In a way, the UK did lose to the USA in WWII. The UK took on huge debts in both WWI and WWII, and also, before WWII the UK still had an empire, afterwards, it didn't, and the USA did. The UK survived WWII without being completely taken over by Nazi Germany, but they didn't really "win". The USA "won"; it suffered almost no losses (relatively; some troops, but not anywhere near as many as the other countries, some ships and a naval base in Pearl Harbor, and that's about it; no civilian infrastructure was harmed at all), and quickly turned into a superpower afterwards with control of much of Europe. It then grew rich rebuilding western Europe.
If you really want to use Windows, you need to pay up for the privilege. I think it's too cheap; they should start these Windows tablets at $2000. I'm sure millions of people will be lining up to buy these things.
Gene Roddenberry also showed us how women in the future should dress. Too bad they screwed it up in TNG and the later shows with women wearing pants. At least Troi had some nice outfits.
I'm sorry, I don't see the problem here. Back before radio was invented, messages had to travel by ship. If someone stuck a message in a bottle and threw it in the ocean before getting in their wooden sailing ship, you'd also see them long before you got the message. BFD.
So what if a radio signal goes slower than a spaceship? That doesn't mean anything. It just means your means of communication is slower than your means of travel, and there's little point to bothering with it. This doesn't imply time travel at all.
This is no different to how I can see things happen before I hear them happen. Everyone knows sound travels slower than light, but that doesn't have anything to do with time travel either.
Strange how real physicists have no trouble with this stuff, and even invent things like "the Alcubierre drive" (named after the physicist who invented it), and are now proclaiming that it might be possible (with some advances we haven't figured out yet, namely how to warp the continuum, possibly using exotic matter), while some yahoos who took a physics class at some point think they're experts and are proclaiming how impossible it is.
A PhD physicist invented the Alcubierre Drive, and physicists at NASA are now working on this warp drive concept, but a couple of armchair physicists on Slashdot think they know physics better than the experts.
American car engines aren't that simple any more; lots of GM cars have GDI now (gasoline direct injection), which is how the V6 Camaro gets nearly 30mpg. Dual overhead cams are pretty standard these days. This isn't the 90s any more. And those older engines weren't that reliable either; they had a reputation for wearing badly; I heard mechanics make jokes that a Japanese engine with 100k miles looked like an American engine with 10k miles.
I haven't heard that much about European cars being unreliable. BMW and Mercedes have had some problems with initial quality surveys, but some have attributed that to their owners being far more picky than buyers of Chevies, and that stuff usually concerns interior fit and finish.
Anyway, I never said American cars are unreliable, but that they were unreliable. The 70s and 80s were a very bad time for American cars. And there's a lot more to a car running reliably than just the engine. A reliable engine isn't very useful if your alternator is constantly crapping out, for instance, or the steering parts are breaking or wheel bearings are going bad.
So what exactly is the draw anyway? 30+ years ago, it was understandable: you could communicate with people all over the world just using a radio. Now, I can do that much cheaper with a computer on the internet, and much more efficiently and effectively too, since I can type my message on a forum that people can read at any hour and long into the future and respond to, rather than having to be listening in on a certain frequency at a certain time. Plus, internet forums are far more specialized, so if I want to chit-chat about Ghostbusters, for instance, I can go to reddit.com/r/ghostbusters. That's not going to happen with ham radio, you're stuck with a random population there.
That's what I mean: it takes public perception some time to catch up with the data you'll see if you look at recalls and service data. Asking "some guy on the street" is exactly the right thing to do if you're trying to see what public perception is, rather than the reality of a manufacturer's current reliability as shown by statistical evidence. And public perception is what drives sales.
Don't forget also that people buy and keep cars a LOT longer than tablets, phones, etc. So a bunch of people still driving their 15-year-old Hondas and Toyotas will likely have great things to say about them, even though their anecdotal evidence isn't really valid any more. A guy looking at Toyotas may ask all his friends, and if his friends have (or had) Toyotas aged 1 year, 5 years, 8 years, 10 years, 13 years, 16 years, and 22 years, he's probably going to hear lots of great things about these cars, along with possibly (but not that likely) one complaint, from one of the guys with the two newest models. And they'll also start telling him about all the problems they had with their American-made cars, which were made in the 1980s. I still have nightmares about the 80s and early 90s American cars I had to put up with! What pieces of shit those were. It takes a long time for an auto maker to live down a bad reputation, and as I showed here, it takes a while for them to trash a good one too.
If you're going to buy an app that stores maps on your phone, and then a bluetooth GPS receiver, wouldn't it be easier to just buy a TomTom?
Personally, I find my Android phone's navigation pretty handy, but it sure has a lot of trouble getting a reliable GPS signal. A dedicated unit like TomTom or Garmin probably doesn't have that problem.
With electronics, there's no such thing as "locally manufactured" for the most part. The best you can do is locally assembled, as it's possible to buy components here and PCBs and have them assembled in the USA (at a very, very high cost; I've looked into it; I think the military contractors are keeping the prices very high). But the components themselves (resistors, capacitors, ICs, etc.) are mostly made in Asia these days, with some things made in Italy.
It's probably mostly thanks to Microsoft and their crap OS. Remember when netbooks came out, running Linux, and how cheap and capable they were? Then MS put the squeeze on all the netbook makers, forced them to dump Linux and put some shitty Windows version on there (which slowed them down and increased the cost), and netbooks quickly became nearly extinct.
If it weren't for monopoly control of the market, we probably would have super-cheap PCs. That said, I managed to buy a low-end Lenovo laptop with an AMD cpu recently for $270 from Fry's.
Depending on exactly what you do with the smartphone, you don't absolutely need the data plan. If you're at home most of the time, you can have the smartphone use your WiFi connection to make calls (on T-mobile at least), and all the data stuff can go through there. Obviously, not having a dataplan will make it impossible to use your phone for GPS navigation, or for surfing the internet while you're away from home, but as I said, it depends on what you want to use it for. Just the visual voicemail feature is worth it to me, so I don't have to wade through some shitty voicemail system pressing 4, 7, *, etc. and can actually see visually who called. Besides, for GPS you can just buy a TomTom.
That's not quite the same. A car is a giant cost, $10-50k. That's a big difference from a $50-500 tablet computer. So it's absolutely rational to try to make a safe purchase decision, even if it costs more. Honda and Toyota have built up excellent reputations for reliability over several decades now; cheaper brands haven't. The American brands have built themselves terrible reputations for reliability, by contrast.
The problem is, the real quality factors have been changing over time. The American brands have gotten a lot better. The Korean brands have improved to an amazing degree since the early 90s Hyundai Excel. And Honda and Toyota have been having problems (like the Prius pedal problem a few years ago), and have fallen behind in other places too. The Honda Civic, which has been on Consumer Reports' top choice list for decades, has actually fallen off of it now, mainly because there's so many other choices that have surpassed it in value.
But it takes time for reputations to change. For cheaper items, people are much more willing to take a chance, since if a $50 tablet computer turns out to be a POS, they're only out $50 and they can buy another one. But if a $35000 car turns out to be a POS, then not only is that a huge financial loss (even if you turn around and re-sell it on the used market, you'll lose thousands), but there's a potential to lose time too, in missing work because your car broke down in the morning commute, having to deal with repairs and loaner or rental cars, etc. Reliable transportation has huge benefits aside from the purchase price.
For one thing, I don't know about your area, but in my crappy metro area that isn't exactly a cultural mecca (Phoenix AZ), there's lots of competing coffee shops around: Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Coffee Rush, etc. These actually do pretty well from what I can see, but Starbucks is still going strong.
But secondly, $5 coffee drinks are a luxury. Normally, when the economy sucks, people economize, especially if they've lost their jobs, and that means cutting out non-essential purchases. Overpriced coffee drinks (even when they're good, which Starbucks' are not) are an obvious luxury, and you can save a lot of money by cutting out your daily coffee habit (or switching to a much cheaper alternative, like making your own with a coffee maker).
I realize coffee can also be an addiction for many people, but still, all considered, it seems like Starbucks should be doing much worse now than they are.
No, not when they haven't done anything wrong, and they're being incarcerated on bogus victimless "crimes" or trumped-up charges and convicted in a kangaroo court.
And why should a private prison be making all this profit on prisoners? If it were the State getting money to offset the cost of incarceration in state-run prisons, that'd be one thing. But we're talking about private corporations here holding people against their will and profiting off of slavery, while simultaneously getting huge amounts of money from their corrupt buddies in the government in no-bid contracts.
Satellite launches are cheap, compared to how much they cost 20+ years ago. They may not be cheap enough for the average Slashdotter to launch his own satellite, but they're cheaper than they've ever been.
Wow, that's pretty insane. How on earth did this boss get to his position with wild ideas like this. Never mind, I think I know: he has a big mouth and can talk his way into anything.
I'm not totally familiar with exactly how IMAP servers work, but yes, in theory, if the IMAP system is doing the search on the server side, it should be competitive with Google Mail in speed, assuming the IT department doesn't cheap out on the IMAP server.
You're a fucking moron. The prisons are privately run in case you didn't notice; they're run by corporations like CCA and Wackenhut. They turn a huge profit, and they use prisoners as slave labor.
Chicago is indeed famous for corruption. However, apparently things are a little better for unions there, since the teachers there are all on strike right now. I guess the corruption is either ambivalent or supportive towards teachers' unions or insufficient to counter their power.
Slashdot Mirror
In a way, the UK did lose to the USA in WWII. The UK took on huge debts in both WWI and WWII, and also, before WWII the UK still had an empire, afterwards, it didn't, and the USA did. The UK survived WWII without being completely taken over by Nazi Germany, but they didn't really "win". The USA "won"; it suffered almost no losses (relatively; some troops, but not anywhere near as many as the other countries, some ships and a naval base in Pearl Harbor, and that's about it; no civilian infrastructure was harmed at all), and quickly turned into a superpower afterwards with control of much of Europe. It then grew rich rebuilding western Europe.
If you really want to use Windows, you need to pay up for the privilege. I think it's too cheap; they should start these Windows tablets at $2000. I'm sure millions of people will be lining up to buy these things.
(Hopefully Steve is reading this.)
Not as often as random people on Slashdot.
Gene Roddenberry also showed us how women in the future should dress. Too bad they screwed it up in TNG and the later shows with women wearing pants. At least Troi had some nice outfits.
I'm sorry, I don't see the problem here. Back before radio was invented, messages had to travel by ship. If someone stuck a message in a bottle and threw it in the ocean before getting in their wooden sailing ship, you'd also see them long before you got the message. BFD.
So what if a radio signal goes slower than a spaceship? That doesn't mean anything. It just means your means of communication is slower than your means of travel, and there's little point to bothering with it. This doesn't imply time travel at all.
This is no different to how I can see things happen before I hear them happen. Everyone knows sound travels slower than light, but that doesn't have anything to do with time travel either.
Strange how real physicists have no trouble with this stuff, and even invent things like "the Alcubierre drive" (named after the physicist who invented it), and are now proclaiming that it might be possible (with some advances we haven't figured out yet, namely how to warp the continuum, possibly using exotic matter), while some yahoos who took a physics class at some point think they're experts and are proclaiming how impossible it is.
A PhD physicist invented the Alcubierre Drive, and physicists at NASA are now working on this warp drive concept, but a couple of armchair physicists on Slashdot think they know physics better than the experts.
American car engines aren't that simple any more; lots of GM cars have GDI now (gasoline direct injection), which is how the V6 Camaro gets nearly 30mpg. Dual overhead cams are pretty standard these days. This isn't the 90s any more. And those older engines weren't that reliable either; they had a reputation for wearing badly; I heard mechanics make jokes that a Japanese engine with 100k miles looked like an American engine with 10k miles.
I haven't heard that much about European cars being unreliable. BMW and Mercedes have had some problems with initial quality surveys, but some have attributed that to their owners being far more picky than buyers of Chevies, and that stuff usually concerns interior fit and finish.
Anyway, I never said American cars are unreliable, but that they were unreliable. The 70s and 80s were a very bad time for American cars. And there's a lot more to a car running reliably than just the engine. A reliable engine isn't very useful if your alternator is constantly crapping out, for instance, or the steering parts are breaking or wheel bearings are going bad.
So what exactly is the draw anyway? 30+ years ago, it was understandable: you could communicate with people all over the world just using a radio. Now, I can do that much cheaper with a computer on the internet, and much more efficiently and effectively too, since I can type my message on a forum that people can read at any hour and long into the future and respond to, rather than having to be listening in on a certain frequency at a certain time. Plus, internet forums are far more specialized, so if I want to chit-chat about Ghostbusters, for instance, I can go to reddit.com/r/ghostbusters. That's not going to happen with ham radio, you're stuck with a random population there.
That's what I mean: it takes public perception some time to catch up with the data you'll see if you look at recalls and service data. Asking "some guy on the street" is exactly the right thing to do if you're trying to see what public perception is, rather than the reality of a manufacturer's current reliability as shown by statistical evidence. And public perception is what drives sales.
Don't forget also that people buy and keep cars a LOT longer than tablets, phones, etc. So a bunch of people still driving their 15-year-old Hondas and Toyotas will likely have great things to say about them, even though their anecdotal evidence isn't really valid any more. A guy looking at Toyotas may ask all his friends, and if his friends have (or had) Toyotas aged 1 year, 5 years, 8 years, 10 years, 13 years, 16 years, and 22 years, he's probably going to hear lots of great things about these cars, along with possibly (but not that likely) one complaint, from one of the guys with the two newest models. And they'll also start telling him about all the problems they had with their American-made cars, which were made in the 1980s. I still have nightmares about the 80s and early 90s American cars I had to put up with! What pieces of shit those were. It takes a long time for an auto maker to live down a bad reputation, and as I showed here, it takes a while for them to trash a good one too.
If you're going to buy an app that stores maps on your phone, and then a bluetooth GPS receiver, wouldn't it be easier to just buy a TomTom?
Personally, I find my Android phone's navigation pretty handy, but it sure has a lot of trouble getting a reliable GPS signal. A dedicated unit like TomTom or Garmin probably doesn't have that problem.
You really think your Android tablet is uploading all your images to Google? If so, I'd like to see some wi-fi capture logs proving that.
With electronics, there's no such thing as "locally manufactured" for the most part. The best you can do is locally assembled, as it's possible to buy components here and PCBs and have them assembled in the USA (at a very, very high cost; I've looked into it; I think the military contractors are keeping the prices very high). But the components themselves (resistors, capacitors, ICs, etc.) are mostly made in Asia these days, with some things made in Italy.
It's probably mostly thanks to Microsoft and their crap OS. Remember when netbooks came out, running Linux, and how cheap and capable they were? Then MS put the squeeze on all the netbook makers, forced them to dump Linux and put some shitty Windows version on there (which slowed them down and increased the cost), and netbooks quickly became nearly extinct.
If it weren't for monopoly control of the market, we probably would have super-cheap PCs. That said, I managed to buy a low-end Lenovo laptop with an AMD cpu recently for $270 from Fry's.
Depending on exactly what you do with the smartphone, you don't absolutely need the data plan. If you're at home most of the time, you can have the smartphone use your WiFi connection to make calls (on T-mobile at least), and all the data stuff can go through there. Obviously, not having a dataplan will make it impossible to use your phone for GPS navigation, or for surfing the internet while you're away from home, but as I said, it depends on what you want to use it for. Just the visual voicemail feature is worth it to me, so I don't have to wade through some shitty voicemail system pressing 4, 7, *, etc. and can actually see visually who called. Besides, for GPS you can just buy a TomTom.
So even back in 1970, the Radio Shack stuff was crap?
Wrong, the expensive part is Apple's monstrous profit margin.
Yes, because Google knowing that you're looking at IMAG1423.jpg or SL732581.jpg is going to spill the beans on all the secrets in your life.
That's not quite the same. A car is a giant cost, $10-50k. That's a big difference from a $50-500 tablet computer. So it's absolutely rational to try to make a safe purchase decision, even if it costs more. Honda and Toyota have built up excellent reputations for reliability over several decades now; cheaper brands haven't. The American brands have built themselves terrible reputations for reliability, by contrast.
The problem is, the real quality factors have been changing over time. The American brands have gotten a lot better. The Korean brands have improved to an amazing degree since the early 90s Hyundai Excel. And Honda and Toyota have been having problems (like the Prius pedal problem a few years ago), and have fallen behind in other places too. The Honda Civic, which has been on Consumer Reports' top choice list for decades, has actually fallen off of it now, mainly because there's so many other choices that have surpassed it in value.
But it takes time for reputations to change. For cheaper items, people are much more willing to take a chance, since if a $50 tablet computer turns out to be a POS, they're only out $50 and they can buy another one. But if a $35000 car turns out to be a POS, then not only is that a huge financial loss (even if you turn around and re-sell it on the used market, you'll lose thousands), but there's a potential to lose time too, in missing work because your car broke down in the morning commute, having to deal with repairs and loaner or rental cars, etc. Reliable transportation has huge benefits aside from the purchase price.
No, I don't think it's that simple.
For one thing, I don't know about your area, but in my crappy metro area that isn't exactly a cultural mecca (Phoenix AZ), there's lots of competing coffee shops around: Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Coffee Rush, etc. These actually do pretty well from what I can see, but Starbucks is still going strong.
But secondly, $5 coffee drinks are a luxury. Normally, when the economy sucks, people economize, especially if they've lost their jobs, and that means cutting out non-essential purchases. Overpriced coffee drinks (even when they're good, which Starbucks' are not) are an obvious luxury, and you can save a lot of money by cutting out your daily coffee habit (or switching to a much cheaper alternative, like making your own with a coffee maker).
I realize coffee can also be an addiction for many people, but still, all considered, it seems like Starbucks should be doing much worse now than they are.
No, not when they haven't done anything wrong, and they're being incarcerated on bogus victimless "crimes" or trumped-up charges and convicted in a kangaroo court.
And why should a private prison be making all this profit on prisoners? If it were the State getting money to offset the cost of incarceration in state-run prisons, that'd be one thing. But we're talking about private corporations here holding people against their will and profiting off of slavery, while simultaneously getting huge amounts of money from their corrupt buddies in the government in no-bid contracts.
Satellite launches are cheap, compared to how much they cost 20+ years ago. They may not be cheap enough for the average Slashdotter to launch his own satellite, but they're cheaper than they've ever been.
Wow, that's pretty insane. How on earth did this boss get to his position with wild ideas like this. Never mind, I think I know: he has a big mouth and can talk his way into anything.
I'm not totally familiar with exactly how IMAP servers work, but yes, in theory, if the IMAP system is doing the search on the server side, it should be competitive with Google Mail in speed, assuming the IT department doesn't cheap out on the IMAP server.
You're a fucking moron. The prisons are privately run in case you didn't notice; they're run by corporations like CCA and Wackenhut. They turn a huge profit, and they use prisoners as slave labor.
Chicago is indeed famous for corruption. However, apparently things are a little better for unions there, since the teachers there are all on strike right now. I guess the corruption is either ambivalent or supportive towards teachers' unions or insufficient to counter their power.