There was a free online service AND a paid premium service. People who paid got leaderboards, PvP play, and were promised additional content. If subscribers had actually received the bonus content, it might have been worth it. They didn't. PvP really didn't work either. Basically they charged people for nothing. And I'm talking in the past tense because, unlike a real MMO, they're making no effort to maintain the service and abruptly discontinued it.
I really wanted to like Hellgate: London. But the incredible lack of innovation and bugs turned me off. Action RPGs have moved forward, see Mass Effect.
If you think the media player and web browser are "PDA features" then we have a semantic disagreement that can't be settled by argument.
Maybe you're making a distinction between "PDA" and "pocket computer" that I don't understand. But the iPhone is more than a "portable media player/phone" like the Motorola ROKR E1 or the Sony Walkman phones. The key distinction to me is the more sophisticated operating system designed to host third-party apps, like PalmOS and Windows Mobile. That's a "pocket computer" feature.
The iPhone has never had a problem lasting all day, even though I've been playing with it a lot since I bought it.
Regardless of your experience, it is an indisputable fact that there are numerous cellular telephones on the market that have longer talk time, better signal quality, better reception, and are MUCH cheaper than the iPhone (in the $50 range). If all you want is a TELEPHONE, the iPhone is a lousy choice. The iPhones call quality, talk time, etc. may be sufficient for your purposes but there are many, many, many, phones available that outperform the iPhone. And they're all smaller and weigh less. Anyone who says differently is ignorant.
I guess my best argument that iPhones are in a different market segment from Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices is that the overlap in ownership is almost entirely in tech-industry people. The vast majority of iPhones and Blackberries are sold to people other than programmers, IT folks, and tech executives, but those are the only folks who seem to seriously consider both kinds of devices.
I don't claim to know the demographics of smartphone buyers. I suspect most Blackberries are bought by corporate IT departments to hand out to employees with the remainder bought by txt messaging teenagers. I suspect most Windows Mobile devices are also bought by corporate IT departments that need to run a third-party app (usually some sort of database front-end) for a mobile workforce with the rest bought by Microsoft fanboys (for fangirls in my girlfriend's case). I suspect almost all iPhones are bought individually by tech geeks who have no business purpose for the phone.
The first time I watched someone using Safari on the iPhone, it was a revelation.
The iPhone has the best web browser of any smartphone by a very wide margin. It also has the best media player (not by a wide margin due to format problems). If you want a phone to surf the web and play music and movies, buy an iPhone.
Note, that's a PHONE. IMHO, there are better dedicated handheld web browsers/media players out there.
When iPhones get better at Exchange integration
Which will be never. Apple refuses to operate a NOC, which makes reliable corporate email impossible for the iPhone. Apple does not know how to deal with the corporate market and probably never will.
This is highway robbery. $6 just to play the game 12-24 hours earlier? WTF? I hate GameStop with a passion, but even they offer a better deal. Plus, GameStop tends to have pre-order bonuses other retailers don't have.
Please don't get me wrong about Gamestop. I hate them. I've sued them twice. Their entire business model revolves around ripping off little kids.
Plus, see that thing about using the women too. If someone actually managed to start a war back then between a tribe of Homo Sapiens and one of Neanderthals, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter would have had the upper hand.
This may have been why Homo Sapiens won, assuming there was armed conflict. Neanderthals put women on the "front lines" so to speak, to get slaughtered while Sapiens left their women with the children. With all their women getting killed, this would have caused the deaths of the children as well AND reduced child production making it easier for Sapiens to out-breed them.
Sure the opening scene of Private Ryan is gruesome and vivid. Yet the message behind it is the pointlessness and futility of the whole thing.
No it is not. How many war resisters and pacifists appeared in Saving Private Ryan? At what point in the film do the soldiers mutiny and refuse to fight?
The message is: "Americans are awesome and the Nazis suck ass!", the same message as every WWII movie. Violence is consistently portrayed as good, even "the greatest good", as long as it's Americans using the violence. The soldiers are reverently portrayed and being noble and heroic and honoring their "sacrifice". Hell, the whole movie is about how the American soldiers are selfless, "going into danger to save one of their own". Did you miss the weepy scenes at the beginning and end of the film?
I'd argue that the message of the film is the exact opposite of what you claim. The message of the film is that it is a moral good to use violence to fight evil, even if that results in massive loss of life.
Name one video game that has the intellectual depth of a fine art painting or literature.
Space Invaders. Really.
Much of "fine art" is often just old pornography, regardless of what you may think. Portraits, stills, etc. usually have no intellectual content whatsoever. The Mona Lisa is just a woman's portrait. Michaelangelo's David is porn. Picasso often tried to put messages in his art, but really he's at the level of graffiti artists in this regard. There ARE artists that try to do real social commentary in their art, and they're usually reviled by "fine art" aficionados.
Now literature is a different story. I can't think of any video game that has the intellectual depth of, say, Sun Tsu's "Art of War" or Plato's "Republic". But that's not what you're talking about. You're talking about cheesy romance novels like "Gone With the Wind". And in that regard, there are plenty of video games with deeper stories, mostly RPGs. Final Fantasy comes to mind as a franchise.
The problem is that the primary push behind Android is the ease of third-party development. Anything that reduces third-party functionality is a major blow from this perspective. I personally believe that Android will have major problems due to it's general lack of polish compared to Windows Mobile and iPhones. Also, the relatively small install base won't attract the third parties. I really believe that Android only has a future in Asia, where manufacturers will adopt it solely because it's cheaper than Symbian or Windows Mobile.
I've got a touchscreen laptop at home. You don't realize how awful touchpads and joysticks (like the Lenovo trackpoint) are as pointing devices until you have a laptop that has a touchscreen.
OTOH, I think a dedicated MOUSE is slightly superior. But you don't always have a flat surface handy.
Yes, the physical typing experience on iPhone is pretty poor, but I find that the auto correction software pretty much makes up for it. I can type just about as fast on iPhone as on another small keyboard with physical buttons, and even though I make horrible typing errors it fixes them on the fly perfectly almost every time.
My girlfriend, who is a transcriptionist and types about 200 words per minute (really), and uses both and AT&T Tilt and iPhone, says that typing is dramatically better on the Tilt because it has a physical keyboard AND (this is the important bit) the auto-correcting is better on Windows Mobile. She can actually do transcription on the Tilt.
As I've said in the past: Want email? Blackberry. Data-entry and third-party apps? Windows Mobile. Web surfing and media? iPhone.
What's the difference between the Republicans taking tax money to bolster corporate America so the economy can thrive and jobs can be created
Has this actually happened? Well, the Republicans gave money to bolster corporate America, but the economy ISN'T good (largely due to the Republican's failure to regulate the housing market or deal with the energy crisis) and good jobs HAVEN'T been created.
with the Democrats taking tax money to pay a large bureaucracy to hand out money to people that in general don't work,
The difference is that this program works. The bureaucracy that you're talking about (Social Security) is concerned with helping the elderly and handicapped and does a pretty good job. Especially compared to tossing them on the streets.
What is your idea for taking care of these people? Private charities don't cut it. They have nowhere near enough money and the canard that most Americans (and American companies!) would donate the same amount of money to private charities that they pay in Social Security taxes is laughable.
Maybe you're going to argue that private charities are more efficent? Good luck with that. Social Security is the single most efficent program, of any kind, in human history. All they do is mail out checks and they do it very well. Overhead is less than 0.1%. Comparable private programs have overhead in the 5-10% range. Social Security also handily beats European pension systems in terms of efficiency.
Are you going to put them all to work somehow? Where, exactly? What kinds of job opportunities are out their for elderly, bedridden people and quadriplegics? Or how about the blind? Or the mentally ill? Or young children (they're covered by SS too)?
do not work hard enough to support the lifestyle that they consider to be a right?
Prove this deranged fantasy. WELFARE DOES NOT EXIST IN THE UNITED STATES. Nobody can simply get money for being poor in the United States. This was never really true, and certainly isn't true today.
There does exist a program called AFDC. This is only for 3 years (maybe 2 now, I don't remember) and every single dime is a LOAN. An AFDC participant is expected to pay back all the money the receives. Now it is a NO INTEREST LOAN, which is nice, but it's not a the same as a handout.
What is your opinion of the theory that by giving people free education (most "welfare" programs in the USA focus on education) and job training they'll be able to make more money to support "their lifestyle" and thereby stimulate the economy with consumer spending?
Along these lines, why shouldn't we provide free college education to anyone in the USA? Why don't you think those would be tax dollars well-spent? How do you feel about the large amount the US government currently spends on education?
And what makes you think how much money you make has absolutely anything whatsoever to do with how hard your work? Fruit pickers work pretty hard, but they don't make very much money.
As another poster has said, that's a GROSS underestimation.
In Mountain View you would really expect to pay between $650,000 to $850,000 for such a home, depending on the square footage and whether it was a standalone home or townhouse. You might be able to get something cheaper if it were literally falling down.
Why in blazes should people who don't have kids, or who responsibly make arrangements for them to be cared for (such as *gasp* having Mom stay home and actually raise them), have to pay in the form of a lower salary for yours?
Because life isn't fair.
Because our society has determined that providing child care to working mothers benefits society as a whole and Google is simply conforming to social pressure.
Because Google wishes to attract working mothers as employees and are offering child care as an incentive. Young single workers are attracted by Google's "coolness" and don't need additional incentives.
BTW, Using child care provided by your employer is "make[ing] arrangements for [children] to be cared for".
I don't know why you don't want to admit the iPhone is in the same market segment as Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices, but it is. It's a freaking PDA. Your argument is "iPhone buyers don't care about the PDA functions", which is just WRONG since the media player and web browser are PDA functions and most users use those. If you bought an iPhone just to make phone calls you're an idiot. The iPhone drops lots of calls, has lousy reception, is difficult to dial, and has truly horrible talk and standby time. Just like the AT&T Tilt (the product most directly comparable to an iPhone). There are lots of far better products for far less money.
Tibet was ruled by Imperial China from 1642 to 1913. At which point the Tibetan Dali Lama, with support for Western backers, declared independence from China due to China's demands for greater political control of Tibet (basically eliminating the Lamas). From 1914 to 1950 Tibet was a completely independent kingdom.
Communist China, not being a representative government and not being a legitimate successor of the Ch'ing Dynasty, has no legitimate claims on Tibet, just as they had no legitimate claims on Korea. The invasion was just another communist power grab.
That's what this is about. These scams are a significant part of the revenue for Nigeria and he's probably in on them. Nowadays, most of the scams aren't from people "ripping off the government" as claimed, but fake "mail-order bride" or "help me feed my starving children" claims.
These claims are beyond disingenuous. He's right is saying it's only a handful of people running theses scams. That's because they KNOW WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE. They're as recognizable in Nigeria as Al Capone was in Chicago. The authorities don't do anything to them because they ARE the authorities.
The proper response is to either:
A) Have the foreign office threaten Nigeria with sanctions if they don't enforce the laws and extradite scammers to Australia.
B) If Nigeria is unwilling to do A, send kidnappers to Nigeria to simply seize the criminals and take them back to Australia and/or shoot them on the spot.
The "good professor" wants to blame everyone but the Nigerian government because he's probably in on it. The scams are a big source of money for the criminals who run the government in Nigeria, he's a government official, therefore his salary is paid by the scams.
The solution is to either impose sanctions on Nigeria (like cutting them off the internet) until they extradite criminals and/or just send agents and bounty-hunters to Nigeria to kidnap them.
Contact Free Press and the FCC regarding Time Warner. Mention the Order against Comcast. The FCC probably won't do much, but you might get some response from Free Press.
Find out as much about what Time Warner is doing as possible. The best method to do so is "pretexting" or "social engineering". Basically, call up the NOCs claiming to be a Time Warner tech and ask for information about the traffic filtering. It helps if you're a network engineer and know what to ask for. Read on forums Time Warner techs visit to get a sense of how they talk. If you've ever worked in a datacenter this shouldn't be too difficult. Contrary to what some people may tell you, this isn't illegal. This is how pretty much all journalism works.
Write down everything you hear. Recordings may expose you to potential liability since surreptitiously recording conversations CAN be illegal.
It costs money for the ISPs to guarantee X Mb/sec bandwidth to you.
Yes, the issues you describe exist. The problem here is that Comcast is engaging in FALSE ADVERTISING when they say you get a 16 Mbps link. The reality is that you get "16Mbps on a few sites a tiny fraction of the time". Their estimates need to be more realistic, like "1 Mbps sustained, up to 16Mbps burst" shortened to "1 Mbps". But they don't do this because they'd lose their marketing advantage against DSL. They also know if they were honest it might prompt Congress to do something about broadband.
The problem isn't the model. The problem is their LYING about the model.
Comcast is heavily subsidized by Federal, state, and local governments and turns a substantial profit. They can afford to upgrade their backend. If they can't, they should be nationalized since they're already ripping off the state.
Also, since net neutrality is not the law, that sort of throttling might even be legal.
The big news about the FCC order is that it DOES establish net neutrality as law. It uses the phrase "protocol agnostic" instead, but it amounts to the same thing. According to the FCC's interpretation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, ISPs aren't allowed to favor certain types of traffic (especially their own services) over others.
Comcast is likely to challenge this order, but for now, "net neutrality" is the law of the land.
She was falling at terminal velocity, and landing on Superman's forearms isn't going to be any softer than landing on concrete. Clark needs to jump up, grab Lois, and *decelerate* her.
It's been hypothesized, in the comics, that Superman's powers are somewhat psychokinetic in nature. For example, Superman can carry more weight in flight than he can standing. So in your example Superman is unconsciously using his psychokinesis to slow Lois down before he catches her.
Tibet was ruled by Imperial China from 1642 to 1913. At which point the Tibetan Dali Lama, with support for Western backers, declared independence from China due to China's demands for greater political control of Tibet (basically eliminating the Lamas). From 1914 to 1950 Tibet was a completely independent kingdom.
Communist China, not being a representative government and not being a legitimate successor of the Ch'ing Dynasty, has no legitimate claims on Tibet, just as they had no legitimate claims on Korea. The invasion was just another communist power grab.
What are you talking about? Hellgate was very consciously a Diablo ripoff. That was even in their marketing.
The problem was that Hellgate was TOO much like Diablo, complete with auto-generated dungeons, mindless hack n' slash, and tons of bugs.
Frankly, I think that Flagship was really greedy. They basically wanted to charge $20 a month for a game that was released for $50 total in 1997. As other people have pointed out, MMOs offer an entire online world with lots of content for their $20 per month. This game was most similar to Guild Wars in terms of content, and that doesn't charge a monthly fee!
What they should have done is made online play free and charge for frequent expansion packs. Instead, they got greedy.
You do it because you CAN. You, as a westerner, have a country that actually cares what happens to you and will complain when their citizens are beaten and/or imprisoned. Native Chinese who protest are almost always imprisoned and tortured, often along with their families. Sometimes protesters are simply killed.
Stexar was working on an ultra-low-power embedded x86 microprocessor that would replace stuff like MIPS in storage servers, set-top appliances, etc. Basically the cheapest thing possible that can still run a Linux kernel. This was a bad idea, as all the other CPU vendors are working hard on the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a free online service AND a paid premium service. People who paid got leaderboards, PvP play, and were promised additional content. If subscribers had actually received the bonus content, it might have been worth it. They didn't. PvP really didn't work either. Basically they charged people for nothing. And I'm talking in the past tense because, unlike a real MMO, they're making no effort to maintain the service and abruptly discontinued it.
I really wanted to like Hellgate: London. But the incredible lack of innovation and bugs turned me off. Action RPGs have moved forward, see Mass Effect.
If you think the media player and web browser are "PDA features" then we have a semantic disagreement that can't be settled by argument.
Maybe you're making a distinction between "PDA" and "pocket computer" that I don't understand. But the iPhone is more than a "portable media player/phone" like the Motorola ROKR E1 or the Sony Walkman phones. The key distinction to me is the more sophisticated operating system designed to host third-party apps, like PalmOS and Windows Mobile. That's a "pocket computer" feature.
The iPhone has never had a problem lasting all day, even though I've been playing with it a lot since I bought it.
Regardless of your experience, it is an indisputable fact that there are numerous cellular telephones on the market that have longer talk time, better signal quality, better reception, and are MUCH cheaper than the iPhone (in the $50 range). If all you want is a TELEPHONE, the iPhone is a lousy choice. The iPhones call quality, talk time, etc. may be sufficient for your purposes but there are many, many, many, phones available that outperform the iPhone. And they're all smaller and weigh less. Anyone who says differently is ignorant.
I guess my best argument that iPhones are in a different market segment from Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices is that the overlap in ownership is almost entirely in tech-industry people. The vast majority of iPhones and Blackberries are sold to people other than programmers, IT folks, and tech executives, but those are the only folks who seem to seriously consider both kinds of devices.
I don't claim to know the demographics of smartphone buyers. I suspect most Blackberries are bought by corporate IT departments to hand out to employees with the remainder bought by txt messaging teenagers. I suspect most Windows Mobile devices are also bought by corporate IT departments that need to run a third-party app (usually some sort of database front-end) for a mobile workforce with the rest bought by Microsoft fanboys (for fangirls in my girlfriend's case). I suspect
almost all iPhones are bought individually by tech geeks who have no business purpose for the phone.
The first time I watched someone using Safari on the iPhone, it was a revelation.
The iPhone has the best web browser of any smartphone by a very wide margin. It also has the best media player (not by a wide margin due to format problems). If you want a phone to surf the web and play music and movies, buy an iPhone.
Note, that's a PHONE. IMHO, there are better dedicated handheld web browsers/media players out there.
When iPhones get better at Exchange integration
Which will be never. Apple refuses to operate a NOC, which makes reliable corporate email impossible for the iPhone. Apple does not know how to deal with the corporate market and probably never will.
This is highway robbery. $6 just to play the game 12-24 hours earlier? WTF? I hate GameStop with a passion, but even they offer a better deal. Plus, GameStop tends to have pre-order bonuses other retailers don't have.
Please don't get me wrong about Gamestop. I hate them. I've sued them twice. Their entire business model revolves around ripping off little kids.
Plus, see that thing about using the women too. If someone actually managed to start a war back then between a tribe of Homo Sapiens and one of Neanderthals, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter would have had the upper hand.
This may have been why Homo Sapiens won, assuming there was armed conflict. Neanderthals put women on the "front lines" so to speak, to get slaughtered while Sapiens left their women with the children. With all their women getting killed, this would have caused the deaths of the children as well AND reduced child production making it easier for Sapiens to out-breed them.
Sure the opening scene of Private Ryan is gruesome and vivid. Yet the message behind it is the pointlessness and futility of the whole thing.
No it is not. How many war resisters and pacifists appeared in Saving Private Ryan? At what point in the film do the soldiers mutiny and refuse to fight?
The message is: "Americans are awesome and the Nazis suck ass!", the same message as every WWII movie. Violence is consistently portrayed as good, even "the greatest good", as long as it's Americans using the violence. The soldiers are reverently portrayed and being noble and heroic and honoring their "sacrifice". Hell, the whole movie is about how the American soldiers are selfless, "going into danger to save one of their own". Did you miss the weepy scenes at the beginning and end of the film?
I'd argue that the message of the film is the exact opposite of what you claim. The message of the film is that it is a moral good to use violence to fight evil, even if that results in massive loss of life.
Name one video game that has the intellectual depth of a fine art painting or literature.
Space Invaders. Really.
Much of "fine art" is often just old pornography, regardless of what you may think. Portraits, stills, etc. usually have no intellectual content whatsoever. The Mona Lisa is just a woman's portrait. Michaelangelo's David is porn. Picasso often tried to put messages in his art, but really he's at the level of graffiti artists in this regard. There ARE artists that try to do real social commentary in their art, and they're usually reviled by "fine art" aficionados.
Now literature is a different story. I can't think of any video game that has the intellectual depth of, say, Sun Tsu's "Art of War" or Plato's "Republic". But that's not what you're talking about. You're talking about cheesy romance novels like "Gone With the Wind". And in that regard, there are plenty of video games with deeper stories, mostly RPGs. Final Fantasy comes to mind as a franchise.
The problem is that the primary push behind Android is the ease of third-party development. Anything that reduces third-party functionality is a major blow from this perspective. I personally believe that Android will have major problems due to it's general lack of polish compared to Windows Mobile and iPhones. Also, the relatively small install base won't attract the third parties. I really believe that Android only has a future in Asia, where manufacturers will adopt it solely because it's cheaper than Symbian or Windows Mobile.
I've got a touchscreen laptop at home. You don't realize how awful touchpads and joysticks (like the Lenovo trackpoint) are as pointing devices until you have a laptop that has a touchscreen.
OTOH, I think a dedicated MOUSE is slightly superior. But you don't always have a flat surface handy.
Yes, the physical typing experience on iPhone is pretty poor, but I find that the auto correction software pretty much makes up for it. I can type just about as fast on iPhone as on another small keyboard with physical buttons, and even though I make horrible typing errors it fixes them on the fly perfectly almost every time.
My girlfriend, who is a transcriptionist and types about 200 words per minute (really), and uses both and AT&T Tilt and iPhone, says that typing is dramatically better on the Tilt because it has a physical keyboard AND (this is the important bit) the auto-correcting is better on Windows Mobile. She can actually do transcription on the Tilt.
As I've said in the past: Want email? Blackberry. Data-entry and third-party apps? Windows Mobile. Web surfing and media? iPhone.
What's the difference between the Republicans taking tax money to bolster corporate America so the economy can thrive and jobs can be created
Has this actually happened? Well, the Republicans gave money to bolster corporate America, but the economy ISN'T good (largely due to the Republican's failure to regulate the housing market or deal with the energy crisis) and good jobs HAVEN'T been created.
with the Democrats taking tax money to pay a large bureaucracy to hand out money to people that in general don't work,
The difference is that this program works. The bureaucracy that you're talking about (Social Security) is concerned with helping the elderly and handicapped and does a pretty good job. Especially compared to tossing them on the streets.
What is your idea for taking care of these people? Private charities don't cut it. They have nowhere near enough money and the canard that most Americans (and American companies!) would donate the same amount of money to private charities that they pay in Social Security taxes is laughable.
Maybe you're going to argue that private charities are more efficent? Good luck with that. Social Security is the single most efficent program, of any kind, in human history. All they do is mail out checks and they do it very well. Overhead is less than 0.1%. Comparable private programs have overhead in the 5-10% range. Social Security also handily beats European pension systems in terms of efficiency.
Are you going to put them all to work somehow? Where, exactly? What kinds of job opportunities are out their for elderly, bedridden people and quadriplegics? Or how about the blind? Or the mentally ill? Or young children (they're covered by SS too)?
do not work hard enough to support the lifestyle that they consider to be a right?
Prove this deranged fantasy. WELFARE DOES NOT EXIST IN THE UNITED STATES. Nobody can simply get money for being poor in the United States. This was never really true, and certainly isn't true today.
There does exist a program called AFDC. This is only for 3 years (maybe 2 now, I don't remember) and every single dime is a LOAN. An AFDC participant is expected to pay back all the money the receives. Now it is a NO INTEREST LOAN, which is nice, but it's not a the same as a handout.
What is your opinion of the theory that by giving people free education (most "welfare" programs in the USA focus on education) and job training they'll be able to make more money to support "their lifestyle" and thereby stimulate the economy with consumer spending?
Along these lines, why shouldn't we provide free college education to anyone in the USA? Why don't you think those would be tax dollars well-spent? How do you feel about the large amount the US government currently spends on education?
And what makes you think how much money you make has absolutely anything whatsoever to do with how hard your work? Fruit pickers work pretty hard, but they don't make very much money.
As another poster has said, that's a GROSS underestimation.
In Mountain View you would really expect to pay between $650,000 to $850,000 for such a home, depending on the square footage and whether it was a standalone home or townhouse. You might be able to get something cheaper if it were literally falling down.
Why in blazes should people who don't have kids, or who responsibly make arrangements for them to be cared for (such as *gasp* having Mom stay home and actually raise them), have to pay in the form of a lower salary for yours?
Because life isn't fair.
Because our society has determined that providing child care to working mothers benefits society as a whole and Google is simply conforming to social pressure.
Because Google wishes to attract working mothers as employees and are offering child care as an incentive. Young single workers are attracted by Google's "coolness" and don't need additional incentives.
BTW, Using child care provided by your employer is "make[ing] arrangements for [children] to be cared for".
I don't know why you don't want to admit the iPhone is in the same market segment as Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices, but it is. It's a freaking PDA. Your argument is "iPhone buyers don't care about the PDA functions", which is just WRONG since the media player and web browser are PDA functions and most users use those. If you bought an iPhone just to make phone calls you're an idiot. The iPhone drops lots of calls, has lousy reception, is difficult to dial, and has truly horrible talk and standby time. Just like the AT&T Tilt (the product most directly comparable to an iPhone). There are lots of far better products for far less money.
Tibet has been part of China since 1792.
Tibet was ruled by Imperial China from 1642 to 1913. At which point the Tibetan Dali Lama, with support for Western backers, declared independence from China due to China's demands for greater political control of Tibet (basically eliminating the Lamas). From 1914 to 1950 Tibet was a completely independent kingdom.
Communist China, not being a representative government and not being a legitimate successor of the Ch'ing Dynasty, has no legitimate claims on Tibet, just as they had no legitimate claims on Korea. The invasion was just another communist power grab.
Edited for clarity.
That's what this is about. These scams are a significant part of the revenue for Nigeria and he's probably in on them. Nowadays, most of the scams aren't from people "ripping off the government" as claimed, but fake "mail-order bride" or "help me feed my starving children" claims.
These claims are beyond disingenuous. He's right is saying it's only a handful of people running theses scams. That's because they KNOW WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE. They're as recognizable in Nigeria as Al Capone was in Chicago. The authorities don't do anything to them because they ARE the authorities.
The proper response is to either:
A) Have the foreign office threaten Nigeria with sanctions if they don't enforce the laws and extradite scammers to Australia.
B) If Nigeria is unwilling to do A, send kidnappers to Nigeria to simply seize the criminals and take them back to Australia and/or shoot them on the spot.
The "good professor" wants to blame everyone but the Nigerian government because he's probably in on it. The scams are a big source of money for the criminals who run the government in Nigeria, he's a government official, therefore his salary is paid by the scams.
The solution is to either impose sanctions on Nigeria (like cutting them off the internet) until they extradite criminals and/or just send agents and bounty-hunters to Nigeria to kidnap them.
Contact Free Press and the FCC regarding Time Warner. Mention the Order against Comcast. The FCC probably won't do much, but you might get some response from Free Press.
Find out as much about what Time Warner is doing as possible. The best method to do so is "pretexting" or "social engineering". Basically, call up the NOCs claiming to be a Time Warner tech and ask for information about the traffic filtering. It helps if you're a network engineer and know what to ask for. Read on forums Time Warner techs visit to get a sense of how they talk. If you've ever worked in a datacenter this shouldn't be too difficult. Contrary to what some people may tell you, this isn't illegal. This is how pretty much all journalism works.
Write down everything you hear. Recordings may expose you to potential liability since surreptitiously recording conversations CAN be illegal.
It costs money for the ISPs to guarantee X Mb/sec bandwidth to you.
Yes, the issues you describe exist. The problem here is that Comcast is engaging in FALSE ADVERTISING when they say you get a 16 Mbps link. The reality is that you get "16Mbps on a few sites a tiny fraction of the time". Their estimates need to be more realistic, like "1 Mbps sustained, up to 16Mbps burst" shortened to "1 Mbps". But they don't do this because they'd lose their marketing advantage against DSL. They also know if they were honest it might prompt Congress to do something about broadband.
The problem isn't the model. The problem is their LYING about the model.
Mod parent up.
Comcast is heavily subsidized by Federal, state, and local governments and turns a substantial profit. They can afford to upgrade their backend. If they can't, they should be nationalized since they're already ripping off the state.
Also, since net neutrality is not the law, that sort of throttling might even be legal.
The big news about the FCC order is that it DOES establish net neutrality as law. It uses the phrase "protocol agnostic" instead, but it amounts to the same thing. According to the FCC's interpretation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, ISPs aren't allowed to favor certain types of traffic (especially their own services) over others.
Comcast is likely to challenge this order, but for now, "net neutrality" is the law of the land.
She was falling at terminal velocity, and landing on Superman's forearms isn't going to be any softer than landing on concrete. Clark needs to jump up, grab Lois, and *decelerate* her.
It's been hypothesized, in the comics, that Superman's powers are somewhat psychokinetic in nature. For example, Superman can carry more weight in flight than he can standing. So in your example Superman is unconsciously using his psychokinesis to slow Lois down before he catches her.
Tibet has been part of China since 1792.
Tibet was ruled by Imperial China from 1642 to 1913. At which point the Tibetan Dali Lama, with support for Western backers, declared independence from China due to China's demands for greater political control of Tibet (basically eliminating the Lamas). From 1914 to 1950 Tibet was a completely independent kingdom.
Communist China, not being a representative government and not being a legitimate successor of the Ch'ing Dynasty, has no legitimate claims on Tibet, just as they had no legitimate claims on Korea. The invasion was just another communist power grab.
What are you talking about? Hellgate was very consciously a Diablo ripoff. That was even in their marketing.
The problem was that Hellgate was TOO much like Diablo, complete with auto-generated dungeons, mindless hack n' slash, and tons of bugs.
Frankly, I think that Flagship was really greedy. They basically wanted to charge $20 a month for a game that was released for $50 total in 1997. As other people have pointed out, MMOs offer an entire online world with lots of content for their $20 per month. This game was most similar to Guild Wars in terms of content, and that doesn't charge a monthly fee!
What they should have done is made online play free and charge for frequent expansion packs. Instead, they got greedy.
You do it because you CAN. You, as a westerner, have a country that actually cares what happens to you and will complain when their citizens are beaten and/or imprisoned. Native Chinese who protest are almost always imprisoned and tortured, often along with their families. Sometimes protesters are simply killed.
Stexar was working on an ultra-low-power embedded x86 microprocessor that would replace stuff like MIPS in storage servers, set-top appliances, etc. Basically the cheapest thing possible that can still run a Linux kernel. This was a bad idea, as all the other CPU vendors are working hard on the same thing.