ING direct is not the best place to save now as their interest rates are no longer competitive and haven't been for some time. The $25 opening bonus (on referral) is some good free cash though. Emigrant direct (my savings acct) or Amboy direct would be much better. Also, get the Presidential internet checking plus if you are getting a direct deposit (4.5% interest!). Rest of the advice is quite sound.
How about Singapore? First world, politically super stable (only one major party - and before anyone starts something about democracy - I lived there for 10 yrs and had much more freedom there as a foriegner than I have here in Chicago), no major natural disasters at all and while one could hardly call it naturally beautiful, you have the superb beaches of Malaysia quite close by. It is also perenially summer so that might be a drawback but it is still a better climate than most places.
On the other hand, wikipedia will not contain articles about places that do not have much internet access. For example, there is no article at all on Thimpu, the capital of Bhutan! Britannica is generally much more comprehensive in that respect. Also, don't forget that the 1911 Britannica is a major source of material for wikipedia.
Overall, both have their advantages and disadvantages. I have an old 1975 edition of Britannica (the last major revision) which a bookseller was glad to get rid of for $20 (!!) which I use ocassionally particularly for history (where the articles can be quite long and are more convenient in book form) while I use wikipedia if I want to find something out quickly.
I have had to change to Windows XP after using only linux, solaris and dec unix for the last 8 yrs or so due to my RSI (speech recognition software being only for windows). I did have win nt installed on my computer as an alternate os to play games for some time before that but the only MS OS I used significantly earlier was DOS. The GUI for WinXP is utter crap, without virtual desktops or multiple desktops. It doesn't even rival the enlightenment from 6 years ago!! How do people keep track of 20+ windows on this GUI?? (My usual number, for web surfing, reading lecture notes, programming etc.) Further, no alternate GUIs seem to be available. The computer seems to crawl once more that 10 programs or so are running (not CPU intensive ones), a problem I never had on linux. Annoyances.org was helpful to some extent but for a serious user, WinXP Pro is not even close to any of the unices.
1. Not sure why you think this. I use a dedicated DivX player on my 10-foot front projection system with DTS/Dolby Digital Audio (with a decent JBL Northridge set of speakers) and it is only very slightly inferior to a DVD. I would find it amazing if you could make out the difference on only a 27" TV unless it is too heavily compressed.
2. With a DivX player same applies.Can't rent DivX CDs easily though - not a problem if you are a student though - evrybody has their own library.
3. I have a portable DivX player too (iRiver iMP-1100).
While agreeing with your other points, your factual statement about Egyptian mummies is clearly false as any visit to a museum with them will show. The Egyptian mummies are wrapped in strips of linen. Further at the time of the pyramids, there was no muslin which came much much later.
In my 16 years in India the only place where I noticed any discrimination based on caste was the -reverse- discrimination (essentially, affirmative action but on a massively larger scale). This could be because I was living in a city but "being treated like virtual slaves" is completely and utterly absurd. The former untouchables have good representation in parliament and several chief ministers and cabinet ministers are from their ranks. Also, they got the vote in 1947 like the rest of the Indians.
The treatment of the blacks in the US was far worse in recent times. It still seems astounding to me that it took till 1968 for all of them to get the vote and finally make America a real democracy.
Well, AFAIK there is nothing such as a work visa in India. You can just work on a tourist visa reporting to a police station every year or so to verify your presence. I have personally known Singaporeans who did that (one as a university professor and the other as a doctor). The Indians do not actually think anyone wants to come to their country to work so they never implemented a work visa.
I want to second the above statement. I have been using linux for seven years now and dos/windows since fifteen years and despite starting as a real newb on both, I found the linux GUIs vastly superior right from the start and this is what made me completely give up windows after three years of using linux. I started with afterstep and now use enlightenment and simply can't do without the virtual desktops. I tried using KDE but the primitive pager (can't move windows directly on the pager, wtf??) and the lack of virtual (not multiple) desktops killed my interest in 5 minutes. It seems to have the same faults as the windows UI. I hope KDE and GNOME not just copy the windows UI ideas but also the excellent stuff from the other linux WMs.
Actually, I agree with this. The realplayer for linux is quite usable and the "registration" is easily circumvented. I have not used windows for years, so I have no idea what the windows version looks like but the linux one is not bad at all for playing realmedia files.
Or consider Singapore where a lot of things are done by the government and done very well, a point I didn't quite realise when I was there but is painfully obvious in my current location (Chicago). The Singapore telecom monopoly prices for a call to the US are less than what I have to pay to call north Chicago from south Chicago! And, -every- single house and apartment in Singapore is wired up for cable modem access (the service is controlled by another monopoly and they have only one plan but their service is decent (about 3 hours of downtime in 1.5 years)).
The American obsession with private enterprise is still something I haven't quite figured out.
Strange, this is what everyone used to say in Singapore when I was living there and this is listed as one of the authoritarian states. Actually, living there compares pretty favourably to living in the US (most basic services are cheaper and more efficient in Singapore atleast when compared to Chicago where I currently live) and both roughly have the same standard of living. Of course, clubbing North Korea and Singapore together as totalitarian regimes is like clubbing the US and India together in democratic countries, accurate but pretty pointless since other factors make considering them together totally absurd. Given a choice, I am pretty sure that most Americans would prefer to live in a first world, totalitarian regime like Singapore rather than a third world, democratic country like India. (There are more Americans in Singapore than India and India is atleast 250 times bigger.)
Actually, here in Asia VCDs have been around for a very, very long time (alteast 10 years) and have never been lumped together with DVDs. VCDs are far more popular as they are very cheap (currently, most original movies are around US$6 and about US$3 if pirated) and are easily backed up. They are in fact so cheap now that they are very common even in Cambodian villages (I visited one last winter on a project and was surprised to see that a large proportion of them had VCD players). I personally have around a hundred movies on VCD.
Clearly, the VCD format for education is a great idea as the penetration even in poor parts of Asia is quite high.
Replying to an earlier comment, standalone VCD players are much cheaper than VCRs (around US$60 now) and there is no need to get a DVD player to play VCDs.
In Nepal, a day's walk might not that be far when the distance is measured as a straight line. This is because the place is incredibly mountainous and one has to keep walking up and down hills. There are very few roads in Nepal, so one has to either fly or walk, or usually do both. Some of the places off the tourist trails are truly backward (sometimes there are entire villages without a single toilet of any sort!)
The problem is that the big city ISP might not have very great access as well. There is only one really big city in Nepal (Kathmandu) with the next biggest city (Biratnagar) only being a small town. The internet situation is so bad that even one of the two medical universities got a website only this year ( BPKIHS - do excuse the poor English in the website) and their internet access can only be described as incredibly slow. This is especially surprising since the university is otherwise quite modern.
Given all this, what this person is trying to do is actually quite incredible. IMHO, it will be just as important to get some of the basic stuff like toilets etc. as it is to get the internet in the villages there.
That apparently happened to the builders of the
Taj Mahal and the pyramids. In the case of the
pyramids, this was so that no one finds out how to
get the treasures.
Actually, you can't get your password back if you have never bought from them. (Why the heck do they assume that every registered has actually bought something from them?)
Yes, sanitation is probably India's biggest failure. Otherwise, basic progress in eliminating chronic hunger (achieved everywhere except West Bengal and Orissa) or ensuring access to safe water has been very good. In fact, access to sanitation has not increased in percentage terms in India in the last 20 years despite the great progress in all the other fronts.
Actually quite a bit of math is needed for physics. Functional analysis and vector spaces form the foundation of one formulation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics (all the functions have to be complex too). Quite a bit of group theory and abstract algebra are reqired to understand relativistic quantum mechanics. In fact, renormalization group theory was developed by physicists. I have also heard that there is far more mathematics involved in string theory (I have not reached that level yet). One can also list several other uses of advanced math in physics but I suppose one gets the general idea.
I don't know why you think that that there is little unregulated spam in Singapore. I am living there and I can tell you that if you are active in newsgroups you will get a lot of spam (at one stage, I was getting at least ten junk e-mails a day). Once you stop posting, the spam disappears quite quickly, though.
Slashdot Mirror
ING direct is not the best place to save now as their interest rates are no longer competitive and haven't been for some time. The $25 opening bonus (on referral) is some good free cash though. Emigrant direct (my savings acct) or Amboy direct would be much better. Also, get the Presidential internet checking plus if you are getting a direct deposit (4.5% interest!). Rest of the advice is quite sound.
How about Singapore? First world, politically super stable (only one major party - and before anyone starts something about democracy - I lived there for 10 yrs and had much more freedom there as a foriegner than I have here in Chicago), no major natural disasters at all and while one could hardly call it naturally beautiful, you have the superb beaches of Malaysia quite close by. It is also perenially summer so that might be a drawback but it is still a better climate than most places.
On the other hand, wikipedia will not contain articles about places that do not have much internet access. For example, there is no article at all on Thimpu, the capital of Bhutan! Britannica is generally much more comprehensive in that respect. Also, don't forget that the 1911 Britannica is a major source of material for wikipedia.
Overall, both have their advantages and disadvantages. I have an old 1975 edition of Britannica (the last major revision) which a bookseller was glad to get rid of for $20 (!!) which I use ocassionally particularly for history (where the articles can be quite long and are more convenient in book form) while I use wikipedia if I want to find something out quickly.
I have had to change to Windows XP after using only linux, solaris and dec unix for the last 8 yrs or so due to my RSI (speech recognition software being only for windows). I did have win nt installed on my computer as an alternate os to play games for some time before that but the only MS OS I used significantly earlier was DOS. The GUI for WinXP is utter crap, without virtual desktops or multiple desktops. It doesn't even rival the enlightenment from 6 years ago!! How do people keep track of 20+ windows on this GUI?? (My usual number, for web surfing, reading lecture notes, programming etc.) Further, no alternate GUIs seem to be available. The computer seems to crawl once more that 10 programs or so are running (not CPU intensive ones), a problem I never had on linux. Annoyances.org was helpful to some extent but for a serious user, WinXP Pro is not even close to any of the unices.
1. Not sure why you think this. I use a dedicated DivX player on my 10-foot front projection system with DTS/Dolby Digital Audio (with a decent JBL Northridge set of speakers) and it is only very slightly inferior to a DVD. I would find it amazing if you could make out the difference on only a 27" TV unless it is too heavily compressed.
2. With a DivX player same applies.Can't rent DivX CDs easily though - not a problem if you are a student though - evrybody has their own library.
3. I have a portable DivX player too (iRiver iMP-1100).
While agreeing with your other points, your factual statement about Egyptian mummies is clearly false as any visit to a museum with them will show. The Egyptian mummies are wrapped in strips of linen. Further at the time of the pyramids, there was no muslin which came much much later.
In my 16 years in India the only place where I noticed any discrimination based on caste was the -reverse- discrimination (essentially, affirmative action but on a massively larger scale). This could be because I was living in a city but "being treated like virtual slaves" is completely and utterly absurd. The former untouchables have good representation in parliament and several chief ministers and cabinet ministers are from their ranks. Also, they got the vote in 1947 like the rest of the Indians.
The treatment of the blacks in the US was far worse in recent times. It still seems astounding to me that it took till 1968 for all of them to get the vote and finally make America a real democracy.
Well, AFAIK there is nothing such as a work visa in India. You can just work on a tourist visa reporting to a police station every year or so to verify your presence. I have personally known Singaporeans who did that (one as a university professor and the other as a doctor). The Indians do not actually think anyone wants to come to their country to work so they never implemented a work visa.
Any chance of a pager where you can move the windows on the pager itself (as in enlightenment) or virtual desktops (not multiple) soon?
I want to second the above statement. I have been using linux for seven years now and dos/windows since fifteen years and despite starting as a real newb on both, I found the linux GUIs vastly superior right from the start and this is what made me completely give up windows after three years of using linux. I started with afterstep and now use enlightenment and simply can't do without the virtual desktops. I tried using KDE but the primitive pager (can't move windows directly on the pager, wtf??) and the lack of virtual (not multiple) desktops killed my interest in 5 minutes. It seems to have the same faults as the windows UI. I hope KDE and GNOME not just copy the windows UI ideas but also the excellent stuff from the other linux WMs.
Actually, I agree with this. The realplayer for linux is quite usable and the "registration" is easily circumvented. I have not used windows for years, so I have no idea what the windows version looks like but the linux one is not bad at all for playing realmedia files.
Or consider Singapore where a lot of things are done by the government and done very well, a point I didn't quite realise when I was there but is painfully obvious in my current location (Chicago). The Singapore telecom monopoly prices for a call to the US are less than what I have to pay to call north Chicago from south Chicago! And, -every- single house and apartment in Singapore is wired up for cable modem access (the service is controlled by another monopoly and they have only one plan but their service is decent (about 3 hours of downtime in 1.5 years)).
The American obsession with private enterprise is still something I haven't quite figured out.
Strange, this is what everyone used to say in Singapore when I was living there and this is listed as one of the authoritarian states. Actually, living there compares pretty favourably to living in the US (most basic services are cheaper and more efficient in Singapore atleast when compared to Chicago where I currently live) and both roughly have the same standard of living. Of course, clubbing North Korea and Singapore together as totalitarian regimes is like clubbing the US and India together in democratic countries, accurate but pretty pointless since other factors make considering them together totally absurd. Given a choice, I am pretty sure that most Americans would prefer to live in a first world, totalitarian regime like Singapore rather than a third world, democratic country like India. (There are more Americans in Singapore than India and India is atleast 250 times bigger.)
Actually, here in Asia VCDs have been around for a very, very long time (alteast 10 years) and have never been lumped together with DVDs. VCDs are far more popular as they are very cheap (currently, most original movies are around US$6 and about US$3 if pirated) and are easily backed up. They are in fact so cheap now that they are very common even in Cambodian villages (I visited one last winter on a project and was surprised to see that a large proportion of them had VCD players). I personally have around a hundred movies on VCD.
Clearly, the VCD format for education is a great idea as the penetration even in poor parts of Asia is quite high.
Replying to an earlier comment, standalone VCD players are much cheaper than VCRs (around US$60 now) and there is no need to get a DVD player to play VCDs.
In Nepal, a day's walk might not that be far when the distance is measured as a straight line. This is because the place is incredibly mountainous and one has to keep walking up and down hills. There are very few roads in Nepal, so one has to either fly or walk, or usually do both. Some of the places off the tourist trails are truly backward (sometimes there are entire villages without a single toilet of any sort!)
The problem is that the big city ISP might not have very great access as well. There is only one really big city in Nepal (Kathmandu) with the next biggest city (Biratnagar) only being a small town. The internet situation is so bad that even one of the two medical universities got a website only this year ( BPKIHS - do excuse the poor English in the website) and their internet access can only be described as incredibly slow. This is especially surprising since the university is otherwise quite modern.
Given all this, what this person is trying to do is actually quite incredible. IMHO, it will be just as important to get some of the basic stuff like toilets etc. as it is to get the internet in the villages there.
That apparently happened to the builders of the
Taj Mahal and the pyramids. In the case of the
pyramids, this was so that no one finds out how to
get the treasures.
Actually, you can't get your password back if you have never bought from them. (Why the heck do they assume that every registered has actually bought something from them?)
Yes, sanitation is probably India's biggest failure. Otherwise, basic progress in eliminating chronic hunger (achieved everywhere except West Bengal and Orissa) or ensuring access to safe water has been very good. In fact, access to sanitation has not increased in percentage terms in India in the last 20 years despite the great progress in all the other fronts.
Actually quite a bit of math is needed for physics. Functional analysis and vector spaces form the foundation of one formulation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics (all the functions have to be complex too). Quite a bit of group theory and abstract algebra are reqired to understand relativistic quantum mechanics. In fact, renormalization group theory was developed by physicists. I have also heard that there is far more mathematics involved in string theory (I have not reached that level yet). One can also list several other uses of advanced math in physics but I suppose one gets the general idea.
I don't know why you think that that there is little unregulated spam in Singapore. I am living there and I can tell you that if you are active in newsgroups you will get a lot of spam (at one stage, I was getting at least ten junk e-mails a day). Once you stop posting, the spam disappears quite quickly, though.