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Whilst the cost of switching would be huge, there is also a massive hidden cost in not switching when dealing with the rest of the world (except for Liberia & Burma, the only other two countries that don't use the metric system)

My request is to a Slashdotter to provide examples of especially what this "massive hidden cost" as mentioned above is .

One thing I know is that US car salesmen are stuck with their inventory and wish they could sell more of those cars to Canadians given the Canadian currency which is now stronger than its US counterpart.

The problem is Canadians employ the metric system, but with US cars calibrated in imperial units, they cannot be allowed on Canadian roads and the cost of conversion is prohibitive.

Until the average person is willing to spend six or seven hundred dollars on a media center PC to play games

AU$498.00 to AU$580.86 for Xbox 360 250GB with Kinect with the Australian and US Dollar at Parity as of this post, perhaps a few cents down at the brick and mortar exchange rate. Average people do spend a shit load on this crap.

Been a while since you've checked the exchange rate.... :)

http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=1000000&From=AUD&To=USD

The car's only 830 pounds

830 pounds = $1300, coming in way under budget.

They need chemists, and they're willing to pay a million Brazilian dollars.

Nice salary for a chemist.

They should have asked for it in Iranian Reals...

Hello, we'd like 15,041,999,992,332,288 in your terrorist Iranian Reals

(source)

It's a strange world in which # is worth more than $

Makes sense to me.

UK VAT (the equivalent of sales tax in the USA) is 17.5%

Removing the tax so we can compare fairly: £429 / 1.175 => £365.11

Converting pounds to dollars: £429 = $539.94 (currency rate is 1 GBP = 1.47884 USD)

So, the difference (before taking into account the import duties of ~10%) is $539.94 - $499.99 or ~$40.

Subtracting $53 (estimated) of import duty means Apple is charging less than they do in the USA.

Simon.

It is possible to get more, but uncapped connections are completely unaffordable. I can't remember the numbers now, but I think it started somewhere around R1000/month for fairly low-speed ADSL, line rental not included.

For the benefit of others who, like me, had no clue: about $137 USD (source) plus whatever line rental costs are.

Not to be confused with the entirely different XE.

The comma isn’t poorly placed. The extra zero at the end is.

http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=200%2C000&From=INR&To=USD

For certain values of 'Mark'. The Mark I know is about 400 lbs, so if thats the case, Superman, you are quite strong indeed.

According to xe.com, the Mark is currently about 0.46 Pounds.

500, in October..

That works out to $712 USD as of this post (click for a more up-to-date rate), but that will probably be European style - unlocked and with no contract.

It will be up to carriers in countries like the US to decide how much to subsidise the phone, over what contract term.

Because the article used pounds (it was submitted at 10:59 UK time, when the USA is sleeping).

Anyway, don't most people know the very approximate value of $, € and £ in their own currency? They're the three most-traded currencies worldwide. xe.com if you don't, and they don't change enough for it to matter when reading a news story.

In Australia, the price of Windows 7 is AU$200. The US equivalent is AU$60.
You do the math.

OK, I will do the math, with assistance from the XE: Currency Convertor

200.00 AUD = 160.921 USD
60.00 AUD = 48.2797 USD
Oh, and one last value from the article since you specifically are talking about Windows 7 numbers:
199.00 USD = 247.314 AUD
AU$200 is less than US$199, not more.

P.S. Where did that AU$60 figure come from? The cheapest edition of Vista purchased from NewEgg (a popular US computer discount website) is:
Windows Vista Home Basic for System Builders) for $89.99 USD ($111.781 AUD).

130.00 NZD = 78.1904 USD

(According to www.xe.com)

I get it - you're Enlightened American Guy and I'm Parochial Redneck Guy! Nice try, douche.

Let's see...

Britain

France

Germany

And yes, the US deficit is growing too thanks to Dubya and Obama Inc and due in no small part to our own efforts including Medicare and Medicaid.

Really it's the same all around. Rising budget deficits. The EU has done OK during the recent bubbles, but it's going to be HI-LARIOUS watching them flounder when they figure out that past performance is not indicative of the future.

Seriously, does it take that much thought to figure out that as your population grows your country is fucked if you provide too many services as entitlements to said population? Seems kind of obvious. Any numbnuts can thing for 30 seconds and realize "shit, as population goes beyond some point per-capita productivity goes down." Extrapolate from there and you can see why EuroSocialism is bound to fail.

But hey, it's worked out alright for the last several decades, therefore it will always work out right, huh?

"it could mean that Canada is going into more debt for health care than the United States."

Canada is spending less per capita, and might somehow be going into more debt? Um, no. I suppose it is possible if Canada did not tax their population enough, but they seem to be doing so - through most of the 1990s and early 2000s Canada's debt was actually falling. Today it seems to be at about $13,800 per person (Canadian dollars are worth something like $0.84 according to http://www.xe.com/ so that comes out to about $11,560 US per person ) while the US debt seems to be about $36,600 per person. They are both growing, but since the Canadian one is less than 1/3 of the US one, I think Canada is clearly in a better position to the US from a national debt point of view.

I do not know about dept per GNP, but the GNP per capita of the US seems to be $43,743, while Canada is $32,546 according to http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/infopays/rank/PNBH2.html so the US is ahead by a factor of 1.344036, so dept per GNP (the "per capitas" will cancel out) of the US is ($36,600/$43,743 =) 0.8367053 and for Canada it is ($11,560/$32,546 =) 0.3551895.

The US national dept: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
The Canadian national dept: http://www.debtclock.ca/

Here is a Wikipedia entry that lists Canada as ahead of the US, but not by as much as my numbers above - maybe their numbers are a bit older?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt

According to http://www.xe.com/ucc/, 0.41USD about 2.80RMB, which bought you about two baozi (the only low-end food source I can remember the price of right now) in Shanghai a few years ago. Outside Shanghai they're sure to be a lot cheaper.
I'd say you'd need six of those to feed you, your wife, and the one child you're allowed.
As those people work 12 hours a day, they'd still have 24.60RMB left. Actually enough for some variance in the diet, provided their rent doesn't exceed, say, 500RMB per month.
I'm pretty sure those worker's families have a, in a material sense, much better life than they could have by relying on subsistence farming, but of course they're giving up one family member for it, and there is no job security whatsoever. These factories often rely on a few customers, and are even more susceptible to market changes than those in developed countries, where no week goes by without one shutting down.

98€ != $96.

That said, your point stands...

25 euros.

Which equals $33.45. Perhaps you meant 25 euro cents? :-)

http://xe.com/ucc

Recent worldwide economic conditions have raped the Australian dollar right through its pants. It's going to be quite a long time until AU$300 is 'just under' US$300 again...

That would be about 46,800,000 Naira. Approximately, I don't know the current exchange rate.

XE.com says 400,000.00 USD = 47,100,000.00 NGN (Nigerian Naira)

The S101 is [...] cheaper ($899)[...]

Not if you take into account that TFA was posted on an Australian site (though they were quite good at hiding that fact) and the current USD/AUD exchange rate...

A bullshit meme -- and a false dichotomy.

Congratulations, you've proven nothing. While you're surfing Wikipedia, may I suggest the section on soundness?

If you can't offer evidence to justify your accusation of "slave labor"...

Hi, my name is Hyperbole, I don't think we've met. . .

What exactly is "fair"? Go ahead, try to justify, why an American is entitled to a wage higher, than a Mexican, who -- upon coming to this country (legally or otherwise) not only manages to earn a living for himself, but to also support extended family back home?

Your argument is based upon the premise that a unit of currency has the same purchasing power in the US as it does in Mexico. This is incorrect. There are a ton of numbers that can be run to make a comprehensive argument here, but let me take just one metric to start: daily wages.

In the US, the median hourly wage for workers with 1-4 years experience in their field is $13.75. Assuming an 8 hour day, that's $110/day pre-tax. The same metric in Mexico is MX$209 per day, or about $20 USD. Think on that.

Yeah, a 20% or 30% VAT hidden in prices so you don't think about how insanely high a sales tax you are paying. And don't all the manufacturing companies pay VAT as well on thier supplies? You don't think that adds to the final price?
I think I prefer my 9% added sales tax thanks.

Example (prices from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk ):
xbox 360 in usa with 20 gig hdd: $300 plus tax. Lets call it 10% tax (in some states its less or zero). So thats $330 out the door.

xbox 360 in UK with 20 gig hdd 190 pounds with 17.5% VAT inside the price.

Currency conversion ( http://www.xe.com/ucc/ ) for 190 pounds comes out to $378.45

Yeah, I think I prefer saving the extra $40 thanks (note that thats more than the extra ~8% would account for).

You can do the same calculation for almost any technology item that has a fairly fixed price, like consoles or console games, or for example almost anything from apple like ipods, or sometimes books will show multiple currencies, or just check something on amazon.com vs amazon.co.uk or amazon.de (except if its on a special sale). Europeans pay a lot more for items in general from what I've seen, especially technology items.

FYI: http://www.xe.com/ucc/ (Bookmark it now!)

As someone said earlier, the EeePM has gotten into the same price bracket as traditional low-end laptops. In fact, you get more performance for the money with a "regular" laptop.

For $690 for get an EeePC with 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD, 10" screen and 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor.

For about 10% more cost you can get something with twice the RAM, at least five times the HDD, dual-core processor and larger display.

There are only valid two reasons I can see how the EeePC is not pricing itself out of the market: First is weight, since they are somewhat lighter than the competition. Second is the SSD which, honestly, doesn't compensate enough for the smaller battery (which is also a big part of why its lighter)
=Smidge=

The price printed on the back of the books are $5 more north of the border. The current exchange rate at http://xe.com/ucc gives the difference of around $0.60.

Guess what I didn't buy today?

When the Euro came out, it was at par with the US dollar. It later dropped to about 70 cents US to the Euro. Right now, as I write this, the dollar is at 1.56 to the Euro (per XE.com). The Canadian dollar, aka the 'loony', was about 68 cents US for ages, being tied to the Pound Sterling. Today, it's 1.02 US to the loony, and the Pound Sterling has climbed from $1.05 to the pound in '85 to $1.98 to the pound today. Most of this movement has been in the last 4 or 5 years.

Had the US dollar retained value, none of the conversion rates would have fluctuated more than maybe 5% according to my economically inclined friends, not lost half its value against the two other major world currencies. And those fluctuations would even out even closer in time. The US economy is taking a dive. Wake up.

As per BBC, 80% of the Indians live on 20 rupees (25p) a day. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6946800.stm
20.00 INR = 0.511247 USD as per http://www.xe.com/
And do NOT expect a civilized society in India...

Just for interest, in the UK:

Smokers are heavily taxed - nearly 80% of each packet of 20 cigarettes is duty, or £4.03 ($7.96) of the cover price of £5.23 ($10.33) (exchange done using xe.com). (Cost of packet of 20 from 16 March 2007 so you can guarantee the cost of a packet of 20 is even higher now.)

Come on everyone knows http://www.xe.com/ is the place to go for currency info, it even has top pagerank on Google.

Wheree do you think I got X-Rates? From Google! Googling dollar euro "foreign exchange" returns X-rates in the top spot.

Come on everyone knows http://www.xe.com/ is the place to go for currency info, it even has top pagerank on Google.

XE says the US dollar is worth about 96.6 Canadian cents.

XE says the US dollar is worth about 96.6 Canadian cents.

Who should we blame for the fact that the US dollar is now worth less than the Canadian dollar? http://www.xe.com/ It is $1.02 to get a Canadian dollar. I know all my paperback books from a few years ago have prices on them like $5.99 US, $7.99 Canada. So this is a rather large event...

They must been using Excel 2007 to calculate their exchange rates... here are some of their international costs:

• GBP = 349.99
• CAD = 679.99
• AUD = 979.95

Based on actual exchange rates, converting from USD$499.99 those prices should be:

• GBP = 248.02
• CAD = 502.25
• AUD = 570.77

Nice way to gouge your international customers...

To make the data a little more meaningful to Europeans: 835.00 USD = 643.790 EUR.

Source.

Check the exchange rate for pounds. What he was offered amounts to $38,923,202.36. Seems like a nice paycheck to me.

> 1,500 UKP

Ukrainian whats? HTH

Alas, the Tugrik is not available in the standard character set, but a capital T is close (the tugrik has two cross bars). But the capital R is for South African Rand. And the Euro symbol has to be escaped for HTML (I think a sibling poster had this trouble).

There don't appear to be any currencies which use symbols close enough to "o" or "M" though. "O" I can understand for it's similarity to "0" (who wants their currency to be "Zeros"?), but M? MONEY. Honestly. Someone invade somewhere and change the currency to "Monetary Units".

Nice Table of Currency Symbols

I am curious as to what conversion rate they are using between the USD and the GBP. According to the XE UCC, 299 USD is equivalent to 158.548 GBP.

In that case it would probably be cheaper to buy the thing from a US website and have it shipped over to the UK.

Close:

450.00 USD = 237.859 GBP

Ok, not close, not even near...

from http://www.xe.com

That is not even mentioning the difference in the cost of books due to monopoly rents in Western countries. I was shocked, when I first bought text books in Asia, at how little they cost. The more copyrights are enforced, the more students are ripped off.

Now, the universities are starting to sell English text books, and the cost of education is going up dramatically.

A good example of this is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China series. This book is like an encyclopedia of Chinese science. On Amazon, Science and Civilization in China volumes appear to go for prices between US$120 and US$210 per volume. When I bought the versions "licensed for sale in Taiwan", however, I only paid between NT$500 and NT$800 per volume. At the current exchange rate, according to XE.com (the first converter I found in a Google search), thats between about US$15 and US$25. These books are not pirated. They were legally produced by a publisher that has the exclusive rights to these volumes in Taiwan only.

During my college years, I was always shocked at the rip offs on campus. However, buying books in Asia changed my shock into indignation. Not only are books more expensive in the West, from the standpoint of someone who is interested in languages (especially those with scripts that are not Roman or alphabetic in nature), this is even worse. While books in China have always contained Chinese characters, and Asian publishers have no problem incorporating Roman characters into their books, the opposite is true of Western publishers. This is why most works dealing with China in Western languages lack Chinese characters. This means that books published by Western publishers are not only more expensive but also contain less information, less value for a higher price.

Books can cost up to 10 times as much. Teachers need higher salaries because of higher taxes. Bureaucracies waste more money. Yet it is assumed that spending more on education necessarily yields better results.

Considering the figures in the Slashdot post, one should come to the conclusion that Asians are less educated than their Western neighbors. However, India has the largest number of engineers in the world, and Chinese students consistently best other students at universities in the US and other countries. Are those Western students really getting their money's worth?

Post Post: I should add that government spending is also less relevant in Chinese cultural areas. Half of schooling is done after school at cram schools. These are private schools that make up for the deficiencies of public schools. Government spending is, therefore, only a fraction of per capita spending on education in Chinese cultural areas.

10,000.00Y ~= 95.6891 CAD http://www.xe.com/

Would have been extra cool if you made it convincing. . .

The $52.2-million(Canadian) facility [...]

And before you write stupid comments about how that's really 5$ worth of "real" money (i.e. US$), just you have a look at http://www.xe.com/

According to http://www.xe.com/ucc/, 25000 yen is: 223.435 USD (dollars), 174.841 EUR (euros), and 119.357 GBP (pounds), not 225, 225, and 150 respectively, as the article says. Just what "various factors" does it take into account, anyway?

yup yup yup. I currently use keywords for google, google images, traceroute, whois, ebay, wiki, xe.net, php.net, mysql.com (though their website is mostly useless (in comparision with the brilliantly useful php.net)), amazon, archive.org, a file extension search page, and ip2country. yay for bookmarks! your suggestions welcome.

FYI:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/tracert.ch?ip=%25s
http://filext.com/detaillist.php?extdetail=%25s&Su bmit3=Go!
http://whois.webhosting.info/%25s
http://web.archive.org/archive_request_ng?collecti on=web&url=%25s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search =%25s
http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=%25s&From =USD&To=GBP
http://www.ezwhois.net/index.php
http://search.ebay.co.uk/search/search.dll?satitle =%25s&ht=1&sokeywordredirect=&from=R8&fkr=1&soloct og=9
http://www.php.net/search.php
http://www.mysql.com/search/?q=%25s&charset=
http://puremango.co.uk/ip2country.php?ip=%25s
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle- form/026-9212734-6757257

An autograph from the software guru Richard Stallman was auctioned (emphasis mine ) for R$23 at FISL 7.0, on Saturday the 22nd. The initiative (the idea) came from Leonardo Vaz, from OPEN BSB inthe state of Rio Grande do Sul, who caused quite an uproar on this last day of the event when he went to personally deliver the money collected to Stallman, accompanied by about 100 persons.

The auction idea sums up the relaxed atmosphere of this last day of FISL 7.0. Scheduled for 4:00 PM is the launch of GULA (Grupo de Usuários de Linux Alcoólatras, or Alchoholic Linux Users' Group), which promises to shake up the final hours of the event.