a) Doesn't work (for reducing offenses, it's great for revenue)
It needn't be money. In England, the fine isn't that much money (£60), but if you are caught four times in three years (for small excesses) you are then banned from driving. The more severe the offence the more quickly you can lose your license. If you've not had a license for long it's also easier to lose, and you might be required to pay for more lessons.
For one thing, they'll presumably be enforcing the laws they're paid to enforce, and not the laws local people don't care about. So more likely to be patrolling to discourage burglars and muggers than sitting at the side of the road with a donut and a radar gun.
Many people have made a similar point.
Why don't they either a) increase the penalty for speeding, to reduce the rate of offending b) Increase speed limits, if that's really what people want c) Install speed cameras at high-risk locations
In America I think you have elected police chiefs, so I'd expect some of this to be easy.
If I see police walking round this bit of London I wonder what's happened. This is a nice bit, there shouldn't be any street crime! I don't see the police in the same places, so I think they're good at patrolling everywhere rather than a fixed route.
I don't run a home email server -- it's too much effort to filter spam -- but there's been a web server running on port 80 for the past year. My mum has another web server in her house (for family photos), with a competing ISP (o2?) and that's been running for almost 10 years.
Only five times? As someone that just got back from Beijing, I'm surprised I wasn't killed in a traffic accident.
Just wait until you go to Thailand or Vietnam. In Vietnam I saw five road accidents -- two of which would probably be called "serious" in British terms -- and the immediate aftermath of one fatal accident in three weeks.
(And, I was told while there, just wait until you visit India.)
I know that the UK plays on patriotism and "terror" as much as the USA does.
Not quite. (And that's a British "not quite", i.e. a polite not at all.) You have to be very, very careful when being patriotic in Britain. There's a risk that you'll be seen as uneducated at best, nationalist / fascist at worst.
From the first paragraph -- I can't tell you when St George's Day is, except it's April. The story is he killed a dragon, but I don't know why that links him to England. My idea of patriotism is far more about ideals -- e.g. historic laws -- than specific symbols, so it's not easy to represent.
The UK is going the same way as the USA. Everyone is fighting and clawing each other to get that "home in the catchment area of the good school" unless they can afford a private school. Which by the way is only affordable to company directors and senior government employees. Anyone who can't achieve that goal has no option but emigration.
Just a room in the edgier parts of London rents for £200/week.
Don't exaggerate, it casts doubt on the rest of your argument. A room in a crap bit of London is more like £100/week, maybe only £70 for a grotty place. Private school isn't as expensive as you suggest either -- I went to one (my dad taught there, so we had a big discount), and there were plenty of children whose families weren't especially rich. They just chose not to have things like satellite TV, fancy foreign holidays, etc, in order to afford the fees.
Having said that, there are deep problems with the cost of housing (and the fact houses are investments before being residences), the focus on financial services (and services generally), and the direction the current government is taking us. If I didn't enjoy my job, I'd be looking to emigrate.
The EU is good at harmonising standards -- that's one of the main things it does. By harmonising standards, manufacturers would be able to sell their goods in any EU country without needing to seek compliance in many countries. I think the idea is that making a product comply with a national standard in one country would automatically make it compliant to sell in any other EU country.
I (in the UK) have different plug sockets to someone in France, or Germany. But French and German sockets are now compatible, and plugs without an earth pin work in most of the EU (not the UK or Ireland). Industrial plugs and sockets have been standardised. Household power 230V 50Hz over the whole EU.
Some stuff has had so much investment it doesn't make sense to change it all (like British plug sockets), or only very slowly (like Spanish broad-gauge railways -- newer lines are standard gauge, some important connections are dual-gauge).
I don't think NIH is much of a problem. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DIN_standards -- lots are withdrawn in favour of an ISO standard (e.g. the standard paper sizes were originally a DIN standard).
Imagine the costs involved in treating every auto accident like a plane crash!!
But imagine the benefits!
The UK has the safest railway in the world (of any reasonably sized country). Look at the rail accident investigation reports -- pick one -- to see why. The reports usually finish with "recommendations already implemented". (I sometimes read these reports, typically the ones about structures or vehicle faults -- the causes are often very technical, and it's interesting to read about how they work out what caused the accident/near-miss).
(This is probably expensive. We also have one of the most expensive railway systems in the world, but it's not clear what the cause is. I don't know why we don't have the same focus on road accidents -- globally, British roads are in the top 5 for safety, but they're still poor compared to railways.)
There was a BT phone box with WiFi near my school in 2003 (in a city in England). Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3110726.stm -- which says they aimed to have 200 by the end of 2003.
I have a stack of graphic novels, left behind when I moved in to a rented house.
I listed them on Amazon.co.uk, and sold a couple for (after fees + my costs to post) about £10. Then one sold for around £5 -- after fees and postage, I'd have made about £1. It wasn't worth the time it takes to carefully package the book. I don't know how the people selling things for £0.01+postage (£2.70?) make any money -- it's certainly not possible for an individual to compete. My colleague sells stuff on eBay as a hobby, and says the same applies there -- unless it's rare, don't bother.
When I get round to it, I'm simply going to take the books to a charity shop.
The only close call I had was a train crossing with a malfunctioning gate that I didn't realize was malfunctioning (wasn't down, wasn't even blinking) until I was doing 45 about two carlengths from the tracks and so was the train
That's really poor on the part of the railway. Did they investigate how it happened?
Something similar happened in England in 2011. The independent investigation is 57 pages long (PDF): http://www.raib.gov.uk/cms_resources/111215_R202011_Lydney.pdf Evidence from a "black box" on the train, the signalling system, and a data logger for the level crossing itself was used to work out what had happened, how it happened, and why. Most importantly, they recommended what should be done to prevent it happening again.
The result of this kind of attention to safety and risk is the UK has the safest railway network in the world (ignoring tiny countries). An accident (or "near miss") isn't shrugged off, but investigated to try and reduce the risk of a recurrence.
(An ironic result of this: in 2010-11, a single railway worker died while at work. He was an infrastructure maintenance worker, and was killed when the van he was in crashed on the A9 (main road) in Scotland. For 2012-13, there were two fatalities. One was killed on a motorway on the way to work.)
Automatic cars should have the same approach to safety. We could almost eliminate road deaths this way.
First option, computer handles it. Slams the breaks, 10 car pile up, 2 dead, 10 injured.
Why would that happen? I'd want an automated car to ensure it isn't being tailgated, e.g. by slowing down. The automated car shouldn't ever put itself into an unreasonably dangerous situation, and should act to reduce excessive risk caused by poor driving of other vehicles.
It could also record the evidence of the faulty/dangerous car behind it and report it to the police, and report the redneck driving at 80mph.
The two GPs I've used (both in London) have had electronic records. The first, which was the GP attached to my university, had what looked like quite and old system -- full-screen CLI based interface.
The second has a Windows desktop application. I've only seen it twice. It told the doctor I was missing a vaccination, and she set a thing to automatically remind my in 1 year to get the second part of the vaccination (for better immunity).
However, I don't know what would happen if I was taken to hospital and they wanted my records, or if I felt ill and went to a GP somewhere else.
(I had travel vaccinations for a trip to China. The doctor offered my a "Little Red Book", which I thought was very appropriate. It had a teddy bear on the front -- children get them so their parents can track what vaccinations they've had while at school etc.)
Do the math; 28 out of 143 is 14% and much less than half. I am just responding to people who post. They are called discussions and I enjoy discussions. I may be a little OCD but I have the time to indulge it.
No, it's almost 20%. That's far beyond indulgence, that's overwhelming the discussion with a single viewpoint.
This post will be my fifth on this story, making my contributions 3% of the total.
It's an issue of being tracked. With pen & paper there is no certainty you were there.
This is a feature, and one I think the union is right to maintain. I don't want a society where everyone is tracked all the time.
Are you sure about that? It could also be one or two workers patrolling a station dealing with issues with no supervisor is present. The London Underground is very spread out.
It shouldn't be too difficult for a manager to travel between stations to check on their staff. There are trains.
The stations are already covered with CCTV cameras, so they could check remotely if they want to.
Having them clocked in by fingerprint makes no difference at all.
Half the comments on this story are yours. Do you work for TfL or something?
If so, do you know for certain that the existing system is paper based? The article suggests it's computerised and terminal or phone-based, which makes pretty much everything you've posted irrelevant.
Or just not turn up for work and have a colleague claim that they're present but you can't see them now because they're out on some obscure bit of track.
The cleaners clean trains and stations, not the track.
Either system doesn't prevent someone clocking in and then not doing their job, whether they saty at the station/depot or not.
Slashdot Mirror
a) Doesn't work (for reducing offenses, it's great for revenue)
It needn't be money. In England, the fine isn't that much money (£60), but if you are caught four times in three years (for small excesses) you are then banned from driving. The more severe the offence the more quickly you can lose your license. If you've not had a license for long it's also easier to lose, and you might be required to pay for more lessons.
They have cars, but it's hard to tell whether they're patrolling or just going somewhere.
I probably see as many police officers on bicycles as on foot -- easily the best way to patrol a European city.
For one thing, they'll presumably be enforcing the laws they're paid to enforce, and not the laws local people don't care about. So more likely to be patrolling to discourage burglars and muggers than sitting at the side of the road with a donut and a radar gun.
Many people have made a similar point.
Why don't they either
a) increase the penalty for speeding, to reduce the rate of offending
b) Increase speed limits, if that's really what people want
c) Install speed cameras at high-risk locations
In America I think you have elected police chiefs, so I'd expect some of this to be easy.
If I see police walking round this bit of London I wonder what's happened. This is a nice bit, there shouldn't be any street crime! I don't see the police in the same places, so I think they're good at patrolling everywhere rather than a fixed route.
(We have a map of crime rates in different areas of London: http://maps.met.police.uk/ )
Too many ISPs forbid this for no rational reason.
Can they not be convinced?
My ISP (Plusnet) is a division of the old state monopoly (BT), and they even have a page on how to set up a home email server: http://www.plus.net/support/email/smtp_mail.shtml
I don't run a home email server -- it's too much effort to filter spam -- but there's been a web server running on port 80 for the past year. My mum has another web server in her house (for family photos), with a competing ISP (o2?) and that's been running for almost 10 years.
Only five times? As someone that just got back from Beijing, I'm surprised I wasn't killed in a traffic accident.
Just wait until you go to Thailand or Vietnam. In Vietnam I saw five road accidents -- two of which would probably be called "serious" in British terms -- and the immediate aftermath of one fatal accident in three weeks.
(And, I was told while there, just wait until you visit India.)
I know that the UK plays on patriotism and "terror" as much as the USA does.
Not quite. (And that's a British "not quite", i.e. a polite not at all.) You have to be very, very careful when being patriotic in Britain. There's a risk that you'll be seen as uneducated at best, nationalist / fascist at worst.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7608125/England-least-patriotic-country.html
From the first paragraph -- I can't tell you when St George's Day is, except it's April. The story is he killed a dragon, but I don't know why that links him to England. My idea of patriotism is far more about ideals -- e.g. historic laws -- than specific symbols, so it's not easy to represent.
The UK is going the same way as the USA. Everyone is fighting and clawing each other to get that "home in the catchment area of the good school" unless they can afford a private school. Which by the way is only affordable to company directors and senior government employees. Anyone who can't achieve that goal has no option but emigration.
Just a room in the edgier parts of London rents for £200/week.
Don't exaggerate, it casts doubt on the rest of your argument. A room in a crap bit of London is more like £100/week, maybe only £70 for a grotty place. Private school isn't as expensive as you suggest either -- I went to one (my dad taught there, so we had a big discount), and there were plenty of children whose families weren't especially rich. They just chose not to have things like satellite TV, fancy foreign holidays, etc, in order to afford the fees.
Having said that, there are deep problems with the cost of housing (and the fact houses are investments before being residences), the focus on financial services (and services generally), and the direction the current government is taking us. If I didn't enjoy my job, I'd be looking to emigrate.
The EU is good at harmonising standards -- that's one of the main things it does. By harmonising standards, manufacturers would be able to sell their goods in any EU country without needing to seek compliance in many countries. I think the idea is that making a product comply with a national standard in one country would automatically make it compliant to sell in any other EU country.
I (in the UK) have different plug sockets to someone in France, or Germany. But French and German sockets are now compatible, and plugs without an earth pin work in most of the EU (not the UK or Ireland). Industrial plugs and sockets have been standardised. Household power 230V 50Hz over the whole EU.
Some stuff has had so much investment it doesn't make sense to change it all (like British plug sockets), or only very slowly (like Spanish broad-gauge railways -- newer lines are standard gauge, some important connections are dual-gauge).
I don't think NIH is much of a problem. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DIN_standards -- lots are withdrawn in favour of an ISO standard (e.g. the standard paper sizes were originally a DIN standard).
The EU tried to force ("encouraged") manufacturers to use their standard -- micro USB etc -- in 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_External_Power_Supply
That's why everyone except Apple stopped using their own connectors, and did so worldwide to avoid the cost of having multiple designs.
The best bit is the response by a competing company, Bertolli, who have managed to personify pasta shapes: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/bertolli-makes-most-barilla-chairmans-anti-gay-comments-152758
I saw an independent Australian documentary on Krokodil in one of the southern Russian cities, like Novobirisk.
Was it this: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/vice-news/siberia-krokodil-tears-full-length ? (Narrator is British, btw).
Imagine the costs involved in treating every auto accident like a plane crash!!
But imagine the benefits!
The UK has the safest railway in the world (of any reasonably sized country). Look at the rail accident investigation reports -- pick one -- to see why. The reports usually finish with "recommendations already implemented". (I sometimes read these reports, typically the ones about structures or vehicle faults -- the causes are often very technical, and it's interesting to read about how they work out what caused the accident/near-miss).
(This is probably expensive. We also have one of the most expensive railway systems in the world, but it's not clear what the cause is. I don't know why we don't have the same focus on road accidents -- globally, British roads are in the top 5 for safety, but they're still poor compared to railways.)
Not the first by at least 10 years.
There was a BT phone box with WiFi near my school in 2003 (in a city in England). Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3110726.stm -- which says they aimed to have 200 by the end of 2003.
I have a stack of graphic novels, left behind when I moved in to a rented house.
I listed them on Amazon.co.uk, and sold a couple for (after fees + my costs to post) about £10. Then one sold for around £5 -- after fees and postage, I'd have made about £1. It wasn't worth the time it takes to carefully package the book. I don't know how the people selling things for £0.01+postage (£2.70?) make any money -- it's certainly not possible for an individual to compete. My colleague sells stuff on eBay as a hobby, and says the same applies there -- unless it's rare, don't bother.
When I get round to it, I'm simply going to take the books to a charity shop.
The only close call I had was a train crossing with a malfunctioning gate that I didn't realize was malfunctioning (wasn't down, wasn't even blinking) until I was doing 45 about two carlengths from the tracks and so was the train
That's really poor on the part of the railway. Did they investigate how it happened?
Something similar happened in England in 2011. The independent investigation is 57 pages long (PDF): http://www.raib.gov.uk/cms_resources/111215_R202011_Lydney.pdf
Evidence from a "black box" on the train, the signalling system, and a data logger for the level crossing itself was used to work out what had happened, how it happened, and why. Most importantly, they recommended what should be done to prevent it happening again.
The result of this kind of attention to safety and risk is the UK has the safest railway network in the world (ignoring tiny countries). An accident (or "near miss") isn't shrugged off, but investigated to try and reduce the risk of a recurrence.
(An ironic result of this: in 2010-11, a single railway worker died while at work. He was an infrastructure maintenance worker, and was killed when the van he was in crashed on the A9 (main road) in Scotland. For 2012-13, there were two fatalities. One was killed on a motorway on the way to work.)
Automatic cars should have the same approach to safety. We could almost eliminate road deaths this way.
First option, computer handles it. Slams the breaks, 10 car pile up, 2 dead, 10 injured.
Why would that happen? I'd want an automated car to ensure it isn't being tailgated, e.g. by slowing down. The automated car shouldn't ever put itself into an unreasonably dangerous situation, and should act to reduce excessive risk caused by poor driving of other vehicles.
It could also record the evidence of the faulty/dangerous car behind it and report it to the police, and report the redneck driving at 80mph.
The two GPs I've used (both in London) have had electronic records. The first, which was the GP attached to my university, had what looked like quite and old system -- full-screen CLI based interface.
The second has a Windows desktop application. I've only seen it twice. It told the doctor I was missing a vaccination, and she set a thing to automatically remind my in 1 year to get the second part of the vaccination (for better immunity).
However, I don't know what would happen if I was taken to hospital and they wanted my records, or if I felt ill and went to a GP somewhere else.
(I had travel vaccinations for a trip to China. The doctor offered my a "Little Red Book", which I thought was very appropriate. It had a teddy bear on the front -- children get them so their parents can track what vaccinations they've had while at school etc.)
So sell them in Canada, or failing that, Mexico.
The rich people who wanted them could still buy them, the contract is under Canadian / Mexican law, and it's the purchaser's problem to import it.
curl 'http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/09/16/2359226/london-tube-cleaners-dont-want-fingerprint-clock-in' | grep --only-matching '~[^"]*">(' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | nl
1 1 ~6Yankee">(
2 1 ~91degrees">(
3 1 ~artor3">(
4 1 ~bill_mcgonigle">(
5 1 ~blackest_k">(
6 1 ~captainpanic">(
7 1 ~chrismcb">(
8 1 ~flayzernax">(
9 1 ~gd2shoe">(
10 1 ~gl4ss">(
11 1 ~greenreaper">(
12 1 ~GumphMaster">(
13 1 ~hawkinspeter">(
14 1 ~Inda">(
15 1 ~jalopezp">(
16 1 ~khellendros1984">(
17 1 ~litehacksaur111">(
18 1 ~madprof">(
19 1 ~MarkvW">(
20 1 ~martyros">(
21 1 ~mysidia">(
22 1 ~RJFerret">(
23 1 ~Skapare">(
24 1 ~StripedCow">(
25 1 ~thegarbz">(
26 1 ~tompaulco">(
27 1 ~Vinegar+Joe">(
28 1 ~vux984">(
29 1 ~whois">(
30 1 ~Xeno+man">(
31 2 ~c0lo">(
32 2 ~CadentOrange">(
33 2 ~cheater512">(
34 2 ~drinkypoo">(
35 2 ~Frobnicator">(
36 2 ~Intrepid+imaginaut">(
37 2 ~Jah-Wren+Ryel">(
38 2 ~kwbauer">(
39 2 ~mjwx">(
40 2 ~ruir">(
41 3 ~Alioth">(
42 3 ~fox171171">(
43 4 ~wonkey_monkey">(
44 5 ~xaxa">(
45 31 ~jklovanc">(
Of the posts visible by default, you have nearly half (31/65, 47%) of the posts.
You've made your point; I have better things to do.
Half the comments on this story are yours.
Do the math; 28 out of 143 is 14% and much less than half. I am just responding to people who post. They are called discussions and I enjoy discussions. I may be a little OCD but I have the time to indulge it.
No, it's almost 20%. That's far beyond indulgence, that's overwhelming the discussion with a single viewpoint.
This post will be my fifth on this story, making my contributions 3% of the total.
It's an issue of being tracked. With pen & paper there is no certainty you were there.
This is a feature, and one I think the union is right to maintain. I don't want a society where everyone is tracked all the time.
AKA "Going on strike"..........
If you read the article, you'll see that the action is to continue to clock in and out with the non-biometric system/method.
Are you sure about that? It could also be one or two workers patrolling a station dealing with issues with no supervisor is present. The London Underground is very spread out.
It shouldn't be too difficult for a manager to travel between stations to check on their staff. There are trains.
The stations are already covered with CCTV cameras, so they could check remotely if they want to.
Having them clocked in by fingerprint makes no difference at all.
Half the comments on this story are yours. Do you work for TfL or something?
If so, do you know for certain that the existing system is paper based? The article suggests it's computerised and terminal or phone-based, which makes pretty much everything you've posted irrelevant.
Or just not turn up for work and have a colleague claim that they're present but you can't see them now because they're out on some obscure bit of track.
The cleaners clean trains and stations, not the track.
Either system doesn't prevent someone clocking in and then not doing their job, whether they saty at the station/depot or not.