Take a look at a Black and Tan.

Which is on the top: the Irish or the British. :)

hawk

perhaps the rest of the Common Market would have gone back to the old Roman measure?

A pound (livre/whatever) of silver being divided into 20 units, each of which was divided into 12 pennies was hardly a British development.

hawk

>We have a certain failed Mars probe to prove the case.

You mean the one that slammed into the ground because some idiot used metric units instead of real ones and miscalculated the thrust? :_)

hawk

Nah, it's just inflation.

Kind of like how a buck used to get you a great burger, but now only the dregs of the menu.

Two enormous rocky-ice things in orbit around one another used to be enough to get you a planet, but no longer . . .

hawk, pretty sure that it's not about a disney trademark . . .

That piece is kind of crap. The main reason is that the summer holidays are over. The kids are in school (and busy with clubs, homework and so on on the weekends) and the parents are working. And as most bathers are gone, so are the drink vendors, the equipment renters and so on.You'll still find people on beaches, just not many.

Perfectly normal Ebola will do fine - you just have to introduce it to Texas ...

Oh, wait ...

The EU is hated because of propaganda funded by the banks. The UK imports 3/4 of its food - mostly from the EU. We pay for it in pounds, but the supply chain buys it in Euros. The banks charge 4% for converting the money. Then we have to export to pay for said food. The banks charge 4% for converting the money back again. Thus the banks take 6% (3/4 * 4 * 2) of our food budget (plus 6% of a lot of other imports/exports).

If we joined the Euro, the banks would be deprived of a collossal amount of easy income. On top of that, if you are a European fund manager, you need to invest a ortion of the fund outside the Eurozone. Would you put that money in Roubles? Dollars? Turkish Lira? Obviously not. The pound gets the vote.

Massive amounts of propaganda are needed to justify the additions to the household budget that not being in the Euro creates. Blaming the French and Germans is low hanging fruit.

By the end of the century America will be speaking Spanish and using metric or dead from Ebola

FTFY

However, I can normally guess the temperature to the nearest degree centigrade. Two degrees if tired, hungry, confused or drunk. No hope of guessing the nearest Farenheit degree, Nearest 5 degrees appears to be common for those used to Farenheit. (I have lived in the UK for over 65 years).

I have no problem measuring things in inches or metres, centimetres or millimetres - my measuring tapes are marked with all of them. I learned pattern cutting (for clothes) in metric. Imperial machine tools are superior because of the way the lead screw is made (it has a completely different thread to metric ones. You can cut metric parts on an imperial mill/lathe - just put the correct gears on it).

I have a serious problem with US gallons being short measure.

Cameron is seeking re-election. Move along now folks - nothing to see here.

I would imagine that this will be the kind of a movie that will be in the five dollar bin at Walmart's within a month of release. And there will be a lot of them that simply stay in that bin.

At least they'll be neatly packed.

Ok. You are obviously much better informed than I am, and I guess you are quite pessimistic about the total amount of oil that would ever be found. But as prices rise, things which are hopelessly uneconomic become more plausible.

Mind you, I consider this totally the wrong way to go. But when prices rise enough there will be a lot more oil available. But there are lots of reasons that that it only becomes available when the prices rise dramatically. Small fields, difficult access, expensive construction, dangerous conditions, etc. Not to mention continuing CO2 pollution.

We *need* to develop renewable energy resources. I'm not really sure that we should be moving into full scale deployment now...except for cases where there isn't much downside, or whether the technology is already mature. (Hydro comes to mind.) But we need significant investment in developing renewable technologies to the "demonstration project" stage. (I.e., one step past the pilot project.) Some of the investment should continue to be in basic research, but more needs to be invested in moving from research result to useful plant. (Don't take that too literally. Rooftop solar isn't exactly a plant, but it falls within the pervue of what I mean.)

"Indeed, in Japan, only the western half of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu have enough sunny days to justify large-scale rooftop solar installations."

Which is why one of the largest solar plants opened near Sendai in northern Honshu a couple years back? What conditions are profitable depend on the technology you use, and the cost of production. And as solar cost decreases and efficiency increases more locations will be realistic.

I view Tesla as the best bet for a completely new American car company in a long time.

The U.S. Big Three have been around for eons. After World War 2 Hudson and Nash were hurting, merged to form American Motors, and went bust. Packard and Studebaker were hurting, merged, and went bust. Kaiser/Frazer tried, and went bust. De Lorean tried and got in to all sorts of trouble. Nobody seemed to be able to launch a new car company and make it work.

Tesla, on the other hand, seem to have cracked it. They're selling all the cars they can make. I see lots of them around here (Vancouver).

...laura

But I didnt buy any media from the play store, and I am not likely to ... particularly if I cant play it with the media player of my choice.

AFAIAC Hangouts, Playbooks and the music thingy are defintiely bloatware. Dont know about Nexus5, but my Nexux7 went to CM solely because the bloatware was over the top. SGS3 same way. Yes I have donated to CM, and hate Google+ as much as anyone else.