I find it funny that the US gets criticized for not being metric, when the UK isn't either. Officially sure, but they all talk in pounds and stone and ounces.
All actual work is done in metric.
The imperial holdovers are in a few bits of daily life: road speeds and distances (but the roads and cars are built using metric measurements), human height and weight (but doctors always use metric), beer volume in pubs.
(Other daily life things are metric: temperature, buying and cooking food, building construction etc.)
It's stupid, and I wish we'd just finish the transition, but it's nowhere near as annoying as the US.
I can't get youtube at work, but I have to chuckle at the thought of "Folk Metal". I envision kids dressed like the Amish, but with the top button of their shirt undone.
It's entirely European in origin, so you should imagine King Arthur's subjects playing the lute. Well, the electric lute, with some distortion:-D
What I don't like about a lot of the modern bands is the fact that they focus more on the aggression than the music.
That's exactly why I chose the three bands above. I go to any folk metal gig I hear about in London (which isn't many), but I'm disappointed when the band is 90% angry growling and 10% random bagpipes (or whatever).
Finntroll and Korpiklaani still growl too much for me, unfortunately. I go to their gigs if they play here, but I don't often play the music at home.
As you already mention, some music is supposed to be listened to while enjoying a beer, but dancing music is not necessarily only meant to be listened to while on drugs, rather as the name would imply while dancing.
With enough dancing, the "drug" is then endorphine and testosterone or oestrogen. (And alcohol is just another drug anyway!)
There does not even seem to be that much popular music made these days which is not made with the intention that it will work both played in radio and in a club
Depending how you define "popular" I may or may not listen to anything popular, but I think the non-club (or non-radio) tracks are also known as "the rest of the album":-)
What annoys me is when songs from "the rest of the album" are played in a club, overlayed by the DJ with a thump-thump-thump-thump beat so the druggies can keep on dancing. VNV Nation has already been posted in this thread, but one of my favourite songs (Standing) is (relatively) often abused this way.
Lots of electronic artists release "club mixes" (which IMO almost always sound crap at home, but can be great in a nightclub with a sound system with the bass turned up, and a room full of dancing people). However, I still don't like them if the original song is a slow and pensive ballad.
Also, they reduce pollution in cities (well, in frequently-stopping traffic).
There are some hybrid buses here, and they're much nicer to stand next to than the normal ones. They often accelerate from a stop entirely on batteries (I think this is by design, since often there are people waiting at bus stops when this happens) and the engine kicks in later.
(The first modern double-decker bus I found on Wikipedia has a 7.4 litre engine. The newest hybrid bus in London only has a 4.5 litre engine!)
Why not just make packaging that is easy to open and recycle, and let the consumer enjoy just the product instead of worrying about the box?
Indeed, I tend to be more impressed with the company if the product arrives in a plain cardboard box, printed with vegetable-based inks, and no plastic packaging waste.
I can then more easily reuse it (e.g. to post something I've sold on eBay, or wrap a fragile gift) or recycle it.
I fail to understand how an educated man, a professor no less, could conceivably end up in an American fast food joint in a city where sticking a pin in the map will possibly still give you too many choices.
Maybe his children said they didn't like the French food, and wanted something familiar. Maybe the children were tired, and then -- rather than spoil the evening -- it's best just to go along with it.
Maybe he (or his wife) were tired after a full day sightseeing, and just wanted to do something simple (order from a known menu, in a familiar-ish place) rather than go through all the questions needed when visiting a restaurant in a foreign city (all the usual things that you can do automatically at home -- like know that that restaurant will be noisy and full of sports fans in half an hour, or that that one will be smoky, or won't like children, or won't have anything vegetarian -- have to be thought about).
Or maybe they wanted to eat in 10 minutes and continue sightseeing.
I was in Poland a couple of months ago. I was going out on Sunday night, and needed to eat something. The real Polish fast-food places had either already shut, or only opened later (to serve people after their night out). I ended up going to KFC, as it seemed to be the only place open. I think I was just in the wrong area (shopping area, rather than a tourist or nightlife area), but it made much more sense to go with KFC and continue with my night out, rather than spend at least half an hour walking around.
To be fair, perhaps Parisian French isn't the mother tongue of the people working at McDonalds, either. It just reeks of positive post-incident justification. Would a British child practice American English at a McDonalds in NYC or LA?
Why not? It's good to get children to practise interacting with people anyway, and even better if they're in a different country. My brother ordered lots of fast food when he was about 6 or 7 and we visited the USA (he was youngest). On occasion, various staff had trouble with "beefburger", "fizzy drink", "juice" and "tomato sauce". However, the staff were almost always pleased to talk to a British child.
(Last year I had trouble in a Subway in New Orleans, and I was 25. "Yeah, just tomatoes" "Say what?" "Tomatoes" "What?" "Um... tomatoes?" "I can't understand you" "I'm pointing. Or you choose, I really don't mind" "I'm sorry sir, I can't understand you" "Oh! Toe-may-toes!" "If you wanted toe-may-toes why didn't you say so?".)
For the record, I sell these things for a living, and have had a WP7 (now 7.5) phone in my pocket for nearly 24 months. It's not perfect, but I like it, a lot, and I really expected not to when I received my first device.
8. Your contact details are automatically uploaded to cloud service whether you like it or not.
Wrong, this can be disabled. I don't have a single contact stored in the cloud on my LG Optimus Quantum. It's actually never had a data features used, 3G or WiFi.
Wait, you sell them, but you've never used most of the features? You've never used the web browser, a social networking app, a map? Have you made a call with it yet?
I cycle over a signalled pedestrian/cyclist crossing every day to get to work, located on the exit road from a large roundabout. I'm not sure if it's because of inattention or something else, but it's pretty common for car drivers to go through the lights on red. I usually see at least one car a week do this. About once a month the police park under the overpass, which makes all the car drivers very polite:-D
Very occasionally I've come across nicely designed subways for cyclists (with normal street-level crossings for pedestrians if they prefer). It's great to see younger children using that kind of facility completely unsupervised, yet still staying very safe. Unfortunately, the safe routes tend not to go anywhere much. Children and teenagers are the biggest losers in our car-centric country:-(
All the main British supermarkets do grocery delivery, and I think most of them do it with staff going round a large store with a list.
I've not used it very often (90% of what I buy is fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, so I need to shop every week anyway and don't want to pay a delivery charge when the shop is on the way home). The few times I have used it, anything out of stock has been substituted free-of-charge with a more expensive item, and a list of such substitutions handed to me. The delivery driver will take back and refund any substitutions I don't like.
While Google do now have many cycle routes marked, I still prefer CycleStreets (which uses the same data as OpenCycleMap, i.e. OpenStreetMap). That gives a choice of three routes (fast, balanced, quiet), and has more cycling-related data on the map. Sometimes the routes can be a bit wiggly, but I think they're working on this.
However, it's great to see the cycle routes on Google, which will make them visible to lots of people -- hopefully those that don't realise their trip to the shops or work is faster by bicycle.
German has three word genders and noun changes depending on case (My red bike is fast, I ride my bike, my bike's frame is muddy, I gave my bike a wash, I washed the mud from my bike, etc -- the "my" in German is different in most of those, and the "red" would need to match the gender of "bike", but not the "muddy", urgh...).
(My sentence is very probably a bit crap, it doesn't include many cases. As a native English speaker I find it hard to work out the grammar, since the words don't change much. My native-German-speaking housemate has no problem doing this, as her language makes it clear what part each word is playing in every sentence.)
You explained the analogy over several paragraphs, why bother if it's not very good?
Perhaps you don't know all the history of why Esperanto isn't spoken. It was especially promoted in Eastern Europe, particularly in the countries around Hungary -- the Austro-Hungarian Empire included many speakers of quite different languages: Hungarian, German, Czech/Slavic, Russian. Esperanto seemed a great way to communicate. However, in the early 20th century, with the rise of nationalism, promoting a universal language was frowned upon, and Esperanto quickly became politically subversive. This continued (in Eastern Europe, where most of the speakers were) through communism, while the rise of the USA promoted English as a common tongue in the West.
Or perhaps you don't know any other languages. English is easy. Most of our tenses are formed by adding an extra word to the present tense ("I jump", "I will jump" "I may jump", shall/would/can etc) or to the simple past tense ("I jumped" "I have jumped" "I had jumped") or a couple ("I should have jumped" "I will have jumped"). Word order is pretty flexible, we don't have any complicated grammar, we don't have noun/adjective genders, the only change for grammatical case is possessive (which is just apostrophe-S), etc. French has lots of different verb endings for each tense. German has three word genders and noun changes depending on case (My red bike is fast, I ride my bike, my bike's frame is muddy, I gave my bike a wash, I washed the mud from my bike, etc -- the "my" in German is different in most of those, and the "red" would need to match the gender of "bike", but not the "muddy", urgh...).
About 1/3 of the world drives on the left, which is a different scale of problem than America all alone with feet and pounds.
I was doing some maintenance on my bicycle yesterday, and wondered if I should get a torque wrench. Most English-language websites waffle on about inch-pounds, foot-pounds, and, for some reason, kilogram-force-centimetre, before mentioning Newton-metres (Nm), and all the conversion factors between them. The British websites only mention Nm, but the online shops here seem to stock tools with either measure.
If you really don't like it: alias h=ls alias hh=ls -l
And then just type 'h'. I've done this, but I don't have a problem typing things with Ls and Ss in them, like balls, bells, bills, boils and bulls, or ails, eels, isles... ills, oils and... urinals.
Incidentally, the "Compose" key functionality in Linux (which you will have to enable, in the GUI or with setxkbmap -option compose:menu (to make the "Menu" key the compose key) is really useful. I typed € with Compose, C, =. AE/Æ was Compose, A, E. Lots of other characters are a couple of keypresses away.)
The speed of mass transit solutions is often irrelevant unless you're talking about ~300 mile trips where High Speed Rail becomes competitive with air travel.
Not long ago Transport for London were advertising that on the Victoria Line "the new [signalling] system will be fully in use by the end of 2012, allowing up to 33 trains per hour instead of 27. This in combination with the new, faster trains will increase the line's capacity overall by 21%" (from Wikipedia, though the upgrade is now complete).
If I've calculated that correctly, that means 12 seconds less waiting time on average, plus a faster journey. I think each train can carry ~1400 people (1200 standing, 200 seated).
However, I think the improvement is probably more to do with acceleration (and deceleration) than top speed, but top speed is important too -- for journeys under 300 miles it helps to compete with road travel.
That's the complete opposite of my experience with 64-bit Linux -- everything has worked as well (or not) as it did on 32-bit Linux. Why shouldn't it? Obviously the code needs to be recompiled, but generally someone else does that, or else I'd need to do it myself on 32-bit anyway.
On Windows 64-bit we've had many problems with odd (often old-ish) drivers not being supported, and old software being buggy, even in "32 bit mode". So far, we only have about 15 machines running 64-bit Windows 7, but all the Linux servers (all 64-bit) have been running fine for many, many years.
I was "recognised" by a computer at LHR last time I went through.
I don't fly very often, but then had to make two trips in two months. On the first trip, as expected, I had to be photographed before going through security -- I think it's something to do with them checking that that people don't somehow get through to the wrong flight.
On the second trip, they still had my picture (I looked at the camera, as the guy in front of me had been asked to do so, and the man on the desk said I didn't need to as they still had my picture from last month). I think they do delete the pictures eventually, as I'd travelled through LHR about six months before the first of the two close-together trips.
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I find it funny that the US gets criticized for not being metric, when the UK isn't either. Officially sure, but they all talk in pounds and stone and ounces.
All actual work is done in metric.
The imperial holdovers are in a few bits of daily life: road speeds and distances (but the roads and cars are built using metric measurements), human height and weight (but doctors always use metric), beer volume in pubs.
(Other daily life things are metric: temperature, buying and cooking food, building construction etc.)
It's stupid, and I wish we'd just finish the transition, but it's nowhere near as annoying as the US.
I can't get youtube at work, but I have to chuckle at the thought of "Folk Metal". I envision kids dressed like the Amish, but with the top button of their shirt undone.
It's entirely European in origin, so you should imagine King Arthur's subjects playing the lute. Well, the electric lute, with some distortion :-D
Korpiklaani unfortunately growls a bit too much for my liking, but this video pretty much shows the "look": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIc4VHxU7iM
What I don't like about a lot of the modern bands is the fact that they focus more on the aggression than the music.
That's exactly why I chose the three bands above. I go to any folk metal gig I hear about in London (which isn't many), but I'm disappointed when the band is 90% angry growling and 10% random bagpipes (or whatever).
Finntroll and Korpiklaani still growl too much for me, unfortunately. I go to their gigs if they play here, but I don't often play the music at home.
Who knows...I just ask, "What the hell is that?"
I changed the station to something more musical...like Led Zeppelin.
I don't much like anything with unintelligible words, which greatly limits the modern metal I listen to.
The internet is almost dead at work (I suspect something to do with the Olympics...) but I like:
- Týr: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I1geB7U5VI
- Subway to Sally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY-R7EeI7yw
- Skyclad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVJkVCWXe9Q
This is all (broadly) folk metal, and unfortunately isn't very popular outside Germany and Scandinavia
As you already mention, some music is supposed to be listened to while enjoying a beer, but dancing music is not necessarily only meant to be listened to while on drugs, rather as the name would imply while dancing.
With enough dancing, the "drug" is then endorphine and testosterone or oestrogen. (And alcohol is just another drug anyway!)
There does not even seem to be that much popular music made these days which is not made with the intention that it will work both played in radio and in a club
Depending how you define "popular" I may or may not listen to anything popular, but I think the non-club (or non-radio) tracks are also known as "the rest of the album" :-)
What annoys me is when songs from "the rest of the album" are played in a club, overlayed by the DJ with a thump-thump-thump-thump beat so the druggies can keep on dancing. VNV Nation has already been posted in this thread, but one of my favourite songs (Standing) is (relatively) often abused this way.
Lots of electronic artists release "club mixes" (which IMO almost always sound crap at home, but can be great in a nightclub with a sound system with the bass turned up, and a room full of dancing people). However, I still don't like them if the original song is a slow and pensive ballad.
Also, they reduce pollution in cities (well, in frequently-stopping traffic).
There are some hybrid buses here, and they're much nicer to stand next to than the normal ones. They often accelerate from a stop entirely on batteries (I think this is by design, since often there are people waiting at bus stops when this happens) and the engine kicks in later.
(The first modern double-decker bus I found on Wikipedia has a 7.4 litre engine. The newest hybrid bus in London only has a 4.5 litre engine!)
Why not just make packaging that is easy to open and recycle, and let the consumer enjoy just the product instead of worrying about the box?
Indeed, I tend to be more impressed with the company if the product arrives in a plain cardboard box, printed with vegetable-based inks, and no plastic packaging waste.
I can then more easily reuse it (e.g. to post something I've sold on eBay, or wrap a fragile gift) or recycle it.
I fail to understand how an educated man, a professor no less, could conceivably end up in an American fast food joint in a city where sticking a pin in the map will possibly still give you too many choices.
Maybe his children said they didn't like the French food, and wanted something familiar. Maybe the children were tired, and then -- rather than spoil the evening -- it's best just to go along with it.
Maybe he (or his wife) were tired after a full day sightseeing, and just wanted to do something simple (order from a known menu, in a familiar-ish place) rather than go through all the questions needed when visiting a restaurant in a foreign city (all the usual things that you can do automatically at home -- like know that that restaurant will be noisy and full of sports fans in half an hour, or that that one will be smoky, or won't like children, or won't have anything vegetarian -- have to be thought about).
Or maybe they wanted to eat in 10 minutes and continue sightseeing.
I was in Poland a couple of months ago. I was going out on Sunday night, and needed to eat something. The real Polish fast-food places had either already shut, or only opened later (to serve people after their night out). I ended up going to KFC, as it seemed to be the only place open. I think I was just in the wrong area (shopping area, rather than a tourist or nightlife area), but it made much more sense to go with KFC and continue with my night out, rather than spend at least half an hour walking around.
To be fair, perhaps Parisian French isn't the mother tongue of the people working at McDonalds, either. It just reeks of positive post-incident justification. Would a British child practice American English at a McDonalds in NYC or LA?
Why not? It's good to get children to practise interacting with people anyway, and even better if they're in a different country. My brother ordered lots of fast food when he was about 6 or 7 and we visited the USA (he was youngest). On occasion, various staff had trouble with "beefburger", "fizzy drink", "juice" and "tomato sauce". However, the staff were almost always pleased to talk to a British child.
(Last year I had trouble in a Subway in New Orleans, and I was 25. "Yeah, just tomatoes" "Say what?" "Tomatoes" "What?" "Um... tomatoes?" "I can't understand you" "I'm pointing. Or you choose, I really don't mind" "I'm sorry sir, I can't understand you" "Oh! Toe-may-toes!" "If you wanted toe-may-toes why didn't you say so?".)
For the record, I sell these things for a living, and have had a WP7 (now 7.5) phone in my pocket for nearly 24 months. It's not perfect, but I like it, a lot, and I really expected not to when I received my first device.
8. Your contact details are automatically uploaded to cloud service whether you like it or not.
Wrong, this can be disabled. I don't have a single contact stored in the cloud on my LG Optimus Quantum. It's actually never had a data features used, 3G or WiFi.
Wait, you sell them, but you've never used most of the features? You've never used the web browser, a social networking app, a map? Have you made a call with it yet?
I cycle over a signalled pedestrian/cyclist crossing every day to get to work, located on the exit road from a large roundabout. I'm not sure if it's because of inattention or something else, but it's pretty common for car drivers to go through the lights on red. I usually see at least one car a week do this. About once a month the police park under the overpass, which makes all the car drivers very polite :-D
Very occasionally I've come across nicely designed subways for cyclists (with normal street-level crossings for pedestrians if they prefer). It's great to see younger children using that kind of facility completely unsupervised, yet still staying very safe. Unfortunately, the safe routes tend not to go anywhere much. Children and teenagers are the biggest losers in our car-centric country :-(
All the main British supermarkets do grocery delivery, and I think most of them do it with staff going round a large store with a list.
I've not used it very often (90% of what I buy is fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, so I need to shop every week anyway and don't want to pay a delivery charge when the shop is on the way home). The few times I have used it, anything out of stock has been substituted free-of-charge with a more expensive item, and a list of such substitutions handed to me. The delivery driver will take back and refund any substitutions I don't like.
While Google do now have many cycle routes marked, I still prefer CycleStreets (which uses the same data as OpenCycleMap, i.e. OpenStreetMap). That gives a choice of three routes (fast, balanced, quiet), and has more cycling-related data on the map. Sometimes the routes can be a bit wiggly, but I think they're working on this.
However, it's great to see the cycle routes on Google, which will make them visible to lots of people -- hopefully those that don't realise their trip to the shops or work is faster by bicycle.
German has three word genders and noun changes depending on case (My red bike is fast, I ride my bike, my bike's frame is muddy, I gave my bike a wash, I washed the mud from my bike, etc -- the "my" in German is different in most of those, and the "red" would need to match the gender of "bike", but not the "muddy", urgh...).
(My sentence is very probably a bit crap, it doesn't include many cases. As a native English speaker I find it hard to work out the grammar, since the words don't change much. My native-German-speaking housemate has no problem doing this, as her language makes it clear what part each word is playing in every sentence.)
You explained the analogy over several paragraphs, why bother if it's not very good?
Perhaps you don't know all the history of why Esperanto isn't spoken. It was especially promoted in Eastern Europe, particularly in the countries around Hungary -- the Austro-Hungarian Empire included many speakers of quite different languages: Hungarian, German, Czech/Slavic, Russian. Esperanto seemed a great way to communicate.
However, in the early 20th century, with the rise of nationalism, promoting a universal language was frowned upon, and Esperanto quickly became politically subversive. This continued (in Eastern Europe, where most of the speakers were) through communism, while the rise of the USA promoted English as a common tongue in the West.
Or perhaps you don't know any other languages. English is easy. Most of our tenses are formed by adding an extra word to the present tense ("I jump", "I will jump" "I may jump", shall/would/can etc) or to the simple past tense ("I jumped" "I have jumped" "I had jumped") or a couple ("I should have jumped" "I will have jumped"). Word order is pretty flexible, we don't have any complicated grammar, we don't have noun/adjective genders, the only change for grammatical case is possessive (which is just apostrophe-S), etc. French has lots of different verb endings for each tense. German has three word genders and noun changes depending on case (My red bike is fast, I ride my bike, my bike's frame is muddy, I gave my bike a wash, I washed the mud from my bike, etc -- the "my" in German is different in most of those, and the "red" would need to match the gender of "bike", but not the "muddy", urgh...).
For language, you need to convince a lot of people to change to make it worthwhile.
I type with a Dvorak keyboard 99% of the time, but that doesn't prevent my emails from being understood by my friends and colleagues.
About 1/3 of the world drives on the left, which is a different scale of problem than America all alone with feet and pounds.
I was doing some maintenance on my bicycle yesterday, and wondered if I should get a torque wrench. Most English-language websites waffle on about inch-pounds, foot-pounds, and, for some reason, kilogram-force-centimetre, before mentioning Newton-metres (Nm), and all the conversion factors between them. The British websites only mention Nm, but the online shops here seem to stock tools with either measure.
If you really don't like it:
alias h=ls
alias hh=ls -l
And then just type 'h'. I've done this, but I don't have a problem typing things with Ls and Ss in them, like balls, bells, bills, boils and bulls, or ails, eels, isles... ills, oils and ... urinals.
Euro: €
Cent:
AE: Æ æ
Incidentally, the "Compose" key functionality in Linux (which you will have to enable, in the GUI or with setxkbmap -option compose:menu (to make the "Menu" key the compose key) is really useful. I typed € with Compose, C, =. AE/Æ was Compose, A, E. Lots of other characters are a couple of keypresses away.)
If you wish to avoid FAT (patents, etc) then use UDF instead.
mkudffs --media-type=hd --blocksize=512 /dev/sdx (NB: no partitions, format the whole device).
I haven't tried this, I hardly ever use USB sticks.
The speed of mass transit solutions is often irrelevant unless you're talking about ~300 mile trips where High Speed Rail becomes competitive with air travel.
Not long ago Transport for London were advertising that on the Victoria Line "the new [signalling] system will be fully in use by the end of 2012, allowing up to 33 trains per hour instead of 27. This in combination with the new, faster trains will increase the line's capacity overall by 21%" (from Wikipedia, though the upgrade is now complete).
If I've calculated that correctly, that means 12 seconds less waiting time on average, plus a faster journey. I think each train can carry ~1400 people (1200 standing, 200 seated).
However, I think the improvement is probably more to do with acceleration (and deceleration) than top speed, but top speed is important too -- for journeys under 300 miles it helps to compete with road travel.
That's awful... when I was three years old this was the theme.
> ...the Olympic motto of "faster, higher, stronger"...
I thought the Olympic motto was "Winning is everything".
I think it's been changed to "i'm lovin' it".
That's the complete opposite of my experience with 64-bit Linux -- everything has worked as well (or not) as it did on 32-bit Linux. Why shouldn't it? Obviously the code needs to be recompiled, but generally someone else does that, or else I'd need to do it myself on 32-bit anyway.
On Windows 64-bit we've had many problems with odd (often old-ish) drivers not being supported, and old software being buggy, even in "32 bit mode". So far, we only have about 15 machines running 64-bit Windows 7, but all the Linux servers (all 64-bit) have been running fine for many, many years.
I was "recognised" by a computer at LHR last time I went through.
I don't fly very often, but then had to make two trips in two months. On the first trip, as expected, I had to be photographed before going through security -- I think it's something to do with them checking that that people don't somehow get through to the wrong flight.
On the second trip, they still had my picture (I looked at the camera, as the guy in front of me had been asked to do so, and the man on the desk said I didn't need to as they still had my picture from last month). I think they do delete the pictures eventually, as I'd travelled through LHR about six months before the first of the two close-together trips.