There are two remaining reasons I have for wanting cable. Baseball and live HD news stories of things like tsunamis or other major events that can only really have full impact with a full HD stream.
That's only a matter of time. Since 2009 the BBC has offered 720p resolution streams of non-live HD content, and it's only a matter of time before that's extended to live Internet streams.
At present, most non-HD streams are 832x468, which is about the same as broadcast SD TV. (The quality of that varies by channel, and time of day/programme.)
The UK is supposed to increase the fixed amount (the duty) every year, but in the last few years the government has "put off" the increase. Driving in the UK is cheaper (accounting for inflation) than it's been for a long while.
You're right that they haven't raised the duty in the last couple of budgets. But you appear to be wrong about that meaning inflation adjusted fuel is cheaper than it's been for a long while. On the contrary, it's quite a bit more expensive.
I wrote (and remember reading) that driving was cheaper, not fuel alone. Accounting for better cars (using less fuel, needing less maintenance) might be what makes that true.
The UK is supposed to increase the fixed amount (the duty) every year, but in the last few years the government has "put off" the increase. Driving in the UK is cheaper (accounting for inflation) than it's been for a long while.
Meanwhile, rail fares went up 4.2% today, for the Nth time in a row, and are 50-95% higher than they were 10 years ago in many cases: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20881684
Some stuff isn't changed if it would cause a problem.
Railway tracks are 1435mm apart, which was originally measured in inches (4ft 8.5in), but it would be crazy to "metricate" that and convert everything to, say, 1500mm. In most countries the distance will be measured and recorded in mm.
Metrication can mean changing the units you measure in, or changing the quantities themselves. Changing from selling milk in 1.19L (was written 2 pints) containers to 1 litre containers would be an example of the latter, and has happened for some dairies in the UK. This doesn't cause an incompatibility with your fridge, and fits in nicely with writing "contains four servings" on the bottle. It's also an excuse to decrease the quantity but maintain the price, which is probably the real reason for a dairy to convert.
Every allan key (hex wrench?) I need for my bicycle is metric, which doesn't affect anything but means I can use standard metric tools, but I think some of the diameters of tubes etc are 25.4mm, etc.
It's not cars that cause the deficit, it's subsidies for buses and trains that are depleting the Highway Trust Fund. Congress authorized spending from that pot of money for mass transit - and it's a massive drain on the system. Conversely, cars actually generate net revenue for the system.
What does "highway" mean? All roads, or just some roads?
I need to replace the old 60W bulb, since it uses more energy alone than the rest of the flat combined. (The typical evening power draw is about 150-350W.)
So the 60W bulb is using at least 75W ?-)
I may have missed a word -- more energy than the rest of the flat's lighting combined.
I still haven't seen the CFL that takes minutes to warm up and visibly flickers.
I have one, in my rented flat. It's very small, made to fit in the same type of fitting as a miniature halogen spot light, but in this case the fitting is shaped to only take the CFL bulb. It's like this, except not Philips. The lights take about 90-120 seconds to warm up fully. It's rarely a problem, as I don't often just pass through this room at night, and I won't bother to replace the bulbs until they fail.
I remember my mum buying a CFL in about 1990, it looked like this (but white). This was well before they were generally used, I think she bought it from a local science museum. It was similarly slow to start, but it's still working.
After rearranging the furniture in my bedroom a previously hardly-used light is now useful. I need to replace the old 60W bulb, since it uses more energy alone than the rest of the flat combined. (The typical evening power draw is about 150-350W.)
If they don't want their privacy violated they shouldn't be telling the whole world what they're doing on a minute by minute basis.
The point wasn't to tell the whole world, it was to tell a selected group of friends.
I signed up to Foursquare after seeing two things in one day: I'd met a friend in central London. His phone "pinged" a little later, saying another friend had "checked in" to a nearby bookshop. We called him, and met up. The coffee shop we went to had an offer of a free larger drink for checking in.
Since then, I've never crossed paths with one of the few people I've added on Foursquare, and never received a special offer from a business. It's been about a year, and it's probably time I lost interest in it.
I've just received an email from Foursquare:
Hello Foursquare community!
2012 has been a pretty huge year. We’ve released over fifty new features, welcomed nearly 15,000,000 new people to Foursquare, and had our 3,000,000,000th check-in. It’s a bit clichéd to say this, but your support really is what keeps us going day after day.
As our product evolves, one of the things we do is update our policies to match it. And a big aspect of that is privacy (something we think about a lot). This email lays out a couple changes that we’ll be making to our privacy policy in the coming month, and explains how they affect you and what you can do about it.
We know that privacy policies can be dense, so we put together a high-level document that we think of as our “Privacy 101.” It describes, in an easy-to-read way, how we build privacy into our product. While it doesn't replace the legal need for the complete description of our privacy practices (which you can read here), we hope it helps you better understand how we think about privacy. We’ve also added new explanations of how privacy works throughout the app in our FAQs, including our default privacy settings and how they can be adjusted.
In addition to creating and refining those documents, we want to point out two specific changes to our policy, both of which will go into effect on January 28, 2013.
1. We will now display your full name. Currently, Foursquare sometimes shows your full name and sometimes shows your first name and last initial (“John Smith” vs. “John S.”). For instance, if you search for a friend in Foursquare, we show their full name in the results, but when you click through to their profile page you don’t see their last name. In the original versions of Foursquare, these distinctions made sense. But we get emails every day saying that it's now confusing. So, with this change, full names are going to be public. As always, you can alter your ‘full name’ on Foursquare at https://foursquare.com/settings.
2. A business on Foursquare will be able to see more of their recent customers. Currently, a business using Foursquare (like your corner coffee shop) can see the customers who have checked in in the last three hours (in addition to the most recent and their most loyal visitors). This is great for helping store owners identify their customers and give them more personal service or offers. But a lot of businesses only have time to log in at the end of the day to look at it. So, with this change, we're going to be showing them more of those recent check-ins, instead of just three hours worth. As always, if you'd prefer not to permit businesses to see when you check into their locations going forward, you can uncheck the box under ‘Location Information’ at https://foursquare.com/settings/privacy.
The Foursquare of today is so different than the first version that launched in 2009, and we appreciate that you let us continue to evolve and build our vision. This occasionally means altering our privacy policy. When we do, we make it a
Facebook Ireland is at least partly a genuine operation; there are reasonable positions available: https://www.facebook.com/careers/locations/dublin and the European datacentre. It's annoying that Ireland has a low tax rate compared to much of the EU, but that can be fixed by intra-EU pressure.
The Cayman Islands isn't even on the list of locations, and will be nothing more than a PO Box. Fixing that means taxing profit in the country it is generated (profit from Irish users/advertisers certainly should be taxed in Ireland).
The US ran trains that fast in the 1930s. 110mph isn't an advance...
Tomorrow, I'm getting the train home to London, and it will travel at an average speed something like 100mph, including the midway stop. I think the official top speed is 125mph. They've run these trains since the 1970s, and they now seem relatively old and clunky as they're heavy, slow diesel trains.
There is still security at Chinese high speed railway stations, but they pretty much ignore white people.
I've taken HSTs about 6 times in China, and every train was at least 80% full. These lines link up many cities, I don't know how many people would travel the whole distance A-B-C-D-E-F-G, but there will be lots of trips from B-D, C-F, etc. That's harder to serve efficiently with aircraft.
It's probably as much down to the population / economic distributions of the two continents. I'd bet the total tonne-km is less in the EU. (Consider rearranging the US so all the "poor" states are in the east, and the richer ones in the west, but one of the richest on an island.)
What's funny is that they don't even link back to this site:p (Just found the link, which was set as hidden in the stylesheet...) I bet some of their readers don't even know it originated from here.
Perhaps because slashdot.jp seems to be owned by OSDN.jp, whereas slashdot.org now belongs to Dice.
Maybe they meant to hide it and forgot? The link in the footer on slashdot.org is visible on the homepage (and easily noticed when I look on my phone, which I often do). However, it's hidden on the story/comment pages.
I think most Europeans would disagree with the "only" part of the statement. A purpose of a business is to make money for shareholders, but it shouldn't be the only purpose.
Why couldn't they "effectively simulate 200-300 people sitting in seats throughout the aircraft" by actually having 200-300 people sitting in seats throughout the aircraft?
Because it's cheaper than using actual people (from the video in the article, they first tested that the potatoes were similar enough to people in a lab). They were able to do some particularly long-running tests and collect a huge amount of data.
Latin is dead, and too old -- odd word order, overly-complicated conjugations etc. I studied it at school for a couple of years.
A few schools in Britain have found that teaching Esperanto has many of the same benefits, but fewer problems. It's very regular, there are actual speakers of the language (mostly in Eastern Europe), and it has very few exceptions. It has some nice constructs not present in English, like a suffix for small or large. Children feel quite confident and successful with Esperanto, because they're rarely told "well, sort of, but actually you have to add an -é when you say that. Oh, and that verbs irregular, so it's really -ré, you'll just have to learn it".
There was a study done in Manchester where some children were taught Esperanto for a couple of years, then French for a couple of years. Others were taught French all the time. The former group spoke better French at the end. By learning Esperanto they'd already learnt how to learn a language (studying grammar, vocabulary, conversation etc), so when they got to the annoying irregularities and complications of French there was less to explain.
I've been considering learning Esperanto myself, but haven't started yet.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two remaining reasons I have for wanting cable. Baseball and live HD news stories of things like tsunamis or other major events that can only really have full impact with a full HD stream.
That's only a matter of time. Since 2009 the BBC has offered 720p resolution streams of non-live HD content, and it's only a matter of time before that's extended to live Internet streams.
At present, most non-HD streams are 832x468, which is about the same as broadcast SD TV. (The quality of that varies by channel, and time of day/programme.)
The UK is supposed to increase the fixed amount (the duty) every year, but in the last few years the government has "put off" the increase. Driving in the UK is cheaper (accounting for inflation) than it's been for a long while.
You're right that they haven't raised the duty in the last couple of budgets. But you appear to be wrong about that meaning inflation adjusted fuel is cheaper than it's been for a long while. On the contrary, it's quite a bit more expensive.
http://www.speedlimit.org.uk/petrolprices.html
I probably got that from here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/9493041/War-on-motorist-a-myth-says-left-of-centre-think-tank.html but can't quickly find the original report. http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/war-motorists-myth has more quoted numbers from it.
I wrote (and remember reading) that driving was cheaper, not fuel alone. Accounting for better cars (using less fuel, needing less maintenance) might be what makes that true.
The UK is supposed to increase the fixed amount (the duty) every year, but in the last few years the government has "put off" the increase. Driving in the UK is cheaper (accounting for inflation) than it's been for a long while.
Meanwhile, rail fares went up 4.2% today, for the Nth time in a row, and are 50-95% higher than they were 10 years ago in many cases: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20881684
It's a British saying.
No, the British one is "a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter".
The American one is "a pint's a pound the world around".
My palm is as near to 4in as it is to 10cm. Index to thumb is as near 6in as 15cm. Nothing else lines up.
Everyone's hands are different sizes, and since cm are smaller that's more 'nice' values for anatomy to approximate to.
Some stuff isn't changed if it would cause a problem.
Railway tracks are 1435mm apart, which was originally measured in inches (4ft 8.5in), but it would be crazy to "metricate" that and convert everything to, say, 1500mm. In most countries the distance will be measured and recorded in mm.
Metrication can mean changing the units you measure in, or changing the quantities themselves. Changing from selling milk in 1.19L (was written 2 pints) containers to 1 litre containers would be an example of the latter, and has happened for some dairies in the UK. This doesn't cause an incompatibility with your fridge, and fits in nicely with writing "contains four servings" on the bottle. It's also an excuse to decrease the quantity but maintain the price, which is probably the real reason for a dairy to convert.
Every allan key (hex wrench?) I need for my bicycle is metric, which doesn't affect anything but means I can use standard metric tools, but I think some of the diameters of tubes etc are 25.4mm, etc.
It's not cars that cause the deficit, it's subsidies for buses and trains that are depleting the Highway Trust Fund. Congress authorized spending from that pot of money for mass transit - and it's a massive drain on the system. Conversely, cars actually generate net revenue for the system.
What does "highway" mean? All roads, or just some roads?
(Maybe it's obvious, but I'm not American.)
The UK does both: there is a fixed tax (a "duty"), and a percentage (VAT). The VAT applies to the duty as well as the base price.
The current rate is 58p per litre. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon_oil_duty
The petrol station opposite my house is selling fuel for £1.39/L, so the cost is (58p fuel + 58p duty) * 1.20 VAT = £1.39.
I think it's the same mechanism in the rest of the EU.
I think that near 2007~2008 they seized ExxonMobil assets and kicked them out, making their refineries state-controlled, which is really awful.
Why is that so bad? Far better to take the profit for the country than simply give it to a foreign company.
So the 60W bulb is using at least 75W ?-)
I may have missed a word -- more energy than the rest of the flat's lighting combined.
I still haven't seen the CFL that takes minutes to warm up and visibly flickers.
I have one, in my rented flat. It's very small, made to fit in the same type of fitting as a miniature halogen spot light, but in this case the fitting is shaped to only take the CFL bulb. It's like this, except not Philips. The lights take about 90-120 seconds to warm up fully. It's rarely a problem, as I don't often just pass through this room at night, and I won't bother to replace the bulbs until they fail.
I remember my mum buying a CFL in about 1990, it looked like this (but white). This was well before they were generally used, I think she bought it from a local science museum. It was similarly slow to start, but it's still working.
After rearranging the furniture in my bedroom a previously hardly-used light is now useful. I need to replace the old 60W bulb, since it uses more energy alone than the rest of the flat combined. (The typical evening power draw is about 150-350W.)
If they don't want their privacy violated they shouldn't be telling the whole world what they're doing on a minute by minute basis.
The point wasn't to tell the whole world, it was to tell a selected group of friends.
I signed up to Foursquare after seeing two things in one day: I'd met a friend in central London. His phone "pinged" a little later, saying another friend had "checked in" to a nearby bookshop. We called him, and met up. The coffee shop we went to had an offer of a free larger drink for checking in.
Since then, I've never crossed paths with one of the few people I've added on Foursquare, and never received a special offer from a business. It's been about a year, and it's probably time I lost interest in it.
I've just received an email from Foursquare:
Hello Foursquare community!
2012 has been a pretty huge year. We’ve released over fifty new features, welcomed nearly 15,000,000 new people to Foursquare, and had our 3,000,000,000th check-in. It’s a bit clichéd to say this, but your support really is what keeps us going day after day.
As our product evolves, one of the things we do is update our policies to match it. And a big aspect of that is privacy (something we think about a lot). This email lays out a couple changes that we’ll be making to our privacy policy in the coming month, and explains how they affect you and what you can do about it.
We know that privacy policies can be dense, so we put together a high-level document that we think of as our “Privacy 101.” It describes, in an easy-to-read way, how we build privacy into our product. While it doesn't replace the legal need for the complete description of our privacy practices (which you can read here), we hope it helps you better understand how we think about privacy. We’ve also added new explanations of how privacy works throughout the app in our FAQs, including our default privacy settings and how they can be adjusted.
In addition to creating and refining those documents, we want to point out two specific changes to our policy, both of which will go into effect on January 28, 2013.
1. We will now display your full name. Currently, Foursquare sometimes shows your full name and sometimes shows your first name and last initial (“John Smith” vs. “John S.”). For instance, if you search for a friend in Foursquare, we show their full name in the results, but when you click through to their profile page you don’t see their last name. In the original versions of Foursquare, these distinctions made sense. But we get emails every day saying that it's now confusing. So, with this change, full names are going to be public. As always, you can alter your ‘full name’ on Foursquare at https://foursquare.com/settings.
2. A business on Foursquare will be able to see more of their recent customers. Currently, a business using Foursquare (like your corner coffee shop) can see the customers who have checked in in the last three hours (in addition to the most recent and their most loyal visitors). This is great for helping store owners identify their customers and give them more personal service or offers. But a lot of businesses only have time to log in at the end of the day to look at it. So, with this change, we're going to be showing them more of those recent check-ins, instead of just three hours worth. As always, if you'd prefer not to permit businesses to see when you check into their locations going forward, you can uncheck the box under ‘Location Information’ at https://foursquare.com/settings/privacy.
The Foursquare of today is so different than the first version that launched in 2009, and we appreciate that you let us continue to evolve and build our vision. This occasionally means altering our privacy policy. When we do, we make it a
Have you checked the Open University? [http://www.open.ac.uk/] Not an US institution but could be what you are looking for.
I did check the Open University, but the CS (or IT) courses aren't offered to US residents.
The list of courses available for American residents is here: http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/countries/USA.shtm
What next? They'll be claiming the breath you exhale is pollution too!
Too much fertilizer in the river will kill all the fish, as algae will grow so much they Jude all the oxygen when they decay.
(IIRC from age ~15at school. Eutrophication.)
Facebook Ireland is at least partly a genuine operation; there are reasonable positions available: https://www.facebook.com/careers/locations/dublin and the European datacentre. It's annoying that Ireland has a low tax rate compared to much of the EU, but that can be fixed by intra-EU pressure.
The Cayman Islands isn't even on the list of locations, and will be nothing more than a PO Box. Fixing that means taxing profit in the country it is generated (profit from Irish users/advertisers certainly should be taxed in Ireland).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_rail_vehicles#World_fastest_point-to-point_average_speeds_in_commercial_operations
The US ran trains that fast in the 1930s. 110mph isn't an advance...
Tomorrow, I'm getting the train home to London, and it will travel at an average speed something like 100mph, including the midway stop. I think the official top speed is 125mph. They've run these trains since the 1970s, and they now seem relatively old and clunky as they're heavy, slow diesel trains.
One positive, though, no TSA pat downs in China.
There is still security at Chinese high speed railway stations, but they pretty much ignore white people.
I've taken HSTs about 6 times in China, and every train was at least 80% full. These lines link up many cities, I don't know how many people would travel the whole distance A-B-C-D-E-F-G, but there will be lots of trips from B-D, C-F, etc. That's harder to serve efficiently with aircraft.
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Freight_transport_statistics
17.1% by rail and 6.5% by water in the EU.
https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2006_fcvt_fotw412.html
US: 36% rail, 20% water.
It's probably as much down to the population / economic distributions of the two continents. I'd bet the total tonne-km is less in the EU. (Consider rearranging the US so all the "poor" states are in the east, and the richer ones in the west, but one of the richest on an island.)
What's funny is that they don't even link back to this site :p (Just found the link, which was set as hidden in the stylesheet...)
I bet some of their readers don't even know it originated from here.
Perhaps because slashdot.jp seems to be owned by OSDN.jp, whereas slashdot.org now belongs to Dice.
Maybe they meant to hide it and forgot? The link in the footer on slashdot.org is visible on the homepage (and easily noticed when I look on my phone, which I often do). However, it's hidden on the story/comment pages.
I think most Europeans would disagree with the "only" part of the statement. A purpose of a business is to make money for shareholders, but it shouldn't be the only purpose.
That is the purpose — the only purpose — of a business.
I think you'd find few Europeans who'd agree with that.
It wasn't a law, just an industry agreement. Basically it lets them state "we are in compliance with agreement number FOO" in their marketing.
IIRC, they were told to sort something out otherwise a law would be made. That's quite a common approach in some European countries.
I am as stunned as you are.
There's a link to Slashdot Japan at the bottom of every page, and has been for a long time.
Why couldn't they "effectively simulate 200-300 people sitting in seats throughout the aircraft" by actually having 200-300 people sitting in seats throughout the aircraft?
Because it's cheaper than using actual people (from the video in the article, they first tested that the potatoes were similar enough to people in a lab). They were able to do some particularly long-running tests and collect a huge amount of data.
Latin is dead, and too old -- odd word order, overly-complicated conjugations etc. I studied it at school for a couple of years.
A few schools in Britain have found that teaching Esperanto has many of the same benefits, but fewer problems. It's very regular, there are actual speakers of the language (mostly in Eastern Europe), and it has very few exceptions. It has some nice constructs not present in English, like a suffix for small or large. Children feel quite confident and successful with Esperanto, because they're rarely told "well, sort of, but actually you have to add an -é when you say that. Oh, and that verbs irregular, so it's really -ré, you'll just have to learn it".
There was a study done in Manchester where some children were taught Esperanto for a couple of years, then French for a couple of years. Others were taught French all the time. The former group spoke better French at the end. By learning Esperanto they'd already learnt how to learn a language (studying grammar, vocabulary, conversation etc), so when they got to the annoying irregularities and complications of French there was less to explain.
I've been considering learning Esperanto myself, but haven't started yet.