Re:What happened to interchangable parts?
on
Inside the Lego Factory
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· Score: 2, Informative
You're wrong. It's simply the possibilities that have increased. If you want the simplicity of fewer kinds of part, just get simple sets - Creator, etc. Otherwise, at the very least, pretty much all parts are reusable in custom builds of a similar theme to the original set (vehicle, building, robot/mecha/spaceship). You can be inventive in your use of the detailed parts, or you can look at the original sets for hints as to how to incorporate them into your builds.
Many of the recent parts are very useful across a large range of custom building.
Sets from the last 3-4 years or so have been good in distribution of parts - certainly Lego sets went through a phase in late 90s early 00s of having a skeletal design of specialised small parts and some large ones. New sets are the best of all worlds; most themes are sets with a great array of ordinary bricks, simple special bricks (e.g. slopes), detail bricks and useful large bricks (platforms, wall panels, vehicle chassis).
Large bricks are only annoying if you don't have large amounts of ordinary bricks. When you do, they are just very useful to help size up your creations and provide support for large structures/vehicle protrusions.
Check out Lego's Shop at Home website (shop.lego.com) and see the massive sets in Exclusives and Creator (brick-heavy for ordinary bricks as well as special ones).
Sorry to say this, but every country has its problems. Perhaps some don't affect the rest of the world so much, but there are catastrophic problems particular to just about any country you think of. Just thinking of here in Europe, seen as fantastic by some liberals in the US - there are depression-inducing 6 month winters (Scandinavia with its wonder social systems), complete anarchaic disorganisation and US-type ideas about social infrastructure (Ireland with its laid back life, quaintness and "land of opportunity"), disaffected youth, unemployed and minorities (the cultured countries of France, Germany with social democracy), police state and underclasses (Britain with its politeness and refinement on the other hand), disfunctional economy/employment, corruption (Spain, Portugal, Italy with the Mediterranean and also relaxed lifestyle), the list goes on despite any of the great things about any of these places.
My advice is just to move to a reasonable part of the US and enjoy the good things about the country, and continue to be politically aware and inform others. Canada seems pretty nice mind you, I'm sure it has its problems though (beyond the French/English clash).
That said my own country Ireland is driving me batty at the moment. After 10 years of unprecented wealth, kids are still schooled in classes of 30+ in crummy prefabs, people wait months on waiting lists for diagnosis in public hospitals, or you pay through the nose for private cover and get treated in the same ill-funded public hospitals (minus the waiting list). Most of the country is like bandit country in terms of policing (entire towns without local cover at night/weekends) and police have to spend far too much time on administrative duties (discouraging actual investigation of crimes as it simply means the immediate work increasing *plus* all the paperwork). Some intercity roads are still cart tracks and Dublin has chronic traffic problems - average vehicle speed is now below the 19C with horse and carts. But we have low taxes and jobs - sure isn't that all that matters? Despite all these problems the same cowboys got re-elected for the third time, and the ministers will not even take responsibility for anything that happens under their dept (I mean *never* - unlike say the UK where despite the same criticism, there are actually some occasional resignations - and importantly, of civil servants too - never going to happen here!) It's for sure nice to be in the EU and have ease of travel to other European countries to get a breather and get sane retail options. Not to mention the preferable weather.
They've progressed a bit more towards having a broad range of parts - large panels, itty bitty parts, ordinary bricks - all in the one set. Many new sets have large amounts of ordinary bricks (e.g. the Tan coloured Creator house, Green Grocer, Café Corner, etc.) and deliberate brick-built features in some places, but custom parts in others where they help build up the set or give nice little features. I bought a bunch of Exo-force (mechwarrior style sets) on sale, and they are heavy on hull pieces and crick-hinged bricks. I plan to use these for some cool spacecraft.
One can very effectively use pretty much any large parts in a custom construction, and some, e.g. rock faces, help build up a construction a huge amount even if you are going crazy with vast amounts of ordinary bricks as well.
I always leave the small stool/step at the open end of the shelves I'm between. I do fear for someone squashing me between two sets of shelves, although they don't move that quickly. I don't think one could use such shelves if you have clausterphobia.
We sometimes have entire months here in Ireland with little direct sunshine (I think last year some places had an entire 80 day block with rain each day, and that was in the lousy summer we had last year).
In any case, it's not a matter of the amount of light in winter. It is to do with UVB rays, and these don't reach us in the winter due to the sun being low in the horizon and refraction from the rays passing through more atmosphere. Not only that, but even past the height of winter, these rays only reach us when the sun is higher in the sky (the middle of the day).
Or, ISP's will stop pretending their customers can get all they want for a fixed price, and we'll see basic traffic packages but metered data after a certain threshold. The Internet will not become like TV, it will economically follow the model of networks for electricity, natural gas or the way voice telephony used to be billed.
Personally, I think it is far more upfront the way my ISP does not throttle heavy users, but instead you just have to worry about your data cap. Once you go over it, you are throttled (to double ISDN speed, usable for web, email, etc.). No excess use charges or cutting you off. And, the cap applies to the last 30 days rather than a calendar month, so across the whole network you do not get degradation from the heavy users all using up their cap at the start of the month. There are fixed rates for purchasing extra data at 10G a go. Alternatively you can switch to a higher package for a larger cap and get more bandwidth.
At the moment the above is not attractive for heavy users, but that is because they can still find stupid (and going bankrupt) ISPs to leech off who aren't even sneakily throttling people. The sneaky throttling is not even as advantageous an approach as the rolling data cap, nevermind its dubious legality.
I think net neutrality is not going to be an issue, as people are starting to demand so much from ISPs that their only viable approach is to actually serve up what people want, but bill for it accordingly.
There's a serious problem with anywhere that people don't consider guns scary. Guns are not amusing toys. Even considering them a necessary tool in pretty wild rural areas, they should surely be considered in a similar category to dangerous farm machinery.
Just having more players along doesn't ensure anything changes. Here in Ireland we have proportional representation with single transferable vote (PR-STV). You get to vote your preferences and if say your first preference is eliminated, then your second preference is counted in the next round of counting. Alternatively if your first preference is easily elected, their surplus votes (randomly selected) are redistributed according to the remaining preferences.
It makes for an entertaining and drawn out count, and indeed representation for small parties. But it's still mostly been Fianna FÃil, the main establishment party, in government for decades. When it wasn't, we had the very similar Fine Gael party. Sure the coalitions add a bit of variation, but no more so than the fringe politicians you might have inside the major parties of a two party state.
Still, PR-STV is quite satisfying way to vote and I recommend it. Nothing like recording your least favorite politician as last preference even if they are from the main party and likely to be elected.
Facebook etc. are patently dot-com reruns, except slicker and flashier. They've even nearly called it dot-com rerun: Web 2.0.
Anyone who can't see how it is going to end has a very very short memory.
This time we might have some very big casualties. It would have been interesting to watch if Microsoft had indeed spend billions on Yahoo and then had to either bankroll their projects or else shelve the lot and forget ever recouping the expenditure (refusal to admit defeat would likely preclude the latter though - I would expect Yahoo to have been a vast money-hole for Microsoft).
We have PR-STV here in Ireland. With manual counting, and transferring votes from eliminations and surpluses, recounts where there is a marginal result in a constituency, and some 4 or 5 seat constituencies, it invariably takes days before the final results of our general election are in.
That said, I'm all for staying with the pencil and paper and having plenty of spectators checking the manual vote counting. Plus, all the tallies and guesswork during the couple days it takes makes for great sport. Sure there are still some people who take no interest, but for a lot of the country it is what makes voting worthwhile - seeing the politicians on tenderhooks, and rooting for a party like you root for a sports team, and trying to show how informed you are by guessing the results ahead of time. Betting of course is an essential part for many people too.
We're stuck with a whole bunch of these useless Dutch voting machines here in Ireland. They weren't used after a govt. committee set up to rubberstamp the use of them came back and pointed out all the flaws. Currently spending millions each year storing them. S. M. A. R. T. Now we probably won't even be able to flog them off to some other country!
Perhaps, although there is plenty of "sci-fi" that in reality is just fantasy in a futuristic setting (or galaxy far far away etc.). Probably hard-core sci-fi fans have the most to grumble about. Apart from finding some pure sci-fi tough going, I think the mixed shelving arrangement probably suits fantasy fans.
The problem isn't religion, it's humans. People are capable of the worst excesses ascribed to religion regardless of whether they are doing it "for religion" or not.
People who are allegedly not religious (as in practicing a religion) are usually just as religious as anyone else, or even more so, when it comes to the issues they care about.
I was basing my discussion of Satellite on the service provided by Digiweb (www.digiweb.ie) here in Ireland. They currently do not have a cap for Satellite users, though they limit bandwidth for "heavy" users during 8am-6pm.
I don't know what it is like in the US, but here in Ireland we have 3G services, that the government even include in statistics as "broadband" connections. However, they do not actually provide good speeds in practice for most, as the service does not handle increased users well - the cell bandwidth gets divided out between the users and so just 20 or so means worse than dial-up speed and useless QoS. At the worst times it can be faster to switch to GPRS (2.5G)
Maybe Edge or whatever is used in the US is better, although I believe the top theoretical speeds are lower even if they do deliver better speed in practice.
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As regards the OP question of how to cope with dial-up, I highly recommend NoScript for Firefox. Greatly reduces the load time for webpages (at least in my experience of seeing it on a browser using dual-channel ISDN). It by default blocks the worst web content - flash and javascript (e.g. loading graphics and animations from 3rd party ad servers). Simpler and more useful than Adblock, also fairer for website owners as you are not blocking ads specifically - just not handling certain types of content. You can easily whitelist javascript for domains for which it is essential.
For email, set up your email client (it doesn't need to be text only) to leave the emails on the email server - you can choose which ones to open up and download, and delete junk without downloading.
For downloading, it is useful to use a download client that can pause and resume downloads, or handle interruptions.
Two-way satellite works great except for the latency. You could always have the dish on the ground out in the garden if the house or shrubs etc. don't shadow the signal. Two-way sat has the advantage of being "always on" and you don't have the time-based billing of dial-up, also usable for downloading large amounts of data.
I buy CDs if the albums are €10 or less and music from either more than 5 years ago, or old reliable bands. I don't have to even shop online for this requirement - the record stores here in Ireland seem to have permanent sales with the line-up changing monthly.
That said, by not buying singles or downloading them illegally or overpriced, I severely curtail my music experience (especially as I mostly skip radio listening due to the amount of rubbish). Unfortunately however overblown the "crime" of "piracy", morally I can't justify practicing it and ignoring the law, despite being completely unsympathetic to the record companies or lawmakers.
And this kind of attitude from across the water is exactly why it's a good idea for Europe to distance itself more from the US and go its own way. Just a pity about the UK's dogged attachment to the US, but Europe's diversity is its strength, so I suppose it at least does ensure Europe doesn't completely rail against the US.
A better analogy might be Irish. We've had independence since 1922 yet Irish-speaking has never been in a sorrier state. Contrast to say, Finland, or Israel. Even Wales fares better than Ireland.
Where there's a will there's a way. No need to give up one's language just because English or some other majority language is useful or indeed necessary.
Just about anyone with DSL has no choice but to rely on Eircom. Most with non-Eircom DSL are just resold wholesale Eircom DSL. The downside is fixing Eircom-related problems if you are not an Eircom customer, there can be little your own telco can do for you in this instance. Even those on LLU exchanges are still relying on Eircom for the phone line. LLU is actually more expensive for other telcos than reselling Eircom DSL wholesale (guess who has complete freedom to arrange prices that way?) so LLU is still not rolled out in many places.
The only tech that can provide service levels comparable to DSL and doesn't require a phone line is Digiweb's "Metro", which uses DOCSIS cable broadband, but with each customer on a dedicated "line" with the signals shifted in frequency for wireless microwave transmission (you get an antenna with freq converter and normal cable modem attached). Metro is only available in certain areas however - Dublin, other cities and a handful of other locations.
Also ironic in this instance. The ISP involved is the former state telco Eircom, which the govt. screwed up the privitisation of such that they have a monopoly on last-mile, exchanges, etc. and have ensured LLU and DSL reselling is not something other telcos can make money out of (the few "players" in that game are just spending millions to "buy" customer base, with a step 2:... before step 3: profit).
Actually, I would probably classify Eircom as vastly more evil than the Irish version of the RIAA (IRMA - Irish Recorded Music Association).
Actually this is an age-old argument, and European Universities are not all the same with regard to depth vs. broadness. Here in Ireland courses are practically training for a specific job, and that is not sensible nor a good basis for the long-term. I do agree that it doesn't entirely make sense to study subjects in wildly different disciplines, but it is not good that you can't even find courses with a broad approach in one discipline. You mention two categories who will get hired; the problem is people in the first category, a narrow technical skill, are not suited towards the ever-changing labour market. What's best for students is really to give them the second category (for IT as you put it "a general understanding of computers and an intimate knowledge of how they work (plus language theory and a wide exposure to different languages)"). A lot of Unis do not now have such an option.
I was fortunate enough to do a Computer Engineering course where we covered a rather broad amount under that description: physics (electrical theory, semiconductors), maths (calculus, stats and language theory), digital and analogue circuit design, basic programming (used Pascal for our first real project work), OOP, software engineering, OS design, compiler theory, networks, 2D and 3D graphical display, AI. Sure in each category we didn't have too much depth, but you had enough immersion in the area as a whole and self-education that you would hit the ground running and be reasonably up to speed in any one topic in weeks. We even had non-discipline subjects of French and "Communication" (i.e. English skills, how to argue, etc.). They were sensible enough choices, although even with the added 1.5 years of French on top of 6 years in secondary school it would take some work for me to get back up to speed now.
Such courses are few and far between in Ireland today, and the ones that remain are not being chosen by students because of poor career guidance. Students are simply randomly picking interesting-sounding course titles from the overall list. Admittedly govt. funded tuition may be dulling people's discernment - but college was expensive enough without tuition fees!
Well... except you may need to dig an awful lot. Archiving, splitting to new article, deleting (page history including talk page deleted), discussion on a given topic on some random policy page, or noticeboard, or project page, or village pump, or user talk pages, or any of the above but split off to a subpage, possibly deleted.
It can be like an archaeological dig trying to analyse things after the fact. Indeed just look at Arbcom cases (what a lovely newspeak word eh?)
Wikipedia is a grand experiment that is descending into disorder and highlighting people's worst aspects. It's also contributing to today's general problems of an erosion of truth, authority, privacy, intelligence, etc. Wikipedia is a dream for the kind of people we have running Western governments at present.
It's all rather ironic, considering the grand ambitions of Wikipedia and it's idea of empowering people with information.
It could be worse. Here in Ireland, eircom (Irish version of BT - amusingly BT Ireland are the main detractors and underdog here) have line rental of nearly €25 (almost $40).
The annoying thing is that DSL from just about anyone else in almost all areas you have to pay Eircom that line rental.
Good chunk of advice. I would suggest if anyone is looking for displaying lots on-screen (whatever about code, it is useful to compare two A4 documents at print-scale side by side) then they should go for a large monitor. I'm quite happy with my 20" LCD with native res of 1600x1200. Some smaller monitors can require squinting at such resolutions.
One more piece of advice is to avoid the new idiotic LCDs that the manufacturers have decided to give a glossy finish to. Yes it looks shiny in the shop and futuristic - but it's not remotely sensible. Go for good old matt effect LCD where you have to really try hard to succeed in getting a specular highlight.
Not as funny a post, but here goes. In many cases the rules are pretty ordinary, but they are EU *directives*; that is, they specify the minimum results needed by law but not how to implement it (that's up to individual states). It is in fact the British themselves that mostly come up with deranged and over-zealous implementations of EU directives in national law, just so the British govt. can continue to be control freaks, but blame the EU.
The British media is complicit. Even the BBC had an article recently about how bus companies have to force their passengers to change buses on long-distance routes "because of crazy EU law".
It's not used for better video quality though, but rather to cramp more tranmissions into the available bandwidth, or longer running time into a smaller amount of storage space.
Large HDTVs are a nice idea, but even the good ones that really do show off high res video to its best just show up the compression artifacts more.
It was rather depressing at CeBit for example to see all these displays of HDTVs and blurb about sharper pictures etc. and the video on all of them looked absolutely terrible compared to an old high-end CRT standard-def TV with a perfect PAL off-air signal being received. Needless to say, we are still using one of these at home rather than rushing out to spend over €1000 on a flat panel TV that dims nicely over time too.
I can understand a bit more people wanting to upgrade from NTSC to HD, although even then you're still stuck with the 60Hz pull-down problem for movies.
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You're wrong. It's simply the possibilities that have increased. If you want the simplicity of fewer kinds of part, just get simple sets - Creator, etc. Otherwise, at the very least, pretty much all parts are reusable in custom builds of a similar theme to the original set (vehicle, building, robot/mecha/spaceship). You can be inventive in your use of the detailed parts, or you can look at the original sets for hints as to how to incorporate them into your builds.
Many of the recent parts are very useful across a large range of custom building.
Sets from the last 3-4 years or so have been good in distribution of parts - certainly Lego sets went through a phase in late 90s early 00s of having a skeletal design of specialised small parts and some large ones. New sets are the best of all worlds; most themes are sets with a great array of ordinary bricks, simple special bricks (e.g. slopes), detail bricks and useful large bricks (platforms, wall panels, vehicle chassis).
Large bricks are only annoying if you don't have large amounts of ordinary bricks. When you do, they are just very useful to help size up your creations and provide support for large structures/vehicle protrusions.
Check out Lego's Shop at Home website (shop.lego.com) and see the massive sets in Exclusives and Creator (brick-heavy for ordinary bricks as well as special ones).
Sorry to say this, but every country has its problems. Perhaps some don't affect the rest of the world so much, but there are catastrophic problems particular to just about any country you think of. Just thinking of here in Europe, seen as fantastic by some liberals in the US - there are depression-inducing 6 month winters (Scandinavia with its wonder social systems), complete anarchaic disorganisation and US-type ideas about social infrastructure (Ireland with its laid back life, quaintness and "land of opportunity"), disaffected youth, unemployed and minorities (the cultured countries of France, Germany with social democracy), police state and underclasses (Britain with its politeness and refinement on the other hand), disfunctional economy/employment, corruption (Spain, Portugal, Italy with the Mediterranean and also relaxed lifestyle), the list goes on despite any of the great things about any of these places.
My advice is just to move to a reasonable part of the US and enjoy the good things about the country, and continue to be politically aware and inform others. Canada seems pretty nice mind you, I'm sure it has its problems though (beyond the French/English clash).
That said my own country Ireland is driving me batty at the moment. After 10 years of unprecented wealth, kids are still schooled in classes of 30+ in crummy prefabs, people wait months on waiting lists for diagnosis in public hospitals, or you pay through the nose for private cover and get treated in the same ill-funded public hospitals (minus the waiting list). Most of the country is like bandit country in terms of policing (entire towns without local cover at night/weekends) and police have to spend far too much time on administrative duties (discouraging actual investigation of crimes as it simply means the immediate work increasing *plus* all the paperwork). Some intercity roads are still cart tracks and Dublin has chronic traffic problems - average vehicle speed is now below the 19C with horse and carts. But we have low taxes and jobs - sure isn't that all that matters? Despite all these problems the same cowboys got re-elected for the third time, and the ministers will not even take responsibility for anything that happens under their dept (I mean *never* - unlike say the UK where despite the same criticism, there are actually some occasional resignations - and importantly, of civil servants too - never going to happen here!)
It's for sure nice to be in the EU and have ease of travel to other European countries to get a breather and get sane retail options. Not to mention the preferable weather.
They've progressed a bit more towards having a broad range of parts - large panels, itty bitty parts, ordinary bricks - all in the one set. Many new sets have large amounts of ordinary bricks (e.g. the Tan coloured Creator house, Green Grocer, Café Corner, etc.) and deliberate brick-built features in some places, but custom parts in others where they help build up the set or give nice little features. I bought a bunch of Exo-force (mechwarrior style sets) on sale, and they are heavy on hull pieces and crick-hinged bricks. I plan to use these for some cool spacecraft.
One can very effectively use pretty much any large parts in a custom construction, and some, e.g. rock faces, help build up a construction a huge amount even if you are going crazy with vast amounts of ordinary bricks as well.
I always leave the small stool/step at the open end of the shelves I'm between. I do fear for someone squashing me between two sets of shelves, although they don't move that quickly. I don't think one could use such shelves if you have clausterphobia.
We sometimes have entire months here in Ireland with little direct sunshine (I think last year some places had an entire 80 day block with rain each day, and that was in the lousy summer we had last year).
In any case, it's not a matter of the amount of light in winter. It is to do with UVB rays, and these don't reach us in the winter due to the sun being low in the horizon and refraction from the rays passing through more atmosphere. Not only that, but even past the height of winter, these rays only reach us when the sun is higher in the sky (the middle of the day).
Or, ISP's will stop pretending their customers can get all they want for a fixed price, and we'll see basic traffic packages but metered data after a certain threshold. The Internet will not become like TV, it will economically follow the model of networks for electricity, natural gas or the way voice telephony used to be billed.
Personally, I think it is far more upfront the way my ISP does not throttle heavy users, but instead you just have to worry about your data cap. Once you go over it, you are throttled (to double ISDN speed, usable for web, email, etc.). No excess use charges or cutting you off. And, the cap applies to the last 30 days rather than a calendar month, so across the whole network you do not get degradation from the heavy users all using up their cap at the start of the month. There are fixed rates for purchasing extra data at 10G a go. Alternatively you can switch to a higher package for a larger cap and get more bandwidth.
At the moment the above is not attractive for heavy users, but that is because they can still find stupid (and going bankrupt) ISPs to leech off who aren't even sneakily throttling people. The sneaky throttling is not even as advantageous an approach as the rolling data cap, nevermind its dubious legality.
I think net neutrality is not going to be an issue, as people are starting to demand so much from ISPs that their only viable approach is to actually serve up what people want, but bill for it accordingly.
There's a serious problem with anywhere that people don't consider guns scary. Guns are not amusing toys. Even considering them a necessary tool in pretty wild rural areas, they should surely be considered in a similar category to dangerous farm machinery.
Just having more players along doesn't ensure anything changes. Here in Ireland we have proportional representation with single transferable vote (PR-STV). You get to vote your preferences and if say your first preference is eliminated, then your second preference is counted in the next round of counting. Alternatively if your first preference is easily elected, their surplus votes (randomly selected) are redistributed according to the remaining preferences.
It makes for an entertaining and drawn out count, and indeed representation for small parties. But it's still mostly been Fianna FÃil, the main establishment party, in government for decades. When it wasn't, we had the very similar Fine Gael party. Sure the coalitions add a bit of variation, but no more so than the fringe politicians you might have inside the major parties of a two party state.
Still, PR-STV is quite satisfying way to vote and I recommend it. Nothing like recording your least favorite politician as last preference even if they are from the main party and likely to be elected.
Facebook etc. are patently dot-com reruns, except slicker and flashier. They've even nearly called it dot-com rerun: Web 2.0.
Anyone who can't see how it is going to end has a very very short memory.
This time we might have some very big casualties. It would have been interesting to watch if Microsoft had indeed spend billions on Yahoo and then had to either bankroll their projects or else shelve the lot and forget ever recouping the expenditure (refusal to admit defeat would likely preclude the latter though - I would expect Yahoo to have been a vast money-hole for Microsoft).
We have PR-STV here in Ireland. With manual counting, and transferring votes from eliminations and surpluses, recounts where there is a marginal result in a constituency, and some 4 or 5 seat constituencies, it invariably takes days before the final results of our general election are in.
That said, I'm all for staying with the pencil and paper and having plenty of spectators checking the manual vote counting. Plus, all the tallies and guesswork during the couple days it takes makes for great sport. Sure there are still some people who take no interest, but for a lot of the country it is what makes voting worthwhile - seeing the politicians on tenderhooks, and rooting for a party like you root for a sports team, and trying to show how informed you are by guessing the results ahead of time. Betting of course is an essential part for many people too.
We're stuck with a whole bunch of these useless Dutch voting machines here in Ireland. They weren't used after a govt. committee set up to rubberstamp the use of them came back and pointed out all the flaws. Currently spending millions each year storing them. S. M. A. R. T. Now we probably won't even be able to flog them off to some other country!
Perhaps, although there is plenty of "sci-fi" that in reality is just fantasy in a futuristic setting (or galaxy far far away etc.). Probably hard-core sci-fi fans have the most to grumble about. Apart from finding some pure sci-fi tough going, I think the mixed shelving arrangement probably suits fantasy fans.
The problem isn't religion, it's humans. People are capable of the worst excesses ascribed to religion regardless of whether they are doing it "for religion" or not.
People who are allegedly not religious (as in practicing a religion) are usually just as religious as anyone else, or even more so, when it comes to the issues they care about.
I was basing my discussion of Satellite on the service provided by Digiweb (www.digiweb.ie) here in Ireland. They currently do not have a cap for Satellite users, though they limit bandwidth for "heavy" users during 8am-6pm.
I don't know what it is like in the US, but here in Ireland we have 3G services, that the government even include in statistics as "broadband" connections. However, they do not actually provide good speeds in practice for most, as the service does not handle increased users well - the cell bandwidth gets divided out between the users and so just 20 or so means worse than dial-up speed and useless QoS. At the worst times it can be faster to switch to GPRS (2.5G)
Maybe Edge or whatever is used in the US is better, although I believe the top theoretical speeds are lower even if they do deliver better speed in practice.
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As regards the OP question of how to cope with dial-up, I highly recommend NoScript for Firefox. Greatly reduces the load time for webpages (at least in my experience of seeing it on a browser using dual-channel ISDN). It by default blocks the worst web content - flash and javascript (e.g. loading graphics and animations from 3rd party ad servers). Simpler and more useful than Adblock, also fairer for website owners as you are not blocking ads specifically - just not handling certain types of content. You can easily whitelist javascript for domains for which it is essential.
For email, set up your email client (it doesn't need to be text only) to leave the emails on the email server - you can choose which ones to open up and download, and delete junk without downloading.
For downloading, it is useful to use a download client that can pause and resume downloads, or handle interruptions.
Two-way satellite works great except for the latency. You could always have the dish on the ground out in the garden if the house or shrubs etc. don't shadow the signal. Two-way sat has the advantage of being "always on" and you don't have the time-based billing of dial-up, also usable for downloading large amounts of data.
I buy CDs if the albums are €10 or less and music from either more than 5 years ago, or old reliable bands. I don't have to even shop online for this requirement - the record stores here in Ireland seem to have permanent sales with the line-up changing monthly.
That said, by not buying singles or downloading them illegally or overpriced, I severely curtail my music experience (especially as I mostly skip radio listening due to the amount of rubbish). Unfortunately however overblown the "crime" of "piracy", morally I can't justify practicing it and ignoring the law, despite being completely unsympathetic to the record companies or lawmakers.
And this kind of attitude from across the water is exactly why it's a good idea for Europe to distance itself more from the US and go its own way. Just a pity about the UK's dogged attachment to the US, but Europe's diversity is its strength, so I suppose it at least does ensure Europe doesn't completely rail against the US.
A better analogy might be Irish. We've had independence since 1922 yet Irish-speaking has never been in a sorrier state. Contrast to say, Finland, or Israel. Even Wales fares better than Ireland.
Where there's a will there's a way. No need to give up one's language just because English or some other majority language is useful or indeed necessary.
Just about anyone with DSL has no choice but to rely on Eircom. Most with non-Eircom DSL are just resold wholesale Eircom DSL. The downside is fixing Eircom-related problems if you are not an Eircom customer, there can be little your own telco can do for you in this instance. Even those on LLU exchanges are still relying on Eircom for the phone line. LLU is actually more expensive for other telcos than reselling Eircom DSL wholesale (guess who has complete freedom to arrange prices that way?) so LLU is still not rolled out in many places.
The only tech that can provide service levels comparable to DSL and doesn't require a phone line is Digiweb's "Metro", which uses DOCSIS cable broadband, but with each customer on a dedicated "line" with the signals shifted in frequency for wireless microwave transmission (you get an antenna with freq converter and normal cable modem attached). Metro is only available in certain areas however - Dublin, other cities and a handful of other locations.
Also ironic in this instance. The ISP involved is the former state telco Eircom, which the govt. screwed up the privitisation of such that they have a monopoly on last-mile, exchanges, etc. and have ensured LLU and DSL reselling is not something other telcos can make money out of (the few "players" in that game are just spending millions to "buy" customer base, with a step 2: ... before step 3: profit).
Actually, I would probably classify Eircom as vastly more evil than the Irish version of the RIAA (IRMA - Irish Recorded Music Association).
Actually this is an age-old argument, and European Universities are not all the same with regard to depth vs. broadness. Here in Ireland courses are practically training for a specific job, and that is not sensible nor a good basis for the long-term. I do agree that it doesn't entirely make sense to study subjects in wildly different disciplines, but it is not good that you can't even find courses with a broad approach in one discipline. You mention two categories who will get hired; the problem is people in the first category, a narrow technical skill, are not suited towards the ever-changing labour market. What's best for students is really to give them the second category (for IT as you put it "a general understanding of computers and an intimate knowledge of how they work (plus language theory and a wide exposure to different languages)"). A lot of Unis do not now have such an option.
I was fortunate enough to do a Computer Engineering course where we covered a rather broad amount under that description: physics (electrical theory, semiconductors), maths (calculus, stats and language theory), digital and analogue circuit design, basic programming (used Pascal for our first real project work), OOP, software engineering, OS design, compiler theory, networks, 2D and 3D graphical display, AI. Sure in each category we didn't have too much depth, but you had enough immersion in the area as a whole and self-education that you would hit the ground running and be reasonably up to speed in any one topic in weeks. We even had non-discipline subjects of French and "Communication" (i.e. English skills, how to argue, etc.). They were sensible enough choices, although even with the added 1.5 years of French on top of 6 years in secondary school it would take some work for me to get back up to speed now.
Such courses are few and far between in Ireland today, and the ones that remain are not being chosen by students because of poor career guidance. Students are simply randomly picking interesting-sounding course titles from the overall list. Admittedly govt. funded tuition may be dulling people's discernment - but college was expensive enough without tuition fees!
Well... except you may need to dig an awful lot. Archiving, splitting to new article, deleting (page history including talk page deleted), discussion on a given topic on some random policy page, or noticeboard, or project page, or village pump, or user talk pages, or any of the above but split off to a subpage, possibly deleted.
It can be like an archaeological dig trying to analyse things after the fact. Indeed just look at Arbcom cases (what a lovely newspeak word eh?)
Wikipedia is a grand experiment that is descending into disorder and highlighting people's worst aspects. It's also contributing to today's general problems of an erosion of truth, authority, privacy, intelligence, etc. Wikipedia is a dream for the kind of people we have running Western governments at present.
It's all rather ironic, considering the grand ambitions of Wikipedia and it's idea of empowering people with information.
It could be worse. Here in Ireland, eircom (Irish version of BT - amusingly BT Ireland are the main detractors and underdog here) have line rental of nearly €25 (almost $40).
The annoying thing is that DSL from just about anyone else in almost all areas you have to pay Eircom that line rental.
Good chunk of advice. I would suggest if anyone is looking for displaying lots on-screen (whatever about code, it is useful to compare two A4 documents at print-scale side by side) then they should go for a large monitor. I'm quite happy with my 20" LCD with native res of 1600x1200. Some smaller monitors can require squinting at such resolutions.
One more piece of advice is to avoid the new idiotic LCDs that the manufacturers have decided to give a glossy finish to. Yes it looks shiny in the shop and futuristic - but it's not remotely sensible. Go for good old matt effect LCD where you have to really try hard to succeed in getting a specular highlight.
Not as funny a post, but here goes. In many cases the rules are pretty ordinary, but they are EU *directives*; that is, they specify the minimum results needed by law but not how to implement it (that's up to individual states). It is in fact the British themselves that mostly come up with deranged and over-zealous implementations of EU directives in national law, just so the British govt. can continue to be control freaks, but blame the EU.
The British media is complicit. Even the BBC had an article recently about how bus companies have to force their passengers to change buses on long-distance routes "because of crazy EU law".
It's not used for better video quality though, but rather to cramp more tranmissions into the available bandwidth, or longer running time into a smaller amount of storage space.
Large HDTVs are a nice idea, but even the good ones that really do show off high res video to its best just show up the compression artifacts more.
It was rather depressing at CeBit for example to see all these displays of HDTVs and blurb about sharper pictures etc. and the video on all of them looked absolutely terrible compared to an old high-end CRT standard-def TV with a perfect PAL off-air signal being received. Needless to say, we are still using one of these at home rather than rushing out to spend over €1000 on a flat panel TV that dims nicely over time too.
I can understand a bit more people wanting to upgrade from NTSC to HD, although even then you're still stuck with the 60Hz pull-down problem for movies.