Sure, but there's also a difference in use. Students won't be talking on their cellphones for hours (if they do I really want to know what kind of school it is). But wifi is always on and always transmitting, so everyone who enters will be exposed all the time..
So the difference is some students at 200-600 milliwatts for a few minutes, or all of them at 35 mw for hours..
My opinion on all this: there's still more oil available than oil companies want us to believe.. the 'easy' wells are now at maximum productivity, and increased demand (China) forces oil companies to open up wells which are less productive and cost more to extract. As some others say, there are locations enough in this world which contain oil, they're not yet investigated, or they're too expensive now to extract.
This running out of oil by 2020 story sounds more like a plot by oil companies so they can increase prices and make record profits. We won't run out of oil, but it will cost more to extract in the future.
> Most experts say computers are not addictive in the same sense that drugs are, but they could be on the same level as gambling...
Or watching tv.
Now a lot of people spend a lot of time in front of their computer it sounds like a bad thing, when they were couch potatoes watching tv, no-one complained about it ???
The number of people who are smart enough to download a game from a website and install it (through a specially bought bluetooth adaptor or cable to their pc) is very small.
The market of 'dumb' people who are just consumers and will pay to download a game is much, much bigger. Most of these games (together with ringtones, wallpapers,..) are marketed through ads in magazines.
Cell phone games are definitely a business. I know someone who has a company doing it, he employs a few developers and it seems they're doing well (at least I think so, he just 'upgraded' his office and has a nice bmw x5..)
Probably.. by giving up their normal life they already live their doomsday scenario.
Stocking some supplies sounds ok to me.. I guess almost everyone has a few days/weeks worth of food in house at all times, even if it is just in case shops are closed for a long weekend.
But as some people on this blog do, to give up their normal job and regular life now, stock up 3 years worth of supplies and move to some rural part to live on your own and supply in your own needs.. No way ! That's giving up already !
I prefer to keep some faith it's all going to be ok with our civilisation.. and if some doomsday scenario starts there'll be some signs so it's still possible to stock up supplies. Not that I wake up tomorrow morning and suddenly hear on the radio that country X started nuking country Y..
> Secondly, Google is certainly not a perfect search engine.
True, especially when dealing with multi-lingual sites.
I noticed my own website took a deep plunge in its pagerank when I added dutch translations to my site. When my site was english only on pinball-related queries I was mostly on the first page of results.
Then I translated almost every page into dutch too.. and bam, my site took a deep plunge and hardly comes up in search results. It's so bad I'm thinking of either taking a new domain name for the dutch version, or just putting english-only pages online.
And btw the idea of a multi-lingual search engine with translations isn't new.. in 2000 I worked for a spin-off of Lernaut and Hauspie which had exactly this.. the company had a search engine which could understand (and map concepts into) multiple languages (en, fr, ger, sp, po), generate a summary and translate it. Cool stuff. Unfortunately the company went bust after the L&H financial problems.. Too bad because I loved working there..
But I agree with a parent poster, this projects seems more a way to attract some EU subsidies..
> he inner city will not all of a sudden consume the entire planet. > Rather all rural areas will empty up because of the expensive gas prices and the cities will not be able to afford services because they will be gradually becoming more expensive.
I don't think so.. Food will probably run out very fast in cities when supply lines are cut. In rural areas people are able to grow food for themselves to survive for a long time.
More information about what parts of the USA are suited in case a desaster hits the usa: www.survivalblog.com I found out about this blog a few months ago.. The thing which scared me most was that it seems a lot of people are convinced the end of the world is coming soon and they're preparing for it..
You can have a dual meter in your house, one for electricity at night and the other for your usage during the day. It's one box with 2 meters. Hours can depend from town to town, but usually 10pm - 6am is 'night tarriff'.
In the fusebox there's a switch installed which gets automatically triggered by the power company. To that you can connect the parts of your house which get activated at night (water heater on electricity in my case). The power company controls the time it gets switched on, usually 10pm but it can be later if that suits the company better.. they do guarantee it'll be on for a number of hours at night (so not that they switch it on at 3am and off at 5am).. but ie the start our can go from 10pm to 11.30 or so.
This switch also has a manual override in case you do need to power the appliances connected to it.
Advantages: at night you pay less for everything, some appliances only run at night (but you can manually override this and then pay the day-tarroff). Disadvantage: during the day you pay more than someone who has a single meter installed.
Price for electricity in the day is about 30 percent more, at night only half of what someone with a single meter pays. So it's only interesting if you have some heavy consumption at night (water heater, washing machine,..)
That's all very true what you're saying about the mental limits.
Also consider the fact that a lot of people use pre-paid cards to call. So as long people aren't at the bottom level of their card they don't immediately see the cost of a ringtone.
And I'm not starting about the false advertising some of these companies use: in ads they say 'text XXXX' to get a free ringtone but you they'll send you a paying ringtone too every few days from then on.. (my wife recently also started to get messages she didn't know she subscribed to and even the 'unsubscribe' text message cost her 2 euro)
Finally there's still the introduction of the euro. It's already a few years now but for most people 1 or 2 euros seems like a small amount. 2,5 euro equals 100 belgian francs and that was a note, not coins. 2 euro is still a coin.. that created a lot of hidden inflation. As long as you're paying with coins, something feels cheap. People have almost no idea anymore how much exactly 'cheap' items cost. 10 or 30 cents ? who cares, it's pocket change.
Someone I know who sells a lot on flea markets/garage sales told me the introduction of the euro was the best thing to ever happen, he earns double as much as before.
So a ringtone of 1 or 2,5 euro which gets substracted from a pre-paid card ? It doesn't feel like paying real money, and certainly not like it is a lot.
My first thought is that it's just a strategic move to show MS they're ready for battle. It's now up to MS to decide if they continue the battle or retreat.
Googles main business is searching.. and that's what they make their profit.
MS otoh makes a large part of their profit from the Office suite.
So MS got more interested in the search engine business.. Google doesn't like it and wants to fight back.. so they now pick their battle field. Not the searching business as they've got too much too loose, but the office business. Google doesn't have a lot to loose there but MS does.
Things like these happened in the past.. if a competitor from another business comes into your business, you see where you can hurt him the most and attack him in this business.. Shift the focus, make clear to him he's got more to loose than you, and hope he'll retreat and you can focus on your core business.
So either an office suite war will start.. or MS will slow down on the area of searching and let Google have that part of the market.
People just have to learn that if they start something, they've got to finish it too.. it's not much use cancelling it now because something new can be developed.. send a new spaceship with better instruments into space.. only to cancel that too when it's half-way because they can start on yet another better one..
Marktplaats is no competition for them anymore as they also bought that one.. probably because it was too popular and some things are sold on marktplaats and are hardly offered on ebay.nl
Yep, that was my first thought too, if a walk is too far, cycling is not an option but you don't want a car, then get a motorcycle or a scooter or something similar..
If you look around there are options enough available.
Want to be retro/stylish ? Get a Vespa or similar. I have an Aprilia Mojito custom myself, drive it since the beginning of this year, wish I had bought it earlier.. just as far as a car (faster if there's heavy traffic), doesn't use a lot of fuel,..
There are scooters with luggage racks/boxes so you can take a lot of stuff with you.
And finally, if you want to look more 'executive' (as someone else said, in some companies it's all about looks) then go for a BMW C1.
Sure in some parts of the world it's better than nothing, that's true. And for that I agree with you and I didn't want to make that study look foolish. I knew before about such studies.
However the parent post was about the US and not 'underdeveloped' countries..
If a country/tribe has the tradition to circumsize, then the hiv-protection is an added benefit. But saying a civilised country like the usa has to do it so it's people are protected, sounds in my opinion like a very bad idea (because some people will think it's 100% safe).
So your study it doesn't really answer the parent/grandparents question why the usa does it.
Recently here in Europe there was a discussion on the news because some people organised 'measles parties' for kids..
In their opinion the vaccin doesn't always do a good job (you still have a small risk you'll have it when you're older and then it'll be much worse) so when one kid got the measles, people brought their children too so they'd get it too.
Doctors complained about this as measles is still dangerous, even for kids.. so the risk that a few vaccinated people get it later in life was much smaller and less dangerous than letting all children have measles again and maybe have a few 'problems' then.
So what your mother did wasn't the smartest thing, a vaccin should be better.. And to answer your question, yes it's a dangerous decision, especially nowadays people travel much more than i.e. 20 or 40 years ago.
So imo circumsising because it'll help a bit more against hiv isn't an arguement. If it's not 100% effective, it's almost criminal to give people a false sense of safety (don't need a condom for protection, I'm circumsised). And yes, some people probably are that stupid.
Sure Siberia was warmer so for the earth itself it doesn't really matter if it does warm up again. Earth will happily keep on orbiting the sun.
However, for these little animals which walk on 2 legs and live all over the world in large cities and who drive around and produce things, it matters.
After all, you don't hear dinosaurs complain that Siberia cooled off in the first place, do you, so it probably didn't matter for them either ?
(and yes I may be off a few thousands years and siberia may have nothing to do with dinosaurs - I'm just giving a fictional example)
Earth heats and cools off.. what matters is our lifestyle. If we want to keep up our comfort and the way we live for a long time and the next generations, we will have to reconsider a few things now. If not, we are probably accelerating a process which may make living very difficult for a large part of the world population.
A local computer shop has an ad running on the radio they'll 'service' your computer and remove virusses/spyware for a fixed fee of 40 euros and it's guaranteed to be ready in a day.. and some marketing stuff that regular servicing can prolong the life you get out of your computer and make it fast again and so on..
so once you have some experience with virii/spyware and have a good toolset and procedure, it can be done quite fast.. The major success is that people drop off their computer at your place, you clean it, and the day after they pick it up and pay you. Best case scenario you just had the press the enter-key a few times to start all removal programs and you did other things during the scan.. but they don't know and probably think you were working all night on it.
If you do house-calls then the people will see you just sit there and wait for the computer to finish so they'll complain more often that you didn't do a lot for the 3 hours spent and don't want to pay..
It seems to work to get people to their booths, right ? And in magazines, on fansites these pictures are shown more.. any attention is good for them.
I was at the ATEI show in London in January (see my website for a review with some pictures of it) where arcade games are presented and sold.. almost all booth babes were at the booth of Sega.. maybe 2 other smaller booths also had 1 babe and that was it. But Sega's booth had 6 or 7 ?
As I say on my website, I found it weird to find the booth babes at such a large companies booth. I'd expect them at an unknown company which wants to get its name known. In case of Sega, the row of dlx-sitdown outrun 2 arcades was more than impressive enough.. the babes posing for pictures were more a distraction to the games. So as far as promoting the Outrun 2 game I don't think they were helping a lot. And I felt almost ashamed for being a man, seeing 10 men in suits waiting in line to have their picture taken..
yes and no. Someone like IBM and other top companies are more concerned by the quality of it-employees. To give an example: say they only hire people with an iq higher than 120.
What's happening now is that those 'smart' people are not considering a career in IT anymore.. Result, IBM has more problems to hire enough people who qualify for their standards (which they don't want to lower).
Happens in the pharmaceutical sector too, for R&D i.e. they only hire the top 15 percent or so.. If they need 50 persons and only 20 are smart enough to pass their tests, they'll hire those 20 and keep on searching for 30 others, instead of just hiring the 30 others too to fill all positions..
Yes and no.. smaller/compact games are most of the time less fun (less things can be put on the playfield, game must be cheaper to produce) and mechanically they may still fail as much.
Furthermore, almost every pinball collector looks down on 'home games'. Pins have been made especially for home use (2 years ago still, a 'Vacation America' pin). Not a lot information is known about them (no repair info as i.e. IC's used are specific, no schematics are released,..), so broken they are really worthless.
People who really want to play, only buy the real thing, as that's more fun. Only people who just want something for the kids buy the home games.
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Sure, but there's also a difference in use.
Students won't be talking on their cellphones for hours (if they do I really want to know what kind of school it is).
But wifi is always on and always transmitting, so everyone who enters will be exposed all the time..
So the difference is some students at 200-600 milliwatts for a few minutes, or all of them at 35 mw for hours..
My opinion on all this: there's still more oil available than oil companies want us to believe.. the 'easy' wells are now at maximum productivity, and increased demand (China) forces oil companies to open up wells which are less productive and cost more to extract.
As some others say, there are locations enough in this world which contain oil, they're not yet investigated, or they're too expensive now to extract.
This running out of oil by 2020 story sounds more like a plot by oil companies so they can increase prices and make record profits.
We won't run out of oil, but it will cost more to extract in the future.
> Most experts say computers are not addictive in the same sense that drugs are, but they could be on the same level as gambling...
Or watching tv.
Now a lot of people spend a lot of time in front of their computer it sounds like a bad thing, when they were couch potatoes watching tv, no-one complained about it ???
The number of people who are smart enough to download a game from a website and install it (through a specially bought bluetooth adaptor or cable to their pc) is very small.
..) are marketed through ads in magazines.
The market of 'dumb' people who are just consumers and will pay to download a game is much, much bigger. Most of these games (together with ringtones, wallpapers,
Cell phone games are definitely a business. I know someone who has a company doing it, he employs a few developers and it seems they're doing well (at least I think so, he just 'upgraded' his office and has a nice bmw x5..)
> Wishfull thinking, perhaps?
Probably.. by giving up their normal life they already live their doomsday scenario.
Stocking some supplies sounds ok to me.. I guess almost everyone has a few days/weeks worth of food in house at all times, even if it is just in case shops are closed for a long weekend.
But as some people on this blog do, to give up their normal job and regular life now, stock up 3 years worth of supplies and move to some rural part to live on your own and supply in your own needs..
No way !
That's giving up already !
I prefer to keep some faith it's all going to be ok with our civilisation.. and if some doomsday scenario starts there'll be some signs so it's still possible to stock up supplies. Not that I wake up tomorrow morning and suddenly hear on the radio that country X started nuking country Y..
> Secondly, Google is certainly not a perfect search engine.
True, especially when dealing with multi-lingual sites.
I noticed my own website took a deep plunge in its pagerank when I added dutch translations to my site. When my site was english only on pinball-related queries I was mostly on the first page of results.
Then I translated almost every page into dutch too.. and bam, my site took a deep plunge and hardly comes up in search results.
It's so bad I'm thinking of either taking a new domain name for the dutch version, or just putting english-only pages online.
And btw the idea of a multi-lingual search engine with translations isn't new.. in 2000 I worked for a spin-off of Lernaut and Hauspie which had exactly this.. the company had a search engine which could understand (and map concepts into) multiple languages (en, fr, ger, sp, po), generate a summary and translate it. Cool stuff.
Unfortunately the company went bust after the L&H financial problems..
Too bad because I loved working there..
But I agree with a parent poster, this projects seems more a way to attract some EU subsidies..
> he inner city will not all of a sudden consume the entire planet.
> Rather all rural areas will empty up because of the expensive gas prices and the cities will not be able to afford services because they will be gradually becoming more expensive.
I don't think so.. Food will probably run out very fast in cities when supply lines are cut.
In rural areas people are able to grow food for themselves to survive for a long time.
More information about what parts of the USA are suited in case a desaster hits the usa: www.survivalblog.com
I found out about this blog a few months ago..
The thing which scared me most was that it seems a lot of people are convinced the end of the world is coming soon and they're preparing for it..
In Belgium we have a similar but better system :)
..)
You can have a dual meter in your house, one for electricity at night and the other for your usage during the day. It's one box with 2 meters. Hours can depend from town to town, but usually 10pm - 6am is 'night tarriff'.
In the fusebox there's a switch installed which gets automatically triggered by the power company. To that you can connect the parts of your house which get activated at night (water heater on electricity in my case). The power company controls the time it gets switched on, usually 10pm but it can be later if that suits the company better.. they do guarantee it'll be on for a number of hours at night
(so not that they switch it on at 3am and off at 5am).. but ie the start our can go from 10pm to 11.30 or so.
This switch also has a manual override in case you do need to power the appliances connected to it.
Advantages: at night you pay less for everything, some appliances only run at night (but you can manually override this and then pay the day-tarroff).
Disadvantage: during the day you pay more than someone who has a single meter installed.
Price for electricity in the day is about 30 percent more, at night only half of what someone with a single meter pays.
So it's only interesting if you have some heavy consumption at night
(water heater, washing machine,
Seems they import now an 'improved' version which should be as safe as an Opel Frontera. :-)
Exactly how safe the Frontera is, is not said
That's all very true what you're saying about the mental limits.
Also consider the fact that a lot of people use pre-paid cards to call.
So as long people aren't at the bottom level of their card they don't immediately see the cost of a ringtone.
And I'm not starting about the false advertising some of these companies use: in ads they say 'text XXXX' to get a free ringtone but you they'll send you a paying ringtone too every few days from then on..
(my wife recently also started to get messages she didn't know she subscribed to and even the 'unsubscribe' text message cost her 2 euro)
Finally there's still the introduction of the euro. It's already a few years now but for most people 1 or 2 euros seems like a small amount.
2,5 euro equals 100 belgian francs and that was a note, not coins.
2 euro is still a coin.. that created a lot of hidden inflation. As long as you're paying with coins, something feels cheap. People have almost no idea anymore how much exactly 'cheap' items cost. 10 or 30 cents ? who cares, it's pocket change.
Someone I know who sells a lot on flea markets/garage sales told me the introduction of the euro was the best thing to ever happen, he earns double as much as before.
So a ringtone of 1 or 2,5 euro which gets substracted from a pre-paid card ?
It doesn't feel like paying real money, and certainly not like it is a lot.
humans have 2 eyes and the brain overlaps the images of both eyes into one sharp view we think we see
My first thought is that it's just a strategic move to show MS they're ready for battle. It's now up to MS to decide if they continue the battle or retreat.
Googles main business is searching.. and that's what they make their profit.
MS otoh makes a large part of their profit from the Office suite.
So MS got more interested in the search engine business.. Google doesn't like it and wants to fight back.. so they now pick their battle field.
Not the searching business as they've got too much too loose, but the office business. Google doesn't have a lot to loose there but MS does.
Things like these happened in the past.. if a competitor from another business comes into your business, you see where you can hurt him the most and attack him in this business..
Shift the focus, make clear to him he's got more to loose than you, and hope he'll retreat and you can focus on your core business.
So either an office suite war will start.. or MS will slow down on the area of searching and let Google have that part of the market.
People just have to learn that if they start something, they've got to finish it too..
it's not much use cancelling it now because something new can be developed..
send a new spaceship with better instruments into space.. only to cancel that too when it's half-way because they can start on yet another better one..
Marktplaats is no competition for them anymore as they also bought that one..
probably because it was too popular and some things are sold on marktplaats and are hardly offered on ebay.nl
So one of these days the whole ground in the middle east countries (Arabia, Iraq, ..) will just collapse because of all the oil they've extracted ?
Yep, that was my first thought too, if a walk is too far, cycling is not an option but you don't want a car, then get a motorcycle or a scooter or something similar..
..
If you look around there are options enough available.
Want to be retro/stylish ? Get a Vespa or similar.
I have an Aprilia Mojito custom myself, drive it since the beginning of this year, wish I had bought it earlier.. just as far as a car (faster if there's heavy traffic), doesn't use a lot of fuel,
There are scooters with luggage racks/boxes so you can take a lot of stuff with you.
And finally, if you want to look more 'executive' (as someone else said, in some companies it's all about looks) then go for a BMW C1.
Sure in some parts of the world it's better than nothing, that's true. And for that I agree with you and I didn't want to make that study look foolish. I knew before about such studies.
However the parent post was about the US and not 'underdeveloped' countries..
If a country/tribe has the tradition to circumsize, then the hiv-protection is an added benefit.
But saying a civilised country like the usa has to do it so it's people are protected, sounds in my opinion like a very bad idea (because some people will think it's 100% safe).
So your study it doesn't really answer the parent/grandparents question why the usa does it.
Recently here in Europe there was a discussion on the news because some people organised 'measles parties' for kids..
In their opinion the vaccin doesn't always do a good job (you still have a small risk you'll have it when you're older and then it'll be much worse) so when one kid got the measles, people brought their children too so they'd get it too.
Doctors complained about this as measles is still dangerous, even for kids.. so the risk that a few vaccinated people get it later in life was much smaller and less dangerous than letting all children have measles again and maybe have a few 'problems' then.
So what your mother did wasn't the smartest thing, a vaccin should be better..
And to answer your question, yes it's a dangerous decision, especially nowadays people travel much more than i.e. 20 or 40 years ago.
Condoms are better to protect against hiv.
So imo circumsising because it'll help a bit more against hiv isn't an arguement. If it's not 100% effective, it's almost criminal to give people a false sense of safety (don't need a condom for protection, I'm circumsised).
And yes, some people probably are that stupid.
Sure Siberia was warmer so for the earth itself it doesn't really matter if it does warm up again.
Earth will happily keep on orbiting the sun.
However, for these little animals which walk on 2 legs and live all over the world in large cities and who drive around and produce things, it matters.
After all, you don't hear dinosaurs complain that Siberia cooled off in the first place, do you, so it probably didn't matter for them either ?
(and yes I may be off a few thousands years and siberia may have nothing to do with dinosaurs - I'm just giving a fictional example)
Earth heats and cools off.. what matters is our lifestyle. If we want to keep up our comfort and the way we live for a long time and the next generations, we will have to reconsider a few things now. If not, we are probably accelerating a process which may make living very difficult for a large part of the world population.
A local computer shop has an ad running on the radio they'll 'service' your computer and remove virusses/spyware for a fixed fee of 40 euros and it's guaranteed to be ready in a day.. and some marketing stuff that regular servicing can prolong the life you get out of your computer and make it fast again and so on..
so once you have some experience with virii/spyware and have a good toolset and procedure, it can be done quite fast..
The major success is that people drop off their computer at your place, you clean it, and the day after they pick it up and pay you.
Best case scenario you just had the press the enter-key a few times to start all removal programs and you did other things during the scan.. but they don't know and probably think you were working all night on it.
If you do house-calls then the people will see you just sit there and wait for the computer to finish so they'll complain more often that you didn't do a lot for the 3 hours spent and don't want to pay..
It seems to work to get people to their booths, right ? And in magazines, on fansites these pictures are shown more.. any attention is good for them.
I was at the ATEI show in London in January (see my website for a review with some pictures of it)
where arcade games are presented and sold.. almost all booth babes were at the booth of Sega.. maybe 2 other smaller booths also had 1 babe and that was it. But Sega's booth had 6 or 7 ?
As I say on my website, I found it weird to find the booth babes at such a large companies booth. I'd expect them at an unknown company which wants to get its name known.
In case of Sega, the row of dlx-sitdown outrun 2 arcades was more than impressive enough.. the babes posing for pictures were more a distraction to the games. So as far as promoting the Outrun 2 game I don't think they were helping a lot. And I felt almost ashamed for being a man, seeing 10 men in suits waiting in line to have their picture taken..
yes and no.
Someone like IBM and other top companies are more concerned by the quality of it-employees.
To give an example: say they only hire people with an iq higher than 120.
What's happening now is that those 'smart' people are not considering a career in IT anymore..
Result, IBM has more problems to hire enough people who qualify for their standards (which they don't want to lower).
Happens in the pharmaceutical sector too, for R&D i.e. they only hire the top 15 percent or so..
If they need 50 persons and only 20 are smart enough to pass their tests, they'll hire those 20 and keep on searching for 30 others, instead of just hiring the 30 others too to fill all positions..
the fun is in the hunt, not the kill..
linux has never been about killing windows, but enjoying what you do with it.
Yes and no.. smaller/compact games are most of the time less fun (less things can be put on the playfield, game must be cheaper to produce) and mechanically they may still fail as much.
..), so broken they are really worthless.
Furthermore, almost every pinball collector looks down on 'home games'.
Pins have been made especially for home use (2 years ago still, a 'Vacation America' pin).
Not a lot information is known about them (no repair info as i.e. IC's used are specific, no schematics are released,
People who really want to play, only buy the real thing, as that's more fun. Only people who just want something for the kids buy the home games.