China has little to worry about, these revolts have been about high unemployment levels. China is not suffering from that. The people got their bread and circusseses. It is the Islamic nations that are worried. They are corrupt, inept and overflowing with ever larger generations of yoing people with no future. China escaped that with the one child policy.
Not quite. China's one-child policy has resulted in a serious gender imbalance where young men greatly outnumber young women. One report predicts there will be 30 million more men than women in China by 2020. With little prospect of finding a wife and raising a child to continue the family name, this could result in higher emigration, internal social unrest, or millions in the military with no reason to return home (won't that be comforting to neighbouring countries...)
Right, because we want merely "reputable" firms building and signing off on bridges that go through heating and cooling stresses, not to mention tons of traffic every day. Codes and standards are completely against the free market and should be gotten rid of, absolutely.
Tell you what, *you* move to a place where bridge and building standards don't exist, and the building is designed and built by the "free market," I'll happily live in and drive on structures and works that have some semblance of enforced quality standards.
No, they're not perfect, and failures occur even when a licensed professional engineer signs off on it, but imagine how much worse it would be if they were more lax.
And in case you forgot, the "free market" is what gave us the recent wave of lead-painted toys and melamine-contaminated milk. The capitalists in China were more than happy (at first) to skimp on actual product, and the capitalists in the west didn't care because they were paying less for it, and neither side had regulations (or they weren't enforced, generating free-market-like conditions where anything goes if you can get away with it) to prevent them from doing so until kids started getting sick and dying.
Perhaps in the US, but as a post above mentioned, in Canada they're extremely strict about use of the word "engineer", enough that they actually took on Microsoft and prevented them from cavalierly using the term engineer in their MCSE and similar programs, i.e. you can say you're an MCSE, but you're legally not allowed to call yourself a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer... minor distinction perhaps, but so goes the law and licensing of the term.
Engineering university programs must be accredited in order for graduates to have a B.Eng (bachelor of engineering), and each type (electrical, systems, civil, etc) is accredited separately. The iron ring is also exclusive to Canadian engineering university graduates, and can't be worn by engineers who graduated in a different country.
I'm a Canadian engineer, but not Professional--ie I don't pay dues nor have I taken the licensing test.
Engineering isn't the only field where terms and titles are strictly enforced--after all, only a select group can call themselves doctors, or lawyers.
Hong Kong and Singapore seem to be doing ok with very low tax rates...
They're both certainly helped by having a very small land area, high population density, easy access to water for most, and weather that's not extreme enough to pothole highways after every winter or flood them away every summer. I'd suggest British colonialism benefited the economies and cultures of both during the 20th century too, compared to their immediate neighbours.
You seek to correct inaccuracies in the bigger story, but when someone attempts to correct something in your own post (and not a simple grammar/spelling issue, if true this is like mixing up Australian and Austrian), you couldn't just say thanks, or challenge it, or even ignore it, but go out of your way to say you don't care about the accuracy of your own post?
I don't care how pedantic the correction may seem to you, that made you look like a hypocrite.
The latest iPod Nanos, with touchscreens, lack a home button. You press and hold (with one finger) anywhere on the screen to return to the home screen. I have gotten used to it, but would still prefer a real home button.
Not that it's directly applicable, but IIRC a big design flaw in some cars with push-start ignition is that to turn it off, the driver had to press and hold the ignition button for a few seconds (like soft-killing the power to a computer). In a couple of cases these cars apparently suffered from sudden acceleration problems, and in a panicked state some drivers weren't holding the button down for long enough to kill the engine.
Yeah, you're right... math skills not so good that early in the morning. OTOH, you've made my comment even stronger, i.e. the challenge is now to find a comparable 10" slate computer for 1/3 the price (i.e. starting around $165 USD).
The last two portable USB HDDs (both Iomegas) I bought were pre-formatted NTFS. They mount just fine in OSX, but it's not obvious to regular users why they can't write anything to it.
Two reasons I can think of: the phone is "free" or very cheap (with subsidized contract), and/or they don't want to pay for the data plan that's often mandatory with a full smartphone.
So, should we be excluding the low-end Android feature phones when comparing against iPhone market share? It would certainly be a fairer comparison.
Another problem I didn't touch on was the Android OS version. A friend bought a good Android phone late 2009, but its carrier-provided firmware was already a generation behind. They finally provided an update last month--to Android v2.1, released over a year ago by that time. And now Android's at v2.3. His phone is last year's news, they're probably not going to bother releasing another major update for it. In theory he could roll his own or install an unofficial one, but anyone doing that falls outside the realm of a regular user (hell, I know many regular iPhone users who don't update their OS).
I'm referring to phones that, for example, have an 800+ MHz processor, or more than a certain amount of ram.
Like I said, it's the same thing as an iPhone...some games just plain don't work on a first or second gen iPhone. If you're confused by something as simple as clock speed, then stick with an iPhone.
Regular users' eyes gloss over the moment you mention processor speed and memory on *computers*, let alone phones. If they know a bit about it, they know from computers that higher MHz/GHz is generally better, but *we* know that's about as useful a metric as megapixels on a digital camera.
So now you expect them to look up an app and check its CPU/RAM requirements, as well as screen size and other features, against their phone (or *potential* phone if they're shopping for one)?
Angry Birds developers at least maintains a list of Android devices they *dont* support, which is a better way to approach this--there's still far fewer phone models than possible computer configurations.
iOS developers can (and do) easily state what devices they *do* support, then the only variable is what OS version they're running.
Apple's only real failing here is not physically marking different generations devices (computers and iOS devices both) the way they refer to them in documentation. I have no idea how to quickly distinguish between an iPhone 3G or 3GS, or any of the iPod touches (except for the 4th gen with its Retina display), and a normal user won't remember.
I'm over 30 and though I have a regular radio alarm clock, I use my iPhone exclusively for regular alarms during the day and week. I'm reconsidering that position now.
I needed a one-off alarm for this morning. It didn't go off. Thankfully a fast-approaching cold front produced strong winds that knocked over things on my balcony and woke me up.
Failure to catch bugs in extremely basic functionality--twice in as many months--is inexcusable. Apple's inability to patch something like this without rolling out a gigantic 400+ MB firmware update highlights a massive shortcoming in their software release methodology--the DST bug was publicly known for weeks before it hit North America (having hit Australia first), but it wasn't fixed until some time after when it was rolled in with other updates.
With all due respect, I don't think most Chinese are able to recognize their own racism. Though to be fair 'racism' is really the wrong sort of term for the phenomenon from (*what I understand to be) a Chinese perspective. The term most often used by sociologists is 'xenophobia' but that too is probably not quite right. 'Phobia' is a fear, but it's not that Chinese fear foreigners per se, it's that they don't respect them as equals beyond a superficial level.
I think this is most clear when you examine the issue of marriage. Business is business, but as soon as a Chinese (or for that matter just about any East Asian ethnic) family finds out their child is involved with a person of a different race it's a big problem. That's racism no matter how you slice it.
I'm Canadian-born Chinese, and am a bit uncomfortable whenever "guilo" is used by relatives. I personally use the more politically correct term which literally means "western person" but that's very imprecise, since people from India and Africa also qualify as west (of China).
Concerning the relationship thing: My last girlfriend was white. My cousin married a Quebecois. At least two other family friends from my generation married white Canadians. The aforementioned cousin's mother is white, and two other family friends in my parents' generation married outside our "race" despite growing up in Hong Kong.
Obviously this is but an anecdote, and perhaps my family and immediate circle just happen to be more progressive and tolerant, but it's clearly not been a problem for us.
That's exactly what I do (but if it's winter, then only when the car's warmed up). The only catch is during the night--do I shut off my headlights or not? They're a significant drain on the battery, which isn't robust to begin with on my 2008 sub-compact, and I'm already sensing hesitation when cold-starting at -10C or below.
My compromise is to leave the parking lights on if I'm stopped at the head of the pack--at least this way cars on the other side don't flash their high-beams at me, thinking I've forgotten to turn my lights on.
This is why I hate having to deal with Windows on the side. In this aside about user CALs, there's three different takes (so far) on when you need a Windows CAL and when you don't.
I got sick of researching Windows Small Business server when I read their FAQ, and the section on licensing was longer than all the other sections combined!
Re:The police are the face of the law itself
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Recording the Police
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I cannot speak for Canada, but in the USA, we imprison so many people that only Nazi Germany and the USSR have us beat -- we actually imprison more people now than China, all convicted under our legal system.
As expected, the federal Conservatives in Canada are gung ho on being "tough on crime"--cracking down on criminals and giving them harsher sentences. On the surface, I don't disagree; some of the sentences for capital crimes have been too lenient.
However, this also means harsher sentences for "crimes" I don't believe should be, like recreational drugs (which I've never used and have no desire to, so I see myself as fairly impartial).
Their agenda also flies in the face of facts (big surprise...). When presented with the hard numbers by Statistics Canada that violent crime was in fact down, they blew it off and claimed they were right, and StatsCan was wrong, and that's why they had to fund new or upgraded prisons.
As appealing as the concept is, the ones that truly deserve it are rich enough and corrupt enough to hire private security goons and, if that fails, their surviving friends will hire investigators and hit squads to take out your family and you (in that order).
"Just rate the games and sell them dammit, let the market decide."
Isn't the market deciding already, by not selling AO games?
Sure, in the same way that the people of dictatorships decide their leader during elections--when popular opposition candidates are deliberately kept off the ballot.
The People drove Circuit City into bankruptcy. Also GM. And Wards. They can do the same with any other corporation they don't like. Look at Blockbuster which is teetering on the verge of death.
Circuit City had plenty of competition, from both big and small electronics stores.
GM had plenty of competition, from other US and foreign brands.
Don't know Wards so can't speak to that.
Blockbuster is being displaced because of Netflix, video-on-demand or downloaded movies (legal or otherwise)--the latter two which, incidentally, requires massive infrastructure and backing of the entertainment industry to work. A true startup has no chance--only a large corporate expansion into such a service has even a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding.
In Canada there are three main "choices" for cell phone service: Bell, Rogers, and Telus, or their subsidiary brands. Despite this "competition" plans require 3 year contracts to get the full subsidy, the longest in the world. People constantly complain about poor service from all three, but all that really happens is they get roughly equal amounts of pissed off customers switching between them.
When's the last time a near-monopoly, last-mile service company (power, water, phone, cable, internet, etc) gone into bankruptcy and actually dissolved? This isn't rhetorical; I can't think of any off the top of my head.
So even if the SGA characters didn't know it was starflight-capable for a year or two (I don't remember if this was actually the case), we as viewers knew it was, so it wasn't a jump-the-shark feature of the city that they retconned in.
Sometimes it's just being in Canada that keeps prices artificially high.
Case in point: Calvin and Hobbes the Complete Collection.
Amazon.com price: $90.97 Amazon.ca price: $125.40
This despite the dollar being at or close to parity, and it's not like Amazon Canada's stock of this title was purchased 5 years ago (when the dollar was weaker) and sitting in a warehouse the entire time.
I've been suspicious of actual competitive price matching, lately. For example, I can't find identical model number laptops at local B&M stores... really, how hard would it be for mfr/retailers to set up unique model numbers for each retailer so that each retailer never actually price match certain items with each other? Even if the internal components are 100% identical, if the model numbers don't match, the clowns at customer service will not price match.
I'm told this is also the case with mattresses and frames, i.e. each sleepware store has slightly different model numbers from each maker.
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China has little to worry about, these revolts have been about high unemployment levels. China is not suffering from that. The people got their bread and circusseses. It is the Islamic nations that are worried. They are corrupt, inept and overflowing with ever larger generations of yoing people with no future. China escaped that with the one child policy.
Not quite. China's one-child policy has resulted in a serious gender imbalance where young men greatly outnumber young women. One report predicts there will be 30 million more men than women in China by 2020. With little prospect of finding a wife and raising a child to continue the family name, this could result in higher emigration, internal social unrest, or millions in the military with no reason to return home (won't that be comforting to neighbouring countries...)
I'm surprised there hasn't been a defense on free speech grounds yet.
Fox "News" can broadcast things they know to be false. Not just lies of omission, actual lies.
Anonymous political donations in amounts so large you know they're from corporations, are "free speech."
And yet publishing the poorly protected keys to the Sony gaming crown jewels gets a legal muzzle.
That was part of the idle section previously, and I hated it. Thankfully it had a button to hide it. I don't see that option with this new design.
One of Microsoft's mantras has long been to hide information from the user.
Proving, once again, that all Microsoft does is follow Apple's lead ;-)
Right, because we want merely "reputable" firms building and signing off on bridges that go through heating and cooling stresses, not to mention tons of traffic every day. Codes and standards are completely against the free market and should be gotten rid of, absolutely.
Tell you what, *you* move to a place where bridge and building standards don't exist, and the building is designed and built by the "free market," I'll happily live in and drive on structures and works that have some semblance of enforced quality standards.
No, they're not perfect, and failures occur even when a licensed professional engineer signs off on it, but imagine how much worse it would be if they were more lax.
And in case you forgot, the "free market" is what gave us the recent wave of lead-painted toys and melamine-contaminated milk. The capitalists in China were more than happy (at first) to skimp on actual product, and the capitalists in the west didn't care because they were paying less for it, and neither side had regulations (or they weren't enforced, generating free-market-like conditions where anything goes if you can get away with it) to prevent them from doing so until kids started getting sick and dying.
Perhaps in the US, but as a post above mentioned, in Canada they're extremely strict about use of the word "engineer", enough that they actually took on Microsoft and prevented them from cavalierly using the term engineer in their MCSE and similar programs, i.e. you can say you're an MCSE, but you're legally not allowed to call yourself a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer... minor distinction perhaps, but so goes the law and licensing of the term.
Engineering university programs must be accredited in order for graduates to have a B.Eng (bachelor of engineering), and each type (electrical, systems, civil, etc) is accredited separately. The iron ring is also exclusive to Canadian engineering university graduates, and can't be worn by engineers who graduated in a different country.
I'm a Canadian engineer, but not Professional--ie I don't pay dues nor have I taken the licensing test.
Engineering isn't the only field where terms and titles are strictly enforced--after all, only a select group can call themselves doctors, or lawyers.
Hong Kong and Singapore seem to be doing ok with very low tax rates...
They're both certainly helped by having a very small land area, high population density, easy access to water for most, and weather that's not extreme enough to pothole highways after every winter or flood them away every summer. I'd suggest British colonialism benefited the economies and cultures of both during the 20th century too, compared to their immediate neighbours.
You seek to correct inaccuracies in the bigger story, but when someone attempts to correct something in your own post (and not a simple grammar/spelling issue, if true this is like mixing up Australian and Austrian), you couldn't just say thanks, or challenge it, or even ignore it, but go out of your way to say you don't care about the accuracy of your own post?
I don't care how pedantic the correction may seem to you, that made you look like a hypocrite.
The latest iPod Nanos, with touchscreens, lack a home button. You press and hold (with one finger) anywhere on the screen to return to the home screen. I have gotten used to it, but would still prefer a real home button.
Not that it's directly applicable, but IIRC a big design flaw in some cars with push-start ignition is that to turn it off, the driver had to press and hold the ignition button for a few seconds (like soft-killing the power to a computer). In a couple of cases these cars apparently suffered from sudden acceleration problems, and in a panicked state some drivers weren't holding the button down for long enough to kill the engine.
Yeah, you're right... math skills not so good that early in the morning. OTOH, you've made my comment even stronger, i.e. the challenge is now to find a comparable 10" slate computer for 1/3 the price (i.e. starting around $165 USD).
So where are the other 10" touchscreen slates with similar performance and capabilities at half the cost?
The last two portable USB HDDs (both Iomegas) I bought were pre-formatted NTFS. They mount just fine in OSX, but it's not obvious to regular users why they can't write anything to it.
Two reasons I can think of: the phone is "free" or very cheap (with subsidized contract), and/or they don't want to pay for the data plan that's often mandatory with a full smartphone.
So, should we be excluding the low-end Android feature phones when comparing against iPhone market share? It would certainly be a fairer comparison.
Another problem I didn't touch on was the Android OS version. A friend bought a good Android phone late 2009, but its carrier-provided firmware was already a generation behind. They finally provided an update last month--to Android v2.1, released over a year ago by that time. And now Android's at v2.3. His phone is last year's news, they're probably not going to bother releasing another major update for it. In theory he could roll his own or install an unofficial one, but anyone doing that falls outside the realm of a regular user (hell, I know many regular iPhone users who don't update their OS).
I'm referring to phones that, for example, have an 800+ MHz processor, or more than a certain amount of ram.
Like I said, it's the same thing as an iPhone...some games just plain don't work on a first or second gen iPhone. If you're confused by something as simple as clock speed, then stick with an iPhone.
Regular users' eyes gloss over the moment you mention processor speed and memory on *computers*, let alone phones. If they know a bit about it, they know from computers that higher MHz/GHz is generally better, but *we* know that's about as useful a metric as megapixels on a digital camera.
So now you expect them to look up an app and check its CPU/RAM requirements, as well as screen size and other features, against their phone (or *potential* phone if they're shopping for one)?
Angry Birds developers at least maintains a list of Android devices they *dont* support, which is a better way to approach this--there's still far fewer phone models than possible computer configurations.
iOS developers can (and do) easily state what devices they *do* support, then the only variable is what OS version they're running.
Apple's only real failing here is not physically marking different generations devices (computers and iOS devices both) the way they refer to them in documentation. I have no idea how to quickly distinguish between an iPhone 3G or 3GS, or any of the iPod touches (except for the 4th gen with its Retina display), and a normal user won't remember.
I'm over 30 and though I have a regular radio alarm clock, I use my iPhone exclusively for regular alarms during the day and week. I'm reconsidering that position now.
I needed a one-off alarm for this morning. It didn't go off. Thankfully a fast-approaching cold front produced strong winds that knocked over things on my balcony and woke me up.
Failure to catch bugs in extremely basic functionality--twice in as many months--is inexcusable. Apple's inability to patch something like this without rolling out a gigantic 400+ MB firmware update highlights a massive shortcoming in their software release methodology--the DST bug was publicly known for weeks before it hit North America (having hit Australia first), but it wasn't fixed until some time after when it was rolled in with other updates.
This from an Apple customer of over 20 years.
With all due respect, I don't think most Chinese are able to recognize their own racism. Though to be fair 'racism' is really the wrong sort of term for the phenomenon from (*what I understand to be) a Chinese perspective. The term most often used by sociologists is 'xenophobia' but that too is probably not quite right. 'Phobia' is a fear, but it's not that Chinese fear foreigners per se, it's that they don't respect them as equals beyond a superficial level.
I think this is most clear when you examine the issue of marriage. Business is business, but as soon as a Chinese (or for that matter just about any East Asian ethnic) family finds out their child is involved with a person of a different race it's a big problem. That's racism no matter how you slice it.
I'm Canadian-born Chinese, and am a bit uncomfortable whenever "guilo" is used by relatives. I personally use the more politically correct term which literally means "western person" but that's very imprecise, since people from India and Africa also qualify as west (of China).
Concerning the relationship thing: My last girlfriend was white. My cousin married a Quebecois. At least two other family friends from my generation married white Canadians. The aforementioned cousin's mother is white, and two other family friends in my parents' generation married outside our "race" despite growing up in Hong Kong.
Obviously this is but an anecdote, and perhaps my family and immediate circle just happen to be more progressive and tolerant, but it's clearly not been a problem for us.
That's exactly what I do (but if it's winter, then only when the car's warmed up). The only catch is during the night--do I shut off my headlights or not? They're a significant drain on the battery, which isn't robust to begin with on my 2008 sub-compact, and I'm already sensing hesitation when cold-starting at -10C or below.
My compromise is to leave the parking lights on if I'm stopped at the head of the pack--at least this way cars on the other side don't flash their high-beams at me, thinking I've forgotten to turn my lights on.
This is why I hate having to deal with Windows on the side. In this aside about user CALs, there's three different takes (so far) on when you need a Windows CAL and when you don't.
I got sick of researching Windows Small Business server when I read their FAQ, and the section on licensing was longer than all the other sections combined!
I cannot speak for Canada, but in the USA, we imprison so many people that only Nazi Germany and the USSR have us beat -- we actually imprison more people now than China, all convicted under our legal system.
As expected, the federal Conservatives in Canada are gung ho on being "tough on crime"--cracking down on criminals and giving them harsher sentences. On the surface, I don't disagree; some of the sentences for capital crimes have been too lenient.
However, this also means harsher sentences for "crimes" I don't believe should be, like recreational drugs (which I've never used and have no desire to, so I see myself as fairly impartial).
Their agenda also flies in the face of facts (big surprise...). When presented with the hard numbers by Statistics Canada that violent crime was in fact down, they blew it off and claimed they were right, and StatsCan was wrong, and that's why they had to fund new or upgraded prisons.
As appealing as the concept is, the ones that truly deserve it are rich enough and corrupt enough to hire private security goons and, if that fails, their surviving friends will hire investigators and hit squads to take out your family and you (in that order).
"Just rate the games and sell them dammit, let the market decide."
Isn't the market deciding already, by not selling AO games?
Sure, in the same way that the people of dictatorships decide their leader during elections--when popular opposition candidates are deliberately kept off the ballot.
The People drove Circuit City into bankruptcy.
Also GM.
And Wards.
They can do the same with any other corporation they don't like. Look at Blockbuster which is teetering on the verge of death.
Circuit City had plenty of competition, from both big and small electronics stores.
GM had plenty of competition, from other US and foreign brands.
Don't know Wards so can't speak to that.
Blockbuster is being displaced because of Netflix, video-on-demand or downloaded movies (legal or otherwise)--the latter two which, incidentally, requires massive infrastructure and backing of the entertainment industry to work. A true startup has no chance--only a large corporate expansion into such a service has even a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding.
In Canada there are three main "choices" for cell phone service: Bell, Rogers, and Telus, or their subsidiary brands. Despite this "competition" plans require 3 year contracts to get the full subsidy, the longest in the world. People constantly complain about poor service from all three, but all that really happens is they get roughly equal amounts of pissed off customers switching between them.
When's the last time a near-monopoly, last-mile service company (power, water, phone, cable, internet, etc) gone into bankruptcy and actually dissolved? This isn't rhetorical; I can't think of any off the top of my head.
I'm sorry, you're simply wrong about "when it took off for the first time."
The pilot episode's very first scene, set "millions of years ago," showed Atlantis taking off from Antarctica:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaUBvCfRxWI
So even if the SGA characters didn't know it was starflight-capable for a year or two (I don't remember if this was actually the case), we as viewers knew it was, so it wasn't a jump-the-shark feature of the city that they retconned in.
Sometimes it's just being in Canada that keeps prices artificially high.
Case in point: Calvin and Hobbes the Complete Collection.
Amazon.com price: $90.97
Amazon.ca price: $125.40
This despite the dollar being at or close to parity, and it's not like Amazon Canada's stock of this title was purchased 5 years ago (when the dollar was weaker) and sitting in a warehouse the entire time.
I've been suspicious of actual competitive price matching, lately. For example, I can't find identical model number laptops at local B&M stores... really, how hard would it be for mfr/retailers to set up unique model numbers for each retailer so that each retailer never actually price match certain items with each other? Even if the internal components are 100% identical, if the model numbers don't match, the clowns at customer service will not price match.
I'm told this is also the case with mattresses and frames, i.e. each sleepware store has slightly different model numbers from each maker.