When browsing through my list of emails, I'd rather see the first line of content than a bunch of hi's.
Isn't that a fault with your email client? I think the salutation is useful as it sets the tone of the email: "Dear Xxxx" is different to "Hi Xxxx", "Hey Xxxx", "Xxxx" and "Dear Sir/Madam". I write one most of the time, but if I'm replying rapidly in an email discussion I'll omit it.
If you're signature is prepended with "-- " on a blank line, the email client should cut it off when someone replies. Most also grey it out, or similar.
The hell do folks' personal gaming interest have to do with their professional life?
Once they put it on their work computer's desktop it gets noticed.
One of my colleagues has a screengrab from a film; a huge gun against someone's head. I didn't much like seeing that. I'm not going to complain about it, but I think it's a bit disrespectful and immature.
An anime/manga background isn't disrespectful (hopefully!), but think about what impression you want to give to colleagues beforehand. That's all.
I got an email from one of the sysadmins today, he'd written "2morow". Checking the mail headers showed it was written in Thunderbird This makes him old: younger people wouldn't have become so used to text-speak, they had smart(er)phones too early.
Travelling within US states has much LESS border controls than within the Schengen Area.
At most the US has slightly less (zero, AFAIK?) checks -- there's nothing left of any border controls (buildings etc) in western and northern Europe. Schengen was only extended eastwards in 2007, so sometimes unmanned buildings remain at large crossings further east.
Of course it's a unit. In fact a lot of so-called metric countries sell goods by the foot. So it's way more than a 'couple' of countries.
The idea that once you go metric ALL of the goods in that country are automatically converted to metric measures is bullshit. For a concrete example in the UK lumber is priced by the cubic foot.
Entering from the US has the last decade ranged from no check whatsoever to some cursory glance at the passport.
It's more than 10 years since 9/2001, so you'd need to go back ~15 years.
In any case they may still have done a review of you but kept a low profile about it. Entry to the US makes you feel like you are a suspect of bank robbery or something.
Correct on both counts. I've entered the Schengen area many times, usually from the UK, which isn't part of it. I've also entered the UK even more times, and both areas are similar: a glance at the passport, and I wander through. The review has been done beforehand.
At Gatwick Airport in April, after a flight from SE Asia, I was walking behind someone through the "Nothing to Declare" area, when (almost) hidden doors opened on both sides, and border police essentially ran across the corridor grabbing the person and their luggage. I assume they'd identified a suspect bag, or something like that. Putting the effort into intelligence work seems much more rewarding than treating the 99.99% of honest travellers like suspects.
One of the things that most Europeans don't appreciate is how small their country is compared to the United States. Denmark is roughly 43,000 square km. The United States is 10,000,000 square km. Denmark is smaller than 41 of the US States.
The Schengen Area, which is a single zone for the purposes of border control, is about 4,300,000 km^2. That's a little over half the size of the contiguous USA.
Travelling within that area is roughly the same as travelling between US states.
“There is a currently consultation focusing on speed-limiting technology already fitted to HGVs and buses.
“Taking account of the results, the Commission will publish in the autumn a document by its technical experts which will no doubt refer to ISA among many other things.”
Thank you!
Any British newspaper, except sometimes the Guardian or Independent, is not a neutral source for news on the EU. They will happily blame the EU for anything, while not noting that British MEPs vote in favour of it, or (fairly often) Britain made a significant input into the proposal.
Complete list of CCTLDs with A records (many more have MX records):
ac has address 193.223.78.210 ai has address 209.59.119.34 cm has address 195.24.205.60 dk has address 193.163.102.24 (and ipv6 2a01:630:0:40:b1a:b1a:2011:1) gg has address 87.117.196.80 io has address 193.223.78.212 je has address 87.117.196.80 kh has address 203.223.32.21 pn has address 80.68.93.100 sh has address 193.223.78.211 tk has address 217.119.57.22 tm has address 193.223.78.213 to has address 216.74.32.107 uz has address 91.212.89.8 vi has address 193.0.0.198 ws has address 64.70.19.33
http://rt.com/usa/americans-refuse-citizenship-tax-317/ "The United States is the only country out of 34 in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that continues to tax citizens regardless of where they live around the world."
"We should tax all foreigners living abroad." - Monty Python
The British Empire did this successfully for hundreds of years. It's a pretty good revenue model, don't knock it.
The US is one of the few countries that tax it's own citizens while they live abroad. My (half) American friend has to fill out a US tax return every year, although since he lives in the UK the tax he already paid here counts towards (and exceeds) the US requirement.
We have had semi-automated and automated railway systems for decades.
And we've had failures of those systems that have resulted in deaths.
Can you find one?
If we include America, which I'd rather not due to that country's lack of investment in rail infrastructure, then there's an accident in Washington DC, but there's so much lacking in that system -- no black boxes on trains, insufficient braking capacity, overdue maintenance -- that it looks designed to be cheap rather than safe.
Aeroplanes won't be in the chart as I don't think they're within the remit of the Department for Transport, whose figures they are. Or perhaps they are, but there are so few internal flights it could really skew the figures.
Some Mexican-ish places have recently opened (and become a bit trendy) in London. I bought some kind of wrap thing for about £6 (only a little more than what a McDonald's meal costs, I think), and it was like trying to eat a whole newborn baby.
Mexico is even more overweight than the US though, so it's not that surprising. They do seem to have more fresh fruit and vegetables in Mexican meals, so that could be a plus...
I met a group of Americans from NYC at lunchtime at a conference in London. It was a nice meal -- probably would cost £15-20 from a restaurant, except there were only two choices (meat / vegan). All the Americans in the group agreed that although the portion was smaller than they were used to, the quantity of food was adequate. Several of them also said they felt overweight in London, but didn't at home as they were "average". (London is significantly below average for obesity in the UK.)
There's probably research on why, but in the UK being given far too much food in a restaurant isn't really seen as a good thing; it's wasteful. It may go back to memories of rationing from WWII being in the culture.
I was expecting a map pinpointing where every death occurred, instead we have a a funny interface to a list of ~30 countries with the # of death per 100k people.
I was too, as I've seen several before for the UK.
The most dangerous I saw was one man driving, another holding a trailer (nothing else connected the trailer to the motorbike) and balancing a couple of large pieces of glass on the trailer (for a shop window or similar). He was holding them against the palm of his hand, without gloves.
You ought to be able to comfortably flat foot both legs at any given stop.
That's not what I've been told. When the pedal is at the lowest point, the knee should be slightly bent. That means when you're stopped you can balance on your toes, but not put a foot flat.
However, I'm not sure how they count passengers in buses. The cited British document seems to include cyclist and pedestrians. So I'm not sure this is the data you wanted.
(For some context on the first paragraph, if it rains many railway stations have recorded announcements like "due to the inclement weather conditions, please take care on and around the station and when boarding trains". The London Underground has loads of posters of people getting trapped in doors or falling down escalators, saying things like "watch your step after a night out: last year, 1 fatality, 452 injuries".)
The red graph at the bottom is for the whole UK (or maybe just Great Britain). Cycling is more dangerous per km than driving, but safer than walking or motorcycling.
The UK has some of the safest roads in the world, so the figures might not be so different elsewhere.
I was in Vietnam earlier this year, and the figures do surprise me. 24 for Vietnam, 3.7 for the UK. Here, I hardly ever see an accident. Less than once in five years do I see the aftermath of a fatal or near-fatal accident. I know of only one friend-of-a-friend killed on the roads.
I was in Vietnam for three weeks, and I saw one body lying in the road after being hit, and four non-fatal accidents with motorcycles (one man was concussed, the others walked away). Other tourists reported the same kind of thing -- one had seen three fatalities in three days!
I expect many road deaths in Vietnam aren't recorded as such.
The automation software has capacity to "see ahead", so to speak, and can and should get the vehicle into a safe state when it looks like a handover is inevitable.
You are sitting there watching a movie as your car drives you down the street. A child pops out from between parked cars and... your automation software had no way of "seeing ahead" that this would happen.
Why not? This is what Google (and others) are working on, it's difficult but not impossible.
creating a collision with the car behind you (and the one behind it...)
But the car behind you wouldn't collide, because it will never follow too closely, unlike most human drivers.
Imagine the flight into the Hudson had the system been automated.
Imagine the one landing at San Francisco had been automated...
Then ignore flights, because they're a lot more dangerous -- there is no easy way to stop one.
An automated car will be able to stop at any point. That's the whole point with keeping a safe distance behind the car in front.
Anyone who thinks that human-created automated driving systems will be perfect and never require instant human attention to avert disaster is the one with zero clue.
We have had semi-automated and automated railway systems for decades. Railways are fail-safe (simply stop all trains), cars will be as well. Aeroplanes are the exception.
I wouldn't say the majority of people in the countryside are all good mechanics either. More than in the city, but not the majority. At least, not here in the UK.
That just depends on the city. London and NYC are full of people who skim money while moving bits of paper around, but that's not because they're cities.
I reckon Birmingham UK (or Detroit USA) have more good mechanics than average.
I was about 13 when I visited a Texan diner, on the first day of a holiday. My mum ordered a salad. "What dressing do you want?" There's a choice?! She asked for the normal one.
A large bowl of salad was provided, and a bowl of pink goop -- probably 75cl or so. My mum asked what the goop was. The waitress said, "that's your thousand island dressing, here, I'll show you" and tipped the whole lot over the salad.
At a fast food place in Texas the five of us chose what we wanted. My mum ordered it "one large hotdogs, one large cheeseburger... oh, is that the large hotdog? Wow, ok, nothing else". The two items fed my parents and three children.
Slashdot Mirror
When browsing through my list of emails, I'd rather see the first line of content than a bunch of hi's.
Isn't that a fault with your email client? I think the salutation is useful as it sets the tone of the email: "Dear Xxxx" is different to "Hi Xxxx", "Hey Xxxx", "Xxxx" and "Dear Sir/Madam". I write one most of the time, but if I'm replying rapidly in an email discussion I'll omit it.
If you're signature is prepended with "-- " on a blank line, the email client should cut it off when someone replies. Most also grey it out, or similar.
The hell do folks' personal gaming interest have to do with their professional life?
Once they put it on their work computer's desktop it gets noticed.
One of my colleagues has a screengrab from a film; a huge gun against someone's head. I didn't much like seeing that. I'm not going to complain about it, but I think it's a bit disrespectful and immature.
An anime/manga background isn't disrespectful (hopefully!), but think about what impression you want to give to colleagues beforehand. That's all.
lolz u old
I got an email from one of the sysadmins today, he'd written "2morow". Checking the mail headers showed it was written in Thunderbird This makes him old: younger people wouldn't have become so used to text-speak, they had smart(er)phones too early.
Travelling within US states has much LESS border controls than within the Schengen Area.
At most the US has slightly less (zero, AFAIK?) checks -- there's nothing left of any border controls (buildings etc) in western and northern Europe. Schengen was only extended eastwards in 2007, so sometimes unmanned buildings remain at large crossings further east.
Here's a typical small border: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schengen_border_Slovakia_1.jpg
Of course it's a unit. In fact a lot of so-called metric countries sell goods by the foot. So it's way more than a 'couple' of countries.
The idea that once you go metric ALL of the goods in that country are automatically converted to metric measures is bullshit. For a concrete example in the UK lumber is priced by the cubic foot.
Maybe 10+ years ago, but that's not the case now.
Biggest supplier: http://www.jewson.co.uk/timber/machined-softwoods/planed-square-edge-timber/standard-redwood-pse/products/FSP25050/pse-5th-redwood-25-x-50mm/
http://fftlumber.co.uk/firewood.html (cubic metres)
http://www.brookstimber.com/softwoods.php (kg / m^3 for the density)
You can ask for something in feet, and you'll get it, but the invoice will be in metres.
Entering from the US has the last decade ranged from no check whatsoever to some cursory glance at the passport.
It's more than 10 years since 9/2001, so you'd need to go back ~15 years.
In any case they may still have done a review of you but kept a low profile about it. Entry to the US makes you feel like you are a suspect of bank robbery or something.
Correct on both counts. I've entered the Schengen area many times, usually from the UK, which isn't part of it. I've also entered the UK even more times, and both areas are similar: a glance at the passport, and I wander through. The review has been done beforehand.
At Gatwick Airport in April, after a flight from SE Asia, I was walking behind someone through the "Nothing to Declare" area, when (almost) hidden doors opened on both sides, and border police essentially ran across the corridor grabbing the person and their luggage. I assume they'd identified a suspect bag, or something like that. Putting the effort into intelligence work seems much more rewarding than treating the 99.99% of honest travellers like suspects.
One of the things that most Europeans don't appreciate is how small their country is compared to the United States. Denmark is roughly 43,000 square km. The United States is 10,000,000 square km. Denmark is smaller than 41 of the US States.
The Schengen Area, which is a single zone for the purposes of border control, is about 4,300,000 km^2. That's a little over half the size of the contiguous USA.
Travelling within that area is roughly the same as travelling between US states.
Instead of rabidly anti-EU British papers.
relevant quote from EU spokesman:
“There is a currently consultation focusing on speed-limiting technology already fitted to HGVs and buses.
“Taking account of the results, the Commission will publish in the autumn a document by its technical experts which will no doubt refer to ISA among many other things.”
Thank you!
Any British newspaper, except sometimes the Guardian or Independent, is not a neutral source for news on the EU. They will happily blame the EU for anything, while not noting that British MEPs vote in favour of it, or (fairly often) Britain made a significant input into the proposal.
http://www.votewatch.eu/ can be useful for finding this, but it's not that easy to search.
tk seems a bit dodgy, but dk reliably redirects:
$ curl -I http://dk./
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:49:11 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: https://www.dk-hostmaster.dk/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
How about http://io./ , that returns 200 (no redirecting) and works fine in Opera, Chromium and Firefox on Linux for me.
$ curl -I http://io./
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 14:50:10 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.2 (Unix) OpenSSL/0.9.8n
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html
Some country-code domains have their CCTLD set up as a website.
Try http://tk./ and http://dk./ for example.
Complete list of CCTLDs with A records (many more have MX records):
ac has address 193.223.78.210
ai has address 209.59.119.34
cm has address 195.24.205.60
dk has address 193.163.102.24 (and ipv6 2a01:630:0:40:b1a:b1a:2011:1)
gg has address 87.117.196.80
io has address 193.223.78.212
je has address 87.117.196.80
kh has address 203.223.32.21
pn has address 80.68.93.100
sh has address 193.223.78.211
tk has address 217.119.57.22
tm has address 193.223.78.213
to has address 216.74.32.107
uz has address 91.212.89.8
vi has address 193.0.0.198
ws has address 64.70.19.33
As I just wrote above -- America is an exception when it comes to taxation of citizens living abroad: http://rt.com/usa/americans-refuse-citizenship-tax-317/
(I meant "half" in the usual British sense, i.e. one parent is American.)
If I move to Bermuda I'd pay no tax to the UK.
http://rt.com/usa/americans-refuse-citizenship-tax-317/ "The United States is the only country out of 34 in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that continues to tax citizens regardless of where they live around the world."
"We should tax all foreigners living abroad." - Monty Python
The British Empire did this successfully for hundreds of years. It's a pretty good revenue model, don't knock it.
The US is one of the few countries that tax it's own citizens while they live abroad. My (half) American friend has to fill out a US tax return every year, although since he lives in the UK the tax he already paid here counts towards (and exceeds) the US requirement.
We have had semi-automated and automated railway systems for decades.
And we've had failures of those systems that have resulted in deaths.
Can you find one?
If we include America, which I'd rather not due to that country's lack of investment in rail infrastructure, then there's an accident in Washington DC, but there's so much lacking in that system -- no black boxes on trains, insufficient braking capacity, overdue maintenance -- that it looks designed to be cheap rather than safe.
Aeroplanes won't be in the chart as I don't think they're within the remit of the Department for Transport, whose figures they are. Or perhaps they are, but there are so few internal flights it could really skew the figures.
Some Mexican-ish places have recently opened (and become a bit trendy) in London. I bought some kind of wrap thing for about £6 (only a little more than what a McDonald's meal costs, I think), and it was like trying to eat a whole newborn baby.
Mexico is even more overweight than the US though, so it's not that surprising. They do seem to have more fresh fruit and vegetables in Mexican meals, so that could be a plus...
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/news/america-fattest-obese-un-144341236.html
I met a group of Americans from NYC at lunchtime at a conference in London. It was a nice meal -- probably would cost £15-20 from a restaurant, except there were only two choices (meat / vegan). All the Americans in the group agreed that although the portion was smaller than they were used to, the quantity of food was adequate. Several of them also said they felt overweight in London, but didn't at home as they were "average". (London is significantly below average for obesity in the UK.)
There's probably research on why, but in the UK being given far too much food in a restaurant isn't really seen as a good thing; it's wasteful. It may go back to memories of rationing from WWII being in the culture.
I was expecting a map pinpointing where every death occurred, instead we have a a funny interface to a list of ~30 countries with the # of death per 100k people.
I was too, as I've seen several before for the UK.
Something like this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8401344.stm (for the UK)
Or this http://citybeast.com/londoncyclists.html (cycle injuries/deaths in London).
The most dangerous I saw was one man driving, another holding a trailer (nothing else connected the trailer to the motorbike) and balancing a couple of large pieces of glass on the trailer (for a shop window or similar). He was holding them against the palm of his hand, without gloves.
(This was Vietnam).
You ought to be able to comfortably flat foot both legs at any given stop.
That's not what I've been told. When the pedal is at the lowest point, the knee should be slightly bent. That means when you're stopped you can balance on your toes, but not put a foot flat.
http://www.downtube.com/Bicycle_Fitting/Saddle_Height_Adjustment/ has decent pictures.
Copenhageners presumably know what they're doing: http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/01/holding-on-to-cyclists-in-copenhagen.html
Road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
USA: 8.5
Germany: 7.2
UK: 3.6 (lowest with the statistic, although only a few countries have it)
However, I'm not sure how they count passengers in buses. The cited British document seems to include cyclist and pedestrians. So I'm not sure this is the data you wanted.
I happened to read this last week, and could easily find it again. So: http://waronthemotorist.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/railway-safety-doesnt-need-scare-quotes-it-works/
(For some context on the first paragraph, if it rains many railway stations have recorded announcements like "due to the inclement weather conditions, please take care on and around the station and when boarding trains". The London Underground has loads of posters of people getting trapped in doors or falling down escalators, saying things like "watch your step after a night out: last year, 1 fatality, 452 injuries".)
The red graph at the bottom is for the whole UK (or maybe just Great Britain). Cycling is more dangerous per km than driving, but safer than walking or motorcycling.
The UK has some of the safest roads in the world, so the figures might not be so different elsewhere.
I was in Vietnam earlier this year, and the figures do surprise me. 24 for Vietnam, 3.7 for the UK. Here, I hardly ever see an accident. Less than once in five years do I see the aftermath of a fatal or near-fatal accident. I know of only one friend-of-a-friend killed on the roads.
I was in Vietnam for three weeks, and I saw one body lying in the road after being hit, and four non-fatal accidents with motorcycles (one man was concussed, the others walked away). Other tourists reported the same kind of thing -- one had seen three fatalities in three days!
I expect many road deaths in Vietnam aren't recorded as such.
The automation software has capacity to "see ahead", so to speak, and can and should get the vehicle into a safe state when it looks like a handover is inevitable.
You are sitting there watching a movie as your car drives you down the street. A child pops out from between parked cars and ... your automation software had no way of "seeing ahead" that this would happen.
Why not? This is what Google (and others) are working on, it's difficult but not impossible.
creating a collision with the car behind you (and the one behind it...)
But the car behind you wouldn't collide, because it will never follow too closely, unlike most human drivers.
Imagine the flight into the Hudson had the system been automated.
Imagine the one landing at San Francisco had been automated...
Then ignore flights, because they're a lot more dangerous -- there is no easy way to stop one.
An automated car will be able to stop at any point. That's the whole point with keeping a safe distance behind the car in front.
Anyone who thinks that human-created automated driving systems will be perfect and never require instant human attention to avert disaster is the one with zero clue.
We have had semi-automated and automated railway systems for decades. Railways are fail-safe (simply stop all trains), cars will be as well. Aeroplanes are the exception.
I wouldn't say the majority of people in the countryside are all good mechanics either. More than in the city, but not the majority. At least, not here in the UK.
That just depends on the city. London and NYC are full of people who skim money while moving bits of paper around, but that's not because they're cities.
I reckon Birmingham UK (or Detroit USA) have more good mechanics than average.
I was about 13 when I visited a Texan diner, on the first day of a holiday. My mum ordered a salad. "What dressing do you want?" There's a choice?! She asked for the normal one.
A large bowl of salad was provided, and a bowl of pink goop -- probably 75cl or so. My mum asked what the goop was. The waitress said, "that's your thousand island dressing, here, I'll show you" and tipped the whole lot over the salad.
At a fast food place in Texas the five of us chose what we wanted. My mum ordered it "one large hotdogs, one large cheeseburger... oh, is that the large hotdog? Wow, ok, nothing else". The two items fed my parents and three children.