911 reasons for which jimmies were rustled
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That's probably more 'on which numbers will the phone try'. Having some number work everywhere by the standard is beneficial for foreigners travelling abroad, as their firmware may not be aware of the local emergency number and hence not try to call it on towers it doesn't have a roaming link on.
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Al Queso?
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That's probably more 'on which numbers will the phone try'. Having some number work everywhere by the standard is beneficial for foreigners travelling abroad, as their firmware may not be aware of the local emergency number and hence not try to call it on towers it doesn't have a roaming link on.
Bah. Think back to the Snopes article. The second mail thread it quotes, from context seems to be English people. Their default emergency number is 999. Why would an English person in England EVER dial 112 over 999? It's stupid advice, especially in the context of the email, which was something like "driving home and someone with flashing lights pulls in behind you and you're not sure if it's really a cop or not."
"Dialing 112 instead of your home country's emergency number will probably work if you're abroad" is sensible advice. "Prefer 112 over your local emergency number" is just plain dumb, unless you can think of a good reason for England to NOT set up 999 to work on all carriers, and instead set 112 up that way, and also, by the way, not engage in any kind of public notice that people should not use the emergency number that's been around for however many decades 999 has existed.
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Ok, the built-in ones.
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I meant to post this:
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I meant to post this:
Yes? Were you expecting something different? You did cheat, after all.
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No, of course I wasn't expecting anything different. This is
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That was unexpected.
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for the metric system is better than the imperial system. If one wants to adhere to engineering or scientific practice one has to admit that.
Oh, imperial is okish for engineering. As long as you don't mind either measuring weight in slugs or force in poundals and measuring long distances in thousands, millions, whateverilions (and milliards and whateverilliards if you are British) of feet, because the conversion factor to miles (whichever ones) is just silly.
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Bah. We should all use assba, khuep, stadion, and li for distance; loan, rood, and cho for area; Planck masses, shekels and maund for mass; batman and ale kilderkin for liquid volumes; keddah for dry volume; and sticks for force.
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And barn / outhouse / shed for areas.
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And barn / outhouse / shed for areas.
Ah, yes, timely and valuable additions to the standard, I concur.
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So I checked the CSS...
body img.emoji { width: 20px; height: 20px; vertical-align: middle; } .emoji[title=":arrows:"] { height: 20px; width: 220px; }Of course... because that is obviously the right way to do that...
Anyway, I guess I now have a whole list of sizes to use for ahem custom emoji that aren't 20px by 20px.
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Bah. We should all use assba, khuep, stadion, and li for distance;
...what's a cubit?
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Interestingly enough, I thought of that routine while I was looking up the different units on Wicked-pedo. I decided to go with shekels for the Hebrew (and Sumerian) example instead.
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measuring long distances in thousands, millions, whateverilions (and milliards and whateverilliards if you are British) of feet, because the conversion factor to miles (whichever ones) is just silly.
It doesn't come in to play, not really. When dealing with public works, you might deal with thousands of feet, or tens of thousands of feet for distance. When I was in construction, we might bid a job with 22,000' of something, but it was never expressed in fractions of a mile. So, not really that different than kilometers.
Large volumes are in cubic yards, so you just have to divide by 27. (As in: "We have to move 2 million yards of earth to move") Area is in square feet or square yards. ("50,000 yards of asphalt to lay").
Highways and interstates are the only place where you will be talking about anything in "miles", and when you do you usually calculate a cost per mile and then roll with it. For a project of any complexity though, you will be doing calculations by the section to account for differences in engineering requirements. The project will be broken up in sections by the thousands of feet and where it makes sense to do so.
Would it be more convenient to use metric? Of course, but that currently doesn't outweigh the inconveniences of changing all the things. And the issues with engineering are mostly taken care of by doing away with the inch and using a decimal feet. In construction and engineering, most of your work is done in engineering feet, that are broken down in a decimal fashion of feet, tenths, hundreths, thousandths, etc. No one cares what an inch is in that domain. ;)
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If I wanted to be so pedantic about the metric system.
Today, the meter is defined to be the distance light travels in 1 / 299,792,458 seconds.
Which means that some other advanced alien race is looking at that and going.... how
ancientquaint.FTFY
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The mere presence of guns makes people into killers.
Ready access to a gun has certainly made killers out of some people: those who would otherwise have lacked close combat skills or had more time to calm down or both. Oscar Pistorius is one name that springs immediately to mind.
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metric is for precision, imperial is for practicality
I've lived with both (Australia went metric when I was thirteen years old) and by the time the new system had been in place for a couple of years I was using it habitually, and finding it every bit as practical as the old system and in some respects more so. Of course, for the first of those two years I grizzled and moaned about it just like you.
The single advantage that imperial has over metric, for people who have grown up with imperial, is familiarity. Every argument in support of imperial on any other basis is just made-up crap: a pathetically obvious attempt to disguise FUCK YOU DON'T TAKE AWAY MY INCHES which is truly the only real argument against going metric.
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At the speed of light, my perception of a meter is infinitely large, in the direction I am traveling.
You can't attain the speed of light because you have rest mass. At any speed you can attain, one metre is the distance light travels in vacuum in 1 / 299,792,458 seconds.
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I am not prepared to believe that 999 cannot use other carriers' towers (or function in the actual absence of any signal) and yet 112 can.
Most phones released after the GSM Phase 2+ spec do handle 999 as an emergency number, along with 911 and 112. Many phones built for markets outside Australia would not treat 000 as an emergency number, so if you had one of those you'd be SOL trying to use 000 outside one of your own carrier's cells in Australia. But 112 would work, because all GSM phones and all GSM networks support it for emergency calls.
If you have a GSM phone, you can call emergency services on 112. You can do that without unlocking your phone with its PIN. You can do that without a SIM in your phone. You can do that if you're out of call credits. You can sometimes do that even if your phone is showing zero bars of signal, because the signal meter is keyed to the network run by the provider whose SIM you have, and does not reflect the availability of signal from other networks.
You might or might not also be able to do some or all of these things using the local emergency number for the country you're in, if you have a GSM Phase 2+ phone and the local emergency number is listed in its firmware and/or on your SIM.
You cannot reach emergency services on 112 if your phone is out of range of any compatible tower, or is switched off, or has no battery in it.
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"Prefer 112 over your local emergency number" is just plain dumb, unless you can think of a good reason for England to NOT set up 999 to work on all carriers
Any GSM Phase 2+ phone offered for sale in England would presumably have 999 on its internal emergency numbers list, and handle it the same way as 112. Older GSM phones only do the special stuff for 112.
The point of preferring 112 on your mobile is that you get used to it, and you won't need to know any other number regardless of where in the world you take your phone. If your phone works at all where you are, 112 will get you the local emergency services call centre. And depending on your phone, it might give you a better chance of getting through than your local emergency services number would.
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Would it be more convenient to use metric? Of course, but that currently doesn't outweigh the inconveniences of changing all the things.
Given that the number of things is pretty much constantly increasing everywhere, it's odd that only in the US does it seem that deferring a once-off episode of extreme cutover pain until such time as it will be much worse is sound policy.
Same logic applies to cutting over to renewable energy. If energy demand is constantly rising, as most of those who opposed renewables on "practical" grounds would have it, then why does it make sense to postpone the inevitable cutover any longer than we have to? We should be getting stuck into it now, while demand is still only one or two orders of magnitude beyond manageable.
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Prefer 112 over your local emergency number
Except for countries that depreciated the older emergency numbers (110/111) for 112.
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@anotherusername said:
That was unexpected.
Only the Spanish Inquisition is unexpected
They're coming around the mountain!
Librarians! We're doooooooooooooooooooommmed!
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Because meters are relative to our time dilation, our relative velocity and gravity.
If I'm going close to the speed of light, I perceive a slower time, therefore my seconds are longer than your seconds. And therefore my meters are longer. Not only that space is perceived to be compressed from my point of view in the direction I am traveling. This compensates for my slower second, by making light appear to travel less distance.
And this is a problem because... ? Of course it's going to be relative. Are you saying that if you need to fix cabling on your theoretical spaceship you need to know how fast you're moving?
Hey, Jack, how long should this cable be?
How fast are we moving?
0.78c
Oh, it's 65.43 xaademeters, then.
Damn it with the decimals!
Hold on, I'll slow down a bit, that will round it off!and milliards and whateverilliards if you are British
UK uses the short system as well for the most part, AFAIK. Bastards, all of you, I have to switch contexts all the time.
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It doesn't come in to play, not really. When dealing with public works, you might deal with thousands of feet, or tens of thousands of feet for distance.…
That's what I was talking about. You pick one unit and use its multiples and fractions at all scales, because converting is not practical.
Would it be more convenient to use metric? Of course, but that currently doesn't outweigh the inconveniences of changing all the things.
For Britons (and Australians and basically everybody except Americans) it did appear to be worth those inconveniences to become consistent with the rest of the world though.
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Same logic applies to cutting over to renewable energy. If energy demand is constantly rising, as most of those who opposed renewables on "practical" grounds would have it, then why does it make sense to postpone the inevitable cutover any longer than we have to? We should be getting stuck into it now, while demand is still only one or two orders of magnitude beyond manageable.
Renewable energy is nowhere near ready to do its task like the metric system was for its task. There are a lot of projects trying to get that stuff working. If it really worked anywhere near as well as conventional energy generation, we'd be switching faster.
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if it was YOUR 1/8" that was in question
You can sometimes do that even if your phone is showing zero bars of signal, because the signal meter is keyed to the network run by the provider whose SIM you have, and does not reflect the availability of signal from other networks.
Many phones will show "emergency calls only" when they have no home signal but can see other towers
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You might or might not also be able to do some or all of these things using the local emergency number for the country you're in
Ok, so what moron country would let phones into its country that couldn't do that? Is this such a difficult concept?
You cannot reach emergency services on 112 if your phone is out of range of any compatible tower, or is switched off, or has no battery in it.
No shit, Sherlock, that was what I was saying all along.
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The point of preferring 112 on your mobile is that you get used to it, and you won't need to know any other number regardless of where in the world you take your phone.
I have a 3,000-mile-wide country to roam in. I will spend the majority of my life in it. 911 is the primary local emergency number. There's no good reason for me to prefer 112 over 911, or anyone else who's going to spend most of their life in the US. Ditto for, say, the UK, and any other country whose number isn't 112 and also has at least one regulator that's not utterly incompetent.
Seriously, are you arguing just for the sake of argument here? You're like one of those SI ibi prefix goons, or maybe a vegan.
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If energy demand is constantly rising, as most of those who opposed renewables on "practical" grounds would have it, then why does it make sense to postpone the inevitable cutover any longer than we have to?
Well, two things. First, who says it's inevitable? Second, because even if it is inevitable, it's well-known to anyone who is paying attention that renewable energy is not sufficient to provide base load coverage without massive overinvestment. Did you see the recent report about UK wind farms, where they spent some huge portion of the time producing less than 10% of their rated power? That will never change, because of the laws of physics (specifically, how wind works in the real world) and given that, you'd need to blanket the entire country (or some less hyperbolic but still huge amount) for them to be a reliable 100% base supply. Or you could accept living with electricity only part-time. Which do you prefer?
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Except for countries that depreciated the older emergency numbers (110/111) for 112.
Then those numbers wouldn't be the primary local emergency number any longer, right? In which case the situation doesn't apply.
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Stop whining and dial 112!
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Stop whining and dial 112!
Fuck you! I'm going to tilt at this windmill until I get bored!
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At least if you bang your head against the windmill you know you should be calling 112
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At least if you bang your head against the windmill you know you should be calling 112
On my phone 112 redirects to 911. Therefore dialing 112 is a bad idea as it slows down response time.
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it slows down response time.
I bet it improves if you put on a hoodie and wave around with a gun
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I bet it improves if you put on a hoodie and wave around with a gun
How would that have any effect? I'm sitting in my office--nobody would see it.
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If it really worked anywhere near as well as conventional energy generation, we'd be switching faster.
Here's the thing, though: we are switching faster. Faster every year. There's already more new renewable capacity being built than anything else. Really all I'm advocating is that people who think we need more nukes and write solar off as a boondoggle educate themselves, stop getting in the way of the market, and support public policy that gets behind renewable energy instead of trying to delay or sabotage it.
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so what moron country would let phones into its country that couldn't do that?
Any country with a tourist industry?
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who think we need more nukes
Still better than everything else un-renewable.
Also, baseload.
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Here's the thing, though: we are switching faster
So why are you whining?
There's already more new renewable capacity being built than anything else.
Even including China and India? Also, is that measuring peak capacity or realistic capacity?
Really all I'm advocating is that people who think we need more nukes and write solar off as a boondoggle educate themselves, stop getting in the way of the market, and support public policy that gets behind renewable energy instead of trying to delay or sabotage it.
It's my understanding that the biggest actual opponents of it are typically the political supporters (or at least the allies of) of the idea of renewable projects. Until someone actually tries to do something crazy like implement it. Like Teddy Kennedy was with the wind farms off his vacation house, or people going crazy over tortoises in the Mojave desert.
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who says it's inevitable?
That's what "non-renewable" means.
it's well-known to anyone who is paying attention that renewable energy is not sufficient to provide base load coverage without massive overinvestment.
That's a factoid well-known to anyone content to pay attention only to talking points put about by the fossil fuel industry and the nuclear fanbois. It's truthy, but it's wrong. Renewables are already good enough and getting better every year.
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For sale on the local carriers
I already covered that. What are you arguing against, exactly?
