In the early days, Queen had a bit of a rep as the intellectuals of rock. I had a friend who looked after the significant others of Queen whilst they were touring Germany many years ago and she maintained occasional contact over the years. Apparently other than Freddie who was absolutely bonkers but a brilliant artist, the rest of the band were very friendly with stable families and seemed quite normal.
Japan has a telephone monopoly (NTT), as do many European nations.
Sorry, I'm currently in a fairly small European country. There are four carriers.
they simply CAN'T make customers sign up for multi-year contracts (at least tis was my experience with Orange and Virgin,
Not quite, the carriers tend to do what the market will bear. In Germany it is two years but in the UK, just one.
On top of that, there's phone locking. In Europe, all carriers and phones are GSM and all phones are interoperable between carriers simply by switching the SIM card. In the USA, despite the fact that MOST phones are GSM and have SIM cards, carriers implement locking to prevent users from moving phones from carrier to carrier.
The UK locks contract phones but other European countries don't. At the end of the initial contract, the carrier will unlock the phone. Even with a locked phone, with a good enough excuse, the carrier will unlock it. For example, I wanted to use a UK phone with a German SIM, both from Vodafone but SIM codes are per country so the carrier unlocked the phone for me.
Skype is hard to firewall. This means that if you can get to the internet with your PC, you can normally access Skype. I'm sure that hotels would like to stop it to force into using their expensive telephones. Mobiles aren't always an option when you are travelling overseas due to extortionate roaming rates. Skype has saved me a fortune on international calls.
I believe Lufthansa was happily using Boeing's Connexion service until it was withdrawn due to insufficient takeup by other carriers. Note that Lufthansa was quite happy with the service even though it cost almost a fortune to mod the 747-400. The service was slow but it provided web and email access from Angels 33 without problems. To those of us old enough to remember 33K modems and slower, the speed wasn't so much an issue (although some people's web design was).
The thing is for short flights, it wasn't particularly interesting. Most people can afford to be off net for a few hours, so unless you were doing coast to coast in the US, it wasn't that interesting. Australia has some quite long distance flights inside the country, let alone to Asia, North America or Europe. That would make some money.
Believe it or not, it is quite difficult to kill another human hand-to-hand. Sure we are vulnerable, but most of us have to be trained hard to find that killer instinct, particularly if it isn't in self defence. Killing someone from a distance makes it easier. First the gun and then the bomb. Killing someone via a video screen is too close to a simulation. I predict more collaterals and blue-on-blue's as it becomes easier to kill than to think.
I would say that the film took visually down by about 20%, but from an RF point of view, I went from 4/5 reception to zero when I was more than a few feet from the window. The thing is that 20% is abou average on a modern building, so it really wouldn't notice.
A rebar wall makes a fairly good Faraday cage, but mostly only the pillars are rebar. Many recent office buildings have 100% glass walls. The film would work ok there. On a building with walls, then a lot of signal normally leaks through. Yes, the posters are right in that thicker walls tend to attenuate better but usually they are quite transparent to RF.
The thing is that at least one of the existing metallized films (3M, I think) used for solar attenuation is quite a good RF blocker. Mobiles certainly don't work through it.
I guess you didn't see the film. He didn't attack the right to bear arms and moreover was making the point that other countries have the same rights but exercise them better. He is a gun-owner and member of the NRA. What concerned him was the ease of access to arms and ammunition as well as attitudes. The points he made were good ones and the better for being aired. Back to the health-care system, it is clear there is a problem, what he has down is to get people talking. Isn't that a good thing?
Not at all. The Canadian "single payer" health-care system has only 3% administrative overhead, as opposed to 35%-40% for the private US one. And since everyone is covered identically, there is no time lost finding out if someone is insured for this or that treatment. Nor are people fired because the employer's insurance is tired of paying for the employee's children expensive cancer treatment.
I think you have put your finger on it. When a hospital has to check the billing status for every aspirin, there are bound to be huge inefficiencies. You may also add the legal climate, when an Ob-Gyn has to pay 30% of their salary on malpractice insurance, then the system has a problem. All professionals make mistakes, some of which may require action but the extent to which punitive damages are handed out cannot be helpful.
Think what we could do with something like ARM, but built in straight 64-bit (i.e. ditch byte addressing and deal strictly in 64-bit words) and going back to Furber and Wilson's original concepts which eschewed complications such as hardware multiply and divide precisely because software implementations can be quicker for shorter word lengths (multiplying two 8-bit values requires only 8 additions, but a 64-bit hardware multiplier will always do 64 anyway)
It was called Alpha - remarkably clean and worked very well. It was essentially betamaxed when HP took over Compaq. HP/Intel were in bed together trying to flog the dead horse, unobtanium. DEC's problem with Alpha is that it was a great chip, but they could never get the volume up to bring the cost down. Alpha ran heavy-iron OSs like VMS, but it also ran Linux. The NT version was hampered as Microsoft used binary emulation for most of their non-OS code. Alpha was fast but emulation was limiting.
Many BIOSs will load microcode fixes into the CPU as part of startup - another good reason to keep up to date. This gets loaded into the CPUs microcde RAM and patches the existing instruction decode to jump to the microcode fix. Yes, it is a little like intercepting an instruction in an OS and emulating it - except on a modern chip, they are RISC machines with a microcde translator around it that interprets the IA32/IA64 instructions.
The problem is that many terrorists don't come from western countries, they don't even have the Latin alphabet at home. Passports are supposed to have names in Latin which are used for comparison but there are multiple possible mappings between say Arabic or Cyrillic and Latin. Dates of birth can also be ambiguous. Believe me, I worked on the problem of identifying people on watch lists for banks. Not only do names and dobs present problems but even the watch lists from say the US and the EU show discrepancies for apparently the same person.
The next point is that the watch lists for the US are maintained by the TSA. You submit a passenger manifest and they tell you clear or not. The system doesn't work in real-time. There have been many instances where the clearance hasn't appeared until the plane is over the Atlantic. This why there isn't a pre-fly check, the TSA cannot cope. Often the TSA would even mix up passenger manifests and flights.
The real check is the overworked entry clearance officer in the visa dept of the consulates and the immigration officer at the point of entry. As is usual, resources are stretched whilst people try to throw technology at the problem.
My wife has a Yaris and loves it. I've also driven an Avensis and the only thing I could complain about is the nav system from Toyota sucked big time. I just wouldn't buy a Ford now after some very negative experiences and their rejigging of manufacturing would make me worry about Mazda, let alone Aston-Martin and Land-Rover. Maybe the latter two would be sold off but because of the integration work, they would be hard to separate.
Had a number of Fords and all but one was a POS. Dealer service sucked big time. I had starting problems in cold weather for ages and was begging them to fix it under warranty and they cleaned the plugs and generally fscked around. When the warranty expired, I replaced the starter motor myself and no more problems. The exchange unit cost a bit but the saved bother more than compensated. It is suggested that Fords cleaned up their act in the nineties with proper quality management but they had lost me as a customer.
It is difficult to come up with a single figure. I would point you at www.adac.de, but even there it is difficult to come up with a clear number for reliability. Unsurprisingly though Toyota comes out about best followed by the German majors, Mercedes, BMW. VWAG has fallen behind a bit.
Add something else. How many Hollywood movies actually make money on paper? Not a lot? Hollywood accounting is a cliché. If they were not losing all that money, would they really be paying that as taxes?
Possibly. I was doing a quick conversion from from 5.5 litres/100Km, mixed cycle. However my wife has the non-sports Yaris with a slightly smaller engine and different tuning.
Unfortunately, I'm looking at max ten years old. Due to where I am at the moment (Germany), unless a car is very old, there is a combination of tax and insurance that makes keeping older cars on the road quite expensive. Of course, the other issue is that the electronics are still very tough to diagnose and fix unless you are a dealer. There are things like reconed EMUs around but they are not cheap.
Interesting. I was staying in the UK for 4 nights a week max but didn't want to enable the phone line + data because of minimum contract lengths. I would guess that cable would have given me a similar issue. It tuned out to be a good idea because the project was canned after three months and I moved country. Unfortunately although rental property sometimes comes with a phone line, it is still quite rare in the UK to find an internet connection. I guess that will change though.
The LK201s (keyboards on VT2xx series) were specced to take coffee and soft-drinks. I know, I had the functional spec way back when. The electronics wouldn't suffer but the action would get grungy. When washed under a tap with clean water and allowed to dry they were back to new.
Trading rooms in particular were the bane of keyboards. Reuters had some pretty expensive ones that they would wash first in water then in Iso-propyl alcohol. After a couple of days or so drying they could be considered 'refurbished' and available as customer swap units.
Maybe for the US produced ones, however there is a very good reason that about 70% of the taxis in Germany are Mercedes and the rest are BMs. They are expensive to buy and maintain but given their planned maintenance they keep going and going. Where they fall down is value for money. An S-class Merc is a beautiful machine but as I'm neither a drug dealer nor a filmstar, I can forget owning one. I do like renting such cars when I travel to Germany though, for 200Kph down the autobahn, they are great.
I also know someone who drove an eight year old three series beamer from Germany to Tashkent. It got there and keeps going and was the pride and joy of my driver there
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In the early days, Queen had a bit of a rep as the intellectuals of rock. I had a friend who looked after the significant others of Queen whilst they were touring Germany many years ago and she maintained occasional contact over the years. Apparently other than Freddie who was absolutely bonkers but a brilliant artist, the rest of the band were very friendly with stable families and seemed quite normal.
Skype is hard to firewall. This means that if you can get to the internet with your PC, you can normally access Skype. I'm sure that hotels would like to stop it to force into using their expensive telephones. Mobiles aren't always an option when you are travelling overseas due to extortionate roaming rates. Skype has saved me a fortune on international calls.
I believe Lufthansa was happily using Boeing's Connexion service until it was withdrawn due to insufficient takeup by other carriers. Note that Lufthansa was quite happy with the service even though it cost almost a fortune to mod the 747-400. The service was slow but it provided web and email access from Angels 33 without problems. To those of us old enough to remember 33K modems and slower, the speed wasn't so much an issue (although some people's web design was).
The thing is for short flights, it wasn't particularly interesting. Most people can afford to be off net for a few hours, so unless you were doing coast to coast in the US, it wasn't that interesting. Australia has some quite long distance flights inside the country, let alone to Asia, North America or Europe. That would make some money.
Believe it or not, it is quite difficult to kill another human hand-to-hand. Sure we are vulnerable, but most of us have to be trained hard to find that killer instinct, particularly if it isn't in self defence. Killing someone from a distance makes it easier. First the gun and then the bomb. Killing someone via a video screen is too close to a simulation. I predict more collaterals and blue-on-blue's as it becomes easier to kill than to think.
I would say that the film took visually down by about 20%, but from an RF point of view, I went from 4/5 reception to zero when I was more than a few feet from the window. The thing is that 20% is abou average on a modern building, so it really wouldn't notice.
A rebar wall makes a fairly good Faraday cage, but mostly only the pillars are rebar. Many recent office buildings have 100% glass walls. The film would work ok there. On a building with walls, then a lot of signal normally leaks through. Yes, the posters are right in that thicker walls tend to attenuate better but usually they are quite transparent to RF.
The thing is that at least one of the existing metallized films (3M, I think) used for solar attenuation is quite a good RF blocker. Mobiles certainly don't work through it.
I guess you didn't see the film. He didn't attack the right to bear arms and moreover was making the point that other countries have the same rights but exercise them better. He is a gun-owner and member of the NRA. What concerned him was the ease of access to arms and ammunition as well as attitudes. The points he made were good ones and the better for being aired. Back to the health-care system, it is clear there is a problem, what he has down is to get people talking. Isn't that a good thing?
Many BIOSs will load microcode fixes into the CPU as part of startup - another good reason to keep up to date. This gets loaded into the CPUs microcde RAM and patches the existing instruction decode to jump to the microcode fix. Yes, it is a little like intercepting an instruction in an OS and emulating it - except on a modern chip, they are RISC machines with a microcde translator around it that interprets the IA32/IA64 instructions.
The problem is that many terrorists don't come from western countries, they don't even have the Latin alphabet at home. Passports are supposed to have names in Latin which are used for comparison but there are multiple possible mappings between say Arabic or Cyrillic and Latin. Dates of birth can also be ambiguous. Believe me, I worked on the problem of identifying people on watch lists for banks. Not only do names and dobs present problems but even the watch lists from say the US and the EU show discrepancies for apparently the same person.
The next point is that the watch lists for the US are maintained by the TSA. You submit a passenger manifest and they tell you clear or not. The system doesn't work in real-time. There have been many instances where the clearance hasn't appeared until the plane is over the Atlantic. This why there isn't a pre-fly check, the TSA cannot cope. Often the TSA would even mix up passenger manifests and flights.
The real check is the overworked entry clearance officer in the visa dept of the consulates and the immigration officer at the point of entry. As is usual, resources are stretched whilst people try to throw technology at the problem.
Sorry, confused it with Jaguar which is also on the block with Land Rover. I hope both survive.
Definitely done in Russia - have seen it happen, especially with diesel trucks. When it gets to -30C, the anti-waxing agent isn't worth much.
Totally agree about the block heater. You really don't want to start a fire underneath!!!!!
My wife has a Yaris and loves it. I've also driven an Avensis and the only thing I could complain about is the nav system from Toyota sucked big time. I just wouldn't buy a Ford now after some very negative experiences and their rejigging of manufacturing would make me worry about Mazda, let alone Aston-Martin and Land-Rover. Maybe the latter two would be sold off but because of the integration work, they would be hard to separate.
I hate to say it, but YMMV!!!!!
Had a number of Fords and all but one was a POS. Dealer service sucked big time. I had starting problems in cold weather for ages and was begging them to fix it under warranty and they cleaned the plugs and generally fscked around. When the warranty expired, I replaced the starter motor myself and no more problems. The exchange unit cost a bit but the saved bother more than compensated. It is suggested that Fords cleaned up their act in the nineties with proper quality management but they had lost me as a customer.
Not funny. I once owned a ford from that era. There would have much more left over - the windshield for example. Ford don't make it and it can't rust.
It is difficult to come up with a single figure. I would point you at www.adac.de, but even there it is difficult to come up with a clear number for reliability. Unsurprisingly though Toyota comes out about best followed by the German majors, Mercedes, BMW. VWAG has fallen behind a bit.
Add something else. How many Hollywood movies actually make money on paper? Not a lot? Hollywood accounting is a cliché. If they were not losing all that money, would they really be paying that as taxes?
Possibly. I was doing a quick conversion from from 5.5 litres/100Km, mixed cycle. However my wife has the non-sports Yaris with a slightly smaller engine and different tuning.
Unfortunately, I'm looking at max ten years old. Due to where I am at the moment (Germany), unless a car is very old, there is a combination of tax and insurance that makes keeping older cars on the road quite expensive. Of course, the other issue is that the electronics are still very tough to diagnose and fix unless you are a dealer. There are things like reconed EMUs around but they are not cheap.
Interesting. I was staying in the UK for 4 nights a week max but didn't want to enable the phone line + data because of minimum contract lengths. I would guess that cable would have given me a similar issue. It tuned out to be a good idea because the project was canned after three months and I moved country. Unfortunately although rental property sometimes comes with a phone line, it is still quite rare in the UK to find an internet connection. I guess that will change though.
The LK201s (keyboards on VT2xx series) were specced to take coffee and soft-drinks. I know, I had the functional spec way back when. The electronics wouldn't suffer but the action would get grungy. When washed under a tap with clean water and allowed to dry they were back to new.
Trading rooms in particular were the bane of keyboards. Reuters had some pretty expensive ones that they would wash first in water then in Iso-propyl alcohol. After a couple of days or so drying they could be considered 'refurbished' and available as customer swap units.
Maybe for the US produced ones, however there is a very good reason that about 70% of the taxis in Germany are Mercedes and the rest are BMs. They are expensive to buy and maintain but given their planned maintenance they keep going and going. Where they fall down is value for money. An S-class Merc is a beautiful machine but as I'm neither a drug dealer nor a filmstar, I can forget owning one. I do like renting such cars when I travel to Germany though, for 200Kph down the autobahn, they are great.
I also know someone who drove an eight year old three series beamer from Germany to Tashkent. It got there and keeps going and was the pride and joy of my driver there