When 11th Doctor did a crossover with Sarah Jane Adventures, he mentioned that he had 507 incarnations.
The Master was on his last incarnation during the classic series, but said he had been granted a new set due to the services he provided during Time War.
My "Flash-Ready" Motorola Milestone is still in 2.1. Last summer they told publicly that they were considering if they publish 2.2 at all, then decided it would come at the end of September.
It still hasn't materialized. The latest information is, that it would come sometime during Q1.
This was the same phone that was sold as Droid in the States, but with added bootloader protection. When users complained, the director of marketing replied that "you should have bought HTC or Nexus One".
Huh? Where I work we sell in the EU, and we do not have any offices or even any employees there.
Well, maybe not in the "legally required to" sense (though I think that in some areas those are mandated as well) but but more in the "if you want your business to succeed" sense.
There are lots of reasons for having headquarters of some sort near your customers. The most important is probably having easy understanding the culture of your customers and/or actually getting or retaining customers. The best example I can come up with on short notice is McDonalds, which for a good reason has headquarters in nearly every European nation in order to set the logistics and handle the cultural integration (see; selling beer in France or selling hamburgers with black rye bread in Finland).
Few years back (2005) I was trying to buy an iPod directly from Apple Europe (located from Ireland), and even that was horrible as the Irish customer service didn't understand my problem (the reference number wasn't correctly formated to be used with Finnish bank transfers* and students don't usually get credit cards even if we have savings and steady income from student benefits). The Finnish FAQ-web page didn't load correctly (links didn't work and some of the images were missing). Apple supposedly had Finnish contact phone numbers but they didn't work either; when I send email afterwards with feedback, they claimed that they "work perfectly from line phones", which few households had even back then. If they had had even one Finnish worker, none of these problems would be an issue. Not to mention better translation for the operating system; you still remove CD's and iPods by clicking button titled "Give Me".
Ireland's tax rate may be low in European terms, it is not when compared with locations such as Singapore, India and China.
But the companies are in Ireland because it's part of EU: they HAVE to have headquarters on the EU-area to do business there. There already is Apple Singapore, Apple India and Apple China (and probably rather same percentage of the rest of the companies listed), and they very well can't move their European operations there. If the taxes rise, the only thing Ireland has going for it is a large population of native English-speakers (and already having all the infra built on Ireland).
The rest of the states have tax of average of 26% and none under 20%; Ireland has 12% and if I understand correctly, USA has anywhere between 15% - 35%. The companies currently have extremely good deal, and even if the taxes would rise, the deal would still be very good.
Few years back, when cutting pirates from the 'net became legal in Finland, one of the first cuts were against the autonomical government of Åland. The newspapers questioned widely if the next target would be hospitals. And that was the last I've heard of THAT business in Finland.
Also it was extremely difficult to multitask. If you were running both Word and Excel for example, you had to first minimize the Word window, then locate the icon representing Excel, followed by clicking it. Then if you wanted to switch back, minimize Excel, find the Word icon, and click it. Royal pain in the ass.
Didn't Windows 3.x have Alt+Tab? I distinctly remember using it. Worked like charm, and even today the best way to move between two programs, no matter what OS you prefer to use.
However, there are relatively few programs that spam the news-feeds, and I find that "x became a fan of y"-posts are usually quite useful in later communication with the mentioned person. For this reason I don't see why (1.) the script has been written nor (2.) why Facebook would be interested about script with such a narrow potential user-base, particularly as this doesn't seem to cut into their ad-money.
Facebook has inbuilt "ignore this"-feature. Every post has an X on the top-right corner, click it, and you can choose do you want to ignore application or the user who spams your newsfeed (in case you don't want to lose him/her from your friendlist). I did this months ago, and since then I've forgotten that Mafia Wars even exist.
It's nothing to do with the size of the country, but with population density. I live in Finland, most of the towns are few hundred people in the middle of nowhere, the population density is less than in most of your States, and they still have ATM (usually several). You may recall the earlier "Internet/mobile access in Finland vs. USA" discussions we had some months ago.
There's "Everyman's Right" in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Austria. They allow hiking and camping on areas that aren't obviously someone's backyard. Scotland allows walking in the wilderness freely, but with some heavier restrictions (though what I have seen of the country, they couldn't really enforce if somebody would decide to set up a camp for few days). England and Wales allows hiking, but apparently camping is frowned upon.
From experience, I also note that while camping in forests may not be exactly allowed by law, it isn't really frowned upon in Germany and Denmark, at least if you try to stay out of the way. At least, nobody bugged me when I was too cheap to make a camp at the backyard of a boarding house (I like to travel carrying a tent on a bike).
In a nutshell; the denser the population, the more likely you are to be bothered (if you camp somewhere without asking permission).
Think about it - can you feasibly run a car on compressed air?
What I read from wikipedia, the technology seems far better than for electric car. Range of 100 km with a tank, charging the tank costs about EUR 2, and in emergency situation you can probably use manual pump to get enough pressure to get to the next station.
The only problem is that a car with a full tank would be rather dangerous in an accident, but I guess they could work around that. Link. The article (and the related articles) are rather badly written though, going from EUR to USD inside one sentence as comparisons, but I guess we can manage.
Well, the statement didn't pass with a really narrow margin - the chairperson decided. One MEP less on the right, and the statement would have went through. While Parliament couldn't have forced Berlusconi to step down nor sell his newspapers OR ask him to stop using them as political weapon, it would have been a statement on what the other countries think of Italy's politics - which also affect the other states. Berlusconi has, among other things, tried to block all EU communication from minister councils and commission without the approval of all member states - effectively making it even harder for citizens to know and affect upon up an coming legislation and directives. If the statement had passed, Berlusconi would have had much harder time trying proceeding on this venue, but.. you know..
"As long as it wasn't Berlusconi.."
If you didn't vote at all, you effectively gave your right to decide to others - who voted Berlusconi (supposing you're Italian). If you aren't Italian, there are quite many bad people you could vote. Remember, the previous EU Parliament was against 138, while the new one much less so. Did you vote? Who did you vote? EU is behind many things.. both good and bad. Most of the "bad things" spring from the Council of Ministers, who are fervently pushing for the good of their own states. Strong parliament is generally a good thing (while examples to the contrary could perhaps be found), and balances things out.
The summary doesn't mention that Patria builds military ordnance. Those patches are meant for soldiers, not civilians (though civilian models might be forthcoming). Imagine how useful that patch would be on the field. It weights less than GPS/radio units, it's easier to wield etc.
When people mention that this is akin to Star Trek-military uniforms, they are completely right. This is for the armed forces.
While you are right, Alcor themselves don't seem to have built up any gold reserve to ensure their survival (maybe I'm wrong, I didn't spend too much time checking). On the topic of their finances, their FAQ states: "The rest of the Trust investments are held at the investment firm of Morgan Stanley."
In other words, they have the money invested, probably in low-risk form as we are talking of hundreds of years. It isn't bound to be melting away in a few moments:)
Banks often move money to gold in times such as this, and I'm sure banks (being smart players as they are!) are doing just this. This is why the market price of gold has gone up lately, even though historically it always averages on the same price.
But as mentioned, that money is held by Trust, probably just so that the company can not use the money for operating costs. The company itself can still collapse, while the Trust would be bursting in money. I wonder what would happen to the funds then?
Re:Geek funeral?
on
A Geek Funeral
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Then there's your certainty that the company will survive for the hundreds or thousands of years it will take for technology to be at the point where they can revive you. That's incredibly unlikely, since no company in history has survived for that long (your arguments about financial stability are laughable, since there will almost certainly be several currency devaluations and government, society, and world upheavals in that period). I put the chances of you actually staying frozen for 1000 years at basically zero.
The oldest company in the world reached well over 1400 years before it fell to hard times. Link. Other old companies can be found here.
And even if we were to accept your argument of losing money over long-term (which history has shown to be false, even during turbulent times such as these), the value of gold has stayed fairly same for most of the human existence.
However, I'm not sure about the chances of getting resurrected, but that's a whole other subject right there.
There are expections. Lots of them. However, the ones you mentioned are rather easily explained, and ones to which I can most probably find comparisons within other nations.
Croatia and Western Balkans are not members of EU, and the situation is similar to how Canadians and Mexicans are (I assume) handled differently at the border of the United States. Norway and Iceland are part of Nordic Union, which has worked toward Nordic integration till late 40s (as I recall). As the Nordic states that are members of EU have heavy ties to the non-members, it would have been unappeasable to cut these ties - particularly as (as one Norwegian mentioned me) the non-members are nations of good standing, who in effect have to change their own laws as not to be cut out from their brothers, thus making them "EU-states with no representatives". Anyway, the Sweden/Norway border would be impossible to patrol, so better not even to try. And Iceland is so small that it doesn't really weight much.. to one direction or another.
The Sweden/Finland thing is just about taking care of local laws. Don't American states have different limits for what's acceptable and what not? Something about "border controls" is well illustrated that the towns of Tornio and Haparanda have merged together, to the point that the towns are usually discussed as one entity, and are often administered as such. The border is apparently next to impossible to detect in nature, as jogging roads etc. criss-cross the border.
And don't security get tightened in parts of America now and again? And as I understand, in China (and maybe in Russia?) you need your passport even when you travel from province to province (or state to state) as a citizen.. though I might be mistaken.
You are talking of EU directives. What you say is true, but there are also so-called community laws; where community law and state law are at odds, the EC-law takes precedence. A case in Germany has shown that community law overrides even constitutional laws of the member states. Link. The directives are something else.
In this case, Schengen is something else entirely. You have to implement the criteria before you are allowed to join (it's not tied to membership of EU, though membership requires you make an effort to join Schengen as well). Thus there are no half-assed implementations.
Also, while I am not familiar with American system, I somewhat suspect that Washington, California, New Mexico and Florida don't have completely similar practises concerning borders and airports as well. The TSA staff aren't trained in one central location, after all (or are they?).
I would like to introduce you to a thing called the "Schengen Area". Wikipedia (the Internet Encyclopaedia that's always right) says this about Schengen area;
The Schengen Area is a group of twenty-five European countries which have abolished all border controls between each other.[...]Implementing the Schengen rules involves eliminating border controls with other Schengen members while simultaneously strengthening border controls with non-member states. The rules include provisions on common policy on the temporary entry of persons (including the Schengen visa), the harmonisation of external border controls, and cross-border police and judicial co-operation.
Regulation of external border controls
Schengen also requires member countries to apply strict checks on people entering or exiting the area. These checks are co-ordinated by the European Union's Frontex agency, and subject to common rules. The details of border controls, surveillance, and the conditions under which permission to enter into the Schengen area may be granted are exhaustively detailed in a European Union regulation called Schengen Borders Code.
It can be found here.
As Schengen is an EU-project with inclusion of additional countries due to earlier agreements, we can talk about "EU Airports". Also; EU might not be a state, but it's a confederation (de facto, if not de jury), no matter how certain people would like to claim otherwise.
1) Usually pro-filesharers try to make it sound like filesharing is usual activity and try go for most or 70-90% user share
It probably is 70-90% in certain age groups. The biggest file-sharers would be people without money and with good computer skills. This means mostly people under 25, as older people have less need to obtain their entertainment illegally. After all, to get the population to 90% file-sharers, it means that grannies and tottlers both would have to take part!
As far as the usability of the report goes... even as we can assume that 1176 people is big enough group (apparently with around 5% margin of error), they basically tweaked every possible figure upwards. Instead of 33 million users of Internet, let's say 40 million (I'm sure there's official records for this), people will lie, so let's adjust to that (why would people lie in anonymous poll?) and lastly, YOU DON'T SHORTHAND THE +/- PART INTO POSITIVE AND ADD TO THE RESULTS.
Not to mention that some of the sourced research was reported wrong. The same author, but different funding and parametres.
Just want to point out that I was able to read "proper" sentences that weren't prepared for me beforehand when I was 8. I was only slightly slower than my peers (I'm a product of Finnish school system).
Point is; being able to read is not the most important thing about school. Sure, it's a basic skill, but so is hand-coordination (which along with alpabets was one of the most important things the previous year) and basic maths, how to survive in nature etc.
Slashdot Mirror
When 11th Doctor did a crossover with Sarah Jane Adventures, he mentioned that he had 507 incarnations.
The Master was on his last incarnation during the classic series, but said he had been granted a new set due to the services he provided during Time War.
My "Flash-Ready" Motorola Milestone is still in 2.1. Last summer they told publicly that they were considering if they publish 2.2 at all, then decided it would come at the end of September.
It still hasn't materialized. The latest information is, that it would come sometime during Q1.
This was the same phone that was sold as Droid in the States, but with added bootloader protection. When users complained, the director of marketing replied that "you should have bought HTC or Nexus One".
Huh? Where I work we sell in the EU, and we do not have any offices or even any employees there.
Well, maybe not in the "legally required to" sense (though I think that in some areas those are mandated as well) but but more in the "if you want your business to succeed" sense.
There are lots of reasons for having headquarters of some sort near your customers. The most important is probably having easy understanding the culture of your customers and/or actually getting or retaining customers. The best example I can come up with on short notice is McDonalds, which for a good reason has headquarters in nearly every European nation in order to set the logistics and handle the cultural integration (see; selling beer in France or selling hamburgers with black rye bread in Finland).
Few years back (2005) I was trying to buy an iPod directly from Apple Europe (located from Ireland), and even that was horrible as the Irish customer service didn't understand my problem (the reference number wasn't correctly formated to be used with Finnish bank transfers* and students don't usually get credit cards even if we have savings and steady income from student benefits). The Finnish FAQ-web page didn't load correctly (links didn't work and some of the images were missing). Apple supposedly had Finnish contact phone numbers but they didn't work either; when I send email afterwards with feedback, they claimed that they "work perfectly from line phones", which few households had even back then. If they had had even one Finnish worker, none of these problems would be an issue. Not to mention better translation for the operating system; you still remove CD's and iPods by clicking button titled "Give Me".
And so on.
*these days it's not issue any more.
Ireland's tax rate may be low in European terms, it is not when compared with locations such as Singapore, India and China.
But the companies are in Ireland because it's part of EU: they HAVE to have headquarters on the EU-area to do business there. There already is Apple Singapore, Apple India and Apple China (and probably rather same percentage of the rest of the companies listed), and they very well can't move their European operations there. If the taxes rise, the only thing Ireland has going for it is a large population of native English-speakers (and already having all the infra built on Ireland).
The rest of the states have tax of average of 26% and none under 20%; Ireland has 12% and if I understand correctly, USA has anywhere between 15% - 35%. The companies currently have extremely good deal, and even if the taxes would rise, the deal would still be very good.
Few years back, when cutting pirates from the 'net became legal in Finland, one of the first cuts were against the autonomical government of Åland. The newspapers questioned widely if the next target would be hospitals. And that was the last I've heard of THAT business in Finland.
We can hope something similar happens at Eire.
Also it was extremely difficult to multitask. If you were running both Word and Excel for example, you had to first minimize the Word window, then locate the icon representing Excel, followed by clicking it. Then if you wanted to switch back, minimize Excel, find the Word icon, and click it. Royal pain in the ass.
Didn't Windows 3.x have Alt+Tab? I distinctly remember using it. Worked like charm, and even today the best way to move between two programs, no matter what OS you prefer to use.
Thankyou for clarifying :)
However, there are relatively few programs that spam the news-feeds, and I find that "x became a fan of y"-posts are usually quite useful in later communication with the mentioned person. For this reason I don't see why (1.) the script has been written nor (2.) why Facebook would be interested about script with such a narrow potential user-base, particularly as this doesn't seem to cut into their ad-money.
Facebook has inbuilt "ignore this"-feature. Every post has an X on the top-right corner, click it, and you can choose do you want to ignore application or the user who spams your newsfeed (in case you don't want to lose him/her from your friendlist). I did this months ago, and since then I've forgotten that Mafia Wars even exist.
I understand it's an update for Windows 7, served with other software updates for computers in EU.
You mean kilometres per second.
763 mph=1 228 km/h
1000 mph=1609 km/h
It's nothing to do with the size of the country, but with population density. I live in Finland, most of the towns are few hundred people in the middle of nowhere, the population density is less than in most of your States, and they still have ATM (usually several). You may recall the earlier "Internet/mobile access in Finland vs. USA" discussions we had some months ago.
There's "Everyman's Right" in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Austria. They allow hiking and camping on areas that aren't obviously someone's backyard. Scotland allows walking in the wilderness freely, but with some heavier restrictions (though what I have seen of the country, they couldn't really enforce if somebody would decide to set up a camp for few days). England and Wales allows hiking, but apparently camping is frowned upon.
From experience, I also note that while camping in forests may not be exactly allowed by law, it isn't really frowned upon in Germany and Denmark, at least if you try to stay out of the way. At least, nobody bugged me when I was too cheap to make a camp at the backyard of a boarding house (I like to travel carrying a tent on a bike).
In a nutshell; the denser the population, the more likely you are to be bothered (if you camp somewhere without asking permission).
Think about it - can you feasibly run a car on compressed air?
What I read from wikipedia, the technology seems far better than for electric car. Range of 100 km with a tank, charging the tank costs about EUR 2, and in emergency situation you can probably use manual pump to get enough pressure to get to the next station.
The only problem is that a car with a full tank would be rather dangerous in an accident, but I guess they could work around that. Link. The article (and the related articles) are rather badly written though, going from EUR to USD inside one sentence as comparisons, but I guess we can manage.
Well, the statement didn't pass with a really narrow margin - the chairperson decided. One MEP less on the right, and the statement would have went through.
While Parliament couldn't have forced Berlusconi to step down nor sell his newspapers OR ask him to stop using them as political weapon, it would have been a statement on what the other countries think of Italy's politics - which also affect the other states. Berlusconi has, among other things, tried to block all EU communication from minister councils and commission without the approval of all member states - effectively making it even harder for citizens to know and affect upon up an coming legislation and directives.
If the statement had passed, Berlusconi would have had much harder time trying proceeding on this venue, but.. you know..
"As long as it wasn't Berlusconi.."
If you didn't vote at all, you effectively gave your right to decide to others - who voted Berlusconi (supposing you're Italian). If you aren't Italian, there are quite many bad people you could vote. Remember, the previous EU Parliament was against 138, while the new one much less so. Did you vote? Who did you vote? EU is behind many things.. both good and bad. Most of the "bad things" spring from the Council of Ministers, who are fervently pushing for the good of their own states. Strong parliament is generally a good thing (while examples to the contrary could perhaps be found), and balances things out.
EU Parliament tried to do something about Berlusconi, but the parties on the right blocked all declarations on the subject.
Who did you vote?
The summary doesn't mention that Patria builds military ordnance. Those patches are meant for soldiers, not civilians (though civilian models might be forthcoming). Imagine how useful that patch would be on the field. It weights less than GPS/radio units, it's easier to wield etc.
When people mention that this is akin to Star Trek-military uniforms, they are completely right. This is for the armed forces.
While you are right, Alcor themselves don't seem to have built up any gold reserve to ensure their survival (maybe I'm wrong, I didn't spend too much time checking). On the topic of their finances, their FAQ states: "The rest of the Trust investments are held at the investment firm of Morgan Stanley."
In other words, they have the money invested, probably in low-risk form as we are talking of hundreds of years. It isn't bound to be melting away in a few moments :)
Banks often move money to gold in times such as this, and I'm sure banks (being smart players as they are!) are doing just this. This is why the market price of gold has gone up lately, even though historically it always averages on the same price.
But as mentioned, that money is held by Trust, probably just so that the company can not use the money for operating costs. The company itself can still collapse, while the Trust would be bursting in money. I wonder what would happen to the funds then?
Then there's your certainty that the company will survive for the hundreds or thousands of years it will take for technology to be at the point where they can revive you. That's incredibly unlikely, since no company in history has survived for that long (your arguments about financial stability are laughable, since there will almost certainly be several currency devaluations and government, society, and world upheavals in that period). I put the chances of you actually staying frozen for 1000 years at basically zero.
The oldest company in the world reached well over 1400 years before it fell to hard times. Link. Other old companies can be found here.
And even if we were to accept your argument of losing money over long-term (which history has shown to be false, even during turbulent times such as these), the value of gold has stayed fairly same for most of the human existence.
However, I'm not sure about the chances of getting resurrected, but that's a whole other subject right there.
There are expections. Lots of them. However, the ones you mentioned are rather easily explained, and ones to which I can most probably find comparisons within other nations.
Croatia and Western Balkans are not members of EU, and the situation is similar to how Canadians and Mexicans are (I assume) handled differently at the border of the United States. Norway and Iceland are part of Nordic Union, which has worked toward Nordic integration till late 40s (as I recall). As the Nordic states that are members of EU have heavy ties to the non-members, it would have been unappeasable to cut these ties - particularly as (as one Norwegian mentioned me) the non-members are nations of good standing, who in effect have to change their own laws as not to be cut out from their brothers, thus making them "EU-states with no representatives". Anyway, the Sweden/Norway border would be impossible to patrol, so better not even to try. And Iceland is so small that it doesn't really weight much.. to one direction or another.
The Sweden/Finland thing is just about taking care of local laws. Don't American states have different limits for what's acceptable and what not? Something about "border controls" is well illustrated that the towns of Tornio and Haparanda have merged together, to the point that the towns are usually discussed as one entity, and are often administered as such. The border is apparently next to impossible to detect in nature, as jogging roads etc. criss-cross the border.
And don't security get tightened in parts of America now and again? And as I understand, in China (and maybe in Russia?) you need your passport even when you travel from province to province (or state to state) as a citizen.. though I might be mistaken.
You are talking of EU directives. What you say is true, but there are also so-called community laws; where community law and state law are at odds, the EC-law takes precedence. A case in Germany has shown that community law overrides even constitutional laws of the member states. Link. The directives are something else.
In this case, Schengen is something else entirely. You have to implement the criteria before you are allowed to join (it's not tied to membership of EU, though membership requires you make an effort to join Schengen as well). Thus there are no half-assed implementations.
Also, while I am not familiar with American system, I somewhat suspect that Washington, California, New Mexico and Florida don't have completely similar practises concerning borders and airports as well. The TSA staff aren't trained in one central location, after all (or are they?).
The Schengen Area is a group of twenty-five European countries which have abolished all border controls between each other.[...]Implementing the Schengen rules involves eliminating border controls with other Schengen members while simultaneously strengthening border controls with non-member states. The rules include provisions on common policy on the temporary entry of persons (including the Schengen visa), the harmonisation of external border controls, and cross-border police and judicial co-operation.
Regulation of external border controls Schengen also requires member countries to apply strict checks on people entering or exiting the area. These checks are co-ordinated by the European Union's Frontex agency, and subject to common rules. The details of border controls, surveillance, and the conditions under which permission to enter into the Schengen area may be granted are exhaustively detailed in a European Union regulation called Schengen Borders Code.
It can be found here.
As Schengen is an EU-project with inclusion of additional countries due to earlier agreements, we can talk about "EU Airports". Also; EU might not be a state, but it's a confederation (de facto, if not de jury), no matter how certain people would like to claim otherwise.
1) Usually pro-filesharers try to make it sound like filesharing is usual activity and try go for most or 70-90% user share
It probably is 70-90% in certain age groups. The biggest file-sharers would be people without money and with good computer skills. This means mostly people under 25, as older people have less need to obtain their entertainment illegally. After all, to get the population to 90% file-sharers, it means that grannies and tottlers both would have to take part!
As far as the usability of the report goes... even as we can assume that 1176 people is big enough group (apparently with around 5% margin of error), they basically tweaked every possible figure upwards. Instead of 33 million users of Internet, let's say 40 million (I'm sure there's official records for this), people will lie, so let's adjust to that (why would people lie in anonymous poll?) and lastly, YOU DON'T SHORTHAND THE +/- PART INTO POSITIVE AND ADD TO THE RESULTS.
Not to mention that some of the sourced research was reported wrong. The same author, but different funding and parametres.
Just want to point out that I was able to read "proper" sentences that weren't prepared for me beforehand when I was 8. I was only slightly slower than my peers (I'm a product of Finnish school system).
Point is; being able to read is not the most important thing about school. Sure, it's a basic skill, but so is hand-coordination (which along with alpabets was one of the most important things the previous year) and basic maths, how to survive in nature etc.
"IMHOTEP - Because you know it lasts"