There are some really nice cave homes in France too: http://www.troglodyte.info/troglodyte_photos.html I've visited them & would happily live in one! Plus it would be cool to say you lived in a Troglodyte village...
In my experience, the key is that lots of people take the bus in places like the UK; gas is expensive, the cities are old & streets are narrow, and parking can be a real pain. They don't have the spread out suburbs of the US. So the buses have more of a representative sample of society. I know lots of car owners in the UK who take the bus regularly. In the US, most places, the bus is the last resort; I know I haven't been on one in the US for years, and neither have most of my friends, even though I live in a pretty transportation-friendly urban area. People I know will take the Metro (DC subway), but rarely the bus.
Exactly. I used to buy a lot of cds; now for $36/year I use Pandora for most casual listening. I have ripped all my cds, but I like to hear new stuff & Pandora makes it easy. I'll buy a few mp3 albums a year from Amazon of stuff I really like, but that's about it. Piracy doesn't figure into this; my decline in spending on music is not because I'm pirating, but because I'm happy with listening to music in ways other than just buying it.
I just installed the new version because I needed to work on an old Visio diagram & I had read that Draw supports Visio imports. It didn't actually support the ancient version I was dealing with, but I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to just duplicate the old diagram in Draw, connectors & all. Big thumbs up!
Given the 6% royalty rate that NATCO has to pay to Bayer, I wouldn't be suprised if Bayer ends up making more money with the compulsory license than before.
But as you said before, they have no interest in the Indian market. What they're scared of is these cheap Indian drugs leaking out to their lucrative North American and European markets. That's where this is likely to hurt their bottom line.
First time I went there I was an ignorant 18 year old & was quite confused when the signs switched from French (which I could get by in) to German (which I couldn't).
The other thing pointing towards a pre-paid vendor is that most of the devices you'll see for the big carriers will be the price with a one or two year contract - someone coming from abroad may not be aware of this & buy something they don't need. I have used the Virgin Mobile 3g dongle: http://www.virginmobileusa.com/mobile-broadband/ovation-mc760.html and it works well in areas where Sprint has coverage. You should be able to pick one up at a Radio Shack or Walmart (the Walmart ones will actually give you a better rate for the data), but both their websites are showing them out of stock so maybe it's being phased out. There's a MiFi too if so, for around $130. Don't buy a used one on ebay unless you can guarantee that the seller will provide you the user name & password for the account it was registered with, without that it's useless. The Virgin stuff won't roam to other carriers' towers like a Sprint branded one, but it's contract free. While you're in the cities you should be fine, but in the boonies it might not have coverage.
iPad, around $500-600. Any other tablet that I like just fine that does everything the ipad does are easily found for under $200.
Please, link to one of these. I have been waiting & waiting for an Android tablet good enough and cheap to actually buy, but I haven't found it yet. Everything under $200 I have seen has way too many issues to bother with. Even the Samsung Galaxy Player 5" is over $200 & it's not getting ICS, and the newer Plus model looks like it will be Asia only.
I call BS on that - my kids' ipod Touches have handled every update (at least 3) gracefully. My Samsung Android update (which I'd say was more critical since it was laggy & buggy) was pretty painful, failed the first time, and required me to call support to have them resend the update. Now, I get that it's not really an *Android* problem when Samsung & my carrier screw up an update, and I also know that I bought a low end device & didn't expect a high level of polish, so I'm not really complaining. But I just don't see Apple updates breaking your old device, and for some Android devices staying with the same level of functionality they came with is not a great option.
My reading was that the tradeoff was between Intel's more powerful CPU/less powerful GPU, and AMD's more powerful GPU/less powerful CPU offerings. In that case there is a real tradeoff - you can't get both the more powerful CPU & GPU in one package.
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, the crappy quality of the layout, typesetting etc of lots of e-books are a whole other kettle of fish - so many seem like just an afterthought, run through some crappy converter & not even proofread. Hopefully that will change as they become a larger & larger part of the market.
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 1
The only times I get annoyed with my nook are when there are illustrations like maps and photos and there's no way to zoom in to get a decent view - right now I'm reading 1493 by Charles Mann, and most of the maps are essentially unreadable. Mostly though, it's great - easy to read, long battery life, no distractions. Magazines on tablets, on the other hand, are also great - the color and the interactivity are a plus there, and with shorter articles the interruptions aren't bad. You can also turn off most notifications if you don't want to be pestered.
That was my thought too - I've always been surprised that Waste never really took off. If this works with NAT, maybe it'll do better - that seemed to be a stumbling block with Waste.
What's it going to take to stop you pirating this stuff?
A DRM free download at around that price. I don't want any more plastic discs hanging around, and I started buying mp3s when Amazon started selling them DRM free. If I could buy a nice mkv file of Harry Potter for $3-5 I'd do it, and so would a lot of other people. But a DRM locked copy from itunes costs $10-15, at least twice the cost of the DVD!
Gas prices in the US are not "artificially low". Like many other places they are artificially high, mostly because of our historical reluctance to tap our own supply, despite it being readily available (Shale oil, gulf oil, tundra oil, the list goes on.)
One problem is that a lot of the marginal supplies like shale really only become economic above a certain price point; the Saudis can always (well, for the near future anyway) extract at a lower cost. In a global market for a fungible commodity, the extra production of our relatively expensive supplies won't really make a huge dent in the price; if they did, they'd start to become uneconomic. Sure, all out drilling it would be a boost to some job sectors, but I don't think it would reduce prices significantly.
So when they say most reliable, I would bet that it's not over a long life of a car... considering the life of a car today is about 10 years. The more complex cars get, the more that can go wrong with them.
I'm not sure where you get that idea - I have a 2003 Honda (bought in 2002), and I fully expect that it'll be going strong in another 10 years. It runs great, the only things I've had to replace are normal wear items & one electronic module. Even that, it ran in limp home mode so I've never been stranded. Modern cars really are well made - I had planned to sell this one when it hit 10 years, but now I'm planning to keep it indefinitely.
I agree, I have noticed that friends who don't ride tend to have a less keenly honed sense of awareness in traffic than those who do, even when they are driving cars.
Also, you tell me how an automated vehicle is going to have the fuzzy logic to know whether a car nearby is actually about to swerve out of control or if the driver is just inattentive and drifting.
If the automated vehicle has fast enough reaction times, it doesn't really matter; when the swerve starts it can react. Unlike a human driver, the automated car always has its "eyes" on all of its surroundings, and can react almost instantly. Once the drifting/swerving car breaches the safe distance, action is taken to avoid a collision. Will there be some situations where it will be physically impossible to avoid being hit? Conceivably, but most collisions aren't in that class.
Electronic Library (like Overdrive) uses DRM to ensure that only one copy of a purchased book is available for use at any given time, making it analogous to the physical library.
These sites seem like they were more like a library which would photocopy you a book anytime you wanted, not making you wait for the original purchased book to be returned first.
I won't buy files with DRM, but I'm actually ok with using my library's Overdrive system since it's pretty much the digital equivalent of the usual library service.
I think what the parent post meant is that all vaccines have some percent of people who don't have the desired antibody response, so you want to keep the unvaccinated numbers as low as possible in order to protect them. There are also the populations of very young/very old/immune compromised who can't be vaccinated. It's these groups most at risk from the willful vaccine refusers.
3) Take away unlimited data because people are using it.
That's not exactly what throttling is though, is it? You still have data access, but at a lower speed than otherwise. I don't use AT&T, but Virgin is doing this too & I don't really have a problem with it. Admittedly I have the $25 unlimited data & 300 minutes plan grandfathered, and Virgin at least only throttles over 2.5Gb, but I feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of the plan. If I ever hit 2.5Gb, I'll still be able to check email & stuff, just maybe not stream Pandora. I can live with that. I might be more upset if I were paying AT&T prices...
Despite all the anti-immigrant rhetoric flying around right now, I think the US still is pretty open to foreigners. There are 40 million foreign-born residents in the US right now, and most are assimilating well. I say come on over, you might like it!
As a guy, I've never had a problem with a pat down, but I've only had your garden variety. Apparently the pat down you get after refusing the scanner is much more intrusive, and if you're a woman involves lifting the breasts etc. So I can see that it would feel like much more of an intrusion. Add that to the fact that neither the scan nor the pat down are doing much for security and I think that rather than legislating for a "passenger advocate" we should be scaling back on the whole setup.
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There are some really nice cave homes in France too:
http://www.troglodyte.info/troglodyte_photos.html
I've visited them & would happily live in one! Plus it would be cool to say you lived in a Troglodyte village...
In my experience, the key is that lots of people take the bus in places like the UK; gas is expensive, the cities are old & streets are narrow, and parking can be a real pain. They don't have the spread out suburbs of the US. So the buses have more of a representative sample of society. I know lots of car owners in the UK who take the bus regularly. In the US, most places, the bus is the last resort; I know I haven't been on one in the US for years, and neither have most of my friends, even though I live in a pretty transportation-friendly urban area. People I know will take the Metro (DC subway), but rarely the bus.
Exactly. I used to buy a lot of cds; now for $36/year I use Pandora for most casual listening. I have ripped all my cds, but I like to hear new stuff & Pandora makes it easy. I'll buy a few mp3 albums a year from Amazon of stuff I really like, but that's about it. Piracy doesn't figure into this; my decline in spending on music is not because I'm pirating, but because I'm happy with listening to music in ways other than just buying it.
I just installed the new version because I needed to work on an old Visio diagram & I had read that Draw supports Visio imports. It didn't actually support the ancient version I was dealing with, but I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to just duplicate the old diagram in Draw, connectors & all. Big thumbs up!
Given the 6% royalty rate that NATCO has to pay to Bayer, I wouldn't be suprised if Bayer ends up making more money with the compulsory license than before.
But as you said before, they have no interest in the Indian market. What they're scared of is these cheap Indian drugs leaking out to their lucrative North American and European markets. That's where this is likely to hurt their bottom line.
First time I went there I was an ignorant 18 year old & was quite confused when the signs switched from French (which I could get by in) to German (which I couldn't).
The other thing pointing towards a pre-paid vendor is that most of the devices you'll see for the big carriers will be the price with a one or two year contract - someone coming from abroad may not be aware of this & buy something they don't need. I have used the Virgin Mobile 3g dongle:
http://www.virginmobileusa.com/mobile-broadband/ovation-mc760.html
and it works well in areas where Sprint has coverage. You should be able to pick one up at a Radio Shack or Walmart (the Walmart ones will actually give you a better rate for the data), but both their websites are showing them out of stock so maybe it's being phased out. There's a MiFi too if so, for around $130. Don't buy a used one on ebay unless you can guarantee that the seller will provide you the user name & password for the account it was registered with, without that it's useless. The Virgin stuff won't roam to other carriers' towers like a Sprint branded one, but it's contract free. While you're in the cities you should be fine, but in the boonies it might not have coverage.
iPad, around $500-600. Any other tablet that I like just fine that does everything the ipad does are easily found for under $200.
Please, link to one of these. I have been waiting & waiting for an Android tablet good enough and cheap to actually buy, but I haven't found it yet. Everything under $200 I have seen has way too many issues to bother with. Even the Samsung Galaxy Player 5" is over $200 & it's not getting ICS, and the newer Plus model looks like it will be Asia only.
I call BS on that - my kids' ipod Touches have handled every update (at least 3) gracefully. My Samsung Android update (which I'd say was more critical since it was laggy & buggy) was pretty painful, failed the first time, and required me to call support to have them resend the update.
Now, I get that it's not really an *Android* problem when Samsung & my carrier screw up an update, and I also know that I bought a low end device & didn't expect a high level of polish, so I'm not really complaining. But I just don't see Apple updates breaking your old device, and for some Android devices staying with the same level of functionality they came with is not a great option.
My reading was that the tradeoff was between Intel's more powerful CPU/less powerful GPU, and AMD's more powerful GPU/less powerful CPU offerings. In that case there is a real tradeoff - you can't get both the more powerful CPU & GPU in one package.
Yeah, the crappy quality of the layout, typesetting etc of lots of e-books are a whole other kettle of fish - so many seem like just an afterthought, run through some crappy converter & not even proofread. Hopefully that will change as they become a larger & larger part of the market.
The only times I get annoyed with my nook are when there are illustrations like maps and photos and there's no way to zoom in to get a decent view - right now I'm reading 1493 by Charles Mann, and most of the maps are essentially unreadable. Mostly though, it's great - easy to read, long battery life, no distractions.
Magazines on tablets, on the other hand, are also great - the color and the interactivity are a plus there, and with shorter articles the interruptions aren't bad. You can also turn off most notifications if you don't want to be pestered.
That was my thought too - I've always been surprised that Waste never really took off. If this works with NAT, maybe it'll do better - that seemed to be a stumbling block with Waste.
What's it going to take to stop you pirating this stuff?
A DRM free download at around that price. I don't want any more plastic discs hanging around, and I started buying mp3s when Amazon started selling them DRM free. If I could buy a nice mkv file of Harry Potter for $3-5 I'd do it, and so would a lot of other people. But a DRM locked copy from itunes costs $10-15, at least twice the cost of the DVD!
Because people buy the iPod Touch for their kids & wouldn't spend more on it.
Gas prices in the US are not "artificially low". Like many other places they are artificially high, mostly because of our historical reluctance to tap our own supply, despite it being readily available (Shale oil, gulf oil, tundra oil, the list goes on.)
One problem is that a lot of the marginal supplies like shale really only become economic above a certain price point; the Saudis can always (well, for the near future anyway) extract at a lower cost. In a global market for a fungible commodity, the extra production of our relatively expensive supplies won't really make a huge dent in the price; if they did, they'd start to become uneconomic. Sure, all out drilling it would be a boost to some job sectors, but I don't think it would reduce prices significantly.
So when they say most reliable, I would bet that it's not over a long life of a car... considering the life of a car today is about 10 years. The more complex cars get, the more that can go wrong with them.
I'm not sure where you get that idea - I have a 2003 Honda (bought in 2002), and I fully expect that it'll be going strong in another 10 years. It runs great, the only things I've had to replace are normal wear items & one electronic module. Even that, it ran in limp home mode so I've never been stranded. Modern cars really are well made - I had planned to sell this one when it hit 10 years, but now I'm planning to keep it indefinitely.
Still wouldn't trust a Chrysler, though.
I agree, I have noticed that friends who don't ride tend to have a less keenly honed sense of awareness in traffic than those who do, even when they are driving cars.
Also, you tell me how an automated vehicle is going to have the fuzzy logic to know whether a car nearby is actually about to swerve out of control or if the driver is just inattentive and drifting.
If the automated vehicle has fast enough reaction times, it doesn't really matter; when the swerve starts it can react. Unlike a human driver, the automated car always has its "eyes" on all of its surroundings, and can react almost instantly. Once the drifting/swerving car breaches the safe distance, action is taken to avoid a collision. Will there be some situations where it will be physically impossible to avoid being hit? Conceivably, but most collisions aren't in that class.
Electronic Library (like Overdrive) uses DRM to ensure that only one copy of a purchased book is available for use at any given time, making it analogous to the physical library.
These sites seem like they were more like a library which would photocopy you a book anytime you wanted, not making you wait for the original purchased book to be returned first.
I won't buy files with DRM, but I'm actually ok with using my library's Overdrive system since it's pretty much the digital equivalent of the usual library service.
I think what the parent post meant is that all vaccines have some percent of people who don't have the desired antibody response, so you want to keep the unvaccinated numbers as low as possible in order to protect them. There are also the populations of very young/very old/immune compromised who can't be vaccinated. It's these groups most at risk from the willful vaccine refusers.
3) Take away unlimited data because people are using it.
That's not exactly what throttling is though, is it? You still have data access, but at a lower speed than otherwise. I don't use AT&T, but Virgin is doing this too & I don't really have a problem with it. Admittedly I have the $25 unlimited data & 300 minutes plan grandfathered, and Virgin at least only throttles over 2.5Gb, but I feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of the plan. If I ever hit 2.5Gb, I'll still be able to check email & stuff, just maybe not stream Pandora. I can live with that.
I might be more upset if I were paying AT&T prices...
Despite all the anti-immigrant rhetoric flying around right now, I think the US still is pretty open to foreigners. There are 40 million foreign-born residents in the US right now, and most are assimilating well. I say come on over, you might like it!
As a guy, I've never had a problem with a pat down, but I've only had your garden variety. Apparently the pat down you get after refusing the scanner is much more intrusive, and if you're a woman involves lifting the breasts etc. So I can see that it would feel like much more of an intrusion. Add that to the fact that neither the scan nor the pat down are doing much for security and I think that rather than legislating for a "passenger advocate" we should be scaling back on the whole setup.
Yeah, I doubt I'd buy one, but I do have a soft spot for QNX - I kept an Ergo Audrey going for years! Of course, the Audrey had an email client....