In the UK (again), there's a general opt-out service: http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/mpsr/ (Mail Preference Service). It works very well, I don't get any junk mail. There's also the telephone preference service, which stops junk phone calls.
The phone book is very slim anyway (1.5cm?), but I'm not sure where I would go to avoid getting it once per year.
no one took me seriously when I pointed out that glass recycling seems a bit pointless because it was _physically impossible_ for humans to run out of silicon dioxide. Likewise, recycling paper doesn't 'save trees' because we grow goddamn trees specifically for paper...talking about 'saving trees' is like talking about 'saving carrots' by refusing to eat carrots.
Sure, the recycling might save a little energy, but that's assuming a lot of transportation stuff that we're making assumptions about. Where's the glass recycling plant, where is the glass making plant, how much does sorting the glass cost, etc?
If recycled glass is used to make new bottles and jars, the energy needed in the furnace is greatly reduced. After accounting for the transport and processing needed, 315kg of CO2 is saved per tonne of glass melted.
Except for infrequent short-term use, a real keyboard and mouse is necessary, and a docking station or stand that holds the laptop screen up to the correct level (top of screen just below eye level, at least an arm's length away) or a separate monitor.
(I had the annual "watch this video on using computers" thing on Thursday. We all laughed at the poor production and daft people in it, but I think everyone went back to their desks and adjusted something that wasn't quite right.)
There's probably a pound of Adderall XR sitting in desks on the floor I work on alone. No, I really to mean a pound.
Assuming you are American (timezone + pounds), you've backed up this post.
I'm left wondering how many of my colleagues would be prescribed drugs if we were in America.
About a year ago, I realised I was having trouble focusing at work. I didn't go to the doctor. I thought about what the problem was (switching to personal email or Slashdot too often), and why I did that (it was so easy, as I left the tabs open in my browser). I removed the temptation to look whenever I used the browser by closing the tab and removing the bookmark to Slashdot. I quit the company email client too, and only opened it every few hours.
After doing that, I realised I found my current task boring. However, I had more time to work on it, so I worked out a way to make it interesting to me (or for the bits that were still boring, simply got them done and out of the way).
What the hell kind of Tylenol are you taking? Also, not all Americans are idiots, you fucking frog, wop, sand jockey, Limey bastard, or whatever the fuck you are;)
He's American. (Or at least lives there. And most of the rest of the world calls the drug "paracetamol".)
Have I misunderstood the modding system? Is there a troll +3 I'm unaware of, or why is this crap at that rank?
+3 Troll could result from some "Underrated" moderations, which increase the score but don't affect the category.
The interface isn't working (I can't see the actual moderation), and it's probably changed by now, but for example +2 underrated, -2 Troll, +1 Interesting = +1 Troll.
Step 6: After the last.uk domain expired, remove the.uk TLD.
That shouldn't ever happen. It would break huge numbers of old links, and disrupt other uses of domains (unique identifiers etc).
Accepting it won't ever happen, there's little point every trying. The UK code is reserved by ISO (will never be allocated), due to the potential for confusion.
I work in a solicitors in the UK. Our website address is.com, as is the address from a huge majority of solicitors who I have to look up daily in order to write to them.
What was the point of you writing this? You must know it's clearly wrong. "dot co dot you kay" is as well-knows as "dot com" in the UK. Of the 10 "local results" that come up when I type "solicitors" into Google, nine have a.co.uk domain for their website.
And how about: argos.co.uk, three.co.uk, orange.co.uk, bbc.co.uk, guardian.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk, mtv.co.uk,...
They don't seem as popular as.de in Germany (15M domains), but they're a lot more popular than.us (only 1M domains in a much bigger country).
I don't really care about TV (I don't have one), so I'm not up-to-date, but I did work on a DVB/IPTV project for a major electronics company a few years ago.
I had a Linux PC with a DVB-T card, which rebroadcast the DVB stream over IP multicast. This is very simple, since the DVB stream is just an MPEG transport stream (including the video, audio, subtitles, text pages, EPG etc). An embedded Linux system (a development set-top box) took what it needed and sent it to the TV.
I'd be surprised if there isn't a small open-source project that does the same thing. A little embedded computer could sit near the aerial and broadcast the stream over your LAN. Ah, I see someone has mentioned something commercially available.
DVB-T, DVB-S and DVB-C are all essentially the same from the point of view of the computer, which just receives the MPEG transport stream. Get whichever is more convenient. IIRC the "Freesat" (Freeview) satellite broadcasts in the UK have more channels. (I had a boring afternoon in a house owned by an Iranian, who had an analogue satellite decoder. There were about 2000 channels available between Hotbird and Astra satellites. About 5 were in English, I never found the Freeview channels.)
Yes, but I'm guaranteed to be able to pay my taxes, rent, buy food etc., with USD, <snip>
Ever tried buying Burger King, or even gasoline, with a $50 bill or higher? These notes are supposed to be legal tender for all debts, public and private, yet certain denominations are not accepted at certain establishments.
In Burger King you aren't in debt, you are offering to exchange your money for the burger. They are allowed to reject your offer.
I, along with many other children, hid behind a sofa because of this guy.
My mum tells me my uncle hid behind the sofa. My grandma says my mum hid behind a cushion, sometimes.
What I don't understand is why the show is currently popular with 20-something adults. I've watched a couple, and found it pretty boring. I don't see the attraction.
(The original theme music is fantastic. The newer music is disappointing. It sounds like the Pirates of the Caribbean formed an indie rock band to cover the CNN theme but tripped over a cheap synth.)
But the real reason you see little OSS from Japan in the west is the gigantic language barriers. The Japanese grasp of English is piss poor. So is the average Americans grasp of English but the Japanese are ashamed of it, so they tend online to either hide to avoid shaming themselves or seclude themselves in corners of the net and not come out.
I spent two weeks on holiday in China, and found it very difficult to talk to people. I made a small effort with Mandarin, but couldn't be understood (beyond some numbers and greetings) even when pointing at the words I was reading from the phrasebook. Adults would talk to me when it was necessary — at hotels, restaurants and so on. But elsewhere, they were really shy. Their children were willing to talk. Several times toddlers walked up to me in the street, "hello, how are you?" "I'm fine, how are you?" "I'm happy!". There'd be a parent watching, having sent them over. I'd ask the parent, "how are you?", and they'd just shy away, embarrassed. Parents of toddlers weren't much older than the teenagers who also spoke to me, but something made it unacceptable for adults to try, but OK for children.
I wonder if it's similar in Japan, which hasn't had the anti-western (anti-white) propaganda the Chinese have.
By the way, can you tell where I'm from? You can make an informed guess based on my language, and the time should narrow it down.
England for its 60 million citizens, some of whom can speak English are not as visible on the net as say the Dutch, a far smaller country whose citizens grasp of proper English is truly shockingly bad (guess where I am from).
That's citizens';-). (And the UK or Britain has 63M people, England has 53M. Compare Netherlands / Holland, which plenty of British people confuse.)
Anyway, I wouldn't be so sure about that. There are lots of British people on Slashdot, but they're harder to spot. I can tell you're not a native speaker from tiny mistakes ("I simply never seen it") that are different to badly-educated native speakers, and correct bits most native speakers get wrong ("some of whom"), but telling a British person from an American requires a spelling difference (colour/color, -ise/-ize), some slang, a regional expression, occasionally a date (24 Feb/Feb. 24) etc. The time of the comment is also a clue, it's 9:22 here but 1:22 in San Francisco.
I use Unicode (non-ISO-8859-1) characters in software I write.
When writing comments I stick to things I can easily type, i.e. characters accessible using the Compose key — essentially only arrow right/left, double angle brackets and bullet, , , , , . I think "childparent" is easier to read than "child->parent".
My 4-month old bicycle was stolen from central London in 2009, and turned up on Gumtree a few days later, with all the signs of a stolen bicycle: picture from the website, specification copied, seller called simply "Alex", mobile phone number to arrange to meet "at a station".
I stuck the phone number into Google, and about 20 listings came back including the same number, from "Pete", "John", "Dave", all stolen bikes, all wanting to meet at the same station.
I was away from London that week, so couldn't do anything about it myself, but I forwarded the whole lot to the police. They phoned me the next day, and said their "intelligence team" were really impressed with what I'd done...
I expect staff also use it for collaborative work.
Computing staff (and some others) might use a shared version control system and LaTeX or similar, and many others will email round MS Word documents, but Google Docs can be superior to both.
(One of the few Google Documents I have was sent to me by an academic at Oxford, he is collaborating on a project with one of my colleagues in London.)
Putting up a third rail or wire overhead incurs costs too. Plus, it's sometimes inconvenient when a train track has a level crossing with 'regular' traffic.
Not really a problem. The wires are well above most road bridge limits (i.e. only a few professional drivers will have to be careful), and third rails can just be ended and restarted either side of the road crossing, the same as must be done for railway/railway crossings. (see the 2nd photo).
I'd be more worried about the huge magnetic fields being generated to transfer energy from the grid to the bus or train. You need a whopping amount of Joules to move a train
There are almost no electrically powered freight trains in the US.
Actually they are all electric, just with an onboard diesel generator. Is it possible to adapt these engines to use overhead lines when available?
The diesel engine is a very heavy part of the train (as batteries would be).
A big advantage -- certainly the main one used to justify electrification of existing railways in the UK -- is faster journey times. That's partly because the top speed is higher, but also because the decreased weight and increased power produce faster acceleration (and deceleration).
See http://www.networkrail.co.uk/aspx/12273.aspx -- other advantages are more seats (no room taken up by engines), less wear on the track (so lower maintenance cost), less maintenance of the train (diesel trains still have electric motors), less noise, and no pollution in towns or at stations.
Also, parking for a day in central or central-ish London can easily cost £20, and the congestion charge is another £10. Except at night, the journey is likely to be slower.
[Metro] trains are preferable to buses. The cost is 10-100% more for normal distances, or up to quadruple for long distances (beyond what most people would sit on a bus for, e.g. over 45 minutes).
Anyone who needs to change buses to get to work probably has quite a low income. However, there's no stigma for taking a bus if it's convenient -- if I don't cycle (too wet/windy) I'll take the bus, it goes from past my house to my office. Contrast the US, where in Atlanta buses wouldn't stop for me. I'm told this was because I'm white, i.e. not poor.
Those things are about as dishwasher friendly as a cat with a scratching post. My question is why aren't they using paper bags? Those things are far better than any reusable bag I've ever had. On the plus side, they're multipurpose as well as 100/% recyclable.
Most supermarkets round here (and most in Europe) have two kinds of reusable bag -- one that's sold for between 10-50p (depending on taxes), and is essentially a thicker plastic bag with better handles, like one you might get from a luxury clothes shop.
The other kind is £1 or more, and made from some kind of durable plastic sheeting. It's not possible to screw these up into a ball, and they last pretty much forever.
(Paper bags, if used only once, can be worse for the environment as they're heavier, so the transport cost is greater.)
...and thought it was worth keeping compatibility with most computers by using standard Dvorak.
I thought most standard computers used some variation of QWERTY.
They do, but most have an option to use Dvorak (just like they have the option to use French AZERTY, or German QWERTZ) without installing anything extra.
Slashdot Mirror
The yellow pages in the Los Angeles area are 4-6" thick. It's a lot of waste.
I live in London. I think they were that thick 10 years ago, but the companies have split the city up into at least 10 small books.
I've used it once in the last 5 years or so.
In the UK (again), there's a general opt-out service: http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/mpsr/ (Mail Preference Service). It works very well, I don't get any junk mail. There's also the telephone preference service, which stops junk phone calls.
The phone book is very slim anyway (1.5cm?), but I'm not sure where I would go to avoid getting it once per year.
The same site has an article on paper: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21130258/resources/InformationSheets/paper.htm
"it is a common misconception that recycling waste paper saves trees."
"For every tonne of paper used for recycling the savings are:
at least 30000litres of water
3000 - 4000 KWh electricity (enough for an average 3 bedroom house for one year)
95% of air pollution."
(I think their pie-chart is probably a bit out of date. My dustbin has perhaps 2% paper (used tissues etc), the recycling bin is probably 25% paper.)
no one took me seriously when I pointed out that glass recycling seems a bit pointless because it was _physically impossible_ for humans to run out of silicon dioxide. Likewise, recycling paper doesn't 'save trees' because we grow goddamn trees specifically for paper...talking about 'saving trees' is like talking about 'saving carrots' by refusing to eat carrots.
Sure, the recycling might save a little energy, but that's assuming a lot of transportation stuff that we're making assumptions about. Where's the glass recycling plant, where is the glass making plant, how much does sorting the glass cost, etc?
If recycled glass is used to make new bottles and jars, the energy needed in the furnace is greatly reduced. After accounting for the transport and processing needed, 315kg of CO2 is saved per tonne of glass melted.
http://www.wasteonline.org.uk/resources/InformationSheets/Glass.htm
I'll leave it to you to find how much CO2 is produced per tonne of glass (i.e. how much of a saving that is).
I don't know how many glass factories there are in the UK, or how far the waste travels. Every area (or almost?) collects glass for recycling though.
Use a real keyboard, mouse and monitor - why do you need to look at the laptop?
Not doing this is either illegal, or close, in the UK: http://www.hse.gov.uk/msd/dse/guidance.htm
Except for infrequent short-term use, a real keyboard and mouse is necessary, and a docking station or stand that holds the laptop screen up to the correct level (top of screen just below eye level, at least an arm's length away) or a separate monitor.
(I had the annual "watch this video on using computers" thing on Thursday. We all laughed at the poor production and daft people in it, but I think everyone went back to their desks and adjusted something that wasn't quite right.)
There's probably a pound of Adderall XR sitting in desks on the floor I work on alone. No, I really to mean a pound.
Assuming you are American (timezone + pounds), you've backed up this post.
I'm left wondering how many of my colleagues would be prescribed drugs if we were in America.
About a year ago, I realised I was having trouble focusing at work. I didn't go to the doctor. I thought about what the problem was (switching to personal email or Slashdot too often), and why I did that (it was so easy, as I left the tabs open in my browser). I removed the temptation to look whenever I used the browser by closing the tab and removing the bookmark to Slashdot. I quit the company email client too, and only opened it every few hours.
After doing that, I realised I found my current task boring. However, I had more time to work on it, so I worked out a way to make it interesting to me (or for the bits that were still boring, simply got them done and out of the way).
What the hell kind of Tylenol are you taking? Also, not all Americans are idiots, you fucking frog, wop, sand jockey, Limey bastard, or whatever the fuck you are ;)
He's American. (Or at least lives there. And most of the rest of the world calls the drug "paracetamol".)
Have I misunderstood the modding system? Is there a troll +3 I'm unaware of, or why is this crap at that rank?
+3 Troll could result from some "Underrated" moderations, which increase the score but don't affect the category.
The interface isn't working (I can't see the actual moderation), and it's probably changed by now, but for example +2 underrated, -2 Troll, +1 Interesting = +1 Troll.
Step 6: After the last .uk domain expired, remove the .uk TLD.
That shouldn't ever happen. It would break huge numbers of old links, and disrupt other uses of domains (unique identifiers etc).
Accepting it won't ever happen, there's little point every trying. The UK code is reserved by ISO (will never be allocated), due to the potential for confusion.
10 million are registered.
There are plenty of registrations for the .us TLD as well, but how many of those do you actually see used?
There are only 1.7 million .US domains compared to 10 million .UK domains, and the UK is smaller.
Not really. Tesco's Czech operation uses .cz http://www.itesco.cz/cs/, their Hungarian one .hu: http://tesco.hu/
I suspect if I accessed tesco.com from a Hungarian IP I'd be redirected.
I work in a solicitors in the UK. Our website address is .com, as is the address from a huge majority of solicitors who I have to look up daily in order to write to them.
What was the point of you writing this? You must know it's clearly wrong. "dot co dot you kay" is as well-knows as "dot com" in the UK. Of the 10 "local results" that come up when I type "solicitors" into Google, nine have a .co.uk domain for their website.
And how about: argos.co.uk, three.co.uk, orange.co.uk, bbc.co.uk, guardian.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk, mtv.co.uk, ...
They don't seem as popular as .de in Germany (15M domains), but they're a lot more popular than .us (only 1M domains in a much bigger country).
If he has cable (Virgin Media) or one of the newer FTT(H/C?) services the speed should be pretty much as advertised.
I don't really care about TV (I don't have one), so I'm not up-to-date, but I did work on a DVB/IPTV project for a major electronics company a few years ago.
I had a Linux PC with a DVB-T card, which rebroadcast the DVB stream over IP multicast. This is very simple, since the DVB stream is just an MPEG transport stream (including the video, audio, subtitles, text pages, EPG etc). An embedded Linux system (a development set-top box) took what it needed and sent it to the TV.
I'd be surprised if there isn't a small open-source project that does the same thing. A little embedded computer could sit near the aerial and broadcast the stream over your LAN. Ah, I see someone has mentioned something commercially available.
DVB-T, DVB-S and DVB-C are all essentially the same from the point of view of the computer, which just receives the MPEG transport stream. Get whichever is more convenient. IIRC the "Freesat" (Freeview) satellite broadcasts in the UK have more channels. (I had a boring afternoon in a house owned by an Iranian, who had an analogue satellite decoder. There were about 2000 channels available between Hotbird and Astra satellites. About 5 were in English, I never found the Freeview channels.)
Yes, but I'm guaranteed to be able to pay my taxes, rent, buy food etc., with USD, <snip>
Ever tried buying Burger King, or even gasoline, with a $50 bill or higher? These notes are supposed to be legal tender for all debts, public and private, yet certain denominations are not accepted at certain establishments.
In Burger King you aren't in debt, you are offering to exchange your money for the burger. They are allowed to reject your offer.
I, along with many other children, hid behind a sofa because of this guy.
My mum tells me my uncle hid behind the sofa. My grandma says my mum hid behind a cushion, sometimes.
What I don't understand is why the show is currently popular with 20-something adults. I've watched a couple, and found it pretty boring. I don't see the attraction.
(The original theme music is fantastic. The newer music is disappointing. It sounds like the Pirates of the Caribbean formed an indie rock band to cover the CNN theme but tripped over a cheap synth.)
But the real reason you see little OSS from Japan in the west is the gigantic language barriers. The Japanese grasp of English is piss poor. So is the average Americans grasp of English but the Japanese are ashamed of it, so they tend online to either hide to avoid shaming themselves or seclude themselves in corners of the net and not come out.
I spent two weeks on holiday in China, and found it very difficult to talk to people. I made a small effort with Mandarin, but couldn't be understood (beyond some numbers and greetings) even when pointing at the words I was reading from the phrasebook. Adults would talk to me when it was necessary — at hotels, restaurants and so on. But elsewhere, they were really shy. Their children were willing to talk. Several times toddlers walked up to me in the street, "hello, how are you?" "I'm fine, how are you?" "I'm happy!". There'd be a parent watching, having sent them over. I'd ask the parent, "how are you?", and they'd just shy away, embarrassed. Parents of toddlers weren't much older than the teenagers who also spoke to me, but something made it unacceptable for adults to try, but OK for children.
I wonder if it's similar in Japan, which hasn't had the anti-western (anti-white) propaganda the Chinese have.
By the way, can you tell where I'm from? You can make an informed guess based on my language, and the time should narrow it down.
England for its 60 million citizens, some of whom can speak English are not as visible on the net as say the Dutch, a far smaller country whose citizens grasp of proper English is truly shockingly bad (guess where I am from).
That's citizens' ;-). (And the UK or Britain has 63M people, England has 53M. Compare Netherlands / Holland, which plenty of British people confuse.)
Anyway, I wouldn't be so sure about that. There are lots of British people on Slashdot, but they're harder to spot. I can tell you're not a native speaker from tiny mistakes ("I simply never seen it") that are different to badly-educated native speakers, and correct bits most native speakers get wrong ("some of whom"), but telling a British person from an American requires a spelling difference (colour/color, -ise/-ize), some slang, a regional expression, occasionally a date (24 Feb/Feb. 24) etc. The time of the comment is also a clue, it's 9:22 here but 1:22 in San Francisco.
I use Unicode (non-ISO-8859-1) characters in software I write.
When writing comments I stick to things I can easily type, i.e. characters accessible using the Compose key — essentially only arrow right/left, double angle brackets and bullet, , , , , . I think "childparent" is easier to read than "child->parent".
I also use Unicode in interfaces. I need a little warning symbol, it takes a few seconds to go to shapecatcher.net, draw the symbol, and paste it in: . Grepping my source code for Unicode, I've used tick and cross marks, 10 kinds of arrow, the handy "undo" symbol, a clock face ("wait"), and some shapes (triangles, squares). The alternative is a poorer interface, having to draw these things myself (and frequent image elements make HTML harder to read) or finding icons on the internet (© problems?).
(Oh look, Slashdot ate everything except © and —.)
My 4-month old bicycle was stolen from central London in 2009, and turned up on Gumtree a few days later, with all the signs of a stolen bicycle: picture from the website, specification copied, seller called simply "Alex", mobile phone number to arrange to meet "at a station".
I stuck the phone number into Google, and about 20 listings came back including the same number, from "Pete", "John", "Dave", all stolen bikes, all wanting to meet at the same station.
I was away from London that week, so couldn't do anything about it myself, but I forwarded the whole lot to the police. They phoned me the next day, and said their "intelligence team" were really impressed with what I'd done...
(I didn't get my bike back.)
I expect staff also use it for collaborative work.
Computing staff (and some others) might use a shared version control system and LaTeX or similar, and many others will email round MS Word documents, but Google Docs can be superior to both.
(One of the few Google Documents I have was sent to me by an academic at Oxford, he is collaborating on a project with one of my colleagues in London.)
Putting up a third rail or wire overhead incurs costs too. Plus, it's sometimes inconvenient when a train track has a level crossing with 'regular' traffic.
Not really a problem. The wires are well above most road bridge limits (i.e. only a few professional drivers will have to be careful), and third rails can just be ended and restarted either side of the road crossing, the same as must be done for railway/railway crossings. (see the 2nd photo).
I'd be more worried about the huge magnetic fields being generated to transfer energy from the grid to the bus or train. You need a whopping amount of Joules to move a train
...something like 5-10MW...
There are almost no electrically powered freight trains in the US.
Actually they are all electric, just with an onboard diesel generator. Is it possible to adapt these engines to use overhead lines when available?
The diesel engine is a very heavy part of the train (as batteries would be).
A big advantage -- certainly the main one used to justify electrification of existing railways in the UK -- is faster journey times. That's partly because the top speed is higher, but also because the decreased weight and increased power produce faster acceleration (and deceleration).
See http://www.networkrail.co.uk/aspx/12273.aspx -- other advantages are more seats (no room taken up by engines), less wear on the track (so lower maintenance cost), less maintenance of the train (diesel trains still have electric motors), less noise, and no pollution in towns or at stations.
About £1.30-£1.40/litre, so about US$2.10/L.
Also, parking for a day in central or central-ish London can easily cost £20, and the congestion charge is another £10. Except at night, the journey is likely to be slower.
[Metro] trains are preferable to buses. The cost is 10-100% more for normal distances, or up to quadruple for long distances (beyond what most people would sit on a bus for, e.g. over 45 minutes).
Anyone who needs to change buses to get to work probably has quite a low income. However, there's no stigma for taking a bus if it's convenient -- if I don't cycle (too wet/windy) I'll take the bus, it goes from past my house to my office. Contrast the US, where in Atlanta buses wouldn't stop for me. I'm told this was because I'm white, i.e. not poor.
Those things are about as dishwasher friendly as a cat with a scratching post. My question is why aren't they using paper bags? Those things are far better than any reusable bag I've ever had. On the plus side, they're multipurpose as well as 100/% recyclable.
Most supermarkets round here (and most in Europe) have two kinds of reusable bag -- one that's sold for between 10-50p (depending on taxes), and is essentially a thicker plastic bag with better handles, like one you might get from a luxury clothes shop.
The other kind is £1 or more, and made from some kind of durable plastic sheeting. It's not possible to screw these up into a ball, and they last pretty much forever.
(Paper bags, if used only once, can be worse for the environment as they're heavier, so the transport cost is greater.)
...and thought it was worth keeping compatibility with most computers by using standard Dvorak.
I thought most standard computers used some variation of QWERTY.
They do, but most have an option to use Dvorak (just like they have the option to use French AZERTY, or German QWERTZ) without installing anything extra.