There will always be someplace cheaper. Sooner or later there will be a country with Slave Labor and we'll go there, human rights violations be dammed. When was the USA economically the strongest? When we had slavery, and then later chain gangs.
After Vietnam it will be North Korea.
And just wait until those African countries get industrialized. If you think China was cheap, wait until we're sending everything to Botswana.
But some of these are just pointless. Oh no, the meaning or pronouniciation of a word has changed. Don't look now, but we're not speaking ye olde english anymore.
----
You know, I'd agree with you on this, but if so, answer the following:
We currently can say that a pretty woman is "ravishing", and she takes it as a complement.
Except that in olden days, "ravishing" means that we'd forced her to have sex.
So, if the nature of language is changing, in 100 years, can we tell a girl that she looks "rape-able", and she'll thank us for the complement?
So, the police came in, grabbed the wrong guy and tortured him to death. Because of a typo. Well, it's a mistake, but not a horrible mistake. Happens all the time really. Go about your business, nothing to see here, eh?
Newsflash: People spend more money to get a BMW than a Ford Escort.
If all you want is bargain basement, dollar-store cheap-crap, then that's what you'll get. If you want something a little better, more refined, better engineered, and built to a certain standard, then expect to pay a little more. What the heck is so weird about that?
Queue George Bush declaring Canada a terrorist haven, starting a war without Congressional approval and invading yet another soverign nation... And Haliburton stock becomes more valuable than Berkshire Hathaway....
"Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s. "
So, how does this converter box work with the battery-powered portable TV I take to the beach? How does this converter box work with the battery-powered hand-held LCD TV Radio Shack sold me a few years back? How does this converter box work with the Wrist-worn TV that James Bond used in Octopussy? How does the converter box work with the TV built into my old Boom-Box?
How does this converter box work with the battery-powered TV I used during the last blackout to get the latest news and information?
So, here we are, worried about Global Warming, and preparing to fill landfills across the country with our older TV sets that will no longer work with this disasterous change-over to digital broadcasting.
Never mind that in poorer neighborhoods, people don't have the money to hand over for a converter box. These people are BORROWING money to get by BETWEEN PAYCHECKS, and often the TV they own is one that was either obtained second-hand or was salvaged from someone else's trash.
Yes, 280,000 people in the USA are on FOOD STAMPS -- dude, that's 10% of the American population. Does the government know and understand that Milk is so expensive now that people can't afford that? That the rising costs of gas, wheat, milk, corn and other necessities have completely killed the tiny percentage (usually measured in cents, not dollars) of what may be left from your minimum wage income at the end of the week?
Yes, I see riots in the streets. I see cities burning in the night. I see a country in a painful transition to third world status while the elite sit in their gated mansions with private security while the inner urban areas of the heartland turn into a war zone.
Just do a search in Google news for IBM and you'll find the story. Looks legit to me, although the Register clearly has an April Fools story that Robert Scobe is an IBM construction with 1TB of memory.
The summary says the car was populated by a "cat", but doesn't mention if there was a human driver. Either that, or the car was driven by a 60's beatnik with a fondness for Jazz music. "Hey dude, I just pulled over this radiocative cat, man, I mean he was smokin'." Cosmic.
I've looked at the orbit of this satellite. Have you noticed that it goes over North America and Africa, otherwise, it spends most of it's time over the oceans?
Okay, there's very little to spy on over the middle of Africa. So, I'm very much coming to the conclusion that the REAL reason they want to shoot it down is because it's very embarassing for someone else to get the data from this bird that shows that what the government is spying on is US -- the USA.
Bush can chant the Patriot act all he wants, but when the Washington Post prints data from the satellite that shows the NSA is intercepting every American's mundane existence, and performing massive invasions of privacy, the Repblican party's chances of re-election will be sunk.
That's what this is really about. Covering your ass in an election year.
Early adopters always get screwed, but it seems to me that the High-Def thing has been particularly bad. The first Audio CD players didn't refuse to play later CDs. Here we have HD-ready TVs that aren't HD ready, Blue Ray players that don't play Blue Ray discs, and HD-DVD players that now are only good as boat anchors.
Not that I'm promoting violence against the consumer electronics industry, but I'd return the Samsung player to Samsung, by finding one of their buildings in the nearest corporate park, and chucking the player through one of their plate-glass windows.
If enough people did that, sooner or later they'd get the hint that you do not screw your customer base.
Also, the author takes an average of 80 characters for the cost of SMS and compares them with the max number of words/characters you can send via US mail. An unfair comparison.
Okay, let's make a FAIR comparison.
Let's assume two people want to communicate a bunch of simple messages over the course of a month. So, they both join AOL, each one paying $30 per month, and they use AOL's instant messaging client. How many Instant Messages can they send a month on their $60 combined expenditure?
Now, same people, same messages sent and recieved, but now via AT&T @ $0.40 ($0.20 to send + $0.20 to recieve). How much is it going to cost to send the same number of messages?
The $ixty Billion figure isn't that far off the mark, actually, once you start doing the math.
Do you have a phone that does an automatic time/Date update every once in a while to keep accurate time? How come the carriers don't charge you for *that* service as well? I mean considering the following -- when a time/date update is performed, the phone has to establish an over-the-air connection, send and recieve data, and close a connection -- essentially, the exact same process as an SMS, with about as much data transmitted and revcieved.
But you're not charged for it, know why? Because your phone bill would be $1000 per month and people would burn down the telcos with torches and pitchforks!
SMS should cost the same, since it's built into the GSM network, but it doesn't because it's become tradition (yes, that's all it is) to charge for messages sent. And now that they can also also double-dip and charge for messages recieved, it's become a nice little gold mine, a license to print money.
But now the telcos are getting greedy and in the good old game they all play of nickel and diming their customers to death (have you EVER tried to read your Verizon bill?), it's only going to be a matter of time before we're calling our Congressmen to make SMS pricing regulated.
(It's a sad state that I pine for the days when Ma Bell was Ma Bell...)
No not really, but I'll bet someone is. I'm speaking for them.
Am I the only one making rational purchasing decisions based on my estimation of technology, what I can afford, and where it falls into my list of priorities? And then doesn't want to sue everyone involved if I make a bad decision?
Apparently, you forgot to read the last line of my post where I indicated that I owned an NTSC TV and hadn't yet joined the so called HD revolution. The only thing I'm bitter about is how the entire US is being hoodwinked by the consumer electronics maufacturers, who think they can have their cake and eat it too, and keep making us buy a different overpriced gizmo every week so they can show quarterly growth.
To make the ubiquitous car analogy on Slashdot, imagine if you bought a car that ran on special gas, and weeks later, they cancel that special gas, and guess what, there's no plan for your car to be converted to the "other" gas that "newer" cars run on, nope, you just have to run out a buy a new car.
Every week, I read stories on Slashdot about how people are getting screwed because of actions of large faceless companies and a government run by those same corporations. Our government was originally created to protect the people from this kind of abuse, but now, it just exists to feed those companies.
We're shutting down analog cellular? Ooops, screwed those early On-Star customers. MLB changes DRM formats? Ooops, screwed everyone who paid for content. Bought a HD-ready TV, and then they add on the HDMI DRM-laden do-hickey if you really want HD? Ooops, screwed thousands more who paid for those TVs... The list goes on.
Personally, if I want to watch something I download it. I don't want to run the risk of being screwed by something I bought and paid for because the company that I'm "renting" what I bought decides to change things so they can make more money.
I own a regular 20" TV and that's all I need to watch CNN and the Weather. Everything else I pretty much got covered by the computer, my portable media player or my phone. Frankly, I can't even imagine how pissed I'd be if I actually owned any of this DRM-laden HD crap -- because I'm pretty pissed off already just by proxy.
So, the warranty on some HD-DVD players isn't even over yet, and the format is already being called dead, and there probably won't be any new content released after today.
Nice, so, all the people that spent $$$$ on some HD-DVD player or Xbox attachment are going to be mighty pissed off, as they have once again, fallen into what I call the High-Def money pit, where you have to constantly buy some new gizmo because the holders of the DRM willy nilly decide to change things.
How many TVs were sold as HD-ready, only to not be? How many 720p sets or even 1080i sets still don't have an HDMI connection? And let's not even get into Vista Media Center, or any of the other depricated formats that have lead to technological dead-ends and/or having to re-buy the same media all over again (MLB, anyone?)...
If I had been stupid enough to even join in the HD revolution, I'd be pissed off enough to start suing every company that dropped the ball. I'd start with demanding my money back, and when they refused, I'd start throwing lawyers into the mix.
I can't decide who's going to be marching on corporate america first with torches and pitchforks -- the early-adopters of HD, or those screwed out of TV when we switch to digital in Feb of 2009.
Either way there are going to be some demanding their pound of flesh. I just want to sit back and watch the whole thing -- in regular NTSC of course, because regular TV is good enough when you consider the content available.
So, combined with a previous story here on Slashdot, buinesses are going to be spending Gigaquads of Cash to archive their data, only to discover that by 2010, Microsoft will have wiped out their ability to OPEN any of their archived documents?
So, what are businesses archiving this data for? Can you imagine the SEC spectacle when some business gets picked for insider trading, they go to start an investigation and their copy of Vista with Office 2010 doesn't allow them to open old documents? What kind of bullshit is this?
Then again, I'm finding it difficult to open my old Macwrite documents (from 1992) on my current iMac because the old Macwrite format isn't supported... Then again, neither is the floppy disk it's written to, but that's a different issue that I've already solved. Still, it's annoying to be able to archive all this data, but then not have access to the applications that wrote this data. It would also be nice if I could read all my C-64 and Amiga diskettes in a current computer. Ironic that I have all my data, I just can't access it either due to hardware or software that just doesn't exist anymore.
It looks like a car that's been squeezed. It would never be sold in the US because it's missing all the federally mandated safety features... not to mention that the thing looks like it'll flip over if it goes faster than 40mph.
What it's going to do is destroy the auto market outside the US. Ford, GM, and heck, even China will have to compete against Tata in the markets that aren't as controlled as the US's is. This is why Volkswagen is making the "UP", which goes back to it's Beetle roots.
Now they can launch that telescope thingie that was going to be left to wither because all the remaining flights have been scheduled for finishing the ISS -- and with delays, they still won't be done by 2013 anyhow.
Hey NASA can go waste all the billions they want, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to wars which suck up a lot more money and produce even less useful results than NASA.
It's too bad the privatized companies (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Armadillo) can't ramp up development to meet the need. Oddly enough, *their* space race will produce the only results that will actually lower the cost per pound to orbit.
It's too bad we're all so scared of failure these days. Consider that during the development of aircraft, a lot of people died. A lot of people died just trying to cross the Atlantic. We didn't halt aircraft development every time some lunatic in a biplane was lost in a storm. But for some reason, we're afraid to blow up the occasional person to get into space. We need to get over that. A lot of people are going to die before we're able to easily leave the planet as easily as we currently visit another continent. That's just a reality and no amount of double checking is going to change that.
Well, for test flights anyhow, we could always use that Humanoid Robot (REEM-B) some guy spent three *whole* years developing!;-)
Seriously... This is something I always wondered about with blogs -- what happens when a major site like this (that I'm sure has been linked to by blogs and used as fodder for blog posts) shuts down? Can you imagine how many blogs will be inconvenienced when Youtube goes the way of the dinosaur as well? All it takes is some bean counter to kill half the internet.
Live Long and Prosper, "startrek.com".... or perhaps not.
You're referring to the "road trains", super-long trucks that can be many, many times the length of a regular truck -- but what you're forgetting is that in Austrialia, those are mostly for transporting goods between long stretches of nowhere, whereas the UK is generally a smaller, denser area and populace with narrow roads and twisty, mountainous terrian.
It's one thing to have a giant truck on the outback, and another to have a giant truck in Picadilly Circus.
I'm starting to believe in the idea that the US has about 90 years left.
You're an optimist.
Between the RIAA suing the masses, Bush and Co. about to nuke the whole world, and Corporate America clamping down on what you can do with the stuff you are forced to buy (yes, they'll sue you if you don't make them a profit), China killing us with cheap garbage, all jobs outsourced to India, and what we have that can laughably be called an "economy" (saddled with enourmous debt), I'm giving "America" exactly until February of 2009. After that, we'll be burning the country to the ground (mostly so we can heat ourselves as none of us will be able to afford oil).
Feb of 2009, if I recall correctly, is when we switch over to Digital TV, and everyone still using rabbit ears suddenly doesn't get their bread and circuses. Once the populace is no longer distracted by "Dancing with the Stars", they might wake up and riot.
The way the world is going, our combined sanity can only hold out for so long. We are headed for a major disaster, the likes of which probably haven't been seen since the Dark Ages.
Slashdot Mirror
There will always be someplace cheaper. Sooner or later there will be a country with Slave Labor and we'll go there, human rights violations be dammed. When was the USA economically the strongest? When we had slavery, and then later chain gangs.
After Vietnam it will be North Korea.
And just wait until those African countries get industrialized. If you think China was cheap, wait until we're sending everything to Botswana.
But some of these are just pointless. Oh no, the meaning or pronouniciation of a word has changed. Don't look now, but we're not speaking ye olde english anymore.
----
You know, I'd agree with you on this, but if so, answer the following:
We currently can say that a pretty woman is "ravishing", and she takes it as a complement.
Except that in olden days, "ravishing" means that we'd forced her to have sex.
So, if the nature of language is changing, in 100 years, can we tell a girl that she looks "rape-able", and she'll thank us for the complement?
How weird is that?
So, the police came in, grabbed the wrong guy and tortured him to death. Because of a typo. Well, it's a mistake, but not a horrible mistake. Happens all the time really. Go about your business, nothing to see here, eh?
Newsflash: People spend more money to get a BMW than a Ford Escort.
If all you want is bargain basement, dollar-store cheap-crap, then that's what you'll get. If you want something a little better, more refined, better engineered, and built to a certain standard, then expect to pay a little more. What the heck is so weird about that?
TTYL
Queue George Bush declaring Canada a terrorist haven, starting a war without Congressional approval and invading yet another soverign nation... And Haliburton stock becomes more valuable than Berkshire Hathaway....
So predictable really.
Whoops, correction: 280,000 was the wrong number, but the correct percentage.
It's 28 Million Americans on food stamps!!!
See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/us/31foodstamps.html?_r=1
"Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s. "
So, how does this converter box work with the battery-powered portable TV I take to the beach? How does this converter box work with the battery-powered hand-held LCD TV Radio Shack sold me a few years back? How does this converter box work with the Wrist-worn TV that James Bond used in Octopussy? How does the converter box work with the TV built into my old Boom-Box?
How does this converter box work with the battery-powered TV I used during the last blackout to get the latest news and information?
So, here we are, worried about Global Warming, and preparing to fill landfills across the country with our older TV sets that will no longer work with this disasterous change-over to digital broadcasting.
Never mind that in poorer neighborhoods, people don't have the money to hand over for a converter box. These people are BORROWING money to get by BETWEEN PAYCHECKS, and often the TV they own is one that was either obtained second-hand or was salvaged from someone else's trash.
Yes, 280,000 people in the USA are on FOOD STAMPS -- dude, that's 10% of the American population. Does the government know and understand that Milk is so expensive now that people can't afford that? That the rising costs of gas, wheat, milk, corn and other necessities have completely killed the tiny percentage (usually measured in cents, not dollars) of what may be left from your minimum wage income at the end of the week?
Yes, I see riots in the streets. I see cities burning in the night. I see a country in a painful transition to third world status while the elite sit in their gated mansions with private security while the inner urban areas of the heartland turn into a war zone.
Wow, if they are finding so many solar systems like our own (2 in a 24-hr period), then there simply must be life out there...
Now if only there were INTELLIGENT life at the slashdot "offices"...
(sigh!)
(Captcha is "nothing"... hrmmmm.)
Just do a search in Google news for IBM and you'll find the story. Looks legit to me, although the Register clearly has an April Fools story that Robert Scobe is an IBM construction with 1TB of memory.
The summary says the car was populated by a "cat", but doesn't mention if there was a human driver. Either that, or the car was driven by a 60's beatnik with a fondness for Jazz music. "Hey dude, I just pulled over this radiocative cat, man, I mean he was smokin'."
Cosmic.
Amazingly, this sounds exactly like the version of Windows I'm currently using, so why would I upgrade?
Now that's an obsolete skill!
I'll bet half the readers of Slashdot have never even seen a punch card in real life.
Now get off my lawn!
I've looked at the orbit of this satellite. Have you noticed that it goes over North America and Africa, otherwise, it spends most of it's time over the oceans?
Okay, there's very little to spy on over the middle of Africa. So, I'm very much coming to the conclusion that the REAL reason they want to shoot it down is because it's very embarassing for someone else to get the data from this bird that shows that what the government is spying on is US -- the USA.
Bush can chant the Patriot act all he wants, but when the Washington Post prints data from the satellite that shows the NSA is intercepting every American's mundane existence, and performing massive invasions of privacy, the Repblican party's chances of re-election will be sunk.
That's what this is really about. Covering your ass in an election year.
TTYL
Early adopters always get screwed, but it seems to me that the High-Def thing has been particularly bad. The first Audio CD players didn't refuse to play later CDs. Here we have HD-ready TVs that aren't HD ready, Blue Ray players that don't play Blue Ray discs, and HD-DVD players that now are only good as boat anchors.
Not that I'm promoting violence against the consumer electronics industry, but I'd return the Samsung player to Samsung, by finding one of their buildings in the nearest corporate park, and chucking the player through one of their plate-glass windows.
If enough people did that, sooner or later they'd get the hint that you do not screw your customer base.
They're NULs (nanowires of unlimited length)... /dev/NUL
Either that, or they've gone to
There's too many jokes here...
Also, the author takes an average of 80 characters for the cost of SMS and compares them with the max number of words/characters you can send via US mail. An unfair comparison.
Okay, let's make a FAIR comparison.
Let's assume two people want to communicate a bunch of simple messages over the course of a month. So, they both join AOL, each one paying $30 per month, and they use AOL's instant messaging client. How many Instant Messages can they send a month on their $60 combined expenditure?
Now, same people, same messages sent and recieved, but now via AT&T @ $0.40 ($0.20 to send + $0.20 to recieve). How much is it going to cost to send the same number of messages?
The $ixty Billion figure isn't that far off the mark, actually, once you start doing the math.
Do you have a phone that does an automatic time/Date update every once in a while to keep accurate time? How come the carriers don't charge you for *that* service as well? I mean considering the following -- when a time/date update is performed, the phone has to establish an over-the-air connection, send and recieve data, and close a connection -- essentially, the exact same process as an SMS, with about as much data transmitted and revcieved.
But you're not charged for it, know why? Because your phone bill would be $1000 per month and people would burn down the telcos with torches and pitchforks!
SMS should cost the same, since it's built into the GSM network, but it doesn't because it's become tradition (yes, that's all it is) to charge for messages sent. And now that they can also also double-dip and charge for messages recieved, it's become a nice little gold mine, a license to print money.
But now the telcos are getting greedy and in the good old game they all play of nickel and diming their customers to death (have you EVER tried to read your Verizon bill?), it's only going to be a matter of time before we're calling our Congressmen to make SMS pricing regulated.
(It's a sad state that I pine for the days when Ma Bell was Ma Bell...)
No not really, but I'll bet someone is. I'm speaking for them.
Am I the only one making rational purchasing decisions based on my estimation of technology, what I can afford, and where it falls into my list of priorities? And then doesn't want to sue everyone involved if I make a bad decision?
Apparently, you forgot to read the last line of my post where I indicated that I owned an NTSC TV and hadn't yet joined the so called HD revolution. The only thing I'm bitter about is how the entire US is being hoodwinked by the consumer electronics maufacturers, who think they can have their cake and eat it too, and keep making us buy a different overpriced gizmo every week so they can show quarterly growth.
To make the ubiquitous car analogy on Slashdot, imagine if you bought a car that ran on special gas, and weeks later, they cancel that special gas, and guess what, there's no plan for your car to be converted to the "other" gas that "newer" cars run on, nope, you just have to run out a buy a new car.
Every week, I read stories on Slashdot about how people are getting screwed because of actions of large faceless companies and a government run by those same corporations. Our government was originally created to protect the people from this kind of abuse, but now, it just exists to feed those companies.
We're shutting down analog cellular? Ooops, screwed those early On-Star customers. MLB changes DRM formats? Ooops, screwed everyone who paid for content. Bought a HD-ready TV, and then they add on the HDMI DRM-laden do-hickey if you really want HD? Ooops, screwed thousands more who paid for those TVs... The list goes on.
Personally, if I want to watch something I download it. I don't want to run the risk of being screwed by something I bought and paid for because the company that I'm "renting" what I bought decides to change things so they can make more money.
I own a regular 20" TV and that's all I need to watch CNN and the Weather. Everything else I pretty much got covered by the computer, my portable media player or my phone. Frankly, I can't even imagine how pissed I'd be if I actually owned any of this DRM-laden HD crap -- because I'm pretty pissed off already just by proxy.
So, the warranty on some HD-DVD players isn't even over yet, and the format is already being called dead, and there probably won't be any new content released after today.
Nice, so, all the people that spent $$$$ on some HD-DVD player or Xbox attachment are going to be mighty pissed off, as they have once again, fallen into what I call the High-Def money pit, where you have to constantly buy some new gizmo because the holders of the DRM willy nilly decide to change things.
How many TVs were sold as HD-ready, only to not be? How many 720p sets or even 1080i sets still don't have an HDMI connection? And let's not even get into Vista Media Center, or any of the other depricated formats that have lead to technological dead-ends and/or having to re-buy the same media all over again (MLB, anyone?)...
If I had been stupid enough to even join in the HD revolution, I'd be pissed off enough to start suing every company that dropped the ball. I'd start with demanding my money back, and when they refused, I'd start throwing lawyers into the mix.
I can't decide who's going to be marching on corporate america first with torches and pitchforks -- the early-adopters of HD, or those screwed out of TV when we switch to digital in Feb of 2009.
Either way there are going to be some demanding their pound of flesh. I just want to sit back and watch the whole thing -- in regular NTSC of course, because regular TV is good enough when you consider the content available.
TTYL
So, combined with a previous story here on Slashdot, buinesses are going to be spending Gigaquads of Cash to archive their data, only to discover that by 2010, Microsoft will have wiped out their ability to OPEN any of their archived documents?
So, what are businesses archiving this data for? Can you imagine the SEC spectacle when some business gets picked for insider trading, they go to start an investigation and their copy of Vista with Office 2010 doesn't allow them to open old documents? What kind of bullshit is this?
Then again, I'm finding it difficult to open my old Macwrite documents (from 1992) on my current iMac because the old Macwrite format isn't supported... Then again, neither is the floppy disk it's written to, but that's a different issue that I've already solved. Still, it's annoying to be able to archive all this data, but then not have access to the applications that wrote this data. It would also be nice if I could read all my C-64 and Amiga diskettes in a current computer. Ironic that I have all my data, I just can't access it either due to hardware or software that just doesn't exist anymore.
Try this link:
http://paultan.org/archives/2007/10/07/more-details-on-tata-1-lakh-car/
It looks like a car that's been squeezed. It would never be sold in the US because it's missing all the federally mandated safety features... not to mention that the thing looks like it'll flip over if it goes faster than 40mph.
What it's going to do is destroy the auto market outside the US. Ford, GM, and heck, even China will have to compete against Tata in the markets that aren't as controlled as the US's is. This is why Volkswagen is making the "UP", which goes back to it's Beetle roots.
Now they can launch that telescope thingie that was going to be left to wither because all the remaining flights have been scheduled for finishing the ISS -- and with delays, they still won't be done by 2013 anyhow.
;-)
Hey NASA can go waste all the billions they want, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to wars which suck up a lot more money and produce even less useful results than NASA.
It's too bad the privatized companies (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Armadillo) can't ramp up development to meet the need. Oddly enough, *their* space race will produce the only results that will actually lower the cost per pound to orbit.
It's too bad we're all so scared of failure these days. Consider that during the development of aircraft, a lot of people died. A lot of people died just trying to cross the Atlantic. We didn't halt aircraft development every time some lunatic in a biplane was lost in a storm. But for some reason, we're afraid to blow up the occasional person to get into space. We need to get over that. A lot of people are going to die before we're able to easily leave the planet as easily as we currently visit another continent. That's just a reality and no amount of double checking is going to change that.
Well, for test flights anyhow, we could always use that Humanoid Robot (REEM-B) some guy spent three *whole* years developing!
Seriously... This is something I always wondered about with blogs -- what happens when a major site like this (that I'm sure has been linked to by blogs and used as fodder for blog posts) shuts down? Can you imagine how many blogs will be inconvenienced when Youtube goes the way of the dinosaur as well? All it takes is some bean counter to kill half the internet.
.... or perhaps not.
Live Long and Prosper, "startrek.com"
You're referring to the "road trains", super-long trucks that can be many, many times the length of a regular truck -- but what you're forgetting is that in Austrialia, those are mostly for transporting goods between long stretches of nowhere, whereas the UK is generally a smaller, denser area and populace with narrow roads and twisty, mountainous terrian.
It's one thing to have a giant truck on the outback, and another to have a giant truck in Picadilly Circus.
TTYL
I'm starting to believe in the idea that the US has about 90 years left.
You're an optimist.
Between the RIAA suing the masses, Bush and Co. about to nuke the whole world, and Corporate America clamping down on what you can do with the stuff you are forced to buy (yes, they'll sue you if you don't make them a profit), China killing us with cheap garbage, all jobs outsourced to India, and what we have that can laughably be called an "economy" (saddled with enourmous debt), I'm giving "America" exactly until February of 2009. After that, we'll be burning the country to the ground (mostly so we can heat ourselves as none of us will be able to afford oil).
Feb of 2009, if I recall correctly, is when we switch over to Digital TV, and everyone still using rabbit ears suddenly doesn't get their bread and circuses. Once the populace is no longer distracted by "Dancing with the Stars", they might wake up and riot.
The way the world is going, our combined sanity can only hold out for so long. We are headed for a major disaster, the likes of which probably haven't been seen since the Dark Ages.