Mobile phone: yes, provide them with a credit card number (which means you're 18), or show ID in a store, and they will unblock it. Fixed-line: unrestricted by default
There is also a system that blocks some foreign child pornography websites. The large ISPs use it; the small ones don't.
- Learning how to read the nutritional info. You’d think this is simple...
Or better: aim for most of what you eat not to have a nutritional label (or any packaging at all). Then the few bits that do probably don't matter.
Or: try and get your country to mandate clearer labelling. Here, the nutritional label is often coloured red or orange if a nutrient is particularly high (just in case you didn't know fizzy drinks had loads of sugar and cheap pizzas were full of salt).
- Get into some physical activity that you _enjoy_.
Or at least has purpose. I cycle to work, which is more exercise each day than many people get in a week. It's only 20 minutes each way.
- Cut out the insanely unhealthy stuff. I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to go full on health nut with my diet.
every time you go to the grocery run down the health nut section and try something that looks not-terrible.
I'm not sure what "health nut" really means. I occasionally eat tofu, probably once a month. I eat turkey about as often.
I don't think I've ever been to a health-nut section, unless you're referring to the fruit and vegetables;-)
So, if you don't know how to cook "healthy stuff": buy a recipe book. I don't know what's available in the US, but I have a few I like (from the UK). I got them mostly for ideas rather than method (I know how to cook, so I tend to forget I'm supposed to be following the method after about 10 minutes). One has quick meals to cook in a single pot, another is a vegan book (I've had lots of ideas from this, I often use them as side-dishes or add non-vegan ingredients).
Haven't found cheap steel cut oats either. Walmart has a quart size can of them for about $4.00.
I had to look up "steel cut oats", I think I'd call them wholegrain oats, or unprocessed oats, or Scottish/Irish oats, the kind to make porridge from. They're £1.20 / kg for a mid-range brand here, or 75p/kg for cheap (Asda) ones, which are probably a bit dusty.
Measuring a dry product by volume is completely alien to me, but I looked up the density (300kg/m^3, so 0.3kg/L ~= 0.3kg/quart, so your "quart sized can" (litre) is about $13 / kg, £8/kg! Mad!
The UK also has the Human Rights Act (the UK act), which codifies the ECHR into law -- "British"* law, enforced by a British court. I think it's an excellent set of rights, but unfortunately, the Daily Mail doesn't like it.
I might be a member, I can't remember. I went to their protest during the wedding last year, anyway, and they seem to be getting more press and attention because of the jubilee (and the ever-encroaching threat of King Charles III).
Your statement about tourism has been answered, but also remember the *huge* income from the "Crown Estate" -- land that "belongs" to the royal family, and from which they are allowed to keep all the income. The Duchy of Cornwall is one big example, but there's also lots of land in big cities that would, in a republic, create revenue for the Treasury.
I use a laptop for development (I'd prefer a desktop, but apparently someone thought hi-spec laptops were a better idea). At work, it spends 99% of it's life plugged into a couple of large monitors.
AIUI, health and safety regulations in the UK effectively prohibit anyone spending lots of time hunched over a laptop screen:
Some of the design features on laptops and other portable computers can make them uncomfortable to use for long periods. Employees shouldn't routinely use laptops where full-sized equipment is available or should be provided with a laptop docking station so that they can work with a full-sized keyboard and screen.
Frankly, I don't know many places that have a jukebox : usually the music played is just what the owner wants, whether you like it or not.
I take it you don't frequent many bars, do you....?
I can only think of a couple of places with a jukebox. It's probably a regional thing, but here in London most of the places I go to have a DJ, or (more often) some CDs/MP3 player/small computer behind the bar, operated only by the staff.
When I was a student, the student union bar had an "Internet jukebox", which had pretty much everything obscure that the Rock and Metal Society managed to search for, but nowhere near everything Goth Society listened to. However, that was about 4 years ago.
I don't think enough people in the UK would have been using computers back before they could reliably produce "£" for it to affect the language. It was easy to localise a computer for something like this -- at worst, just change the picture on the keyboard and the font bitmap for the corresponding character on the output device.
In Britain if people can't type £ they generally write "pounds", GBP, UKP, L or even $. Writing # makes no more sense than using &, * or @. (Except, perhaps, that # has no meaning at all.)
What are some of the big issues dividing the Dems and Repubs: Abortion rights, gay marriage, etc. They are social issues, not economic issues. In other countries these things are not discussed in the context of political affiliation..
Exactly. The current government in the UK (which is mostly the Conservative party (305 MPs), with a few Liberal Democrats (57)) is being accused in the conservative media of focussing too much on social issues, like gay marriage.
But the argument is not that gay people shouldn't be able to get married -- I'm not certain, but I think the proposal for change has come from the conservative part of the coalition government. Instead, some bits of media are complaining that debating time in Parliament should be spent fixing the economy, as that's more important.
This article further backs up what you wrote: (the Telegraph is the most right-wing/conservative of the "proper" newspapers, i.e. it's a big newspaper not full of pictures, celebrities, the royal family or sport.)
In America this week, David Cameron will see a Republican Party expending a great deal of time and energy deciding how, precisely, it will lose the presidential election in November. As fractious as the Tory tribe can be, it has nothing on the GOP in 2012 for splits, disaggregation and pointless introspection.
Nor has British party politics been infected thus far by the culture wars that have so disfigured American politics, or the “God gap” – the chasm between secular voters and those whose religion guides their electoral behaviour.
Origin of the term "Normal for Norfolk", look it up;-)
I'll come clean and admin I'm ¼ Norfolkish (?). At the last family gathering my great aunt, from Norfolk, said it was unfair how people made fun of Norfolk. Her younger brother, my great uncle, agreed.
My grandma, the oldest by about 5 years, then listed four couples. Grandma: "Don't you remember old Charles the butcher? And Esme." G. Aunt: "Oh yes, they were a strange couple. Did they ever get married?" Grandma: "No. Esme was Charles' cousin." "And Mr Pitchin and Miss Ethlewhite"... "And Mr...."
I think the great aunt and great uncle had left Norfolk before they were old enough to be aware of such matters.
While you're right, I think the cookie thing was an EU sponsored piece of legislation.
Although our wonderful media often overlooks it, remember that British MEPs probably voted in favour of the legislation (I'm sure it should be linked somewhere from here, but I can't find the voting record).
(Also, I think it's a decent bit of legislation. I don't want my visit to a newspaper website to be known about (and tracked) by 10 third-party companies, like ad networks and Facebook etc.)
Plus, US Customs can't confiscate your laptop and detain you without probable cause because you didn't want to be x-rayed by a security guard if you never go there in the first place.
And you won't have your balls fondled by the TSA.
I went through security in America with long hair and unusual cloths. I thought the treatment I got was unusual because of that, but it turns out it's normal.
I went for business, and spent about $5000. I'd rather that had gone to a country that values personal freedom.
In addition to the points raised by the other replies, if 5W of power can be saved per person -- perhaps by mandating that standby power consumption of home electronics can be reduced -- then in a country of 50M people that's 250MW. That's a small fossil-fuel power plant, or a large wind/solar plant, which no longer needs to be built.
But I think a lot of people complain about the news being "London centric" when it isn't really. The actual London-centric news is about public transport, the mayor, schools, knife crime etc, and people outside SE England are rarely aware of much of this.
English viewers have *their* national Education, Health and Policing stories covered during the "UK" wide 6 o'clock news
Although, Scottish MPs do get to vote on those matters...
So, if the modern day equivalent is loading more slowly and providing less, then it's due to a clear lack of caring at all about the service, I'd say than anything about the technology. There's more than enough bandwidth available, and you don't have to constantly replay all the content for everybody on the hopes that anybody would see it, like the broadcast model. You only have to serve it on demand.
You do have to constantly replay it, it's still a broadcast model. In the digital TV stream (as implemented for DVB, but I assume it's pretty similar for the American thing) packets are broadcast, of which the vast majority are video/audio, a very few are the EPG (constantly repeated), and a few are "interactive" services (text, etc). There's nowhere for it to request data from, it's a listen-only broadcast service.
In fact, the situation is that Scotland gets the UK 6 o'clock news- including much that is irrelevant to us- followed by Scotland-wide (non-local) news that fills in the gaps to some extent. The English get the same 6 o'clock news- except that it's mostly relevant to them, so they don't *need* an England-specific bulletin- followed by half an hour of true local news (which Scotland doesn't get). But Scotland is getting "special" treatment and the better deal because it has its own news programme apparently. *cough*
Scotland has a population of 5.2 million. London has a population of 7.8 million. The West Midlands has 5.2 million. The East Midlands has 4.1 million.
It seems Scotland gets a reasonably good deal for it's local news, if we assume the amount of newsworthy activity generated per person is similar.
(Note that London has it's own "parliament", the London Assembly.)
BBC Radio 4 broadcasts in digital, FM and longwave. They could broadcast something. Alternatively, for flood warnings (which is the most common problem) local radio stations would probably broadcast something -- even if it were just part of the normal weather report.
I knew an Aussie living in Edinburgh in 1995 who "watched" the Ashes on Ceefax.
My dad would regularly "watch" sport (football, cricket, rugby, snooker) on Ceefax.
There were sometimes special pages, where almost all of the page was transparent except a couple of lines at the bottom showing the cricket score, so you could watch the football on another channel. But more often that not, he'd read a magazine while glancing up at the Ceefax screen every few minutes to see if England had lost another wicket.
I that that would be with the Connect service on, but we unplug it when it's not being used anyway, especially since it's probably only used every month or so anyway.
Over a year, it would cost me between £11 and £16 if left on standby all the time.
The rest of the appliances around the TV are new enough that they have EU-mandated actual power buttons, but a smart power board is a good (sometimes better) alternative.
For several years in a row when the Wii was at it's popularity peak, the greenpeace "report card" gave Nintendo a failing grade
Do you own a Wii and a power consumption meter? I do (my electricity supplier gave me the meter, the government required it. It's supposed to help people reduce consumption).
Anyway, the Wii uses about 10-15W while on standby (I can't remember how much exactly). That's a huge amount, compared to almost everything else in the house. My bedroom is lit with less power!
Slashdot Mirror
Mobile phone: yes, provide them with a credit card number (which means you're 18), or show ID in a store, and they will unblock it.
Fixed-line: unrestricted by default
There is also a system that blocks some foreign child pornography websites. The large ISPs use it; the small ones don't.
Last time I took the train they checked the passports in Folkstone, UK. It was quite a few years ago thoush so things might have changed...
They check them as you depart, so they don't have to check them when you arrive. You must have been travelling to France.
- Learning how to read the nutritional info. You’d think this is simple...
Or better: aim for most of what you eat not to have a nutritional label (or any packaging at all). Then the few bits that do probably don't matter.
Or: try and get your country to mandate clearer labelling. Here, the nutritional label is often coloured red or orange if a nutrient is particularly high (just in case you didn't know fizzy drinks had loads of sugar and cheap pizzas were full of salt).
- Get into some physical activity that you _enjoy_.
Or at least has purpose. I cycle to work, which is more exercise each day than many people get in a week. It's only 20 minutes each way.
- Cut out the insanely unhealthy stuff. I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to go full on health nut with my diet.
every time you go to the grocery run down the health nut section and try something that looks not-terrible.
I'm not sure what "health nut" really means. I occasionally eat tofu, probably once a month. I eat turkey about as often.
I don't think I've ever been to a health-nut section, unless you're referring to the fruit and vegetables ;-)
So, if you don't know how to cook "healthy stuff": buy a recipe book. I don't know what's available in the US, but I have a few I like (from the UK). I got them mostly for ideas rather than method (I know how to cook, so I tend to forget I'm supposed to be following the method after about 10 minutes). One has quick meals to cook in a single pot, another is a vegan book (I've had lots of ideas from this, I often use them as side-dishes or add non-vegan ingredients).
Haven't found cheap steel cut oats either. Walmart has a quart size can of them for about $4.00.
I had to look up "steel cut oats", I think I'd call them wholegrain oats, or unprocessed oats, or Scottish/Irish oats, the kind to make porridge from. They're £1.20 / kg for a mid-range brand here, or 75p/kg for cheap (Asda) ones, which are probably a bit dusty.
Measuring a dry product by volume is completely alien to me, but I looked up the density (300kg/m^3, so 0.3kg/L ~= 0.3kg/quart, so your "quart sized can" (litre) is about $13 / kg, £8/kg! Mad!
Why are such basic foods so expensive in America?
The UK also has the Human Rights Act (the UK act), which codifies the ECHR into law -- "British"* law, enforced by a British court. I think it's an excellent set of rights, but unfortunately, the Daily Mail doesn't like it.
* English & Welsh, whatever
Why does it have to be about the money?
If it costs us *more* I'd still rather have an elected head of state.
No doubt a dictatorship would also be cheaper to run. None of those expensive elections...
Republic: http://republic.org.uk/ campaign for that.
I might be a member, I can't remember. I went to their protest during the wedding last year, anyway, and they seem to be getting more press and attention because of the jubilee (and the ever-encroaching threat of King Charles III).
Your statement about tourism has been answered, but also remember the *huge* income from the "Crown Estate" -- land that "belongs" to the royal family, and from which they are allowed to keep all the income. The Duchy of Cornwall is one big example, but there's also lots of land in big cities that would, in a republic, create revenue for the Treasury.
I use a laptop for development (I'd prefer a desktop, but apparently someone thought hi-spec laptops were a better idea). At work, it spends 99% of it's life plugged into a couple of large monitors.
AIUI, health and safety regulations in the UK effectively prohibit anyone spending lots of time hunched over a laptop screen:
Some of the design features on laptops and other portable computers can make them uncomfortable to use for long periods. Employees shouldn't routinely use laptops where full-sized equipment is available or should be provided with a laptop docking station so that they can work with a full-sized keyboard and screen.
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1073793590&type=RESOURCES
I take it you don't frequent many bars, do you....?
I can only think of a couple of places with a jukebox. It's probably a regional thing, but here in London most of the places I go to have a DJ, or (more often) some CDs/MP3 player/small computer behind the bar, operated only by the staff.
When I was a student, the student union bar had an "Internet jukebox", which had pretty much everything obscure that the Rock and Metal Society managed to search for, but nowhere near everything Goth Society listened to. However, that was about 4 years ago.
I don't think enough people in the UK would have been using computers back before they could reliably produce "£" for it to affect the language. It was easy to localise a computer for something like this -- at worst, just change the picture on the keyboard and the font bitmap for the corresponding character on the output device.
In Britain if people can't type £ they generally write "pounds", GBP, UKP, L or even $. Writing # makes no more sense than using &, * or @. (Except, perhaps, that # has no meaning at all.)
Except in the UK, where they tend to refer to it as "square". Which is perhaps even more bizarre.
Do you live here? I've only ever heard it called "hash".
(Worst citation ever: A UK Yahoo! answers post: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091206143109AAzb2iQ repeating the "joke" "For drugs, press the hash key.")
Whatever happened to calling it the pound sign? Or is that just a telecom thing?
It's called "hash" in British English (and probably Australia, NZ, etc). I've never heard it called anything else here.
"Pound" might mean money or old-fashioned weight. "Pound sign" "pound key" will always mean £, since the weight is always written "lb".
And here it's always "Item No. 3" rather than "Item #3".
What are some of the big issues dividing the Dems and Repubs: Abortion rights, gay marriage, etc. They are social issues, not economic issues. In other countries these things are not discussed in the context of political affiliation. .
Exactly. The current government in the UK (which is mostly the Conservative party (305 MPs), with a few Liberal Democrats (57)) is being accused in the conservative media of focussing too much on social issues, like gay marriage.
But the argument is not that gay people shouldn't be able to get married -- I'm not certain, but I think the proposal for change has come from the conservative part of the coalition government. Instead, some bits of media are complaining that debating time in Parliament should be spent fixing the economy, as that's more important.
(The government says they have time for both.)
This article further backs up what you wrote: (the Telegraph is the most right-wing/conservative of the "proper" newspapers, i.e. it's a big newspaper not full of pictures, celebrities, the royal family or sport.)
In America this week, David Cameron will see a Republican Party expending a great deal of time and energy deciding how, precisely, it will lose the presidential election in November. As fractious as the Tory tribe can be, it has nothing on the GOP in 2012 for splits, disaggregation and pointless introspection.
Nor has British party politics been infected thus far by the culture wars that have so disfigured American politics, or the “God gap” – the chasm between secular voters and those whose religion guides their electoral behaviour.
IIRC the British equivalent is Norfolk.
Origin of the term "Normal for Norfolk", look it up ;-)
I'll come clean and admin I'm ¼ Norfolkish (?). At the last family gathering my great aunt, from Norfolk, said it was unfair how people made fun of Norfolk. Her younger brother, my great uncle, agreed.
My grandma, the oldest by about 5 years, then listed four couples. ... "And Mr. ..."
Grandma: "Don't you remember old Charles the butcher? And Esme."
G. Aunt: "Oh yes, they were a strange couple. Did they ever get married?"
Grandma: "No. Esme was Charles' cousin."
"And Mr Pitchin and Miss Ethlewhite"
I think the great aunt and great uncle had left Norfolk before they were old enough to be aware of such matters.
While you're right, I think the cookie thing was an EU sponsored piece of legislation.
Although our wonderful media often overlooks it, remember that British MEPs probably voted in favour of the legislation (I'm sure it should be linked somewhere from here, but I can't find the voting record).
(Also, I think it's a decent bit of legislation. I don't want my visit to a newspaper website to be known about (and tracked) by 10 third-party companies, like ad networks and Facebook etc.)
Plus, US Customs can't confiscate your laptop and detain you without probable cause because you didn't want to be x-rayed by a security guard if you never go there in the first place.
And you won't have your balls fondled by the TSA.
I went through security in America with long hair and unusual cloths. I thought the treatment I got was unusual because of that, but it turns out it's normal.
I went for business, and spent about $5000. I'd rather that had gone to a country that values personal freedom.
In addition to the points raised by the other replies, if 5W of power can be saved per person -- perhaps by mandating that standby power consumption of home electronics can be reduced -- then in a country of 50M people that's 250MW. That's a small fossil-fuel power plant, or a large wind/solar plant, which no longer needs to be built.
You're missing the point.
Agreed. I now agree with you.
But I think a lot of people complain about the news being "London centric" when it isn't really. The actual London-centric news is about public transport, the mayor, schools, knife crime etc, and people outside SE England are rarely aware of much of this.
English viewers have *their* national Education, Health and Policing stories covered during the "UK" wide 6 o'clock news
Although, Scottish MPs do get to vote on those matters...
So, if the modern day equivalent is loading more slowly and providing less, then it's due to a clear lack of caring at all about the service, I'd say than anything about the technology. There's more than enough bandwidth available, and you don't have to constantly replay all the content for everybody on the hopes that anybody would see it, like the broadcast model. You only have to serve it on demand.
You do have to constantly replay it, it's still a broadcast model. In the digital TV stream (as implemented for DVB, but I assume it's pretty similar for the American thing) packets are broadcast, of which the vast majority are video/audio, a very few are the EPG (constantly repeated), and a few are "interactive" services (text, etc). There's nowhere for it to request data from, it's a listen-only broadcast service.
In fact, the situation is that Scotland gets the UK 6 o'clock news- including much that is irrelevant to us- followed by Scotland-wide (non-local) news that fills in the gaps to some extent. The English get the same 6 o'clock news- except that it's mostly relevant to them, so they don't *need* an England-specific bulletin- followed by half an hour of true local news (which Scotland doesn't get). But Scotland is getting "special" treatment and the better deal because it has its own news programme apparently. *cough*
Scotland has a population of 5.2 million.
London has a population of 7.8 million.
The West Midlands has 5.2 million.
The East Midlands has 4.1 million.
It seems Scotland gets a reasonably good deal for it's local news, if we assume the amount of newsworthy activity generated per person is similar.
(Note that London has it's own "parliament", the London Assembly.)
Was teletext ever used to relay emergency information?
No. Natural disasters tend to be pretty tame compared to what you get in North America. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_in_the_British_Isles
BBC Radio 4 broadcasts in digital, FM and longwave. They could broadcast something. Alternatively, for flood warnings (which is the most common problem) local radio stations would probably broadcast something -- even if it were just part of the normal weather report.
I knew an Aussie living in Edinburgh in 1995 who "watched" the Ashes on Ceefax.
My dad would regularly "watch" sport (football, cricket, rugby, snooker) on Ceefax.
There were sometimes special pages, where almost all of the page was transparent except a couple of lines at the bottom showing the cricket score, so you could watch the football on another channel. But more often that not, he'd read a magazine while glancing up at the Ceefax screen every few minutes to see if England had lost another wicket.
I that that would be with the Connect service on, but we unplug it when it's not being used anyway, especially since it's probably only used every month or so anyway.
Over a year, it would cost me between £11 and £16 if left on standby all the time.
The rest of the appliances around the TV are new enough that they have EU-mandated actual power buttons, but a smart power board is a good (sometimes better) alternative.
(Hmm... before anyone thinks I'm an idiot, I meant to write, "That's a huge amount while on standby, compared to almost everything else in the house".
For several years in a row when the Wii was at it's popularity peak, the greenpeace "report card" gave Nintendo a failing grade
Do you own a Wii and a power consumption meter? I do (my electricity supplier gave me the meter, the government required it. It's supposed to help people reduce consumption).
Anyway, the Wii uses about 10-15W while on standby (I can't remember how much exactly). That's a huge amount, compared to almost everything else in the house. My bedroom is lit with less power!