Footpath in the UK does indeed mean the same as "sidewalk" or "alleyway" in the USA. Hence a number of posts saying "you've got to be kidding, no way will that be allowed". Police are pretty strict about riding bikes where you shouldn't here if they catch you doing it. They don't like it. Unlikely as an individual to get more than a bit of a polite telling off "on the road please, sir, the pavement is for pedestrians". But I can imagine if somebody comes through the town or village with a Google-emblazoned monster trike the coppers will be right on the case. Or at least on the radio ("oh, so he was cycling on the pavements around your part of town as well Bob?... right sir, can we take some details down, I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to come down to the station with me....").
As for turning round to a local copper and saying "hey but I am from the American internet company Google", I reckon that will get a swift response, including the expression "bloody Yanks";-)
Cycle routes, bridleways, canal towpaths, etc, I can see Google getting permission to use though. Plenty of those wider non-vehicular routes around.
Those are really not going to fit round a good number of medieval city UK footpaths, in the same way Hummers really aren't going to fit round medieval city streets...
they are too high, too wide, and too long for quite a few places I know of. Try getting around some of central London, here's the passageway next to the Lamb and Flag for an example. Here's a typical footpath from my home town, lots of hills in some places...
I work in a new town, and the really nice cycle lanes have bollards and offset fences where they intersect the roads, no way would that beast traverse them.
Nice idea, but a bit big. And in towns where the coppers are not so friendly, you will be nicked so quickly for riding it on a footpath. No bikes on footpaths here. They are for people, err, on foot.
"Orange has the largest integrated 2.5/3G network in the UK. This means that our 3G network covers 85% of the population, so if you happen to go out of our 3G range, you'll be seamlessy transferred to our 2.5G network"... which is of very little use to me when I am working in the Highlands of Scotland supporting geology students. I can assure Orange that about half the locations we work in still have *no* phone connectivity whatsoever. Not 1G let alone 3G.
In the UK the phone companies still advertise coverage by population rather than by geographical area because that makes them look a lot better. There's some very low populated but large geographical areas once you head away from the south east and big cities...:-)
We've written a tool which guides them through their environmental enquiries. It's still under development but you can read the general information about our project here (Personal Inquiry website). Drupal on top of LAMP, running on the default Xandros OS. Battery life was something that concerned us for the full day trips across two towns, but we solved that by checking out tips on www.eeeuser.com
- switching off wireless in the BIOS (though used in the one hour school playground trials) - lowering screen brightness a little - setting the laptops to sleep on lid closing, and asking the students to close lids between locations (we walked across town stopping at a dozen places in each to collect data) - hiding games so the students didn't run the batteries down playing these between working - carrying spare batteries and swapping over some (not all required) at lunchtime.
Also used them on the ERA Project supporting disabled access to geology fieldwork in the Scottish Highlands - found that a field geologist could stream video and send photos from one Asus to another across a thrown up wifi network all day, needed one battery change generally, occasionally two for long field days.
"To buy that traffic from Google at $.20/click, you'd have to pay $100,000 a month"
So google says its worth 20 cents a click. What if I say it's only worth a cent a click then its worth $5000, or perhaps at 0.1 cents a click its worth $500.
All make believe. Don't tell me "an expert told you so" because I think a bunch of "experts" called "bankers" just got discredited a few months ago for overvaluing other virtual sales...;-)
Except I guess this is America so the writer is probably getting ready to sue the paper for his $100,000 lost one month's earnings on the grounds that he read it on the internet that he's lost $100K. Not bad for a bloke who probably usually earns $2000 a month but will keep really quiet about the actual figure he actually earns:-)
I have to stand up for the Asus Eee PCs and speak about my experiences in their defence. I bought 30 x 701s a year and a half ago for a university project working with 11-14 year old school children. They've since been issued to a total of approximately 330 students across 12 different classes, taken out on field trips, and issued for home use. Only one has broken so far, a student dropped it onto a tarmac road while walking and carrying it in her hand, so that's about a metre or so drop. It broke the corner of the screen casing but apart from that was fine, we could pull the data off it and give her a spare to carry on with. We now use it as a test machine back in the lab, it works fine but we don't really want to issue it to students.
A few have started to show scratches on the casing, and that's been it so far. They work ok in light rain, though the touch pad freaks out when they get too wet, we've found for field trips the solution is to get transparent plastic bags and slide them over the laptops and then they are fine (we use our geology department's rock sample bags, thanks guys!).
So I'd say they are reasonably robust given these kind of conditions.
Agreed Jeff, I made a cheap joke about the Americans to hold up a mirror to all those folks who idly announce that the French are all cowards and surrender in times of war and tried to get the parent and others to do some more thinking.
I hope you understand I did it in this context to raise debate and my third sentence clarified that I do have upmost respect for the Americans and everybody else who helped the UK when we were fighting against invasion in 1940 and later in the war. I've been to the USAF war graves in Cambridge and seen the rows and rows of graves of young US airmen who came over here and died far from home. Nobody can be failed to be moved by that and respect what they did. You only have to talk to my parents and other folks of that generation who can remember hiding in cellars while the bombs were dropping and coming out to find their streets obliterated and neighbours and friends dead to realise how terrible those times were.
A lot of brave French men and women died fighting for their homelands while the Yanks made excuses and sat around eating ice cream in Times Square or whatever they were up to and didn't get involved til 1941. Show a bit of respect.
Ok jokes aside and in Europe we're truly grateful for the Americans finally getting involved in 1941 and for less open but valuable support beforehand, but I think you do the French a disservice, take a look at how many were fighting in different theatres of war and in home resistance. I think over here in Europe we're much more aware about how many nations fought together and suffered terribly. Check how many nationalities fought on the Allies side in the Battle of Britain, something like a sixth of the RAF pilots were from countries other than Britain.
I am not sure where American naivety comes from regarding WW2 (though for sure it's not limited to your country)- perhaps because the war was mostly something that happened far away and didn't happen on your home soil except with rare exceptions? I guess the folk-memory of the war is life going on as normal and waving off the brave boys to distant lands. Maybe this is something to do with how that war is perceived differently in the USA from Europe?
Your argument is that you get better quality applicants if you reduce pay? I find this a tricky concept. By extrapolation, therefore, surely you would get better quality teachers if you paid them 14K instead of 28K, or even zero?
If you increased pay, would you then not get a larger number of applicants, allowing you to choose from a higher quality pool of potential new employees?
I agree with you that levels of education do not directly equate to ability to teach. But in the UK, for example, for many years many teacher training schools required lower school grades than standard university entrance, so it became known by 18 year olds as the thing you did if you wanted a professional career but weren't good enough to be a subject specialist. If you weren't good enough to study Physics at university, you could still teach physics. I don't think that's necessarily healthy for an education system.
I'm really surprised the postings here are all debating whether or not the methods of communication claimed to be used this guy and his colleagues are secure or not, and debates about NSA.
How about questioning if this is what was actually used? Maybe he's just making it up because he's had enough of the conditions he was kept in and will say anything to get away from Guantanamo Bay. I'm not saying he was tortured, but if you put me in a military prison for five years, flew me out to Morocco for some "hard questioning", repeatedly made me feel like you were going to drown me ("waterboarding"[1]), smacked my head against a wall multiple times ("headbanging"[2]) and locked me in a small cage with insects I had a phobia about and told me they might bite me [3] I might well just say anything I thought you wanted me to.
When the Daily Mail, a right wing newspaper, suggests the US military are echoing interrogation techniques used in Orwell's "1984" then I think we have to be a little bit critical about believing the credibility of the information gathered in this manner.
"On the other hand, kids that are of a coloring-book age (like my 5-year-old) at this point probably don't remember September 11, 2001, anyhow."
Such as obvious point and I'd completely missed it. You're very right! What age is this colouring book aimed at? under 10s I guess, who would have been less than toddlers when it happened and so won't have any memory of the event. Very good point my friend.
I completely agree with you - I think colouring books to get kids talking about a traumatic event and enable them to manage their feelings is a really good idea, I am all for it. Look at all the pictures drawn by small children after terrible events (e.g. the Tsunami in Asia a few years ago) and it seems really clear that art is therapeutic and a way to help kids talk about frightening events. But you make the really obvious point that anybody who can remember 9/11 is at least a teenager by now. So maybe other resources would be more helpful to help teenagers overcome bad memories of 9/11.
However if the book is more of a general resource for children dealing with a number of possible traumatic 'environmental' events and the 9/11 pictures are only one of several examples then by all means continue to publish.
"In other words, if you're not near death, you can't see someone who can actually help you"
Last year I had an earache. I knew I wasn't dying but it was a bit annoying. I phoned the doctor's surgery, they gave me an appointment that evening. I went to see the doc and he checked my ear, gave me a prescription for ear drops which I took to the chemist and it sorted out my minor infection.
Parent's poster is wrong. You don't need to be near death to see somebody who can help you.
Oh these Americans, so over dramatic.
Perhaps that was the problem, I wonder if the American friend went to the local doc and explained "OH MY GOD DOC! I've been sharing a house with a SMOKER, for TWO WHOLE DAYS, I think I've got CANCER, and I AM DYING!". I can imagine a British doc saying "yes yes well calm down, have you had any extreme symptoms? No? well, let me do a check... everything seems in order. How about you ask your friend to stop smoking in the house or perhaps you move to another flat. Get out and take up a little exercise as well."
I think the doctor would be sitting there thinking that if the problem was the guy was living with a smoker, why didn't he move and so solve his problem?
As another poster has noted, we have public health services in the UK but also private doctors, nobody stops you going to a private doctor if you want to pay.
(ok I've been a little jolly in this post and apologies I am sure your friend was in distress and I wish them well... but you did set me up a bit there. You suggest that "health care is something to be earned and not a right" and then complain your friend who'd been living in the UK for only one year couldn't get free specialist treatment. Why didn't he go and pay for a private specialist?).
I'm pretty sure quite a lot of the British elite is still due to being good at killing other people and invading their land, as much as market forces.
David Cameron is a direct descendant of William IV for example and his family got to be kings by either invading England or being invited to rule by the nobility, depending on your reading of history. "Down with the kids and the people" Dave might come over as chummy and merely rich through his ancestors financial dealings and connections to the Rothschilds but that's just him playing up his urban street cred..
An awful lot of the upper class elite in the UK got to be upper class elite a long time back through land grants from the king or doing a bit of land grabbing, killing and invading sometime between the Saxons and now (still quite a few Norman names there today, eh?). Pretty sure that "new money" still means your great great grand dad made money through cotton or the Empire as far as a lot of the Eton set is concerned;-)
But while you're saving the company 20 dollars, or 200 dollars worth of cable, what does the company lose by you doing that for an hour?
If you're the lone IT guy and you're responsible for maintaining a T1 line, maybe while you're happily singing along to the radio and crimping away in your server room a technical crisis could happen and the company loses waaaaaay more than a couple of hundred dollars as a result.
Personally I agree with you - any competent IT guy should be able to crimp up the odd length of cable when required to a highly professional standard. But from your boss's perspective, that's probably not what he wants you to be doing with your time.
(ok non-UK readers should probably stop here though in the spirit of slashdot I should assume everybody in the world lives in my country;-) )
I've signed up for the Telephone Preference Service - but still get junk calls from overseas telemarketing: anybody know how to get rid of them?
Also I've noticed that telephone numbers get handed on by BT to other people. Not sure how to get round that one. I moved into a house a year ago and the number I was given was changed from the previous owners number to a new one, and it had some sort of bad credit history, I got a lot of phone calls from people urgently needing to speak to a Mr or Mrs so-and-so. Clearly they'd not lived at my address because the previous owner (a little old lady) had lived there for many years. So I think I inherited a "bad" number and got so fed up of the calls I had to ask BT to change me to a new number which mostly seemed to sort things out.
Alas another useful opt-out alas appears to ask BT to make you ex-(telephone) directory. I've resisted this for years believing telephone directories to be a good idea but my impression is they are getting harvested by junk callers these days and indeed when I went ex-directory for the new number the volume of junk calls dropped significantly.
Not sure how the term is received in the USA but over here in the UK calling somebody from Pakistan a "paki" is like calling somebody with African-American heritage a "nigger". Most people consider it outdated and downright offensive, most folk with Pakistani origins who live in the UK associate it with small minded neo-nazis shouting at them, parading through the streets and telling them to "go home" and worse.
For your information... Not sure how the the term is received in the USA. But if you ever came on holiday to the UK you'd be better not to use the term unless you wanted to get into fights quite regularly.
You want to come to the East End of London, me old china, and I'll show you tea that isn't weak! Proper builders brews.
I'm telling you, you could stand a spoon in some of the brews you get down the proper caffs. Proper traditional places with a big tea pot always on the go, they pour you a couple of inches from that into a mug and then top up the other 2/3 of the mug with hot water. I swear the tea in those big tea pots is some sort of nuclear brew that's been stewing in there since the days the Cutty Sark used to sail up the Thames, they just top it up with a couple more spoonfuls of leaf tea every Christmas and it gets heavier and heavier and more and more evil.
My first job was in a hospital with a couple of retired Navy guys, they'd been through the war, I was the youngest so I was "the boy" and any time we had a problem I was sent to make a pot of tea so we could stand there with our mugs and suck our teeth and sip our tea and work out how to get the box through the door or whatever. Taught me how to make proper strong brews those lads did.
I think your green tea is the happy asian gentle stuff*, nothing wrong with it but not for yer average British builder, you know... you'd get laughed off a site if you tried bringing that along...
cheers though! Nothing like a lovely cup of tea eh? (or 10 or so).
*no disrespect to asian builders, I bet if you're on a building site in Singapore or Tokyo or wherever the lads there can probably brew green tea to some frightening level of intensity too...
Read my post in context with the parent to which I was responding. Original poster used the term "fucking barbaric" to describe a country that executed drug users and I was suggesting they thought a little more about their posting.
Agreed my language should have been more carefully chosen. I completely agree the issue is more nuanced than a short response can provide however felt it would be mostly lost on the original poster, hence decided to give them a blunt response to get them thinking about what they'd written. Perhaps I shouldn't have jumped back at a troll...
Clearly you are more capable of a more rational debate and it would be more pleasant to have a decent conversation and discuss the issues with you rather than User Jaysyn.The issues are indeed complex.
I'd note though that the State of Texas- a part of the USA - apparently still reserves the right to execute under 18 year olds and President Obama has promised to review the failure to ratify the Convention (Ref.)
Only two countries in the World refuse to sign up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and declare their right to execute children as part of their legal processes:
1. Somalia 2. United States of America
Careful who you are calling barbaric, some people might also call executing kids a pretty primitive practice.
"From what I understand, U.S. law allows photography on public property, i.e. streets. If you have a problem with that, you shouldn't be complaining to Google, you need to take it up with city/state legislators."
RTFA? - the article is about Broughton, Buckinghamshire, in the *UK*. Much as our glorious leaders fawn and worship the grand USA, they've not managed to get us to be the 51st State yet... believe it or not we have this quaint olde thing called our own laws, US laws don't apply here*. English law is generally what is supposed to be in effect in Buckinghamshire (cue comedy responses;-) ) - though probably you're allowed to take photos on public land most of the time, unless aforementioned householders are rich in which case you get chased orf their land (peasant).
*Unless its "the war on terror" in which case US law applies, you guys get to torture people here, boil them down for their fat (or whatever "rendition" means, I was never sure about that one), etc, on the grounds that your laws trump ours because you're American.
Which countries are predominantly automatic-driving places? USA, famous for it. I think quite a lot of folk in Turkey drive automatics. But I'd be interested to know what the breakdown is across the rest of the world. My impression is "driving with a clutch" is more common than "driving with automatic only".
Here in the UK it's the norm to drive with a clutch driven car. People are generally encouraged to learn to drive with a clutch driven car because the UK manual licence lets you drive an automatic, but not vice versa.
My experience was the opposite to yours - when a friend got married in the USA a few years ago I had to grab hold of him as we walked towards the rental place at the airport and ask "dude, how do I drive an automatic car? I've never driven one before". A couple of hours on the Miami freeways at rush hour taught me how to drive a US automatic (plus remembering everything is on the other side of the road) pretty fast...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Footpath in the UK does indeed mean the same as "sidewalk" or "alleyway" in the USA. Hence a number of posts saying "you've got to be kidding, no way will that be allowed". Police are pretty strict about riding bikes where you shouldn't here if they catch you doing it. They don't like it. Unlikely as an individual to get more than a bit of a polite telling off "on the road please, sir, the pavement is for pedestrians". But I can imagine if somebody comes through the town or village with a Google-emblazoned monster trike the coppers will be right on the case. Or at least on the radio ("oh, so he was cycling on the pavements around your part of town as well Bob?... right sir, can we take some details down, I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to come down to the station with me....").
As for turning round to a local copper and saying "hey but I am from the American internet company Google", I reckon that will get a swift response, including the expression "bloody Yanks" ;-)
Cycle routes, bridleways, canal towpaths, etc, I can see Google getting permission to use though. Plenty of those wider non-vehicular routes around.
Those are really not going to fit round a good number of medieval city UK footpaths, in the same way Hummers really aren't going to fit round medieval city streets...
they are too high, too wide, and too long for quite a few places I know of. Try getting around some of central London, here's the passageway next to the Lamb and Flag for an example. Here's a typical footpath from my home town, lots of hills in some places...
I work in a new town, and the really nice cycle lanes have bollards and offset fences where they intersect the roads, no way would that beast traverse them.
Nice idea, but a bit big. And in towns where the coppers are not so friendly, you will be nicked so quickly for riding it on a footpath. No bikes on footpaths here. They are for people, err, on foot.
http://www2.orange.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?c=OUKService&pagename=OUKPersonal&cid=1096023564458 [orange.co.uk]
"Orange has the largest integrated 2.5/3G network in the UK. This means that our 3G network covers 85% of the population, so if you happen to go out of our 3G range, you'll be seamlessy transferred to our 2.5G network" ... which is of very little use to me when I am working in the Highlands of Scotland supporting geology students. I can assure Orange that about half the locations we work in still have *no* phone connectivity whatsoever. Not 1G let alone 3G.
In the UK the phone companies still advertise coverage by population rather than by geographical area because that makes them look a lot better. There's some very low populated but large geographical areas once you head away from the south east and big cities... :-)
We've written a tool which guides them through their environmental enquiries. It's still under development but you can read the general information about our project here (Personal Inquiry website). Drupal on top of LAMP, running on the default Xandros OS. Battery life was something that concerned us for the full day trips across two towns, but we solved that by checking out tips on www.eeeuser.com
- switching off wireless in the BIOS (though used in the one hour school playground trials)
- lowering screen brightness a little
- setting the laptops to sleep on lid closing, and asking the students to close lids between locations (we walked across town stopping at a dozen places in each to collect data)
- hiding games so the students didn't run the batteries down playing these between working
- carrying spare batteries and swapping over some (not all required) at lunchtime.
Also used them on the ERA Project supporting disabled access to geology fieldwork in the Scottish Highlands - found that a field geologist could stream video and send photos from one Asus to another across a thrown up wifi network all day, needed one battery change generally, occasionally two for long field days.
So where did the value of $100,000 come from?
"To buy that traffic from Google at $.20/click, you'd have to pay $100,000 a month"
So google says its worth 20 cents a click. What if I say it's only worth a cent a click then its worth $5000, or perhaps at 0.1 cents a click its worth $500.
All make believe. Don't tell me "an expert told you so" because I think a bunch of "experts" called "bankers" just got discredited a few months ago for overvaluing other virtual sales... ;-)
Except I guess this is America so the writer is probably getting ready to sue the paper for his $100,000 lost one month's earnings on the grounds that he read it on the internet that he's lost $100K. Not bad for a bloke who probably usually earns $2000 a month but will keep really quiet about the actual figure he actually earns :-)
I have to stand up for the Asus Eee PCs and speak about my experiences in their defence. I bought 30 x 701s a year and a half ago for a university project working with 11-14 year old school children. They've since been issued to a total of approximately 330 students across 12 different classes, taken out on field trips, and issued for home use. Only one has broken so far, a student dropped it onto a tarmac road while walking and carrying it in her hand, so that's about a metre or so drop. It broke the corner of the screen casing but apart from that was fine, we could pull the data off it and give her a spare to carry on with. We now use it as a test machine back in the lab, it works fine but we don't really want to issue it to students.
A few have started to show scratches on the casing, and that's been it so far. They work ok in light rain, though the touch pad freaks out when they get too wet, we've found for field trips the solution is to get transparent plastic bags and slide them over the laptops and then they are fine (we use our geology department's rock sample bags, thanks guys!).
So I'd say they are reasonably robust given these kind of conditions.
Agreed Jeff, I made a cheap joke about the Americans to hold up a mirror to all those folks who idly announce that the French are all cowards and surrender in times of war and tried to get the parent and others to do some more thinking.
I hope you understand I did it in this context to raise debate and my third sentence clarified that I do have upmost respect for the Americans and everybody else who helped the UK when we were fighting against invasion in 1940 and later in the war. I've been to the USAF war graves in Cambridge and seen the rows and rows of graves of young US airmen who came over here and died far from home. Nobody can be failed to be moved by that and respect what they did. You only have to talk to my parents and other folks of that generation who can remember hiding in cellars while the bombs were dropping and coming out to find their streets obliterated and neighbours and friends dead to realise how terrible those times were.
A lot of brave French men and women died fighting for their homelands while the Yanks made excuses and sat around eating ice cream in Times Square or whatever they were up to and didn't get involved til 1941. Show a bit of respect.
Ok jokes aside and in Europe we're truly grateful for the Americans finally getting involved in 1941 and for less open but valuable support beforehand, but I think you do the French a disservice, take a look at how many were fighting in different theatres of war and in home resistance. I think over here in Europe we're much more aware about how many nations fought together and suffered terribly. Check how many nationalities fought on the Allies side in the Battle of Britain, something like a sixth of the RAF pilots were from countries other than Britain.
I am not sure where American naivety comes from regarding WW2 (though for sure it's not limited to your country)- perhaps because the war was mostly something that happened far away and didn't happen on your home soil except with rare exceptions? I guess the folk-memory of the war is life going on as normal and waving off the brave boys to distant lands. Maybe this is something to do with how that war is perceived differently in the USA from Europe?
Your argument is that you get better quality applicants if you reduce pay? I find this a tricky concept. By extrapolation, therefore, surely you would get better quality teachers if you paid them 14K instead of 28K, or even zero?
If you increased pay, would you then not get a larger number of applicants, allowing you to choose from a higher quality pool of potential new employees?
I agree with you that levels of education do not directly equate to ability to teach. But in the UK, for example, for many years many teacher training schools required lower school grades than standard university entrance, so it became known by 18 year olds as the thing you did if you wanted a professional career but weren't good enough to be a subject specialist. If you weren't good enough to study Physics at university, you could still teach physics. I don't think that's necessarily healthy for an education system.
I'm really surprised the postings here are all debating whether or not the methods of communication claimed to be used this guy and his colleagues are secure or not, and debates about NSA.
How about questioning if this is what was actually used? Maybe he's just making it up because he's had enough of the conditions he was kept in and will say anything to get away from Guantanamo Bay. I'm not saying he was tortured, but if you put me in a military prison for five years, flew me out to Morocco for some "hard questioning", repeatedly made me feel like you were going to drown me ("waterboarding"[1]), smacked my head against a wall multiple times ("headbanging"[2]) and locked me in a small cage with insects I had a phobia about and told me they might bite me [3] I might well just say anything I thought you wanted me to.
[1]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5185835/CIA-waterboarded-Khalid-Sheikh-Mohammed-183-times.html
[2] http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB123975168816518691-lMyQjAxMDI5MzE5NDcxNTQxWj.html
[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1170857/Obama-wont-prosecute-CIA-agents-used-insects-waterboarding-sleep-deprivation-terror-suspects.html
When the Daily Mail, a right wing newspaper, suggests the US military are echoing interrogation techniques used in Orwell's "1984" then I think we have to be a little bit critical about believing the credibility of the information gathered in this manner.
"On the other hand, kids that are of a coloring-book age (like my 5-year-old) at this point probably don't remember September 11, 2001, anyhow."
Such as obvious point and I'd completely missed it. You're very right! What age is this colouring book aimed at? under 10s I guess, who would have been less than toddlers when it happened and so won't have any memory of the event. Very good point my friend.
I completely agree with you - I think colouring books to get kids talking about a traumatic event and enable them to manage their feelings is a really good idea, I am all for it. Look at all the pictures drawn by small children after terrible events (e.g. the Tsunami in Asia a few years ago) and it seems really clear that art is therapeutic and a way to help kids talk about frightening events. But you make the really obvious point that anybody who can remember 9/11 is at least a teenager by now. So maybe other resources would be more helpful to help teenagers overcome bad memories of 9/11.
However if the book is more of a general resource for children dealing with a number of possible traumatic 'environmental' events and the 9/11 pictures are only one of several examples then by all means continue to publish.
"In other words, if you're not near death, you can't see someone who can actually help you"
Last year I had an earache. I knew I wasn't dying but it was a bit annoying. I phoned the doctor's surgery, they gave me an appointment that evening. I went to see the doc and he checked my ear, gave me a prescription for ear drops which I took to the chemist and it sorted out my minor infection.
Parent's poster is wrong. You don't need to be near death to see somebody who can help you.
Oh these Americans, so over dramatic.
Perhaps that was the problem, I wonder if the American friend went to the local doc and explained "OH MY GOD DOC! I've been sharing a house with a SMOKER, for TWO WHOLE DAYS, I think I've got CANCER, and I AM DYING!". I can imagine a British doc saying "yes yes well calm down, have you had any extreme symptoms? No? well, let me do a check... everything seems in order. How about you ask your friend to stop smoking in the house or perhaps you move to another flat. Get out and take up a little exercise as well."
I think the doctor would be sitting there thinking that if the problem was the guy was living with a smoker, why didn't he move and so solve his problem?
As another poster has noted, we have public health services in the UK but also private doctors, nobody stops you going to a private doctor if you want to pay.
(ok I've been a little jolly in this post and apologies I am sure your friend was in distress and I wish them well... but you did set me up a bit there. You suggest that "health care is something to be earned and not a right" and then complain your friend who'd been living in the UK for only one year couldn't get free specialist treatment. Why didn't he go and pay for a private specialist?).
I'm pretty sure quite a lot of the British elite is still due to being good at killing other people and invading their land, as much as market forces.
David Cameron is a direct descendant of William IV for example and his family got to be kings by either invading England or being invited to rule by the nobility, depending on your reading of history. "Down with the kids and the people" Dave might come over as chummy and merely rich through his ancestors financial dealings and connections to the Rothschilds but that's just him playing up his urban street cred..
An awful lot of the upper class elite in the UK got to be upper class elite a long time back through land grants from the king or doing a bit of land grabbing, killing and invading sometime between the Saxons and now (still quite a few Norman names there today, eh?). Pretty sure that "new money" still means your great great grand dad made money through cotton or the Empire as far as a lot of the Eton set is concerned ;-)
But while you're saving the company 20 dollars, or 200 dollars worth of cable, what does the company lose by you doing that for an hour?
If you're the lone IT guy and you're responsible for maintaining a T1 line, maybe while you're happily singing along to the radio and crimping away in your server room a technical crisis could happen and the company loses waaaaaay more than a couple of hundred dollars as a result.
Personally I agree with you - any competent IT guy should be able to crimp up the odd length of cable when required to a highly professional standard. But from your boss's perspective, that's probably not what he wants you to be doing with your time.
(ok non-UK readers should probably stop here though in the spirit of slashdot I should assume everybody in the world lives in my country ;-) )
I've signed up for the Telephone Preference Service - but still get junk calls from overseas telemarketing: anybody know how to get rid of them?
Also I've noticed that telephone numbers get handed on by BT to other people. Not sure how to get round that one. I moved into a house a year ago and the number I was given was changed from the previous owners number to a new one, and it had some sort of bad credit history, I got a lot of phone calls from people urgently needing to speak to a Mr or Mrs so-and-so. Clearly they'd not lived at my address because the previous owner (a little old lady) had lived there for many years. So I think I inherited a "bad" number and got so fed up of the calls I had to ask BT to change me to a new number which mostly seemed to sort things out.
Alas another useful opt-out alas appears to ask BT to make you ex-(telephone) directory. I've resisted this for years believing telephone directories to be a good idea but my impression is they are getting harvested by junk callers these days and indeed when I went ex-directory for the new number the volume of junk calls dropped significantly.
Not sure how the term is received in the USA but over here in the UK calling somebody from Pakistan a "paki" is like calling somebody with African-American heritage a "nigger". Most people consider it outdated and downright offensive, most folk with Pakistani origins who live in the UK associate it with small minded neo-nazis shouting at them, parading through the streets and telling them to "go home" and worse.
For your information... Not sure how the the term is received in the USA. But if you ever came on holiday to the UK you'd be better not to use the term unless you wanted to get into fights quite regularly.
regards.
My impression was that several US music companies also seemed rather unhappy and didn't like the Pirate Bay people either.
You want to come to the East End of London, me old china, and I'll show you tea that isn't weak! Proper builders brews.
I'm telling you, you could stand a spoon in some of the brews you get down the proper caffs. Proper traditional places with a big tea pot always on the go, they pour you a couple of inches from that into a mug and then top up the other 2/3 of the mug with hot water. I swear the tea in those big tea pots is some sort of nuclear brew that's been stewing in there since the days the Cutty Sark used to sail up the Thames, they just top it up with a couple more spoonfuls of leaf tea every Christmas and it gets heavier and heavier and more and more evil.
My first job was in a hospital with a couple of retired Navy guys, they'd been through the war, I was the youngest so I was "the boy" and any time we had a problem I was sent to make a pot of tea so we could stand there with our mugs and suck our teeth and sip our tea and work out how to get the box through the door or whatever. Taught me how to make proper strong brews those lads did.
I think your green tea is the happy asian gentle stuff*, nothing wrong with it but not for yer average British builder, you know... you'd get laughed off a site if you tried bringing that along...
cheers though! Nothing like a lovely cup of tea eh? (or 10 or so).
*no disrespect to asian builders, I bet if you're on a building site in Singapore or Tokyo or wherever the lads there can probably brew green tea to some frightening level of intensity too...
Read my post in context with the parent to which I was responding. Original poster used the term "fucking barbaric" to describe a country that executed drug users and I was suggesting they thought a little more about their posting.
Agreed my language should have been more carefully chosen. I completely agree the issue is more nuanced than a short response can provide however felt it would be mostly lost on the original poster, hence decided to give them a blunt response to get them thinking about what they'd written. Perhaps I shouldn't have jumped back at a troll...
Clearly you are more capable of a more rational debate and it would be more pleasant to have a decent conversation and discuss the issues with you rather than User Jaysyn.The issues are indeed complex.
I'd note though that the State of Texas- a part of the USA - apparently still reserves the right to execute under 18 year olds and President Obama has promised to review the failure to ratify the Convention (Ref.)
regards.
Only two countries in the World refuse to sign up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and declare their right to execute children as part of their legal processes:
1. Somalia
2. United States of America
Careful who you are calling barbaric, some people might also call executing kids a pretty primitive practice.
"From what I understand, U.S. law allows photography on public property, i.e. streets. If you have a problem with that, you shouldn't be complaining to Google, you need to take it up with city/state legislators."
RTFA? - the article is about Broughton, Buckinghamshire, in the *UK*. Much as our glorious leaders fawn and worship the grand USA, they've not managed to get us to be the 51st State yet... believe it or not we have this quaint olde thing called our own laws, US laws don't apply here*. English law is generally what is supposed to be in effect in Buckinghamshire (cue comedy responses ;-) ) - though probably you're allowed to take photos on public land most of the time, unless aforementioned householders are rich in which case you get chased orf their land (peasant).
*Unless its "the war on terror" in which case US law applies, you guys get to torture people here, boil them down for their fat (or whatever "rendition" means, I was never sure about that one), etc, on the grounds that your laws trump ours because you're American.
The queen has no role in the security status of her government
The Queen is Commander in Chief of the UK military..
OUCH YOU'RE REALLY shouting VERY LOUD there!
You can get your message across in just plain text and a little bit of thought out spacing you know...
cheers.
>>Wouldn't have been francium - that stuff's got such a short half life
>Because it surrenders to the germanium?
Which countries are predominantly automatic-driving places? USA, famous for it. I think quite a lot of folk in Turkey drive automatics. But I'd be interested to know what the breakdown is across the rest of the world. My impression is "driving with a clutch" is more common than "driving with automatic only".
Here in the UK it's the norm to drive with a clutch driven car. People are generally encouraged to learn to drive with a clutch driven car because the UK manual licence lets you drive an automatic, but not vice versa.
My experience was the opposite to yours - when a friend got married in the USA a few years ago I had to grab hold of him as we walked towards the rental place at the airport and ask "dude, how do I drive an automatic car? I've never driven one before". A couple of hours on the Miami freeways at rush hour taught me how to drive a US automatic (plus remembering everything is on the other side of the road) pretty fast... :-)