And he really, really needs you to buy his PCs. Any reason will do.
Take out a loan and buy two or three. Encourage your friends to do the same. Encourage strangers, too.
only a total of 5m live in finland . So something is wrong with that calculation.
No, it's roughly correct.
Finland's area is about one third of a million sq.km, and has a population of just over 5 million, which makes 15-ish million per million sq.km (although 15½ per sq.km would be a more conventional way to express it).
It used to be that trains in Britain mostly worked, but the food aboard them was ghastly. Since privatization, the whole service has been transformed utterly. Now it's all reminiscent of those expensive mouldy greasy cardboard sandwiches.
Inter-city trains in Finland are much better - fairly comfy with non-poisonous food. Also, they are never over-booked; if you reserve a seat, you get it. Alas, despite the trains being subsidized, it's not always cheaper than flying. In particular, for travel between Helsinki and anywhere more than 300km away which has an airport, a plane ticket can often be found for less than a train ticket. For travel which does not involve Helsinki, or involves somewhere far from any airport, then trains are usually cheaper.
Considering you could drop finland into alaska and lose it, it would be much larger task to develop that kind of infrastructure in the USA. Not gonna happen soon.
There are exactly 6 U.S. states with lower population density than Finland. Even including these large empty states, the U.S. has double the population density of Finland. The other 44 states have higher population densities than Finland, often much higher. There are also 7 states which each have more than 5 times the population density of Finland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density.
I live in the countryside in Finland, about 350km north of Helsinki. I have 100/10Mbps fiber to the house, with no capacity limits. So do my "neighbours" (houses are typically separated by a few hundred meters along the road). The ISP has a monopoly, but was required by the municipality to provide a certain level of service in return for having access to its citizens and use of roads etc. to reach them. The ISP is a private company and appears to be profitable.
As far as I can see, the problems in the US are not really with population density or sparsity of population distribution. They would seem to be caused by local/state governments not balancing the interests of their citizens with the interests of ISPs. As a result, some ISPs are granted local monopolies without compensating conditions on quality of service. This allows them to avoid competition and maximize the squeeze on captive customers while providing a shoddy service by minimizing their investment in infrastructure. There are apparently some areas of the US with decent service, but in far too many places, it seems that the customers are being brutalized by the ISPs, while the authorities egg them on.
And citizens redefined to those who voluntarily pay full price for internet service.
I already pay full price: euro55 per month for 100/10Mbps fiber to the house without any caps on throughput. It includes a basic package of IP TV channels and apparently some sort of IP telephone service (not in use). And I live in the countryside, 20km from the nearest town. In Finland.
Apparently in the bigger cities (if any in Finland actually count as big), there is now a 100/10Mbps service which is less than euro45 per month.
The Armed forces are still giving out medals that were originally produced in anticipation of that invasion.
For example, 500,000 Purple Hearts were made in preparation for the anticipated invasion of Japan. As it turned out, they were not needed then. This stockpile has been reduced by the Korean and Vietnam wars and all of the lesser actions (Iraq 1 & 2, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, and various "peacekeeping" missions), but about 100,000 still remain unused.
I call bullshit, and suspect that you only tried the IE that was pre-installed on your Windows PC, and lack any other browsers.
That site works fine in all of the browsers installed on my Ubuntu Linux PC (Opera 10.0, Epiphany 2.26.1, Firefox 3.0.14, and Firefox 3.5.3).
An encyclopedia in the form of an e-book for $99. Sorry if I'm not too excited...
I bought a nice new 30-volume Britannica in 1983 (leather-bound dead trees). It cost considerably more than $99, and is no longer up-to-date. It still resides on my bookshelves, but rarely gets consulted any more. This is one of the few cases where the ebook is actually superior to the dead-tree version, as it can be kept up-to-date, while the dead-tree version progressively loses relevance over decades.
My only gripe about this ebook is that a few GB seems too little. I have not tried to httrack wikipedia's English edition (and mirroring only wikipedia and wikimedia material), but suspect that 10s of GB would be needed, since so much of the graphics are in bitmap rather than vector form.
Vista is the worst OS I've used since the Windows 3. Perhaps even worse than that. It's a pile of shit with whipped cream on top, and I'm glad it's been replaced with Windows 7.
Worse than Windows 3.0... hmm... that would be Windows 2.1/386 (the proto of 3.0) or Windows 2.1/286, or Windows 1.0 (yes, I used it; yes, it sucked even by the standards of the day). I don't think I ever used Windows 2.0, but it probably sucked also.
Since it would be used only for eco-friendly recycling, it could not possibly be considered a weapon of any sort.
I'm sure this is what medieval siege engineers shouted at the unhappy garrisons of besieged castles they were bombarding with decaying horse corpses: "That's no weapon, we're just recycling!"
The besiegers ate horse corpses before they decayed. For bio-warfare ammo, they used decaying human corpses, preferably plagued. They also used shit. ISS could go either way...
It could be used to launch the "organic wastes" at high enough speed that they simply drop, conferring at least two benefits: (i) a boost to compensate for orbital decay, (ii) making people on Earth rather nervous and increasing sales of robust umbrellas. Since it would be used only for eco-friendly recycling, it could not possibly be considered a weapon of any sort.
The cost would be higher, of course, but I'm sure obtaining funding would be even easier. The ground-based version would be a necessary stage in development, used to launch the parts into orbit.
Only if you want them to arrive on orbit as people paste.
Scotty wouldn't have minded this technique. At least he would not have been spread across Puget Sound by a rocket failure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Doohan
We occasionally exceed 400GB on the wired connection at home, without running torrents/worms/bots/etc.
Wow. What are you running to suck up so much bandwidth?
Running a family, actually - two adults and some kids, all with their own PCs, plus a server for the home LAN. Streaming music, streaming video, browsing sites with multi-megabyte pages, downloading a few ISOs to try a different distro. It adds up. All our nodes run linux, and I have not set up any proxy for updates (why bother?), so that's a multiplier on the regular updates & sporadic upgrades. Sometimes we have our work PCs at home also for teleconferencing, which also boosts usage.
Most months we're around the 100GB mark, which would be less than one third of a percent of the potential throughput. Our connection is 100/10 Mbps without capacity limits, so the theoretical capacity is about 30 TB per month.
Ah, the ASCII table and an actual clipboard were essential. I'm sure there's a 360k floppy with it somewhere in the barn, along with other delights of the early 1980s, like WordStar.
If the above means anything to you, "apt-get install joe mc" will make you smile as well.
...is that 400MB per month is considered "heavy". We occasionally exceed 400GB on the wired connection at home, without running torrents/worms/bots/etc.
Slashdot fsck-up on patent terminology yet again.
This is a published patent application, which has not yet been examined at all. Check its status on PAIR (12/099137 is the application number) and you will see "Docketed new case - Ready for examination", which merely means they've submitted enough paperwork and fees that an examiner will read the thing soon. If you're a bit masochistic, you could go to the Image File Wrapper and read the official correspondence between the applicant's attorney and the PTO, which will include the examiner's material when it becomes available.
There are many steps between the start of examination and the issue of a patent, during which the claims may have to be narrowed or revised or rewritten completely. Some applications get chucked out, no matter how loud and prolonged the howls of the applicant. In most cases which actually issue as patents, the claims get modified to some extent. Claim 1 of this application looks like it will be treated somewhat roughly by the examiner during prosecution.
Slashdot Mirror
And he really, really needs you to buy his PCs. Any reason will do.
Take out a loan and buy two or three. Encourage your friends to do the same. Encourage strangers, too.
only a total of 5m live in finland . So something is wrong with that calculation.
No, it's roughly correct.
Finland's area is about one third of a million sq.km, and has a population of just over 5 million, which makes 15-ish million per million sq.km (although 15½ per sq.km would be a more conventional way to express it).
It used to be that trains in Britain mostly worked, but the food aboard them was ghastly. Since privatization, the whole service has been transformed utterly. Now it's all reminiscent of those expensive mouldy greasy cardboard sandwiches.
Inter-city trains in Finland are much better - fairly comfy with non-poisonous food. Also, they are never over-booked; if you reserve a seat, you get it. Alas, despite the trains being subsidized, it's not always cheaper than flying. In particular, for travel between Helsinki and anywhere more than 300km away which has an airport, a plane ticket can often be found for less than a train ticket. For travel which does not involve Helsinki, or involves somewhere far from any airport, then trains are usually cheaper.
Finland, Finland, Finland ...
Your mountains so lofty
For small values of "lofty". The Norwegians kindly allow us to claim the lower slopes of some of their real mountains.
Considering you could drop finland into alaska and lose it, it would be much larger task to develop that kind of infrastructure in the USA. Not gonna happen soon.
There are exactly 6 U.S. states with lower population density than Finland. Even including these large empty states, the U.S. has double the population density of Finland. The other 44 states have higher population densities than Finland, often much higher. There are also 7 states which each have more than 5 times the population density of Finland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density.
Moreover, the U.S. is 82% urbanized while Finland is only 63%, so the U.S. population is more concentrated into compact areas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country.
the US is much more regionally diverse (read 'f'ing big and spread out) compared to EU countries so it's much more challenging
I thought this canard was long buried. Here's a reminder.
The population density of Finland (15.6/sq.km) is about half that of the USA (30/sq.km) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density. The population density of Finland is lower than that in 44 of the 50 US states http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density. Moreover, the population in Finland is quite dispersed, with very few large centers. Helsinki+Espoo+Vantaa combined just exceed 1 million, Tampere and Turku are each around 0.3 million when their outlying areas are included, Oulu and Jyvaskyla are each around 0.14 million, and Kuopio and Lahti are each around 0.1 million http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Finland_by_population.
I live in the countryside in Finland, about 350km north of Helsinki. I have 100/10Mbps fiber to the house, with no capacity limits. So do my "neighbours" (houses are typically separated by a few hundred meters along the road). The ISP has a monopoly, but was required by the municipality to provide a certain level of service in return for having access to its citizens and use of roads etc. to reach them. The ISP is a private company and appears to be profitable.
As far as I can see, the problems in the US are not really with population density or sparsity of population distribution. They would seem to be caused by local/state governments not balancing the interests of their citizens with the interests of ISPs. As a result, some ISPs are granted local monopolies without compensating conditions on quality of service. This allows them to avoid competition and maximize the squeeze on captive customers while providing a shoddy service by minimizing their investment in infrastructure. There are apparently some areas of the US with decent service, but in far too many places, it seems that the customers are being brutalized by the ISPs, while the authorities egg them on.
And citizens redefined to those who voluntarily pay full price for internet service.
I already pay full price: euro55 per month for 100/10Mbps fiber to the house without any caps on throughput. It includes a basic package of IP TV channels and apparently some sort of IP telephone service (not in use). And I live in the countryside, 20km from the nearest town. In Finland.
Apparently in the bigger cities (if any in Finland actually count as big), there is now a 100/10Mbps service which is less than euro45 per month.
The Armed forces are still giving out medals that were originally produced in anticipation of that invasion.
For example, 500,000 Purple Hearts were made in preparation for the anticipated invasion of Japan. As it turned out, they were not needed then. This stockpile has been reduced by the Korean and Vietnam wars and all of the lesser actions (Iraq 1 & 2, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, and various "peacekeeping" missions), but about 100,000 still remain unused.
Android is a new shiny thing with lots of hype and a comforting corporate mother figure we can all snuggle up to and suckle on
Hmm, I tend to anthropomorphize Google as a MILF figure.
That way, I might enjoy eventually being screwed...
And try http://www.bladeforums.com/forums
It works only in IE.
I call bullshit, and suspect that you only tried the IE that was pre-installed on your Windows PC, and lack any other browsers.
That site works fine in all of the browsers installed on my Ubuntu Linux PC (Opera 10.0, Epiphany 2.26.1, Firefox 3.0.14, and Firefox 3.5.3).
An encyclopedia in the form of an e-book for $99. Sorry if I'm not too excited...
I bought a nice new 30-volume Britannica in 1983 (leather-bound dead trees). It cost considerably more than $99, and is no longer up-to-date. It still resides on my bookshelves, but rarely gets consulted any more. This is one of the few cases where the ebook is actually superior to the dead-tree version, as it can be kept up-to-date, while the dead-tree version progressively loses relevance over decades.
My only gripe about this ebook is that a few GB seems too little. I have not tried to httrack wikipedia's English edition (and mirroring only wikipedia and wikimedia material), but suspect that 10s of GB would be needed, since so much of the graphics are in bitmap rather than vector form.
...and the DNS bit everyone else.
Goat.se
Arrgh... the horror... http://goat.se/cx You'll want to claw your eyes out!
Loser Pays. Apparently pays about $10000 according to TFA.
"Do you not want to unprevent discontinuing disabled non-avoidance of this site?"
[Affirm]
[Deny]
[WTF?] (default)
Vista is the worst OS I've used since the Windows 3. Perhaps even worse than that. It's a pile of shit with whipped cream on top, and I'm glad it's been replaced with Windows 7.
Worse than Windows 3.0... hmm... that would be Windows 2.1/386 (the proto of 3.0) or Windows 2.1/286, or Windows 1.0 (yes, I used it; yes, it sucked even by the standards of the day). I don't think I ever used Windows 2.0, but it probably sucked also.
Since it would be used only for eco-friendly recycling, it could not possibly be considered a weapon of any sort.
I'm sure this is what medieval siege engineers shouted at the unhappy garrisons of besieged castles they were bombarding with decaying horse corpses: "That's no weapon, we're just recycling!"
The besiegers ate horse corpses before they decayed. For bio-warfare ammo, they used decaying human corpses, preferably plagued. They also used shit. ISS could go either way...
It could be used to launch the "organic wastes" at high enough speed that they simply drop, conferring at least two benefits: (i) a boost to compensate for orbital decay, (ii) making people on Earth rather nervous and increasing sales of robust umbrellas. Since it would be used only for eco-friendly recycling, it could not possibly be considered a weapon of any sort.
The cost would be higher, of course, but I'm sure obtaining funding would be even easier. The ground-based version would be a necessary stage in development, used to launch the parts into orbit.
Only if you want them to arrive on orbit as people paste.
Scotty wouldn't have minded this technique. At least he would not have been spread across Puget Sound by a rocket failure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Doohan
will be created in 12000 years by Harry Seldon,
Hari doesn't like people mis-spelling his name. You'll probably be retroactively erased from psychohistory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Seldon
We occasionally exceed 400GB on the wired connection at home, without running torrents/worms/bots/etc.
Wow. What are you running to suck up so much bandwidth?
Running a family, actually - two adults and some kids, all with their own PCs, plus a server for the home LAN. Streaming music, streaming video, browsing sites with multi-megabyte pages, downloading a few ISOs to try a different distro. It adds up. All our nodes run linux, and I have not set up any proxy for updates (why bother?), so that's a multiplier on the regular updates & sporadic upgrades. Sometimes we have our work PCs at home also for teleconferencing, which also boosts usage.
Most months we're around the 100GB mark, which would be less than one third of a percent of the potential throughput. Our connection is 100/10 Mbps without capacity limits, so the theoretical capacity is about 30 TB per month.
shit, is that TSR still hanging around? goodness!
Ah, the ASCII table and an actual clipboard were essential. I'm sure there's a 360k floppy with it somewhere in the barn, along with other delights of the early 1980s, like WordStar.
If the above means anything to you, "apt-get install joe mc" will make you smile as well.
In a few years, it'll be "apt-get pension"...
...is that 400MB per month is considered "heavy". We occasionally exceed 400GB on the wired connection at home, without running torrents/worms/bots/etc.
Are the wireless networks really so wimpy, or has the bandwidth just been massively oversold? OK, maybe it's both, and illustrates that wireless is not ready for prime time, as was mentioned here recently (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/08/2243242/FCC-Chairman-Warns-of-Wireless-Spectrum-Gap).
Slashdot fsck-up on patent terminology yet again.
This is a published patent application, which has not yet been examined at all. Check its status on PAIR (12/099137 is the application number) and you will see "Docketed new case - Ready for examination", which merely means they've submitted enough paperwork and fees that an examiner will read the thing soon. If you're a bit masochistic, you could go to the Image File Wrapper and read the official correspondence between the applicant's attorney and the PTO, which will include the examiner's material when it becomes available.
There are many steps between the start of examination and the issue of a patent, during which the claims may have to be narrowed or revised or rewritten completely. Some applications get chucked out, no matter how loud and prolonged the howls of the applicant. In most cases which actually issue as patents, the claims get modified to some extent. Claim 1 of this application looks like it will be treated somewhat roughly by the examiner during prosecution.
He says as he posts on an ad supported website...
Perhaps he checked the "Ads disabled" box up in the top right of the page...