As an American it saddens me to truthfully say that most Americans today are dumbasses.
This isn't a new phenomena.
âoeThe best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.â - Widely attributed to Winston Churchill.
People by and large have always been dumbarses, the difference is that now their believe that their ignorance is worth as much as anyone's knowledge and this has made them entitled.
Most especially, those who regularly ingest the mental poison that is Fox News are the dumbest of the dumb
Garbage in, garbage out.
I honestly believe western nations are lapsing into a neo-fascism. There's only going to be two solutions, rip it off fast like a bandaid or let it fester and rot until the whole arm needs to be removed. If we rip it off fast, we have to accept that we're going to have to offend the fascists.
They want hydrogen cars to be big because they missed the boat on battery electric and a lot of the basic tech is now owned by other companies. They are facing either having to delay their EVs to wait out the patents or pay royalties, and all the while need to do their own EV R&D to avoid falling further behind.
Battery electric has already won. We already have 99% of the infrastructure in place.
Maybe in Hipster Central, SoCal... But out here in the real world 1% of the infrastructure isn't even in place.
Also my time isn't free. Spending an hour recharging just go to the 5 miles to home is a huge waste. If someone manages to produce hydrogen from seawater cost effectively, battery cars are effectively dead.
For taxes, the issue is that sales (and other) tax(es) in the US are levied by states and other municipalities. So it would make it impossible to advertise a nationwide price. (Add even if you advocate replacing all the state sales taxes with a national VAT or sales tax, there are other location dependent taxes, e.g. hotel occupancy tax.)
I can get the state sales tax reasons (which isn't an issue for most countries)... but for hotels, they know what the HOT and other fees are in advance and should advertise that as a final price. Its not like the hotels location is going to change in the next few months.
If it's part of the cost it's part of the cost. They advertise costs that are bfore Fees. People get this when it's taxes and 911 fees but fees that GO to ATT are B.S. deception.
why not advertise free service*
* plus $64/mo content delivery fee.
The US allows you to advertise prices sans taxes and fees... to those of us in the ROTW, this seems pants on head retarded.
When an airline advertises an airfare in the UK, this is the price I pay to get the airfare including all applicable taxes and non-optional fees.
Could someone convert that to american football fields for me? I can't do metric.
Given that an American football game is 4x15 minute quarters and requires over two hours to complete a game (not including half time), if this were in American football fields it would take 37 years to make a touchdown.
The big problem was from pilots in the early days, headphones have to be incredibly clear, which makes them very sensitive to EM interference. Basically as soon as you were airborne phones would start screaming for a tower (which transmit down, not up) and this translated into that annoying electronic beep/buzz that you used to get with your TV when your 90's Nokia went off.
Also they interfered with navigation system (pretty sure the announcements used to say "please switch of your mobile phone as it interferes with aircraft navigation systems" back in the day). Having to do course adjustments during the flight meant more time airborne. This may not matter to Freddy Facebookadict but I want to get to where I'm going reasonably on time.
By all means, let's charge SpaceX for the use of airspace.
But, if we do that we should charge the airlines as well - after all, why should they get subsidized by being given a free ride? It's not their airspace after all.
We already do charge them per mile in fuel taxation. 21.9 cents per gallon on Jet fuel, 19-something cpg on AvGas. The more you burn, the more you pay.
Laptop vendors can do more than new CPUs to bring some usefulness and features. Being able to have an OS in ROM would be handy, if only to have a way to restore an OS without having to worry about recovery media. If a Tandy MS-DOS clone back in the 1980s can do this, so can a PC vendor. Other things come to mind as well, be it the ability to charge (albeit slowly) on USB-C for beefier laptops, allowing for multiple USB chargers to charge a battery at the same time, built in vitualization and encryption so one can have their gaming stuff, their work stuff, personal stuff, and stuff nobody should see, all on one laptop, perhaps using something like PhonebookFS to further hide the presence of other VMs.
Another idea would be to have better support for external GPU breakout boxes. That way, one can go from running command line stuff to Crysis fairly easily, as well as providing fast access to additional storage.
CPUs are nice, but there are still many things that can be done to differentiate one's product from everyone else.
The issue is that adding all of that adds weight. Now You may be thinking that this race to make things thinner and lighter is a bad idea but if that is the case you never had a laptop in 2005 when they were huge bulky monstrosities that weighted 5KG. This isn't an exaggeration. The reason most people had desktops back then is that laptops weren't much smaller or lighter.
I've got a 8 yr old 30L backpack I use as carry on luggage. When I bought it I had a 14" Lenovo that would barely fit inside, my current 15" Asus K501 slips in quite easily and I've never had so much spare space in that bag.
The only thing I miss is an optical drive, but I've got a USB one and still have a lot of space in my bag so I cant really complain.
Another idea would be to have better support for external GPU breakout boxes. That way, one can go from running command line stuff to Crysis fairly easily, as well as providing fast access to additional storage.
The NVidia Optimus thing is pretty good for this. Sitting in a hotel room watching videos in bed, it uses the Intel GPU for low power draw, when playing games it uses the GeForce GPU for max graphics. The battery life using the Nvidia GPU is about 3-4 hours compared to the 9-10 it gets on the Intel GPU so when playing games at an airport, it's good to have it plugged in.
The problem with external boxes is that you need access to the PCI-E bus using a PCI-E x4 port at the very least for graphics, PCI-E x16 for proper eye-melting goodness and we don't have a small enough standard adaptor for that one. Using non-standard adaptors means we'll have 15+ different standards.
So Samsung has been making mobile phones for a while. What the hell does that have to do with anything? I remember the original Samsung smartphones. They were so similar to the 1-3G iPhones I inadvertently walked off with a Samsung phone a couple of times when I mistook one for my iPhone 3G. Here's a graphic that kind of says it all: http://allthingsd.com/files/20...
I saw one of the first Android prototypes too. It was a half screen and half keyboard affair that was clearly meant to be a Blackberry killer. Nobody took Apple seriously as a phone manufacturer, they all figured Apple would bring out some kind of glorified iPod with a keypad. When the iPhone hit the market everybody went back to the drawing board and the next thing you know they're all, by some cosmic coincidence, selling phones that look like more or less exactly like the iPhone. But of course none of them copied what Apple was doing... perish the thought.
No they weren't...
If you cant tell the difference between a Samsung Galaxy and Iphone, that really says a lot about how daft you are. Here's a non-photoshoped picture for reference.
Its a different size, colour and has the word "Samsung" prominently displayed in large letters.
This is why I don't use apps. They steal your contact lists, use your camera and microphone when it's not necessary for the functioning of the app and they do some mining on the side. Apps suck. Use the website.
This, uninstalled Facebook and now use Firefox with Ublock and Ghostery. As a side effect, I get about 20% more idle time on my battery.
Phones and computers need a manual (not software) "data capture" on/off switch. This switch would physically disable the phone's microphone and cameras (and if possible, screen capture).
If I manually slide the data capture switch to OFF, then the mic and cameras are physically disabled. No matter what any data, software, or user preferences are, the mic and cameras are physically unable to capture sound or images. They can't capture sound or images again, until I manually slide the data capture switch back to ON.
Or rather the OS denies access to everything by default and you have to approve use when they app tries to use it. I mean all sensors, camera, GPS, microphone, accelerator/gyro, so on and so forth.
I beleive Android does this already, not that it stops people from somnambulently clicking "allow", but it at least gives those of us who care a chance.
Also default deny of sensor access when the application isn't open and active. A messenger application does not need to listen when I'm not using it.
What can really be done?
I explain shit like this to people, they call me paranoid.
I show them proof, they say they don't care.
Privacy? They say they have nothing to hide.
Then when their private details and credit card numbers are published online they shout "why didn't someone do something about this" in shrill nasal tones.
Someone could have done something about this Karen, you could have Karen. But you said it was too hard and too inconvenient to practice a few basic self preservation measures. You wanted to gratification now Karen and this is how you pay for it. I swear you'd still take sweeties from strangers if your mother didn't drill it into your head as a kid, I suspect literally, Karen.
By their report in the article the berach has been discovered on June 19 and they are informing affected parties on June 26, one week later. Doesn't the GDPR (they are even based in France) require to inform in just 72 hours (3 days)? Also if they adhered to PCI-DSS standards credit card numbers shouldn't have been stored unencrypted.
You are assuming that they were adhering tot he GDPR (or whatever French regulation came before, GDPR was mainly an amalgamation of the existing data protection/privacy acts in EU nations, giving it the clout of the full ECJ). If they were not adhering to PCI-DSS, why would they care about GDPR. I assume they assumed they simply wouldn't get caught.
This is why I dont use dodgy 3rd party booking agents. Hotels, airlines, et al. will likely give you the same price if you call, you'll be treated better and there's less risk of a massive breach like this.
In Canada I think a lot more people have more freedom to choose better educational opportunities and better medical services
Is that why Florida is a medical tourism destination for Canadians ? Well I guess you have the freedom to leave the country to get yourself healed.
For elective surgery.... Canadians go to Florida to get cheap tit jobs. You tit.
Lots of Americans go to the Philippines or Thailand for dental work... I guess that's damning proof that two developing nations have better medical systems than the US, right?
OTOH, Canada has US citizens trying to claim Canadian citizenship to get basic medical care.
Communism and socialism fail with humans just the same as capitalism and pretty much any pure 'ism'.
It should however, be noted that whilst Communism has been tried and failed, a pure capitalist state has never even gotten of the ground.
There was an effort to create a "Galts Gulch" in Chile around 2010 but none of the Libertarian business geniuses who invested in it could manage to get that it was a scam... Most of them are now trying to get their money back from a developing nation that doesn't have a functioning justice system.
But your point stands, any extremist government is ultimately doomed to fail. They require people to be too rational, to all have the same wants, the same needs, to produce the same output, to all believe in the same thing. Despite being very much diametrically opposed philosophies, Nazism and Stalinism shared one aspect in common because they had to, authoritarianism. The only way the state could maintain power was via brutal suppression of opposition because people believed in different things, had different wants and needs and lets face it, aren't rational.
Almost all successful countries are mixed economy democracies because for all their flaws, this is the only system we have that works. It works because its flexible enough to be robust in a world of irrational, different people.
The Knowledge is for London's black cabs only. As Uber is a pre-booked service, they are classified as a minicab operation and not required to be tested on The Knowledge.
However I don't give Uber long before they do something else that violates the terms of the license.
The issue with guns isn't if someone is determined to kill you. As you note, once someone reaches that point (which is very difficult to reach), there isn't much that will stop them.
But when a gun is involved, there is no need to be determined to kill you. All it takes is a quick squeeze on a trigger. Something which is easy to do in anger, or accidentally, or just out of annoyance.
The point of gun legislation is not to get at the people who are determined to kill you no matter what. It's to get at the people who don't, but who with a gun might kill you anyway.
This, gun legislation in most western countries are designed to primarily protect the gun owner and user from their own gun.
The secondary benefit is that it is difficult to impossible for the average hoodlum on the street to get a gun. Sure they have knifes but how often is an innocent bystander hit in a drive by stabbing? If you get stabbed by a crim in the UK, they did it with intent.
The Cupertino, California-based company is working on new AirPods with noise-cancellation and water resistance. There are over-ear headphones coming from Apple, too. Those will compete with pricey models from Bose Corp. and Sennheiser.
Let's assume their headphones will also have noise cancellation, the real question is - will their noise-cancelling headphones be better than Bose? You may not like the Bose audio quality but they are the king of noise cancellation.
Assuming that they'll have active noise cancellation is a pretty bad assumption to make. At best they'll have passive noise cancellation and cost as much as the Bose QC with far worse sound quality (and Bose QC's aren't the best, by far not the worst but you're definitely not buying them for accurate reproduction).
Honestly, expect better sound quality and noise cancellation from a pair of £30 over ear Senns.
HMRC have some particularly complex requirements for logging on to any of their services. You need a magic number and a password. The magic number bears no resemblance to anything you might know, or ever learn. The password has to be so complex that it too is something you'll never know. I forget exactly how these things are supplied to you, but I seem to remember one half is sent via snail mail and the other half is SMS messaged.
For the uninitiated, the HRMC (Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs) is the tax department of the UK, like it's contemporaries the IRS (US) and ATO (AU) they operate in such a fashion that no interaction with them can be completed without extensive pain and suffering. Put simply, with the HRMC, Nothing. Is. Fucking. Easy.
I'm going to have to disagree about tipping. Tipping well at establishments you frequent is how you get better service and complimentary items.
The bartenders at my favorite place comp me anywhere from half to all of my drinks when I eat there. Granted, this is in Chicago and I never eat at chain restaurants.
Erm, no it doesn't.
I rarely tip... and that is usually only in places that have been Americanised (meaning the US and their favourite tourist hotspots) and only because its customary (when in Rome). I never tip in Europe unless someone has gone above and beyond the call of duty.
So how do you get free stuff here in the UK (or Australia).... Be liked. Simple as that, if someone likes you they'll give you things. Be polite to the staff, start a rapport with the business owner. Nothing makes you more liked than forgiving simple mistakes. There was a pub I frequented, owned by a Kiwi in Streatham whilst I lived in London, when I walked in and he'd just got a new ale in he'd draw me a half pint without even asking and give it to me saying "We've just got this in" and described the beer.
Tipping creates a negative culture.
1. The wait staff aren't being genuine and they're only doing what they have to in order to get a tip out of you. This means if they dont like you they'll take it out in ways you cant see.
2. It creates an environment of entitlement. Because you have given money, you feel you are entitled to something. Nothing is more annoying to a service person than someone who thinks because they have a modicum of money that they must be treated like king Dick.
Many Brits bemoan the lack of national service here... I don't, rather I would put everyone through 2 years mandatory customer facing work in the retail sector so they can see how bad people act as customers.
I've been told many times that on those surveys "management considers anything less than an 8 [out of 10] a fail"
This is one of the bigger reasons why I generally don't leave feedback, especially on something as impersonal and soulless as a out of 10/5 star rating system.
My BMW dealer was honest with me and said unless he gets a 5 star rating, he doesn't get paid commission. I could respect that honesty and the fact he never wasted my time (sure, it was a just 2 series and I had put the screws to him on price, but he never wasted my time and I did not waste his either).
Have I got any feedback, I'll deliver it in person or at the very least, in writing, preferably to their manager. When writing a complement you should mention the person who helped you by name.
So much for Apple's so called "best design" in the business.
I'd like to believe that someone at Apple learns from this debacle, and makes some significant design changes to the next generation of professional laptops.
What has Apple got to do with "professional laptops"?
Rubbish. I do hope you know the difference between a regular RPG (even a multiplayer one) and an MMO,
You're an idiot, before the internet RPG games COMBIND both single player and multiplayer in the same game. They just RPG's and that had campaign and a multiplayer component. All the PC games during the 90's came with both. Companies got smart because they knew people like you were morons. That's why diablo 3 was "rebranded" an mmo... aka They took diablo which was a game fully within our control and it now requires a server in order for you to play the campaign portions of the game.
Game company CEO's want all games to be "online" and stream the files to your computer so you never control the videogame software, they've been propagandizing to you with PR. Don't think so? Go look at UBISOFT's wet dream.
FPS and RTS games used to be that you could host a local game with your friends on a LAN, few games will let you run a dedicated server without checking into the mothership, let alone let you run on your LAN with software included with the game. All this is done to ensure they can sell you the next minor variant of the same game in 6 to 18 months time. Of course, the holy grail for these companies is to have you pay on a monthly basis.
I find myself shunning more and more AAA titles because they've spend all the money on advertising and locking you in as opposed to creating more than 3 hours of gameplay and spending more cash on indie games. Steam's Early Access program has allowed more than a few indie gems to flourish.
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As an American it saddens me to truthfully say that most Americans today are dumbasses.
This isn't a new phenomena.
âoeThe best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.â - Widely attributed to Winston Churchill.
People by and large have always been dumbarses, the difference is that now their believe that their ignorance is worth as much as anyone's knowledge and this has made them entitled.
Most especially, those who regularly ingest the mental poison that is Fox News are the dumbest of the dumb
Garbage in, garbage out.
I honestly believe western nations are lapsing into a neo-fascism. There's only going to be two solutions, rip it off fast like a bandaid or let it fester and rot until the whole arm needs to be removed. If we rip it off fast, we have to accept that we're going to have to offend the fascists.
...a period is a sign of anger.
It certainly is with my wife...
In the ROTW, the punctuation mark is called a "full stop" which pretty much describes post-marital sex lives.
They want hydrogen cars to be big because they missed the boat on battery electric and a lot of the basic tech is now owned by other companies. They are facing either having to delay their EVs to wait out the patents or pay royalties, and all the while need to do their own EV R&D to avoid falling further behind.
Battery electric has already won. We already have 99% of the infrastructure in place.
Maybe in Hipster Central, SoCal... But out here in the real world 1% of the infrastructure isn't even in place.
Also my time isn't free. Spending an hour recharging just go to the 5 miles to home is a huge waste. If someone manages to produce hydrogen from seawater cost effectively, battery cars are effectively dead.
For fees, I have no defense.
For taxes, the issue is that sales (and other) tax(es) in the US are levied by states and other municipalities. So it would make it impossible to advertise a nationwide price. (Add even if you advocate replacing all the state sales taxes with a national VAT or sales tax, there are other location dependent taxes, e.g. hotel occupancy tax.)
I can get the state sales tax reasons (which isn't an issue for most countries)... but for hotels, they know what the HOT and other fees are in advance and should advertise that as a final price. Its not like the hotels location is going to change in the next few months.
If it's part of the cost it's part of the cost. They advertise costs that are bfore Fees. People get this when it's taxes and 911 fees but fees that GO to ATT are B.S. deception.
why not advertise free service*
* plus $64/mo content delivery fee.
The US allows you to advertise prices sans taxes and fees... to those of us in the ROTW, this seems pants on head retarded. When an airline advertises an airfare in the UK, this is the price I pay to get the airfare including all applicable taxes and non-optional fees.
Could someone convert that to american football fields for me? I can't do metric.
Given that an American football game is 4x15 minute quarters and requires over two hours to complete a game (not including half time), if this were in American football fields it would take 37 years to make a touchdown.
Or 1287 London busses parked end to end.
The FCC bans use of cellphones on aircraft, not the FAA. The Wikipedia article on the topic links out to a few other good sources.
This.
The big problem was from pilots in the early days, headphones have to be incredibly clear, which makes them very sensitive to EM interference. Basically as soon as you were airborne phones would start screaming for a tower (which transmit down, not up) and this translated into that annoying electronic beep/buzz that you used to get with your TV when your 90's Nokia went off.
Also they interfered with navigation system (pretty sure the announcements used to say "please switch of your mobile phone as it interferes with aircraft navigation systems" back in the day). Having to do course adjustments during the flight meant more time airborne. This may not matter to Freddy Facebookadict but I want to get to where I'm going reasonably on time.
By all means, let's charge SpaceX for the use of airspace.
But, if we do that we should charge the airlines as well - after all, why should they get subsidized by being given a free ride? It's not their airspace after all.
We already do charge them per mile in fuel taxation. 21.9 cents per gallon on Jet fuel, 19-something cpg on AvGas. The more you burn, the more you pay.
Next daft idea.
Laptop vendors can do more than new CPUs to bring some usefulness and features. Being able to have an OS in ROM would be handy, if only to have a way to restore an OS without having to worry about recovery media. If a Tandy MS-DOS clone back in the 1980s can do this, so can a PC vendor. Other things come to mind as well, be it the ability to charge (albeit slowly) on USB-C for beefier laptops, allowing for multiple USB chargers to charge a battery at the same time, built in vitualization and encryption so one can have their gaming stuff, their work stuff, personal stuff, and stuff nobody should see, all on one laptop, perhaps using something like PhonebookFS to further hide the presence of other VMs.
Another idea would be to have better support for external GPU breakout boxes. That way, one can go from running command line stuff to Crysis fairly easily, as well as providing fast access to additional storage.
CPUs are nice, but there are still many things that can be done to differentiate one's product from everyone else.
The issue is that adding all of that adds weight. Now You may be thinking that this race to make things thinner and lighter is a bad idea but if that is the case you never had a laptop in 2005 when they were huge bulky monstrosities that weighted 5KG. This isn't an exaggeration. The reason most people had desktops back then is that laptops weren't much smaller or lighter.
I've got a 8 yr old 30L backpack I use as carry on luggage. When I bought it I had a 14" Lenovo that would barely fit inside, my current 15" Asus K501 slips in quite easily and I've never had so much spare space in that bag.
The only thing I miss is an optical drive, but I've got a USB one and still have a lot of space in my bag so I cant really complain.
Another idea would be to have better support for external GPU breakout boxes. That way, one can go from running command line stuff to Crysis fairly easily, as well as providing fast access to additional storage.
The NVidia Optimus thing is pretty good for this. Sitting in a hotel room watching videos in bed, it uses the Intel GPU for low power draw, when playing games it uses the GeForce GPU for max graphics. The battery life using the Nvidia GPU is about 3-4 hours compared to the 9-10 it gets on the Intel GPU so when playing games at an airport, it's good to have it plugged in.
The problem with external boxes is that you need access to the PCI-E bus using a PCI-E x4 port at the very least for graphics, PCI-E x16 for proper eye-melting goodness and we don't have a small enough standard adaptor for that one. Using non-standard adaptors means we'll have 15+ different standards.
So Samsung has been making mobile phones for a while. What the hell does that have to do with anything? I remember the original Samsung smartphones. They were so similar to the 1-3G iPhones I inadvertently walked off with a Samsung phone a couple of times when I mistook one for my iPhone 3G. Here's a graphic that kind of says it all: http://allthingsd.com/files/20... I saw one of the first Android prototypes too. It was a half screen and half keyboard affair that was clearly meant to be a Blackberry killer. Nobody took Apple seriously as a phone manufacturer, they all figured Apple would bring out some kind of glorified iPod with a keypad. When the iPhone hit the market everybody went back to the drawing board and the next thing you know they're all, by some cosmic coincidence, selling phones that look like more or less exactly like the iPhone. But of course none of them copied what Apple was doing ... perish the thought.
No they weren't... If you cant tell the difference between a Samsung Galaxy and Iphone, that really says a lot about how daft you are. Here's a non-photoshoped picture for reference. Its a different size, colour and has the word "Samsung" prominently displayed in large letters.
I cant imagine how many Android phones you walk off with now IOS has changed into Android.
This is why I don't use apps. They steal your contact lists, use your camera and microphone when it's not necessary for the functioning of the app and they do some mining on the side. Apps suck. Use the website.
This, uninstalled Facebook and now use Firefox with Ublock and Ghostery. As a side effect, I get about 20% more idle time on my battery.
Phones and computers need a manual (not software) "data capture" on/off switch. This switch would physically disable the phone's microphone and cameras (and if possible, screen capture).
If I manually slide the data capture switch to OFF, then the mic and cameras are physically disabled. No matter what any data, software, or user preferences are, the mic and cameras are physically unable to capture sound or images. They can't capture sound or images again, until I manually slide the data capture switch back to ON.
Or rather the OS denies access to everything by default and you have to approve use when they app tries to use it. I mean all sensors, camera, GPS, microphone, accelerator/gyro, so on and so forth.
I beleive Android does this already, not that it stops people from somnambulently clicking "allow", but it at least gives those of us who care a chance.
Also default deny of sensor access when the application isn't open and active. A messenger application does not need to listen when I'm not using it.
What can really be done?
I explain shit like this to people, they call me paranoid.
I show them proof, they say they don't care.
Privacy? They say they have nothing to hide.
Then when their private details and credit card numbers are published online they shout "why didn't someone do something about this" in shrill nasal tones.
Someone could have done something about this Karen, you could have Karen. But you said it was too hard and too inconvenient to practice a few basic self preservation measures. You wanted to gratification now Karen and this is how you pay for it. I swear you'd still take sweeties from strangers if your mother didn't drill it into your head as a kid, I suspect literally, Karen.
By their report in the article the berach has been discovered on June 19 and they are informing affected parties on June 26, one week later. Doesn't the GDPR (they are even based in France) require to inform in just 72 hours (3 days)? Also if they adhered to PCI-DSS standards credit card numbers shouldn't have been stored unencrypted.
You are assuming that they were adhering tot he GDPR (or whatever French regulation came before, GDPR was mainly an amalgamation of the existing data protection/privacy acts in EU nations, giving it the clout of the full ECJ). If they were not adhering to PCI-DSS, why would they care about GDPR. I assume they assumed they simply wouldn't get caught. This is why I dont use dodgy 3rd party booking agents. Hotels, airlines, et al. will likely give you the same price if you call, you'll be treated better and there's less risk of a massive breach like this.
In Canada I think a lot more people have more freedom to choose better educational opportunities and better medical services
Is that why Florida is a medical tourism destination for Canadians ? Well I guess you have the freedom to leave the country to get yourself healed.
For elective surgery.... Canadians go to Florida to get cheap tit jobs. You tit.
Lots of Americans go to the Philippines or Thailand for dental work... I guess that's damning proof that two developing nations have better medical systems than the US, right?
OTOH, Canada has US citizens trying to claim Canadian citizenship to get basic medical care.
Communism and socialism fail with humans just the same as capitalism and pretty much any pure 'ism'.
It should however, be noted that whilst Communism has been tried and failed, a pure capitalist state has never even gotten of the ground.
There was an effort to create a "Galts Gulch" in Chile around 2010 but none of the Libertarian business geniuses who invested in it could manage to get that it was a scam... Most of them are now trying to get their money back from a developing nation that doesn't have a functioning justice system.
But your point stands, any extremist government is ultimately doomed to fail. They require people to be too rational, to all have the same wants, the same needs, to produce the same output, to all believe in the same thing. Despite being very much diametrically opposed philosophies, Nazism and Stalinism shared one aspect in common because they had to, authoritarianism. The only way the state could maintain power was via brutal suppression of opposition because people believed in different things, had different wants and needs and lets face it, aren't rational.
Almost all successful countries are mixed economy democracies because for all their flaws, this is the only system we have that works. It works because its flexible enough to be robust in a world of irrational, different people.
what about the knowledge test?
The Knowledge is for London's black cabs only. As Uber is a pre-booked service, they are classified as a minicab operation and not required to be tested on The Knowledge.
However I don't give Uber long before they do something else that violates the terms of the license.
The issue with guns isn't if someone is determined to kill you. As you note, once someone reaches that point (which is very difficult to reach), there isn't much that will stop them.
But when a gun is involved, there is no need to be determined to kill you. All it takes is a quick squeeze on a trigger. Something which is easy to do in anger, or accidentally, or just out of annoyance.
The point of gun legislation is not to get at the people who are determined to kill you no matter what. It's to get at the people who don't, but who with a gun might kill you anyway.
This, gun legislation in most western countries are designed to primarily protect the gun owner and user from their own gun.
The secondary benefit is that it is difficult to impossible for the average hoodlum on the street to get a gun. Sure they have knifes but how often is an innocent bystander hit in a drive by stabbing? If you get stabbed by a crim in the UK, they did it with intent.
I didn't fire the guy. His fellow inmates ... I mean cow-orkers ... made that decision.
I choose firing by combat.
Let's assume their headphones will also have noise cancellation, the real question is - will their noise-cancelling headphones be better than Bose? You may not like the Bose audio quality but they are the king of noise cancellation.
Assuming that they'll have active noise cancellation is a pretty bad assumption to make. At best they'll have passive noise cancellation and cost as much as the Bose QC with far worse sound quality (and Bose QC's aren't the best, by far not the worst but you're definitely not buying them for accurate reproduction).
Honestly, expect better sound quality and noise cancellation from a pair of £30 over ear Senns.
HMRC have some particularly complex requirements for logging on to any of their services. You need a magic number and a password. The magic number bears no resemblance to anything you might know, or ever learn. The password has to be so complex that it too is something you'll never know. I forget exactly how these things are supplied to you, but I seem to remember one half is sent via snail mail and the other half is SMS messaged.
For the uninitiated, the HRMC (Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs) is the tax department of the UK, like it's contemporaries the IRS (US) and ATO (AU) they operate in such a fashion that no interaction with them can be completed without extensive pain and suffering. Put simply, with the HRMC, Nothing. Is. Fucking. Easy.
I'm going to have to disagree about tipping. Tipping well at establishments you frequent is how you get better service and complimentary items.
The bartenders at my favorite place comp me anywhere from half to all of my drinks when I eat there. Granted, this is in Chicago and I never eat at chain restaurants.
Erm, no it doesn't.
I rarely tip... and that is usually only in places that have been Americanised (meaning the US and their favourite tourist hotspots) and only because its customary (when in Rome). I never tip in Europe unless someone has gone above and beyond the call of duty.
So how do you get free stuff here in the UK (or Australia).... Be liked. Simple as that, if someone likes you they'll give you things. Be polite to the staff, start a rapport with the business owner. Nothing makes you more liked than forgiving simple mistakes. There was a pub I frequented, owned by a Kiwi in Streatham whilst I lived in London, when I walked in and he'd just got a new ale in he'd draw me a half pint without even asking and give it to me saying "We've just got this in" and described the beer.
Tipping creates a negative culture.
1. The wait staff aren't being genuine and they're only doing what they have to in order to get a tip out of you. This means if they dont like you they'll take it out in ways you cant see.
2. It creates an environment of entitlement. Because you have given money, you feel you are entitled to something. Nothing is more annoying to a service person than someone who thinks because they have a modicum of money that they must be treated like king Dick.
Many Brits bemoan the lack of national service here... I don't, rather I would put everyone through 2 years mandatory customer facing work in the retail sector so they can see how bad people act as customers.
I've been told many times that on those surveys "management considers anything less than an 8 [out of 10] a fail"
This is one of the bigger reasons why I generally don't leave feedback, especially on something as impersonal and soulless as a out of 10/5 star rating system.
My BMW dealer was honest with me and said unless he gets a 5 star rating, he doesn't get paid commission. I could respect that honesty and the fact he never wasted my time (sure, it was a just 2 series and I had put the screws to him on price, but he never wasted my time and I did not waste his either).
Have I got any feedback, I'll deliver it in person or at the very least, in writing, preferably to their manager. When writing a complement you should mention the person who helped you by name.
I'd like to believe that someone at Apple learns from this debacle, and makes some significant design changes to the next generation of professional laptops.
What has Apple got to do with "professional laptops"?
Rubbish. I do hope you know the difference between a regular RPG (even a multiplayer one) and an MMO,
You're an idiot, before the internet RPG games COMBIND both single player and multiplayer in the same game. They just RPG's and that had campaign and a multiplayer component. All the PC games during the 90's came with both. Companies got smart because they knew people like you were morons. That's why diablo 3 was "rebranded" an mmo... aka They took diablo which was a game fully within our control and it now requires a server in order for you to play the campaign portions of the game.
Game company CEO's want all games to be "online" and stream the files to your computer so you never control the videogame software, they've been propagandizing to you with PR. Don't think so? Go look at UBISOFT's wet dream.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/...
A good point and it's not limited to RPGs.
FPS and RTS games used to be that you could host a local game with your friends on a LAN, few games will let you run a dedicated server without checking into the mothership, let alone let you run on your LAN with software included with the game. All this is done to ensure they can sell you the next minor variant of the same game in 6 to 18 months time. Of course, the holy grail for these companies is to have you pay on a monthly basis.
I find myself shunning more and more AAA titles because they've spend all the money on advertising and locking you in as opposed to creating more than 3 hours of gameplay and spending more cash on indie games. Steam's Early Access program has allowed more than a few indie gems to flourish.