The Republic of Korea would be happy to run data to their cousins in the north, but Fearless Leader really doesn't want his people even watching capitalist television, much less having real communications.
Lots of articles over the past few years have talked about Koreans being heavy-duty gamers, so I'm not surprised by latency being a concern there. For much of the population, of course, the latency and bandwidth are easy to provide, as long as an apartment building doesn't oversubscribe its feed, because the bits have to go all the way down town to reach the servers. There are a lot of people living in rural areas or other cities, but a lot of it is Seoul.
The real question is what interesting things the Koreans are doing besides gaming with their more typical 10-100mbps - apparently there's a certain amount of online shopping (looking at the video from the local grocery store to see what's on special), but there aren't that many applications that need high bandwidth these days other than watching television, because there's so much spare CPU around to do things like compressing video.
Leaving aside any security-specific use of RFID reading (such as checking that the person trying to get information from the computer has the correct RFID badge, which he took when he was taking the computer), RFID readers do have a lot of potential use in hospitals - tracking medication, reading patient ID bracelets to make sure you've got the right set of records and meds for the patient, making sure this is the anesthetized patient who needs their leg cut off, not the one who needs their appendix out, inventorying all kinds of stuff, etc.
I'm guessing your reference to drink options is because McDonald's sells beer in Europe? Last time I had it was a decade or so ago, probably in Germany(?), but the beer was lame US-style beer, light-colored and content free. It could have been a cheap pilsner or Stella or something, but to me it seemed like US Budweiser rather than like beer from Budweis.
2GB DDR2 memory costs about $20/stick at Fry's. Real El-Cheapo graphics cards cost $29 and run DirectX 9, and there are $29 cards that have 128MB and run DirectX 10, but I can't tell if they have WDDM driver support or not. There are a lot of cards in the $50 range that have 512MB and WDDM-capable chip sets, and I assume MS can get the things in bulk at prices that'll match Fry's+rebate. Most of the more expensive graphics cards seem to be PCI-Express, which might be a limitation on some systems, but most of those probably don't claim to be Vista-capable.
So for a desktop that uses DDR2, $50-80 should be enough. SO-DIMM DDR2 RAM is similarly priced, but obviously upgrading laptop graphics is as you say, not easy.
My interpretation of Vista's marketing all along has been that they were clear about having a range of products with different requirements, and that the basic version would require a RAM upgrade, while the shiny version would require RAM and graphics upgrades, and that it'd run like a dog unless you had a faster-than-minimum CPU, so they told you from the beginning that there'd be some bait&switch to watch out for.
For those of us who were doing computing in the early 90s, USB-propagated viruses shouldn't be any surprise; they're just a rediscovery of the floppy disk viruses that used to be so popular. After all, it's a way to move files between machines, and also a way to move file systems with arbitrary contents that the operating system looks at before the user does. So if the OS is vulnerable, or if the files are opened by programs that treat data files as executable code, then you're open to trouble.
The "Jerusalem B" virus showed up a year before the Morris Worm. It was the first PC virus I met in the wild, around 1990, when a coworker's PC got infected by a floppy he brought in from home, where his home PC was infected by a floppy his kid brought home from school or from the kid's friends, probably with some pirated game software.
Most of the files people move around on USB sticks where I work are Microsoft Office documents, either Powerpoint or Word, and the most common time they're used is between a sales person and a customer, for instance to hand off an electronic copy of an RFP (too big to email), or to hand off a Powerpoint presentation to the person running a projector at a meeting (because the customer's LAN or wireless doesn't support adequate guest access for the sales person to connect to his email system and email it, or just because it's faster.)
That's a lot of driving - I've got ~190K miles on my 21-year-old van, but the longest commute I've had was ~10 miles of driving (vs. telecommuting, or 1 mile of driving to the train.)
The price of older cars depends a lot on condition - here in California, winters are mild and cars don't rust, and most cars these days can last over 200K miles (300K km) (though my van needed a new engine after ~110K miles, because it's from Detroit.) Last year's high gas prices made older big cars lose a lot of value; mv van's probably worth twice as much now that gas prices have dropped.
My 85 Toyota Tercel got 27mpg; it's hard to find non-hybrids today that even beat that. The PT Cruiser is basically a Neon with a taller body, and it's annoying that mine only gets 20-22mpg (local/highway.)
My old Chevy van has no trouble getting 400 miles per tank, but that's because it has a 33 gallon tank (:-) - it used to get 500 miles when it was newer. If I did serious commuting I'd need a better-mileage car, but since I don't it's been ok, and it's nice to be able to carry anything I want or take it camping and have better visibility when I am driving.
Ireland's taxes are lower than most of the rest of the EU, so it makes sense for any company doing pan-EU business to be based there. It also has had a number of years where it was a cheap place to get labor, and had workers that were educated and spoke English, though there's recently been a lot of business moving to Eastern Europe, especially Poland, where the labor's cheaper.
Obviously the backbones of the Internet aren't monopoly, and haven't been since we got the NSFnet out of the way, so I assume you're talking about the last-mile access.
Last-mile access not only isn't a natural monopoly, it isn't a government monopoly either. Sure, telephone wires and cable TV in most places in the US were both installed by monopolies, but that's all changed - the FCC's required that cities allow overbuilding of cable TV for over a decade, and while most copper telephone wires are still owned by the telcos, they're generally required by PUCs to not only rent them to other DSLAM providers like Covad and/or to support virtual circuit connections from other ISPs using the telco's DSLAMs.
Cable TV franchises were usually originally given out to small companies wanting to provide television, and while *your* town may have decided who got them based on visionary thinking about the future of telecommunications, most towns let them tear up the streets in return for deals about whose brother-in-law got the paving contract and how many channels the town council could extort for public access or broadcasting their council meetings. But that was the 70s-80s, and by the late 90s, most of the little guys had been bought up by national carriers like Comcast or Time-Warner, who then had to modernize the really ugly mess of local infrastructure. But the FCC mandated that competition be legalized, and companies like RCN actually installed additional cable systems in some places.
The real monopolies are in radio spectrum - the FCC allowed a few small high-interference not-very-useful bands for unlicensed low-power use, so that's of course where the most creativity and competition have taken place (2.4 and 5GHz.) They've also given oligopoly-style licenses to cellular companies, which haven't been as creative because they've had to pay way too much for the spectrum on the expectation of getting it out of their customers' wallets later. And there's a whole lot of spectrum given to TV stations, or kept for themselves, or licensed for other applications (e.g. 38GHz point-to-point microwave.)
There are ISPs that are happy to have you share bandwidth. Another poster mentioned Speakeasy; I'm using sonic.net. Some of them have deals where the roaming user pays for an account and the wired user gets credited for it, and typically the ISP gets to sell you a faster DSL link so you're all happy.
Condos are apartment buildings in which each unit is separately owned, typically by the resident, as opposed to buildings where one owner owns all the units and rents them out. Often they're townhouses as opposed to single-story apartments or flats. The important issue from an RF standpoint isn't the legal structure of ownership, though (:-), it's that you've got a large number of people living close together, as opposed to free-standing houses with lots of space between them.
Yer right, Brendan Fraser would be far more wrong for the role than Keanu.
I actually really like most of Keanu's movies - he's not always playing a deep character, but they seem to _work_ in ways they might not with somebody else. (Haven't seen Day the Earth Stood Still, though...) He's not the right actor for Spike, wasn't even the right actor 20 years ago, and he's too old now. Somebody suggested having him play Vicious, which might work.
I was hoping to see a better-resolution image of the actor (e.g.) than the 1-pixel image you included. Does the site you referenced require a login to see images?
The couple of images on the main imdb page for him look like he could do the right facial expressions for Spike.
Depp has done a huge range of acting, and I've almost always been impressed (though I haven't actually seen Pirates etc.) He's not just Sweeney Todd. I found it really surprising that the lame punk from 21 Jump St. could turn into the stunningly good character in "Benny and Joon", or the quite reasonable Gilbert Grape, or, ok, Edward Scissorhands was kind of weird, but there's probably nobody else could have done it as well.
To some extent, there are two ways to become an A-list actor - either develop some experience (which requires getting older), or look really really hot when you're young (in which case you don't usually have much experience.) Some people can be good actors while they're still young enough to play parts that require good acting skills as well as physicality and youth, but not enough, and it's easier for a young actor to get cast in a big movie by looking hot, and harder to get cast in a movie that requires acting skills without being in good parts that get them seen. But in general I agree with you - there are good actors who aren't well-known and would do fine in most sci-fi, if the movie people can find them.
The typical problem with sci-fi movies, though, is that they're either putting too much money into special effects as opposed to writing, or else they're imagining they need more special effects than they can afford, so they overdose on totally cheesy CGI.
The bill's been proposed. It only takes one politician to do that. It's been referred to a committee, which is what typically happens to all kinds of bills. The committee hasn't officially done anything with it yet, and unless they vote in favor of it, it's not going to get to the whole State Senate to vote on, much less the other house or the governor. And they're the Judiciary Committee, which sounds like a technically reasonable committee to handle this kind of bill.
So no, not only is "retards" politically-incorrect-but-not-banned-in-this-law language, but there's no evidence that South Carolina elected more than one scurvy Constitution-disrespecting dog of a politician. If the committee approves it, that'd be different. Unfortunately, legislative information websites generally don't say "the committee laughed at the Honorable Senator's bill before crumpling it up and discarding it" or things like that - it takes a judge to really insult a lawmaker on the record.
No, there's no law that says you can't pass bad laws. Courts can strike down laws that violate the Constitution, or laws (or more usually, parts of laws) that are too vague to be enforceable, but that's after the law gets passed, and usually not until somebody tries to enforce it.
But this law isn't "void for vagueness" - courts, including the US Supreme Court, have allowed obscenity laws that have "community standards" rather than explicit definitions, and Justice Potter Stewart famously said about obscenity "I know it when I see it". This law's sufficiently clear and way over-the-top about what it's trying to prohibit, it's just blatantly unconstitutional.
The real question is why the politician is trying to propose such a law when he should know better. Is he really ignorant enough not to know better (unlikely, but quite possible)? Is he trying to excite his base so they'll give him more money next election? Is he following a promise he made when he was running? Is he trying to get some other politicians to oppose the bill so he can accuse them of being in favor of profanity and obscenity? Or is he just being rude to the public?
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What's the bandwidth of an unladen swallow carrying clay tablets?
The Republic of Korea would be happy to run data to their cousins in the north, but Fearless Leader really doesn't want his people even watching capitalist television, much less having real communications.
Lots of articles over the past few years have talked about Koreans being heavy-duty gamers, so I'm not surprised by latency being a concern there. For much of the population, of course, the latency and bandwidth are easy to provide, as long as an apartment building doesn't oversubscribe its feed, because the bits have to go all the way down town to reach the servers. There are a lot of people living in rural areas or other cities, but a lot of it is Seoul.
The real question is what interesting things the Koreans are doing besides gaming with their more typical 10-100mbps - apparently there's a certain amount of online shopping (looking at the video from the local grocery store to see what's on special), but there aren't that many applications that need high bandwidth these days other than watching television, because there's so much spare CPU around to do things like compressing video.
Leaving aside any security-specific use of RFID reading (such as checking that the person trying to get information from the computer has the correct RFID badge, which he took when he was taking the computer), RFID readers do have a lot of potential use in hospitals - tracking medication, reading patient ID bracelets to make sure you've got the right set of records and meds for the patient, making sure this is the anesthetized patient who needs their leg cut off, not the one who needs their appendix out, inventorying all kinds of stuff, etc.
Is there some reason to prefer that family of probiotics to the various Lactobacillus and other things found in yogurt, etc.?
I've been looking for some good utility to convert FLACs to MP3 - thanks!
I'm guessing your reference to drink options is because McDonald's sells beer in Europe? Last time I had it was a decade or so ago, probably in Germany(?), but the beer was lame US-style beer, light-colored and content free. It could have been a cheap pilsner or Stella or something, but to me it seemed like US Budweiser rather than like beer from Budweis.
2GB DDR2 memory costs about $20/stick at Fry's. Real El-Cheapo graphics cards cost $29 and run DirectX 9, and there are $29 cards that have 128MB and run DirectX 10, but I can't tell if they have WDDM driver support or not. There are a lot of cards in the $50 range that have 512MB and WDDM-capable chip sets, and I assume MS can get the things in bulk at prices that'll match Fry's+rebate. Most of the more expensive graphics cards seem to be PCI-Express, which might be a limitation on some systems, but most of those probably don't claim to be Vista-capable.
So for a desktop that uses DDR2, $50-80 should be enough. SO-DIMM DDR2 RAM is similarly priced, but obviously upgrading laptop graphics is as you say, not easy.
My interpretation of Vista's marketing all along has been that they were clear about having a range of products with different requirements, and that the basic version would require a RAM upgrade, while the shiny version would require RAM and graphics upgrades, and that it'd run like a dog unless you had a faster-than-minimum CPU, so they told you from the beginning that there'd be some bait&switch to watch out for.
For those of us who were doing computing in the early 90s, USB-propagated viruses shouldn't be any surprise; they're just a rediscovery of the floppy disk viruses that used to be so popular. After all, it's a way to move files between machines, and also a way to move file systems with arbitrary contents that the operating system looks at before the user does. So if the OS is vulnerable, or if the files are opened by programs that treat data files as executable code, then you're open to trouble.
The "Jerusalem B" virus showed up a year before the Morris Worm. It was the first PC virus I met in the wild, around 1990, when a coworker's PC got infected by a floppy he brought in from home, where his home PC was infected by a floppy his kid brought home from school or from the kid's friends, probably with some pirated game software.
Most of the files people move around on USB sticks where I work are Microsoft Office documents, either Powerpoint or Word, and the most common time they're used is between a sales person and a customer, for instance to hand off an electronic copy of an RFP (too big to email), or to hand off a Powerpoint presentation to the person running a projector at a meeting (because the customer's LAN or wireless doesn't support adequate guest access for the sales person to connect to his email system and email it, or just because it's faster.)
It was supposed to be 18 FEET high!
That's a lot of driving - I've got ~190K miles on my 21-year-old van, but the longest commute I've had was ~10 miles of driving (vs. telecommuting, or 1 mile of driving to the train.)
The price of older cars depends a lot on condition - here in California, winters are mild and cars don't rust, and most cars these days can last over 200K miles (300K km) (though my van needed a new engine after ~110K miles, because it's from Detroit.) Last year's high gas prices made older big cars lose a lot of value; mv van's probably worth twice as much now that gas prices have dropped.
My 85 Toyota Tercel got 27mpg; it's hard to find non-hybrids today that even beat that. The PT Cruiser is basically a Neon with a taller body, and it's annoying that mine only gets 20-22mpg (local/highway.)
My old Chevy van has no trouble getting 400 miles per tank, but that's because it has a 33 gallon tank (:-) - it used to get 500 miles when it was newer. If I did serious commuting I'd need a better-mileage car, but since I don't it's been ok, and it's nice to be able to carry anything I want or take it camping and have better visibility when I am driving.
Ireland's taxes are lower than most of the rest of the EU, so it makes sense for any company doing pan-EU business to be based there. It also has had a number of years where it was a cheap place to get labor, and had workers that were educated and spoke English, though there's recently been a lot of business moving to Eastern Europe, especially Poland, where the labor's cheaper.
Obviously the backbones of the Internet aren't monopoly, and haven't been since we got the NSFnet out of the way, so I assume you're talking about the last-mile access.
Last-mile access not only isn't a natural monopoly, it isn't a government monopoly either. Sure, telephone wires and cable TV in most places in the US were both installed by monopolies, but that's all changed - the FCC's required that cities allow overbuilding of cable TV for over a decade, and while most copper telephone wires are still owned by the telcos, they're generally required by PUCs to not only rent them to other DSLAM providers like Covad and/or to support virtual circuit connections from other ISPs using the telco's DSLAMs.
Cable TV franchises were usually originally given out to small companies wanting to provide television, and while *your* town may have decided who got them based on visionary thinking about the future of telecommunications, most towns let them tear up the streets in return for deals about whose brother-in-law got the paving contract and how many channels the town council could extort for public access or broadcasting their council meetings. But that was the 70s-80s, and by the late 90s, most of the little guys had been bought up by national carriers like Comcast or Time-Warner, who then had to modernize the really ugly mess of local infrastructure. But the FCC mandated that competition be legalized, and companies like RCN actually installed additional cable systems in some places.
The real monopolies are in radio spectrum - the FCC allowed a few small high-interference not-very-useful bands for unlicensed low-power use, so that's of course where the most creativity and competition have taken place (2.4 and 5GHz.) They've also given oligopoly-style licenses to cellular companies, which haven't been as creative because they've had to pay way too much for the spectrum on the expectation of getting it out of their customers' wallets later. And there's a whole lot of spectrum given to TV stations, or kept for themselves, or licensed for other applications (e.g. 38GHz point-to-point microwave.)
Thanks - that was a useful post.
There are ISPs that are happy to have you share bandwidth. Another poster mentioned Speakeasy; I'm using sonic.net. Some of them have deals where the roaming user pays for an account and the wired user gets credited for it, and typically the ISP gets to sell you a faster DSL link so you're all happy.
Condos are apartment buildings in which each unit is separately owned, typically by the resident, as opposed to buildings where one owner owns all the units and rents them out. Often they're townhouses as opposed to single-story apartments or flats. The important issue from an RF standpoint isn't the legal structure of ownership, though (:-), it's that you've got a large number of people living close together, as opposed to free-standing houses with lots of space between them.
Look, if you're going to do it wrong, put some real effort into doing it wrong...
Yer right, Brendan Fraser would be far more wrong for the role than Keanu.
I actually really like most of Keanu's movies - he's not always playing a deep character, but they seem to _work_ in ways they might not with somebody else. (Haven't seen Day the Earth Stood Still, though...) He's not the right actor for Spike, wasn't even the right actor 20 years ago, and he's too old now. Somebody suggested having him play Vicious, which might work.
I was hoping to see a better-resolution image of the actor (e.g.) than the 1-pixel image you included. Does the site you referenced require a login to see images?
The couple of images on the main imdb page for him look like he could do the right facial expressions for Spike.
Depp has done a huge range of acting, and I've almost always been impressed (though I haven't actually seen Pirates etc.) He's not just Sweeney Todd. I found it really surprising that the lame punk from 21 Jump St. could turn into the stunningly good character in "Benny and Joon", or the quite reasonable Gilbert Grape, or, ok, Edward Scissorhands was kind of weird, but there's probably nobody else could have done it as well.
To some extent, there are two ways to become an A-list actor - either develop some experience (which requires getting older), or look really really hot when you're young (in which case you don't usually have much experience.) Some people can be good actors while they're still young enough to play parts that require good acting skills as well as physicality and youth, but not enough, and it's easier for a young actor to get cast in a big movie by looking hot, and harder to get cast in a movie that requires acting skills without being in good parts that get them seen. But in general I agree with you - there are good actors who aren't well-known and would do fine in most sci-fi, if the movie people can find them.
The typical problem with sci-fi movies, though, is that they're either putting too much money into special effects as opposed to writing, or else they're imagining they need more special effects than they can afford, so they overdose on totally cheesy CGI.
... and misses. At least in the Adventure version; I haven't actually played Zork much.
However, as a newly unemployed travelling sales engineer, I may be in great danger of getting sucked in :-)
The bill's been proposed. It only takes one politician to do that. It's been referred to a committee, which is what typically happens to all kinds of bills. The committee hasn't officially done anything with it yet, and unless they vote in favor of it, it's not going to get to the whole State Senate to vote on, much less the other house or the governor. And they're the Judiciary Committee, which sounds like a technically reasonable committee to handle this kind of bill.
So no, not only is "retards" politically-incorrect-but-not-banned-in-this-law language, but there's no evidence that South Carolina elected more than one scurvy Constitution-disrespecting dog of a politician. If the committee approves it, that'd be different. Unfortunately, legislative information websites generally don't say "the committee laughed at the Honorable Senator's bill before crumpling it up and discarding it" or things like that - it takes a judge to really insult a lawmaker on the record.
No, there's no law that says you can't pass bad laws. Courts can strike down laws that violate the Constitution, or laws (or more usually, parts of laws) that are too vague to be enforceable, but that's after the law gets passed, and usually not until somebody tries to enforce it.
But this law isn't "void for vagueness" - courts, including the US Supreme Court, have allowed obscenity laws that have "community standards" rather than explicit definitions, and Justice Potter Stewart famously said about obscenity "I know it when I see it". This law's sufficiently clear and way over-the-top about what it's trying to prohibit, it's just blatantly unconstitutional.
The real question is why the politician is trying to propose such a law when he should know better. Is he really ignorant enough not to know better (unlikely, but quite possible)? Is he trying to excite his base so they'll give him more money next election? Is he following a promise he made when he was running? Is he trying to get some other politicians to oppose the bill so he can accuse them of being in favor of profanity and obscenity? Or is he just being rude to the public?