I think you could probably get answers to your questions by visiting public libraries, and talking to people. Maybe the "talking to people" bit might not get you definitive answers (though probably as good as a lot of Wikipedia content) but you might have found out a whole lot more. Also the public libraries probably had a lot of this info if you were looking for solid facts.
I appreciate a portable + off the net wikipedia would be a cool tool as well but nothing beats chatting to the locals.
Oh wait, you already have... lucky it didn't have people on board. Maybe shift to metric before you do another collaborative project and somebody dies.
I assume the International Space Station is a total nightmare because of this, all partners but the Americans working in metric and everybody having to dual-measure to deal with the US parts of the ship. Anybody got any information on how that's all dealt with?
Also from the UK. Agreed we switch between metric and imperial in day to day measures but my experience is that all engineering, science, and other accurate work is done in metric. Also metric is uniformally taught in schools (disclaimer: I am an educational researcher at a UK university, I work alongside teachers in local schools so sit in on a lot of lessons).
All accurate measurement is done in metric (apart from maybe a few very traditional craft fields).
General trades like the electricians and plumbers work in mm.
Looking forward to your response: can you show me a big science or engineering project in the UK recently completed or underway that doesn't work in metric? Any new bridges, buildings, vehicles, satellites, etc. PR for said projects might give dual figures (BBC website is particularly keen to maintain imperial measures it seems) but for the actual builders on the projects, I can't think of an example where they are measuring in feet, inches, thousands of an inch etc.
"Hunter-gatherers "worked" an average of 10-20 hours a week to maintain themselves."
My gut feeling is this might be true though I'd like a reference if you have one.
Also true is that hunter gathers in the pre-agriculture past lived much shorter and probably much more brutal lives than us. Fine if you're happy with dying from many things that only need a short trip to the doctor, living til you're 40 if you're lucky, being happy facing the world with flint as your cutting tools and animal skins as your clothing, delivering babies and trying major operations without anaesthetic or sterile environments, and being at the mercy of a climate you can't predict.
I'm guessing some of those other hours in the week were spent in survival activities as well as cultural activities. For sure it is clear that some hunter gatherers led nice lives and a few small remnants today still do but I don't buy this "primitive happy savage" idea.
Boring pragmatic things like "I wouldn't want to live in a world where an infected small cut on my little toe could kill me" put me off that as being better to what I have...
The extra hours of work brought some useful advances, medicine, more constant food supplies, metalworking,etc. Guess it's a trade off.
Is it specifically the current people running your county that you don't trust or the concept of anybody running a county? Sounds like your current lot are pretty dodgy but is it a general principle that you wouldn't trust anybody with your money to maintain roads or schools etc?
My impression in the USA is that many people don't really trust anybody with setting up and running public services, you're generally more comfortable with private companies running these sorts of things. I think it's maybe a philosophical stance? Over here in the UK we're more towards a social model of society where most people are happy to pay taxes towards public bodies maintaining roads and sewers, fire and police services etc.
"BT was a public company, the reason it was privatised was exactly because it wasn't perceived to be very good"
With all due respect I think you need to unpack that sentence a bit. I don't think BT was privsatised because "it wasn't perceived to be very good", I think one of the main reasons it was privatised was because the government of the time - the right wing conservative party - adhered to a strategy of privatising public companies whereever possible.
(In 1979, the Conservatives, driven by an ideological preference for the private over the public sector, and justifying the policy on the basis of the scale of investment needed if the UK was to remain a global competitor in communications services, decided that telecommunications should be fully separated from the Post Office. By 1981, the British Telecommunications Act was passed, and the service became British Telecom in October that year) source: wikipedia
I am inclined to agree with you - buy the best infrastructure possible for your country, everybody wins. Problem is I've noticed that there's a general consensus from US posters to slashdot that "taxes are bad" - so I am not sure how you square that one. It feels to me from across the pond that you'd have a hard time persuading people to pay extra for good roads and you're rather stuck with poor ones. Asking people to fund high quality public services is seen as a bit dodgy, socialist or communist or similar?
Interested to hear examples of where people in the USA have been persuaded to pay for expensive public services for their states, and how the argument was won. The impression from over here is that the majority of people in the USA prefer everything to be private.
Stopping mud: you can buy something called "mudguards" which do the job.
"Carting around all these outfits" - well if it's raining I am going to take a coat to work regardless of my mode of transport as there will be some walking to do, and a pair of waterproof trousers is only a couple of hundred grams more weight and get packed up pretty small.
"sealing all the perspiration in" - Gortex and the like, see my original posting. I am guessing you don't do outdoor activities in places where it gets wet. For your information, these modern fabrics are pretty efficient at getting rid of perspiration while keeping you dry from rain. Wonders of modern technology and all that. I go walking and camping, so gortex outer layers come with the territory. You don't want to be going up Scottish mountains without them.
"Raining but hot" - haha, I am in the UK, I should be so lucky. Very occasionally in the summer. But solved with gortex raincoat and spare pair of light trousers for such occasions.
All this to save 2 dollars on gasoline? well add up the other costs associated with running a car (so it's more than 2 dollars, and I am in the UK where our gasoline is approximately 4 times as expensive as yours), and that you're sitting on your backside getting fatter while I am exercising, the planet and local school kids get a little less pollution, I think it adds up as healthy and sustainable means of transport.
I drive a car sometimes but it's really not necessary all the time.
I love it, only on slashdot. Mod parent up for being a true geek! Only a true geek who doesn't do daylight or weather query whether bikes work in the rain.
For your information, pretty well. Stopping distance is slightly longer and like motorbikes and cars, performance is somewhat reduced.
People who use bicycles in wet weather handle the rain by using "coats". They put their luggage in waterproof containers which keeps the rain (a type of "weather") off the contents.
I cycle to work and back, 8 miles each way, any weather apart from ice and heavy snow. You put on a coat, and waterproof trousers. Gortex is a wonderful invention. Waterproof panniers keep my laptop nice and dry. No problem.
Some people wear specialist cycling clothing, I just use my walking gear.
I'm guessing you're not much of an outdoors kind of person.
"And what does "battle hardened" even mean with commercial pilots? " It's a slashdot law: "Where ever possible, use a military metaphor when posting for emphasis even when inappropriate or ridiculous".
sounds like you're a better man than me! nice one:-)
One lesson I learnt was - don't use storage places, they are a waste of money. At one point I was due to go off to a project in Ghana for a year so I put my stuff into storage. Project didn't work out, six months later I pulled my stuff out of storage - and when I worked out how much I'd spent on storing it... well it would have been cheaper to sell/ throw away/give to friends on long term loan most of that stuff and just buy new stuff when I got it back. Waste of money storing cheap furniture etc for that long. Really interesting was that there were skips for dumped stuff round the back of this chain self storage place and they were always full, I wasn't the only person coming back after a while and wondering "what the heck did I store this for?".
I used to be a librarian so getting rid of books is truly painful....:-)
Wailt til you get your own place and you intend on being there for a while, that's when you'll find out what you're really like for hoarding stuff. I'm terrible, though I have friends who are really light on what they own. Partly depends on your needs and interests I guess. Doing a house up is terrible for this...
There always seems to be one more tool that needs to be bought to fix a simple DIY job and having a garage, oh that's a killer for keeping spare dust sheets, lengths of useful timber, etc....
Sounds like you're pretty good at getting rid of books as soon as you've read them but I find that tough!:-)
Do you guys in the USA still seriously believe that Cuba is going to invade and conquer you / subvert your citizens and turn them into communists / invite Putin to set up ICBMs pointing at you?
Across the water here in the UK it seems a bit daft. Really interested in some measured responses about why the USA still has a trade embargo against Cuba and treats them so coldly. I'm not trying to wind you up, but really curious and I don't understand. If the reason is because you believe Cuba has a poor human rights record, well that doesn't stop the USA trading with other countries where serious human rights abuses are commonplace. Is it because Cuba is nominally communist? I am pretty sure the USA trades with other countries that have communist/dictatorial leaderships.
Really curious - can any slashdotters enlighten me as to why the Cuba / USA situation continues? I would have thought it's all long gone cold war history and both countries would benefit from getting over it. Or has the Cuban leadership said something that the USA doesn't find acceptable and won't back down until they apologise?
You want to read some history books (and sometimes even the newspapers) about what our nobility and occasionally royalty have got up to over the years.
"They're great at grabbing reams of private information they would have no right to if Britain were still a free society."
When were we ever a free society? When has any country been "free"? I suppose there's a philosophical discussion to be had here but I get the sense that
a: we might be as free now as we've ever been and
b: this is close to a conversation about a mythical golden age that never was (I like the definition that golden ages are invariably the belief that things were better two generations ago)...
Interested to hear when you think the UK was a 'free' society. It would have to probably be after 1928 - universal suffrage, before then women under 28 couldn't vote so they weren't very free. Couldn't be 1939 - 1952 as we had identity cards then. Interested to hear your definition of 'free'.
"Stealing is taking something away from you that's exclusive (you and I can't both have it) without your consent. It's not a synonym for "conduct I dislike" or "conduct I find unethical".
How about accessing and then downloading copies of high security US military data? I am sure some gentlemen from the CIA might dispute your argument that this is not stealing on the grounds that they still have access to the original copies of their data.
You and I could both have copies of how to make a nuclear bomb, for example, from your original data. You could still make a nuclear bomb, but I can now also make a nuclear bomb.
Though I have to say a more basic philosophical discussion could be started here...:-)
Same as it has ever been. You get (and got) what you paid for.
A lovely fiction book to read which talks about the condition of working class tradesmen in England in the early 20th century is "The ragged trousered philanthropists" by Robert Tressell. The novel is about one man's attempt to survive the situations many people found themselves in, and on the way you get great descriptions of what life was like for working class folk. Cheap furniture which fell apart for sure, and the book describes how the supervisor for the workers in the book encourages them to do jobs on the cheap when they are decorating a new house because the rich owners won't notice till a few years later that a bodge job has been done, and this will make a little more profit for the owners of the painting and decorating companies.
Always has been good and rubbish furniture and construction, and there's always been people on the make squeezing a bit of profit by doing things cheaply.
Some right wide boy racers, particularly on the bigger roads out west, Hammersmith flyover and that area. One gangster knocked my brother coming home from work clean off his 125cc motorbike about 2am doing way too fast in a boy racer car. Thankfully my wee brother wears proper armour and as it was 2am there were no other cars on the road so my brother and his bike just went skidding down the road and bounced off the kerbs a couple of times til they came to a halt. Could have been messy if more traffic was about.
Wide boys frequently do high speeds late at night on the bigger London roads "because there's nobody about so it's safe" - until they hit innocent people like my brother quietly chugging along home minding their own business, or crossing the road, etc.
Same with auto deaths. An interesting chat about this was on Radio 4 on the BBC one morning recently. Somebody was arguing that car crashes should warrant full investigations the same as when planes crash or trains have fatal accidents. the argument was that its national and international news if a plane falls out the sky and 100 people die, they will often ground all aircraft round the world of that make until the investigation works out what went wrong, or at least upgrade all the other planes of the same model.
The argument was that 2943 people died on UK roads last year, if that many people died in plane or train crashes or by swine flu (UK swine flu toll: zero - yet millions spent on health alerts, tv advertising, upgrading medical services) - there would be national outrage, but we're happy to accept this many deaths by auto.
Don't HGVs (heavy goods vehicles, artics, trucks, whatever you call them) have speed limiters on them as it is? I think this is so in the UK and some of Europe? (90kph/ 56mph)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you could probably get answers to your questions by visiting public libraries, and talking to people. Maybe the "talking to people" bit might not get you definitive answers (though probably as good as a lot of Wikipedia content) but you might have found out a whole lot more. Also the public libraries probably had a lot of this info if you were looking for solid facts.
I appreciate a portable + off the net wikipedia would be a cool tool as well but nothing beats chatting to the locals.
Oh wait, you already have... lucky it didn't have people on board. Maybe shift to metric before you do another collaborative project and somebody dies.
I assume the International Space Station is a total nightmare because of this, all partners but the Americans working in metric and everybody having to dual-measure to deal with the US parts of the ship. Anybody got any information on how that's all dealt with?
"Metric System Thriving In Nation's Inner Cities"
Apparently numbers like 9mm, key (for kilo) , cc's and liters are well known ;-)
Also from the UK. Agreed we switch between metric and imperial in day to day measures but my experience is that all engineering, science, and other accurate work is done in metric. Also metric is uniformally taught in schools (disclaimer: I am an educational researcher at a UK university, I work alongside teachers in local schools so sit in on a lot of lessons).
All accurate measurement is done in metric (apart from maybe a few very traditional craft fields).
General trades like the electricians and plumbers work in mm.
Looking forward to your response: can you show me a big science or engineering project in the UK recently completed or underway that doesn't work in metric? Any new bridges, buildings, vehicles, satellites, etc. PR for said projects might give dual figures (BBC website is particularly keen to maintain imperial measures it seems) but for the actual builders on the projects, I can't think of an example where they are measuring in feet, inches, thousands of an inch etc.
Check Iran's history. I'd imagine nobody in Iran would want to be associated with 'change through US firepower'.
"Hunter-gatherers "worked" an average of 10-20 hours a week to maintain themselves."
My gut feeling is this might be true though I'd like a reference if you have one.
Also true is that hunter gathers in the pre-agriculture past lived much shorter and probably much more brutal lives than us. Fine if you're happy with dying from many things that only need a short trip to the doctor, living til you're 40 if you're lucky, being happy facing the world with flint as your cutting tools and animal skins as your clothing, delivering babies and trying major operations without anaesthetic or sterile environments, and being at the mercy of a climate you can't predict.
I'm guessing some of those other hours in the week were spent in survival activities as well as cultural activities. For sure it is clear that some hunter gatherers led nice lives and a few small remnants today still do but I don't buy this "primitive happy savage" idea.
Boring pragmatic things like "I wouldn't want to live in a world where an infected small cut on my little toe could kill me" put me off that as being better to what I have...
The extra hours of work brought some useful advances, medicine, more constant food supplies, metalworking,etc. Guess it's a trade off.
Is it specifically the current people running your county that you don't trust or the concept of anybody running a county? Sounds like your current lot are pretty dodgy but is it a general principle that you wouldn't trust anybody with your money to maintain roads or schools etc?
My impression in the USA is that many people don't really trust anybody with setting up and running public services, you're generally more comfortable with private companies running these sorts of things. I think it's maybe a philosophical stance? Over here in the UK we're more towards a social model of society where most people are happy to pay taxes towards public bodies maintaining roads and sewers, fire and police services etc.
"BT was a public company, the reason it was privatised was exactly because it wasn't perceived to be very good"
With all due respect I think you need to unpack that sentence a bit. I don't think BT was privsatised because "it wasn't perceived to be very good", I think one of the main reasons it was privatised was because the government of the time - the right wing conservative party - adhered to a strategy of privatising public companies whereever possible.
(In 1979, the Conservatives, driven by an ideological preference for the private over the public sector, and justifying the policy on the basis of the scale of investment needed if the UK was to remain a global competitor in communications services, decided that telecommunications should be fully separated from the Post Office. By 1981, the British Telecommunications Act was passed, and the service became British Telecom in October that year) source: wikipedia
I am inclined to agree with you - buy the best infrastructure possible for your country, everybody wins. Problem is I've noticed that there's a general consensus from US posters to slashdot that "taxes are bad" - so I am not sure how you square that one. It feels to me from across the pond that you'd have a hard time persuading people to pay extra for good roads and you're rather stuck with poor ones. Asking people to fund high quality public services is seen as a bit dodgy, socialist or communist or similar?
Interested to hear examples of where people in the USA have been persuaded to pay for expensive public services for their states, and how the argument was won. The impression from over here is that the majority of people in the USA prefer everything to be private.
Stopping mud: you can buy something called "mudguards" which do the job.
"Carting around all these outfits" - well if it's raining I am going to take a coat to work regardless of my mode of transport as there will be some walking to do, and a pair of waterproof trousers is only a couple of hundred grams more weight and get packed up pretty small.
"sealing all the perspiration in" - Gortex and the like, see my original posting. I am guessing you don't do outdoor activities in places where it gets wet. For your information, these modern fabrics are pretty efficient at getting rid of perspiration while keeping you dry from rain. Wonders of modern technology and all that. I go walking and camping, so gortex outer layers come with the territory. You don't want to be going up Scottish mountains without them.
"Raining but hot" - haha, I am in the UK, I should be so lucky. Very occasionally in the summer. But solved with gortex raincoat and spare pair of light trousers for such occasions.
All this to save 2 dollars on gasoline? well add up the other costs associated with running a car (so it's more than 2 dollars, and I am in the UK where our gasoline is approximately 4 times as expensive as yours), and that you're sitting on your backside getting fatter while I am exercising, the planet and local school kids get a little less pollution, I think it adds up as healthy and sustainable means of transport.
I drive a car sometimes but it's really not necessary all the time.
all the best.
"How well does a bike work in the rain?"
I love it, only on slashdot. Mod parent up for being a true geek! Only a true geek who doesn't do daylight or weather query whether bikes work in the rain.
For your information, pretty well. Stopping distance is slightly longer and like motorbikes and cars, performance is somewhat reduced.
People who use bicycles in wet weather handle the rain by using "coats". They put their luggage in waterproof containers which keeps the rain (a type of "weather") off the contents.
I cycle to work and back, 8 miles each way, any weather apart from ice and heavy snow. You put on a coat, and waterproof trousers. Gortex is a wonderful invention. Waterproof panniers keep my laptop nice and dry. No problem.
Some people wear specialist cycling clothing, I just use my walking gear.
I'm guessing you're not much of an outdoors kind of person.
Surveillance isn't ubiquitous in the UK.
Not unless you're one of those folks who think UK=England, and England=London. Of which there are quite a few.
(Actually I've never quite understood why people mix up the UK and England as being synonymous, any ideas?)
Mind you I accept there is too much surveillance over here.
Emergency services in the UK all use flashing blue lights. e.g. see The Highway Code, Rule 31.
"And what does "battle hardened" even mean with commercial pilots? "
It's a slashdot law: "Where ever possible, use a military metaphor when posting for emphasis even when inappropriate or ridiculous".
sounds like you're a better man than me! nice one :-)
One lesson I learnt was - don't use storage places, they are a waste of money. At one point I was due to go off to a project in Ghana for a year so I put my stuff into storage. Project didn't work out, six months later I pulled my stuff out of storage - and when I worked out how much I'd spent on storing it... well it would have been cheaper to sell/ throw away /give to friends on long term loan most of that stuff and just buy new stuff when I got it back. Waste of money storing cheap furniture etc for that long. Really interesting was that there were skips for dumped stuff round the back of this chain self storage place and they were always full, I wasn't the only person coming back after a while and wondering "what the heck did I store this for?".
I used to be a librarian so getting rid of books is truly painful.... :-)
Wailt til you get your own place and you intend on being there for a while, that's when you'll find out what you're really like for hoarding stuff. I'm terrible, though I have friends who are really light on what they own. Partly depends on your needs and interests I guess. Doing a house up is terrible for this...
There always seems to be one more tool that needs to be bought to fix a simple DIY job and having a garage, oh that's a killer for keeping spare dust sheets, lengths of useful timber, etc....
Sounds like you're pretty good at getting rid of books as soon as you've read them but I find that tough! :-)
Do you guys in the USA still seriously believe that Cuba is going to invade and conquer you / subvert your citizens and turn them into communists / invite Putin to set up ICBMs pointing at you?
Across the water here in the UK it seems a bit daft. Really interested in some measured responses about why the USA still has a trade embargo against Cuba and treats them so coldly. I'm not trying to wind you up, but really curious and I don't understand. If the reason is because you believe Cuba has a poor human rights record, well that doesn't stop the USA trading with other countries where serious human rights abuses are commonplace. Is it because Cuba is nominally communist? I am pretty sure the USA trades with other countries that have communist/dictatorial leaderships.
Really curious - can any slashdotters enlighten me as to why the Cuba / USA situation continues? I would have thought it's all long gone cold war history and both countries would benefit from getting over it. Or has the Cuban leadership said something that the USA doesn't find acceptable and won't back down until they apologise?
cheers for any insights!
The 1990s - well, as long as you didn't mind that the Criminal Justic Act (1994) came into being. This made it legal for the police powers to stop and search, without any reason, any vehicle or person, and keep DNA from anybody arrested. No right to public demonstrations any more. No right to public gatherings above ten people if the police suspect they are going to go to a party. No right for more than two people to gather together if the police suspect they might organise a party.
Don't forget the Community Charge aka the Poll Tax either.
You want to read some history books (and sometimes even the newspapers) about what our nobility and occasionally royalty have got up to over the years.
"They're great at grabbing reams of private information they would have no right to if Britain were still a free society."
When were we ever a free society? When has any country been "free"? I suppose there's a philosophical discussion to be had here but I get the sense that
Interested to hear when you think the UK was a 'free' society. It would have to probably be after 1928 - universal suffrage, before then women under 28 couldn't vote so they weren't very free. Couldn't be 1939 - 1952 as we had identity cards then. Interested to hear your definition of 'free'.
cheers.
"Stealing is taking something away from you that's exclusive (you and I can't both have it) without your consent. It's not a synonym for "conduct I dislike" or "conduct I find unethical".
How about accessing and then downloading copies of high security US military data? I am sure some gentlemen from the CIA might dispute your argument that this is not stealing on the grounds that they still have access to the original copies of their data.
You and I could both have copies of how to make a nuclear bomb, for example, from your original data. You could still make a nuclear bomb, but I can now also make a nuclear bomb.
Though I have to say a more basic philosophical discussion could be started here... :-)
Same as it has ever been. You get (and got) what you paid for.
A lovely fiction book to read which talks about the condition of working class tradesmen in England in the early 20th century is "The ragged trousered philanthropists" by Robert Tressell. The novel is about one man's attempt to survive the situations many people found themselves in, and on the way you get great descriptions of what life was like for working class folk. Cheap furniture which fell apart for sure, and the book describes how the supervisor for the workers in the book encourages them to do jobs on the cheap when they are decorating a new house because the rich owners won't notice till a few years later that a bodge job has been done, and this will make a little more profit for the owners of the painting and decorating companies.
Always has been good and rubbish furniture and construction, and there's always been people on the make squeezing a bit of profit by doing things cheaply.
Some right wide boy racers, particularly on the bigger roads out west, Hammersmith flyover and that area. One gangster knocked my brother coming home from work clean off his 125cc motorbike about 2am doing way too fast in a boy racer car. Thankfully my wee brother wears proper armour and as it was 2am there were no other cars on the road so my brother and his bike just went skidding down the road and bounced off the kerbs a couple of times til they came to a halt. Could have been messy if more traffic was about.
Wide boys frequently do high speeds late at night on the bigger London roads "because there's nobody about so it's safe" - until they hit innocent people like my brother quietly chugging along home minding their own business, or crossing the road, etc.
Same with auto deaths. An interesting chat about this was on Radio 4 on the BBC one morning recently. Somebody was arguing that car crashes should warrant full investigations the same as when planes crash or trains have fatal accidents. the argument was that its national and international news if a plane falls out the sky and 100 people die, they will often ground all aircraft round the world of that make until the investigation works out what went wrong, or at least upgrade all the other planes of the same model.
The argument was that 2943 people died on UK roads last year, if that many people died in plane or train crashes or by swine flu (UK swine flu toll: zero - yet millions spent on health alerts, tv advertising, upgrading medical services) - there would be national outrage, but we're happy to accept this many deaths by auto.
Don't HGVs (heavy goods vehicles, artics, trucks, whatever you call them) have speed limiters on them as it is? I think this is so in the UK and some of Europe? (90kph/ 56mph)
Information welcomed.