The Miscellaneous Thread

[Walkabout]

as a 'sponsor' they probly receive 'perks' for their money; maybe prefered times of their ads or other condideration like visiting the set or hanging out with the stars??

[Libby]

They wouldn't get visits to the sets/actors for US TV shows - but now that you've mentioned advertising, I wonder if the "sponsored by" is a way of getting round the TV advertising rules. In the UK, there are restrictions on the number of minutes of adverts per hour, which is why some UK-made TV shows have quite a bit of "filler" that can be replaced by adverts if the show gets sold overseas. BBC documentaries are becoming very noticeable for having lots of filler, because there are no adverts (apart from trailers for other shows at the top of the hour). I recently watched one BBC documentary called "She-Wolves - England's Early Queens", and if that does make its way over to the US it's worth watching in itself, but you'll get adverts rather than the filler in the original.

[Libby]

OK, it's a little bit of a stretch to go from TV shows to undersea cables, but I guess the term "cable" has something to do with it.

Here's a map showing the current and future undersea communications cables. (There's an option to select/deselect current and future.) The map is based on Google maps, so it has all the functionality of Google maps, plus being able to click on a particular cable and get info in the right-hand column. I hadn't realised that so much of the internet traffic from the US to the UK came in via Widemouth Bay, which is on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall, and where a lot of smuggling went on in the past (so has a kind of connection to modern times with illegal downloading via the internet).

https://www.cablemap.info/

https://en.wikipedia....i/Widemouth_Bay

[Walkabout]

I thought most internet was satalite origin.

[Earthnut]

I think satellite it more for governments and the military, but for us little folk I think it's mostly cable, the phone line, and of course wireless, which from what I understand is like a radio wave.

[Libby]

Things might well be different in the US as compared with the UK, but here satellites are mostly used for TV. There are sat-phones, but cell-phones here are connected via phone masts. Sat-phones are mostly used in very remote areas of the world.

I've found an article about the cable at Widemouth Bay: https://www.guardian....ous-cable-uk-us, which says "it surprises many people that the internet greatly relies on these cables. Virtually no internet traffic goes via satellite as it's too expensive and the bandwidth available is minimal."

[Libby]

Sorry, got called away, so I hit "post" before i'd finished.

Yep, cell phones work wirelessly because they transmit using radio waves to the nearest tower/mast which then passes the call on. Again, I don't know how things work in the US but in the UK there's a record of which tower is connected to when someone makes or receives a call, and that's been used in court cases to establish where a person was at a certain time. It can also be used to find people who are lost out in the wilds, so rescuers can find them.

I've just remembered: there are also sat-navs which obviously use satellites and the Global Positioning System. Some people have those in their cars, and most commercial vehicles do - leading to some drivers following the sat-nav instructions rather than paying attention to road signs and some lorries ending up down narrow tracks barely wide enough for a horse.

Cell phone coverage in the UK is mostly very good, though I have noticed that's not always the case in the US, going by Mulder and Scully's inability to get a signal when they most need it.

[Walkabout]

thanks for that info Libby. It is always interesting how things work in different countrys.

[Earthnut]

Oops, yes, forgot about satellite TV and phones, etc.

[Libby]

An addendum, because I seem to be in miscellaneous mode at the moment:

The emergency number in the UK is 999.

The emergency number in most of Europe is 112.

If in the UK, either number will go through directly to the emergency operator, and that's publicised for our European visitors.

The emergency number in the US is 911.

If in the UK, that number will probably go through to the emergency operator, but that's not fully implemented, but will sometime have to be because so many people here watch US TV shows.

The emergency operator asks which emergency service is required - police/fire/ambulance. The ambulance/paramedic service here is completely separate from the fire service.

If a 999 call is made in a coastal area (and we do have a lot of coastline), the options are police/fire/ambulance/coastguard. The coastguard service deals with various things: ships in difficulty, controlling the busy ship-lanes in the English Channel/La Manche which is the narrow sea between the south coast of England and the north coast of France, as well as a whole lot of other things.

They also cooordinate rescues, including people who are caught out on beaches by rising tides or stuck half-way up sea-cliffs, or who have lost power/sails while out in the channel. The coastguard service is funded by the government, but most of the rescues are carried out by the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute), which is a voluntary organisation solely funded by donations and solely staffed by unpaid volunteers. The whole situation is probably quintessentially British - it might not make a lot of sense, yet it works.

Well, that's enough rambling from me.