an anonymous reader links to a story at The Guardian about some good old fashioned friendly interception
It's funny the way they phrase things when governments are involved. If you steal your neighbor's car, they won't call it a "friendly theft" just because you were on good terms prior to the theft.
Congratulations, you've found some British humour.
The summary could have been improved by mentioning the G8 summit starts in Northern Ireland today.
We pay our placement students* just above minimum wage. They make no more (or less) tea than the rest of the staff, they have a real project to do, and their university usually makes them write a report about it.
New graduates are paid almost double minimum wage, and at least half of the placement students apply for jobs here a year or two after their placement.
If the student isn't even worth minimum wage to the company then they're not doing anything. Sixteen year olds can do that (we call it "work experience", and it can end up as making tea and photocopying) but a student with two years at university should be able to offer (and be offered) much more.
* "interned" in British English means put in prison.
I've never heard of a passenger train being cancelled due to engine failure.
Where do you live? Are there many trains?
It's not very common, but a train being cancelled "due to a problem with the train" is common enough that there's a prerecorded announcement for it in the UK. It happens in the rest of Europe too.
The problem probably isn't going to be a complete engine failure -- it's probably some safety system that is reporting a fault that can't be fixed quickly -- but the result is similar.
Public transportation, yes, long distance high speed trains, except Frankfurt no.
Many larger British airports are on inter-city railways. Heathrow is probably the main exception -- it's on a branch line. From London Gatwick you can go directly to Brighton, London or Bedford. From London Stansted to London, Cambridge, Leicester or Birmingham. From Birmingham International [Airport] to London, Manchester, Oxford. From Manchester Airport to Edinburgh, you get the idea.
They're not proper high-speed lines, but they're still pretty fast (200km/h) and the inter-city trains are often more frequent than in France or Germany.
The only high speed line is the one to the Channel Tunnel (it doesn't go anywhere near any airports), but the planned line from London to Birmingham should have a station at Birmingham International, and the later extension north at Manchester Airport.
I've also been on a high-speed train in China which stopped at an airport, it might have been Shanghai.
use the bus as a feeder from downtown, suburban, or whatever areas are far away from the rail station. Drive the bus onto the train
That's not simple. The only train I know of that carries buses is the Eurotunnel shuttle through the Channel Tunnel. The vehicles are super-wide -- not compatible with most railways -- to allow room for relatively quickly loading and unloading. It still takes a while to load though -- not as long as loading a normal vehicle train, but much longer than a passenger train (under 2 minutes).
If the journey is short, it's probably faster to drive the bus to the airport. If it's long, it's probably better to drive the bus to the railway station and let everyone get off. Not everyone wants to go in the same direction! (If they do, perhaps extend the railway.)
The places where you need a train/airplane cross over, just let the train "go right into the terminal" like any connecting flight.
Isn't that pretty common anyway?
Of the five airports in London, four (Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and City) have railway stations directly underneath, within or adjacent to the terminal buildings. That's also the case for most large / modern airports I've used in Europe.
1W * 20 hours = 0.020kWh (the extra energy used by Chrome).
However, I think the whole thing's rubbish -- I don't constantly load websites, I load them once (which takes a few seconds -- or longer if it's IE), then spend time reading the page.
I think they work best in big cities, where plenty of people are in a hurry and follow the appropriate etiquette -- if you have more than an armful of stuff, use the manned checkout.
Almost every supermarket and "mini supermarket" (what used to be local shops, but have been replaced by small Tesco (etc) shops) in London has them, and the lines usually move very quickly.
They're not new though, I think they were introduced five or six years ago.
(They usually have one clerk for about every 8 machines, as they still have to have someone authorise the sale of alcohol, or help if there's a problem.)
Actually it is scarier than that. Just in time shipping has taken all the slack out of the supply chain. No one wants to stock more than they need to have before the next shipment arrives.
The downside is when things go wrong they really really go wrong for a long time.
The other downside is the increase in traffic, pollution etc, as there will be many half-full lorries, and the effect it has on competition.
In the UK, the big supermarkets have used their JIT delivery system to set up small convenience stores (thousands of them). They're much bigger than an independent shop could be, since they don't need a stockroom at all, or at most they need only a tiny one -- the delivery lorry arrives overnight with exactly what was sold. It's not unusual to walk past these stores between midnight and 3am and see all the aisles packed with the large wheeled racks they used to move delivered stock around.
It now takes a significant effort to buy groceries from a shop that's not owned by Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda or Morrisons (the British supermarket oligopoly).
People can be overly critical of a good system on a bad day if they have high expectations from it.
Believe me, I know. I'm British, and live in London.
On holiday in Germany, my friends mostly complained about how bad British [everything] was in comparison, which gets old pretty quickly. I think it's worse than the general complaining -- without comparison -- back in Britain, since at least there I can pretend people haven't travelled much and don't know any better.
Well, after reviewing the research one question still remains unanswered, did he at least get a good spot in the parking lot?
I grew up in Leicester, and went to school just over the wall from the car park. Looking at the map of the monastry, I could pretend I danced on the alter, although I think I probably just sulked nearby.
Richard got a good spot near the best shops. Within two minutes walk of the burial place you could but Magic: The Gathering cards, Warhammer, comics, computer games, CDs, sweets, BDSM gear (although I was asked to leave when I was 14), second-hand books, cannabis seeds and other equipment, New Age shit, 'punk' clothes and (if you hung around the alleyway behind the cathedral) ecstasy.
All these shops were (and I think still are) independent.
I can imagine lots of other burial places that would be less famous or reputable than a parking lot.
It's lucky the land is a car park (only a small one, for an office). It's surrounded on all sides by 19th century buildings in the centre of Leicester.
A group ticket for five people for a 120km journey last week (on a week-day) cost EUR35. We were over an hour early, due to a tail-wind on the flight, and were surprised that the booked ticket was still valid for the earlier train.
A similar journey in the UK (where I live) would have cost a *lot* more, like EUR15-20 each, and we couldn't have got the earlier train without buying new tickets. However, the British train would probably have been longer (more space) and faster. (The German high-speed ICE is faster than the British intercity trains, but the German local trains seem to be slower than normal British trains.)
Oh, and the German trains and surroundings definitely have more graffiti. So does Germany in general.
The current English renderings for Mandarin are unintuitive at best. Better under the old scheme at least.
I don't speak more than 20 words of Mandarin, but I didn't find Pinyin too difficult. There's a few letters to learn, like Q, but that's no different to any language.
I'm in Poland at the moment, and I think that's more difficult. I have learned that W is pronounced V, is pronounced W, there are a few vowels with cedillas which/. probably can't cope with, C is like SH, so is SZ. Wrocaw is "Vrotsh-lav", Szczecin is "shchet-chin" (the shch like in pushchair).
I recall there was a newer more accurate scheme proposed but it was rejected by the DRC because it made sense, therefore it was politically unacceptable.
Sounds like anti-Chinese prejudice, frankly. They use Pinyin to teach children, and to type, not only in the PRC but Taiwan and Singapore.
Do you hire immigrants? I am looking to get out of the US again.
Not often, I think it would be difficult. The government is the employer (indirectly).
"For the year from 6 April 2013 to 5 April 2014, a maximum of 20,700 skilled workers can come to the UK under Tier 2 (General) to do jobs with an annual salary below £152,100." -- which probably means it's not easy to come anyway. (This has recently changed. We used to let in as many skilled workers as could get jobs.)
My smartphone is almost three years old, and I don't intend to replace it until at least the end of the year (by that point I think it might no longer do what it did when I bought it, as the size of various important apps, like email and maps, will have increased beyond the size of the internal memory, and the complexity of web pages might be more than it can reasonably cope with).
I've seen many of my friends upgrade to the latest phone as soon as their 24 month contract ended, but the battery life is the same, the screen is slightly larger, the internal memory larger -- nothing so important that I feel I should spend £400-600 on a new phone. That's enough to pay for a holiday, or simply save.
The older way to write the word using Latin letters gave "chi" (and "Peking"), the newer way "qi" (and "Beijing"). It's pronounced like the "chee" in "cheese".
I live in the UK. It was easier to find an air conditioner website from Australia.
What you refer to is "soft metrication", where the amount is unchanged, just the label. There aren't that many cases remaining -- but those that do remain are common products. Milk, jam, sausages, sometimes cream, but often only the old or biggest brands. Look at Cravendale milk, or any other luxury brand, or the milk sold at your local corner shop. It's a multiple of 0.5L (probably to make it look cheaper; the proposed laws to avoid this situation were not introduced.)
I went on holiday for three weeks in March. While on the train to the airport, I set the work email account "check frequency" to "never".
My manager has my personal email address (I have hers). She has used it once: on the final day of a holiday last year she emailed to tell me that the office was shut to non-essential staff due to a problem with the water supply. That's the way it should be! She also has my mobile phone number, but she's never called it.
I'm on holiday again this week. I don't have a sensibly priced data service, which usually makes me realise how often I pull my phone out of my pocket in otherwise empty moments. Too much!
They're a little over 1m^3, due to the tubes giving it strength, but I think they're near enough for the visualisation. It's how I imagine 1m^3 (or a tonne of water) anyway.
I reckon if the UK converted properly, which is more down to the Daily Mail than the government (it's attitude rather than legislation) there'd be a lot less dual measurements in both countries -- most packaged products seem to be labelled for both countries.
The measurement varies by brand, anyway. Most butter is sold in 250g blocks (no one cares), but crap sausages are 454g (the way God intended, etc). Supermarket milk is in pints (people get religious about this), but the fancy stuff and the stuff sold at the corner shop is in litres.
Even in countries that have converted, you find plenty of unit mixture. In Canada you will see things at grocers sold in pounds, gallons, etc. It is amusing that in the same grocer you can see meats side by side, some priced by pound, some by 100 grams.
You won't find that in countries that have fully converted.
Like ever buy a home AC? They are sized in "tons"
...in the US. In Australia they are measure in kW (I'm not sure if that's the power consumption or the cooling rate, I don't live in Australia, and have never needed to buy an air conditioning unit). http://www.harveynorman.com.au/appliances/heating-cooling/air-conditioning . It's the same in other metric countries.
Slashdot Mirror
or people in large parts of the world started taking up British English again.
Like everyone in Europe?
an anonymous reader links to a story at The Guardian about some good old fashioned friendly interception
It's funny the way they phrase things when governments are involved. If you steal your neighbor's car, they won't call it a "friendly theft" just because you were on good terms prior to the theft.
Congratulations, you've found some British humour.
The summary could have been improved by mentioning the G8 summit starts in Northern Ireland today.
We pay our placement students* just above minimum wage. They make no more (or less) tea than the rest of the staff, they have a real project to do, and their university usually makes them write a report about it.
New graduates are paid almost double minimum wage, and at least half of the placement students apply for jobs here a year or two after their placement.
If the student isn't even worth minimum wage to the company then they're not doing anything. Sixteen year olds can do that (we call it "work experience", and it can end up as making tea and photocopying) but a student with two years at university should be able to offer (and be offered) much more.
* "interned" in British English means put in prison.
I've never heard of a passenger train being cancelled due to engine failure.
Where do you live? Are there many trains?
It's not very common, but a train being cancelled "due to a problem with the train" is common enough that there's a prerecorded announcement for it in the UK. It happens in the rest of Europe too.
The problem probably isn't going to be a complete engine failure -- it's probably some safety system that is reporting a fault that can't be fixed quickly -- but the result is similar.
Public transportation, yes, long distance high speed trains, except Frankfurt no.
Many larger British airports are on inter-city railways. Heathrow is probably the main exception -- it's on a branch line. From London Gatwick you can go directly to Brighton, London or Bedford. From London Stansted to London, Cambridge, Leicester or Birmingham. From Birmingham International [Airport] to London, Manchester, Oxford. From Manchester Airport to Edinburgh, you get the idea.
They're not proper high-speed lines, but they're still pretty fast (200km/h) and the inter-city trains are often more frequent than in France or Germany.
The only high speed line is the one to the Channel Tunnel (it doesn't go anywhere near any airports), but the planned line from London to Birmingham should have a station at Birmingham International, and the later extension north at Manchester Airport.
I've also been on a high-speed train in China which stopped at an airport, it might have been Shanghai.
use the bus as a feeder from downtown, suburban, or whatever areas are far away from the rail station. Drive the bus onto the train
That's not simple. The only train I know of that carries buses is the Eurotunnel shuttle through the Channel Tunnel. The vehicles are super-wide -- not compatible with most railways -- to allow room for relatively quickly loading and unloading. It still takes a while to load though -- not as long as loading a normal vehicle train, but much longer than a passenger train (under 2 minutes).
If the journey is short, it's probably faster to drive the bus to the airport. If it's long, it's probably better to drive the bus to the railway station and let everyone get off. Not everyone wants to go in the same direction! (If they do, perhaps extend the railway.)
The places where you need a train/airplane cross over, just let the train "go right into the terminal" like any connecting flight.
Isn't that pretty common anyway?
Of the five airports in London, four (Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and City) have railway stations directly underneath, within or adjacent to the terminal buildings. That's also the case for most large / modern airports I've used in Europe.
Using this (so making five cups at once):
2.2kW * 3 minutes / 5 = 0.022kWh.
1W * 20 hours = 0.020kWh (the extra energy used by Chrome).
However, I think the whole thing's rubbish -- I don't constantly load websites, I load them once (which takes a few seconds -- or longer if it's IE), then spend time reading the page.
I've heard of the system you describe, I think Waitrose (UK) are trialling it. I can't find a reference.
They've had a more basic non-phone version for at least 10 years, probably more like 15: http://www.waitrose.com/home/about_waitrose/quick_check.html
I think they work best in big cities, where plenty of people are in a hurry and follow the appropriate etiquette -- if you have more than an armful of stuff, use the manned checkout.
Almost every supermarket and "mini supermarket" (what used to be local shops, but have been replaced by small Tesco (etc) shops) in London has them, and the lines usually move very quickly.
They're not new though, I think they were introduced five or six years ago.
(They usually have one clerk for about every 8 machines, as they still have to have someone authorise the sale of alcohol, or help if there's a problem.)
Actually it is scarier than that. Just in time shipping has taken all the slack out of the supply chain. No one wants to stock more than they need to have before the next shipment arrives.
The downside is when things go wrong they really really go wrong for a long time.
The other downside is the increase in traffic, pollution etc, as there will be many half-full lorries, and the effect it has on competition.
In the UK, the big supermarkets have used their JIT delivery system to set up small convenience stores (thousands of them). They're much bigger than an independent shop could be, since they don't need a stockroom at all, or at most they need only a tiny one -- the delivery lorry arrives overnight with exactly what was sold. It's not unusual to walk past these stores between midnight and 3am and see all the aisles packed with the large wheeled racks they used to move delivered stock around.
It now takes a significant effort to buy groceries from a shop that's not owned by Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda or Morrisons (the British supermarket oligopoly).
People can be overly critical of a good system on a bad day if they have high expectations from it.
Believe me, I know. I'm British, and live in London.
On holiday in Germany, my friends mostly complained about how bad British [everything] was in comparison, which gets old pretty quickly. I think it's worse than the general complaining -- without comparison -- back in Britain, since at least there I can pretend people haven't travelled much and don't know any better.
Well, after reviewing the research one question still remains unanswered, did he at least get a good spot in the parking lot?
I grew up in Leicester, and went to school just over the wall from the car park. Looking at the map of the monastry, I could pretend I danced on the alter, although I think I probably just sulked nearby.
Richard got a good spot near the best shops. Within two minutes walk of the burial place you could but Magic: The Gathering cards, Warhammer, comics, computer games, CDs, sweets, BDSM gear (although I was asked to leave when I was 14), second-hand books, cannabis seeds and other equipment, New Age shit, 'punk' clothes and (if you hung around the alleyway behind the cathedral) ecstasy.
All these shops were (and I think still are) independent.
I can imagine lots of other burial places that would be less famous or reputable than a parking lot.
It's lucky the land is a car park (only a small one, for an office). It's surrounded on all sides by 19th century buildings in the centre of Leicester.
Just west of the three white vans
I'm not German, but their railway is very good.
A group ticket for five people for a 120km journey last week (on a week-day) cost EUR35. We were over an hour early, due to a tail-wind on the flight, and were surprised that the booked ticket was still valid for the earlier train.
A similar journey in the UK (where I live) would have cost a *lot* more, like EUR15-20 each, and we couldn't have got the earlier train without buying new tickets. However, the British train would probably have been longer (more space) and faster. (The German high-speed ICE is faster than the British intercity trains, but the German local trains seem to be slower than normal British trains.)
Oh, and the German trains and surroundings definitely have more graffiti. So does Germany in general.
The current English renderings for Mandarin are unintuitive at best. Better under the old scheme at least.
I don't speak more than 20 words of Mandarin, but I didn't find Pinyin too difficult. There's a few letters to learn, like Q, but that's no different to any language.
I'm in Poland at the moment, and I think that's more difficult. I have learned that W is pronounced V, is pronounced W, there are a few vowels with cedillas which /. probably can't cope with, C is like SH, so is SZ. Wrocaw is "Vrotsh-lav", Szczecin is "shchet-chin" (the shch like in pushchair).
I recall there was a newer more accurate scheme proposed but it was rejected by the DRC because it made sense, therefore it was politically unacceptable.
Sounds like anti-Chinese prejudice, frankly. They use Pinyin to teach children, and to type, not only in the PRC but Taiwan and Singapore.
Do you hire immigrants? I am looking to get out of the US again.
Not often, I think it would be difficult. The government is the employer (indirectly).
"For the year from 6 April 2013 to 5 April 2014, a maximum of 20,700 skilled workers can come to the UK under Tier 2 (General) to do jobs with an annual salary below £152,100." -- which probably means it's not easy to come anyway. (This has recently changed. We used to let in as many skilled workers as could get jobs.)
My smartphone is almost three years old, and I don't intend to replace it until at least the end of the year (by that point I think it might no longer do what it did when I bought it, as the size of various important apps, like email and maps, will have increased beyond the size of the internal memory, and the complexity of web pages might be more than it can reasonably cope with).
I've seen many of my friends upgrade to the latest phone as soon as their 24 month contract ended, but the battery life is the same, the screen is slightly larger, the internal memory larger -- nothing so important that I feel I should spend £400-600 on a new phone. That's enough to pay for a holiday, or simply save.
It's Mandarin for life force or energy.
The older way to write the word using Latin letters gave "chi" (and "Peking"), the newer way "qi" (and "Beijing"). It's pronounced like the "chee" in "cheese".
When and where are you hiring? ;-)
Hopefully at some point by mid summer. In London.
The salary is a bit low for London, but I prefer having 30+ days annual leave, no stress and a clear conscience to a job in a bank.
I live in the UK. It was easier to find an air conditioner website from Australia.
What you refer to is "soft metrication", where the amount is unchanged, just the label. There aren't that many cases remaining -- but those that do remain are common products. Milk, jam, sausages, sometimes cream, but often only the old or biggest brands. Look at Cravendale milk, or any other luxury brand, or the milk sold at your local corner shop. It's a multiple of 0.5L (probably to make it look cheaper; the proposed laws to avoid this situation were not introduced.)
I went on holiday for three weeks in March. While on the train to the airport, I set the work email account "check frequency" to "never".
My manager has my personal email address (I have hers). She has used it once: on the final day of a holiday last year she emailed to tell me that the office was shut to non-essential staff due to a problem with the water supply. That's the way it should be! She also has my mobile phone number, but she's never called it.
I'm on holiday again this week. I don't have a sensibly priced data service, which usually makes me realise how often I pull my phone out of my pocket in otherwise empty moments. Too much!
Do you have the 1000L chemical containers in the US? The big white plastic cube in a grid? http://www.blowmouldingmachine.cc/products_info/-Chemical-plastic-barrels-1000L-218722.html They're pretty common here, but probably not seen in public that often.
They're a little over 1m^3, due to the tubes giving it strength, but I think they're near enough for the visualisation. It's how I imagine 1m^3 (or a tonne of water) anyway.
I reckon if the UK converted properly, which is more down to the Daily Mail than the government (it's attitude rather than legislation) there'd be a lot less dual measurements in both countries -- most packaged products seem to be labelled for both countries.
The measurement varies by brand, anyway. Most butter is sold in 250g blocks (no one cares), but crap sausages are 454g (the way God intended, etc). Supermarket milk is in pints (people get religious about this), but the fancy stuff and the stuff sold at the corner shop is in litres.
Even in countries that have converted, you find plenty of unit mixture. In Canada you will see things at grocers sold in pounds, gallons, etc. It is amusing that in the same grocer you can see meats side by side, some priced by pound, some by 100 grams.
You won't find that in countries that have fully converted.
Like ever buy a home AC? They are sized in "tons"
...in the US. In Australia they are measure in kW (I'm not sure if that's the power consumption or the cooling rate, I don't live in Australia, and have never needed to buy an air conditioning unit). http://www.harveynorman.com.au/appliances/heating-cooling/air-conditioning . It's the same in other metric countries.