Interesting Links for 18-04-2013

[andrewducker]

• New Zealand legalises same-sex marriage
  (tags: newzealand marriage lgbt )
• David Cameron can, as usual, fuck right off.
  (tags: davidcameron margaretthatcher )
• Viewing a web page is not breach of copyright (Good to have that confirmed)
  (tags: law uk web copyright )
• How Pixar Used Moore's Law to Predict the Future
  (tags: thefuture computers pixar )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

We might all be Thatcherites now but some of us would rather not be.

[bart_calendar]

1. Why private schools are called "public schools."

2. Why you call meeting for lunch going to tea.

3. The number of Robbie Williams and Oasis hits. (In America each only had one hit song.)

4. Room temperature beer.

5. Shandys. (sp?)

6. Cigarettes that come in random numbers of cigarettes in a pack instead of the universal standard of 20 per pack in the rest of the world.

7. Giant, heavy coins that are practically worthless.

8. Voting for a party instead of a person to lead your country.

9. Many Scottish accents. (Though, they may be incomprehensible to people in the UK who do not live in Scotland.)

10. Marmite.

Public Schools

[danieldwilliam]

As I understand it private schools are called public schools because, before the advent of state provided education, your educational choices were private tuition either in your own castle by a series of tutors or through some sort of guild like undertaking or you could use a new-fangled innovation a school that was prepared to sell its services to the general public - a public school in the same sense that a taxi is a public car.

Re: Public Schools

[danieldwilliam]

I think most of them are technically charities although with some imagination and a good accountant I’m certain that you could get the money to flow to the people who were actually the de facto owners of the institution.

[philmophlegm]

"And Now, A Small Example of What a Generation Gap Looks Like"
"Things that Americans find incomprehensible about the UK (who'se got more?)"

Presumably something that Americans (or at least those commenting on John Scalzi's blog) would find incomprehensible about the UK is that our telephones plug into the wall with a plug (admittedly we wouldn't use the term 'jack', and surely that's the word for 'plug' not the word for 'socket', as in 3.5mm headphone jack).

Am I being stupid here? But how exactly do American phones that aren't mobiles connect to the telephone network?

I thought take-up of mobile phones was generally lower in the US than in the UK, and over here, surely the vast majority of people still have a landline, even if they have a mobile and live in a good coverage area.

[andrewducker]

Wikipedia says:
"Jack commonly refers to a connector often with the female electrical contact or socket, and is the "more fixed" connector of a connector pair. Plug commonly refers to a movable connector, often (but not always) with the male electrical contact or pin, and is the movable (less fixed) connector of a connector pair."

A little googling seems to back that up.

This piece from 2011 says that 1/3 of Americans don't have land lines:
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/business-brains/one-third-of-us-households-chuck-landlines-now-use-mobile-only/20746

And Scalzi has land lines, but it's entirely possible that they aren't visible to most people. A base station will plug into it, and the rest of the portable phones will then connect over DECT, so teenagers don't ever actually see the hard-link, and aren't aware of it.

[bart_calendar]

Yes. "Jack" in American English is the thing you plug a cord into.

Jack?

[lsanderson]

Here in the midwest, we'd only use "jack" for low power, sound, or phone equipment; otherwise, ittsa "outlet."

[bart_calendar]

Yeah, how do people in America get Internet at home without a phone jack. I mean I have a WIFI box, but that box plugs into a phone jack.

[threegoldfish]

Cable, for the most part. Generally cable tv companies have what is effectively a monopoly in most areas and they bundle high speed internet with their cable tv service. So if you have a cable line coming into the house, you get internet through that. Verizon recently laid the infrastructure in my neighborhood for fiber optic (which was a trial because basically every home owner that wasn't a townhouse had to give Verizon permission to dig on their property) so we get ours through that. But that required a special box installed in the house and connected to the cable wired through the house by a previous owner.

In the ether!

[lsanderson]

My blazingly fast, cheep internet comes over the ether from a transmitter down and across the street migikally through the walls and everything! Well, OK, for some values of "blazingly fast" and "cheap."

[del_c]

A lot of the things Americans say they don't have in America, they do. They just blank them out. I got into an argument many years ago with someone who was Wrong On The Internet about the uiquely non-violent American sports culture, so I gathered news reports from one year of US basketball riots: cities set on fire, running battles with the police. All local reports, because unlike in the UK, they don't get reported in the big outlets where they can be seen by anyone who doesn't live in that city, or in another country

[bart_calendar]

Yeah, we even have violence at American Football matches. A few years back there was a Jets game right after a snowstorm and people actually started attacking the players with sharp icicles.

And the last time the Mets won the World Series the fans literally tore Shea Stadium apart, stealing everything from the seats to the grass on the field.

And before any American football match you'll find drunk fans fighting with each other in the parking lot.

And, when Army plays Navy, holy shit can that be a disaster in the making, because you know 50,000 drunk veterans of opposing teams in the stands is not good. Same thing when the New York Giants play the New York Jets.