The US isn't "interfering"; rather, two Orwellian governments are joining forces for a common objective.
They seem to want to have a single world ID standard, which would be fine if there was one world state in which all human beings could travel freely. Unfortunately, it looks like people's citizenship will be restricted to one place, whereas all the governments of the world can get in cahoots to oppress people no matter where they go.
Re:Prices Differ; profit margin is huge..
on
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Even if it's something as minor as the groove for your finger -- it's considered a "higher end feature."
The groove for your finger is only a "feature" if you're a member of the evil Right-Handed Overlords club. If you're a lefty, you think of those grooves as "pointless additions that 80% of the population will barely even notice, as opposed to the 20% who do notice and consequently find the product completely unusable". Non-right-handed high-end mice are almost impossible to find these days (forget lefty models; even plain neutral mice would be fine). Are things like little thumb grooves that important?
So if a laptop is designed in the US and has an Japanese-made CPU, a Chinese hard drive, a Korean TFT screen, a Filipino keyboard, etc., etc. how do they By value? By weight?
What does "Made in XXX" really mean anyway?
If you can read Japanese, you might wanto check out places like Yahoo Auctions:
http://search3.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/search/auc? p=SL-6000&auccat=23336...where, as I type this, there are two SL-6000s available for about US$600, with no bids. Don't be put off by the "will not ship internationally" bit; that's the default setting on Yahoo! Japan auctions, so some sellers don't realize it. Ask politely (in Japanese if you can) and they'll send you the goods.
Kudos to the guy for offering it for free. Even if he signs me up for spam and I have to delete a hundred useless messages, 100 deletions x 1 sec/deletion x wage of 0.5c/sec > probable price of paper book.
If it's on a CD, certainly. (Assuming you take care of it, it doesn't get lost or stolen, and it isn't a James Bond self-destructing CD.)
I'm pretty sure this is Mission: Impossible, not Bond...?
A ver informative post, though; had no idea about the two-move rule. I'll be burning everything to CD now -- which defeats the purpose of hard-disk-based digital music!
Well (and this argument has probably been hashed out over thousands of discussion forums already), TV stations don't have unlimited budgets, and presumably can't afford to do dual broadcasts for much longer after digital television is feasible. It's like asking why a school library on a fixed income should have to shell out for a CD-ROM drive after the encyclopedia company has stopped printing paper editions.
Rather than complain about a future that's got to come sooner or later, we should be finding new uses for the objects we already have, and finding ways to integrate them with modern tech. Environmental consciousness + spiffy retro-look atristica = good.
These TVs aren't exactly obsolete -- they can still function as monitors for game systems, video tapes, DVDs, etc., etc.
The question is how expensive these converter boxes will be. I might be willing to shell out the money for one of those, attach it to the oldest functioning TV set I can find, and have a nice retro piece.
They could easily ensure that no one removes it from their cars by simply making it illegal to do so. Require an inspection-like sticker saying that "this car has a monitoring device installed", and if you don't have one, instant fine.
Online subscribers pay $84/year, whereas print subscribers are still paying $356...
Actually, they're not "still" paying $356 per year; the print version was 75c per copy until very recently. Perhaps more people would buy it on the newsstand and enjoy the luxury of a paper copy if they didn't charge so much.
"well not really the regions on DVDs are so some poorer regions can get cheaper DVDs and not cut into the profits of places where a higher price is ok."
While I suppose I could accept this argument for third-world countries where DVDs have to be cheaper that the Hollywood list price on order to sell, I find it ludicrous that the same technology is used to give other regions, such as Japan, a free hand to gouge customers and charge twice as much as the "base price" in the US.
There are already regulations on shipping software, DVDs, and CDs overseas for just this reason. Why stick it to honest people who have lived in multiple places and want to enjoy all their music and movies, not having to buy dupliucate devices?
They probably take them off to stamp and coin shops and get a nice profit for them -- 1c notes are quite old, aren't they?
And governments could avoid such problems if they did a better job of preventing inflation and keeping their currency's value stable! How about bringing back the silver standard? Fiat money, my hind foot!
(Kindly forgive the lack of formatting in my last post -- read this one instead.)
A goofy DST-related story: If you look at a map of the world's time zones, many more zones lean slightly to the west (creating a kind of artificial DST) instead of being perfect parallel lines. One of the few exceptions, where the time zone juts out to the east (making sunset and sunrise earlier than they should be; a kind of artificial 'daylight-wasting-time') is Japan -- especially northeast Japan.
Consequently, where I live, it's light from 4:00 AM to 6:00 PM in the summer, and from 6:00 AM to 4:00 PM in the winter. The problem is that people aren't about to let pesky things like the sun get in the way of what time is displayed on the clock.
I was riding home from work at 4:25 AM (night shift) and a police officer pulled me over for not having my bicycle headlight on.
A goofy DST-related story:
If you look at a map of the world's time zones, many more zones lean slightly to the west (creating a kind of artificial DST) instead of being perfect parallel lines. One of the few exceptions, where the time zone juts out to the east (making sunset and sunrise earlier than they should be; a kind of artificial 'daylight-wasting-time') is Japan -- especially northeast Japan. Consequently, where I live, it's light from 4:00 AM to 6:00 PM in the summer, and from 6:00 AM to 4:00 PM in the winter.
The problem is that people aren't about to let pesky things like the sun get in the way of what time is displayed on the clock. I was riding home from work at 4:25 AM (night shift) and a police officer pulled me over for not having my bicycle headlight on.
"But officer, it's as bright as noon!"
"Yes, but (pointing to watch) it's nighttime!"
* Netscape 7 isn't fully supported. Uses a proportional font and doesn't put line breaks in, so I have to scroll across the screen horizontally. That alone puts me off using their service.
Yahoo, on the other hand, well, I'd gladly trade 99% of that additional space away if they would just stop using EUC-JP encoding for Japanese, and consequently glitching anything I try to send that isn't basic ASCII.
(Yes, I know, these are newbie-ish problems and surely many people know how to solve them. Constructive solutions, not flames, please!)
Works in other countries too. I'm white and live in Asia, and have had stores do everything they can not to take my credit card (which is in fact a debit card), even after checking signature and ID. "Sorry, we only take Japanese credit cards." -- "But my card was issued by Sumitomo Bank!" -- "Hmm...... OK, let's see your alien registration so I know you're a legal resident."
Fortunately this has changed over the last five years or so, and this kind of nonsense is disappearing.
HaveYourSecretaryCallJeeves'SecretaryAndThey'llD oLunch.com?
Wait a minute... can you have apostrophes in URLs? Anyone smart enough to squeeze $2 billion from someone for Ask Jeeves is probably wisse to these things.
I have a cell phone which can handle novels (with vertical text, even!), but haven't used it for that purpose yet. Why? Because, as several posters have mentioned, used books are easier to look at.
Plus, books that are being offered for cell phones cost almost as much as the real versions. And since only books likely to sell well are on phones (so far), that only increases the probability that these books will be popular enough to find at the neighborhood used-book shop for a big discount.
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The US isn't "interfering"; rather, two Orwellian governments are joining forces for a common objective.
They seem to want to have a single world ID standard, which would be fine if there was one world state in which all human beings could travel freely. Unfortunately, it looks like people's citizenship will be restricted to one place, whereas all the governments of the world can get in cahoots to oppress people no matter where they go.
Even if it's something as minor as the groove for your finger -- it's considered a "higher end feature."
The groove for your finger is only a "feature" if you're a member of the evil Right-Handed Overlords club. If you're a lefty, you think of those grooves as "pointless additions that 80% of the population will barely even notice, as opposed to the 20% who do notice and consequently find the product completely unusable". Non-right-handed high-end mice are almost impossible to find these days (forget lefty models; even plain neutral mice would be fine). Are things like little thumb grooves that important?
So if a laptop is designed in the US and has an Japanese-made CPU, a Chinese hard drive, a Korean TFT screen, a Filipino keyboard, etc., etc. how do they By value? By weight? What does "Made in XXX" really mean anyway?
Troden, you're missing the last lines. (Yeah, Offtopic, I know.)
(Scene: Pizza delivery man arrives at Mr. Sheehan's house.)
Delivery Man: "Herea re your pizzas, sir. That'll be $50.01, please."
Customer: "But you said $49.99 on the phone!"
Delivery Man: "Yes, but at one point you were put on hold."
Customer: "And...!?"
Delivery Man: "Well, the RIAA wants its two cents for that Fugees Muzak remix that was playing while you waited."
(Customer slams door and goes to fix himself a salad.)
Readers of Bodrell's comment above can see the relevant Supreme Court decision here: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/03pdf/03-55 54.pdf
It is as he has stated.
If you can read Japanese, you might wanto check out places like Yahoo Auctions:
? p=SL-6000&auccat=23336 ...where, as I type this, there are two SL-6000s available for about US$600, with no bids. Don't be put off by the "will not ship internationally" bit; that's the default setting on Yahoo! Japan auctions, so some sellers don't realize it. Ask politely (in Japanese if you can) and they'll send you the goods.
http://search3.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/search/auc
Kudos to the guy for offering it for free. Even if he signs me up for spam and I have to delete a hundred useless messages, 100 deletions x 1 sec/deletion x wage of 0.5c/sec > probable price of paper book.
I myself will be signing up to read it.
"Okay, you're purchasing a box of copier paper. That's $5.48 for the cost of the paper, plus an extra $20 anti-piracy surcharge, plus tax ..."
Wait a minute, you have to pay sales tax on the surcharge!? Shouldn't it be "$5.48 for the paper, plus sales tax, plus surcharge"? ^_^;
...and up would pop IE. That is hardly innovation.
That's because you didn't configure it to launch Firefox or something similar. ^_^;
Yeremein,
If it's on a CD, certainly. (Assuming you take care of it, it doesn't get lost or stolen, and it isn't a James Bond self-destructing CD.)
I'm pretty sure this is Mission: Impossible, not Bond...? A ver informative post, though; had no idea about the two-move rule. I'll be burning everything to CD now -- which defeats the purpose of hard-disk-based digital music!
Well (and this argument has probably been hashed out over thousands of discussion forums already), TV stations don't have unlimited budgets, and presumably can't afford to do dual broadcasts for much longer after digital television is feasible. It's like asking why a school library on a fixed income should have to shell out for a CD-ROM drive after the encyclopedia company has stopped printing paper editions. Rather than complain about a future that's got to come sooner or later, we should be finding new uses for the objects we already have, and finding ways to integrate them with modern tech. Environmental consciousness + spiffy retro-look atristica = good.
These TVs aren't exactly obsolete -- they can still function as monitors for game systems, video tapes, DVDs, etc., etc. The question is how expensive these converter boxes will be. I might be willing to shell out the money for one of those, attach it to the oldest functioning TV set I can find, and have a nice retro piece.
They could easily ensure that no one removes it from their cars by simply making it illegal to do so. Require an inspection-like sticker saying that "this car has a monitoring device installed", and if you don't have one, instant fine.
Online subscribers pay $84/year, whereas print subscribers are still paying $356...
Actually, they're not "still" paying $356 per year; the print version was 75c per copy until very recently. Perhaps more people would buy it on the newsstand and enjoy the luxury of a paper copy if they didn't charge so much.
69, dudes! Oh, wait...
Which scene was most difficult to craft, considering what your mind envisioned when reading the book?
"well not really the regions on DVDs are so some poorer regions can get cheaper DVDs and not cut into the profits of places where a higher price is ok."
While I suppose I could accept this argument for third-world countries where DVDs have to be cheaper that the Hollywood list price on order to sell, I find it ludicrous that the same technology is used to give other regions, such as Japan, a free hand to gouge customers and charge twice as much as the "base price" in the US.
There are already regulations on shipping software, DVDs, and CDs overseas for just this reason. Why stick it to honest people who have lived in multiple places and want to enjoy all their music and movies, not having to buy dupliucate devices?
They probably take them off to stamp and coin shops and get a nice profit for them -- 1c notes are quite old, aren't they? And governments could avoid such problems if they did a better job of preventing inflation and keeping their currency's value stable! How about bringing back the silver standard? Fiat money, my hind foot!
(Kindly forgive the lack of formatting in my last post -- read this one instead.)
A goofy DST-related story: If you look at a map of the world's time zones, many more zones lean slightly to the west (creating a kind of artificial DST) instead of being perfect parallel lines. One of the few exceptions, where the time zone juts out to the east (making sunset and sunrise earlier than they should be; a kind of artificial 'daylight-wasting-time') is Japan -- especially northeast Japan.
Consequently, where I live, it's light from 4:00 AM to 6:00 PM in the summer, and from 6:00 AM to 4:00 PM in the winter. The problem is that people aren't about to let pesky things like the sun get in the way of what time is displayed on the clock.
I was riding home from work at 4:25 AM (night shift) and a police officer pulled me over for not having my bicycle headlight on.
"But officer, it's as bright as noon!"
"Yes, but (pointing to watch) it's nighttime!"
A goofy DST-related story: If you look at a map of the world's time zones, many more zones lean slightly to the west (creating a kind of artificial DST) instead of being perfect parallel lines. One of the few exceptions, where the time zone juts out to the east (making sunset and sunrise earlier than they should be; a kind of artificial 'daylight-wasting-time') is Japan -- especially northeast Japan. Consequently, where I live, it's light from 4:00 AM to 6:00 PM in the summer, and from 6:00 AM to 4:00 PM in the winter. The problem is that people aren't about to let pesky things like the sun get in the way of what time is displayed on the clock. I was riding home from work at 4:25 AM (night shift) and a police officer pulled me over for not having my bicycle headlight on. "But officer, it's as bright as noon!" "Yes, but (pointing to watch) it's nighttime!"
My beefs with Gmail:
* Netscape 7 isn't fully supported. Uses a proportional font and doesn't put line breaks in, so I have to scroll across the screen horizontally. That alone puts me off using their service.
Yahoo, on the other hand, well, I'd gladly trade 99% of that additional space away if they would just stop using EUC-JP encoding for Japanese, and consequently glitching anything I try to send that isn't basic ASCII.
(Yes, I know, these are newbie-ish problems and surely many people know how to solve them. Constructive solutions, not flames, please!)
Works in other countries too. I'm white and live in Asia, and have had stores do everything they can not to take my credit card (which is in fact a debit card), even after checking signature and ID. "Sorry, we only take Japanese credit cards." -- "But my card was issued by Sumitomo Bank!" -- "Hmm... ... OK, let's see your alien registration so I know you're a legal resident."
Fortunately this has changed over the last five years or so, and this kind of nonsense is disappearing.
AskJeeves'Butler.com?
AskJeeves'Secretary.com?
Schedule AnAppointmentWithJeeves.com?
HaveYourSecretaryCallJeeves'SecretaryAndThey'llD oLunch.com?
Wait a minute... can you have apostrophes in URLs? Anyone smart enough to squeeze $2 billion from someone for Ask Jeeves is probably wisse to these things.
I have a cell phone which can handle novels (with vertical text, even!), but haven't used it for that purpose yet. Why? Because, as several posters have mentioned, used books are easier to look at. Plus, books that are being offered for cell phones cost almost as much as the real versions. And since only books likely to sell well are on phones (so far), that only increases the probability that these books will be popular enough to find at the neighborhood used-book shop for a big discount.
Haven't lost a game all year, those Leafs!