold water; we aren't comparing apples to apples.
Ditto unemployment. Not only do unemployment rates vary enormously across the EU (mass unemployment in France; hardly any in the UK), but the benefits paid also vary enormously.
Treating the EU as one homogenous mass, just because it's relatively small, densely populated, some bits of it share a single currency and some (different) bits of it share a single border control system, is going to completely kill any statistical argument. You can't pretend that rich countries such as Denmark and the UK are in any way economically similar to poorer nations such as Portugal or Poland. The EU exists to make trade easier and regulations more consistent, not to make the dozens of member countries into one country called Europe.
Over here in the UK
Yes, but then we generally drive manual transmission stick-shift with small engines that require frequent gear changes to maximise efficiency, rather than the oversized fairground bumper-car dodgems with huge slow engines and lazy automatic 4-speed gearings that the Americans drive. Plus their speed limit is only 55mph - I mean, how dangerous can they be?
My experience of driving a brand new Chevrolet up California's route 101 for a week, was that it was not unlike playing GTA:San Andreas from a large comfortable sofa with all the responsiveness and cornering of an exceptionally reluctant cow. Compare this to whipping along a European autobahn at twice that speed in a hatchback a gazillion times as fast on an engine half the size, passing six national borders in a day.
On the third hand, the US so big that anyone travelling any serious distance just flies there, so the question of driving ability isn't really relevent beyond local commuting and the occasional road trip vaccation. The irony being that they can't use their mobile phones on an aeroplane, either.
If you want to talk to anyone, your cellphone-over-wifi connection needs to get terminated back into the regular phone system somehow
That's only true because the phone companies (fixed and cell) are discouraging VOIP from the market through FUD. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a numbers game; where sufficient numbers adopt a particular VOIP standard, the balance will fall in VOIP's favour. The fact that that balance has not yet tipped doesn't indicate that the old PSTN system is somehow a mandatory standard, it just indicates that it's what the majority of morons use.
I don't know anyone, not even my great-uncles and great-aunts, not anyone who doesn't have VOIP-capable kit already in their homes (ie. 40kbps+ unmetered TCP/IP connection, PC, speakers and microphone). Yet nobody can be bothered to use it, because they all believe the phone companies' hype that the only convenient way to call someone is to use a PSTN phone.
When I go abroad 4000 miles away in the USA, I text (SMS) the missus back in the UK to say "Go on MSN" and we chat on MSN with full audio and video, for zero pence-per-minute; free. There's plenty of other apps that do this, too, both freeware and FOSS.
Yet the only reason my missus and I do this, is because I set up my wife's PC to do it.
And that's how the phone companies manage to keep us locked into the pay-per-minute PSTN cage. Convenience, and FUD that VOIP is just too hard.
British Telecom's "Fusion" service already provides this. It uses a variant of either the Motorola Razr V3 or Motorola V560 cellphone with Bluetooth, and is shipped with a dedicated BT Bluetooth & WiFi ADSL router that handles both the VOIP calls and regular broadband access for home computers. It's available to anyone in the UK with a British Telecom phoneline that supports ADSL broadband - which is over 99% of the population, including almost all rural areas such as mine.
Most people think the calls route over the normal analogue voice line, but the giveaway that it is VOIP is on this page where they state "can make up to three simultaneous calls", obviously this is must therefore be routed over the ADSL side rather than the voice side.
drivers punching in "crackpot" as their destination?
;-) (Disclaimer: I am a UK rural resident and 1.3litre-engine 4x4 driver)
They're not. The navigation systems are using Crackpot as a waypoint on a calculated "shortest route" between two other points - most likely between Liverpool and Newcastle.
North Yorkshire is a rural hilly area with few roads, which takes up most of central northern England. It is moorland - vast grassy hills, nearly mountains, which are so steep they cannot be cultivated for agriculture, and are left for sheep grazing.
See this map showing the lack of roads in central northern England.
Basically if you are heading from Liverpool to Newcastle, you can either take a massive detour to use the motorways (interstates), or you can go cross-country on rural roads. It would seem that in this case the satellite systems are picking roads which are significantly more rural than the drivers were expecting.
But at least now those townies know that some country folk actually do need 4x4s. The Crackpots, anyway
Does "know" sound like "now" and "we're" sound like "where" in an American accent?
Interesting if so - in English (England) pronunciation, "know" has a long "oh" sound, rhyming with "blow", whereas "now" as an "ou" sound, rhyming with "plough". Also "we're" is pronounced the same as "weir" (as in canal/river; two syllables, we-yr) whereas "where" rhymes with "bear" (one syllable). Plus some Englishmen pronounce "where" with the soft "h" sound just audible.
Similar legislation already exists in the UK. It is illegal for a retailer to sell anything second-hand which plugs into the mains which has not passed a Portable Appliance Test. A PAT is also required on almost every mains-powered electrical item in the workplace (computers, monitors etc), usually once every 4 years, unless it is for a high-risk industry such as construction in which case the PAT requirement can be as frequent as every 3 months. Furthermore most charities, schools and so forth will not accept donations of mains electric items which don't have a recent PAT.
What is possibly new about the Japanese legislation is that the article doesn't distinguish between mains-powered and battery-powered items. I expect this has simply been lost in translation; ie. the article is missing this vital information, and in fact the law does indeed only apply to mains-powered items and not battery-powered ones. I can't imagine any government would see safety risks in a battery-powered handheld game.
Yes, I have one. The Commodore Plus 4 was actually released AFTER the Commodore 64, although it had inferior sound and graphics. It did come with a built-in word processor and was aimed at the home office market.
Unfortunately the machine was a commercial flop, with people preferring to stick with the more powerful and games-oriented C64. The Plus 4's programs were compatible with the Commodore C16 (which had smaller memory) which was also a flop.
Ah! Now it makes sense - thanks for that.
Out of interest - and waaaay offtopic now - is there a relationship between St John (or the Hospitaliers) and Denmark, whose national flag is also a white cross (albiet offset) on red background?
A red cross sign doesn't mean "the red cross corporation (tm)" to anybody, it means:
a)This guy patches people up
b)He doesn't carry a weapon
c)Don't shoot him.
Nope - a red cross on a white background means that the bearer is a Knight Templar in the Middle Ages (around 1200AD), a European Crusader warrior for the Christians involved in a Holy War against the Moors (Muslims of Turkey and the Middle East). The Templars also happened to have hospitals which were open for public use - as did pretty much any holy order of most religions - but you can be pretty damned sure they carried some very nasty weapons, and were known for meting out some very unpleasant retribution on Muslim civilians (the Moors were also guilty of some awful attrocities- it was a particularly bloody period of history on all sides, but that's religion for you).
Various bodies still associating themselves with the Knights Templar still exist today, most of which are fairly harmless religious sects (well, as harmless as monotheism can be), but a small minority are fronts for racist right-wing extremists.
The word "hospital" also comes from related Crusader cult, the Knights Hospitaller (aka the Knights of Malta) who were charged with protecting Christian pilgrims on their journies to the Middle East. "Hospitaller" was the word for the staff of a "Hospice" or "Hostel"- words meaning a hotel for pilgrims; primarily providing bed and food, but usually also some basic medical facilities (pilgrims would usually be old or ill anyway, and usually embarked on their pilgrimage in the hope of divine intervention against a terminal illness). However, the Knights Hospitaller's symbol was a white Maltese cross on a red background - the opposite of the Red Cross symbol.
Ah, so what you want is an Apricot PC with a 2x40 character LCD display (scroll down) from 1983.
This was my first experience with PCs; my dad had one, issued to lecturers by Wolverhampton University. British built by Brummies, fact fans. Just like those lovely Mini cars. Bostin'!