Aren't you assuming that Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah have any sort of legitimacy at home? Judging from the huge fiasco around the elections earlier this year, I was under the impression that the only people who believe anything the current regime says are the hard-right, who would never support the pro-green camp, anyways.
Iran can continue spouting this and that about falsifications and the evil British empire, but ultimately I don't think anyone is going to believe any of it, anymore, except for the people who are unmovably pro-Ahmadinjead, anyways.
Mine was $50 in a small city, and right when I left they did introduce bandwidth capping -- they asked us to please refrain from uploading more than 500 gigabytes per month, with no download cap. Japan makes the US internet situation look paltry.
For the record (for those claiming the landmass has anything to do with it), the way Japan regulated was that it encouraged/forced ISPs to work together to cooperatively build and share lines all the way up to the DSL station. From there, each company was responsible for setting up wires from the station to each individual house. That way, it kept a free market-type approach, but it rid the need of companies that want to set up shop in some area to have to roll out lines across the entire country just to get to that area.
I'd like to chime in and say it lowered my ASUS G1S notebook's standard operating temperature up to 30-40 degrees celsius. It lowered my sister's HP notebook's standard operating temperature by 20 degrees. Both are as reported by CPUID's HWMonitor
Additionally, file operations function, again (wtf, Vista? You can't even copy correctly?), so there's no more random freezing when you're trying to copy or delete a bunch of files, or even one file, for that matter.
Lastly, read/write speeds to my external HDD have doubled. Consistently doubled.
On the battery side, Vista SP1 and above actually had remarkably good battery life, and Windows 7 does the same.
I'm very happy with Windows 7. May Windows Vista rot forever in hell.
Quad-core Mac Pro - 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel processor - 3GB DDR3 RAM - 640GB hard drive - NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB GDDR3 Cost: $2,500
Does this cost $2500 to produce? Alright, now that we've got the obvious comparison out of the way, let's look at some other things that, once built, are very cheap to maintain. However, they do spend money on adding/renewing infrastructure (like how Microsoft spends money making/updating OSes), R&D, and *gasp* make a profit.
- Utility companies (water, electric, sewers) - Telephone company (landline and cellphone) - ISPs - Game companies - Movie companies - Music companies - Basically all entertainment companies - Museums - Theater and plays (once you get the props, what else do you have to pay for? We're ignoring the fact that we have to pay the actors, because we ignored that Microsoft has 93,000 employees...)
$150 for a family 3-pack is nice abusing a monopoly. If there's anything that Microsoft is gouging on it's their massive, unbelievable price tag for business licenses and support for businesses running Windows on hundreds of PCs.
Conspiracy theories aside, fingerprinting isn't all that bad, IMO. Japan now does it and the process is quick and painless. Besides, there's literally nothing to do with the fingerprints other than waste megabytes in some database of useless fingerprints that will never matter they are of people who don't live in the US. That said, Japanese customs agents are incomparably, perhaps infinitely nicer than US customs agents could ever even dream of on a nice day.
What you should be more worried about than fingerprints, that even I'm worried about as an America ncitizen, is the tearing apart your luggage because you've been randomly chosen as part of their non-terrorist-looking quota (to prevent racial profiling charges) and the confiscating (read: stealing) of your laptop, potentially exposing all of its confidential information.
(1) Delete all homebrew and uninstall Bootmii (2) Update (3) If Bricked, e-mail Nintendo (4) Nintendo will ship you a box to mail your bricked Wii back to them (5) When Nintendo finds no homebrew, they will send you a new Wii for free (6) Reinstall all homebrew, Bootmii on brand new Wii (7) ??? (8) PROFIT
Of course, if you Wii is already bricked with homebrew on it, you're out of luck. But then again, why in the world would you update your Wii with homebrew on it without checking to see what the new update does first?
Apple should just add a pay-to-preview feature. When you click on the 30 second preview, a little box pops up, saying "Such and such artists requests that you pay them a small fee of 25 cents to preview this song. Would you like to pay?"
If such a thing occurred, it would be the biggest boom the indie music scene has ever seen.
It IS greed. There are successful businesses, and then there are businesses who care about naught but lining their and their shareholders' pockets with money. Time, time, time, and time again, history has shown that you can run a business that people like and make money, or you can be a greedy monster and make money. It works for some time, but will those businesses be around in 100 years? If you go around the world and look at some of the companies that HAVE been around for over a century (a lot of food companies have), you'll find that the workers there are typically treated well and are very happy.
It's the same as the old king analogy. As a king, you can rule with kindness or you can rule by fear. By kindness and you can have everything you want (and everything your prosperous country can produce) and will be remembered forever. By fear and you can have everything (only what your pitiful starving country can give you) and will be forgotten over the centuries. For some reason, a lot of leaders tend to choose the latter.
You can't pick the concrete up and work on the road surface underneath it. You may well be able to do that with an engineered roadway which is laid down in segments. Since most roads seem to fail due to inadequacies of the roadbed or the surface beneath it, this could make a big difference. An engineered roadway which was thick enough might actually help a great deal in this regard, because when it spans a hole it might adequately cover it where concrete (with no self-healing) or asphalt (whose self-healing abilities are limited and pretty well restricted to hot weather) would simply be pressed into the hole and broken; on the other hand, it might also be a liability because it might hide that kind of defect in a roadbed until it becomes a major problem.
It would be a lot smarter to build solar railways, with solar panels between the rails, and forget about this interstate highway bullshit.
That's actually an incredibly good idea. Someone should throw that idea Japan's way.
While you're correct that they usually do have someone that cares about them, they usually don't ever go back to them for help, or god forbid they'd have to give up even a few of their bad habits to live in a comfortable, supportive house.
Most computer parts are made not in China but in Taiwan or Malaysia. I'm not sure if I have any Chinese-made parts in my computer. Maybe the packaging?
And most clothing, too, is made in countries poorer than China, now (at least in my experience). For instance, my current shirt is made in Bangladesh, and another in Qatar.
Japan has the space program thing mastered very well. They build lots of probes to do a lot of scientific work, and then they basically go out to a store, by a nice 1080p Panasonic camera, or something, and weld it to the probe. JAXA gets their science, the people get their awesome photos/videos (e.g., Kaguya, and hey, scientists like looking at pretty pictures, too!
I don't claim to know what happened in your previous discussions, but I would venture to guess that people stated that Holland was Socialist not because of their social freedoms, but because of your 6%/19% VAT, your income tax that goes as high as 52%, and your "wealth tax". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Netherlands
The article claims that it would be cheaper, and brighter than a compact-fluorescent, and the manufacturing process is simple. Additionally, the nature of the way they're increasing the light output allows for selective modification of certain areas of the spectrum; increasing certain parts of the spectrum and decrease other parts would make for a cleaner, notably whiter light.
I suppose I should have described the article since it's rather lengthy.
Basically, stealth technology works very well against a single or even several radar points. The problem is if you have hundreds, even thousands of radars. Building that many radars would be prohibitively expensive, but cell phone towers are already in place every few miles, and so we have our "thousands of radars" network.
It's not an easy task, by any means, but it is an accomplishable task to detect stealth fighters using the cell phone networks. The principle is that stealth aircraft bounce radar in a different direction than it comes. Presumably, one of these randomly bounced signals will hit another radar somewhere (a cell phone tower). The required computing power is immense, but doable with modern technology, as there are very, very, very few points in which a stealth aircraft would bounce a signal perfectly back to a different radar, so you'd have to be scanning a multitude of cell phone towers very carefully. This can be done, however, and if you do it, by more carefully analyzing the data, the velocity, size, shape, and even characteristics such as engine rotation or structural vibration can be calculated.
Fortunately, US defense contractors are ahead of the game, and this idea has been thought of already. It is apparently important in naval radar detection because underwater vessels naturally don't reflect very well, so radar arrays are necessary to do meaningful detection; thusly, this principle has been extended to the air, as well. Also, Lockheed has already been working on just such a detection system, using TV broadcasts instead of cell phone towers. The idea is that there are fewer but still many TV broadcasting towers, reducing the computing requirements, and TV towers emit radio waves much more powerfully than cell phone towers.
Experts also said that even if you could detect a stealth aircraft, things such as cell phone towers are very susceptible to jamming, and even if you could detect a stealth aircraft well, you need to get a missile extremely close to it to shoot it down, anyways.
Anyways, the technology is relatively sound and research is actively being done on it. Any such systems based on the concept are also either in the very, very early prototype stage or not developed, at all. And it's good to know that the stealth and radar experts are on top of things, already.
I had 100mbps down 50mbps up for ~$40 in Japan in a modest-sized city of 400,000 while I was staying there. It was part of NTT's new B FLETS package that they're pushing throughout the entire country.
I might add that right before I left, they began the ~controversial~ practice of bandwidth capping. They sent out a letter to everyone asking to please not upload more than 500 gigabytes in a single month, but downloads remained unlimited.
We had Insight (who now flaunts the "fastest ISP in the US!" label) for years, and then Comcast bought them out in Indiana. Now all of our cable channels signal quality has degraded to Comcast's usual fuzziness, and our bill has risen 4 times in 1 year, all the while Comcast has been bombarding us with "Bill will not change!" commercials.
Google Video had the right idea back in its hayday -- bring movies, documentaries online. I remember back a couple of years ago, a ton of Japanese movies made prior to 1953 that had become public domain were put into Google Video, and I watched a couple. Additionally, a good amount of documentaries were up.
Google needs to monetize off of movies and tv shows. They should keep their current ad format (the semi-transparent ads) for user videos, and then they should use interstitial ads based on the length of the video for commercial ads. Additionally, they could charge more for videos with higher amounts of daily viewings.
For instance, maybe put 1 commercial break for every 15 minutes of video. If you want to advertise during Days of Our Lives, maybe it won't cost so much. But if you want to place an advertisement during South Park, it's going to cost you a lot more, just like real TV advertisements.
Additionally, they should try very hard to get anime companies on board. There are many, many millions of people who would love to watch anime on YouTube, even in shit-quality, even with a few short interstitial ad breaks if they could. Anime companies are much more on top of changing technologies than the movie or TV industries, and I think it'd be beneficial for both of them to start offering their content online to users for free.
When I was in Japan, I was getting a 100mbps/40mbps plan for about ~$52 per month. Right before I left, they sent out notices to everyone saying they were going to start a new controversial bandwidth-capping plan -- starting from then on, you can upload no more than 500 gb per month, but there would be no download cap.
I might also add that I was only in a medium-sized city (pop. 400,000) and I was still getting these options.
I'll make this perfectly clear -- when American ISPs argue the need for bandwidth caps and talk about the top 1% of consumers, don't buy it -- they're fucking you up the arse, and they know it.
In 7th grade, I learned about Christianity and creationism, as well as Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hindu, and touched briefly on some others. It was quite informative and I'd recommend it to everyone.
This was, of course, done where it belonged -- in Social Studies class, not Science. Perhaps if the people of the school boards of Texas would just agree to teach it similarly, there wouldn't be a big stink about it.
While connecting the dots to infer something may not make it so, Russia has a rich history of cyber attacks against enemies. Isn't it prudent to consider their history when looking at the evidence?
480 days is outrageous. I won't argue that it's beneficial for the child. But business is fast, always changing, and you must always adapt. If someone takes off 480 days, just by the sheer amount that they've forgotten and the amount that they've missed out on, it'd be like hiring a new employee.
America was in debt since ever before Andrew Jackson and ever after Andrew Jackson. Certainly long before Reagen.
Jackson despised any form of national bank (in our time, the Federal Reserve), and saw to their bankruptcy and demise, as he thought that whoever controlled the money had power and he wanted the people to have power.
After bankrupting the national bank, he became the first and only president to date to pay off the national debt. I suspect he will also be the last president to pay off national debt, as the United States probably won't exist in its current form by the time it will take to pay off the $15 trillion left by the end of Obama's first time.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't you assuming that Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah have any sort of legitimacy at home? Judging from the huge fiasco around the elections earlier this year, I was under the impression that the only people who believe anything the current regime says are the hard-right, who would never support the pro-green camp, anyways.
Iran can continue spouting this and that about falsifications and the evil British empire, but ultimately I don't think anyone is going to believe any of it, anymore, except for the people who are unmovably pro-Ahmadinjead, anyways.
Any Iranians, correct me if I'm wrong?
Mine was $50 in a small city, and right when I left they did introduce bandwidth capping -- they asked us to please refrain from uploading more than 500 gigabytes per month, with no download cap. Japan makes the US internet situation look paltry.
For the record (for those claiming the landmass has anything to do with it), the way Japan regulated was that it encouraged/forced ISPs to work together to cooperatively build and share lines all the way up to the DSL station. From there, each company was responsible for setting up wires from the station to each individual house. That way, it kept a free market-type approach, but it rid the need of companies that want to set up shop in some area to have to roll out lines across the entire country just to get to that area.
I'd like to chime in and say it lowered my ASUS G1S notebook's standard operating temperature up to 30-40 degrees celsius. It lowered my sister's HP notebook's standard operating temperature by 20 degrees. Both are as reported by CPUID's HWMonitor
Additionally, file operations function, again (wtf, Vista? You can't even copy correctly?), so there's no more random freezing when you're trying to copy or delete a bunch of files, or even one file, for that matter.
Lastly, read/write speeds to my external HDD have doubled. Consistently doubled.
On the battery side, Vista SP1 and above actually had remarkably good battery life, and Windows 7 does the same.
I'm very happy with Windows 7. May Windows Vista rot forever in hell.
Alright, let's take a look at the competition.
Quad-core Mac Pro
- 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel processor
- 3GB DDR3 RAM
- 640GB hard drive
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB GDDR3
Cost: $2,500
Does this cost $2500 to produce? Alright, now that we've got the obvious comparison out of the way, let's look at some other things that, once built, are very cheap to maintain. However, they do spend money on adding/renewing infrastructure (like how Microsoft spends money making/updating OSes), R&D, and *gasp* make a profit.
- Utility companies (water, electric, sewers)
- Telephone company (landline and cellphone)
- ISPs
- Game companies
- Movie companies
- Music companies
- Basically all entertainment companies
- Museums
- Theater and plays (once you get the props, what else do you have to pay for? We're ignoring the fact that we have to pay the actors, because we ignored that Microsoft has 93,000 employees...)
$150 for a family 3-pack is nice abusing a monopoly. If there's anything that Microsoft is gouging on it's their massive, unbelievable price tag for business licenses and support for businesses running Windows on hundreds of PCs.
Conspiracy theories aside, fingerprinting isn't all that bad, IMO. Japan now does it and the process is quick and painless. Besides, there's literally nothing to do with the fingerprints other than waste megabytes in some database of useless fingerprints that will never matter they are of people who don't live in the US. That said, Japanese customs agents are incomparably, perhaps infinitely nicer than US customs agents could ever even dream of on a nice day.
What you should be more worried about than fingerprints, that even I'm worried about as an America ncitizen, is the tearing apart your luggage because you've been randomly chosen as part of their non-terrorist-looking quota (to prevent racial profiling charges) and the confiscating (read: stealing) of your laptop, potentially exposing all of its confidential information.
(1) Delete all homebrew and uninstall Bootmii
(2) Update
(3) If Bricked, e-mail Nintendo
(4) Nintendo will ship you a box to mail your bricked Wii back to them
(5) When Nintendo finds no homebrew, they will send you a new Wii for free
(6) Reinstall all homebrew, Bootmii on brand new Wii
(7) ???
(8) PROFIT
Of course, if you Wii is already bricked with homebrew on it, you're out of luck. But then again, why in the world would you update your Wii with homebrew on it without checking to see what the new update does first?
Apple should just add a pay-to-preview feature. When you click on the 30 second preview, a little box pops up, saying "Such and such artists requests that you pay them a small fee of 25 cents to preview this song. Would you like to pay?"
If such a thing occurred, it would be the biggest boom the indie music scene has ever seen.
It IS greed. There are successful businesses, and then there are businesses who care about naught but lining their and their shareholders' pockets with money. Time, time, time, and time again, history has shown that you can run a business that people like and make money, or you can be a greedy monster and make money. It works for some time, but will those businesses be around in 100 years? If you go around the world and look at some of the companies that HAVE been around for over a century (a lot of food companies have), you'll find that the workers there are typically treated well and are very happy.
It's the same as the old king analogy. As a king, you can rule with kindness or you can rule by fear. By kindness and you can have everything you want (and everything your prosperous country can produce) and will be remembered forever. By fear and you can have everything (only what your pitiful starving country can give you) and will be forgotten over the centuries. For some reason, a lot of leaders tend to choose the latter.
You can't pick the concrete up and work on the road surface underneath it. You may well be able to do that with an engineered roadway which is laid down in segments. Since most roads seem to fail due to inadequacies of the roadbed or the surface beneath it, this could make a big difference. An engineered roadway which was thick enough might actually help a great deal in this regard, because when it spans a hole it might adequately cover it where concrete (with no self-healing) or asphalt (whose self-healing abilities are limited and pretty well restricted to hot weather) would simply be pressed into the hole and broken; on the other hand, it might also be a liability because it might hide that kind of defect in a roadbed until it becomes a major problem.
It would be a lot smarter to build solar railways, with solar panels between the rails, and forget about this interstate highway bullshit.
That's actually an incredibly good idea. Someone should throw that idea Japan's way.
While you're correct that they usually do have someone that cares about them, they usually don't ever go back to them for help, or god forbid they'd have to give up even a few of their bad habits to live in a comfortable, supportive house.
Most computer parts are made not in China but in Taiwan or Malaysia. I'm not sure if I have any Chinese-made parts in my computer. Maybe the packaging?
And most clothing, too, is made in countries poorer than China, now (at least in my experience). For instance, my current shirt is made in Bangladesh, and another in Qatar.
Japan has the space program thing mastered very well. They build lots of probes to do a lot of scientific work, and then they basically go out to a store, by a nice 1080p Panasonic camera, or something, and weld it to the probe. JAXA gets their science, the people get their awesome photos/videos (e.g., Kaguya, and hey, scientists like looking at pretty pictures, too!
I don't claim to know what happened in your previous discussions, but I would venture to guess that people stated that Holland was Socialist not because of their social freedoms, but because of your 6%/19% VAT, your income tax that goes as high as 52%, and your "wealth tax".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Netherlands
The article claims that it would be cheaper, and brighter than a compact-fluorescent, and the manufacturing process is simple. Additionally, the nature of the way they're increasing the light output allows for selective modification of certain areas of the spectrum; increasing certain parts of the spectrum and decrease other parts would make for a cleaner, notably whiter light.
I suppose I should have described the article since it's rather lengthy.
Basically, stealth technology works very well against a single or even several radar points. The problem is if you have hundreds, even thousands of radars. Building that many radars would be prohibitively expensive, but cell phone towers are already in place every few miles, and so we have our "thousands of radars" network.
It's not an easy task, by any means, but it is an accomplishable task to detect stealth fighters using the cell phone networks. The principle is that stealth aircraft bounce radar in a different direction than it comes. Presumably, one of these randomly bounced signals will hit another radar somewhere (a cell phone tower). The required computing power is immense, but doable with modern technology, as there are very, very, very few points in which a stealth aircraft would bounce a signal perfectly back to a different radar, so you'd have to be scanning a multitude of cell phone towers very carefully. This can be done, however, and if you do it, by more carefully analyzing the data, the velocity, size, shape, and even characteristics such as engine rotation or structural vibration can be calculated.
Fortunately, US defense contractors are ahead of the game, and this idea has been thought of already. It is apparently important in naval radar detection because underwater vessels naturally don't reflect very well, so radar arrays are necessary to do meaningful detection; thusly, this principle has been extended to the air, as well. Also, Lockheed has already been working on just such a detection system, using TV broadcasts instead of cell phone towers. The idea is that there are fewer but still many TV broadcasting towers, reducing the computing requirements, and TV towers emit radio waves much more powerfully than cell phone towers.
Experts also said that even if you could detect a stealth aircraft, things such as cell phone towers are very susceptible to jamming, and even if you could detect a stealth aircraft well, you need to get a missile extremely close to it to shoot it down, anyways.
Anyways, the technology is relatively sound and research is actively being done on it. Any such systems based on the concept are also either in the very, very early prototype stage or not developed, at all. And it's good to know that the stealth and radar experts are on top of things, already.
I had 100mbps down 50mbps up for ~$40 in Japan in a modest-sized city of 400,000 while I was staying there. It was part of NTT's new B FLETS package that they're pushing throughout the entire country.
I might add that right before I left, they began the ~controversial~ practice of bandwidth capping. They sent out a letter to everyone asking to please not upload more than 500 gigabytes in a single month, but downloads remained unlimited.
We had Insight (who now flaunts the "fastest ISP in the US!" label) for years, and then Comcast bought them out in Indiana. Now all of our cable channels signal quality has degraded to Comcast's usual fuzziness, and our bill has risen 4 times in 1 year, all the while Comcast has been bombarding us with "Bill will not change!" commercials.
Google Video had the right idea back in its hayday -- bring movies, documentaries online. I remember back a couple of years ago, a ton of Japanese movies made prior to 1953 that had become public domain were put into Google Video, and I watched a couple. Additionally, a good amount of documentaries were up.
Google needs to monetize off of movies and tv shows. They should keep their current ad format (the semi-transparent ads) for user videos, and then they should use interstitial ads based on the length of the video for commercial ads. Additionally, they could charge more for videos with higher amounts of daily viewings.
For instance, maybe put 1 commercial break for every 15 minutes of video. If you want to advertise during Days of Our Lives, maybe it won't cost so much. But if you want to place an advertisement during South Park, it's going to cost you a lot more, just like real TV advertisements.
Additionally, they should try very hard to get anime companies on board. There are many, many millions of people who would love to watch anime on YouTube, even in shit-quality, even with a few short interstitial ad breaks if they could. Anime companies are much more on top of changing technologies than the movie or TV industries, and I think it'd be beneficial for both of them to start offering their content online to users for free.
That's how scientific progress works. The real geniuses are usually thought of as imbeciles.
Of course, the imbeciles are also thought of as imbeciles, and it's often hard to differentiate the two. :3
When I was in Japan, I was getting a 100mbps/40mbps plan for about ~$52 per month. Right before I left, they sent out notices to everyone saying they were going to start a new controversial bandwidth-capping plan -- starting from then on, you can upload no more than 500 gb per month, but there would be no download cap.
I might also add that I was only in a medium-sized city (pop. 400,000) and I was still getting these options.
I'll make this perfectly clear -- when American ISPs argue the need for bandwidth caps and talk about the top 1% of consumers, don't buy it -- they're fucking you up the arse, and they know it.
In 7th grade, I learned about Christianity and creationism, as well as Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hindu, and touched briefly on some others. It was quite informative and I'd recommend it to everyone.
This was, of course, done where it belonged -- in Social Studies class, not Science. Perhaps if the people of the school boards of Texas would just agree to teach it similarly, there wouldn't be a big stink about it.
While connecting the dots to infer something may not make it so, Russia has a rich history of cyber attacks against enemies. Isn't it prudent to consider their history when looking at the evidence?
480 days is outrageous. I won't argue that it's beneficial for the child. But business is fast, always changing, and you must always adapt. If someone takes off 480 days, just by the sheer amount that they've forgotten and the amount that they've missed out on, it'd be like hiring a new employee.
America was in debt since ever before Andrew Jackson and ever after Andrew Jackson. Certainly long before Reagen.
Jackson despised any form of national bank (in our time, the Federal Reserve), and saw to their bankruptcy and demise, as he thought that whoever controlled the money had power and he wanted the people to have power.
After bankrupting the national bank, he became the first and only president to date to pay off the national debt. I suspect he will also be the last president to pay off national debt, as the United States probably won't exist in its current form by the time it will take to pay off the $15 trillion left by the end of Obama's first time.
"Almost anything you pick up at a Best Buy first breathed life across the Pacific Ocean."
Most computer parts I've seen are made in Malaysia, Indonesia, or Taiwan, not China.