Yeah, OK that is different. First of all there is only one government and only they can collect taxes. In the UK (and EU) every one up the chain from the producer to the consumer is paying sales tax (VAT/IVA/TVA/whatever), but because the amount you pay is offset against the amount you charge in theory you're only paying on your profit and the ultimate consumer can't offset so they pay the full amount, I imagine this is to avoid the coke case you mention, but opens up all sorts of loopholes and red tape. Over EU borders there is a waiver agreement in place where you don't have to charge VAT to a customer in another EU country and therefore the customer does not have to claim it back. I guess this is because the tax rates vary from country to country and the output and input tax would no longer balance making everyone lives more miserable than they already are.
Income tax is also collected on individual's net income of course and corporation tax on companies net profit (20% for small companies, 30% for big ones, 0% for very big ones). In the UK we also have National Insurance which isn't technically a tax but a "Contribution" and historically was used to fund the National Health Service. It is of course collected buy the same government and goes straight into the same coffers as income tax, but it is a convienient way for the government to say the are not raising tax while still actually raising tax (the NI rate is now about half the income tax rate, ideally it should be about 5%).
The trouble is gnome's workspaces are not intuitive, they are not linked to each other in any way so it's hard to visualise where you are in the system. Beryl's cube is great for this and just as easy to use. What's not good about it is all the confusion over desktops, workspaces and viewports. Especially the fact that Gnome's workspaces can't be synced with Beryl meaning that all the open windows on the system show up in the taskbar on all viewports. Which is stupid.
It's been a few months since I tried it so maybe they fixed it by now, but it does stop it being useful for me.
I work with large ad agencies regularly and I can assure you that they are not worried about the effect ad-block is having on their business. I've given up mentioning it now, but the usual response was "ad-what? why would people want to do that?", followed by "If ads make them angry they're not our target market" and one has pointed out that if fewer people you know aren't going to click see the ad that raises the CTR. Love it or hate it advertising is here to stay.
If a site is really that valuable to me, I'll pay (micropayments?) for the content. No you won't (well, maybe you personally will, but 99.999999% of the rest of the world won't). Ask anyone who's run a content site that has chosen to go ad-free, subscription only instead of ad paid free-at-point-of-delivery (and that is a choice all successfull sites have to make at some point). The subs funded sites die before they hit the ground. You instantly lose 90% of your traffic and the remaining 10% are slowly whittled away by new competitors that chose the other route.
It's probably worth pointing out that there is also no such thing as an "English" exam either, there are a dozen different examination boards and they all set their own. A school also doesn't have to be in the geographic area of the examination board to sit their exams. At least that was the case 15 years ago: one of my GCSE exams at my school in the midlands was set by the southern examination board, 2 more by the midlands board, 2 by a general board and the rest by the northern board. Schools can pick and choose according to their taste
As to the article, this has been going on for years and everyone here knows it. Every year the pass rates go up, the government says "wow, aren't we good" and the pupils get stupider. The was a recent news article here about how much employers are having to spend to retrain new employees in basic numeracy and literacy skills and having hired for a position last year I can confirm that, even amongst graduates, literacy is absolutely appalling.
I'm no MS fanboy, but I don't really get the vista bashing that goes on on here. Well, I do, MS == EVIL, duh, but I'd have expected more people to have actually used it. I thought I would never use it given its bad press and stupid licensing deals, but I got a new laptop from work with vista pre-installed. I was going to blow it away and put ubuntu on but having now used it for 2 months I have to say I am pleasantly surprised. I does just seem to work. All the problems I have had have turned out to be VAIO drivers. It is much better than XP in every respect I have noticed (though I don't play games on my laptop) and all thoughts of ubuntu have evaporated.
I was actually considering swapping to a mac because I wanted a better environment than XP to work in, but they are just too expensive (in the UK) and my coworker who is a mac fanboy has at least as many problems with his macbook as my old XP machine did, plus I really dislike the lack of choice in software that running a mac gives you. It shouldn't matter if the default works well, but that's not the point. In the end it was this and the one-button mouse that put me off; I'm so used to right clicking and the scroll wheel in windows and ubunutu that it drove me up the wall not to have these two things (in my brief testing).
How does gun control always come to mixed up in these Freedom discussions? The right bear arms does not keep you free (most people don't even take it up). Do you really think your 9mm handgun, or even that WWII AT gun you've got in the backyard, is going to help you if the government did suddenly turn militarily on it's own people? Neither have much penetrating power against an Abrams.
No, the way a government turns on its own people is by making them carry ID papers and giving the police the freedom to stop and search at any time. The right to carry arms has no bearing on this and is largely irrelevant in the modern age, it was written when the height of military technology was a man on a horse with a flintlock musket. Even a homemade matchlock could take him down, so every person who owned a gun was an effective soldier.
How the 2nd amendment has managed to become twisted over time to be now portayed as defending yourself against the state is beyond me. Given exactly what it says and a little knowledge of how the revolutionary war was fought (ie they raised impromtu militias and only had a miniscule standing army), it clearly means that the national government wanted people to keep a gun so that they could raise a militia in times of need (goddamn Regulators), NOT that they felt that people should be able to protect themselves from the state, because that would have been a rebellion (which one Sam Adams felt should be punishable by death).
Isn't that like when people thought the Earth was flat, despite the Bible saying it was round? I think the first half of that is a myth, at least as far as educated people are concerned. The ancient greeks knew the world was round, as did the Romans. Your medieval peasant-in-the-field may have thought that it was flat, if he thought about it at all, but the Bible would have had very little affect on him as even if he could read Latin he wasn't allowed to read that particular book until Martin Luther (I think) came along. Don't forget that Columbus was trying to get to the Indies by going the long way round the world when he hit America. He wouldn't have tried that if he didn't think the world was round.
Agreed, only a few weeks ago Putin was badmouthing the WTO and the US seems to be (in public at least) sticking to it's guns on them dropping government subsidies for Tupelov (cos Boeing's never had gubment money...) plus the EU seems to be getting cold feet now, so perhaps Putin has changed his mind and decided he can go it alone now. Other events certainly seem to point that way (Litvenenko, the Arctic, Georgia).
There is more chance of Congress giving Fidel the medal of honour than them dropping cotton subsidies.
It is a game of logic No, no it's not. Not if you're any good anyway. I lost interest in chess when I was about 13 when I realised that the people who were beating me at chess were simply memorising moves and positions and treating it as a test of memory rather than logic. I actually got through about three rounds in an inter-schools tournament (despite being an awful player) simply by doing stupid moves that no one was prepared for. That random/fisher chess sounds like a solution, but frankly there are better and more fun games around these days.
Also, as far as I know, they still haven't solved some of the problems with XML Maybe that's why... I mean why wait for the solution to a possibly insoluble problem in order to progress? XML is great for programmers but your average myspace/hello world user has enough problems with html. Why not just accept that html isn't xml?
So now we get more tags in HTML. What are those good for? Why not update? The various HTML incarnations were developed in the 90s based on what we *thought* the web might be used for in the future, why not update to reflect what it's actually used for now, after 10 years of experience?
In a UK general election all votes are paper and counted by hand and unless there's a recount the results are are always available within 12 hours (and normally much quicker). ie polling closes at 10pm and when you wake up the next day the results are known. I can't see any reason to need the results quicker than that.
If it takes a week they need to either employ more counters (they're unpaid volunteers in the UK AFAIK) or re-examine their methods.
The UK does have EDGE, (I know because my orange phone is constantly telling me) however O2 doesn't have an Edge network, which makes it a very strange choice of network. Unless they're planning a 3G version for europe, not that the coverage of that is great either.
In reply to your first point; we call them lightbulbs. (Powered by methane digesters. TFA is wrong, read the original site)
Your second point is better... They are naive if they think that a) they can do that and b) it's not in itself harmful. Wild bugs are needed for such essential functions as pollination and decomposition. No one really understands the exact organisms and mechanisms involved (cf the Biosphere project) so you can't introduce just the "beneficial" species.
Although some people did RTFA most clearly just looked at the pics and didn't go any further. If you actually read the site they have of course thought about this: http://www.verticalfarm.com/plans-2k5.htm
The UK market is horrendously expensive compared to, as far as I can work out, the whole of the rest of the world, particularly when it comes to data. I saw some Scandawegian data tariffs quoted on here a few days ago and, apart from an all-you-can-eat tariff simply not being available here, it was an order of magnitude cheaper. When I looked last year for my company the cheapest data tarif I could find was ~£100/month for 20Mb of data with overages at £10/Mb! Looking now they've dropped a load in a year, but I'm not surprised as no-one can have been buying it at those rates. I assume they justify it because they paid billions for the 3G licenses, but 3G is only accessible in large cities and no is going to use it at those prices anyway. It's like one of the world's biggest companies doesn't understand the basic laws of supply and demand.
The only good news is that the EU is about to come down on them all like a ton of bricks...
TA planes are turned back every month now, it just doesn't get reported anymore. Normally it's because the passenger list includes a "Mohammed".
The US may think it can call the shots, but if you had to permanently live in a room with a sociopath you'd probably opt for the quiet life too (or cut off his oil supply).
NONE of the providers make thier roaming charges easy to find out, sure its probablly burried on thier websites somewhere lol, Orange in the UK don't know their own charges anyway! If you ring up their business support line they have to go away and speak to another dept in order to get them, and even then they weren't really sure. And this was for France, not Albania or somewhere.
The average brit is photographed 200 to 400 times per day WTF?! Where did you get that stat from? I can guarantee you that I am not photographed once in a normal working day (and no I don't work from home). Perhaps a Londoner might get to this figure if you count each frame of a movie as one photograph, but London != Britain. Everyone who lives in London gets what they deserve, commuting charge and all. In fact I've always thought that a much better idea would be to charge people coming out of London, that way the rest of us might be spared a little on bank holidays.
Also where in that BBC article does it say "random"? If (and it's a big If given the tone of the article) they're used, they'll only be used on people who have been pulled over anyway. No policeman has the time to randomaly pull people over just to ID them, there simply aren't enough of them.
You shouldn't believe the UK Big Brother sensationalism you read on here all the time, in the same way I shouldn't believe that America is run by multinationals who are all secretly in league with Bush and populated by gun-toting hillbillies who think that Hilary is a Commie and all foreigners should be strip searched when entering the country.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, OK that is different. First of all there is only one government and only they can collect taxes. In the UK (and EU) every one up the chain from the producer to the consumer is paying sales tax (VAT/IVA/TVA/whatever), but because the amount you pay is offset against the amount you charge in theory you're only paying on your profit and the ultimate consumer can't offset so they pay the full amount, I imagine this is to avoid the coke case you mention, but opens up all sorts of loopholes and red tape. Over EU borders there is a waiver agreement in place where you don't have to charge VAT to a customer in another EU country and therefore the customer does not have to claim it back. I guess this is because the tax rates vary from country to country and the output and input tax would no longer balance making everyone lives more miserable than they already are.
Income tax is also collected on individual's net income of course and corporation tax on companies net profit (20% for small companies, 30% for big ones, 0% for very big ones). In the UK we also have National Insurance which isn't technically a tax but a "Contribution" and historically was used to fund the National Health Service. It is of course collected buy the same government and goes straight into the same coffers as income tax, but it is a convienient way for the government to say the are not raising tax while still actually raising tax (the NI rate is now about half the income tax rate, ideally it should be about 5%).
The trouble is gnome's workspaces are not intuitive, they are not linked to each other in any way so it's hard to visualise where you are in the system. Beryl's cube is great for this and just as easy to use. What's not good about it is all the confusion over desktops, workspaces and viewports. Especially the fact that Gnome's workspaces can't be synced with Beryl meaning that all the open windows on the system show up in the taskbar on all viewports. Which is stupid. It's been a few months since I tried it so maybe they fixed it by now, but it does stop it being useful for me.
I work with large ad agencies regularly and I can assure you that they are not worried about the effect ad-block is having on their business. I've given up mentioning it now, but the usual response was "ad-what? why would people want to do that?", followed by "If ads make them angry they're not our target market" and one has pointed out that if fewer people you know aren't going to click see the ad that raises the CTR. Love it or hate it advertising is here to stay.
Given that they spelt "are" in their petition name as "r", I with you...
I think that was exactly the point he was making...
It's probably worth pointing out that there is also no such thing as an "English" exam either, there are a dozen different examination boards and they all set their own. A school also doesn't have to be in the geographic area of the examination board to sit their exams. At least that was the case 15 years ago: one of my GCSE exams at my school in the midlands was set by the southern examination board, 2 more by the midlands board, 2 by a general board and the rest by the northern board. Schools can pick and choose according to their taste
As to the article, this has been going on for years and everyone here knows it. Every year the pass rates go up, the government says "wow, aren't we good" and the pupils get stupider. The was a recent news article here about how much employers are having to spend to retrain new employees in basic numeracy and literacy skills and having hired for a position last year I can confirm that, even amongst graduates, literacy is absolutely appalling.
I was actually considering swapping to a mac because I wanted a better environment than XP to work in, but they are just too expensive (in the UK) and my coworker who is a mac fanboy has at least as many problems with his macbook as my old XP machine did, plus I really dislike the lack of choice in software that running a mac gives you. It shouldn't matter if the default works well, but that's not the point. In the end it was this and the one-button mouse that put me off; I'm so used to right clicking and the scroll wheel in windows and ubunutu that it drove me up the wall not to have these two things (in my brief testing).
How does gun control always come to mixed up in these Freedom discussions? The right bear arms does not keep you free (most people don't even take it up). Do you really think your 9mm handgun, or even that WWII AT gun you've got in the backyard, is going to help you if the government did suddenly turn militarily on it's own people? Neither have much penetrating power against an Abrams.
No, the way a government turns on its own people is by making them carry ID papers and giving the police the freedom to stop and search at any time. The right to carry arms has no bearing on this and is largely irrelevant in the modern age, it was written when the height of military technology was a man on a horse with a flintlock musket. Even a homemade matchlock could take him down, so every person who owned a gun was an effective soldier.
How the 2nd amendment has managed to become twisted over time to be now portayed as defending yourself against the state is beyond me. Given exactly what it says and a little knowledge of how the revolutionary war was fought (ie they raised impromtu militias and only had a miniscule standing army), it clearly means that the national government wanted people to keep a gun so that they could raise a militia in times of need (goddamn Regulators), NOT that they felt that people should be able to protect themselves from the state, because that would have been a rebellion (which one Sam Adams felt should be punishable by death).
There is more chance of Congress giving Fidel the medal of honour than them dropping cotton subsidies.
640K ought to be enough for anybody!
I believe there's a saying for what you're talking about; it involves shovels and gold diggers...
In a UK general election all votes are paper and counted by hand and unless there's a recount the results are are always available within 12 hours (and normally much quicker). ie polling closes at 10pm and when you wake up the next day the results are known. I can't see any reason to need the results quicker than that.
If it takes a week they need to either employ more counters (they're unpaid volunteers in the UK AFAIK) or re-examine their methods.
The UK does have EDGE, (I know because my orange phone is constantly telling me) however O2 doesn't have an Edge network, which makes it a very strange choice of network. Unless they're planning a 3G version for europe, not that the coverage of that is great either.
In reply to your first point; we call them lightbulbs. (Powered by methane digesters. TFA is wrong, read the original site)
Your second point is better... They are naive if they think that a) they can do that and b) it's not in itself harmful. Wild bugs are needed for such essential functions as pollination and decomposition. No one really understands the exact organisms and mechanisms involved (cf the Biosphere project) so you can't introduce just the "beneficial" species.
Although some people did RTFA most clearly just looked at the pics and didn't go any further. If you actually read the site they have of course thought about this: http://www.verticalfarm.com/plans-2k5.htm
Well, my (tech) company is based in a small town in South Devon, so that's what I mean ;)
The only good news is that the EU is about to come down on them all like a ton of bricks...
The US may think it can call the shots, but if you had to permanently live in a room with a sociopath you'd probably opt for the quiet life too (or cut off his oil supply).
I no longer know where to get my new and used Eigen Vectors!
Also where in that BBC article does it say "random"? If (and it's a big If given the tone of the article) they're used, they'll only be used on people who have been pulled over anyway. No policeman has the time to randomaly pull people over just to ID them, there simply aren't enough of them.
You shouldn't believe the UK Big Brother sensationalism you read on here all the time, in the same way I shouldn't believe that America is run by multinationals who are all secretly in league with Bush and populated by gun-toting hillbillies who think that Hilary is a Commie and all foreigners should be strip searched when entering the country.