You think that selling peerages / giving them away to your mates is a new thing that started with New Labour? Best read a little history, pal....
You could argue that the House of Lords had its origin in William the Conqueror carving up England and handing out bits of it to his people in exchange for help conquering the land in 1066. How do you think the original Lords became nobility in the first place? Down the centuries various best mates/lovers/wealthy bankers of the kings and queens became lords and therefore law makers. Nothing new.
Why do people confuse "England" and "United Kingdom" so much and use the terms interchangeably? (for your own health and safety, please don't make this mistake when visiting Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland)
Are academic journals obsolete? Not as long as academic status is measured by your publication record.
Good points made in the./ story - journals may take years to be published after articles are submitted, the peer review process can take a long time and may be faulty, paper journals might cost a lot more than online journals to produce, they may not add much to wider society.
*But* being published in peer reviewed journals is still perceived as being a solid indicator of one's academic status and career progression. It's a key element of an academic CV. It's one way of getting a PhD. Poor publication record, poor career prospects. Published in prestigious journals? you're going places. Until this changes, peer reviewed journals (whether paper or online) will remain central to the academic world.
I'm speaking as a junior academic. Interested to hear of senior academics perspectives...
"It's always amazing to me how a demonstrably bad idea gets mimicked over and over again."
For some bizarre reason UK politicians adore the USA to the point of embarrassment for the general population. Maggie Thatcher practically swooned over Ronnie Reagan but this was often seen as the Conservative (right wing) political view combined with Cold War practicalities - it was felt we needed US military support to keep the UK safe from the Soviet Union. With the end of the cold war and a Labour (left wing, supposedly socialist) government a lot of people thought this would finish but Tony Blair spent a lot of time appearing to dream of being vice president of the USA/governor of the 51st state of America.
This love of all things American seems to permeate down through political layers and US initiatives are often seen by politicians in the UK as desireable models to emulate.
I think it's a hang over from post first and second world war periods where the USA emerged as much stronger economically, comparatively speaking. For war weary and rationed British people, America was indeed a glittering, glamourous and wealthy country and many people aspired to that level of wealth. I think a lot of politicians felt then and now if we followed the same political systems we'd have the same wealth in the UK.
Check the wiki.eeeuser.com pages. Lots of folks have run larger (as in disk drive size) distros on their mini laptops. Issue as another poster notes is they aren't optimised and come with too many extra tools and guff. No point installing a thousand apps by default just because you can on a minilaptop which is pushed for space.
I'm sure you don't intend it but your first lines of posting come over as the classic linux expert user criticism of newbies - "it's not the software that's wrong, it's you!".
I'm very pleased that many of the linux distros have got their act together to appeal to a wider audience these days.
Where I come from "60-deep" is used to suggest a wide frontage crowd x 60 rows back. Say 50 x 60? So I'd expect from your headline to see a crowd of a few thousand at least. View from the front of a rock stadium gig, that sort of thing. What the photos look like are a line of some people one behind the other. Perhaps 60 in total.
Maybe the headline is you're looking for is "a group of 60 people".
Wow, 60 people go to a store in New York. Makes headline. Big village you've got there....
Just returned from Mumbai in India which proves you can fit a lot more than 7 million into a city. I think what you're saying is "more than 7 million in a lifestyle that I wish to lead" which is a completely different thing. Globalisation means a lot of changes are coming...
"Britain stood alone against fascism? A bastion against the Soviets? I am not surprised your government wants to keep a close eye on you. An island nation with an ego like that definitely requires close supervision."
I believe the original poster was from the USA, not the UK. I suppose the USA is sort of an island nation, all be it a very big island...:-)
I think the only people in the UK who might make those claims are the nasty people in the ultra right wing nationalist-racist parties and the more out of touch Conservatives who are still living in the late 1940s... The rest of us would rather have a nice cup of tea and carry on.
Well in the last few years they've sold off a lot of the land they previously owned (modern housing estate being built there now) and you can indeed rent out some of the buildings, plus they rent the main areas out as function rooms.
Trouble is the UK is on the edge of a recession - you might have noticed housing prices being a bit dodgy in the USA recently? and so the office rental market is shrinking not growing. So it's a tough market to be in and 60 year old buildings in Bletchley, well, that's a tough sell compared to high tech office in central London (or even central Milton Keynes).
"21,000 kilometers per hour..." - Arggh! Ed (Weiler)! some of your guys are using metric units! Have a quick check round the lab and make sure they all are! Maybe the quiet guy in the corner in charge of retro rockets is still using miles not kilometres!
I'm sure you have, but you know, we've been here before...;-)
Police in the UK won't give you a hard time if you're drunk as long as you're harmless appearing and not doing anything particularly offensive or abusive to others. If you're a bit out of order they'll have a quiet word with you and suggest you go home or calm down, if you're a danger to yourself or others they will probably take further action. In the first instance this probably means giving you an official warning and then they'll arrest you if you don't sort yourself out. Arresting you means anything from a small fine to a serious criminal charge depending on what you were doing at the time (being an idiot and not listening to what the police tells you to do=small fine and probably a night in the cells, being aggressive, fighting, damaging people or property - could be jail time). There's definitely some town centre public drunkeness in the UK. Americans between 18 and 21 tend to go a bit crazy when they visit here as well, I think they get very excited about a> being able to drink, often without showing ID (we are more relaxed about that here, if you look old enough the bar staff won't ask you for ID) and b> the beer's stronger.
Police in UK certainly won't tolerate you carrying a gun though like in that BBC news story, and will definitely call in heavy support if you try to drill a hole in your wall using one. Pretty well nobody is allowed a gun over here, you have to have a very, very good reason to get permission for one (e.g. farmer who needs to kill vermin, gamekeepers for shooting deer). If the police here discovered you were carrying a gun they'd probably get the heck out of there and call in armed response to pin you down - and shoot holes in you if you didn't put the gun down immediately.
I am one of the percentage that got assaulted in view of a CCTV camera (Hackney, London, Summer 2002), and nothing got solved as a result. When the police came to review the footage after I reported my attack. they told me "sorry the image quality is too poor, we can't make out who it was".
Great. So speaking from painful experience (plus a ruined suit), CCTV doesn't work. Maybe 20 years ago thugs might have worried about being caught on camera but now they all know the image quality is so crap they won't get caught so it doesn't bother them.
I don't believe in CCTV (philosophically as well as practically) and I am annoyed I pay my taxes for this waste of money.
Has it crossed your mind that you might have been the people that 'ruined' Waikiki?
I don't understand the moral superiority that some people have when they declare it's ok for them to visit places, but not other people. A bit like people who insist on calling themselves "travellers" rather than "tourists". You're all outsiders visiting a place. Perhaps if you and your friends hadn't visited Waikiki a local guy (or another outsider) wouldn't have had the brainwave to throw up the first highrise hotel. By you going there such folks realised more money could be made.
I'm not necessarily saying it's a good or bad thing you or other people visit out of the way places (in many cases locals might be happy for people to visit and spend money) but I question this moral high ground angle that somehow your actions were positive whereas everybody else's visit is negative. Seems like snobbery to me.
"The vast majority of us who want a free market for health insurance do so because we know that in the long run, everyone including the poor will be much better off. Free markets a) promote innovation and better health care and b) drive costs down.
Do you also stand by this argument regarding fire services and police forces protecting your house and neighbourhood? Do you prefer private fire protection to publicly taxed fire departments, and private law enforcement over public police? Just curious as perplexed as it seems to me as an outsider that "socialized" fire and police protection seem acceptable but "socialized medicine" appear to be less acceptable in the USA. Wondering where the difference between these services is seen by the American public?
No point spending 5300 dollars on speakers when you're an average adult in this day and age in the Western world. You've probably got that much hearing damage by the time you're 30 that spending anything over a certain point (a few hundred dollars) is really not going to make that much difference. For small children maybe, but the rest of us have walked past that many pneumatic drills, been to funfairs and rock concerts, firework displays and walked alongside busy roads that really, spending the price of an auto on speakers is wasted money. For a small percentage of careful people they might make a difference, but if you spent any time as a teenage with ear bud headphones stuffed in your ears listening to music, forget it....
"With $200 machines being all the rage these days, it's surprising that more coverage hasn't been given to Shuttle's KPC..."
It's not a laptop. Next!
Not flamebait, but the truth. Cute little laptops have been either underpowered or the preserve of the rich till now, so Asus and everybody else knocking out workable, durable, cute machines is newsworthy. A desktop box that costs 200 dollars? where's the news in that? You can find those on every high street, and loads of people have brought out cute looking ones so nothing new there either. Plus it's not 200 dollars and press the on button, for Joe Public it's 200 dollars, spend some more on a monitor, then plug it into the wall. SO more like buying another desktop. Yawn.
An areal vehicle, is this something that is independent of reality or possibly without reality? in the same way as amoral is without morals?
Is this some kind or ultra stealth vehicle, influenced by the Hitchhikers Guide "Heart of Gold" spaceship? something which does and doesn't exist at the same time perhaps? wow, I knew you Americans were doing some crazy cutting edge stuff out in Area 51 but this is really something!
It's a great visit. Go check it out. They don't get a lot of funding so they are very dependent on visitors (and volunteers if you live nearby) to help keep things going. They had to sell off some of their land recently to keep going (this is now getting turned into a local housing estate).
Rather sad that this got modded 'funny'. Not sure whether I feel more sad or angry. Millions of people died in terrible conditions, millions of people suffered for years afterwards. I don't think that's "Funny". Shame on you folks. Take just ten minutes out of your lives to read up on the grim reality of Word War One.
...except that the British Army doesn't fly Harriers: check here for what the Army Air Corps flies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_Kingdom_military_aircraft... only the RAF (the Air Force) and Fleet Air Arm (the branch of the Royal Navy responsible for the operation of the aircraft on board their ships) fly Harriers.
The USA has some wide open spaces but I believe it is also the home of the skyscraper, there are some urban areas there as well.... I'd guess a few folks live in urban environments there as well as in Europe. Manhattan and Santa Monica seemed pretty similar to European cities in terms of layout last time I was there: I think as another poster has suggested, the reasons for bikes not being attractive in the USA is as much to do with cultural and social reasons as geographical ones.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that selling peerages / giving them away to your mates is a new thing that started with New Labour? Best read a little history, pal....
You could argue that the House of Lords had its origin in William the Conqueror carving up England and handing out bits of it to his people in exchange for help conquering the land in 1066. How do you think the original Lords became nobility in the first place? Down the centuries various best mates/lovers/wealthy bankers of the kings and queens became lords and therefore law makers. Nothing new.
Interested:
Which State is this?
Why do people confuse "England" and "United Kingdom" so much and use the terms interchangeably? (for your own health and safety, please don't make this mistake when visiting Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland)
Curious... thanks in advance...
Are academic journals obsolete? Not as long as academic status is measured by your publication record.
./ story - journals may take years to be published after articles are submitted, the peer review process can take a long time and may be faulty, paper journals might cost a lot more than online journals to produce, they may not add much to wider society.
Good points made in the
*But* being published in peer reviewed journals is still perceived as being a solid indicator of one's academic status and career progression. It's a key element of an academic CV. It's one way of getting a PhD. Poor publication record, poor career prospects. Published in prestigious journals? you're going places. Until this changes, peer reviewed journals (whether paper or online) will remain central to the academic world.
I'm speaking as a junior academic. Interested to hear of senior academics perspectives...
"Under this plan there would always be the option of sending the kids to a better school across town if the nearby school got too bad."
1. If they can afford the transport costs
2. If they live in a town or another location where there's more than one school: are you writing off the rural population of your country?
"It's always amazing to me how a demonstrably bad idea gets mimicked over and over again."
For some bizarre reason UK politicians adore the USA to the point of embarrassment for the general population. Maggie Thatcher practically swooned over Ronnie Reagan but this was often seen as the Conservative (right wing) political view combined with Cold War practicalities - it was felt we needed US military support to keep the UK safe from the Soviet Union. With the end of the cold war and a Labour (left wing, supposedly socialist) government a lot of people thought this would finish but Tony Blair spent a lot of time appearing to dream of being vice president of the USA/governor of the 51st state of America.
This love of all things American seems to permeate down through political layers and US initiatives are often seen by politicians in the UK as desireable models to emulate.
I think it's a hang over from post first and second world war periods where the USA emerged as much stronger economically, comparatively speaking. For war weary and rationed British people, America was indeed a glittering, glamourous and wealthy country and many people aspired to that level of wealth. I think a lot of politicians felt then and now if we followed the same political systems we'd have the same wealth in the UK.
Check the wiki.eeeuser.com pages. Lots of folks have run larger (as in disk drive size) distros on their mini laptops. Issue as another poster notes is they aren't optimised and come with too many extra tools and guff. No point installing a thousand apps by default just because you can on a minilaptop which is pushed for space.
I'm sure you don't intend it but your first lines of posting come over as the classic linux expert user criticism of newbies - "it's not the software that's wrong, it's you!".
I'm very pleased that many of the linux distros have got their act together to appeal to a wider audience these days.
Where I come from "60-deep" is used to suggest a wide frontage crowd x 60 rows back. Say 50 x 60? So I'd expect from your headline to see a crowd of a few thousand at least. View from the front of a rock stadium gig, that sort of thing. What the photos look like are a line of some people one behind the other. Perhaps 60 in total.
Maybe the headline is you're looking for is "a group of 60 people".
Wow, 60 people go to a store in New York. Makes headline. Big village you've got there....
Just returned from Mumbai in India which proves you can fit a lot more than 7 million into a city. I think what you're saying is "more than 7 million in a lifestyle that I wish to lead" which is a completely different thing. Globalisation means a lot of changes are coming...
"Britain stood alone against fascism? A bastion against the Soviets? I am not surprised your government wants to keep a close eye on you. An island nation with an ego like that definitely requires close supervision."
:-)
I believe the original poster was from the USA, not the UK. I suppose the USA is sort of an island nation, all be it a very big island...
I think the only people in the UK who might make those claims are the nasty people in the ultra right wing nationalist-racist parties and the more out of touch Conservatives who are still living in the late 1940s... The rest of us would rather have a nice cup of tea and carry on.
Well in the last few years they've sold off a lot of the land they previously owned (modern housing estate being built there now) and you can indeed rent out some of the buildings, plus they rent the main areas out as function rooms.
Trouble is the UK is on the edge of a recession - you might have noticed housing prices being a bit dodgy in the USA recently? and so the office rental market is shrinking not growing. So it's a tough market to be in and 60 year old buildings in Bletchley, well, that's a tough sell compared to high tech office in central London (or even central Milton Keynes).
"21,000 kilometers per hour..." - Arggh! Ed (Weiler)! some of your guys are using metric units! Have a quick check round the lab and make sure they all are! Maybe the quiet guy in the corner in charge of retro rockets is still using miles not kilometres!
;-)
I'm sure you have, but you know, we've been here before...
Police in the UK won't give you a hard time if you're drunk as long as you're harmless appearing and not doing anything particularly offensive or abusive to others. If you're a bit out of order they'll have a quiet word with you and suggest you go home or calm down, if you're a danger to yourself or others they will probably take further action. In the first instance this probably means giving you an official warning and then they'll arrest you if you don't sort yourself out. Arresting you means anything from a small fine to a serious criminal charge depending on what you were doing at the time (being an idiot and not listening to what the police tells you to do=small fine and probably a night in the cells, being aggressive, fighting, damaging people or property - could be jail time). There's definitely some town centre public drunkeness in the UK. Americans between 18 and 21 tend to go a bit crazy when they visit here as well, I think they get very excited about a> being able to drink, often without showing ID (we are more relaxed about that here, if you look old enough the bar staff won't ask you for ID) and b> the beer's stronger.
Police in UK certainly won't tolerate you carrying a gun though like in that BBC news story, and will definitely call in heavy support if you try to drill a hole in your wall using one. Pretty well nobody is allowed a gun over here, you have to have a very, very good reason to get permission for one (e.g. farmer who needs to kill vermin, gamekeepers for shooting deer). If the police here discovered you were carrying a gun they'd probably get the heck out of there and call in armed response to pin you down - and shoot holes in you if you didn't put the gun down immediately.
I am one of the percentage that got assaulted in view of a CCTV camera (Hackney, London, Summer 2002), and nothing got solved as a result. When the police came to review the footage after I reported my attack. they told me "sorry the image quality is too poor, we can't make out who it was".
Great. So speaking from painful experience (plus a ruined suit), CCTV doesn't work. Maybe 20 years ago thugs might have worried about being caught on camera but now they all know the image quality is so crap they won't get caught so it doesn't bother them.
I don't believe in CCTV (philosophically as well as practically) and I am annoyed I pay my taxes for this waste of money.
What's your experience?
Has it crossed your mind that you might have been the people that 'ruined' Waikiki?
I don't understand the moral superiority that some people have when they declare it's ok for them to visit places, but not other people. A bit like people who insist on calling themselves "travellers" rather than "tourists". You're all outsiders visiting a place. Perhaps if you and your friends hadn't visited Waikiki a local guy (or another outsider) wouldn't have had the brainwave to throw up the first highrise hotel. By you going there such folks realised more money could be made.
I'm not necessarily saying it's a good or bad thing you or other people visit out of the way places (in many cases locals might be happy for people to visit and spend money) but I question this moral high ground angle that somehow your actions were positive whereas everybody else's visit is negative. Seems like snobbery to me.
"The vast majority of us who want a free market for health insurance do so because we know that in the long run, everyone including the poor will be much better off. Free markets a) promote innovation and better health care and b) drive costs down.
Do you also stand by this argument regarding fire services and police forces protecting your house and neighbourhood? Do you prefer private fire protection to publicly taxed fire departments, and private law enforcement over public police? Just curious as perplexed as it seems to me as an outsider that "socialized" fire and police protection seem acceptable but "socialized medicine" appear to be less acceptable in the USA. Wondering where the difference between these services is seen by the American public?
No point spending 5300 dollars on speakers when you're an average adult in this day and age in the Western world. You've probably got that much hearing damage by the time you're 30 that spending anything over a certain point (a few hundred dollars) is really not going to make that much difference. For small children maybe, but the rest of us have walked past that many pneumatic drills, been to funfairs and rock concerts, firework displays and walked alongside busy roads that really, spending the price of an auto on speakers is wasted money. For a small percentage of careful people they might make a difference, but if you spent any time as a teenage with ear bud headphones stuffed in your ears listening to music, forget it....
Occasionally I am forced to agree with Dr. Johnson. If no other argument works, then turn to that...
It's not a laptop. Next!
Not flamebait, but the truth. Cute little laptops have been either underpowered or the preserve of the rich till now, so Asus and everybody else knocking out workable, durable, cute machines is newsworthy. A desktop box that costs 200 dollars? where's the news in that? You can find those on every high street, and loads of people have brought out cute looking ones so nothing new there either. Plus it's not 200 dollars and press the on button, for Joe Public it's 200 dollars, spend some more on a monitor, then plug it into the wall. SO more like buying another desktop. Yawn.
An areal vehicle, is this something that is independent of reality or possibly without reality? in the same way as amoral is without morals?
Is this some kind or ultra stealth vehicle, influenced by the Hitchhikers Guide "Heart of Gold" spaceship? something which does and doesn't exist at the same time perhaps? wow, I knew you Americans were doing some crazy cutting edge stuff out in Area 51 but this is really something!
But which football code are we talking about? The different games have different sized pitches you know... ;-)
At least provide a link to the Bletchley Park museum itself!
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
It's a great visit. Go check it out. They don't get a lot of funding so they are very dependent on visitors (and volunteers if you live nearby) to help keep things going. They had to sell off some of their land recently to keep going (this is now getting turned into a local housing estate).
Rather sad that this got modded 'funny'. Not sure whether I feel more sad or angry. Millions of people died in terrible conditions, millions of people suffered for years afterwards. I don't think that's "Funny". Shame on you folks. Take just ten minutes out of your lives to read up on the grim reality of Word War One.
...except that the British Army doesn't fly Harriers: check here for what the Army Air Corps flies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_Kingdom_military_aircraft ... only the RAF (the Air Force) and Fleet Air Arm (the branch of the Royal Navy responsible for the operation of the aircraft on board their ships) fly Harriers.
The USA has some wide open spaces but I believe it is also the home of the skyscraper, there are some urban areas there as well.... I'd guess a few folks live in urban environments there as well as in Europe. Manhattan and Santa Monica seemed pretty similar to European cities in terms of layout last time I was there: I think as another poster has suggested, the reasons for bikes not being attractive in the USA is as much to do with cultural and social reasons as geographical ones.