- You want to live somewhere? Cool. So does everyone else. Rents are ridiculously high -- Manhattan rents START at $5 per square foot per month in rent -- and that's for a REALLY crappy tenement built in the 1920s with ROACHES and it may or may not have an elevator. "Luxury" apartments (what in other places you would consider just barely acceptable normal places to live) start at $10/sq foot per month.
Your rents pretty accurate, but you are forgetting to mention with these expensive apartments comes the relative ease of making a good six-figure income if you are capable. I could care less my apartment is $2,200 a month. I make $250,000 a year. Sure, it'd be nice to move to east bumblefuck and pay half that or less - but it will be next to impossible for me to make that much money elsewhere.
- You want to go to the movies? Awesome! Plan on either buying your tickets 5 hours in advance online or not going at all or going at midnight on a Wednesday the second week the movie is out. Almost all the good shows are sold out. Oh also movie tickets start at $10 for your basic crappy theater.
My god it's not that bad. I don't seem to have too much trouble - but then again, I go to see independent films that aren't really available anywhere else in the country.
- You want to have a car in Manhattan? Sorry it's impossible because there is NO PARKING. However, you can perhaps keep a car in one of the other boroughs like Brooklyn or Queens -- but don't forget to move your car twice a week because of "alternate side parking rules". It sounds simple enough but the average car owner in Queens spends about $250 per year on parking tickets because this alternate side system inevitably leads to your forgetting to move your car and getting a ticket. I personally spent about $400 in parking tickets last year. That's the cost of insurance in most states.
Yeah, it's a big city. The streets need to be kept clean. The "alternate side parking rules" exist so street sweepers can, you know, clean the street. What would you prefer, no street cleaning? And, who needs a car in Manhattan? People live in the city simply so they don't have to drive!
- You want to go to the beach on the weekend? Well you probably don't have a car (see previous point) so you either have to rent one (plan on spending at least $100/day for a crappy economy car) *or* you can take the Long Island Railroad with all the other schmucks. There's nothing like schlepping a cooler up and down stairs to catch a train that makes you just feel like a winner. Oh and if you do rent that car plan on spending 2 hours each way in bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic on the notoriously overburdened LIE.
Christ, go to Coney Island. Oh wait, you're probably afraid of all the minorities. It doesn't matter it's a $2 subway ride away and one of the best beaches in the US, and the only one in the tristate area that doesn't have riptides.
- They say the subway is great. They are people that haven't really lived in NY for longer than 1 year. The first year is fun -- the subway feels new and exciting and it's very NEW YORK so newbies get into it. However, after taking it for 20+ years to school, work, etc I can say it is a horribly dehumanizing experience. I have gotten yelled at, pushed, mugged, lost, been stuck in trains for hours, and been subjected to all sorts of gruesome sounds and sights and smells. Also, at rush hour it's really a very unhappy experience since it's so crowded you literally have to push and fight people for a spot to stand. It's really quite uncivilized.
The subway system is certainly running at capacity, but for the price, it's an amazing deal. I don't have a car and spend $45 a month for unlimited metrocard usage thanks to the fare being tax deductible. You can also get a bicycle and get your ass into shape.
- The nightlife is cool, but people are jaded and cold and it's a bit of a superficial existence.
Quite frankly, your personal views are irrelevant. The city already has far more tourists than it can handle. Hotel occupancy is at the highest level in the country and finding a room is quite difficult without spending hundreds of dollars a night. As well, tourists destroy the city. Much of Manhattan has already been totally corrupted by catering to "daytrippers" such as yourself wishing to live a bit of the MTV lifestyle for a brief moment. The East Village is now a gigantic mall of bars that cater to "nighttrippers" from out of town. The meatpacking district is filled with guido nightclubs catering to such filth. And my god, the tourists in times square - endless hordes of fat tourists - need to be kept out. Then there are the universities. Spoiled rich kids across the world flock to this city to live the New York City life - so much so that all of Greenwich Village is now a college campus.
We don't want or need your money. Stay away, please.
You obviously don't live in New York City and probably haven't even been to the city.
This isn't purely about global warming. Manhattan today has more cars than it can possibly handle. Once upon a time, you could pay for the luxury of taking a taxi if you were in a hurry or had a lot of stuff to carry. Now, most of the island is a parking lot during business hours. I don't even bother trying to drive anywhere in the city as you simply cannot get around quickly. Cars are everywhere. The level of road rage because of constant traffic results in out-of-towners honking their horns endlessly out of frustration, and driving recklessly the moment traffic eases a bit - even if it means running a red light or killing a bicyclist. Then there is the simple fact of pollution. Pollution is a big problem, and cars are the major cause of it.
I don't think any New Yorkers even think of these new traffic congestion taxes in terms of global warming. We need to decrease the number of cars in Manhattan during peak hours and this is a sensible way to do it, as evidenced in London which already has this system.
Actually, the point you make is a good one - but your missing a crucial point. Price deflation is the necessary result of technological advancement. It is only due to massive injection of previously non-existant currency into the economy that results in inflation. Prior to the creation of the federal reserve, consumer products declined in price rapidly for over a century. It's hard to lend money on such products however as the loan collateral ceases to be equivalent to the value of the loan over the payment period. So, when the banksters wanted to make money by charging interest on money created by the federal government, this system had to change. Only with massive creation of money could prices continue to rise as hapless consumers spent more money than they had, effectively resulting in demand always exceeding supply due to vast availability of credit.
Computer technology has up until this time been immune to the inflationary central banking practices because of the relentless innovation.
So, what you are seeing is one of the few instances where price deflation is occurring. Someday, when the Fed can no longer keep dumping money on the people, prices will drop for everything.
1) While fair skin and blond hair are directly related, fair skin doesn't require blond hair. Consider the vast majority of people with fair skin don't have blond hair - your point is obviously wrong.
2) Vitamin D is not exclusively used for bone growth. It's primary function is immunological. And besides - most children gain darker hair long before their bones are finished growing. I believe the average age is 7 or 8.
Your personal whims are irrelevant. The Wii and the PS3 are simply not comparable products, and the sales history for them is irrelevant. For someone like myself who has a nice 46" LCD, the Wii is just a waste of money. $250 is too much for a low power game console that looks like shit on my $2000 television. I'd rather go spend $250 on a nice dinner. The PS3 is targeted towards people who have higher end setups and are in a higher income bracket than yourself.
Actually, Nairobi is not as backwards of a place as you seem to think. A number of international corporations have office towers there. Infrastructure is largely there, but their biggest problem is most certainly crime. To be fair, South Africa has certainly become a shockingly dangerous place as well since the end of apartheid.
If there is a drug that makes you deaf, please let me know what it is because I could really use it at work.
Inhalants cause hearing loss, just so you know.
Some prescription narcotics cause hearing loss - look at what happen to Rush Limbaugh with vicodin use. Morphine and heroin don't have that effect however.
You post more comments on slashdot than anyone I have seen on this site besides a few notable editors in past years. My god, you've posted a comment every 5 minutes the entire day! There isn't a thread I read where you don't post a comment. You need to get a job, and stop being a fanboy.
The problem is that they're not just letting copper go by the wayside where they're installing FiOS, they're letting copper go down the tubes (so to speak) everywhere - even where they have no real plans to install fiber. Fiber is expensive and they are cherry picking the hig-density, high disposable income areas. To fund this expansion of service, they are shorting funds to maintain copper to the rest of the area.
I live in a section of Brooklyn where the average single-family home sells for about $1,750,000, and the average household income is well in the top 5% of American households. Suffice it to say, we don't have have access to FIOS and I know of no neighborhood in the Borough that has it.
Manhattan is the same thing.
It seems to me they are hitting moderately dense fringe towns that are moderately wealthy. Much of Staten Island for instance has FIOS, despite the fact there are far fewer homes that cost over $1,000,000 and far fewer people with high incomes.
Honestly, it seems that deploying the service in highly dense areas with attached housing, whether apartment buildings or townhouses, is difficult for them. So - while they are looking for areas that are moderately dense, true high-density housing is also avoided.
That's the problem with the infrastructure being run by for-profit corporations - there is effectively no competition.
But they ARE deploying it, because of competition from cable companies. It isn't perfect, but if it wasn't for the competition you are saying doesn't exist - they'd just leave us with DSL running over 50-year old wires.
I wonder if Sony will start trying to make fun games and stop killing goats.
I have a PSP and have quite a few fun games, most of which have kept me quite satisfied with my purchase. They are:
1. Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters 2. Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception 3. Lumines 4. Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops 5. Wipeout Pure 6. GTA: Liberty City Stories 7. GTA: Vice City Stories 8. Field Commander 9. Mega Man Powered Up
I just don't get it. The PSP has many great games, yet this slashdot myth persists.
Here in New York City, the PSP is by far the most popular portable device. There isn't a day that goes by I don't see someone playing one on the subway. I rarely if ever see a DS. I also have a PSP and play it quite frequently. You know what? The screen is in perfect condition. Every one I have seen is in perfect condition. I have a hard time believing anyone would let a fairly expensive device get "scratched to hell".
So far, the DS is the only device of any significant with a clamshell design. The original gameboy was in use for over 12 years without anyone freaking out about scratched screens. People still play Gameboy Advances without any trouble with screen scratches. The Nokia candybar cellphone design is still amazingly popular. This entire thread is about the iPhone which carries the same design motif as the iPod, which also has an exposed screen. Between the gameboy, candybar style phones, and ipods, we are talking about hundreds of millions of electronic devices with which people are relatively happy.
So, this begs the question: with so many devices out there with exposed screens, why is the PSP unique or unusual in this regard? In regards to my personal experience, is it so bizarre that people in NYC have protective cases for their PSPs?
Do you have any evidence of this? Are you saying that if I write an application to execute 16 threads simultaneously 16 different processors on a machine running Vista, that application will not see any speed increase over running that 16 thread application on an 8 processor machine?
Why would this be? And what is with the mac pro nonsense? Do you really think only apple makes 8 core machines?
I remember the first time I saw a (nominally) consumer grade multiprocessor OS. It was at a Comdex event in 1994 and a machine was running on 16 pentium 66 processors with OS/2 2.1 SMP. There was this old graphics app called Colorworks that were highly optimized for SMP systems, probably moreso than Photoshop today.
Needless to say, it ripped through complex image transformations faster than anything I had ever seen at the time. In those days, when everyone was talking about the death of the 386 architecture... it seemed going SMP was the way to.
I sincerely hope this isn't taken as a troll, but George W Bush himself always came across to me as someone playing a movie-style president for an electorate brought up on the same thing. Not just the gung-ho mentality, but the whole package.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my gut reaction is that you're so soaked in this that you can't see it. Or are you implying that US society is much *less* influenced by images in popular culture than others are?
Only a naive fool believes that those who oppose him are simply victims of propaganda. Propaganda is all around us, no one makes a value judgment without being greatly influenced by various artistic mediums.
Is Superman radically different than Ulysses? No, not really.
People you are dangerous for the simple reason you have no respect for the decisions people make. Rather than understand their failings, you invalidate them. Frequently, some of the worst oppression has resulted from this.
Democracy is certainly a failure, but a truly noble heart shows a bit more respect and compassion for those who have shown they cannot take care of themselves.
I have to say your argument is shortsighted. There aren't really any games out right now that truly require the space of a blu-ray disk, but they are coming. What happens when you want to play GTAIV or Final Fantasy XXXX or whatever?
And besides - in my 15 years of playing video games on CD, I have never had the need for a backup, ever. I even played my original copy of the Return to Zork just a month ago.
So, I think your real desire here is to pirate video games. Given the success of the Wii and the moderate success of the Gamecube, the ability to pirate/backup games appears to be irrelevant.
Maybe if they cared enough to fix some of the HUGE issues with the PS3, consumer adoption would be higher. Like the 720p problem. I have a Panasonic 27" 1080i CRT HDTV in my bedroom. It does NOT suppose 720p and goes black when a 720p source is fed to it over component. Therefore, I can only get 480p out of my console for games designed to run at 720p. The games that do run at 1080p take a huge hit in framerate and are downscaled to 1080i.
Umm, this is total bullshit. I have a 42" 1080i/720p Toshiba LCD, and it works fine via HDMI cables. I haven't found the framerates of any game I own unusual or unacceptable.
I don't care to buy BluRay movies at all. So when I bought my PS3, I had to shell out $200 more for functionality I don't need or want.
I think you're in the minority. Everyone to whom I've shown Casino Royale has been blown away. I think HD movies are great, and right now my PS3 is my only DVD/Bluray player. Other HD players are the same price as a PS3. Quite frankly, given the low quality of cable/satellite HD channels - a bluray/HD-DVD player is the only way to REALLY see the benefit of an HDTV. I mean seriously, you spend $1,500 on a television - why would you want to wait for HD players to go down in price? Even if it's 6 months, that is a major benefit of an HD player you paid for that you are not using for an extended period of time.
And no, I don't buy the argument that next-gen games just absolutely NEED that kind of storage capacity.
The folks at Rockstar disagree with you. They have already publicly stated that they are having major problems fitting the necessary data for GTA4 on a single DVD.
So yeah Sony, stop shoving your Superior Formats(TM) down our throats and rootkitting our computers, you might actually start making money!
See, this is the kind of stuff that indicates you are just trolling. Bluray is NOT Sony exclusive - it has more industry support than does HD-DVD. And whatever else Sony has done, it is nowhere NEAR as bad as Microsoft. At least I'm happy running Yellowdog Linux on my PS3. I could never do that with another console.
Also, as someone who makes a decent 6 figure income, I could never imagine buying all three consoles and simply have a POS 27" TV. Like most trolls in the console wars, your entire post is a rant made up of misinformation. You don't actually own all these consoles.
It's true though. I'm 29, and I first played Super Mario Brothers when I was 7. I've had enough. Please, let us move forward from these tired characters.
Evidence of what? dell has bad service? thats not hard to come by... The question is why the hell is it the AG's job to sue somebody for poor service? Does not NY have some real problems to deal with?
Yes they do, but fixing those problems are long-term issues that are outside the scope of democracy. The State of New York faces enormous future budget shortfalls as government workers retire and the entire vote-buying apparatus of the state bureaucracy comes crashing to the ground.
Democrats previously gained votes by promoting "social" programs like welfare, public housing, and other such initiatives. Government workers account for a full 17% of the workforce in New York State. When you consider that nearly 50% of the population (NOT the workforce) receive public assistance, you begin to see the problems for the Democratic Party.
They can no longer establish a plutocracy by stealing from the hardworking citizenry of the state. More people take from the state's coffers than donate to it. The game of throwing the people's money around to buy votes is over.
So what is a democrat to do?
Something... ANYTHING... that doesn't cost money. And this is an example of that.
First, lesbians don't want to have sex with straight women any more than I want to have sex with you. I am a man who likes to have sex with gay men. Though even if you are a closet case... um I'm on a drama free diet. However George Takei might be interested... at least if you play basketball.
You, unfortunately, are not a real lover of masculinity but a product of our feminized society. You knew you were gay when you were a virgin? I don't think so.
Your lustful desires are not turned on by a nametag that says "I am a faggot!". Every person discovers their own sexuality through life experiences. For any person to identify with a certain sexual identity, someone somewhere must have first convinced him to have sex.
While not personally gay myself, I have many gay friends and many, if not most, take great pleasure in seducing straight men. Most have also had sexual experiences with women, especially at a young age.
I can say that with pretty good certainty because I work two days a week as a physician at a historically queer focused women's health clinic.
I think you're just living in a fantasy world. A historically QUEER focused health clinic? I don't think so. They don't even have such a clinic in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of the few lesbian neighborhoods to ever have existed in the entire history of our planet.
So I think that hostility you are feeling has more to do with the fact that you are a mysogynist prick rather than the fact that you have a prick.
I think you're just a bottom who is pissed you don't have a vagina. The testosterone poisoning phrase is insulting to everything that makes men beautiful, and the creative driving force of art, culture, and history.
For example, my fiancee is North African, and her traditional meals are largely vegetarian with relatively few percent of calories from animal-derived foods. She's never had a health problem. Her grandmother is 103. Granted, the reason the average person from her country doesn't eat more meat is because they can't afford it, not because they have some inhibition about eating meat. Yet, the wealthier members of the population there are eating more and more American-style foods and guess what... they're already seeing an increase in cancers, strokes, heart attacks and diabetes, but without the drugs and surgical techniques we use to try and compensate for the lifetime abuse of our bodies.
Friend, North Africa is a hell hole. Anecdotal evidence of her grandmother doesn't discount the fact the entire region was once the epicenter of the civilized world and that today, it is more barbaric than it has been in almost 3,000 years.
You have somehow irrationally determined that the only measure of success of a people is their average lifespan, rather than a careful analysis of the creative output of said people.
I would take Roman North Africa with an average lifespan of 65 over barbaric modern North Africa with an average lifespan of over 100.
Oh, and by the way, last time I was in Cairo, the number of men with huge guts was comical. Most of the men there look pregnant.
This is true for EVERYONE. In this world where the government frequently throws people in jail for "lying to investigators", but rarely prosecutes people for outright perjury, the only sensible course of action is simply say nothing at all.
Don't say "I don't know". If they can prove you DID know, they will prosecute for lying. Simply say the magic words: "I have nothing to say". No matter what a law enforcement official asks you, simply tell them you have nothing to say.
Slashdot Mirror
- You want to live somewhere? Cool. So does everyone else. Rents are ridiculously high -- Manhattan rents START at $5 per square foot per month in rent -- and that's for a REALLY crappy tenement built in the 1920s with ROACHES and it may or may not have an elevator. "Luxury" apartments (what in other places you would consider just barely acceptable normal places to live) start at $10/sq foot per month.
Your rents pretty accurate, but you are forgetting to mention with these expensive apartments comes the relative ease of making a good six-figure income if you are capable. I could care less my apartment is $2,200 a month. I make $250,000 a year. Sure, it'd be nice to move to east bumblefuck and pay half that or less - but it will be next to impossible for me to make that much money elsewhere.
- You want to go to the movies? Awesome! Plan on either buying your tickets 5 hours in advance online or not going at all or going at midnight on a Wednesday the second week the movie is out. Almost all the good shows are sold out. Oh also movie tickets start at $10 for your basic crappy theater.
My god it's not that bad. I don't seem to have too much trouble - but then again, I go to see independent films that aren't really available anywhere else in the country.
- You want to have a car in Manhattan? Sorry it's impossible because there is NO PARKING. However, you can perhaps keep a car in one of the other boroughs like Brooklyn or Queens -- but don't forget to move your car twice a week because of "alternate side parking rules". It sounds simple enough but the average car owner in Queens spends about $250 per year on parking tickets because this alternate side system inevitably leads to your forgetting to move your car and getting a ticket. I personally spent about $400 in parking tickets last year. That's the cost of insurance in most states.
Yeah, it's a big city. The streets need to be kept clean. The "alternate side parking rules" exist so street sweepers can, you know, clean the street. What would you prefer, no street cleaning? And, who needs a car in Manhattan? People live in the city simply so they don't have to drive!
- You want to go to the beach on the weekend? Well you probably don't have a car (see previous point) so you either have to rent one (plan on spending at least $100/day for a crappy economy car) *or* you can take the Long Island Railroad with all the other schmucks. There's nothing like schlepping a cooler up and down stairs to catch a train that makes you just feel like a winner. Oh and if you do rent that car plan on spending 2 hours each way in bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic on the notoriously overburdened LIE.
Christ, go to Coney Island. Oh wait, you're probably afraid of all the minorities. It doesn't matter it's a $2 subway ride away and one of the best beaches in the US, and the only one in the tristate area that doesn't have riptides.
- They say the subway is great. They are people that haven't really lived in NY for longer than 1 year. The first year is fun -- the subway feels new and exciting and it's very NEW YORK so newbies get into it. However, after taking it for 20+ years to school, work, etc I can say it is a horribly dehumanizing experience. I have gotten yelled at, pushed, mugged, lost, been stuck in trains for hours, and been subjected to all sorts of gruesome sounds and sights and smells. Also, at rush hour it's really a very unhappy experience since it's so crowded you literally have to push and fight people for a spot to stand. It's really quite uncivilized.
The subway system is certainly running at capacity, but for the price, it's an amazing deal. I don't have a car and spend $45 a month for unlimited metrocard usage thanks to the fare being tax deductible. You can also get a bicycle and get your ass into shape.
- The nightlife is cool, but people are jaded and cold and it's a bit of a superficial existence.
It's funny, my only complaint about the nightl
Quite frankly, your personal views are irrelevant. The city already has far more tourists than it can handle. Hotel occupancy is at the highest level in the country and finding a room is quite difficult without spending hundreds of dollars a night. As well, tourists destroy the city. Much of Manhattan has already been totally corrupted by catering to "daytrippers" such as yourself wishing to live a bit of the MTV lifestyle for a brief moment. The East Village is now a gigantic mall of bars that cater to "nighttrippers" from out of town. The meatpacking district is filled with guido nightclubs catering to such filth. And my god, the tourists in times square - endless hordes of fat tourists - need to be kept out. Then there are the universities. Spoiled rich kids across the world flock to this city to live the New York City life - so much so that all of Greenwich Village is now a college campus.
We don't want or need your money. Stay away, please.
You obviously don't live in New York City and probably haven't even been to the city.
This isn't purely about global warming. Manhattan today has more cars than it can possibly handle. Once upon a time, you could pay for the luxury of taking a taxi if you were in a hurry or had a lot of stuff to carry. Now, most of the island is a parking lot during business hours. I don't even bother trying to drive anywhere in the city as you simply cannot get around quickly. Cars are everywhere. The level of road rage because of constant traffic results in out-of-towners honking their horns endlessly out of frustration, and driving recklessly the moment traffic eases a bit - even if it means running a red light or killing a bicyclist. Then there is the simple fact of pollution. Pollution is a big problem, and cars are the major cause of it.
I don't think any New Yorkers even think of these new traffic congestion taxes in terms of global warming. We need to decrease the number of cars in Manhattan during peak hours and this is a sensible way to do it, as evidenced in London which already has this system.
What was the alternative to the UMD? They wanted a large, inexpensive format that will fit in a handheld.
Actually, the point you make is a good one - but your missing a crucial point. Price deflation is the necessary result of technological advancement. It is only due to massive injection of previously non-existant currency into the economy that results in inflation. Prior to the creation of the federal reserve, consumer products declined in price rapidly for over a century. It's hard to lend money on such products however as the loan collateral ceases to be equivalent to the value of the loan over the payment period. So, when the banksters wanted to make money by charging interest on money created by the federal government, this system had to change. Only with massive creation of money could prices continue to rise as hapless consumers spent more money than they had, effectively resulting in demand always exceeding supply due to vast availability of credit.
Computer technology has up until this time been immune to the inflationary central banking practices because of the relentless innovation.
So, what you are seeing is one of the few instances where price deflation is occurring. Someday, when the Fed can no longer keep dumping money on the people, prices will drop for everything.
1) While fair skin and blond hair are directly related, fair skin doesn't require blond hair. Consider the vast majority of people with fair skin don't have blond hair - your point is obviously wrong.
2) Vitamin D is not exclusively used for bone growth. It's primary function is immunological. And besides - most children gain darker hair long before their bones are finished growing. I believe the average age is 7 or 8.
And Toyotas sell 5 times as many units as Lexus. Who cares?
Your personal whims are irrelevant. The Wii and the PS3 are simply not comparable products, and the sales history for them is irrelevant. For someone like myself who has a nice 46" LCD, the Wii is just a waste of money. $250 is too much for a low power game console that looks like shit on my $2000 television. I'd rather go spend $250 on a nice dinner. The PS3 is targeted towards people who have higher end setups and are in a higher income bracket than yourself.
Actually, Nairobi is not as backwards of a place as you seem to think. A number of international corporations have office towers there. Infrastructure is largely there, but their biggest problem is most certainly crime. To be fair, South Africa has certainly become a shockingly dangerous place as well since the end of apartheid.
Why don't you read up on it a bit.
If there is a drug that makes you deaf, please let me know what it is because I could really use it at work.
Inhalants cause hearing loss, just so you know.
Some prescription narcotics cause hearing loss - look at what happen to Rush Limbaugh with vicodin use. Morphine and heroin don't have that effect however.
You post more comments on slashdot than anyone I have seen on this site besides a few notable editors in past years. My god, you've posted a comment every 5 minutes the entire day! There isn't a thread I read where you don't post a comment. You need to get a job, and stop being a fanboy.
The problem is that they're not just letting copper go by the wayside where they're installing FiOS, they're letting copper go down the tubes (so to speak) everywhere - even where they have no real plans to install fiber. Fiber is expensive and they are cherry picking the hig-density, high disposable income areas. To fund this expansion of service, they are shorting funds to maintain copper to the rest of the area.
I live in a section of Brooklyn where the average single-family home sells for about $1,750,000, and the average household income is well in the top 5% of American households. Suffice it to say, we don't have have access to FIOS and I know of no neighborhood in the Borough that has it.
Manhattan is the same thing.
It seems to me they are hitting moderately dense fringe towns that are moderately wealthy. Much of Staten Island for instance has FIOS, despite the fact there are far fewer homes that cost over $1,000,000 and far fewer people with high incomes.
Honestly, it seems that deploying the service in highly dense areas with attached housing, whether apartment buildings or townhouses, is difficult for them. So - while they are looking for areas that are moderately dense, true high-density housing is also avoided.
That's the problem with the infrastructure being run by for-profit corporations - there is effectively no competition.
But they ARE deploying it, because of competition from cable companies. It isn't perfect, but if it wasn't for the competition you are saying doesn't exist - they'd just leave us with DSL running over 50-year old wires.
I wonder if Sony will start trying to make fun games and stop killing goats.
I have a PSP and have quite a few fun games, most of which have kept me quite satisfied with my purchase. They are:
1. Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters
2. Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception
3. Lumines
4. Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops
5. Wipeout Pure
6. GTA: Liberty City Stories
7. GTA: Vice City Stories
8. Field Commander
9. Mega Man Powered Up
I just don't get it. The PSP has many great games, yet this slashdot myth persists.
Here in New York City, the PSP is by far the most popular portable device. There isn't a day that goes by I don't see someone playing one on the subway. I rarely if ever see a DS. I also have a PSP and play it quite frequently. You know what? The screen is in perfect condition. Every one I have seen is in perfect condition. I have a hard time believing anyone would let a fairly expensive device get "scratched to hell".
So far, the DS is the only device of any significant with a clamshell design. The original gameboy was in use for over 12 years without anyone freaking out about scratched screens. People still play Gameboy Advances without any trouble with screen scratches. The Nokia candybar cellphone design is still amazingly popular. This entire thread is about the iPhone which carries the same design motif as the iPod, which also has an exposed screen. Between the gameboy, candybar style phones, and ipods, we are talking about hundreds of millions of electronic devices with which people are relatively happy.
So, this begs the question: with so many devices out there with exposed screens, why is the PSP unique or unusual in this regard? In regards to my personal experience, is it so bizarre that people in NYC have protective cases for their PSPs?
Do you have any evidence of this? Are you saying that if I write an application to execute 16 threads simultaneously 16 different processors on a machine running Vista, that application will not see any speed increase over running that 16 thread application on an 8 processor machine?
Why would this be? And what is with the mac pro nonsense? Do you really think only apple makes 8 core machines?
I remember the first time I saw a (nominally) consumer grade multiprocessor OS. It was at a Comdex event in 1994 and a machine was running on 16 pentium 66 processors with OS/2 2.1 SMP. There was this old graphics app called Colorworks that were highly optimized for SMP systems, probably moreso than Photoshop today.
Needless to say, it ripped through complex image transformations faster than anything I had ever seen at the time. In those days, when everyone was talking about the death of the 386 architecture... it seemed going SMP was the way to.
They were right, but were about 10 years early...
No, you are mistaken. He also was one of the few who voted against the Iraq War. In general, he supports a total non-interventionist foreign policy.
9 0402.htm
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2002/cr0
I sincerely hope this isn't taken as a troll, but George W Bush himself always came across to me as someone playing a movie-style president for an electorate brought up on the same thing. Not just the gung-ho mentality, but the whole package.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my gut reaction is that you're so soaked in this that you can't see it. Or are you implying that US society is much *less* influenced by images in popular culture than others are?
Only a naive fool believes that those who oppose him are simply victims of propaganda. Propaganda is all around us, no one makes a value judgment without being greatly influenced by various artistic mediums.
Is Superman radically different than Ulysses? No, not really.
People you are dangerous for the simple reason you have no respect for the decisions people make. Rather than understand their failings, you invalidate them. Frequently, some of the worst oppression has resulted from this.
Democracy is certainly a failure, but a truly noble heart shows a bit more respect and compassion for those who have shown they cannot take care of themselves.
I have to say your argument is shortsighted. There aren't really any games out right now that truly require the space of a blu-ray disk, but they are coming. What happens when you want to play GTAIV or Final Fantasy XXXX or whatever?
And besides - in my 15 years of playing video games on CD, I have never had the need for a backup, ever. I even played my original copy of the Return to Zork just a month ago.
So, I think your real desire here is to pirate video games. Given the success of the Wii and the moderate success of the Gamecube, the ability to pirate/backup games appears to be irrelevant.
Maybe if they cared enough to fix some of the HUGE issues with the PS3, consumer adoption would be higher. Like the 720p problem. I have a Panasonic 27" 1080i CRT HDTV in my bedroom. It does NOT suppose 720p and goes black when a 720p source is fed to it over component. Therefore, I can only get 480p out of my console for games designed to run at 720p. The games that do run at 1080p take a huge hit in framerate and are downscaled to 1080i.
Umm, this is total bullshit. I have a 42" 1080i/720p Toshiba LCD, and it works fine via HDMI cables. I haven't found the framerates of any game I own unusual or unacceptable.
I don't care to buy BluRay movies at all. So when I bought my PS3, I had to shell out $200 more for functionality I don't need or want.
I think you're in the minority. Everyone to whom I've shown Casino Royale has been blown away. I think HD movies are great, and right now my PS3 is my only DVD/Bluray player. Other HD players are the same price as a PS3. Quite frankly, given the low quality of cable/satellite HD channels - a bluray/HD-DVD player is the only way to REALLY see the benefit of an HDTV. I mean seriously, you spend $1,500 on a television - why would you want to wait for HD players to go down in price? Even if it's 6 months, that is a major benefit of an HD player you paid for that you are not using for an extended period of time.
And no, I don't buy the argument that next-gen games just absolutely NEED that kind of storage capacity.
The folks at Rockstar disagree with you. They have already publicly stated that they are having major problems fitting the necessary data for GTA4 on a single DVD.
So yeah Sony, stop shoving your Superior Formats(TM) down our throats and rootkitting our computers, you might actually start making money!
See, this is the kind of stuff that indicates you are just trolling. Bluray is NOT Sony exclusive - it has more industry support than does HD-DVD. And whatever else Sony has done, it is nowhere NEAR as bad as Microsoft. At least I'm happy running Yellowdog Linux on my PS3. I could never do that with another console.
Also, as someone who makes a decent 6 figure income, I could never imagine buying all three consoles and simply have a POS 27" TV. Like most trolls in the console wars, your entire post is a rant made up of misinformation. You don't actually own all these consoles.
It's true though. I'm 29, and I first played Super Mario Brothers when I was 7. I've had enough. Please, let us move forward from these tired characters.
Evidence of what? dell has bad service? thats not hard to come by... The question is why the hell is it the AG's job to sue somebody for poor service? Does not NY have some real problems to deal with?
Yes they do, but fixing those problems are long-term issues that are outside the scope of democracy. The State of New York faces enormous future budget shortfalls as government workers retire and the entire vote-buying apparatus of the state bureaucracy comes crashing to the ground.
Democrats previously gained votes by promoting "social" programs like welfare, public housing, and other such initiatives. Government workers account for a full 17% of the workforce in New York State. When you consider that nearly 50% of the population (NOT the workforce) receive public assistance, you begin to see the problems for the Democratic Party.
They can no longer establish a plutocracy by stealing from the hardworking citizenry of the state. More people take from the state's coffers than donate to it. The game of throwing the people's money around to buy votes is over.
So what is a democrat to do?
Something... ANYTHING... that doesn't cost money. And this is an example of that.
First, lesbians don't want to have sex with straight women any more than I want to have sex with you. I am a man who likes to have sex with gay men. Though even if you are a closet case... um I'm on a drama free diet. However George Takei might be interested... at least if you play basketball.
You, unfortunately, are not a real lover of masculinity but a product of our feminized society. You knew you were gay when you were a virgin? I don't think so.
Your lustful desires are not turned on by a nametag that says "I am a faggot!". Every person discovers their own sexuality through life experiences. For any person to identify with a certain sexual identity, someone somewhere must have first convinced him to have sex.
While not personally gay myself, I have many gay friends and many, if not most, take great pleasure in seducing straight men. Most have also had sexual experiences with women, especially at a young age.
I can say that with pretty good certainty because I work two days a week as a physician at a historically queer focused women's health clinic.
I think you're just living in a fantasy world. A historically QUEER focused health clinic? I don't think so. They don't even have such a clinic in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of the few lesbian neighborhoods to ever have existed in the entire history of our planet.
So I think that hostility you are feeling has more to do with the fact that you are a mysogynist prick rather than the fact that you have a prick.
I think you're just a bottom who is pissed you don't have a vagina. The testosterone poisoning phrase is insulting to everything that makes men beautiful, and the creative driving force of art, culture, and history.
For example, my fiancee is North African, and her traditional meals are largely vegetarian with relatively few percent of calories from animal-derived foods. She's never had a health problem. Her grandmother is 103. Granted, the reason the average person from her country doesn't eat more meat is because they can't afford it, not because they have some inhibition about eating meat. Yet, the wealthier members of the population there are eating more and more American-style foods and guess what ... they're already seeing an increase in cancers, strokes, heart attacks and diabetes, but without the drugs and surgical techniques we use to try and compensate for the lifetime abuse of our bodies.
Friend, North Africa is a hell hole. Anecdotal evidence of her grandmother doesn't discount the fact the entire region was once the epicenter of the civilized world and that today, it is more barbaric than it has been in almost 3,000 years.
You have somehow irrationally determined that the only measure of success of a people is their average lifespan, rather than a careful analysis of the creative output of said people.
I would take Roman North Africa with an average lifespan of 65 over barbaric modern North Africa with an average lifespan of over 100.
Oh, and by the way, last time I was in Cairo, the number of men with huge guts was comical. Most of the men there look pregnant.
This is true for EVERYONE. In this world where the government frequently throws people in jail for "lying to investigators", but rarely prosecutes people for outright perjury, the only sensible course of action is simply say nothing at all.
Don't say "I don't know". If they can prove you DID know, they will prosecute for lying. Simply say the magic words: "I have nothing to say". No matter what a law enforcement official asks you, simply tell them you have nothing to say.