It's not common at the moment but orange reccently launched a flat rate data service. 25UKP (about 38USD) per month for roughly 56Kbps internet access wherever you are with your laptop.
I'm with Orange, and a GPRS customer. Unfortunately, this is still rather expensive. IIRC, GPRS is around 2 UKP for 1 meg. To make flat rate worthwhile, you'd need to use up around 12 meg. I've got an IMAP sync every 2 hours and use the web now and again, and I've never went over 8meg in one month, average is nearer four.
Of course, with unmetered, I'd use a lot more, but it just can't be justified for 99% of users. I'd bet that the only ones with it on their account are management perk-loving types who don't even know what GPRS is!!
I'v been told by a geek aquantance that GPRS operates over ATM which provides a virtual circuit. This means using GPRS on the move works very badly because it takes minutes for the ATM layer to find you when you move from one cell to another and then trys to deliver all the retry packets that both ends have been putting out in the meantime rarther than drop them as expected.
Yup. I've tried streaming radio to mine on the move. Forget it! You are lucky if you can keep the stream going for over 5 mins when not moving!! The first three months of GPRS were unmetered, so we got to try this stuff out for free!;-)
Look at the name of this website. How many people here are interested in a "normal mobile".
Until they can pack an mp3 player, 1gb memory that looks like a removable drive to the OS, GPS, flat rate broadband, colour screen and camera and voice for all under 100 bucks (not including stupid contract) for get it. Oh and no custom USB cables. Thats why I do not buy iRiver players, I need to carry cables everywhere I go just to move files.
Open your eyes. Most of them have already been done. mp3, SDIO cards (1gig available, no upper limit like IDE), GPS (over BT, integrated soon, but GSM can do DF already), broadband (3G phones), colour screen, camera, and an IRDA/USB/COM hookup. My current phone has all of these except the broadband. 3G phones aren't all that great yet, so I'm holding off on that one.
I've also got a shitload of pretty good games, DivX episodes of Futurama etc, e-mail, proper internet, blah blah blah. Everything a pocket PC has, because it is essentially one.
Yup, it has an airplane mode, however forget being able to do it outside of business class. Even if you persuade the flight staff that it's safe, the other passengers will either bitch or bring out their own unsafe phones. Not worth the hassle for the staff.
Except the contract part. Do you have any idea how much these devices cost? The contract is neccessary for the telco to make a profit! They wouldn't do it at a loss!! The phones cost at least 500 bucks to buy without contract. You'd be lucky if you could buy a colour screen and a battery for 100 bucks!!
What happens when the bus gets a flat? That does happen every now and again. It seems like the weight of the bus will fall on the engine. Are they planning on putting 2 tires in each wheel well (like a truck) in case this happens.
Eh? The weight of the bus is already on the engine, tire or no tire. Try this experiment to verify for yourself:
Put book on table, simulating a tyre
Put your hand on the book
Hit hand very hard with a hammer
Repeat without the book.
See if there is any difference on the forces with and without the book.
It's not about making anyone feel secure. It's about making anyone wanting to try anything feel uncomfortable. It's a psychological tactic as much as anything. That's why the security monkeys are generally assholes - they're trained to be, because it helps freak potential nutters out.
Very true. The experienced security people are behind CTV monitors in an office somewhere. They relay messages to the grunts of anyone suspicious and worthy of further search. You are being watched closely from the moment you step into the system.
As someone who's...returned from Amsterdam with local "delicacies" many times, beating airport security is unbelievably easy. In fact, the terror stuff makes my holiday shopping easier, as it shifts security from incoming to outgoing.;-)
Personally, I think they're wasting their time (any everyone elses). All it'll do is force real terrorists to get better trained and use more hidable devices.
Tin-foil hat time: The real reasons for increaced security could be:
Reassure the public that flying is safe
Scare the public to back the war on "terror" (i.e. unprofitable regimes)
Appear to be "doing something about it"
Let's face it...they would only catch idiotic terrorists with the current methods. Given the number of ways to beat passenger security, the alternates to that (e.g. baggage handlers), and the plethora of other targets out there for terrorists other than airtraffic, it's fairly clear that providing a real increase in security isn't possible without putting everyone in the goatse position.
The recently proposed tunnel from Morocco (North Africa) to Spain (South Europe) would out-do the Chunnel easilly though, should it be built.
If it was, the driving time to Africa would be drastically reduced (good for the Landrover crowd), plus it would mean you get so avoid a few Middle-Eastern hot spots on the way.
If you think offshore outsourcing is bad now, just wait until IT is unionized.
"You can't treat the working man this way! One day we'll form a union, and get the fair and equitable treatment we deserve! Then we'll go too far, and get corrupt, and shiftless, and the Japanese will eat us alive!" - The Simpsons
Bah. Amiga sux. For music, it had to be the Atari ST. Had one back then, kick-ass. Digital sampling and integrated MIDI. Many a classic electro track was coined there. No one used Amigas!
Technically, the 1991 war remained a cease-fire, a truce which Iraq violated by firing on US patrols during said cease-fire. This invoked the US's right to resume hotilities.
"They started it!!". How lame. Besides, I think you'd probably find that we fired first. We've been bombing them almost non-stop for the past 10 years. Just 'cos it ain't on CNN doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
Furthermore, Iraq was in violation of about 2 dozen UN resolutions.
Cool. If we are going on UN resolution violations, I take it Israel is next? Didn't think so...
I'll be interested to learn what Saddam has to say on the matter after intense interrogation.
You mean torture? Oh wait, that's a cultural thing. It's not torture if you don't draw blood apparently. Sleep deprivation and phy-opps you call it, eh?
So, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why would he throw out weapons inspectors and risk being thrown out of power?
Because the American ones seemed more interested in Saddam's movements than WMD. And seeing as you've actively been trying to assassinate him for the past 10 years, I'd say that was good reason to get pissed. Imagine the US outrage if Saddam were to take a pot-shot at Bush!
All Saddam had to do was comply with inspectors and he'd still be living in palaces built woth the Iraqi people's money, and still torturing and killing dissenters.
No, he'd be dead, due to a precission guided bomb, sent using inteligence by the US members of the inspection team, who were pretty likely CIA. And that was the good thing about Saddam...predictability. He will do anything he can to stay in power. Simple as that.
What he doubtless meant was that roughly 70% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussain was responsible for the attacks on September 11.
Hell, anyone wanna keep count of how many times Bush & Blair etc use the word "terror" while talking about Iraq? Any chance they get, they drop it in. "Saddams reign of terror" etc.
LCD's do have a fixed resolution but can emulate lower resolutions if they divide evenly into the native one
Which is, never. Running a lower resolution than the native one will always look terrible. I used to game on laptops all the time. Not pretty. If you plan on using the same res all the time, LCD is great.
The costs are about the same now and the reasons to go LCD largely outweigh the reasons otherwise not to.
Size matters. I've got a great 19" CRT flat-screen monitor running at 1600x1200. There aren't any affordable LCD equivalents to that, and it looks beautiful with the DPI turned up in the OS.
Ultimately, I'd go by desk space. If your desk can handle the bit sticking out the back, then get a CRT.
Oh i forgot, free thinking is only encouraged when it agrees with you. Sheesh
Eh? You are blindly following the leader. That's not free thinking. And consider Bushes proclaimation of anti-war people being "unamerican" or "not patrotic"; that whole line of thinking is about as unpatriotic as you can possibly get. The US is built on the ability to hold your own views and beliefs, and the acceptance of others opinions. Where does "Freedom Fries" fit into this agument?
Bush is about as unAmerican as you can get, destroying almost everything that once made your country great. The Constitution, gone. Bill of Rights, gone. If I was American myself, I'd be mighty pissed about that.
You are an anti-Iraqi moron. There are a lot more than 20,000 families who have lost family members due to Saddam's decades-old war against Iraq, in which he executed many thousands each year (including the ones who died this year becaused he used them as human shields by placing his military sites in civilian areas). However, his war is all but over. Thanks to Bush and a coalition of true leaders such as Blair who stand up for good instead of defending evil.
I'm not anti-Iraqi, just anti people with no common sense. How about the 500,000 we killed via sanctions (UN estimates)?
Oh, and how you forget how Saddam was once your friend, when he was using American sold chemical and biological weapons against Islamic people? How you sold him deadly strains of Anthrax? WTF were you doing breeding Anthrax in the first place? For a nation that whines about WMD, you invented them all!!
And they are still angry, most of them blaming Saddam as they should.
Nope:
"I hate Americans," he said. "I want revenge. I will wait, I will join a group, and, one day, I will kill Americans," - Ahmed Muthana, 14 year old Iraqi who's uncle was killed by crossfire in during an
operation to surpress an anti-America demonstration.
Saddam's regime had proven links to terrorism against the US and other countries.
Nope. The only tenious link is that he once offered money to the families of suicide bombers in Israel, many years ago. Most of the IRA terrorist organizations funding comes from the US. Should the UK invade you for this?
Saddam and Al Quada were already friends.
Absolutely not! They were sworn enemies! Not all Arabs get along, it's not us vs. them by the way.
Retaliating to effectively stop aggression is not in itself aggression.
Tell that to the kids that'll grow up hating you. Remember, the root of anti-US terrorism is in response to thing the Americans did to them first. But we are digressing into "he started it" terretory now, which is pointless.
By your logic, 9/11 was not an act of aggression as it was retailation to other aggression perpretraited by you. Of course, you aren't taught US/Middle East history in school, and Jerry Bruckheimer ignores the subject, so you can be forgiven for not having a clue.
The terrorists, however, hate freedom and democracy, which is why they are terrorists.
No, they hate America. There are many other countries that embrace freedom and democracy more than the US (e.g. Europe), yet you don't see them lining up to kill us. Bush uses "freedom and democracy" as it is a time-proven method to get the US population behind the "war". "Armed robbery writ large", more like, to paraphrase your Tom Clancy.
Bush and the coalition are dealing with the root cause of terrorism: the regumes which create it.
Good! When do we invade Saudi Arabia, staunch US ally and also the homeland and primary source of funding for the 9/11 attacks? Does that also mean that Bush etc are all resigning? Go read some history moron, the US is the worlds number one supporter of terrorism. Google for "School of the Americas", or if that is too complex for you, click on this link.
As your anti-US and anti-Iraq rants prove.
Actually, I'm very pro-US. I just can't see her anywhere these days. There is someone about who looks like her, but is very different now.
Bush is a scandal. The shit will hit the fan, Enron style, and the US will be forced to appologise to the world for all this. Then people will eat your words and ask "how could we let this happen?"
You are a moron. As I type, there are around 20,000 families in Iraq who lost someone due to this war.
Now, will they be brought up to love america, or hate you? Tough choice. Remember the anger you felt on 9/11? They got that for several months this year, when the bombs rained down around them.
What does the next generation of terrorists look like? Send the marines to the Iraqi schools, because that's where they are. A country with no proven links to anti-US terrorism now hates you, and has made an ally of a former enemy, Al Qaeda, who are flooding into the country to take pot-shots at Americans (they can't afford F-16s, so they take what they can). Good going!! It is exactly this kind of agressive behaviour that produced the current generation of terrorists. They don't hate freedom or democracy. They hate the people who killed their fathers, brothers, priests & leaders. The reason, legitimacy and morality behind each US attack are irrelevant...hate rarely follows logic.
I'm not surprised. When I visited a couple years ago the motorcycles seemed to be completely unrestricted, weaving in and around cars, butting to the front of the line at traffic lights, and completely disregarding lane lines and general traffic ettiquette.
That's half of the appeal of bikes, the ability to jump traffic. Great for gridlock commuting. Don't you get bikes cutting between lanes of traffic in gridlock in the USA? It's most common in the UK on the motorways, which like most countries, crawl during rush hour.
The UK is much the same. Cycle lanes are only really for show, they merge in and out of normal traffic lanes, buses and taxis ignore them. I read a study once that the real danger with cycle lanes are these merges, and the potential for accidents is actually increased by having a half-assed system.
Amsterdam has it nailed though. Only problem are the stoned tourists who aren't used to the road markings, and walk along cycle areas completely obvious to annoying the locals.
The cameras aren't hidden, they are a combination of security cameras operated by businesses to protect their premises, and those operated by local cameras for traffic control, and where necessary, crime reduction in city centres etc.
Rest assured that when Total Information Awareness comes to fruition, the US system will be fully interconnected.
In some ways, having all this old legacy stuff is a boom for privacy. I'll only worry when they are networked with facial recognition capabilities.
It's obvious if you live in Europe, where a lot of houses and buildings are old, and do not provide adequate sound-proofing.
The rest of your post is spot on, but I have to disagree with this. Old buildings are made up from huge chucks of stone. The interior wall thickness in my flat is over a foot, the exteriour ones are at least a foot and a half, possibly two feet. The sound-proofing is brilliant, much better than a modern flat were the walls are often less than 4-6 inches between adjoining units. Install double-glazing, and you won't get much better, short of lining the outside of your home with eggboxes.
You could argue that they were built to last, though it's obvious that the lesser constructed buildings from the 19th century have fallen down, leaving only the sturdy ones! But yes, there are a lot of new buildings in the regions being looked at here as well.
Also, old building techniques make for good inter-appartment sound proofing. We are talking about the days before dumpsters and haulage, so any waste/rubble got dumped in wall cavities and ceiling space. I rarely hear my neighbours, and I've yet to have a complaint about my loud home cinema, or late night habits.
Combined with high roofs (>12 feet) and a little bit of class/history, old buildings are the way to go. The "coolest" areas in most UK cities (mostly "The West End" due to the prevailing winds) are all old areas with appartments/townhouses like these. Anything built in the last thirty years will be lucky to last the same again in servicable condition. There are 60s housing projects being torn down as I type, it was a terrible decade for archtechure in Great Britain. New homes are also of the cheap-ass-shit practically pre-fab variety.
If you add to this situation the fact that a lot of streets in large European cities are small and not made for cars (meaning medieval streets, not US-Grid-Style streets/boulevard)
Because of this layout, it means we rely a lot on "main roads" (don't know the US term), to carry the bulk of the traffic, usually two lanes in each direction. If you live near to one of them, expect loud diesel engine noises 24 hours a day. But the smaller backroads mean that locals can nip about using obscure short-cuts that cut the length of trips. It's quite an art, the taxi drivers are of course the best at it.
I'm also not convinced that the grid layout is superiour in terms of traffic management. Sure, it spreads the load but it's horribly inefficient. Many of the side streets on our main roads have been bollarded up to reduce the numbers of junctions, and increase traffic flow from A to B. Grid layout is a worse-case-scenario for this.
But in the "Internet Age", where a store or bank is receiving electronic transactions from all over the globe, how can the store or bank have a "certain level of trust" that the data it is receiving is from a biometric scanner and not just a stolen recording of someone else's data?
And just take a look at the ATM thread a couple of articles below this to see how ATMs have been comprimised. Cracking counter-point devices will be childs play in comparison.
but trying to explain archives and decompression, you start to lose them.
Don't then.;-) Tell them it's a box of files and you have to unpack it to get them all. Mention it's easier to bring home the shopping when it's in one bag, rather than lot's of little bags. They'll get what you mean.
Plain English works most of the time! Just mention whatever you need to teach in a form they are already familiar with.
Re:Oh Well, there not the first, there not the las
on
Kazaa-lite Shut Down
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· Score: 1
It's trivial to find IPs of people sharing any file (just ask the tracker; it'll give you a FULL LIST), without even downloading the file/joining the swarm yourself.
And how is that different from any other p2p network? The only difference is that with some others you may need to initiate a download to get the list, but if you are working for a company working for the RIAA to monitor p2p (which is a growing industry), I somehow think they won't be charging you with copyright infringement.
Oh, ever wonder why most machines have been retrofitted with a card swiper instead of an eater? It's because people were putting stuff inside of it so cards would jam, and then they would sit across the parking lot with a spotting scope and watch a person type their pin. When the person couldn't get their card out and left, they would come by with a little extraction tool, take the card, and go on an ATM spree.
I've heard of that scam being called "The Lebonese Loop". Our local newspapers warned against it six months ago, but it's been around for years.
There are still some artists who produce albums as an artistic whole, not just a bunch of singles, but as a complete artistic statement. The fear is that if the per song market becomes dominent, that the art of albums will consequently suffer
Yeah, but they aren't the ones that'll be impacted by the single song download market. It'll be your Britney (et al) CDs with 2-3 "good" tracks and the rest filler.
Besides. How hard is it to search for a zip/rar of the whole album anyway?
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I'm with Orange, and a GPRS customer. Unfortunately, this is still rather expensive. IIRC, GPRS is around 2 UKP for 1 meg. To make flat rate worthwhile, you'd need to use up around 12 meg. I've got an IMAP sync every 2 hours and use the web now and again, and I've never went over 8meg in one month, average is nearer four.
Of course, with unmetered, I'd use a lot more, but it just can't be justified for 99% of users. I'd bet that the only ones with it on their account are management perk-loving types who don't even know what GPRS is!!
I'v been told by a geek aquantance that GPRS operates over ATM which provides a virtual circuit. This means using GPRS on the move works very badly because it takes minutes for the ATM layer to find you when you move from one cell to another and then trys to deliver all the retry packets that both ends have been putting out in the meantime rarther than drop them as expected.
Yup. I've tried streaming radio to mine on the move. Forget it! You are lucky if you can keep the stream going for over 5 mins when not moving!! The first three months of GPRS were unmetered, so we got to try this stuff out for free! ;-)
Look at the name of this website. How many people here are interested in a "normal mobile".
Until they can pack an mp3 player, 1gb memory that looks like a removable drive to the OS, GPS, flat rate broadband, colour screen and camera and voice for all under 100 bucks (not including stupid contract) for get it. Oh and no custom USB cables. Thats why I do not buy iRiver players, I need to carry cables everywhere I go just to move files.
Open your eyes. Most of them have already been done. mp3, SDIO cards (1gig available, no upper limit like IDE), GPS (over BT, integrated soon, but GSM can do DF already), broadband (3G phones), colour screen, camera, and an IRDA/USB/COM hookup. My current phone has all of these except the broadband. 3G phones aren't all that great yet, so I'm holding off on that one.
I've also got a shitload of pretty good games, DivX episodes of Futurama etc, e-mail, proper internet, blah blah blah. Everything a pocket PC has, because it is essentially one.
Yup, it has an airplane mode, however forget being able to do it outside of business class. Even if you persuade the flight staff that it's safe, the other passengers will either bitch or bring out their own unsafe phones. Not worth the hassle for the staff.
Except the contract part. Do you have any idea how much these devices cost? The contract is neccessary for the telco to make a profit! They wouldn't do it at a loss!! The phones cost at least 500 bucks to buy without contract. You'd be lucky if you could buy a colour screen and a battery for 100 bucks!!
Eh? The weight of the bus is already on the engine, tire or no tire. Try this experiment to verify for yourself:
- Put book on table, simulating a tyre
- Put your hand on the book
- Hit hand very hard with a hammer
- Repeat without the book.
See if there is any difference on the forces with and without the book.Very true. The experienced security people are behind CTV monitors in an office somewhere. They relay messages to the grunts of anyone suspicious and worthy of further search. You are being watched closely from the moment you step into the system.
As someone who's...returned from Amsterdam with local "delicacies" many times, beating airport security is unbelievably easy. In fact, the terror stuff makes my holiday shopping easier, as it shifts security from incoming to outgoing. ;-)
Personally, I think they're wasting their time (any everyone elses). All it'll do is force real terrorists to get better trained and use more hidable devices.
Tin-foil hat time: The real reasons for increaced security could be:
Let's face it...they would only catch idiotic terrorists with the current methods. Given the number of ways to beat passenger security, the alternates to that (e.g. baggage handlers), and the plethora of other targets out there for terrorists other than airtraffic, it's fairly clear that providing a real increase in security isn't possible without putting everyone in the goatse position.
If it was, the driving time to Africa would be drastically reduced (good for the Landrover crowd), plus it would mean you get so avoid a few Middle-Eastern hot spots on the way.
"You can't treat the working man this way! One day we'll form a union, and get the fair and equitable treatment we deserve! Then we'll go too far, and get corrupt, and shiftless, and the Japanese will eat us alive!" - The Simpsons
(ah, feel young again, just like the old days!)
"They started it!!". How lame. Besides, I think you'd probably find that we fired first. We've been bombing them almost non-stop for the past 10 years. Just 'cos it ain't on CNN doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
Cool. If we are going on UN resolution violations, I take it Israel is next? Didn't think so...
You mean torture? Oh wait, that's a cultural thing. It's not torture if you don't draw blood apparently. Sleep deprivation and phy-opps you call it, eh?
Because the American ones seemed more interested in Saddam's movements than WMD. And seeing as you've actively been trying to assassinate him for the past 10 years, I'd say that was good reason to get pissed. Imagine the US outrage if Saddam were to take a pot-shot at Bush!
No, he'd be dead, due to a precission guided bomb, sent using inteligence by the US members of the inspection team, who were pretty likely CIA. And that was the good thing about Saddam...predictability. He will do anything he can to stay in power. Simple as that.
So true! It's great that someone who has maimed and killed Iraqi's for the personal gain of his family & peers has finally been arrested.
Which prison are they keeping Bush in anyway?
Hell, anyone wanna keep count of how many times Bush & Blair etc use the word "terror" while talking about Iraq? Any chance they get, they drop it in. "Saddams reign of terror" etc.
And no one has challenged them about it!!
Which is, never. Running a lower resolution than the native one will always look terrible. I used to game on laptops all the time. Not pretty. If you plan on using the same res all the time, LCD is great.
The costs are about the same now and the reasons to go LCD largely outweigh the reasons otherwise not to.
Size matters. I've got a great 19" CRT flat-screen monitor running at 1600x1200. There aren't any affordable LCD equivalents to that, and it looks beautiful with the DPI turned up in the OS.
Ultimately, I'd go by desk space. If your desk can handle the bit sticking out the back, then get a CRT.
Or you could just use the best one around at the moment (IMHO), BSplayer
Go and buy some history books and get a clue.
Eh? You are blindly following the leader. That's not free thinking. And consider Bushes proclaimation of anti-war people being "unamerican" or "not patrotic"; that whole line of thinking is about as unpatriotic as you can possibly get. The US is built on the ability to hold your own views and beliefs, and the acceptance of others opinions. Where does "Freedom Fries" fit into this agument?
Bush is about as unAmerican as you can get, destroying almost everything that once made your country great. The Constitution, gone. Bill of Rights, gone. If I was American myself, I'd be mighty pissed about that.
I'm not anti-Iraqi, just anti people with no common sense. How about the 500,000 we killed via sanctions (UN estimates)?
Oh, and how you forget how Saddam was once your friend, when he was using American sold chemical and biological weapons against Islamic people? How you sold him deadly strains of Anthrax? WTF were you doing breeding Anthrax in the first place? For a nation that whines about WMD, you invented them all!!
And they are still angry, most of them blaming Saddam as they should.
Nope:
Saddam's regime had proven links to terrorism against the US and other countries.
Nope. The only tenious link is that he once offered money to the families of suicide bombers in Israel, many years ago. Most of the IRA terrorist organizations funding comes from the US. Should the UK invade you for this?
Saddam and Al Quada were already friends.
Absolutely not! They were sworn enemies! Not all Arabs get along, it's not us vs. them by the way.
Retaliating to effectively stop aggression is not in itself aggression.
Tell that to the kids that'll grow up hating you. Remember, the root of anti-US terrorism is in response to thing the Americans did to them first. But we are digressing into "he started it" terretory now, which is pointless.
By your logic, 9/11 was not an act of aggression as it was retailation to other aggression perpretraited by you. Of course, you aren't taught US/Middle East history in school, and Jerry Bruckheimer ignores the subject, so you can be forgiven for not having a clue.
The terrorists, however, hate freedom and democracy, which is why they are terrorists.
No, they hate America. There are many other countries that embrace freedom and democracy more than the US (e.g. Europe), yet you don't see them lining up to kill us. Bush uses "freedom and democracy" as it is a time-proven method to get the US population behind the "war". "Armed robbery writ large", more like, to paraphrase your Tom Clancy.
Bush and the coalition are dealing with the root cause of terrorism: the regumes which create it.
Good! When do we invade Saudi Arabia, staunch US ally and also the homeland and primary source of funding for the 9/11 attacks? Does that also mean that Bush etc are all resigning? Go read some history moron, the US is the worlds number one supporter of terrorism. Google for "School of the Americas", or if that is too complex for you, click on this link.
As your anti-US and anti-Iraq rants prove.
Actually, I'm very pro-US. I just can't see her anywhere these days. There is someone about who looks like her, but is very different now.
Bush is a scandal. The shit will hit the fan, Enron style, and the US will be forced to appologise to the world for all this. Then people will eat your words and ask "how could we let this happen?"
Now, will they be brought up to love america, or hate you? Tough choice. Remember the anger you felt on 9/11? They got that for several months this year, when the bombs rained down around them.
What does the next generation of terrorists look like? Send the marines to the Iraqi schools, because that's where they are. A country with no proven links to anti-US terrorism now hates you, and has made an ally of a former enemy, Al Qaeda, who are flooding into the country to take pot-shots at Americans (they can't afford F-16s, so they take what they can). Good going!! It is exactly this kind of agressive behaviour that produced the current generation of terrorists. They don't hate freedom or democracy. They hate the people who killed their fathers, brothers, priests & leaders. The reason, legitimacy and morality behind each US attack are irrelevant...hate rarely follows logic.
That's half of the appeal of bikes, the ability to jump traffic. Great for gridlock commuting. Don't you get bikes cutting between lanes of traffic in gridlock in the USA? It's most common in the UK on the motorways, which like most countries, crawl during rush hour.
Amsterdam has it nailed though. Only problem are the stoned tourists who aren't used to the road markings, and walk along cycle areas completely obvious to annoying the locals.
Rest assured that when Total Information Awareness comes to fruition, the US system will be fully interconnected.
In some ways, having all this old legacy stuff is a boom for privacy. I'll only worry when they are networked with facial recognition capabilities.
The rest of your post is spot on, but I have to disagree with this. Old buildings are made up from huge chucks of stone. The interior wall thickness in my flat is over a foot, the exteriour ones are at least a foot and a half, possibly two feet. The sound-proofing is brilliant, much better than a modern flat were the walls are often less than 4-6 inches between adjoining units. Install double-glazing, and you won't get much better, short of lining the outside of your home with eggboxes.
You could argue that they were built to last, though it's obvious that the lesser constructed buildings from the 19th century have fallen down, leaving only the sturdy ones! But yes, there are a lot of new buildings in the regions being looked at here as well.
Also, old building techniques make for good inter-appartment sound proofing. We are talking about the days before dumpsters and haulage, so any waste/rubble got dumped in wall cavities and ceiling space. I rarely hear my neighbours, and I've yet to have a complaint about my loud home cinema, or late night habits.
Combined with high roofs (>12 feet) and a little bit of class/history, old buildings are the way to go. The "coolest" areas in most UK cities (mostly "The West End" due to the prevailing winds) are all old areas with appartments/townhouses like these. Anything built in the last thirty years will be lucky to last the same again in servicable condition. There are 60s housing projects being torn down as I type, it was a terrible decade for archtechure in Great Britain. New homes are also of the cheap-ass-shit practically pre-fab variety.
If you add to this situation the fact that a lot of streets in large European cities are small and not made for cars (meaning medieval streets, not US-Grid-Style streets/boulevard)
Because of this layout, it means we rely a lot on "main roads" (don't know the US term), to carry the bulk of the traffic, usually two lanes in each direction. If you live near to one of them, expect loud diesel engine noises 24 hours a day. But the smaller backroads mean that locals can nip about using obscure short-cuts that cut the length of trips. It's quite an art, the taxi drivers are of course the best at it.
I'm also not convinced that the grid layout is superiour in terms of traffic management. Sure, it spreads the load but it's horribly inefficient. Many of the side streets on our main roads have been bollarded up to reduce the numbers of junctions, and increase traffic flow from A to B. Grid layout is a worse-case-scenario for this.
And just take a look at the ATM thread a couple of articles below this to see how ATMs have been comprimised. Cracking counter-point devices will be childs play in comparison.
Don't then. ;-) Tell them it's a box of files and you have to unpack it to get them all. Mention it's easier to bring home the shopping when it's in one bag, rather than lot's of little bags. They'll get what you mean.
Plain English works most of the time! Just mention whatever you need to teach in a form they are already familiar with.
And how is that different from any other p2p network? The only difference is that with some others you may need to initiate a download to get the list, but if you are working for a company working for the RIAA to monitor p2p (which is a growing industry), I somehow think they won't be charging you with copyright infringement.
I've heard of that scam being called "The Lebonese Loop". Our local newspapers warned against it six months ago, but it's been around for years.
Yeah, but they aren't the ones that'll be impacted by the single song download market. It'll be your Britney (et al) CDs with 2-3 "good" tracks and the rest filler.
Besides. How hard is it to search for a zip/rar of the whole album anyway?