I would have to say though that my preference would be that Bell should be broken up into one company that maintains the network, and another company that sells the service. That way, Bell's Sympatico service would have to compete on equal footing with any other DSL provider.
Doing that would undoubtedly bankrupt Bell Sympatico, as people realize that Sympatico's service is the shits, and they get tired of yelling at Emily for a human being.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that you genuinely don't know what's wrong with your suggestion.
There's plenty of competition in high speed internet, but there is *NOT* plenty of competition in terms of technologies in use. Bell Nexxia owns 100% of the copper to the house. Likewise for cable TV lines... in Ottawa, where I live, for example, 100% of the cable TV lines (and that includes cable Internet) are owned by either Rogers (on the Ontario side), or Videotron (on the Quebec side). There is exactly one provider of wireless Internet services.
That means that if Bell's argument is accepted by the CRTC, the Ottawa market will go from having about 50 options for high speed Internet to having exactly 3, each with a monopoly on their respective technology.
To make matters worse, not one of those three providers offers a service that is suitable for technologies like VPN, or running your own server. All three of them filter access on those ports, and won't allow their users any incoming connections. It's also in their service agreements that they can terminate your service if they catch you running a server.
In other words... not only will the variety of consumer-level services be cut down to 3 monopolies, the quality of services available to consumers will fall into the shitter. It's already fairly well known that if you need to run a VPN, you don't go with Bell, Rogers, or Storm in this city... you go with one of the 3rd parties that's leasing time through one of those three, to get unfettered access. If you want decent access to the Internet, you have to buy a corporate connection from these people... Bell's cheapest runs about $80/month, Rogers is the same, and Storm is $195/month. Just for the privilege of actually having a connection to the 'net which you can use for more than surfing and e-mail.
What's more, tax dollars paid for the establishment of Bell Nexxia. We paid for that copper which they own. So no. They should absolutely be required to continue leasing service. Actually, the Government should acquire Bell Nexxia and turn it back into a crown corporation, and make BCE, the phone/Internet company, lease time from Nexxia as well.
Satire. Noun. A literary technique of writing or art which principally ridicules its subject often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. Humour is often used to aid this.
Whether you personally agree with their message is beside the point. I don't buy products from companies that use negative advertising either. But they're still satirizing the competition, and making light of the fact that the Telus ads haven't really changed in years.
Uh... do I know you? I just finished building my own antenna over the weekend, too.... Just in time to catch the Edmonton/Calgary game on Saturday.... I'm also in Ottawa, btw. I was switching from a cheap indoor antenna that I'd picked up at Radio Shack to the one I rolled on my own. I've got a blind spot under OTA channel 9, so I lost Global (channel 6) and CBC's analogue (channel 4), but I gained Omni 2 (channel 14), PBS Watertown (channel 18), TV Ontario (channel 24), A Channel (channel 43), and Omni 1 (channel 60). I also get better reception on CFCF (channel 11), CJOH (channel 13), and CityTV (channel 65). So I'd consider it a fair trade.:) Plus... I can fix the blind spot by adding a pair of rabbit ears... >.> You can make a better antenna for $20 worth of parts than you can buy, if you're willing to put up with something that may not be as pretty.:)
Incidentally... it could be because I'm in the west end of Ottawa, in Stittsville, but I'm only getting two HD channels at the moment. CBC Ottawa and Radio-Canada Ottawa.
I'd agree. The Nature of Things broadcast, which was on Sunday at 7pm, was *way* better on the OTA broadcast. I did a side-by-side comparison of that, and the hockey game, against my Starchoice, using an LG 42" 1080p HDTV (LG 42LB5D), and the (subjective) difference was significant. And I can remember amazing at how much clearer the picture and sound were when I switched to Starchoice from Rogers....
FWIW, CTV, Global, CityTV, and both Omni channels have requests in with the CRTC to start broadcasting in HD in Ottawa. They'll probably go live within the next few months.:)
Oh yeah, up here in western Canada, Shaw (which uses cable) makes fun of Telus (ADSL) by having talking snails that talk about how they prefer everything to be slow, so that's whey they use DSL, etc... Yeah, snails. Give me a break. How much more contrived can you possibly get? Condescending, for that matter - as though we can't understand something more interesting or subtle, so we need some 3d-animated slow snails to talk slowly and in a low pitch so we can understand the biased message Shaw is trying to get across...
It's worth pointing out that Telus has been running (successful) commercials featuring animals for a very long time. Brightly coloured parrots, monkeys, fish, whatever. It doesn't really matter... what matters is that the Telus commercials have been using animals to plug their products for years. That puts the Shaw commercials into a slightly different light, no? They aren't talking down to you, they're satirizing the Telus ads.
Steam turbines are mechanically complicated and smell of old tech but they are actually rather efficient. Large steam turbines have thermodynamic efficiency in the 90% range. I rather doubt this new nuclear photocell is anywhere close.
Can you think of a reason this kind of technology can't be used in conjunction with a steam turbine? Modern nuclear reactors almost all work on basis of using radiation to heat up water, turning it into steam which then turns a turbine. But the water doesn't trap all of the radiation. Why not install something like this around the water tank to trap any radiation that doesn't get used to heat up water? Even if it's only able to trap 5% of the energy that's bombarding it, it's still better than the 0% that gets converted back to electricity by traditional shielding.
*grins* Slashvertisements don't necessarily have to be paid to/.... Just a submission coming from somebody who works for the company, if it's interesting enough to get posted, could be called a "Slashvertisement". The Slashdot Effect is well known, especially in IT circles.
You can do 250mph on German Autobahns in a good modern car.
There's only a handful of cars in the world that can do 250mph, and that I'm aware of, exactly one production model car that's currently available, and that car runs out of gas after 12 minutes at that speed. (Read this thread further if you want to know which one it is) Did you perhaps mean 250km/h? That's quite doable for a large number of modern cars. Heck, I have an "economy" car, and it'll do 175km/h. (2007 Chevrolet Aveo, 103hp 1.6L inline 4, fuel injected, no turbo, using 89 octane 10% ethanol fuel... this is the stock LT configuration). Even then, I rarely feel safe taking it over 140km/h and mostly stick to around 120km/h for fuel economy.
You're right. There is a political impetus behind keeping the speed limits down. I can think of three good reasons to keep the highway speed limit around 100-120km/h: public safety, fuel economy, and darwinism. I've driven fast. Fastest I've ever gone was in a 1988 Subaru XT6... 2.7L H6 with an aftermarket turbocharger and a curb weight of about 1100kg. 290km/h on a closed track outside of Ottawa, ON, Canada. The world flies by at that speed.... fast enough that you probably won't register that you're looking at a hazard until after you've passed it. It's idiotic to the point of insanity to try that kind of speed on a public road, because human reactions simply aren't fast enough, and because a small hazard you can't even see, like a rock or nail in the road, which wouldn't really be anything to worry about at a speed like 80km/h, can cause a tire blowout. And quite frankly, most of us don't have a clue what to do if you have a tire blowout at speed. I don't remember any mention of it in *my* drivers' ed class. I've seen people flip their cars when they had a blowout at 80km/h... do you really want to imagine what'll happen at 3x that speed?
And it's not a question of teaching people how to drive better, either. No amount of education can prepare you for driving at that kind of speed. It's just not safe for a human to do it in uncontrolled situations. Even in controlled situations, it's not particularly bright.
Reminds me of an old motorcycle adage... there's old riders, and there's bold riders. You don't see any old bold riders.
Many Japanese can make sense out of written Chinese, but that doesn't mean they find the spoken language easy to learn. From their point of view, it seems to be every bit as devoid of logic as English. Despite having borrowed a lot of words from Chinese, the underlying language is very different from Japanese.
Obligatory statement... I took 4 years of Japanese at university, forming the minor to my double major degree in Philosophy and Linguistics. English and French are my first languages, Japanese is number 5, after Spanish and German. There's also a smattering of Greek and Latin in there, remnants from a time when I thought that learning those languages would make learning other European languages easier.
I can tell you that spoken Japanese is probably the easiest language to learn on the planet. I can also tell you that it's a language isolate, and is not related to any other language on the planet. The reason it's partly written with Chinese characters (and in fact, the Katakana and Hiragana writing systems are derived from Kanji) has to do with an influx of Chinese in the last two thousand years. The Japanese language itself, and underlying grammar, predates the introduction of the Chinese writing system by thousands of years.
There's two main verb tenses, and you can count the number of irregular verbs on one hand. (There's actually a whole bunch more, but the overwhelming majority of them are formed as noun + the verb "suru" meaning "to do". For example, the verb for driving a car is "untensuru", literally meaning "to do driving"). The grammar is particle delineated... it really doesn't matter what order you get the nouns in when forming a sentence, because their function is indicated by a particle. Finally, there's exactly 5 vowel sounds.
Contrast that to English, which takes vocabulary and grammar from at least 5 major donor languages, and has over 30 vowel sounds. No language has more cases where you "just have to know" than English. *shrugs* One of the hardest languages there is, IMO.
You get a pass since you said "popularization" but most people seem to thing Tang was born of space technology)
Oh, I know.:) Not one of the technologies I listed was actually *invented* by NASA. But none of them would be where they are today if it wasn't for NASA. There are other technologies that wouldn't exist at all if it wasn't for NASA, but you start getting into more esoteric fields of study, and things that don't have as broad an appeal. Everybody has a microwave oven, just as everybody on this website has access to the Internet. Both could have happened without NASA, but NASA did pour a lot of money into commercializing microwaves because they thought it could be used to cook meals safely in space. Likewise, the Internet wouldn't be nearly as useful, global, or as fast as it is today if it weren't for the communication sattelites in orbit. The same goes for any global communications method, which is why I listed cellular phones (even though they're a military technology)... the global Fibre Optic network probably never would have been commercialized if sattelite-based global communication hadn't first created the market. Gotta remember that in September 1956, the first trans-atlantic phone cable was opened. As of its opening, there were 36 trans-atlantic circuits. Count 'em. 36. If all lines were in use, you had to wait. And one of those had to be kept open 24/7 because it carried the Washington-Moscow hotline. The "red phone".
*shrugs* anyway. Not really blasting you... not fair. You're just (rightly) pointing out a mistake that a lot of people make.:) But I do kinda get passionate about the space program... we really do owe the state of modern communications to the space program, and any time some nutter asks what NASA has done for us, I just have to look up. Not a one of those satellites would be up there if it wasn't for the space programs of the US and USSR having proven it was commercially viable.
Please explain to me how the mars rovers have improved the lives of billions of people. Sure it's neat that we have the technology to go explore planets but honestly, you and I will never go there. It's great that we're contemplating colonizing planets but really we should be focusing on their problems we face on our own planet.
Ever hear of Velcro or Microwave Ovens? What about Tang? Ever owned a cell phone? Used the Internet lately?
NASA played a significant role in the popularization/development of all of those technologies. It's a fair assessment to say that none of those technologies would be anywhere near as ubiquitous as they are today if it wasn't for the role NASA played. It's not a question of whether you'll ever go to Mars yourself. It's a question of what new technologies are being developped, or commercialized, as a result of the space program.
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
Not abnormal at all. My experience is with the Canadian Forces, as well as with Public Works and Gov't Services Canada. Family members who work for CSIS and for Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) confirm that it's the same for them, too. By policy, hard drives are destroyed when computers are decomissioned. This is usually done with a drill press, punching a dozen holes into it and through the platter, before dismantling the hard drive and disposing of the platters separately. Good way to get your hands on some rare earth magnets, actually; I've got a handful of them holding stuff to my fridge.:) The computer itself is then sold to a reseller, less the hard drive.
Consider... when I was in the military, I routinely worked with material and information that required clearance. One of my coworkers had actually spent 2 months in military prison for putting his initials on the wrong line of a document shredding report. They take a very strict approach to guarding secrecy. If there's even the slightest chance that secret information will get out, somebody's head is going to roll. If the Canadians are paranoid to the degree that they'd destroy every hard drive when decomissioning a computer, what makes you think for a moment that the US government wouldn't be?
When my shop sells any new system, my techs go over the machine before it leaves the building - the first thing I have them do is remove the crapware (including the Norton trial most come with), load Avast if they dont have their own AV, install Spybot, windows updates. The idea is that the user can take full advantage of the system from the moment it leaves the store.
Y'know, some users would consider your choice of software to be little difference. Your choice in software is perhaps a little more benevolent, but you're still making software choices for your user, and installing stuff they didn't ask for. Plus... from your wording, I'm assuming that you're a reseller, and that systems from Lenovo/HP/Dell/Whatever are leaving your building? What happens when your customers call up Dell tech. support and expect help with Avast? After all, it came with their computer....
You may also want to check on the EULA conditions for Avast, because I *think* what you're doing is against the license. It's certainly against the AVG license.
Indeed... I've got a 1TB external drive. The initial population was a pain in the butt... took about 6h to copy all my data over through IEEE 1394a. But once the data was on the drive, it's plenty fast enough. I use it for storing MP3s and DivX videos on my HTPC.
Given how silently Windows is able to connect to a wireless network, I don't see how this law would last. Computer novices with brand new laptops will just turn them on and start surfing the net without having a clue about what an ISP is, how the internet work, or even how they are connecting to the internet. They know there is this thing called the "internet" and that when they click on the big blue "e", they are accessing the internet. Where do you draw the line between the innocent bystander and the criminal?
that argument loses (some) weight when you consider that Windows Vista asks you like half a billion confirmation dialogues when you tell it to connect to an unencrypted wireless net, and it asks you tons more when you try to make that unencrypted 'net the default connection.
But what's the point of having an article about an X-Prize if they don't actually say what target the car has to meet?
Case in point... my car is a 2007 Chevrolet Aveo... Not only does it meet every requirement that's actually listed in TFA, it beats them. It's classed as a LEV, and I know from experience that it pulls 40mpg at 100mph (Filled up in Vaudreiul, QC, topped off the tank an hour later in Ottawa, ON, it took 10L, total distance is just over 159km), making it far more efficient than most (non-hybrid, gasoline) cars on the market. I doubt, however, that this is in the league they're looking for.
Seriously... am I blind, or did they seriously write an article about an X-Prize for fuel efficiency without saying, anywhere in the article, what the target efficiency is?
Problem I had with the analysis is the idea that someone making an average wage of $26K/year, or even $48K/year/household would purchase new a low-mid range car at $30K. I would say such a person would be more likely to purchase a low-mid range car at $20K, Kia, Hyundai, Chevy, etc...
People at $26k/year are more likely to lease a car than buy one, but that's a technicality.... Leasing does, however, introduce an entirely different dynamic into the discussion that wasn't there 100 years ago, because in effect it magnifies your purchasing power, allowing you to have a more expensive vehicle for the same monthly payment. Car leases didn't exist 100 years ago, and that limited access to cars to only those who could afford to buy them (or who could get the necessary credit).
At the core of the discussion is the buying power that any given dollar has. It's more than just calculating inflation. You need to take into account economies of scale and the relative deflation that introduces, too. Even a $12k car today has more bells and whistles than a top of the line car had 100 years ago, simply by virtue of increased production and modernization.
To get a truly accurate measure of that vehicle's worth in comparison to modern vehicles, you need to compare it to its contemporaries and draw parallels that way. That thing was $2200 give or take. A Ford Model T was $360. About 1/6th the cost of that thing. If you liken the Model T to the kind of car that the average person is likely to have today (I've got a 2007 Chevrolet Aveo LT, for example, that cost $16,500), then you need to liken the electric car from TFA to something that costs 6X as much. The $100,000 Mercedes-Benz. It was not a car for the proletariat.
I can buy a 2009 Toyota Camry for a base price of around $19,000, and a Camry is one of Toyota's better models. The top of the line Toyota, the Avalon, starts around 33K. At best $30K is a reasonable price for a mid-high end car. A nice lower end car (Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla) can be bought for the $17K - $20K range, and a low end car (Hyundai Accent) can be had for under $15K.
Different economics... $30k is closer to the low end, when you consider that high end includes cars worth well over $100,000. You need to consider brands like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Maserati, Ferrari and the like when you're talking about the "high end". The luxury you get in a $30k Toyota is about par with the luxury you get out of a $30k Mercedes. It doesn't even compare to what you can get from a $100k Mercedes.
$30k is midrange. Not even close to high end.
Still... the point stands. In 1910, there weren't a lot of people making enough in a given year that they could afford to buy a $2000 luxury. That's 10 years' salary for a lot of people, and these days the only thing most of us would buy that's in that price range would be a house.
Why can't they focus thier efforts and resources on shaping traffic to block this kind of nonsense, rather than Torrents?
A lot of them are... Bell Sympatico, in Canada, for example, silently redirects all traffic on port 25 to their mail servers, blocking access on that port to the rest of the world. They also deny relay to clients that haven't first authenticated, either by secure authentication or by first receiving your POP3 account.
There's a ton of bigger ISPs that do exactly that, too. It's not going to stop all of the spam, but it is going to make a rather significant impact. It's also why you couldn't pay me enough to use Sympatico... I run my own mail server, thankyouverymuch.
The point of a Turing Test is essentially: "if it acts intelligently, then it is intelligent, regardless if it is programmed to be so (simulated) or not". You are asking for a bodily incarnation, which has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. For all you know, everyone in your environment could be a simulated entity in a world created only for you. Descartes: cogito ergo sum. You simply cannot know that we are real.
Nagging point, but "cogito ergo sum" means "I think, therefore I am". While it does have to do with existentialism, Descartes didn't actually say it in his Meditations, which is where he proposed the point you're trying to make. The argument about the evil deceiver, that everything could be a simulation, is the 1st meditation. The 2nd meditation is perhaps the closest to "cogito ergo sum", because it posits "I exist as a thinking being", or "I think, I am".
The dell price is lowered by a lot by the 60 pound delivery costs DELL charges. You do not see that amount until you continue in the ordering price. Something to keep in mind, because there is no option not to pay those costs. ever.
So buy from the Inspiron line of product, instead of the Vostro. 2 weeks ago my mum took delivery on an Inspiron 1525 that, taxes included, cost about $700 CAD. About 325 pounds, if my math is right. Delivery was free, and it had 2GB of DDR2, 120GB HDD, DVD-RW, 1.6GHz Core2 Duo.... And, oddly, she actually likes the Vista Home Premium it came with. *shrugs*
Ultraportables was luxury before the EEE pc came along. Now everyone can own one. That is the main advantage. I've used computers for the last 25 years (and worked with them for 10 years) but I have never owned a laptop. To me they are just bulky, or very expensive if you want small. I'm very excited at these new computers and will buy me a EEE 900 when they are released. Small footprint, and very lightweight does it for me. CPU specs is of no importance for me on a laptop, as long as a webbrowser and the terminal is zippy I don't care.
Admittedly, you and I are in different markets. But I haven't used a desktop computer (barring my HTPC) in almost 2 years. In the long run, I see laptops as the replacement for desktop computing, and want a good balance between performance and portability. Ultraportable is all well and good, but not when it comes at the expense of useability, and to me that means having decent enough specs for applications like gaming. To that end, the Dell is the only one of those reviewed that I'd even consider buying. And in fact, did consider buying when it came time to buy my latest laptop. I'd rather spend that extra $300 and get something that I can actually use for more than just e-mail/surfing.
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Doing that would undoubtedly bankrupt Bell Sympatico, as people realize that Sympatico's service is the shits, and they get tired of yelling at Emily for a human being.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that you genuinely don't know what's wrong with your suggestion.
There's plenty of competition in high speed internet, but there is *NOT* plenty of competition in terms of technologies in use. Bell Nexxia owns 100% of the copper to the house. Likewise for cable TV lines... in Ottawa, where I live, for example, 100% of the cable TV lines (and that includes cable Internet) are owned by either Rogers (on the Ontario side), or Videotron (on the Quebec side). There is exactly one provider of wireless Internet services.
That means that if Bell's argument is accepted by the CRTC, the Ottawa market will go from having about 50 options for high speed Internet to having exactly 3, each with a monopoly on their respective technology.
To make matters worse, not one of those three providers offers a service that is suitable for technologies like VPN, or running your own server. All three of them filter access on those ports, and won't allow their users any incoming connections. It's also in their service agreements that they can terminate your service if they catch you running a server.
In other words... not only will the variety of consumer-level services be cut down to 3 monopolies, the quality of services available to consumers will fall into the shitter. It's already fairly well known that if you need to run a VPN, you don't go with Bell, Rogers, or Storm in this city... you go with one of the 3rd parties that's leasing time through one of those three, to get unfettered access. If you want decent access to the Internet, you have to buy a corporate connection from these people... Bell's cheapest runs about $80/month, Rogers is the same, and Storm is $195/month. Just for the privilege of actually having a connection to the 'net which you can use for more than surfing and e-mail.
What's more, tax dollars paid for the establishment of Bell Nexxia. We paid for that copper which they own. So no. They should absolutely be required to continue leasing service. Actually, the Government should acquire Bell Nexxia and turn it back into a crown corporation, and make BCE, the phone/Internet company, lease time from Nexxia as well.
Satire. Noun. A literary technique of writing or art which principally ridicules its subject often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. Humour is often used to aid this.
Whether you personally agree with their message is beside the point. I don't buy products from companies that use negative advertising either. But they're still satirizing the competition, and making light of the fact that the Telus ads haven't really changed in years.
*checks*
:) Plus... I can fix the blind spot by adding a pair of rabbit ears... >.> You can make a better antenna for $20 worth of parts than you can buy, if you're willing to put up with something that may not be as pretty. :)
:)
Uh... do I know you? I just finished building my own antenna over the weekend, too.... Just in time to catch the Edmonton/Calgary game on Saturday.... I'm also in Ottawa, btw. I was switching from a cheap indoor antenna that I'd picked up at Radio Shack to the one I rolled on my own. I've got a blind spot under OTA channel 9, so I lost Global (channel 6) and CBC's analogue (channel 4), but I gained Omni 2 (channel 14), PBS Watertown (channel 18), TV Ontario (channel 24), A Channel (channel 43), and Omni 1 (channel 60). I also get better reception on CFCF (channel 11), CJOH (channel 13), and CityTV (channel 65). So I'd consider it a fair trade.
Incidentally... it could be because I'm in the west end of Ottawa, in Stittsville, but I'm only getting two HD channels at the moment. CBC Ottawa and Radio-Canada Ottawa.
I'd agree. The Nature of Things broadcast, which was on Sunday at 7pm, was *way* better on the OTA broadcast. I did a side-by-side comparison of that, and the hockey game, against my Starchoice, using an LG 42" 1080p HDTV (LG 42LB5D), and the (subjective) difference was significant. And I can remember amazing at how much clearer the picture and sound were when I switched to Starchoice from Rogers....
FWIW, CTV, Global, CityTV, and both Omni channels have requests in with the CRTC to start broadcasting in HD in Ottawa. They'll probably go live within the next few months.
It's worth pointing out that Telus has been running (successful) commercials featuring animals for a very long time. Brightly coloured parrots, monkeys, fish, whatever. It doesn't really matter... what matters is that the Telus commercials have been using animals to plug their products for years. That puts the Shaw commercials into a slightly different light, no? They aren't talking down to you, they're satirizing the Telus ads.
Can you think of a reason this kind of technology can't be used in conjunction with a steam turbine? Modern nuclear reactors almost all work on basis of using radiation to heat up water, turning it into steam which then turns a turbine. But the water doesn't trap all of the radiation. Why not install something like this around the water tank to trap any radiation that doesn't get used to heat up water? Even if it's only able to trap 5% of the energy that's bombarding it, it's still better than the 0% that gets converted back to electricity by traditional shielding.
*grins* Slashvertisements don't necessarily have to be paid to /.... Just a submission coming from somebody who works for the company, if it's interesting enough to get posted, could be called a "Slashvertisement". The Slashdot Effect is well known, especially in IT circles.
There's only a handful of cars in the world that can do 250mph, and that I'm aware of, exactly one production model car that's currently available, and that car runs out of gas after 12 minutes at that speed. (Read this thread further if you want to know which one it is) Did you perhaps mean 250km/h? That's quite doable for a large number of modern cars. Heck, I have an "economy" car, and it'll do 175km/h. (2007 Chevrolet Aveo, 103hp 1.6L inline 4, fuel injected, no turbo, using 89 octane 10% ethanol fuel... this is the stock LT configuration). Even then, I rarely feel safe taking it over 140km/h and mostly stick to around 120km/h for fuel economy.
You're right. There is a political impetus behind keeping the speed limits down. I can think of three good reasons to keep the highway speed limit around 100-120km/h: public safety, fuel economy, and darwinism. I've driven fast. Fastest I've ever gone was in a 1988 Subaru XT6... 2.7L H6 with an aftermarket turbocharger and a curb weight of about 1100kg. 290km/h on a closed track outside of Ottawa, ON, Canada. The world flies by at that speed.... fast enough that you probably won't register that you're looking at a hazard until after you've passed it. It's idiotic to the point of insanity to try that kind of speed on a public road, because human reactions simply aren't fast enough, and because a small hazard you can't even see, like a rock or nail in the road, which wouldn't really be anything to worry about at a speed like 80km/h, can cause a tire blowout. And quite frankly, most of us don't have a clue what to do if you have a tire blowout at speed. I don't remember any mention of it in *my* drivers' ed class. I've seen people flip their cars when they had a blowout at 80km/h... do you really want to imagine what'll happen at 3x that speed?
And it's not a question of teaching people how to drive better, either. No amount of education can prepare you for driving at that kind of speed. It's just not safe for a human to do it in uncontrolled situations. Even in controlled situations, it's not particularly bright.
Reminds me of an old motorcycle adage... there's old riders, and there's bold riders. You don't see any old bold riders.
Obligatory statement... I took 4 years of Japanese at university, forming the minor to my double major degree in Philosophy and Linguistics. English and French are my first languages, Japanese is number 5, after Spanish and German. There's also a smattering of Greek and Latin in there, remnants from a time when I thought that learning those languages would make learning other European languages easier.
I can tell you that spoken Japanese is probably the easiest language to learn on the planet. I can also tell you that it's a language isolate, and is not related to any other language on the planet. The reason it's partly written with Chinese characters (and in fact, the Katakana and Hiragana writing systems are derived from Kanji) has to do with an influx of Chinese in the last two thousand years. The Japanese language itself, and underlying grammar, predates the introduction of the Chinese writing system by thousands of years.
There's two main verb tenses, and you can count the number of irregular verbs on one hand. (There's actually a whole bunch more, but the overwhelming majority of them are formed as noun + the verb "suru" meaning "to do". For example, the verb for driving a car is "untensuru", literally meaning "to do driving"). The grammar is particle delineated... it really doesn't matter what order you get the nouns in when forming a sentence, because their function is indicated by a particle. Finally, there's exactly 5 vowel sounds.
Contrast that to English, which takes vocabulary and grammar from at least 5 major donor languages, and has over 30 vowel sounds. No language has more cases where you "just have to know" than English. *shrugs* One of the hardest languages there is, IMO.
Oh, I know.
*shrugs* anyway. Not really blasting you... not fair. You're just (rightly) pointing out a mistake that a lot of people make.
Ever hear of Velcro or Microwave Ovens? What about Tang? Ever owned a cell phone? Used the Internet lately?
NASA played a significant role in the popularization/development of all of those technologies. It's a fair assessment to say that none of those technologies would be anywhere near as ubiquitous as they are today if it wasn't for the role NASA played. It's not a question of whether you'll ever go to Mars yourself. It's a question of what new technologies are being developped, or commercialized, as a result of the space program.
Not abnormal at all. My experience is with the Canadian Forces, as well as with Public Works and Gov't Services Canada. Family members who work for CSIS and for Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) confirm that it's the same for them, too. By policy, hard drives are destroyed when computers are decomissioned. This is usually done with a drill press, punching a dozen holes into it and through the platter, before dismantling the hard drive and disposing of the platters separately. Good way to get your hands on some rare earth magnets, actually; I've got a handful of them holding stuff to my fridge.
Consider... when I was in the military, I routinely worked with material and information that required clearance. One of my coworkers had actually spent 2 months in military prison for putting his initials on the wrong line of a document shredding report. They take a very strict approach to guarding secrecy. If there's even the slightest chance that secret information will get out, somebody's head is going to roll. If the Canadians are paranoid to the degree that they'd destroy every hard drive when decomissioning a computer, what makes you think for a moment that the US government wouldn't be?
Y'know, some users would consider your choice of software to be little difference. Your choice in software is perhaps a little more benevolent, but you're still making software choices for your user, and installing stuff they didn't ask for. Plus... from your wording, I'm assuming that you're a reseller, and that systems from Lenovo/HP/Dell/Whatever are leaving your building? What happens when your customers call up Dell tech. support and expect help with Avast? After all, it came with their computer....
You may also want to check on the EULA conditions for Avast, because I *think* what you're doing is against the license. It's certainly against the AVG license.
Indeed... I've got a 1TB external drive. The initial population was a pain in the butt... took about 6h to copy all my data over through IEEE 1394a. But once the data was on the drive, it's plenty fast enough. I use it for storing MP3s and DivX videos on my HTPC.
An ignorant president? That's unpossibilical.
In the courtroom, though, ignorance is still not a defence.
that argument loses (some) weight when you consider that Windows Vista asks you like half a billion confirmation dialogues when you tell it to connect to an unencrypted wireless net, and it asks you tons more when you try to make that unencrypted 'net the default connection.
But what's the point of having an article about an X-Prize if they don't actually say what target the car has to meet?
Case in point... my car is a 2007 Chevrolet Aveo... Not only does it meet every requirement that's actually listed in TFA, it beats them. It's classed as a LEV, and I know from experience that it pulls 40mpg at 100mph (Filled up in Vaudreiul, QC, topped off the tank an hour later in Ottawa, ON, it took 10L, total distance is just over 159km), making it far more efficient than most (non-hybrid, gasoline) cars on the market. I doubt, however, that this is in the league they're looking for.
Seriously... am I blind, or did they seriously write an article about an X-Prize for fuel efficiency without saying, anywhere in the article, what the target efficiency is?
Sadly, that doesn't make Microsoft the new Dodo.
People at $26k/year are more likely to lease a car than buy one, but that's a technicality.... Leasing does, however, introduce an entirely different dynamic into the discussion that wasn't there 100 years ago, because in effect it magnifies your purchasing power, allowing you to have a more expensive vehicle for the same monthly payment. Car leases didn't exist 100 years ago, and that limited access to cars to only those who could afford to buy them (or who could get the necessary credit).
At the core of the discussion is the buying power that any given dollar has. It's more than just calculating inflation. You need to take into account economies of scale and the relative deflation that introduces, too. Even a $12k car today has more bells and whistles than a top of the line car had 100 years ago, simply by virtue of increased production and modernization.
To get a truly accurate measure of that vehicle's worth in comparison to modern vehicles, you need to compare it to its contemporaries and draw parallels that way. That thing was $2200 give or take. A Ford Model T was $360. About 1/6th the cost of that thing. If you liken the Model T to the kind of car that the average person is likely to have today (I've got a 2007 Chevrolet Aveo LT, for example, that cost $16,500), then you need to liken the electric car from TFA to something that costs 6X as much. The $100,000 Mercedes-Benz. It was not a car for the proletariat.
Different economics... $30k is closer to the low end, when you consider that high end includes cars worth well over $100,000. You need to consider brands like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Maserati, Ferrari and the like when you're talking about the "high end". The luxury you get in a $30k Toyota is about par with the luxury you get out of a $30k Mercedes. It doesn't even compare to what you can get from a $100k Mercedes.
$30k is midrange. Not even close to high end.
Still... the point stands. In 1910, there weren't a lot of people making enough in a given year that they could afford to buy a $2000 luxury. That's 10 years' salary for a lot of people, and these days the only thing most of us would buy that's in that price range would be a house.
A lot of them are... Bell Sympatico, in Canada, for example, silently redirects all traffic on port 25 to their mail servers, blocking access on that port to the rest of the world. They also deny relay to clients that haven't first authenticated, either by secure authentication or by first receiving your POP3 account.
There's a ton of bigger ISPs that do exactly that, too. It's not going to stop all of the spam, but it is going to make a rather significant impact. It's also why you couldn't pay me enough to use Sympatico... I run my own mail server, thankyouverymuch.
Nagging point, but "cogito ergo sum" means "I think, therefore I am". While it does have to do with existentialism, Descartes didn't actually say it in his Meditations, which is where he proposed the point you're trying to make. The argument about the evil deceiver, that everything could be a simulation, is the 1st meditation. The 2nd meditation is perhaps the closest to "cogito ergo sum", because it posits "I exist as a thinking being", or "I think, I am".
Funny... I do my gaming on a Dell Inspiron 1520... 256MB GeForce 8600GT in it. *shrugs* 15.4" 1680x1050 screen.
So buy from the Inspiron line of product, instead of the Vostro. 2 weeks ago my mum took delivery on an Inspiron 1525 that, taxes included, cost about $700 CAD. About 325 pounds, if my math is right. Delivery was free, and it had 2GB of DDR2, 120GB HDD, DVD-RW, 1.6GHz Core2 Duo.... And, oddly, she actually likes the Vista Home Premium it came with. *shrugs*
Admittedly, you and I are in different markets. But I haven't used a desktop computer (barring my HTPC) in almost 2 years. In the long run, I see laptops as the replacement for desktop computing, and want a good balance between performance and portability. Ultraportable is all well and good, but not when it comes at the expense of useability, and to me that means having decent enough specs for applications like gaming. To that end, the Dell is the only one of those reviewed that I'd even consider buying. And in fact, did consider buying when it came time to buy my latest laptop. I'd rather spend that extra $300 and get something that I can actually use for more than just e-mail/surfing.