she walks, she talks, she's full of chalk. The lacteal fluid from the female of bovine species is highly prolific to the 0th degree (I have no milk at my desk).
Granted high speed has more value to it than POTS dialup, but is this company really going to be able to compete? Several states are starting to consider WiFi as a viable public utility that they provide for "free" using the Tax Base. Benefit to the people is seamless wireless access without ads. Benefit to the state is reliable high speed access for public safety and services such as fire, police, EMS, etc.. Plus, once they ensure that everyone is online, they can begin reducing costs by allowing a great deal of government red tape to be handled electronically. (i.e. paying speeding tickets or applying for building permits)
I think the laziness factor is the big one. I went to the Naval Academy, supposedly an institution that only accepts America's brightest well rounded "leaders of the future" and I lost count of the number of times I heard statements like "2.0 and go" or "Poli-Sci and fly."
The real wake up call was getting stationed in Japan and travelling around SE Asia. I simply couldn't believe the work ethics I saw. You can make all the jokes you want about Japan producing mindless robots, but the guys who worked for me didn't just stay after hours until the job was done, they stayed until the job was done right. Most of them were pretty damned creative and willing to try new things too.
I've always been impressed with America's ability to fight back to the top when we realize we are the underdog. The question simply is, when are we going to wake up?
You people seriously need to stop playing Illuminati!
I write software that does similar things to this, except way more indepth than just a license plate scan.
You know what hapens when you do a lookup on a plate that has no crime associated with it? Nothing! No one is reading your biography or analyzing your porno rentals just because you drove through their town. The only info that will pop up is if the Vehicle is actually the subject of an alert. These alerts are generated one of two ways. #1 The vehicle was witnessed at a crime scene, or #2 the owner called 911 and reported the vehicle missing. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who commits a crime just voluntarily exposed themselves to public inquiry. And if it was your car that was stolen, I'm sure you'd be quite happy that the plates were being scanned. The only people who have anything to fear are those that are trying to hide something.
Just last week, our software allowed all the police officers in Utah to have access to the citations history of the highway patrol...including warnings given out. The very next day after we activated it, a kid got pulled over doing 94 in a 65 and gave the patrollman the usual BS story of "honest officer, I've never been pulled over...I was just trying to pass someone." Turns out he had been warned twice in the past month for 76 in a 65 and 82 in a 65. Tell me how he didn't deserve the reckless driving citation they gave him after seeing his apparent complete disregard for speeding AND BEING WARNED TWICE about it.
1984 My A$$! God forbid the folks who risk their lives to provide for the public safety actually have some decent tools to help them out.
It's not a Joke....the real joke was an advertisement for a job opening in 2007 at their lunar facility. It was there at about 2330MST, now it's gone and of course googling for it is fruitless. I wish I had printed it. It was about 8 pages long and even went into how they would use Einsteins theory of relativity to combat SPAM.
sheesh! C'mon guys! I thought everyone wanted to move to Utah so they could be neighbors with Darl McBride. He says he's gonn amake a lot of money off his Linux scam^h^h^h^h business venture...
"Next time you have to wait for your bullet train because some high schooler couldn't take the pressure of his or her exams, think about what all that extra schooling can do.
I agree, most Americans could use more schooling, but not the way it's practiced throughout Asia, with tests as early as middle school that can essentially determine the rest of your life."
Both of these are predominantly facets of Japan. The first point is incorrect, the second is fairly dead on. Suicide in Japan is a completely different concept than most westerners would understand. High profile suicides happen all the time (most recently the owners of a major poultry farm over the bird flu scandal), but it has very little to do with stress and very much to do with over 1000 years of cultural history that accepted suicide as an honorable way to bow out in disgrace. There is also a fairly strong trend of double suicides among young lovers even today. It is a trend that is slowly on the wane, but it was just as strong when the mojority of the populace did not even attend formal schooling.
The nobel arguement is somewhat weak as America is one of the few countries who can brag that all 101 years of the awards process there were no major battles fought within her borders. Naturally when you don't have to spend most of your time rebuilding infrastructure, you are somewhat at an advantage when it comes to pressing ahead.
However, if you look at periods in Asian history when they were not in open war, or immersed in 3rd world relative levels of poverty, America and the reast of western europe really doesn't have too much to brag about.
Don't get me wrong, I'm proud to be an American and I don't think there is another culture on the planet that can match our competive spirit and fierce love of liberty(many come close though). I'm just willing to admit after spending 3 years abroad that I've seen some things done better.
I would hazard a guess that you dodn't know the answer because you never finished school yourself.
#1 keiretsu do not offer any kind of employment. The word refers to a business arrangement between multiple companies that follows along the Machiavellan idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
#2 Even today, and even in Toyota, the concept of giri-ninjo(duty-empathy) is still strong in Japan and likely will be for the next decade. Companies continue to run at reduced revenues holding onto aged employees because letting them go would be an insult to the years of faithful service given to the company. This is SLOWLY giving way to performanced based positioning and retention, but a majority of Japan's woes (and potentially soon to be America's) is the gross amount of bad debt produced in out of control investing. The dot-com bubble was just a taste of what will happen if China decides to float its currency ala Thailand.
The Wired story is dead on! I'd hire someone from Asia straight out of undergrad school any day over an American with 10 years experience. Why?
Education: Asians average an extra 150+ hours of K12 education a year. Most school systems teach responsibility from day one by assigning class leaders and having the students clean their own classrooms.
Work ethics: are centered around providing the highest level of quality all the time, not just "when it matters." If you ever go to Japan, before you go to see the temples, or the bullet train, or Electric town, go to McDonalds. You won't find someone wearing a stained uniform, chewing gum, and moving to get your food like they're in a competition to see how slow they can go. You'll find a clean restaraunt, with professional workers who zip around putting everything together like they're swamped, even if you are the only customer waiting. Oh yeah, and the food actually looks like the pictures there. McDonalds is a low wage job there just like it is here. The difference is simply attitude. Their's is good, our is....
You were expecting me to say money next....you were wrong. The cheap labor rates in the western area os SE Asia are certainly nothing to break my heart, but I'd still outsource to india and china even if their cost of living was 50% higher than here. It's all about bang for your buck and right now, America is lagging behind with no sign of recovery. I have no doubt we will, because Americans hate to be in second place. But then again, we also just gained the title of most obese nation in the world...what an honor!
You missed the whole point there bud. I was advocating that if you really consider buying from the industry such a rip off that there are cheaper means to hear the music you want to hear. So even your jab that I am a subcontractor of the RIAA has no foundation.
I am actually a software engineer and IF it were as EASY to pirate software as it is to copy music, there would probably be a SDAA out there making lawsuits as well. I will admit that for the technically adept, it's not that hard to find cracked ISO's and such, but that is probably less than 1% of the pupulation that has the technical capabilities to download kazaa. Plus most of the major games right now depend on the unique CD key to work on network enabled games.
heheheheh...insert laughter at myself here. CD's average $14 on Amazon and you could probably work some magic with columbia house "buy 10 CD's for $1" scams to work 50 CD's into $500, but my estimate should have been around the $750 range.
"This is a slight misrepresentation, the works are NOT their property, never have been, and never will be. An idea, nor the expression of an idea can ever eb property."
Crack Cocaine, right? That's what you're smoking isn't it? I'm going to tell a story and see if you agree with it.
You are a student and just spent two weeks reading through articles and six books for a research paper on the history of the computer. Your room mate is a lazy, dishonest moron who consideres pot to be the secret to graduating. Well..., that and copying your research paper because he has the same assignment from a different professor. He at least has the decency to spend five minutes changing around a few sentences to make himself feel like he made some effort. Now you both have A's. He's still high, and you're still tired from lack of sleep. Tell me that paper wasn't YOUR idea and that he didn't just STEAL it!
I hate to break this to you, but most musicians spend YEARS getting to be as good as they are. The product they produce based on that experience and usually some long hours with a piano and an eraser is nothing more than their IDEA of what sounds good. Note the use of the pronoun THEIR. It's THEIR idea, they made it, and they damn sure do own it and deserve to be compensated for making something that gives you pleasure whan you listen to it.
Why do so many people on this site believe it is their divine right to have anything that makes them happy be given to them free?....unless it has to do with never growing up since as a kid, your concept of property is that everything is given to you for free. Too bad parents aren't there to bend you over and spank you for being a moron.
"Why won't the government allow people to set up their own private communication links? Seems like a blatant violation of privacy and property to me. My communication with another party is my property just the same as you claim this music 'belongs' to someone. If I or some company can set up a system to communicate privately so be it. Then we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. You can't own data. You can only hide it. We should all come to grips with this reality of the 21st century."
You seriously need to stop playing Illuminati and get a grip on reality. POTS, Cellualar, and VOIP from companies are all SERVICES provided to you that you use VOLUNTARILY. If you want private VOIP, VPN to the person you want to talk to and run netmeeting to each other. Of course, you are also doing this over the INTERNET which is also a SERVICE that you use VOLUNTARILY. If you are really so paranoid about not wanting your conversations viewed by the owners and proprieters of the communication means you use, either meet in public and talk, or send a letter since mail is a legally protected form of communication. You can even encrypt it so NASA won't be able to read it with their gerbil powered X-Ray secret spy labratory located on the dark side of the moon.
Sorry folks, I hate the RIAA just as much as everyone else here, but this simply needs to be said.
The whole music stealing thing....they're right. Does anyone seriously think they can stand up in a court of law and convince the judge that they deserve to have music for free. It's not like the musicians or the hundreds of people who somehow touch the music (even the janitor who sweeps the recording studio) are out there working for free. Are the studios charging way too much?...yes, a bit. Can you just record it off the radio?...yes, but royalties were already paid.
I'm a 29 year old has been trombone player (played professionally in the Marines for a bit), but I still pay for every piece of music I have on general principal. I know those musicians put in some long hard work to get as good as they are and I don't mind rewarding them...even if it is being laundered and embezzled by the industry. But I haven't even spent $3000 in my whole lifetime on CD's. Everyone who is out there giving away copies of music they likely never even paid for themselves in the first place are risking a $3000 law suit plus legal fees. And for what? I seriously doubt most people doing this even understand the concept of civil disobedience. And I don't think the judge will accept excuses about being a poor college student, or that the CD's are over-priced. If you want cheap music, sign up for one of those streaming services that let you listen to whatever you want for like $6 a month. If you want free music, either stream your favorite radio station off the internet, or get really nostalgic and actually learn how to work the FM tuner on your stereo system.
Again, I'm not saying the RIAA is this innocent victem of abuse. I'm just saying it's stupid to risk a $3000 law suit when you can likely purchase every CD you will listen to for the next year for less than $500 (that's about 50 CD's for the slow in math...practically a new disc every week), or just listen to the radio for free.
"[Japanese phones] tend to miss out on a few technologies... english predicitve text for one..."
Uhh....if you extract your American, "why doesn't everyone speak English?", attitude from this, Japan has had predictive text in JAPANESE for at least 3 years. If they actually had enough demand for phones with English as the primary language, I'm sure they'd accomodate your desires.
While I'm at it, let's b!tch about another "new" feature on the Nokia....mp3 playing. This ideas was tested in Japan almost 5 years ago and was quickly tossed as useless. For those that do have a camera phone, notice how quickly your battery drains when your taking pictures. Now imagine how much of your measily 2 hour talk time is going to be sacrificed playing the latest Britney Spears (typed with the lisp from Stan's sister Shelly in South Park) tune. Also, how much are you going to be gouged by the phone company for downloading it? Even using a memory stick, it wouldn't suprise me if the novelty wore off the second time you missed an important phone call because you had drained your battery.
end rant except to say that I have yet to see a useful technology in an American phone that hasn't been in a Japanese one fro at least two years. Note that Palm Pilots are useless in Japan as the written language is too complex to do with a stylus and all the rest of the PDA features were already in the cell phones when Palm first came out.
Looks down at my D505i that I bought in Japan almost a year ago for $120 and sighs. It's now nothing better than a travel alarm with cool games.
(D505i: 1.3MP digital camera(SVGA images), modified 16MB sony memory stick slot for easy storage and transfer of data, 8x digital zoom, 256,000 TFT display, full blown on phone email support [not this gay SMS text messsaging crap], Java powered with an open spec API so I could write my own stuff, all the features of my old Palm pilot, and kick @$$ games by Sqare Soft [The guys who write the Final Fantasy series])
Yeah, Nokia really is breaking new ground here...and at a bargain price of $600. Why have we let America get so far behind? And why do we put up with this inferior crap?
just my venting folks....be back in Japan in less than a year.
Unfortunately his point is uneducated and shows a complete lack of thought into the subject. If the 1st Amendment only protected "Speech", Wouldn't that leave a mute or deaf person as a legally defined second class of society that is not allowed to participate. Asking why a 228 year old document doesn't address a 30 year old technology is completely absurd. It has been decided repeatedly that any form of expression of an idea is protected under this Amendment.
However, if local communities agree that this particular act of expression grossly infringes on the rights of their citizens (i.e. like Child Pornography infringes on the rights of the children), then that community is perfectly within bounds to establish ordanances to prevent that act.
Just as there are many people that argue pr0n is evil and should be completely banned, there will be folks complaining about this game and various other acts of expression that hit a nerve somewhere. I'm sure when this is all over, I will still be playing GTA when I'm not watching pr0n.
Yeah....now that I think about it, the automobile industry hasn't really revolutionized much at all considering they still use that silly wheel invention.
Disclaimer: Prices may vary. Check your local retailer. Senseless litigation available in most locations. All rights reserved or acquired in court against your will.
Hmmm...me thinks this guy has never been to Japan.
Nobody!, and I mean nobody spends money like the Japanese. Primarily from aspects of their culture such as usually holding parties in restaurants rather than the home like western countries, the sheer number of occasions where gift giving is appropriate, and no less than a dozen major festivals held each year. Japanese economy problems are mainly stemming from corruption in the major banks that is still being cleaned up and an overly inflated cost of living that drives down tourism.
The reason why Japan is in the lead for a useful Maglev, is because they already have a society built around the reliable usage of trains. I've been to Tokyo at least 15 times and I couldn't even imagine trying to get around that city without trains. The same deal applies to cross country travel. The shinkansen (bullet train) is at least 5 times faster than driving a car and slightly cheaper than flying. Everybody uses them. In the US, I'd bet money that 9 out of 10 average Americans couldn't even guess at the cost of a train ride from New York to D.C. The reason why is because most Americans first learn of passenger travel on a train when they see than Amtrack has derailed once again and dozens of people are dead or in the hospital. Plus in most major cities, I'll cite L.A. and Dallas for examples having been to both, you'll never hear someone respond to a complaint on the terrible traffick jams by saying, "yeah, but you can just take the train/subway, it's faster anyways." I'm 29 and most of my friends in Tokyo don't even own cars....they don't feel the need to.
America is fighting a cultural battle on this one. Gas is dirt cheap compared to just about anywhere else in the world and it's just more convenient for every average joe to have a car and drive everywhere. Until this changes, there's not going to be a lot of interest in riding a new high speed, low drag, sexy maglev. Well, other than the geek in all of us wanting to do it once so we can say we did.
Unless you live in Japan where New Line completely failed to pull the event off.
However, Last Samurai opened here at the same time as the US and most Japanese people don't even want to see it because they know Hollywood fsck'd up the history on it.
Because, as the anal retentive person who started this thread has failed to see, the word has not yet been officially accepted into the language.
Doh!
And a year ago, someone could have whined about the above word being ficticious as well.
Seriously people, either go get drunk, or go get laid. Preferably both, but at the very least EASE UP! If you are incapable of either, you are not old/educated enough to participate in an intelligent discussion on the evolution of the English language....and you b0><3n was probably just H4><0r3D and infested with virii!
Please take note that the amount of free space on an empty, but FORMATTED hard drive will always be a noticable chunk less than full capacity as the OS requires storage space overhead for the file system.
I just finished explaining this to someone who was whining about their 128MB USB keychain drive only having 123MB of space.
Your directory structure has to be kept somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
she walks, she talks, she's full of chalk. The lacteal fluid from the female of bovine species is highly prolific to the 0th degree (I have no milk at my desk).
Granted high speed has more value to it than POTS dialup, but is this company really going to be able to compete? Several states are starting to consider WiFi as a viable public utility that they provide for "free" using the Tax Base. Benefit to the people is seamless wireless access without ads. Benefit to the state is reliable high speed access for public safety and services such as fire, police, EMS, etc.. Plus, once they ensure that everyone is online, they can begin reducing costs by allowing a great deal of government red tape to be handled electronically. (i.e. paying speeding tickets or applying for building permits)
I think the laziness factor is the big one. I went to the Naval Academy, supposedly an institution that only accepts America's brightest well rounded "leaders of the future" and I lost count of the number of times I heard statements like "2.0 and go" or "Poli-Sci and fly."
The real wake up call was getting stationed in Japan and travelling around SE Asia. I simply couldn't believe the work ethics I saw. You can make all the jokes you want about Japan producing mindless robots, but the guys who worked for me didn't just stay after hours until the job was done, they stayed until the job was done right. Most of them were pretty damned creative and willing to try new things too.
I've always been impressed with America's ability to fight back to the top when we realize we are the underdog. The question simply is, when are we going to wake up?
You people seriously need to stop playing Illuminati!
I write software that does similar things to this, except way more indepth than just a license plate scan.
You know what hapens when you do a lookup on a plate that has no crime associated with it? Nothing! No one is reading your biography or analyzing your porno rentals just because you drove through their town. The only info that will pop up is if the Vehicle is actually the subject of an alert. These alerts are generated one of two ways. #1 The vehicle was witnessed at a crime scene, or #2 the owner called 911 and reported the vehicle missing. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who commits a crime just voluntarily exposed themselves to public inquiry. And if it was your car that was stolen, I'm sure you'd be quite happy that the plates were being scanned. The only people who have anything to fear are those that are trying to hide something.
Just last week, our software allowed all the police officers in Utah to have access to the citations history of the highway patrol...including warnings given out. The very next day after we activated it, a kid got pulled over doing 94 in a 65 and gave the patrollman the usual BS story of "honest officer, I've never been pulled over...I was just trying to pass someone." Turns out he had been warned twice in the past month for 76 in a 65 and 82 in a 65. Tell me how he didn't deserve the reckless driving citation they gave him after seeing his apparent complete disregard for speeding AND BEING WARNED TWICE about it.
1984 My A$$! God forbid the folks who risk their lives to provide for the public safety actually have some decent tools to help them out.
Ah...it's back....here's the REAL Joke
It's not a Joke....the real joke was an advertisement for a job opening in 2007 at their lunar facility. It was there at about 2330MST, now it's gone and of course googling for it is fruitless. I wish I had printed it. It was about 8 pages long and even went into how they would use Einsteins theory of relativity to combat SPAM.
sheesh! C'mon guys! I thought everyone wanted to move to Utah so they could be neighbors with Darl McBride. He says he's gonn amake a lot of money off his Linux scam^h^h^h^h business venture...
"Next time you have to wait for your bullet train because some high schooler couldn't take the pressure of his or her exams, think about what all that extra schooling can do.
I agree, most Americans could use more schooling, but not the way it's practiced throughout Asia, with tests as early as middle school that can essentially determine the rest of your life."
Both of these are predominantly facets of Japan. The first point is incorrect, the second is fairly dead on. Suicide in Japan is a completely different concept than most westerners would understand. High profile suicides happen all the time (most recently the owners of a major poultry farm over the bird flu scandal), but it has very little to do with stress and very much to do with over 1000 years of cultural history that accepted suicide as an honorable way to bow out in disgrace. There is also a fairly strong trend of double suicides among young lovers even today. It is a trend that is slowly on the wane, but it was just as strong when the mojority of the populace did not even attend formal schooling.
The nobel arguement is somewhat weak as America is one of the few countries who can brag that all 101 years of the awards process there were no major battles fought within her borders. Naturally when you don't have to spend most of your time rebuilding infrastructure, you are somewhat at an advantage when it comes to pressing ahead.
However, if you look at periods in Asian history when they were not in open war, or immersed in 3rd world relative levels of poverty, America and the reast of western europe really doesn't have too much to brag about.
Don't get me wrong, I'm proud to be an American and I don't think there is another culture on the planet that can match our competive spirit and fierce love of liberty(many come close though). I'm just willing to admit after spending 3 years abroad that I've seen some things done better.
I would hazard a guess that you dodn't know the answer because you never finished school yourself.
#1 keiretsu do not offer any kind of employment. The word refers to a business arrangement between multiple companies that follows along the Machiavellan idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
#2 Even today, and even in Toyota, the concept of giri-ninjo(duty-empathy) is still strong in Japan and likely will be for the next decade. Companies continue to run at reduced revenues holding onto aged employees because letting them go would be an insult to the years of faithful service given to the company. This is SLOWLY giving way to performanced based positioning and retention, but a majority of Japan's woes (and potentially soon to be America's) is the gross amount of bad debt produced in out of control investing. The dot-com bubble was just a taste of what will happen if China decides to float its currency ala Thailand.
The Wired story is dead on! I'd hire someone from Asia straight out of undergrad school any day over an American with 10 years experience. Why?
Education: Asians average an extra 150+ hours of K12 education a year. Most school systems teach responsibility from day one by assigning class leaders and having the students clean their own classrooms.
Work ethics: are centered around providing the highest level of quality all the time, not just "when it matters." If you ever go to Japan, before you go to see the temples, or the bullet train, or Electric town, go to McDonalds. You won't find someone wearing a stained uniform, chewing gum, and moving to get your food like they're in a competition to see how slow they can go. You'll find a clean restaraunt, with professional workers who zip around putting everything together like they're swamped, even if you are the only customer waiting. Oh yeah, and the food actually looks like the pictures there. McDonalds is a low wage job there just like it is here. The difference is simply attitude. Their's is good, our is....
You were expecting me to say money next....you were wrong. The cheap labor rates in the western area os SE Asia are certainly nothing to break my heart, but I'd still outsource to india and china even if their cost of living was 50% higher than here. It's all about bang for your buck and right now, America is lagging behind with no sign of recovery. I have no doubt we will, because Americans hate to be in second place. But then again, we also just gained the title of most obese nation in the world...what an honor!
You missed the whole point there bud. I was advocating that if you really consider buying from the industry such a rip off that there are cheaper means to hear the music you want to hear. So even your jab that I am a subcontractor of the RIAA has no foundation.
I am actually a software engineer and IF it were as EASY to pirate software as it is to copy music, there would probably be a SDAA out there making lawsuits as well. I will admit that for the technically adept, it's not that hard to find cracked ISO's and such, but that is probably less than 1% of the pupulation that has the technical capabilities to download kazaa. Plus most of the major games right now depend on the unique CD key to work on network enabled games.
heheheheh...insert laughter at myself here. CD's average $14 on Amazon and you could probably work some magic with columbia house "buy 10 CD's for $1" scams to work 50 CD's into $500, but my estimate should have been around the $750 range.
"This is a slight misrepresentation, the works are NOT their property, never have been, and never will be. An idea, nor the expression of an idea can ever eb property."
Crack Cocaine, right? That's what you're smoking isn't it? I'm going to tell a story and see if you agree with it.
You are a student and just spent two weeks reading through articles and six books for a research paper on the history of the computer. Your room mate is a lazy, dishonest moron who consideres pot to be the secret to graduating. Well..., that and copying your research paper because he has the same assignment from a different professor. He at least has the decency to spend five minutes changing around a few sentences to make himself feel like he made some effort. Now you both have A's. He's still high, and you're still tired from lack of sleep. Tell me that paper wasn't YOUR idea and that he didn't just STEAL it!
I hate to break this to you, but most musicians spend YEARS getting to be as good as they are. The product they produce based on that experience and usually some long hours with a piano and an eraser is nothing more than their IDEA of what sounds good. Note the use of the pronoun THEIR. It's THEIR idea, they made it, and they damn sure do own it and deserve to be compensated for making something that gives you pleasure whan you listen to it.
Why do so many people on this site believe it is their divine right to have anything that makes them happy be given to them free?....unless it has to do with never growing up since as a kid, your concept of property is that everything is given to you for free. Too bad parents aren't there to bend you over and spank you for being a moron.
"Why won't the government allow people to set up their own private communication links? Seems like a blatant violation of privacy and property to me. My communication with another party is my property just the same as you claim this music 'belongs' to someone. If I or some company can set up a system to communicate privately so be it. Then we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. You can't own data. You can only hide it. We should all come to grips with this reality of the 21st century."
You seriously need to stop playing Illuminati and get a grip on reality. POTS, Cellualar, and VOIP from companies are all SERVICES provided to you that you use VOLUNTARILY. If you want private VOIP, VPN to the person you want to talk to and run netmeeting to each other. Of course, you are also doing this over the INTERNET which is also a SERVICE that you use VOLUNTARILY. If you are really so paranoid about not wanting your conversations viewed by the owners and proprieters of the communication means you use, either meet in public and talk, or send a letter since mail is a legally protected form of communication. You can even encrypt it so NASA won't be able to read it with their gerbil powered X-Ray secret spy labratory located on the dark side of the moon.
Sorry folks, I hate the RIAA just as much as everyone else here, but this simply needs to be said.
The whole music stealing thing....they're right. Does anyone seriously think they can stand up in a court of law and convince the judge that they deserve to have music for free. It's not like the musicians or the hundreds of people who somehow touch the music (even the janitor who sweeps the recording studio) are out there working for free. Are the studios charging way too much?...yes, a bit. Can you just record it off the radio?...yes, but royalties were already paid.
I'm a 29 year old has been trombone player (played professionally in the Marines for a bit), but I still pay for every piece of music I have on general principal. I know those musicians put in some long hard work to get as good as they are and I don't mind rewarding them...even if it is being laundered and embezzled by the industry. But I haven't even spent $3000 in my whole lifetime on CD's. Everyone who is out there giving away copies of music they likely never even paid for themselves in the first place are risking a $3000 law suit plus legal fees. And for what? I seriously doubt most people doing this even understand the concept of civil disobedience. And I don't think the judge will accept excuses about being a poor college student, or that the CD's are over-priced. If you want cheap music, sign up for one of those streaming services that let you listen to whatever you want for like $6 a month. If you want free music, either stream your favorite radio station off the internet, or get really nostalgic and actually learn how to work the FM tuner on your stereo system.
Again, I'm not saying the RIAA is this innocent victem of abuse. I'm just saying it's stupid to risk a $3000 law suit when you can likely purchase every CD you will listen to for the next year for less than $500 (that's about 50 CD's for the slow in math...practically a new disc every week), or just listen to the radio for free.
</RANT>
"[Japanese phones] tend to miss out on a few technologies ... english predicitve text for one..."
Uhh....if you extract your American, "why doesn't everyone speak English?", attitude from this, Japan has had predictive text in JAPANESE for at least 3 years. If they actually had enough demand for phones with English as the primary language, I'm sure they'd accomodate your desires.
While I'm at it, let's b!tch about another "new" feature on the Nokia....mp3 playing. This ideas was tested in Japan almost 5 years ago and was quickly tossed as useless. For those that do have a camera phone, notice how quickly your battery drains when your taking pictures. Now imagine how much of your measily 2 hour talk time is going to be sacrificed playing the latest Britney Spears (typed with the lisp from Stan's sister Shelly in South Park) tune. Also, how much are you going to be gouged by the phone company for downloading it? Even using a memory stick, it wouldn't suprise me if the novelty wore off the second time you missed an important phone call because you had drained your battery.
end rant except to say that I have yet to see a useful technology in an American phone that hasn't been in a Japanese one fro at least two years. Note that Palm Pilots are useless in Japan as the written language is too complex to do with a stylus and all the rest of the PDA features were already in the cell phones when Palm first came out.
Looks down at my D505i that I bought in Japan almost a year ago for $120 and sighs. It's now nothing better than a travel alarm with cool games.
(D505i: 1.3MP digital camera(SVGA images), modified 16MB sony memory stick slot for easy storage and transfer of data, 8x digital zoom, 256,000 TFT display, full blown on phone email support [not this gay SMS text messsaging crap], Java powered with an open spec API so I could write my own stuff, all the features of my old Palm pilot, and kick @$$ games by Sqare Soft [The guys who write the Final Fantasy series])
Yeah, Nokia really is breaking new ground here...and at a bargain price of $600. Why have we let America get so far behind? And why do we put up with this inferior crap?
just my venting folks....be back in Japan in less than a year.
Unfortunately his point is uneducated and shows a complete lack of thought into the subject. If the 1st Amendment only protected "Speech", Wouldn't that leave a mute or deaf person as a legally defined second class of society that is not allowed to participate. Asking why a 228 year old document doesn't address a 30 year old technology is completely absurd. It has been decided repeatedly that any form of expression of an idea is protected under this Amendment.
However, if local communities agree that this particular act of expression grossly infringes on the rights of their citizens (i.e. like Child Pornography infringes on the rights of the children), then that community is perfectly within bounds to establish ordanances to prevent that act.
Just as there are many people that argue pr0n is evil and should be completely banned, there will be folks complaining about this game and various other acts of expression that hit a nerve somewhere. I'm sure when this is all over, I will still be playing GTA when I'm not watching pr0n.
Yeah....now that I think about it, the automobile industry hasn't really revolutionized much at all considering they still use that silly wheel invention.
ONE BILLION DOLLARS MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH?
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Hmmm...me thinks this guy has never been to Japan.
Nobody!, and I mean nobody spends money like the Japanese. Primarily from aspects of their culture such as usually holding parties in restaurants rather than the home like western countries, the sheer number of occasions where gift giving is appropriate, and no less than a dozen major festivals held each year. Japanese economy problems are mainly stemming from corruption in the major banks that is still being cleaned up and an overly inflated cost of living that drives down tourism.
The reason why Japan is in the lead for a useful Maglev, is because they already have a society built around the reliable usage of trains. I've been to Tokyo at least 15 times and I couldn't even imagine trying to get around that city without trains. The same deal applies to cross country travel. The shinkansen (bullet train) is at least 5 times faster than driving a car and slightly cheaper than flying. Everybody uses them. In the US, I'd bet money that 9 out of 10 average Americans couldn't even guess at the cost of a train ride from New York to D.C. The reason why is because most Americans first learn of passenger travel on a train when they see than Amtrack has derailed once again and dozens of people are dead or in the hospital. Plus in most major cities, I'll cite L.A. and Dallas for examples having been to both, you'll never hear someone respond to a complaint on the terrible traffick jams by saying, "yeah, but you can just take the train/subway, it's faster anyways." I'm 29 and most of my friends in Tokyo don't even own cars....they don't feel the need to.
America is fighting a cultural battle on this one. Gas is dirt cheap compared to just about anywhere else in the world and it's just more convenient for every average joe to have a car and drive everywhere. Until this changes, there's not going to be a lot of interest in riding a new high speed, low drag, sexy maglev. Well, other than the geek in all of us wanting to do it once so we can say we did.
Unless you live in Japan where New Line completely failed to pull the event off.
However, Last Samurai opened here at the same time as the US and most Japanese people don't even want to see it because they know Hollywood fsck'd up the history on it.
(sigh!)
Because, as the anal retentive person who started this thread has failed to see, the word has not yet been officially accepted into the language.
Doh!
And a year ago, someone could have whined about the above word being ficticious as well.
Seriously people, either go get drunk, or go get laid. Preferably both, but at the very least EASE UP! If you are incapable of either, you are not old/educated enough to participate in an intelligent discussion on the evolution of the English language....and you b0><3n was probably just H4><0r3D and infested with virii!
Please take note that the amount of free space on an empty, but FORMATTED hard drive will always be a noticable chunk less than full capacity as the OS requires storage space overhead for the file system.
I just finished explaining this to someone who was whining about their 128MB USB keychain drive only having 123MB of space.
Your directory structure has to be kept somewhere.
I bet he would be this no-name Janitor who does complex proofs while mopping the floor and beat up his kindergarden cassmates for kicks.
Oh wait, that was Matt Damon...wrong guy.
.NET is more like a cold than a fashion. After a while, it will just go away and everyone will feel better that it is gone.
Makes you wonder if there is some hidden insight in calling the Linux version 'Mono'.