Makes calls, sends/receives SMS messages, has an alarm clock. Nothing more.
The display is an interesting high-contrast E-Paper gizmo. It requires no backlight to read in any sort of lighting (including direct sunlight). The image 'holds' if you pop the battery out. As you can imagine, the battery life's great. On the downside, the display is also the phone's greatest weakness, as the resolution is miserably low, which makes sending/reading texts and navigating the phonebook a daunting task.
But still, at £20 for an unlocked phone, I'm not complaining. If it had a slightly better display, it'd be a killer phone. Also a pity that it's not sold in the US...
Seriously.... does the American auto industry have an f----ing death wish?
Their cars are expensive, inefficient, underpowered, and poorly-made compared to the competition. And now they spy on you....
Why can't Detroit wake up in time to save its sorry ass? I hate to say it, but I think there's a *very* real chance of seeing both GM and Ford going belly-up in my lifetime. Hopefully whatever comes along (if anything) to replace them will be a bit more innovative.
And please don't take this as flamebait, but when you've lost your edge and are hemorrhaging cash and customers, the *last* thing a company wants to do is to alienate their remaining customers even further.
However, AT&T and Verizon's wireless arm sit somewhere among the RIAA, MPAA, and the guy who designed the packaging on jewel cases in terms of the amount of respect/patience I have for them.
If we can get a carrier that doesn't treat its customers like dirt, I think the ads are a decent tradeoff. Even better, if the carriers are indeed disaggregated, we'll wind up with a system like Europe, where the cost of the handset is often *completely* separated from the plan. The Mobile networks provide the airspace and the bandwidth -- that's it. Pricing schemes tend to be mostly straightforward.
I pay 10p ($0.20 USD) GBP per minute outgoing, and 5p ($0.10 USD) per SMS outgoing on my UK mobile. No monthly fees or bizarre restrictions like you see on US prepay carriers. If you're a heavy user, a prepay scheme might cost you a bit more money, but for someone like myself who rarely gabs on for more than a minute or two, it's much cheaper than what I used to pay in the US. (OT: This is more or less the *only* instance under which something is cheaper in the UK than the US. This graph should scare the pants off of you if you're an American.)
I didn't mind paying for my handset either. I needed a basic but durable handset, and the fine forces of capitalism indeed produced such a device at a reasonable cost. I'm pretty sure that all Verizon users can testify that their entire line of devices is absolute garbage.
So... bring it on. I welcome some 'real' competition in the industry.
This site provides a pretty good list of colloquialisms present in British English that are absent in America. If you take a visit to the UK, I'd advise skimming through it as to not seem completely ignorant, and to avoid a certain degree of confusion. If you're visiting Edinburgh, and don't want to stick out like a sore thumb, I'd also recommend learning how to pronounce the name of the city -- I'm always amazed by how many people get that one wrong....
On the other hand, if they start using cockney rhyming slang, just give up.
That said, the article wasn't really loaded with British colloquialisms that you couldn't figure out on your own.
IE7's user interface is absolutely ghastly. It's considerably different from IE6, and doesn't offer much (if anything) in terms of improvements.
From the user's perspective, the transition from IE6 to Firefox is much less than the transition between IE6 and IE7.
I welcome the improved standards support in IE7, and laud Microsoft for (finally) doing so. However, Firefox remains the superior browser out of the two.
Oh come now. Although I don't want this to turn into a political flamewar, France doesn't have any sort of pervasive hatred toward Americans.
Yes. France disagreed with the U.S. about Iraq (and yes, even though their reasons for doing so weren't the most honorable, it's fairly safe to say at this point that they were on the "right" side of the debate). However, this was a criticism of a matter of foreign politics and policy, and not some sort of personal vendetta against the entire population of America (especially those evil industrial design firms in California!)
It was the US who took the issue way too far. Even though it was a joke, serving "freedom fries" in the senate cafeteria was terribly crass.
Surprise! The world does not hate Americans by default. Most of them don't approve of what the government's doing, but neither do 70% of Americans these days.
Am I the only one a bit concerned about Novel taking on the self-assumed role of being the new "corporate stewards" of Linux? Especially since the slashdot community seems to accept them and IBM in that role...
My last job (I'm currently a full-time student) was as an IT guy in a 40% Mac, 60% PC shop.
The Macs definitely cost us less to maintain per machine, simply because we never had to remove spyware from them.
If a mac came in with a hardware problem, it was more often than not covered under our support agreement with Apple, and we'd box it up and ship it out at Apple's expense. If it was an urgent matter requiring a turnaround of more than the 2 or 3 days it took to do a depot repair, we'd lend them a spare. When buying in bulk, the support contracts are usually cheap enough to be "definitely worth it".
Sure, it's probably not optimal, and I suppose that it's not great for our job security either, but it also never really bothered anybody.
We all know that the Appendix is the useful bit at the end of the instruction manual. Heck.... there are often several of them, all labeled in a neat alphabetical order.
And yeah.... if you pour water on it, and set it out in the sun, I'm sure it'll become a haven for bacteria.... but would you really want to do that?
Bell Labs had a near infinite source of money, and concentrated much of its efforts on hardware development, as well as pushing the envelope on general science.
Sun manufactures nice servers (increasingly using off-the-shelf components), and writes software. I'm also not going to forgive them for Java.
You're judging a computer solely based upon how easy it is to disassemble?
I think you need to step back, and remember that IT works for the company. The company does not work for the IT department. If the boss wants the laptop, then he's damn well going to get a laptop. Unless you have a better excuse than "It occasionally makes my job a pain", he's got the upper hand.
I will agree that Thinkpads are very nice. With a few minor exceptions, they're easy to disassemble. They're ridiculously durable, and generally tend to be pretty reliable. All this comes at a cost of course, and Thinkpads tend to be hellishly expensive, especially if you want something particularly fast or lightweight.
Apple's got the laptop thing figured out pretty well. Their machines are generally fitted with the Intel's top-of-the-line-without-being-extravagant chips, have decent specs, are lightweight and durable (even on the low-end models), and are really quite inexpensive when you consider the value for the money. They seem to have addressed the hard-drive replacement concerns, and the drives on the new MacBooks are much easier to access (I'll agree that the older iBooks were indeed awful to disassemble).
But Dell..... Dell's laptops have been awful for a few years now. For the most part, they haven't significantly evolved past the C-Series chassis that they were using since the 90s. Pick up a dell laptop with one hand -- it'll weigh 6 pounds, feel flimsy, and in many cases, you'll actually hear the chassis start to creak and bend. Now do the same with a Thinkpad or MacBook. Now, decide which of the three is least likely to survive being dropped from 4 feet up.
I suppose that the ability to remove the hard drive, and also completely break the machine apart into a million pieces with minimal effort could be considered a selling point, but it's not very high up on my list.
There was a point in time when the expandability of an ATX desktop was considerably superior to a laptop or a proprietary desktop. Considering that technology has become relatively stable, along with the advent of USB and Firewire, the need for an expandable system is pretty much negated. Unless you count gamers, and anyone else who has the serious need to do massive amounts of number-crunching, most people are adequately served by a laptop.
NY's actually pretty easy to explain. A quick history lesson:
Their infrastructure is a mess. It's old, it's outdated, and the scary thing is that nobody really has a firm grip on just how bad it is.
The Queens blackout last year was a prime example of this. It lasted almost two weeks, and Con Edison (NYC's public utility) didn't have any idea what was the main cause of it. Every time they patched the hole, another part of the system would fail catastrophically.
Earlier this year, a portion of 42nd street exploded, because a hundred-year-old steam pipe failed. The particular pipe had never been tested, and the steam system evidently does not have any sort of system to shut off the flow in the event of an explosive decompression.
Have you been on one of the Subways recently? How about Penn Station? NYC still doesn't have ATO on its subways, and uses an ancient interlocking system that forces the trains to run at wider intervals than they could. There was a fire a few years back in a room full of relays and other electrical equipment that dated back to the subway's original construction. It was feared that that line would be offline for years, as the only people who knew about the equipment in that room had been dead for decades, and there were no accurate or plans of how to rebuild the room.
They're currently in the process of building a new subway. One of the most expensive parts of the project is just going to be locating and moving existing infrastructure, because the city doesn't have a terribly good idea of what's buried underground, and moreover what's still being used and what's abandoned.
New York City was one of the last places on the planet where you could buy DC off of the grid. Many older buildings had lifts that were old enough to pre-date alternating current. It was finally discontinued last year, as DC power transmission is horrendously inefficient.
A few years ago, a lady was electrocuted after touching a metal streetpole. In the investigation that followed, Con Edison discovered hundreds of poles and metallic surfaces with hazardous levels of stray voltage in them, all in public places.
These examples pretty strongly support the hypothesis that New York's infrastructure is in a scary state. I'm not terribly surprised that the telecom systems aren't completely up to snuff -- they've got a host of other things to work on. NYC's infrastructure was hastily constructed in the early 20th century, and then neglected for the remainder of it. Now the money's finally in place, and something's being done about it, but it's still going to be a while before we see any tangible results. There are Verizon and ConEd trucks on every corner laying new cable -- just give it patience, and it'll eventually get done.
Re:Do you like Slashdot discussions?
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 1
More to the point: Do you have a second account that you use for anonymity?
Is KDawson such an account, collectively used by the editors for the stories they're too drunk/embarrassed to post themselves?
Re:Why haven't you fired Kdawson yet?
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 1
My best guess is that the aggregating blogs (ie. Boing Boing) have a lot more bandwidth. Likewise, I'm sure that the editors don't want to be accused of plagiarism. If he got the idea for the story for another blog, he should link back to it -- it really *is* the ethical thing to do.
I was indeed referring to that with the heaviest of sarcasm.
Since I suppose the slashdot nerds don't appear quite as up to speed on the situation, the President of Iran made a speech at Columbia University a week or two ago, where he proudly declared that there are absolutely no homosexuals in Iran.
And, yes. Of course I understand that homosexuality is a naturally-occurring phenomenon (with strong statistical and biological evidence to support this). However, from what I understand, the bell-curve hypothesis isn't well-supported, especially with the peak centered around 50%. Whatever the estimates are regarding the distribution of human sexuality, it's safe to say that 50% of the population is NOT bisexual. In the gay community, there's also a surprising bit of contention over whether or not there are "real" bisexuals (especially among males).
A more reasonable alternate proposed was a bimodal distribution with a large peak halfway between Heterosexual and bisexual, and a smaller peak halfway between bisexual and homosexual.
Insulin's a generic drug. It's not the most terribly profitable thing to manufacture and sell, especially given the relatively static demand for it.
In the pharmaceutical industry, margins on generic drugs tend to be razor-thin simply due to the laws of economics. Insulin is insulin -- assuming that there's no industry collusion, if one vendor lowers their price, the entire market will flock to that vendor, because his product is identical.
This results in the price bottoming out somewhere just above the mark at which it's profitable to produce the stuff.
Personally, I'm a bit more afraid of the idea that the people in charge at the moment aren't stupid at all.
George Bush may be (or at least appear to be) a bumbling idiot, but the people working directly for him are most certainly not. That scares the crap out of me.
You're conveniently remembering that the kid was being held on the ground by at least four police officers when he was tased, and wasn't resisting arrest by that point.
It's also pretty doubtful that there was ever the risk of him causing any sort of physical harm to the officers or people in the room.
It's a very clear-cut case of police brutality, especially given the number of people who caught it on film. The police instigated a confrontation, tackled the kid to the ground, and after he had fully submitted to them, he was attacked once again.
In the 20th century, we pushed the envelope on what the science of the time would allow. I might be naive to say this, but by the 70s, modern science was rapidly approaching its limits (at least on the frontiers that were being explored at the time)
Now that we've reached that limit, we're starting new frontiers open up, particularly in how we can engineer new products and materials out of existing technology --- this doesn't occur through breakthroughs or sudden leaps and bounds.
Quantum Mechanics wasn't developed overnight, and I'm sure that many of the physicists involved in the field at the time were frustrated as hell by the fact that none of their data could even be remotely explained by what we thought were the fundamental laws of the universe. In retrospect, it's a remarkable and groundbreaking discovery, but at the time, I'm pretty sure the physicists were going "What the $&*#* is this?"
We've got ITER and the LHC. In the US, the NSF and DoE are constantly pushing the envelope as best as their budgets will allow (and contrary to what you may believe, they actually do receive a good bit of money, even if it is dwarfed by our military spending). If Fusion doesn't work out (I'm 50/50 on that one), we've still got promising research into fuel cells, safer methods of nuclear generation, and we're starting to see the large-scale proliferation of wind and solar power.
The Hubble Space Telescope is arguably the most scientifically important accomplishment in the history of manned spaceflight. The fact that Spirit and Opportunity are still chugging along is also a staggering accomplishment. Sure, NASA's got some very serious issues it needs to work out at the moment, but there's no denying that they've contributed greatly to our knowledge of engineering and science.
The space race was very heavily dependent upon German rocket research during both of their wars, and wasn't quite as groundbreaking as you would be led to think it was -- it wasn't as simple as "Hey. What if we aimed these things at the sky instead of London?", but the basic technology was already there.
Speaking of space, how about SpaceShipOne, and Virgin Galactic? Considering the "shoestring" budget it was built on, it's a bloody impressive accomplishment that they developed and produced a craft capable of sub-orbital flight for less than it costs to build a 747.
We're building airliners out of Carbon Fiber. The Boeing 787 is supposed to be something like 20% more efficient than a traditional passenger jet. It's not quite as dramatic as a new form of propulsion, but it's still a pretty dramatic jump.
Carbon fiber is also starting to show up in consumer products. Strong as steel, as light as plastic. If the cost of manufacturing it falls to reasonable levels, there are some very cool applications. All sorts of other new classes of materials are emerging as well.
In the past 15 years: the internet, global cellular coverage -- even in 3rd-world nations. Enough said.
Certain cancers now have extremely high odds of survival if they're detected early enough. This list of "certain cancers" is growing every day. There may be no miracle cure-all, but we've made impressive progress nonetheless.
If you took my iMac, or my digital camera back to 1970, I'm pretty sure they'd be quite impressed.
I'm not going to deny that we may have slowed down a bit. However, we're on the brink of some very exciting new stuff, and it's exactly not fair to compare the past 20 years to an entire century. I'll take slow progress over World War 3 any day.
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I personally like my phone quite a bit.
Makes calls, sends/receives SMS messages, has an alarm clock. Nothing more.
The display is an interesting high-contrast E-Paper gizmo. It requires no backlight to read in any sort of lighting (including direct sunlight). The image 'holds' if you pop the battery out. As you can imagine, the battery life's great. On the downside, the display is also the phone's greatest weakness, as the resolution is miserably low, which makes sending/reading texts and navigating the phonebook a daunting task.
But still, at £20 for an unlocked phone, I'm not complaining. If it had a slightly better display, it'd be a killer phone. Also a pity that it's not sold in the US...
Seriously.... does the American auto industry have an f----ing death wish?
Their cars are expensive, inefficient, underpowered, and poorly-made compared to the competition. And now they spy on you....
Why can't Detroit wake up in time to save its sorry ass? I hate to say it, but I think there's a *very* real chance of seeing both GM and Ford going belly-up in my lifetime. Hopefully whatever comes along (if anything) to replace them will be a bit more innovative.
And please don't take this as flamebait, but when you've lost your edge and are hemorrhaging cash and customers, the *last* thing a company wants to do is to alienate their remaining customers even further.
You're right. Ads suck. I'll agree with that.
However, AT&T and Verizon's wireless arm sit somewhere among the RIAA, MPAA, and the guy who designed the packaging on jewel cases in terms of the amount of respect/patience I have for them.
If we can get a carrier that doesn't treat its customers like dirt, I think the ads are a decent tradeoff. Even better, if the carriers are indeed disaggregated, we'll wind up with a system like Europe, where the cost of the handset is often *completely* separated from the plan. The Mobile networks provide the airspace and the bandwidth -- that's it. Pricing schemes tend to be mostly straightforward.
I pay 10p ($0.20 USD) GBP per minute outgoing, and 5p ($0.10 USD) per SMS outgoing on my UK mobile. No monthly fees or bizarre restrictions like you see on US prepay carriers. If you're a heavy user, a prepay scheme might cost you a bit more money, but for someone like myself who rarely gabs on for more than a minute or two, it's much cheaper than what I used to pay in the US. (OT: This is more or less the *only* instance under which something is cheaper in the UK than the US. This graph should scare the pants off of you if you're an American.)
I didn't mind paying for my handset either. I needed a basic but durable handset, and the fine forces of capitalism indeed produced such a device at a reasonable cost. I'm pretty sure that all Verizon users can testify that their entire line of devices is absolute garbage.
So... bring it on. I welcome some 'real' competition in the industry.
This site provides a pretty good list of colloquialisms present in British English that are absent in America. If you take a visit to the UK, I'd advise skimming through it as to not seem completely ignorant, and to avoid a certain degree of confusion. If you're visiting Edinburgh, and don't want to stick out like a sore thumb, I'd also recommend learning how to pronounce the name of the city -- I'm always amazed by how many people get that one wrong....
On the other hand, if they start using cockney rhyming slang, just give up.
That said, the article wasn't really loaded with British colloquialisms that you couldn't figure out on your own.
Compulsory voting sounds a lot scarier than non-compulsory voting.
Likewise, voting for/not voting for a certain candidate isn't necessarily indicative of support for that candidate once in office.
There are more than a few republicans who are pretty pissed off at Bush for lying to them at campaign time....
IE7's user interface is absolutely ghastly. It's considerably different from IE6, and doesn't offer much (if anything) in terms of improvements.
From the user's perspective, the transition from IE6 to Firefox is much less than the transition between IE6 and IE7.
I welcome the improved standards support in IE7, and laud Microsoft for (finally) doing so. However, Firefox remains the superior browser out of the two.
Oh come now. Although I don't want this to turn into a political flamewar, France doesn't have any sort of pervasive hatred toward Americans.
Yes. France disagreed with the U.S. about Iraq (and yes, even though their reasons for doing so weren't the most honorable, it's fairly safe to say at this point that they were on the "right" side of the debate). However, this was a criticism of a matter of foreign politics and policy, and not some sort of personal vendetta against the entire population of America (especially those evil industrial design firms in California!)
It was the US who took the issue way too far. Even though it was a joke, serving "freedom fries" in the senate cafeteria was terribly crass.
Surprise! The world does not hate Americans by default. Most of them don't approve of what the government's doing, but neither do 70% of Americans these days.
Am I the only one a bit concerned about Novel taking on the self-assumed role of being the new "corporate stewards" of Linux? Especially since the slashdot community seems to accept them and IBM in that role...
Okay. If we're going to start nitpicking...
My last job (I'm currently a full-time student) was as an IT guy in a 40% Mac, 60% PC shop.
The Macs definitely cost us less to maintain per machine, simply because we never had to remove spyware from them.
If a mac came in with a hardware problem, it was more often than not covered under our support agreement with Apple, and we'd box it up and ship it out at Apple's expense. If it was an urgent matter requiring a turnaround of more than the 2 or 3 days it took to do a depot repair, we'd lend them a spare. When buying in bulk, the support contracts are usually cheap enough to be "definitely worth it".
Sure, it's probably not optimal, and I suppose that it's not great for our job security either, but it also never really bothered anybody.
We all know that the Appendix is the useful bit at the end of the instruction manual. Heck.... there are often several of them, all labeled in a neat alphabetical order.
And yeah.... if you pour water on it, and set it out in the sun, I'm sure it'll become a haven for bacteria.... but would you really want to do that?
Not even remotely valid.
Bell Labs had a near infinite source of money, and concentrated much of its efforts on hardware development, as well as pushing the envelope on general science.
Sun manufactures nice servers (increasingly using off-the-shelf components), and writes software. I'm also not going to forgive them for Java.
You're judging a computer solely based upon how easy it is to disassemble?
I think you need to step back, and remember that IT works for the company. The company does not work for the IT department. If the boss wants the laptop, then he's damn well going to get a laptop. Unless you have a better excuse than "It occasionally makes my job a pain", he's got the upper hand.
I will agree that Thinkpads are very nice. With a few minor exceptions, they're easy to disassemble. They're ridiculously durable, and generally tend to be pretty reliable. All this comes at a cost of course, and Thinkpads tend to be hellishly expensive, especially if you want something particularly fast or lightweight.
Apple's got the laptop thing figured out pretty well. Their machines are generally fitted with the Intel's top-of-the-line-without-being-extravagant chips, have decent specs, are lightweight and durable (even on the low-end models), and are really quite inexpensive when you consider the value for the money. They seem to have addressed the hard-drive replacement concerns, and the drives on the new MacBooks are much easier to access (I'll agree that the older iBooks were indeed awful to disassemble).
But Dell..... Dell's laptops have been awful for a few years now. For the most part, they haven't significantly evolved past the C-Series chassis that they were using since the 90s. Pick up a dell laptop with one hand -- it'll weigh 6 pounds, feel flimsy, and in many cases, you'll actually hear the chassis start to creak and bend. Now do the same with a Thinkpad or MacBook. Now, decide which of the three is least likely to survive being dropped from 4 feet up.
I suppose that the ability to remove the hard drive, and also completely break the machine apart into a million pieces with minimal effort could be considered a selling point, but it's not very high up on my list.
There was a point in time when the expandability of an ATX desktop was considerably superior to a laptop or a proprietary desktop. Considering that technology has become relatively stable, along with the advent of USB and Firewire, the need for an expandable system is pretty much negated. Unless you count gamers, and anyone else who has the serious need to do massive amounts of number-crunching, most people are adequately served by a laptop.
NY's actually pretty easy to explain. A quick history lesson:
Their infrastructure is a mess. It's old, it's outdated, and the scary thing is that nobody really has a firm grip on just how bad it is.
The Queens blackout last year was a prime example of this. It lasted almost two weeks, and Con Edison (NYC's public utility) didn't have any idea what was the main cause of it. Every time they patched the hole, another part of the system would fail catastrophically.
Earlier this year, a portion of 42nd street exploded, because a hundred-year-old steam pipe failed. The particular pipe had never been tested, and the steam system evidently does not have any sort of system to shut off the flow in the event of an explosive decompression.
Have you been on one of the Subways recently? How about Penn Station? NYC still doesn't have ATO on its subways, and uses an ancient interlocking system that forces the trains to run at wider intervals than they could. There was a fire a few years back in a room full of relays and other electrical equipment that dated back to the subway's original construction. It was feared that that line would be offline for years, as the only people who knew about the equipment in that room had been dead for decades, and there were no accurate or plans of how to rebuild the room.
They're currently in the process of building a new subway. One of the most expensive parts of the project is just going to be locating and moving existing infrastructure, because the city doesn't have a terribly good idea of what's buried underground, and moreover what's still being used and what's abandoned.
New York City was one of the last places on the planet where you could buy DC off of the grid. Many older buildings had lifts that were old enough to pre-date alternating current. It was finally discontinued last year, as DC power transmission is horrendously inefficient.
A few years ago, a lady was electrocuted after touching a metal streetpole. In the investigation that followed, Con Edison discovered hundreds of poles and metallic surfaces with hazardous levels of stray voltage in them, all in public places.
These examples pretty strongly support the hypothesis that New York's infrastructure is in a scary state. I'm not terribly surprised that the telecom systems aren't completely up to snuff -- they've got a host of other things to work on. NYC's infrastructure was hastily constructed in the early 20th century, and then neglected for the remainder of it. Now the money's finally in place, and something's being done about it, but it's still going to be a while before we see any tangible results. There are Verizon and ConEd trucks on every corner laying new cable -- just give it patience, and it'll eventually get done.
More to the point: Do you have a second account that you use for anonymity?
Is KDawson such an account, collectively used by the editors for the stories they're too drunk/embarrassed to post themselves?
My best guess is that the aggregating blogs (ie. Boing Boing) have a lot more bandwidth. Likewise, I'm sure that the editors don't want to be accused of plagiarism. If he got the idea for the story for another blog, he should link back to it -- it really *is* the ethical thing to do.
I was indeed referring to that with the heaviest of sarcasm.
Since I suppose the slashdot nerds don't appear quite as up to speed on the situation, the President of Iran made a speech at Columbia University a week or two ago, where he proudly declared that there are absolutely no homosexuals in Iran.
And, yes. Of course I understand that homosexuality is a naturally-occurring phenomenon (with strong statistical and biological evidence to support this). However, from what I understand, the bell-curve hypothesis isn't well-supported, especially with the peak centered around 50%. Whatever the estimates are regarding the distribution of human sexuality, it's safe to say that 50% of the population is NOT bisexual. In the gay community, there's also a surprising bit of contention over whether or not there are "real" bisexuals (especially among males).
A more reasonable alternate proposed was a bimodal distribution with a large peak halfway between Heterosexual and bisexual, and a smaller peak halfway between bisexual and homosexual.
Insulin's a generic drug. It's not the most terribly profitable thing to manufacture and sell, especially given the relatively static demand for it.
In the pharmaceutical industry, margins on generic drugs tend to be razor-thin simply due to the laws of economics. Insulin is insulin -- assuming that there's no industry collusion, if one vendor lowers their price, the entire market will flock to that vendor, because his product is identical.
This results in the price bottoming out somewhere just above the mark at which it's profitable to produce the stuff.
It would be pretty ironic if that got used against Iran.
(Not that I would condone such a thing....)
Personally, I'm a bit more afraid of the idea that the people in charge at the moment aren't stupid at all.
George Bush may be (or at least appear to be) a bumbling idiot, but the people working directly for him are most certainly not. That scares the crap out of me.
You're conveniently remembering that the kid was being held on the ground by at least four police officers when he was tased, and wasn't resisting arrest by that point.
It's also pretty doubtful that there was ever the risk of him causing any sort of physical harm to the officers or people in the room.
It's a very clear-cut case of police brutality, especially given the number of people who caught it on film. The police instigated a confrontation, tackled the kid to the ground, and after he had fully submitted to them, he was attacked once again.
Calling bullshit on this one.
In the 20th century, we pushed the envelope on what the science of the time would allow. I might be naive to say this, but by the 70s, modern science was rapidly approaching its limits (at least on the frontiers that were being explored at the time)
Now that we've reached that limit, we're starting new frontiers open up, particularly in how we can engineer new products and materials out of existing technology --- this doesn't occur through breakthroughs or sudden leaps and bounds.
Quantum Mechanics wasn't developed overnight, and I'm sure that many of the physicists involved in the field at the time were frustrated as hell by the fact that none of their data could even be remotely explained by what we thought were the fundamental laws of the universe. In retrospect, it's a remarkable and groundbreaking discovery, but at the time, I'm pretty sure the physicists were going "What the $&*#* is this?"
We've got ITER and the LHC. In the US, the NSF and DoE are constantly pushing the envelope as best as their budgets will allow (and contrary to what you may believe, they actually do receive a good bit of money, even if it is dwarfed by our military spending). If Fusion doesn't work out (I'm 50/50 on that one), we've still got promising research into fuel cells, safer methods of nuclear generation, and we're starting to see the large-scale proliferation of wind and solar power.
The Hubble Space Telescope is arguably the most scientifically important accomplishment in the history of manned spaceflight. The fact that Spirit and Opportunity are still chugging along is also a staggering accomplishment. Sure, NASA's got some very serious issues it needs to work out at the moment, but there's no denying that they've contributed greatly to our knowledge of engineering and science.
The space race was very heavily dependent upon German rocket research during both of their wars, and wasn't quite as groundbreaking as you would be led to think it was -- it wasn't as simple as "Hey. What if we aimed these things at the sky instead of London?", but the basic technology was already there.
Speaking of space, how about SpaceShipOne, and Virgin Galactic? Considering the "shoestring" budget it was built on, it's a bloody impressive accomplishment that they developed and produced a craft capable of sub-orbital flight for less than it costs to build a 747.
We're building airliners out of Carbon Fiber. The Boeing 787 is supposed to be something like 20% more efficient than a traditional passenger jet. It's not quite as dramatic as a new form of propulsion, but it's still a pretty dramatic jump.
Carbon fiber is also starting to show up in consumer products. Strong as steel, as light as plastic. If the cost of manufacturing it falls to reasonable levels, there are some very cool applications. All sorts of other new classes of materials are emerging as well.
In the past 15 years: the internet, global cellular coverage -- even in 3rd-world nations. Enough said.
Certain cancers now have extremely high odds of survival if they're detected early enough. This list of "certain cancers" is growing every day. There may be no miracle cure-all, but we've made impressive progress nonetheless.
If you took my iMac, or my digital camera back to 1970, I'm pretty sure they'd be quite impressed.
I'm not going to deny that we may have slowed down a bit. However, we're on the brink of some very exciting new stuff, and it's exactly not fair to compare the past 20 years to an entire century. I'll take slow progress over World War 3 any day.
Mods on crack! Not one, but two people moderated that insanely sarcastic comment as being Informative.
For you sarcasm-deprived moderators, I suggest a heavy dose of Monty Python and Douglas Adams. Listening to Alanis Morrisette is also advisable.
Well, I mean the packing list includes a "for glue the sex rubber mat" -- so it can't possibly be that bad, could it?
Actually, ew. It's an ethernet switch. I really don't want to know what that bit's for!
I'm not even sure you'd want to count the fashionistas and hipsters in NYC, because they're almost just as bad.
Now if we could also do something about the hideous American accent...
Now there, I think you're giving the Americans a little too much credit. We're not a particularly well-dressed culture, unless you count the extremes.
We're also really, really, really fat.
So, no. Americans don't tend to give a damn about what other people think of them.