The point is that by moving to a 12" screen, Asus is not really selling a "netbook" any more, but has merely rebadged "subnotebooks" or "ultraportables" as netbooks. Old wine in new bottles. If five years ago manufacturers could bring out small notebooks with optical drives in under 2 Kg, then where has five years of "progress" got us?
How much does your old laptop weigh? How thick is it? Does it have an optical drive?
One of my old Averatec laptops from 2004 is still running very nicely, thanks very much. It's got a 12" diagonal screen, weighs less than 2 Kg, and is around 2cm thick when closed, and that includes its optical drive. Thanks for asking.
The subtext of this story is that medication is bad, that treatment of a disease state with chemicals is sub-optimal. What if the real story here is that middle-class children have a higher probability of being under-medicated and under-treated? They are already under-vaccinated because of bizarre anti-preservative delusions that tend to be associated with higher economic status parents. I've actually met middle-class parents who tried to treat their diabetic children homeopathically. That's a stupidity reserved for those with sufficient income, inappropriate self-esteem and just enough self-regard and personal "knowledge" to be dangerous.
Ah, advertising frothiness. I recall in the early noughties getting a "free" Virgin WebPlayer (in return for allowing it to run ads within its sandboxed browser). It made a nice little MP3 player (using Win 98) and, later, Debian. A friend I worked with got an iOpener instead. He now works for Google. I doubt Google would make the same mistakes as Netpliance.
the long-pondered question of why humans only use 1-15% of their brain is largely a matter of power consumption
This old wives' tale is just plain nonsense. If you really only "used" such a small fraction of an organ, natural selection would quickly have reduced it down to a more manageable size. Your brain is a wonderfully heterogeneous organ composed of somewhere between 300-500 sub-organelles, many of which are permanently "on" to regulate such basic functions as temperature, corneal reflex, appetite, serum CO2 level and O2 levels, oculovestibular vestibular tracking, swallowing, gagging, and so on.
Another way of thinking about it is to look at the biochemistry of glucose takeup in the brain compared to the body. Unlike organs whose energy requirements and input/output profile vary dramatically (such as skeletal muscle with GLUT4), the brain has no insulin-regulated GLUT cell membrane transporters. And unlike, say, the liver, which uses high-capacity, low-affinity GLUT2 transporters, neurons tend to use GLUT3 (high affinity, low capacity), while the brain's endothelial barrier tends to use the basal-rate GLUT1. The brain is simply not an organ designed to rapidly up- or down-regulate its energy consumption.
The product in this case is a PC with windows installed.
Product tying is explicitly and specifically one of the monopolist trade practices that Microsoft agreed in a consent decree with the US FTC to disengage from performing in the early-mid-90s, and contravention of this consent decree and Microsoft's continued constraint upon its OEM partners to continue product tying was among the monopolist actions that caused Microsoft to be judged as a criminal monopoly in the United States v Microsoft, and to further be judged an abusive monopoly by the European Commission and the European Communities' Court Of First Instance.
While your answer is logical and, on the surface, correct, it assumes perfect accounting procedures. However, if Irish tax authorities did not require VAT remitted to them for books sold, and Amazon was collecting said VAT, then where did the VAT go? Having dealt with VAT returns, I do know that while the wheels of revenue and excise turn extremely slowly, they do turn, and eventually, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, you will get a VAT credit for overpayment.
The EU VAT policy directives specifically categorise ebooks and audio books as books, and thus *supposed* to be within the reduced VAT bands.
Following its policy line in the field of reduced rates of VAT established in its Communication of July 2007 (COM (2007) 380 final), the Commission adopted a proposal for a Council Directive amending Directive 2006/112/EC as regards reduced rates of VAT : COM(2008)428:... allow reduced rates for:
* children's nappies;
* audio books, CD's, CD-ROMs or other physical support that predominantly reproduce the same information content as printed books;
* few other technical adaptations already proposed in 2003, which are still valid, as equipment, aids and other appliances for disabled or services linked with waste treatment, etc.
Amazon has a long history of basically ignoring EU law when it suits it. For example, Amazon.co.UK insisted for years on charging for VAT for books delivered to Ireland (when the UK still charged VAT). Did it refund that improperly charged VAT for Irish customers when it finally relented? No. See also: One-Click Patent. Amazon likes to borrow a lot of the oxygen about the freedom of information and open markets and the disincentivising quality of software patents, etc, but when it comes down to it, it's as aggressive and exclusionary and predatory as Apple or Microsoft.
Under the VAT Directive 2006/112/EC of 28 November 2006, the suggested EU VAT rate for books (and children's nappies!) is the reduced rate of 5%. Many countries, such as Ireland, the UK, and Poland, for example, have charged zero percent VAT on books for years. Amazon is, as usual, full of it.
Given that Apple was the first into the whole PDA space with the Newton
I think you are confusing Apple with Psion, or Go, or Grid, all of whom released PDAs before Apple. In Psion's case, almost a decade earlier. Psion morphed into what is now by far the world's most popular smartphone OS, Symbian.
I'm not quite sure how you get Qualcom CDMA phones to work on a GSM network.
Use something like the Qualcomm MSM7600 chipset in the new HTC Touch Pro 2, which provides a quad-band GSM as well as CDMA radio. Now, carriers preferring lock-in will undoubtedly disable either the GSM or the CDMA functionality of the phone in firmware (or use another Qualcomm single-radio chipset such as the MSM7200), but it is *technically* possible to do, and may become a reality given some clever firmware hacking. Or maybe if you just buy the international, unlocked version.
If you are caucasian then, given these figures, unless you are descended from a multi-generational set of *extremely* inbred kin, the probability that at least one of your ancestors was in that battle is quite high. The Most Recent Common Ancestor of all peoples. never mind all Europeans, is more recent than you think.
The screen on the Apple devices is smaller than the OP wants, and is seriously low-res for 2009. 480x320? Seriously cheap move by Apple. The HTC and Nokia devices do 800x480 and the difference, especially for annoying formats such as PDF, is like night and day.
When 60+ percent* and increasing of all mobile web journeys come from iPhones, the other platforms fade away.
You're mistaking the United States as a proxy for the entire world.
I will note in passing that each HTC model seems to sell between 1-2m each. Not a huge amount, but HTC does have a lot of different units available, and replaces them around eveyr 12-18 months or so. According to Gartner's most recent report, Apple's share of the smartphone market was ~11%, while HTC's was ~6%.
I will say that I was without wired Internet for a week while AT&T tried and failed miserably to install U-Verse. Apparently the 40-year-old rat-chewed internal copper wiring can't take VDSL. Who'd have thought so? Anyway, I cranked up the old Sprint Mogul (HTC Titan) and tethered it, rebroadcasting the 3G signal as WiFi and BT using WMWiFiRouter. Over WiFi, I was able to get up to around ~1.5/.5 Mbps, after initially being frustrated with ~250/50 Kbps. It seems to be very sensitive to phone position and signal strength, and also elevation.
The best thing about this is that the tethering ability is available within the $30/month all-in SERO plan (as long as I use a suitable proxy to disguise the phone usage). Sprint's main problem compared to AT&T and Verizon is that is is so damn cheap and it has found it difficult to raise prices like them and increase the ARPU. I think with the Pre, it wants to can tethering until it's more certain it can successfully and reliably charge a premium for it.
See, something has been added. Your grammar was frequently atrocious in your earlier screeds, but I decided to give you a free pass for those ones. You really should concentrate on getting the basics of English down, because using it poorly reflects badly on your message, no matter what you are saying. Or trying to say.
You sound just like my niece when she was 7 years old in 2004
With your uncreative use of crude language, your dogmatism in the face of wisdom, your fondness for ad hominem attacks, and your reliance on anecdote as evidence, *you* actually sound like everyone's 7-year-old niece.
The historical reality is that an internationally constituted body with considerable subject matter expertise and domain knowledge has heard multiple arguments from both parties, along with appeals and arbitration arguments, and has rendered a decision that has been tested and accepted by all sides in the dispute.
Ed "sumdumass" Lolington's fictional reality is that they, a random slashdot poster, claim to possess superior legal understanding of the argument and issues, and that their judgement alone constitutes the entirety of a more correct analysis of the argument.
showing them you ignorance does help set the record straight and prevent the fictional reality that has cropped into the real world.
Dear Mr Honorary Ed Lolington, e-Lawyer Extraordinaire:
Getting in the last word does not make you right, it just makes you look anal.
Also, the historical reality is that an internationally constituted body with considerable subject matter expertise and domain knowledge has heard multiple arguments from both parties, along with appeals and arbitration arguments, and has rendered a decision that has been tested and accepted by all sides in the dispute.
Your fictional reality is that you, a random slashdot poster, claims to possess superior legal understanding of the argument and issues, and that your judgement alone constitutes the entirety of a more correct analysis of the argument.
You can't read it, understand it, and not come to the same conclusion I did... the only thing stopping you is laziness... You are intellectually lazy and a moron. If you invested just a few minutes into verifying what I said, you would be in total agreement with me... All it does is make you look like a moron.
Oh you're adorable. Is this your first week on the Tubes, or are you off your meds? Don't ever change.
Now it seems that not only are you severely challenged mentally in this conversation
Let's see. Who do I trust more? An Ed Lolington random wannabe on the internet whose first recourse is to hurl childish insults, or the decisions of several rounds of hearings, arbitration, and appeals of an international legal body with representation from around the world and across the political spectrum?
You lose. Sorry.
Upon reflection, the servers are not based in the US. The DNS resolvers are not based in the US. The depository banks are not based in the US. The players, however, are based in the US, and are exercising their freedom to trade internationally. The US is now intervening to retard the transfer of capital with very little in the way of excuses other than "Do what we say, not what we do" to its citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that by moving to a 12" screen, Asus is not really selling a "netbook" any more, but has merely rebadged "subnotebooks" or "ultraportables" as netbooks. Old wine in new bottles. If five years ago manufacturers could bring out small notebooks with optical drives in under 2 Kg, then where has five years of "progress" got us?
How much does your old laptop weigh? How thick is it? Does it have an optical drive?
One of my old Averatec laptops from 2004 is still running very nicely, thanks very much. It's got a 12" diagonal screen, weighs less than 2 Kg, and is around 2cm thick when closed, and that includes its optical drive. Thanks for asking.
The subtext of this story is that medication is bad, that treatment of a disease state with chemicals is sub-optimal. What if the real story here is that middle-class children have a higher probability of being under-medicated and under-treated? They are already under-vaccinated because of bizarre anti-preservative delusions that tend to be associated with higher economic status parents. I've actually met middle-class parents who tried to treat their diabetic children homeopathically. That's a stupidity reserved for those with sufficient income, inappropriate self-esteem and just enough self-regard and personal "knowledge" to be dangerous.
Ah, advertising frothiness. I recall in the early noughties getting a "free" Virgin WebPlayer (in return for allowing it to run ads within its sandboxed browser). It made a nice little MP3 player (using Win 98) and, later, Debian. A friend I worked with got an iOpener instead. He now works for Google. I doubt Google would make the same mistakes as Netpliance.
the long-pondered question of why humans only use 1-15% of their brain is largely a matter of power consumption
This old wives' tale is just plain nonsense. If you really only "used" such a small fraction of an organ, natural selection would quickly have reduced it down to a more manageable size. Your brain is a wonderfully heterogeneous organ composed of somewhere between 300-500 sub-organelles, many of which are permanently "on" to regulate such basic functions as temperature, corneal reflex, appetite, serum CO2 level and O2 levels, oculovestibular vestibular tracking, swallowing, gagging, and so on.
Another way of thinking about it is to look at the biochemistry of glucose takeup in the brain compared to the body. Unlike organs whose energy requirements and input/output profile vary dramatically (such as skeletal muscle with GLUT4), the brain has no insulin-regulated GLUT cell membrane transporters. And unlike, say, the liver, which uses high-capacity, low-affinity GLUT2 transporters, neurons tend to use GLUT3 (high affinity, low capacity), while the brain's endothelial barrier tends to use the basal-rate GLUT1. The brain is simply not an organ designed to rapidly up- or down-regulate its energy consumption.
The product in this case is a PC with windows installed.
Product tying is explicitly and specifically one of the monopolist trade practices that Microsoft agreed in a consent decree with the US FTC to disengage from performing in the early-mid-90s, and contravention of this consent decree and Microsoft's continued constraint upon its OEM partners to continue product tying was among the monopolist actions that caused Microsoft to be judged as a criminal monopoly in the United States v Microsoft, and to further be judged an abusive monopoly by the European Commission and the European Communities' Court Of First Instance.
While your answer is logical and, on the surface, correct, it assumes perfect accounting procedures. However, if Irish tax authorities did not require VAT remitted to them for books sold, and Amazon was collecting said VAT, then where did the VAT go? Having dealt with VAT returns, I do know that while the wheels of revenue and excise turn extremely slowly, they do turn, and eventually, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, you will get a VAT credit for overpayment.
The EU VAT policy directives specifically categorise ebooks and audio books as books, and thus *supposed* to be within the reduced VAT bands.
Amazon has a long history of basically ignoring EU law when it suits it. For example, Amazon.co.UK insisted for years on charging for VAT for books delivered to Ireland (when the UK still charged VAT). Did it refund that improperly charged VAT for Irish customers when it finally relented? No. See also: One-Click Patent. Amazon likes to borrow a lot of the oxygen about the freedom of information and open markets and the disincentivising quality of software patents, etc, but when it comes down to it, it's as aggressive and exclusionary and predatory as Apple or Microsoft.
Under the VAT Directive 2006/112/EC of 28 November 2006, the suggested EU VAT rate for books (and children's nappies!) is the reduced rate of 5%. Many countries, such as Ireland, the UK, and Poland, for example, have charged zero percent VAT on books for years. Amazon is, as usual, full of it.
Given that Apple was the first into the whole PDA space with the Newton
I think you are confusing Apple with Psion, or Go, or Grid, all of whom released PDAs before Apple. In Psion's case, almost a decade earlier. Psion morphed into what is now by far the world's most popular smartphone OS, Symbian.
I'm not quite sure how you get Qualcom CDMA phones to work on a GSM network.
Use something like the Qualcomm MSM7600 chipset in the new HTC Touch Pro 2, which provides a quad-band GSM as well as CDMA radio. Now, carriers preferring lock-in will undoubtedly disable either the GSM or the CDMA functionality of the phone in firmware (or use another Qualcomm single-radio chipset such as the MSM7200), but it is *technically* possible to do, and may become a reality given some clever firmware hacking. Or maybe if you just buy the international, unlocked version.
I should add these population numbers:
1350, England: 2,500,000
1345, France: 20,200,000
Let's see...
2009-1369 = 640 years
Using a (conservative) 25 years/generation...
640/25 ~= 25.6. Call it 26.
2^26 = 67,108,864
According to medieval demographics and human population, the number of people alive in "Europe" around then peaked at 70-100m *before* the famines and plagues of the 14th century. Europe would not regain that population peak again for 200 years.
If you are caucasian then, given these figures, unless you are descended from a multi-generational set of *extremely* inbred kin, the probability that at least one of your ancestors was in that battle is quite high. The Most Recent Common Ancestor of all peoples. never mind all Europeans, is more recent than you think.
I'd love to hear others feedback on similar personal use ULTRA CHEAP RAID setups.
For software, use OpenFiler.
The screen on the Apple devices is smaller than the OP wants, and is seriously low-res for 2009. 480x320? Seriously cheap move by Apple. The HTC and Nokia devices do 800x480 and the difference, especially for annoying formats such as PDF, is like night and day.
When 60+ percent* and increasing of all mobile web journeys come from iPhones, the other platforms fade away. You're mistaking the United States as a proxy for the entire world.
SpamGourmet - I can't begin to say how awesome this is.
None of those phones are very popular.
I will note in passing that each HTC model seems to sell between 1-2m each. Not a huge amount, but HTC does have a lot of different units available, and replaces them around eveyr 12-18 months or so. According to Gartner's most recent report, Apple's share of the smartphone market was ~11%, while HTC's was ~6%.
I will say that I was without wired Internet for a week while AT&T tried and failed miserably to install U-Verse. Apparently the 40-year-old rat-chewed internal copper wiring can't take VDSL. Who'd have thought so? Anyway, I cranked up the old Sprint Mogul (HTC Titan) and tethered it, rebroadcasting the 3G signal as WiFi and BT using WMWiFiRouter. Over WiFi, I was able to get up to around ~1.5/.5 Mbps, after initially being frustrated with ~250/50 Kbps. It seems to be very sensitive to phone position and signal strength, and also elevation.
The best thing about this is that the tethering ability is available within the $30/month all-in SERO plan (as long as I use a suitable proxy to disguise the phone usage). Sprint's main problem compared to AT&T and Verizon is that is is so damn cheap and it has found it difficult to raise prices like them and increase the ARPU. I think with the Pre, it wants to can tethering until it's more certain it can successfully and reliably charge a premium for it.
Your not adding anything to the conversation
"You're". Not: "your".
See, something has been added. Your grammar was frequently atrocious in your earlier screeds, but I decided to give you a free pass for those ones. You really should concentrate on getting the basics of English down, because using it poorly reflects badly on your message, no matter what you are saying. Or trying to say.
I addressed the merits of your case earlier, with regard to the physical location of the plant used to operate the gaming, versus the residence of the gamers. You argued that the WTO had no remit in this case. The WTO panel disagreed, and in accepting arbitration, the US *and* Antigua both accepted remit. You are, in effect, second guessing the legal and political teams from two countries as well as an international panel of jurists. As with idiosyncratic stock picking, there is a very, very small probability of you being correct in this instance, versus a very high probability of you not being correct in this case. I have read your bloggish/fisking-style arguments againt the WTO decision and they are unconvincing and merely reiterate or restate many of the initial arguments of the US deposition in the first round of hearings. These arguments were judged at the time to be of insufficient merit to prevent the arbitration from proceeding. Your stubborn refusal to recognise that a legally constituted body delegated to come to a resolution of this difficult problem bespeaks a cognitive difficulty in accepting wisdom.
Sometimes, you just have to admit that you are wrong. The problem is that when your intellectual capabilities constrain you from recognising the domain borders of your inexpertise, there is a high probability that you will overestimate your capabilities.
You sound just like my niece when she was 7 years old in 2004
With your uncreative use of crude language, your dogmatism in the face of wisdom, your fondness for ad hominem attacks, and your reliance on anecdote as evidence, *you* actually sound like everyone's 7-year-old niece.
The historical reality is that an internationally constituted body with considerable subject matter expertise and domain knowledge has heard multiple arguments from both parties, along with appeals and arbitration arguments, and has rendered a decision that has been tested and accepted by all sides in the dispute.
Ed "sumdumass" Lolington's fictional reality is that they, a random slashdot poster, claim to possess superior legal understanding of the argument and issues, and that their judgement alone constitutes the entirety of a more correct analysis of the argument.
There's a word for this.
showing them you ignorance does help set the record straight and prevent the fictional reality that has cropped into the real world.
Dear Mr Honorary Ed Lolington, e-Lawyer Extraordinaire:
Getting in the last word does not make you right, it just makes you look anal.
Also, the historical reality is that an internationally constituted body with considerable subject matter expertise and domain knowledge has heard multiple arguments from both parties, along with appeals and arbitration arguments, and has rendered a decision that has been tested and accepted by all sides in the dispute.
Your fictional reality is that you, a random slashdot poster, claims to possess superior legal understanding of the argument and issues, and that your judgement alone constitutes the entirety of a more correct analysis of the argument.
There's a word for this.
Polystyrene no longer sufficient.
You can't read it, understand it, and not come to the same conclusion I did ... the only thing stopping you is laziness ... You are intellectually lazy and a moron. If you invested just a few minutes into verifying what I said, you would be in total agreement with me ... All it does is make you look like a moron.
Oh you're adorable. Is this your first week on the Tubes, or are you off your meds? Don't ever change.
Now it seems that not only are you severely challenged mentally in this conversation
Let's see. Who do I trust more? An Ed Lolington random wannabe on the internet whose first recourse is to hurl childish insults, or the decisions of several rounds of hearings, arbitration, and appeals of an international legal body with representation from around the world and across the political spectrum?
You lose. Sorry.
Upon reflection, the servers are not based in the US. The DNS resolvers are not based in the US. The depository banks are not based in the US. The players, however, are based in the US, and are exercising their freedom to trade internationally. The US is now intervening to retard the transfer of capital with very little in the way of excuses other than "Do what we say, not what we do" to its citizens.
Do you work for a US casino?