That doesn't apply to healthcare paid by insurance (certainly not travel insurance held by a child from a country with "free" healthcare). The hospital was chosen because it was first one we could find, and the bill would have been paid pretty much however much it cost.
When we arrived at the hospital, they weren't interested in the obviously sick 10-year-old until my mum found the insurance documents. At that point, he went from "take a ticket, you're number N in the queue" to "step this way sir! How many x-rays would you like?". It was very odd, as that was so alien to us all, and my parents weren't really aware of how the American system worked -- this was 10 years ago, before all the debate (partly covered in the British media) about "Obamacare".
Frankly, I doubt the government minister will have much effect regarding homoeopathy.
One counterargument: your profit-driven doctors and hospitals might give you unnecessary tests and treatment to increase their profits. (This is what happened when my 10-year-old brother was ill while on holiday in the US. The doctors saw the comprehensive worldwide travel insurance, and $ signs flashed in their eyes.)
My webserver runs on a 32-bit machine. I can't remember how old it is -- probably about 10 years (the processor is an AMD Athlon 1.4GHz).
It runs my website fine, and the website for a community group, and hold all my photos, and my parent's photos, and a backup of my desktop PC -- hosting for 70GB of photos wouldn't be cheap.
(My offline backup PC boots up once a month to back up the webserver. That also has Debian, and is even older -- an 800MHz CPU, I think.)
I had to write essays like "Compare and contrast the attitudes to life after death between Christianity, Buddhism and Islam". "Explain the different attitudes to euthanasia for Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and atheists".
(So I can see why the US wouldn't want children to actually think about religion.)
I can't honestly say I've endorsed a whole heck of a lot of ideas from Estonia.
Estonia has some nice stuff -- their society is really embracing technology, and the country is small enough that they worry less about the "evil government".
For example, I think everyone has a government-provided account on a service for submitting tax details, receiving notifications from the government, etc, and it's all secured using PGP on a cryptocard.
I first did some programming at about 6 years old.
My school (in the UK) had a "floor turtle", a simple robot on wheels that could run a LOGO program (Forward 20, Left 45, Forward 10, etc). We programmed it to run over the lines of the netball court. We didn't use any sensors or anything (I assume it had some) -- I expect older kids did that, but by the time I was older the teacher who knew how to use the software had left. Or maybe the curriculum had changed into "use the word processor", which is what most use of the computer was from when I was about 8 until 18.
What stops the students from sharing an access code?
I didn't have to buy *any* books for university. There were plenty of copies of anything "important" in the library (with a portion of them not available for loan), and most lecturers just gave a list of 10 or so books, only a few recommended one book over all others. One lecturer once set questions from a book, about half an hour later a student sent an email to the discussion list for the course with a scan of the relevant page. The lecturer forwarded it to the whole class. (I actually bought the book, I thought it was interesting.)
Old x86 boxes are unreliable, which isn't appropriate for a lab, and take up far more space + power + cooling. There's also much less chance of some of the students doing something really interesting with an old PC, compared to a tiny ARM board. And where would you get a class set of 50/100/whatever similar old PCs? And where would you store them?
Also, ARM's R&D is in Cambridge, right next to the main computer science buildings.
Others said it's £9000/year (which the government loans at close to interest-free, that you don't pay back until you have an OK job, and doesn't appear on your credit rating).
Students from outside the EU would have to pay £24,800/year, plus spend approximately £8000/year on living expenses, to study at Cambridge.
Since (almost) all UK/EU students can get loans and/or grants from their governments, I think support from the university or its alumni is less common than in the USA -- but I don't really know, and could be very wrong.
Apart from housing, most other costs are broadly similar to the rest of the UK.
Where else in the UK does a pint cost £5?
Did you actually read the next sentence?
The one after said "outside the centre they're cheaper", and my evidence for this is the two friends from Leeds who visited unexpectedly this evening. I took them to a restaurant in Islington -- 10 minutes walk from King's Cross station -- and we paid £10 each for a meal that would probably have cost near to £20 in the West End or the City.
Plus everything revolves around London. London is expensive, dirty and not always a joy to be in. Compare that to working in California (before factoring anything else) and which would you rather work in?
London? Not so sunny, but there's stuff to do here (as you said, everything revolves around London).
What is the infrastructure in London like? Is there easy and direct access to roads, or is there draconian limits on driving in the city. Is there universal access to high-speed internet, or are there restrictions on what you can do with your net connection?
The roads aren't the primary transport infrastructure in London (that's railways), the limits actually help companies (by reducing congestion). But as a way to start your comment, you seem like you've made up your mind already.
I'll answer your questions very quickly: Internet yes, restrictions no, business *extremely* easy, tax breaks no, political favours not really, tolerance for ideas yes, radical political ideas yes, libel is complicated (and how is this going to affect you anyway?), the IP stuff is global, I've never felt monitored, afraid, or been looking over my shoulder in London.
Bored now, since you're just on an anti-UK ramble anyway.
I don't see why you think the people are unlikely to want to work in a city. There are already start-ups in London, and similar companies (Google, Mozilla, Yahoo!).
The UK is pro-privacy, compared to the US, and similar to the EU. The libel laws are odd; if you're that worried about the cameras you've read Slashdot too much.
London has 8 million people, they're not all bankers. But note that there are a *lot* of start-ups working for the financial industry -- I've been to conferences in London and been surprised how many people had made something cool and sold the service to a bank. You need business people anyway (investors, people who can make the company work).
London doesn't attract people with its weather (although it rains less here than you probably think, check a rainfall map). London attracts people with culture, something California lacks.
Because stuff is already happening in East London.
If you want to live somewhere boring;-) and work for a tech startup, there are already options: Cambridge, Silicon Valley, etc. I know plenty of people who live in London who you couldn't pay to move to those places (me included) -- and a few you couldn't pay to move to London (the bias is because I live in London).
Yes, the commercial space is really expensive, but the number of people who live within 45 minutes of it is much higher than the alternatives -- which leads to more candidate employees.
London is not as concentrated on the centre as most American cities I've seen -- there are businesses located all over it. However, given a choice I'd prefer a job in the centre (where there's more interesting stuff, and where I can travel to easily from anywhere) than on the other side. An alternative would be to have so many highways that people could drive round, but London has railways into the centre instead.
(At the moment, I have a job about 1/2 way out. It's annoying -- it limits where I can live to that side of London, which is a more boring and expensive area.)
Apart from housing, most other costs are broadly similar to the rest of the UK.
Exceptions are restaurants/pubs/cinema/etc, although that depends a lot -- in the centre of London these things are very expensive, but outside the centre they're cheaper.
I live in London because it's one of the best cities in the world for culture, things to do, etc, and it's worth paying to be here. I wouldn't move to Silicon Valley -- it seems boring in comparison. But, I know people who wouldn't want to live in London as it's too busy, or whatever.
You both read Slashdot too much; it's given you an extraordinarily distorted view of the UK.
The US felt less free to me -- just as many cameras in the cities (except on public transport, which no one cares about), signs in public spaces listing what's forbidden, armed police, and an invasive search when I left.
At least in the UK there are people trying to do something about it, rather than alternating between refusing to recognise the problem and pointing at another country and saying "but X is worse!".
You can already buy an SD card with an integrated WiFi chip: http://uk.eye.fi/
Put that in the DSLR, and set up your phone as a hotspot. Problem solved?
(I haven't tried this, the eye-fi card is a bit too expensive to buy when I don't really need it. I have seen one demonstrated though, a laptop picked new photos up straight away from the camera.)
Europeans drive a lot less -- by living closer to where we work and using public transport more.
Is that why stores in the Netherlands are closed on Sundays, to give public transit drivers a day off?
Sorry, I don't understand. Public transport runs on Sundays, but generally with a less-frequent service as far fewer people are trying to get to work/school etc.
I've not been to the Netherlands for a very long time, but I think they have a similar situation to here (the UK): many stores are closed on Sundays, or only open for a limited time. This was originally for religious reasons, but has been kept to ensure people working at such stores have time to see their families.
Proper left handed scissors have the blades the other way round, so you can see where you are cutting.
(Try holding some normal scissors in your left hand. The right blade hides the cutting point.)
My mum is left handed, so her house has mostly left-handed scissors. They annoyed me, until I realised I'm about 95% as good with my left hand as my right.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't apply to healthcare paid by insurance (certainly not travel insurance held by a child from a country with "free" healthcare). The hospital was chosen because it was first one we could find, and the bill would have been paid pretty much however much it cost.
When we arrived at the hospital, they weren't interested in the obviously sick 10-year-old until my mum found the insurance documents. At that point, he went from "take a ticket, you're number N in the queue" to "step this way sir! How many x-rays would you like?". It was very odd, as that was so alien to us all, and my parents weren't really aware of how the American system worked -- this was 10 years ago, before all the debate (partly covered in the British media) about "Obamacare".
He lives in Britain (in London), so perhaps he chooses to get more involved in politics here than anywhere else.
I'm not sure I follow. What does Prince Charles have to do with the government?
The news last week was that he's secretly consulted about certain laws. There's a FoI request to disclose the process by which he is consulted.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/aug/31/prince-charles-public-duty-private-power
Here are the guidelines for asking for a second opinion on the NHS: http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/910.aspx
Frankly, I doubt the government minister will have much effect regarding homoeopathy.
One counterargument: your profit-driven doctors and hospitals might give you unnecessary tests and treatment to increase their profits. (This is what happened when my 10-year-old brother was ill while on holiday in the US. The doctors saw the comprehensive worldwide travel insurance, and $ signs flashed in their eyes.)
My webserver runs on a 32-bit machine. I can't remember how old it is -- probably about 10 years (the processor is an AMD Athlon 1.4GHz).
It runs my website fine, and the website for a community group, and hold all my photos, and my parent's photos, and a backup of my desktop PC -- hosting for 70GB of photos wouldn't be cheap.
(My offline backup PC boots up once a month to back up the webserver. That also has Debian, and is even older -- an 800MHz CPU, I think.)
And Debian, no less. You don't pick Debian for 'new hotness'.
Ubuntu has less amd64 installs than i386: http://popcon.ubuntu.com/
sudo dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest and "Yes" to join the contest (mine was disabled for some reason).
I had to write essays like "Compare and contrast the attitudes to life after death between Christianity, Buddhism and Islam". "Explain the different attitudes to euthanasia for Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and atheists".
(So I can see why the US wouldn't want children to actually think about religion.)
I can't honestly say I've endorsed a whole heck of a lot of ideas from Estonia.
Estonia has some nice stuff -- their society is really embracing technology, and the country is small enough that they worry less about the "evil government".
For example, I think everyone has a government-provided account on a service for submitting tax details, receiving notifications from the government, etc, and it's all secured using PGP on a cryptocard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card
I first did some programming at about 6 years old.
My school (in the UK) had a "floor turtle", a simple robot on wheels that could run a LOGO program (Forward 20, Left 45, Forward 10, etc). We programmed it to run over the lines of the netball court. We didn't use any sensors or anything (I assume it had some) -- I expect older kids did that, but by the time I was older the teacher who knew how to use the software had left. Or maybe the curriculum had changed into "use the word processor", which is what most use of the computer was from when I was about 8 until 18.
What stops the students from sharing an access code?
I didn't have to buy *any* books for university. There were plenty of copies of anything "important" in the library (with a portion of them not available for loan), and most lecturers just gave a list of 10 or so books, only a few recommended one book over all others. One lecturer once set questions from a book, about half an hour later a student sent an email to the discussion list for the course with a scan of the relevant page. The lecturer forwarded it to the whole class. (I actually bought the book, I thought it was interesting.)
It was this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/MACHINE-LEARNING-Mcgraw-Hill-International-Edit/dp/0071154671 which is £34 / $54.
On Amazon.com the paperback "International Edition" isn't sold; the hardcover is $163 http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Tom-M-Mitchell/dp/0070428077 How's that free market? ;-)
Why did you use the RISC PC? Surely you had an old Archimedes lying around!
Old x86 boxes are unreliable, which isn't appropriate for a lab, and take up far more space + power + cooling. There's also much less chance of some of the students doing something really interesting with an old PC, compared to a tiny ARM board. And where would you get a class set of 50/100/whatever similar old PCs? And where would you store them?
Also, ARM's R&D is in Cambridge, right next to the main computer science buildings.
Others said it's £9000/year (which the government loans at close to interest-free, that you don't pay back until you have an OK job, and doesn't appear on your credit rating).
Students from outside the EU would have to pay £24,800/year, plus spend approximately £8000/year on living expenses, to study at Cambridge.
Since (almost) all UK/EU students can get loans and/or grants from their governments, I think support from the university or its alumni is less common than in the USA -- but I don't really know, and could be very wrong.
Apart from housing, most other costs are broadly similar to the rest of the UK.
Where else in the UK does a pint cost £5?
Did you actually read the next sentence?
The one after said "outside the centre they're cheaper", and my evidence for this is the two friends from Leeds who visited unexpectedly this evening. I took them to a restaurant in Islington -- 10 minutes walk from King's Cross station -- and we paid £10 each for a meal that would probably have cost near to £20 in the West End or the City.
Plus everything revolves around London. London is expensive, dirty and not always a joy to be in. Compare that to working in California (before factoring anything else) and which would you rather work in?
London? Not so sunny, but there's stuff to do here (as you said, everything revolves around London).
What is the infrastructure in London like? Is there easy and direct access to roads, or is there draconian limits on driving in the city. Is there universal access to high-speed internet, or are there restrictions on what you can do with your net connection?
The roads aren't the primary transport infrastructure in London (that's railways), the limits actually help companies (by reducing congestion). But as a way to start your comment, you seem like you've made up your mind already.
I'll answer your questions very quickly: Internet yes, restrictions no, business *extremely* easy, tax breaks no, political favours not really, tolerance for ideas yes, radical political ideas yes, libel is complicated (and how is this going to affect you anyway?), the IP stuff is global, I've never felt monitored, afraid, or been looking over my shoulder in London.
Bored now, since you're just on an anti-UK ramble anyway.
I don't see why you think the people are unlikely to want to work in a city. There are already start-ups in London, and similar companies (Google, Mozilla, Yahoo!).
The UK is pro-privacy, compared to the US, and similar to the EU. The libel laws are odd; if you're that worried about the cameras you've read Slashdot too much.
London has 8 million people, they're not all bankers. But note that there are a *lot* of start-ups working for the financial industry -- I've been to conferences in London and been surprised how many people had made something cool and sold the service to a bank. You need business people anyway (investors, people who can make the company work).
London doesn't attract people with its weather (although it rains less here than you probably think, check a rainfall map). London attracts people with culture, something California lacks.
http://siliconmilkroundabout.com/companies
Because stuff is already happening in East London.
If you want to live somewhere boring ;-) and work for a tech startup, there are already options: Cambridge, Silicon Valley, etc. I know plenty of people who live in London who you couldn't pay to move to those places (me included) -- and a few you couldn't pay to move to London (the bias is because I live in London).
Yes, the commercial space is really expensive, but the number of people who live within 45 minutes of it is much higher than the alternatives -- which leads to more candidate employees.
London is not as concentrated on the centre as most American cities I've seen -- there are businesses located all over it. However, given a choice I'd prefer a job in the centre (where there's more interesting stuff, and where I can travel to easily from anywhere) than on the other side. An alternative would be to have so many highways that people could drive round, but London has railways into the centre instead.
(At the moment, I have a job about 1/2 way out. It's annoying -- it limits where I can live to that side of London, which is a more boring and expensive area.)
Apart from housing, most other costs are broadly similar to the rest of the UK.
Exceptions are restaurants/pubs/cinema/etc, although that depends a lot -- in the centre of London these things are very expensive, but outside the centre they're cheaper.
I live in London because it's one of the best cities in the world for culture, things to do, etc, and it's worth paying to be here. I wouldn't move to Silicon Valley -- it seems boring in comparison. But, I know people who wouldn't want to live in London as it's too busy, or whatever.
You both read Slashdot too much; it's given you an extraordinarily distorted view of the UK.
The US felt less free to me -- just as many cameras in the cities (except on public transport, which no one cares about), signs in public spaces listing what's forbidden, armed police, and an invasive search when I left.
At least in the UK there are people trying to do something about it, rather than alternating between refusing to recognise the problem and pointing at another country and saying "but X is worse!".
More holidays increases the employment rate.
You can already buy an SD card with an integrated WiFi chip: http://uk.eye.fi/
Put that in the DSLR, and set up your phone as a hotspot. Problem solved?
(I haven't tried this, the eye-fi card is a bit too expensive to buy when I don't really need it. I have seen one demonstrated though, a laptop picked new photos up straight away from the camera.)
Europeans drive a lot less -- by living closer to where we work and using public transport more.
Is that why stores in the Netherlands are closed on Sundays, to give public transit drivers a day off?
Sorry, I don't understand. Public transport runs on Sundays, but generally with a less-frequent service as far fewer people are trying to get to work/school etc.
I've not been to the Netherlands for a very long time, but I think they have a similar situation to here (the UK): many stores are closed on Sundays, or only open for a limited time. This was originally for religious reasons, but has been kept to ensure people working at such stores have time to see their families.
Proper left handed scissors have the blades the other way round, so you can see where you are cutting.
(Try holding some normal scissors in your left hand. The right blade hides the cutting point.)
My mum is left handed, so her house has mostly left-handed scissors. They annoyed me, until I realised I'm about 95% as good with my left hand as my right.