Actually, what surprises me is that the incumbents in the US don't seem to have fight brands. I'm with Koodo, in Canada, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Telus... On Telus, you get 150 anytime minutes and data for $50/mo, add $15/mo for call display/domestic texting, and long distance is extra. On Koodo, you get 150 anytime minutes, 5pm evenings/weekends, data, unlimited global texting, call display, voicemail, and unlimited long distance for $45/mo. You're buying the service from the same company, with the same towers, you can put a Koodo SIM in a Telus phone and vice-versa without unlocking the phone, but because you're buying from the fight brand, you get a good deal. My price is still stupidly overpriced when compared to what can be had in Europe, but I'm getting a much better plan than I could get from one of the incumbents....
Free Texting (and they give you a phone number) and phone calls. All the solutions I'm aware of lack Picture Capability, but Google is working on that I Think. Fuck AT&T & Verizon's 20 bucks a month for texting, that's all I'm saying. Anyone who pays so much for so little needs their head checked
I can get Unlimited global texting for $5/mo, Call display for $6/mo, and Voicemail for $6/mo, or I can get all three for $10/mo. By NA standards that's stupidly cheap... but European and Asian standards, that's ridiculously overpriced. It depends on who you're with, I suppose. That said, ATT seems to like fucking its customers over, just going on past example.... perhaps your problem isn't that you're paying for texting, it's that the company you're with has their heads so far up their asses they can see out their mouth....
A nuclear payload doesn't take anywhere near the 5,300lbs of slow burning high explosive that these things are packed with. It's true that one of them should produce a bang bigger than the bomb at Hiroshima, and that the delivery mechanism could be used to deliver a nuclear payload, but these are non-nuclear weapons. The whole reason the MOAB and other bombs like it (including this one) were developed was because the US is bound by international treaty and law not to use nuclear weapons in war.
How many of those ISPs have overlapping service areas?
Shaw, Rogers, Cogeco, and Videotron have divvied up the territories for cable service, and don't overlap service areas. Similarly, Telus, Bell, MTS, and Aliant have divvied up the territories for landline service, and also don't overlap service areas.
It's only in the mobile telephone area that there's overlap between companies like Bell/Telus, and even that isn't *real* overlap, as they're sharing each others' towers.
So yeah. For Internet service, there is a duopoly. You're either buying cable service from one of the cable companies, or you're buying landline phone service from one of the phone companies, and the only way to choose which cable/phone company it is is to move to a different part of the country.
And FYI, the French revolution came long after the American one. You'd have done better to talk about the French enlightenment, and better still to learn history before lecturing on it.
You do realize that the American revolution was actually a French revolution, right? Bought and paid for by the French, won by virtue of the fact that the British were too busy beating up the French, and led by military leaders who were trained by a French general (an openly gay one, at that). The Germans had a hand in providing some of the funding and training as well (which is why the language of commerce in the US was very nearly German, not English), but basically, if it weren't for the French providing a distraction for the English back in Europe, the American revolution never would have succeeded. Don't believe me? Look up the campaign from 1812-1814, when Madison decided to annex Canada. The story about why the White House is painted white came from that war....
The problem is, most Americans have never heard of Locke these days, even though the so-called "American Ideals" are basically a restatement of the ideas he put on paper in the 16th century, and were acknowledged to be so by the founding fathers of his country.
While it's true that the Brits did expel most of the Acadians when they took over the maritimes, most of the Acadians came back and resettled under British rule. There's a reason that New Brunswick is the only province in the country that officially recognizes both French and English as official languages. Frankly, the Brits should have done the same thing to Quebec... we wouldn't have anywhere near the number of stupid problems caused by morons trying to rewrite history had that actually happened.... Quebec actually believes that they were treated worse than the Acadians when the Brits won the war....
Not sure... but wouldn't it require not being in the desert for there to be water to evapourate to form the lines?
It wouldn't make much sense for them to pipe seawater into the middle of the Gobi to evapourate for the salt, when they could simply desalinate closer to the coast....
It's a radio show. So no, Bob McDonald doesn't happen to own a farm, he works for a radio station doing a weekly science news broadcast. He is Canadian, however, so he may own an igloo.
More seriously, being a vegetarian is 'cool' to certain demographics. Those people don't really want to be vegetarian. They just want to be cool. Thus they rationalize why the animals they eat don't count. I have literally had 'vegetarians' tell me that only red meat counts as meat.
There's health reasons to avoid eating red meat for some folks... but that isn't a vegetarian telling you that only red meat counts as meat, it's an idiot who doesn't understand that there's a different word for somebody who doesn't eat red meat.
Personally, I don't really care what you eat. I don't really care what you call your eating habits, either. As long as you don't try to evangelize me, it's none of my concern, and if you do try telling me I'm evil because I eat meat, then I'm going to tell you what you can go do with yourself. I don't avoid meat, I don't go out of my way to eat meat, I eat it when I feel like it, which lately is maybe once every couple of weeks, sticking mostly to fish and poultry. It's been over a year since I last felt like eating a steak, but somehow I'm an evil person because it's not off the menu entirely, and if I felt a desire to eat it, I would? le sigh. people suck.
That said, I love meat, I plan to keep eating meat. Will I eat synthetically grown meat? I don't see why not, assuming they manage to make it taste close enough to the real thing (which is a tougher task than one might think, what we taste in meat is not just the raw muscle itself, but is also influenced by the way the animal as exercised, and the food it has eaten.)
That's a point a lot of people have raised... I'm actually surprised TFA didn't address it, because it was one of the first questions that Bob McDonald (of Quirks and Quarks on CBC, in Canada) asked the scientist, about 2 years ago when I first heard about this kind of project.
The scientist's answer wasn't that the meat was super tough, rather that it was very tender. The problem with the meat was that it was just a hunk of meat grown in a test tube... the science behind growing the meat had been well established by that point, and it was nutritionally, and the challenge was in scaling it up to industrial scales, and finding a way to make it taste like *meat*. And the solution they'd found and were working on scaling on the flavour side of things was to use electrical muscle stimulation to "exercise" the meat, giving it tone and flavour. On the small scale, they'd found that it worked quite well, and that the meat was reasonably palatable.
So AFAIK, the real concern isn't the flavour of the meat, or the nutrition, it's how do they scale it up to be feasible on an industrial scale.
Especially if that first language is Catalan, French, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian, or Spanish (and probably several others I'm not thinking of right now), where the word is actually "soja".
I'd be more worried about heat generation than how to actually repair the thing. Sounds like it's very densely packed electronics, coupled with one of the fastest processors ever put into a phone. Even if the thing is 99% idle 99% of the time, that still runs the risk of the thing overheating at some point in its usable life.
Because people lending (which is different to whats going on here) over "sneakernet" doesn't equate to tens of thousands of people having their own copy in only a few hours.
*shrugs* it takes about 10 minutes for me to transfer an ISO to my hard drive, stripping the region coding as I do it, and then about 30 minutes to transcode that ISO into an MKV file that includes all of the soundtracks and subtitle information. If I'm not worried about the storage space, I can skip the second step. With a reasonably fast Internet connection, it *could* equate to tens of thousands of people having their own copy in only a few hours, and the main difference between what I'm doing and downloading it off the Internet is that instead of downloading it from a host that might actually be owned by the content holder, I'm creating my own digital copy of it. That I don't then upload it to the Internet is mostly because I can't be bothered to do so, because I don't really care about that side of things. I am digitizing movies so that I don't have to devote a large amount of shelf space to their storage, not because I believe the information wants to be free.
You don't seriously think that the people doing the actual ripping/uploading (who are the people that the industry should *really* be going after) are *buying* dvd's, though, do you? All of the movies I rip, I own (physical copies and everything, just not kept in my living room), but most of the people who actually do the ripping/uploading are getting the movies from some form of sneakernet. Either they work at a video store and have physical access to the DVD before it's released, or they work in a theatre as a projectionist or something, and can rip the DVD while it's still in theatres, or they have a friend who does the above and gets the DVD for them. Most of them are not going to retail outlets and actually *buying* the DVD so that they can rip it.
What you say would be true if FB didn't actually do business in Germany. The thing is, they do. They have offices in Hamburg, and they also do business with German advertisers, selling the information of German citizens. If they want to continue doing business in Germany, then they comply with German laws. Be grateful. This wouldn't be the first time some American company with no concept of consumer rights has tried to fuck over its customers, only to be thwarted by the laws of a country where they do business, and it certainly won't be the last. Perhaps you should be bitching about the state of privacy laws and individual rights in the US rather than about a sovereign nation enforcing its laws on companies seeking to do business in their jurisdiction.
If they were strictly a US site that happened to be accessible from Germany (like, for example, Slashdot), then perhaps what you say would have merit. The thing is, they aren't, and it doesn't. This isn't really any different from the US enforcing its laws on foreign companies... case in point, Bell Canada has to comply with SarbOx rules, because some of their stock gets traded through the NYSE. This is a company that doesn't have any customers outside of Canada, that doesn't offer service outside of Canada (doesn't even offer service to all of Canada), that doesn't buy services from providers outside of Canada, and that is majority owned by Canadians. By all judgements, they have even less to do with the US than Facebook has to do with Germany, but because they trade on the NYSE, they have to comply with US trade rules, and the only way to not comply with rules like SarbOx would be to de-list from the NYSE. And yet nobody in the US is bitching about that, or the thousands of other examples of foreign companies that have to comply with US laws to do business in the states. Hypocrisy much?
If they want to do business in Germany, they comply with German law. Not sure what's so difficult to understand on that point... wouldn't be the first time Facebook has had to adjust its practices to stay on the friendly side of the law. Actually, it wouldn't be the first time they've had to adjust their practices to comply with German law, at that. The reason you can hide your profile from search, among other privacy features you've been granted, are because of the orders of the German and Canadian privacy commissions....
The time spent learning to do that from command line could be better spent getting stuff done. And for an awful lot of computer users, they'll never be able to internalize something like video editing from a command line, because they need to visualize it. They'll be much more productive if you give them a way to simply visualize what they're doing and drag/drop than they would be if you make them have to do math and calculations, then put it into a CLI, hope it works, and if not, go back, redo the calculations, and put it back into the CLI.
Gaming was the only thing that held me on Windows 7. When I gave up on computer games and moved on to different passtimes, I found I no longer needed Windows. I still have a Win7-based gaming laptop, for the odd time when I want to fire up Civ5 or Dragon Age, or whatever, but most of my computing is now done on a Linux-based ultraportable laptop.
For people who don't want to play video games, and really just want to type up a document or surf the web, Linux is a great option. And as people realize that Windows and OSX are treating them like children, they'll start to migrate over to Linux. But for people who actually want to play games, Linux isn't really an option right now. Wine works reasonably well for most games, but there's still some gamestopping glitches in some games, and features that simply don't work. Not to mention all the fun times that happen when you try getting an NVidia or ATi graphics card working properly in Linux, or when you do a system update and it nukes your system because the kernel version wasn't locked. It's not a problem on my ultraportable laptop because that has an Intel-based graphics processor and doesn't need extra drivers installed, but on a system with NV or ATi graphics, on which you plan to actually do some gaming? Most people aren't going to want to have to reinstall their graphics driver, from a CLI interface every time they do a system update because some library or kernel module that the graphics driver depends on got updated and now X won't start.
Now, they just come at you from a new IP address within hours.
Greylisting is your friend. Your mail server gives them a service temporarily unavailable error. If their mail server follows the SMTP standard, it comes back a few hours later from the same IP address and gets let through. Most spammers are interested in volume, and don't waste resources following up like that. And if they do, and it happens to be a new IP address, then they get delayed again for having a new IP address.
It doesn't take long for Greylisting filters to learn legitimate hosts, especially if you receive a fair amount of mail from said hosts, and within a day or two you won't notice any delays at all with legitimate mail.
Caffeine is also less addictive, and has less negative side effects than amphetamines. Nobody ever "borrowed" a tank and took it for a joy ride after drinking a cup of coffee.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, what surprises me is that the incumbents in the US don't seem to have fight brands. I'm with Koodo, in Canada, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Telus... On Telus, you get 150 anytime minutes and data for $50/mo, add $15/mo for call display/domestic texting, and long distance is extra. On Koodo, you get 150 anytime minutes, 5pm evenings/weekends, data, unlimited global texting, call display, voicemail, and unlimited long distance for $45/mo. You're buying the service from the same company, with the same towers, you can put a Koodo SIM in a Telus phone and vice-versa without unlocking the phone, but because you're buying from the fight brand, you get a good deal. My price is still stupidly overpriced when compared to what can be had in Europe, but I'm getting a much better plan than I could get from one of the incumbents....
Free Texting (and they give you a phone number) and phone calls. All the solutions I'm aware of lack Picture Capability, but Google is working on that I Think. Fuck AT&T & Verizon's 20 bucks a month for texting, that's all I'm saying. Anyone who pays so much for so little needs their head checked
Depends on your carrier, I guess.
https://shop.koodomobile.com/plans/add-ons/index.html
I can get Unlimited global texting for $5/mo, Call display for $6/mo, and Voicemail for $6/mo, or I can get all three for $10/mo. By NA standards that's stupidly cheap... but European and Asian standards, that's ridiculously overpriced. It depends on who you're with, I suppose. That said, ATT seems to like fucking its customers over, just going on past example.... perhaps your problem isn't that you're paying for texting, it's that the company you're with has their heads so far up their asses they can see out their mouth....
Clouds. Zoom in far enough and you can easily distinguish the shadows they're casting.
Except NAFTA. ;)
A nuclear payload doesn't take anywhere near the 5,300lbs of slow burning high explosive that these things are packed with. It's true that one of them should produce a bang bigger than the bomb at Hiroshima, and that the delivery mechanism could be used to deliver a nuclear payload, but these are non-nuclear weapons. The whole reason the MOAB and other bombs like it (including this one) were developed was because the US is bound by international treaty and law not to use nuclear weapons in war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Treaty
These are weapons designed to be used, not designed to sit in a warehouse somewhere as a deterrent in case somebody else uses a nuke.
I would assume most insurances have exclusions if a crime has been involved. Copyright violation is theft, right?
Not in Canada. Right now, in Canada, copying something isn't illegal at all. Distributing that copy is, however.
How many of those ISPs have overlapping service areas?
Shaw, Rogers, Cogeco, and Videotron have divvied up the territories for cable service, and don't overlap service areas.
Similarly, Telus, Bell, MTS, and Aliant have divvied up the territories for landline service, and also don't overlap service areas.
It's only in the mobile telephone area that there's overlap between companies like Bell/Telus, and even that isn't *real* overlap, as they're sharing each others' towers.
So yeah. For Internet service, there is a duopoly. You're either buying cable service from one of the cable companies, or you're buying landline phone service from one of the phone companies, and the only way to choose which cable/phone company it is is to move to a different part of the country.
And FYI, the French revolution came long after the American one. You'd have done better to talk about the French enlightenment, and better still to learn history before lecturing on it.
You do realize that the American revolution was actually a French revolution, right? Bought and paid for by the French, won by virtue of the fact that the British were too busy beating up the French, and led by military leaders who were trained by a French general (an openly gay one, at that). The Germans had a hand in providing some of the funding and training as well (which is why the language of commerce in the US was very nearly German, not English), but basically, if it weren't for the French providing a distraction for the English back in Europe, the American revolution never would have succeeded. Don't believe me? Look up the campaign from 1812-1814, when Madison decided to annex Canada. The story about why the White House is painted white came from that war....
The problem is, most Americans have never heard of Locke these days, even though the so-called "American Ideals" are basically a restatement of the ideas he put on paper in the 16th century, and were acknowledged to be so by the founding fathers of his country.
While it's true that the Brits did expel most of the Acadians when they took over the maritimes, most of the Acadians came back and resettled under British rule. There's a reason that New Brunswick is the only province in the country that officially recognizes both French and English as official languages. Frankly, the Brits should have done the same thing to Quebec... we wouldn't have anywhere near the number of stupid problems caused by morons trying to rewrite history had that actually happened.... Quebec actually believes that they were treated worse than the Acadians when the Brits won the war....
Not sure... but wouldn't it require not being in the desert for there to be water to evapourate to form the lines?
It wouldn't make much sense for them to pipe seawater into the middle of the Gobi to evapourate for the salt, when they could simply desalinate closer to the coast....
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/
It's a radio show. So no, Bob McDonald doesn't happen to own a farm, he works for a radio station doing a weekly science news broadcast. He is Canadian, however, so he may own an igloo.
More seriously, being a vegetarian is 'cool' to certain demographics. Those people don't really want to be vegetarian. They just want to be cool. Thus they rationalize why the animals they eat don't count. I have literally had 'vegetarians' tell me that only red meat counts as meat.
There's health reasons to avoid eating red meat for some folks... but that isn't a vegetarian telling you that only red meat counts as meat, it's an idiot who doesn't understand that there's a different word for somebody who doesn't eat red meat.
Personally, I don't really care what you eat. I don't really care what you call your eating habits, either. As long as you don't try to evangelize me, it's none of my concern, and if you do try telling me I'm evil because I eat meat, then I'm going to tell you what you can go do with yourself. I don't avoid meat, I don't go out of my way to eat meat, I eat it when I feel like it, which lately is maybe once every couple of weeks, sticking mostly to fish and poultry. It's been over a year since I last felt like eating a steak, but somehow I'm an evil person because it's not off the menu entirely, and if I felt a desire to eat it, I would? le sigh. people suck.
That said, I love meat, I plan to keep eating meat. Will I eat synthetically grown meat? I don't see why not, assuming they manage to make it taste close enough to the real thing (which is a tougher task than one might think, what we taste in meat is not just the raw muscle itself, but is also influenced by the way the animal as exercised, and the food it has eaten.)
That's a point a lot of people have raised... I'm actually surprised TFA didn't address it, because it was one of the first questions that Bob McDonald (of Quirks and Quarks on CBC, in Canada) asked the scientist, about 2 years ago when I first heard about this kind of project.
The scientist's answer wasn't that the meat was super tough, rather that it was very tender. The problem with the meat was that it was just a hunk of meat grown in a test tube... the science behind growing the meat had been well established by that point, and it was nutritionally, and the challenge was in scaling it up to industrial scales, and finding a way to make it taste like *meat*. And the solution they'd found and were working on scaling on the flavour side of things was to use electrical muscle stimulation to "exercise" the meat, giving it tone and flavour. On the small scale, they'd found that it worked quite well, and that the meat was reasonably palatable.
So AFAIK, the real concern isn't the flavour of the meat, or the nutrition, it's how do they scale it up to be feasible on an industrial scale.
Especially if that first language is Catalan, French, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian, or Spanish (and probably several others I'm not thinking of right now), where the word is actually "soja".
I dunno. Aside from the cold of living in the northern part of the country, Norway isn't that bad.
I'd be more worried about heat generation than how to actually repair the thing. Sounds like it's very densely packed electronics, coupled with one of the fastest processors ever put into a phone. Even if the thing is 99% idle 99% of the time, that still runs the risk of the thing overheating at some point in its usable life.
Because people lending (which is different to whats going on here) over "sneakernet" doesn't equate to tens of thousands of people having their own copy in only a few hours.
*shrugs* it takes about 10 minutes for me to transfer an ISO to my hard drive, stripping the region coding as I do it, and then about 30 minutes to transcode that ISO into an MKV file that includes all of the soundtracks and subtitle information. If I'm not worried about the storage space, I can skip the second step. With a reasonably fast Internet connection, it *could* equate to tens of thousands of people having their own copy in only a few hours, and the main difference between what I'm doing and downloading it off the Internet is that instead of downloading it from a host that might actually be owned by the content holder, I'm creating my own digital copy of it. That I don't then upload it to the Internet is mostly because I can't be bothered to do so, because I don't really care about that side of things. I am digitizing movies so that I don't have to devote a large amount of shelf space to their storage, not because I believe the information wants to be free.
You don't seriously think that the people doing the actual ripping/uploading (who are the people that the industry should *really* be going after) are *buying* dvd's, though, do you? All of the movies I rip, I own (physical copies and everything, just not kept in my living room), but most of the people who actually do the ripping/uploading are getting the movies from some form of sneakernet. Either they work at a video store and have physical access to the DVD before it's released, or they work in a theatre as a projectionist or something, and can rip the DVD while it's still in theatres, or they have a friend who does the above and gets the DVD for them. Most of them are not going to retail outlets and actually *buying* the DVD so that they can rip it.
What you say would be true if FB didn't actually do business in Germany. The thing is, they do. They have offices in Hamburg, and they also do business with German advertisers, selling the information of German citizens. If they want to continue doing business in Germany, then they comply with German laws. Be grateful. This wouldn't be the first time some American company with no concept of consumer rights has tried to fuck over its customers, only to be thwarted by the laws of a country where they do business, and it certainly won't be the last. Perhaps you should be bitching about the state of privacy laws and individual rights in the US rather than about a sovereign nation enforcing its laws on companies seeking to do business in their jurisdiction.
If they were strictly a US site that happened to be accessible from Germany (like, for example, Slashdot), then perhaps what you say would have merit. The thing is, they aren't, and it doesn't. This isn't really any different from the US enforcing its laws on foreign companies... case in point, Bell Canada has to comply with SarbOx rules, because some of their stock gets traded through the NYSE. This is a company that doesn't have any customers outside of Canada, that doesn't offer service outside of Canada (doesn't even offer service to all of Canada), that doesn't buy services from providers outside of Canada, and that is majority owned by Canadians. By all judgements, they have even less to do with the US than Facebook has to do with Germany, but because they trade on the NYSE, they have to comply with US trade rules, and the only way to not comply with rules like SarbOx would be to de-list from the NYSE. And yet nobody in the US is bitching about that, or the thousands of other examples of foreign companies that have to comply with US laws to do business in the states. Hypocrisy much?
If they want to do business in Germany, they comply with German law. Not sure what's so difficult to understand on that point... wouldn't be the first time Facebook has had to adjust its practices to stay on the friendly side of the law. Actually, it wouldn't be the first time they've had to adjust their practices to comply with German law, at that. The reason you can hide your profile from search, among other privacy features you've been granted, are because of the orders of the German and Canadian privacy commissions....
The time spent learning to do that from command line could be better spent getting stuff done. And for an awful lot of computer users, they'll never be able to internalize something like video editing from a command line, because they need to visualize it. They'll be much more productive if you give them a way to simply visualize what they're doing and drag/drop than they would be if you make them have to do math and calculations, then put it into a CLI, hope it works, and if not, go back, redo the calculations, and put it back into the CLI.
Gaming was the only thing that held me on Windows 7. When I gave up on computer games and moved on to different passtimes, I found I no longer needed Windows. I still have a Win7-based gaming laptop, for the odd time when I want to fire up Civ5 or Dragon Age, or whatever, but most of my computing is now done on a Linux-based ultraportable laptop.
For people who don't want to play video games, and really just want to type up a document or surf the web, Linux is a great option. And as people realize that Windows and OSX are treating them like children, they'll start to migrate over to Linux. But for people who actually want to play games, Linux isn't really an option right now. Wine works reasonably well for most games, but there's still some gamestopping glitches in some games, and features that simply don't work. Not to mention all the fun times that happen when you try getting an NVidia or ATi graphics card working properly in Linux, or when you do a system update and it nukes your system because the kernel version wasn't locked. It's not a problem on my ultraportable laptop because that has an Intel-based graphics processor and doesn't need extra drivers installed, but on a system with NV or ATi graphics, on which you plan to actually do some gaming? Most people aren't going to want to have to reinstall their graphics driver, from a CLI interface every time they do a system update because some library or kernel module that the graphics driver depends on got updated and now X won't start.
Now, they just come at you from a new IP address within hours.
Greylisting is your friend. Your mail server gives them a service temporarily unavailable error. If their mail server follows the SMTP standard, it comes back a few hours later from the same IP address and gets let through. Most spammers are interested in volume, and don't waste resources following up like that. And if they do, and it happens to be a new IP address, then they get delayed again for having a new IP address.
It doesn't take long for Greylisting filters to learn legitimate hosts, especially if you receive a fair amount of mail from said hosts, and within a day or two you won't notice any delays at all with legitimate mail.
I'm not sure what the problem is because I've always heard plants grow better to the sound of music.
Well, the hills are alive, after all...
Caffeine is also less addictive, and has less negative side effects than amphetamines. Nobody ever "borrowed" a tank and took it for a joy ride after drinking a cup of coffee.