Due to similar regulations being implemented a bit sooner in the EU, this rented flat has a mixture of LED, CFL and halogen bulbs. (All the light fittings are under 5 years old, so everything came with these bulbs.)
I've paid to replace one failed bulb in two years, which is perhaps equivalent to replacing several incandescents over a similar period.
My parents are a similar time away (by train). I didn't want them to have Ubuntu forced on them, but after the first lost weekend -- when I was about 19 -- I installed Ubuntu alongside Windows, and set the default to Windows.
The next time it broke, I told my dad how to boot Ubuntu over the phone, and asked if he could manage with that. He could for a while. (I also pointed out that my brother and sister never needed me to fix their computers, so maybe he could ask them to fix his, since they hadn't moved out yet.)
I'm an American, I've been to the UK. I used to live in LA, only place I was ever victim to violent crime (a mugging by knife) was in London. Never been mugged in the US, not even when living in LA.
I lived in one of England's larger cities for 18 years, and London for another 10, and the only time I've been a victim of crime is when someone stole my bicycle (when it was locked in the street). Anecdotes are a bit pointless.
But of course you guys always focus in on gun violence which is lower there, but ignore violent crime in general, which isn't.
That claim floats around, but it's not valid. See http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checking-ben-swann-is-the-uk-really-5-times-more-violent-than-the-us/ -- the US has a violent crime rate of 446/100,000. The UK classifies a much, much wider group of crimes as "violent", including things like “possession of an article with a blade or point,” and causing “public fear, alarm, or distress,” which gives a figure of 2034. The blog author concludes that the UK rate using US definitions would be at the lower end of the range 271-776.
Is programming an actually useful skill for many people? Maybe. Most are not going to write code professionally.
Even if they don't, it helps to have an understanding of what a computer program is, and the kinds of problems it might solve. Programming isn't the main function of most people's jobs, but a lot of people work using a computer and would benefit from being more aware of what it can do.
For example, a colleague was manually reorganising a large set of JPG files based on their filenames. A few "mv" commands could have done 99% of the task in under a minute, but she didn't realise it was possible.
Someone else needed to do some repetitive change on thousands of rows in an Excel spreadsheet. They spent the whole morning doing it, and then grumbled about it at lunchtime, and how it would probably take another whole day. It took me less than five minutes, and she's since written some macros herself, saving time and processing data in ways she didn't find practical before.
Did you know that with some kind of explosive (preferably one that you can remotely detonate) and some coins (easily available) you probably can kill or severely injure a lot more people than you can with a firearm? The ensuring explosion is like a frag grenade, except you can make it a lot bigger and lethal. Bonus points for triggering it in a cafeteria o some other kind of eating place with lots of people.
Nails are generally preferred to coins. They're perhaps the most common form of terrorism in the UK. this failed case was in a restaurant, this man planted three in London.
A plumber will take the offcuts and old pipes and fittings to be recycled -- it's easily worth their time. The same for many other trades -- and they'll all have relatively small quantities.
The law in the UK requires the scrap metal buyer to be registered, photocopy and store an identity card / passport, and not pay by cash, but electronically (or by cheque). These stricter requirements were only introduced about a year ago, and I haven't heard of as much railway cable theft since then... maybe it worked!
The US has double the installed power of nuclear reactors compared to France or Japan, and more than 5x the capacity of the UK.
The UK and France already have reprocessing plants to convert weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel, which isn't yet done in the US, so I'm guessing they have even less need for uranium.
Wire transfers are extremely common the world over. The oddity is that in the U.S. it's easier for individuals to do, and that's because most other countries police wire transfers more heavily.
I expect GCHQ know that my electricity costs £33/month, but the process is extremely widespread, free (for me), and very easy to set up, either for paying bills (of fixed or varying amounts), or sending money to individuals.
There's apparently a default limit of £10k/day, but that's the bank (who will change it if asked), not the law. Regulations are only for international or "suspicious" transfers, and that applies to Western Union as much (probably more...) than Barclay's.
In the Netherlands our royal family are business people who make deals for our large corporations and open up trade negotiations with other countries. Our royal family works for their living and earn the Netherlands a lot of money.
In the United Kingdom our Royal Family include a racist old man and a homoeopathic nutter. Their main economic output is selling trashy newspapers.
I'd prefer to choose trade ambassadors, it's much easier to get rid of them if they turn out to be corrupt. Is your Royal Family also exempted from any efforts to improve political transparency? (e.g. for here, Freedom of Information requests.)
IIRC the British monarchy brings in more revenue than it costs. Those most critical of the monarchy put the annual cost of maintaining it at 400 million GBP (more conservative figures peg that as much lower), but the royal family generates 500 million GBP / year in tourism revenue. I'm sure one can poke holes in this argument, but based on these two figures alone, it sounds like the monarchy is worth it.
The Royal Family certainly doesn't generate £500M/year. The top place given following the reference on your link is the Tower of London, which no longer has anything to do with the Royal Family, except they "own" it.
Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle would bring in much more money if the Queen would fuck off. They could be permanently opened as museums.
That's pretty much what the RNIB link I posted said: "The impact of the iPad led a number of other computer manufacturers to swiftly release similar devices using Windows, Android or Linux operating systems. Most of these proved to be poor competitors to the iPad, but in the last couple of years a number of Android alternatives have also become very popular. Examples include the Galaxy Tab, the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10, and the Kindle Fire."
It sounds like the iPad is most suitable, and that's probably a good thing to try first, but there may be alternatives. Everyone has particular needs, so it's best to try one in a shop. There's very little discussion of Android on the RNIB forum, and good reports of using iPads, but Windows is apparently better than Mac on a laptop/desktop.
I think you should ask some blind people, not Slashdot people.
A friend is blind, and could certainly afford anything, but I'm 90% sure he has an Android phone. It's certainly not an iPhone, it's possible it's a less-smart-phone.
I don’t know enough about the academic publishing situation to know why authors would agree to sign away self publishing rights, but presumably there’s some value to using Elsevier’s services, even if the “value” is only in the sense that authors are required to do it in order to be “published” and advance their careers.
I may have misinterpreted, but that sounds like you're suggesting scientists only publish work for selfish reasons (for their own career). Publishing work in a peer-reviewed journal is part of the process which shows the research is reasonable, and -- in theory -- puts it somewhere where it can be accessed by other scientists, validated or contested, and cited. It's often a requirement of receiving a grant, including from the/a government.
Play.com is^H^Hwas in Jersey, one of the small islands between Great Britain and France. It's a "Crown Dependency" of the UK, roughly comparable to the US Virgin Isles. It's not part of the EU. There was a loophole, where low-value items imported into the UK weren't charged VAT. Jersey is also considered part of the UK for postal prices, so the postage cost was the same for a business there as in, say, Manchester.
That led to Play.com and others selling DVDs and CDs to the UK, until April 2012 when the loophole was closed, and January this year when they shut down the Jersey warehouse.
A lot of U.S. states have 21-to-enter laws for venues that serve alcohol but do not qualify as restaurants and require the bouncer to check IDs at the door. How should an effort to change these laws be organized?
I don't know -- I doubt 14 is in any law, it's probably some balance between the cost of insurance / perceived risk and the income from under 18s.
So... how come most of the people I saw at the concert last year were youngsters? University student age.
Probably because the concert was at one of the few venues of that scale that still allows under-21 fans to attend. A lot of touring bands end up playing at venues that serve too much alcohol to be considered "restaurants" under the law.
Wow, that must really suck. Is it easy for 18 year olds to sneak in? What about 16 year olds? 18-21s are a big part of the standing audience at many concerts in the UK, and it's pretty common to see a few under-15s with a parent, sometimes not looking too impressed with the music:).
Example: http://www.wembleyarena.co.uk/the-wembley-experience/faqs (14+ to stand, 15+ to be unaccompanied). That's normal -- 18+ is the exception, and generally when the event is held in a nightclub that will start its club night as soon as the last band finishes.
My POTS is much more reliable than the electric power - can't remember the last time, if ever, that it was down.
Would you notice? I notice the one-a-year or less that there's an interruption in my electrical supply, as some digital clocks need resetting. It doesn't matter if I'm in/awake or not, and a 1-second interruption is enough.
If I used the POTS phone for all calls while I'm at home, I'm only going to notice it's not working if I try and make a call, which is a small fraction of the week.
Example (since I have a BT line): http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/12209/~/do-faults-ever-occur-on-the-bt-network%3F "BT currently clears 89% of business faults within five hours. We are committed to continuous improvement. Published network reliability statistics suggests on average only one fault in seven years." So they are more reliable, but probably not more than 10 times more reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
Due to similar regulations being implemented a bit sooner in the EU, this rented flat has a mixture of LED, CFL and halogen bulbs. (All the light fittings are under 5 years old, so everything came with these bulbs.)
I've paid to replace one failed bulb in two years, which is perhaps equivalent to replacing several incandescents over a similar period.
My parents are a similar time away (by train). I didn't want them to have Ubuntu forced on them, but after the first lost weekend -- when I was about 19 -- I installed Ubuntu alongside Windows, and set the default to Windows.
The next time it broke, I told my dad how to boot Ubuntu over the phone, and asked if he could manage with that. He could for a while. (I also pointed out that my brother and sister never needed me to fix their computers, so maybe he could ask them to fix his, since they hadn't moved out yet.)
These were people who were only expected to have "Basic MS Office skills" or whatever.
I'm sure thats the law in most sensible countries. Carrying a screwdriver is also seen as bad as a knife when its not part of teh toolkit
Here's the UK version: https://www.gov.uk/find-out-if-i-can-buy-or-carry-a-knife
I've never been concerned that carrying a sharp knife to a picnic would be a problem (it isn't). Carrying one in my belt or shoe probably would be.
I'm an American, I've been to the UK. I used to live in LA, only place I was ever victim to violent crime (a mugging by knife) was in London. Never been mugged in the US, not even when living in LA.
I lived in one of England's larger cities for 18 years, and London for another 10, and the only time I've been a victim of crime is when someone stole my bicycle (when it was locked in the street). Anecdotes are a bit pointless.
But of course you guys always focus in on gun violence which is lower there, but ignore violent crime in general, which isn't.
That claim floats around, but it's not valid. See http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checking-ben-swann-is-the-uk-really-5-times-more-violent-than-the-us/ -- the US has a violent crime rate of 446/100,000. The UK classifies a much, much wider group of crimes as "violent", including things like “possession of an article with a blade or point,” and causing “public fear, alarm, or distress,” which gives a figure of 2034. The blog author concludes that the UK rate using US definitions would be at the lower end of the range 271-776.
Is programming an actually useful skill for many people? Maybe. Most are not going to write code professionally.
Even if they don't, it helps to have an understanding of what a computer program is, and the kinds of problems it might solve. Programming isn't the main function of most people's jobs, but a lot of people work using a computer and would benefit from being more aware of what it can do.
For example, a colleague was manually reorganising a large set of JPG files based on their filenames. A few "mv" commands could have done 99% of the task in under a minute, but she didn't realise it was possible.
Someone else needed to do some repetitive change on thousands of rows in an Excel spreadsheet. They spent the whole morning doing it, and then grumbled about it at lunchtime, and how it would probably take another whole day. It took me less than five minutes, and she's since written some macros herself, saving time and processing data in ways she didn't find practical before.
I think you should probably visit the UK and Australia before posting any more of these ridiculous statements.
Regarding daily life, they're more free. There are fewer laws, a less-corrupt police force, a better justice system.
Do you really think the US government would have any more trouble controlling citizens than the Australian government?
Did you know that with some kind of explosive (preferably one that you can remotely detonate) and some coins (easily available) you probably can kill or severely injure a lot more people than you can with a firearm? The ensuring explosion is like a frag grenade, except you can make it a lot bigger and lethal. Bonus points for triggering it in a cafeteria o some other kind of eating place with lots of people.
Nails are generally preferred to coins. They're perhaps the most common form of terrorism in the UK. this failed case was in a restaurant, this man planted three in London.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nail_bomb
A plumber will take the offcuts and old pipes and fittings to be recycled -- it's easily worth their time. The same for many other trades -- and they'll all have relatively small quantities.
The law in the UK requires the scrap metal buyer to be registered, photocopy and store an identity card / passport, and not pay by cash, but electronically (or by cheque). These stricter requirements were only introduced about a year ago, and I haven't heard of as much railway cable theft since then... maybe it worked!
See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22148611
Chernobyl is in Ukraine, not Russia. I think they might object.
The US has double the installed power of nuclear reactors compared to France or Japan, and more than 5x the capacity of the UK.
The UK and France already have reprocessing plants to convert weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel, which isn't yet done in the US, so I'm guessing they have even less need for uranium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel#Current_applications
And yet I have not heard of a company doling out computers with SSD drives in them.
My work computer has an SSD, it's great. It boots in a few seconds (to Ubuntu), and everything is really fast :)
Wire transfers are extremely common the world over. The oddity is that in the U.S. it's easier for individuals to do, and that's because most other countries police wire transfers more heavily.
I expect GCHQ know that my electricity costs £33/month, but the process is extremely widespread, free (for me), and very easy to set up, either for paying bills (of fixed or varying amounts), or sending money to individuals.
There's apparently a default limit of £10k/day, but that's the bank (who will change it if asked), not the law. Regulations are only for international or "suspicious" transfers, and that applies to Western Union as much (probably more...) than Barclay's.
In the Netherlands our royal family are business people who make deals for our large corporations and open up trade negotiations with other countries. Our royal family works for their living and earn the Netherlands a lot of money.
In the United Kingdom our Royal Family include a racist old man and a homoeopathic nutter. Their main economic output is selling trashy newspapers.
I'd prefer to choose trade ambassadors, it's much easier to get rid of them if they turn out to be corrupt. Is your Royal Family also exempted from any efforts to improve political transparency? (e.g. for here, Freedom of Information requests.)
IIRC the British monarchy brings in more revenue than it costs. Those most critical of the monarchy put the annual cost of maintaining it at 400 million GBP (more conservative figures peg that as much lower), but the royal family generates 500 million GBP / year in tourism revenue. I'm sure one can poke holes in this argument, but based on these two figures alone, it sounds like the monarchy is worth it.
Citation
The Royal Family certainly doesn't generate £500M/year. The top place given following the reference on your link is the Tower of London, which no longer has anything to do with the Royal Family, except they "own" it.
Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle would bring in much more money if the Queen would fuck off. They could be permanently opened as museums.
http://republic.org.uk/What%20we%20want/In%20depth/Royal%20finances/index.php
That's pretty much what the RNIB link I posted said: "The impact of the iPad led a number of other computer manufacturers to swiftly release similar devices using Windows, Android or Linux operating systems. Most of these proved to be poor competitors to the iPad, but in the last couple of years a number of Android alternatives have also become very popular. Examples include the Galaxy Tab, the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10, and the Kindle Fire."
It sounds like the iPad is most suitable, and that's probably a good thing to try first, but there may be alternatives. Everyone has particular needs, so it's best to try one in a shop. There's very little discussion of Android on the RNIB forum, and good reports of using iPads, but Windows is apparently better than Mac on a laptop/desktop.
I think you should ask some blind people, not Slashdot people.
A friend is blind, and could certainly afford anything, but I'm 90% sure he has an Android phone. It's certainly not an iPhone, it's possible it's a less-smart-phone.
The British Royal National Institute for the Blind was top in my Google search, there's probably an equivalent in your country.
I don’t know enough about the academic publishing situation to know why authors would agree to sign away self publishing rights, but presumably there’s some value to using Elsevier’s services, even if the “value” is only in the sense that authors are required to do it in order to be “published” and advance their careers.
I may have misinterpreted, but that sounds like you're suggesting scientists only publish work for selfish reasons (for their own career). Publishing work in a peer-reviewed journal is part of the process which shows the research is reasonable, and -- in theory -- puts it somewhere where it can be accessed by other scientists, validated or contested, and cited. It's often a requirement of receiving a grant, including from the/a government.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
(A LINK rel="alternate" in the HTML head element. Opera shows an icon in the address bar, I'm sure some other browsers do too.)
Wouldn't they be charged import taxes?
Play.com is^H^Hwas in Jersey, one of the small islands between Great Britain and France. It's a "Crown Dependency" of the UK, roughly comparable to the US Virgin Isles. It's not part of the EU. There was a loophole, where low-value items imported into the UK weren't charged VAT. Jersey is also considered part of the UK for postal prices, so the postage cost was the same for a business there as in, say, Manchester.
That led to Play.com and others selling DVDs and CDs to the UK, until April 2012 when the loophole was closed, and January this year when they shut down the Jersey warehouse.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-jersey-20953357
(Guernsey and the Isle of Man are the other two tax havens in the British Isles, although we have plenty more spread around the world.)
Amazon.co.uk, .de, etc are already based in Luxembourg, to avoid as much tax as possible while remaining within the EU.
A lot of U.S. states have 21-to-enter laws for venues that serve alcohol but do not qualify as restaurants and require the bouncer to check IDs at the door. How should an effort to change these laws be organized?
I don't know -- I doubt 14 is in any law, it's probably some balance between the cost of insurance / perceived risk and the income from under 18s.
Maybe Ticketmaster could do something. They should realise that their ticket sales trends: http://media.ticketmaster.com/en-us/img/static/ticketlogy/images/2012_Concert_Trends_v11.pdf is lacking a 14-18 category, which presumably exists for their UK market (they are possibly the biggest ticketseller here). I can't find a report for the UK though.
Last.fm or MusicMetric might also have some European data to compare to US data.
Venues either leave it for the barman to check id, or sometimes give a different-coloured wristband to anyone under 18.
I reckon they finance their tours themselves. They have a plane: http://maiden-world.com/articles/ed-force-one.html (a 757-200).
(Only leased, but still...)
That might be regional...
Normally t-shirts at concerts or festivals are about £12-£15, over £18 ($30) warrants some muttering about the prices.
So... how come most of the people I saw at the concert last year were youngsters? University student age.
Probably because the concert was at one of the few venues of that scale that still allows under-21 fans to attend. A lot of touring bands end up playing at venues that serve too much alcohol to be considered "restaurants" under the law.
Wow, that must really suck. Is it easy for 18 year olds to sneak in? What about 16 year olds? 18-21s are a big part of the standing audience at many concerts in the UK, and it's pretty common to see a few under-15s with a parent, sometimes not looking too impressed with the music :).
Example: http://www.wembleyarena.co.uk/the-wembley-experience/faqs (14+ to stand, 15+ to be unaccompanied). That's normal -- 18+ is the exception, and generally when the event is held in a nightclub that will start its club night as soon as the last band finishes.
My POTS is much more reliable than the electric power - can't remember the last time, if ever, that it was down.
Would you notice? I notice the one-a-year or less that there's an interruption in my electrical supply, as some digital clocks need resetting. It doesn't matter if I'm in/awake or not, and a 1-second interruption is enough.
If I used the POTS phone for all calls while I'm at home, I'm only going to notice it's not working if I try and make a call, which is a small fraction of the week.
Example (since I have a BT line): http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/12209/~/do-faults-ever-occur-on-the-bt-network%3F "BT currently clears 89% of business faults within five hours. We are committed to continuous improvement. Published network reliability statistics suggests on average only one fault in seven years."
So they are more reliable, but probably not more than 10 times more reliable.