If you had to choose between two companies to invest in, which would you consider had the greater capability, the company that had launched one satellite, can lift 670kg to LEO and has proved it can lift a lightweight satellite, or one that had launched 290 satellites, has lifted 21,000kg to LEO and has proved it can build and fly an autonomous vehicle that can dock with the ISS? (SpaceX vs ESA).
Pah, they have no ambition. I am *planning* to go to Saturn for 2011. Ok, I have no idea how but I could probably sketch up some Photoshop pictures of my rocket, I've got some technical drawings I made when I was 7 years old.
Seriously, can somebody point me at proof these companies can actually launch human-rated spacecraft? It seems that some fairly large nations are still struggling to make steps towards this. Can anybody explain why it will be any easier for a company like this than India, South Korea, Japan, ESA, etc? at least these companies/organisations have a track record of launching unmanned payloads of 10 -20 tonnes so I can believe they are on the way.
Feels like vapourware to me. What happened to that dozen or so original X-Prizes companies that promised they'd be in space and carrying astronauts by now? I seem to remember it was launched in 1996 and those companies were all promising launches in about 2003?
Open Source is a lot better from when I first started looking into it 15 years ago but I still occasionally get hit by cultural attitudes of some of the software developers. To be fair, I understand that a lot of the projects are volunteer run and small scale, maybe one or two people hitting way above their weight and competing with large commercial corporations, but the documentation can be sparse. There's still an emphasis on getting software out rather than communicating what it does or how to help people to use it in some cases. More friendly introductions and more explicit guidance would be useful.
I think there are still a lot of elitist attitudes in the open source movement, with people "points scoring" - trying to prove they are more elite, more expert, and more competent than others and basing their sense of worth on proving they are better than others. Some of this filters into support forums where innocent questions from beginners can be savagely put down ("if you don't know how to do this, get lost newbie!").
The open source movement has come on a long way but could go a lot further in taking advantage of the large number of people who philosophically wish to support open source / FOSS/FLOSS whatever you want to call it but are not technical experts. Think of the large number of people who will pay extra to buy free range eggs / fairtrade food: they don't want to become small holding farmers themselves and look after chickens in their own back yard but they'll pay extra for food sources they believe in and fight furiously for it to be promoted as an alternative to be used in schools and government workplaces. Maybe think how the open source movement could learn lessons from this?
For non UK readers, you need to be a little cautious with this typical slashdot attention grabbing headline. The newspaper quoted is the right-wing Daily Telegraph often referred to as the newspaper of the Tory (Conservative) Party, the party in opposition. It will generally pick a fight with any legislation put up by the current nominally left wing government. It's probably worth reading the article carefully and picking out the "could"'s and "maybe"'s and other similar phrases. So when they talk about subjective evidence maybe being used, you have to bear in mind this is what judges do in legal cases anyway.
The irony being noted in the UK about the media cries against this legislation (further checking of people who might work with children) is that it came about partly because the very same newspapers made a lot of noise a few years ago when a couple of children were tragically killed by an unstable person who had a job working with children and hadn't been identified by the vetting processes at the time. The media shouted loudly that "something should be done" and "more checks need to be put in place to stop this happening again". And now the government has agreed and proposed for more checks, the same papers are crying "nanny state, too much bureaucracy!". Ironic.
Sorry, I think you misunderstand my point. I wasn't discussing format, more the content of the material.
Agreed that a Led Zeppelin song/ Beethoven symphony is as useful 100 years later but I was considering the *content* of school text books.
You might be able to keep old copies going but do you really want your children to be learning about the current state of physics from a 40 year old physics book? or history from a book that says today's President of the US is Roosevelt and we're at war with Germany?
Article is about school, and a lot of learning materials need to be updated. That's an issue with library content regardless of physical format.
Aren't they making autos bigger because people can't fit in smaller ones? Can you imagine an American family all fitting into a Model T Ford these days?
... they get all excited by films and books and rely on artists to come up with cool cultural memes to follow and become fans of? (like the rest of society)
So we're hearing criticism of the police. But I'd be interested to hear about how the Bungie employee was acting. I am guessing the Bungie employee was pleased as punch to be asked to carry some kit he doesn't often get to play with *right down a public street*, knowing it looks a little bit scary, and a bit hard. Probably strutted down that street feeling like he was the big man. I'm willing to guess he was a bit at fault here - otherwise, given how many guns there are in America, how come false alarms like this don't happen all the time? What sparked particular interest for the police this time? My understanding is that it's relatively trivial in the USA for somebody to walk around with a gun so why this time. My guess is the Bungie guy was behaving like a fool in some manner (or the person phoning in was really freaked for some reason).
Maybe if Bungie had said "look this might freak sombody out, wrap it in a cover" the whole episode would have been avoided.
As for getting the model of the gun wrong, well, you can hardly blame the police for not chasing that up. If you've got somebody potentially loose with a lethal weapon and people are phoning in worried, you don't sit in the cop shop and say "well we're not coming out until you can give us the exact model of gun - and if you get it wrong we're going back to the office again and you'll have to sort it out".
You may be able to tell different guns apart from each other, but a lot of folk can't, they've got other things they are interested in like cars, flower arranging, their grand kids, etc. this doesn't make them a fool, just somebody with more important things to do with their time. Like other posters have noted, "AK-47" is probably shorthand for "scary gun".
That's a very fair comment. Of course e-book content, like paper book content, ages, and you need to purchase new versions / updates. Can't see many students thanking you for giving them 40 year old e-text books any more than they'd like to learn from 40 year old paper text books.
Perhaps school will work out the "total cost of ownership" as being the balancing point over a set period - say ten years? For paper books it would be how many books you need, and I guess over ten years you probably have to change the books 2 or 3 times. For the ebook option, 3 or 4 changes of reader, and the licencing costs of the e-book content: will be interesting to see if the content is leased for set periods of time or handed over for ownership.
I hope pedagogical considerations will also be a critical aspect of the decision taken on ebooks vs paper as well. I can see benefits in both sides but think that it's still with paper.
I can think of a large number of books that are still useful even though they are 10+ years old. Not sure of your angle on chalkboards but a fair number are used in universities and step away from highly developed countries and they are very much in evidence.
"Dusty stacks" - hmm... you mean books which still work even though they are 5, 10, or more years old. How many people would be happy with their children learning using ten year old computers? Most tech is useless after 3 or 4 years, let alone ten years.
Works for a super rich private school, not going to happen in the public sector.
Handlebars on traditional bikes are a good idea. Leaning slightly forward in your normal position with your hands in front of you on a nice solid piece of metal, if you have to brake suddenly your weight shifts forward.
So on a traditional bike if you hit the brakes when that inevitable Volvo driver cuts across you without signalling/pulls out, your weight shifts forward and you brace yourself with your arms. Your arms are pretty strong and it's a very natural position for them to take weight: we've been falling over and putting our weight on our arms since we were toddlers. The weight transfers to your arms, onto the rigid handlebars, and this is transferred through your front forks onto your front wheel, which has a little give with the pumped up tyre. You're still in control of your bike in this position, and the next most dramatic move is to slip forward off your saddle to a standing position forward of a saddle both feet on the floor. You've got your vehicle to brace yourself against to stop moving forwards, and you're gripping the handlebars tightly so getting the most out of your brakes.
On this new bike, yikes indeed. You stop suddenly and from the look of it your head is ahead of the rest of you. To stop you flying forward you're relying on your grip on the handlebars, much less reliable I'd imagine than locking your arms in front of you. Still your head is going to swing forward some amount. An alternative is that you've got to let go and lose control of your vehicle and take a few tenths of a second to swing your arms in front of you - nothing to hold on to - but just to protect you from the moving car or the road. You're not in control of your vehicle and all you can brace yourself against is the road or the car.
I think the traditional bike wins in this situation. Thoughts from others?
(1) A person who publishes in the United Kingdom a work to which this Act applies must at his own expense deliver a copy of it to an address specified (generally or in a particular case) by any deposit library entitled to delivery under this section. "
Well said sir. Not many countries have operated a satellite around the moon and achieved their primary objectives in nearly a year of successful operation. The more countries (and private concerns) that do so the better, we need more countries with space ambitions. It's very likely only one country will have the capability to launch people into space in the near future, it's easy to fear a time when we cease to have meaningful explorations into space at all.
A bit of a shame that the majority of slashdot posts just make crap / racist jokes regarding what seems to have been a pretty successful first mission (how many lunar expeditions failed for the USA or Russia?)
I fear the slashdot postings that will get published if an African country puts a satellite into lunar orbit.
"How do you prove that a person was 'texting, webbing, reading, etc'?"
I'm not sure how it works in the USA but here in the UK phone providers hold logs of calls - I guess you must have the same or how else does the phone provider bill you for your phone calls at the end of the month? So if an accident happens and there's any suspicion that use of a phone was involved, the police can ask for the phone records. They check the logs.
If you'd kept out folk from Spain and England coming in with alien illnesses in the 1600s you'd have been in a better position than you are now. Maybe that is the root of the problem?
Experian claimed I wasn't on the Electoral Roll for the time when I was living in Hackney. I am a bit absent minded but I was sure I was. The Experian people didn't believe me and told me their records were correct and I was wrong. I took a train to London, to Hackney Town Hall, and the kind council officer brought my records up and showed me that they did indeed have the record that I had posted back my voting documents for the addresses I had lived at.
I phoned Experian while standing there and they re-iterated that I was not on the Electoral Roll and did not believe me. I said "one moment please, I am passing you over to the Electoral Officer for Hackney" and the nice officer kindly spoke to Experian and said words to the effect of "yes he is standing here with me and yes I am the Electoral Roll Officer and yes he is in the records" - at which point the Experian person agreed to change my records.
Thank you nice person from Hackney Council.
For those non-UK people, the Electoral Roll, whether you are signed up to vote for elections in your local area (including national elections) is quite a big deal for credit records when applying for home mortgages. So having a credit company (that your bank uses to check your credit status) not keep those records straight is a real problem for first time house buyers like me.
Experian also mixed up my records with my brother, and I had loads of his personal credit history on my record at one point, and I had to sort that out. Luckily me and my brother get on really well but I had access to all the details of my brother's personal credit loans for a while. I had to spend my time and money to sort that out.
Be careful of Experian.
I guess it is something we have to put up with - big companies getting our details wrong and us suffering as a result. I certainly don't have the time and money to do anything more than correct their errors on my record and rant on slashdot. Would have been nice if they'd refunded my train fare to London though!
"My understanding is that in England, most of the time if you are born in the "working class", your children will die as part of the "working class". If you look at U.S. statistics, you discover that most of the people in the bottom quarter of wealth in the population ten years ago, aren't in the bottom quarter today."
Might be true, might be false, I don't know. But I'd like to hear your references. Also - you should match like with like. You suggest people in England born poor die poor, but people in USA (of undeclared age, you're not suggesting new born) ten years later are more wealthy. This is not matching like with like. Give me equivalent statistics for both places and I'd be interested to hear more. You might expect somebody aged 20 to move up the wealth scale in both countries by the time they reach the age of 30. It's a different argument to suggest that somebody born into a socio-economic group in England is more likely to die in that group than in the USA.
Interested to read your arguments once referenced though, they are certainly an interesting theories.
And when you find you can't get a loan / get a mortgage / have other credit problems because of this mistaken identity getting entered into a central credit agency that your bank refers to?
It happened to me: Experian got information wrong about me and they refused to change my records until I took a train to London to speak to the council officers who kindly agreed to speak to Experian on the phone, and explained that they held incorrect records about me. Local government officials, thank you. Experian - dodgy commercial operation that doesn't care about people.
More hype and a misleading Slashdot headline, what's new? How many of the X-Prize teams ever got a person more than 100 metres off the ground?
"Excalibur Almaz To Offer Commercial Orbital Flights" - perhaps more like Excalibur Almaz *hopes* to offer commercial orbital flights. Early days of space exploration and all that but more hype than activity right now. Wake me up when they've done their first test flights with their own technical staff. I wish them and all the other commercial companies the best of luck - I so want it all to be successful and the prices to drop so an average guy like me might get up there one day - but it's mostly hype at the moment.
"the RNLI is a charity supported entirely by money received from the public. They get nothing from the government, which is a Good Thing for the efficiency of the service;"
I wouldn't say "efficiency of service" is measured as to whether or not you get government money. I have worked for commercial companies that are incredibly inefficient and they don't get a penny of government money. I'd not say "efficiency" is a direct correlation to how much you have to do with a government. Maybe distance from funding source, not giving a damn where the money's coming from and not being accountable?
I personally also find it amazing and shocking that as a small island nation the people responsible for pulling drowning people out of the water, going miles out to sea in huge storms to save drowning sailors and rescue fishermen are voluntary and unfunded.
When you buy a $10 share in an oil company, you may believe its real because you can go and touch the office building, or an oil rig. But your share is only worth $10 because people believe that a small percentage of the company's assets (oil rigs, office buildings etc) works out at a value of $10. It's all virtual. Maybe the next day the oil company announces it might have found oil in some new location. It's not sure, but it thinks so. Probably your share will now be worth $11 or $15. There aren't 10% more oil rigs or 50% more buildings you can touch, they haven't grown over night, it's just people believe that's how much your percentage of the company is worth.
It's just as virtual as a game world possession. Nobody's actually going to let you unbolt a $10 section of railing from an oil rig if you want your money back. You don't actually own any physical property in the company. All virtual. Back to that old chestnut about how much is a glass of water worth? not a lot in the monsoon season, a heck of a lot if you're thirsty and in a desert.
Slashdot Mirror
If you had to choose between two companies to invest in, which would you consider had the greater capability, the company that had launched one satellite, can lift 670kg to LEO and has proved it can lift a lightweight satellite, or one that had launched 290 satellites, has lifted 21,000kg to LEO and has proved it can build and fly an autonomous vehicle that can dock with the ISS? (SpaceX vs ESA).
Pah, they have no ambition. I am *planning* to go to Saturn for 2011. Ok, I have no idea how but I could probably sketch up some Photoshop pictures of my rocket, I've got some technical drawings I made when I was 7 years old.
Seriously, can somebody point me at proof these companies can actually launch human-rated spacecraft? It seems that some fairly large nations are still struggling to make steps towards this. Can anybody explain why it will be any easier for a company like this than India, South Korea, Japan, ESA, etc? at least these companies/organisations have a track record of launching unmanned payloads of 10 -20 tonnes so I can believe they are on the way.
Feels like vapourware to me. What happened to that dozen or so original X-Prizes companies that promised they'd be in space and carrying astronauts by now? I seem to remember it was launched in 1996 and those companies were all promising launches in about 2003?
Open Source is a lot better from when I first started looking into it 15 years ago but I still occasionally get hit by cultural attitudes of some of the software developers. To be fair, I understand that a lot of the projects are volunteer run and small scale, maybe one or two people hitting way above their weight and competing with large commercial corporations, but the documentation can be sparse. There's still an emphasis on getting software out rather than communicating what it does or how to help people to use it in some cases. More friendly introductions and more explicit guidance would be useful.
I think there are still a lot of elitist attitudes in the open source movement, with people "points scoring" - trying to prove they are more elite, more expert, and more competent than others and basing their sense of worth on proving they are better than others. Some of this filters into support forums where innocent questions from beginners can be savagely put down ("if you don't know how to do this, get lost newbie!").
The open source movement has come on a long way but could go a lot further in taking advantage of the large number of people who philosophically wish to support open source / FOSS/FLOSS whatever you want to call it but are not technical experts. Think of the large number of people who will pay extra to buy free range eggs / fairtrade food: they don't want to become small holding farmers themselves and look after chickens in their own back yard but they'll pay extra for food sources they believe in and fight furiously for it to be promoted as an alternative to be used in schools and government workplaces. Maybe think how the open source movement could learn lessons from this?
For non UK readers, you need to be a little cautious with this typical slashdot attention grabbing headline. The newspaper quoted is the right-wing Daily Telegraph often referred to as the newspaper of the Tory (Conservative) Party, the party in opposition. It will generally pick a fight with any legislation put up by the current nominally left wing government. It's probably worth reading the article carefully and picking out the "could"'s and "maybe"'s and other similar phrases. So when they talk about subjective evidence maybe being used, you have to bear in mind this is what judges do in legal cases anyway.
The irony being noted in the UK about the media cries against this legislation (further checking of people who might work with children) is that it came about partly because the very same newspapers made a lot of noise a few years ago when a couple of children were tragically killed by an unstable person who had a job working with children and hadn't been identified by the vetting processes at the time. The media shouted loudly that "something should be done" and "more checks need to be put in place to stop this happening again". And now the government has agreed and proposed for more checks, the same papers are crying "nanny state, too much bureaucracy!". Ironic.
Hey maybe the Imperial measurement countries (USA+Liberia+Burma) will go one way and the Decimal countries (Rest of the World) will go another?
Would make it easier all round for the engineers and the construction crews!
Sorry, I think you misunderstand my point. I wasn't discussing format, more the content of the material.
Agreed that a Led Zeppelin song/ Beethoven symphony is as useful 100 years later but I was considering the *content* of school text books.
You might be able to keep old copies going but do you really want your children to be learning about the current state of physics from a 40 year old physics book? or history from a book that says today's President of the US is Roosevelt and we're at war with Germany?
Article is about school, and a lot of learning materials need to be updated. That's an issue with library content regardless of physical format.
ESA's is already launching to the ISS.
Ariane 5 has a payload of approx. 6 to 10 tons to GTO and up to 21 tons to LEO.
Not tomorrow, not if, but now. If you're scared of the Russian communists, you could always use the European socialists ;-)
Aren't they making autos bigger because people can't fit in smaller ones? Can you imagine an American family all fitting into a Model T Ford these days?
... they get all excited by films and books and rely on artists to come up with cool cultural memes to follow and become fans of? (like the rest of society)
So we're hearing criticism of the police. But I'd be interested to hear about how the Bungie employee was acting. I am guessing the Bungie employee was pleased as punch to be asked to carry some kit he doesn't often get to play with *right down a public street*, knowing it looks a little bit scary, and a bit hard. Probably strutted down that street feeling like he was the big man. I'm willing to guess he was a bit at fault here - otherwise, given how many guns there are in America, how come false alarms like this don't happen all the time? What sparked particular interest for the police this time? My understanding is that it's relatively trivial in the USA for somebody to walk around with a gun so why this time. My guess is the Bungie guy was behaving like a fool in some manner (or the person phoning in was really freaked for some reason).
Maybe if Bungie had said "look this might freak sombody out, wrap it in a cover" the whole episode would have been avoided.
As for getting the model of the gun wrong, well, you can hardly blame the police for not chasing that up. If you've got somebody potentially loose with a lethal weapon and people are phoning in worried, you don't sit in the cop shop and say "well we're not coming out until you can give us the exact model of gun - and if you get it wrong we're going back to the office again and you'll have to sort it out".
You may be able to tell different guns apart from each other, but a lot of folk can't, they've got other things they are interested in like cars, flower arranging, their grand kids, etc. this doesn't make them a fool, just somebody with more important things to do with their time. Like other posters have noted, "AK-47" is probably shorthand for "scary gun".
That's a very fair comment. Of course e-book content, like paper book content, ages, and you need to purchase new versions / updates. Can't see many students thanking you for giving them 40 year old e-text books any more than they'd like to learn from 40 year old paper text books.
Perhaps school will work out the "total cost of ownership" as being the balancing point over a set period - say ten years? For paper books it would be how many books you need, and I guess over ten years you probably have to change the books 2 or 3 times. For the ebook option, 3 or 4 changes of reader, and the licencing costs of the e-book content: will be interesting to see if the content is leased for set periods of time or handed over for ownership.
I hope pedagogical considerations will also be a critical aspect of the decision taken on ebooks vs paper as well. I can see benefits in both sides but think that it's still with paper.
I can think of a large number of books that are still useful even though they are 10+ years old. Not sure of your angle on chalkboards but a fair number are used in universities and step away from highly developed countries and they are very much in evidence.
"Dusty stacks" - hmm... you mean books which still work even though they are 5, 10, or more years old. How many people would be happy with their children learning using ten year old computers? Most tech is useless after 3 or 4 years, let alone ten years.
Works for a super rich private school, not going to happen in the public sector.
Handlebars on traditional bikes are a good idea. Leaning slightly forward in your normal position with your hands in front of you on a nice solid piece of metal, if you have to brake suddenly your weight shifts forward.
So on a traditional bike if you hit the brakes when that inevitable Volvo driver cuts across you without signalling/pulls out, your weight shifts forward and you brace yourself with your arms. Your arms are pretty strong and it's a very natural position for them to take weight: we've been falling over and putting our weight on our arms since we were toddlers. The weight transfers to your arms, onto the rigid handlebars, and this is transferred through your front forks onto your front wheel, which has a little give with the pumped up tyre. You're still in control of your bike in this position, and the next most dramatic move is to slip forward off your saddle to a standing position forward of a saddle both feet on the floor. You've got your vehicle to brace yourself against to stop moving forwards, and you're gripping the handlebars tightly so getting the most out of your brakes.
On this new bike, yikes indeed. You stop suddenly and from the look of it your head is ahead of the rest of you. To stop you flying forward you're relying on your grip on the handlebars, much less reliable I'd imagine than locking your arms in front of you. Still your head is going to swing forward some amount. An alternative is that you've got to let go and lose control of your vehicle and take a few tenths of a second to swing your arms in front of you - nothing to hold on to - but just to protect you from the moving car or the road. You're not in control of your vehicle and all you can brace yourself against is the road or the car.
I think the traditional bike wins in this situation. Thoughts from others?
The term is Legal Deposit Libraries: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2003/ukpga_20030028_en_1
"Duty to deposit
1 Deposit of publications
(1) A person who publishes in the United Kingdom a work to which this Act applies must at his own expense deliver a copy of it to an address specified (generally or in a particular case) by any deposit library entitled to delivery under this section. "
Well said sir. Not many countries have operated a satellite around the moon and achieved their primary objectives in nearly a year of successful operation. The more countries (and private concerns) that do so the better, we need more countries with space ambitions. It's very likely only one country will have the capability to launch people into space in the near future, it's easy to fear a time when we cease to have meaningful explorations into space at all.
A bit of a shame that the majority of slashdot posts just make crap / racist jokes regarding what seems to have been a pretty successful first mission (how many lunar expeditions failed for the USA or Russia?)
I fear the slashdot postings that will get published if an African country puts a satellite into lunar orbit.
Nice one India, go for it.
"How do you prove that a person was 'texting, webbing, reading, etc'?"
I'm not sure how it works in the USA but here in the UK phone providers hold logs of calls - I guess you must have the same or how else does the phone provider bill you for your phone calls at the end of the month? So if an accident happens and there's any suspicion that use of a phone was involved, the police can ask for the phone records. They check the logs.
You'd be happy with somebody getting 2 years in jail for killing your wife/girlfriend/mother (etc)?
If you'd kept out folk from Spain and England coming in with alien illnesses in the 1600s you'd have been in a better position than you are now. Maybe that is the root of the problem?
Experian claimed I wasn't on the Electoral Roll for the time when I was living in Hackney. I am a bit absent minded but I was sure I was. The Experian people didn't believe me and told me their records were correct and I was wrong. I took a train to London, to Hackney Town Hall, and the kind council officer brought my records up and showed me that they did indeed have the record that I had posted back my voting documents for the addresses I had lived at.
I phoned Experian while standing there and they re-iterated that I was not on the Electoral Roll and did not believe me. I said "one moment please, I am passing you over to the Electoral Officer for Hackney" and the nice officer kindly spoke to Experian and said words to the effect of "yes he is standing here with me and yes I am the Electoral Roll Officer and yes he is in the records" - at which point the Experian person agreed to change my records.
Thank you nice person from Hackney Council.
For those non-UK people, the Electoral Roll, whether you are signed up to vote for elections in your local area (including national elections) is quite a big deal for credit records when applying for home mortgages. So having a credit company (that your bank uses to check your credit status) not keep those records straight is a real problem for first time house buyers like me.
Experian also mixed up my records with my brother, and I had loads of his personal credit history on my record at one point, and I had to sort that out. Luckily me and my brother get on really well but I had access to all the details of my brother's personal credit loans for a while. I had to spend my time and money to sort that out.
Be careful of Experian.
I guess it is something we have to put up with - big companies getting our details wrong and us suffering as a result. I certainly don't have the time and money to do anything more than correct their errors on my record and rant on slashdot. Would have been nice if they'd refunded my train fare to London though!
"My understanding is that in England, most of the time if you are born in the "working class", your children will die as part of the "working class". If you look at U.S. statistics, you discover that most of the people in the bottom quarter of wealth in the population ten years ago, aren't in the bottom quarter today."
Might be true, might be false, I don't know. But I'd like to hear your references. Also - you should match like with like. You suggest people in England born poor die poor, but people in USA (of undeclared age, you're not suggesting new born) ten years later are more wealthy. This is not matching like with like. Give me equivalent statistics for both places and I'd be interested to hear more. You might expect somebody aged 20 to move up the wealth scale in both countries by the time they reach the age of 30. It's a different argument to suggest that somebody born into a socio-economic group in England is more likely to die in that group than in the USA.
Interested to read your arguments once referenced though, they are certainly an interesting theories.
And when you find you can't get a loan / get a mortgage / have other credit problems because of this mistaken identity getting entered into a central credit agency that your bank refers to?
It happened to me: Experian got information wrong about me and they refused to change my records until I took a train to London to speak to the council officers who kindly agreed to speak to Experian on the phone, and explained that they held incorrect records about me. Local government officials, thank you. Experian - dodgy commercial operation that doesn't care about people.
More hype and a misleading Slashdot headline, what's new? How many of the X-Prize teams ever got a person more than 100 metres off the ground?
"Excalibur Almaz To Offer Commercial Orbital Flights" - perhaps more like Excalibur Almaz *hopes* to offer commercial orbital flights. Early days of space exploration and all that but more hype than activity right now. Wake me up when they've done their first test flights with their own technical staff. I wish them and all the other commercial companies the best of luck - I so want it all to be successful and the prices to drop so an average guy like me might get up there one day - but it's mostly hype at the moment.
"the RNLI is a charity supported entirely by money received from the public. They get nothing from the government, which is a Good Thing for the efficiency of the service;"
I wouldn't say "efficiency of service" is measured as to whether or not you get government money. I have worked for commercial companies that are incredibly inefficient and they don't get a penny of government money. I'd not say "efficiency" is a direct correlation to how much you have to do with a government. Maybe distance from funding source, not giving a damn where the money's coming from and not being accountable?
I personally also find it amazing and shocking that as a small island nation the people responsible for pulling drowning people out of the water, going miles out to sea in huge storms to save drowning sailors and rescue fishermen are voluntary and unfunded.
When you buy a $10 share in an oil company, you may believe its real because you can go and touch the office building, or an oil rig. But your share is only worth $10 because people believe that a small percentage of the company's assets (oil rigs, office buildings etc) works out at a value of $10. It's all virtual. Maybe the next day the oil company announces it might have found oil in some new location. It's not sure, but it thinks so. Probably your share will now be worth $11 or $15. There aren't 10% more oil rigs or 50% more buildings you can touch, they haven't grown over night, it's just people believe that's how much your percentage of the company is worth.
It's just as virtual as a game world possession. Nobody's actually going to let you unbolt a $10 section of railing from an oil rig if you want your money back. You don't actually own any physical property in the company. All virtual. Back to that old chestnut about how much is a glass of water worth? not a lot in the monsoon season, a heck of a lot if you're thirsty and in a desert.