The Sony Reader Daily Edition comes close to meeting your needs, although there's no backlight and the presence of the touchscreen apparently makes it much more reflective than other e-readers. Still, it's $100 cheaper, so I thought I'd mention it.
You know, a lot of people manage to satisfy their creative urges without the use of a computer. Just because you don't get involved in the current 'user generated content' craze, that doesn't make you a pod person.
Deary me, I'd hate to know what you think of people who act as mindless recipients of, say, literature from a book.
And everybody likes to sit back, relax, and watch some TV sometimes. There are intelligent, thought-provoking programmes out there (although it sounds like you don't watch them). You might as well criticise people for buying their food instead of growing it themselves.
She also wants an iPhone so she can listen to her music (yes, I told her there are plenty of phones that do the same thing and cost much less).
Other phones can do the same thing for much less, but more often than not they're torturous to use. My boss is one of the most anti-Apple (and pro-Nokia) people I've met, yet even he has been won over by the iPhone music player.
If my parents hadn't already bought my grandparents a Vista laptop a while back, I would be recommending one of these to them. It does everything that they do with said laptop, it's simple to use, and there's nothing that can really go wrong.
Apple have released a toaster and everyone (myself included) is complaining that it's not a pressure cooker.
Consequently, nations other than England currently have significantly more representation in government than the English do.
The number of Scottish MPs was reduced from 72 to 59 following the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, in order to bring us more in line with the average. Scots make up about 8.6% of the population, and we're represented by 9.1% of MPs.
We're still over-represented to the tune of 3 MPs; 56 would bring us closest to the correct proportion. The sparsely populated areas of Scotland tend to be over represented; the already large constituencies in the highlands would be vast otherwise, and the island constituencies don't lend themselves to being increased in size.
I think the issue of Scottish MPs goes some way to prove your initial point. One of the sticking issues surrounding the whole topic of the West Lothian Question has been that Scotland returns a large number of Labour MPs to Westminster. This is more due to the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system than actual voting intentions. It's not particularly democratic.
If you look at the results of the constituency part of the 2007 Scottish Parliament election (which is conducted using FPTP), the SNP actually received more votes than Labour, yet Labour was handed an absolute majority of constituency seats. Obviously you can't draw a direct comparison between this and the 2005 General Election (different constituencies, different voting intentions etc.), but the huge discrepancy between the vote numbers and seat numbers sets alarm bells ringing. Fortunately the Scottish Parliament voting system has the list vote to return proportionality to the system.
Of course the other aspect of the West Lothian Question is that despite the perceived unfairness of it all, there is no real appetite for change in England. Nobody wants devolution. Nobody really wants to change the voting system (and Labour's recent, admittedly cynical, attempts to raise the issue have been shouted down). The solution seems to be a hack-job in the House of Commons where Scottish MPs would lose their right to vote on certain issues*, the bare minimum required that doesn't restore balance to the system as much as complicate it further. More broadly, the solution seems to be to change the government, rather than change the system of government, as if the Tories would behave any more responsibly.
* MPs in Westminster can vote on Scottish issues, and they can legislate on issues under the Scottish Parliament's remit. They tend not to, unless requested to by the Scottish Parliament using a Sewel motion, as it would make a lot of Scots very unhappy indeed and would bolster the cause of the SNP. Indeed, they have the power to disband the Scottish Parliament entirely. This is a power that federal governments such as those in the US, Germany or Australia don't have, but has been used more than once in the UK, to disband the Northern Ireland Parliament and Assembly.
I'm sure that the cyclist would hate being made late for work because of having to continually stop to let drivers past. That 70 km/h speed limit is a maximum for ideal weather and traffic conditions, not a God-given right.
And that cyclist is driving a decent distance from the kerb for two very good reasons. First, the gutter is where you will find recessed drains, detritus and slippery road markings; not the kind of thing you want to be riding over on a two-wheeled vehicle. A cyclist who falls off in the conditions you describe runs the very real risk of ending up under the wheels of the car that is following too closely behind.
Second, if the cyclist was in the gutter, it would encourage idiot drivers to overtake without leaving adequate room, making the road dangerous for everybody on it.
Technically, traffic rules apply to both cars and bikes. In reality, traffic rules are designed around cars and completely fail to take into account the fact that the characteristics of driving and cycling are entirely different.
Bikes are slow, unless you're Chris Hoy. Stopping and starting continually puts more strain on the rider, as does travelling uphill, in contrast with cars. Their redeeming feature is that they are small and highly manoeuvrable.
I have never seen a road layout that takes these things into account, so cyclists will inevitably make the best of a bad situation. Don't try to pretend that drivers would behave any different; for example, if a wide, empty road has a 30mph speed limit, it will be broken. Similarly, if a cyclist can use a gap in traffic or hop onto a pavement for a few seconds in order to avoid a large, complicated and dangerous junction that has been designed for vehicles with wholly different characteristics, they will (been there, done that).
Recording every inch of public space is (and should be) different from policing public space.
By that logic you would put blind bobbies on the beat. You can't police a public space unless you can detect crime. In an ideal world, you'd have an actual police officers capable of intervening, preventing the crime from continuing and hopefully catching the culprit. But we don't live in an ideal world; police officers cost money and nobody wants to pay for them with tax rises. If you can cheaply detect a crime, and hopefully provide evidence that can be used to gain a conviction in court, surely that's better than not detecting it at all?
We want to keep down crime but we also want people to carry on their lives without everything being dissected and analysed.
What is it about surveillance that prevents people from going about their ordinary lives? Nothing. It's less intrusive than a stop-and-search or stop-and-account.
I have a Humax Foxsat HD Freesat receiver, and it can pick up any satellite channel as well. There's a 'Freesat mode' that can be turned off. I don't see why you'd want to though.
The maintenance problem is lessened in comparison to normal cars by the use of an all-electric drivetrain, where there is much less that can go wrong. Really the problem I'd be more worried about is running out of electricity. People still run out of petrol on the roads, and have to call the AA (or equivalent) to get them moving again. How many people will try to push it that extra couple of miles only to discover that they don't have enough energy left for a controlled landing?
Autogyros don't suffer from the falling out of the sky problem; they're able to descend safely in the event of engine failure.
I'm all in favour of an English parliament, and I think most Scots would be open to the idea, but by all accounts the English electorate don't want one. England is hugely apathetic to the idea of devolution, presumably because of their historical dominance in the Commons. It even took a Scottish MP to highlight the fact that this might be an issue!
What I'm curious about is how the voting rights of Scots in the House of Lords would be handled. The Acts of Union guarantee Scottish lords the same rights as their English counterparts. Would this still be an acceptable situation, given that they don't actually serve a constituency?
Not particularly likely, for a variety of different reasons.
For one, most people attribute most of these problems to the current government, as opposed to the system of government. There is a general election coming this year and people think that will change things.
Also, the areas of the UK that have traditionally been most ill-content with the way the country is governed now have devolved parliaments, and are to some degree in charge of their own affairs. Scotland, for example, has its own control over policing, crime and the legal system, and as a consequence we don't have many of the problems mentioned above. In most cases, records are removed from our DNA database if a person is found not guilty, for example.
I can't speak for the specific legislation covering this, but it's not uncommon for UK laws to exempt the police and security services from laws. This is from the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003:
(3) Subsections (1) and (2) do not make unlawful anything done by, or on behalf of, law enforcement agencies or any of the intelligence services -
(a) in the interests of national security; or
(b) for the purpose of the prevention or detection of crime, the investigation of an offence, or the conduct of a prosecution,
MP3 players were niche, but the portable music players (including cassette, CD and minidisc players) were not. The iPod targets this pre-existing market, just with a newer technology.
In the iPhone's case, I'd consider the 'dumb' phone and smartphone markets to be two sides of the same coin, rather than distinct markets. Selling a tablet to the consumer as a functional device is much more difficult than persuading a dumb phone user to upgrade to a smartphone.
The odd thing about the way apps were brought to the iPhone is that, although Apple touted web-apps as the future when the first phone was released, many important (mostly HTML5) features that could have made the web API an almost viable platform didn't arrive until iPhone OS 2.1, a point version after the native SDK was released.
Page caching, offline DB storage and the ability to run an app full-screen from the home screen are all features that are available now but weren't available pre-2.1. With them it's possible to make (relatively basic) iPhone apps without having to go through the App Store approval process, which I thought would have been quite a major incentive by now.
As is already the case with credit transfers, ATM cash withdrawals and card payments, the cost of a cross-border direct debit in euro will become the same as the cost of a national direct debit.
You've never worked in a shop during the tourist season when the nearest ATM has run out of £10 notes and is only dispensing twenties, have you? I was amazed at how quickly we ran out of change. It's actually the notes that go first, so you deplete your stocks of high-value coins pretty quickly, until soon enough all you have left is a pile of 1p and 2p coins and the odd 5p coin, and you have to start turning customers away. Anybody who came in and paid with exact change was treated as a god.
We would have taken cheques from anybody who had a chequebook with them, but nobody did.
Credit and debit cards that work like you've described are already being issued in the UK; the Bank of Scotland sent me one a couple of months ago. If you've seen the BarclayCard advert with the guy on the water-slide, that's what it's advertising.
So far, the only places where you can use them that I can remember off-hand are at automatic ticket machines in railway stations (although that might be Scotrail only), and Caffè Nero. And they're not entirely PIN-free, you have to use your PIN on first use and at random intervals later on.
payWave is the Visa brand, not sure what MasterCard are calling it.
It could be that that's to do with Eurozone rules though. I know that when it comes to ATM and credit/debit card transactions, you can't legally charge someone an extra fee because they're using a card from elsewhere in the Eurozone (unless the same fee is applied to local cards).
It doesn't apply to EU member states that aren't Eurozone members though.
The Israelis may have over-reacted a bit, but turning up with a damaged passport was a bit dumb. At the very least, I would have made a trip to an Embassy or Consulate the first port of call, and asked for advice on how to get it replaced.
Iran is a country that represses its own people, or so the prevailing opinion in the West goes.
Israel, on the other hand, is held up as a shining beacon of democracy and civil rights in its part of the world, and (despite what the UK government likes to think) it's the US's number 1 ally.
Is it wrong for an American to expect better treatment in Israel than in Iran?
Slashdot Mirror
The Sony Reader Daily Edition comes close to meeting your needs, although there's no backlight and the presence of the touchscreen apparently makes it much more reflective than other e-readers. Still, it's $100 cheaper, so I thought I'd mention it.
You know, a lot of people manage to satisfy their creative urges without the use of a computer. Just because you don't get involved in the current 'user generated content' craze, that doesn't make you a pod person.
Deary me, I'd hate to know what you think of people who act as mindless recipients of, say, literature from a book.
And everybody likes to sit back, relax, and watch some TV sometimes. There are intelligent, thought-provoking programmes out there (although it sounds like you don't watch them). You might as well criticise people for buying their food instead of growing it themselves.
Other phones can do the same thing for much less, but more often than not they're torturous to use. My boss is one of the most anti-Apple (and pro-Nokia) people I've met, yet even he has been won over by the iPhone music player.
If my parents hadn't already bought my grandparents a Vista laptop a while back, I would be recommending one of these to them. It does everything that they do with said laptop, it's simple to use, and there's nothing that can really go wrong.
Apple have released a toaster and everyone (myself included) is complaining that it's not a pressure cooker.
The number of Scottish MPs was reduced from 72 to 59 following the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, in order to bring us more in line with the average. Scots make up about 8.6% of the population, and we're represented by 9.1% of MPs.
We're still over-represented to the tune of 3 MPs; 56 would bring us closest to the correct proportion. The sparsely populated areas of Scotland tend to be over represented; the already large constituencies in the highlands would be vast otherwise, and the island constituencies don't lend themselves to being increased in size.
I think the issue of Scottish MPs goes some way to prove your initial point. One of the sticking issues surrounding the whole topic of the West Lothian Question has been that Scotland returns a large number of Labour MPs to Westminster. This is more due to the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system than actual voting intentions. It's not particularly democratic.
If you look at the results of the constituency part of the 2007 Scottish Parliament election (which is conducted using FPTP), the SNP actually received more votes than Labour, yet Labour was handed an absolute majority of constituency seats. Obviously you can't draw a direct comparison between this and the 2005 General Election (different constituencies, different voting intentions etc.), but the huge discrepancy between the vote numbers and seat numbers sets alarm bells ringing. Fortunately the Scottish Parliament voting system has the list vote to return proportionality to the system.
Of course the other aspect of the West Lothian Question is that despite the perceived unfairness of it all, there is no real appetite for change in England. Nobody wants devolution. Nobody really wants to change the voting system (and Labour's recent, admittedly cynical, attempts to raise the issue have been shouted down). The solution seems to be a hack-job in the House of Commons where Scottish MPs would lose their right to vote on certain issues*, the bare minimum required that doesn't restore balance to the system as much as complicate it further. More broadly, the solution seems to be to change the government, rather than change the system of government, as if the Tories would behave any more responsibly.
* MPs in Westminster can vote on Scottish issues, and they can legislate on issues under the Scottish Parliament's remit. They tend not to, unless requested to by the Scottish Parliament using a Sewel motion, as it would make a lot of Scots very unhappy indeed and would bolster the cause of the SNP. Indeed, they have the power to disband the Scottish Parliament entirely. This is a power that federal governments such as those in the US, Germany or Australia don't have, but has been used more than once in the UK, to disband the Northern Ireland Parliament and Assembly.
I'm sure that the cyclist would hate being made late for work because of having to continually stop to let drivers past. That 70 km/h speed limit is a maximum for ideal weather and traffic conditions, not a God-given right.
And that cyclist is driving a decent distance from the kerb for two very good reasons. First, the gutter is where you will find recessed drains, detritus and slippery road markings; not the kind of thing you want to be riding over on a two-wheeled vehicle. A cyclist who falls off in the conditions you describe runs the very real risk of ending up under the wheels of the car that is following too closely behind.
Second, if the cyclist was in the gutter, it would encourage idiot drivers to overtake without leaving adequate room, making the road dangerous for everybody on it.
Technically, traffic rules apply to both cars and bikes. In reality, traffic rules are designed around cars and completely fail to take into account the fact that the characteristics of driving and cycling are entirely different.
Bikes are slow, unless you're Chris Hoy. Stopping and starting continually puts more strain on the rider, as does travelling uphill, in contrast with cars. Their redeeming feature is that they are small and highly manoeuvrable.
I have never seen a road layout that takes these things into account, so cyclists will inevitably make the best of a bad situation. Don't try to pretend that drivers would behave any different; for example, if a wide, empty road has a 30mph speed limit, it will be broken. Similarly, if a cyclist can use a gap in traffic or hop onto a pavement for a few seconds in order to avoid a large, complicated and dangerous junction that has been designed for vehicles with wholly different characteristics, they will (been there, done that).
By that logic you would put blind bobbies on the beat. You can't police a public space unless you can detect crime. In an ideal world, you'd have an actual police officers capable of intervening, preventing the crime from continuing and hopefully catching the culprit. But we don't live in an ideal world; police officers cost money and nobody wants to pay for them with tax rises. If you can cheaply detect a crime, and hopefully provide evidence that can be used to gain a conviction in court, surely that's better than not detecting it at all?
What is it about surveillance that prevents people from going about their ordinary lives? Nothing. It's less intrusive than a stop-and-search or stop-and-account.
I have a Humax Foxsat HD Freesat receiver, and it can pick up any satellite channel as well. There's a 'Freesat mode' that can be turned off. I don't see why you'd want to though.
The maintenance problem is lessened in comparison to normal cars by the use of an all-electric drivetrain, where there is much less that can go wrong. Really the problem I'd be more worried about is running out of electricity. People still run out of petrol on the roads, and have to call the AA (or equivalent) to get them moving again. How many people will try to push it that extra couple of miles only to discover that they don't have enough energy left for a controlled landing?
Autogyros don't suffer from the falling out of the sky problem; they're able to descend safely in the event of engine failure.
I'm all in favour of an English parliament, and I think most Scots would be open to the idea, but by all accounts the English electorate don't want one. England is hugely apathetic to the idea of devolution, presumably because of their historical dominance in the Commons. It even took a Scottish MP to highlight the fact that this might be an issue!
What I'm curious about is how the voting rights of Scots in the House of Lords would be handled. The Acts of Union guarantee Scottish lords the same rights as their English counterparts. Would this still be an acceptable situation, given that they don't actually serve a constituency?
Not particularly likely, for a variety of different reasons.
For one, most people attribute most of these problems to the current government, as opposed to the system of government. There is a general election coming this year and people think that will change things.
Also, the areas of the UK that have traditionally been most ill-content with the way the country is governed now have devolved parliaments, and are to some degree in charge of their own affairs. Scotland, for example, has its own control over policing, crime and the legal system, and as a consequence we don't have many of the problems mentioned above. In most cases, records are removed from our DNA database if a person is found not guilty, for example.
I can't speak for the specific legislation covering this, but it's not uncommon for UK laws to exempt the police and security services from laws. This is from the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003:
MP3 players were niche, but the portable music players (including cassette, CD and minidisc players) were not. The iPod targets this pre-existing market, just with a newer technology.
In the iPhone's case, I'd consider the 'dumb' phone and smartphone markets to be two sides of the same coin, rather than distinct markets. Selling a tablet to the consumer as a functional device is much more difficult than persuading a dumb phone user to upgrade to a smartphone.
At 29p a copy it wouldn't have counted towards the singles chart. The rules require a minimum price of 40p on downloaded content.
While it was great to see Berlusconi take one in the face, it's even funnier when the politicians fight back.
The odd thing about the way apps were brought to the iPhone is that, although Apple touted web-apps as the future when the first phone was released, many important (mostly HTML5) features that could have made the web API an almost viable platform didn't arrive until iPhone OS 2.1, a point version after the native SDK was released.
Page caching, offline DB storage and the ability to run an app full-screen from the home screen are all features that are available now but weren't available pre-2.1. With them it's possible to make (relatively basic) iPhone apps without having to go through the App Store approval process, which I thought would have been quite a major incentive by now.
[citation provided]
'Check' is still a word, it just means something different to 'cheque'.
Just like 'metre' and 'meter' are both words meaning different things.
You've never worked in a shop during the tourist season when the nearest ATM has run out of £10 notes and is only dispensing twenties, have you? I was amazed at how quickly we ran out of change. It's actually the notes that go first, so you deplete your stocks of high-value coins pretty quickly, until soon enough all you have left is a pile of 1p and 2p coins and the odd 5p coin, and you have to start turning customers away. Anybody who came in and paid with exact change was treated as a god.
We would have taken cheques from anybody who had a chequebook with them, but nobody did.
Credit and debit cards that work like you've described are already being issued in the UK; the Bank of Scotland sent me one a couple of months ago. If you've seen the BarclayCard advert with the guy on the water-slide, that's what it's advertising.
So far, the only places where you can use them that I can remember off-hand are at automatic ticket machines in railway stations (although that might be Scotrail only), and Caffè Nero. And they're not entirely PIN-free, you have to use your PIN on first use and at random intervals later on.
payWave is the Visa brand, not sure what MasterCard are calling it.
It could be that that's to do with Eurozone rules though. I know that when it comes to ATM and credit/debit card transactions, you can't legally charge someone an extra fee because they're using a card from elsewhere in the Eurozone (unless the same fee is applied to local cards).
It doesn't apply to EU member states that aren't Eurozone members though.
The Israelis may have over-reacted a bit, but turning up with a damaged passport was a bit dumb. At the very least, I would have made a trip to an Embassy or Consulate the first port of call, and asked for advice on how to get it replaced.
Iran is a country that represses its own people, or so the prevailing opinion in the West goes.
Israel, on the other hand, is held up as a shining beacon of democracy and civil rights in its part of the world, and (despite what the UK government likes to think) it's the US's number 1 ally.
Is it wrong for an American to expect better treatment in Israel than in Iran?
Why would Europeans cross the Atlantic to travel to Paris?