You're a perfect example of why they don't do it, and why unlimited plans in general survive. You said it yourself, you'd spend half as much on a metered plan. You think that's what they want, for revenue from you to decrease by 50%?
Well then I'm a perfect examle of why they should do it. I was looking for a new contract at the time. If the carrier selling it over here had had a reasonable plan, I would have changed to them. Instead I picked up a used iPhone for less than it would have cost new and use it with plan from a different carrier that fits my need. The only disadvantage is that I don't have warranty on my phone because I had to jailbreak and unlock it. The warranty, however, would have been close to expiry now anyway, and jailbreaking had a number of other significant advantages for me, so I'm better off in every respect.
If there had been a reasonable (for me) plan with the iPhone, I would have bought one new, Apple would have sold another phone, and the official carrier would have had a new customer. This way they have neither.
Re:Solution looking for a problem.
on
Cone of Silence 2.0
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I raise your closed office door by 1 hidden mic.
From the summary:
they use a sensor network to work out where potential eavesdroppers are
And from the article:
Knowing the position of the computer, the sensors identify the person and map out the locations of people around them. Software assesses who is so close that they must be participants in the conversation, and who might be a potential eavesdropper.
Good luck using this to defeat hidden microphones. And if you can identify the location of hidden microphones, you don't need a cone of silence to defeat them.
This is more like a surrogate closed office door for offices without doors. Whether that makes much sense as a whole remains another matter.
That's not proper. Per default it should install to %ProgramFiles%, which is often C:\Program Files, but not always.
SRWare Iron already defaults to %ProgramFiles%. On a German Windows it suggests C:\Programme as installation location. I guess the GP poster simply didn't notice the difference because he's using an English Windows.
The user local location is a good safe place to install for most apps, especially beta versions. We really need to get away from the Windows "The only user is me, and I can do anything!" mentality that causes so many problems.
While I agree in principle, there's a "portable" Iron version for download, which will keep its profiles in the same folder as the application. It's meant for installations on removable media, but it's also extremely useful for testing. To me this seems like a much more end-user-transparent solution.
I really encourage you to test it, it's quite a decent program.
'There are probably other search engines that would pay us more money,' Baker says. Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN, Google's two main search rivals, come to mind
Well, MSN doesn't really come at least to my mind when I think of a search engine that could sponsor Firefox development.
XP and Vista Starter edition were cut-price, limited versions for developing markets, to combat piracy.
That never made sense to me. Why would anyone put up with a hopelessly-crippled-to-the-point-of-being-nearly-useless version of Windows when they could buy a bootleg of a Pro/Ultimate edition on a street corner for almost nothing or even torrent it for free?
I have some experience with this from developing countries. Sometimes it's nice to have licensed software, such as when you're an international organisation, a government body, a joint venture, or when your country sometimes does care about licensing issues. So people buy the cheap version to prove that they have licensed software. Then they buy a copy of the full version for $2 on the street corner.
I hoped that Linksys, et.al., would intro consumer routers at CES2009 with IPv6/IPv4 dual stacks.
As I wrote elsewhere, you can get IPv6 on Linksys (et al.) routers at present as well, but you have to use custom firmware, meaning OpenWRT or DD-WRT.
Unfortunately this means that it can be quite difficult to configure. OpenWRT is not really suitable for non-technical users anyway, so for their userbase it won't be much of a problem. For DD-WRT, IPv6 was supported quite well in v23, but has been having problems for some years in v24 out of the box. If you want IPv6 in recent DD-WRT versions (v24 or higher), you need some manual configuration as well as a custom build, but then it's possible.
This arguably doesn't really qualify as a consumer solution, though.
FYI, my Linksys, flashed with DD-WRT (an older version, from a few years ago, can't remember) is what provides my IPv6 connectivity at my house.
The keyword here is "from a few years ago". IPv6 has been broken in recent DD-WRT versions for years. The software tools are incomplete, some of them (such as radvd) may not run properly at all in the release builds, and there is no configuration interface. There is a tutorial, but it's largely outdated.
Some users users have been sticking with 23 SP2 for precisely this purpose. It's possible to run IPv6 with more recent DD-WRT versions, but in order to get it to run, you need a custom build (see also here) and/or some medium to major manual configuration juggling.
On top of this TCP hasn't seen a major update since the 80's.
Uhh, TCP Vegas, TCP New Reno, BIC and CUBIC? All of which have been implemented in the Linux kernel? TCP has only been standing still since the 80's if you're using an OS from the 80's... or a Microsoft OS.
Note that the only one of those which made it into an RFC is New Reno, aka RFC 2582, which has been implemented in the Windows TCP stack since Vista, along with a number of other recent RFCs.
The others are basically different suggestions for implementing TCP congestion control. Microsoft has its own variant of those (Compound TCP, which is quite similar to TCP Vegas and has also been ported to Linux).
Your 1980s comment is not quite up to date, of course. Microsoft has been sticking to their BSD-based implementation of the TCP stack for quite a long time (too long in fact), but with Vista it's been undergoing quite a bit of change. I know it's unpopular to say something in favour of MS and/or Vista here and I'm far from being a MS apologetic, but it's worth actually reading their Cable Guy columns every now and then to be up to date with regards to what the Windows network stack actually does and doesn't do - especially if you are a sysadmin or interested in developments in the TCP arena.
the Mayan calendar merely resets at that date. similar to how computers were expected to reset at y2k, it was not that they expected the world to end they just did not include dates after that much like our calendar does not include specifically year numbers for after 9999
Actually it's even less catastrophic than that. The Mayan long count calendar is based on a hierarchical system of cycles, called kin (1 day), winal (20 days), tun (18 winal), katun (20 tun) and baktun (20 katun). Dates are indicated by giving the position in the relative cycle, so today, November 27, 2008, would usually be quoted as 12.19.15.15.15 in the Long Count calendar. You can check out the conversion formula e.g. in the source code for Fourmilab's calendar converter.
The five-position notation for the long count has a cycle length of 2,880,000 days, or approximately 7885 years, ranging from 11 August 3113 BC (0.0.0.0.0) to October 12, 4772 (19.19.19.17.19). If that isn't enough, there are higher-order cycles as well - a pictun of 20 baktun with a cycle length of some 150000 years, a kalabtun of 20 pictun with a cycle length of 3.15 million years and so on. These are conventionally omitted in notation, because dates from these cycles are rarely met in Mayan astrology (or elsewhere for that matter), but there is a mechanism for expressing them.
Thursday, December 20, 2012 is 12.19.19.17.19, and all that happens on December 21 is that all cycles reset and the baktun gets incremented by one, to 13.0.0.0.0. Some New Age freaks interpreted this as the end of the world because of a rather arcane interpretation of the significance of the 13th baktun cycle in a previous world, but even in 4772 the calendar won't "overflow", it will just shift to the next higher-order cycle.
"For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time."
He also seems to delegate a lot of web research to others, as evident from a number of posts in the same discussion where he wrote that he "had been told" certain things about the OpenBSD ports collection and the licensing issues connected with it. So whatever he may have to say about browsers, his computer usage habits habits certainly aren't transferable to everyone.
Their low-bandwidth page also contained direct download links for unlocked versions of their products. The page is down, but the downloads still work (they come from a different server). So if you're only interested in having an unlocked version, you can help keep the load on their registration page down. Here are the links:
Expect this discussion to be full of astroturf, red herrings and trolls
Ah, no problem. Just give the red herring to the troll and he'll let you pass the bridge:)
And if you're feeling nasty you can poison the fish before giving it to him (well, it doesn't make any in-game difference, but it's a red herring after all!) Also remember that you can learn an insult from the troll before bribing him, which greatly speeds up the later battles.
not to mention, in 2007 that the northwest passage was completely ice free for the first time in recorded history.
Yea, right. Pull the other one. First time in recorded history huh? Except for 1906, 1944, 1957, 1969, 1977, 1984, 1985, 1988 and 2000 in wooden ships, catamarans, naval vessels, cruise ships, etc.
One should note that in 1906 at least it wasn't exactly ice free, which is why it took Amundsen and his Gjoa three years to pass through (1903-1906). Your list is basically a list of years when some vessel finished sailing through the North-West Passage, but it doesn't really say anything about how much ice they encountered on the way.
That's also the basic fallacy of the blog you're linking to - it mentions an ice-free North-West Passage, but only for 2000. For the other years it just mentions a couple of vessels, while not really saying anything ice (except for 1984, where it says that the ice was "in retreat", implying that there still was some ice there).
So, for a comment like "Stop beliving the propaganda and do some googling before you open yer piehole and up looking like a retard." you are leaning out of the window a bit too much for my taste.
I am currently in Uzbekistan. Our Internet uplink goes through China (because of a domestic Internet monitoring policy that allows for only one country-level Internet provider). On the IPv4 block allocation generosity scale we are at the lower end, twice. Depending how things are configured there I am usually behind one or two layers of NAT already from the provider, not counting our own internal network. Something as simple as Skype usually goes through 4 to 8 relays, and getting a server working reliably here can be a challenge.
Market forces have decided that in the US, and slightly less so in Europe, where IPv4 block allocation was comparatively generous, NAT is enough for your own unwashed masses. Everywhere else NAT is an abomination and an administration headache that has to go away. NAT is like deodorant for the unwashed mashes where what they really need would be a good decent shower.
Since implementation of IPv6 routing elsewhere is picking up steam, we can only hope that the same market forces that have allowed the US to stick to their comfy IPv4 couch will eventually force the US to adopt it as well. Since it looks like the non-US market is growing, things are looking good here, and the story confirms it.
By 1943, The german Tiger and Panther were more than a match for T-34/76. And as the Battle of Kursk proved, the T-34 was inadequate to save the soviet butts.
Well the Soviets actually won the Battle of Kursk. That was firstly because they had large numbers of Ilyushin Il-2 ground attack aircraft, which did save the Soviet butts to use your vocabulary, secondly because they deployed far larger numbers of tanks that made their individual inferiority negligible, and thirdly because the newly-introduced Panthers sucked and had huge quality problems - more Panthers were lost to mechanical failure than to enemy action at Kursk.
There were about 55,000 T-34s produced during the war, compared to about 1800 Tigers and 6000 Panthers (which the Germans then had to divide up between their various fronts and find fuel for). The Soviets were also relatively quick to refit the T-34 with an 85mm gun that made them more effective against the Panther in early 1944, and this T-34/85 variant alone was produced in far larger numbers than the Panther (about 22,000).
German WWII tanks weren't all that great. They had good specs, but were complex and very expensive to produce and relatively difficult to maintain. Also the Germans diversified their tank production too much for effective production under wartime conditions (a bit like what happened to them with aircraft). It took the Germans something like four years to find out how to produce things during a war. The Soviets in comparison kept to a Keep It Simple Stupid strategy, while showing considerable flexibility in shifting the complete production to newly-developed models. By 1943 or so every individual Soviet tank was inferior to the newest enemy models, but this was negated by numbers.
Hitler's standing orders were stupid, but under overall 1944 conditions the Eastern Front was not winnable anymore, with or without them.
You want to control how much you eat in your own household, but you don't want to be told how much to eat by who sells you your food. Where's the hypocrisy in that?
I believe this guy was the last one to surrender. He lasted 26 years. No, Teruo Nakamura was last. He lasted 31 years, from 1943 to December 18, 1974.
There are occasional references to a Captain Fumio Nakahira who was allegedly found in 1980 on Mt Halcon on Mindoro, Philippines, but they all repeat the same one-liner and appear to be based on a spurious reference. There were Japanese soldiers who were discovered later, but they had been aware of the end of WWII and settled down or joined local rebel groups. Nakamura is the last well-documented holdout in the strict sense AFAIK.
Orion overlapped a non-DARPA project called SNPO (pronounced "Snow-Poe") which was concerned with practical nuclear-powered space vehicles. For some reason, spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere became unpopular and the project was shelved, but not until working engines had been built and tested. They definitely picked some idiotic names for their project. Snow Poo is just one of them, another is from the article you linked:
The reactors were tested in Nevada at Jackass Flats.
I know it's probably the public anti-nuclear sentiment that stopped them from getting off the ground, but their name choices were really unlucky.
Open Source licenses have become so much more confusing.
To be honest they were pretty confusing already, with license proliferation leading to a large number of very similar free software licenses with minute, but potentially decisive differences. It didn't need Microsoft for that. Even the general overview at Wikipedia lists 54 different Open Source licenses, not counting superseded or volunarily retired ones.
History constitutes less than 2000 years. Thats the farthest back for which there are any usable records. I don't know what you consider a "usable record". Even if you only refer to the written record and discount things like ice cores or C-14 dating of artifacts, you are missing about 2500 years in the least. Cuneiform writing in the Middle East appears to have been established by about 3000 B.C., and we have Sumerian monumental inscriptions which we can date to about 2600 B.C. This is the oldest historical record for which dating is uncontrocersial. There are all sorts of hypothesis regarding possible earlier forms of writing elsewhere, and some of these may actually hold water. Nationalism also plays a role here (I can understand Chinese archeologists looking to prove that Chinese writing is older than Sumerian writing, but I will take their results with a grain of salt). Anyway since these, if anything, would prove that the historical record is even older, it doesn't really disprove my point.
The first Sumerian king who is attested in inscriptions (other than the well-known semi-mythological Sumerian king list) is Enmebaragesi of Kish, who reigned in about 2600 B.C.
If you want more precise dating, we have clay tablets documenting the victory of Sargon of Akkad over Lugalzaggesi of Uruk, which marked the beginning of the Akkadian empire, in 2335 B.C. One of the earliest events which we can find documented precisely and uncontrocersially is the solar eclipse of June 15, 763 B.C. (again, there are lots of attempts to locate evidence for earlier eclipses, but they usually rely on much supposition).
Because of what it could be used for. What ever happened to all those Jews who used to live on the continent anyway?
The majority of the Jews killed during the war lived in Eastern Europe and were killed after the conquest by the German Army, which basically just marched in and carted everybody off. Not having an ID card didn't save a lot of lives.
This is a straw man argument, and a particularly disgusting one.
I know that a lot of them moved to America, Canada, Britain and Australia
Those that fit into the quota systems installed by those countries anyway. (I don't know about Australia.)
Because the ID card act is really about creating a centralised government database that stores all information about you in one place. Not just personal information either - this would be every electronic record that exists about you, like what you buy and where you travel.
You guys are confusing "creating a database" with "creating a primary key".
Let's for the sake of the argument assume that the tinfoil hat crowd is right and that the big spidery evil government works as they think it does. If the governments wants to create the database, but doesn't get the ID through legislation, they will create the database anyway and just use some other key, and live with the inconvenience of an occasional duplicate record or even exploit them, e.g. for creating extra voters. Whether the government collects data on everything you buy and everywhere you travel is completely independent of whether there is a national ID.
In 2006 I bought a Thinkpad X60s when they were new. Last year I spent nine months doing field work in Central Asia with it, going round the various countries, between deserts and mountains, between +45 and -20 degrees Centrigrade, and all the while lugging it around on buses, in shared taxis and in ex-Soviet trains.
Once it fell out of my bag off my back in Tashkent, five feet on solid concrete and landed on a corner. I thought "that was my laptop", opened it and it booted just fine. These are solid little devices. No optical drive, but I found I hardly ever have the need for one of those on the road.
So that would be my recommendation. It's light, yet solid, and not underpowered. I've got the extended battery, which gives me 7 to 9 hours of battery life, and I also bought a worldwide on-site warranty option which would probably be useful in your situation as well.
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You're a perfect example of why they don't do it, and why unlimited plans in general survive. You said it yourself, you'd spend half as much on a metered plan. You think that's what they want, for revenue from you to decrease by 50%?
Well then I'm a perfect examle of why they should do it. I was looking for a new contract at the time. If the carrier selling it over here had had a reasonable plan, I would have changed to them. Instead I picked up a used iPhone for less than it would have cost new and use it with plan from a different carrier that fits my need. The only disadvantage is that I don't have warranty on my phone because I had to jailbreak and unlock it. The warranty, however, would have been close to expiry now anyway, and jailbreaking had a number of other significant advantages for me, so I'm better off in every respect.
If there had been a reasonable (for me) plan with the iPhone, I would have bought one new, Apple would have sold another phone, and the official carrier would have had a new customer. This way they have neither.
I raise your closed office door by 1 hidden mic.
From the summary:
they use a sensor network to work out where potential eavesdroppers are
And from the article:
Knowing the position of the computer, the sensors identify the person and map out the locations of people around them. Software assesses who is so close that they must be participants in the conversation, and who might be a potential eavesdropper.
Good luck using this to defeat hidden microphones. And if you can identify the location of hidden microphones, you don't need a cone of silence to defeat them.
This is more like a surrogate closed office door for offices without doors. Whether that makes much sense as a whole remains another matter.
Ever since battery technology made high performance, high fly time electrics possible, the indoor/outdoor electric RC genre has exploded.
Nice Sony reference you've snuck in there! :)
That's not proper. Per default it should install to %ProgramFiles%, which is often C:\Program Files, but not always.
SRWare Iron already defaults to %ProgramFiles%. On a German Windows it suggests C:\Programme as installation location. I guess the GP poster simply didn't notice the difference because he's using an English Windows.
The user local location is a good safe place to install for most apps, especially beta versions. We really need to get away from the Windows "The only user is me, and I can do anything!" mentality that causes so many problems.
While I agree in principle, there's a "portable" Iron version for download, which will keep its profiles in the same folder as the application. It's meant for installations on removable media, but it's also extremely useful for testing. To me this seems like a much more end-user-transparent solution.
I really encourage you to test it, it's quite a decent program.
'There are probably other search engines that would pay us more money,' Baker says. Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN, Google's two main search rivals, come to mind
Well, MSN doesn't really come at least to my mind when I think of a search engine that could sponsor Firefox development.
Picking up a power meter is likely to have a good return on investment.
Remember to pick only Energy Star-compliant power meters, though!
I have some experience with this from developing countries. Sometimes it's nice to have licensed software, such as when you're an international organisation, a government body, a joint venture, or when your country sometimes does care about licensing issues. So people buy the cheap version to prove that they have licensed software. Then they buy a copy of the full version for $2 on the street corner.
I hoped that Linksys, et.al., would intro consumer routers at CES2009 with IPv6/IPv4 dual stacks.
As I wrote elsewhere, you can get IPv6 on Linksys (et al.) routers at present as well, but you have to use custom firmware, meaning OpenWRT or DD-WRT.
Unfortunately this means that it can be quite difficult to configure. OpenWRT is not really suitable for non-technical users anyway, so for their userbase it won't be much of a problem. For DD-WRT, IPv6 was supported quite well in v23, but has been having problems for some years in v24 out of the box. If you want IPv6 in recent DD-WRT versions (v24 or higher), you need some manual configuration as well as a custom build, but then it's possible.
This arguably doesn't really qualify as a consumer solution, though.
The keyword here is "from a few years ago". IPv6 has been broken in recent DD-WRT versions for years. The software tools are incomplete, some of them (such as radvd) may not run properly at all in the release builds, and there is no configuration interface. There is a tutorial, but it's largely outdated.
Some users users have been sticking with 23 SP2 for precisely this purpose. It's possible to run IPv6 with more recent DD-WRT versions, but in order to get it to run, you need a custom build (see also here) and/or some medium to major manual configuration juggling.
Uhh, TCP Vegas, TCP New Reno, BIC and CUBIC? All of which have been implemented in the Linux kernel? TCP has only been standing still since the 80's if you're using an OS from the 80's... or a Microsoft OS.
Note that the only one of those which made it into an RFC is New Reno, aka RFC 2582, which has been implemented in the Windows TCP stack since Vista, along with a number of other recent RFCs.
The others are basically different suggestions for implementing TCP congestion control. Microsoft has its own variant of those (Compound TCP, which is quite similar to TCP Vegas and has also been ported to Linux).
Your 1980s comment is not quite up to date, of course. Microsoft has been sticking to their BSD-based implementation of the TCP stack for quite a long time (too long in fact), but with Vista it's been undergoing quite a bit of change. I know it's unpopular to say something in favour of MS and/or Vista here and I'm far from being a MS apologetic, but it's worth actually reading their Cable Guy columns every now and then to be up to date with regards to what the Windows network stack actually does and doesn't do - especially if you are a sysadmin or interested in developments in the TCP arena.
the Mayan calendar merely resets at that date. similar to how computers were expected to reset at y2k, it was not that they expected the world to end they just did not include dates after that much like our calendar does not include specifically year numbers for after 9999
Actually it's even less catastrophic than that. The Mayan long count calendar is based on a hierarchical system of cycles, called kin (1 day), winal (20 days), tun (18 winal), katun (20 tun) and baktun (20 katun). Dates are indicated by giving the position in the relative cycle, so today, November 27, 2008, would usually be quoted as 12.19.15.15.15 in the Long Count calendar. You can check out the conversion formula e.g. in the source code for Fourmilab's calendar converter.
The five-position notation for the long count has a cycle length of 2,880,000 days, or approximately 7885 years, ranging from 11 August 3113 BC (0.0.0.0.0) to October 12, 4772 (19.19.19.17.19). If that isn't enough, there are higher-order cycles as well - a pictun of 20 baktun with a cycle length of some 150000 years, a kalabtun of 20 pictun with a cycle length of 3.15 million years and so on. These are conventionally omitted in notation, because dates from these cycles are rarely met in Mayan astrology (or elsewhere for that matter), but there is a mechanism for expressing them.
Thursday, December 20, 2012 is 12.19.19.17.19, and all that happens on December 21 is that all cycles reset and the baktun gets incremented by one, to 13.0.0.0.0. Some New Age freaks interpreted this as the end of the world because of a rather arcane interpretation of the significance of the 13th baktun cycle in a previous world, but even in 4772 the calendar won't "overflow", it will just shift to the next higher-order cycle.
He is not sure right now because he uses lynx.
Also, he seems not to browse the Web at all in the traditional sense, as he pointed out last December on the openbsd-misc mailing list:
He also seems to delegate a lot of web research to others, as evident from a number of posts in the same discussion where he wrote that he "had been told" certain things about the OpenBSD ports collection and the licensing issues connected with it. So whatever he may have to say about browsers, his computer usage habits habits certainly aren't transferable to everyone.
Their low-bandwidth page also contained direct download links for unlocked versions of their products. The page is down, but the downloads still work (they come from a different server). So if you're only interested in having an unlocked version, you can help keep the load on their registration page down. Here are the links:
Expect this discussion to be full of astroturf, red herrings and trolls
Ah, no problem. Just give the red herring to the troll and he'll let you pass the bridge :)
And if you're feeling nasty you can poison the fish before giving it to him (well, it doesn't make any in-game difference, but it's a red herring after all!) Also remember that you can learn an insult from the troll before bribing him, which greatly speeds up the later battles.
Ah, good times. :)
not to mention, in 2007 that the northwest passage was completely ice free for the first time in recorded history.
Yea, right. Pull the other one. First time in recorded history huh? Except for 1906, 1944, 1957, 1969, 1977, 1984, 1985, 1988 and 2000 in wooden ships, catamarans, naval vessels, cruise ships, etc.
One should note that in 1906 at least it wasn't exactly ice free, which is why it took Amundsen and his Gjoa three years to pass through (1903-1906). Your list is basically a list of years when some vessel finished sailing through the North-West Passage, but it doesn't really say anything about how much ice they encountered on the way.
That's also the basic fallacy of the blog you're linking to - it mentions an ice-free North-West Passage, but only for 2000. For the other years it just mentions a couple of vessels, while not really saying anything ice (except for 1984, where it says that the ice was "in retreat", implying that there still was some ice there).
So, for a comment like "Stop beliving the propaganda and do some googling before you open yer piehole and up looking like a retard." you are leaning out of the window a bit too much for my taste.
NAT is good enough for the unwashed masses.
I am currently in Uzbekistan. Our Internet uplink goes through China (because of a domestic Internet monitoring policy that allows for only one country-level Internet provider). On the IPv4 block allocation generosity scale we are at the lower end, twice. Depending how things are configured there I am usually behind one or two layers of NAT already from the provider, not counting our own internal network. Something as simple as Skype usually goes through 4 to 8 relays, and getting a server working reliably here can be a challenge.
Market forces have decided that in the US, and slightly less so in Europe, where IPv4 block allocation was comparatively generous, NAT is enough for your own unwashed masses. Everywhere else NAT is an abomination and an administration headache that has to go away. NAT is like deodorant for the unwashed mashes where what they really need would be a good decent shower.
Since implementation of IPv6 routing elsewhere is picking up steam, we can only hope that the same market forces that have allowed the US to stick to their comfy IPv4 couch will eventually force the US to adopt it as well. Since it looks like the non-US market is growing, things are looking good here, and the story confirms it.
There were about 55,000 T-34s produced during the war, compared to about 1800 Tigers and 6000 Panthers (which the Germans then had to divide up between their various fronts and find fuel for). The Soviets were also relatively quick to refit the T-34 with an 85mm gun that made them more effective against the Panther in early 1944, and this T-34/85 variant alone was produced in far larger numbers than the Panther (about 22,000).
German WWII tanks weren't all that great. They had good specs, but were complex and very expensive to produce and relatively difficult to maintain. Also the Germans diversified their tank production too much for effective production under wartime conditions (a bit like what happened to them with aircraft). It took the Germans something like four years to find out how to produce things during a war. The Soviets in comparison kept to a Keep It Simple Stupid strategy, while showing considerable flexibility in shifting the complete production to newly-developed models. By 1943 or so every individual Soviet tank was inferior to the newest enemy models, but this was negated by numbers.
Hitler's standing orders were stupid, but under overall 1944 conditions the Eastern Front was not winnable anymore, with or without them.
(Disclaimer: I'm German, and a historian.)
You want to control how much you eat in your own household, but you don't want to be told how much to eat by who sells you your food. Where's the hypocrisy in that?
There are occasional references to a Captain Fumio Nakahira who was allegedly found in 1980 on Mt Halcon on Mindoro, Philippines, but they all repeat the same one-liner and appear to be based on a spurious reference. There were Japanese soldiers who were discovered later, but they had been aware of the end of WWII and settled down or joined local rebel groups. Nakamura is the last well-documented holdout in the strict sense AFAIK.
To be honest they were pretty confusing already, with license proliferation leading to a large number of very similar free software licenses with minute, but potentially decisive differences. It didn't need Microsoft for that. Even the general overview at Wikipedia lists 54 different Open Source licenses, not counting superseded or volunarily retired ones.
The first Sumerian king who is attested in inscriptions (other than the well-known semi-mythological Sumerian king list) is Enmebaragesi of Kish, who reigned in about 2600 B.C.
If you want more precise dating, we have clay tablets documenting the victory of Sargon of Akkad over Lugalzaggesi of Uruk, which marked the beginning of the Akkadian empire, in 2335 B.C. One of the earliest events which we can find documented precisely and uncontrocersially is the solar eclipse of June 15, 763 B.C. (again, there are lots of attempts to locate evidence for earlier eclipses, but they usually rely on much supposition).
This is a straw man argument, and a particularly disgusting one.Those that fit into the quota systems installed by those countries anyway. (I don't know about Australia.)
You can look, for example, at the voyage of the St. Louis, which in 1939 carried 936 Jewish refugees to Cuba, the USA and Canada, where they were refused entry, and then back to Europe. Britain acceppted 288 passengers, the others went to France, Belgium and Holland, which didn't help them a lot.
You guys are confusing "creating a database" with "creating a primary key".
Let's for the sake of the argument assume that the tinfoil hat crowd is right and that the big spidery evil government works as they think it does. If the governments wants to create the database, but doesn't get the ID through legislation, they will create the database anyway and just use some other key, and live with the inconvenience of an occasional duplicate record or even exploit them, e.g. for creating extra voters. Whether the government collects data on everything you buy and everywhere you travel is completely independent of whether there is a national ID.
In 2006 I bought a Thinkpad X60s when they were new. Last year I spent nine months doing field work in Central Asia with it, going round the various countries, between deserts and mountains, between +45 and -20 degrees Centrigrade, and all the while lugging it around on buses, in shared taxis and in ex-Soviet trains.
Once it fell out of my bag off my back in Tashkent, five feet on solid concrete and landed on a corner. I thought "that was my laptop", opened it and it booted just fine. These are solid little devices. No optical drive, but I found I hardly ever have the need for one of those on the road.
So that would be my recommendation. It's light, yet solid, and not underpowered. I've got the extended battery, which gives me 7 to 9 hours of battery life, and I also bought a worldwide on-site warranty option which would probably be useful in your situation as well.