Teak is pretty dense. In fact if you take a as-cut piece of teak it'll sink in water.
To sink in fresh, pure water at 4c, wood has to have a specific gravity of 1 or higher. True ironwoods meet that requirement. Teak is not an ironwood.
As salt water is ~3.5% denser than fresh water at the same temperature, something that doesn't sink in fresh water isn't going to sink in salt water under the same conditions.
That doesn't mean that it isn't possible to find a particular piece of teak that is heavier than 1 (though this is highly unlikely, teak typically tops out around.75) due to specific growing conditions, and of course water gets less dense as it gets warmer, but I will leave the math to you to figure out just how warm the water has to be for a freshly cut piece of teak to sink. Adding in unknown impurities to the water starts make it challenging (other than salt).
For more homework, examine what kinds of trees grow along coastlines subject to tsunamis (including trunks of trees that could find their way to the sea shore via rivers) and what their specific gravities are. Add in that a trunk of meaningful size can take years to fully saturate, and realize that flotsam comparable to that dock has been crossing oceans far longer than bipedal locomotion has existed.
Which has nothing to do with whether or not that floating dock should be sold to the highest bidder as scrap, and if the highest bidder wants to put it back into service it must be cleaned/scraped before doing so.
I didn't want to pick the easiest fruit only to leave no one interested in playing along;-). The Time Enough for Love was worth it if only for that one quote, the other stuff was more like a man's version of a bodice ripper, agreed:))!
And, yes, he was pretty much a Rand-ian, though in favor of a strong central government? Quite the opposite. From wikiquotes: I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces — with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way the government sticks its nose into everything, now.
The Robert Heinlein Interview, and other Heinleiniana (1990) by J. Neil Schulman
How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show — it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak. (Red Planet, 1949)
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck." (Time Enough for Love, 1973)
And I wouldn't classify a 23" 1080p monitor as having 72dpi. My particular monitor is 51 cm across yielding ~95dpi. Most desktop monitors today are in the 100dpi realm (+/-10 dpi; anyone who would buy a 27" 1080p monitor to use at normal desktop monitor distances probably isn't very picky about jaggies, for sure, but at greater than 90-100 cm viewing distances they can be quite nice). At 100 dpi, English characters are legible and not jaggy at the specs I previously mentioned (super- and subscripts of 12-14 point fonts aren't typically 12-14 point fonts so they don't count, though the anti-aliasing grey edges are plainly there for many people on 12-14 point fonts for black on white text, I suspect).
Would more be better? Yes, but not so much for English characters. All the people who use ideographs or more curvy character sets would appreciate it a lot, though, not to mention all the non-character based usages.
English characters on a 1080p screen at a reasonable distance for the usage model aren't too bad (ex. 23" diagonal @ arms length or a bit further, 12-14 point fonts). Many Chinese characters are still jaggy as hell to me at similar font sizes, though. Age has taken away my post-lasik 20/15 vision, so I don't think I am a corner case. Maybe it is time for a touch-up job.
I won't complain about 127 DPI on a 92cm diagonal monitor (if you sold me one for a price I could afford). If they had even 1/2 the DPI of the iPhone, though, it would only be a ~64cm diagonal monitor and I would have a lot better chance of being able to afford it- assuming screen real estate is more expensive than more drivers in a smaller space.
Given the usage model of a computer monitor versus a smart phone, 1/2 the DPI of an iPhone seems quite reasonable to me (at least until next year).
Cheapest (and easiest) way to get win7 in North America (and probably Europe, too, but it doesn't work in Asia): Make friends with a university student who doesn't want the $15 copy that Microsoft makes available to students at accredited universities (but not in Asia). $15 for the full Ultimate retail version, and if the school doesn't actually have DVDs on site Microsoft will email out a license code and a download link to a valid.edu address (and non.edu with some kicking, screaming, and a note from your professor). A similarly cheap (but not as easy) way is to make friends with someone who works at Microsoft.
Alternatively, if you do want to go to Frys, Microcenter, or any other retailer who offers you an OEM copy for $99, it is not legit (stupidly) unless you also buy at least one part you could use to build a computer (CPU fan, HDD, graphics card, etc...). When trivial gaming allows you to get ~50% discount, regular price is set way too high. But there are reasons why lotteries exist, as well.
The Thinkpad series started in 1992, and you would have been hard pressed to get one without at least 1 MB of memory because they were high-end at the time. It would also have a 486, which should be pretty recognizable if you opened up the computer. Also, you say it is running XP, so that right there says it probably isn't one of the original Thinkpads.
Are you sure it isn't a computer with 128MB of RAM? Might it not be just as easy to rummage around in a drawer and find some old laptop memory to shove in the computer and make it bootable? I try to keep my spare parts to a manageable space- no more than one medium moving box, including old (1)ST-506 and (2)SCSI drives, fans, and assorted bare chips- but short of bubble memory I probably could fill a spare slot in any commercially successful desktop or notebook computer since the late '80s;-).
I not only know how to spell it, I know how to say it and even prepare it for the restaurant I used to own. But for the accents, 5 years spent off and on in France was enough to make me realize that je ne donne pas une merde. Was that spelled well enough for you?
Protip: Some things are just worth laughing about in good fun.
If this happened in Australia Kim would altready be in US custardy.
NZ purposly made legal mistakes and are now intentionally hindering the US!
It is distinctly possible that the USA would jail Kim for as long as they could, but it is highly unlikely they would ever attempt to turn him into a creme brulee.
Yes to this. Down Lafayette way, the rule is "If it doesn't move, eat it. If it does move, hit it over the head, then eat it."
I find it humorous the number of Chinese I break montou with in Beijing who are somewhat intimidated by the range of what I consider not just an acceptable food but desirable. However, the wording is different. In the US, I get told "Dude, sick" or "F*cking Cajun" (by my friends), here I get told "You are great!" by people who then won't even consider touching what I am eating with their chopsticks. That is never an issue in Guangzhou, however. Some of the bugs in the aquariums as you walk into the seafood restaurants there do qualify as beyond my willingness to try a second time.;-)
While you make a good point, you also fail on the other. Japan was on the receiving end of 2 atomic bombs targeted at military/industrial complex cities. They had no idea that the USA had only two bombs to use, and that there was no 3rd ready for a coup de grace on Tokyo or perhaps Osaka or Yokohama.
Yet your point about Russia is well made. Reading the historical accounts of surviving leaders of Japan, what I gleaned is that they WOULD have been willing to bombed to total annihilation or starved to death by the Americans rather than be captured in fighting with the Russians. The majority of military leaders weren't so much afraid of being killed by the Russians as having Tokyo captured by them, and with two bombs having destroyed so much manufacturing infrastructure they knew this to be an inevitability if they didn't surrender sooner to the Allied forces.
Actually, no. Party officials in China are broken up into four ranks when it comes to cars stipends: 1) they get so much they can afford a Mercedes or BMW (means they are one of the top 5% or so officials in a province, more in a big city like Beijing, Shanghai, or Chongqing, and these guys have absolutely no problems being ostentatious, thus their princeling children started learning their lessons early) 2) they get enough so they can afford an Audi A6L (if they want to use their own cash to move up to an A8L they can, but there generally isn't enough money to afford a nice Mercedes or BMW if you include maintenance/repairs beyond the ordinary) 3) they get enough to afford an A4L 4) they get nothing. The luxury car companies all fight it out for these stipends, with Audi probably doing the best at matching features to appropriate price bands.
Notice that all versions have an L after them. A party official would generally prefer die than own a non-L version, since the L versions are considered cars they COULD have a driver with, if a situation ever called for it. Few people short of class 1 ever get a driver on a regular basis, though. In general, the cost of moving up from an A4L to a Mercedes or BMW is much too great, and they would rather save their money for a "nice" flat. Same goes for the A6L- take the car, save money for as many houses as they can afford (that attitude is beginning to change with property prices dropping from their historic highs). The guy I was dealing with has a flat provided by the university, so he used his money to buy a nice car, instead, since he doesn't qualify for a stipend. The money the school pays him isn't enough to actually afford the car, he raised the extra money via entrepreneurial spirit and getting commissions for signing kids up for IELTS and TOEFL cram schools.
This is far enough away from the Iran subject that I will drop it now. Besides, I have another dinner to be at shortly.
So you are saying the Fars News Agency, an Iranian web site, is actually a US media site and was founded by a former adviser to Dick Cheney? Because the very first link in the Yahoo web page I originally included points to it. Perhaps I should have used that link originally, but I thought the Yahoo web site did a better job of fleshing out the story.
But you are welcome to begin believing that even native Farsi speakers are unable to translate correctly, because the following is obviously a mistranslated peace overture: "The Zionist regime is a real cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut, God Willing," Ayatollah Khamenei underscored.
The proper way to get yourself in bad with the head of the communist party at a university is to ask if he owns the Audi he drove up in, but the 30 seconds or so of blank stare as he goes through all the possible reasons why you might be asking that question is freaking hilarious.
Never is a mighty long time, and religious tenets frequently get left behind (or reinterpreted, or taqiyya'd) in a desire to achieve a goal.
“The Iranian nation is standing for its cause and that is the full annihilation of Israel,” Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi said in a speech to a defense
gathering Sunday in Tehran.
His remarks came on the day International Atomic Energy Agency director Yukiya Amano flew to Tehran to negotiate for inspections
of Iran’s nuclear program. They were reported by the Fars News Agency, the media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
While he could expect everyone else to do the dirty work and hope for a better outcome then the 6 day war, the only meaningful way the Iranian military could achieve his stated cause is with nukes (or chemical/biological weapons).
While I see no indication that Nazism is popular in China, at almost every book sale I pass on college campuses, I see Chinese translations of Mein Kampf for sale. I have never seen one sold, nor even seen anyone pick one up, but I don't hang around the sales for a long time, either. One of these days I am going to have to ask what's up with that.
As for the original topic, if you can't reverse engineer 50 year old technology that you have in your physical possession at least to the point of understanding the basic physics well enough to make a reasonable imitation, what a backwards place you have to be. What are they going to copy next, the B-52? Copying an airframe isn't very challenging, particularly when they already own plenty to disassemble, but without modern electronics and modern doctrine training, they might as well be clay pigeons to anyone but their own people.
Looking at the original article (mod me up, I RTFM'd!), though, I am wondering how many of those Cobras were photoshopped in (and why none of them seem to have more than half the rotor with the sky a strange color in the space where the missing blade should be), and why can't I find Jar-Jar Binks... he has to be in there somewhere!
I travel between China and the USA, and when I am in the USA I want 4G support, so buying a non-4G version of the Razr Maxx is out of the question (what is sold in Asia is all non-4G as far as I have found). I already know the Verizon version is supported on China Unicom's 3G network, so using it in China isn't a problem.
I wonder what the chance is this ban, even temporary, would allow me to pick up a 4G Razr Maxx for less than the fairly crazy US$649/no contract price it goes for in the USA... Surely some have to fall off the backed up shipping crates in Guangzhou (they haven't made it to Taobao yet, though:( )... I wish I had a mustache to twirl right now...
What helps to be able to bypass requirements is being able to demonstrate life experience, as you point out. The other way to do it is to be personally known by a professor working at the university you wish to attend. In spite of only having a B.S. in C.S., I was offered the chance to go directly for my PhD by both a Berkley (or was he at Stanford, I forget) and University of Texas professor because they were my students in a specialized computer architecture course I taught in the 90's, both were willing to get me waived through 90% of the pre-req graduate courses and completely ignore any entrance testing requirements. Looking back, I really regret not taking Dr. Jenevein up on his offer, I might have been able to study with Djikstra. I was having too much fun playing round-the-world consultant at that time to consider the 2 year break... short term thinking, sigh...
Qbertino- Consider moving outside of Germany for a while. If you can find a workplace that values you for more than just your technical skills (the ability to speak fluent German [and English, I guess?] in a non-German speaking country, for example), you may find it easier to move into a management position. Once you have a couple of years in management in another country, you have ticked several boxes that will make you more valuable back at home. Just be prepared that, outside of Switzerland, no one will ever be consistently on time for meetings with you...:P.
Slashdot Mirror
Replying to myself: Whoever marked my original message overrated as obviously never tried lionfish!
Teak is pretty dense. In fact if you take a as-cut piece of teak it'll sink in water.
To sink in fresh, pure water at 4c, wood has to have a specific gravity of 1 or higher. True ironwoods meet that requirement. Teak is not an ironwood.
As salt water is ~3.5% denser than fresh water at the same temperature, something that doesn't sink in fresh water isn't going to sink in salt water under the same conditions.
That doesn't mean that it isn't possible to find a particular piece of teak that is heavier than 1 (though this is highly unlikely, teak typically tops out around .75) due to specific growing conditions, and of course water gets less dense as it gets warmer, but I will leave the math to you to figure out just how warm the water has to be for a freshly cut piece of teak to sink. Adding in unknown impurities to the water starts make it challenging (other than salt).
For more homework, examine what kinds of trees grow along coastlines subject to tsunamis (including trunks of trees that could find their way to the sea shore via rivers) and what their specific gravities are. Add in that a trunk of meaningful size can take years to fully saturate, and realize that flotsam comparable to that dock has been crossing oceans far longer than bipedal locomotion has existed.
The person who keeps spamming that trees will quickly absorb water and sink needs to be trolled out of existence (not for doing it once, for doing it repeatedly). Balsa, for example, has a specific gravity of under 200, and it takes longer for water to saturate it enough than it takes to cross the Pacific Ocean. Remember Kon-Tiki?
In fact, had Heyerdahl followed the advice of other sailors, both he and his crew would likely have perished. The sap in the balsa wood prevented the sea water from penetrating the logs and kept them buoyant. Also, as the waves lifted the boat, the ropes used to lash the logs together dug into the soft wood, forming grooves that protected the ropes. Steel cables or wire would have sawed through the logs and left the crew clutching small stumps to survive. Balsa is not the only wood (far from it) capable of such a feat.
Which has nothing to do with whether or not that floating dock should be sold to the highest bidder as scrap, and if the highest bidder wants to put it back into service it must be cleaned/scraped before doing so.
Anything that brings cheaper sushi, I am all for it! Best way to resolve invasive species problems... first find a way to serve them up!
I didn't want to pick the easiest fruit only to leave no one interested in playing along ;-). The Time Enough for Love was worth it if only for that one quote, the other stuff was more like a man's version of a bodice ripper, agreed :))!
And, yes, he was pretty much a Rand-ian, though in favor of a strong central government? Quite the opposite.
From wikiquotes:
I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces — with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way the government sticks its nose into everything, now.
The Robert Heinlein Interview, and other Heinleiniana (1990) by J. Neil Schulman
How many Heinlein quotes are appropriate here?
How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show — it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak. (Red Planet, 1949)
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck." (Time Enough for Love, 1973)
Two good ones to consider, I think.
I wonder if they will approach the level of condemnation that Saverin received for giving up his USA citizenship first before the IPO?
And I wouldn't classify a 23" 1080p monitor as having 72dpi. My particular monitor is 51 cm across yielding ~95dpi. Most desktop monitors today are in the 100dpi realm (+/-10 dpi; anyone who would buy a 27" 1080p monitor to use at normal desktop monitor distances probably isn't very picky about jaggies, for sure, but at greater than 90-100 cm viewing distances they can be quite nice). At 100 dpi, English characters are legible and not jaggy at the specs I previously mentioned (super- and subscripts of 12-14 point fonts aren't typically 12-14 point fonts so they don't count, though the anti-aliasing grey edges are plainly there for many people on 12-14 point fonts for black on white text, I suspect).
Would more be better? Yes, but not so much for English characters. All the people who use ideographs or more curvy character sets would appreciate it a lot, though, not to mention all the non-character based usages.
English characters on a 1080p screen at a reasonable distance for the usage model aren't too bad (ex. 23" diagonal @ arms length or a bit further, 12-14 point fonts). Many Chinese characters are still jaggy as hell to me at similar font sizes, though. Age has taken away my post-lasik 20/15 vision, so I don't think I am a corner case. Maybe it is time for a touch-up job.
I won't complain about 127 DPI on a 92cm diagonal monitor (if you sold me one for a price I could afford). If they had even 1/2 the DPI of the iPhone, though, it would only be a ~64cm diagonal monitor and I would have a lot better chance of being able to afford it- assuming screen real estate is more expensive than more drivers in a smaller space.
Given the usage model of a computer monitor versus a smart phone, 1/2 the DPI of an iPhone seems quite reasonable to me (at least until next year).
Cheapest (and easiest) way to get win7 in North America (and probably Europe, too, but it doesn't work in Asia): Make friends with a university student who doesn't want the $15 copy that Microsoft makes available to students at accredited universities (but not in Asia). $15 for the full Ultimate retail version, and if the school doesn't actually have DVDs on site Microsoft will email out a license code and a download link to a valid .edu address (and non .edu with some kicking, screaming, and a note from your professor). A similarly cheap (but not as easy) way is to make friends with someone who works at Microsoft.
Alternatively, if you do want to go to Frys, Microcenter, or any other retailer who offers you an OEM copy for $99, it is not legit (stupidly) unless you also buy at least one part you could use to build a computer (CPU fan, HDD, graphics card, etc...). When trivial gaming allows you to get ~50% discount, regular price is set way too high. But there are reasons why lotteries exist, as well.
The Thinkpad series started in 1992, and you would have been hard pressed to get one without at least 1 MB of memory because they were high-end at the time. It would also have a 486, which should be pretty recognizable if you opened up the computer. Also, you say it is running XP, so that right there says it probably isn't one of the original Thinkpads.
Are you sure it isn't a computer with 128MB of RAM? Might it not be just as easy to rummage around in a drawer and find some old laptop memory to shove in the computer and make it bootable? I try to keep my spare parts to a manageable space- no more than one medium moving box, including old (1)ST-506 and (2)SCSI drives, fans, and assorted bare chips- but short of bubble memory I probably could fill a spare slot in any commercially successful desktop or notebook computer since the late '80s ;-).
I not only know how to spell it, I know how to say it and even prepare it for the restaurant I used to own. But for the accents, 5 years spent off and on in France was enough to make me realize that je ne donne pas une merde. Was that spelled well enough for you?
Protip: Some things are just worth laughing about in good fun.
If this happened in Australia Kim would altready be in US custardy.
NZ purposly made legal mistakes and are now intentionally hindering the US!
It is distinctly possible that the USA would jail Kim for as long as they could, but it is highly unlikely they would ever attempt to turn him into a creme brulee.
Yes to this. Down Lafayette way, the rule is "If it doesn't move, eat it. If it does move, hit it over the head, then eat it."
I find it humorous the number of Chinese I break montou with in Beijing who are somewhat intimidated by the range of what I consider not just an acceptable food but desirable. However, the wording is different. In the US, I get told "Dude, sick" or "F*cking Cajun" (by my friends), here I get told "You are great!" by people who then won't even consider touching what I am eating with their chopsticks. That is never an issue in Guangzhou, however. Some of the bugs in the aquariums as you walk into the seafood restaurants there do qualify as beyond my willingness to try a second time. ;-)
While you make a good point, you also fail on the other. Japan was on the receiving end of 2 atomic bombs targeted at military/industrial complex cities. They had no idea that the USA had only two bombs to use, and that there was no 3rd ready for a coup de grace on Tokyo or perhaps Osaka or Yokohama.
Yet your point about Russia is well made. Reading the historical accounts of surviving leaders of Japan, what I gleaned is that they WOULD have been willing to bombed to total annihilation or starved to death by the Americans rather than be captured in fighting with the Russians. The majority of military leaders weren't so much afraid of being killed by the Russians as having Tokyo captured by them, and with two bombs having destroyed so much manufacturing infrastructure they knew this to be an inevitability if they didn't surrender sooner to the Allied forces.
Actually, no. Party officials in China are broken up into four ranks when it comes to cars stipends: 1) they get so much they can afford a Mercedes or BMW (means they are one of the top 5% or so officials in a province, more in a big city like Beijing, Shanghai, or Chongqing, and these guys have absolutely no problems being ostentatious, thus their princeling children started learning their lessons early) 2) they get enough so they can afford an Audi A6L (if they want to use their own cash to move up to an A8L they can, but there generally isn't enough money to afford a nice Mercedes or BMW if you include maintenance/repairs beyond the ordinary) 3) they get enough to afford an A4L 4) they get nothing. The luxury car companies all fight it out for these stipends, with Audi probably doing the best at matching features to appropriate price bands.
Notice that all versions have an L after them. A party official would generally prefer die than own a non-L version, since the L versions are considered cars they COULD have a driver with, if a situation ever called for it. Few people short of class 1 ever get a driver on a regular basis, though. In general, the cost of moving up from an A4L to a Mercedes or BMW is much too great, and they would rather save their money for a "nice" flat. Same goes for the A6L- take the car, save money for as many houses as they can afford (that attitude is beginning to change with property prices dropping from their historic highs). The guy I was dealing with has a flat provided by the university, so he used his money to buy a nice car, instead, since he doesn't qualify for a stipend. The money the school pays him isn't enough to actually afford the car, he raised the extra money via entrepreneurial spirit and getting commissions for signing kids up for IELTS and TOEFL cram schools.
This is far enough away from the Iran subject that I will drop it now. Besides, I have another dinner to be at shortly.
So you are saying the Fars News Agency, an Iranian web site, is actually a US media site and was founded by a former adviser to Dick Cheney? Because the very first link in the Yahoo web page I originally included points to it. Perhaps I should have used that link originally, but I thought the Yahoo web site did a better job of fleshing out the story.
But you are welcome to begin believing that even native Farsi speakers are unable to translate correctly, because the following is obviously a mistranslated peace overture: "The Zionist regime is a real cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut, God Willing," Ayatollah Khamenei underscored.
The proper way to get yourself in bad with the head of the communist party at a university is to ask if he owns the Audi he drove up in, but the 30 seconds or so of blank stare as he goes through all the possible reasons why you might be asking that question is freaking hilarious.
d6/2, round up. Turn in your geek card.
Never is a mighty long time, and religious tenets frequently get left behind (or reinterpreted, or taqiyya'd) in a desire to achieve a goal.
“The Iranian nation is standing for its cause and that is the full annihilation of Israel,” Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi said in a speech to a defense
gathering Sunday in Tehran.
His remarks came on the day International Atomic Energy Agency director Yukiya Amano flew to Tehran to negotiate for inspections
of Iran’s nuclear program. They were reported by the Fars News Agency, the media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
While he could expect everyone else to do the dirty work and hope for a better outcome then the 6 day war, the only meaningful way the Iranian military could achieve his stated cause is with nukes (or chemical/biological weapons).
While I see no indication that Nazism is popular in China, at almost every book sale I pass on college campuses, I see Chinese translations of Mein Kampf for sale. I have never seen one sold, nor even seen anyone pick one up, but I don't hang around the sales for a long time, either. One of these days I am going to have to ask what's up with that.
As for the original topic, if you can't reverse engineer 50 year old technology that you have in your physical possession at least to the point of understanding the basic physics well enough to make a reasonable imitation, what a backwards place you have to be. What are they going to copy next, the B-52? Copying an airframe isn't very challenging, particularly when they already own plenty to disassemble, but without modern electronics and modern doctrine training, they might as well be clay pigeons to anyone but their own people.
Looking at the original article (mod me up, I RTFM'd!), though, I am wondering how many of those Cobras were photoshopped in (and why none of them seem to have more than half the rotor with the sky a strange color in the space where the missing blade should be), and why can't I find Jar-Jar Binks... he has to be in there somewhere!
That would be a first.
I travel between China and the USA, and when I am in the USA I want 4G support, so buying a non-4G version of the Razr Maxx is out of the question (what is sold in Asia is all non-4G as far as I have found). I already know the Verizon version is supported on China Unicom's 3G network, so using it in China isn't a problem.
I wonder what the chance is this ban, even temporary, would allow me to pick up a 4G Razr Maxx for less than the fairly crazy US$649/no contract price it goes for in the USA... Surely some have to fall off the backed up shipping crates in Guangzhou (they haven't made it to Taobao yet, though :( )... I wish I had a mustache to twirl right now...
What helps to be able to bypass requirements is being able to demonstrate life experience, as you point out. The other way to do it is to be personally known by a professor working at the university you wish to attend. In spite of only having a B.S. in C.S., I was offered the chance to go directly for my PhD by both a Berkley (or was he at Stanford, I forget) and University of Texas professor because they were my students in a specialized computer architecture course I taught in the 90's, both were willing to get me waived through 90% of the pre-req graduate courses and completely ignore any entrance testing requirements. Looking back, I really regret not taking Dr. Jenevein up on his offer, I might have been able to study with Djikstra. I was having too much fun playing round-the-world consultant at that time to consider the 2 year break... short term thinking, sigh...
Qbertino- Consider moving outside of Germany for a while. If you can find a workplace that values you for more than just your technical skills (the ability to speak fluent German [and English, I guess?] in a non-German speaking country, for example), you may find it easier to move into a management position. Once you have a couple of years in management in another country, you have ticked several boxes that will make you more valuable back at home. Just be prepared that, outside of Switzerland, no one will ever be consistently on time for meetings with you... :P.
Damn good thing I have a keyboard cover, I don't own a mechanical keyboard I can just toss in the dishwasher anymore!