According to an old article in the Australian Financial Review, the notes were manufactured in a hollow six storey building in Canberra. They blew a giant plastic bubble then slit it down to get the film used in final production. It was done this way to ensure even film thickness. I wonder if this had any connection with the notes' propensity to curl?
I don't think so. I think it's more that they "set" into a curled position if held that way for any length of time, e.g. in a folded wallet.
They're also rather difficult to crease if folded tightly - they spring back when you let them go. Usually this is a non-issue, but I used to have a favourite wallet with a little wire to "hang" paper money on behind a leather flap (kind of like an un-sprung money clip). I had to give it up when the currency switched because the new notes wouldn't fold well enough to stay on it.
I think they go through a regular dryer just fine. I seem to recall putting some through mine without a problem. At higher temperatures they shrink like those cereal-box novelties. I have a friend with a miniature $5 note that was in the pocket when he ironed his shirt.
The most annoying tendency is for the notes not to lie flat. The first generation of $5 notes were particularly bad. I was working in retail just after they were introduced and it was a real chore to keep them from curling up in the till and escaping from under the spring clip thingy. The technology has improved a lot, but they're still a bit curly.
As to the commenter below asking about the g-string issue, if you roll them length-wise they'll stay straight, but the corners and edges can be quite sharp and scratchy, so the ladies (and, one presumes, gentlemen in the appropriate establishments) probably prefer their tips on the stage, not in the undies.
This guideline offends my morality, decency and propriety.
With vauge crap like that why even have a rule...
Basically it's worded like this to bring it in line with the laws applying to other media. Bear in mind that government censorship of non-political speech is constitutionally legal in Australia, and applied to all commercially distributed media and some personal imports.
Wording the law like this is actually a good idea (if we have to have censorship at all), because it allows for the fluctuating standards of society. For example, the film Last Tango in Paris was originally "banned" (refused classification) in Australia because depicting two strangers having a sexual relationship without knowing each other's names or having any other social connection was considered morally reprehensible (this despite the fact that the film doesn't condone or glorify this in any way). In the 90s, the film was finally classified and distributed for public screening because the original arguments no longer represented the majority view of morality in Australian society.
C = lambda times nu...big deal, it's what I said without explaining how it works. You still haven't told me how an adverse effect is inversely proportional to a longer lambda. see I can use big words too. but still...explain if you want.
The thing is that there is a threshold. It's not just a direct proportionality. Photons with energy below the threshold of breaking chemical bonds aren't "a little bit dangerous" they're just not (individually) dangerous at all. Enough of them to cause heating can be dangerous, hence not standing near open furnaces nor putting oneself in the microwave, but at low intensity they just will not have the same effect on chemical substances that high frequency photons will have, no matter how long the exposure.
and if your standing near a particle emiter - such as a cell phone
A cell phone is not a particle emitter (in the sense of a particle being a thing with mass, not something with a localized wave-function). In general, high-velocity particles with mass (alpha and beta radiation) are much more dangerous than the photons you encounter in your daily life because they have vastly more energy.
if one lucky photon can on the off chance give you "cancer" what's the likely hood that prolonged exposure to radiation at a similiar frequency won't get you "lucky" again. really?
Similar frequency, sure. The longer you're exposed to UV radiation the higher the chance of something bad (e.g. melanoma) happening. However, if the photons are below the threshold of causing chemical change, as those from radio transmitters are, the length of exposure doesn't matter at all. None of the photons have enough energy to do anything significant.
If qualifications are important, I have a degree in physics and physical chemistry, but I got it a few years ago so I'll apologize in advance if the facts I "crammed" in there have faded a little.
i think u should head back and do some chem 101 and physics: electromagnetism. Radiation is radiation, if its at a low frequency for a long period of time you will have molecular activity, specifically what is called molecular jitter or vibration.
If you're exposed to a higher frequency for a shorter period of time, you'll just get activity sooner.
That's quite wrong actually. You will get very different types of activity depending on the frequency, because the frequency determines the energy per photon, and a molecule can only absorb a photon of electromagnetic radiation if its energy corresponds to the energy gap between two quantum states.
For microwaves you're talking about the rotational states of things like water molecules, and for infra-red, the vibrational states of covalent bonds. What we feel as temperature. Over time, the temperature can rise to the point where a chemical change will occur, but those changes absolutely will not occur unless the irradiated area actually gets hot. The human body is also really good at spreading and dissipating excess heat.
Higher frequency radiation can to act on the electrons in molecules directly, starting with visible light which can interact with electrons in the large orbitals of highly conjugated long-chain molecules and bring about conformational changes (this is how your eyes work). Ultra-violet light can break a covalent bond directly, damaging tissue and DNA or creating free radicals which then go on to do this damage. X-rays and gamma rays can blow an electron right out of an atom, creating interesting and exotic ions which could wreak all kinds of havoc in the body.
The first category of electromagnetic radiation, which includes wi-fi and mobile phones, is only dangerous if it is intense enough do deliver energy to your body faster than you can dissipate it. For example, if you're standing near a large fire. The latter type can trigger a cancer with a single "lucky" photon, which is why you should always wear a hat and sunscreen to minimise that chance.
I really wish people would understand this. Radiation is Radiation.
No. It's not. Really. This is true even without getting into the differences between electromagnetic radiation, particle-based radiation (alpha and beta rays), and radioactive material -- all of which are referred to as "radiation" in the popular media.
Australia has the metric system and we still have 6 inch and foot-long subs at Subway.
Indeed. And you can get a Quarter Pounder at McDonalds too (no "royale with cheese" here). They generally have a little TM next to the name, since it's a brand and not an actual measurement of what you're getting (I'm pretty sure it's illegal to sell items in imperial units).
You can also go to the pub and order a (imperial, 20 oz) pint, but the bottom of the glass will actually say 570 mL.
And if you are near Australia, the PopSci website force-redirects you to the.au URL where this article is 404, so you can't find out about it.
Re:Sugar doesnt 'damage' you.
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
No. The OP is exactly right. Elevated blood glucose levels are quite toxic to the body. Ask anyone with type-1 diabetes why their sense of taste is failing, and why they have to have an eyesight test for their driver's license more often than the rest of us.
In a healthy individual, insulin makes sure blood glucose doesn't stay too high for too long. This does not negate the fact that, while necessary, glucose does have the ability to seriously damage your body.
Re:Sorry but it does not meet the criteria
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
I own my iPhones. Even if I dump AT&T today, I will maintain ownership of my iPhones. I am not renting nor leasing them, nor are they a work for hire under contract. They are commodity goods sold off the shelf, so therefore the first sale doctrine applies - along with bypassing DRM for the purpose of interoperability. Courts have upheld jailbreaking as a legal activity so why is Apple still fighting it? I am a jailbreaker, and yet I still buy apps from the app store, and even occasionally buy tracks through iTunes rather than dig out certain CDs to re-rip them.
Sure you own the phone, but you don't own the software. You have a license for to use iOS on the device, so long as you abide by certain conditions (i.e. no jailbreaking). So you're completely free to jailbreak and install Android on your iPhone, but not to continue running iOS and using the App Store. You might not like it, but the legal concepts behind software licensing have held up pretty well in the courts so far.
You think Dropbox is less secure than a protocol which sends passwords and data in clear text, and reads passwords in clear text from a.netrc file? Please.
The only mistake Dropbox have made is not re-keying on password change. Linux doesn't re-key your SSH authorized_keys file when you change your password either.
Also, if your job sometimes involves labor or maintenance tasks (rebooting a server, swapping RAM...) they're increasing the amount of time necessary to get your butt on premises to fix it, and potentially impacting their business while you do so.
Last time I had that kind of job, the datacentre was closer to my house than it was to the office anyway. We also had 2 PSTN lines to a console server and a remote-controlled power strip, allowing me to get at everything from the POST screen onwards via modem.
The free market has proved itself repeatedly to be phenomenally bad at providing necessary infrastructure, because the best way to deliver infrastructure is via monopoly (scale efficiencies, 100% compatibility, only digging up the road once).
Have the government run all the cell towers, and all the last-mile phone/internet delivery hardware. Lease out access to whatever private enterprises want to offer phone and broadband services. Then you will have real competition in areas that matter - customer service, bonus features, subsidized handsets, free content, low rates.
"Prepend" isn't a word either, but technical people use it a lot because there is a specific meaning there that needs a word -- to append at the beginning. Strictly speaking you could use "prefix" as a verb, but that word has a connotation of adding a small fixed string to the beginning of one or more items. "Prefix all international phone numbers with a + symbol." "Prepend the header before sending the request."
Similarly there is a need for a concise expression meaning "of adequate performance" without stretching to "high-performance" (especially since High Performance Computing has a specific meaning of its own). Unfortunately, in the modern language of hyperbole, terms like "adequate" and "acceptable" have negative connotations along the lines of "not really good enough but better than nothing". So, we, as an industry, have invented a jargon word "performant" to express the idea that a thing has a level of performance sufficient that you don't need to worry about it and can look for optimisations elsewhere in your system.
Considering this long and lengthy argument from 1786, I don't know how can you reach that braiddead conclusion. Note the final bolded sentence.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Jefferson's position seems pretty clear to me. He does not believe that the rights to ideas and inventions are property rights. Thus, there are not fundamental rights in the same way that property rights are (in the Lockian philosophy which underpins the US constitution). However, he does recognize the economic importance of protecting the creator's interests in "productions in literature, and [...] inventions in the arts" for a limited time through legislation.
This is in contrast to how many view "intellectual property" today. These people see the the ability to control the use and dissemination of ideas and expressions as a fundamental right which the law protects, rather than an artificial right which the law creates.
I'm not a programmer, but my guess is that it would take Google just one line of code to remove from search results all links containing the term "DVDRIP". Isn't that omission obvious and therefore a conscious choice? In my humble opinion, yes and yes.
If you're happy for this perfectly legitimate discussion to be removed from the Google index because you just use that term, sure.
Of course, as soon as it becomes apparent that this term is censored from Google, another term will be used. Why do you think we have terms like warez and pr0n? Word filters have been tried and have failed since before the Internet.
Why isn't Google, MSN, Yahoo, and anyone else who has a search engine functioning under arrest? Almost all content they list in their results is copyrighted.
I think someone has applied a very narrow filter to copyrighted content.
Search engines can get away with it because they're not curated. They have a plausible case that "we didn't know it was there" and/or "we didn't know what it was". This is because computers are not currently capable of determining meaning and context on a scale sufficient to automatically recognize infringing content.
For a site where a person manually links things, it is very difficult for the linker to deny knowledge of what was at the end of those links.
That may be sampling bias, though. I imagine that Twitter's just reading off statistics, and wouldn't do this if they thought it would be a significant hit to their business!
It's almost certainly sampling bias, but it's bias towards real people who actually use the system to communicate with other real people.
I know some self-styled "social media optimizer" consultants who will promise you thousands of twitter followers in hours. It's just a botnet of twitter accounts, all following each other and re-tweeting random garbage. In other words, the official client and the website might account for a large proportion of the volume, but it's quite possible that 3rd-party clients account for a large proportion of the signal.
$25, prepaid, for 300 minutes and 'unlimited data'.
The LG Optimus V is on-sale right now at Target for $130 + $20 Gift Card. Plus, you can get cheap rates on the refills:
Save an extra 5% with your RedCard. I like to buy my Top Up Cards with my RedCard at Target, since I get 5% off. The best deal is getting the $20 RECHARGEABLE Top-Up card from Target. For every 5 charges, you get $10 free. Plus 5% off with the RedCard.
Does any provider in the US offer this kind of service on a GSM network? Last time I checked when traveling to the USA the minimum I'd have to pay for a non-trivial amount of data from AT&T or T-Mobile was $70-80/mo. Kind of crazy when I can get a pre-paid SIM with 500 MB (+voice minutes) for $30 from major Aussie providers, or even less through budget resellers.
In the United States the called person pays for the call to the mobile phone.
This always mystified me. The US seems to be the only country that does this. The US was also the last western country to get ubiquitous mobile phone usage.
The only sane explanation I've seen is that, for some odd reason, the US cell phone numbering scheme is unified with the land-line numbering scheme. Your cell phone has an area code based on where you were when you signed up for the phone account. Thus, the caller cannot know whether they are calling a mobile phone, so it would be unfair to the caller to charge them call-to-mobile rates without warning. In other parts of the world (certainly in the UK and Australia), mobile phones have their own prefix codes, so you always know when you're calling a mobile, and you know you're going to pay more.
"Windows" isn't actually a window -- it's an operating system. If they had called it "The Operating System" they'd have a hard time trying to keep anyone else from calling their OS "The Operating System."
Don't shoot the Messenger Agent, but even a Student can see that Microsoft's Projects are all creatively named, protectable trademarks. My Word, your Office's Assistants and Publishers could easily tell you that. Movie Maker.
Jobs should bring this up at his next keynote. I bet he could come up with pages of numbers to support his point.
I'm shocked, the prices in Australia are reasonable this time! 13 inch is $1199 US (excl sales tax?) vs. $1399AU incl GST or $1271.82 w/o
Actually, I was looking at the previous ones earlier this week, and the prices pretty much have not changed. They added a lower-spec 13" (the $1399 that you quoted), but the low-end 15" that I was looking at is almost exactly the same. The real annoyance is things like $349 for AppleCare on the US site, and $449 on that AU site. GST would bump it up to $384. What is the extra $65 for?
Accounting for GST, there seems to be a $50-$100 premium on everything from the AU store.
Case in point: A replacement battery for my old MBP would still be $199 from the AU store, $129 from the US -- a $57 premium after GST.
Slashdot Mirror
According to an old article in the Australian Financial Review, the notes were manufactured in a hollow six storey building in Canberra. They blew a giant plastic bubble then slit it down to get the film used in final production. It was done this way to ensure even film thickness. I wonder if this had any connection with the notes' propensity to curl?
I don't think so. I think it's more that they "set" into a curled position if held that way for any length of time, e.g. in a folded wallet.
They're also rather difficult to crease if folded tightly - they spring back when you let them go. Usually this is a non-issue, but I used to have a favourite wallet with a little wire to "hang" paper money on behind a leather flap (kind of like an un-sprung money clip). I had to give it up when the currency switched because the new notes wouldn't fold well enough to stay on it.
I think they go through a regular dryer just fine. I seem to recall putting some through mine without a problem. At higher temperatures they shrink like those cereal-box novelties. I have a friend with a miniature $5 note that was in the pocket when he ironed his shirt.
The most annoying tendency is for the notes not to lie flat. The first generation of $5 notes were particularly bad. I was working in retail just after they were introduced and it was a real chore to keep them from curling up in the till and escaping from under the spring clip thingy. The technology has improved a lot, but they're still a bit curly.
As to the commenter below asking about the g-string issue, if you roll them length-wise they'll stay straight, but the corners and edges can be quite sharp and scratchy, so the ladies (and, one presumes, gentlemen in the appropriate establishments) probably prefer their tips on the stage, not in the undies.
This guideline offends my morality, decency and propriety.
With vauge crap like that why even have a rule...
Basically it's worded like this to bring it in line with the laws applying to other media. Bear in mind that government censorship of non-political speech is constitutionally legal in Australia, and applied to all commercially distributed media and some personal imports.
Wording the law like this is actually a good idea (if we have to have censorship at all), because it allows for the fluctuating standards of society. For example, the film Last Tango in Paris was originally "banned" (refused classification) in Australia because depicting two strangers having a sexual relationship without knowing each other's names or having any other social connection was considered morally reprehensible (this despite the fact that the film doesn't condone or glorify this in any way). In the 90s, the film was finally classified and distributed for public screening because the original arguments no longer represented the majority view of morality in Australian society.
C = lambda times nu...big deal, it's what I said without explaining how it works. You still haven't told me how an adverse effect is inversely proportional to a longer lambda. see I can use big words too. but still...explain if you want.
The thing is that there is a threshold. It's not just a direct proportionality. Photons with energy below the threshold of breaking chemical bonds aren't "a little bit dangerous" they're just not (individually) dangerous at all. Enough of them to cause heating can be dangerous, hence not standing near open furnaces nor putting oneself in the microwave, but at low intensity they just will not have the same effect on chemical substances that high frequency photons will have, no matter how long the exposure.
and if your standing near a particle emiter - such as a cell phone
A cell phone is not a particle emitter (in the sense of a particle being a thing with mass, not something with a localized wave-function). In general, high-velocity particles with mass (alpha and beta radiation) are much more dangerous than the photons you encounter in your daily life because they have vastly more energy.
if one lucky photon can on the off chance give you "cancer" what's the likely hood that prolonged exposure to radiation at a similiar frequency won't get you "lucky" again. really?
Similar frequency, sure. The longer you're exposed to UV radiation the higher the chance of something bad (e.g. melanoma) happening. However, if the photons are below the threshold of causing chemical change, as those from radio transmitters are, the length of exposure doesn't matter at all. None of the photons have enough energy to do anything significant.
If qualifications are important, I have a degree in physics and physical chemistry, but I got it a few years ago so I'll apologize in advance if the facts I "crammed" in there have faded a little.
i think u should head back and do some chem 101 and physics: electromagnetism. Radiation is radiation, if its at a low frequency for a long period of time you will have molecular activity, specifically what is called molecular jitter or vibration.
If you're exposed to a higher frequency for a shorter period of time, you'll just get activity sooner.
That's quite wrong actually. You will get very different types of activity depending on the frequency, because the frequency determines the energy per photon, and a molecule can only absorb a photon of electromagnetic radiation if its energy corresponds to the energy gap between two quantum states.
For microwaves you're talking about the rotational states of things like water molecules, and for infra-red, the vibrational states of covalent bonds. What we feel as temperature. Over time, the temperature can rise to the point where a chemical change will occur, but those changes absolutely will not occur unless the irradiated area actually gets hot. The human body is also really good at spreading and dissipating excess heat.
Higher frequency radiation can to act on the electrons in molecules directly, starting with visible light which can interact with electrons in the large orbitals of highly conjugated long-chain molecules and bring about conformational changes (this is how your eyes work). Ultra-violet light can break a covalent bond directly, damaging tissue and DNA or creating free radicals which then go on to do this damage. X-rays and gamma rays can blow an electron right out of an atom, creating interesting and exotic ions which could wreak all kinds of havoc in the body.
The first category of electromagnetic radiation, which includes wi-fi and mobile phones, is only dangerous if it is intense enough do deliver energy to your body faster than you can dissipate it. For example, if you're standing near a large fire. The latter type can trigger a cancer with a single "lucky" photon, which is why you should always wear a hat and sunscreen to minimise that chance.
I really wish people would understand this. Radiation is Radiation.
No. It's not. Really. This is true even without getting into the differences between electromagnetic radiation, particle-based radiation (alpha and beta rays), and radioactive material -- all of which are referred to as "radiation" in the popular media.
Australia has the metric system and we still have 6 inch and foot-long subs at Subway.
Indeed. And you can get a Quarter Pounder at McDonalds too (no "royale with cheese" here). They generally have a little TM next to the name, since it's a brand and not an actual measurement of what you're getting (I'm pretty sure it's illegal to sell items in imperial units).
You can also go to the pub and order a (imperial, 20 oz) pint, but the bottom of the glass will actually say 570 mL.
And if you are near Australia, the PopSci website force-redirects you to the .au URL where this article is 404, so you can't find out about it.
No. The OP is exactly right. Elevated blood glucose levels are quite toxic to the body. Ask anyone with type-1 diabetes why their sense of taste is failing, and why they have to have an eyesight test for their driver's license more often than the rest of us.
In a healthy individual, insulin makes sure blood glucose doesn't stay too high for too long. This does not negate the fact that, while necessary, glucose does have the ability to seriously damage your body.
There are no nutrients in sugar
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=macronutrient
I wonder how much iodine-131 this is, compared to the amount released into the South Pacific region by French nuclear tests.
I own my iPhones. Even if I dump AT&T today, I will maintain ownership of my iPhones. I am not renting nor leasing them, nor are they a work for hire under contract. They are commodity goods sold off the shelf, so therefore the first sale doctrine applies - along with bypassing DRM for the purpose of interoperability. Courts have upheld jailbreaking as a legal activity so why is Apple still fighting it? I am a jailbreaker, and yet I still buy apps from the app store, and even occasionally buy tracks through iTunes rather than dig out certain CDs to re-rip them.
Sure you own the phone, but you don't own the software. You have a license for to use iOS on the device, so long as you abide by certain conditions (i.e. no jailbreaking). So you're completely free to jailbreak and install Android on your iPhone, but not to continue running iOS and using the App Store. You might not like it, but the legal concepts behind software licensing have held up pretty well in the courts so far.
You think Dropbox is less secure than a protocol which sends passwords and data in clear text, and reads passwords in clear text from a .netrc file? Please.
The only mistake Dropbox have made is not re-keying on password change. Linux doesn't re-key your SSH authorized_keys file when you change your password either.
Also, if your job sometimes involves labor or maintenance tasks (rebooting a server, swapping RAM...) they're increasing the amount of time necessary to get your butt on premises to fix it, and potentially impacting their business while you do so.
Last time I had that kind of job, the datacentre was closer to my house than it was to the office anyway. We also had 2 PSTN lines to a console server and a remote-controlled power strip, allowing me to get at everything from the POST screen onwards via modem.
The free market will save us!
Any minute now...
The free market has proved itself repeatedly to be phenomenally bad at providing necessary infrastructure, because the best way to deliver infrastructure is via monopoly (scale efficiencies, 100% compatibility, only digging up the road once).
Have the government run all the cell towers, and all the last-mile phone/internet delivery hardware. Lease out access to whatever private enterprises want to offer phone and broadband services. Then you will have real competition in areas that matter - customer service, bonus features, subsidized handsets, free content, low rates.
"Prepend" isn't a word either, but technical people use it a lot because there is a specific meaning there that needs a word -- to append at the beginning. Strictly speaking you could use "prefix" as a verb, but that word has a connotation of adding a small fixed string to the beginning of one or more items. "Prefix all international phone numbers with a + symbol." "Prepend the header before sending the request."
Similarly there is a need for a concise expression meaning "of adequate performance" without stretching to "high-performance" (especially since High Performance Computing has a specific meaning of its own). Unfortunately, in the modern language of hyperbole, terms like "adequate" and "acceptable" have negative connotations along the lines of "not really good enough but better than nothing". So, we, as an industry, have invented a jargon word "performant" to express the idea that a thing has a level of performance sufficient that you don't need to worry about it and can look for optimisations elsewhere in your system.
>>>Jefferson actually supported IP laws
Considering this long and lengthy argument from 1786, I don't know how can you reach that braiddead conclusion. Note the final bolded sentence.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Jefferson's position seems pretty clear to me. He does not believe that the rights to ideas and inventions are property rights. Thus, there are not fundamental rights in the same way that property rights are (in the Lockian philosophy which underpins the US constitution). However, he does recognize the economic importance of protecting the creator's interests in "productions in literature, and [...] inventions in the arts" for a limited time through legislation.
This is in contrast to how many view "intellectual property" today. These people see the the ability to control the use and dissemination of ideas and expressions as a fundamental right which the law protects, rather than an artificial right which the law creates.
The only reason third-parties don't gain any traction is because of your lazy, defeatist attitude.
The reason third-party candidates don't gain any traction is because the USA does not have widespread preferential voting.
I'm not a programmer, but my guess is that it would take Google just one line of code to remove from search results all links containing the term "DVDRIP". Isn't that omission obvious and therefore a conscious choice? In my humble opinion, yes and yes.
If you're happy for this perfectly legitimate discussion to be removed from the Google index because you just use that term, sure.
Of course, as soon as it becomes apparent that this term is censored from Google, another term will be used. Why do you think we have terms like warez and pr0n? Word filters have been tried and have failed since before the Internet.
Why isn't Google, MSN, Yahoo, and anyone else who has a search engine functioning under arrest? Almost all content they list in their results is copyrighted.
I think someone has applied a very narrow filter to copyrighted content.
Search engines can get away with it because they're not curated. They have a plausible case that "we didn't know it was there" and/or "we didn't know what it was". This is because computers are not currently capable of determining meaning and context on a scale sufficient to automatically recognize infringing content.
For a site where a person manually links things, it is very difficult for the linker to deny knowledge of what was at the end of those links.
That may be sampling bias, though. I imagine that Twitter's just reading off statistics, and wouldn't do this if they thought it would be a significant hit to their business!
It's almost certainly sampling bias, but it's bias towards real people who actually use the system to communicate with other real people.
I know some self-styled "social media optimizer" consultants who will promise you thousands of twitter followers in hours. It's just a botnet of twitter accounts, all following each other and re-tweeting random garbage. In other words, the official client and the website might account for a large proportion of the volume, but it's quite possible that 3rd-party clients account for a large proportion of the signal.
Check out VirginMobile's Data Plans.
$25, prepaid, for 300 minutes and 'unlimited data'.
The LG Optimus V is on-sale right now at Target for $130 + $20 Gift Card. Plus, you can get cheap rates on the refills:
Save an extra 5% with your RedCard. I like to buy my Top Up Cards with my RedCard at Target, since I get 5% off. The best deal is getting the $20 RECHARGEABLE Top-Up card from Target. For every 5 charges, you get $10 free. Plus 5% off with the RedCard.
Does any provider in the US offer this kind of service on a GSM network? Last time I checked when traveling to the USA the minimum I'd have to pay for a non-trivial amount of data from AT&T or T-Mobile was $70-80/mo. Kind of crazy when I can get a pre-paid SIM with 500 MB (+voice minutes) for $30 from major Aussie providers, or even less through budget resellers.
In the United States the called person pays for the call to the mobile phone.
This always mystified me. The US seems to be the only country that does this. The US was also the last western country to get ubiquitous mobile phone usage.
The only sane explanation I've seen is that, for some odd reason, the US cell phone numbering scheme is unified with the land-line numbering scheme. Your cell phone has an area code based on where you were when you signed up for the phone account. Thus, the caller cannot know whether they are calling a mobile phone, so it would be unfair to the caller to charge them call-to-mobile rates without warning. In other parts of the world (certainly in the UK and Australia), mobile phones have their own prefix codes, so you always know when you're calling a mobile, and you know you're going to pay more.
"Windows" isn't actually a window -- it's an operating system. If they had called it "The Operating System" they'd have a hard time trying to keep anyone else from calling their OS "The Operating System."
SQL Server says hi.
Don't shoot the Messenger Agent, but even a Student can see that Microsoft's Projects are all creatively named, protectable trademarks. My Word, your Office's Assistants and Publishers could easily tell you that. Movie Maker.
Jobs should bring this up at his next keynote. I bet he could come up with pages of numbers to support his point.
I'm shocked, the prices in Australia are reasonable this time!
13 inch is $1199 US (excl sales tax?) vs. $1399AU incl GST or $1271.82 w/o
Actually, I was looking at the previous ones earlier this week, and the prices pretty much have not changed. They added a lower-spec 13" (the $1399 that you quoted), but the low-end 15" that I was looking at is almost exactly the same. The real annoyance is things like $349 for AppleCare on the US site, and $449 on that AU site. GST would bump it up to $384. What is the extra $65 for?
Accounting for GST, there seems to be a $50-$100 premium on everything from the AU store.
Case in point: A replacement battery for my old MBP would still be $199 from the AU store, $129 from the US -- a $57 premium after GST.