Posts by PJI
80 posts • joined Thursday 25th June 2009 22:10 GMT
Pardon?
"different ... THAN...? Aaaaargh.
As any English speaker knows, it is "different FROM" and "similar TO". Just think, would you say, "X differs FROM Y" or "X differs THAN Y" or "X differs TO Y"? Americans do use a lot of German and Yiddish (a sort of mixed up German plus others) grammar. American is, after all, English spoken by foreigners. As English speakers, we can still speak English or try to.at any rate.
Re: Unkempt and dirty
Umm, re sandpaper: actually, though clean shaven just now, I grow a beard now and then. One of the positive results is that women are pleased NOT to have the sandpaper effect as a full grown beard, even neatly trimmed, is soft, unlike stubble a millimetre or so long.
As for cleanliness: I take it you shave your head and pubis too. Ugh. Do you also prefer men to be hairless all over, insisting on no more hair than on a small baby, shaved chest, legs ..?
Now, all those nice pimples and minor infections in minute cuts from a sharp razor, or the coating of microbes from an inadequately maintained electric razor, that is off-putting.
I think you are sadly lacking in actual knowledge.
Please
I live, now, in a country with ID cards. These are not actually compulsory; but everyone has got one and it is according to an international standard. It means I can cross any borders, enter most countries (even non-EU ones) without fuss (getting into UK is quicker than using my UK passport!). I can do everything without ever having to produce copies of a recent gas bill (except when dealing with UK insurance companies). I have never, ever been asked to show it by a policeman. I am only ever asked under the same circumstances as UK people ask for identification. I have done certain jobs in two countries (including England) where I was required to carry, at all times, an identity card. I survived.
Last year, I wanted to take an internal flight, in England, from Manchester. They demanded a form of identity with my photograph. A driving licence was not acceptable. I was given no notice. Fortunately I had my identity card. I asked what they would do if not, answer: then you can not fiy. I visited my English bank: I proved my identity with the magic photo. card. My children all used to carry passports when they went out as the only way of proving their ages to enter clubs, buy drink and so on. This was expensive. They wore out the standard passports in no time.
You live in a country where they photograph you non-stop, where if a DNA sample is taken for any reason it is retained for years, where rather trivial, everyday transactions expect you to carry photographic proof of who you are. You live in a country that refused to join Schengen, while accepting more non-European immigrants than the rest put together, so you have to show passports even for a day trip to France. (I just walk across the border, never asked most of the time. If so, I've got this tiny card, if I remember to put it in my wallet). You do not trust politicians, whom you elect and can throw out; but you happily sign up to Google or Facebook and trust a commercial company, whose living is advertising, that is foreign owned and so beyond the law, not to misuse the information. You let credit companies keep the most outrageous details, true and false.
Get over it: persuade the government to produce a functional card that does not try to carry your whole life on a chip and use it to reduce the daily bother and restore some of the freedom of movement that you once had.
Do n't bleat about not trusting politicians. You elected them; you joined their parties or ignored their antics. Get off your bottoms and take part in democracy at every level. Tell commercial entities to take a running jump when they demand photocopies of a recent bank statement or bill (to me these are more personal than anything on my identity card). Stop complaining about illegal immigrants if you are not prepared for even the most basic means of identifying them (not that it really stops them).
GB is one of the most watched, controlled, surveilled countries in the world. Get one, basic form of identity and fight the "informal", all pervasive stuff to show yuo have proved who you are.
I do wonder, did you all refuse to get birth certificates for your children? Death certificates for the deceased? National Insurance numbers?
As for cost: you are the electorate. You've got directly elected MPs and councillors. Sort it out.
Re: I'm just waiting
You can set osx to do it. Of course, using an X wm on osx also gives it.
Extraordinary
20% use them for business, however you define that. 31% of people got help to buy from their employers! In a long working life with various firms in various countries, the most I ever encountered was getting help with the bill for an Internet connection, so I could be on standb y at home out of working hours. I think this is an astonishing success for a consumer device.
As for the fans of the failed net books. What are such inflexible dinosaurs doing here?
Re: Netbooks are dead
I had thought, after seeing the average netbook and other, smaller form laptops, that the 11" Air would be too small, until I saw one and played with it and spoke to others who have bought one. It's rather impressive and now I may have to reconsider my hard and fast decision to buy at least a 14". That smaller size seems to be remarkably readable, powerful and useful and, of course, wonderfully portable.
Re: Sounds familiar
Er, you need to get out a bit. Hardware, not software and illegal with or without patents plus direct fraud against both customer and supplier.
As for the licences nonsense: you write like an anti-Apple, pro-Google type. You may be unaware of the origins of Linux or the GNU tools that make it useable (shell, utilities, compilers) and other software and where that comes from (including BSD actually) or of the many, unpaid or paid by private company developers, maintainers, debuggers etc. who still tinker with the system and its utilities while Google, Nokia, Redhat and others use their work. I think you will find the various BSD variants come from sources that have a few years (up to thirty?) of looking after themselves and have been happy for it to be used by OSX, nee Next and various dedicated and general systems, for longer than you have been alive (not sure if you are alive or just a robot troll).
Even UNIX built on ideas from Multics and other operating systems, while C was a development from B (I think from Cambridge U., England). So now what do you want to do? Write your own system, from scratch, using no hardware or software ever known before?
Re: Photocopy
Even your courses sound dull. I did not go to university to complete an apprenticeship. I wanted to learn principles, ideas, problem solving so that I could come to grips with future problems, develope ideas, change direction if necessary. Write an ecommerce application? Ugh. My ambitions go a little higher than being a programmer. Now, designing, in detail, with user interfaces, justification, research some hitherto unthought of idea for some really useful task (other than quicker ways to take someone's money), e.g. in cooperation with the biology or foreign languages or architecture or physics or archaeology departments as real "clients". And all you can think about, as a student, is how to write exercises for ecommerce or assembling a circuit board. No wonder the quality of so much computing today is so low.
But then I have a wonderful advantage, by chance: informatics is my fourth career (albeit too long in it now) and had real experience of a life without it. To the amazement of some people, that really is possible, even normal. That experience makes one a far better designer and implementer than the best university apprenticeship-style informatics course where one is taught in isolation from the rest of the world according to the ideas of academics similarly narrow in their experience.
So, the real problem is that students are just bored to tears. It is well known in almost every teaching place and by every tutor that one learns more deeply and faster "through the hand, pen and paper". You can do all the exercises you like learning, say, Spanish grammar, on the computer. But having to write a correct sentence by hand will teach more effectively and more quickly than an hour of ticking multiple choice boxes or selecting from a menu or even typing into the space. Somehow, the hand - brain connection is just more effective.
Of course, Powerpoint is just dull. One sees a thousand, all looking essentially the same and most fairly content-free, apart from pretty effects and lots of circles, squares, arrows and no time to understand what is meant, if anything.
Re: So what, would you rather be blown up?
The chance of being harmed by these "enemies", to the extent that they exist in the form and with the capabilities spread by propaganda on all sides, is rather a lot lower than the chance that an official will misuse information for his own or his employer's purposes or just out of incompetent assessment of you as a criminal, child molester or "enemy of hte state".
Like many Britons, I lived a signficant part of my life, in Britain, even in a job that was more exposed than most, during the height of N. Irish troubles, when some 2000 or more people were killed in the British Isles. Living in London, three bombs exploded near my flat at different times. Tourists died messily in the Tower of London, children were killed in Liverpool. Lovely. Funnily enough we survived without massive restrictions nor even intrusive searches of luggage or people boarding aeroplanes or trains. We took a little risk and preserved immense, personal freedom.
I think the balance was right and is worth the risk. Anything else is much less than "freedom". We have lost that freedom now, at the behest of people, who seem to think that any risk must be removed at any cost, while getting into their cars or onto their motorbikes to experience far greater risk to themselves and to others.
Re: Paid? Some school techs are simply "volunteers"!
Is Apple so evil? Microsoft did it. Heavens, AT&T or Bell labs. or whoever it was at the time gave UNIX to Berkely and now look where we are, or are you all UNIX haters as well? Suppose so, as OS X is BSD based, must be bad.
Some in this forum even argue it must be Linux and open source only, to indoctrinate the children in those.
Leave fantasy behind: of course firms give bargains for long term gain as well as generosity. I wonder, do you all work for nothing?
Re: We're fat, wasteful and decadent.
Healthier? That must be why people today are living longer by several years, are staying active physically and mentally to an age when our great grandparents were considered old and infirm if still alive with false teeth and ulcers, when infant, child and maternal mortality was a normal, everyday fact of life and malnutrition was a debilitating factor for much of the working class population. There was a good reason for the introduction of state pensions and the National Health Service after the Second World War.
Re: Apple Lock-In
Well well. It's how UNIX got going: BSD was the improved version of the basic UNIX, given away for the cost of the tape, to universities in USA and now, here we are with UNIX, Linux etc...
Do you think teaching institutions pay full price for Microsoft products? Even I get MS Office free through a scheme MS has set up with the bank that employs me - well, free for Windows, a very low price for OS X.
How else do you think MS PCs got such a foothold in schools and business?
Patter?
Ywa: your are a cheapskate who under-specs to save money and spends more later to rectify your mistake. Classic pattern for those who buy cheap and pay dear.
And the developer?
Do you work for nothing? So who pays the developer, provides the shop advertising and management to get his/her goods onto the market and collects his fee?
I gather that this "monopoly" must be why IOS developers are said to make more money and provide more secure apps than the alternatives, as well as have a better, more consistent development platform and target.
As a matter of interest, I wonder how much a decent quality, for example, Android app costs the developer to produce, advertise, sell, maintain. distribute updates and collect income, in comparison with such for IOS. From a working (as opposed to hobby) developer viewpoint, what platform for him is most profitable? I am not interested in rants about Apple's fees, insistence on meeting its rules etc., just on actual figures and facts for the serious, high quality developer/software engineer.
Re: I'm no expert, but...
Only by those without the wit or ability to get one themselves.
Re: Browser agents
Do tell, is ignorance really bliss? I've got Opera and a couple of other browsers on my iPhone, as well as Safari, just for fun and in case some sites are awkward. However, Safari is first choice as it seems the pleasantest to use and generally most capable.
Why do n't people check their facts before broadcasting their ignorant prejudices? Where did you get your idea that there is only one browser for the iPhone?
Re: Didn't Apple drop support on older phones?
No. Not unless the 3G is less than two years old.
Re: So I'm descended from an ancient turkey?
The Danelaw was not insignificant. Over half of modern England was under Viking control and extensive settlement with Danish kings such as Knut. York was a very important Viking city. So English was heavily marked e.g. "Th" words and much grammar, Geordie and Cumbrian., Manx parliament.
Language tends to adapt to the dominant culture, even in computing. Look at the sad effect of American media on English or even German For centuries the ruling class spoke Norman French, the courts and church used Latin and French and the rest spoke 'English'. The English before the conquest was more or less mutually intelligible with the speech of Scandinavia, Netherlands, N Germany and so on. Even now with some effort you should get the gist of written Dutch or Norwegian. The sounds have moved rather apart as with all dialects and the differing spelling conventions confuse things further.
Re: Not quite
Nonsence. Of the 100 commonest everyday words, 70 or so are Anglo-Saxon. Most of the rest are Norse. then come lots of Norman French, Latin and Greek as well as German etc. of course the N. European languages are closely related and overlapping. The various Celtic languages are scarcely represented apart fro place names. Latin and Greek tend to be used in technical, scientific and legal contexts. But the basics, with grammar simplified as Saxon and Scandinavian invaders and settlers mixed, are not French. food and art are heavily French and Italian.
USA English vocabulary and grammar are strongly influenced by their main immigrant sources, such as ex slaves, East Europe and Yiddish, Hispanic languages and German, resulting in tendencies to new speech patterns, intonation and words as all the immigrants adapt English to their familiar patterns, with a curious retention of some archaic English and Irish forms through separation until modern times.
Linus had certain advantages
University facilities and support plus education. Not having to do a demanding, full time commercial job and no starving if he did not. Rightly he built on existing work and ideas, not least of which are UNIX and MINIX. GNU provided the top layer and much else. BSD provides more.
This does not belittle the work. But it is not a work of great orginality or genius.
The incredible financial support in such cases is: no personal risk, available equipment, technical and academic support, advice and time.
Re: In an occasionally connected world
Added to which: Internet/cloud dependency is all very well for the stay-at-homes and those always near free wi-fi. But you need deep pockets and to stay on the beaten track if you travel at all. Fat lot of good all your maps, pictures and books are in the cloud when you've got no connection or a kb of data costs as much as dinner for one.
Re: ageism
How old are you? 12? Look around when you start work. You may be surprised how many rather good and innovative engineers are older than you. Think about it, idiot. Do you think Linus Torvalds or Tim Berners-lee (about 42 and 57 respectively) are still teenagers or lost their marbles the day they reached 21? Dreadful and unexpected; but the moving spirits behind UNIX, C, shell etc. are about 70, some even old enough to have died of old age, which you will not live long enough to see with your out-dated attitude.
No wonder the quality of young informatics types' code and design is so piss poor if you are that ignorant and rude. You are condemned to repeat the mistakes of your silly forbearers.
An important point missed
This is a terrible precedent that should frighten every one of us.
Like it or not (I do not), it is rather hard to live in the developed world, today, without using credit or debit cards and the banking system. If one wants to own or rent a telephone, travel, rent a car, pay a large bill, do any transaction not face-to-face, fill your car with petrol late at night, pay for a holiday, lots of things, one must use credit cards, debit cards and the banking system.
This makes the privately managed, consumer level financial system more than just some business selling bread or cars or computers; to say that it is private and can do what it likes is ignorant. To all intents and purposes, in most fields, credit and debit cards have replaced money. So the refusal of a provider to give service to customers is akin to banning a customer from using traditional money.
This means that, whatever the alleged (i.e. not tried and proved in a court of law) offence and even for a proved offence, to withdraw access is not comparable with refusing to sell a television or something, as some of the ill-thought-out comments above seem to think. The fact that just about all governments do not prosecute Visa or the banks for processing payments to illegal activities supports this.
It is irrelevant how nice or nasty you think somebody or his activities is. Payment processing by finance companies has become essential to our way of life, to our survival as a society. So, until the USA does apply such strictures to IRA payments, with punishment for all such deeds to date, or to illegal gambling payments or to illegal finance industry speculation payments by whatever means, the victimisation of Assenge is clearly wrong in every sense and a great danger to all of us in the precedent it sets..
Bit earlier than that
I am in late middle age, to put it politely. From the age of about 10 I was taught only metric units, or SI I think we called them. GB made Metric units legal in the mid 19th century (having had proposers of something similar for a couple of centuries before that) and went officially metric in the early 1960s. It is said that only Myanmar, Liberia and USA are not metric. But the first two seem to be increasingly so and even the USA is getting there. Actually, good, old Imperial was formalised as late at the 1840s.
So, get up to date, into the computer age too. If we were all like the anti-metrics, I suppose we would be back in the late Middle Ages, if we were lucky.
Re: Really?
Whereas Capitalism is taking from workers to give more to failed and crooked bankers and speculators who show their loyalty by betting against country and customer.
Re: Really?
The number of nights in the country is something like 60 allowed per year for UK plus other evidence concerning domicile and residence. But, though some commenters seem to. be confused about which country they inhabit, GB is not part of the USA and has a completely different legal and tax system. According to all my American friends, quite a few where I live in continental Europe, they have to complete tax returns every year and pay if required, no matter if they never even set foot in the USA, for ever. In addition, since the latest Swiss problems with USA demands, most banks here will no longer conduct business with them. By the way, the total USA tax level is not that benign and the state gives precious little back for it, depending on which state.
Also, Tax Evasion is illegal. Tax Avoidance is legal, being simply the using of permittied allowances and devices to reduce one's tax assessment
Re: Reg -> English dictionary
When first I lived in England, "bonk" meant, to hit someone, usually playfully on the head. After some years away it had changed to mean the act of sexual intercourse, possibly still playfully. Now the yanks have appropriated it to mean, I think, touching one mobile against another.
Curious. Is this telephone sex?
Re: Nope
But English is fragmented for the very reason you give. American is very different from English as spoken by most English people. Then we have got Indian English ( actually quite a close one to that spoken in England, closer than American as used by the average American), Canadian, Australian, NZ, South African and more. Yes, there is a common core. But very quickly one finds unique words and phrases and different semantics and syntax.
I'm no Java expert; but it does seem highly fragmented in the different libraries etc. for, say, string handling or platforms. Compare Perl or even C or Pyton.
Customer respect.
The thing stinks of some young yank who has been no further than his nearest McD coming up with a clever wheeze.
Somebody should remind them that a lot of customers are over 16 and live a long way from USA. I abhor seeing American spelling and cultural assumptions used in my small country of jnearly 70 millions. I should have thought any yank firm should be able to translate to English just as well as they can to German or different dialects of Spanish, out of respect for customers often paying higher than USA prices.
That good?
They must have improved it!
Re: "In English"?
Except the Telegraph - still preferring Fahrenheit, a good Scandinavian concoction.
I agree. Even I, uncomfortably near pension age, learnt metric or SSI units before going to secondary school and 'O' levels. I was shocked, when accompanying a late thirties or early forties English woman to a skiing shop in Davos to rent kit: when asked her height and weight, she could say it only in feet and inches and in stones: she claimed to be a "remedial maths teacher" in Birmingham.
That, to me, explains a lot about English educational problems. To me, she should not have even known the Imperial measures, let alone used them. What is she teaching those poor children?
User changing system date? Really?
I think he can not have meant that. So, I think, oh, want to be in sync with my friend in Timbuctoo, let's change the system to Timbuctoo time. My wife, son, whoever, logs in to the system, with their own UID and finds the date command and display is "wrong" and dates their files etc., date macros etc. wrongly, breaks make(1) ....
This is a UNIX look-alike. Never heard of the TZ variable? In your own environment you can set that to provide any time zone you like, including one of your own devising, while leaving the system default hopefully set by NTP with a system default time zone, in good order for other users and system programmes that are a bit fussy about time stamps, such as incremental back-ups.
Of course you may have to learn about the shell and so on. But then if you are going to fiddle with system time, one hopes you have done this already, even if you were once an innovative rewriter of a kernel (design was old hat and even the concept of reimplementation had been covered by Minix and others).
Re: Re: This is a developing pattern
If Linux suppliers and advocates really want it to become a mainstream system, chosen by professionals and firms, then of course printers and other peripherals must be controlled. This could be a matter of security (e.g. printing confidential documents on a printer in the wrong department or a public area may be thought to be undesirable, or adding a printer with a scanning+email capability, fax ....) or it could just be money: most firms seem to object to unnecessary, or even vaguely necessary printing in colour on cost grounds. So they restrict the use of colour printers.
Of course, at home, the user can take what risks he likes. But a school, for instance, may well object to some smart-alec adding the printer in the headmaster's office and printing his or her sense of humour-inspired work of genius on it. Yes, there are other, more expensive ways, such as smart cards, subnets etc.; but the simplest way is usually the best They may want to prevent the accidental choice of a printer in the school library for confidential letters to the local council.
I suggest that those who think otherwise need to get a job in a reasonably sized firm or institution, with responsibility for budget or security and get burnt a couple of times. Being wonderful at software or design does not make one an infallible expert in the realities and practicalities of life.
Re: Re: Linux is just a kernel
"Yes and Mac OS is just BSD UNIX with apple-sauce on top."
Which is possibly why it is so good, a real UNIX and not some rehash by a load of variable quality "contributors".
I worked for a while with someone who claimed to have got a bug fix for the ext2 file systems accepted. I have had to correct and extend his code since then; I would not let him provide a fix to "Hallo World".
Re: There are a million ways to over-analyse iOS versus Android market share ...
Think you are either spuddling, thick or ignorant. Numbers apply to profits, not items. Which is still in business, BMW, Rolls Royce, British Leyland, Woolworths? Which is just about the richest firm? Apple? Samsung? LTC? Nokia? Sony?
Sadly, you're right
It is here. Thankfully, you are wrong: why should one "get over it"? How defeatist. The customer is king, remember? If the customer does not like it, it has failed, e.g. Vista. Never, ever "get over it" if you are paying for "it".
Just suffered my first few days of W7 at work (after XP). Horrible is too kind a word. Those fussy, bulky, almost old fashioned-style window borders and scores of options in a ribbon competing for attention and space. So you can 'disable' them, except they reappear as soon as you choose anything. And slow! Aaaaargh!
Thank Heavens OS X is getting leaner and cleaner if anything, for the most part. MS needs some good designers trained in Europe.
Still, W8 should make it even worse, so W7 will be just a short footnote (except for those of us in large firms that have just jumped to w7).
Symbian is excellent at what it does. I heard good things about the (not-Android) Nokia Linux implementation.
Posted in Male dinosaurs failing on social privacy
Re: Re: USA survey covers USA social whores only
Actually I like your reading of the title. Better than what I wrote. Pithy and to the point.
Re: Re: Re: Who owns the data?
Wikipedia? Are you serious that that is your legal reference?
Anyway, you seem to support AC after a fashion: it is significantly different from USA law, as one should expect. So, he is to a large extent right: check your own nationality rather than that of the most recent television show or report.
Posted in Male dinosaurs failing on social privacy
USA survey covers USA social mores only
Do not assume that because this survey covers the USA it is valid for Great Britain, France, Australasia, Asia or the rest of Europe.
Contrary to the popular press, even England has a totally different set of social ideas and mores from the USA, as does Canada. This is a social survey.
How rude can the loosing set get?
Ever noticed how those on the loosing side of an argument get ever more abusive and shrill? It's hard being uncertain of oneself or knowing that your pet beliefs are being shattered.
Get over it, retrieve your calmness and put that energy into adjusting to the changing world.
And, dear Linux fans: never forget that it is an incomplete UNIX imitation and, despite all the roaring and cheering for many years now, has not and is unlikely ever to make it into the hands of the common man. It may work if, like OSX vis a vis IOS, it takes the lessons learnt from Android mobile telephones (well, some of them) and becomes more user friendly.
Until then, huff and puff and sheer rudeness will not work. Unlike you, most of the world hates neither Apple nor Microsoft (and barely knows the difference, just like you I suspect).
@Bear Features - : Re: The truth is iPad showed us
Are you sure you used OS X? Not confusing it with IOS? I take it that you never learnt how to use it and know even less about UNIX (BSD variant, as OS X).
I use Windows XP, Windows 7, OS X, Solaris, Cygwin and have used most varieties of Linux (gave up when I got OS X and found a better implementation of UNIX and no longer had to support it at work) - mixture of work requirements and home pleasure. Windows is the most annoying, "locked/walled" system, with its fussy interfaces, rough edges even on mature products and constantly trying to be too clever. The only thing I appreciate is Excel. But the implementation by MS for OSX seems to be faster and more reliable. Actually, MS Office is rather decent on OS X. I am sure it would be more than passable on IOS too.
Re: Re: Terminal.app is still available ;-)
gcc(1) not on the terminal? Good Heavens, you're right. It's a binary called from the shell. In a shell session, via the terminal app or an xterm, type "man gcc" at the prompt and see if you can understand the result. Bit hard to find the programme, /usr/bin/cc or /usr/bin/gcc - oops, gave it away.
Try the same for ruby, python, perl, m4, sh, ksh, csh, etc., X, xterm, awk, make, sed and so on. Enable apache, set up printers using CUPS. Use vi/vim, emacs. Set up Postfix. Try a real UNIX implementation, even run twm. If you have not installed it (most of it is in the standard, installed distribution), it's in the free developer kit provided with every mac. But if you want to play it the Linux way, go to Sourceforge, GNU, Macports or wherever you like and download source or binary. Even disable the GUI completely and work completely from the shell (command line) or use an X server and twm or download something slow like Gnome. Install Eclipse for your Java development.
Install VirtualBox and run Windows, another Mac OS, Linux, whatever you like.
I hate OS X, it is so restricting and closed. Naughty Apple, naughty, naughty, naughty.
spelling problem?
In UK, licence as a noun is spelt with a "C". So perhaps this programme does not understand English, as opposed to American (though even they are learning to spell in such cases, sometimes).
Agile development?
You know, get it out quickly, painlessly, without design, design reviews and so on? Could be as I suspect Google follows most fads without thinking why the original way evolved in the first place.
Is that like
open source safe combinations? So we can all check them? Surely, in this case the algorithms must be kept secret at least to slow down casual attacks.
I just love this idea that clever people with an interest in improving security will, for nothing, spend hours of their spare time vetting code for banks and telling them how to fix it.
Do tell us, how much of your spare time do you devote to reading other peoples' "open source" code and delivering back reasoned, informed and accurate reviews? Do send us the links to your samples.
Ah, altruism for the sake of commerce. Good Lord, just saw a whole flock of spotted pigs fly by in question mark formation.
Anyway, according to its proponents, everything from Google is open source, so what went wrong? Did they just get fed up fixing code for nothing for one of the wealthier firms in the advertising business?
Umm
Interesting link. No idea that BMI was a UK government body, as you imply.
Just possible, I suppose, that it is a not very good, private airline with a frightened and prissy staff. No, I must be wrong, must be a government body run by dedicated jobsworths.
?
How long were you here, a week? Where, just one small village?
After many, many years here, I can say you are wrong and spouting pure propaganda. You also have not got a very good eye for scarves or their prices. I also visit UK, seem to find myself a fair bit in Germany and so on. They too seem very fond of iPhones. But UK seems the most fanatical.
I actually thought it would be cheaper to get an iPhone in UK - wrong of course. Worse, the demand is so high in UK that on two visits, last November and December, all Apple shops had none left (having found this so in Manchester I checked on line for the whole country) and that the competition to get one is so intense that, unlike in Switzerland, one has to book one's purchase by 21.00 hours the evening before and turn up to the right shop at the appointed time to collect it or lose your chance to purchase it. In Switzerland, I just walked into a shop and bought one there and then. A shop assistant in UK explained to me, that they had big queues, fights breaking out and had to employ security men to control the situation; so they had introduced the booking system.
Are you sure you were in Switzerland, the one with four main languages, some rather tall hills and 20% foreigners?
I can confirm the informal observations of other writers: From Zurich to Geneva, on ICs, S-Bahns and Regional trains, trams and buses, the iPhones and iPads have it, with a pretty good showing by macbooks.
As for money being a factor: possibly. But then, in our society, money tends to be a product of success; successful people tend to have better judgement and ability than unsuccessful ones; so very often their choice of goods, being less constrained by immediate cash needs, is often better. Please do not claim that the less well off have no interest in fashion, even if it is not your fashion.
I can imagine that buyers of iPhones hang onto their mobiles for longer than buyers of other makes and so those who want one have got one, with the inevitable result that, after a while, that market is close to saturation and the frequent swappers dominate the market with non-iPhone models. This is not to say which is best for most people, nor which is cheapest.
Even an American can not be serious with this comment.
How long has California been bankrupt in part or whole? I say, Michigan, especially Flint, is doing really well. Detroit is a model for the world. I gather from Americans who saw the old Soweto that Soweto seemed to be better off than some areas in the American South in the prosperous times! I believe it has got no better and even the USA has had its credit rating questioned or was it down-graded?
I bet you are glad the Euro is having problems as it lessens the risk that the holders of American purse strings, the Arabs and Chinese, will switch their reserves precipitously. But note how the Chinese are considering supporting the Euro.
What you have got is size and bluster. But much of your talent, ideas, invention is actually imported, even from Great Britain.
Sorry, how many people did you say have got no medical insurance? 20 % of the country and even those with it are financially buggered if seriously ill for more than a week or two?
Must be great to be such a runaway success as a world leader. And you call that democracy and justice? How many mistaken executions occur, let alone wrongful convicitions leading to hundreds of years of imprisonment? No wonder extreme religiosity is so popular in USA, God is the only hope many of its citizens have got. Still, you can get a cheap gun whenever you want, so that's all right.
What baffles me is why the rest of the world misses the good parts of it and imports the rubbish parts of its language, failed attitudes and "culture".
GMT is still OK
What's more, I think it was agreed at a conference in the USA as a tribute to the work and formalisation of time zones by those awful people (now, clear out your chromosomes), the British (hence the passing of the line through Greenwich, England.
http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/time-zones-history.htm
What's so clever about discarding history?
