I am not racist (...). Every country but the US enforces its immigration laws (...). Schools are flooded where 70% of the kids are not US born, have limited english, get free health care, and their parents do not pay for taxes. (...) Sorry but if I spoke iwth my great American accent in London the police there have a right too to ask if I am there legally right?
Are you kidding me? Your blatant display of racism blinds you. US immigration laws are far more stringent and complex than in any other country I can name. It's such a nightmare to go there legally that it's much easier to swim across the Rio Grande, or to go in and out every three months sprinkled with month long breaks.
Also, to douse your utter ignorance, if you spoke with your great American accent in London, the police would assume you're a tourist. They'd never bother controlling your ID as a result, because they need to issue a receipt for controlling anyone -- complete with a justification for doing so. This is to avoid abuses and bullying of legal immigrants by the police. As a US citizen you could likely live there illegally for as long as you never get in trouble.
I mean, seriously... Companies in general, and corporate giants in particular, aren't too willing to share information, much less potentially confidential documentation. But I've never heard of any company refusing a wide range of information when called by a student introducing himself as such -- especially on obsolete products. Heck, if activists can make it into poultry farms when presenting themselves as agriculture students, surely you can wiggle yourself into finding a few proud engineers at Nintendo who can recount whatever you want to know first hand. Eg "Hi, I'm compiling data on XYZ as part of my school curriculum and I was wondering if you could forward me to someone in the tech department who could give me the information I could be looking for." Seriously... Try it. People get so much email nowadays that they're more than happy to answer a phone call for a change.
Based on your anecdotes, I'd argue that Best Buy is under-delivering on service in every possible manner.
For in-warranty defects, it's becoming fairly common to replace defective devices with new or refurbished ones when the warranty still applies, and to extend a 1-year warranty or longer from that day onward. If you turn in an iPad with a defective screen or to replace its battery, for instance, Apple will hand you a refurbished iPad -- not the one you brought in. As recently as a few months ago, they replaced iPods with entirely new ones. In my experience, kitchen appliance and vacuum cleaner vendors do the same exact thing, so I'm hardly cherry picking.
As for how you service an actual repair, my 2007 laptop would no longer turn on recently. I brought it to the local store down my street.
It's not a big store chain: three stores in three cities that are an hour or two apart from each other. I was not one of their customers, either. I was just another guy walking in, who bought a laptop in a different country, and needed it repaired ASAP.
They took it in for a diagnostic and a quote. This meant shipping the laptop to a nearby city -- and shipping it back free of charge if I refused the quote.
I got a quote by email the next morning. Without my laptop to read emails (fail!), I only discovered this when I called in for an update the follow-up day.
They needed to replace the laptop's top case (the keyboard/trackpad part). I highlighted that I needed a qwerty keyboard rather than the local azerty flavor. They understandably had none in stock; ETA one week as a result.
Understanding it was my work laptop, they immediately offered me one of their (free) replacement laptops until mine got repaired -- a 13" MacBook Air, no less. My tools and data were on my own device, so I declined, but their offer left me with an absolutely delightful impression.
They received the top case on the next day -- much faster than expected. The laptop was waiting for me at their store the following morning. The new top case came with a 1-year warranty.
Incidentally, its keyboard had a few defective keys. I brought my laptop back on the spot. It was waiting for me with yet another newly ordered top case the next afternoon -- free of charge.
In a more typical situation for them I'd likely have gotten a next-day repair, including the round trip to the city where they're stocked in spare parts. Which qualifies as impeccable service.
Not all companies deliver service like this, but they should strive to. It also leads me to suggest that the only acceptable reason for making a customer wait for a whole week nowadays is if you're waiting for parts coming from the other end of the world. Anything else has understaffed and poor logistics written all over it.
I am baffled ( I do understand it ) by this behavoir, how everyone immediately hurries to buy shares in some company just because someone shared his interest in it. I do understand that it is a way to gain money but I can't help but to think of hyenas each time I see this happen.
Then again, this one has "we're looking for a few dumb fucks to actually fund this mess irrespective of the shitty economy" written all over it.
He just did. "Anything less than Proportional Representation doesn't meet any sensible definition of democracy."
It's a sensible argument in some respects. It means no winner-takes-all-seats during elections. If there are N seats for an area, and votes are spread like 35%, 30%, 20%, 10%, and a couple of weenies, then each of the major parties involved get seats in proportion to their share of the votes. The alternative is to split the same area into N districts, and give a seat to the winning party in each one. The top party in that same area would usually get most if not all of the seats -- yet it's only 5% more popular than the next largest party, and only representing a third of the voters; it's the rule of the majority by the biggest minority.
In other respects, it's not that sensible. Depending on the threshold at which parties get one seat, it can give tremendous bargaining power to smaller parties since a ruling majority can seldom be formed without them; it's also the rule of the majority by minorities.
The two systems can be (and usually are) combined: allocate a seat or two to the leading party of each district, and the remaining seats proportionally over the whole area. That way, major parties can more readily form majorities in parliaments.
By your logic, Slashdot is (partly?) responsible for THIS comment? And yours? Where do you draw the line? Why should the fact that Slashdot (presumably) makes one off running the site make a difference, why the distinction whether it's for-profit or non-profit?
Can't speak for the OP, but I like the way the line is drawn in Franch law.
Websites are responsible for what gets published on them. Much like written print publications, they're expected to excercise editorial control. They distinguish between pre- vs post- moderation, however. If you pre-moderate comments, your ass is on the line -- always, and in full. If you post-moderate comments, your ass is on the line too, but the law is such that the author becomes responsible if you can identify him and proactively remove the offending material.
Don't show me Dems, show me single Dem girls of roughly my age!
Seriously, in the age of Girls Around Me plotting an obfuscated version of a public data set (the last name is edited out) should not look creepy any longer. The app could have opted to edit nothing out, and then link the data to plethoras of other data sets and social network accounts.
As a society, the US has been persistently trading privacy for shopping coupons, transparency and security for the past century or so. As individuals, it's your responsibility to share what little information you've still control of on a per need basis. Most evidently don't care that much. (How many cash-only people do you know? What about non-Googlers?)
If it ever is illegal to aggregate data on anyone unless they opt-in in no uncertain terms, and illegal to bundle such an opt-in clause in terms and services, I'll shed a real tear. But we're not heading there.
Maybe not intentionally, maybe a lower percentage...
And that makes all the damn difference. I'm not going to intentionally eat bugs, and I certainly wouldn't eat any food if I knew that it often came with insects...
Why not? Ant larva are absolutely delicious with guacamole and crackers. Crickets are nice and crunchy. Snails (arguably not an insect) are absolutely delicious with a twist of garlic. You eat alga whenever you eat maki at a suhi bar.
Haven't your parents taught you to try food before saying you don't like it?
Of course nowadays there's very little difference in graphics or sound, so people just pick the defacto standard (the OS that has 88% desktop penetration).
What's to buy at Nokia? Like RIM, they laughed out loud when the iPhone came out, all the way to their current situation, and likely into bankruptcy. Where I feel sorry for the employees (I couldn't bother shedding a tear for the shareholders) is that they won't manage to pull out a Motorola, meaning they'll be bought at the vilest possible price.
I'd argue they aren't that bad in developed countries.
In other words, public entities usually aren't much more inefficient than the fattest, slowest, most entrenched corporations out there. That sets the bar pretty high.
Not saying that the bar is high. I find it awkwardly low too. Just saying that apples should be compared with apples -- or arguably with Apple, which reportedly managed to keep a start-up culture.
So we should be happy because it could be a lot worse? Again, you are setting very high expectations for government entities. I hope they can achieve them.
I suspect you don't even have the beginning of a clue of what interacting with a corrupt administration can be like. As a yard stick, consider that the UN and not-for-profits are happy when 25% of any foreign aid sent to some countries actually ends up where it should. You read that right: a 75% loss due to bribery and protection rackets is considered efficient use of funds.
Closer to you and your everyday life, imagine interacting with a rabid IRS inspector that will only stop harassing you if you accept to pay a small fine due to "misapproprietely" reported revenue -- for him to justify the time he spent on you -- and a yearly protection racket so he won't waste your time the follow-up years. Further, imagine complaining to his boss or the judge, getting dismissed, and finding out later on that both get their cut of the corrupt agent's protection racket, and that their own bosses are mafiosi. Far fetched? Nope: at your door step. Bars, restaurants and hotels in touristy areas of the Riviera Maya nearly all either belong to the mafia, or pay lavish protection rackets to one or more of criminals, health inspectors and tax inspectors; and the governor of Yucatan got arrested a few years back for being a mafioso himself.
I presume you don't have to endure this kind of crap. Consider it a huge achievement, because some do, and eventually consider it a cost of doing business.
Once you've seen it, you'll readily accommodate yourself with a good enough/not too corrupt administration on a "could be hellishly worse" basis.
It always rubs me the wrong way when government spending gets systematically and broadly dissed as inefficient.
I've lived in a number of countries and, frankly, public entities seldom stroke me as materially more inefficient than large corporations. The difference is meaningful, inasfar as I've been experiencing it anyway, in only a few cases:
The first and most important is when corruption is rampant. Eg. good luck finding a lost luggage in a sub-Sahara airport if you don't tip the employee; or spending less than a whole afternoon paying for a parking ticket in Mexico if you didn't get the memo that you should tip the cop who hands you the ticket in the first place. This is virtually non-existent in western countries.
The second most important is the heightened awareness of and concern for the welfare of local communities and the environment, either because they like to get the job well done, as opposed to well enough, or due to public opposition. Eg. noone in his right mind would argue that bullet proof vests are wasteful spending for soldiers, irrespective of the subsequent PST costs; and a public entity would need to surmount a mountain of opposition before building a highway or setting train tracks in a wild life reserve. This is virtually non-existent outside of western countries.
Another is silly procedures, but it's arguably not the public servants' fault, and large corporations are notoriously full of them too.
Staff that doesn't give a shit about anything is yet another, but I found this to be mostly cultural: when mostly true, it also holds mostly true at the population level. This is particularly pronounced in developing countries.
The next, last and arguably least important is when powerful public unions successfully bargained for lavish benefits. Eg. a public servant cannot get sacked in France even if he spends most of his day pretending to work. Frankly though, most public servants I've met or interacted with over the years were just as professional as the next guy working for a large corporation -- which is to say, not very, but being a public servant has little to do with it. The real difference is that you're forced to interact with public servants, and you typically do so in times of hardship. (If you ever had to deal with an unscrupulous insurance company, you probably know what I mean.)
Your mileage varies per country, obviously. French public servants, for instance, are very self-entitled and often mocked by the French as the epitome of inefficiency; a quick tour in a Mexican administration, however, will make any French person (correctly) praise his home country's adminstration as one of the most efficient in the world. Much the same could be said of the UK and German ones, minus the public servants' attitude. The US one is competent by my standards, as is the Canadian one. Neither are very friendly nor helpful, but they get things done efficiently. The Mexican one, an absolute mess by any standard, actually shines when compared to the (understaffed) Indian one. And don't even get me started on African countries.
Anyway, my point is this: mock your administration all you want; complain about its costliness; pinpoint its uselesness; but keep in mind that people in most other countries would envy it as a model of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Yet another example of how centralized systems are bad.
Social networks, torrent indexes, search engines, you name it. All of them censored and/or unreliable.
We need decentralization.
You must be meaning outsourced services/software as a service. There's nothing inherently wrong with centralizing your data, as long as you're not subjecting yourself to the moodiness of a handful of service providers.
Simple... Half of the available IPv4 blocks are reserved for the US, over half of the world's population is in Asia, they're adopting cell phones at a rate of a new AT&T-sized carrier each year (chew on that...), and many of them are getting a smartphone as their first personal Internet device. Not to mention countries like Korea where everyone and his dog enjoys super fast broadband.
3 million IPv6 switchers (0.1% of the 4 billion+ available IPv4 addresses) is a meaningful number? Please wake me up when it's a few dozen millions.
On a side hote, does anyone know how many IP addresses major US IT firms and carriers manage combined? Isn't that more than 3 million IP addresses between them?
RSS support has not been left out of iOS for as long as I've been using an iDevice (Mobile Safari's RSS reader is a farce). And I vaguely recollect reading that neither Mail nor Safari support it in Mountain Lion. How much lower on the consumer's radar can anything get?
The few people I know who actually use RSS feeds do so only through Flipboard and similar Apps or (in the case of internet marketers) as a data source for spammy activities.
Nah, you can't know what cold is until you spent a winter in blistering-fucking-cold-and-humid-to-the-bone-marrow Quebec. But agreed: hell is *very* cold.
A few train stops away from NYC is way too far already. The maximum distance you want to live away from TriBeCa is whatever distance you can walk yourself home when drunk late at night.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not racist (...). Every country but the US enforces its immigration laws (...). Schools are flooded where 70% of the kids are not US born, have limited english, get free health care, and their parents do not pay for taxes. (...) Sorry but if I spoke iwth my great American accent in London the police there have a right too to ask if I am there legally right?
Are you kidding me? Your blatant display of racism blinds you. US immigration laws are far more stringent and complex than in any other country I can name. It's such a nightmare to go there legally that it's much easier to swim across the Rio Grande, or to go in and out every three months sprinkled with month long breaks.
Also, to douse your utter ignorance, if you spoke with your great American accent in London, the police would assume you're a tourist. They'd never bother controlling your ID as a result, because they need to issue a receipt for controlling anyone -- complete with a justification for doing so. This is to avoid abuses and bullying of legal immigrants by the police. As a US citizen you could likely live there illegally for as long as you never get in trouble.
I mean, seriously... Companies in general, and corporate giants in particular, aren't too willing to share information, much less potentially confidential documentation. But I've never heard of any company refusing a wide range of information when called by a student introducing himself as such -- especially on obsolete products. Heck, if activists can make it into poultry farms when presenting themselves as agriculture students, surely you can wiggle yourself into finding a few proud engineers at Nintendo who can recount whatever you want to know first hand. Eg "Hi, I'm compiling data on XYZ as part of my school curriculum and I was wondering if you could forward me to someone in the tech department who could give me the information I could be looking for." Seriously... Try it. People get so much email nowadays that they're more than happy to answer a phone call for a change.
How would you folks, with far more detailed information on BeOS, compare it to Mac OS X today?
Obsolete.
Based on your anecdotes, I'd argue that Best Buy is under-delivering on service in every possible manner.
For in-warranty defects, it's becoming fairly common to replace defective devices with new or refurbished ones when the warranty still applies, and to extend a 1-year warranty or longer from that day onward. If you turn in an iPad with a defective screen or to replace its battery, for instance, Apple will hand you a refurbished iPad -- not the one you brought in. As recently as a few months ago, they replaced iPods with entirely new ones. In my experience, kitchen appliance and vacuum cleaner vendors do the same exact thing, so I'm hardly cherry picking.
As for how you service an actual repair, my 2007 laptop would no longer turn on recently. I brought it to the local store down my street.
It's not a big store chain: three stores in three cities that are an hour or two apart from each other. I was not one of their customers, either. I was just another guy walking in, who bought a laptop in a different country, and needed it repaired ASAP.
They took it in for a diagnostic and a quote. This meant shipping the laptop to a nearby city -- and shipping it back free of charge if I refused the quote.
I got a quote by email the next morning. Without my laptop to read emails (fail!), I only discovered this when I called in for an update the follow-up day.
They needed to replace the laptop's top case (the keyboard/trackpad part). I highlighted that I needed a qwerty keyboard rather than the local azerty flavor. They understandably had none in stock; ETA one week as a result.
Understanding it was my work laptop, they immediately offered me one of their (free) replacement laptops until mine got repaired -- a 13" MacBook Air, no less. My tools and data were on my own device, so I declined, but their offer left me with an absolutely delightful impression.
They received the top case on the next day -- much faster than expected. The laptop was waiting for me at their store the following morning. The new top case came with a 1-year warranty.
Incidentally, its keyboard had a few defective keys. I brought my laptop back on the spot. It was waiting for me with yet another newly ordered top case the next afternoon -- free of charge.
In a more typical situation for them I'd likely have gotten a next-day repair, including the round trip to the city where they're stocked in spare parts. Which qualifies as impeccable service.
Not all companies deliver service like this, but they should strive to. It also leads me to suggest that the only acceptable reason for making a customer wait for a whole week nowadays is if you're waiting for parts coming from the other end of the world. Anything else has understaffed and poor logistics written all over it.
I am baffled ( I do understand it ) by this behavoir, how everyone immediately hurries to buy shares in some company just because someone shared his interest in it. I do understand that it is a way to gain money but I can't help but to think of hyenas each time I see this happen.
Then again, this one has "we're looking for a few dumb fucks to actually fund this mess irrespective of the shitty economy" written all over it.
Care to back that up with some argumentation?
He just did. "Anything less than Proportional Representation doesn't meet any sensible definition of democracy."
It's a sensible argument in some respects. It means no winner-takes-all-seats during elections. If there are N seats for an area, and votes are spread like 35%, 30%, 20%, 10%, and a couple of weenies, then each of the major parties involved get seats in proportion to their share of the votes. The alternative is to split the same area into N districts, and give a seat to the winning party in each one. The top party in that same area would usually get most if not all of the seats -- yet it's only 5% more popular than the next largest party, and only representing a third of the voters; it's the rule of the majority by the biggest minority.
In other respects, it's not that sensible. Depending on the threshold at which parties get one seat, it can give tremendous bargaining power to smaller parties since a ruling majority can seldom be formed without them; it's also the rule of the majority by minorities.
The two systems can be (and usually are) combined: allocate a seat or two to the leading party of each district, and the remaining seats proportionally over the whole area. That way, major parties can more readily form majorities in parliaments.
By your logic, Slashdot is (partly?) responsible for THIS comment? And yours? Where do you draw the line? Why should the fact that Slashdot (presumably) makes one off running the site make a difference, why the distinction whether it's for-profit or non-profit?
Can't speak for the OP, but I like the way the line is drawn in Franch law.
Websites are responsible for what gets published on them. Much like written print publications, they're expected to excercise editorial control. They distinguish between pre- vs post- moderation, however. If you pre-moderate comments, your ass is on the line -- always, and in full. If you post-moderate comments, your ass is on the line too, but the law is such that the author becomes responsible if you can identify him and proactively remove the offending material.
Don't show me Dems, show me single Dem girls of roughly my age!
Seriously, in the age of Girls Around Me plotting an obfuscated version of a public data set (the last name is edited out) should not look creepy any longer. The app could have opted to edit nothing out, and then link the data to plethoras of other data sets and social network accounts.
As a society, the US has been persistently trading privacy for shopping coupons, transparency and security for the past century or so. As individuals, it's your responsibility to share what little information you've still control of on a per need basis. Most evidently don't care that much. (How many cash-only people do you know? What about non-Googlers?)
If it ever is illegal to aggregate data on anyone unless they opt-in in no uncertain terms, and illegal to bundle such an opt-in clause in terms and services, I'll shed a real tear. But we're not heading there.
This is slashdot; the attribution was redundant. Most of us got it on the second line...
Not everyone read that book in English -- or at all, for that matter.
Maybe not intentionally, maybe a lower percentage...
And that makes all the damn difference. I'm not going to intentionally eat bugs, and I certainly wouldn't eat any food if I knew that it often came with insects...
Why not? Ant larva are absolutely delicious with guacamole and crackers. Crickets are nice and crunchy. Snails (arguably not an insect) are absolutely delicious with a twist of garlic. You eat alga whenever you eat maki at a suhi bar.
Haven't your parents taught you to try food before saying you don't like it?
Of course nowadays there's very little difference in graphics or sound, so people just pick the defacto standard (the OS that has 88% desktop penetration).
Or phones:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/243542/android_ios_games_rake_in_more_cash_than_sony_and_nintendo.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=posner+apple
Why would 3 failures of the mobile market want to get together?
Because three turkeys make an eagle.
In other news, it's not the first nor the last time zdnet publishes idiotic opinion pieces
http://www.google.com/search?q=claim+chowder+site:daringfireball.net+link:zdnet.com
What's to buy at Nokia? Like RIM, they laughed out loud when the iPhone came out, all the way to their current situation, and likely into bankruptcy. Where I feel sorry for the employees (I couldn't bother shedding a tear for the shareholders) is that they won't manage to pull out a Motorola, meaning they'll be bought at the vilest possible price.
Per the example I gave to khallow, include the bribes.
I'd argue they aren't that bad in developed countries.
In other words, public entities usually aren't much more inefficient than the fattest, slowest, most entrenched corporations out there. That sets the bar pretty high.
Not saying that the bar is high. I find it awkwardly low too. Just saying that apples should be compared with apples -- or arguably with Apple, which reportedly managed to keep a start-up culture.
So we should be happy because it could be a lot worse? Again, you are setting very high expectations for government entities. I hope they can achieve them.
I suspect you don't even have the beginning of a clue of what interacting with a corrupt administration can be like. As a yard stick, consider that the UN and not-for-profits are happy when 25% of any foreign aid sent to some countries actually ends up where it should. You read that right: a 75% loss due to bribery and protection rackets is considered efficient use of funds.
Closer to you and your everyday life, imagine interacting with a rabid IRS inspector that will only stop harassing you if you accept to pay a small fine due to "misapproprietely" reported revenue -- for him to justify the time he spent on you -- and a yearly protection racket so he won't waste your time the follow-up years. Further, imagine complaining to his boss or the judge, getting dismissed, and finding out later on that both get their cut of the corrupt agent's protection racket, and that their own bosses are mafiosi. Far fetched? Nope: at your door step. Bars, restaurants and hotels in touristy areas of the Riviera Maya nearly all either belong to the mafia, or pay lavish protection rackets to one or more of criminals, health inspectors and tax inspectors; and the governor of Yucatan got arrested a few years back for being a mafioso himself.
I presume you don't have to endure this kind of crap. Consider it a huge achievement, because some do, and eventually consider it a cost of doing business.
Once you've seen it, you'll readily accommodate yourself with a good enough/not too corrupt administration on a "could be hellishly worse" basis.
It always rubs me the wrong way when government spending gets systematically and broadly dissed as inefficient.
I've lived in a number of countries and, frankly, public entities seldom stroke me as materially more inefficient than large corporations. The difference is meaningful, inasfar as I've been experiencing it anyway, in only a few cases:
The first and most important is when corruption is rampant. Eg. good luck finding a lost luggage in a sub-Sahara airport if you don't tip the employee; or spending less than a whole afternoon paying for a parking ticket in Mexico if you didn't get the memo that you should tip the cop who hands you the ticket in the first place. This is virtually non-existent in western countries.
The second most important is the heightened awareness of and concern for the welfare of local communities and the environment, either because they like to get the job well done, as opposed to well enough, or due to public opposition. Eg. noone in his right mind would argue that bullet proof vests are wasteful spending for soldiers, irrespective of the subsequent PST costs; and a public entity would need to surmount a mountain of opposition before building a highway or setting train tracks in a wild life reserve. This is virtually non-existent outside of western countries.
Another is silly procedures, but it's arguably not the public servants' fault, and large corporations are notoriously full of them too.
Staff that doesn't give a shit about anything is yet another, but I found this to be mostly cultural: when mostly true, it also holds mostly true at the population level. This is particularly pronounced in developing countries.
The next, last and arguably least important is when powerful public unions successfully bargained for lavish benefits. Eg. a public servant cannot get sacked in France even if he spends most of his day pretending to work. Frankly though, most public servants I've met or interacted with over the years were just as professional as the next guy working for a large corporation -- which is to say, not very, but being a public servant has little to do with it. The real difference is that you're forced to interact with public servants, and you typically do so in times of hardship. (If you ever had to deal with an unscrupulous insurance company, you probably know what I mean.)
Your mileage varies per country, obviously. French public servants, for instance, are very self-entitled and often mocked by the French as the epitome of inefficiency; a quick tour in a Mexican administration, however, will make any French person (correctly) praise his home country's adminstration as one of the most efficient in the world. Much the same could be said of the UK and German ones, minus the public servants' attitude. The US one is competent by my standards, as is the Canadian one. Neither are very friendly nor helpful, but they get things done efficiently. The Mexican one, an absolute mess by any standard, actually shines when compared to the (understaffed) Indian one. And don't even get me started on African countries.
Anyway, my point is this: mock your administration all you want; complain about its costliness; pinpoint its uselesness; but keep in mind that people in most other countries would envy it as a model of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
There... I fed the troll.
Finding new ways to spy on people is something we seem to be really good at here in the UK
On the plus side, James Bond ends up with an ample supply of new gadgets to show off.
Yet another example of how centralized systems are bad.
Social networks, torrent indexes, search engines, you name it. All of them censored and/or unreliable.
We need decentralization.
You must be meaning outsourced services/software as a service. There's nothing inherently wrong with centralizing your data, as long as you're not subjecting yourself to the moodiness of a handful of service providers.
You're obviously not managing a network...
Simple... Half of the available IPv4 blocks are reserved for the US, over half of the world's population is in Asia, they're adopting cell phones at a rate of a new AT&T-sized carrier each year (chew on that...), and many of them are getting a smartphone as their first personal Internet device. Not to mention countries like Korea where everyone and his dog enjoys super fast broadband.
3 million IPv6 switchers (0.1% of the 4 billion+ available IPv4 addresses) is a meaningful number? Please wake me up when it's a few dozen millions.
On a side hote, does anyone know how many IP addresses major US IT firms and carriers manage combined? Isn't that more than 3 million IP addresses between them?
RSS beats Facebook any day.
Who uses RSS? In all seriousness...
RSS support has not been left out of iOS for as long as I've been using an iDevice (Mobile Safari's RSS reader is a farce). And I vaguely recollect reading that neither Mail nor Safari support it in Mountain Lion. How much lower on the consumer's radar can anything get?
The few people I know who actually use RSS feeds do so only through Flipboard and similar Apps or (in the case of internet marketers) as a data source for spammy activities.
Facebook trounces RSS any day.
Nah, you can't know what cold is until you spent a winter in blistering-fucking-cold-and-humid-to-the-bone-marrow Quebec. But agreed: hell is *very* cold.
A few train stops away from NYC is way too far already. The maximum distance you want to live away from TriBeCa is whatever distance you can walk yourself home when drunk late at night.