Domain: wikimedia.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to wikimedia.org.
Comments · 6,832
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Stop and identify
Some states have a stop and identify law, which means that for a terry stop or higher, when asked you must truthfully tell the officer your name.
Note that this is only for Terry stops and above. An officer may walk up and simply ask that you identify yourself - in the same manner that any regular citizen could do so - and in this instance you are not required to answer. You are not required to interact in any way with a police officer acting in the manner of a regular citizen. To do this they need suspicion and have to escalate it to Terry status.
Note also that in no instance are you required to prove your identity. You need not "show your papers" to anyone.
The statute may be written in such a way that there are one or two other things that the officer may legally ask and that you must answer. New Hampshire, for example, allows the officer to ask your address, why you are there, and where you are going.
Massachusetts does not have such a law, and so you do not have to respond when asked. Period, end of story.
Many people will point out the difference between theory and practice, in that the police will simply disregard the rules and do it anyway and inconvenience you so-you-might-as-well-submit-andbeasheepandyoucantfightandsoonandsoon...
Be aware that a civil rights violation is a windfall in your favor. If you have good evidence, such as a video clearly showing what happened, you can get a court judgement of from tens of thousands to a couple of million dollars... if you are willing to press the issue. This will require some investment and a lot of inconvenience on your part - think of it as an investment of 10,000 dollars to make a potential million.
It all boils down to the strength of your ethics. There can be no ethics without courage. If everyone had the courage to press the issue, then the practice would stop very quickly.
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Re:halal://persianbabes.allah
I've already registered halal://upchador.persianbabes.allah. See a totally hot content preview here.
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Re:This story is a lie
You're out of touch with reality.
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Re:Thinking back to Millenium Challenge '02
Or like this. ~
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Re:Awesome, but..
Well a possible solution would be to gradually replace the original, organic neurons in your brain with eletronic counterparts. Of course, it would lead to some interesting questions, like the Ship of Theseus paradox, i.e. if you replace all the parts, are you still "you"?
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
But, considering cells die and replacements are born all the time in your body, if the process is gradual enough, there would be no such problems at all...
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Re:Perspective
1) La de da, I'm building a bridge. My favorite welder on his days off likes to stick tab A into slot B of a member of the same sex. I understand the meaning of an independent variable and file this as such; don't much care. I guess that makes me an engineer-libertarian.
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Complexity, Time and Money Prevents Good Security
Anyone who has actually worked for a time in web development will tell you that tight schedules, shoestring budgets and large sites, with many moving parts, all conspire to ensure that security holes exist in just about every non-trivial web app of any meaningful size. It's not that we're unaware of SQL injection, validation of inputs or even cross site scripting, we just don't have time to check and test everything and all possible interactions before we have to move on to something else (thank you MBAs). The people who write the checks don't care about security as much as they care about new features, being buzzword compliant or getting everything "into the cloud" and most of all: being on time and within budget . Under these circumstances, something has to give and that something is usually security because few clients care enough to pay, in both time and money, for what good security really costs. Until companies are held liable instead of just saying, "whoops" and advising people to check their credit reports for the next N years, this will continue. One good example where increased liability is leading to better security is in electronic medical records and related healthcare software due to the penalties imposed by HIPAA for breaches of protected health information. As soon as breaches go straight to the bottom line companies start caring.
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Re:The idea of removing impurities is cool...
Current best silicon photocell technology is 25% http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/PVeff(rev111205).jpg and hasn't improved in a decade. Their 16% or 20% is nothing to crow about.
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Re:Chasing the sun
I agree with AC in that I can't stand incandescent lightbulbs. I especially love 5500K+ fluorescents, I find they complement daylight well during the day and make it feel like I have an extra window! According to Wikipedia, the sun has a colour temperature of 5500K to 6500K, and that same article has an excellent picture comparing different bulb types and temperatures.
I think it's really just what you get used to over time - if you've spent most of your life with incandescents, you'll prefer them to LEDs/fluorescents and visa versa. -
US Navy 1, Iranian Navy 0
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Re:R&D
In latin, "et" means "plus" or "and". You'll occasionally see "et" pop up in things like legal documents or academic papers.
The ampersand (&) is basically the current evolution of writing "et" in cursive. There are some interesting pictures on the subject.
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Re:This is good
Soon we can turn Antarctica into a useful human settle-able land with farming and cities. Maybe Al Gore Warming isn't so bad.
Well, even if you melt off all the ice, there isn't actually all that much _land_ that is above sea level hidden under Antarctica. Because of the weight of the ice, most of the continent is under sea level. Once you melt the ice, it will slowly rise, like Canada is currently doing after the northern ice sheet melted at the end of the last glaciation. It's called an isostatic rebound, but I wouldn't buy land down there yet.
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Re:This is good
I wonder if the newly won land on Antartica can even offset the flooded land along the coats of the earth, if the ice on Antarctica is completely molten.
Doubtful. Here's a map of Antarctica with the ice removed, with the added assumption that sea level is unchanged by the removal of said ice sheets. Lakes are shown for interior areas below sea level (arguably lakes might not occupy all regions below sea-level, but might also occupy some areas which would be above sea-level).
Of course melting the Antarctic ice would add about 61m to global sea level (net, allowing for floating ice, etc.), or 68m if Greenland's ice sheets also melt. These estimates would be modified slightly depending on assumed temperature change above freezing, oceanic mixing, and oceanic salinity change.
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Re:naysayers
And when we look at the geological record, you'll see that this is the coldest the planet has ever been. For most of our history, the Antarctic hasn't even had ice!
The only worrisome trend is how quickly the climate changes are happening now. Even blaming mankind for that is crazy, seeing how it started about 1.2 million years ago.
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Re:"what if" game
Jesus, relax. It was a simple picture.
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Re:Buncha pussies
True. See the oscillograms in the eye diagram article on Wikipedia to get an idea of what happens to the signal at the speeds HDMI runs at.
A perfect square wave requires infinite bandwidth to reproduce. In practice, you want at least 5x the bandwidth of your fundamental frequency, and 10x is better, so that you get enough of the harmonics to approximate a true square wave.
I seem to recall that HDMI is currently running at up to 2 GHz, so HDMI would require 10-20 GHz cable drivers if the goal were to produce square waves. Somehow I don't think the $60 Bluray player I just bought for Christmas has a high-end microwave transmitter built into it.
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Re:No reason to change from H.264
Any DivX Plus HD certified device: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/DivX_Plus_HD#Hardware
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the true visionary
hero of alexandria had him beat my about 2000 years
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Re:Let us not forget that "stealing" went both way
Interesting point. I had all but forgotten about the 141, and it seems to never having entered service.
And yes, comparisons do reveal a certain similarity:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Yak-141_3D.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/F-35A_three-view.PNGThe F-35 do have a very different engine design tho.
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Re:Let us not forget that "stealing" went both way
Interesting point. I had all but forgotten about the 141, and it seems to never having entered service.
And yes, comparisons do reveal a certain similarity:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Yak-141_3D.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/F-35A_three-view.PNGThe F-35 do have a very different engine design tho.
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Cognitive biases
Tell them to read https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
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Re:No
A) They're not just fossil fuel powered. They're powered by a variety of sources, including clean nuclear power, hydro, and (to a much smaller extent) "renewables". See here for US sources of electricty: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Electricity_Production_the_USA.svg and recognize that in other places (like France and Canada), the majority of electricity on the power grid is from clean sources. Those countries benefit even more from moving to electric vehicles.
B) A large central fossil fuel power plant is vastly more efficient the fuel combustion engine in any car, which results in vastly less overall pollution.
C) Electric vehicles have a lot less wear and tear, which means less replacement parts need to be manufactured for them, which reduces their overall energy use.
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Re:NASA is the world leader in what?
There may have been pressure from Russia to the East but without the invasion of Normandy and the threat from the West, Germany could have easily sustained it's control over the entirety Europe.
Have a look at this map showing in yellow and pink the Soviet advances on the Eastern front before D-day. So much for your "sustaining control over the entirety of Europe".
Does Russia have the ability to defeat a single-fronted German army?
They did. This a historical fact. Read up on Stalingrad and Kursk.
Better yet, no need to trust them damn foreigners. You can read the analysis by American generals at the time urging the administration to open the Western front least the Russians take all of Europe.
Take your blatant anti-Americanism out of it and look at history.
Which again proves the OP point. One cannot challenge the--at very least contentious and most likely false--claim of supremacy of the USA forces without being accused of being anti-patriotic.
Thanks, your job here is done.
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Re:Good move (don't doit GameBoy)
GameBoy, you should take back your apology.. people like Blue Stone are common where they make-believe that just 'saying' something is suppose to make everyone believe it, and act on their empty statements.
Two reports on how CleanFeed is NOT working (because of the work-around created by Newzbin-2 new client apt, which is more thorough than the browser plugin, for this particular web interaction (ie. news-feeds)).
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/11/3/bts-newzbin-block-circumvented/
and
https://torrentfreak.com/newzbin2-release-encrypted-client-to-defeat-website-blocking-110914/
The next link explains about proxies in general and transparent ones as well..
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Proxy_server#Transparent_proxy
and a discussion on the legal decision
http://www.francisdavey.co.uk/2011/10/newzbin2-order.html
As far as those with only 2 brain cells, fighting over who is boss, who call themselves 'Authorities', banning ip addresses, even temporarily... well.. they would have an impossible time doing that with ip6, with the almost infinite amount of numbers, where someone could hide from these kooks.
Good ALWAYS wins out in the end.
-- I will gladly lose all of life's battles.. if thats what it takes, to win the war...
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Re:Evil enough yet?
Goldfish memory?
Fine. I'll bite. The answer is: "The last time I bought a Sony product".
First, there's this lovely music CD which will install a root kit on your computer...
Next, there's this lovely play box things which comes with functions x, y and z and a great networked playground to hoon around in.. but we're going to clip one of your nuts at any point in the future after you buy one
.. when we feel like it..Onwards to this 'star wars' thing... now we believe that there is a galaxy of
.. well.. profit .. to be made out there an we can assure you that .. oh screw it, money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money did you say something? money money money money money money money money money money money moneyBut, hey, let's check wikipedia!
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/EvilEvil is the violation of, or intent to violate, some moral code. Evil is usually seen as the dualistic opposite of good. Definitions of evil vary along with analysis of its root motive causes, however general actions commonly considered evil include: conscious and deliberate wrongdoing, discrimination designed to harm others, humiliation of people designed to diminish their psychological needs and dignity, destructiveness, and acts of unnecessary and/or indiscriminate violence that are not legitimate acts of self-defense but aggressive and designed to cause ill-being to others.
I am wondering if someone at Sony has copied their strategic plan into wikipedia and tidied up the words a little...
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Re:it's more complicated than that
we're going to see a huge change in programming methods coming pretty soon. Today, A.I. is still math and computer based. The problem is that data, input, and all of the algorithms you're going to write can result in a plane nose-diving -- even though no human being has ever chosen to nose-dive under any scenario in a commercial flight.
I'm not sure that's the case, and I'm aware of at least one instance where it would have been a good idea:
In that case the "non-AI" pilots kept pulling back on the stick instead of going nose-down, which would have corrected the stall. The whole thing was caused by the single airspeed indicator reading wrong since it had frozen over.
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Re:core is icey hot?
High pressure from all that mass, possibly? Just speculating here.
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Re:running it
One thing I kinda wondered about - how do they deal with buttons on old Android phones? On Galaxy Nexus, they show buttons for Back, Home, and task switcher at the bottom of the screens, but those aren't dedicated - they're actually painted on the main screen. On Nexus S, do they just use its hardware buttons, and don't paint anything? If so, does this mean that you don't get a dedicated button to switch tasks?
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Re:Get another party into congress
Don't get me wrong, a good-enough plan that's moving forward beats a perfect plan stalled in its tracks, but...
Do you realize just how pathological IRV is? Are you sure it's really good-enough, that a few publicized failures due entirely to the mechanics of IRV won't poison the voting-reform well for decades?
I like full-on range voting for its expressiveness, though approval voting (the 1-bit version of range voting) is nearly as good practically, but I'm not married to them -- if you value, say, moderation* over range voting's slavish representation of actual preferences, then pick a method like Borda that's ill-behaved (particularly, Borda is weak with regard to cloning) but biased in favor of moderates, not IRV, which (in addition to its nonmotonic pathologies), is biased in favor of extremists (if slightly less so than plurality/FPTP). See these Monte Carlo simulations of several voting methods.
*Fundamentally, any bias is a risk -- if your voting system prefers moderates, a political machine can set up straw candidates to pull an Overton window stretch, not on the voters, but on the election itself.
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get informed: sousveillance
And, folks, make sure to do your part by learning about this asymmetry.
Here's one idea worth knowing about: sousveillance.
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Re:Metrics suck
I think the main thing the submitter can take away from that article is that you measure the availability of systems rather than trying to painstakingly log activities among the IT staff. What is considered 'optimal' is not covered in the previous story. You'd be working on something like: Internet access only being down 5 mins per day; email for 10 mins; each workstation only suffering 30 mins per month - or whatever. The most important stats probably won't be in your 'ticket management system' - the good news is that you can generate lots of juicy data automagically - Nagios.
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Re:Solution to US debt problem
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Goodheart's law
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Goodhart's_law
In essence, any metric with a economic impact will be gamed to hell and back.
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Could you be more obvious?
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Re:When will Iran apologize to humanity?
Exactly. Why would they do that? What have they possibly got to gain by going to war with random countries in the middle east, or south america, or russia.
A country can't be evil. A few evil people in key places can have a big effect though.
Posting anonymous so that my entire argument can be ignored due to me being a conspiracy theorist...
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Re:If they're not doing it, we're not doing it.
You would have a great deal of difficulty with such an argument if you were trying to base it on facts anyway. This picture tells a slightly different story to the one that the crowd who complain about India and China would have you believe.
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Re:Nothing new, move along -
Actually, it's 93% of Americans.
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Re:computing power scales exponentially
what else would they be useful for?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Grover's_algorithm
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Re:Oblig. Contact quote
So actually the universe is a big vaccum production facility, and all we see is just a bit of dirt contaminating the otherwise perfect vacuum.
Well, be prepared for the coming of the large vacuum cleaner ... :-)I wonder what the average density of the universe is. Probably about the same as the best vacuum we can create.
From Wikipedia, I get that the average density of the observable universe is slightly below 10^-26 kg/m^3. On the other hand, the best laboratoy vacuum is a bit above 10^-17 kg/m^3.
In other words, our best vacuum is 9 orders of magnitude worse than the universe as a whole.
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Re:No, we need one *better* language, not "more"
First, natural language programming is hard.
In fact, it's probably impossible. English and other natural languages are context-sensitive. The precise meanings of some statement(s) in context-sensitive languages cannot be determined solely from the statements themselves without additional information that is external to the languages. For example, the double entendre. If you want another real world example a rule system that's been mucked up by natural language, you need look no further than the various legal codes and presently in use around the world and the lawyers who profit from and manipulate ambiguities therein.
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Re:No, we need one *better* language, not "more"
First, natural language programming is hard.
In fact, it's probably impossible. English and other natural languages are context-sensitive. The precise meanings of some statement(s) in context-sensitive languages cannot be determined solely from the statements themselves without additional information that is external to the languages. For example, the double entendre. If you want another real world example a rule system that's been mucked up by natural language, you need look no further than the various legal codes and presently in use around the world and the lawyers who profit from and manipulate ambiguities therein.
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Re:Said it before and I'll say it again ...
Why would you want to remove ads? Genuine Rolex watches for only $99! They are what support the development of (Refinance today!) new applications for your benefit. Just like you can benefit from a bigger penis! I don't find it (THIS IS NOT ANNOYING!) annoying at all.
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Re:Perfect american corporate business practice
I would ban day trading, and I will tell you why. It's that mentality for short gains that has lead to our economic collapse. If it was illegal from the start to securitize mortgages, or that it would require very very well documented and physical transfers of the mortgage note from one owner to the other, we would not be in this situation.
You seem to also have the mentality for "short gains" in the terms of a "quick fix" by banning day trading. It *was* illegal to securitize mortgages, but then Barnie Frank and his friends in congress repealed the Glass-Stegal act and failed to monitor the implications of allowing the US banking system more degrees of freedom. They did this because everyone thought it was a great idea that "people who can't afford a home should be able to buy a home."
It was the intense building greed of Wall Street that made the packaging and reselling of mortgage backed securities go faster and faster and faster, and eventually, the demand was so great that loans were originated that anybody with a brain new could not be repaid and would default within 4 years.
Subprime? Subprime my ass. Guaranteed 99.99% Loss Financial Loans is what I would have called them at the end.Everyone, having the benefit of hindsight, has various different theories for what went wrong. However, at the time, everything *seemed* to be great and very very few people saw it comming. The people who did see it comming, were not in a position to prevent it. Again, this is a failure of government to monitor the industry. We have known for 100's of not 1,000's of years, that capitalism, unregulated, unmonitored, unwatched, and unaccountable, will run amuck in the pursuit of profit. This is why we don't have pure capitalism. We have regulated capitalism, and when the regulators fail, the outcome is not good.
The need to trade faster and faster only encourages this bullshit, and I don't buy for one second, that it is beneficial to the stock market by blah blah blah economist reasoning inserted here.
"The need to trade faster and faster" as you put it, is not the reason the term "daytrading" exists. The fundamental motivation today, for purchasing a stock and selling it before the close of the day, is the limited amount of leverage allowed when purchasing stocks. Due to the speculative excesses that allowed the Kennedy family to rise to power, while at the same time, causing the the Stock Market Crash of 1929, which in turn contributed to the Great Depression, margin rates on stocks have been limited to 2:1. By buying and selling within the same day, this leverage ratio can be raised to 4:1. See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Daytrading for an introduction of the practice. Pay special attention to the bits on the special rules surrounding "Pattern Day Traders."
It also introduces arbitrage . Do you think they are building a multi-billion dollar fiber optical trans-Atlantic cable to reduce latency for shits and giggles? No. It is so they can link the stock exchanges and game the system even more. It won't be Call of Duty packets going across that pipe, but it will be warfare.
There is nothing wrong, or negative, with arbitrage, and it is an important factor in price discovery and market liquidity. As for linking exchanges via fiber optic cable, this reduces the opportunities for arbitrage due to price mismatches. As for you calling it warfare, that would be like someone calling your exercise of emailing 1,000 copies of your resume to potential employers warfare.
Why is it that in a certain building in New York that colocation of a server costs 50-100x that of the going rate?
Why is that some people are trying to make microsecond trading and "stock exchange on a chip"?
It's called unfair advantages far worse than insider trading and it is -
Re:Win8 is a non-event
The main UI innovation of Win95 was to copy NextSTEP, except not quite right. It is foolish to have the 'kill window' button too close to any other button. Kill should be on one side (e.g. right), and other functions on the left.
Nextstep: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3b/NeXTSTEP_desktop.jpg
Win95: http://theoligarch.com/images/win95.gif
In both looks and basic functionality for a desktop OS, NeXTSTEP is still more "right" than anything else. Even MacOSX screwed up and most apps have red(kill) next to yellow and green basically copying Win95.
NeXTSTEP with the MacOSX dock (which is clearly an evolution of the NeXT dock) would still be quite excellent.
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Re:That's right, Apple has a monopoly on smart
So, not Acer: http://blog.dialaphone.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/acer-tablet1.jpg
or Motorola: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2011/4/27/1303887422785/Motorola-Xoom-tablet-005.jpg
or the HP Touchpad: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41I6VtL6D%2BL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
or the Advent Vega: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent_Vega
or the Sony Tablet S: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Sony_Tablet_S.jpg/300px-Sony_Tablet_S.jpg
or the Viewsonic G: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/49/ViewSonic_G_Tablet.JPG/220px-ViewSonic_G_Tablet.JPGno, none of these look remotely like an iPad. Except the Xoom, cause Apple have tried to sue Motorola for them. The rest haven't been sued because they're not black, with rounded edges and a single button with a rectangular screen.
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Re:That's right, Apple has a monopoly on smart
So, not Acer: http://blog.dialaphone.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/acer-tablet1.jpg
or Motorola: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2011/4/27/1303887422785/Motorola-Xoom-tablet-005.jpg
or the HP Touchpad: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41I6VtL6D%2BL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
or the Advent Vega: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent_Vega
or the Sony Tablet S: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Sony_Tablet_S.jpg/300px-Sony_Tablet_S.jpg
or the Viewsonic G: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/49/ViewSonic_G_Tablet.JPG/220px-ViewSonic_G_Tablet.JPGno, none of these look remotely like an iPad. Except the Xoom, cause Apple have tried to sue Motorola for them. The rest haven't been sued because they're not black, with rounded edges and a single button with a rectangular screen.
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Re:Expensive and limited netbook
It has this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Apple-logo.svg
Apple has done a reasonable job of ensuring that the majority of day-to-day computing needs can be satisfied by the programs they have approved for use on the iPad. What I find interesting about this situation is that when we had the first wave of flamewars about the iPad and the App Store model, people were saying that there was no way that an iPad would ever be someone's primary computer. I guess they were wrong? -
Re:The End of USPS
What is your point ?
Maybe you should use statistics that matter, or use more than one and explain how you combine them.
Percentage of urban population by country
This statistic is more relevant than yours because distribution network works as a a mesh network of hubs, followed by a star network for delivery, and not some kind of globally meshed network.
Due to economies of scale, the mesh network costs less to operate, so the most relevant aspect of operating costs is the efficiency of the star network, which improves with local population density, independantly from the global, average population density. -
History proves you wrong
However, tampering with letters would be a pretty ugly process to scale up(machines would be unlikely to be able to do it delicately enough, and 20,000 human tamperers are going to talk...)
History proves you wrong: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MfS_Abt_M_Brief1.jpg - Automatic letter re-sealer, in use by East-German Staatssicherheit (Stasi) until the fall of the wall.
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Employee-owned companies
Overtime makes sense when you're working in https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies