Yeah but you can go to your indium mine and extract 100 million tons of ore tomorrow. As opposed to monitors, where you need to collect each monitor and ship it to whatever processing plant on palates. Much worse economies of scale!
At the household recycling sites in the UK, the monitors and TVs are simply stacked into a standard container. When the container is full, it's taken away in a lorry/train/barge (for the latter, I like the irony of "Smuggler's Way" in south London being the recycling site).
Remember the alternative is still to collect the monitors, still to transport them, but then to deal with the problems of heavy metals leeching into the groundwater.
4) Make roads where these cars will drive safer by blocking easy pedestrian access to them - put up a fence, or require a wide, flat shoulder (and no parking) wherever possible so you can see possible hazards approaching from the side.
No -- that's the wrong way around. Make the kind of roads where a child might be playing very safe: make them all dead ends for cars (but allow pedestrians and cyclists to go through), and make the speed limit 15km/h or so. There won't be many drivers (the road is only useful for residents), and they won't be driving very far to get to the large road.
(Also, suddenly stopping from 65 won't matter -- the car behind will also suddenly stop, since it will always keep the safe stopping distance, and "listen" to what the car in front is doing directly.)
All three replies have missed the point, so evidently I didn't make it very well. I'll try making it the other way round.
When road signs in the US say things like "2000 feet" it takes too long for me to parse the unfamiliar number and unit, remember the conversion (1/3 metre) and do the calculation (less than 700m). If there's an added problem -- perhaps I can't see what the sign is for -- I'm likely to doubt my conversion. Did I miss a zero or something?
Fortunately, nothing important (engineering/science/etc) is done in feet, including in America (according to the GGP post), so it doesn't really matter.
But important stuff does use metric units, and many people in America working with them aren't as familiar with them as they could be.
Truth is, imperial is actually simpler for household things like baking and cooking, because you're usually working in single digit numbers rather than triple digit numbers, which is great for the mathematically impaired.
Really? Many people seem to struggle with fractions.
There's no reason cooking using metric couldn't use fractions -- half-kilo, quarter-kilo, eight-kilo etc -- yet it doesn't. The fractions make it more complicated to scale recipes.
Fahrenheit also makes sense for temperature because of how much of a temperature difference we can feel, which is why a lot of metric thermostats go up in increments of.5 instead of whole numbers
They don't (or if they do, I bet the Fahrenheit scale goes up in 0.5 too), and most systems aren't that accurate anyway (the heat/cooling doesn't kick in again if the temperature has fallen/risen by only 0.5C).
We mostly use imperial units for stuff that doesn't matter, like milk or the speed of cars down highways. It makes sense - why should I toss all of my grandmother's cookbooks, or even go through the effort of converting them?
Because then you'd be more familiar with the units, which might enable you to spot mistakes more easily (as in, "50g? Why is this 50g, surely they mean 5g!"), where otherwise using different units obscures them.
How fast is 80km/h? Residential road, large road, highway, or what?
"Max. capacity 1200kg" -- how many people?
"50C when operating" -- safe to touch?
Or, how easily can you work out how much cholesterol there is in half a bottle of milk, when it says "14mg per 100mL" on the side, but the capacity is a quart?
Also, the US seems to use all kinds of archaic units for different things. Bushels of wheat, barrels of oil, troy ounces of gold, normal ounces of everything else, the short ton, long ton, a foot, a survey foot, a pint, a dry pint, a peck,... do you know conversions for all these?
One can consume doses of alcohol that do not impart the debilitating effects that lead to the accidents that kill people.
Really?
Plenty of countries have a zero limit for drink driving, with good justification -- even a small drink is proven to affect concentration, decision-making etc.
I live in Western NY. Drinking and driving does occur, but it is not anywhere near as common as it was 20 years ago. Here you are looking at five figure fines, and the possibility of jail time.
Ok..well, that somewhat confirms my observations, that they are much more uptight about it up in the NE
Since over 300 people a year die because of it (in NY), it doesn't seem unreasonable to be "uptight".
About 300 people a year die from it in Louisiana too, yet that state has a just a quarter of the population.
Nice to see the haters are out today - having a nice time are you?
I understood the books I was reading very nicely thank you - I just didn't give a fuck about English Lit (and I still dont). And no, they weren't separate subjects when I was taking GCSEs (mid 1990s) - it was just "English".
its just that "English" as taught today (as in my day when I took GCSEs) has little to do with mastering the various technicalities and abilities of the written and spoken word, and much more to do with contrived, manufactured investigations into so called "literary classics"
After a bit of investigating to jog my memory I've remembered what English and English Literature GCSEs were about:
English: - reading lots of newspaper articles from different newspapers (e.g. Mirror and Telegraph), and explaining the bias, bad arguments, irrelevancies etc. (My main memory of my English teacher is him reading something from the Daily Mail, then reading it again and shouting out every "may", as in "it's is thought that immigrants MAY have...") - reading a few poems - "speaking and listening" -- a presentation, and listening to everyone else's presentation
English Lit: - what you said
I don't remember where the Shakespeare and novels went -- probably some in both.
Oh, and it's actually A*, A, B, C, D, E, F, G and "fail" ("U", I can't remember what it stands for). A G is a pass, and you get a certificate, if you get U you don't get a certificate.
(There are noticeable differences between E, F, G and U, but I don't know whether any employer would care.)
I struggled with some of English and English Literature (they were taught together, so I don't remember which was which; there was poetry as well as Of Mice And Men). Much of my coursework was graded as B or C. However, towards the end of the year the teacher set me (only me) an assignment to analyse some factual writing -- articles from popular science magazines. I could do that, and easily got an A*. Apparently, stuff like that was on the syllabus but most English teachers didn't like it, so taught the alternatives.
My final grade was A, in 2002. The syllabus has probably changed a bit, but the way it is graded is changed far too much every few years to suit the politicians.
And once they have complete access to your Amazon account, they can't just change the physical shipping address why?
If you try and do that (I did last week, to order something to be delivered to work) they ask for the CCV code from the back of the credit card (if you choose to pay with an existing card).
In Britain there's a bus service from Inverness to London, taking 12½ hours to travel 900km (the train takes 8 hours, driving a car about 9).
I can't find a much longer journey even if leaving the country (which has at least a 30 minute break while going through the Channel Tunnel). London to Berlin is about 1100km, anything further than that requires a change. However, less-densely-populated continents could easily just change the driving crew.
Are you stupid? To get access to someone's Amazon account you need their email address and billing address. To get access to someones Apple account you need their email address, billing address, and last 4 of their CC. Both of these systems are stupidly insecure, but it is pretty goddamn obvious Amazon's is the worse.
But what is Amazon protecting?
1) The ability to order goods using my credit card to be delivered to my registered address 2) The ability to order virtual goods using my credit card (music, ebooks, gift certificates).
1) doesn't really help the fraudster. 2) might, but they're difficult to resell and Amazon probably don't care about refunding these purchases -- they're very low value
Now, what is Apple protecting?
1) Everything using that email address 2) All Apple equipment registered to the account, and all files on that equipment
I had the following conversation with the Student Loans Company (UK) "I need you to answer a security question. Can you tell me the third letter of your... er... oh..." "Mother's maiden name?" "Yeah, but... hang on..." "Percent sign" "Oh? Yes, that's right. I thought something was wrong with my screen." (Another problem with their system: the phone person shouldn't know the real answer, only whether what I tell him, and what he types in, is correct.)
I visited a couple of weeks ago, and stayed with a Luxembourgish friend.
I thought it was strange that, even though Luxembourgish is far more closely related to German, French seems more prominent in daily life outside the home. Shop staff speak French, menus are in French, the captions in the museums and galleries are in French first (and sometimes not in anything else). At the cinema the film was subtitled in French.
Learning a language will teach you how to learn a language, which will be useful if you want to learn a few words of German for your holiday.
I started German evening classes a couple of years ago, and was surprised at how two people in the class struggled so much. It turned out they were the only two (of about 14) who had never been taught another language, which was unusual for here (they were immigrants from the US and the Bahamas).
(I could probably do something more useful than learn German, but I could also do something more useful than write this comment.)
so a university, probably a 'progressive' organization, manipulates stats to praise some aspect of 'multiculturalism' for an obvious profit motive. what a shock. perhaps it's just that those who can learn languages quickly are simply smarter people.
In case you didn't read the article before your reactionary flamebait comment, notice the study was done in Scotland with Scottish children (some speak Gaelic), and in Sardinia with Sardinian children (some speak Sardinian). Hardly multicultural.
Luxembourg is a good example -- people born there (to Luxembourgish parents) tend to speak Luxembourgish, German, French and English.
Many people in Wales speak both English and Welsh.
A huge number of Europeans speak their native language plus English, but how often they use English will depend on their occupation. Some universities give lectures in English (rather than the local language), and some workplaces work in English.
All dimensions and speeds in this report are given in metric units, except speed and locations on Network Rail managed infrastructure, which are given in imperiay dimensions, in accordance with Network Rail practice. In this case the equivalent metric value is also given.
Distances are still in miles/chains, from when most railways were built. I'm not sure why they don't convert them -- there was a "near miss" on the railway near my house, as the night shift engineering team looked at the overhead electricity gantries (which had plates giving the distance in km from the start of the line) instead of the mileposts (which have the distance in miles) to see where they were supposed to be working. I'm very near the end of the line, so the misunderstanding wasn't unreasonable on their part. I assume the cost of converting 16000km of railway signposts isn't seen as worthwhile -- if you read a report on a "new" (or somehow redone) railway it's 100% metric.
NB kg/minute, seconds, hours, bar are all metric (though not SI).
I saw someone with a USB Wifi dongle on his RPi that was about 5mm bigger than the USB socket. A search for "tiny usb wifi" shows there are several, but I'm not sure which one it was -- they aren't necessarily all compatible.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but you can go to your indium mine and extract 100 million tons of ore tomorrow. As opposed to monitors, where you need to collect each monitor and ship it to whatever processing plant on palates. Much worse economies of scale!
At the household recycling sites in the UK, the monitors and TVs are simply stacked into a standard container. When the container is full, it's taken away in a lorry/train/barge (for the latter, I like the irony of "Smuggler's Way" in south London being the recycling site).
Remember the alternative is still to collect the monitors, still to transport them, but then to deal with the problems of heavy metals leeching into the groundwater.
4) Make roads where these cars will drive safer by blocking easy pedestrian access to them - put up a fence, or require a wide, flat shoulder (and no parking) wherever possible so you can see possible hazards approaching from the side.
No -- that's the wrong way around. Make the kind of roads where a child might be playing very safe: make them all dead ends for cars (but allow pedestrians and cyclists to go through), and make the speed limit 15km/h or so. There won't be many drivers (the road is only useful for residents), and they won't be driving very far to get to the large road.
(Also, suddenly stopping from 65 won't matter -- the car behind will also suddenly stop, since it will always keep the safe stopping distance, and "listen" to what the car in front is doing directly.)
I think that part of my post was a distraction from my main point -- see the reply above.
All three replies have missed the point, so evidently I didn't make it very well. I'll try making it the other way round.
When road signs in the US say things like "2000 feet" it takes too long for me to parse the unfamiliar number and unit, remember the conversion (1/3 metre) and do the calculation (less than 700m). If there's an added problem -- perhaps I can't see what the sign is for -- I'm likely to doubt my conversion. Did I miss a zero or something?
Fortunately, nothing important (engineering/science/etc) is done in feet, including in America (according to the GGP post), so it doesn't really matter.
But important stuff does use metric units, and many people in America working with them aren't as familiar with them as they could be.
Truth is, imperial is actually simpler for household things like baking and cooking, because you're usually working in single digit numbers rather than triple digit numbers, which is great for the mathematically impaired.
Really? Many people seem to struggle with fractions.
There's no reason cooking using metric couldn't use fractions -- half-kilo, quarter-kilo, eight-kilo etc -- yet it doesn't. The fractions make it more complicated to scale recipes.
Fahrenheit also makes sense for temperature because of how much of a temperature difference we can feel, which is why a lot of metric thermostats go up in increments of .5 instead of whole numbers
They don't (or if they do, I bet the Fahrenheit scale goes up in 0.5 too), and most systems aren't that accurate anyway (the heat/cooling doesn't kick in again if the temperature has fallen/risen by only 0.5C).
We mostly use imperial units for stuff that doesn't matter, like milk or the speed of cars down highways. It makes sense - why should I toss all of my grandmother's cookbooks, or even go through the effort of converting them?
Because then you'd be more familiar with the units, which might enable you to spot mistakes more easily (as in, "50g? Why is this 50g, surely they mean 5g!"), where otherwise using different units obscures them.
How fast is 80km/h? Residential road, large road, highway, or what?
"Max. capacity 1200kg" -- how many people?
"50C when operating" -- safe to touch?
Or, how easily can you work out how much cholesterol there is in half a bottle of milk, when it says "14mg per 100mL" on the side, but the capacity is a quart?
Also, the US seems to use all kinds of archaic units for different things. Bushels of wheat, barrels of oil, troy ounces of gold, normal ounces of everything else, the short ton, long ton, a foot, a survey foot, a pint, a dry pint, a peck, ... do you know conversions for all these?
One can consume doses of alcohol that do not impart the debilitating effects that lead to the accidents that kill people.
Really?
Plenty of countries have a zero limit for drink driving, with good justification -- even a small drink is proven to affect concentration, decision-making etc.
Ok..well, that somewhat confirms my observations, that they are much more uptight about it up in the NE
Since over 300 people a year die because of it (in NY), it doesn't seem unreasonable to be "uptight".
About 300 people a year die from it in Louisiana too, yet that state has a just a quarter of the population.
http://www.dui-usa.drinkdriving.org/New+York_dui_drunkdriving_statistics.php
http://www.dui-usa.drinkdriving.org/Louisiana_dui_drunkdriving_statistics.php
I'm too young to know whether the punishment and fines changed, but in the 1980s and 1990s the British government successfully reduced the rate of drink driving by making it socially unacceptable. They ran horrific ads:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5ma_Xv7rGM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyzTFdCEXWk
These are more recent:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsY_Co-p8Bw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtJqw--DGl8
The stats: http://www.drinkdriving.org/drink_driving_statistics_uk.php
And the penalties; in case you want to compare: http://www.drinkdrivingfacts.com/drinkdriving/drink_driving_facts.aspx
Nice to see the haters are out today - having a nice time are you?
I understood the books I was reading very nicely thank you - I just didn't give a fuck about English Lit (and I still dont). And no, they weren't separate subjects when I was taking GCSEs (mid 1990s) - it was just "English".
http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/8938/1/6908_gcse_english_literature.pdfseems to think otherwise, but I'm not a teacher, and did mine in 2002.
its just that "English" as taught today (as in my day when I took GCSEs) has little to do with mastering the various technicalities and abilities of the written and spoken word, and much more to do with contrived, manufactured investigations into so called "literary classics"
After a bit of investigating to jog my memory I've remembered what English and English Literature GCSEs were about:
English: ...")
- reading lots of newspaper articles from different newspapers (e.g. Mirror and Telegraph), and explaining the bias, bad arguments, irrelevancies etc. (My main memory of my English teacher is him reading something from the Daily Mail, then reading it again and shouting out every "may", as in "it's is thought that immigrants MAY have
- reading a few poems
- "speaking and listening" -- a presentation, and listening to everyone else's presentation
English Lit:
- what you said
I don't remember where the Shakespeare and novels went -- probably some in both.
Oh, and it's actually A*, A, B, C, D, E, F, G and "fail" ("U", I can't remember what it stands for). A G is a pass, and you get a certificate, if you get U you don't get a certificate.
(There are noticeable differences between E, F, G and U, but I don't know whether any employer would care.)
I struggled with some of English and English Literature (they were taught together, so I don't remember which was which; there was poetry as well as Of Mice And Men). Much of my coursework was graded as B or C. However, towards the end of the year the teacher set me (only me) an assignment to analyse some factual writing -- articles from popular science magazines. I could do that, and easily got an A*. Apparently, stuff like that was on the syllabus but most English teachers didn't like it, so taught the alternatives.
My final grade was A, in 2002. The syllabus has probably changed a bit, but the way it is graded is changed far too much every few years to suit the politicians.
And once they have complete access to your Amazon account, they can't just change the physical shipping address why?
If you try and do that (I did last week, to order something to be delivered to work) they ask for the CCV code from the back of the credit card (if you choose to pay with an existing card).
That has got to be a typo! :O
In Britain there's a bus service from Inverness to London, taking 12½ hours to travel 900km (the train takes 8 hours, driving a car about 9).
I can't find a much longer journey even if leaving the country (which has at least a 30 minute break while going through the Channel Tunnel). London to Berlin is about 1100km, anything further than that requires a change. However, less-densely-populated continents could easily just change the driving crew.
Are you stupid? To get access to someone's Amazon account you need their email address and billing address. To get access to someones Apple account you need their email address, billing address, and last 4 of their CC. Both of these systems are stupidly insecure, but it is pretty goddamn obvious Amazon's is the worse.
But what is Amazon protecting?
1) The ability to order goods using my credit card to be delivered to my registered address
2) The ability to order virtual goods using my credit card (music, ebooks, gift certificates).
1) doesn't really help the fraudster. 2) might, but they're difficult to resell and Amazon probably don't care about refunding these purchases -- they're very low value
Now, what is Apple protecting?
1) Everything using that email address
2) All Apple equipment registered to the account, and all files on that equipment
I had the following conversation with the Student Loans Company (UK)
"I need you to answer a security question. Can you tell me the third letter of your... er... oh..."
"Mother's maiden name?"
"Yeah, but... hang on..."
"Percent sign"
"Oh? Yes, that's right. I thought something was wrong with my screen."
(Another problem with their system: the phone person shouldn't know the real answer, only whether what I tell him, and what he types in, is correct.)
I visited a couple of weeks ago, and stayed with a Luxembourgish friend.
I thought it was strange that, even though Luxembourgish is far more closely related to German, French seems more prominent in daily life outside the home. Shop staff speak French, menus are in French, the captions in the museums and galleries are in French first (and sometimes not in anything else). At the cinema the film was subtitled in French.
Why not German?
Learning a language will teach you how to learn a language, which will be useful if you want to learn a few words of German for your holiday.
I started German evening classes a couple of years ago, and was surprised at how two people in the class struggled so much. It turned out they were the only two (of about 14) who had never been taught another language, which was unusual for here (they were immigrants from the US and the Bahamas).
(I could probably do something more useful than learn German, but I could also do something more useful than write this comment.)
so a university, probably a 'progressive' organization, manipulates stats to praise some aspect of 'multiculturalism' for an obvious profit motive. what a shock. perhaps it's just that those who can learn languages quickly are simply smarter people.
In case you didn't read the article before your reactionary flamebait comment, notice the study was done in Scotland with Scottish children (some speak Gaelic), and in Sardinia with Sardinian children (some speak Sardinian). Hardly multicultural.
Luxembourg is a good example -- people born there (to Luxembourgish parents) tend to speak Luxembourgish, German, French and English.
Many people in Wales speak both English and Welsh.
A huge number of Europeans speak their native language plus English, but how often they use English will depend on their occupation. Some universities give lectures in English (rather than the local language), and some workplaces work in English.
I've read a few of those reports.
All dimensions and speeds in this report are given in metric units, except speed and locations on Network Rail managed infrastructure, which are given in imperiay dimensions, in accordance with Network Rail practice. In this case the equivalent metric value is also given.
Distances are still in miles/chains, from when most railways were built. I'm not sure why they don't convert them -- there was a "near miss" on the railway near my house, as the night shift engineering team looked at the overhead electricity gantries (which had plates giving the distance in km from the start of the line) instead of the mileposts (which have the distance in miles) to see where they were supposed to be working. I'm very near the end of the line, so the misunderstanding wasn't unreasonable on their part. I assume the cost of converting 16000km of railway signposts isn't seen as worthwhile -- if you read a report on a "new" (or somehow redone) railway it's 100% metric.
NB kg/minute, seconds, hours, bar are all metric (though not SI).
I saw someone with a USB Wifi dongle on his RPi that was about 5mm bigger than the USB socket. A search for "tiny usb wifi" shows there are several, but I'm not sure which one it was -- they aren't necessarily all compatible.
The price from RS in the UK ( http://raspberrypi.rsdelivers.com/default.aspx?cl=1 ) is £21.60 without VAT or shipping, which is $33.50. That's also what's printed on my invoice, from 19 May.
You can have a capable device, but not use it.
I don't pay a TV license, as the TV is only used for console gaming and DVDs.
I'm quite happy paying my license fee, and don't really see why I should help fund free viewing for the rest of the world.
I do. The rest of the world watching British TV is better than them watching, for example, American TV. It promotes our culture and values.
(I think the BBC World Service radio is partly funded for this reason.)
Use the right tool for the job, in this case imperial. We're talking about feet in an olympic article about running and feet, so use feet to measure.
Can we use my feet? They're about 27cm long.
(In case you hadn't noticed, the race is measured in metres, and almost all the athletes measure all distances in metres.)