Ah, I didn't realize. I assume they're still used for major transactions like buying a car or something?
I live in the USA, but aside from rent and occasionally paying a friend for something expensive I haven't used a check since graduation except to pay rent and buy my car.
I switched banks a couple of months ago, and it's just occured to me that I didn't receive a chequebook. Perhaps I would need to request it. The previous account (opened ~6 years ago) sent me one automatically, though I only used three of them. This time, all my direct debits, saved accouts (mostly friends I've sent money to) were transferred automatically, and a redirect to the new account made for my salary.
I would use a debit card to buy a car. It's far more secure for both me and the vendor. It's less clear what the best way to buy a used card from an individual is.
Rent is paid electronically, set up either online or by filling in a form at a bank.
It depends. If they paid online, a charge-back is easy. For "card not present" transactions, charge-backs are almost automatic, and the merchant has little recourse. If the physical card was used at the hotel, then it will be much harder.
Since it's a British card, so has a chip, even if the owner authorised (using his PIN) the cost of the room at the hotel using the card, they won't have authorised the subsequent £100 charge.
"The Broadway Hotel's booking policy reads (in small print),...."
I'm betting these nice patrons read that as carefully as you did. The first time.
TFA says they booked through Booking.com -- on their page for the hotel I don't see any fine print with those words. They may have changed it today. They have a note about disabled access.
It's clearly an unfair contract term anyway. Would you agree to it if it was explicit? No -- it's intentionally hidden away in the small print.
If you agree we need a railway, then making it high speed shouldn't cost much more than not. (At least, that's the theory. I'm not interested enough to get past all the biased websites and find some facts.)
I wouldn't be surprised if some people do start commuting from Manchester to London, or working for part of the week in both cities. A few people already commute from Leicester, which is 70 minutes from London. You're sure to get a seat, so it isn't necessarily wasted time. Last time I passed through St Pancras there were adverts for commuter houses in Northamtonshire. Weekly commuting is probably more common. Two colleagues spend the weekends in York and Truro, respectively.
Regenerative braking requires very little extra equipment, the electric motors are used as generators and the power produced put back into the electric supply (overhead wires).
The alternative is simply dumping the generated power to a grid of resistors, which some diesel trains do, as it reduces wear on brake pads.
How about a compromise? Make the last mile providers utilities and require them to allow other ISPs to sell on their infrastructure. Since the infrastructure in many areas was a government granted monopoly when it was put in, regulate the rates that they can charge ISPs, but let the ISPs compete on prices, speeds and features. I remember when DSL was this way and I thought it worked pretty well.
And then you'll get the situation we have in Canada [which is bad]
Or you might get the situation in the UK, where I can choose from a wide range of providers at a wide range of prices and service levels. A few lay their own fibre and connections, most of the better ones lay fibre to the phone exchanges and have some routing equipment inside, the cheap ones lease everything from BT and save money (compared to BT) with customer service and usage limits (but plenty for my grandma, who pays £2.50/month or so for a few GB to check her email and chat on Skype).
The tiny sums mentioned in the article were a surprise. If it can be that cheap to make significant progress on such an intractable problem, imagine what some serious dough could do! Christopher and Dana Reeve foundation have some resources.
That might not be the total cost. I tried to find what that was, and who funded it, but can't. I got as far as the sources of support for the research department: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ion/depa... -- but the actual operation was done in Poland, and I think going further might require reading Polish.
Nice to see breakthrough research like this coming from a single-payer healthcare system like the UK. When people start saying that the only places that can afford groundbreaking medical research are the ones where the "customers" pay a fortune, it'll be good to be able to point them to things like this.
"The lack of financial incentive for the pharmaceutical industry could help explain why it has taken so long for the research to get this far. Using a patient's own cells to heal them means there is no profit for the pharmaceutical industry."
But I'm not sure where the funding did come from, some at least came from the Polish government. The scientist mentioned in the BBC article works at UCL (University College London), which has a large NHS teaching/research hospital (UCLH), but it won't necessarily be 100% NHS funding for this work. I think this is the paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.3727/0963... .
It would be horrible if GCHQ had ANY anonymous tube traveller so you did them the favor to show your Papiere.
Is there any practical difference between using an Oyster card automatically topped up from a credit card, and using the credit card directly? I doubt it.
The new (year-old) £50 has probably removed some problems, it has the modern security features that the previous one lacked. I haven't used one myself, I rarely have more than £80 in my wallet.
Occasionally cash machines in Germany (and elsewhere) will dispense €50s and even €100s. I have withdrawn €100 (one note), walked into a nightclub and apologised while buying a cola. The bartender didn't see a problem.
Last time I was in Italy the local supermarket was a bit like Harrods, and the man in front of me paid about €545 for his wine^Wshopping in three €200s. The cashier did check them with a machine, but not the €50 he handed over to make the change nicer.
I use my contactless card a lot, since my shopping is rarely over £20. I've bought lots of £1.45 bus / tube fares (in London). The cheapest thing was probably around £1 from the local Tesco. Or €1.50 for a drink in a museum in Amsterdam (that was mostly seeing if it worked).
Taking that many GW-hrs of production offline for that length of time is a serious outage.
It's still summer here, so there's probably lots of space capacity elsewhere. Few homes have air conditioning, the outside temperature tomorrow is forecast to peak at 21C in London. August is the month with the lowest demand.
I'm on a driverless train right now, the Docklands Light Railway on London. It's been running without a driver since 1987, the one accident was minor, and under manual override.
A Wikipedia list was posted above of similar systems.
In London it's not necessary to talk to bus drivers. The fare is a flat rate (£1.45) regardless of distance and cash isn't accepted, only smartcard, credit card and some other prepayment method.
I, for one, will NEVER ride in or own a vehicle that does not have a steering wheel, foot-actuated throttle pedal, foot-actuated brake pedal, foot-actuated clutch pedal (where applicable), gear selector lever, etc. and I know I'm not alone in this. I don't care HOW foolproof they make them. I will NEVER put my life in the hands of some programmer or team of programmers, not even if they're riding in the car with me.
Have you ever used a train, including a metro train? A good many are electronically controlled (rather than levers etc), and -- especially on metro systems -- many have no more input from a driver than a "ready to proceed" button. Some don't even need the driver to press the button -- usually when there's not a union in the way. Signalling systems have been electronic for ages.
(Yes, cars are a lot more complicated -- but automatic trains have been running since the 1980s.)
In fact, above 55 mph or so, the rates of injuries and fatalities in accidents mostly plateaus; that is to say, a wreck at 85 mph is not significantly more dangerous than one at 65.
Nonsense. Stopping distance at 55mph is 350ft, at 85mph it's 530ft.
190ft of the latter is "thinking distance", so at 85mph you'll hit close-ahead obstacles at full speed. (e.g. obstacle 200ft away, 85mph collision at 85mph, ~30mph (guessing) if you were at 55mph).
London... it sucks the life (jobs, investment, infrastructure) out of the rest of the country, which is only partly compensated for by the large tax revenue it provides
Not really. Tax revenue from London subsidises the rest of the country. But, it's a load of bankers stealing money -- it would be more accurate to say they suck money out of the whole world. Perhaps the City of London should investigate the numerous tax-avoiding companies headquartered there...
3. Maximum dissemination. The museum digitizes its works and makes them available in as many places as possible under a permissive license: its own website, archival repositories run by nonprofits and state institutions, Wikimedia, archive.org, news agency file-photo catalogues, etc. The goal is to fulfill its public mission of dissemination/education as widely as possible, and perhaps also achieve some advertising for the museum's collections and the works/artists it conserves, by ensuring that its works are the ones most likely to be used as illustrative examples in Wikipedia articles, books, newspaper/magazine articles, etc.
This project seems to have come out of the Europeana project, which aims to make a single portal with images/sounds/videos of all European museum collection objects: http://europeana.eu/
I'd like to know what Wikimedia would think of the sheer volume of data that's there -- would they really want, say, 14 million high resolution photographs of beetles?
("Maximum lockdown" is often a result of cuts to other sources of funding, e.g. public subsidy.)
But what really happens is the book is printed in Germany, sold to Amazon in Luxembourg, sold to someone in France, and all the profit funneled through Netherlands and/or Ireland, where is somehow becomes no profit and hence no tax due.
I learnt German and French at school, so I know how to learn a language, particularly European ones. I don't recall being frustrated with not knowing why I was wrong. Screenshot of the app showing the same mistake: http://imgur.com/8YzOYof
I found the mobile app really useful for learning some Spanish before going on holiday to South America earlier this year. One press turns off the microphone exercises, either permanently or for the next hour.
Slashdot Mirror
Rails never had 'steam'. (I supose you mean something else than that digi-distro-channel by Valve)
A steam locomotive. When it runs out of steam, it stops. (Wording chosen for the pun with Rails.)
Ah, I didn't realize. I assume they're still used for major transactions like buying a car or something?
I live in the USA, but aside from rent and occasionally paying a friend for something expensive I haven't used a check since graduation except to pay rent and buy my car.
I switched banks a couple of months ago, and it's just occured to me that I didn't receive a chequebook. Perhaps I would need to request it. The previous account (opened ~6 years ago) sent me one automatically, though I only used three of them. This time, all my direct debits, saved accouts (mostly friends I've sent money to) were transferred automatically, and a redirect to the new account made for my salary.
I would use a debit card to buy a car. It's far more secure for both me and the vendor. It's less clear what the best way to buy a used card from an individual is.
Rent is paid electronically, set up either online or by filling in a form at a bank.
There are plenty of photos on Tripadvisor, and they're not nice. (e.g. mouldy socks left in a drawer, chunks of damp plaster falling off walls.)
It depends. If they paid online, a charge-back is easy. For "card not present" transactions, charge-backs are almost automatic, and the merchant has little recourse. If the physical card was used at the hotel, then it will be much harder.
Since it's a British card, so has a chip, even if the owner authorised (using his PIN) the cost of the room at the hotel using the card, they won't have authorised the subsequent £100 charge.
FTFA:
"The Broadway Hotel's booking policy reads (in small print), ...."
I'm betting these nice patrons read that as carefully as you did. The first time.
TFA says they booked through Booking.com -- on their page for the hotel I don't see any fine print with those words. They may have changed it today. They have a note about disabled access.
It's clearly an unfair contract term anyway. Would you agree to it if it was explicit? No -- it's intentionally hidden away in the small print.
If you agree we need a railway, then making it high speed shouldn't cost much more than not. (At least, that's the theory. I'm not interested enough to get past all the biased websites and find some facts.)
I wouldn't be surprised if some people do start commuting from Manchester to London, or working for part of the week in both cities. A few people already commute from Leicester, which is 70 minutes from London. You're sure to get a seat, so it isn't necessarily wasted time. Last time I passed through St Pancras there were adverts for commuter houses in Northamtonshire. Weekly commuting is probably more common. Two colleagues spend the weekends in York and Truro, respectively.
Regenerative braking requires very little extra equipment, the electric motors are used as generators and the power produced put back into the electric supply (overhead wires).
The alternative is simply dumping the generated power to a grid of resistors, which some diesel trains do, as it reduces wear on brake pads.
Unless you can find a way to network breastfeeding or find a way to run Lunix on it, I don't see how the topic is appropriate for /.
The interest is using Amazon Turk for a quick survey.
How about a compromise? Make the last mile providers utilities and require them to allow other ISPs to sell on their infrastructure. Since the infrastructure in many areas was a government granted monopoly when it was put in, regulate the rates that they can charge ISPs, but let the ISPs compete on prices, speeds and features. I remember when DSL was this way and I thought it worked pretty well.
And then you'll get the situation we have in Canada [which is bad]
Or you might get the situation in the UK, where I can choose from a wide range of providers at a wide range of prices and service levels. A few lay their own fibre and connections, most of the better ones lay fibre to the phone exchanges and have some routing equipment inside, the cheap ones lease everything from BT and save money (compared to BT) with customer service and usage limits (but plenty for my grandma, who pays £2.50/month or so for a few GB to check her email and chat on Skype).
The tiny sums mentioned in the article were a surprise. If it can be that cheap to make significant progress on such an intractable problem, imagine what some serious dough could do! Christopher and Dana Reeve foundation have some resources.
That might not be the total cost. I tried to find what that was, and who funded it, but can't. I got as far as the sources of support for the research department: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ion/depa... -- but the actual operation was done in Poland, and I think going further might require reading Polish.
Nice to see breakthrough research like this coming from a single-payer healthcare system like the UK. When people start saying that the only places that can afford groundbreaking medical research are the ones where the "customers" pay a fortune, it'll be good to be able to point them to things like this.
According to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/heal...
"The lack of financial incentive for the pharmaceutical industry could help explain why it has taken so long for the research to get this far. Using a patient's own cells to heal them means there is no profit for the pharmaceutical industry."
But I'm not sure where the funding did come from, some at least came from the Polish government. The scientist mentioned in the BBC article works at UCL (University College London), which has a large NHS teaching/research hospital (UCLH), but it won't necessarily be 100% NHS funding for this work. I think this is the paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.3727/0963... .
I can't find a single place "advertising" all the research the NHS funds. Here's a couple of sites: http://www.uclh.nhs.uk/researc... http://www.imperial.nhs.uk/res...
Gambling is much more common in the UK, most activity is legal (and taxed), and the problems are treated roughly as alcohol problems are.
It would be horrible if GCHQ had ANY anonymous tube traveller so you did them the favor to show your Papiere.
Is there any practical difference between using an Oyster card automatically topped up from a credit card, and using the credit card directly? I doubt it.
The new (year-old) £50 has probably removed some problems, it has the modern security features that the previous one lacked. I haven't used one myself, I rarely have more than £80 in my wallet.
Occasionally cash machines in Germany (and elsewhere) will dispense €50s and even €100s. I have withdrawn €100 (one note), walked into a nightclub and apologised while buying a cola. The bartender didn't see a problem.
Last time I was in Italy the local supermarket was a bit like Harrods, and the man in front of me paid about €545 for his wine^Wshopping in three €200s. The cashier did check them with a machine, but not the €50 he handed over to make the change nicer.
I use my contactless card a lot, since my shopping is rarely over £20. I've bought lots of £1.45 bus / tube fares (in London). The cheapest thing was probably around £1 from the local Tesco. Or €1.50 for a drink in a museum in Amsterdam (that was mostly seeing if it worked).
In general, Britain has an anti-sneak culture, so I doubt many people would literally report their neighbour. It's more likely to be general nosiness.
I could believe people check on their neighbour, find they haven't paid, but only grumble to their friends and other neighbours.
I use a fountain pen (or three, with black, blue and some other colour).
I find it much more comfortable to write with, compared to a ballpoint pen.
Taking that many GW-hrs of production offline for that length of time is a serious outage.
It's still summer here, so there's probably lots of space capacity elsewhere. Few homes have air conditioning, the outside temperature tomorrow is forecast to peak at 21C in London. August is the month with the lowest demand.
There are some graphs and dials here: http://www.gridwatch.templar.c...
I'm surprised nuclear power varies over the year -- does anyone know why?
I'm on a driverless train right now, the Docklands Light Railway on London. It's been running without a driver since 1987, the one accident was minor, and under manual override.
A Wikipedia list was posted above of similar systems.
In London it's not necessary to talk to bus drivers. The fare is a flat rate (£1.45) regardless of distance and cash isn't accepted, only smartcard, credit card and some other prepayment method.
I, for one, will NEVER ride in or own a vehicle that does not have a steering wheel, foot-actuated throttle pedal, foot-actuated brake pedal, foot-actuated clutch pedal (where applicable), gear selector lever, etc. and I know I'm not alone in this. I don't care HOW foolproof they make them. I will NEVER put my life in the hands of some programmer or team of programmers, not even if they're riding in the car with me.
Have you ever used a train, including a metro train? A good many are electronically controlled (rather than levers etc), and -- especially on metro systems -- many have no more input from a driver than a "ready to proceed" button. Some don't even need the driver to press the button -- usually when there's not a union in the way. Signalling systems have been electronic for ages.
(Yes, cars are a lot more complicated -- but automatic trains have been running since the 1980s.)
In fact, above 55 mph or so, the rates of injuries and fatalities in accidents mostly plateaus; that is to say, a wreck at 85 mph is not significantly more dangerous than one at 65.
Nonsense. Stopping distance at 55mph is 350ft, at 85mph it's 530ft.
190ft of the latter is "thinking distance", so at 85mph you'll hit close-ahead obstacles at full speed. (e.g. obstacle 200ft away, 85mph collision at 85mph, ~30mph (guessing) if you were at 55mph).
London ... it sucks the life (jobs, investment, infrastructure) out of the rest of the country, which is only partly compensated for by the large tax revenue it provides
Not really. Tax revenue from London subsidises the rest of the country. But, it's a load of bankers stealing money -- it would be more accurate to say they suck money out of the whole world. Perhaps the City of London should investigate the numerous tax-avoiding companies headquartered there...
3. Maximum dissemination. The museum digitizes its works and makes them available in as many places as possible under a permissive license: its own website, archival repositories run by nonprofits and state institutions, Wikimedia, archive.org, news agency file-photo catalogues, etc. The goal is to fulfill its public mission of dissemination/education as widely as possible, and perhaps also achieve some advertising for the museum's collections and the works/artists it conserves, by ensuring that its works are the ones most likely to be used as illustrative examples in Wikipedia articles, books, newspaper/magazine articles, etc.
This project seems to have come out of the Europeana project, which aims to make a single portal with images/sounds/videos of all European museum collection objects: http://europeana.eu/
I'd like to know what Wikimedia would think of the sheer volume of data that's there -- would they really want, say, 14 million high resolution photographs of beetles?
("Maximum lockdown" is often a result of cuts to other sources of funding, e.g. public subsidy.)
In that case, France would charge an import tax.
But what really happens is the book is printed in Germany, sold to Amazon in Luxembourg, sold to someone in France, and all the profit funneled through Netherlands and/or Ireland, where is somehow becomes no profit and hence no tax due.
I learnt German and French at school, so I know how to learn a language, particularly European ones. I don't recall being frustrated with not knowing why I was wrong. Screenshot of the app showing the same mistake: http://imgur.com/8YzOYof
I found the mobile app really useful for learning some Spanish before going on holiday to South America earlier this year. One press turns off the microphone exercises, either permanently or for the next hour.