It is true that rural and to a lesser extent suburban US is very conservative. But for the most part that is balanced out by the fact that much of the urban US is more liberal. Look at a map of electoral votes in the latest polls, or from the last election. If you don't look really closely at the map the first thing you'll wonder is why, if 80% of the map is red, our elections are even close. But when you look closer and realize that the blue states of New York, California, and Chicago make up something like a quarter of the US population, it makes a little more sense. And if you look at the groups that you mentioned that Kerry has a hard time appealing to as well as what I said before, you may notice a pattern. (Hint #1: The midwestern state that tends the most to the left is always Illinois, typically followed by Minnesota and Michigan. Now quick, name the five biggest cities you can think of in the Midwest... Hint #2: Which state in the south was the closest in the race between Al Gore and W? Hint #3: Why is the rust belt called the rust belt?)
For the most part, if you take the average of the full political spectrum of the US public, it's pretty close to smack in the middle of our two parties. Both parties try to stay as close to the middle as they can in order to try and attract the most votes. And for the most part, the candidate that wins will be the one who either a) can stress the right issues to get enough people on his side of the fence interested enough to actually get up and vote, since we know that less than 50% of eligible voters tend to vote in any given election or b) whose personality will get enough people in the middle or on his side interested enough to actually vote.
Since the advent of televised politics, (b) has become much more important than (a). The candidate that can come off as being more personable and likeable than the other has a significant advantage. Witness JFK, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton... In that sense, Kerry has a really hard fight ahead of him, although he has a slight edge over Al Gore at least, partly because he's not Al Gore, and partly because over the last four years, Bush has done a lot to piss off people even on his side of the fence.
Re:Less might be more? Only one way to find out!
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Less Might Be More
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· Score: 1
pretty much all of the newer athlons do this. the fx chips when idle will slow down to 800MHz-1GHz and lower the core voltage to around 1V iirc. i believe this is available on pretty much all of their current cpus provided your motherboard supports it.
If you ever do install Firefox, just change the shortcut to the IE icon and use firesomething to rename the appication to "Internet Explorer". There's probably an Internet Explorer icon theme for firefox too, although I haven't looked yet. I think I'm going to try this on my parents' computer the first time I go home after 1.0 is released.
while i didn't read the specific article you cited, a google search of my own turned up a lot of articles citing purely speculation and anecdotal evidence. while i agree that, at least in large cities, most of the people who steal bikes do it more or less professionally, I don't see any reason why it would have to be even nominally organized. there are plenty of people in large cities who will have no qualms about buying or using stolen property, and in many cases the police could hardly care less. Considering the number of people I know who have actually witnessed their own bike or the bike of someone they know being stolen and were unable to do anything about it, i doubt bicycle theft is a high risk activity, at least in large cities here in the US where most people will turn a blind eye to anything that doesn't directly concern them. and even given the very depressed street value of a stolen bike (one article that i read mentioned that a $200 bike is worth about $20 on the street while a $2000 bike may get $100) in many of the poorer areas of chicago, a person could live off of stealing one or two bikes a week.
at any rate, you may still be correct. when i read "organized crime" in your original post, i interpreted it as referring to mob/mafia organized crime, who i am certain have much better ways to spend their time. while it does make sense that a sizeable amount of bicycle theft (particularly expensive bikes) would be the doing of loosely organized groups of thieves, i still suspect the majority is the doing of common crooks looking for a quick and easy buck.
I tried this today on my older Kryptonite lock (purchased summer 2000 or so) and busted a couple of pens trying. the diameter of the cylinder appears to be slightly larger on my lock. i was able the wedge the pen into the lock cylinder, but only with some amount of work, and the pen barrel stretched noticeably to fit around the center part of the lock. as far as i could tell, the pen wasn't pushing on the pins in any meaningful way.
it's possible that the older locks had a more sophisticated locking mechanism, but i suspect the real diffrence is just the diameter of the lock cylinder- if you had a different pen barrel of the right diameter they may still be vulnerable. one of the other posts mentioned trying the pen cap instead of the barrel. i will have to see if that works tonight.
ironically, my wife has a kryptonite combination lock that she bought because it was a lot cheaper than the key locks and at the time she had a pretty crappy bike and didn't feel like spending the extra money for a more secure lock. it seems that all this time her lock may have been more secure than mine...
Bicycle theft in the US and Europe isn't sucky individual people, it's organised crime.
can you back that up, or even give some basic reasoning behind that statement. i've known people in chicago who actually witnessed their bikes being stolen (they could see the bike but were far enough away that the thief in question had it unlocked and rode away on it before they could do anything about it.) also talked to movers who had witnessed people pulling unlocked bicycles out of the back of a moving truck while the movers were within sight of the truck. in all cases the perp was (to all appearances anyway) a common street criminal. they are not so much organized as experienced. and in a large city environment like that nobody wants to notice anything going on outside their personal bubble.
i find it hard to belive that organized crime would see any real value in stolen bicycles.
wait....
spiderman had a plot? oh yeah that's right.
1. high school kid gets super powers.
2. bad guy decides he doesn't like super powered high school kid
3. super powered high school kid fights bad guy, and (gasp) wins.
hope i didnt ruin it for any one who hasn't seen it yet.
i agree. i think i remember seeing black and white once referred to as the "most addictingly mediocre game you'll ever play". i played it for weeks, hoping that i could just get it to the point where my creature and people would look after themselves. i really wanted to believe that if i could just get past that initial hump i would stop having to micromanage everything that happened, and could actually enjoy the game.
eventually the reality set in. despite all of the stupid and pointless things you could "teach" your creature to do, you could never really train him to be very useful. and you could never spend more then 10% of your time working with him, because you had to spend every free moment taking care of a bunch of idiots who were utterly incapable of looking out for themselves.
i always figured the mouse gestures were a pointless gimick. the first thing i did was to reconfigure the keyboard keys for moving around and zooming so i wouldn't have to spend half of my play time dragging myself around the map. i controlled everything i could with keystrokes. by the time i gave up on the game the only thing i used the guestures for any more was performing a new miracle. after that it was just 'r' as many times as i needed to repeat it until i needed to perform a different miracle.
people prefer cable in the us because you have to deal with the baby bells to get dsl. dsl may be about $10-$15 a month cheaper than cable in my area right now, but i save double that by not having a land line and just using my cell phone as my only phone. so dsl is really just not an option for me. (especially because i am in a 10 month lease in my current apartment and you end up paying a butt-load of money to get dsl for less than a year, at least with every dsl provider i know of) of course, cable is not reall a very attractive option either, because it's still over $50 a month if you are not a cable tv subscriber, which is more than i'm willing to pay.
i would presume based on that graph, that the telephone companies are much less obnoxious in the rest of the world. or the cable companies more so....
Agreed. I just moved out of chicago about two months ago, but since I moved one the guys I used to work with told me that you can now, in some parts of Chicago near downtown, get 6Mbit down DSL for around $80 a month. So, in the densely populated areas of the US, the options are not so bad. Almost everyone I knew in Chicago had broadband. I was getting cable for about $30 a month, because there were actually 2 cable companies that covered the area where i lived. Now that I have moved, I would have to pay about $50 a month for the same cable internet service through the same service provider, because there are no competitors here.
so basically, the densely populated parts of the US don't have that bad of options for high speed internet (not great, certainly not as good as some other countries, but not bad either.) The problem is that those densely populated areas only cover maybe 30% of our population, with the rest being spread out among sprawling suburbs and huge open rural areas, both of which are much less economically attractive areas for the companies who are providing broadband service.
by the way, if anybody knows a decent way to get broadband internet in boulder colorado for around $40 a month, i'd be glad to hear it....
i want an updated treo 300 with a better processor, sd slot, and bluetooth. maybe 802.11 too.... can the two co-exist on one device? i would assume so, but so far every pda i've seen has one or the other (or neither). must be too bulky still.
and lastly, a swappable battery. that was the biggest thing i missed when i upgraded from my samsung i300 to the treo.
Any Linux user probably already has Firefox, so the only reason they'd be going to the website would be to download the Windows version for family/friends.
why wouldn't he do that on their computer?
and what if he wants to upgrade? or do firefox users never upgrade? maybe it didn't come with his distro, and he's accessing the page through lynx....
His pet peeve is that somebody will get hurt when a porch railing collapse, and the local authorities will amend the building code to require that porch railings be built stronger. Except that the problem was that the railing didn't meet code to begin with. Then carpenters will scratch their heads and ask him whether a railing they just built is strong enough.
i would suspect that this only happens extremely rarely. I can think of two cases in the last few years in chicago where several people died or were seriously injured because of code violations. one was a deck that collapsed and landed on the people on the deck below. when a code issue is suspected to be responsible for a death or serious injury, the city should first investigate to see what was the cause of the failure and whether the code was adequade. (in the case of the collapsing deck, the deck was built to code, but there were about 3 times as many people on it at the time of the collapse as there should have been.) only if the existing code is deemed to be inadequate will they change the code. it is possible that, in your example, the railing was not up to code to start out with, but the city may have decided that even if the railing were up to code it would not have prevented the problem.
that said, i agree that codes often end up being ridiculously arcane, and the selective enforcement of the people who give out the building permits (at least in chicago) only makes it more difficult. i do like the idea behind your brother in law's "butt test". the point should be that builders build structures that they are confident in, not that they do the bare minimum that they can to meet some more or less arbitrary building code.
I would bring the bare minimum to start out with. bring one computer to use for homework, email, whatever. stereo optional. (much more so now than it was when i started school, as you can store all of your music on your pc now if you have enough disk space). leave the tv, consoles, and everything else behind. your dorm room is likely ancient (i.e. poor power supply), almost guaranteed to be tiny, you will probably have to share it with someone, and depending where you are going to school, you may not have too many options as far as rearranging it (bed's attached to walls, etc.)
there is almost guaranteed to be a tv in a lounge or somewhere nearby that you can watch your favorite shows with other people. if you are lucky someone will hook a game console up to it as well. and even if you don't have these things available to you, you'll find out pretty quickly that you didn't need them as badly as you thought.
space is a premium in most dorms. much more so than almost anything you could possibly bring with you. use that space for sleeping and homework, and try to do as much else as possible outside your room (i.e. with other people).
once you've finished your first semester, and you've settled into the college lifestyle, and know what things you still want in your room (and still have room for), then go home over christmas break and get all the things you left behind when you started that you think you still need. the other advantage to this is that you can then coordinate with your roomate(s) on who is going to bring what. the last thing you need is for two or four roomates all to show up for their first day of school with tv, full stero system, two computers, two consoles.....
must depend on your cable provider. i had rcn digital cable at one of my previous apartments in chicago a little over a year ago, and we had 3 tv's hooked up to it. two and a computer, actually. only the tv in the living room went through the cable box. the computer's tv tuner card (homebrew tivo-like device also hooked up to the living room tv) and the tv in my roomrates bedroom were both hooked up directly, and both worked fine with their standard tuner. perhaps if we had any premium channels or wanted pay per view, that would have only worked through the cable box, but for basic cable, even digital cable, i suspect any relatively recently manufactured tuner should work fine (my roomates tv was purchased around summer 2000.)
Also, delivering the source code as mandated by the GPL would be a problem, where would you store it?
you don't have to provide the source code right along with the binary version (ever downloaded an rpm? they don't automatically come with source code.) you just have to make sure that it's available to anyone who gets a copy of the binary version, and that you make it known to them that it is available. the gpl provides a list of several different ways this condition could be met. iirc, in the early days of the fsf, most people who wanted a copy of the source code of gnu tools had to send money to the fsf to get it shipped to them on magnetic tape, as the gpl does allow you to charge for the price of media and shipping.
i was packing stuff for a move last night, and i discovered i had my dad's old 386 20MHz laptop in one of my storage boxes. better yet, i still had a copy of civilization installed on it. i'm going to have to see if i can hook it up to my kvm switch after i'm done with the move and play some of those good old games on it.
why does everyone think gsm is so hot? just because they use it in europe it's better?
i used to have sprint pcs until the number portability went into effect. my wife and i decided to switch away partly because we were sick of sprint's customer service, but partly because it was time for my wife and i to get new phones, and the only way to get a good deal on a new phone is to sign up with a new carrier.
my wife and i both switched to gsm carriers, (t-mobile for her and cingular for me) and quite frankly, they suck. they phone selection is awful, the phones are cheaply built, the data rates are slower and more expensive, and the only thing i really gained is the knowledge that i might be able to use my phone the next time i go to europe, if it's not sim-locked to my current carrier or i'm willing to pay out the ass to use my american carrier's service while i'm there.
in short, once my current contract is up, i will gladly switch back to a cdma phone and service, and if i really need a cellphone the next time i visit europe (i haven't the last two) i'll rent one.
Slashdot Mirror
It is true that rural and to a lesser extent suburban US is very conservative. But for the most part that is balanced out by the fact that much of the urban US is more liberal. Look at a map of electoral votes in the latest polls, or from the last election. If you don't look really closely at the map the first thing you'll wonder is why, if 80% of the map is red, our elections are even close. But when you look closer and realize that the blue states of New York, California, and Chicago make up something like a quarter of the US population, it makes a little more sense. And if you look at the groups that you mentioned that Kerry has a hard time appealing to as well as what I said before, you may notice a pattern. (Hint #1: The midwestern state that tends the most to the left is always Illinois, typically followed by Minnesota and Michigan. Now quick, name the five biggest cities you can think of in the Midwest... Hint #2: Which state in the south was the closest in the race between Al Gore and W? Hint #3: Why is the rust belt called the rust belt?)
For the most part, if you take the average of the full political spectrum of the US public, it's pretty close to smack in the middle of our two parties. Both parties try to stay as close to the middle as they can in order to try and attract the most votes. And for the most part, the candidate that wins will be the one who either a) can stress the right issues to get enough people on his side of the fence interested enough to actually get up and vote, since we know that less than 50% of eligible voters tend to vote in any given election or b) whose personality will get enough people in the middle or on his side interested enough to actually vote.
Since the advent of televised politics, (b) has become much more important than (a). The candidate that can come off as being more personable and likeable than the other has a significant advantage. Witness JFK, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton... In that sense, Kerry has a really hard fight ahead of him, although he has a slight edge over Al Gore at least, partly because he's not Al Gore, and partly because over the last four years, Bush has done a lot to piss off people even on his side of the fence.
{~}->md5 /usr/bin/more /usr/bin/less
MD5 (/usr/bin/more) = 7a4c8da95ee39534dd84c9552b058848
MD5 (/usr/bin/less) = 7a4c8da95ee39534dd84c9552b058848
it is if you use FreeBSD
pretty much all of the newer athlons do this. the fx chips when idle will slow down to 800MHz-1GHz and lower the core voltage to around 1V iirc. i believe this is available on pretty much all of their current cpus provided your motherboard supports it.
If you ever do install Firefox, just change the shortcut to the IE icon and use firesomething to rename the appication to "Internet Explorer". There's probably an Internet Explorer icon theme for firefox too, although I haven't looked yet. I think I'm going to try this on my parents' computer the first time I go home after 1.0 is released.
Funniest thing is that was actually the ad i saw when i read one of the linked articles :)
while i didn't read the specific article you cited, a google search of my own turned up a lot of articles citing purely speculation and anecdotal evidence. while i agree that, at least in large cities, most of the people who steal bikes do it more or less professionally, I don't see any reason why it would have to be even nominally organized. there are plenty of people in large cities who will have no qualms about buying or using stolen property, and in many cases the police could hardly care less. Considering the number of people I know who have actually witnessed their own bike or the bike of someone they know being stolen and were unable to do anything about it, i doubt bicycle theft is a high risk activity, at least in large cities here in the US where most people will turn a blind eye to anything that doesn't directly concern them. and even given the very depressed street value of a stolen bike (one article that i read mentioned that a $200 bike is worth about $20 on the street while a $2000 bike may get $100) in many of the poorer areas of chicago, a person could live off of stealing one or two bikes a week.
at any rate, you may still be correct. when i read "organized crime" in your original post, i interpreted it as referring to mob/mafia organized crime, who i am certain have much better ways to spend their time. while it does make sense that a sizeable amount of bicycle theft (particularly expensive bikes) would be the doing of loosely organized groups of thieves, i still suspect the majority is the doing of common crooks looking for a quick and easy buck.
I tried this today on my older Kryptonite lock (purchased summer 2000 or so) and busted a couple of pens trying. the diameter of the cylinder appears to be slightly larger on my lock. i was able the wedge the pen into the lock cylinder, but only with some amount of work, and the pen barrel stretched noticeably to fit around the center part of the lock. as far as i could tell, the pen wasn't pushing on the pins in any meaningful way.
it's possible that the older locks had a more sophisticated locking mechanism, but i suspect the real diffrence is just the diameter of the lock cylinder- if you had a different pen barrel of the right diameter they may still be vulnerable. one of the other posts mentioned trying the pen cap instead of the barrel. i will have to see if that works tonight.
ironically, my wife has a kryptonite combination lock that she bought because it was a lot cheaper than the key locks and at the time she had a pretty crappy bike and didn't feel like spending the extra money for a more secure lock. it seems that all this time her lock may have been more secure than mine...
Bicycle theft in the US and Europe isn't sucky individual people, it's organised crime.
can you back that up, or even give some basic reasoning behind that statement. i've known people in chicago who actually witnessed their bikes being stolen (they could see the bike but were far enough away that the thief in question had it unlocked and rode away on it before they could do anything about it.) also talked to movers who had witnessed people pulling unlocked bicycles out of the back of a moving truck while the movers were within sight of the truck. in all cases the perp was (to all appearances anyway) a common street criminal. they are not so much organized as experienced. and in a large city environment like that nobody wants to notice anything going on outside their personal bubble.
i find it hard to belive that organized crime would see any real value in stolen bicycles.
I would have liked it to have been readable without squinting.
wait....
spiderman had a plot? oh yeah that's right.
1. high school kid gets super powers.
2. bad guy decides he doesn't like super powered high school kid
3. super powered high school kid fights bad guy, and (gasp) wins.
hope i didnt ruin it for any one who hasn't seen it yet.
apparently you didn't actually finish the movie. as far as i could tell, he was not any sort of hero, super or otherwise...
Did he at least put this line back in? what reason could he possibly have had for taking that out?
i agree. i think i remember seeing black and white once referred to as the "most addictingly mediocre game you'll ever play". i played it for weeks, hoping that i could just get it to the point where my creature and people would look after themselves. i really wanted to believe that if i could just get past that initial hump i would stop having to micromanage everything that happened, and could actually enjoy the game.
eventually the reality set in. despite all of the stupid and pointless things you could "teach" your creature to do, you could never really train him to be very useful. and you could never spend more then 10% of your time working with him, because you had to spend every free moment taking care of a bunch of idiots who were utterly incapable of looking out for themselves.
i always figured the mouse gestures were a pointless gimick. the first thing i did was to reconfigure the keyboard keys for moving around and zooming so i wouldn't have to spend half of my play time dragging myself around the map. i controlled everything i could with keystrokes. by the time i gave up on the game the only thing i used the guestures for any more was performing a new miracle. after that it was just 'r' as many times as i needed to repeat it until i needed to perform a different miracle.
people prefer cable in the us because you have to deal with the baby bells to get dsl. dsl may be about $10-$15 a month cheaper than cable in my area right now, but i save double that by not having a land line and just using my cell phone as my only phone. so dsl is really just not an option for me. (especially because i am in a 10 month lease in my current apartment and you end up paying a butt-load of money to get dsl for less than a year, at least with every dsl provider i know of) of course, cable is not reall a very attractive option either, because it's still over $50 a month if you are not a cable tv subscriber, which is more than i'm willing to pay.
i would presume based on that graph, that the telephone companies are much less obnoxious in the rest of the world. or the cable companies more so....
Agreed. I just moved out of chicago about two months ago, but since I moved one the guys I used to work with told me that you can now, in some parts of Chicago near downtown, get 6Mbit down DSL for around $80 a month. So, in the densely populated areas of the US, the options are not so bad. Almost everyone I knew in Chicago had broadband. I was getting cable for about $30 a month, because there were actually 2 cable companies that covered the area where i lived. Now that I have moved, I would have to pay about $50 a month for the same cable internet service through the same service provider, because there are no competitors here.
so basically, the densely populated parts of the US don't have that bad of options for high speed internet (not great, certainly not as good as some other countries, but not bad either.) The problem is that those densely populated areas only cover maybe 30% of our population, with the rest being spread out among sprawling suburbs and huge open rural areas, both of which are much less economically attractive areas for the companies who are providing broadband service.
by the way, if anybody knows a decent way to get broadband internet in boulder colorado for around $40 a month, i'd be glad to hear it....
i want an updated treo 300 with a better processor, sd slot, and bluetooth. maybe 802.11 too.... can the two co-exist on one device? i would assume so, but so far every pda i've seen has one or the other (or neither). must be too bulky still.
and lastly, a swappable battery. that was the biggest thing i missed when i upgraded from my samsung i300 to the treo.
Any Linux user probably already has Firefox, so the only reason they'd be going to the website would be to download the Windows version for family/friends.
why wouldn't he do that on their computer?
and what if he wants to upgrade? or do firefox users never upgrade? maybe it didn't come with his distro, and he's accessing the page through lynx....
From the article.....
This is not any more news now than it was "when bell-bottom pants were cool."
no one has to reverse engineer it. unlike css, it's a published format.
but it's also patented, so you cannot legally write or distribute software that decodes it without licensing the patent from microsoft.
His pet peeve is that somebody will get hurt when a porch railing collapse, and the local authorities will amend the building code to require that porch railings be built stronger. Except that the problem was that the railing didn't meet code to begin with. Then carpenters will scratch their heads and ask him whether a railing they just built is strong enough.
i would suspect that this only happens extremely rarely. I can think of two cases in the last few years in chicago where several people died or were seriously injured because of code violations. one was a deck that collapsed and landed on the people on the deck below. when a code issue is suspected to be responsible for a death or serious injury, the city should first investigate to see what was the cause of the failure and whether the code was adequade. (in the case of the collapsing deck, the deck was built to code, but there were about 3 times as many people on it at the time of the collapse as there should have been.) only if the existing code is deemed to be inadequate will they change the code. it is possible that, in your example, the railing was not up to code to start out with, but the city may have decided that even if the railing were up to code it would not have prevented the problem.
that said, i agree that codes often end up being ridiculously arcane, and the selective enforcement of the people who give out the building permits (at least in chicago) only makes it more difficult. i do like the idea behind your brother in law's "butt test". the point should be that builders build structures that they are confident in, not that they do the bare minimum that they can to meet some more or less arbitrary building code.
I would bring the bare minimum to start out with. bring one computer to use for homework, email, whatever. stereo optional. (much more so now than it was when i started school, as you can store all of your music on your pc now if you have enough disk space). leave the tv, consoles, and everything else behind. your dorm room is likely ancient (i.e. poor power supply), almost guaranteed to be tiny, you will probably have to share it with someone, and depending where you are going to school, you may not have too many options as far as rearranging it (bed's attached to walls, etc.)
there is almost guaranteed to be a tv in a lounge or somewhere nearby that you can watch your favorite shows with other people. if you are lucky someone will hook a game console up to it as well. and even if you don't have these things available to you, you'll find out pretty quickly that you didn't need them as badly as you thought.
space is a premium in most dorms. much more so than almost anything you could possibly bring with you. use that space for sleeping and homework, and try to do as much else as possible outside your room (i.e. with other people).
once you've finished your first semester, and you've settled into the college lifestyle, and know what things you still want in your room (and still have room for), then go home over christmas break and get all the things you left behind when you started that you think you still need. the other advantage to this is that you can then coordinate with your roomate(s) on who is going to bring what. the last thing you need is for two or four roomates all to show up for their first day of school with tv, full stero system, two computers, two consoles.....
must depend on your cable provider. i had rcn digital cable at one of my previous apartments in chicago a little over a year ago, and we had 3 tv's hooked up to it. two and a computer, actually. only the tv in the living room went through the cable box. the computer's tv tuner card (homebrew tivo-like device also hooked up to the living room tv) and the tv in my roomrates bedroom were both hooked up directly, and both worked fine with their standard tuner. perhaps if we had any premium channels or wanted pay per view, that would have only worked through the cable box, but for basic cable, even digital cable, i suspect any relatively recently manufactured tuner should work fine (my roomates tv was purchased around summer 2000.)
Also, delivering the source code as mandated by the GPL would be a problem, where would you store it?
you don't have to provide the source code right along with the binary version (ever downloaded an rpm? they don't automatically come with source code.) you just have to make sure that it's available to anyone who gets a copy of the binary version, and that you make it known to them that it is available. the gpl provides a list of several different ways this condition could be met. iirc, in the early days of the fsf, most people who wanted a copy of the source code of gnu tools had to send money to the fsf to get it shipped to them on magnetic tape, as the gpl does allow you to charge for the price of media and shipping.
i was packing stuff for a move last night, and i discovered i had my dad's old 386 20MHz laptop in one of my storage boxes. better yet, i still had a copy of civilization installed on it. i'm going to have to see if i can hook it up to my kvm switch after i'm done with the move and play some of those good old games on it.
why does everyone think gsm is so hot? just because they use it in europe it's better?
i used to have sprint pcs until the number portability went into effect. my wife and i decided to switch away partly because we were sick of sprint's customer service, but partly because it was time for my wife and i to get new phones, and the only way to get a good deal on a new phone is to sign up with a new carrier.
my wife and i both switched to gsm carriers, (t-mobile for her and cingular for me) and quite frankly, they suck. they phone selection is awful, the phones are cheaply built, the data rates are slower and more expensive, and the only thing i really gained is the knowledge that i might be able to use my phone the next time i go to europe, if it's not sim-locked to my current carrier or i'm willing to pay out the ass to use my american carrier's service while i'm there.
in short, once my current contract is up, i will gladly switch back to a cdma phone and service, and if i really need a cellphone the next time i visit europe (i haven't the last two) i'll rent one.