I don't think this lag effect is limited to broadband.
My experience with any form of social or technological infrastructure here is that it takes much longer to be adopted or upgraded. London, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney all update their public transport systems much more frequently that the states. They seem to have newer airports too.
Online banking services, online bill payment, etc are much broader with British and Australian banks (haven't got any accounts in Japan so not sure how they fare).
Taxi technology (particularly with telephony and GPS services) is lacking here too.
GSM and other mobile telecommunications improvements are also years behind.
Is it that the systems here are so large that there's major financial barriers to change? Is there a mentality of "it aint broke so don't fix it" too?
JSP is part of J2EE.
Furthermore, programming for the web and developing real applications is an entirely different set of skills. I'd call it a complete waste of $120K in school fees if MIT graduates ended up doing web development or if they couldn't adapt to either JSP or J2EE if so required by market forces.
Do you think their government is worried? I'd also imagine there'd be many people jumping at the opportunity to rish their lives for such an achievement too...
Wow, there you have it folks, the definition of a super power from our learned friend.
Doesn't "having the bomb" and the ability to launch it anywhere in the world make China unapproachable and hence any attempt at a quantitative comparisson of power becomes useless? Bleh, military power discussions are so boring... moving right along...
I'd say they've (China has) manouvered themselves into a pretty secure position - with the most people in any one nation, a huge, no wait, vast supply of natural resources, the fastest growing economy, a functioning space program, etc.. etc.. I'd say they've been the quiet achievers in the superpower game. If our anonymous friend won't give this status to them yet, oh well, perhaps they'd prefer not to have the spotlight on them?
In case you didn't notice, they've taken over Japan as the second largest economy in the world (it happened last year in case you didn't get the memo). It is believed that they will become the largest economy in less than 10 years. They achieved this without freedom of political election or information... just a relaxation of fiscal policies in terms of foreign investment and small non-state owned entities. This relaxation quadrupled their GDP in under 25 years. (And if anyone says, yeah sure, at what cost - or, what about pollution? the states must remain silent).
As for being isolationist - that isn't true about their people or thier culture these days. For one, I'd say their culture is more pervasive than most, possibly more than the states in many countries. Perhaps being isolationist is a better policy these days anyway?
I can't fathom people worrying about what China will do with its power, like, the fact that not being a democracy makes them any more dangerous than other nuclear powers with "elected" leaders. Perhaps the states is worried that it won't get its way, sure, but why should they? I'd admit they they've probably got their eye on being a superpower (according to our anonymous friend) in the long run, but they're not going to start throwing nukes around willy-nilly and invade people. The chinese government seems to have a good thing going for itself - why would it change it?
Erm, doesn't that sound paradoxical to you? Er, we can but we can't afford it... so, doesn't that make China better in this case if they can afford it?
Definitely - it's a book that you can pick up again and again and enjoy just a few pages. Singh presents facts in an interesting manner - not a book you'd want to give away!
There's already been talk and patents for food items that have magnetic-frequency or radio-frequency (see link below for the latter) marked labels so that users can just walk up to a super market attendant and pay for it - no scanning required as it happens simulatenously... expected in the not too distant future:
http://www.mobileinfo.com/News_2001/Issue18/Smart_ Tags.htm
I know it is cool to have a copy of it but they, the owners, also want to make money off you when you buy the DVD. There's much more to it than just the initial movie marketing. In fact, I heard somewhere recently that the gaming industry has far surpassed the film industry in terms of revenue - but that's another topic...
Anyway, you may have images of these big wigs rubbing their hands together over pots of gold and mountains of cash, plotting to get you in your sleep... but really, they're not. I'll say it again: it - is - a - business. Whether you agree with it or not, what they are doing is legal and it's part of the society we have created. Trying to change or having differing opinions about the laws of business is also allowed (well, in most countries), but you're not allowed to bring change by pirating stuff and deciding what you'll pay for.
When I was younger, I too would have loved to have found a movie like the matrix or lotr on the net for free and probably would have downloaded it - but now I'm an adult - I have been in the "business world", helped deals go through etc.. - I understand why anyone would be pissed off at losing revenue. It's like if you're a software engineer trying to sell your own software and decided they'll pirate software from people they don't like. Again, because you don't agree morally with someone's actions, doesn't mean you should break the law or, at the very least, be a hypocrite.
I understand that sometimes fans get so emotionally attached to things that they don't see the reality of the business behind their interest. Their attachment makes them believe that, somehow, the movie/song/drawing/piece is partly theirs. No matter how often artists accepting awards might lead you to believe this idea.... it's not "yours" inherently. It's theirs! You buy the right to view it once at the cinema. You buy the right to watch it privately many times on DVD.
Yes, these business wouldn't exist without fans - but that's the magic of an economic market - supply and demand. If they were "raping" people for money, people should stop paying attention to their stuff.
(and lets not forget that no one is forcing you to see any of these movies - it's a choice of entertainment, not a compulsory sex-ed video in junior high).
So, before you bring on a barrage of abuse claiming that I'm a tree-hugging maniac or law abiding do-gooder or god bother, stop. I believe in neither god nor greenpeace. I'm just being rational, yes I write software, yes I buy software, dvds, and go to the movies.
While it would be nice if it were this simple, they are the ones making the movies and thus hold the rights. It's their movie, not yours. Sure, it sucks paying to go and see something crap - everything is nicer when its free, right?
Well, trust me, they aren't going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the hope that you (or half of american-movie-fan-asians) will go and see it a second time because you liked it after seeing a pirated copy. They want your money even if you didn't like it....and before you say "exactly, that's why they can't have it" - think twice. If the world ran this way, business wouldn't.
Yes, I was going to say that too - often you don't think about it in movies, but in Matrix 2 -the music was terrible - it stuck out in scenes as being very awkward - it just didn't line up and detracted from what was going on. Who did the music anyway?
Yes it is a form of censorship, but NO this is not about free speech - SPAM is not free in the cost sense. It costs money to move it around - if you don't believe me, then you have no idea how the internet works.
Sure, if you get SPAM at work, you personally don't absorb the cost... and sure, if you have uncapped internet access, sure you don't absorb the cost. BUT SOMEONE DOES. I don't get SPAM at work but do on some personal email addresses and I, like many other people outside the united states, DO NOT have unlimited download limits.
So those who want the right to speak freely about their latest porn sites, sex products, can pay, albeit a tiny amount of money, per email we receive.
Another thing about free speech, it doesn't mean you can talk as loudly as you want in the middle of the street at 3am - no, you WILL be approached by authorities for disturbing the peace - just try it. SPAM is not really all that much different - you don't have the option of not hearing it, the same way as you don't have the option of not hearing someone blaring music or screaming at 3am while trying to sleep. While the remedy might sound easier to delete a SPAM message than bother the local police for noise complaints, you don't have the noise every day, and hundreds of times.
Free speech might mean not being censored, but it doesn't mean you can do it at other people's expense of inconvenience.
You can't do a direct comparison to the price using exchange rates, because Australian's do not earn US dollars! To them, it is very expensive in comparison!
Most people say AOL is a monolithic shit-for-brains company that everyone with more than half-an-hour of experience on the net hates, cool. I have little if anything to do with them...
..but, to Australians, Telstra invokes a similar reaction. Many Americans would be surprised to see what this monopolistic company charges for local calls, mobile phone calls, internet access and cable tv (with foxtel).
Australians might want to support Australian businesses, but this company doesn't deserve loyalty. I welcome any negative action against Telstra - especially from giant US corporations. Oh please - won't some US telco come in to Australia and NOT play by telstra's rules?!
Little freaks saying "dupe" - it't not the end of the world.
Anyway, depsite many people hating AOL, this, for once, looks like a step in the right direction to winning back confidence for the dubious ISP.
Now, if everyone would stop pretending they're experts on the constitution and free speech and everyone got serious about attacking spam'ers, it would be alot more constructive than posting "dupe, dupe" cries.
By "town network", your post seems to imply that it will be entirely run by local citizens... how close is everyone in your community? Are they typically generations of families there? I could imagine this sort of cooperation working if the skills were local and the population relatively static... but what would you do if key people decided to leave town?
Also, do you have a better breakdown of what that $40 per month covers? Will all citizens agree to flat rate fees? A flat rate is good for the 20-something year olds who use gigabytes of data a month, but I'm sure the granny's emailing wouldn't put much of a tax on the system. If you think about how flat rate for electricity would work in a similar environment, you might start to look at pricing models differently.
Although these are pretty damn funny, it's sad to see insane people struggle for vindication of their whacky ideas - obviously with considerable mental anguish. Perhaps this is a sign of the information age? Instead of witches, astrologers, numerologists, and occultists, we have modern-day 'psychoscientists'.
I was given a sharp reminder of how unstable people's minds can be at an open-to-the-public lecture in Harvard uni's astronomy department last year. People sat through a great lecture on the life of Galileo and afterwards were invited to observe the near-full moon's surface and a binary star system through the facility's telescopes. I had guessed that most of the attendees were amateur astronomers and enthusiasts, but while waiting in line with one of my old roommates, an old lady tried to start a conversation. She was rambling about how she was born in Eastern Europe and was a child of the moon or some such with a direct connection with the cosmos and god... I wondered had she completely misunderstood what the astronomy department was researching these days and/or saw the irony between her and the subject matter presented in the lecture, that is, Galileo's life long struggle against the ignorance (and arrogance) of the church?
Perhaps these people get the feeling of inspiration that science brings many of us, but completely misunderstand the science of it?
Slashdot Mirror
My experience with any form of social or technological infrastructure here is that it takes much longer to be adopted or upgraded. London, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney all update their public transport systems much more frequently that the states. They seem to have newer airports too.
Online banking services, online bill payment, etc are much broader with British and Australian banks (haven't got any accounts in Japan so not sure how they fare).
Taxi technology (particularly with telephony and GPS services) is lacking here too.
GSM and other mobile telecommunications improvements are also years behind.
Is it that the systems here are so large that there's major financial barriers to change? Is there a mentality of "it aint broke so don't fix it" too?
We need a new mail protocol where you can not send annonymous email.
JSP is part of J2EE. Furthermore, programming for the web and developing real applications is an entirely different set of skills. I'd call it a complete waste of $120K in school fees if MIT graduates ended up doing web development or if they couldn't adapt to either JSP or J2EE if so required by market forces.
My Japanese is rusty, but I believe they said your name is stupid.
Do you think their government is worried? I'd also imagine there'd be many people jumping at the opportunity to rish their lives for such an achievement too...
Doesn't "having the bomb" and the ability to launch it anywhere in the world make China unapproachable and hence any attempt at a quantitative comparisson of power becomes useless? Bleh, military power discussions are so boring... moving right along...
I'd say they've (China has) manouvered themselves into a pretty secure position - with the most people in any one nation, a huge, no wait, vast supply of natural resources, the fastest growing economy, a functioning space program, etc.. etc.. I'd say they've been the quiet achievers in the superpower game. If our anonymous friend won't give this status to them yet, oh well, perhaps they'd prefer not to have the spotlight on them?
In case you didn't notice, they've taken over Japan as the second largest economy in the world (it happened last year in case you didn't get the memo). It is believed that they will become the largest economy in less than 10 years. They achieved this without freedom of political election or information... just a relaxation of fiscal policies in terms of foreign investment and small non-state owned entities. This relaxation quadrupled their GDP in under 25 years. (And if anyone says, yeah sure, at what cost - or, what about pollution? the states must remain silent).
As for being isolationist - that isn't true about their people or thier culture these days. For one, I'd say their culture is more pervasive than most, possibly more than the states in many countries. Perhaps being isolationist is a better policy these days anyway?
I can't fathom people worrying about what China will do with its power, like, the fact that not being a democracy makes them any more dangerous than other nuclear powers with "elected" leaders. Perhaps the states is worried that it won't get its way, sure, but why should they? I'd admit they they've probably got their eye on being a superpower (according to our anonymous friend) in the long run, but they're not going to start throwing nukes around willy-nilly and invade people. The chinese government seems to have a good thing going for itself - why would it change it?
Erm, doesn't that sound paradoxical to you? Er, we can but we can't afford it... so, doesn't that make China better in this case if they can afford it?
Definitely - it's a book that you can pick up again and again and enjoy just a few pages. Singh presents facts in an interesting manner - not a book you'd want to give away!
There's already been talk and patents for food items that have magnetic-frequency or radio-frequency (see link below for the latter) marked labels so that users can just walk up to a super market attendant and pay for it - no scanning required as it happens simulatenously... expected in the not too distant future: http://www.mobileinfo.com/News_2001/Issue18/Smart_ Tags.htm
EOM
Anyway, you may have images of these big wigs rubbing their hands together over pots of gold and mountains of cash, plotting to get you in your sleep... but really, they're not. I'll say it again: it - is - a - business. Whether you agree with it or not, what they are doing is legal and it's part of the society we have created. Trying to change or having differing opinions about the laws of business is also allowed (well, in most countries), but you're not allowed to bring change by pirating stuff and deciding what you'll pay for.
When I was younger, I too would have loved to have found a movie like the matrix or lotr on the net for free and probably would have downloaded it - but now I'm an adult - I have been in the "business world", helped deals go through etc.. - I understand why anyone would be pissed off at losing revenue. It's like if you're a software engineer trying to sell your own software and decided they'll pirate software from people they don't like. Again, because you don't agree morally with someone's actions, doesn't mean you should break the law or, at the very least, be a hypocrite.
I understand that sometimes fans get so emotionally attached to things that they don't see the reality of the business behind their interest. Their attachment makes them believe that, somehow, the movie/song/drawing/piece is partly theirs. No matter how often artists accepting awards might lead you to believe this idea.... it's not "yours" inherently. It's theirs! You buy the right to view it once at the cinema. You buy the right to watch it privately many times on DVD.
Yes, these business wouldn't exist without fans - but that's the magic of an economic market - supply and demand. If they were "raping" people for money, people should stop paying attention to their stuff.
(and lets not forget that no one is forcing you to see any of these movies - it's a choice of entertainment, not a compulsory sex-ed video in junior high).
So, before you bring on a barrage of abuse claiming that I'm a tree-hugging maniac or law abiding do-gooder or god bother, stop. I believe in neither god nor greenpeace. I'm just being rational, yes I write software, yes I buy software, dvds, and go to the movies.
While it would be nice if it were this simple, they are the ones making the movies and thus hold the rights. It's their movie, not yours. Sure, it sucks paying to go and see something crap - everything is nicer when its free, right? Well, trust me, they aren't going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the hope that you (or half of american-movie-fan-asians) will go and see it a second time because you liked it after seeing a pirated copy. They want your money even if you didn't like it. ...and before you say "exactly, that's why they can't have it" - think twice. If the world ran this way, business wouldn't.
Yes, I was going to say that too - often you don't think about it in movies, but in Matrix 2 -the music was terrible - it stuck out in scenes as being very awkward - it just didn't line up and detracted from what was going on. Who did the music anyway?
Yes it is a form of censorship, but NO this is not about free speech - SPAM is not free in the cost sense. It costs money to move it around - if you don't believe me, then you have no idea how the internet works.
Sure, if you get SPAM at work, you personally don't absorb the cost... and sure, if you have uncapped internet access, sure you don't absorb the cost. BUT SOMEONE DOES. I don't get SPAM at work but do on some personal email addresses and I, like many other people outside the united states, DO NOT have unlimited download limits.
So those who want the right to speak freely about their latest porn sites, sex products, can pay, albeit a tiny amount of money, per email we receive.
Another thing about free speech, it doesn't mean you can talk as loudly as you want in the middle of the street at 3am - no, you WILL be approached by authorities for disturbing the peace - just try it. SPAM is not really all that much different - you don't have the option of not hearing it, the same way as you don't have the option of not hearing someone blaring music or screaming at 3am while trying to sleep. While the remedy might sound easier to delete a SPAM message than bother the local police for noise complaints, you don't have the noise every day, and hundreds of times.
Free speech might mean not being censored, but it doesn't mean you can do it at other people's expense of inconvenience.
You can't do a direct comparison to the price using exchange rates, because Australian's do not earn US dollars! To them, it is very expensive in comparison!
Most people say AOL is a monolithic shit-for-brains company that everyone with more than half-an-hour of experience on the net hates, cool. I have little if anything to do with them...
..but, to Australians, Telstra invokes a similar reaction. Many Americans would be surprised to see what this monopolistic company charges for local calls, mobile phone calls, internet access and cable tv (with foxtel).
s /
/ more4you.htm
Look at their internet broadband rates:
http://www.bigpond.com/broadband/access/ADSL/plan
Are you kidding me?
Just as bad are the costs of mobiles, text messages and calls:
http://www.telstra.com.au/mobilenet/price_options
25c a text message!? Wtf?
Australians might want to support Australian businesses, but this company doesn't deserve loyalty. I welcome any negative action against Telstra - especially from giant US corporations. Oh please - won't some US telco come in to Australia and NOT play by telstra's rules?!
Little freaks saying "dupe" - it't not the end of the world. Anyway, depsite many people hating AOL, this, for once, looks like a step in the right direction to winning back confidence for the dubious ISP. Now, if everyone would stop pretending they're experts on the constitution and free speech and everyone got serious about attacking spam'ers, it would be alot more constructive than posting "dupe, dupe" cries.
By "town network", your post seems to imply that it will be entirely run by local citizens... how close is everyone in your community? Are they typically generations of families there? I could imagine this sort of cooperation working if the skills were local and the population relatively static... but what would you do if key people decided to leave town? Also, do you have a better breakdown of what that $40 per month covers? Will all citizens agree to flat rate fees? A flat rate is good for the 20-something year olds who use gigabytes of data a month, but I'm sure the granny's emailing wouldn't put much of a tax on the system. If you think about how flat rate for electricity would work in a similar environment, you might start to look at pricing models differently.
Although these are pretty damn funny, it's sad to see insane people struggle for vindication of their whacky ideas - obviously with considerable mental anguish. Perhaps this is a sign of the information age? Instead of witches, astrologers, numerologists, and occultists, we have modern-day 'psychoscientists'. I was given a sharp reminder of how unstable people's minds can be at an open-to-the-public lecture in Harvard uni's astronomy department last year. People sat through a great lecture on the life of Galileo and afterwards were invited to observe the near-full moon's surface and a binary star system through the facility's telescopes. I had guessed that most of the attendees were amateur astronomers and enthusiasts, but while waiting in line with one of my old roommates, an old lady tried to start a conversation. She was rambling about how she was born in Eastern Europe and was a child of the moon or some such with a direct connection with the cosmos and god... I wondered had she completely misunderstood what the astronomy department was researching these days and/or saw the irony between her and the subject matter presented in the lecture, that is, Galileo's life long struggle against the ignorance (and arrogance) of the church? Perhaps these people get the feeling of inspiration that science brings many of us, but completely misunderstand the science of it?