(Oh, I should say: it's not all unicorns and rainbows. I understand your US contracts generally cover the whole country at a sensible rate, whereas I'm currently in Poland. My German and British networks charge 9c/minute to receive calls, 39c to make them, 10c/text, *49c/MB* (!). These are the maximum amounts allowed under EU law, outside the EU (where the law doesn't apply, obviously) you can double, triple or even quadruple (e.g. in Africa) those figures.
It's almost impossible to find a good price for regular intra-EU travel, which is why I have the German SIM. The "travel bundles" most networks offer tend to be awful, like 25MB for a day, for around £2).
Several of my friends from all over the UK switched to Three.co.uk in the last few months, and we met on holiday in Germany last week. They all complained that Three made it difficult to activate international roaming, and had excessive international charges (the maximum permitted by the EU by default, and poor deals) and a crap call centre.
Having read some of the posts on this article, I'm less annoyed with Three. My contract costs £6.90/month, for 500MB data and 200 minutes.
I think that's exactly what my friends have, but I went one step further and got £40 cashback by finding a deal online.
(I'm using a fairly old smartphone, an HTC Desire. It's probably time to upgrade, but I don't like throwing out mostly-working electronics.)
Are you sure that's EU? I think it's just Germany (and apparently Spain and France). I'm pretty sure such a system has been proposed for the UK, but not implemented.
I have a friend who's a Londoner (or was), and she says that the Tube is very nice. If I may ask, what are the fares? In DC they are quite high: from $1.80 to $5.50 for a one-way ride, depending on the distance and time of day, and the real cost is twice that, since it's 50% subsidized and taxpayers pay the rest.
Tube: £2.10 for a single journey in the central zone (any time). £1.60 for a single short-ish journey not in the central zone (peak time). £3 for a very long journey off-peak, £5 at peak (zone 6 to zone 1).
Bus: Any bus (or tram) journey is £1.40.
There is an automatic limit to what you pay if you use the contactless payment card (which everyone does), see the web page ("price cap"). There is a lower limit for only using buses or trams.
Road: driving between 7h-19h within (roughly) zone 1 costs £10.
I can't find reliable figures on the amount of subsidy. It seems to be mostly of interest to right-wing crackpots. The revenue from the £10 congestion charge is spent on public transport.
Fares have increased significantly with the current mayor, I think he has shifted what the subsidy pays for.
Perhaps mass transit works better other places -- I'm sure that in (picking a city at random) Frankfurt it is more pleasant than here. But mass transit is not a land of faeries and rainbow-pooping unicorns.
No unicorns and faeries in London, but I've never seen human faeces anywhere on public transport. Some years ago someone was almost sick on me in a lift -- she was very, very, drunk. Occasional pools of vomit in the corners of stations isn't especially unusual on a Friday or Saturday night, but the cleaners clean it up pretty quickly. Again, it's drunk people rather than mentally ill etc, and it's very bad form.
Drunk people on public transport can get injured. There's a set of advertisements urging people to take care, like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuzitalondon/292988703/in/photostream/ -- one of them is something about drinking/alcohol. Of course, the injuries are usually relatively minor, the person probably *very* drunk, and the bystanders unhurt. Falling down a long escalator or in front of a train can be fatal.
That reminds me of something I saw in Beijing: two policemen were carrying/dragging a man so drunk he was hardly able to walk through the station. I followed -- I wanted to know what they would do, and it was the direction for my transfer anyway. They took him to the platform, waited for the train, and helped him sit down. Then they left.
And above all drink-driving needs to be properly stigmatized socially, I was stunned how many people drank and drive when I moved to the US from Europe, folks regularly drink many times the limit and drove when public transport/taxi is a viable alternative
A long-running campaign in the UK helped alter the public perception of drink driving.
Well, some of them are too small. But see this project (online catalogue of edible insects in central/west Africa). The first picture has larvae of a decent size.
(I've met someone who works on that project. He'll eat anything, and pretty much has to -- you can't visit a village then refuse the food they offer if you want permission to take photographs, insect samples etc.)
I'm not sure why anyone would see this and think "I want to eat that!" Shameless plug: I took that photo.
You may as well say the same about a prawn or crab, since that's just as "yuk" in some cultures.
I've tried waxworms and crickets (at the insect museum in New Orleans) and something on a stick in China. The waxworms and crickets tasted of cajun seasoning and fudge, since the museum was trying to make them palatable to unadventurous American children*, but the thing-on-a-stick was OK -- surprisingly meaty, like a prawn.
* They failed. The two teenage boys there at the same time as me ran away when they were told the fudge with insects in wasn't a joke. More for me!
I think you're probably correct about the lack of brand loyalty. Might most people think of Facebook roughly the way they think of email, or the telephone? Everyone has is, except some people who like to say they don't have it, since for some things it's the normal / easiest way to do something. It's just a utility though, and a better utility will replace it when it gets enough momentum.
I guess the brain dead teenagers
Teenagers don't use Facebook (though they have an account). Their parents do (which is why they don't), but it's most popular with the 18-24 and 25-35 groups.
Continuing is pointless without some statistics. The report you link to has some, and prints in bold "The data set contains only 11 stories out of 4,699 where a criminal took a gun away from a defender; the reverse was reported more than 20 times more often.", but in the text notes that this is because the dataset didn't collect data where the defender was injured.
Frankly, I don't care to debate this -- I'm happy with the situation in my country, presumably you like your country's approach, and arguing over the Web is rarely useful.
Yes. Knives and sticks are less dangerous: it's far easier to run away, and much clearer what the criminal is intending to do (it takes more movement on their part)
Especially for the old, weak, or handicapped? When they show up in the house? When they are a gang? There are many cases of old men and women with a gun defending themselves successfully against attackers.
No doubt there are also many cases of old men and women being shot by attackers, probably sometimes with their own gun.
The newspaper article links to their source. Their headline is embarrassingly misleading for what's supposed to be a serious newspaper.
The homicide rate is higher in the USA, the rape rate is higher, the major assault rate is higher, the car theft rate is higher.
In England and Wales the burglary rate and non-major assault rates are higher.
Is it really that comforting to know somebody was murdered without a gun instead of with a gun?
Yes. Knives and sticks are less dangerous: it's far easier to run away, and much clearer what the criminal is intending to do (it takes more movement on their part). It's also very difficult to accidentally kill bystanders.
I was lazy and used Google. I have GNU units installed, but I forget to use it. It's much better than trying to coax Google into giving the correct conversion.
The fact that both the latin Super [latinwordlist.com] and the greek Hyper [answers.com] translate into the same word does not really help the distinction.
Wait. What? I fail to see why two words having the same definition in two languages (Latin/Greek), but different definitions in a third (English), is a problem or is in anyway confusing, unless your endeavor is to speak in all three languages at once.
We English-speaker hide the meaning of technical words by using Latin or Greek. If you know some Latin or Greek that can often help understand the meaning of English.
What's "oxygen"? Greek for "acid maker". That corresponds to the German "Sauerstoff", "acid material". Many German technical words are made from normal German words, which helps understanding, IMO.
"Petroleum" = "rock oil", Greek and Latin. German: "Erdöl" -- earth oil, but Erd and Öl are normal, everyday words.
That doesn't work very well in practise. Luxembourg can take a tiny amount of money from lots of essentially foreign businesses to subsidise their 500,000 residents. With over 100 times the population, Germany, the UK or France simply need much more money to pay for infrastructure.
I've been to Luxembourg. It's tiny, about 70km from top to bottom. The whole country is perfectly maintained, like the very nicest areas in London (like Knightsbridge, where a house costs £10M). There's perfect paving, new everything, no litter or dirt at all, everything is perfectly maintained.
If both Luxembourg and the UK had similar tax rates, Luxembourg would tax actual companies there (not that many, for 0.5M people) and the UK would tax companies based here (somewhat more, for 68M people).
What kind of guests do you have? Why do they spend so long using the Internet that managing it becomes an issue?
My flatmate is from a different country, and regularly has friends visiting. They often ask to print a ticket or boarding pass, check email, check Facebook, but it's never been a problem. They can log in as guest on any computer, and the wifi password is on a post-it by the router.
I took an 11 hour Amtrak trip in the US. The scenery is fantastic, and for me it was much nicer to do it by train.
Work sent me to New Orleans (London - New Orleans is difficult to do except by plane...). I asked for a return flight from Atlanta, and spent $55 on the train ticket between them. OK, that's not the best scenery the US has to offer, but after a very busy week's work -- I'm not used to American hours -- and a Friday and Saturday night in New Orleans, an 11-hour trip from dawn to dusk in a huge seat was great:-)
The only American on the train was about 10 years old. The others were European tourists.
(The speed of the train was quite poor, and the journey included over an hour waiting for freight trains to pass. It would be better without this, and certainly more useful to non-tourists. The food was the worst I've ever had, but possibly understandable given the low passenger numbers.)
I did a similar trip in China, on the new (ish) high speed line from Beijing to Shanghai. That was 300km/h for most of the way, but less interesting as the views were spoilt by smog. It was still better than flying and seeing nothing much. It was more expensive than the American train (!).
Yeah, just a bit. One of my friends travelled to Austria by train last weekend.
From London.
I thought they were crazy. It wasn't as long as the GP's journey, but it was still something like 13 hours.
2 hours is fine, I rarely get bored on a journey that long. Four hours is OK, so long as the train is going fast (e.g. London to Edinburgh takes this long). That's the point the plane starts to get attractive, the shortest flight is 1h15m, but add 45-75 minutes to get to the airport from London, 30 minutes to check in and be there before the flight leaves (flexible tickets are too expensive), and 30 minutes in Edinburgh to get from the airport to the destination.
However, it all depends how else I'd be spending the time. I'd rather go to Edinburgh on the slow overnight train (leaves at midnight, arrives at 7) than have to get up early to get a daytime train or plane. I don't care so much about spending 4-6 hours travelling on a boring day, but I wouldn't plan that on a nice Friday evening in the summer.
Slashdot Mirror
"kilometerage"
Klickage
Distance.
(Oh, I should say: it's not all unicorns and rainbows. I understand your US contracts generally cover the whole country at a sensible rate, whereas I'm currently in Poland. My German and British networks charge 9c/minute to receive calls, 39c to make them, 10c/text, *49c/MB* (!). These are the maximum amounts allowed under EU law, outside the EU (where the law doesn't apply, obviously) you can double, triple or even quadruple (e.g. in Africa) those figures.
It's almost impossible to find a good price for regular intra-EU travel, which is why I have the German SIM. The "travel bundles" most networks offer tend to be awful, like 25MB for a day, for around £2).
Several of my friends from all over the UK switched to Three.co.uk in the last few months, and we met on holiday in Germany last week. They all complained that Three made it difficult to activate international roaming, and had excessive international charges (the maximum permitted by the EU by default, and poor deals) and a crap call centre.
Having read some of the posts on this article, I'm less annoyed with Three. My contract costs £6.90/month, for 500MB data and 200 minutes.
I think that's exactly what my friends have, but I went one step further and got £40 cashback by finding a deal online.
(I'm using a fairly old smartphone, an HTC Desire. It's probably time to upgrade, but I don't like throwing out mostly-working electronics.)
Are you sure that's EU? I think it's just Germany (and apparently Spain and France). I'm pretty sure such a system has been proposed for the UK, but not implemented.
I have a friend who's a Londoner (or was), and she says that the Tube is very nice. If I may ask, what are the fares? In DC they are quite high: from $1.80 to $5.50 for a one-way ride, depending on the distance and time of day, and the real cost is twice that, since it's 50% subsidized and taxpayers pay the rest.
See http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tickets/14416.aspx for fares and http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/london-rail-and-tube-services-map.pdf for a map of all Tube, rail and tram lines.
Tube:
£2.10 for a single journey in the central zone (any time).
£1.60 for a single short-ish journey not in the central zone (peak time).
£3 for a very long journey off-peak, £5 at peak (zone 6 to zone 1).
Bus: Any bus (or tram) journey is £1.40.
There is an automatic limit to what you pay if you use the contactless payment card (which everyone does), see the web page ("price cap"). There is a lower limit for only using buses or trams.
Road: driving between 7h-19h within (roughly) zone 1 costs £10.
I can't find reliable figures on the amount of subsidy. It seems to be mostly of interest to right-wing crackpots. The revenue from the £10 congestion charge is spent on public transport.
Fares have increased significantly with the current mayor, I think he has shifted what the subsidy pays for.
Perhaps mass transit works better other places -- I'm sure that in (picking a city at random) Frankfurt it is more pleasant than here. But mass transit is not a land of faeries and rainbow-pooping unicorns.
No unicorns and faeries in London, but I've never seen human faeces anywhere on public transport. Some years ago someone was almost sick on me in a lift -- she was very, very, drunk. Occasional pools of vomit in the corners of stations isn't especially unusual on a Friday or Saturday night, but the cleaners clean it up pretty quickly. Again, it's drunk people rather than mentally ill etc, and it's very bad form.
Drunk people on public transport can get injured. There's a set of advertisements urging people to take care, like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuzitalondon/292988703/in/photostream/ -- one of them is something about drinking/alcohol. Of course, the injuries are usually relatively minor, the person probably *very* drunk, and the bystanders unhurt. Falling down a long escalator or in front of a train can be fatal.
That reminds me of something I saw in Beijing: two policemen were carrying/dragging a man so drunk he was hardly able to walk through the station. I followed -- I wanted to know what they would do, and it was the direction for my transfer anyway. They took him to the platform, waited for the train, and helped him sit down. Then they left.
And above all drink-driving needs to be properly stigmatized socially, I was stunned how many people drank and drive when I moved to the US from Europe, folks regularly drink many times the limit and drove when public transport/taxi is a viable alternative
A long-running campaign in the UK helped alter the public perception of drink driving.
This larva is several bites large.
Or how about Gonimbrasia belina .
(Insects are sufficiently different to mammals that sanitary conditions are less important, so you have less to worry about there.)
Well, some of them are too small. But see this project (online catalogue of edible insects in central/west Africa). The first picture has larvae of a decent size.
(I've met someone who works on that project. He'll eat anything, and pretty much has to -- you can't visit a village then refuse the food they offer if you want permission to take photographs, insect samples etc.)
I'm not sure why anyone would see this and think "I want to eat that!" Shameless plug: I took that photo.
You may as well say the same about a prawn or crab, since that's just as "yuk" in some cultures.
I've tried waxworms and crickets (at the insect museum in New Orleans) and something on a stick in China. The waxworms and crickets tasted of cajun seasoning and fudge, since the museum was trying to make them palatable to unadventurous American children*, but the thing-on-a-stick was OK -- surprisingly meaty, like a prawn.
* They failed. The two teenage boys there at the same time as me ran away when they were told the fudge with insects in wasn't a joke. More for me!
I think you're probably correct about the lack of brand loyalty. Might most people think of Facebook roughly the way they think of email, or the telephone? Everyone has is, except some people who like to say they don't have it, since for some things it's the normal / easiest way to do something. It's just a utility though, and a better utility will replace it when it gets enough momentum.
I guess the brain dead teenagers
Teenagers don't use Facebook (though they have an account). Their parents do (which is why they don't), but it's most popular with the 18-24 and 25-35 groups.
I prefer to Rtfm, so my employer sends me to QCon. I recommend it, it's useful to see all the new stuff in one place.
"Woman shoots intruders" makes a good story, "woman shot by intruders" is just a regular day in the USA.
Nevertheless, here's a couple of articles:
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/131161/
http://www.topix.com/forum/city/noble-la/TR15JA061K07R7VC6
http://omaha.com/article/20120912/NEWS/120919892
Continuing is pointless without some statistics. The report you link to has some, and prints in bold "The data set contains only 11 stories out of 4,699 where a criminal took a gun away from a defender; the reverse was reported more than 20 times more often.", but in the text notes that this is because the dataset didn't collect data where the defender was injured.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-kellermann.htm shows a different side.
Frankly, I don't care to debate this -- I'm happy with the situation in my country, presumably you like your country's approach, and arguing over the Web is rarely useful.
Yes. Knives and sticks are less dangerous: it's far easier to run away, and much clearer what the criminal is intending to do (it takes more movement on their part)
Especially for the old, weak, or handicapped? When they show up in the house? When they are a gang? There are many cases of old men and women with a gun defending themselves successfully against attackers.
No doubt there are also many cases of old men and women being shot by attackers, probably sometimes with their own gun.
The newspaper article links to their source. Their headline is embarrassingly misleading for what's supposed to be a serious newspaper.
The homicide rate is higher in the USA, the rape rate is higher, the major assault rate is higher, the car theft rate is higher.
In England and Wales the burglary rate and non-major assault rates are higher.
Is it really that comforting to know somebody was murdered without a gun instead of with a gun?
Yes. Knives and sticks are less dangerous: it's far easier to run away, and much clearer what the criminal is intending to do (it takes more movement on their part). It's also very difficult to accidentally kill bystanders.
Whoops, my figure was for 1 mph/second, not 3.3.
I was lazy and used Google. I have GNU units installed, but I forget to use it. It's much better than trying to coax Google into giving the correct conversion.
For example, the maximum acceleration on either test is 3.3 mph per second.
It's hard to take a paper seriously when it gets the units of measure wrong.
What's the problem? That *is* an acceleration.
(The SI measure is ms^-2, metres per second squared, or metres per second per second. 3.3 (miles/hour)/second = 0.44704 m s^-2.)
The fact that both the latin Super [latinwordlist.com] and the greek Hyper [answers.com] translate into the same word does not really help the distinction.
Wait. What? I fail to see why two words having the same definition in two languages (Latin/Greek), but different definitions in a third (English), is a problem or is in anyway confusing, unless your endeavor is to speak in all three languages at once.
We English-speaker hide the meaning of technical words by using Latin or Greek. If you know some Latin or Greek that can often help understand the meaning of English.
What's "oxygen"? Greek for "acid maker". That corresponds to the German "Sauerstoff", "acid material". Many German technical words are made from normal German words, which helps understanding, IMO.
"Petroleum" = "rock oil", Greek and Latin. German: "Erdöl" -- earth oil, but Erd and Öl are normal, everyday words.
(I only speak a little German.)
The war on drugs targets and prosecutes non-whites more harshly for the same action.
Which statute are you referring to, specifically?
In the UK the law is fair, and judges are fair (as far as I know), but in some areas the police -- on average -- aren't: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/apr/22/ethnic-minority-britons-stop-search-white
There's clearly potential for laws to be made that the lawmakers know will be selectively enforced, but I don't know the situation in the US.
That doesn't work very well in practise. Luxembourg can take a tiny amount of money from lots of essentially foreign businesses to subsidise their 500,000 residents. With over 100 times the population, Germany, the UK or France simply need much more money to pay for infrastructure.
I've been to Luxembourg. It's tiny, about 70km from top to bottom. The whole country is perfectly maintained, like the very nicest areas in London (like Knightsbridge, where a house costs £10M). There's perfect paving, new everything, no litter or dirt at all, everything is perfectly maintained.
If both Luxembourg and the UK had similar tax rates, Luxembourg would tax actual companies there (not that many, for 0.5M people) and the UK would tax companies based here (somewhat more, for 68M people).
What kind of guests do you have? Why do they spend so long using the Internet that managing it becomes an issue?
My flatmate is from a different country, and regularly has friends visiting. They often ask to print a ticket or boarding pass, check email, check Facebook, but it's never been a problem. They can log in as guest on any computer, and the wifi password is on a post-it by the router.
I think you mean 1 teragram, 1Tg. The "k" contributes 3 extra zeroes, 1,000,000,000kg = 1,000,000,000,000g
Yes, correct. Silly me!
I dunno, "megatons" are a fairly popular unit of measure (both in "1 million tons mass/weight" and in "million tons of TNT equivalent" senses)
1000kg is a ton(ne), and is metric (but not SI). Megaton means 1,000,000,000kg, or 1 gigagram, 1Gg.
I took an 11 hour Amtrak trip in the US. The scenery is fantastic, and for me it was much nicer to do it by train.
Work sent me to New Orleans (London - New Orleans is difficult to do except by plane...). I asked for a return flight from Atlanta, and spent $55 on the train ticket between them. OK, that's not the best scenery the US has to offer, but after a very busy week's work -- I'm not used to American hours -- and a Friday and Saturday night in New Orleans, an 11-hour trip from dawn to dusk in a huge seat was great :-)
The only American on the train was about 10 years old. The others were European tourists.
(The speed of the train was quite poor, and the journey included over an hour waiting for freight trains to pass. It would be better without this, and certainly more useful to non-tourists. The food was the worst I've ever had, but possibly understandable given the low passenger numbers.)
I did a similar trip in China, on the new (ish) high speed line from Beijing to Shanghai. That was 300km/h for most of the way, but less interesting as the views were spoilt by smog. It was still better than flying and seeing nothing much. It was more expensive than the American train (!).
You are atypical.
Yeah, just a bit. One of my friends travelled to Austria by train last weekend.
From London.
I thought they were crazy. It wasn't as long as the GP's journey, but it was still something like 13 hours.
2 hours is fine, I rarely get bored on a journey that long. Four hours is OK, so long as the train is going fast (e.g. London to Edinburgh takes this long). That's the point the plane starts to get attractive, the shortest flight is 1h15m, but add 45-75 minutes to get to the airport from London, 30 minutes to check in and be there before the flight leaves (flexible tickets are too expensive), and 30 minutes in Edinburgh to get from the airport to the destination.
However, it all depends how else I'd be spending the time. I'd rather go to Edinburgh on the slow overnight train (leaves at midnight, arrives at 7) than have to get up early to get a daytime train or plane. I don't care so much about spending 4-6 hours travelling on a boring day, but I wouldn't plan that on a nice Friday evening in the summer.