US football (soccer) players urinate on the pitch during games? "(Gets rid of the problem of urination on the field that is plagues any event with real soccer players )"... No wonder football (soccer) isn't popular in the USA. I never understood why the beautiful game wasn't as popular there as in the rest of the world, now I understand. Uggg.
I'm 36 and from the UK. When I was a kid growing up in the UK, 10^6 was a million, 10^9 was just known as "a thousand million" (maybe they were protecting us kids from more big words, but I am pretty sure adults used this expression as well, though "milliard" is a damn fine word!) and 10^12 was a billion. I remember being told at school that we should call 10^9 a thousand million but that Americans referred to this as "a billion". I think there was general impression that those overexcitable Americans preferred hyperbole and that was why they used the billion expression for 10^9:-)
I think the logic as far as I remember it was thousand x thousand = million so million x million = billion, there is already a word for thousand x million and that is thousand million. And yes, I grew up thinking billion x billion = trillion so I am not sure what a trillion is these days... thousand billion (US)?
Somebody help me! what are the international standards for these words!!!:-)
I suppose these days if somebody says "a billion" I assume they mean 10^9 but I'll be damned if I have to go back to feet and inches and perches and rods and goodness knows what;-) !
umm, read the article. The article was written by a guy in Barcelona, Spain not USA.
US laws don't apply in Spain (yet... is Spain with the US or against it?...). Fair comment to suggest people should check their national laws on microwave antennae but "Off Topic" to suggest a Spanish poster should be aware of US law.
The symbolic origin of the cross is surely not only Christian, unless sssmashy means "*The* Cross" with capitals and all that... is this what you mean sssmashy? - as adopted by Christian countries for their flags? otherwise I'd say crosses probably belong to universal vocabulary of basic symbols like circles, dots, zig zags... I remember how blown away I was when I found a design I'd always thought of as very celtic (Scots/Irish) cropping up in some African designs. My little theory (and I'd love it if more enlightened people could suggest further readings) is that there are a basic number of ways the human hand moves and strong images to copy, so the same shapes and symbols are going to be pretty universal.
The Daily Telegraph is also well known for its political stance, jokingly known as "The Daily Torygraph" (Tory party = Conservative Party, the main right wing UK political party - the Telegraph is the party's 'unofficial voice' and will follow the party line). It would be worthwhile noting that the Telegraph has long viewed the BBC as having a left-wing bias. Hence it's a good point that you make - reporters and their media are never neutral, and once you're trying to find out what's happening through several biased filters it all gets quite difficult. Daily Telegraph reporter with his bias reporting on the BBC reporter with their bias reporting from the UK-US military post with their bias. Yup, the expression "Chinese Whispers" springs to mind...
no offense intended but US perspective here...
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 2, Informative
umm, perhaps we should mention an earlier Civil War spectator reference, people have been doing this for a bit longer. I refer to the Civil War battle involving Boudicca and the Romans in Britain , A.D.61:-) (not called England in those days, the Angles weren't to invade for another few hundred years).
Tacitius reported that the rebels thought this was going to be another slaughter of Romans, so they assembled as many spectators as possible. Mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, babies, livestock, etc., and wagons loaded with the material gains so far plundered were amassed behind the British. Everyone waited to see the spectacle and revel in their impending victory. Of course things went the wrong way but that's another story. People have been doing this for a longgggg time.
oops, yup, the land of the armyvehicle-as-personal-transport:-))).
Me an Old European living in land of funny little curvy streets built 800 years before introduction of newfangled internal combustion engine. Tiny cars make sense in tiny streets and not so tiny fuel tax (gas here approx 5 dollars a gallon). Unpowered bicycles also useful for making me feel slightly less guilty about lack of other exercise...
Don't Smart Cars do 80mpg? I am pretty sure that several compact cars make about this kind of fuel consumption. I agree with bruceholt. 80mpg? gee whizz... I thought the little pizza delivery bikes did much better than that, over 100mpg surely?
Why loads of English teachers? French is the mother tongue for most people in Senegal (official language? can't remember). Is the intention to teach the kids a second language?
ok this is geekland! Somebody provide a reference rather than "your nation stinks more than my nation!" (oh ok it is/. I spose).
Come on then, somebody dig up stats, are the good people of the US the fattest in the world? or at least how do they compare with UK, and Oz, and say the French and Italians, and err, I dunno, some other non Western country, Japan? Egypt?
I'd love to know where the USA is on an international scale, say of % of inhabitants overweight...
Ok geek call here but I'd *love* to get a copy of that Bingo album. Could you post up as many details as you have about that album so I could try to track it down... cheers
Operation Northwood - US shooting down airliner
on
Should you Fear Google?
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· Score: 3, Informative
US plan to shoot down an airliner and blame the Cubans, so providing a pretext to invade Cuba in 1963.
Was this for real? or is it a spoof? can anybody provide references - rather than just their - obviously golden - slashdot opinions? I would love to know if some of these plans were actually on the table at the time...
I reckon positive environmental projects like solar heating for developing countries won't get a look in.
If it really is a useful low-reflecting material, the Official Secrets people will slap a secrecy and Military Secret stylee order on the whole lot and the only time we'll see the stuff (pun intended:-) ) is on UK military equipment. Oh, and US military as well, seeing as Tony is trying his damndest to make us the 51st State these days....
Wishing well of other people's endeavours for a cause that will benefit us all - no, I don't think that is 'unpatriotic' - or at least surely only in a dictatorship which accepts no dominance apart from its own.
A terrible thing has happened but as many other posters have commented, the actual death toll is insignificant in terms of human loss, compared to the number of people who die at sea, are killed in mining accidents, starve in developing countries, die in wars every year if not every week. I think it's more about the confidence of the US to accept this as part of participating in dangerous ventures. I also wish well all peoples and countries who explore the unknown and hope we can work together to make it happen. There must be so much knowledge out there held by scientists bound by their governments from sharing life saving knowledge for reasons of political advantage - let's hope that accidents like this can help things change and more sharing results.
...humanity wrote some ok books in its first 3000 years (-ish) of literacy. The Koran, the Bible, Shakespeare... yeah there's some ok books out there not covered by the stupid copyright situation we are now in. Hopefully Gutenburg can bring some pressure on the ridiculous copyright fiasco, but in the meanwhile, there's a whole store of amazing works of learning and literature out there.
Mmm, fair point. I guess the hardware making the bucks would still be churned out and the R and D would go to the wall.
Damn it's a pity they stopped at that point, though, from what I've read it seems as if it was a better machine in quite a few ways than the US shuttle. Let's hope some of the Buran engineers got taken on by NASA, or at least kept their jobs doing something else at Energia.
Um, wasn't one of the reasons for Buran development stopping that the entire superstate funding the project (USSR) collapsed at that point, so the contributing nations had more on their minds than space research? (like defining their nations, sorting out their economies, avoiding military coups..) I thought this was a main reason for the research getting shelved?
There have been several high profile (probably because of the look-at-the-poor-wee-dears value) cases in the UK. One primary school wanted to put on a version of "The Lion King" and the lawyers descended with all sorts of threats. Andrew Lloyd Webber is apparently rather clear about making sure his plays (e.g. Joseph and Technicolour...) get permission. It's an issue for teachers in the UK have to be aware of.
Money doesn't tend to be an issue, it's more the right to put on the show/ make an adaptation for a bunch of seven year olds in the first place. I am more interested in the issues surrounding the rights to perform/adapt / evolve a piece of art rather than the money issue. I think the money issue is probably the leverage the big companies use to prevent innovation in these circumstances.
Say I live in a town / country where we have a traditional story. Kids do it as a theatre show in school, local radio companies put it on the radio, usual small town stuff. DisneyCorps comes along and realises it's a great story, makes a film out of it. Next year all the local schools are threatened with multimillion law suits if the local 7 year olds try to tell their little traditional story for their mums and dads at the end of year show....
...All Your Culture Belongs To Us...
I guess if multinational food companies can tell local farmers that their multicorp now owns the rights to the crops the locals have been farming for thousands of years, the same could happen about cultural heritage?
Party: Good music, dancing, drugs (some maybe legal in different countries, some maybe not, careful in your choices, you wouldn't want alcohol in Saudi, you wouldn't want tobacco in California..), girls, boys, mixing it up and some people getting very friendly, lots of laughter...
Alternative Party:... ok guys, you really sunk this article with this headline, you want to tell me why I want to come to an Alternative Party which presumably has none of the above ?:-))
Hmm, reminds me of a story I heard regarding the much-maligned SA80 rifle over here in the UK.. apparently top brass invited over Mr Kalashnikov one day (designer of AK47 fame). Mr K. had a good look at the SA80 and turned to the generals and said "You must have really clever soldiers".
Slashdot Mirror
yukkkkkk!
US football (soccer) players urinate on the pitch during games? "(Gets rid of the problem of urination on the field that is plagues any event with real soccer players )"... No wonder football (soccer) isn't popular in the USA. I never understood why the beautiful game wasn't as popular there as in the rest of the world, now I understand. Uggg.
Can you give that in metric for us euros ;-) ?
I'm 36 and from the UK. When I was a kid growing up in the UK, 10^6 was a million, 10^9 was just known as "a thousand million" (maybe they were protecting us kids from more big words, but I am pretty sure adults used this expression as well, though "milliard" is a damn fine word!) and 10^12 was a billion. I remember being told at school that we should call 10^9 a thousand million but that Americans referred to this as "a billion". I think there was general impression that those overexcitable Americans preferred hyperbole and that was why they used the billion expression for 10^9 :-)
I think the logic as far as I remember it was thousand x thousand = million so million x million = billion, there is already a word for thousand x million and that is thousand million. And yes, I grew up thinking billion x billion = trillion so I am not sure what a trillion is these days... thousand billion (US)?
Somebody help me! what are the international standards for these words!!! :-)
I suppose these days if somebody says "a billion" I assume they mean 10^9 but I'll be damned if I have to go back to feet and inches and perches and rods and goodness knows what ;-) !
umm, read the article. The article was written by a guy in Barcelona, Spain not USA.
US laws don't apply in Spain (yet... is Spain with the US or against it?...). Fair comment to suggest people should check their national laws on microwave antennae but "Off Topic" to suggest a Spanish poster should be aware of US law.
The symbolic origin of the cross is surely not only Christian, unless sssmashy means "*The* Cross" with capitals and all that ... is this what you mean sssmashy? - as adopted by Christian countries for their flags? otherwise I'd say crosses probably belong to universal vocabulary of basic symbols like circles, dots, zig zags... I remember how blown away I was when I found a design I'd always thought of as very celtic (Scots /Irish) cropping up in some African designs. My little theory (and I'd love it if more enlightened people could suggest further readings) is that there are a basic number of ways the human hand moves and strong images to copy, so the same shapes and symbols are going to be pretty universal.
The Daily Telegraph is also well known for its political stance, jokingly known as "The Daily Torygraph" (Tory party = Conservative Party, the main right wing UK political party - the Telegraph is the party's 'unofficial voice' and will follow the party line). It would be worthwhile noting that the Telegraph has long viewed the BBC as having a left-wing bias. Hence it's a good point that you make - reporters and their media are never neutral, and once you're trying to find out what's happening through several biased filters it all gets quite difficult. Daily Telegraph reporter with his bias reporting on the BBC reporter with their bias reporting from the UK-US military post with their bias. Yup, the expression "Chinese Whispers" springs to mind...
umm, perhaps we should mention an earlier Civil War spectator reference, people have been doing this for a bit longer. I refer to the Civil War battle involving Boudicca and the Romans in Britain , A.D.61 :-) (not called England in those days, the Angles weren't to invade for another few hundred years).
Tacitius reported that the rebels thought this was going to be another slaughter of Romans, so they assembled as many spectators as possible. Mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, babies, livestock, etc., and wagons loaded with the material gains so far plundered were amassed behind the British. Everyone waited to see the spectacle and revel in their impending victory.
Of course things went the wrong way but that's another story. People have been doing this for a longgggg time.
Ref: http://www.romans-in-britain.org.uk/his_boudiccan_ rebellion_final_battle.htm
oops, yup, the land of the armyvehicle-as-personal-transport :-))).
Me an Old European living in land of funny little curvy streets built 800 years before introduction of newfangled internal combustion engine. Tiny cars make sense in tiny streets and not so tiny fuel tax (gas here approx 5 dollars a gallon). Unpowered bicycles also useful for making me feel slightly less guilty about lack of other exercise...
Don't Smart Cars do 80mpg? I am pretty sure that several compact cars make about this kind of fuel consumption. I agree with bruceholt. 80mpg? gee whizz... I thought the little pizza delivery bikes did much better than that, over 100mpg surely?
Why loads of English teachers? French is the mother tongue for most people in Senegal (official language? can't remember). Is the intention to teach the kids a second language?
ok this is geekland! Somebody provide a reference rather than "your nation stinks more than my nation!" (oh ok it is /. I spose).
Come on then, somebody dig up stats, are the good people of the US the fattest in the world? or at least how do they compare with UK, and Oz, and say the French and Italians, and err, I dunno, some other non Western country, Japan? Egypt?
I'd love to know where the USA is on an international scale, say of % of inhabitants overweight...
Your misspelling of the word "Intelligence" makes for quite a funny posting.
cheers for the info!
Ok geek call here but I'd *love* to get a copy of that Bingo album. Could you post up as many details as you have about that album so I could try to track it down... cheers
US plan to shoot down an airliner and blame the Cubans, so providing a pretext to invade Cuba in 1963.
Was this for real? or is it a spoof? can anybody provide references - rather than just their - obviously golden - slashdot opinions? I would love to know if some of these plans were actually on the table at the time...
How about France?
I reckon positive environmental projects like solar heating for developing countries won't get a look in.
If it really is a useful low-reflecting material, the Official Secrets people will slap a secrecy and Military Secret stylee order on the whole lot and the only time we'll see the stuff (pun intended :-) ) is on UK military equipment. Oh, and US military as well, seeing as Tony is trying his damndest to make us the 51st State these days....
Wishing well of other people's endeavours for a cause that will benefit us all - no, I don't think that is 'unpatriotic' - or at least surely only in a dictatorship which accepts no dominance apart from its own.
A terrible thing has happened but as many other posters have commented, the actual death toll is insignificant in terms of human loss, compared to the number of people who die at sea, are killed in mining accidents, starve in developing countries, die in wars every year if not every week. I think it's more about the confidence of the US to accept this as part of participating in dangerous ventures. I also wish well all peoples and countries who explore the unknown and hope we can work together to make it happen. There must be so much knowledge out there held by scientists bound by their governments from sharing life saving knowledge for reasons of political advantage - let's hope that accidents like this can help things change and more sharing results.
...humanity wrote some ok books in its first 3000 years (-ish) of literacy. The Koran, the Bible, Shakespeare... yeah there's some ok books out there not covered by the stupid copyright situation we are now in. Hopefully Gutenburg can bring some pressure on the ridiculous copyright fiasco, but in the meanwhile, there's a whole store of amazing works of learning and literature out there.
Damn it's a pity they stopped at that point, though, from what I've read it seems as if it was a better machine in quite a few ways than the US shuttle. Let's hope some of the Buran engineers got taken on by NASA, or at least kept their jobs doing something else at Energia.
Um, wasn't one of the reasons for Buran development stopping that the entire superstate funding the project (USSR) collapsed at that point, so the contributing nations had more on their minds than space research? (like defining their nations, sorting out their economies, avoiding military coups..) I thought this was a main reason for the research getting shelved?
There have been several high profile (probably because of the look-at-the-poor-wee-dears value) cases in the UK. One primary school wanted to put on a version of "The Lion King" and the lawyers descended with all sorts of threats. Andrew Lloyd Webber is apparently rather clear about making sure his plays (e.g. Joseph and Technicolour...) get permission. It's an issue for teachers in the UK have to be aware of.
Money doesn't tend to be an issue, it's more the right to put on the show/ make an adaptation for a bunch of seven year olds in the first place. I am more interested in the issues surrounding the rights to perform /adapt / evolve a piece of art rather than the money issue. I think the money issue is probably the leverage the big companies use to prevent innovation in these circumstances.
Say I live in a town / country where we have a traditional story. Kids do it as a theatre show in school, local radio companies put it on the radio, usual small town stuff. DisneyCorps comes along and realises it's a great story, makes a film out of it. Next year all the local schools are threatened with multimillion law suits if the local 7 year olds try to tell their little traditional story for their mums and dads at the end of year show....
...All Your Culture Belongs To Us...
I guess if multinational food companies can tell local farmers that their multicorp now owns the rights to the crops the locals have been farming for thousands of years, the same could happen about cultural heritage?
Party: Good music, dancing, drugs (some maybe legal in different countries, some maybe not, careful in your choices, you wouldn't want alcohol in Saudi, you wouldn't want tobacco in California..), girls, boys, mixing it up and some people getting very friendly, lots of laughter...
Alternative Party: ... ok guys, you really sunk this article with this headline, you want to tell me why I want to come to an Alternative Party which presumably has none of the above ? :-))
Hmm, reminds me of a story I heard regarding the much-maligned SA80 rifle over here in the UK.. apparently top brass invited over Mr Kalashnikov one day (designer of AK47 fame). Mr K. had a good look at the SA80 and turned to the generals and said "You must have really clever soldiers".