That's pretty much what is happening now in Ireland. Irish Water is asking for PPS numbers for all the children in a household and for the main householder. PPS numbers are similar to Social Security numbers in the US.
At the moment Irish Water is a semi state body, but there are large fears that it will be sold off to a private company in a few years, along with the PPS numbers and details of everyone in Ireland.
There was a large demonstration against it last weekend [1]
Yup. Irish person here. Hence how I know. Now, I'm not saying that the way IW is doing it well, or that PPS numbers are a good approach. But the idea that "How will they know?" is some sort of unanswerable, impossible question is silly.
It was the first one I installed myself. I spent a long time trying to download all the floppy disk images for A and X over dial up. Trying to do it while on work experience on the only PC that had an internet connection made it all the more fun.
Reading this article (and lots more around world cup time) written about football by North Americans, I've noticed that there's a different way of thing about teams and countries than in Europe (or the English speaking part at least).
The biggest one that jumps out at me is using single person to describe the teams. We generally describe a team as 'they' rather than 'it'. So we are more likely to see 'Germany’s win will also affect their odds in the World Cup final' than the way it's written in the article.
home-field advantage (US) is home advantage (elsewhere)
"Some of the goals that Brazil keeper Julio Cesar allowed were unavoidable, but he was not exactly Tim Howard in net. " (US)
would be [approx]
"Some of the goals that Brazil keeper Julio Cesar conceded were unavoidable, but he was not exactly Tim Howard in goal." (elsewhere)
Away from the article, the most jarring thing for a football (US: soccer) fan exposed to the US media is the use of "tie" instead of "draw". Of course there is also the US concept of an "assist" which has in fact now been embraced by the wider football community.
As well as differences in specific terminology, there is a broader and difficult to pin down difference in the "feel" of US coverage of football. To someone used to traditional football coverage it feels alien, maybe basketball or baseball translated into football rather than native football.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy American sport and love the rapid fire humour and passion of American sport journalism in all media.
> "Some of the goals that Brazil keeper Julio Cesar conceded were unavoidable, but he was not exactly Tim Howard in goal." (elsewhere)
There's another plural/singular one. It would more likely be 'in goals', or more colloquially, 'in sticks'.
> the use of "tie" instead of "draw"
That reminds me of another one, how the score is communicated. Americans say something like 'Germany won seven to one', I'd say 'Germany won seven one'. This then gets quite confusing for Gaelic football where we say things like 'Mayo won three twelve to one seven' (3 goals and 12 points to 1 goal and seven points)
I'm guessing you're from the UK? This isn't specific to teams. Any group is referred to in the plural in the UK and the singular in the US. For example, "the police is" vs "the police are".
Right, and as an American when I read British English it's not the use of "their" vs "its" that strikes me as 'foreign', it's the fact that as you point out, the names of groups take plural verbs in British and singular verbs in American usage.
I hadn't noticed the wider use of singular groups previously, but that does make sense when you point it out. I suppose it was just more obvious because we rarely see american analysis of football outside of the world cup.
It's not little - it's quite comprehensive. Excellent job done. It's explained quite well in a very enjoyable writing style.
I think anyone who knows enough to add a banner to a webpage can work their way through the document.
It's a good idea to promote it as an alternative because from the outside at least, it seems freedombox has lost momentum since the privoxy release, even though the idea is sound.
I didn't mean to belittle it all, I'm well impressed with it. Nicely explained for the most part and I saw afterwards that it's up on github too so it's easy to send in corrections for it.
I had to look up Friendica and Movim to see what they were (I'd never heard of them before), it'd be nice to have links to the respective homepages, so off I'll go and add them in.
No problems, I can see one or two bits that I think could do with clarifying (not least to get rid of emacs :P ). I'll have a go at it this evening and take notes.
The particular editor isn't all that important. You could just use nano or vi. I don't think any of the instructions contain anything really Emacs specific.
I happen to use Emacs and the source for the site is an org-mode document, which makes editing it very easy. Exporting it as HTML is a few key presses.
As a vi user, i'd be willing to leave the great war to one side and give nano the thumbs up, many people not used to the console struggle to quit out of vi or emacs while being competent with sublime text or notepad++. nano works better for them.
These instructions have been put together recently - mostly in January this year. It's an ongoing effort to include as much useful communications software as possible.
There doesn't seem to be anything that jumps out as a reason to use aptitude over apt-get there. It mentions that the defaults for upgrading the distro are better for aptitude but doesn't say why or what differences there are.
I can see the search being useful though.
Seeing as my muscle memory is set at apt-get, i'll stick with it for the moment.
There was a brief time when aptitude was smarter than apt-get (it was smart enough to remove auto-installed dependencies when you removed a package, for example). During that time, the advice was to use aptitude instead of apt-get.
Those smarts were later moved to apt itself, but it's still a part of the folklore.
At the moment Irish Water is a semi state body, but there are large fears that it will be sold off to a private company in a few years, along with the PPS numbers and details of everyone in Ireland.
There was a large demonstration against it last weekend [1]
[1] http://www.thejournal.ie/water-charge-protest-in-dublin-1718...