A currency doesn't have to be legal tender to be of value, it only needs to be accepted. In Scotland, there are no legal tender banknotes, but you'll see notes issued by three different commercial banks, plus Bank of England notes, in circulation and used in the same way as any other country's currency.
You do get the odd crackpot scheme, such as the Hawick Pound, to introduce local currencies in order to boost tourism, but they never meet with much acceptance.
Legal tender very specifically relates to the paying-off of an existing debt, and doesn't come into play in most currency transactions.
That may be so, but the sectarian hatred and violence lives on. It's not even for a cause any more, just people who despise each other because of what football teams they support.
You can't run "real software" in Chrome OS, either. Do you mean dual-booting that into Windows? But then you might as well just buy a good Windos laptop for the same money.
With SSD and a battery that will last for 8.5 hours of active use?
Doesn't the 8.5 hours figure assume that you're running Chrome OS? I don't think you'll see the same battery life if you're running Windows on the thing.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the UK something which you can prove to be true cannot be libel. However, the onus is on the defendant to prove that the statement they made was true, rather than the onus being on the plaintiff to prove that it was false.
My electricity company sent me an electricity monitor free of charge. It's not a meter and doesn't replace my regular old-fashioned meter, but it does give me a visualisation of how much electricity I'm using in real-time.
This gives me some of the advantages of a smart meter without giving the utility company any new information whatsoever.
Most electric meters are actually installed outside the house.
Both my gas and electricity meters are inside my house. My electricity meter is relatively accessible, in a cupboard up above my front door in my hallway. My gas meter is in my living room, in a cupboard behind my TV, and it's a royal pain in the ass to get into. I'm eagerly awaiting a smart gas meter with an embedded SIM card.
That said, as long as you submit your own readings from the meters, the energy companies only send somebody round to read it once every six months, maybe even less frequently than that.
The best example I can cite with personal experience is the Eurostar from London to Paris.
That's cheating slightly, because you can't drive from London to Paris without taking either a ferry or the channel tunnel. Well, you can, but you wouldn't necessarily want to.
I thought the problem with ground effect super freighters was that it was very hard to land them in anything other than water, and once you'd landed them in water you had to expend so much energy getting them back out that in the end it wasn't really worth it.
My problem is that, while I'm perfectly good at the technical side of building a website, art and design is not my forté, and I'm not confident that I could build a website that would make an interview panel sit up and take notice. In fact, I'd be worried that my perfectly functional website that nonetheless looks like ass might be detrimental to the outcome of my job application.
The problem as explained in the article seems to be that the HR department isn't in tune with the needs of the company or IT department, and sending them advice to check that the candidate has a website is going to result in a lot of candidates with pretty but kludgy websites getting jobs at the expense of candidates with well-designed but ugly sites.
Perhaps it would be better to make sure that somebody from the IT department is on the interview panel.
I wouldn't say it was uncommon to hear the month-first representation in speech in the UK, but to see it written down as MM/DD/YY is a complete mind-bender.
What is uncommon is to hear "May nine, two thousand eleven", where the usual UK phrase would be "the ninth of May, two thousand and eleven". Americans seem to drop syllables all over the place.
Also, Americans break their month-first rule by celebrating their Independence Day on the "fourth of July", instead of "July four".
I was about to say that in Scotland, we used to suffer power cuts every time there was any significant snowfall due to the snow weighing down the power lines. In 2001 we had snowfall in my area that was probably about as bad as the last couple of winters have been nationally, and the power was out for about three days.
Having said that, in the past two years we've had two severe (in UK terms) winters and never suffered a single power cut, so I guess things are improving.
That's what they said about the first generation of nuclear reactors. "Too cheap to meter" was the phrase. But we're still in the situation where heating a house using electricity is an expensive option, and even the 'cheap' option of natural gas heating is too expensive for some people during the winter.
Nuclear reactors exist within an electricity market and will sell their electricity for whatever they can get for it. They also have to make sure that over the lifetime of the plant, they save up enough cash to fund the extensive decommissioning process at the end of the plant's life.
I'll believe in "too cheap to meter" when I see it.
I've certainly found that I read directional road-signs a lot less when I'm using sat-nav.
I tend to rely on a memorised route (by reading maps beforehand) and road signs for the majority of my driving, and I only really use sat-nav for the last mile or two of a journey that's unfamiliar to me. I could find my way to Irvine on my own, for example, but finding my way to Joe Bloggs' house in Irvine is when I might consider the sat-nav.
It's quite hard (not to mention dangerous) to read a map while driving, and when using sat-nav I usually rely on the audio prompts far more than the map displayed on the screen, only glancing at it occasionally when coming up to a complicated junction, where the audio prompt might be ambiguous.
I've had mine do the opposite. It's told me before that I should leave the main road and take a longer route to avoid a 30mph zone. I've never quite figured out if following its instructions in this instance is a good idea or not.
Yeah, the Bank of Scotland (my old bank) had those too, but on that occasion I got ushered towards the human operators because there was no queue at the time.
The Co-op was the bank that I moved to, and yes, they do have a cheques by post scheme.. Kinda necessary, because they only have one branch in Scotland. I've never had any cheques to pay in since I switched to them, so I haven't used the service yet.
In my office we got rid of the fax machine a long time ago, as it was more trouble than it was worth, and replaced it with a virtual fax number which forwards faxes on as emails. We get maybe one fax every three months.
We have one product where we're required to get proof of ownership of mobile phones, and most customers scan a bill and then email it to us. We had one customer, however, who tried to use our virtual fax number, and for some reason it simply wouldn't work. He phoned up, rather irate, and I mentioned that it was probably an incompatibility between his physical fax machine and our virtual one.
He was surprised that we didn't have a real fax machine, and said, "You're the only company I've ever dealt with that doesn't have a fax machine".
In an effort to resolve the problem, I asked him if he could scan the bill and email it to us. He replied, "We don't have a scanner".
I had to bite my lip to stop myself from blurting out, "You're the only company I've ever dealt with that doesn't have a scanner".
I use them pretty regularly, but my problem with them is that they were introduced around the time when supermarkets were staring to encourage shoppers to use reusable bags. Despite this, some of the machines weren't compatible with these bags (they would yell "Unexpected item in bagging area" if you tried to use one).
There's usually a button now for "I'm using my own bags", but I've found that it's not that reliable. I tried using it in Tesco, and the whole machine crashed. I tried using it in Asda, but on that occasion I was using my backpack (with other things in it), which apparently was too heavy to be considered a bag. During that trip, the machine flagged every single item I scanned as "requiring attention".
I still use the tills regularly, but only for small amounts of shopping, and when I'm not buying alcohol as it requires human intervention. I make a point of scanning everything, paying, and then packing my bag.
The last time I entered a bank branch was to pay in a cheque. It was a long time ago, maybe over a year ago. I handed over the cheque and the card for the account. Before paying in the cheque, the teller scanned my card, brought up the details and balances of all my accounts (not just the one I was trying to pay into), and then tried to get me to sign up for additional services. All the while, holding the unprocessed cheque in her hand.
Now, I can appreciate why the bank would want to do something like this, and that it could be a useful service for some customers. But I was on my lunch break (because I work 08:30-17:00, Monday to Friday, and in their wisdom the banks don't open outwith those hours), and I did not appreciate having to wait for upwards of five minutes to complete a transaction that should have taken less than 60 seconds.
I left that bank a few months ago. I was sick of them.
And I've worked with actual, real life location data, and I've never seen an accuracy figure even approaching 40 m, never mind "much, much better". I've seen a few figures that have dipped below 100 m, but in most of these cases we've been able to conclusively prove that the phone was actually outwith the area painted by the location plus accuracy figure, meaning that accuracy was poorer than the phone was reporting.
1 cell tower will give your relative direction and approximate distance, 2 cell towers can narrow it down, 3 will pinpoint it with the values I stated.
I understand how a single cell tower can give a relative direction, as each cell tower is typically made up of three nodes, each with a 120 degree field of 'vision'. But how do you calculate approximate distance, without the values being overwhelmed by errors in anything other than ideal conditions?
It's a fact.
Highly dubious, IMHO. Show me your maths and I might reconsider.
Of course this is all irrelevant, because you've ignored the second point I made in my original comment: the locations stored in mobile phone caches aren't triangulated.
Did you know that "cell tower data" is accurate up to accuracy is +- 40 meters (usually much, much better)?
This is either a gross exaggeration, or you're mixing up cell tower data with wifi or GPS location data. An accuracy approaching 100 m is extremely good for a cell tower location, 40 m is spectacularly accurate, and "much, much better" than 40 m is fiction. Either that, or your local cellphone company has decided to blanket your area with femtocells.
Typically you'll find that 3G cells in cities will give you accuracies of a few hundred meters, with 2G cells giving lower accuracies, from a few kilometres in urban or hilly areas, up to 10 km or more in flat areas.
And before you say 'triangulation'... if this is indeed intended as a cache of cell tower locations, in order to more effectively locate you when you don't have good data connectivity, then it will be pre-triangulation. Triangulation would occur after reading from the cache. There's no sense in storing your post-triangulation data in the cache, because all it would do is skew future results.
There was a case a while back where a police officer was prosecuted, and subsequently cleared, of driving at 159 mph on a deserted motorway. If I remember correctly, his claim was that his high-speed pursuit training meant that what he was doing wasn't dangerous.
My question at the time was, why isn't this training available to the ordinary motorist?
Isn't that because roads with higher speed limits tend to be dual carriageways (divided highways) with a central reservation, whereas roads with a lower speed limit tend to be single carriageways (undivided highways? No idea what Americans call these)?
Assuming no speeding, the worst combined speed you're going to have in an accident on a 70 mph dual carriageway is 70 mph. On a 60 mph single carriageway, the combined speed in an accident could be up to 120 mph.
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A currency doesn't have to be legal tender to be of value, it only needs to be accepted. In Scotland, there are no legal tender banknotes, but you'll see notes issued by three different commercial banks, plus Bank of England notes, in circulation and used in the same way as any other country's currency.
You do get the odd crackpot scheme, such as the Hawick Pound, to introduce local currencies in order to boost tourism, but they never meet with much acceptance.
Legal tender very specifically relates to the paying-off of an existing debt, and doesn't come into play in most currency transactions.
Lately? You mean this week? Yes.
That may be so, but the sectarian hatred and violence lives on. It's not even for a cause any more, just people who despise each other because of what football teams they support.
Doesn't the 8.5 hours figure assume that you're running Chrome OS? I don't think you'll see the same battery life if you're running Windows on the thing.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the UK something which you can prove to be true cannot be libel. However, the onus is on the defendant to prove that the statement they made was true, rather than the onus being on the plaintiff to prove that it was false.
I think the conspiracy is only in your head.
My electricity company sent me an electricity monitor free of charge. It's not a meter and doesn't replace my regular old-fashioned meter, but it does give me a visualisation of how much electricity I'm using in real-time.
This gives me some of the advantages of a smart meter without giving the utility company any new information whatsoever.
Both my gas and electricity meters are inside my house. My electricity meter is relatively accessible, in a cupboard up above my front door in my hallway. My gas meter is in my living room, in a cupboard behind my TV, and it's a royal pain in the ass to get into. I'm eagerly awaiting a smart gas meter with an embedded SIM card.
That said, as long as you submit your own readings from the meters, the energy companies only send somebody round to read it once every six months, maybe even less frequently than that.
That's cheating slightly, because you can't drive from London to Paris without taking either a ferry or the channel tunnel. Well, you can, but you wouldn't necessarily want to.
I thought the problem with ground effect super freighters was that it was very hard to land them in anything other than water, and once you'd landed them in water you had to expend so much energy getting them back out that in the end it wasn't really worth it.
My problem is that, while I'm perfectly good at the technical side of building a website, art and design is not my forté, and I'm not confident that I could build a website that would make an interview panel sit up and take notice. In fact, I'd be worried that my perfectly functional website that nonetheless looks like ass might be detrimental to the outcome of my job application.
The problem as explained in the article seems to be that the HR department isn't in tune with the needs of the company or IT department, and sending them advice to check that the candidate has a website is going to result in a lot of candidates with pretty but kludgy websites getting jobs at the expense of candidates with well-designed but ugly sites.
Perhaps it would be better to make sure that somebody from the IT department is on the interview panel.
I think the rest of the world would respond to that idea with one or two well-chosen syllables...
I wouldn't say it was uncommon to hear the month-first representation in speech in the UK, but to see it written down as MM/DD/YY is a complete mind-bender.
What is uncommon is to hear "May nine, two thousand eleven", where the usual UK phrase would be "the ninth of May, two thousand and eleven". Americans seem to drop syllables all over the place.
Also, Americans break their month-first rule by celebrating their Independence Day on the "fourth of July", instead of "July four".
I was about to say that in Scotland, we used to suffer power cuts every time there was any significant snowfall due to the snow weighing down the power lines. In 2001 we had snowfall in my area that was probably about as bad as the last couple of winters have been nationally, and the power was out for about three days.
Having said that, in the past two years we've had two severe (in UK terms) winters and never suffered a single power cut, so I guess things are improving.
That's what they said about the first generation of nuclear reactors. "Too cheap to meter" was the phrase. But we're still in the situation where heating a house using electricity is an expensive option, and even the 'cheap' option of natural gas heating is too expensive for some people during the winter.
Nuclear reactors exist within an electricity market and will sell their electricity for whatever they can get for it. They also have to make sure that over the lifetime of the plant, they save up enough cash to fund the extensive decommissioning process at the end of the plant's life.
I'll believe in "too cheap to meter" when I see it.
I've certainly found that I read directional road-signs a lot less when I'm using sat-nav.
I tend to rely on a memorised route (by reading maps beforehand) and road signs for the majority of my driving, and I only really use sat-nav for the last mile or two of a journey that's unfamiliar to me. I could find my way to Irvine on my own, for example, but finding my way to Joe Bloggs' house in Irvine is when I might consider the sat-nav.
It's quite hard (not to mention dangerous) to read a map while driving, and when using sat-nav I usually rely on the audio prompts far more than the map displayed on the screen, only glancing at it occasionally when coming up to a complicated junction, where the audio prompt might be ambiguous.
I've had mine do the opposite. It's told me before that I should leave the main road and take a longer route to avoid a 30mph zone. I've never quite figured out if following its instructions in this instance is a good idea or not.
I could believe it. The fact that Windows has improved dramatically over the past few years certainly helps.
Yeah, the Bank of Scotland (my old bank) had those too, but on that occasion I got ushered towards the human operators because there was no queue at the time.
The Co-op was the bank that I moved to, and yes, they do have a cheques by post scheme.. Kinda necessary, because they only have one branch in Scotland. I've never had any cheques to pay in since I switched to them, so I haven't used the service yet.
In my office we got rid of the fax machine a long time ago, as it was more trouble than it was worth, and replaced it with a virtual fax number which forwards faxes on as emails. We get maybe one fax every three months.
We have one product where we're required to get proof of ownership of mobile phones, and most customers scan a bill and then email it to us. We had one customer, however, who tried to use our virtual fax number, and for some reason it simply wouldn't work. He phoned up, rather irate, and I mentioned that it was probably an incompatibility between his physical fax machine and our virtual one.
He was surprised that we didn't have a real fax machine, and said, "You're the only company I've ever dealt with that doesn't have a fax machine".
In an effort to resolve the problem, I asked him if he could scan the bill and email it to us. He replied, "We don't have a scanner".
I had to bite my lip to stop myself from blurting out, "You're the only company I've ever dealt with that doesn't have a scanner".
I use them pretty regularly, but my problem with them is that they were introduced around the time when supermarkets were staring to encourage shoppers to use reusable bags. Despite this, some of the machines weren't compatible with these bags (they would yell "Unexpected item in bagging area" if you tried to use one).
There's usually a button now for "I'm using my own bags", but I've found that it's not that reliable. I tried using it in Tesco, and the whole machine crashed. I tried using it in Asda, but on that occasion I was using my backpack (with other things in it), which apparently was too heavy to be considered a bag. During that trip, the machine flagged every single item I scanned as "requiring attention".
I still use the tills regularly, but only for small amounts of shopping, and when I'm not buying alcohol as it requires human intervention. I make a point of scanning everything, paying, and then packing my bag.
The last time I entered a bank branch was to pay in a cheque. It was a long time ago, maybe over a year ago. I handed over the cheque and the card for the account. Before paying in the cheque, the teller scanned my card, brought up the details and balances of all my accounts (not just the one I was trying to pay into), and then tried to get me to sign up for additional services. All the while, holding the unprocessed cheque in her hand.
Now, I can appreciate why the bank would want to do something like this, and that it could be a useful service for some customers. But I was on my lunch break (because I work 08:30-17:00, Monday to Friday, and in their wisdom the banks don't open outwith those hours), and I did not appreciate having to wait for upwards of five minutes to complete a transaction that should have taken less than 60 seconds.
I left that bank a few months ago. I was sick of them.
These things complement physical media, but they're a long way from replacing it.
Also, if you're paranoid about a PSN-style hack affecting whatever service you subscribe to, then you can always by blu-ray discs using cash.
And I've worked with actual, real life location data, and I've never seen an accuracy figure even approaching 40 m, never mind "much, much better". I've seen a few figures that have dipped below 100 m, but in most of these cases we've been able to conclusively prove that the phone was actually outwith the area painted by the location plus accuracy figure, meaning that accuracy was poorer than the phone was reporting.
I understand how a single cell tower can give a relative direction, as each cell tower is typically made up of three nodes, each with a 120 degree field of 'vision'. But how do you calculate approximate distance, without the values being overwhelmed by errors in anything other than ideal conditions?
Highly dubious, IMHO. Show me your maths and I might reconsider.
Of course this is all irrelevant, because you've ignored the second point I made in my original comment: the locations stored in mobile phone caches aren't triangulated.
This is either a gross exaggeration, or you're mixing up cell tower data with wifi or GPS location data. An accuracy approaching 100 m is extremely good for a cell tower location, 40 m is spectacularly accurate, and "much, much better" than 40 m is fiction. Either that, or your local cellphone company has decided to blanket your area with femtocells.
Typically you'll find that 3G cells in cities will give you accuracies of a few hundred meters, with 2G cells giving lower accuracies, from a few kilometres in urban or hilly areas, up to 10 km or more in flat areas.
And before you say 'triangulation'... if this is indeed intended as a cache of cell tower locations, in order to more effectively locate you when you don't have good data connectivity, then it will be pre-triangulation. Triangulation would occur after reading from the cache. There's no sense in storing your post-triangulation data in the cache, because all it would do is skew future results.
There was a case a while back where a police officer was prosecuted, and subsequently cleared, of driving at 159 mph on a deserted motorway. If I remember correctly, his claim was that his high-speed pursuit training meant that what he was doing wasn't dangerous.
My question at the time was, why isn't this training available to the ordinary motorist?
Isn't that because roads with higher speed limits tend to be dual carriageways (divided highways) with a central reservation, whereas roads with a lower speed limit tend to be single carriageways (undivided highways? No idea what Americans call these)?
Assuming no speeding, the worst combined speed you're going to have in an accident on a 70 mph dual carriageway is 70 mph. On a 60 mph single carriageway, the combined speed in an accident could be up to 120 mph.